CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
VLADIMIR SOLOV'EV; RELIGION AS MYSTICISM
§ 137.
HAVING dealt with the defenders of official theocracy we have now to consider the theorist of "free theocracy" Vladimir Sergěevič Solov'ev, the most influential teacher of the recent searchers after God and the leading representative of the Russian philosophy of religion.
Solov'ev was born at Moscow in the year 1853. A gifted lad, he found much to stimulate his literary and philosophical faculties in his home and among the family acquaintances. Sergěi Solov'ev, the father, is already known to us as liberal historian and professor at Moscow university; the mother was also a person of active intelligence; whilst the Solov'ev family had lively traditions of the remarkable philosopher Skovoroda, to whom the mother was kin. The family talent is further signalised by the fact that Vladimir Solov'ev's elder brother was a writer of novels, whilst one of his sisters attained reputation as painter and poet.
Before leaving school, Solov'ev had already shown keen interest in philosophical and religious questions. In the middle and late sixties, when the representatives of the radical trend of Černyševskii and Pisarev were being persecuted, Solov'ev, at the age of fourteen, became an enthusiastic nihilist. Until his seventeenth year he was faithful to positivism, materialism, and atheism, regarding Pisarev as the greatest Russian philosopher, and Spinoza as the greatest philosopher the world had ever produced. Further, Solov’'ev was an enthusiast for Buddhism, and his pantheistic inclinations were fostered by the study of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. Entering the university in 1869, he devoted himself to the study of natural science, but transferred two years later, to the philosophical faculty, where his chief teacher was Jurkevič. In addition, he attended the philosophical lectures of Kudrjavcev-Platonov at the seminary. Throughout life Solov'ev cherished these two teachers in grateful memory. We are already acquainted with Jurkevič, the opponent of Černyševskii. The characteristics of Kudrjavcev's philosophy will be suggested by the consideration that he adopted the additional name of Platonov. A highminded opponent of contemporary philosophy, especially of materialism, positivism, and Darwinism, he exercised an enduring influence upon Solov'ev.
Study of the slavophils led Solov'ev to Plato, and also to neoplatonism, to Plotinus; he was especially interested in the work of Homjakov. From the slavophils he passed to Schelling, and Schelling smoothed his path to Baader, Jacob Boehme, and all the mystics, Swedenborg of course not excepted. Solov'ev found in the mystics the mainspring of true knowledge. The gnostics (Philo and Valentinus), the first Greek fathers of the church (especially Origen), and Augustine, became his favourite authorities. The study of ecclesiastical history and the ideal of the union of the churches led Solov'ev to the Catholic traditionalists (de Bonald, de Maistre, etc.).
Even before he left the university, but still more in later years (his translation of Kant's Prolegomena was published in 1889), Solov'ev was much disquieted by Kant as well as by the mystics. Hegel reinforced the rationalistic trend, whilst Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann confirmed Solov'ev in his mysticism. In addition, Schopenhauer directed his attention to Hindostan, whilst his own inclinations towards magian superstition made spiritualism, hypnotism, and occultism congenial to him. He was greatly influenced by Auguste Comte: at first by positivism, which, however, he soon came to regard as inadequate, his own earliest philosophical writings being refutations of positivism; and subsequently by Comte's works upon the religion of humanity.[1]
In 1874 he took up his residence as professor of philosophy in Moscow, and published his work on The Crisis in Western Philosophy. Next year, however, he set out on a journey to study in the west, and visited London to examine in the British Museum the sources of our knowledge of Hindostan. Thence he passed to the east, to search among the Bedouins of Egypt for remnants of ancient apostolical tradition. Returning to Moscow in 1876, he resigned his professorship in 1877. A dispute had broken out over the university statutes between the liberal and the conservative professors. Solov'ev (in opposition to his own father) espoused the cause of the conservatives, and was supported by Katkov, with whom the younger Solov'ev had now become closely acquainted, Solov'ev being a collaborator on Katkov's review. At this epoch, too, he had friendly relations with Ivan Aksakov and Leont'ev, whilst among the younger slavophils Kojalovič was a favourite associate.
Removing from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Solov'ev joined the ministry for education as a member of the scientific committee. The outbreak of the war with Turkey led him for a while to think of visiting the theatre of war as correspondent of Katkov's review, but the idea was never carried out. In St. Petersburg he became intimate with Dostoevskii, with the poet Fet, and also with Tolstoi, although his mental outlook became continually more divergent from that of the last-named.
In the year 1880, at the St. Petersburg philosophical faculty, he defended his dissertation, Critique of Abstract Principles, which had not brought him the desired professorship. Vladislavlev, professor of philosophy, was opposed to Solov'ev; Čičerin, too, was adverse at this time (see Mysticism in Science, 1880); and at a somewhat earlier date Kavelin had likewise shown himself an opponent (Apriori Philosophy or Positive Science?). Despite the veto thus exercised by two of the most notable representatives of westernism and liberalism, Solov'ev after a while (1888) moved away from Katkov towards the liberals—or at any rate his writings secured acceptance in liberal organs.
In 1881, after the assassination of Alexander II, in a public lecture Solov'ev demanded pardon for the tsaricides. Therewith his academic career necessarily came to a close. Count Deljanov, minister for education, a willing instrument of Pobědonoscev, had no place for Solov'ev as professor, for Solov'ev was "a man with ideas."
Solov'ev now devoted himself to questions concerning the philosophy of religion and the history of the church. His studies in these fields led him to defend the union of the churches and brought him near to Catholicism. He entered into close relationships with Bishop Strossmayer and the Jesuit Pierling. Among Catholic thinkers, Bossuet, with his philosophy of ecclesiastical history, became dear to Solov'ev. The religious censorship now forbade him to publish in Russia any writings upon religious topics, and his chief works were therefore produced abroad. The first volume of the History and Future of Theocracy, containing Foreword, Introduction, and Philosophy of Biblical History, was published in Russian at Agram in 1887; La Russie et l’église universelle appeared at Paris in 1889.
During the nineties, Solov'ev devoted his attention to ethical and political questions. His leading ethical treatise was entitled Justification of the Good, Moral Philosophy (1897, 2nd edition 1898).
At this time he planned with his brother a translation of Plato; he translated Kant's Prolegomena; and he wrote a detailed biography of Mohammed (1896)—the Mohammedan religious world had ever allured him.
Solov'ev paid frequent visits to Europe. In 1899 he revisited Egypt, and wished to go to Palestine, but lacked funds for the purpose. Returning home in debilitated health, he died next year (August 12th) on the estate of one of his professorial friends, Prince Trubeckoi.
All his biographers are agreed in deploring Solov'ev's carelessness about his health. His meals were ill selected and irregular; in later years he became a vegetarian, though he ate fish occasionally; when ill he often refused to follow his doctor's advice. He would work far on into the night; lived quite alone for months without a servant; whilst he would visit his friends unexpectedly, this too, perhaps, at a very late hour, in order to discuss vital questions with them. It cannot be said that he shunned society. He was restless, highly strung, of irregular habits, and might be described as a secular monk and ascetic.
§ 138.
A DETAILED study of Solov'ev would have to follow closely the philosopher's course of internal development, but in a sketch, which is all that can be given here, I must content myself with presenting the leading important ideas of Solov'ev's philosophy and with making no more than brief allusion to the chief phases of his development.
I will begin with a description of his most important work, the History of Ethics, the second edition of which was published shortly before his death. At the outset I must insist that this treatise is, in fact, Solov'ev's only finished work. It is far more carefully elaborated than any of the others, and it exhibits the author's views on the philosophy of religion in a clarified and largely mitigated form. It provides free theocracy and theosophy with an ethical foundation, whilst mysticism is kept within bounds by Kantian criticism.
Having to face the decisive question, what proof he can find for theism and consequently for theocracy, he adduces the so-called moral proof of the existence of God, but from this outlook he goes beyond Kant, whose hypothetical statement naturally seems to him inadequate. To Solov'ev the consciousness of good and evil appears absolute; he considers that this consciousness, and the distinction between good and evil, cannot be shaken by any scepticism. All that scepticism can effect is that it may make us doubt the existence of the objective world; it cannot affect moral conviction; man has to recognise within himself the dualism of good and evil, and he cannot fail to feel the sense of moral obligation; conscience cannot be purely subjective. To this point Solov'ev follows Kant. Morality is autonomous. But thence Solov'ev does not merely derive postulates; he deduces rather that God and the soul are not superadded to morality from without, but are the direct energies of morality. The historic fact that for the generality of mankind the moral standard continues to grow, and that for mankind this standard grows independently of individual men, leads Solov'ev to the conclusion that the moral growth of mankind is the direct outcome of the superhuman power of the Good; but the good is God.[2]
Thus for Solov'ev the direct moral consciousness affords direct certainty of the living God and the living soul. Religion is for him the living sense of the real presence of the unitary and all-embracing godhead.
Before ethics, Hume called a halt to his scepticism. Solov'ev accepts this limitation, strengthens the argument by an appeal to Kant, and proceeds thence to the highest good of Plato. Solov'ev believes himself to have thus constructed an ethic entirely independent of theory, independent alike of the theory of cognition and of metaphysics—for ethics cannot be wholly independent of religion.
The views are reminiscent of Kant and Plato, but also of Spinoza; and we must ask ourselves whether the real presence of the all-embracing God is to be interpreted pantheistically or monotheistically. When Solov'ev speaks of the soul he tells us that he does not conceive the soul as being necessarily an individual and independent substance. It is possible to conceive the soul as a relationship, as one of many mutually inseparable relationships, of the godhead to one or another substratum of mundane life, relationships that are perdurable, immortal. Immortal relationships? We cannot further consider this argument, which does not seem particularly cogent, for it has been adduced merely to show how Solov'ev passes back from Kant by way of Spinoza to Plato.
Solov'ev shows more originality and independence when he deduces the theocratic organisation of mankind from an ethical principle, that of asceticism. He assumes the feeling of shame to be inborn. It appears, he says, in three distinct modifications, and constitutes the moral vital energy. The sentiment of shame in the strictest sense is shown in the relationship between man and the lower creation, and in man's relationship to matter, in especial towards his own material body, towards matters of sex. The sentiment of shame also takes the form of fellow-feeling, of sympathy or altruism. Sympathy is not irrational as Schopenhauer contends; it is rational; it is the positive recognition of another; it is truth and justice, compassion, conscience.
In veneration (pietas, reverentia), finally, Solov'ev discerns the root of religion for each individual. The first manifestations of veneration are seen in family life, in veneration for parents. "The idea of the godhead is incorporated in the living personality of the parents; providence, the main attribute of the godhead, is incorporated in the care and foresight of the mother." To emphasise the religious significance of motherhood, Solov'ev appeals to the first stage of historical development, to the theories of matriarchy and gynecocracy. Yet the father has the higher religious significance. The mother is greatly esteemed by children, but to the adult, death brings awareness of veneration towards ancestors; to the adult, his father seems an understudy for the gods, whilst his grandfather has simply become a god.[3] Christianity discovered the father of the universe and the sentiment of veneration in the spirit and in truth; the relationship of sonhood became sacred; this relationship attests what the Son of God has taught us, that we must do the Father's will, not our own; for Solov'ev, Christianity, and God incarnate, are identical ideas.
Thus for Solov'ev shame is the starting point and the rational foundation of the moral organisation of mankind. Individual chastity is the guarantee of sound asceticism; social chastity, the conscience, regulates the relationships between man and man; finally, religious chastity, the fear of the Lord, brings man into his true relationship with God.
Without entering upon a detailed criticism, we may recognise, above all, the vigour, of this attempt at a unitary construction, while perceiving that Solov'ev is more indebted than he is himself aware to Schopenhauer and modern philosophy. In a word, although his first and chief desire is to be a Christian, he seems to have mislaid Christian love. It is true that he frequently insists upon love as the basis of religion, but he is thinking of Spinoza's "amor intellectualis" and not of Christian love; the "pietas" and "reverentia" of the patriarchs are far more akin to fear, to Leont'ev's timor Domini, than they are to Christian love. Moreover, Schopenhauer's "sympathy in mutual human relationships" is not love, and it is a mere accessory that the feeling should be rationalised. Such rationalisation of basic sentiments is extremely characteristic of Solov'ev; he starts voluntaristically from feeling, but proceeds to rationalise feeling. Schopenhauer is supplemented and corrected by Kant and Spinoza. Spinoza shared with Schopenhauer the position of Solov'ev's first philosophic love.
The important question is whether Solov'ev failed to note that his explanation of morality and the religious sentiment accorded ill with Christian doctrine. In essentials Solov'ev accepted the attempts of the deists to explain religion as natural. He appealed on his own account to natural religion, never noting that natural religion and revealed religion are somewhat inharmonious. He showed, indeed, that we should not conceive religion either as fetichism or as mythology, but he merely did this in order that he might stress more effectively the pietas erga parentes, But since he admitted (following Darwin and others) that even the dog and the monkey, in their feelings towards the master, display the rudiments of religious sentiment, we must ask why man, who in religious matters stands so far above the beasts, should need revelation. We must ask what proofs there are of the existence of revelation. What need has Solov'ev of dogma, to which, as we shall shortly see, he attaches so much importance?
By Schopenhauer, too, Solov’ev was won over to the cause of asceticism, or rather Schopenhauer led him to esteem religious asceticism even more highly than before. The entire superstructure of his free theocracy is founded upon asceticism. For him, church, state, individual morality, the entire moral organisation of mankind, are ascetic. In asceticism, in the sentiment of shame, man realises himself to be man, therein he finds himself to be higher than the beasts and higher than matter; and in asceticism Solov'ev seeks the essence of genius. (Here, too, he borrows to some extent from Schopenhauer.)
It is impossible to expound Solov'ev's individual doctrines or to recapitulate his prescriptions for asceticism. Suffice it to say that he conceives of marriage as a form of asceticism, characterising it as a great deed and as an act of martyrdom. Russian theologians refuse to accept Solov'ev's ascetic principle. Solov'ev, they say, exaggerates the significance of this principle in the spiritual life of mankind, and they insist that he is wrong in regarding it as a primary, not as a secondary principle. Finally they reproach him because his teaching is not in accord with Holy Writ, though it may be endorsed by that of some of the fathers of the church. Solov'ev does in fact come to the same conclusions as Eduard von Hartmann. Solov'ev demands absolute sexual continence, and the dying out of the human race would not conflict with his outlook.
Solov'ev's psychological interpretation of the sentiment of shame was fallacious, and his moral estimate of the sentiment was no less erroneous. We may admit that he showed a fine understanding of the feeling for another's individuality, the feeling that induces the reflective man to discover within himself something akin with all other individuals and even with non-living things, but Solov'ev errs when he interprets this sentiment as a manifestation of shame.
I must also draw special attention to the fact that he fails to recognise the distinction between chastity and physical intactness (virginity), failing here to transcend ecclesiastical materialism.
In his poems the poet-philosopher gives an intimate record of a succession of meetings. The nine-year-old boy conceived an ardent love for a girl of the same age, and at this early age already sought help against passion in the church. The second meeting took place in London; the third in Egypt. On several subsequent occasions Solov'ev had tender relationships with women. Once he was on the point of marrying a peasant girl; another-time, a family council dissuaded him from marrying a relative; a yet later intimacy was broken off by himself.
Solov'ev displayed similar inconsistencies as regards the other physical passions. He kept fasts, and ate no meat, but was fond of wine (not to excess) and sweets.
Solov'ev's doctrine of asceticism was connected with his view that man's nature is radically evil. In this matter, too, he followed Kant and not Rousseau, who considered that man was naturally good but had been corrupted in the course of history. In contradistinction to Kant, however, Solov'ev exhibited a habitual concern about life, tantamount to pessimism. This accounts for his antipathy to Nietzsche and to the Nietzschean cult of a pagan joie de vivre.
§ 139.
SOLOV'EV is definitely opposed to egoism and therefore to eudemonism and to utilitarianism, since these are based on egoism. He rejects egoism as individualism and subjectivism; his metaphysical amalgam of monotheism and pantheism makes it impossible for him to find satisfaction in individualism. His conception of the relationship between the individual and society resembles that of Comte. There is for him no opposition; society forms the content of personality, and the individual is concentrated society; in the historical process, the individual is the dynamic factor, whilst society is the static factor. Thus, and in similar ways, does Solov'ev formulate the problem. He does not trouble himself with psychological and sociological analysis, but is interested in practical aspects. For him, humanity is, or to be more precise, will become, a unified organism, the organism of the church universal. At present, evolution has not gone so far, but the trend and aim of evolution are already so far discernible that we can in all seriousness now speak of "humanity as a whole."
Inasmuch as Solov'ev so decisively rejects subjectivism, he can only regard morality as organised morality. The individual, the individual consciousness does not exist in isolation, but as a member of church and state; the philosophical principles of ethics and religion are abstractions derived from a study of the concrete state and the concrete church, abstractions from the study of the members of these extant organisations.
Solov'ev distinguishes three leading social organisations, the economic, the political, and the ecclesiastical. The economic order reposes upon the division of labour (Solov'ev inclines here towards the views of Mihailovskii), and aims at the organisation of labour; the positive sciences and the methods of technique belong to this domain. The state is the political organisation of the workers, and in this field art and philosophy are active. The church, finally, is the spiritual society, the manifestation of mysticism and theology the organisation of spiritual love; the state does not need love, but only law, or justice, the latter being recognised by Solov'ev as merely a formal principle. Law is for him the attainable minimum of morality; law is distinguished from morality by the former's appeal to the coercive powers of the state. Solov'ev does not recognise that there is any right to inflict capital punishment or to impose sentences of lifelong imprisonment; but, differing from Tolstoi, he regards war as permissible.
Solov'ev defends human rights (though not equal rights, and rejects political privileges. The privilege of one, is realised in oriental despotisms; the privilege of a few, in classical aristocracies; and finally the privilege of many, in democracy.
Solov'ev rejects socialism on account of its economic materialism, saying that the socialist order would be a social ant-hill (Dostoevskii was fond of this phrase). The social question he contends, will be readily and spontaneously solved from the religious outlook. Coming to practical details, Solov'ev is at one with the narodniki in contending that land should be assigned to every family.[4]
According to Solov'ev the church with its doctrines and mystagogy must permeate political and economic society, the state. This involves the essence of free theocracy, for men, he holds, cannot fail to approve and accept true Christianity as soon as they are sufficiently acquainted with it.
The church is the organisation of piety. Man lives in "this world," which is imperfect, finite, and relative; but man lives also a life in God, in "the realm of God," and for this latter life the church is the mediating religious instrument.
Religious life, religious truth, is neither scientific nor philosophical; it is not even theological; but it is life, pious life, such as the teachings of religion demand and render possible. Theoretic theosophy finds expression in theurgy. The mysteries of the seven sacraments and the dogmatic utterances of the seven councils (the holy seven!) are represented and manifested in the church by and through life.
In the church a fraternity, a liberty, and an equality, real because spiritual, are realised, not however through the individual, but through Christ. Solov'ev accepts Dostoevskii's dictum concerning "Russian socialism," whereby is denoted the essential being of the church universal. The principle of the spiritual life, says Solov'ev, basing himself on St. John, is "not of itself"; hence the need for the apostolate and the hierarchy—the church. The church is for Solov'ev the incarnation of God; in and through the church, men are united with Christ, God incarnate
The personal representatives of the moral organisation of mankind, those upon whom the higher services devolve, are: the high priests, absolute authority (but an authority devoted to true tradition), the representative of the highest piety; the climax of grace and sympathy, absolute power, the being truly aware of existing needs, to wit the king (tsar); the prophet, finally, who represents the acme of the sense of shame and of conscience, represents absolute freedom, believes in the true picture of the future.
Solov'ev has most of all to tell us about the prophetic function. Christianity was in truth right to do away with the prophets. In rare cases only have they appeared since, and usually as false prophets, this explaining all the anomalies of medieval and modern history. Solov'ev desires the reestablishment of the prophetic function, but this does not depend upon the human will. The prophet has profound social significance in that he is perfectly independent, has no fear of anything external, and is not subordinated to anything external—possesses an absolute freedom which neither the masses nor democracy can ever guarantee. The prophet is not a vain dreamer of dreams; his picture of the future is not a utopia spun out of personal fancies, but arises in response to the actual needs of society and is rooted in mysterious religious tradition; herein lies the connection between the prophet's mission on the one hand, and high priesthood and kingship on the other.
It is difficult to determine how far Solov'ev was thinking of Nietzsche in this description of a modern prophet. Nietzsche's prophet was creator rather than seer, whereas Solov'ev vacillates between seer and creator. For Solov'ev the creator became transformed into the artist (vide infra § 144).
§ 140.
WHEN, in his Ethics, Solov'ev expounds his free theocracy we feel throughout that his aim is to provide an ethical foundation for the idea of theocracy. Speaking generally, for Solov'ev life, history, and the world have a moral meaning. In his ethical system the Kantian outlook finds expression, and he endeavours to formulate the concept of theocracy as reasonably as possible, to bring the idea into harmony with the views of modern philosophers and sociologists.
The earlier works devoted to the establishment of the doctrine of free theocracy, those of the eighties, produce a very different impression, for in these Solov'ev is guided by the theology and the teachings of the slavophils. In its first draft, his free theocracy has a much closer resemblance with the actual theocracy of Russian caesaropapism.
In practice, Solov'ev wishes to secure a free theocracy by a union of the three main churches. In this matter the state as the second great social organisation, must cooperate with the church; the ecclesiastical and the political organisation must work in harmony. The absolute truth of the church being recognised, Christianity cannot fail to permeate the entire life of society; but for this the state, too must become Christian, and the state must help the church to diffuse Christianity.
In the west, the church conquered the powerful Roman state. After the schism, however, the church became unduly political, taking over the function of the state, and since the Teutonic state was too feeble to resist it, Catholicism grew one-sidedly coercive. But the most momentous schism in the church was the secession of Byzantium, which thereby became Asiatic; the state subdued the church, the church retired into itself, lapsed into spiritual death, and was therefore conquered by Islam; the east was and is the true home of Christianity, which, however, has remained an inward Christianity, and has failed to animate life and civilisation. The extant autocephalic Orthodox churches have, even more than the Byzantine mother church, become the prey of little states. Solov'ev points to the hostile attitude of the patriarchate of Constantinople towards the Bulgarian church, and shows how the churches of the Balkans are dominated by a petty nationalist spirit.
Protestantism, in its justified protest against Rome, was too one-sided in its advocacy of the critical activity of the understanding.
Whereas the functions of high priest, king (Solov'ev is speaking in Russian terminology of the tsar), and prophet were harmoniously united in the person of Christ, these three religious functions were one-sidedly developed in the three churches. The papacy represented the one-sided development of high priesthood; Orthodoxy, the one-sided development of kingship; Protestautism, the one-sided development of prophethood. To express the matter in a different way, in the person of Christ there existed a harmonious unification and unity of Father (high priest), Son (king), and Holy Spirit (prophet). The aim of the church must be to effect the social realisation of this trinity in unity, but the three Christian churches have carried out the task in a non-organic and one-sided manner.
Russia received church and civilisation from Byzantium, and for this reason in Russia, too, church and civilisation are one-sided. Situated geographically between the Asiatics (Mohammedans) and the Latins, Russia maintained her freedom, developed her political organism, and separated herself wholly from the west. But in Russia the church was weakened even more than in Byzantium. Solev'ev gives an account of ecclesiastical evolution in Russia wherein the patriarch Nikon, in contradistinction to customary views, is represented as antichrist. The persecution of the raskolniki and of the sectaries is described as an unchristian use of violence; Peter's reforms are considered to be nothing more than an outward and mechanical linking-up with the west, nothing more than a first step; Peter and his successors definitively subjugated the church. The task of Russia, therefore, is to sectre an intimate and inward union with the west. She must not merely adopt foreign forms but must understand them. At the same time, Russia wil place a vigorous state at the disposal of the church universal so that the latter may complete the rebirth of the nations. The Russian tsar and the pope must become the instruments of the genuine and the free theocracy—for the theocracy that reposes upon force is false.
The content of history is constrained by Solov'ev to submit itself to the limitations of the formula of a struggle between Asia and Europe. Solov'ev frequently speaks of the centralising force of the east (the Mohammedan east), of the individualism of western civilisation, and of the reconciling energy or mission of the Slavs.
Thus Solov'ev looks for light from the east, ex oriente lux. But he asks on one occasion whether it is to come from the east of Xerxes or from the east of Christ.
In historically extant Russia, Solov'ev discerns the capacity for the practical inauguration of the church of the future, and considers that this will be effected by the solution of the Polish problem and of the Jewish problem.
The mission of the Poles, says Solov'ev, is something very different from the attainment of political independence. The Poles forfeited their political independence because their nobles absorbed, overvalued, and therefore ruined, the entire state. The political independence of Poland can never be regained and this political aim is fantastical and fruitless. Nor can Poland become comparatively independent upon the basis of a one-sided idea of nationality. But Poland can constitute a "living bridge" between the west and the east, and may serve the free theocracy by inaugurating the union of the churches.
The political aims of the Polish nobles are "irrational and immoral," and yet these nobles are to take part in the "service of God" which Solov'ev assigns to the Polish nation, they are to help in bringing about the union of the churches! Besides how are we to represent to our minds the "living bridge" between east and west? Do such bridges exist?
The question of the Jews was one by which Solov'ev is more disquieted than by that of the Poles. In the Jews he discovers a living link between Old Testament days and the stage of religion and revelation, of which Christianity was an organic succession. The relationship between Jews and Christians is, therefore, of a quite exceptional character. In Solov'ev's apocalyptic vision (vide infra § 148), the significance of the question is symbolically displayed when the author makes the number of the Christians exceed that of the Jews by no more than one half.
Upon his deathbed Solov'ev begged his friends to keep him awake, for he had many prayers to say on behalf of the Jews. In the complex of Russian problems, the Jewish question is one of the most momentous, and Solov'ev frequently discussed it.[5] The importance of the question for Russia depends upon the fact that there are nearly six million Jews in the country, a population equal to that of the whole state of Belgium.
To Solov'ev the Jewish problem is a Christian problem, a religious problem. Solov'ev's treatment of the Jews as pioneers of commerce and industry frequently recalls the manner in which Marx handles the question. It was not the Jews, but the Christians, who created the cult of the golden calf. Cultured Europe, which had become dechristianised, and had devoted itself to the service of mammon, was here the offender. The Jews were merely consistent in the way they followed the example thus set before them. "If economic life is to be humanised, it must be resubordinated to the religious and moral life. For Europe and for Russia this can be effected in no other way than by the great union of the churches, in which the Jews will find their place. As a theocratic nation they will be at home in the renovated theocracy; now they are estranged from themselves just as the Christians are estranged from themselves. But true Jewish principles lead to Christianity, just as true Christian principles lead to Judaism. The union of the churches, therefore, will at the same time be a union between the renovated Christians and the renovated Jews, these latter being the better part of Jewry, namely the Russian Jews, who have maintained their religious principles in greater purity than have their western brethren. The Jews as town dwellers will retain their social and economic function, but this function will assume a different meaning, will be guided by a loftier aim. Its aim will be to human nature and material life,[6]
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.
§ 141.
SOLOV'EV'S views upon the philosophy of ecclesiasticism necessitate a comparison with the teachings of the slavophils. Solov'ev was greatly influenced by the founders of slavophilism, and above all by Homjakov. After his materialistic crisis, it was by the slavophils that Solov'ev was led to religion and the church, it was their trend which he followed throughout. He was at one with them in recognising the cultural primacy of religion, of mysticism, in the approval he gave to eastern theology, and in the importance he attached to the Russian church. Being guided by the same tendency, he was led on occasions to the same or to similar judgments in points of detail. The slavophils and Solov'ev, moreover, sat at the feet of the same teachers (Plato, Schelling, etc.); whilst Solov'ev had personal and literary relations with Ivan Aksakov, and wrote for the latter's periodical "Rus'!"
In the course of his mental development, Solov'ev came to recognise the value of Catholicism, came to consider that it possessed ecclesiastical advantages as compared with the eastern church. This made him diverge in certain details from the slavophils, though his general trend remained the same. Where Solov'ev differed as a philosopher from the Slavophils was that he attempted to found an independent theosophical system, whereas the slavophils were content with the philosophical idealisation of official orthodoxy.
Solov'ev subsequently diverged from the slavophils, and above all from Homjakov, in his exposition of the history of Christendom and of the severance of the churches, Solov'ev who upon historic and dogmatic grounds acknowledged the supremacy of the pope of Rome, referred the schism to antecedent heretical endeavours in Byzantium, and considered that the fault lay with Byzantium, not with Rome. We may say that in general, in his studies of ecclesiastical history, Solov'ev was far more influenced than were the slavophils by the idea of evolution; and we may say, too, that Solov'ev was more critical, though only towards the east.
For Solov'ev was of opinion that the Catholic church, in contrast with the eastern, and above all with the Russian church, had evolved and progressed. The Roman church had in especial promoted the evolution of dogma, and had made reiterated attempts to lead the cultural development of the western nations, to permeate that development with its spirit. Solov'ev was greatly impressed by the rock of Peter and its steadfastness. Doubtless Rome had been masterful and pitiless in her condemnation of the godless world; but in this unyieldingness, too, we must recognise the mysterious energy of God. Solov'ev admitted that Rome had fallen very low, but it had continued to progress, and had never failed to rise after its falls. Russia, on the other hand, had never fallen because it had continued to sit unceasingly on the same spot.
In his ecclesiastical history and in his views of church policy Solov'ev's trend was unmistakably Catholicising. The reproach he levelled against Homjakov may be turned against himself. Homjakov, said Solov'ev, while criticising Catholicism and Protestantism in their historically extant forms, gave an idealised view of Orthodoxy. But no less idealised was Solov'ev's presentation of Catholicism and the papacy, whereas he took a somewhat more realistic view of the two other leading churches. But essentially, as has already been explained, he completely failed to see the historically extant churches in their true colours.
In Russia, both clericalists and liberals have written much concerning Solov'ev's attitude to Catholicism. On many occasions he was publicly represented as a Catholic, and publicly defended himself against the accusation, to which weight was, however, given by his acquaintanceship with Bishop Strossmayer and with Pierling, and by the fact that he had his book The History and Future of Theocracy printed at Agram.
Solov'ev did not in actual fact become a Catholic while in Europe, but his intimate friends expected him to go over to Rome, considering that this step would have been the logical outcome of his opinions. When directly asked why he had not been received into the Catholic church, seeing that his inclinations towards that faith were so strong, he replied that to become a Catholic would deprive him of his influence upon the Russian people. When further asked whether consideration for the welfare of his own soul did not imperiously demand that he should become a Catholic, Solov'ev rejoined that he was not concerned about his personal salvation, but was thinking about Russia.
I consider that the logic of his friends and opponents was sounder than his own. In the end, Solov'ev went so far to admit the cogency of these arguments that, in 1896, long after his friendship with Strossmayer, he joined the Russian Uniats. Before death he received communion from an Orthodox priest (no Catholic priest was available).
None the less it remains significant that the most notable modern philosopher of religion should have been an admirer of Catholicism. It is not enough to suggest that Solov'ev was won over by the efforts towards union made by Leo XIII, for the existence of a whole series of Catholicising Russians before and since the days of Alexander I gives a more general significance to attempts towards union.
It need hardly be said that the slavophils censured Solov'ev in strong terms for his attitude towards Catholicism and towards Orthodoxy. Ivan Aksakov frequently wrote against Solov'ev, and polemic writings emphasising the slavophil views concerning Orthodoxy and concerning the impossibility of a union, exercised a notable influence upon Solov'ev. He was less affected by the controversial opinions of Strahov and the other demi-slavophils and demi-westernisers.
Solov'ev's sociological and philosophical estimate of nationality likewise distinguished him from the later slavophils. The early slavophils had not attained to perfectly clear views concerning the relationships of nationality to religion, church, and culture; although Kirěevskii had subordinated nationality to spiritual culture and religion; whilst Homjakov did the same thing, though he endeavoured to arrive at a more independent conception of the historic function of nationality. It was only the later slavophils who made common cause with the Old Russians in proclaiming nationality as coequal with state and church.
For Solov'ev, race and nationality were entirely subordinate to religion and church. The idea of a nation, said Solov'ev, is not.constituted by what the nation thinks about itself in time, but by what God thinks about the nation in eternity. It was his fundamental idea of the God-man and God-humanity which led him to view as essentially different the roles of the individual nations in the theocratic organisation of mankind.
When Solov'ev accepted the idea of Russian messianism, he was not thinking of the national qualities of the Russian folk, but of the Russian church and religion. He went so far as to declare that the qualities of the chosen people were a minor matter, seeing that this people, in fulfilling its function of saviour, would not be realising its own ideas, but the divine ideas. He spoke of the God-nation as an organic member of God-humanity (by which he meant, the united church universal). But none the less for Solov'ev the Russian people and the Russian state were the chosen theocratic people and the chosen theocratic state.
Contrasting nationality with nationalism, Solov'ev fiercely attacked the nationalism of the younger slavophils. He considered that Russian nationalism had exhibited three stages. The early slavophils prostrated themselves before the nation as the chosen bringer of universal (religious) truth. Next came Katkov, who saw in the nation the elemental vital energy which was independent of universal truth. Last of all came the chauvinistic obscurantism of late date (he was referring to the era of Alexander III), when people paid homage to the national one-sidedness and the historical anomalies by which the Russians were kept separate from civilised mankind. Katkov was the nemesis of the slavophils; recent obscurantism was the nemesis of Katkov. Solov'ev went so far as to say that slavophilism had declined to the level of "national and political blackmailing." He condemned Jaroš, professor at Moscow university, who proposed to supplement Katkov's program by the apotheosis of John the Terrible as the first and most exemplary Russian, Orthodox, and Tsar. Whilst Katkov had taken his crude politics from de Maistre, Katkov's successors contented themselves with a caricature of de Maistre (Bergeret, Principes de politique); in like manner, Danilevskii borrowed his leading idea from Professor Rückert, a German. This alleged primal Russian slavophilism was in fact unrussian and foreign. Solov'ev's definitive formula was that we should love all other nationalities as we love our own.
From this outlook we must consider and appraise Solov'ev's own views concerning the Poles and the Jews. He gave due recognition to the valuable religious inheritance of these two peoples, who were wher he wrote more hostile to the Russians than any others. The Poles and the Jews, he declared must lend aid to the Russians. The messianism of the "theocratic nation" was not a source of privilege, but involved duty and service; it did not give any right to dominance or hegemony. True patriotism, said Solov'ev, was to be found in national self-knowledge, not in national self-complacency, whereas the nationalists had reduced the slavophil idea of messianism to the level of zoomorphic, zoological patriotism. True patriotism involved conviction of sin and confession.
§ 142.
TO know Solov'ev thoroughly we must examine his theosophy, though we shall content ourselves with a few samples. What is meant by theosophy? The desire to know, the belief that we really do know precisely, what God is, what he has made and is making.
Solov'ev finds in German philosophy the last word of philosophic knowledge as hitherto attainable. Above all it is the latest German philosophical system, that of Eduard von Hartmann, which has attracted wide attention in Russia no less than elsewhere, that discloses to Solov'ev the mission of a new and higher philosophy. From Hartmann, Solov'ev learns, first of all, that epistemologically neither rationalism nor empiricism has proved competent to furnish satisfactory and trustworthy knowledge; metaphysically, Hartmann points the way to a concrete spiritual monism; in the ethical field, finally, we gain the knowledge that our ultimate aim can be attained and our true satisfaction secured solely in the unification of all being and through the development of the world-all, to which the individual must surrender himself.
Solov'ev is unable to follow Hartmann all the way, but he considers that Hartmann is on the right track, if only because the German sets out from Schelling's positive philosophy, a synthesis of Hegel and Schopenhauer, of rationalism and volutarism. Schelling had been commended to Solov'ev by his first Russian teachers, the slavophils.
Thus in German philosophy from Schelling to Hartmann does Solev'ev discover intimations of Christian philosophy as a rationalistic and scientific interpretation of Christian revelation. Solov'ev actually believes that he is able to secure a sound understanding of Christian revelation by a synthesis of German rationalism and French positivism. Comte's philosophy of history, positivist fetichism, and Hartmann's philosophy of the world process, lead him to the gnostics and neoplatonists, and to their theosophy and their theogony.
Solov'ev believes that from this material and imperfect world we can press forward to true, absolute being. We have thus discovered the inclined plane connecting the absolute with the finite, and the inmost nature of the world is comprehended and explained.
The absolute, for Solov'ev, is the all-in-one being, is God, is the good. The absolute is one, of one kind, the unifying, the one thing uniting all others; God is all-embracing and all-unifying in the sense that all parts of the world-all aspire towards him, through him, finding unity in him. God is love.
Absolute being, as absolute substance, as absolute reality, as actus purus, God taking pleasure in himself, God with his absolute autonomy, with his freedom (the only freedom in the true sense of the word)—is spaceless and timeless, is everlasting. Beside him, likewise eternal, exists chaos, the eternal potentiality, or as Hegel put it, evil infinity, multiplicity, the subdivided, the not-one, anarchy. God's wisdom (sophia) conquers chaos, displaying all might and intelligence; at the same time (displaying goodness and grace) he bestows upon chaos more than chaos deserves, namely the possibility of choosing freely the side of God.
Like God, chaos is eternal. In this fundamental point Solov'ev already diverges from Christian mythology. But, following Christian mythology, he assumes that there are three hypostases in the Godhead, the father, the son logos, and the spirit.
According to Solov'ev, the doctrine of the trinity is a revelation of God, and is the doctrine of the infallible church; but none the less Solov'ev believes himself able to expound and prove the doctrine upon grounds of reason. The existence of God being given, the trinity in unity of God immediately follows from this existence. Solov'ev considers that every living being necessarily possesses a unity, a duality, and a trinity. The unity is given by being itself. The duality arises from the conviction that this being does not merely exist, but that it is something, that it has a definite objectivity (the idea of itself, the {{lang|fr|raison d'être of itself). The trinity of the living being is comprised in the threefold relationship of the being towards this its objectivity: it possesses this objectivity simply in virtue of the fact that it exists; it possesses this same objectivity in its activity, which is the necessary manifestation of the existing being; and thirdly it possesses this objectivity in the sphere of feeling, in the enjoyment of its being and its activity.
With the aid of this scholasticism it is not difficult for Solov'ev, in accordance with the Hebrew text of certain passages from the Old Testament which he quotes word for word (betraying to us the while, that the Hebrew phrases exercise a fetichistic influence upon his mind), and with the assistance of certain passages from the New Testament (which he gives us not in Greek, but in Latin), to interpret the Christian doctrine of the trinity and the three designations of father, son, and holy ghost, in the sense of strict monarchism (Solov'ev writes "monarchism," not "monarchianism," though the latter form is the one usually preferred by theologians), as energy, truth, and grace, or as power, justice, and goodness, or, finally, as reality, idea, and life.
God, as the absolute, could be self-sufficing, but this would conflict with his grace and goodness. From God and chaos, Solov'ev evolves the world and its history, evolves them as do all mythagogues, notionally and in their reality.
The sophia strives against chaos; this struggle presupposes a soul, the world-soul, the materia prima, the potential mother of the created world. The creation of the world proceeds from the father; the logos brings forth the higher world of ideas, but these ideas are mere contemplative and impassive beings; from the holy ghost originate the pure spirits or angels, which have feeling and will, and possess a higher order of freedom than man.
The cosmic process in its first period is astral, and at this time the stellar bodies are formed; during the second period our own solar system comes into existence; during the third period, within this system, the earth becomes the peculiar stage for mankind, mankind being conceived by Solov'ev as the second absolute. Solov'ev's God takes his delight, not in the angels, but in men. Every living being finds the meaning of his own being in the absolute being of God; the significance of man lies in the union between the divine and the mundane. In man, the world-soul becomes completely conscious of itself.[7]
The fall of the angels and of man is described on Old Testament lines. The fallen angels, possessing a higher freedom than man, side eternally against God; man, with his more limited freedom, is able after the fall, to rejoin himself to God. According to Solov'ev, man possesses freedom of choice, and this is manifested in the choice of evil, not in the following 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 slavophils); the second stage is characterised by the organisation of nations and of the state, wherein sex manifestations take the form of family life; this organisation continues to exist in the present, but will be replaced by the universal organisation of mankind which the future will bring.
This future organisation will be effected by the church and in the church; in the church the fullness of the genuinely human life will be attained; man will lead a complete existence, at once individually, socially, and politically.
Examining the spiritual content of evolution, Solov'ev considers that the first stage of universalism was Buddhism, the second Platonism, the third Christianity. Since the appearance of the God-man, history has been the history of the church, and the task of the philosophy of ecclesiastical history is to explain why, after Christ's coming, history should continue, and why and how the great schism of the churches should have preceded the predestined union of the churches. By his life, the God-man overcame moral evil; by his resurrection he vanquished physical evil, the evil of evils, death. Man must freely choose Christ, but freedom can be attained solely through experience, and therefore the historical process must endure after the coming of Christ. The baptised Christian must first spiritually assume Christ into himself; history makes this possible to him.
The meaning and the aim of the cosmological process and the historical process lie in this, that the world and mankind strive towards union with God; this union with God will secure for the finite, for nature, and for mankind, a share in divine immortality.
Thus does theosophy cosmologically and historically justify a belief in the kingdom of God. This kingdom is not to be identified with any of the existing churches, nor is it the sum and union of the separated churches; the union of the churches is merely the condition of its realisation in so far as it can be realised on earth.
Belief in the realm of God unites within itself three beliefs (thus is the doctrine expressed in the third of his Addresses commemorative of Dostoevskii): belief in God; belief in man; and belief in matter (nature). The severance of these three beliefs manifests itself in three one-sided intellectual trends. The quietists and pietists desire to content themselves with the mere contemplation of God; they despise the freedom of man, and turn away from nature. The rationalists and idealists believe in man, but for them God shrinks to become an embryo man, whilst nature becomes the shadow of man. Since, however, this shadow makes itself strongly felt, the naturalists (realists and materialists) have come into existence; these worship the dead mechanism of nature, whilst denying all that is divine and spiritual.
Just as the three severed churches must be united, so must these three trends or "faiths" be theoretically synthetised and practically conciliated. The belief in God gives rise to belief in the God-man and in God-matter (the mother of God). True theism, true humanism, and true naturalism, in their organic unity, are the precondition for the realisation and diffusion of the kingdom of God on earth.
§ 143.
THE brief account that has been given of Solov'ev's theosophical and mythological speculations may suffice to furnish a general idea of his thought; I have done no more than select what is most important, and will not attempt an examination of the individual contentions, as regards their derivation from the works of this or that neoplatonist, from Plato, Paracelsus, Schelling, etc.
Essentially, Solov'ev's theosophical speculations are merely the projection of his ethics and politics into the universe, and Feuerbach would have claimed that Solov'ev's mythology was but additional confirmation of his theory.
In his Critique of Abstract Principles (1877–1880), Solov'ev already opens an attack upon the subjectivism of the new philosophy, and he combats it as scepticism. He finds even Kant unduly sceptical, for he considers that not rationalism alone (the dogmatic and critical rationalism of Kant and the absolute rationalism of Hegel), but likewise empiricism (sensualism, empiricism, positivism), leads to subjectivism, and therefore to scepticism. For experience and ratiocination lead only to relative knowledge; experience merely teaches what is, while reason tells us no more than what must be in given circumstances, so that in both cases we attain only to relativism. In contradistinction to this, Solov'ev demands absolute principles alike for practice and theory, demands absolute, absolutely certain, knowledge. "Nothing can furnish true satisfaction but the one truth which can be neither of to-day nor of to-morrow because it is eternal." With Descartes, Solov'ev considers that scepticism can serve only as a methodological instrument, through the use of which the absoluteness of true knowledge is all the more brilliantly displayed. Solov'ev does not condemn the temporary and honest unbelief of a Thomas.
It was Solov'ev's aim to complete his ethic and his philosophy of religion by a systematic exposition of "theoretical philosophy," but he published no more than a few essays contributory to this work (1897–1899). It is interesting to read in one of these that Solov'ev does not admit the force of Descartes' cogito ergo sum. The "sum" is unwarranted. Of him who contends, I think (i.e., I have consciousness), therefore I am, we may ask, Whose consciousness have you? The answer might run, No one knows, for it might be the consciousness of Peter or of Paul; it might be a pathological consciousness; and so on.
Solov'ev believes, on the other hand, that in his History of Ethics he has provided an absolutely secure foundation for knowledge and activity, that he has furnished the basis for normal society, free unity in spiritual love. Free theosophy ensures truth, absolute truth; this truth is characterised by absolute reality and absolute rationality.
In contradistinction to the sceptical relativism of the antedecent empirical and rationalistic philosophy, Solov'ev anchors his free philosophy to the all-in-one being. This absolute (this absolute absolute, we might say after the manner of Solov'ev) is given us directly by the mystical or religious apprehension. Through this immediate apprehension, experience and thought are verified, thought acquires its absolute rationality, experience acquires its absolute reality, the mystically conceived "truth" becomes natural truth. Absolute truth is "introduced" into the forms of logical thought and is realised in experience.
In this unification of mystical cognition with experience by means of logical, rational thought, Solov'ev believes he has furnished a harmonious synthesis of theology, rationalistic philosophy, and positive science.
A synthesis of theology, Kant, and Comte?
In his endeavour to evade scepticism, in the last resort Solov'ev can discover no other expedient than to make an unconditional surrender to theology. Nevertheless, the critic consciousness cannot find even in theology true repose and certainty; scepticism is not transcended. In Solov'ev's thought, Kant again and again comes into his own.
Kant and Kant's influence are already discernible in the fact that Solov'ev's real starting-point is from ethics, that Solov'ev seeks in ethics the foundation of the absolute as good. Practical philosophy is made the basis of theoretical, quite after the manner of Kant and his successors and in especial of Schopenhauer. At the close of The Critigue of Abstract Principles we read: "In God, truth is eternal, but in so far as God is not in us we do not live in the truth; not only is our knowledge fallacious, but our very being, our very reality is fallacious. Consequently for the true organisation of knowledge the organisation of reality is essential."
We recognise Kant in Solov'ev's mythology. Solov'ev's theosophical novel gives an ethical description of the cosmological process; the world-drama is the mythical objectivation of ethical human relationships; ethical problems are myth logically projected into the acons.
And what is Solov'ev's theoretical philosophy but the Kantian apriorism, expressed in a different terminology and provided with a different, a theological, content? Solov'ev's "mystical perception" is, in fact, modelled upon the "regulative ideas" of Kant. Just as for Kant these ideas were associated with rational or conceptual thought and with sensuous experience, so for Solov'ev is mystical apprehension associated with thought and experience or sensation. Solov'ev even uses unhesitatingly the Kantian terminology, speaking of "the forms of thought," of "concepts," and so on.
Conceptual thought and sensations, says Solov'ev, give to us objects merely as these are conceived and perceived by us. But we ascribe existence to such objects; we assume their effect upon us as manifested in our sensations to be immediately true; we create, in thought, relationships between one object and other objects; and we are convinced that the object exists independently of our thought and sensation. Here, too, Solov'ev employs Kantian terminology when he says that the object persists by itself; we have to do with the Kantian thing-by-itself. Even though Solov'ev differs from Kant in the psychological explanation of the way wherein the thing-by-itself enters into relation with our understanding, nevertheless the explanation he gives is Kantian in character. For Solov'ev considers that the apprehension of objectively existing things is a combination of belief, imagination, and creation. The belief is the inward and immediate apprehension of the object. In the belief that the object exists objectively, independently of our sensuous perception and conceptual thought, we manifest ourselves as free cognising subjects, as existing beings, who inwardly apprehend another existing being. This inward apprehension is a species of union of the knower with the known; it is something distinct from sensation and from comprehension in thought. The immediate apprehension is belief, faith; it is absolute, mystical cognition.
Further, in this act of belief, imagination plays its part. In our understanding we construct the idea of the object, we imagine what the object is. Ultimately, the ideal image of the object becomes incorporated in sensations. Solov'ev, thus inverts the formula of rationalism, and contends, nihil est in sensu, quod non fuerit prius in intellectu.
As I have pointed out, this psychological analysis of the process of cognition reminds us of Kant. We have here what Kant terms the spontaneity of the active understanding, the self-birth of our reason; we have the synthesis of the various elements of cognition in connection with which for Kant, too, the force of imagination had so great a part to play; and, further, the Kantian transcendental apperception, the "I think," comes into its own in Solov'ev's system. The great distinction between Solov'ev's doctrine and Kant's, is that for Kant the thing-by-itself is no more than imaginatively cognised, whereas Solov'ev effects an inward union with the thing-by-itself.
The dependence of Solov'ev's thought upon that of Kant is sufficiently indicated by the title of the work, we are considering. It is a critique of abstract principles. In other words, it is a critique of pure reason; but pure reason does not suffice Solov'ev, and he transforms it into the direct mystical apprehension of reality.
With Plato, Solov'ev is an ultra-realist. Plato looked upon being as pure soul before incorporation; Solov'ev transformed Plato's pre-existent contemplation into an existent contemplation, and considered that man contemplates the truly existing in this life.
What is this that really exists? Solov'ev answers, like Plato, that that which really exists is in truth God. Above all else, mystical contemplation apprehends God; but in addition we directly contemplate individual things; apprehending them believingly, imaginatively, and creatively.
§ 144.
SOLOV'EV believes himself able to reconcile experience and thought with theology. In all seriousness, he believes himself able to apprehend, not God only, but the triune God and the God of revelation.
Solov'ev turns away from Kant and Comte to revelation; the critical and sceptical philosopher becomes a scholastic and a mythagogue who with the aid of analogies and images desires to rationalise the content of revelation. For Solov'ev, too, philosophy becomes ancilla theologiae, free theosophy becomes scholasticism. "To justify the faith of our fathers by raising that faith to a new level of the rational consciousness; to show how this old faith, freed from the shackles of local separatism and national self-complacency, can be harmonised with eternal and universal truth—such, in general terms, is the aim of my work." Such is the program of Solov'ev's History and Future of Theocracy.
The faith of our fathers, where has this faith been precisely formulated, and who are these fathers? Where has the eternal and universal truth been formulated? Like many orthodox theologians, Solov'ev frequently insists that Christ is the head of the church and of Christianity; but this means that the New Testament, supplemented by the Old Testament, constitutes the decisive authority in matters of faith. Solov'ev stresses this consideration against Tihomirov above all, for Tihomirov had referred the cultured to the authority of the clergy. Solov'ev quotes against him Platon, the metropolita of Moscow, for whom the authority of Holy Writ was the sole and ultimate appeal. It is not the clergy, continues Solov'ev, but the folk, which is to be regarded as the bearer and custodian of Christian verity. Thus we are told that Jesus Christ, Holy Writ, the folk, our fathers, and the church, all furnish us with eternal and universal truth. This wealth of sources and criteria of truth is really somewhat embarrassing!
Solov'ev clings to the idea of catholicity, but in the end the formal principle of catholicity leaves him in the lurch, as it has left others before him. The principle of catholicity of St. Vincent of Lérins did not prevent Pius IX from proclaiming papal infallibility as the formal principle of the Catholic church.
Solov'ev was not clear in his own mind concerning the formal principle of the Catholic church in the sense of the catholicity he demanded, as we can discern from the conflicting nature of the criteria he adduces. In the end, however, he discerned divine truth in the syllabus of Pius IX and in the new dogma of that pope.
Characteristic was Solov'ev's attitude towards Döllinger and the Old Catholics.
Instead of examining the reasons put forward by these prominent theologians, and instead of enlightening himself as he should from their historical studies concerning the development of papal centralism and absolutism, he dismisses the whole movement with the remark that Old Catholicism is nothing more than professorial learning, the learning of the study, that the masses have remained unaffected by it, that at most Bismarck has favoured it as against the Catholic church. Solov'ev was greatly impressed by the fact that the entire Catholic world accepted the new dogma of infallibility, whereas Döllinger and his associates protested in the name of individual freedom against the authority of the church, thus rejecting the principle of the Catholic church in favour of the Protestant principle.
This criticism of Old Catholicism, written in the year 1883, is extremely uncritical. In the first place, it is not true that Bismarck favoured the Old Catholics, for Bismarck, like Solov'ev, considered that the masses were quite unaffected by the movement, and that for this reason it was devoid of significance for the Protestant statesman. "Quieta non movere" was Bismarck's leading principle in practical politics, and he did not lift a finger to set the masses in motion. It is not to Bismarck but to Solov'ev that we should look for an examination of the problem, for a consideration of the numerous and important points made against papal absolutism by such men as Döllinger, von Schulte, Maassen, Friedrich, Langen, and others. But in his studies of dogmatics and ecclesiastical history, Solov'ev did not get beyond an extremely uncritical dilettantism, and thus it was that in a question of such importance he could associate himself with Strossmayer, a man of scant competence in theological matters. Yet even Strossmayer found the new dogma repugnant!
None the less, the scholastics, some in especial, did much for the development of modern philosophy, and the slavophils were perfectly right in holding that scholasticism had inaugurated the reformation and the revolutionary movement. Scholasticism slew theology—and Solov'ev, like the scholastics, had a fondness for discovering reasons for what he already believed. Solov'ev's scholasticism was an attack upon Russian theology, upon clericalism, and helped the Russian movement towards liberty. Solov'ev praised the true monk for his willingness to undertake all kinds of distasteful and dirty work in addition to the service of God; such work was the fulfilment of the vow of obedience. In the field of literature, Solov'ev accepted service of this kind, and made a clearance of all the garbage of such pseudo-orthodox pseudo-patriots as Tihomirov & Co.
Solov'ev, however, was not solely concerned with this campaign against the Tihomirovs; he had an internal struggle of his own, the struggle with himself, the struggle between faith and untaith. "Kant" and "Plato" are the two war-cries wherein the tragic problem of Solov'ev is comprised. The man's whole life was a vain attempt to bring these two poles together, to reconcile their opposition. Kant represents deliberate action in accordance with the light of reason, represents individual activity and spontaneity; Plato represents deliberate receptivity, passive contemplation of the objective higher world. Kant represents the self-sufficiency and independence of the individual critical understanding; Plato represents dependence upon the absolute, upon the revelation of the absolute, upon dogma, upon the church. Solov'ev's life problem, life drama, life tragedy, was found in the epistemological impossibility of effecting an organic combination between fire and water, between two mutually destructive elements. It was impossible for Solov'ev to extinguish the Kantian flame with slavophil and orthodox holy water. The flame allured him; in the fireman, the artist awakened; the fireman forgot his duties, and in rapt contemplation, his eyes glistening in the radiance, he looked on admiringly at the splendour of the conflagration.
I am aware that this view of Solov'ev, this criticism, will please neither his friends nor his foes. I need not trouble myself about the foes, and in especial may ignore the theologians, but I must insist that his friends and adherents discern in the works of their teacher and master a unity which is in truth non-existent. It cannot reasonably be contended that Solov'ev's greatness and originality lay in an alleged organic synthesis of opposites. Apart from the fact that a synthesis of such opposites cannot possibly be organic, it is in the very failure of the attempt that, in my view, is to be discovered Solov'ev's originality and significance, above all for Russia. Unwillingly did he become a heretic to his own teaching.
A man cannot for four years be a materialist, a positivist, and an atheist, without his thought being thereby affected throughout life. Shortly before his death he was engaged in the simultaneous translation of Kant's Prolegomena and of Plato; and he arranged for the translation, not only of Plato, but likewise of Lange's History of Materialism and of Jodl's History of Ethics—Jodl, the Feuerbachian!
Solov'ev's tendency towards individualism and subjectivism was reinforced by the study of Kant and of German idealism. His primitive materialism and positivism gave expression to a naïve objectivism or realism, and this phase was overcome by Solov'ev with the aid of Kant and idealism. At the same time, however, the study of Schopenhauer, Schelling, and even Hegel, made his mind receptive to slavophil mysticism—the ecclesiastical and religious conditions prevailing in his native land having, of course, a contributory influence. Despite Kant, and with Kant, Solov'ev moved on towards Spinoza, Jacob Boehme, and Baader. He learned from Baader how Kant and Descartes could be epistemologically transcended, or at least made susceptible of an orthodox interpretation. Kant's apriori was transformed into revelation; Kant's thing-by-itself and ens realissimum became the triune God as the highest and only rational being; transcendental idealism took on a new aspect as religious and mystical faith.
Impelled by necessity, Solov'ev moved on to Anselm and his credo ut intelligam; while, from the practical side, at least, Solov'ev had to halt when he came to Augustine. It was necessary that the freedom of man should be reconciled with the influence of the absolute on man, but it cannot be said that Solov'ev was able to give a precise solution of this problem. Basing himself upon Augustine, he was a determinist; but he endeavoured to content himself with psychologically conceivable freedom of choice as an extant datum. Metaphysically, he followed Augustine in deducing the doctrine of grace. God, the absolute, exercises an influence upon the world and upon men; the logical consequences of absolute predestination cannot be evaded. Empirically, however, it suffices that we are aware of our freedom of choice, and that we are conscious of the fundamental distinction between the concepts of good and of evil. The Kantian ethic must be based upon the metaphysic of Anselm, Augustine, Origen, and Plato.
Baader led him astray into the attempt to transcend Kant entirely, and to establish even the theory of cognition upon a religions foundation; but Kant continually reasserted his rights, and Solov'ev found it necessary to concede that ethics could not be wholly grounded on religion. Again and again did he return to Kant.
More than once Solov'ev, in truth, forgot his past when he animadverted upon Tihomirov and the latter's rejection of "independent philosophising" in matters of religion.
Solov'ev was, as it were, a modern Origen, nor was it a chance matter that Origen should have exercised so strong an attraction upon him. We have in Solov'ev the same attempt as in Origen to reconcile gnosis with orthodoxy; upon a Platonist basis there is effected an association between mysticism and revelation, between the human and the divine. It gratified Solov'ev to find that Origen laid so much stress upon the idea of the God-man, whilst as a systematist Solov'ev was delighted with the first attempt at a systematisation of Christian doctrine.
I do not purpose to undertake a detailed description of Solov'ev's theory of cognition. Doubtless the attentive reader will already have perceived that Solov'ev gives an unjustifiable extension to the concept of belief, unhesitatingly subsuming religious faith in revelation under belief, which latter is in reality a judgment of truth. In fact, the question is begged.
For the further characterisation of Solov'ev's theory of cognition, I shall allude to two only of his doctrines
As we have seen, from Plato and the neoplatonists Solov'ev likewise took the doctrine of ideas, not in the Kantian form, but in that which we owe to Plato. He adopted the view that ideas were not simply ideal concepts, but objectively existing ideal beings. It need hardly be said that there resulted for Solov'ev all the epistemological difficulties which resulted long ago for Plato.
Of great importance finally for Solov'ev was his doctrine that theory depends upon practice. Here, too, Solov'ev did not think after the manner of Kant and his successors (Schopenhauer, for instance), but understood by the realisation of the divine in human nature that which he termed "free theurgy." Our whole empirical reality must be "organised," must be made inwardly "subject" to our mind, just as our mind must itself be made "subject" to the divine. "Free theurgy is the realisation of the divine principle through mankind, its realisation in the whole of empirical and natural reality; it is the realisation through mankind of the divine energies in the real being of nature " We perceive that the ethical and religious imitatio Christi has become the imitatio Dei in the sense of a metaphysical creation, for Solov'ev does not speak merely of the permeation of the human by the divine, but of the like permeation of nature in general. It is manifest, however, that Solov'ev cannot apply the idea of free theurgy consistently and in all seriousness, and he is therefore content to reduce theurgy to the spheres of artistic creation and aesthetics. Manifestly we have here an attempt to outbid the thought of Schelling, and consequently we find ourselves once more in the realm of mythology and mysticism.[8]
§ 145.
TO enable us to appraise Solov'ev's mysticism, it is necessary to undertake an epistemological examination of the general nature of mysticism. This is essential to the understanding of Russian philosophy, and I should perhaps have discussed the question at an earlier stage, before giving an account of the slavophils.
The attention of the mystic is exclusively concentrated upon a single object of cognition, and especially upon God, philosophy becoming theosophy. Amid the multiplicity of things, the mystic endeavours to grasp unity, and, more directly, to grasp the one; even the dualism of the ego and the non-ego is to be transcended. The mystic is a radical monist, at once monotheist and pantheist.
In the religious domain the mystic aspires towards union with God, and wishes to free the soul from the body and its earthly shackles. He longs for repose, repose of the soul, and finds it in mysticism.
Mystical exclusiveness readily becomes pathological, the attention being hypnotised by a single object; contemplation rises into ecstasy, with its peculiar feelings of blissfulness.
The mystic despises the empirical, the conceptual cognition, which advances step by step, for he is impatient, and desires at one stride to attain to the highest cognition; the mystic contemplates God and objects. In this aspiration towards complete knowledge, the mystic gladly adopts the results of cognition; he cherishes traditionalism; revelation is welcome to him as a complete doctrine. The mystic rejects logic and methodology; he seeks the desert, the hermitage, and the cloister, with their artificial solitude, for there he can embrace mysticism as a permanent condition. The mystics have cultivated their own peculiar and quasi-pathological methods for the attainment of the mystical state in its completeness.
Mysticism makes its appearance in the earlier stages of civilisation. Speaking generally, we may say that as the centuries pass mysticism becomes weaker and rarer. Solov'ev finds it necessary to fall back upon the neoplatonists and upon Plato, whilst he gives his approval to the religious imbeciles (jurodivyi) of his own land. Obviously, certain times and certain places will display a greater inclination to mysticism than will others.
Mysticism is an outcome of a mythical outlook on the universe, and therefore thrives best in the theological and religious domain. The new critical and empirical philosophy and science exercise a debilitating influence upon myth and mysticism.
Criticism; scientific specialised training with its complete subjection of miracle to law and consequent rejection of miracle; scientific analysis of all so-called mysterious phenomena (hypnotism, spiritualism, etc.); technological efficiency, which replaces and outbids miracle; the universal need to labour; the doing away with idle aristocracy; the general restlessness and haste of economically developed and civilised life; the characteristics of urban existence; finally, the great diffusion and educative influence of literature and art, supplementing and mitigating intellectualism, and thus rendering mysticism superfluous—such are the chief factors by which we can explain the decline of mysticism and the decay of myth.
To-day, therefore, the religious problem is dominated by the question whether religion, the religious mentality, be in fact necessarily mystical, and whether they may not exist in default of mysticism, though the theologians and many philosophers have ever insisted upon the need for the mystical factor. For our purposes it suffices to moot the question, and in our study of the various philosophies of religion to determine in each case the content of mysticism, its degree and its quality.
It is noteworthy that many of the opponents of mysticism condemn as mystical the mere dwelling in contemplation upon internal psychical processes and experiences (mental self-analysis). Many materialists, naturalists, realists, and positivists, detest such feelings and moods, detest all psychical processes of the kind. Yet many of these opponents of mysticism (the naturalists, for instance) are themselves mystics.
Attention must be drawn to another point. Mysticism is not, as mystics contend, a source of profounder and loftier insight. Mystics are wholly subordinated to the knowledge of their time and environment; the Christian mystic differs from the Buddhist mystic, and so on. As psychologists, the mystics are noteworthy only in so far as they comprehend the intimate relationships of men one to another and to the outer world. To this extent mystics may render service to ethics and religion.
There exist various kinds of mysticism, for the mystical mood varies in accordance with the object of mystical contemplation and with the nature of the mystical subject. It varies according as the object is God; God as Christ (man, the love of Jesus, the love of Mary, and so on); pantheistic God (conceived now materialistically, now again spiritualistically); theistic God; or, again, man, animals, and other objects (these, in association with the Godhead, constituting the so-called devotionalia). It varies also as the subject varies in conformity with variations in the degree and quality of culture and philosophy; in accordance with differences of time and place; and in accordance with peculiarities of individual or of national character. It varies according as the mystical thinker inclines to be intellectual or sentimental; to be clear or obscure in his scientific outlook; to be abstract or concrete in his mode of thought; to be dilettantist, poetic (thinking in pictures) ; according as he is inclined to theorise (gnostic or theosophic); or, finally, according as he is characterised by an ethical trend (dwelling upon the sentiment of love or upon the need for a change of will).
As regards Solov'ev, it may be asked whether his mysticism was predominantly Russian, Orthodox (Byzantine), Catholic, or Protestant. This much is certain, that Solov'ev had immersed himself in the thought of various eastern and western mystics, aucient and modern, thus training himself mystically. His experience had included a knowledge of the monastic and folk mysticism widely diffused in Russia. Competent persons allude to meditation, contemplation, ecstatic union with God, absorption in the mysteries of ceremonial (mystagogy), as especially characteristic of the Orthodox church, and tell us that this applies above all to Russian mystics. Noteworthy in this connection are the hesychasts (quietists) of Athos. The west inclines to stress the ethical aspect, so that western mysticism operates above all upon the will, which is sometimes weakened, but sometimes strengthened (Loyola). Among Roman Catholics, mysticism was less common than in the oriental churches; and it was still less common in the Lutheran and Protestant churches (though there were Lutheran quietists). The eighteenth-century enlightenment was hostile to mysticism. With romanticism was associated a partial approval of mysticism, but on the whole we may say that the modern age is unfavourable to mysticism.
Solov'ev's mysticism, therefore, appears in the following light.
In the first place, we must point out that Solov'ev desired to escape from subjectivism and scepticism by way of mystical or religious cognition. It is questionable whether mystical contemplation, as he describes it, does really do away with subjectivism to the extent that Solov'ev contends. Does a presumably direct contemplation, uniting subject with object, suffice? Are not belief, imagination, and the creative act of imagination, likewise subjective? Beyond question, against Solov'ev's mystical cognition we may adduce the same arguments that he himself adduced against Descartes' cogito ergo sum; we may talk of errors, illusions, pathological states, as invalidating his theory no less than that of Descartes.
Moreover, in what respect is Solov'ev's mystical cognition religious? All that Solov'ev describes is the cognition of objects; every external object is similarly apprehended by the subject in a "mystical or religious" manner. This universal application of the term seems forced, though I by no means wish to deny that Solov'ev's psychological study of the cognition of objects was perspicacious.
In view of these considerations, it might be contended that Solov'ev's mysticism is not really mysticism at all; on the other hand, it might be contended that Solov'ev's mysticism is not restricted to the domain of theosophy, but extends to all domains of thought, religious belief being no more than a special case of belief.
On the other hand, Solov'ev restricts mystical contemplation to God and to the higher suprasensible world, herein conforming to the traditional views concerning mysticism, and understanding by that term the direct intercourse between the cognising subject and the Godhead. He does not make it clear how far mysticism is philosophic and how far it is religious, for by the term "direct intercourse" we may understand objective cognition, but we may also understand the emotional aspect and outcome of such cognition, and above all the love of God.
In the present sketch, no attempt can be made to come to a definite decision regarding these and similar obscurities. There would first be necessary a detailed comparison of Solov'ev with Plato, Plotinus, Philo, and Origen; with Spinoza, Jacob Boehme, and Swedenborg; with Schelling, Baader, Schopenhauer, and the Indian mystics. Moreover, we should have to describe Solov'ev's own mystical mood in actual life; we should have to quote textually a number of passages from his writings; we should have to appeal to the biographies of Solov'ev and to the records of his personal intimates. Here I can do no more than give a brief account of Solov'ev's mysticism, as I have given a brief account of his philosophy, this account being based upon a study of his writings; but I cannot feel sure that what I say about his mysticism will evoke a mystical mood or mystical sympathy in the reader.
As previously stated, Solov'ev studied the works of eastern and western mystics, immersing himself in their mentality. This per se suffices to show that in mysticism, too, he was endeavouring to effect asynthesis. Inasmuch as setting out from Kant, he considered that morality was the most important element in religion, it was natural that he should prefer western mysticism, and above all Catholic mysticism, to oriental mysticism. Since he never permanently adopted the contemplative life, but rather, as a born fighter, entered the arena on behalf of his ideals, we must be careful to avoid exaggerating his mysticism. We have learned that he regarded mere religious contemplation as inadequate. For him, religion was leadership, the active leadership of men and mankind by the church. For him, the Russian cloister and the Russian monk were historic representatives of traditional energy, in conjunction with the great landowners and the village community; but he did not consider monasticism powerful enough to conquer the modern world. He demanded the realisation of free democracy by an active "Christian policy."
From time to time, Solov'ev suffered from hallucinations, fancying he had seen Satan in bodily form, and having other spectral visitants, whilst it is not improbable that his unhygienic and ascetic life was a partial factor in inducing his mysticism, we must also recognise that his mode of life was the outcome of his mysticism. Solov'ev held spiritualistic séances amid romantic forest solitudes; when in Egypt he visited a Bedouin tribe which was supposed to have preserved secret traditions of Solomon. He sought solitude in the city, but also sought society there. There was something too restless, too nomadic, about his temperament for him to be wholly and enduringly the mystic.
He accepted theology, Christian mythology, as revelation His philosophy, therefore, necessarily became scholastic, despite his mysticism, and despite his repudiation of scholasticism. Philosophy, said Solov'ev, must illumine the religious life, and should not attempt to demonstrate it. But he was not always guided by his own rule, and the scholastic frequently replaced the mystic!
Mysticism obscured Solov'ev's scientific insight, debilitated his critical faculties (he wrote, for example, an introduction to a work by Hellenbach), and misled him in practical matters.
Solov'ev was interested, not merely in hypnotism, but likewise in spiritualism, in the unexplained phenomena of so-called telepathy, and in the various other matters comprised under the general name of occultism, endeavouring in these fields to discover proofs for the existence of a higher world of mystery and of its influence upon human life. The impracticable theosophy of his co-national Madame Blavatsky was more than condoned by Solov'ev.
The mystics seek, and everywhere discern, the mysterious. They associate things and ideas which have no reasonable connection, for they discover secret similarities and identities. In this matter, the mystic resembles the scholastic, with his analogies, interpretations, indexes of truth, and so on. In the name "Roma," Solov'ev discovers the word amor, for it would appear that the Romans must have read from right to left after the Semitic fashion!
The attempt to find evidences for the influence upon this world of a higher invisible world, led him to regard as miracle the failure of the attempt on the tsar's life at Borki.
We have an index here, not merely of superstition, but of the conservative trend characteristic of mysticism. Mysticism is per se religious aristocracy, and aristocracy in general. The Mystic evades the petty details of work, in scientific matters, no less than in economic. He delights in the giddy theosophical constructions of a fantastic cosmogony; he has no taste either for stable and empirical conceptual thought or for technical economic labour. Contempt for this world is aristocratic, a manifestation of a conservative and reactionary aristocratic trend.
Solov'ev organised his free theocracy in a thoroughly aristocratic manner. Above all, the gift of prophecy was denied to the masses and to the democracy.
In political matters, too, Solov'ev was conservative. This is why his attention was riveted by the miracle of Borki, whereas he had no eye for thousands of similar miracles. This is why Emperor William II (dissent as he might from the latter's Philosophy of history) was for him the new Siegfried. This is why he admired Tsar Nicholas I, for to the tsar there had been granted a mysterious knowledge of higher Christian truth when in the name of Christianity he forbade Samarin to effect the forcible Russification of the Baltic provinces. In 1896, again, Solov'ev participated in the official jubilee, and shared in the joys, of his opponent Pobědonoscev.
The aristocratic trend of mysticism was likewise displayed in his preference for Catholicism, though the reasons for this preference were not clear to his own mind. Although he looked upon the church as the catholicity of the human race, it was the monarchical element in the papacy which allured him. Monotheism found its living symbol and likeness in monopapism, if I may coin the term.
It is true, however, that Solov'ev's aristocratic leanings depend upon his ecclesiastical ideas as well as upon his mysticism. He ascribes a decisive rôle to the hierarchy, thus completely abandoning Homjakov's conception of the church. Leont'ev, thoroughly approved his estimate of the hierarchy.
I need hardly say that I must not be interpreted as suggesting that every mystic is a mere conservative and reactionary. Mysticism was frequently adverse to scholasticism and to the church's faith in the letter. Even Solov'ev, despite his mysticism and by his mysticism, was driven into the liberal camp, just as the masonic mystics as well as the Voltairians were serviceable to the enlightenment. As circumstances may demand, we must examine mysticism either in respect of its content or of its social influence
§ 146.
ACCORDING to Solov'ev, Europe, having been secularised by the reformation, had since then been passing into a state of religious and moral decay. The ideal of Christianity had disappeared. Revolutionary philosophy had made praiseworthy efforts to replace the unity of the church by the unity of the human race, but with scant success. The universality of militarism converted entire nations into hostile armies, and stimulated a national hatred which had been unknown in the middle ages. The class struggle threatened to transform everything into blood and fire. As the increasing frequency of mental disorder, suicide, and crime, showed, individual moral strength had been weakened. In contrast with these symptoms of degradation, the most we could point to as indications of a certain degree of moral progress was that the criminal law had become less harsh and that torture had been abolished. Nothing but the union of the churches offered the possibility of realising the kingdom of God on earth.
In Solov'ev's opinion, secularised Russia, no less than secularised Europe, though in a different form, presented an image of decay.
Partial, one-sided, and purely political reform was incapable of producing the desired and indispensable regeneration. The program of the moral and religious rebirth of the individual and of the Russian people, the program of the positive all-in-one, as Solov'ev termed his theocratic idea, discountenanced the political aspirations of his contemporaries as one-sided and inadequate, and discountenanced above all the revolution.
In his conception of revolution and in his condemnation of the revolutionary movement, Solov'ev agreed with Dostoevskii, taking from that author his analysis and his estimate of the revolution, of nihilism, and of atheism. Just like Dostoevskii, Solov'ev had at first enthusiastically accepted nihilism. In his school days he had been an "iconoclast," and on one occasion had thrown out of the window the icons before which he had been accustomed to pray.
The essence of the moral decay of Europe and Russia, the essence of "secularisation," is discerned by Solov'ev as by Dostoevskii in atheism, in the turning away from God, in godlessness, which manifests itself as modern subjectivism and individualism, as the doctrine of the superman.
It was from Dostoevskii that Solov'ev took his philosophy of atheism, which, to put the matter shortly, was that atheism, as subjectivism and individualism, leads to murder or to suicide.
Solov'ev adduced, in addition the spread of criminality, the increasing frequency of suicide and mental disorder, as symptoms and consequences of moral decadence. He was especially interested in the study of suicide, his attention having been directed to the matter by Schopenhauer and Hartmann. He began his Ethics by enquiring what was the essential nature of suicide. He considered that suicide afforded proof that there are men, serious-minded men, who take their lives deliberately, fully responsible for what they are doing, actuated by disillusionment or despair, and thus give expression to their conviction that life is void of meaning. These practical pessimists impress Solov'ev's imagination more than do the theoretical pessimists, more than those who continue to cling to life despite all their reasoning concerning its futility; it is the existence of the former which induces him to give the leading place in his philosophy to ethics as the doctrine of the meaning of life. God is, and God furnishes, the meaning of life. Theism gives meaning and value to life, whereas atheism deprives life of meaning and value; atheism is death, and the atheist becomes a murderer or a suicide.
In his analysis of Dostoevskii, Solov'ev accepts this formula and develops it as follows.
A man who bases his right to change the world upon his wickedness and unreason is essentially a murderer; he will employ force against others, and will himself ultimately perish through force. He considers himself strong, but is in the power of others. He is proud of his freedom, but is the slave of chance and of outward happenings.
The man must undergo conversion if he is to be saved from this logical sequence of his atheism, and the first step upon the way to salvation is that he should recognise his weakness and lack of freedom. But Solov'ev warns us that while one who takes no more than this first step will cease to be a potential murderer, he will nevertheless, if he goes no further, remain a potential suicide.
Suicide, the application of destructive force to oneself, is a loftier and freer deed than murder. The judge and the condemned are one and the same; but the judgment is false, for the decision to commit suicide involves a contradiction (this is an echo of Schopenhauer). The man recognises his weakness and lack of freedom, and yet the act of suicide manifests the possession of a certain degree of strength and freedom. Why, then, did he not turn this strength and freedom to account on behalf of life?
The suicide rightly recognises in himself the existence of human incapacity, but he draws a false conclusion when he makes this incapacity a universal law, for now he does not merely feel the evil but believes in evil. "Everyone who recognises the universality of human evil, but fails to believe in superhuman goodness, is driven to suicide." Now, superhuman goodness is God.
Thus suicide is the necessary consequence of atheism. Belief in God restores to men belief in man. But the man who is left entirely to himself, and who attempts to dispense with God, becomes a murderer or a suicide. The last deed of the godless man is murder or suicide. Unmeaning concentration upon oneself, disastrous isolation, results in murder or suicide. He only who unites himself in Christ with God and in the church with the world will avoid transferring his own wickedness into nature; all that he will take from nature will be death.
Dostoevskii bases the thesis in a somewhat different manner, and we shall have to discuss the problem in fuller detail when we come to consider the ideas of that writer Here it suffices to say that Solov'ev, like Dostoevskii, identifies the revolution with murder, but that Solov'ev fails to discuss the matter adequately. He indicates that there is a connection between the problem of suicide and murder, and the general question of objectivism and subjectivism; but he fails to perceive the real significance of the matter as it was formulated before his day by Bělinskii and Bakunin.
§ 147.
SOLOV'EV was a poet, and art plays a leading part in his system. When he wishes to give expression to his most intimate thoughts and feelings, he takes refuge in rhapsody. His last work on the philosophy of history was an apocalyptic vision. Speaking generally, his philosophy of religion is a product of the mythological imagination.
In the field of aesthetics, too, as a mystic Solov'ev followed Plato and Plotinus. Among recent writers, he was influenced by Schopenhauer and Hegel.
In harmony with his metaphysics and his free theosophy, beauty is defined as the perfect freedom of the individual parts in the completed unity of the whole; the uniting element, unity, uniformity, is the yearning of the philosopher, who desires to escape from his own internal disunion.
The beautiful is essentially identical with the good and the true. The artist's aim is the same as that of the philosopher and statesman. All three desire to grasp the meaning of existence. The artist embodies his ideas in pictures; the philosopher in ideas; the statesman in actions. Bělinskii expressed the same thought, but Solov'ev interprets the notion in the sense of his mystical theosophy, for to him an idea is what it was to Plato and Plotinus.
He frequently indicates his view that artistic genius and enthusiasm constitute a condition sui generis, rendering the enthusiast (Solov'ev, like Plato, conceives artistic inspiration as a kind of divine possession) capable of grasping ideas; artistic inspiration verges on the gift of prophecy and is essentially akin thereto.
He considers that the force of imagination is an element of primary importance in artistic creation. For him, imagination is an intimation of the higher world which, in virtue of this function of imagination, is able to come into touch with our phenomenal world. That which Schopenhauer discerns in music, Solov'ev discerns in poesy, and especially in lyric verse, here we have a direct grasp of ideas, of the higher world. Goethe, Shakespeare, and Hoffmann, are the chiefs among poets; in this realm of art they are the arch-controllers of the force of "fantastic imagination." (Solov'ev translated Hoffmann's The Golden Pot into Russian.)
Solov'ev considers art higher than philosophy. Artistic creation, as a form of activity, is more akin than philosophy to moral action; it is an image of the divine work of creation. Solov'ev's views concerning the mission of free theurgy have already been discussed.
In his Three Addresses in commemoration of Dostoevskii (1881–1883), Solov'ev expresses the hope that poesy, the poesy of the future, will reunite itself with religion, reconstituting the union that existed in the primitive days of our race, when poets were prophets and priests. He discerns in Dostoevskii as contrasted with the artists of materialist realism, the precursor of the art of the future, which will work in free association with religion.
By his antipathy for materialism, Solov'ev had his attention directed to the definition of ugliness. The ugly contrasts with unity and harmony; it is found in chaos, and in the opposition of chaos to the higher world and to ideas.
Although he thus clings to metaphysical aesthetics, from time to time Solov'ev gives expression to more realist notions on the subject, endeavouring, for example, to furnish a systematic exposition of the gradations of beauty in nature. His classification of natural beauties is based upon the physical classifications of the external world. First comes the quiescent world of light—sun, moon, stars, atmosphere (the rainbow), the sea in a calm, matter (the noble metals, and above all the diamond). Next comes nature in motion. Solov'ev then gives an analysis of beauty in organic life, and tells us that the worm is here the archetype of ugliness; living beings are beautiful in proportion as their organisation contrasts with that of the worm. In this disquisition Solov'ev avails himself of modern zoological theories, borrowing in especial from the ideas of Darwin.
Solov'ev wrote a few studies dealing with poets he admired. He distinguished three categories among Russian poets, according to the degree to which their art was self-conscious Puškin's relationship to his creative work was directly organic, not reflective. By reference to the poems wherein Puškin wrote concerning poetry and the poet, Solov'ev endeavoured to show that Puškin's views concerning art and the artist's mission were still purely naive and uncritical. Solov'ev took a low estimate of Puškin as a thinker, and said that Puškin's Byronism was superficial. In these judgments we may perhaps trace the influence of Pisarev or Tolstoi. Unquestionably Solov'ev failed to understand the significance of Puškin's Oněgin, and failed to understand the general significance of Puškin's creative work, for he looked upon Puškin too one-sidedly as a representative of pure art. In Solov'ev's article The Fate of Puškin, the poet's death was rightly represented as self-ordained destiny; but the analysis of Puškin's relationship with Madame Kern is incomplete and biased, whilst the poet's fondness for epigram is taken amiss, and Uvarov is commended in comparison. This study by Solov'ev has been deservedly censured.[9]
Lermontov and Barjatynskii are poets of reflection. That which in Puškin was the expression of a passing mood, was in the two other poets the outcome of definitive conviction. For them, sceptical and pessimistic reflection became a constitutive element of creation; there was a rift within their philosophy, and this disintegration impaired their artistic activities. Subjective dissatisfaction, says Solov'ev (speaking here, too, in the sense of his doctrine of methodological scepticism), has notable significance as providing the first impulse towards self-consciousness; thus negation is essential, but what is abnormal and futile is to rest in negation, to find satisfaction in personal dissatisfaction. Solov'ev considers that Lermontov shows strong leanings towards Nietzscheanism; towards the psychopathic idea of the superman, which ascribes superhuman importance "to the ego, or to the ego and company." This is the complete victory of egoism and of contempt for mankind. No doubt the principle of individuality is the precondition of the most intensive awareness of the content of life, but the principle is not itself that content, for the strong ego can be void of content. Lermontov was too much the man of genius to remain void. He devoted himself to love; but really, says Solov'ev, in the end he sang only the praise of loving, not the beloved, not love itself. He considers that Lermontov displayed a positively demoniacal wickedness and demoniacal sensuality ("impurity"); he recognises the religious spirit of the poet, and ascribes to him the mystical faculty of so-called second sight, for Lermontov is supposed to have foreseen the circumstances of his death. For Solov'ev, this alleged talent of Lermontov seems a confirmation of his own mysticism.
The third category comprises the poets of harmonious thought, and to this class belong Tjutčev and Aleksěi Tolstoi. Lermontov's disintegration has been overcome; negation has given place to positivism. In Tolstoi, moreover, there has been superadded the factor of the will, of the love of struggle, impelling towards activity. Solov'ev recalls the satire directed against the St. Petersburg officialdom, published in Černyševskii's periodical during the fifties and sixties, and reissued in book form in 1883. The work was professedly written by a certain Kozma Petrovič Prutkov, but was really composed by A. Tolstoi and A. Žemčužnikov. Solov'ev had an affection for Prutkov, whom he imitated; whilst he wrote a brief but sympathetic article concerning A. Žemčužnikov.
It isinteresting to note that Solov'ev's literary and aesthetic studies were exclusively concerned with the lyric poets. The only novelists to whom he referred were Dostoevskii and L. Tolstoi, but with them he dealt, not from the aesthetic outlook but from that of the philosophy of religion. The consequence was that he treated of the development of nihilism no more than casually and in brief annotations. He was as little interested in Turgenev's Bazarov as in Oněgin, and the only novel to which he gave detailed attention was Lermontov's A Hero of our own Time. To Černyševskii's What is to be Done he made no more than a passing allusion, as an attempt to outbid Fathers and Children, whilst artistic appreciation was expressed for Gončarov’s Oblomov as a universal Russian type. He frequently mentioned Tolstoi; that author's literary judgments were quoted on occasions; and Tolstoi's psychological analysis met with Solov'ev's approval. But on the whole, Solov'ev's interest in Tolstoi concerned only the latter's philosophy of religion, and it was Solov'ev's dissent from that philosophy which ultimately led him into conflict with Tolstoi.
Dostoevskii was not merely congenial to Solov'ev, but was elevated to the rank of a prophet. Proof of the prophetic function was found in the fact (for Solov'ev) that in Crime and Punishment the murder committed by a Moscow student was foreseen, whilst in The Devils the Nečaev trial was foreshadowed. Dostoevskii did not merely look around but looked ahead; he possessed a philosophic understanding of the movement of Russian society; he deduced from this movement its inevitable consequences, and passed the right judgment upon them. As a revolutionary, Dostoevskii grasped while in Siberia, and recounted in The House of the Dead, that he had erred, and how he had erred; he came to understand that Russia could be saved in no other way than by a moral rebirth. Solov'ev discovered in Dostoevskii his own theocratic ideal. Dostoevskii's speech at the Puškin festival, with its reconciliation of slavophils and westernisers, had really formulated the program of the reconciliation of east and west in the church universal.
Solov'ev was on terms of personal friendship with Dostoevskii. In 1878 the two were together on a visit at the monastery of Optina Pustyn. It is remarkable that Solov'ev gave no account of Dostoevskii's attitude towards Catholicism,[10] but Solov'ev had no understanding of Dostoevskii's real nature.
Like Homjakov, Solov'ev occasionally expounded his ideas upon the philosophy of religion in metrical form. His poems convey an impression of truth, and some of them are excellent. Apart from these verses on the philosophy of religion and others of a more directly religious nature, distinguished by their sincerity are the biographical sketches wherein the poet endeavoured to give a psychological description (affective in its colour for the most part) of his feelings at the time of writing. In Solov'ev's philosophy, above all in his theosophy but also in his ecclesiastical history, we trace the poet. His translation of Plato was to some extent the outcome of an artistic impulse. It was the same impulse, doubtless, which led him to translate part of Dante's Vita Nuova and the before-mentioned work by Hoffmann.
Solov'ev carried on a vigorous campaign against the decadents and the symbolists. This is psychologically noteworthy, seeing that he himself was a great symbolist, and seeing that the general impression he produces on our minds is that he was a decadent struggling towards regeneration. The pathological aspects of his mysticism and asceticism, the fondness he displayed for the mysterious, the attempt to transcend Kantian criticism and Comptist positivism by gnosticism, his romanticist return towards the old theology and the old religion, may all, I believe, be considered indications of decadence.
§ 148.
IN the year 1899, Solov'ev published in the periodical "Nedělja" an apocalyptic picture of the end of the world. He himself termed this writing a work of genius, and the judgment was endorsed by his friends and adherents.
Solov'ev's apocalypse is certainly of great philosophical interest, and in our general appreciation of this writer it is important to note the manner in which his views on the philosophy of history underwent modification towards the close of his career.
First, however, we must briefly recount the contents of the three discourses.[11]
At the close of the nineteenth century, Japan awakens the slumbering energies of China and unites the Mongol races. During the ensuing half-century, Europe falls a prey to the Asiatics. At first the unprepared Russian army is defeated; the Germans gain a great victory; but the French now enter into an alliance with the Asiatics, and the Germans are given honourable conditions of demobilisation. The French army gets out of hand, and Paris, where there has been a rising of the sanspatrie workmen, opens its gates to the bogdyhan [Russian title for Chinese emperor]. The English buy his favour, paying for a pledge that he will not attack England. This subjugation brings the various European nations to their senses; they effect their political unification; the Mongol yoke is shaken off after a decisive victory of European arms has been secured in the plains of Russia. The old European monarchies disappear; the United States of Europe are organised "more or less democratically"; at their head is the superman as life-long president. No long time elapses before this president, who has acquired world-wide reputation by a work entitled The Open Way to Universal Peace and Well Being, is, as a mark of general recognition, elected Roman emperor.
The new emperor is antichrist, though an antichrist of an extremely progressive type. He believes in the good, he believes in God and Christ; but his love is given to himself alone. He is abstemious, disinterested, and gentle; he is a spiritualist, an ascetic, a philanthropist, and even a philozoist; but he considers himself greater than Christ, whom he regards with boundless envy and hatred.
In outward aspect, the civilisation of the new United States is dazzling and resplendent, but the inner spiritual life remains unsatisfied. Through the advances in psychology and physiology, the problems of "life and death," of the end of the world and of mankind, are rendered more complicated, but are not solved, all that is attained being a purely negative result. A notable decay of theoretical materialism sets in.
Antichrist establishes his world monarchy and introduces social reforms, by which everyone is remunerated in accordance with his capacities, every capacity in accordance with work and service; there ensues the equality of universal satiety. The satiated, however, as in ancient Rome, desire circuses as well as bread. These are provided for them by a magian (a half oriental, half European, bishop in partibus) with the aid of the acquirements of natural science, Antichrist having at length removed his capital from Rome to Jerusalem, now summons a general council of the Christian population, reduced by this time to forty-five millions. In Jerusalem he is unmasked, and the leaders of the three principal churches, Peter II, John, and Professor Paul (the respective representatives of Petrine, Johannine, and Pauline Christianity; of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism), unite in brotherly love at a remote and solitary spot. John and Paul recognize Peter as shepherd of the united flocks. The Jews, who to the number of thirty millions have settled in Palestine, rise against the antichrist, who has announced himself to them as a Jew and the messiah. Christ now appears for the last judgment, and the millennium dawns.
It will be seen that in this picture of the future, Solov'ev accepts the widely diffused philosophico-historical view of the pessimists and socialists that a cataclysm is imminent, and that he shows us the development of civilisation brought to a close. Mankind has become senile; European civilisation has by the growth of positivism, materialism, and socialism, been transformed into a Chinese system; consequently the actual China is destined to devour Europe with all her civilisation and all her progress. Europe will succumb to the "yellow peril," from within and from without.
Solov'ev received the impulse to this vision from Finland in 1894, when he was contemplating the Finnish nationalist movement. We learn this from his poem Panmongolism, wherein he sees the yellow peril knocking at the gates of St. Petersburg and of the winter palace. Some years later, he was profoundly impressed by the expedition of the western powers against China. The speech of Emperor William to the soldiers leaving for China aroused his enthusiasm. William seemed to him the successor of the Christian crusaders. Shortly before his death he dedicated to the German emperor his poem The Dragon. The new Siegfried was to save Christendom.
Solov'ev's disciples admire the Three Discussions as a veritable prophecy, but in my opinion this view is exaggerated. In Russia, relationships with Asia arouse keener feelings than among us in the west, and the so-called yellow peril is more strongly felt. As long ago as 1587, I was frequently told of the danger threatening from the east, and was assured that even among the common people a fear of China was widespread. Mihailovskii, giving a description of Solov'ev's vision, refers to numerous other Russian and European prophesies of the yellow peril.
The vision of antichrist seems weak to me, and especially weak do I consider the onslaught on Tolstoi. Antichrist is Tolstoi himself. Tolstoi's Buddhistic doctrine of non-resistance exasperated Solov'ev, for Solov'ev had long been of opinion that "cross and sword are one." Solov'ev had hoped at first that he and Tolstoi would be able to work jointly on behalf of Solov'ev's religious ideal, but personal intercourse between the two men was frequently broken off. As far back as 1884 Solov'ev had confided to common friends his doubts concerning Tolstoi's trustworthiness. At length, in the Three Discussions, Solov'ev definitely formulated his opposition to Tolstoi.
The description of antichrist recalls Dostoevskii's grand inquisitor, and in the figure of antichrist we may likewise discern traces of the Nietzschean superman. In Solov'ev's delineation, Tolstoi appears not merely futile, null, and prone to fallacy, but a deliberate cheat. Solov'ev pursues his opponent with ardent hatred, which finds expression both in the general picture and in certain prominent details. Without further ado, Tolstoi's thoughts of suicide are transformed into an attempt at suicide on the part of the dissatisfied superman. His life is saved in miraculous fashion by the devil, who then instils into the superman a man-controlling energy.
This hatred blinded Solov'ev and weakened his artistic faculty. His apocalypse does not for a moment bear comparison with its Johannine exemplar. Solov'ev's writing is didactic, rhetorical, and overladen. In points of detail the quality of his analysis is here and there extremely questionable, as when he tells us that the election of the emperor is undertaken at the desire of the freemasons, who are made to appear the real leaders of European politics. Moreover, the positive element, the description of the Christian leaders, is lacking in strength. The Fichtean and Schellingian formula of the Johannine church of the future is realised in an unduly professorial manner.
Many other objections could doubtless be raised to the historico-philosophical criticism embodied in the work. Above all does it seem questionable to me whether in the figure of antichrist, Solov'ev has rightly characterised the dangers of the present day. I am confirmed in this doubt when I read the preface to the reissue in book form. Solov'ev here refers to the importance of Islam and panislamism, a matter discussed by him in a further but unpublished prophetical work. He speaks of the possibility that the end of the world may be deferred for another two or three centuries, whereas elsewhere he gives us to understand that the end may be expected in the immediate future Surely a prophet should be a little less vague about dates!
If we are to regard this polemic against Tolstoi as a literary monument of the revival of prophecy, it must be admitted that the venture is somewhat ineffective. The rules which Solov'ev himself formulated for the recognition of the true prophet are not fulfilled—though we may doubt whether in these rules Solov'ev was entirely successful in defining the concept of the modern prophet. In Solov'ev's writings, the figures of the Old Testament prophets blend with the figure of Socrates (this does not accord very well with his Platonism), and above all he recognises Dostoevskii as a divinely sent seer. But in addition to Dostoevskii, the leading Russian imaginative thinkers are hailed as prophets.
Characteristic of Solov'ev is the opposition to Tolstoi.
, Solov'ev, like Tolstoi, is at odds with the Orthodox church; Solov'ev, like Tolstoi, assigns a modest role to the understanding; both thinkers have a special fondness for Schopenhauer and Kant; Solov'ev, too, stresses, above all, the moral aspects of religion and philosophy—and yet Solov'ev discerns in Tolstoi the figure of antichrist!
It seems to me that the antichrist embodies large elements of self-criticism. Solov'e'’s polemic writing is often strongly worded precisely because the author is endeavouring to convince himself, Tolstoi is his own uneasy conscience.
During the closing years of his life, Solov'ev succumbed to a pessimistic mood, and this can be discerned in the antichrist figure. In fact, Solov'ev completely abandoned his earlier policy of ecclesiasticism. In the Three Discussions the messianic mission of the Russian people and of the tsar has completely disappeared. We do not find that a union of the churches is effected as a precondition for theocracy. The three churches are reconciled during the last days, those immediately preceding Christ's second advent; and the reunion takes place without any assistance from the state. The tsar, meanwhile, and the tsarist realm, have disappeared with the formation of the democratic United States of Europe. No more than forty-five millions of Christians remain, a comparatively small body of believers, who stand firm, however, in the faith, and can therefore effect the union of the churches—just before the closing of the gates.
It is obvious that the earlier ecclesiastical policy has been wholly abandoned, and that the union of the churches takes place in accordance with the principles of Protestant ecclesiastical policy à la Schelling. Russians and the Russian church are somewhat scurvily treated in Three Discussions. In further proof of this assertion, I may mention that at the council Solov'ev makes the emperor win over the Russians by providing them with funds for the construction of a universal museum for Christian archeology. In return for this, most of the hierarchs of the east and the north, half of the old believers, and more than half of the Orthodox priests, monks, and laymen, espouse the emperor's cause.
Manifestly a precise census would notably reduce the forty-five millions of "genuine Christians."
In actual fact, Solov'ev had lost his vigorous faith, not only in the tsar but also in the Russian people. We learn from his biography that as early as 1891 this faith had been seriously shaken when he witnessed the devastations of the famine and the apathetic inertia of society. At this epoch he conceived constitutionalist hopes, but did not cherish them for long. For a time, even, he had thoughts of revolution, a revolution of a somewhat quaint character. He seriously believed that he would be able to persuade General Dragomirov and one of the dissatisfied princes of the church to place themselves at the head of the movement, and that the army and the people would thus be won over. Solov'ev's friends killed this great design by their ridicule.
In 1894, he produced Panmongolism, a work in which he had conceived the fall of the third Rome, without however following the example of the old Moscow chronicler, and mooting the possibility of a fourth Rome.
Writing in 1896 upon the relationship of Byzantinism to Russia, Solov'ev again displayed his scepticism concerning the mission of the third Rome.
Coming now to the period in which the antichrist was conceived, we find numerous documentary proofs that Solov'ev had abandoned his messianic designs. In 1898 he penned an essay to controvert the opinions of those who looked for the solution of the Russian and European question to be effected after some centuries by the simple law of superior force, and with the aid of the four hundred millions to which by then the population of Russia was to have increased. Solov'ev declared that many uncertain elements entered into such calculations; he pointed out that in the interior administrative districts of Russia the population had ceased to increase; and he appealed to "reflective and disquicting" patriotism to attend without delay to its duties of conscience.
He had also come to the conclusion that Europe is less corrupt than he had imagined in earlier years, when he had regarded positivism and socialism as affording the most striking manifestations of estrangement from God.
In like manner, he had altered his attitude towards the revolutionaries and the radicals.
In the autumn of 1898, delivering a lecture on Bělinskii, he represented that writer as an apostle of humanitarianism and of practical Christianity. Bělinskii's only defect was that he had not found the true faith. Solov'ev blames himself, however, for having allowed his attention to be monopolised by the still insoluble question of the union of the churches, whilst disregarding those more immediate interests of the present to which Bělinskii was devoted. "Mea culpa," exclaims Solov'ev, "mea maxima culpa!"
During this same year, Solov'ev penned an extremely cordial commemorative essay on Černyševskii which could not be published until after the writer's death. Extolling Černyševskii's character, he showed that the government had committed a crime against "this wise and just man." Solov'ev had hoped to write more fully about Černyševskii.
Coming last of all to the Antichrist, we find that in this work the change in Solov'ev's views on the philosophy of history is most conspicuous. Not merely has he abandoned the idea of Russia's mission, but he would seem to have held less favourable views of Catholicism now than of yore. His description of the pope, his reference to the Catholic magian, and finally the flight of the pope (who flees to St. Petersburg to escape the emperor, secures there a friendly reception, but is cautioned against carrying on propaganda in Russia)—all these details would seem to confirm the impression that Solov'ev had grown out of tune with Catholicism and the papacy.
Let me reiterate, in conclusion, that his fierce onslaught on Tolstoi was in truth directed against the rebel within himself. Antichrist displays the inner cleavage of Solov'ev's personal experience. On the one hand he is forced to concede that Kant was right, and under the influence of Kantian thought he wrote his Ethics, a second edition of this work, very carefully revised, having been published in the same year as Antichrist. Here, following Kant, the whole outlook on the universe is based upon morality. On the other hand, Solov'ev could not completely free himself from the opinions of his church and of the slavophils. Being unable to dispense with the mystical element in religion, he could not break with the church and church tradition as Tolstoi had done. "Not only do I believe in everything supernatural, but, to speak accurately, I believe in nothing else." These words, written in 1887 in the Letter to Strahov, give terse expression to Solov'ev's religious sentiments as contrasted with those of Tolstoi. They explain why Solov'ev inclined to the ideas of Dostoevskii, and why he could never wholly agree with Tolstoi. Solov'ev's faith demanded miracle. Belief in the resurrection of Christ was for Solov'ev the most important doctrine of all, for Solov'ev dreaded death, which he interpreted as the manifest victory of non-sense over sense, of chaos over cosmos. In a letter to Tolstoi, Solov'ev expressed his dissent from the latter's views in respect of one concrete particular, the doctrine of the resurrection.
Kant versus Plato, criticism versus myth and mysticism, such is the momentous contrast.
§ 149.
SOLOV'EV'S general trend and the purport of his philosophical and religious aspirations make him appear as a successor of the slavophils and a continuer of their work, that of Kirěevskii and Homjakov at least. But in Solov'ev the mystical element is much stronger, is denser, I might say, and more opaque. His criticism and negation of Byzantium and Old Russia has much in common with Čaadaev, for Solov'ev and Čaadaev displayed similar leanings towards Catholicism.
Solov'ev's critical side brought him into association with the westernisers and the liberals, although these by no means approved of his mysticism. Čičerin and Kavelin both protested against Solov'ev's mysticism, being concerned, of course, not solely with the distinction in individual points of teaching, but with the entire trend and mood. Compare, for example, Solov'ev with Mihailovskii; how great is the contrast between the positivist critic, the "profane" man, and the mystical prophet.
Mysticism and the philosophy of religion brought Solov'ev for a time into association with Katkov and Leont'ev, the latter, during his closing years, being much disquieted by Solov'ev's philosophy of history and by his criticism of the Russian church and of the Orthodox church in general. Solov'ev defended Dostoevskii against Leont'ev's accusation of "new" Christianity, but it was characteristic that Solov'ev should have completely failed to recognise the devastating internal struggle with nihilism that was taking place in Dostoevskii's mind.
Solov'ev shunned intercourse with the socialists and the narodniki, for he detested economic materialism and "economism" in general. Religious prejudice (I can use no other term) made it impossible for Solov'ev to understand socialism. If he regarded socialism as nothing more than the extremest manifestation of bourgeois civilisation, it was because his attention was exclusively concentrated on metaphysical materialism and positivism. He failed to discern the great political and social movement of the masses, and failed to grasp its ethical significance. From the liberals, too, he might well be repelled by their religious indifferentism; but there were some liberals of religious inclinations, and notably Solov'ev's own opponents, Čičerin and Kavelin. By his conception of progress, Solov'ev was compelled to regard the modern civilisation of Europe secularised by the reformation, as an advance upon the religious society of former days. It is true that Voltaire, as adversary of the old (and ununified) church, was necessarily uncongenial to him, but he could not fail to recognise the Christian in the Frenchman's humanitarian efforts.
It seems to me that his attitude towards Voltaire was characteristic of Solov'ev's vacillations between rationalism and mysticism.
In Russia, Solov'ev's espousal of the cause of religion was an important and noteworthy act, seeing that the new and non-academic philosophy had been antireligious. Herzen, Bělinskii, Bakunin, Černyševskii, Dobroljubov, Pisarev, Mihailovskii, Lavrov, the Marxists, and most of the narodniki, had been disciples of Feuerbach and Comte. Solov'ev, on the other hand, though at the outset he had shared their antireligious philosophy, soon took the field as an opponent of their basic theories, alike in the theoretical and in the practical field. Faith which Granovskii had tacitly cherished, which half ashamedly he had defended against Herzen, was championed by Solov'ev with the armoury of a thoroughly cultivated philosophical mind.
Starting from the extant ecclesiastical theology, Solov'ev attempted to reconstitute that theology on philosophical lines, but he endeavoured more than he was himself willing to admit to preserve the foundations of the Russian church, to preserve its dogma, its ritual, and its mysticism. If the majority of Solov'ev's theological adversaries failed to note this clearly, it was because they themselves adhered to Solov'ev's views upon church history and church politics. In this connection it was not difficult to demonstrate Solov'ev's errors. Guettée, for instance, was right in declaring that Solov'ev's historical outlook on the filioque controversy was unsound. As I have mentioned Guettée, it may be interesting to recall that this French priest and ecclesiastical historian, was (just like Baader, the Catholic philosopher, who was influenced by Solov'ev) inclined towards Orthodoxy by the study of theology. Guettée was ultimately received into the Orthodox church. To the official representatives of the church and of "coercive theology," Solov'ev's free theology and free theocracy were a stumbling-block. Solov'ev's campaign on behalf of freedom of conscience deserves full recognition.
Solov'ev saw clearly enough that the outward "temple Christianity" was difficult to reconcile with the inward "family Christianity," and yet he could not himself abandon the temple of the Pharisees—for there are, in truth, honest Pharisees.
"Men of action live a life apart, but it is not they who create life, not they, but the men of faith! Those who are called fantasts, utopists, imbeciles, these are the prophets, these are the best of men and the leaders of mankind!" Solov'ev did not realise that Bělinskii, Herzen, Černyševskii, and the other "just men" of modern days, likewise had faith, and sacrificed their lives to their faith. Solov'ev's own faith was hardly stronger. His own theory of faith should have enabled him to comprehend the faith of others. What was the real content of belief in the respective camps? In which camp were the better men to be found? Does a Katkov or a Pobědonoscev bear comparison for a moment with a Bělinskii or a Černyševskii?
The critics have drawn attention to one peculiarity in Solov'ev's letters. Side by side with the humorous cheerfulness which breathes from his confidential utterances to his friends, we discover a scathing cynicism, a cynical irony concerning himself and his most sacred feelings, religious feelings not excepted. The fact is undeniable, but the explanation of this cynicism is very different from that suggested by the aforesaid critics. We shall have to discuss this matter in fuller detail when we come to deal with Dostoevskii, and for the present it will suffice to indicate the circumstance, and to say that such cynicism could not exist in the absence of a profound inner scepticism.
Solov'ev suffered from spiritual disintegration. He himself declared that the disintegration of modern man was due to incapacity for uniting heaven with earth. Now Solov'ev, himself was unable to harmonise the past with the present. He was unequal to the task; he desired to be a Christian, but his metaphysic was Platonist, not evangelical. He wished to save monotheism, but pantheism was too strong for him, and his god, who was "more than personality," had less resemblance to Jesus than to the god of Spinoza. Of Jesus, the great adversary of the scribes and Pharisees, there remains little for Solov'ev. In the end, therefore, theology gains the victory over Solov'ev's philosophy; Kant is not transcended, but sacrificed; a utopian philosophy and theocracy are built up, incompetent to lead either theoretically or practically to any desired goal. The absolute all and all-in-one, and its unfolding in the world process, shrinks to the ideal of a papistical church universal; the religion of universalised humanity can offer us in the end nothing more than the vague content of an ecclesiastico-political imperialism ;_ religion, in place of a belief in Jesus, gives us a belief in signs and wonders; a morbid and multiform mysticism is elevated to the position of intimate essence of religion.
Yet the very weaknesses of his philosophy of religion and of his religious outlook, secured for Solov'ev numerous and enthusiastic disciples. These disciples and Solov'ev himself were signs of the times, indications of an incomplete transition from the past. As so often happens, the master's weaknesses were more conspicuous in the pupils. Solov'ev found it difficult to tolerate quite a number of his followers, and engaged in controversy with some of them.
Solov'ev's significance for the development of Russian philosophy was very great.
I have already pointed out that Solov'ev had had a thorough philosophical training. I mean that Solov'ev had studied ancient and modern philosophy thoroughly, and as a specialist. His real significance, however, lay in this, that he was the first Russian to study the Kantian criticism in all its bearings; he was the first Russian who thought the whole question over anew for himself; and he was the first who attempted to transcend the Kantian criticism by a criticism of his own. Solov'ev learned from many sources, and adopted philosophical details from many different writers, but from Kant he derived his epistemological criticism. A number of philosophers of academic status had discussed Kant before Solov'ev; Solov'ev himself heard much of Kant from Jurkevič; but Jurkevič's study of Kant was not fundamental. Solov'ev, as a grateful pupil, was embarrassed by this without realising it—or at any rate, when speaking of Jurkevič, he failed to allude to the matter.
Solov'ev fully realised that the Kantian criticism marked a turning point in the evolution of human thought, and he realised why this was so. In the ethical sphere, Solov'ev even believed that Kant had established the basis of ethics for all time. It seemed to Solov'ev that the categorical imperative was as certain as are the axioms of pure mathematics.
Solov'ev understood the problem, formulated by Kant, of subjectivism versus objectivism; and he realised that Kant failed to discover the epistemological solution of this problem, remaining entangled in a powerless subjectivism and apriorism. Solov'ev set to work, building upon a Kantian foundation and using Kantian methods, to attempt his own solution. He had learned from Kant that the cognition of the thing-by-itself must really be the cognition of God, must be a creative and purely intellectual intuition, which after all originates in man. Solov'ev's creative and imaginative belief was to replace Kant's creative intellectual intuition. Solov'ev had learned from Kant that criticism led back to faith. He heard with gladness the tidings of this mission; and since Kant did not furnish any cogent doctrines, Solov'ev returned to the faith of the fathers of the eastern church, borrowing the while in addition from Plato, Spinoza, Jacob Boehme, and many others.
The attempt to effect an organic union between criticism and mysticism failed, and could not but fail. Solov'ev was, however, cautious enough to follow Kant in establishing religion, too, upon an ethical foundation. He was, I repeat, cautious. He could not but feel the inadequacy of his attempt, and for this very reason the internal warfare waged by Solov'ev with his critical rationalism against his own traditionalist mysticism, is so instructive and so fascinating. A more detailed study of Solov'ev's philosophical development would describe the vicissitudes of this struggle in its individual stages, would show how Solov'ev's views matured, and to what influences he was chiefly subjected at various epochs; and it would further be necessary to sympathise with his remarkable spiritual cleavage and the moods to which that cleavage gave rise from the time of its first appearance.
From this outlook, Solov'ev's Antichrist and his attack on Tolstoi, the religious rationalist, becomes comprehensible. Within the recesses of Solov'ev's own mind, Tolstoi threatened to gain the victory!
Solov'ev's influence upon Russian philosophy was powerful and beneficial, above all because philosophy was not for him a profession, or an opportunity for the display of academic learning, but was an attempt to understand life and to solve the problems of life. Congenial minds have endeavoured to clarify even his mysticism epistemologically (S. Trubeckoi). Critical historians of Russian philosophy have raised a memorial of their friendship and appreciation in the form of detailed criticism (E. Radlov), I will merely add the opinion of a personal friend and associate of Solov'ev, to whose judgment I attach importance because he is himself an academic philosopher, a professor. Professor Lopatin of Moscow wrote: "He was the first among us Russians to undertake a direct investigation of the problems or objects of philosophy, the first who was not content to discuss the opinions of western philosophers concerning these problems. Thus it was that he became the first Russian philosopher."
Solov'ev lamented that he had no school, no successors.
- ↑ In the Russian edition of Brockhaus' encyclopædia, the following articles on philosophers, theologians, and mystics are penned by Solov'ev: Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Origen, Pelagius, Basil the Great, Duns Scotus, Hugues of Saint-Victor, Raymond Lully, Hermes Trismegistus, Campanella, Malebranche, Swedenborg, de Maistre, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Hartmann, Maine de Biran.
- ↑ Solov'ev is not consistent in the use of the capital, writing sometimes "the Good" and sometimes "the good."
- ↑ Solov'ev lays especial stress upon the Russian practice of using patronymics (e.g. Vladimir Sergěevič, the son of Sergěi) as an index of the importance of "fatherhood."
- ↑ In opposition to Voroncov, Solov'ev defends agrarian reform; he favours latifundia, upon which intensive agriculture could be carried on.
- ↑ As early as 1852, at St. Petersburg university, in his lectures to women, he discussed the universal and historical significance of Judaism, whilst at a later date he wrote upon the theme.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Some expounders identify the world-soul with mankind or with "ideal humanity." Radlov has recently given expression to the latter view, with a reference to Comte's Le Grand Etre, which in Solov'ev's teaching, says Radlov, appears as the world-soul. In my opinion, the idea of the world-soul, as formulated by Solov'ev, derives from Schelling and Plato. It is certain, moreover, that Solov'ev was familiar with the speculations of [[Author:Giordano Bruno}}, etc.
- ↑ Solov'ev's free theurgy may be compared with the doctrine of Smetana, the Schellingian, who believed that in days to come religion would be replaced by a loving art which would purify and transform nature.
- ↑ Solov'ev had good reason for his critical view of Puškin's relationship with his fellows; but it was inconsistent of Solov'ev to speak of Uvarov as the most highly cultivated and talented of Russian ministers for education, as a man whose activities were peculiarly fruitful.
- ↑ The third address in commemoration of Dostoevskii was delivered in 1883, at a time when Solov'ev had already been strongly influenced in the direction of Catholicism.
- ↑ Three Discussions concerning War, Progress, and the End of the History, including a short story of the antichrist, with appendixes, published in 1899 and 1900 in "Nedělja," and reprinted in book form in 1900. Two English translations have been published.