Work · Russian Religious Philosophy
Lectures on Godmanhood
Public lectures in St Petersburg presenting history as the gradual union of God and humanity, culminating in Christ and the idea of Sophia.
Introduction
Solovyov gave the twelve “Lectures on Godmanhood” in St Petersburg in the first months of 1878, before a large audience that included Dostoevsky; they were published in instalments up to 1881. The young philosopher presents Christianity as the truth that completes earlier religions and philosophies. God is the absolute that holds all things in unity; the world, having fallen away into fragmentation, is meant to return to that unity through a historical process. Its centre is the incarnation: in Christ the divine and the human are joined, and humanity as a whole is called to follow in “Godmanhood”. Sophia, divine wisdom, is the ideal humanity in God and the soul of the world. The lectures draw on Schelling’s late philosophy and on Gnostic and mystical sources and became the starting point of Russian sophiology.
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