Włodzimierz Sołowjow

Dzieła

• 1878Wykłady o Bogoczłowieczeństwie

  Publiczne wykłady w Petersburgu przedstawiające historię jako stopniowe zjednoczenie Boga i ludzkości, którego szczytem jest Chrystus i idea Sofii.

• 1897Usprawiedliwienie dobra

  Filozofia moralna oparta na uczuciach wstydu, litości i czci, rozszerzona w teorię prawa, państwa i jedności ludzkości.

• 1900Trzy rozmowy

  Dialogi o wojnie, postępie i końcu historii, które odrzucają naukę Tołstoja o niesprzeciwianiu się i kończą się „Krótką opowieścią o Antychryście”.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists (Krizis zapadnoi filosofii. Protiv pozitivistov, 1874)
• Lectures on Godmanhood (Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve, 1878–81)
• Critique of Abstract Principles (Kritika otvlechennykh nachal, 1880)
• Russia and the Universal Church (La Russie et l’Église universelle, 1889)
• The Justification of the Good (Opravdanie dobra, 1897)
• Three Conversations (Tri razgovora, 1900)