Vladimir Solovyov
All things are meant to form one whole with God; history moves towards that unity in Godmanhood, and morality grows from shame, pity and reverence into the task of making society just.
Placement
Russian philosopher, poet and theologian who built a system of “all-unity” against positivism: the world is meant to be united with God through “Godmanhood”, and Sophia, divine wisdom, stands for that unity; his ethics of the good grounded morality in shame, pity and reverence.
Key ideas
- All-unity (vseedinstvo)
- Godmanhood
- Sophia, divine wisdom
- Shame, pity and reverence as roots of morality
Influence
Influenced by 2
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
influenced by
Solovyov’s Lectures on Godmanhood (1878–81) drew on Schelling’s late philosophy of mythology and revelation for history as the union of God and humanity. V. Solovyov, Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve (1878–81); SEP “Vladimir Solov’ëv”
Evidence: AI draft
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling › 1775–1854
Fyodor Dostoevsky
influenced by
Solovyov travelled with Dostoevsky to Optina Pustyn in 1878 and in Three Speeches in Memory of Dostoevsky (1881–83) honoured him as a religious thinker of universal Christian unity. V. Solovyov, Tri rechi v pamiat Dostoevskogo (1881–83); SEP “Vladimir Solov’ëv”
Evidence: AI draft
Fyodor Dostoevsky › 1821–1881
Influenced 2
Nikolai Berdyaev
influenced ✓
Berdyaev took up Solovyov’s idea of Godmanhood, the union of God and humanity, and in The Russian Idea (1946) placed him at the centre of Russian religious thought. N. Berdyaev, Russkaia ideia (1946); V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy (1948–50; tr. 1953)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Nikolai Berdyaev › 1874–1948
Pavel Florensky
influenced
Florensky continued Solovyov’s metaphysics of all-unity and his teaching on Sophia, divine Wisdom, in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914). P. Florensky, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (1914); V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy (1948–50; tr. 1953)
Evidence: AI draft
Pavel Florensky › 1882–1937
Criticism
Criticizes 2
Auguste Comte
criticised
Solovyov’s master’s thesis, The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (1874), argued that Comte’s positivism marks the exhaustion of Western abstract rationalism. V. Solovyov, Krizis zapadnoi filosofii. Protiv pozitivistov (1874)
Evidence: AI draft
Auguste Comte › 1798–1857
Leo Tolstoy
criticised
Solovyov’s Three Conversations (1900) attacked Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-resistance to evil, which Solovyov held leaves the innocent defenceless and keeps Christ’s morality without his resurrection. V. Solovyov, Tri razgovora (1900), Preface and Third Conversation
Evidence: AI draft
Leo Tolstoy › 1828–1910
Works
Public lectures in St Petersburg presenting history as the gradual union of God and humanity, culminating in Christ and the idea of Sophia.
A moral philosophy grounded in the feelings of shame, pity and reverence, extended into a theory of law, the state and the unity of humanity.
Dialogues on war, progress and the end of history that reject Tolstoy’s doctrine of non-resistance and close with the “Short Tale of the Antichrist”.
Position
Solovyov is on the map as the founder of Russian religious philosophy. Against positivism and the one-sided “abstract principles” of rationalism and empiricism he set the idea of all-unity (vseedinstvo): truth, goodness and beauty are aspects of one whole, and knowledge must unite science, philosophy and faith. Drawing on Schelling, Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism, he saw history as a process in which humanity, through Christ, is joined with God in “Godmanhood”; Sophia, divine wisdom, names the world as it exists in God. In “The Justification of the Good” (1897) he grounded ethics in shame, pity and reverence and defined law as the minimum of morality that the state enforces. He opposed antisemitism in his writings on Judaism and Christianity and in a protest he drafted in 1890, which the censors did not allow to appear, and he criticised Russian nationalism. His “Three Conversations” turned against Tolstoy’s non-resistance and end in an apocalyptic tale that also echoes the period’s fear of a “yellow peril”. Berdyaev, Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov and the Symbolist poets Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely took up his ideas; Orthodox critics found his sophiology hard to reconcile with church teaching.
Life & context
Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow on 28 January 1853, the son of the historian Sergei Solovyov. After a youthful phase of atheism and materialism he studied natural sciences and then history and philology at Moscow University, attended lectures at the Moscow Theological Academy and in 1874 defended his master’s thesis “The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists”. In 1875–76 he worked in the British Museum in London and travelled to Egypt; he later described visions of Sophia in Moscow, London and the desert near Cairo. In 1878 he gave his “Lectures on Godmanhood” in St Petersburg and travelled with Dostoevsky to the monastery of Optina Pustyn. His doctoral thesis, “Critique of Abstract Principles”, followed in 1880. After a public lecture in March 1881 in which he asked the new tsar to spare the assassins of Alexander II, he gave up university teaching and lived as an independent writer. In the 1880s he worked for a reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic churches and published “La Russie et l’Église universelle” in Paris (1889). He wrote poetry, journalism and the philosophy articles of the Brockhaus–Efron encyclopaedia, and died on 13 August 1900 at Uzkoye near Moscow, the estate of his friends the Trubetskoys.
Further main works
- The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (Krizis zapadnoi filosofii. Protiv pozitivistov, 1874)
- Critique of Abstract Principles (Kritika otvlechennykh nachal, 1880)
- Russia and the Universal Church (La Russie et l’Église universelle, 1889)
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