According to Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), in fact, only the Trinitarian God is “personal” in the full sense, because in the simplicity of his coinherent life of love he comprises every modality of personal being: he is at once “I,” “we,” “thou,” “you,” but entirely as the one God. We are not that. And this means that we require others in order to possess all the necessary and constitutive modalities of true personal existence for ourselves. So, if not subsistent relations, we are nonetheless, so long as we are anything at all, subsistences of relationality; each of us is an entire history of
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