Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov

by Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov

The founder of modern Russian philosophy, Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) is widely considered its greatest practitioner. Together with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he is one of the towering intellectual figures in late-nineteenth-century Russia, and his diverse writings influenced much of the non-Marxist tradition of twentieth-century Russian thought. Philosopher, journalist, poet, and playwright, Solovyov was also a mystic who claimed to have had three visions of Divine Sophia. This personification of wisdom with golden hair and a radiant aura echoes both the eternal feminine and the world soul. Rooted in Christian and Jewish mysticism, Eastern Orthodox iconography, Greek philosophy, and European romanticism, the Sophiology that suffuses Solovyov's philosophical and artistic works is both intellectually sophisticated and profoundly inspiring. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt brings together key texts from Solovyov's writings about poetry, fiction, drama, and philosophy, all extensively annotated and some available in English for the first time (with assistance from the translators Boris Jakim and Laury Magnus). In the comprehensive introductory essay that encompasses the book's first half, Kornblatt establishes the historical, philosophical, religious, and literary context of Solovyov's Sophiology, emphasizing its connection to contemporaneous religious and philosophical thought as well as other social and cultural trends in Europe and the United States―for example, Solovyov's reactions to his changing world ran parallel to and sometimes intersected with those of Darwin, Nietzsche, and William James. Sophiology is once again finding enthusiasts both in Russia and among seekers around the world. The definitive introduction to Solovyov's wisdom and its profound impact on Russian thought and culture, Divine Sophia makes Solovyov's mystical visions and literary "re-visions" of Sophia accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. Solovyov's wisdom writings captivated several generations of poets and philosophers during the pre- and postrevolutionary periods in Russia and abroad. In particular, his Sophiology had a profound influence on such major figures of Russia's Silver Age as Alexander Blok, Andrei Belyi, Pavel Florensky, and Sergei Bulgakov.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Christianity, Mysticism, Theology, Russia, Nonfiction

297 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Russian: Владимир Сергеевич Соловьёв) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.

Reviews

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vladimir Soloviev was a bit of an eccentric. A poet, philosopher, mystic, polemicist, and activist, his brilliantly ambitious but often obscure and idiosyncratic writings ruffled many feathers in nineteenth century Russia, assuring that his relatively short life would be as restless as his mind. Much of his thought was centered around the “theosophical” development of a series of encounters he claimed to have had with a divine feminine presence to which he would give the name Sophia: a mediating and syncretizing force that represented the perfect union of heaven and earth, or God and Man. After first encountering Sophia while attending the Divine Liturgy as a young child, Soloviev met her again in a London library in 1875, where he was immersing himself in gnostic and mystical texts. She told him to seek her out in Egypt, which he dutifully did later that year. While travelling by night through the desert from Cairo to the Thebaid, Soloviev, according to a letter he wrote to his parents, was nearly killed by a group of Bedouin who mistook him for the devil, and was forced to sleep on the sand under the open sky. Years later, in a short story called “At the Dawn of Misty Youth”, he would describe what happened next:

“Regaining consciousness, I saw only the bright sunlight, a strip of blue sky, and bending over me in that light, and against the sky, the image of a beautiful woman. . . . It was as though my entire existence—all my thoughts, feelings, and desires—had melted and flowed together into a single, endless, sweet, bright, and dispassionate sensation. A single wondrous image was motionlessly reflected in that sensation, as in a pure mirror, and I felt and knew that in that one was all.”

In 1877, Soloviev gave a lecture in support of the Russo-Turkish War, championing the pan-Slavic cause by presenting the Slavic people as mediators between the monolithic despotism of the East and the fragmentary anarchy of the West. He procured a rifle and traveled to the front, but returned after only a month without ever having fired it. In 1878, he achieved national fame when he delivered his Lectures on Divine Humanity in Saint Petersburg to an audience that included Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; but soon afterwards he aroused controversy by moving away from conservative Slavophilism in favor of a social activism that he favorably identified with the Jews, and by encouraging Czar Alexander III to practice “Christian politics” by commuting the sentences of his father’s assassins. In testimony to the range and uniqueness of Soloviev’s thought, he was pejoratively characterized by his opponents, at various points in his life, as a Catholic, a Protestant, a rationalist, a mystic, a nihilist, an Old Believer, and a Jew.

What made Soloviev’s philosophy so multifarious was his desire to incorporate the dualisms of idealism and materialism, or divinity and nature, into a united and transfigured Divine-Human or Sophianic whole. Rather than simply negating the Positivism of August Comte with an apophatically-defined metaphysical ideal, Soloviev insisted that the full actuality and multiplicity of this world—the positive content of the world—must necessarily mirror a positivity, actuality, multiplicity, and plenitude of being that subsists eternally within the Divinity. If this Divine World, content, or positivity is not identified and distinguished from the content of the material world, then God becomes only an abstract negation of the latter, and will thus either be identified with materiality, leading to pantheism, or will simply be jettisoned from it altogether, leading to atheism:

“[It] is precisely to absolutely distinguish God from our world, from our nature, from this visible reality, that it is necessary to acknowledge in Him His own distinctive eternal nature, His own distinctive eternal world. Otherwise, our idea of Divinity will be poorer, more abstract, than our conception of the visible world.”

“If we do not acknowledge in Divinity the whole fullness of actuality, and thus necessarily of multiplicity too, positive significance inevitably passes to the multiplicity and actuality of this world. Then Divinity retains only a negative significance and is gradually denied. For if there is no other actuality, no absolute actuality, if there is no other multiplicity, no other fullness of being, then our present actuality will be the only one. Then Divinity will be left without any positive content. It will either merge with this world, with this nature (this world, this nature would then be acknowledged as the direct, immediate content of Divinity) and we will pass into a naturalistic pantheism, where this finite nature is all and God is only an empty word, or (and this is more consistent), Divinity, as an empty abstraction, will simply be denied, and consciousness will be openly atheistic.”

Soloviev identifies this World-within-Divinity with Wisdom (Sophia) as presented in the Biblical books of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, as well as with the “Holy Wisdom” to which many churches in the Christian East were dedicated, including the great Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. Wisdom is the idea or blueprint that God actualizes in creation; and since humanity is the bridge between the spiritual and material worlds—between the Divine Sophia and the creaturely Sophia, as Bulgakov would later put it—Sophia is the ideal, perfect, and eternal humanity as well.

“God ‘had [wisdom] in the beginning of His way’ (Proverbs 8:22). In other words, wisdom is the idea that God has before Him in His work of creation and that He, consequently, actualizes. We find this term in the New Testament as well (in the Apostle Paul), now in a direct relation to Christ.”

In 1 Corinthians 1:22-24, the Apostle Paul states, “For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

It seems that Soloviev would interpret this passage to mean that the “top-down” revelation demanded by the Jews and the “bottom-up” insight sought by the Greeks represent, respectively, the demiurgic capacity of the Logos, the “producing unity” or the One that produces the All (both eternally and economically); and the ideal humanity, the “produced unity”, or the All that produces the One (both eternally and economically) which Soloviev calls Sophia; both of which are united (eternally and economically) in Christ, the “integral divine being”:

“If in the divine being, in Christ, the first, the producing unity is, strictly speaking, Divinity, God as the active force, or Logos, and if, thus in this first unity we have Christ as the divine being proper, then the second, the produced unity, to which we have given the mystical name Sophia, is the principle of humanity, the ideal or normal human being. And Christ, who partakes, within this unity, of the human principle, is a human being, the second Adam (to use the scriptural expression). Thus, Sophia is the ideal or perfect humanity, eternally contained in the integral divine being, or Christ.”

Christ thus anchors the union of the work of God in creation (Logos) and the work of creation in realizing or receiving its divinization (Sophia). Christ unites the movements from One to All and from All to One; a co-divinity of unity and multiplicity, ideal and materiality, the absolute and positive content, that prevails eternally within God and manifests itself in temporal creation through free human activity. Logos is Christ’s perfect Divinity, and Sophia His perfect humanity, which is likewise contained in the Godhead from eternity.

Sophia, then, however ambiguously, integrates the ideal/material dualism to which Platonism and Gnosticism both succumbed. Plato, according to Soloviev, at least had intimations of an intermediate force between the world of the forms and the world of matter, which he called Eros; but his grief over the death of Socrates left him unable to finally integrate the two. Gnosticism rejected the value and legitimacy of the material world outright, viewing it as irredeemably inferior to the ideal world of the absolute; a prison to be escaped rather than a receptacle to be infused with the fullness of divinity. In Kabbalah, however, Soloviev found a worthy predecessor, as in its esoteric system the work of God culminated in the realization of humanity, rather than descending to it in a weakened form. Soloviev’s study of the Zohar inspired his appreciation for what he viewed as a peculiarly Jewish ethos of social activism, as well as his criticism of the supposed aloofness of the Church from social and political matters. For Soloviev, the eternal reality of the Divine Humanity places enormous weight on historical, social activity, which instantiates the Kingdom of God.

The works of each individual—inhering in Sophia, their unifying principle—are thus necessary components of the eternal Divine Humanity:

“Divine forces constitute the single, integral, absolutely universal, absolutely individual organism of the living Logos. Similarly, all human elements constitute a similarly integral organism, one both universal and individual, which is the necessary actualization and receptacle of the organism of the living Logos. They constitute a universally human organism as the eternal body of God and the eternal soul of the world. Since this latter organism, that is, Sophia, in its eternal being necessarily consists of a multiplicity of elements of which she is the real unity, each of these elements, as a necessary component part of eternal Divine Humanity, must be recognized as eternal in the absolute or ideal order.”

Therefore, our participation in Divine Humanity is the basis of our freedom and immortality; our freedom, because it makes us coworkers with God rather than the purely passive subjects of His arbitrary will; and our immortality because it places the ideal foundation of humanity within eternity rather than reducing the human being “to phenomenal appearance, to manifested existence, which actually begins only with physical birth.” After all, “[That] which appeared only in time must also disappear in time.”

God’s love and devotion to the world, and the world’s love and devotion to God, are thus revealed in the Divine-Humanity to be one act, manifesting one reality. And it is only in light of this one reality, eternally present in Heaven and realized on Earth within history, war, politics, ecology, statecraft, poetry, ritual, and all the drama of actual human life, that we can truly affirm that God is One.

[Jacob Aitken]

Judith Kornblatt gives an introduction and annotated commentary on Vladimir Solovyov's Sophianic writings. She begins with a brief and skillful introduction to 19th century Russian and European philosophical movements. She notes, like CS Lewis, that European man by this time was both an extreme rationalist and an extreme irrationalist. Denying the Christian God, and yet placing unreasonable demands upon Science, the skeptic had turned into a "materialist magician" (29). This is not as paradoxical as it seems, for Solovyov would attempt to recapture what Plato and Aristotle meant by form, substance, and essence. Much European philosophy and science, however, had denied the concept of essence for a stricter materialist position (science moreso than philosophy). The reason for this materialism was tied to the role of alchemy. They wanted to bend, shape, and transform matter (and since humans were simply matter, they could remake them, too). This is the scene on which Solovyov wrote: men were highly skeptical and highly superstitious.

Solovyov's Philosophy:
Solovyov was one of the early proponents of "Sophiology." Sophia, loosely constructed at this point, was the bridge between 1) heaven and earth; 2) the members of the Trinity (e.g., how the Trinity relates to one another), and 3) the relation between the two natures of Christ. (Of course, I am offering a Bulgakovian reading of Solovyov).

Analysis of Solovyov:
While I am definitely sympathetic to Sophiology and consider it a breathtaking move in Trinitarian and theotic discussions, it is hard to consider the early Solovyov orthodox. It would take the later Sergei Bulgakov to give a better reading. Solovyov, in his earlier days, made overtures to paganism and at times appeared to engage in witchcraft and devil-worship. Indeed, it is hard to put a positive spin on his early Kabbalism. However, despite the gnostic-sounding references, Solovyov's "Sophia," whatever else she may be, was certainly no gnostic. She appeared to Solovyov as a very sexual Russian maiden.

Analysis of the book's structure and editorials:
I bought this book thinking that it was a collection of Solovyov's writings that Kornblatt edited. It was that, but it was more of Kornblatt's analysis of Solovyov's writings. There is nothing wrong with that, and Kornblatt did a masterful job, but that wasn't exactly how the book was advertised. Kornblatt, again it must be noted, did a fine job. One quibble: she kept referencing St Maximus the Confessor and St Gregory of Nyssa as "closet gnostics." This simply won't do. Their quasi-divine writings stand in savage contradiction to gnosticism.

Conclusion:
This is definitely a good introduction to Sophiology and Solovyov. However, it needs to be immediately supplemented by Sergei Bulgakov.

--
Jacob Aitken

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a bit difficult to rate a book like this, that is seemilngly the book to read on Solovyov and Sophia, giving us translated parts of his works in the second half of the book, but most of all, a biography and deep dive into his idea of Sophia in the first part. So there is so much good here, but the format of it makes it a bit uneven as it is kind of two in one - giving us the writing of Solovyov that is a bit uneven and could easily have been reduced a bit. It is still great to have these in translation, so great work to bring us them! The first part is really the top of the notch, and really why you want this book for. Especially if you already have read some of the main writings of Solovyov - there is so much to bring you furthere here.

[Peter Barker · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent attempt to try to make Solovyov's various incomprehensible philosophies make sense.