Ellen Mayne

THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV

It is one of the aims of the New Atlantis Foundation to draw attention to the works of those men of genius, whether thinkers or writers or artists, who are of particular significance to the present age, and who have either been forgotten or neglected, or their significance misunderstood. Vladimir Solovyov may be considered the most outstanding Christian philosopher of the present age, in that he was neither only a Christian dogmatist, nor merely a rationalist philosopher, but was equally philosopher and theologian. He was profoundly convinced of the truth of the Christian revelation, but he equally held that this truth must not only be believed but also thought and known, and his life work was devoted to this end. Solovyov was a Russian whose life covered the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately only a few of his most important works are translated into English, but in this lecture I shall make free use of his own words and phrases in translation without special recognition on every occasion.

Genius is evident by the universality of a man's scope and understanding, and as well as being one of the spiritual leaders of his time, a philosopher and theologian, Solovyov was a poet and political thinker. All his genius drove towards making understandable to mankind through mind and reason, the deep mysteries which man had embraced by faith and intuition through the ages. In his book Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, he affirms that the question 'What is the purpose of life?' must be answered by any philosophy which claims to be of universal concern. Philosophy which is thinking about real reality must take into account the whole of human experience. It concerns not only thought, but also will and feeling; and in this sense that which is thought as truth, must also be willed as good and felt as beautiful.

Solovyov thinks from the whole to the part. It is not that he confuses meanings and categories. He is most precise in his distinctions, but he sees the parts essentially in their mutual interdependence. He sees philosophy in relation to the whole man, and individual man in relation to the Kingdom of Mankind, and the Kingdom of Mankind in relation to the Cosmos. For him the lesser can only be explained by the greater, and not the greater by the lesser; and the part only has meaning and existence within the whole of which it is a part. Thus in explaining any single step in a process of development he looks rather to the perfected end than to the step before. If religion is the realm of ends, and gives life its meaning and purpose, then philosophy, which is concerned with truth about reality, cannot be isolated from religion. And for this reason Solovyov could not be just a philosopher, in the sense of the philosophy of the schools, nor could he be just a theologian or a Christian dogmatist. He was equally a theological-philosopher and philosophical-theologian.

In earlier Foundation lectures reference has been made to the notion that through the course of history there have been revealed to Man three major truths. In history they have succeeded one another and have been so different from one another as to be almost contradictory, and yet in human thought and life they are complementary and coexistent, in the same way as an individual experiences will, thought and feeling as distinct and yet all three equally himself. In these three revelations we may call the first to appear in history the pre-Christian revelation of the ancient wisdom, the wisdom or revelation of God to Man. The second revelation - the event of the appearnce of Christ in history - is the revelation of the God-Man. The third revelation, as was explained in our third Foundation lecture, is the revelation of Man's world becoming divine through the true understanding of genius.

The outstanding and most comprehensive exponent of the First Revelation is Dr. Rudolf Steiner. In his thought and work he has brought together all the strands which make up the ancient wisdom. But he has done more than that, he has reconciled the ancient truths with the central significance of Jesus Christ. He brought the truth of the Christian revelation into relationship with the truth of the pre-Christian revelation, and he expressed the whole in a modern mode, making it understandable to the modern rational mind. He spoke in terms of rational understanding rather than dogmatism or mysticism, and he also brought his work into relationship with modern science. He was nevertheless essentially an exponent of the ancient wisdom.

The man who has presented the Christian revelation most fully and most appropriately for the modern age is Vladimir Solovyov. For him the world event of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ was the central event, not only in human history but also in cosmic evolution. The ancient wisdom lays more emphasis on God as revealed in the universe, and the third, modern revelation lays the emphasis on Man as containing within himself the power to reach divinity. The Christian revelation proclaims that Man received the divinity within himself. Perfect God and perfect Man were united in the same Person. To Solovyov there is no compromise about this. He will not glorify the divinity of Jesus Christ at the expense of His humanity nor yet reduce Him to mere humanity at the expense of His divinity, since it is the essence and meaning of the Christian mystery that He was at the same time God and Man. But Solovyov does not exclude the wisdom of the pre-Christian revelation or imagine that the knowledge of Christ superseded the earlier knowledge of truth. We know that, early in his life, he undertook extensive studies in gnostic, Indian and medieval philosophy, and his acquaintance with the Vedanta, Kabala and Jewish thought, and also with Greek philosophy including the Neo-Platonists, is very evident from his works.

He considers the whole ancient wisdom as part of the organic development of Man and the Cosmos, of which Christ is the central point; Christianity is the crown and centre of all religions, but not the supplanter of them. Equally he does not see the Christian revelation as the final realised truth. It is the establishment of the norm or ideal or archetype, but it requires that the development of this norm into actuality in human and cosmic life should follow. This vision of perfected Man and finally a perfected Cosmos, was his vision of Sophia, and this is essentially Man's own work to be undertaken in his own way by his own free will. The norm is established in the Person of Christ but the realisation of the norm in the actual wholeness of mankind has to be brought about by Man's own free will and reason.

It is not enough in the modern world to say 'Believe in God and in Jesus Christ as the Son of God'. Solovyov was brought up as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but early in his life he lived through agnosticism and materialism, and he studied the whole range of European philosophy, after which mere naïve belief is not possible to any intelligent person. But blind belief is even against the essence and meaning of Christianity. Christianity did not just produce another God, only better than the rest. It was not just an affirmation about God, and Jesus Christ as the Son of God. It was an affirmation about Man, for Jesus Christ was not only God, but also Man. It is of the essence of the Christ principle that God and Man coexisted in the same Person and that God was thus comprehended within Man and must therefore be able to be thought and known by the human mind.

Man inevitably ascribes to himself infinite significance. The attempt to portray Man, as some scientists do, as if he were a mere insignificant speck in the universe at the mercy of natural forces and mechanical causality, may seem to be very heroic intellectually, but it does not satisfy the whole man as true. Nevertheless Man can only give to himself this infinite significance if he puts himself into the context of the whole of mankind and the whole of the Cosmos, and there sees the whole as an organic process, developing towards an ultimate purpose. Solovyov saw the ineffectiveness in the modern world of dogmatic religion and religious ritual with no philosophical basis. He rejected the superstitious belief in imaginative mythologies or unverifiable dogma as unquestioned fact. Equally he rejected the superstition of intellectual materialism, which fears imaginative and mythological expression, and tries to establish a purely thought basis for the whole of life. No one can fmally take the element of mystery out of life, because not only the creative power and order of the universe, but man's own will and unconscious remain a mystery to him. To be afraid to call that creative power God, simply because ideas have been attached to the notion of God which we now regard as superstitious, is in itself a superstition. We must admit that at a certain stage we can no longer know reality through intellect but only through intuition, and the philosopher must give way to the poet. And in this sense Solovyov is like Plato, whom he follows so much in his whole style and idea, that though he is continually trying to follow reason to its limits, he does not hesitate, when he can go no further, to use poetry and myth, so as to awaken in his readers their own imaginative intuition of reality.

What is the unique and specific content of Christianity, its own unique meaning and significance and message which does not belong to any other religion or world view? It is not the belief in the Fatherhood of God or the Brotherhood of man, or in a particular moral teaching, or even in the doctrine of the Trinity. All these notions belong to other religions as well, though they are essential to Christianity and transformed by it; but none of them is the unique central essence which distinguishes Christianity. I shall give the answer in Solovyov's own words for they are clear and uncompromising and epitomise the essence of his Christian thought:

'Christianity has a content of its own and that content is solely and exclusively Christ. In Christianity as such we find Christ, and Christ only - this is a truth very often uttered but very little assimilated.

'If we consider the whole of the theoretical and moral content of Christ's teaching as expounded in the Gospels, the only thing that will be new in it and specifically different from all other religions is Christ's teaching about Himself, His speaking of Himself as the living, incarnate truth: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; he that believeth on me hath everlasting life".

'Thus, if the characteristic content of Christianity be sought in the teaching of Christ, we must admit that it is to be found in Christ Himself'. Solovyov goes on to say:

'What then are we to think? What appears to our reason under the name of Christ as the life and the Truth?

'The Eternal God for ever realises Himself in realising His content, i.e. in realising all. That 'all' in contradistinction to the living God as absolutely one, is plurality - but plurality as the content of the absolute unity, as dominated by unity, as reduced to unity.

'Plurality reduced to unity is a whole. A real whole is a living organism. God as a Being that has realised its content, as a unity containing all plurality, is a llving organism.

'The elements of the divine organism taken together embrace the fulness of being; in that sense it is a universal organism. But universality does not prevent it from being perfectly individual - on the contrary, it logically implies individuality.

'A universal organism expressing the absolute content of the divine principle is pre-eminently a unique individual being. The individual being or the realised expression of the absolute living God is Christ'.

In the whole style and spirit of these few sentences, two characteristics of Solovyov's Christian philosophy of which I have spoken, show through clearly. He makes no affirmation without a rational philosophical basis, but he will not weaken the central content of Christianity by rationalistic apology. The centre of Christianity is a mystery, and because this is so it is all the more important to understand as much as can be understood, and not to do, as so many so-called Christians do, either call the whole of it a mystery or attempt to explain away even the mystery in logical thought.

At this point, a host of questions come to one's mind. We still want to know why God should incarnate as a man. How can it be of significance to us here and now to believe in some event which happened at such a remote time in Palestine? Was it an accident that Christ, the perfect God-Man, appeared in the middle of history? Why not at the end of historic development? How was this incarnation of the Deity different from other so-called divine appearances? And by what right does it claim to be historical while the others are wholly or partially mythological? Was it just chance that it all happened as it did, or was it by design of Providence? One of the reasons for the inadequacy of the usual explanations that we may have been given, is that Christianity is usually presented to us either as a static fact, or as a mere series of events, bearing no relation to the world around us. Since therefore these explanations are not self-evident to our intellect or within our range of experience, we find them hard to accept. But with the full energy of his mind and with the conviction of his heart Solovyov goes to the centre of all these questions:

'It can easily be understood' he says, 'why Christ first made his appearance in the middle of history and not at the end of it. As the object of the world process is the revelation of the Kingdom of God, or the perfect moral order realised by the new mankind (which latter is spiritually growing out of God-Man), it is clear that this universal revelation must be preceded by an individual revelation of the God-Man'.

It is necessary for the understanding of Solovyov's whole philosophy and attitude to describe briefly his account of creation, of the crown of creation in Man, of the centre of human history in the God-Man Jesus Christ, and his whole idea of sin and redemption leading to the final realisation of Sophia in perfected Man and perfected Cosmos, which is the Kingdom of God and the end of the world. Inevitably, however, in the short space of this lecture much of the philosophical reasoning and explanatory detail must be left out. Solovyov starts from the wholeness of the Cosmos, and it is hardly surprising that the account he gives of its origin bears a distinct resemblance to the teachings of Vedanta philosophy. When we try to think right through to Ultimate Reality, we inevitably reach the idea that the world originates from a Supreme Unity. This is Man's earliest intuition as expressed in the Vedanta, and is inescapable if we try to reach the truth by thought alone. Equally we can find value and meaning in human life only in relation to a purpose, and that purpose must somehow or other be the integration of ourselves into a final perfect unity with the whole world. In our experience, however, both our outer experience from the senses and our inner experience of feeling, we find not perfect unity but plurality, many different things in the world Outside, and a constant succession of changing states within.

How are we to reconcile the unity which we necessarily think, with the plurality which we in fact experience? Thought alone, apart from experience, gives us an empty abstract unity - Solovyov calls it the negative unity. Experience alone gives us a chaotic and meaningless variety which has no unity and can lead to no positive goal. To Solovyov the Absolute Reality, which we call God, is indeed unity, but unity in plurality. It is not empty unity but the unity of one in all, which contains the multiplicity of all in one. 'For', he says, 'if we do not recognise in Divinity the whole fulness of reality which is plurality, then inevitably, the positive significance passes to the diverse reality of this world. The Divinity retains only a negative significance and little by little is denied'.

Thus God holds in his unity all plurality. God is the Full-Wholeness of all things and beings in their unity and organic co-functioning. But He both is the unity and wholeness in everything and he is everything in its unity and wholeness. That is to say we must think of Him as that perfect unity which has in itself the power of containing all diversity - and also as the principle of the actual manifestation of that diversity in its unity. The first aspect is God as one Will, or God the Father. The second is God the Son or the Logos, that is the principle of the whole system of ideas, in the Platonic sense, which can manifest itself in an actual world of multiplicity. And in this sense it is true that God the Father, the one unified Will containing the possibility of all within Himself, begets the Son, the Logos, the principle of multiplicity. The Father is the sole cause of the Son, and the Son has nothing in Himself that He does not receive from the Father. And finally God must realise Himself as many in unity, not only as having the possibility of all multiplicity within Him, but, after the whole system of multiplicity has in idea unfolded itself. That is to say, the multiplicity must assert itself in its unity; and that is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person which proceeds from the Father and the Son.

I have by the necessity of language spoken of this as if it were a process in time, but we are still speaking within God's own subjectivity in a timeless and spaceless ideality. The whole ideal content of reality which is differentiated potentiality in God in the Father, and which in the Son is only in ideal differentiation, is the Word or Logos of which it is written in the first verses of St. John's Gospel, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. By Him were all things made . . .' And the completing of the circle of God's inner reality in the Holy Spirit is not a process. It is not itself an action, but God's perfect freedom to act beyond Himself. God is One, but as One alone He would be empty, and as dual he would be divided against Himself. It is only as Three Persons that He can be the Full-Whole with the power to create a world. 'Thus', says Solovyov, 'the general idea of the Trinity of God is as much a truth of contemplative reason as of revelation'.

But we are still speaking only of God's subjectivity, which is within itself in absolute perfection. There is no world or any idea of it. For there to be the possibility of a world, there must be an 'other' to God, which is as object to God as subject. This is the idea of universal substance or 'all in unity', as created and yet as eternally existent. This universal substance is known in Christian mystical philosophy as Sophia. In the Proverbs of Solomon, Sophia is called the Wisdom of God, and speaks thus, 'The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting from the beginning or ever the earth was', and so during the whole of creation, 'I was by Him as one brought up with Him, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable parts of His earth; and my delights were with the sons of men'. And Sophia is, as we shall see, really the principle of perfected humanity. But to Solovyov, Sophia is not just a philosophical principle such as universal substance, nor a mythological person, but a real being as the archetype of the eternal feminine receptive principle of the Universe.

He describes an ikon in the eleventh century cathedral of Novgorod, in which the centre is occupied by an unusual feminine figure in royal vestment, seated on a throne. Facing it and slightly bending towards it are on the right, Our Lady of the Byzantine type, and on the left, St. John the Baptist; Christ with uplifted arms is seen to rise above the seated figure, and above Christ there is the heavenly world represented by several angels surrounding the divine Word symbolised by the book of the Gospels. The ikon is called the ikon of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. Solovyov's own explanation of this ikon is as follows:

'This great royal and feminine Being, which is not God, not the eternal Son of God, not an angel, not a saint, but receives homage both from the last representative of the Old Testament and the progenetrix of the New, is no other than the true, pure and perfect humanity, the highest and all embracing form, and the living soul of nature and universe, united to God from all eternity, and in the temporal process attaining union with Him and uniting to Him all that is'.

So long as Sophia rejoices before God in perfection, no creation is possible. But there is the possibility that plurality shall exist not only in unity and wholeness within God, but in division and chaos outside God. God holds all together in unity widiin Him by His Will, and by the divine Idea, which keeps multiplicity in organic wholeness. But He desires that this same perfection which is within Him shall exist outside Him by grace, by its own free Will. In desiring freedom for His 'other', God creates the World Soul and gives her a share in His own will so that she desires to exist not only as 'other' to God, but in and for herself. And thereupon all the multiplicity which was held together in the divine Idea falls apart into myriads of individual monads, or souls each willing to be itself apart from all else. Sin is the determination of each monad to remain separate and not be part of the whole.

The whole world process starts as the blind striving of the World Soul towards an end she knows not, but which is the unity she has lost. The divine Logos already has in Himself the creative idea of organic wholeness which He wishes to realize in another, and which the world soul, without knowing it, wishes to receive. But she must will it herself. The Divine Logos cannot act except by the free will of the World Soul. Gradually through struggle and evolution, unity asserts itself, until the moment arrives when with the creation of Man, the Divine Logos is able to enter into the World Soul. For Man not only contains nature within his organism, but has in his consciousness the possibility of realising the Logos as himself. Hence for the first time in creation it can be said that a being was made in the image of God. Within Man, God and nature are united, but it is now necessary for God to enter Man by Man's free will.

At first Man is under the domination of cosmic forces. Later, in the ancient Indian civilization he realises freedom within his own consciousness, and there are born in embryo all the ideal creations of Man's mind, philosophical and religious. In the Graeco-Roman civilization, Man gets beyond his own subjectivity into those objective creations by which he realizes beauty and reason in the world, in art, in rational philosophy and in the State based on law and order. But Man's personal will is still active only in the material world, which remains in opposition to the world of ideal truth. To resolve this opposition it was necessary for the Divine Logos not merely to enlighten Man's mind from outside, but actually to become a regenerative force as personal will within Man. And as the Kingdom of Man consists of single individuals each with his own will, there was no way for this to happen except by the Divine Logos being born as an actual individual man, in whom there is both human and divine will side by side. This could only happen among that race whose intense personal subjectivity was such that their God only said of Himself, 'I am that I am'- that is, of course, among the Jews. Thus God has become Man in the person of Jesus Christ; but even in Him, the human will must submit freely to the divine will. So Christ, as God, must freely renounce the glory of God in order to have as Man the possibility of that glory. And this is the critical significance and triumph of the three temptations in the wilderness.

So the revelation of Christianity, of the God-Man Jesus Christ, is not that of a God to whom we must only bow down in worship. It is that God's nature is our own true and most inward nature. For in Jesus Christ, Man contained in his single individual consciousness the whole fulness of reality. He was infmlte, and He knew it. This is the first part of the message of Christianity. It is for us to know and realise. This is the Truth of Christ Jesus. The second part is something for us to realise, not just by knowing, but by willing and doing: that is the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is neither to be conceived as another world, only to be attained after death, nor as attainable on earth merely by good works. The very fact of the Incarnation of God in the single person of Jesus Christ as God-Man, tells us that the Kingdom of God is to be both human and divine. In order that the union between the Deity and Man should be perfect it must be free and mutual, and the inner possibility of this union is therefore to he found in Man himself: 'The Kingdom of God is within you'. Man must manifest this Kingdom hidden within him, and in order to do so he must combine a deliberate effort of his free will with Divine Grace. The Kingdom of God is a work and a task, the highest work of Man's life, and the final end of his efforts. It is not confined to his personal destiny but is to be found in the social destinies of mankind as a whole.

Both the spiritualisation of individuals and the initiative for the human world order are necessary, but in their separation each has gone astray, for the attempt to reach either one without the other is bound to fail. Solovyov realised that there was a correspondence between his notion of the Kingdom of God, and Auguste Comte's le Grand Etre. Comte, too, saw that mankind is to be regarded, not as a collective aggregate of all individual human beings, either in the present, or even past, present and future, but as an actual living organism embracing all singles and giving to them their reality. And if Comte, thinking in terms of a progress towards a perfect whole, failed to see that an absolute which is becoming in time presupposes an absolute which eternally is - namely Sophia - nevertheless he, 'a godless infidel', as Solovyov affectionally calls him, was inspired with real devotion to this ideal which is indeed the very essence of Christianity. So the idea of the Kingdom of God necessarily brings us to the duty of working for the realization of Christian principles in the collective life of mankind by the attainment of a perfect social order. It is the duty of a Christian to work towards the realization of the divine human order in three distinct ways: as social justice between individuals; as the true order of the state, which in its organic form should allow the free co-functioning of all its component parts; and as the true justice and order between states and other human institutions.

Christ founded the Church and left it behind Him as the sign that the task before Man was not only his own personal salvation, but the redemption of all mankind. Solovyov, however, saw this Church divided within itself. The Eastern Church understood the union of the divine and the human in Christ, but in the Church it wanted to have only the divine and not the divinely human. The Roman Catholic Church on the other hand realised the divinely human mission of the Church, but tried to hold this Church together by force, and by force to dominate states and compel individuals into submission to it. The result was the division into an Eastern and Western Church, the triumph of the state as secular power and the rebellion of the individual conscience in Protestantism. But then Protestantism itself, which was right in affirming that the truth of Christianity must be seen and understood by the individual's own reason, degenerated through its absolute rejection of the authority of the Church, into making personal opinion the criterion of truth, and arbitrary will the standard of right. Thus all religious basis for political work and social striving is lost. Truth rests only with the human intellect, which finding no content in itself, sets about understanding the material world outside, and positive science becomes the only truth. The progress which Comte describes with approbation, and rightly in his way, from theology, through metaphysics, to positive science, is seen by Solovyov as a regression.

The aim of life accordingly degenerates into individual wellbeing or economic Socialism, and into the whole degradation of present day democracy, which in the name of freedom of the individual reduces individuality to mere vulgar egoism without content or meaning, and in the name of human equality, sets up material wealth as an object of worship and gives it supreme power as plutocracy. 'This path', says Solovyov, with prophetic insight 'has not been traversed to the end as yet', and he portrays the end in the story of the Anti-Christ. Anti-Christ is depicted not as a wicked man, but a brilliant, powerful, intelligent and reasonable man, working for the progress of mankind, and building a world order where everyone lived in peace and well-being. What then made him the Anti-Christ? This man was shown by Solovyov as someone who had gained not only command over himself, but power over others, in fact power over all the earth, and he is shown as achieving his goal; Mankind is in fact brought to peace all over the earth by his efforts. He ordered the world on a material basis, and by external power. Mankind was reduced to happiness, but remained unregenerate. He is the Anti-Christ because he follows exclusively his own will and uses his great power for himself to establish himself as the centre of the universe and refuses to acknowledge Jesus Christ. But it was by Jesus Christ that the Church was founded as the universal organisation of the true life, and it is through Man's own weakness that the visible Church has become divided and is no longer the human manifestation of its divine foundation.

There is much argument about whether Solovyov really became a Roman Catholic, and whether he died a Catholic or Orthodox. This argument would have been meaningless to Solovyov himself, whose answer would have been that he was a member of the Universal Church of Christ. 'For', he says, 'all men who acknowledge the fatherly authority of the apostolic hierarchy, who confess the Son of God and the Son of Man and take part in the gracious gifts of the Holy Spirit, belong to Christ's Church on earth; they are in the Church and the Church is in them'. With his deep conviction and understanding, this became for Solovyov not a passive belief only, but a call to all mankind as a practical task. 'The aim of Christian politics', he says, 'is the free union of mankind in the Church of Christ'. It followed then that the practical task, which he actively took upon himself in his life, was the union of the Churches. It is not that the Universal Church has to be founded, it exists already, but it is neither Roman Catholic nor Orthodox.

He was convinced that the Orthodox Eastern Church could never be converted to Romanism, for in that case the Universal Church would become the Roman Church, and Christianity would lose the specific significance of the Eastern Church in human history. 'But when Orthodox and Catholics, who abide in the unity of the body of Christ, become aware of that mystical unity and are moved to confirm it by the moral bond of love and communion, the Protestant principle of freedom will find its true application and occupy a high position in the completion of the Church, for that completion is free theocracy '. Nevertheless, Solovyov leaves no doubt at all that the Church which Jesus Christ founded was the Church of Peter; and he explains why it was upon Peter that the Lord founded his Church, and not on the college of the apostles together. The faith and enthusiasm of one man, who was prepared to answer for all the apostles and thus for the whole world, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God', was the quality needed to found an institution with power and authority such that the gates of hell could not prevail against it. The necessity for a unifying centre and for a leading authority in the earthly Church follows, not from the Church's absolute and eternal essence, but from its temporary condition as the Church militant. This is the central significance of the Roman Church, that there never has been nor ever can be any other unifying centre for the Church than the chair of St. Peter, the impregnable rock whereon to base the divine human activity. 'But' says Solovyov, 'power does not touch upon the eternal foundations of the Church, and can only give the Bishop of Rome the privileges of sovereign guidance of the Church's earthly affairs, for better directing and applying social and individual forces to the needs of God's work at any given time'.

Even the Church however, as an institution, can be considered only as instrumental to the final attainment of the Kingdom of God. The real inner power by which Man's regeneration is possible is power of love, through which, as Solovyov wrote in in his book The Meaning of Love, we come to know the truth of another, not in abstraction, but in reality, and actually transfer the centre of our life beyond the confines of our empirical separateness. Egoism is indeed necessary in order that a person shall ascribe absolute significance and infinite dignity to himself, but the evil and falsity of egoism lies not in a man's recognition of his own absolute significance and value, but in the fact that while he justly ascribes such significance to himself, he unjustly denies it to others. The meaning and value of love as a feeling, consists in the fact that it makes us actually, with our whole being, recognise in another the absolute central significance which owing to egoism we feel in ourselves only. Man may be 'all' only together with others; only together with others can he realise his absolute significance.

There is only one power which may, and actually does, undermine egoism at the root within, and that is love. All love is a manifestation of this power, but not every kind of love realises it to the same extent or undermines egoism with the same force. Mystical love, for instance, and love of mankind are too weak, and maternal love still has in it an element of egoism. Only the love between man and woman, demanding the fulness of the inner and final union is strong enough to achieve this end. The aim of sexual love is not the perpetuation of the species, for which love is not even necessary; all nature reproduces, but only Man is capable of love. The negation of the flesh is false spirituality, true spirituality is its regeneration, spintualization and resurrection. Indeed this book of Solovyov's is very like Plato's Symposium in its intention. It is by love that Man is led to realise that it is not only the person, whom he loves as woman in the flesh, for the adoration and infinite devotion, which is so characteristic of love, is meaningless as referring solely to the earthly object of his love. What a man desires, however unconsciously, in the person of an individual woman is the vision of Sophia - the ultimate perfection of mankind united, and the whole Cosmos redeemed. The idealisation of the lower being is the beginning of the realisation of the higher, and in this lies the truth of love's exaltation. The complete realisation, the transformation of an individual feminine being into a ray of the divine eternal feminine, unseparated from its radiant source, will be the real reunion of the human being with the Deity, the reinstatement of the living and immortal image of God in Man.

There remains but one final and inescapable evil, and that is the actual fact of physical death and decay. For how can we resign ourselves to the idea that this perfection which we grasp in our mind, will last only for a short space, and then be destroyed by death, and that this will go on for generation after generation? Man calls for eternal life and nature meets this world-wide aspiration with eternal death. Solovyov does not take refuge in any easy or comfortable doctrine of immortality. Death can be conquered. The resurrection of Jesus Christ would be meaningless if this were not so. In speaking of humanity being eternal, we mean by implication that each separate human entity is eternal. If it were not so, humanity itself would be a fiction. It is only possible to admit that he exists after death if it be recognised that he is not merely an appearance, but also an eternal intelligible essence; that is to say that Sophia in its eternal being, inevitably consists of a multiplicity of elements of which it is the real unity; consequently each of these elements as a necessary component part of the eternal divine humanity, must be recognised as eternal on the ideal plane.

But only the whole of Man can be immortal, that is, the individual in his whole organic relatedness with the divine and human whole. And Sophia does not mean to Solovyov only the perfected and redeemed mankind. It means all the other kingdoms of the world, including even inorganic matter transformed by Man through the redeeming power of Jesus Christ. Thus we can see that Sophia may be compared with the Mother of God, for she is the eternal feminine virgin by whose submission to God, Jesus Christ was born, and is the fmal realization of the Holy Spirit as the united and perfected Cosmos.

The world process starts from the perfect unity of all in God the Father, and through the unfolding of all possibilities contained in the Son, the Divine Logos, expressed on earth in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, reaches the final meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in the attainment of everlasting life by the redemption of Man and the Cosmos in Sophia. 'The fulness of existence perfectly united with God through the Son of Man, is the absolute ideal, the realization of which began with Jesus Christ and continues in the world's history as humanity's common and universal task. God's work has become the work of Man also'. Out of the individual realization of the Everliving, of the Christ-principle, will come our renaissance and every renaissance! Materialism in things of the spirit must be overcome! Materialism and death must be overcome; for ever, even now.