SOLOVYOV, VLADIMIR SERGEEVICH. - The greatest Russian philosopher, b. January 16 (28), 1853 in Moscow, d. July 31 (Aug. 13), 1900 near Moscow.
He studied at the University and at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Moscow. In 1874 he defended his thesis The Crisis of Western Philosophy, against the Positivists. He taught at the University of Moscow (Jan.-May 1875). He subsequently traveled to London, Paris, Nice, and Egypt (where he had the famous vision of "Sophia-Wisdom": cf. his poem Three Encounters). Between 1880-81 he also lectured at the University of St. Petersburg. From that time date: The Philosophical Foundations of Integral Knowledge (1877), The Critique of Abstract Principles (1877-80) and, more importantly, Lectures on Godmanhood (1878-81). In 1881 he had to give up teaching, because he had made a public appeal for clemency for the assassins of Tsar Alexander II. Other trips abroad followed (1886, 1888-89, 1893 and 1899). In 1886 in Zagreb he wrote a part of The History and the Future of Theocracy, and there in 1888 the introduction to La Russie et l'Eglise universelle (Italian trans.), another part of the vast work that remained unfinished. He devoted himself entirely to the study of religious and political questions and to an extensive politico-religious activity for the reunion of the separated Christians. At first a Slavophile, in the years 1882-88 he increasingly detached himself from the opinion of the old Slavophiles on the cause of the schism between East and West, and ended by accepting the Catholic doctrine on dogmatic development and the primacy of the Pope. At the beginning of that period he wrote The Religious (later Spiritual) Foundations of Life (1882-84). The last important works are: On the Justification of the Good (1894-97; 2nd ed. 1898), S.'s ethics, and Three Discourses (with, at the end, the Legend on the Antichrist, 1899-1900). He also began a translation of Plato's dialogues. In 1896 S. secretly accepted the Catholic creed. He received the last Sacraments on the estate of Princes S. and E. Trubetskoj, since there was no Catholic priest, from the non-Catholic parish priest of the village.
S. stands at the center of Russian philosophy. He underwent very diverse influences: from Neoplatonism, from Spinoza, from idealism (Schelling, von Baader, but also Hegel), from Böhme, Schopenhauer, E. von Hartmann, A. Comte, from the Cabala, theosophy, etc., and he was in contact with the most eminent Russians of the time (Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, K. Leont'ev, and many others). He sought synthesis, both of faith and reason in an intuitive-mystical realism, and of the two main currents of Russian thought, Slavophilism and Westernism. He notably influenced the "Russian Renaissance" at the beginning of the 20th century and the best Russian philosophers: S. and E. Trubetskoj, V. Ern, S. Bulgakov, N. Berdyaev, P. Florensky, V. Ivanov, L. Karsavin, and others.
The great synthetic and universal ideas of S.'s thought are: the "all-unity" (vseedinstvo) of God and of the cosmic and historical universe (in the various phases of creation, fall, redemption, eschatology); the "Godmanhood" (bogo-čelověčstvo) of the Logos and of Sophia (Wisdom), of Christ and of the Church; the ensemble of "theosophy, theocracy and theurgy"; the Christian "universal theocracy," that is, the kingdom of Christ on earth (of which the three principles of priesthood, kingship and free prophetism are part: the "Trinitarian" principle). S. later abandoned the idea of the earthly realization of theocracy, without however renouncing the universality of his own cultural, philosophical, religious-Christian synthesis.
S. was a systematic spirit, with intuitive-mystical experiences as the basis of his theoretical speculations. His itinerary from the anti-Roman Slavophile position to the acceptance of the primacy of the pope is admirable. He confuted Slavophilism in a classic manner. His synthesis nevertheless presents, from the Catholic point of view, certain uncertainties: in the relationship between God and the creature, the analogy of uncreated and created being is neglected; the relation of God to the world is similar to that between the soul and the body, whereby S. approaches pantheism. In attempting to deduce logically supernatural mysteries, such as that of the S. but Trinity (whose existence he supposes on the other hand as revealed), he indulges in a certain semi-rationalism. In the intent to affirm and appropriate all that is true in the various Christian confessions, and especially wishing to be at once "Catholic and Orthodox," S. sometimes expressed himself in the sense of a supra-confessionalism, in which it does not emerge clearly enough that the Catholic Church is the only true Church of Christ, which has remained essentially universal even after the great separations of East and West.
Bibliography18 works
Bernardo Schultze