after good; but after the fall, man can choose the good. Evil is for Solov'ev not the simple absence of good, but is a positive energy, one dominating the world, which man must destroy in himself—evil and the evil one being here fused into a single concept.
With the coming of man, the cosmological process is transformed into a historical process, and history forms the most important constituent of the world process; the unification of the divine and the mundane must take place in man and for man. As a rational being, man can comprehend the divine, the absolute; thus man is the mediator between heaven and earth, the deliverer of the world from chaos, the unifier of the world with God.
Man is a union of logos (reason) and matter (body); man is the active, woman the passive; sex represents the contrast between the logos and the mundane.
Man as individual has complete being, but mankind alone can realise all that exists potentially in the individual. In actual fact there is but one form of human existence, man; woman is no more than the supplement, society no more than the expansion of man.
The direct union of God with mankind has taken place in but one being, the God-man, the incarnation of the logos; Christ, therefore, is the only complete personality, the supplement of the God-man is the holy virgin, his expansion is the church.
God, man, church, are the three fundamental ideas of Solov'ev. They may, however, be reduced to two, God and church, for the church is organised mankind; and mankind, not man, is for Solov'ev the essential.
Cosmology is to him no more than the introduction to and the background of the historical process, which unfolds itself as a religious and moral drama. Man, as an imperfect being, cognises perfect good, and there thus originates in human beings the aspiration towards perfection. Solov'ev fully accepts the modern notion of progress, but conceives it as a spiritual process, wherein the external or material remains without significance. This progress is naturally collective, for only collective mankind can realise the destiny of man.
Regarded anthropologicaliy, human history begins with the organisation of the sexual relationship (it is worth noting that Solov'ev's father maintained this theory against the
