Interest in the religious and philosophical life of Russian society on the eve of the Revolution in general, and in the disputes about Onomatodoxy at the beginning of the twentieth century in particular, has increased in recent years.Footnote ¹ The discussion of Onomatodoxy, after a pause of several decades, is now being continued on the internet and in books and journals with no less fervour than at the beginning of the conflict. The most frequent subject of discussion is the ‘Athonite’ version of Onomatodoxy, that is, the teaching about the name of God in the form that was developed by the Hieroschemamonk Anthony (Bulatovich) in the 1910s, since it was this doctrine (as opposed to the later interpretations of Onomatodoxy by such thinkers as Priest Pavel Florensky, Alexey Losev, Archpriest Sergey Bulgakov) that became a subject of dispute on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.

The life of the Hieroschemamonk Anthony (1870–1919) as well as his philosophical and theological thought represent a rare phenomenon in Russian culture: a person who had no special theological education and who led a life far removed from church activities before becoming a monk,Footnote ² entered into a complex theological debate and suddenly revealed himself as a better expert in the patristic tradition than his opponents – bishops and other important church figures. Therefore, the works of Anthony deserve far more attention than they have received so far. Strangely enough, despite the fact that the dispute about honouring the name of God has not yet been exhausted, the views of Anthony Bulatovich have not yet become the subject of an in-depth study.

The publications of the 1910s–1920s which focused on the teaching of AnthonyFootnote ³ reveal their polemical, non-scholarly and mostly superficial character. Unfortunately, the majority of those who opposed the adherents of Onomatodoxy at that time tried to achieve the condemnation of their opponents at any price, and not to uncover the truth, as researchers have already noted.Footnote ⁴

In recent works on Onomatodoxy, the thought of Anthony was studied either in a fragmentary way, or too superficially and with a lack of specific details. Many authors focused on the history of the conflict and its further development, or simply set a timeline of events and published documents relating to the events of 1910s–1920s. Bishop Ilarion Alfeev, the author of the most significant study on Onomatodoxy to date,Footnote ⁵ not only presented a historical outline of events related to the dispute on honouring the name of God, but also analysed the views of the most prominent church leaders and philosophers who wrote about Onomatodoxy. With such a broad scope, the author inevitably has paid too little attention to Anthony Bulatovich. In fact, he considered only his first work, Apology of Faith in the Name of God and in the Name ‘Jesus’ and in his analysis paid almost no attention to Antony's later works. Comparing the teaching of Anthony with the teaching of the Eastern church fathers, Bishop Ilarion Alfeev did not provide a comprehensive analysis, and as far as the theology of Anthony is concerned, the study of Alfeev can be considered fairly superficial. The same can be said about the book by the Priest Dmitry Leskin on the Onomatodoxy dispute.Footnote ⁶

The Onomatodoxy dispute in general and the teaching of Anthony in particular generated even less interest in the West. Antoine Nivière defended his doctoral thesis on the Onomatodoxy disputeFootnote ⁷ in 1987, before the discussion of the issues related to Onomatodoxy resumed in Russia. However, in his work he focused more on the historical outline of events than on the theological framework of the controversy, and came to the conclusion that from a theological point of view the question of honouring the name of God has remained unresolved. A year later, the same author in his brief survey article asserted, concerning the contents of the Onomatodoxy doctrine, that ‘cette doctrine affirmait la présence effective de l'Être divin dans son nom’, and that this doctrine had not ever been formulated by anyone.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, we do not find the doctrine of the real presence of the divine substance in the name of God among the fathers; however, this was not taught by the adherents of Onomatodoxy either. Their doctrine was that divine energeia is present in the name of God, at least, this thesis is insisted upon in all the works of Anthony Bulatovich. In his thinking, the name of God according to the material aspect (letters and sound), is the receptacle of the divine energy, while according to its inner aspect, as a part of divine revelation, it is itself an energy of God and in this sense the Onomatodoxy formula ‘The Name of God is God’Footnote ⁹ has a right to exist.

In his Master's thesis on the Onomatodoxy controversy,Footnote ¹⁰ Tom Dikstra discussed the history of the dispute, the basic theological positions of the supporters and opponents of Onomatodoxy, but the doctrine of Anthony was not considered in much detail (he mainly focused on the Apology of Faith), because the work had a general expository character.

Evaluating the extent of investigation of the theological works of Anthony Bulatovich and, thus, of the Athonite Onomatodoxy, we should mention a noteworthy fact: despite a fairly large number of articles and published documents on Onomatodoxy, only the Apology of Faith was reprinted out of all major works of Antony Bulatovich,Footnote ¹¹ while My Thought in Christ – the work where the originality and independence of Antony's thought and at the same time its close relation with the patristic tradition appear most vividly – has not been reprinted until now, and no one has ever analysed this work in detail. None of the theological works of Antony Bulatovich have so far been translated into any European language.

In our time, as at the beginning of the twentieth century, people continue to argue whether, from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, the Athonite Onomatodoxy was a heresy. Yet, paradoxically, too little attention is paid to investigating to what extent the doctrine of the adherents of Onomatodoxy, and especially of Anthony Bulatovich, corresponds to the doctrine concerning the name of God by the fathers of the Byzantine era when this doctrine received its final philosophical form,Footnote ¹² although one can only speak of heresy from the standpoint of the church in the case of discrepancies between the doctrine under examination and the consensus patrum. Thus the historical outline of events related to the conflict has been studied sufficiently, yet the same cannot be said concerning the theological aspects of the dispute.

In this article I would like to focus on one aspect of the doctrine of Anthony Bulatovich – his view of the divine revelation as action, that is, as energy of God – and to find out how the views of Antony Bulatovich are related to the teaching of the fathers of the Eastern Church.

During the controversy about honouring the name of God, which broke out in Russia in the 1910s–1920s, Father Anthony Bulatovich, the leader of the Athonite adherents of Onomatodoxy, repeatedly emphasised that the Onomatodoxy dispute had many similarities with the dispute between the followers of Gregory Palamas and of Barlaam of Calabria in fourteenth-century Byzantium.Footnote ¹³ Antony Bulatovich also pointed out that the dispute arose with regard to the Jesus prayer but eventually it ‘shifted to a dispute on the energy of God in general’.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘The main thesis of the adherents of Onomatodoxy’, argued Anthony Bulatovich, ‘is that every energy of God is God and is called God, and therefore the words of God recorded in the Holy Scripture, are also not the dead words of God but the living words. Hence the names of God are also the Spirit and Life in their innermost mystery, and they possess divine dignity and can be rightly called God Himself, as the Energy of the Divinity, inseparable from the substance of God.’Footnote ¹⁵ Since the name of God is a particular case of the more general ‘word of God’,Footnote ¹⁶ in order to prove the divinity of the name, it is enough to prove the divinity of the revealed truth and ultimately the divinity of every action of God. Thus in his works Anthony devotes considerable space to the question of divine energy and to proving the divinity of the words of prayer and the words of the scripture, as well as the presence of the divine energy in them as in the true words of God and not the words of a human being.

In our time a sufficient number of studies have been dedicated to the Palamite doctrine which is commonly accepted in the Eastern Church,Footnote ¹⁷ but in the beginning of the twentieth century, when Russian academic theology had very little interest in the Palamite issues,Footnote ¹⁸ Antony Bulatovich faced a difficult challenge – to prove the divinity of the revelation of God, ‘the words of God’. According to the quotations in his writings, Antony Bulatovich did not have at his disposal the majority of sources that were used by Gregory Palamas, nor the works of Palamas himself. Apparently, Anthony Bulatovich only knew about the subject of the dispute between St Gregory Palamas and Barlaam, and about the anathema of those who did not recognise the divinity of the energy of God; not once did Antony quote Palamas in his writings. In other words, Antony Bulatovich knew about the church teaching on the energies of God, but had to rediscover the proofs for this teaching. Anthony had success in this task, although using other means than St Gregory Palamas. If, while writing his treatises, Gregory Palamas referred to the dogmatic works of the fathers, Antony Bulatovich in his works focused on the scriptures and on the liturgical texts, which are given an interpretation in the Palamite sense. The entire work My Thought in Christ is dedicated to this objective. In this treatise Anthony dwells on proving the divinity of the energy of God, its inalienability from the nature of God and on the legitimacy of calling it God (the opponents of the adherents of Onomatodoxy denied that the energy of God may be called GodFootnote ¹⁹). Antony Bulatovich places special emphasis on the manifestation of divine energy through the actions of God the Word, especially after the incarnation. However, Antony does not separate the actions of God the Word and the actions of other persons of the Holy Trinity: their actions/energy are ‘triune’.Footnote ²⁰ Chapters 1–3 of the first part of My Thought in Christ are dedicated to this topic.

Anthony calls ‘the Word’ the energy of God on the basis of the Church Slavonic translation of Heb 1:1–3, ‘understanding the word “Word” not in the sense of articulate speech, but in the sense of a certain unknown verbal Activity of the Word, . . . who determines, that is to say, utters all the volitions of the Father’, ‘not in the sense of articulate human speech, but in a spiritual and mental sense’.Footnote ²¹ The Word of the Logos is the New Testament revelation, the preaching of the Gospels, ‘the words of the divine sowing, the seeds of divine virtues, . . . living words of God, . . . His Activity and Divinity’,Footnote ²² and in these words ‘the Father acts together with the Son and the Holy Spirit’.Footnote ²³ These words are God Himself: ‘“Now you are clean through the Word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you” (John 15:3–4). . . . You are clean, says the Lord to the Apostles, through the words of My Mouth. Abide in My words with your thought, and I Myself will abide in you, for I am in my words. . . . “If you abide in me, and My Words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you” (John 15:7). As you can see, what is said in the preceding text: “I in you”, is read in this text: “My Words abide in you”. Who would dare to doubt that the Lord names with the name “I” not only His Substance but also His Activity, His Words!’Footnote ²⁴

According to Antony Bulatovich, the Kingdom of Heaven consists of ‘uniting people to the light and, on the whole, to the energy of the divinity’,Footnote ²⁵ when ‘the Spirit of God, that is, the Energy of the Divinity enters into man’.Footnote ²⁶ Interpreting the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3–23), Anthony writes that Christ calls the seed ‘the word of the Kingdom’, because his words embody his energy, and ‘after adopting the words of the Savior with faith, the Holy Spirit starts to reign in man’; ‘a person can become “the son of the kingdom” only if he adopts the verbal Energy of the Son of God, His Words, which are the living seed. With the adoption of this verbal Activity of the Word, His verbal Seed, into the will, the thought, and the senses of man, the Triune Holy Trinity starts to reign in man with its triadic Activity, and then the man sees the coming of “the Kingdom of God”, about which it is said that “it is within you”’.Footnote ²⁷

Many times, analysing New Testament texts, Bulatovich returned to the idea that the energy of God, the light, the power and the divine ‘seed’ are not only the words of Christ, which he said during his earthly life, but the words of deified saints, primarily the Apostles, and therefore these words, when recorded, bear the hidden power of God, which can always act upon man if he accepts these words with faith.Footnote ²⁸ The same may be said about the words of the Prophets, that is, about the revelation in the Old Testament,Footnote ²⁹ and in general about any divinely inspired thought: ‘the Lord says that “the Holy Spirit will guide” us “into all truth” – “He shall receive of mine and shall shew it unto you”, “it is not you that speak”, but the Holy Spirit, “when you will be brought to the tribunals for my sake”, and thus the Lord clearly testifies with these words . . ., that divinely inspired thoughts and ideas in man are His activity together with the activity of the good-willing Father and the Holy Spirit’.Footnote ³⁰

This doctrine is in accordance with the teaching of the Orthodox ascetic tradition which understands the word of God as divine and spiritual power. For example, St John of Sinai writes that ‘reading [the Scriptures] can enlighten and gather the mind a great deal, for these are the words of the Holy Spirit that instruct those who come to them in every way’.Footnote ³¹ St Cyril of Jerusalem thus explains, interpreting John 6:63: ‘Since many and different things are written about the Spirit in a simple manner in the Divine Scriptures, there is a danger that some out of ignorance could become confused, not knowing in what kind of spirit we should understand what was written; as a precaution, it is useful now to explain what Spirit is called Holy by the Scripture. . . . The Lord Himself says about good teaching: the words that I spoke unto you, they are spirit, and they are life (John 6:63), that is, they are spiritual. But the Holy Spirit cannot be uttered with a tongue. He is the Living One who gives the ability to speak wisely, Himself speaking and conversing. . . . And again: the Holy Spirit said to the Apostles who were in Antioch: separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them (Acts 13:2). See? The Spirit is Living, He separates, calls, and sends with power. . . . This was told us because it was said: the words that I spoke unto you, they are spirit – so you would not consider the Spirit as a simple utterance of the mouth, but the good teaching.’Footnote ³² Thus the saving teaching here is made equal to the very energy of the Holy Spirit.

The theme of the words of Christ and the saints as true words of God is especially prominent in the Homilies of St Macarius the Great (the so-called Ps-MacariusFootnote ³³), whose theology is, so to say, permeated with the spirit of Onomatodoxy. St Macarius repeatedly states that the word of God which is written in the Bible is not just a ‘word about God’, as the opponents of the adherents of Onomatodoxy argued, but the true word of God, which has divine power in itself: ‘The listeners should give heed to those who tell the mysteries of the Spirit from the Spirit and from God, the living source, as if they hear the word coming from the mouth of God and as if the Holy Spirit moves the organ of the tongue and speaks through it’;Footnote ³⁴ ‘He gave some hidden power from His substance . . . to Mary, who loved him, and sat at His feet, . . . The very words that God said with peace unto Mary, were spirit and certain power. And these words, entering her heart, became the soul in the soul, the spirit in the spirit, and the Divine power has filled her heart.’Footnote ³⁵ Examples can be multiplied; the fact that St Macarius believed that the word of God and the words of the saints possess divine energy is quite obvious. Anthony Bulatovich defended the same idea in his works, rebuking his opponents that they called the words of the Gospel not the ‘living words of God’ as the holy fathers did, but only ‘the words of the Apostles about God’: ‘But why – asks Antony Bulatovich – do you refuse to acknowledge the Words of the Hypostatic Word as Activity of God and as Divinity? . . . Or maybe you tend to think together with various western sages who now set themselves to correct the Gospels, that out of ignorance the Apostles and the Evangelists spoiled the words of the Savior and wrote down not the Words of God, but their personal recollections about the Savior, the fruits of their personal memory? But then we are of absolutely different mind with you, because we believe that the words of the Gospel are divinely inspired and true.’Footnote ³⁶

The Seventh Ecumenical Council proclaimed the same doctrine. One of the arguments which was used at the Council in defence of icon veneration reads as follows: ‘Since you, venerating the book of the law [i.e. the Gospels, the ritual veneration of which has existed in the Orthodox Church from the earliest times], venerate not the nature of skin and ink which are in it, but the words of God that are contained therein, in the same way I, venerating the icon of God, venerate not the nature of wood and paints – let it not be! – But having a soulless image of Christ, I think that through it I have Christ Himself and venerate Him.’Footnote ³⁷ At the same time, further clearing themselves from the charges of idolatry, the fathers of the Council argue that ‘the people of Christ . . . have not revered and worshipped anything that exists, but the Holy and Life-Giving Trinity . . . ; the image of idolatry is known, and for pious Christians only the Lord of all can be venerated’.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, we can conclude that, according to the fathers of the Council, the words of God which are confined in the scriptures are God himself, since Christians can worship only God and not anything else.

Here we come to a very interesting topic, which in itself requires a special study: the connection between the New Testament asceticism and dogmatic theology with the Old Testament theology as expressed both in the Bible and in the Jewish apocryphal and apocalyptic literature. As has already been noted, according to the dominating paradigm of modern patristic studies, with the beginning of the era of the Ecumenical Councils and great doctors of theology (starting with the Cappadocians), ‘Christianity had been totally Hellenised and had fully rejected its Jewish cultural roots’, starting to speak the language of Greek philosophy. ‘The use of Jewish symbolism was visible only in poetic metaphors scantily interspersed in Church hymnography and ascetic literature’, and therefore such symbolism cannot be used for extracting a doctrinal meaning.Footnote ³⁹ The first scholar who reconsidered this approach was Alexander Golitsyn, the founder of the Theophaneia School at the Marquette University (Milwaukee, USA), who showed that the major themes in Christian asceticism and dogma, especially those associated with the vision of divine light/glory, with the deification of the saints, with the transformation of the inner man according to God's image, were borrowed from Old Testament texts and Jewish Apocalyptic literature, although they underwent a transformation by the Christian writers.Footnote ⁴⁰

The study of the influence that ‘the Jewish matrix’ made on Christian writers is only beginning; so far its influence on subsequent Jewish tradition has been studied much better. The works of Andrei Orlov on Jewish pseudoepigrapha are of some interest in connection with the theme of revering the name of God and of the attitude of the church fathers to the word of God in general. Thus, referring to the biblical roots of the tradition related to the name of God in the Revelation of Abraham, the Jewish text which survived only in Slavonic translation,Footnote ⁴¹ Orlov notes that the idea of the appearance of God as a theophany of his voice and name is the ancient tradition of perceiving God which can be found in biblical texts.Footnote ⁴² In the struggle with the anthropomorphic representations of the deity, ‘the book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic school promulgated an anticorporeal theology of the divine name with its conception of sanctuary (tabernacle) as the exclusive dwelling of God's Name’.Footnote ⁴³ Moreover, the name was associated with the glory of God, his shining and majesty; the same notion of the appearance of God as a proclamation of his name can be found in the book of Exodus (33:18–20), where the appearance of his glory and the proclamation of God's name is juxtaposed with the theophany of his face which cannot be seen by the people, thus the whole idea can be expressed as ‘the possibility of encountering the deity not only through the form but also through the sound’.Footnote ⁴⁴

It is obvious that here we have the roots of the subsequent differentiation between the substance of God (‘the face’ of God, which is unapproachable for contemplation) and his energy (accessible and knowable name of God, his glory).

Byzantine theology interpreted various theophanies in Greek philosophical terms with distinctions between essence and energy, but this difference, albeit in different terms, may be noted in Old Testament theology. This is the distinction between ‘the face’ of God, which is unapproachable for contemplation, that is, his substance, and the knowable and approachable name of God, his glory, that is, the divine energy. This tradition can be found, for example, in Theodoret of Cyrus, in his Commentary on the Psalms: ‘“And blessed be the name of His glory for ever and ever” (Ps 71:19; the Septuagint). Therefore all should glorify him. For if we cannot know his nature as unapproachable, we have learned His saving name.’Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘“Praise the name of the Lord, praise you, the servants of the Lord” (Psalm 134:1, Septuagint). Since the nature of God is invisible, but it is commanded to praise it, He suitably said: Praise the name of the Lord. Naming God, he says, is sufficient to you, and do not seek to see what is not allowed to see.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Similar interpretations can be found in other church fathers.

With regard to the revelation of God as his utterance, as Andrei Orlov notes, the revelation announced by God (for example, in Deuteronomy 4:36 – the revelation to Moses at Mt Sinai as the words of God, his voice, emanating ‘from the midst of the fire’) in the Deuteronomic theological school replaces visual revelation, and ‘the depiction of the deity's activity and presence as the voice in the fire thus becomes one of the distinctive features of the Shem theology’,Footnote ⁴⁷ therefore, according to Tryggve Mettiger, ‘it is not surprising that the Name of God occupies such a central position in a theology in which God's words and voice receive so much emphasis’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As the same scholar observes, ‘when the Deuteronomistic theologians chose shem, they seized on a term which was already connected with the idea of God's presence’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, according to biblical theology, the name of God is equivalent to the glory of God, the presence of God, that is, to nothing else than the divine energy, if we express the same idea in the terms of Byzantine theology.

If we now turn to the above-cited Homily 12 of Macarius the Great, it becomes clear how he could take the idea of the uttered words of Christ as the words which are ‘spirit and certain power’, which could ‘enter the heart’ and fill it with divine power. St Macarius is exactly an author who was heavily influenced by ancient Jewish traditions, but at the same time he is the author who himself had an enormous influence on the subsequent ascetic and theological tradition of Eastern Christianity, including such theologians as Dionysius the Areopagite, Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, when the opponent of the adherents of Onomatodoxy, Sergei Troitsky, accused them of being not the followers of the holy fathers, but of ‘Jewish and rabbinical teaching’ concerning the word of God as well as concerning the effectiveness and reverence of the divine names,Footnote ⁵¹ it was not entirely wrong. His mistake was in claiming that the teaching of the holy fathers had no connection with the Jewish traditions, whereas in fact the process of ‘putting on the Greek garb’ that Christian theology underwent from the second century, constituted not the invention of a completely new way of theological thinking, but only the development of Old Testament and early Christian theology: ‘new things were introduced as an addition to the old, as their further explanation, and not as any kind of alternative to it’.Footnote ⁵² We should note that Anthony Nulatovich himself, making a critical analysis of Troitsky's attacks on Onomatodoxy,Footnote ⁵³ noted that Troitsky in vain scoffed at the faith of the Jews in the name ‘Shem’. Despite the fact that Rabbinic Judaism in this area largely shifted in the direction of magic, its basis was still the faith of the Old Testament church in the name of God: ‘If the Jews obviously invented many miracles for the sake of glorifying the name “Shem” over the name “Jesus”, still the name “Shem” does not cease to be the name of God, and this Name undoubtedly revealed its power in the Old Testament Church.’Footnote ⁵⁴

We should repeat that the theme of the words of God and his revelation as possessing divine energy is so important for Antony Bulatovich because, in his opinion, the name of God is a particular case of the word of God, ‘verbal’, that is, a spiritual action of God, divinely revealed truth, ‘the word living and effective’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Therefore, since the word of God is divine action or energy as a part of divine revelation, it can be called God according to its interior aspect. Antony made a strict distinction between the interior, ‘spiritual and mental’ aspect of the name of God, and its external aspect, expressed in letters and sounds.Footnote ⁵⁶

Thus, based on the analysis of texts written by Anthony Bulatovich, it is possible to conclude that his doctrine of the divinity of the biblical revelation being the result of divine action or energy, as well as his doctrine of the spiritual power of the words of Christ and the saints, is consistent with the teaching of the fathers of the Eastern Christian Church as well as with the Old Testament theology on the name of God.