Art has been a feature of human society since prehistoric times. [...] Art discloses what we think our society is like, or what it is not like but ought to be like.  As the main expression (other than childbirth) of human creativity it can be said to take further the original creation by bringing into being new realities of intrinsic worth.  Above all, it is or can be a pointer to transcendence in three main ways.  The first [...] by making us go beyond interpretations of this or that thing or event toward an overall reading of the world.  The second was to see the world as having as its own precondition a fundamental meaningfulness beyond itself.  The third (after we had noted the possible moral effects of art in making us go beyond the limits of our present character) was that art might be regarded as a kind of epiphany of divine presence, divine light. [...] The arts reveal the human world, either as it actually is or as it ideally is.  They express the creativity of man when the artist adds to the things of intrinsic worth in the world, or the art-appreciating public makes the artist’s vision of what he has made live again.  The arts point to transcendence, not just the way the world as a whole is wonderful and presupposes a meaning greater than itself, but also by enacting divine presence sustaining the special density of meaning that art, literature, music can contain (pp. 145-146). 

Nichols then relates his findings to three aspects of the person and work of Jesus Christ.  First of all, Christ makes manifest or reveals what humanity is.  “As the true Adam, he shows us the reality of what the human species should be like and on the Cross discloses the range and power of the evil which inhibits our being as the first Adam was meant to be, in God’s image and likeness” (p. 148).  So Christ reveals what the postlapsarian world is like and (thankfully) what it ought to be like.  Second, Christ’s redemptive work transcends nature “by bringing into being a further dimension of reality,” viz., salvation and “new resources of grace and life” (p. 148).  In other words, just as art advances and elevates creation, so too does the work of Christ.  Third, in Christ the meaning of the world as a whole is revealed and points to the “Father’s wonderful plan to bring about the nuptials of heaven and earth, the uncreated and the created, in the sacrificial joy of the Kingdom.  He points to the source of the world in a pre-existing divine truth, [...] Moreover, he enacts that truth-the truth which is the Holy Trinity-in his own person” (p. 148).    Though only the Son took on flesh, the Son is eternally “co-defined by the Father and the Holy Spirit.” Hence, “Jesus is always the Trinitarian Son, essentially related to the Father and the Spirit in his work on earth” (p. 148).  In fact, the whole redeemed creation shall one day enter into the eternal dance of the Trinity, as captured in Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity (p. 148). 

The risen and ascended God-man is the true predestined goal of all creation.  Here the capacity of artwork to be the vehicle of divine presence in the material form of words or sounds or shapes and colours is super-filled.  Christ is, then the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realized those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends.  Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesized with finite form, the cave-painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him through they realized it not (p. 148). 

This brings us to Maritain’s account of the beautiful as found in Art et scolastique.  According to Maritain, “[i]f a thing exalts and delights the soul by the very fact of being given to its intuition, it is good to apprehend, it is beautiful” (p. 36).[1]  Here beauty is no doubt connected with the intellect, but following Thomas, beauty delights the mind through the senses.  “‘Our [human] art’ works over sensuous matter to bring joy to the spirit.  It is in a sense a taste of Paradise, the first Paradise, the Paradise of Eden, because ‘it restores for a moment the simultaneous peace and delectation of the mind and the senses’” (Art et scolastique, p. 37).[2]

Notes

By 1917, Bulgakov was recognized in Russia as a gifted Orthodox intellectual and was elected a member of the Russian Church Council-a council which had the massive responsibility of picking up the pieces after the fateful February Revolution (1917).  However, with the subsequent October Revolution and the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, the Orthodox Church came under great persecution, and Bulgakov, now ordained as a priest, was forced the following year (1918) to flee (p. 603, 604).  He found a temporary place of rest in the Crimea, but this was soon taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1922.  As a result, Bulgakov, as were many intellectuals, was forced to leave and eventually made his way to Paris where he lived his remaining years (1925-1944).  In Paris, Bulgakov became a founding member of the theological institute, Saint-Serge, where he taught for a number of years (p. 604).  During his time in the Crimea, Bulgakov briefly entertained becoming a Catholic; however, this period of doubt ended in a strengthening of his own Orthodox roots. Nonetheless, Bulgakov was extremely ecumenically minded and interacted with a number of Anglicans and other Protestants. Describing Bulgakov’s ecumenical activities, Nichols writes:

In 1927 he helped found-in England-the Anglican-Orthodox Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, and in the years 1933 to 1935 published some remarkable articles in English in the journal of that Fellowship, arguing that Orthodoxy remained in what he called an “invisible, mysterious communion with Catholicism (p. 604).

Although Bulgakov was well-known as a theologian-in part due to the publication of his “Little Trilogy”:  The Friend of the Bridegroom, The Burning Bush, and Jacob’s Ladder-in 1935 Bulgakov was charged with heresy by two Russian jurisdictions (both of which were not his own jurisdiction, the Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarch for Western Europe, in which Bulgakov remained in good standing) [p. 604, 605].  The charge against Bulgakov, which he strongly denied, was that “Sophia, the Wisdom of God, is in effect a fourth person of the Holy Trinity” (p. 605). 

In the years 1933-1936, Bulgakov wrote his “Great Triology”:  The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb.  He became ill with cancer of the throat in 1939 and died on July 12, 1944, not long after the completion of his final book, The Apocalypse of John. 

Nichols, Fr. Aidan.  “Wisdom from Above? The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov,” New Blackfriars 85, (2004): 598-613.

Notes

As Nichols explains, there were three significant experiences (two of which are described below) that played crucial roles in bringing Bulgakov back to his Orthodox faith.  The first occurred

in 1894 when holidaying in the Caucasus mountains on the border between the present day Georgia and the Russian Federation.  It was an experience of the beauty of the mountains as somehow more than material-a pointer to a beauty that transcends matter [...].  A few years later, in the period 1898 to 1900 while he was studying abroad (by this point, incidentally, he had married), he underwent the second experience which led to his re-conversation to the faith.  And this was by way of response to the spiritual purity he glimpsed in a painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael.  Known as the “Sistine Madonna”, he saw it displayed in Saxony, in the City of Dresden art gallery.  On his return from Germany to Russia, his Marxism was definitely shaken, and his master’s thesis on capitalism and agriculture, which he presented at this time, is generally regarded as the work of someone already leaving a distinctively Marxian viewpoint behind (p. 600). 

With the completion of his thesis, he was able at the age of thirty to obtain a teaching position in political economics at the University of Kiev.  In addition to teaching, Bulgakov was also very active in politics and served in 1907 as a deputy to the Second Duma (p. 600).  During this time, Bulgakov began to doubt the ability of Russia’s newly introduced constitutional reforms to truly change people’s lives.  As Nichols observes, the changes in Bulgakov’s views

coincided with a change of direction in the aspirations of the Russian intelligentsia generally.  They become more interested in the creative powers of the human mind-an interest which, in philosophy, is often connected with the school of thought called “Idealism”.  They also began to look more sympathetically at religion and especially at the Russian heritage of Orthodox Christianity.  Such intellectuals hoped for a reform and renewal of the Church. That was partly because they expected so deeply rooted an institution to have some effect in transforming the rest of society.  Bulgakov’s own personal developments mirrors these trends.  He moved from Marxism to Idealism, without, however, denying his earlier interest in the economy and the potential of matter.  And then he moved from Idealism to a rediscovered Orthodoxy, without, however, denying his earlier convictions of the importance of human creativity, the uniqueness of the human subject, the person who says “I”.  This happened at an exciting time in Russian cultural and intellectual life, a time historians have dubbed Russia’s “silver age” (pp. 600-601). 

Bulgakov’s contribution to Russia’s short-lived Silver Age was to help reawaken interest in Dostoevsky by giving a famous lecture on the novel, The Brothers Karamazov.  Ironically, or rather providentially, Bulgakov’s efforts to draw attention back to Dostoevsky occurred during the same time that Dmitri Merezhkovsky-a highly influential literary critic-was also promoting Dostoevsky’s works among the intelligentsia of St. Petersburg.  According to Merezhkovsky, Dostoevsky’s work points to the religious principle that should govern human culture, viz., “Godmanhood”-a principle of grace by which God raises humanity into union with Himself and, which stands opposed to the principle operative and ruling in the West, “mangodhood” (p. 601).  Bulgakov, in his essay “Церков и культура” (“Church and Culture”)-an essay written prior to his return to the Church-stressed Christianity’s mission to culture, claiming that there are no “religiously indifferent” or neutral zones; “[t]here must be nothing that is in principle ‘secular’”.[2]  In essence, Bulgakov’s essay was a challenge to the Church, “for the Church had in effect abandoned its task of being yeast to the leaven of the rest of culture and [had] withdrawn into the ghetto of its own rituals” (p. 602).  As a number of Silver Age intellectuals grew weary of the claims made by the then predominant anti-religious voices of Russian intelligentsia, they published a collection of essays entitled Вехи (Signposts), which served both as a kind of manifesto as well as a critique of their predecessors.   One of the new (religiously attuned) intelligentsia’s main points of contention focused on how a true and lasting transformation of culture is possible.  According to the authors of the Signposts essays, genuine transformation of society must include, and in fact presupposes, conversion of human hearts to the Good. 

Notes

[2] As found in “Wisdom from Above?” p. 602.  Republished in S. Bulgakov, Dva grada (Two Cities), Moscow, 1911, p. 309.