Abstract
At last, an English translation of the great Sergij Bulgakov’s early work on German Idealism. Let’s dispense with the accolades so we can get down to business: Stephen Churchyard has not only rendered a highly readable translation of the Russian original but also aided the task of its interpretation with a careful introduction and explanatory notes throughout—a boon to readers less familiar with either Bulgakov’s native tongue or his idealist idiom. Helpful, too, is John Milbank’s spirited foreword, which goes a long way in accentuating Bulgakov’s “philosophical inventiveness” in this book and beyond, “perhaps unsurpassed amongst other modern systematic theologians” (p. xiii). More on Milbank anon.
But first: why should one of Bulgakov’s lesser-known works garner such praise in the first place? The Tragedy of Philosophy (written in 1920–1921, published in 1927) belongs to a period of transition in Bulgakov’s career, during which the quondam Marxist was taking leave of the economic and philosophic manuscripts that occupied his attention prior to “reconversion” in 1909 and preparing to take up the dogmatic task he would pursue in his more famous “trilogies” of the late 1920s and 1930s. The book’s argument reflects its liminal position in the corpus. By playing immanent critic to German Idealism—traveling as far as he can with the likes of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, while simultaneously pointing up their limitations from what he takes to be a more resolutely Christian perspective—Bulgakov forges a path from philosophy to dogma, as though his readers were being given to watch his own intellectual maturation in real time. Except that his critique of philosophical modernity distinguishes itself from contemporary and especially Catholic versions of the same by following the example of the Church Fathers, for whom the very distinction between philosophy and theology proves necessary but ultimately provisional. For, in actual fact, the latter is the former’s condition of possibility, not simply its flat contradiction. Better yet, Christian dogma bears witness to the limits of philosophical speculation by asking and even answering the very questions it begs.
Such is the “tragedy” in question. Philosophy always and everywhere intends a “super-rational” truth preserved in Christian dogma, but remains powerless to reach that summit because of its propensity for closed systems. Bulgakov distills the history of philosophy to just three: “idealist” systems on the pattern of Fichte (pp. 24–51); “panlogistic” systems of the Hegelian variety (pp. 51–64); “systems of substantiality” in the Spinozan mold (pp. 65–88). By indexing each to a specific grammatical element—subject, predicate, and copula, respectively—Bulgakov claims that any given philosophical system reduces the necessarily “triadic” structure of judgment (e.g., I am I) to a single moment, and thereby mistakes a part of the “living proposition” of spirit for the whole of being (p. 9). Only the principle of “triadicity” on which Christian dogma rests (cf. “The Philosophy of Triadicity,” which comprises the book’s second part; pp. 91–155) is capable of correlating each moment of the syllogism one to another, “without separation and without confusion” (p. 17). Which means not only that every philosophical system represents a “heresy” in the strictest sense—an “arbitrary election . . . of some single thing or part instead of the whole,” says Bulgakov—but that philosophizing cannot help but terminate in such “deliberate one-sidedness,” so long as reason indulges its natural appetite for logical non-contradiction. Hence, “tragedy” is not some overwrought conceit but a quasi-technical term of literary-critical extraction. From the superior vantage of Christian dogma, every philosopher reads like an Antigone, an Othello, a Phédre: locked within a system of their own making, forced to make an inevitably fatal choice.
Salvation would lie in allowing the very experience of tragedy to rid philosophy of any pretension about its own powers of reasoning, in letting the “catharsis of thought” (p. 88) on the far side of its own failure rob philosophy of any claim to that which Christian dogma alone is capable of disclosing. So it is that Bulgakov’s immanent critique of philosophical history issues neither in some kind of fideism that would abandon reason altogether nor an “eclecticism” (p. 87) that would seek perennial truths in every system of thought—still less a “dialectic” that would sublate even reason’s apparent “contradictions” (p. 88) into some final synthesis of its own discoveries. Instead, he recommends a “critical antinomism” (p. 21) in the strictly Kantian sense: “critical” insofar as reason can and should comprehend its own “grounds and structure,” but “antinomism” to the extent that any such transcendental deduction must concede that reason is utterly incapable of deriving from itself the mystery on which hangs the whole of being. Philosophy’s highest calling would thus be to demonstrate its need for “revelation,” and thereby become a “philosophy of [!] revelation” (pp. 20, 88).
Students of German Idealism should recognize Bulgakov’s position. Churchyard picks up the scent when he notes the absence of any “Excursus on [F.W.J.] Schelling” (p. lv) alongside the withering chapters on Kant (pp. 159–170), Fichte (pp. 207–236), and Hegel (pp. 171–205); or again when he observes that Bulgakov’s stated program, “Fichte plus Spinoza” (p. 234), “is already the task for Schelling” (p. lvi). Then again, it’s hardly a detective story when Bulgakov himself says the following: a philosophy of revelation . . . must become the most radical philosophical rallying-cry of our times, one which, in modern history, was first proclaimed by Schelling [in his late cycle of lectures on the Philosophie der Offenbarung], in the ripest maturity of his working life. (p. 88)
Nor do the borrowings end there. Bulgakov’s repeated and initially puzzling insistence that “dogmatic rationalism” must give way to “religious empiricism” (p. 88) finds precedent in the late Schelling’s own turn to a metaphysischer Empirismus—not a repristination of Hume but a bid for thought’s dependence on that which is prior to itself, “unprethinkable being” (das unvordenkliche Sein). In fact, Bulgakov’s entire post-mortem on German philosophy looks conspicuously like Schelling’s own. Except whereas the latter sums up that entire sweep of intellectual history under the banner of “negative philosophy” and thus distinguishes the various systems of his one-time comrades from the “positive philosophy” that occupied the final two decades of his career, the former prefers to speak of “philosophy” as such in opposition to “dogma.” Suffice it to say, Bulgakov makes his break with German Idealism by treading a path Schelling first blazed.
Which makes it all the more surprising that Milbank’s foreword lobbies for the outsized influence of Fichte on this book. Milbank’s case rests on the claim that Bulgakov privileges the subject of the “living proposition” of substance, even as he clearly maintains its coequality with the copula and predicate in his “philosophy of triadicity.” According to Milbank, in other words, Bulgakov’s “trinitarian ontology” betrays the influence of Fichte’s Ich-Philosophie just to the extent that his theological convictions oblige him to affirm “the ‘monarchic’ primacy of the hypostasis of the Father” (p. xii). What’s more: by leveraging subjective idealism into the service of a patently Orthodox gloss on personhood, Bulgakov draws out the “realist” upshot of Fichte’s own system. That is, he shows how and why “the I” (subject) always and everywhere posits “the Not-I” (predicate) by means of a third term irreducible to either (copula), just as the Father eternally generates the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. Instead of the “Luciferian” philosopher who feigns to derive “all of reality out of his own selfhood” (p. xii), Fichte turns out to be, mirabile dictu, “more realist than . . . Kant” (p. xvii), and thus capable of lodging a proleptic critique of German Idealism as a whole. So it is, argues Milbank, “that Bulgakov much more derives his proposed Trinitarian ontology from an engagement with Fichte than he does with Hegel or even with Schelling” (p. xi).
Setting aside Milbank’s insistence that Fichte himself broached something like this “grammatical” correction to “the supposed existential primacy of logic” (p. xxii) in modern philosophy—he’s out of step with the vast majority of scholarship when it comes to a “realist” turn in Fichte’s own texts, it must be said—there is a case to be made, as Milbank suggests, that Bulgakov has indeed attempted a coup against the German idealist tradition, and this by first parlaying Fichte’s doctrine of the self-positing ego into a demonstration of its (non-)identity with a substance that both outstrips it but cannot be understood without it, before then claiming that only revelation discloses the actual fact of their unity-in-difference. But, again, the project Milbank attributes to Bulgakov was already Schelling’s own! This he began to pursue in his early Naturphilosophie, for which Bulgakov’s “Fichte plus Spinoza” could have served as a fitting slogan, but perfected in the late period, during which his various efforts to outline a positive Philosophie meant precisely to show that any such correlation of the transcendental subject to natural objectivity—the goal of every idealist system—can only be secured by the event to which Christian dogma bears witness. From the start, Schelling carried out this inside job on German Idealism in critical dialogue with Fichte, acknowledging his profound debts to the philosopher on whose thought he patterned his earliest work (e.g., the overtly Fichtean Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie of 1795) while nevertheless advancing beyond Ich-Philosophie by showing that and how transcendental idealism begs the question of its own “unprethinkable” ground. But even when he leveled the latter critique, thus rounding the corner of his return to something like philosophical realism in late texts like Philosophie der Offenbarung, Schelling himself always maintained a certain primacy of the subject in a stubbornly idealist way, occasionally citing Fichte by name for his unsurpassable achievement on precisely this score: “to have determined infinite substance as the I,” he admits, “is so significant a move that one forgets about it . . .” (SW II/3:54). It may therefore be that Milbank is basically right about Bulgakov’s “metacritical neo-realism” (p. xxxii), in this transitional book at least, but neglectful of the very figure from whom he inherited that intellectual project.
Of course, a thinker of Bulgakov’s caliber never simply repeats previous authorities. Milbank is right: “his degree of philosophical inventiveness” is indeed “unsurpassed amongst other modern systematic theologians” (p. xiii). But it’s only by registering the full depth of Bulgakov’s engagement with modern philosophy—critical and sympathetic—that his creativity on this front will come into tighter focus. This first English translation of The Tragedy of Philosophy will make that task a possibility for a new generation of Anglophone readers. We should hope they include scholars of German Idealism as well as Christian theologians; receiving Bulgakov in all his breadth will require both.
