All Things Shining: Sergii Bulgakov’s Theology of Beauty

by Brandon Gallaher

Everything is more than itself. Everything shines. It shines because all things are transparent; and beauty, glory is the shining of God through all things: theophaneia. Our essay will explore in Bulgakov’s theology the structure of this shining, in both God and creation, in both the Divine and the Creaturely Sophias. This structure is the fundamental iconicity of all of reality. For Bulgakov, iconicity and beauty, considered together, are quite simply the process of salvation as divinization.

Brandon Gallaher

A senior lecturer of systematic and comparative theology at the University of Exeter and a deacon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate serving in the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain. He is the author of Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2016). His latest book, co-edited with John Chryssavgis, is The Living Christ: The Theological Legacy of Georges Florovsky (Bloomsbury, 2021). Gallaher’s recent research has focused on Orthodoxy and modernity. He is writing a book on Sergii Bulgakov’s ecclesiology.

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