Reimaging Aesthetics: Sergius Bulgakov on Seeing the Wisdom of Creation

Abstract

In this essay I resource the philosophy and theology of Sergius Bulgokov, particularly his understanding of divine and human imaging, as a way of mapping human comportment towards the non-human material world in aesthetic terms. By comparing the development of his account of human action from his early Philosophy of Economy and his later dogmatic theology, I seek to render less disconcerting an ambiguity in Bulgakov’s work regarding human activity toward nature by contextualizing his early political philosophy within his later dogmatics. I argue that his later Trinitarian and Christological context more aptly suggests ways of viewing human action toward nature as aesthetic action animated by the perception of divinely created beauty. I then turn to Bulgakov’s views on iconographic art in order to show some theologically informed constraints and limits to aesthetic judgment and human creativity in the practice of iconographic writing that accord with Bulgakov’s broader theological anthropology.