Subject Area

Anthropology, Art History/Criticism/Conservation, Humanities, Language and Literature, Slavic, Philosophy, Religion, Theology/Religious Education

Abstract

This dissertation’s primary interlocutor is Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944), the prominent Marxist economist later turned Idealist religious philosopher and finally Russian Orthodox priest and dogmatician who was forcibly exiled from his homeland in 1922 never to return. The thesis this manuscript pursues is that Bulgakov’s theology of beauty and metaphysics of personhood are inextricably enmeshed. Chapter 1 begins with beauty, specifically the problem or “tragedy of beauty,” a thematic to which Bulgakov consistently draws attention regarding the religious experience of postlapsarian persons. Chapter 2 assays Bulgakov’s chief rudiments of personhood as such, providing a kind of grammar for his metaphysical structuring of human persons and philosophy of subjectivity via his theology proper, particularly how his doctrine of God grounds and contours his vision of personhood in relation to beauty. For Bulgakov’s trinitarian personalism, these rudiments are grounded in an ontology of love-humility and include a theological interpretation of “image and likeness,” depend upon the ancient coupling of hypostasis/ousia though read with (and sometimes against) modern philosophies of mind, and form a trinitarian linguistic philosophy of subjectivity. The primary argument as to beauty and personhood’s connection is ‘resolved’ in Chapter 3, which gathers all that has come before and homes in on the concept of “spiritual-artistic struggle” [dukhovno-khudozhestennyi podvig’]. These three chapters together contribute to the overall takeaway that Bulgakov’s approach to beauty and personhood’s relation invites one to contemplate and enact generative feats of love, ways of seeing, and forms of faithfully, creatively making. I endeavor to show how Bulgakov’s theological anthropology summons one to a richer, sometimes stranger, vision of the reductive self of late modernity. I hope to accomplish this by showing how works of theological thinking can fruitfully, mutually utilize art, poetry, and literary fiction to uncover the self as it is—the real, relational self, the “porous” self, the self that cannot but be loved and, therefore, in turn love and poetically make.

Degree Date

Spring 5-16-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Religious Studies

Advisor

D. Stephen Long

Second Advisor

Bruce D. Marshall

Third Advisor

James K. Lee

Fourth Advisor

Natalie Carnes

Fifth Advisor

Paul L. Gavrilyuk

Number of Pages

317

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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