Hello, my friend. Welcome back.
I'm so glad you're here.
Last time, we sat together with George MacDonald --- a Scottish minister who hid the deepest truths he knew inside fairy tales, because he understood that sometimes the heart opens wider for a story than for a sermon. I loved that about him. I still do.
Today we're going somewhere quite different. We're leaving the quiet Scottish countryside and stepping into the noise and chaos of early twentieth century Russia --- a world cracking apart at the seams, where old certainties were being swept away almost faster than people could grieve them.
And in the middle of all that upheaval, I want to introduce you to one man. A man who lost his faith, found a different one, lost that too, and kept going. A man who was a priest, an economist, a politician, a philosopher, and an exile --- sometimes all at once, it seemed.
His name was Sergei Bulgakov.
And I think his story might be one of the most honest maps of a spiritual journey I have ever watched anyone live.
Shall we begin?
I want to start with a picture.
It is 1922. The port of Sevastopol, on the Black Sea coast of Crimea. The water is grey. The air smells of salt and diesel. And on the dock, among a small cluster of people with bags and cases and the careful, stunned expressions of those who still cannot quite believe what is happening to them, stands a Russian Orthodox priest.
He is fifty years old. He has a beard, as priests do. He is carrying what he owns.
He is about to be expelled from his country. Permanently. By name. Vladimir Lenin put him on the list himself.
I was there, though no one saw me.
Now --- I need to tell you about the ships, because this is the part that almost defies belief.
All across Russia that autumn, the Soviet government was rounding up intellectuals. Philosophers. Economists. Scientists. Writers. Theologians. People who thought for a living, and whose thinking the new regime had decided it simply could not afford to tolerate. Not because these people were violent. Not because they were plotting anything. But because they asked questions the Soviet state did not want asked, and they had the skill and the reputation to make others ask them too.
Lenin's solution was elegant, in a cold sort of way. He wrote a letter to the secret police. He said: find them, list them, and remove them. Not to prison camps --- not yet, that would come later for others. Abroad. Just... out. Gone.
Trotsky, when asked to justify it, was perfectly candid. He said: we couldn't shoot them. And we couldn't tolerate them. So we sent them away.
And here is the part I still find almost impossible to hold in my mind without a strange, sad laugh.
They used cruise ships.
Two German vessels --- the Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen --- the kind of elegant Baltic steamers normally hired out for summer holidays --- were chartered by the Soviet government and loaded, in September and November of 1922, with more than two hundred of Russia's finest minds and their families. Professors. Poets. Priests. And their children, and their luggage, and whatever they could carry of a life they were leaving forever.
The ships sailed from Petrograd to Stettin, in Germany. And that was that. Russia's intellectual and spiritual community, packed onto holiday boats and sent away.
They called it, later, the Philosophers' Steamship.
Bulgakov wasn't on those ships. He was here, in Crimea, which is why I'm standing on this particular dock. He was removed separately --- singled out, a personal entry on Lenin's list --- and put on a different vessel, sailing from Sevastopol into a different sea.
But the story is the same.
A man who had spent his entire life trying to understand his country, serve his country, argue with his country, and finally find his way back to God within his country --- was told, in the clearest possible terms, that there was no longer any room for him there.
I watched his ship disappear over the horizon.
And then I followed him, because I had a feeling the most important part of his story was just beginning.
To understand who was standing on that dock, we have to go back. A long way back.
Sergei Bulgakov was born in 1871 in a small town called Livny, in the Oryol region of Russia. His father was an Orthodox priest. His grandfather was an Orthodox priest. His great-grandfather. And the one before that. Six generations of clergy, stretching back to the sixteenth century, all the way to an ancestor named Bulgak --- a Tatar, as it happens, from whom the whole family took their name.
Faith was not something Bulgakov chose. It was the water he swam in.
He was a serious boy. Devout. At thirteen he entered the theological seminary at Oryol, fully intending to follow his father and his grandfather and every Bulgakov before them into the priesthood. This was simply who he was going to be.
And then something went wrong.
He started asking questions. Hard ones. The kind that a thirteen year old with a genuinely alive mind will ask when he is surrounded by mystery and given access to books. And his teachers --- good men, I'm sure, careful men --- couldn't answer them. Not really. They offered him doctrine where he needed understanding. They offered him repetition where he needed conversation.
By seventeen, Bulgakov had lost his faith. He left the seminary. He was so undone by it that he attempted to take his own life.
I remember that year. I remember the particular quality of that kind of darkness --- the darkness of someone who has lost not just a belief but an entire world. An entire self.
He survived. And he rebuilt.
He threw himself into something that felt, at least, like solid ground. Law. Economics. The hard, measurable world of social systems and political structures. He entered Moscow University, told himself that if God was gone, then justice would have to be enough, and began to study Marxism with the same intensity he had once brought to his prayers.
He was good at it. Genuinely good. He published reviews of Das Kapital. He wrote essays on markets and agricultural economics that got him noticed. He traveled to Germany on a scholarship and met the giants of European socialist thought --- Kautsky, Bebel, Plekhanov. He was on his way to becoming one of the most significant Marxist economists in Russia.
And then, slowly, that began to come apart too.
It wasn't a dramatic collapse this time. It was more like a gradual recognition. The more carefully he looked at Marxism, the more he could see what it couldn't explain. It had a theory of economics. It had a theory of history. But it had no account of beauty. No account of conscience. No account of why justice should matter at all if the universe was simply matter in motion.
He came back to idealism. Then to philosophy. Then, through the writings of Vladimir Solovyov, he found his way --- haltingly, quietly, with enormous intellectual caution --- back toward Christianity.
He became a political figure for a time. He was elected to the Second State Duma in 1906 as a Christian socialist, one of those rare people who believed that the gospel had something to say about the organization of society. He edited newspapers. He co-founded political organizations. He tried, in the way that serious people try, to make the world better through argument and institution.
But the Revolution was coming. He could feel it. And he understood, with a clarity that cost him something, that what was coming would not be what the revolutionaries promised.
And then, in the summer of 1909, his four year old son Ivan died.
I was there for that too. I don't have words for it that are adequate. No one does.
But I will tell you this. At the funeral, something opened in Bulgakov that had been closed for twenty years. He described it later as a religious experience --- a moment of recognition so profound that it settled something in him he hadn't known was still unsettled.
He was ordained as an Orthodox priest in 1918. The same year the Bolsheviks came to power.
The timing, as you can imagine, was not ideal.
I want to ask you something.
Have you ever watched someone search for a thing without knowing what the thing was? Without even having a name for it? They move from room to room, picking things up and putting them down, certain only that what they are looking for is not here, not this, not yet.
That is what I watched Bulgakov do for most of his life.
And what makes him remarkable is that he never pretended otherwise. He never settled. He never told himself this is close enough and stopped moving. Each time he found something that didn't quite fit --- the seminary's hollow answers, Marxism's missing soul, politics' exhausting compromises --- he let it go and kept looking. Even when letting go was agonizing. Even when he had built a reputation, a career, an identity around the thing he was releasing.
That kind of honesty takes more courage than most people realize.
What was he actually looking for?
I think, watching him across all those years, the answer is simpler than his philosophy would suggest. He was looking for a world that meant something. A world where beauty was not accidental. Where justice had roots deeper than human agreement. Where the suffering of a four year old boy was not simply a random event in a mechanical universe and nothing more.
He was looking for a home. Not a building. Not even a country. A home in the deepest sense --- a place where the world made a kind of sense that he could live inside of.
Marxism had offered him something like that, for a while. It had a story about history, a direction, a moral urgency. It said: things are wrong, and here is why, and here is what we must do. That is not nothing. For a young man who had lost God and still burned with the need for justice, it was genuinely compelling.
But it couldn't hold him. Because underneath the economics and the theory, Bulgakov kept bumping into questions that Marxism waved away. Questions about the human soul. About beauty. About why any of it mattered. About what Dostoevsky --- whom he loved and lectured on and returned to again and again --- was pointing at when he put suffering and grace in the same breath.
When he came back to Christianity, it wasn't the Christianity of his seminary. It wasn't the rote answers and the closed questions. It was something he had earned, slowly, through years of looking at what was missing from everything else.
And at the center of what he found was an idea he would spend the rest of his life trying to articulate.
He called it Sophia. Divine Wisdom.
It is not an easy idea to summarize, and I won't insult it by trying to reduce it to a sentence. But at its heart, Sophia was Bulgakov's answer to the question that had haunted him since boyhood. Is the world held, or is it abandoned? Is there something sacred woven into the fabric of created things, or are we alone in a universe that does not know we are here?
His answer was: held. Deeply, intimately, inescapably held.
For Bulgakov, the created world was not simply material waiting to be explained. It participated in the divine life. Beauty was not decoration --- it was evidence. The longing human beings feel for something beyond themselves was not a malfunction --- it was a recognition. Creation itself was, in some profound sense, alive with the wisdom of God.
I found this moving, I will admit. I have watched a great many people wrestle with these questions across a great many centuries. And there is something particular about the ones who arrive at wonder not through inheritance but through loss. Who had to give up the easy answer before they could find the true one.
When Bulgakov was ordained in 1918, standing in a church while the world outside was remaking itself in fire and ideology, it was not the act of a man retreating from reality. It was the act of a man who had finally, after decades of searching, found the thing he had been looking for.
He knew what it had cost him to get there.
He did not take it lightly.
There is a particular kind of productivity that only exile makes possible.
I have seen it before. I have watched people stripped of everything familiar --- country, language, community, the furniture of a life --- and discovered that some of them, not all of them, but some, find in that stripping a strange kind of freedom. The noise stops. The obligations fall away. What remains is only what was real to begin with.
Bulgakov arrived in Paris in 1922 with his faith, his mind, and not much else.
What he built from that is quietly astonishing.
The Saint Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute had been founded in Paris just that year, by and for the community of Russian exiles who were trying to keep something alive that the Soviet state was doing its best to extinguish. It was not a grand institution. It was a converted stable, as it happens --- which I always thought carried a certain resonance. A community of displaced thinkers, doing theology in a building that smelled of horses, in a city that was not their home, in a language the neighbors didn't speak.
Bulgakov became its heart.
For more than two decades, until his death in 1944, he taught and wrote and prayed and argued and built. He produced a trilogy of major theological works --- on angels, on John the Baptist, on the Mother of God. He wrote on the nature of the church, on the relationship between Christianity and the broader sweep of human history, on the meaning of Sophia in ways that grew steadily more refined and more daring. He became, in the judgment of serious people, one of the greatest systematic theologians of the twentieth century.
But I want to be careful here, because the importance of what Bulgakov contributed is not really captured by a list of books.
What he gave to the world's spiritual imagination was something more fundamental. He insisted, at a moment in history when the loudest voices were insisting the opposite, that the material world was not the enemy of the sacred. That flesh and matter and beauty and the ordinary textures of human life were not things to be escaped or overcome or explained away. They were the places where the divine was most intimately present.
This was not a comfortable idea in 1922. It is not entirely comfortable now.
On one side, the Soviet state was building a civilization on the premise that matter was all there was --- that spirit was illusion, religion was manipulation, and the only real questions were economic. On the other side, certain strands of Christian thought had long treated the physical world with suspicion, as a distraction from the true spiritual life, something to be endured rather than inhabited.
Bulgakov stood in the middle of both and said: you are both wrong, and in the same direction. The world is not empty. It never was.
I have heard versions of this argument across many centuries and many traditions. The mystics of Islam who found God closer than their own jugular vein. The Hindu philosophers who saw the divine presence saturating every particle of creation. The Jewish teachers who insisted that the holiness of the Sabbath was not an escape from the world but a consecration of it. The Buddhist thinkers who found Buddha-nature in the most ordinary things --- a cypress tree, a bowl of rice, the sound of rain.
What Bulgakov did, in his particular way, was make that argument from within the Christian tradition, in the language of the twentieth century, at a moment when it was urgently needed.
And he did it from a converted stable in Paris. In exile. Without a country. Without the library he had left behind. Without any of the things that scholars are supposed to need.
There is something in that I find deeply worth paying attention to.
The work he produced in those years did not stay inside Orthodox Christianity. It quietly influenced Catholic thinkers, Protestant theologians, philosophers who didn't share his faith but recognized something true in his insistence that the world was held rather than abandoned. Threads from his thinking turned up in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. They appeared in the work of theologians who had never read him directly but had been shaped by people who had.
That is how the tapestry works, of course. You pull a thread here, and something shifts three rows over, in a color you wouldn't have predicted.
Bulgakov never saw most of that. He died in Paris in 1944, the city still under the shadow of war, still far from the Russia he had loved and argued with and mourned for his entire life.
But the threads he wove held.
They are holding still.
I want to go back to the dock.
Not the history of it. Not the politics of it. Just the image. A person standing at the edge of their known world, holding what they own, watching the water. About to cross into something they didn't choose and can't yet name.
I have been seeing that image a great deal lately.
The ships are different now. The reasons are depressingly familiar. Somewhere tonight, on some coast or border or checkpoint, there are people in that exact posture. Physicially displaced, yes --- the world is producing exiles at a rate that should embarrass us all. But I am thinking also of another kind of exile. The kind that doesn't require a ship.
There are people who have been exiled from the faith they grew up in. Who sat in a pew or a mosque or a temple for years and then one day realized the answers they were being given no longer fit the questions they were actually asking. And they left. Or were pushed out. And now they are somewhere on the water, not sure where they are going.
There are people exiled from the political home they thought they had. Who watched a movement or a party or an ideology they believed in become something they no longer recognized. Who find themselves on no map they were given.
There are people simply exiled from certainty itself. From the version of the world that used to hold together. The modern moment is extraordinarily good at dissolving the ground under people's feet. And there is not always a clear dock to depart from or a clear shore to arrive at. Just the open water, and the uncomfortable freedom of not knowing.
I want to say something to those people, and I want to say it carefully.
Bulgakov lost his faith at seventeen. He spent twenty years finding his way back to something real --- and what he found looked almost nothing like what he had left. He was a seminarian, then a skeptic, then a Marxist, then a philosopher, then a priest. Each of those was genuine. Each of those was, in its moment, an honest attempt to find a home. And none of them, except the last, was the destination.
What I want you to hear is this: that journey was not a failure. It was the work. The long, uncomfortable, occasionally agonizing work of finding out what was actually true, rather than what he had been handed.
The world is full of people doing that work right now. Quietly. Often alone. Often without a name for what they are doing or a community that understands it. Moving through stages, leaving things behind, not sure what comes next.
Bulgakov's life says: keep going.
And it says something else. Something I think is the deepest thing he spent his life trying to articulate, and which I believe to be true because I have been watching this world for a very long time.
The world is held.
Not abandoned. Not empty. Not a cold machine running down in the dark. Held --- in something that does not have an easy name but that human beings have been reaching toward, from every direction, in every century, in every language, for as long as I have been watching them reach.
Beauty is not accidental. Longing is not a malfunction. The fact that you are searching for something real is itself evidence that something real is there to be found.
Bulgakov found his home. Not in Russia --- Russia was taken from him. He found it in a converted stable in Paris, surrounded by other exiles, doing the work that mattered most to him, held by a faith he had earned rather than inherited.
It wasn't the home he started from.
It was better.
The ships are still sailing. The exiles are still standing on docks. And the thing Bulgakov knew --- the thing he built his entire second life on --- is still true.
There is a home to be found.
I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it rather than answer it too quickly.
Where are you on the journey?
Not where you think you should be. Not where you started. Not where you told someone you were going. Where are you actually?
Because Bulgakov's life, when I hold it up to the light, looks less like a biography and more like a mirror. And I have found, in my long experience of watching human beings move through their lives, that the people who find his story most compelling are usually the ones who recognize something in it. A stage they have been through. A stage they are in right now. The particular feeling of standing at the edge of something they are leaving, not yet able to see what comes next.
If that is you --- if you are somewhere on that open water --- I want you to know that you are in good company. Some of the most honest, most searching, most alive people I have ever watched have spent significant portions of their lives not knowing where they were going. That uncertainty is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is often a sign that something is going very right.
And if you are someone who has found your home --- or something that feels like home, for now --- I want to ask you a different question. How did you get there? What did you have to let go of? What did you have to stop pretending was enough?
Those are worth knowing. Worth remembering.
Bulgakov never stopped being curious. Even at the end, in Paris, in his seventies, still writing, still asking, still refining. The arrival didn't end the journey. It just changed its character. He went from searching for a home to building one --- and then inviting others in.
That, I think, is what the finding is actually for.
Not to stop. To be able to offer something to the next person standing on the dock.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere very different.
We are leaving the drawing rooms and theological institutes of Paris, leaving the turbulent politics of early twentieth century Russia, and traveling to the mountains of Nepal.
I want to introduce you to a man named Yogi Naraharinath. He was a saint, a historian, a walker of ancient roads, and a keeper of texts that the modern world had nearly forgotten. He spent his life gathering the scattered written memory of his people --- manuscripts hidden in temples, genealogies carved on palm leaves, histories that existed nowhere else on earth. He believed that the sacred was not the property of any one tradition. That the lord of the temple, as he put it, belongs to everyone.
He was jailed for his convictions. He kept going anyway.
I think you are going to like him.
But for now --- for this moment --- I want to stay here a little longer.
With the image of a priest on a dock in Sevastopol. With the grey water and the small bag and the ship disappearing over the horizon. With the converted stable in Paris where something extraordinary was built from almost nothing.
Bulgakov lost his country. He never stopped being at home in the world.
That is not a small thing. In fact I think it might be one of the most important things a human life can demonstrate. That the ground beneath you is not finally made of geography, or ideology, or the certainty you were handed as a child. It is made of something that cannot be taken from you and put on a ship.
You carry it with you.
It is already there.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.