will be guided by a loftier aim. Its aim will be to human nature and material life,[1]
The utopian character of Solov'ev's ecclesiastical policy is manifest. He works with unhistorical schemata.
Solov'ev's essential error is, of course, that he assumes church doctrine to be absolutely true, and that from this outlook he touches up the whole of history; for him, not Jesus and Jesus' teaching, but church doctrine and church dogma, are decisive. He fashions for himself the ideal of a Christian church and the ideal of a Christian state. If, as Solov'ev tells us in his Ethics, the church is to represent sympathy with the soul, and the state is to represent sympathy with the body, there will doubtless be an organic harmony between church and state; but these as we know them are something altogether different. As a matter of historic fact, we recognise different types of theocracy, and Solov'ev is right when he rejects extant theocracy as false, as coercive; but he errs all the mere conspicuously when he regards a union between pope and tsar as furnishing the promise and potency of a free theocracy. Solov'ev himself shows us how one-sided was the development of the papacy and of tsarism, how both these institutions have ever been based upon the use of force. Are we to expect that pope and tsar, having made common cause, will suddenly become compassionate? We ask whether the genuinely Christian state will and can cooperate with the church for the diffusion of true Christianity, and we ask what means the state will employ to secure this end.
- ↑ In support of his ideas of union, Solov'ev might have referred to theJudaising sects among the Christians and to the Christianising sects among the Jews. In actual fact the Jews have exercised a religious influence in Russia, and they have done this also in Europe. Concerning this question of an intimate synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, I may refer to a work of considerable psychological interest, Lhotzky's biography of Josef Rabinovič, entitled Blätter zur Pflege des persönlichen Lebens, 1904, Heft II. Solov'ev did not consider the possibility that the Jews, starting from their own religious foundations, might effect a religious reformation in the modern sense, might do this spontaneously, though availing themselves of the general acquirements of civilisation. This possibility, however, is the leading idea of the Russian Jew Achad-ha-am (Uscher Ginzberg), whose writings on the philosophy of history and the philosophy of religion recall in many respects those of Solov'ev, Dostoevskii, and the slavophils. For the consideration of the Jewish question in Russia, and for the understanding of the different parties among the Russian Jews, Achad-ha-am, in so far as he has been translated, is indispensable. I should add that Achad-ha-am's views are rooted in religious mysticism (that of the Chasidim), but that he has attained rank as a modern thinker. Consult, Am Scheideweg (At the Parting of the Ways), Achad-ha-am's selected essays translated from the Hebrew by Professor Friedländer, 1904.
