Soloviev

Vladimir Soloviev

Descartes founded the modern self on thinking: I think, therefore I am. Vladimir Soloviev founded the moral self on something more humbling. "I am ashamed of my animality," he wrote, "therefore I still exist as man." The feeling of shame, the flush of an animal that has caught itself being merely an animal, is for Soloviev the first proof that a human being is more than nature, a moral being and not only a clever one. With that quiet inversion of the most famous sentence in modern philosophy, the founder of Russian religious thought announced his whole program: to put back together what the modern world had taken apart, beginning with the human person and reaching all the way up to God.

All-unity. The idea that organizes everything Soloviev wrote is vseyedinstvo, all-unity or total-unity. Reality, he held, is not a heap of separate things but an organic whole in which everything is bound to everything else and to its source in the Absolute; truth, goodness, and beauty are not three departments but three faces of one unity. The sickness of the modern age is fragmentation, the splitting of faith from reason, fact from value, the religious East from the rational West, the human from the divine. The cure is the recovery of the whole, an integral knowledge in which theology, philosophy, and science stop quarreling and become aspects of a single understanding. Almost everything Soloviev built is an attempt to think one thing where his century saw only pieces.

Against abstract principles. He began as a critic. His early work diagnosed what he called the crisis of Western philosophy, the way positivism, empiricism, and rationalism had each seized one aspect of the whole, an abstract principle, and mistaken it for the totality. Empiricism makes a god of sensation, rationalism a god of the bare concept, and each ends starved, because the real is neither raw fact nor empty form but a living unity that includes and exceeds them. The young Soloviev meant to end the quarrel of the schools by showing that their truths were partial views of one reality, and that philosophy's task was synthesis, not the endless victory of one abstraction over another.

Godmanhood. At the center of his religious metaphysics is bogochelovechestvo, usually rendered Godmanhood or divine humanity. The union of the divine and the human, achieved once in Christ, is for Soloviev the meaning and direction of all history: the divine is gradually becoming incarnate in humanity, and the human is gradually being raised toward the divine, until the world itself is transfigured. History is not blind progress and not mere decline but this long mutual movement of God toward man and man toward God. Readers of Hegel will recognize the rhythm of Spirit coming to itself in time, but Soloviev makes it personal and Christological where Hegel had made it logical, and he insists the union is achieved in love, not deduced in a system.

Sophia. All-unity has, in Soloviev, a name and almost a face: Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, the eternal feminine, the world-soul, the ideal humanity present in God from the beginning. She is the unity of all things gathered into a single living principle, and Soloviev wrote of meeting her in three visions, as a boy in church, as a young scholar in the reading room of the British Museum, and finally in the desert outside Cairo. This is the most contested and the most poetic strand of his thought, and the Russian Symbolist poets, Blok and Bely above all, would take Sophia from him and make her their muse. Approached rightly, she is not an eccentricity but the metaphysics of all-unity given a personal form, the whole imagined as someone who can be loved.

The justification of the good. His major work of ethics builds the entire moral world out of three feelings that Soloviev says a human being cannot help having. Shame is our relation to what is below us, the recoil from our own animal nature that proves we are more than it. Pity, or compassion, is our relation to our equals, the suffering-with that recognizes another as real. And reverence is our relation to what is above us, the bowing of the soul before the higher and the holy. From these three primary data, shame before the beast, pity before the neighbor, reverence before the heights, Soloviev derives the whole structure of morality, personal and then social, an ethics that is rigorously argued and yet open at the top to the religious. It is autonomous reason and living faith refusing, once again, to be two things.

The end of history. In his last book the optimist darkened. War, Progress, and the End of History, cast as three conversations, ends with a short story of the Antichrist, and the Antichrist is the most unsettling figure Soloviev ever drew: not a monster but a great humanitarian, a benefactor who unites the nations, feeds the poor, and solves every problem, and who is the deceiver precisely because his perfect counterfeit of the good has no place in it for Christ. It is a warning against a progress that would replace the kingdom of God with a comfortable forgery, and it includes a pointed argument against the doctrine of non-resistance, a parting disagreement with his friend Tolstoy.

What this room reads. The corpus carries two public-domain translations. Nathalie Duddington's The Justification of the Good (1918) is his systematic ethics, the source of the three moral feelings. Alexander Bakshy's War, Progress, and the End of History (1915) is the late work with the tale of the Antichrist. Both are read from Internet Archive scans with some OCR noise, and citations run by work and part or chapter. His Lectures on Godmanhood and the early Crisis of Western Philosophy are not in the namespace in public-domain English, so the chat grounds all-unity, Sophia, and Godmanhood partly in these two works and partly in training knowledge, and says which is which.

Soloviev was the founder of the great Russian religious renaissance, the spring from which Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Florensky, and Frank all drew; he shaped Dostoevsky, who is said to have modeled the Karamazov brothers partly on him, and he argued to the end with Tolstoy. Read now, he is the boldest modern attempt to reunite what the age had split, to think faith and reason, the divine and the human, the East and the West back into the single whole he called all-unity, and to root the moral life in three things no one can honestly deny feeling. Plato's One, Schelling's Absolute, and Hegel's self-realizing Spirit all flow into him, and behind them stands Nicholas of Cusa, who four centuries earlier had longed in the same way for the coincidence of all opposites in God. The reader who suspects that modern thought has left something whole in pieces will find in Soloviev a philosopher who spent his life trying to gather it up.