What do Immanuel Kant and Pablo Picasso have in common? What sounds like the beginning of a bad academic joke was a serious question for the Russian philosophertheologian Sergii Bulgakov (1871Bulgakov ( -1944. For the affinities between the twentieth-century artist and the eighteenth-century philosopher were, for him, substantial. Indeed, readers of Bulgakov's The Tragedy of Philosophy-recently published in translation by Angelico Press-might consider the description of Kant as a 'cubist' and of his philosophy as a 'cubism', one of the book's more outlandish and perplexing claims. Nor is it a claim that Bulgakov makes only once. In Tragedy, Kant's epistemology is described as 'subjective-cubistic', 1 in response to Kant's conviction that the unity of perceptions does not arise from objects themselves, but is instead imparted by the understanding to experience. 2 Later in the same work, Bulgakov simply inserts the exclamation 'cubism!' into a citation from Kant's own text on the unifying role of the understanding. These are the only two instances in Tragedy where Kant's alleged cubism is asserted. They are marginal and gnomic assertions, and give an indication of the perplexities that await the intrepid reader. But they nonetheless gesture toward the abiding concern of this work. For Kant's 'cubism' has to do with his approach to unity, and particularly his view of the understanding as imparting unity to experience, rather than the unity of things being received by the understanding from the perceived objects themselves.Bulgakov has more to say on Kant's 'cubism' elsewhere. The characterisation of Kant as a cubist pre-dates the extended discussion of the latter's philosophy in Tragedy by a few 1
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 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. 2 Among his untranslated texts, I focus chiefly on 'Chapters on Trinitarity' (first published in two parts in 1928 and 1930). A recent critical edition of the Russian text can be found in Sergii Bulgakov, 'Glavy o troichnosti', in idem, Trudy o troichnosti, ed. Anna Reznichenko (Moscow: O.G.I., 2001), 54-180. (Henceforth GT). I also discuss his Tragediia Filosofii (written in 1920-21), which has recently received an English translation: The Tragedy of Philosophy, trans. Stephen Churchyard (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2020). (Henceforth TP). For an extended discussion of this work and a critical review of the recent translation, see my 'On Sergii Bulgakov's
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