From Symbol to Sacrament: Losev, Bulgakov, and the Ontology of Eucharistic Ecclesiology

In the heart of religious life, there is a persistent question about how the invisible becomes visible. For centuries, thinkers have wrestled with the idea of a symbol: is it merely a sign that points to something else, like a road sign pointing to a city, or is it something that actually contains the reality it represents? In the Eastern Christian tradition, this question is not just about philosophy; it is about the very nature of the church and its most sacred ritual, the Eucharist. Here, bread and wine are believed to become the body and blood of Christ, yet they remain bread and wine to the senses. This creates a tension: how can a physical object truly hold a divine presence without ceasing to be itself? If the connection between the physical and the divine is too weak, the ritual is just a reminder. If it is too strong, the physical world disappears entirely. Understanding how these two realities can coexist is essential for grasping how a community of people can be considered a living, divine organism rather than just a social club.

A new paper by Daniel Kisliakov explores this deep tension by looking at the work of two Russian thinkers from the early twentieth century: the philosopher Aleksei Losev and the theologian Sergei Bulgakov. The author does not argue that Losev directly taught Bulgakov, nor does he claim that Bulgakov's ideas were simply copied from Losev. Instead, the paper proposes that their ideas fit together like two pieces of a puzzle that were made in the same workshop. Losev developed a sophisticated way of thinking about symbols, names, and myths, arguing that when a symbol appears, it does not just point to a hidden truth; it actually participates in that truth. For Losev, a symbol is a real manifestation where the visible and the invisible share the same space without merging into one another. The paper suggests that this philosophical framework provides the missing "bridge" that helps explain Bulgakov's more complex theological ideas about the church.

Bulgakov, writing in exile, described the church as a "divine-human" organism. He believed that the church is not just a group of people following rules, but a living body where human beings and divine life are united. The paper shows that Bulgakov's view of the Eucharist relies on the same logic that Losev applied to symbols. In Bulgakov's view, when the church gathers for the Eucharist, the physical elements and the community do not just represent Christ; they actually become the place where Christ is present. This is not a metaphor. The paper argues that Bulgakov saw the Eucharist as the moment where the church is truly formed, not just organized. However, Bulgakov did not always use the specific term "Eucharistic ecclesiology" (the idea that the church is defined by the Eucharist) in his writings. That specific phrase was later made explicit by another theologian, Nicholas Afanasiev, in the 1950s. The paper's main finding is that the deep philosophical ground for Afanasiev's explicit theory was already present in the earlier, implicit work of Bulgakov, and that Losev's philosophy helps us see exactly how that ground works.

The author carefully rules out the idea that Losev was the direct source of Bulgakov's theology. The timeline of their lives and writings does not support a simple story of one influencing the other. Bulgakov was already developing his major ideas while Losev was still a student, and Bulgakov continued to refine his theology in exile while Losev remained in the Soviet Union. Instead of a line of influence, the paper identifies an "ontological affinity." This means that both men were solving the same fundamental problem about the nature of reality, even if they used different words. Losev provided the philosophical language to explain how a symbol can be real without being the thing itself. Bulgakov used this same logic to explain how the church can be human and divine at the same time. The paper suggests that without Losev's philosophical clarity, it is harder to understand the deep structure of Bulgakov's theology, but without Bulgakov's theological application, Losev's ideas remain abstract philosophy.

The core of the argument rests on the concept of participation. In this view, the church is not a building or a hierarchy; it is a reality that exists because its members share in the life of Christ. The paper explains that this sharing is not a matter of identity—humans do not become God—but it is also not a matter of mere association. It is a real connection where the human and the divine meet. The Eucharist is the concentrated expression of this. When the bread and wine are shared, the church is not just remembering a past event; it is participating in a present reality that exceeds the physical gathering. The paper posits that this understanding transforms how we see the church. It is not an institution that happens to have a ritual; it is a community that is constituted by the ritual. The physical gathering is the visible form of a reality that is larger than the gathering itself.

This perspective challenges the modern tendency to separate the spiritual from the physical or to treat religious rituals as purely symbolic gestures. The paper argues that for the Russian thinkers of this era, the material world was not a barrier to the divine but the very place where the divine could be encountered. Losev's work on the "energy of the essence" suggests that the invisible is not less real because it is hidden; it is present in the visible without being trapped by it. Bulgakov applied this to the church, showing that the human community is the vessel for divine life. The paper concludes that the explicit theory of "Eucharistic ecclesiology" that emerged later was not a sudden invention. It was the natural result of a deeper, shared intuition about how reality works. By connecting Losev's philosophy of symbols with Bulgakov's theology of the church, the paper reveals that the church is known most fundamentally through its participation in Christ, a participation that is made real and visible in the Eucharist. This connection suggests that the church is not defined by its rules or its history, but by the real, living presence of the divine within the human community.