Abstract

This article provides a reading of Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy as expressed in his ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity’ and ‘The Meaning of Love’. It seeks to unpack his eclectic thought in order to answer the question of whether there is a Jewish Kabbalistic influence on the Russian thinker amidst his usual platonic, gnostic, and Schellengian tropes. Interested as a young man in Jewish Mysticism, Solovyov fluctuates in his ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity’ between a platonic reading of Schellengian Gnosticism and some elements of Kabbalistic origin. In ‘The Meaning of Love’, he develops a notion of love that puts him very close to what Moshe Idel calls ‘theosophic-theurgical Kabbalah’. Showing how ‘The Meaning of Love’ completes the narrative of ‘Lectures’, we can affirm that there is a certain Christian Kabbalistic line in Solovyov’s thought that culminates in his theurgical understanding of love. In this sense, Solovyov might be called a philosophical Marrano as he is certainly a heterodox theosopher that fluctuates between Christian Gnosis and Christian Kabbalah, never assuming a solid identity.

Highlights

  • This article provides a reading of Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy as expressed in his ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity’ and ‘The Meaning of Love’

  • The cosmoerotic relationship between God’s emanations arguably has its roots in the neo-platonic renaissance, there might be a Jewish influence on Solovyov in how he differentiates between love in the human world and true love in the metaphysical realm of forms

  • The narrative of “The Meaning of Love” does not repeat exactly the story of Sophia’s fall that Solovyov tells in Lectures on Divine Humanity, but there is a single core: the differentiation within God is the process of the first creation, and the fullness of the first creation is a feminine entity, together with her God creates later the phenomenal material world

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Summary

Introduction

This article provides a reading of Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy as expressed in his ‘Lectures on Divine Humanity’ and ‘The Meaning of Love’. The cosmoerotic relationship between God’s emanations arguably has its roots in the neo-platonic renaissance, there might be a Jewish influence on Solovyov in how he differentiates between love in the human world and true love in the metaphysical realm of forms.

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