Sergii Bulgakov’s Linguistic Trinity*

Joshua Heath

doi:10.1111/moth.12708

Abstract

AbstractAs the work of Sergii Bulgakov has become more widely available in English, his Trinitarian theology has become a subject of particular interest. This article analyses his less well‐known works on the Trinity from the 1920s, arguing that the understanding of Trinitarian doctrine developed there is inseparable from Bulgakov’s analyses of language and consciousness. By analysing Bulgakov’s approach to the Trinity via language, this article will draw particular attention to his negotiation of the notion of divine transcendence. We will see that Bulgakov’s writings on the Trinity display, contrary to received opinion, a deep apophatic tendency, or recognition of divine transcendence. But we will also see that his more thoroughly linguistic approach to the Trinity, in which divine transcendence flows from what it means for God to be Love, contradicts his explicit discussion of divine transcendence elsewhere as a transcendence of the Father alone.

Highlights

As the work of Sergii Bulgakov has become more widely available in English, his Trinitarian theology has become a subject of particular interest
This article will examine the Trinitarian theology of the Russian philosopher-theologian Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1 944)
The ambition of this article is to advance our understanding of this major figure in twentieth-c entury theology, by demonstrating how his mature theological work thoroughly depends upon the fruits of his more obscure linguistic investigations

Summary

Introduction

This article will examine the Trinitarian theology of the Russian philosopher-theologian Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1 944). To draw out Bulgakov’s distinctive understanding of God as incomprehensible because personal, I should like to set him in conversation with one of his most critical contemporaries, Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958) Lossky himself presented his ‘recovery’ of the apophatic character of Eastern Christianity[36] against what he considered the speculative excesses of the Russian religious philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and of Bulgakov in particular.[37]. In this definition of the subject’s reality as dependent upon the not-I, we find the hidden centre of Bulgakov’s engagement with German Idealism in ‘Chapters’ Through his treatment of ‘reality’, Bulgakov decisively confronts the Ich Philosophie [I Philosophy] of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1 814) and articulates his own distinct understanding of personal existence.[74] It might seem strange to locate Bulgakov’s engagement with Fichte in the seemingly generic concept of reality, since the influence of the latter is all-too-e vident in ‘Chapters’, through the adoption of Fichte’s peculiar manner of speaking about the subject. That the human intelligence cannot know God insofar as love as a principle of identity contradicts created personhood, it is unclear how Bulgakov can justify ascribing such a limitation to thought and language

Fragmenting Personhood and the Incomprehensibility of God

The Trinity and the Absolute

The Father and the Absolute