Vladimir Solovyov: The Philosophy of the Last Classic. Lecture

Abstract

The article was prepared on the basis of an open lecture given on April 8, 2022 at the Center Church and International Relations MGIMO of the acting Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University A. P. Kozyrev. The article raises the question of the significance of the legacy of Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (1853–1900) in Russian philosophy. It is argued that Vladimir Solovyov was a man of the universal, ecumenical type. The author characterizes Solovyov’s philosophy as the completion of European philosophical systematics, noting the syncretic nature of his teaching and the influence of Platonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and early Christianity on the thoughts of the Origen of the 19th century, as Solovyov’s contemporaries called him. He also cites the characteristics of Solovyov’s thought given by individual contemporaries and representatives of subsequent Russian philosophy — S. N. Bulgakov, G. V. Florovsky, F. A. Stepun, A. Kozhev and others. In answers to questions at the end of the lecture, a number of essential provisions on works and personality of V. S. Solovyov are clarified. According to the thinker, the fate of Russia depends on the choice of Christianity or opposing oneself to the entire Christian world. For him, there is a distinction between religious Westernism and non-religious Westernism. A.P. Kozyrev subsumes P. Ya. Chaadaev to the type of religious Westerner, since P. Ya. Chaadaev based his ideas of building a Christian kingdom — the city of God on earth, as Augustine wrote on medieval Christianity. Solovyov per se considered himself somewhere in between. A genius cannot be limited to one political ideology, narrow political worldview, a genius does not think in black and white the categories. It makes Solovyov’s idea that there are not only different Wests, but different Easts — China, Japan, and above all the Middle East, Jerusalem — as well. The nature of these and similar constructions allows us to see in Solovyov not only a taxonomist, but a religious philosopher, who argues that a metaphysical lever is necessary to fight evil. It is not for nothing that Solovyov begins Three Conversations with a reflection on whether evil is only a lack of good, a kind of ghost that can easily be eliminated, or whether evil is a real force with its own substance and its essence, and can be defeated not by abstract good, but by the God-man. Therefore, Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ is not just a prophecy about the finale of world history, where the Antichrist appears under the guise of a socialist, humanist and philanthropist, he is a politician, president of the United States of Europe, ready to open sacristies to the Orthodox and return the papacy to Catholics, Protestants create an institute for the study of the Bible, you just have to worship him as God. This idea of fake good is destructive for life itself. All that glitters is not gold — this is the maxim of Three Conversations. Good is determined not by the amount of goods that a person produces, but by the name for which they are done, what is put at the forefront. Solovyov, in a certain sense, founded Russian liberalism and the philosophy of law (the human right to a dignified existence, criticism of the death penalty). P. I. Novgorodtsev will call Solovyov the founder of the Moscow school of legal philosophy. Solovyov thinks of law as a way to ensure a minimum of good in society, connects law and morality, basing law on a moral imperative, from which it cannot be decoupled, otherwise the legal norm degenerates, turning into a moral fetish. “The task of law is not at all to turn the world lying in evil into the Kingdom of God, but only to ensure that it does not turn into hell before the time comes,” wrote Solovyov.