HISTORY OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

HISTORY OF
RUSSIAN
PHILOSOPHY
by

N. O. LOSSKY
Professor of Philo,fJophy
Russian Orthodox Seminary of Neu: York
Formerly Professor of Philosophy
University of St. Petersburg
London
George Allen and Unwin Ltd
RUSKIN BOUSE MUSEUM STREET
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
I. Russian Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century and in
the First Part of the Nineteenth Century 9
II. Slavophils 15
1. I. Kireyevsky 15
2. A. Khomiakov 29
8. K. Aksakov-Y. Samarin 41
III. Westernizers 47
1. P. Chaadaev 47
2. N. Stankevich 51
3. V. Belinsky 5S
4. A. Hertsen 56
IV. Russian Materialists in the Sixties-Nihilism 59
1. M. Bakunin '59
2. N. Chernyshevsky 60
3. D. Pisarev 62
4. I. Sechenov 6 ~
v. Russian Positivists 65
1. P. Lavrov-G. Virubov-E. de Roberty 65
2. N. Mihailovsky 66
8. K. Kavelin-M. Troitsky-N. Kareyev-
N. Korkunov 68
VI. Degeneration of Slavophilism 7 ~
1. N. Danilevsky 7C
2. N. Strakhov-K. Leontiev
7 ~
VII. Precursors of Vladimir Soloviev 7 ~
1. P. Yurkevich-V. Kudriavtsev
7 ~
2. N. Fedorov
7 ~
VIII. Vladimir S. Soloviev 81
IX. Epistemology, Logic and Metaphysics in the Last Quarter
of the Nineteenth Century .
Ig4
I. B. Chicherin IS4
2. N. Debolsky 1 4 ~
3. P. Bakunin 14,4
4. M. Karinsky 145
5. N. Grot 149
x. Princes S. and E. Trubetskoy 150
5
1;8
158
160
161
16S

166
f"'1
6
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
xxv.
XXVI.
XXVII.
CON1'ENTS
The Russian Personalists
. I. A. Kozlov
2. L. Lopatin
3. N. Bugayev-P. Astafiev-E. Bobrov
The Russian Neo-Kantians
1. A. Vvedensky
2. I. Lapshin
The Changing Mentality of Russian Intellectuals in the
Beginning of the Twentieth Century 171
Father Pavel Florensky 176
Father Sergzus BuIgakov 192
N. Berdyaev
The Intuitivists 251
1. N. Lossky 251
2. s. Frank 266
3. A. Losev 292
4. D. Boldyrev-S. Levitsky 296
5. V. Kozhevnikov 297
L. Karsavin 299
Studies in Logic
Transcendental-Logical Idealism in Russia and Its Critic,
V. Ern
I. Representatives of Transcendental-Logical Idealism 318
2. Shestov's Irrationalism 325
3. v. Ern 326
Scientist-Philosophers 829
Jurist-Philosophers 333
Philosophical Ideas of Poet-Symbolists 835
I. Andrei Belyi 335
2. V. Ivanov-N. Minsky
3. D. Merezhovsky 837
4. V. Rozanov
Dialectical Materialism in the U.S.S.R. 345
I. Hegel's Dialectical Method 845
2. Dialectical Materialism
The Influence of E. Mach and R. Avenarius on Marxists 378
Recent Developments in Russian Philosophy 381
I. S. Alexeyev (Askoldov) 381
2. V. Szylkarski 383
3. L. Kobilinsky 384
4. B. Vysheslavtsev 885
5. I. Ilyin 387
6. Father Vassili Zenkovsky 389
7. Father George Florovsky 391
8. V. Lossky
Characteristic Features of Russian Philosophy 402
Index 411
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In these uncertain times it is no easy task t<f publish a long book on
philosophy. I wish, therefore, to express my profound gratitude to all
those who have helped in various ways with the production of this book:
the St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York and its
Dean, Father George Florovsky: Professor B. Bakhmeteff of Columbia
University; Dr. P. Zouboff; Mrs. N. Duddington; Miss H. Iswolsky; and
Professor A. S. Kagan of the International Universities Press, New York.'
N. o. LOSSKY
Chapter 1
RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY IN' THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY AND IN THE FIRST PART
OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The Russian culture of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century has a world-wide significance. Such significance may
be said to attach to a nation's culture when the values developed in it
hold for humanity as a whole. Such was the culture of ancient Greece
and Rome, and, in modern times, of England, France, Germany,
America; Russian culture in the form it had before the Bolshevik
revolution undoubtedly also has a universal significance. To see the
truth of this it is sufficient to recall the !lames of Pushkin, Gogol,
Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky,
Rimsky Korsakov, or the achievements of Russian theatrical art in the
drama, the opera, the ballet. In the realm of science it is enough to
mention the name.- of Lobachevsky, Mendeleyev and Mechnikov. The
beauty, wealth, and subtlety of the Russian language give it an incon-
testable right to be considered one of the world languages. In the
domain of political culture, e.g., in rural and municipal self-government,
law and executive justice, imperial Russia created values which will
prove to have a universal significance when they are sufficiently studied
and understood, and above all, when they are reborn in the postrevo-
lutionary development of the Russian state. For capable of
religious experience it is unquestionable that Orthodoxy in the Russian
form of it contains values of exceptionally high order of excellence;
they can be most easily detected in the aesthetic aspect of the Russian-
.Orthodox worship.
It w.Quld be strange if so high a culture had produced nothing
original in the domain of philosophy. True, according to, Hegel's apt
'remark, owl does not begin to fly till evening dusk, and the
of Russian thought conforms to this rule: Russian philoso-
develop only in the nineteenth century, when the Russian
lstate was years old.
10 R.USSIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH
The Russian people accepted Christianity in 988 and as soon as
the works of the Fathers of the Church began to be translated into
church slavonic language, they got their first introduction to philosophy.
As early as the twelfth century a translation was available of St. John
Damascene's system of theology, the third part of his book 1n\Y11'yvt6aem; ,
under the title The Word About the True Faith. The philosophical
introduction to this book was translated in the fifteenth century, btrt
fragments from it appeared' in Sviatoslav's Izbornik in 1073. In the
fourteenth century the works of Dionysius the Areopagite with com-
mentaries by St. Maxim the Confessor were translated. These books and
also the works of other Eastern Fathers were available in many Russian
monasteries.'
With the help Qf these writings some of the Russian clergy at-
tempted to continue the theological and philosophical work of Byzan-
tium, e.g., the Metropolitan Pyotr Mogila in the seventeenth century
and Bishop Feofan Prokopovich at the beginning of the eighteenth.
Among laymen mention should be made of Grigory Skovoroda (1722-
1794), a moralist who based his doctrine primarily upon the Bible, but
also made use of certain nee-Platonic theories (e.g., in his interpretation
of matter), of Philo, the Fathers of the Church and the German mystics
(in his teaching about the outer and the inner man. the abyss of the
human spirit and of the Divine being, of the "spark" in the heart of
man-a favorite simile of the German mystics.s
The centuries of the Tartar domination and then the isolationism
of the Moscow state prevented the Russian people from becoming
acquainted with Western-European philosophy. Not until Peter the
Great had "cut a window into Europe" was Russian society introduced
to the western culture on a wide scale. The western influence at once
affected the attitude toward the Church. Voltairian freethinking became
widespread the Russian nobility, but on the other h\nd there
appeared a striving to find greater depths in the religious life, to find
the meaning of "the true Christianity" and realize it in practice. In the
first half of the eighteenth century freemasonry appeared in Russia 311d
by the second. half it had become widespread. The chief philosophical
tendencies by which it was influenced were connected with the names
of the French mystic Saint-Martin and the German mystic
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). Saint-Martin's book On Errors and Truth
was published in a Russian translation as early as 1785. There was also
a translation of Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ and of a book
1. The list of them is given in the first volume of Golubinsky's of the
nussian Church. / ' .-_,...
2. G. s. Collectetl.Worlu, Petersburg 1912; Em. G. S. MOl-
row 1912; D. Chlzhevsky, The 01 G. S. SAo11Oroda, Warsaw/t9S4.
AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTUllY II
by a Lutheran theologian Johann Arndt (1555-1621) True Christianit,.
Many translations of Jacob Boehme's works were circulated in manu-
script and some were published.
Freemasons understood true Christianity as the development of
spiritual life, moral self-improvement and active love for one's neighbors,
N. T. Novikov (1744-1818) worked particularly hard in spreading the
iaeas of true Christianity; he published many books, edited
periodicals and organized libraries. II G. Schwarz (1751-1784), a German
who was professor of philosophy at the Moscow University from 1779-
1782, should be mentioned alongside of Novikov. Schwarz was a be-
liever in the Rosicrucian doctrines. and in the lectures which he de-
livered at his house he explained obscure passages in the works of St.
Martin by references to Jacob Boehme's Mysterium Magnum. He main-
tained that God created the world not out of nothing, but out of His
own inner essence. He preached the need for man's moral and spiritual
improvement and denounced political and ecclesiastical abuses and de-
fects of the clergy. His early death saved him from government persecu-
tion. Novikov also denounced the wrongs of the Russian political and
ecclesiastical life, and in 1792 was incarcerated by Catherine II in the
Schliisselburg fortress. Four and a half years later he was liberated by
Paul I, after Catherine's death, but the imprisonment had shattered him
both physically and mentally. In 1790 Catherine the Great exiled to
Siberia another famous critic of the wrongs of Russian life-A. N.
Radlshchev: after her death he too was liberated by Paul 1.
8
.
Radishchev (1749-1802) was a highly cultured man. With eleven
other young men he was sent by the Empress Catherine to the University
of Leipzig to study jurisprudence and other allied subjects. He spent six
years at that university (1766-1772). He was familiar with the social
and philosophical theories of Rousseau, Locke, Montesquieu, Helvetius,
Leibniz, \Ierder. He was opposed to autocracy, and the institution of
serfdom roused his indignation. He expressed his ideas on the subject
most forcibly in his book The Journey from Petersburg to Moscow and
was punished for it by exile to Siberia.
Radishchev's book On Man and His Mortality and Immortality, has
a philosophical significance. It consists of four parts. In the first two the
author expounds materialistic arguments against immortality, intended
to prove that material properties belong to mental processes as well,
that mental life depends upon the body and that, therefore, destruction
5. VI Tukalevsky. "Philosophical Tendencies in the Russian Society of the
Eighteenth Century," Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, May 1911; S. G.
Vemadsky, "Russian Freemasons During the Reign of Catherine II:' Annals th.
Pete1'.fburg Facult, of Arts, 1917; V. Bogolubov, N. Nwi1cO'll QndHil Tima,
Moscow 1916.
12 R.USSIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH
of the body must involve destruction of the mental life also. In the third
and fourth parts he disproves these contentions and shows that the
human soul is "an independent entity, distinct from the body;" it is
"simple, nonextended, and indivisible among all feelings and thoughts."
If it had no such unity "the man at this moment would not know
whether he was the same as he had been the moment before. He wouJs:l
not be the same to-day as he was the day before;" he could not "either
remember, or compare, or reason:"
Radishchev says that Helvetius was wrong in reducing all knowl-
edge to sensuous experience. When I look at an object now with one,
and now with the other eye, I see it every time. If I look at it with both
eyes, I have two impressions, but "although the sensations in my eyes
are two, the sensation-in the soul is one, hence, the sensation of the eyes
is not the same as that of the soul, for what is two in the eyes is one in
the soul." Similarly, when I see a bell, hear it ringing and touch its
hardness, I have three different sensations and nevertheless I "form one
single conception of the bell" (258 f.). Thus, Radishchev clearly saw
the difference between sensuous experience and nonsensuous thought
about the object.
Having arrived at the conclusion that the soul was simple and in-
divisible, Radishchev deduces from it that it was immortal. His reason-
ing is as follows: The purpose of life is the striving after perfection and
bliss. The all-merciful Father did not create us in order that we should
find this rt.-rpose to be a vain dream. It is therefore reasonable to 'sup-
pose that after the destruction of his present body man shall possess
another, a more perfect -one, corresponding to the stage of development
attained by him and that he will go on growing in perfection (298). In
expounding the doctrine of reincarnation Radishchev refers to Leibniz
who compared the transition from one incarnation to another to the
transformation of a hideous caterpillar into a chrysalis and the appear-
ance of a lovely butterfly out of Ute chrysalis (288).&5
Radishchev was opposed to mysticism and therefore did not join
the freemasons. The famous statesman, M. M. Speransky (1772-1889)
was a freemason from 1810 till 1822 when the masonic .movement was
forbidden in Russia. He knew the ~ o r k s of the Western-European
4. Radichev, Collected Works; II, 245, Moscow 1907; I. Lapskin, Radichetf,
Philosophy, 1922.
Editorial Note: Throughout this book, Arabic numerals refer to page references,
while Roman numerals indicate the number of the volume; the words "page" and
"volume" were omitted throughout.
5. See N. Lossky's article "Leibniz's Doctrine of Reincarnation as Metamorphosis,"
Collected Works of the Russian Scientific Institute in Prague, II, 1 9 ~ 1 ; in German:
"Leibniz' Lehre von der Reinkarnation als Metamorphose," Archiv Jilr Geschichtt1
der Philosophie, XI, 1931. I
AND EAllLY NINETEENTH CENTUR.Y 18
mystics-Tauter, Ruysbruck, Jacob Boehme, Pordage, St. John of the
Cross, Molinos, Mme Guyon, Fenelon. He translated into Russian
Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ and selections from Tauler.
The ultimate reality was for him spirit free from space and possessing
unlimited freedom of will. The triune God is in His inmost being an
,byss, "eternal silence." The feminine principle, Sophia or Wisdom, is
the contemplation of the Divine knowledge, the mother of all that
exists outside of God. The Fall of angels and of man gave rise to im-
penetrable matter and to its spatial form. Speransky was in sympathy
with the theory of reincarnation; he says that although it has been
condemned by the Church, it is found in many of the Fathers, e.g., in
Origen, St. Methodius, Pamphilius, Synesius and others. In the domain
of the spiritual Iife he condemned the practice of ,replacing inner fasting
by the outer, spiritual prayer by vain repetition of words. He regarded
fhe worship of the letter of the Bible rather than of the living word of
God as pseudo-Chrisrianity.s
The continuous development of Russian philosophical thought
began in the nineteenth century when the Russian society had passed
through a period of enthusiasm for the German idealism of Kant,
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Schelling's philosophy of nature and
aesthetics was expounded by Professors M. G. Pavlov, D. M. Vellansky,
A. I. Galich, N. I. Nadezhdin. Pavlov (1773-1840) was professor of
physics.. mineralogy and agriculture at the Moscow University. He main-
tained that the main principles of the structure of nature are 'discovered
through intellectual intuition, and experience merely confirms it. He
interpreted intellectual intuition as the self-contemplation of the Abso-
lute. Nadeshdin (1804-1856) was professor of aesthetics at the Moscow
University. He introduced to his students Schelling's doctrine of the
organic creativeness of genius. Vellansky (1774-1847) was
professor of anatomy and physiology in the Petersburg Medico-Surgical
Academy, and Galich (178S-1848) was, from 1805, professor at the
Petersburg Pedagogical Institute reconstituted in 1819 as a University.
In 1821 he was made to resign because "he preferred the godless Kant
to Christ, and Schelling to the Holy Spirit."?
The beginnings of independent philosophical thought in Russia
date back to the Slavophils Ivan Kireyevsky and Khomyakov. Their
philosophy is an attempt to overcome the German type of philosophiz-
ing on the strength of the Russian interpretation of Christianity based
upon the works of the Eastern Fathers and nourished by the national
6. See A. Yelchaninov, "The Mysticism of M. M. Speransky," Theological Re-
view 1906..
7. On the influence of SchelUIlJ see V. Setschkareff, Schellings Einfluss in cUr
ruuisc/aen Literatur dcr 20er und JOer Jahre des 1i.lX. Leipzig 19S9.
If RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH
peculiarities of Russian spiritual life. Neither Kireyevsky nor Khomya-
kov worked out a system of philosophy, but they set out the program
and established the spirit of the philosophical movement which is the
most original and valuable achievement of Russian thought-I mean
the attempt of the Russian thinkers to develop a systematic Cltristian
world conception. Vladimir Soloviev was the first to create a system.of
Christian philosophy in the spirit of Kireyevsky's and Khomyakov's
ideas. He was followed by a whole galaxy of philosophers in the same
line. Religious philosophers include Prince S. N. Trubetskoy, his
brother Prince Eugene Trubetskoy, N. Fyodorov, Father Pavel Floren-
sky, Father Sergius Bulgakov, Ern, N. Berdyaev, N. Lossky, L. P.
Karsavin, S. L. Frank, J. A. Ilyin, Father Vassili Zenkovsky, Father
George Florovsky, V: Vysheslavtsev, N. Arseniev, P. Novgorodtsev, E.
Spektorsky. This movement goes on developing and increasing up to
the present day. Since it began with I. Kireyevsky and .Khomyakov, I
propose to give a detailed account of the life and teachings of these two
men.
Chapter 2
SLAVOPHILS
I. I. V. KIREYEVSKY
Speaking of Russian philosophers, I will make short references to
their social origin and the conditions of their life in order to give an
idea of Russian culture in general. Ivan Kireyevsky was born in Moscow
on 20th March, 1806, the son of a nobleman landowner, and died of
cholera in 51. Petersburg on II th June, 1856. Almost the whole of his
childhood, part of his youth and much of his later life he spent in his
native village Dolbino, near Belev in the Tula province. In the country-
side he received a good home education, firstly under the romantic poet
v. A. Zhukovsky and afterwards from his stepfather, A. A. Elagin, The
extent of his talents may be seen in an ability to play chess excellently
at the age of seven. In 1813 the captive French general, Bonami, "de-
clined to play with him, fearing to lose to a seven-year-old boy; for
several hours he followed with curiosity the play of the boy who easily
beat the other French officers."! At ten years of age he was well ac-
quainted with the best writings in Russian literature and with classic
French literature in the original; by twelve he knew German thoroughly.
He begars to learn Latin and Greek at sixteen in Moscow, but mastered
these languages only in his forties, in order 'to read the Fathers of the
Church in the original so that he might advise and criticize the Russian
translation of St. Maxim the Confessor.
His interest in philosophy began already when he was a lad and
was due to A. A. Elagin, who became acquainted with Schelling's works
in 1819. Attracted by them Elagin began translating his Philosophical
Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1796).
In 1822 all his mother's family moved to Moscow. Here Kireyevsky
heard, among others, the public lectures of Schelling's disciple, Pavlov,
on the philosophy of Schelling.
1. Kireyevs1c.y, Complete Works, 2 vols., edited by Gershenson, I, 4, Moskow 1911.
The reference is to the captive Frenchman of Napoleon's army after the campaign
of 1812"
15
16 SLAVOPHILS
In Moscow he was one of a group of young scholars (Shevyrev,
Pogodin), poets and writers (D. Venevitinov, Prince V. Odoevsky, etc.),
He benefited by the influence of this cultured atmosphere, but himself
produced hardly any literary work. This was chiefly due to the fact that
like many gifted Russians, he was satisfied with the inner life and did
not trouble to express himself either in writing or even in lecturing. For
instance, in correspondence with friends on an offer to become editor of
the paper Muscovite in 1845 he writes that it would be useful to him;
"I need some external and even urgent compulsion to arouse my ac..
tivity."2
Kireyevsky did not have any of the negative traits of character that
impel many people to strenuous external activities-traits such as am-
bition, rivalry, love of dispute, a thirst to expose an opponent's weak
points and triumph over him. His sensitive nature above all sought
peace, calm and love. A monk of Optina Pustyn remarked to C. Leontiev:
"He was all soul and love."? The blows of fate, obstacles to a literary
career did not produce a strong reaction in him but drove him into
himself, into submission to Providence, to that "Master who knows
better than we how the human reason must develop." The central place
in the life of the personality according to his view was the "heart," feel-
ing. Of all feelings and dispositions he preferred sadness; the feeling of
sadness, he thought, gave a particular insight into the meaning and the
richness of life (I, 7).
In 1829 Kireyevsky fell in love with Natalya Petrovna Arbeneva,
and asked for her hand, but, because of a distant relationship between
the two families, he was refused. He was badly shaken by this; "he
spends his life on a couch with coffee and a pipe," says Pogodin.s His
relatives and doctors began to fear a decline. He was sent as a diversion
on a journey abroad, where he spent the year 1830, visiting Berlin,
Dresden and Munich. In Berlin he met Hegel and his followers, Hans
and Michelet, and attended their lectures. In Munich he met Schelling
and Oeken, likewise attending their lectures. Returning to Russia he
began to publish in, 1831 the magazine The European but the magazine
was banned after the second number on account of Kireyevsky's article
"The Nineteenth Century." The reason given for the ban-based on the
words of the Emperor Nicholas I, who had read the articles--was that
the author .alleged that he was not speaking of politics but of literature,
but his intention was something quite different: by "education" he
2. Letters to Zhukovsky (II, 2M), to Khomiakov (II, 231). He wrote the same to
Shevyrev on October 26, 18!1 with reference to the publication of The European.
5. Gershenzon, Historical Notes, 10.
4. Barsukov, The Life and Works 01 Pogodin, II, !UO.
s, Gershenzon, Historical N o t e ! ~ 6.
I. v. 17
neant "freedom" and by "the activity of the reason" he meant "revolu..
ion:' while his artificial middle line was nothing less than constitutional
;ovemment. This astonishing reason sounds like the ravings of a mad-
nan suffering from persecution mania. Kireyevsky might even have
ieen exiled from the capital, had not Zhukovsky defended him. For,
.leven years after this blow Kireyevsky wrote practically nothing.
In 1845 he was co-editor of The Muscovite but soon gave it up as
ie had not received official permission to hold the post. In 1852 the
;lavophils began to publish Moscow Miscellanies but after the first
look this publication was forbidden for "disseminating absurd and
rarmful notions." The .chief reason was Kireyevsky's article "The
:haracter of European Civilization." Kireyevsky himself was placed
under open police surveillance. It is not surpris'ng that this man, who
was conscious of his vocation to serve his country in literature, showed
"signs of secret grief upon his brow." Hertzen, the famous Russian
publicist and emigre who published the revolutionary magazine The
Bell, wrote of Kireyevsky's appearance that it brought to mind "the
melancholy calm of the sea swell over a sunken ship."
When you know the substance of Kireyevsky's teaching and ideals,
you will be surprised that it was possible in this ridiculous manner to
cramp the thought of a noble thinker, whose writings were in no sense
a danger to the social order. You think perhaps that a denial of free
speech such as existed in Russia in the reign of Nicholas I is possible
only under primitive barbaric conditions. But you would be very much
mistaken. Even in western Europe today after an age-long struggle for
freedom, when an apparently high level of culture has been reached,
there are once more harsh persecutions of free speech and thought, for
example, in the Fascist countries. Do not, then, when you hear about
the severities during the reign of Nicholas I, jump to general conclu-
sions about Russian culture, the Russian state and the Russian mind.
While living in the country Kireyevsky prepared in the last years
of his life A Course of Philosophy.. He often went from his estate to
Optina Pustyn; he was bound to the monastery by his close relations
with the Elders, particularly with Father Makary, and also by his
literary work, advising on translating and publishing the Fathers of the
Church. (Optina Pustyn was a monastery in the Kaluga province,
famous for its "Elders." Those who are unacquainted' with Russian
culture can obtain a picture of an Elder from Father Zossima in Dostoev-
sky's Brothers Karamazous
After the death of Nicholas I and the accession of Alexander II the
air breathed freedom. In 1856 in Moscow was founded the magazine
Russian Conversation, edited by Kirejevsky's friend, the Slavophil
18
SLAVOPHILS
Koshelev. There Kireyevsky published an article on "The Possibility
and Necessity of New Principles in Philosophy." The article was in-
tended as an introduction to a large work but actually it was Kireyev-
sky's last. He went to visit his son at St. Petersburg in was taken
ill with cholera and died. He was buried at Optina Pustyn.
Already at the age of twenty-eight Kireyevsky had laid plans (in, a
letter to A. I. Koshelev in 1827) to join his friends in literary work for
the good of his native land. "What can we not do, if we work togetherl"
"We shall restore the right of true religion, we shall reconcile external
refinement with morality, we shall arouse love of truth, we shall re-
place a stupid liberalism with respect for law and we shall raise the
purity of life above the purity of style" (I, 10).
The religion, of' which Kireyevsky speaks at this moment of his
life, was not Orthodoxy. That is clear because seven years later, in
when he married Natalya Petrovna Arbeneva, he was not pleased with
her observing church rites and practices. "She, on the other hand," said
Koshelev, "was grievously surprised by his lack of faith and his. utter
neglect of all the practices of the Orthodox Church." As he respected
her religious feelings, he promised not to scoff in her presence," Not
before 1840 is it possible to speak of his return to the Orthodox Church.
He obviously had retained from his youth some religion, but, it is diffi-
cult to say what it consisted in. Koshelev says that in the Philosophical
Society, of which Kireyevsky was a member, "German philosophy com-
pletely replaced religion in the young men."? .
It is obvious, however, that even at that time the Gospel was the
book which Kireyevsky read most. In 1830, when in Berlin, he asked his
sister to copy out in each letter some text from the Gospels; he wanted
in the first place to give her further occasion to study the Gospels and
in the second place to make her letters "as much as possible flow from
o
the heart" (II, 218).
At the same time he showed an ability to observe those subtle
nuances in the mental life, which are close to mystical experience and
compel us to recognize the presence of deep and intimate bonds be-
tween people and between all beings generally. He wrote to his sister
about his dreams in Berlin: "They are no trifle to me, the best part of
my life has been spent in dreams.... In order that you may know how
to confer a dream, I must teach you to know the qualities of dreams in
Dreams "depend on those to whom they refer" (1830, II, 221).
He expresses an even more striking thought with regard to the
death in war of Count Michael Vyelgorsky: "1 there is the feeling in
6. Koshelev, The Story of Kireyevsky's Conversion, I, 285.
7. Barsukov, The Life and of Pagodin, I, S02.
I. v. KI1lEYEVSK.Y 19
our heart which was part of his inner life as well, obviously our heart
becomes the place where he being not only in ideal but in
actual contact with it" (1855; II, 290). Such thoughts are not the result
of logical inference; they are first suggested to tis by the experience we
have after the death of those we love.
Religion on a philosophical basis, connected with personal mysti--
cal experience went side by side in the young Kireyevsky with a strong
love of Russia and faith in her great destiny. He says that in modem
history there always has been some one State which was, so to speak, the
metropolis of the others; it was the heart from which comes and to
which returns all the blood, all the living forces in the civilization of the
peoples. "Now England and stand at of Euro-
pean civilization; at present they are characterized by the one-sidedness
of maturity." After them, he thinks, will come the turn of Russia, who
will possess herself of all sides of European enlightenment and become
the spiritual leader of Europe.s
Returning from abroad he founded his magazine The European,
the very name of which shows how highly Kireyevsky rated Russia's
task. of assimilating the principles of European enlightenment. In a
letter to Zhukovsky he says that, by getting all the best magazines and
books, "I should like to make my study into the class room of a Euro-
pean university, and my magazine, like the notes of an assiduous stu-
dent, would be useful to those who have neither the time nor the means
to take lessons at first hand" (1831, II, 224).
We must not assume, however, that his journey to Western Europe,
where he met the best minds of that time. enslaved Kireyevsky to
Europe. The culture of Europe impressed him adversely by its
one-sidedness, its narrow rationalism. He valued German scholarship
, highly, ')tet in general Germany struck him as stupid (II, 223; I, 28),
wooden (II, 221) and dense.
Kireyevsky's repugnance to petty rationalism can be seen from a
letter in which he criticizes the lecture of Schleiermacher on the resur-
rection of Jesus Christ. This subject, says Kireyevsky, leads a Christian
philosopher to the summit of his world conception, there, where faith
and philosophy must be shown "ill their antithesis and consequently in
all their fullness and completeness. The necessity of such a confession of
faith is contained in the subject itself. He could not act otherwise, even
if he wanted to; the proof is that he did want to but could not." "It was
as though he wanted to avoid the central idea of his teaching;" "instead
of embracing his subject at once in a single question, he revolved
around it in a series of incomplete, irrelevant questions. He asked, e.g.:
8. A. Rmew 01 Russian Literature for the feat II. 38.
20 SLAVOPHILS
.. Q[ Was there left
in-gim an unnoticeable spark of life? Or was there complete death?
and so on" (I. Sl). Kireyevsky did not doubt that Schleiermacher was a
sincere believer and as his translations from Plato showed, a man of
high intelligence. The superficiality of his lecture is explained by the
that "the convictions of his heart are formed separately from his
intellectual convictions" (I. 82). "He believes with his heart and wants
to believe with his head. His system is like a pagan temple, converted
into a Christian church, where all the externals, every stone, every
adornment, speaks of idolatry, while within are sung hymns to Jesus
and the Mother of God" (I. 32). In these critical considerations we can
already observe the basic principle of Kireyevsky's subsequent thought-
the principle, which He afterwards recognized as the essential virtue of
the Russian cast of mind and character.
That principle is wholeness. Wholeness in the working of the mind
consists in man's effort to bring together "all his different powers;" the
condition of this collectedness is "that he should not regard his abstract
logical capacity as the one and only instrument for the apprehension of
truth; that the voice of ecstatic feeling unco-ordinated with the other
powers of the spirit, should not be looked upon as an unerring indica-
tion of truth; that the promptings of aesthetic thought taken in isola-
tion should not be considered independently of other concepts as a sure
guide to the comprehension of the ultimate nature of the world; [that
even the inner judgment of a more or less purified conscience should
not be accepted in defiance of the other intellectual faculties as the final
judgment of the highest justice];" not even must the ruling love of the
heart be thought of separately from the other claims of the spirit as an
infallible instructor in the achievement of the highest good; man must
constantly seek in the depth of his soul that inner root of understand-
ing, where all the separate faculties unite in one living whole of spiritual
vision.'10
At a high stage of moral development, reason is raised to the level
of "spiritual vision," without which Divine truth cannot be seen (I,
251); thought is lifted up "to a sympathetic agreement with faith" (I,
249); faith (and Revelation) is for thought in this condition "an au-
thority external and internal, the highest reasonableness, enlivening
the mind" I, 250). "Faith is not credulity in other people's assurances."
it is "a real communion with the Divine, with the world above, with
9. The sentence in brackets was struck out by the censor; I conjecture that it
should be inserted here. See I, 287.
10. I, 249. "The Possibility and Necessity of New Principles in Philosophy,"
Ruuion Conversation" 1856.
r, V. KIR.EYEVSKY 21
heaven, with God" (Extracts I, 279). In other words Kireyevsky believes
that. having united into a harmonious whole all his spiritual powers,
"thought, feeling, aesthetic sense, love of the heart, conscience, and a
disinterested will for truth," man acquires a capacity of mystical in-
tuition and contemplation which makes accessible to him superrational
truths about God and His relation to the world. The faith of such.a
man is not a trust in external authority, in the letter of written revela-
tion but "a living and whole vision of the mind."
Kireyevsky finds the germ of such a philosophy in the Fathers of
the Church; the ultimate development of their teaching "responsive to
the present state of science and corresponding to the claims and ques-
tions of the modern mind" would get rid, he says, of "the morbid con..
tradiction between reason and belief, between 'nner convictions and
external life" (Extracts I, 270). Such knowledge must "reconcile faith
and reason," "confirm spiritual truth by its visible supremacy over
natural truth and elevate natural truth by its correct relation to spiritual
truth, and at last bind both truths in one living thought" (Ext. I, 272).
This knowledge based on the full unity of all the spiritual powers,
differs fundamentally from the knowledge elaborated by the abstract
"logical reason divided from the will." True, "the thinking man must
conduct his knowledge through the domain of logic," but he must
"know that this is not the summit of knowledge but only a stepping
stone; knowledge is hyperlogical, where light is not a candle but life.
Here the will grows side by side with thought" (1840, Letter .to Khomya-
kov, I, 67). In such knowledge we arrive at those principles which are
"inexpressible," to that in the soul which is related to the region of
"the unsolved" (I, 67). Obviously, Kireyevsky has in view here the ap-
prehension of the "metalogical" principles of being, lying deeper than
qualitative and quantitative determinations. Such determinations, taken
by themselves would be disunited in space and time and connected only
by external relations expressible in rational concepts. Only the presence
of metalogical principles such as the Absolute or God, in so far as He
creates the world as an integral whole, and such principles as the indi-
vidual substantial ego, creating real existence as its manifestations in
space and time, makes possible intimate internal relations in the world,
the bonds of love, of sympathy, of intuitive insight, mystical experience
and so on. \
The mind which does not see this side of the world, which abstracts
from its content only the rational elements, qualitative and quantita-
tive determinations, relations in time and space, etc., is poor and one-
sided and inevitably gets into a blind-alley. Western-European civiliza-
tion recognizes as the source of knowledge only personal experience and
22
SLAVOPHILS
reason.t! the result is in some thinkers a formal abstractness, i.e., ra-
tionalism, in others an abstract sensuousness: i.e., positivism.
12
In social
life these qualities are expressed in the logical system of Roman Law
but in social and family life it distorts the natural and moral relations
of people (186 "European Civilisation"). In the Roman Church the
rational quality leads to the result that her theologians see the unity of
the Church in "the external unity of the episcopate;" they ascribe "an
essential worth" to "the external actions of man;" among the means of
salvation they admit "a definite term of purgatory;" they work out a
doctrine of "a superabundance of good in external actions" and the
possibility of utilizing this superabundance for the shortcomings of
others" (I, 189). In philosophy the medieval philosophers try to express
the whole system of knowledge in the form of a chain of syllogisms (I,
194); even the originator of modern philosophy, Descartes, "was so
strangely blind to living truth that he did not consider his inner direct
consciousness of his own existence as convincing until he had deduced
it by abstract syllogistic inference.t'P France might have developed an
independent positive philosophy thanks to Pascal and Fenelon, and the
Port-Royal philosophers. Pascal pointed to ways of thought more lofty
than Roman scholastics and rationalist philosophy (the "logic of the
heart," religious experience, etc.), Fenelon defended Madame Guyon
and collected the teachings of the Fathers of the Church about the inner
life. But the Jesuits destroyed this movement. The "cold logic of Bos-
suet" compelled Fenelon "by the authority of the Pope to recant' his
sacred beliefs out of respect to Papal infallibility." What was the re-
sult? France surrendered to "Voltaire's laughter" and to doctrines
destroying religion.t-
Spinoza, formulating his philosophical system in a chain of syl-
logisms, could not find the "living Founder" of the world or !Jetect in
man his "inner freedom" (I, 196). Leibniz, pursuing the connection of
abstract concepts, did not observe the living causal connection between
bodily and mental processes, and had recourse to the theory of the pre-
established harmony. Fichte saw in the external world the phantom of
imagination (I, 197). Hegel developed the whole of his philosophy by
the dialectical method as a system of the logical self-development of
reason; but, carrying that method to its extreme limit, he perceived the
limits of philosophical thought; he observed that the whole dialectical
process "is only a potential, not an actual truth," "demanding for its
realization another kind of thinking capable of positive and not only
11. "The Character of European Civilization," Moscow Miscellanies. I, 177. 1852.
12. An Answer to Khomiakou, I, 111, written in 18!9.
I!. I, 196. Kireyevsky is wrong in thinking cogito ergo sum to be a syllogism.
14. New Principles, I. 231, 18S&..
1. V. klltEYEVSltV
25
of hypothetical comprehension and standing as far above the logical
self-development as actual fact stands above mere possibility" (New
Principles, I, 259). One must observe that Kireyevsky knows how Hegel
defended his philosophy from the accusation of rationalism; he says
that according to Hegel reason "deduces its knowledge through the
laws of intellectual necessity, not from an abstract concept but from the
very source of self-consciousness, where being and thought unite in orfe
unconditional identity" (I, 258). Nevertheless he is right in accusing
Hegel of overemphasizing the logical activity, since Hegel wants to
understand in accordance with the laws of intellectual neces-
sity; on that ground I add for myself that in his system God is not the
Creator of the world and his system is not theism but pantheism.
Schelling at the height of his development unglerstood "the limited
nature of rational thought" (I, 198) and founded a new system of
philosophy, which "unites in itself two opposite aspects," one true and
negative, showing the "insolvency of rational thought," the other posi-
tive and, in Schelling, a failure; it consists in recognizing the necessity
of "Divine Revelation" and "living faith, as the highest form of
reason." But Schelling did not turn directly to Christianity (New
Principles, I, 261). He understood the limitations of Protestantism which
rejected tradition, but he could not turn to the Roman Church which
confused the true tradition with the false. He had with his own powers
"to acquire from the confused Christian tradition that which cor-
responded to his inner understanding of Christian truth; it is a sorry
task to compose one's own faith." He sought in ancient mythology "the
traces of corrupted Revelation" and his philosophy, therefore, differs
from Christianity in the understanding of the most itnportant dogmas,
while in the very method of understanding he did not rise to a "full
consciousness of the believing reason" (I, 260-264), to that condition in
which "he highest truths of the mind, its living visions" are revealed
(I, 178). Accordingly the philosophy of Schelling together with German
philosophy can serve the Russians only as a "convenient stepping stone"
for the transition to an "independent philosophizing" (I, 264), wherein
the Fathers of the Church must serve as a positive support.
Such in fact was the history of Kireyevsky's own development of
thought. His friend, the Slavophil Koshelev, tells us that, having
married in 1834, Kireyevsky gave his wife in the second year of their
marriage some Cousin to read; she obeyed his wishes but said that while
there was much good in the book, in the Fathers of tile Church "all
this is put more profoundly and more satisfyingly." Later they began
to read Schelling together and here too more than once she found
passazes in the Fathers more significant in her opinion. Kireyevsky be.
24
SLAVOPHILS
gan to borrow her books from her in secret and was interested in them.
Afterwards he entered into relations with the monk Philaret, an elder
and skhimnik (hermit) of the Novospassky Monastery. By 1842 Kireyev-
sky had already set his foot firmly within the circle of the ideas of
Orthodoxy.P
Kireyevsky did not regard the philosophy of the Fathers as final,
requiring no further development. Granovsky ascribes to him the
thought that in the Fathers of the Church "there is nothing to add,
everything is said.'?" This is an example of the customary unfairness to
the Slavophils. In his article on the possibility and necesgity of new
principles in philosophy Kireyevsky says that it would be a great mis-
take to think that we have in the Fathers of the Church a ready-made
philosophy; our philosophy has yet to be created-and not by one man.
The attitude of mind found by Kireyevsky in the Eastern Fathers
is "a serene inner wholeness of spirit" as the basis of all conduct and
thought (I, 201). Together with Christianity this type of spiritual cul-
ture was received by the Russian people, whose culture was particularly
high in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (I, 202). Wholeness and
reason are its fundamental traits, while in the West we find dualism and
rationalism (I, 218). This distinction is sharply drawn in a multitude of
instances: First, in the \Vest an abstract rationalist theology, the demon-
stration of truth by a logical concatenation of concepts, in old Russia a
striving after truth "by means of the inner elevation of self-conscious-
ness to a warm-hearted wholeness and concentration of the intellect;"
secondly, in the West a State system founded on violence and conquest,
in old Russia a State system founded on the natural development of the
national life; thirdly, in the West a hostile separation of the classes, in
old Russia their single-minded combination; fourthly, in the West landed
property as the basis of civic relations, in old Russia property o n ~ v as the
accidental expression of personal relations; fifthly, in the West a formal
logical legality, in old Russia a legality derived from life. Generally
speaking, in the West a dualism of spirit, science, state, classes, family
rights and obligations; in Russia a striving for wholeness of the internal
and external mode of life, "a perpetual consciousness of the relation
- of the temporal to the eternal, of the human to the Divine." Such was
the life of old Russia, the traces of which are conserved even now in the
people (Extracts, I, 265).
Having abandoned the search for the infinite and set himself
petty tasks, "Western man is almost always satisfied with his condi-
tion;" he is "ready, to say to himself and to others proudly clapping him-
15. The Story of Kireyevsky's Conversion, I, 285.
16. T. Granovsk.y, A. Stanlcevi,I., 112.
I. V. KIR.EYEVSKY 25
self on the chest, that his conscience is completely at rest, that he is quite
clean before God and man, that he only asks of God that all other men
might be like him:' If he collides with generally accepted principles of
conduct, he thinks out for himself an original system of morality and is
once more at peace." "The Russian on the contrary always feels keenly
his shortcomings and the higher he is on the moral scale, the more he
demands of himself and the less pleased he is with himself" (I, 216).
It must not be supposed that Kireyevsky is an obscurant, recom-
mending Russians to turn their backs on Western-European civiliza-
tion. "The love of European culture," he says, "and the love of our own
coincide in the last point of their development into a single love, a
single tendency to a living, full, pan-human and Christian civiliza-
tion:'11 When they reject one another both cultures become one-
sided.
Is
The task of the creative civilization of the future consists in
this, that the "highest principles" of the Orthodox Church, transcending
European civilization without supplanting it but on the contrary em-
bracing it in their fullness, should give itthe highest meaning and the
final development (I, 222). In his maturity Kireyevsky said "now too I
still love the West," If! belong to it by training, manners and "tastes" (I,
112, letter to Khomiakov). More than that, he valued so highly the
exact scientific methods of Western-European thinkers that in 1839 he
wrote (in answer' to Khomiakov): it would be a good thing if "some
Frenchman were to understand the originality of Christian teaching as
it is contained in our Church and were to write an article about it for
a big magazine, the German would believe him and would study our
Church more profoundly, as something which is necessary now for
Europe, and then doubtless we should believe the Frenchman and Ger-
man and should ourselves come to know what we have" (I, 120). It is
remarkqple that in our time the wish of Kireyevsky is being fulfilled;
in Germany there is a widespread study of Russian culture and Russian
religion, as a result of which there is growing up among Russians them-
selves an interest in the riches of their culture which they had not suffi-
ciently valued in the past.
As is apparent from this survey, Kireyevsky has much to say about
the right method of approaching truth, but he did not work out a sys-
tem of philosophy. He has left only fragments of valuable ideas, which
in part are elaborated in later Russian philosophy, in part await their
elaboration.
At the end of his life, while he prepared a work on the history of
philosophy, he said: "The direction pf philosophy depends in the first
17. A Review of Contemporary Literature, I, 162, 1845.
18. The Character 01 European Civili:.ation, '- 162, 1845; I, 222, 1852.
2ft SLAVOPHILS
place on that concept which we have of the Holy Trinity" (I, 79). This
thought. at first sight paradoxical, acquires profound meaning if we
read such works as Vladimir Soloviev's Lectures on Godmanhood and
The Spiritual Foundations of Life, Father Paul Florensky's Pillar and
Foundation of Truth} Father Sergius Bulgakov's Tragedy of Philosophy,
N. Lossky's Value and Existence. With these works we shall become
acquainted in the later chapters.
Kireyevsky undoubtedly connected the.. idea of consubstantiality,
expressed in the dogma of the Trinity, with the idea that the structure
of the created spiritual world also has the character of immediate inner
unity. "Each moral victory in the inmost depths of one Christian soul,"
he says, "is a spiritual triumph for the whole Christian world" (Extracts,
I, 277); "in the physical world each being lives and is maintained only
by the destruction of others, while in the spiritual world the construction
of each personality constructs all, and each lives by the life of all" (I,
278). He asserts "the spiritual communion of each Christian with the
plenitude of the whole Church" (I, 278). We find in these ideas the con-
ception of sobornost, the commonalty principle, the doctrine of which
was elaborated by Khomiakov. Undoubtedly the communal ideal pre-
sented itself to Kireyevsky as the guiding principle also of the social
order. He says that "the distinctive type of the Russian outlook on every
type of order" is "the combination of personal independence with the
general order as a whole," but the mind of the Western European "does
110t comprise order without uniformity" (1, 76-To C. S. Aksakov,
June 1, 1855).
The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence
and the individual diversity of the citizens, is possible only on the con-
dition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and
in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole, love of the
Church, love of their nation and State, and so on.
From this same understanding of wholeness as sobornost or corn-
monalty springs Kireyevsky's negative attitude to exaggerating the im-
portance of the hierarchy in the Church; of the Theology of Bishop
Makarius he remarks that the Introduction contains a doctrine incom-
patible with our Church "concerning the infallibility of the hierarchy,
as if the Holy Ghost appeared in the hierarchy independently of the
Totality of all Christianity" (1851, To Koshelev, II, 258).
From the same understanding of wholeness as free commonalty
springs Kireyevsky's teaching about the relation of Church and State
which he developed in a letter to Koshelev (Oct.-Nov. 1853, II, 271, 280).
"The State is the organization of society, having as its aim life on earth,
in time; the Church is the o r ~ a n i z a t i o n of the same society, having as its
I. V. KlflEYEVSKY
lim life in heaven, in eternity." The temporal must serve the eternal;
:onsequently the ordering of society by the State must serve the Church
'H, 251). "The hegemony of the Church I do not understand in the
:orm' of an inquisition or of persecution for faith;" it consists in the
State's setting itself the task (1) to become imbued with the spirit of the
Church; and (2) to see in its existence only a means for the fullest and
best establishment of the Church of God on earth" (II, 271). In fact in
.0 far as the state realizes justice, morality, sanctity of the law, the
dignity of man and so on, it serves not temporal but eternal ends. Only
In such a State can freedom of the personality be guaranteed. On the
contrary, a State existing for a petty earthly purpose cannot respect
freedom. Political freedom is a relative and negative concept; if it is
given a substantive and positive meaning, it isbased on respect for
moral freedom and human dignity, on a recognition of lithe sanctity of
the moral person" combined with the sanctity of eternal moral truths.
Such ideas can only have a religious basis. The free and lawful develop-
ment of personality therefore, can be guaranteed only in a State subject
to religious faith (II, 280). The subordination of the State to the Church
may be turned under the excuse of public security into the supremacy
of the State; the priesthood may be converted into a body of officials,
the citizens may be compelled to go to the sacraments, and there may be'
similar limitations of freedom; but these are abuses (II, 274).
,In order to ascertain whether Kireyevsky's thought was significant
or represented a negligible episode in the history of Russian culture, let
us subject his basic idea to a critical examination.
He does not rate highly "abstract logical thought;" for the posses-
sion of truth, he says, it is essential to gather together all one's capacities
into a single whole, logical thought, feeling ("the heart"), aesthetic
sense, t ~ conscience, love. Truth is unfolded only to the whole man;
"the inner root of understanding" is there "where all the separate facul-
ties unite in one living whole vision."
At first sight these expressions may appear empty, even meaningless.
What bearing have feeling and aesthetic sense upon knowledge as a
system of judgments with subjects, predicates, adequate grounds and so
on? Must we not go further and say that the whole man must seize truth
also with his hands, his feet and his mouth?
In answer to that I recall that precisely in contemporary philosophy
many of the most varied thinkers insist on the necessity of developing
Pascal's thought that besides the "logic of the mind" there is a "logic of
the heart." It may be said that there is only one logic, and it is nonsense
to think that there are many logics; I agree, but I still maintain that
Pascal with his insistence on using the :'heart" for knowledge, and
28 SLAVOPHILS
Kireyevsky with his claim to add also the will and indeed all the facul-
ties of man, present a perfectly fair methodological demand and one
very difficult to fulfill. Philosophy sets itself the task to embrace the
world as a whole together with the supercosmical principle. Skill in
dealing with logical forms and relations is not enough to achieve this
end; if we are really to succeed, these forms must be filled with an all-
round meaning, which can be given only by the fullness of experience,
by the use of experience in all its diversity. There is a sensory experi-
ence, of the eyes, the ears, the touch; there is a nonsensory experience
of the soul, self-observation and observation of the psychic life of others;
there is a spiritual experience, the contemplation of ideas, e.g., mathe-
matical ideas; there is an experience of feeling, bringing into the con-
sciousness the value aspect of the world. M. Scheler has developed a
whole theory on the subject that feelings are irreducible to subjective
experiences but in their "intentional" aspect put us in communion with
objective values; he calls his teaching "emotional intuitivism.' One
variety of such an experience of feeling is aesthetic receptivity, leading
to the realm of beauty; then there is moral experience, and, finally, re-
ligious and mystical experience, establishing communion with the King-
dom of the Holy and the Divine.
Contemporary philosophy begins to develop the theory of these
varieties of experience. If experience in all its completeness includes
religious experience,' a philosophy working on the right lines must be
religious and Christian, since indisputably Christianity is the highest
stage of religion achieved by man in the historical process of his de-
velopment.
It was precisely this task of developing a Christian world conception
that Kireyevsky set himself in the middle of the nineteenth century;
now it is recognized by Russian and many European philoss-phers as
the urgent problem of the day.
Kireyevsky, one may say, almost confined himself to setting prob-
lems, pointing the way; he did not develop them. Nevertheless the cor-
rect setting of a problem is already a great service. That Kireyevsky
rendered this service, is to be seen in the fact that in a marvelous way-
almost a century ago he cast a programme, with the development of
which Russian philosophy began to occupy itself thirty years later and
continues to occupy itself with success to this day.
, In fact the task of developing a Christian world conception has
become almost the general theme of Russian philosophy. The most
many-sided attempt to solve it belongs to Vladimir Soloviev; the works
of his youth, The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge and
1'he Critique of Abstract Principles, show that he went the way pointed
A. S. K.HOMlAKOV 29
out by Kireyevsky, the way of overcoming abstract rationalism and
acquiring knowledge through the integral unity of all man's faculties.
The further development of Christian philosophy has been carried on
by the Princes Sergius and Eugene Trubetskoy, .Father Paul Florensky,
Father Sergius BuIgakov, N. Berdiayev, Ern, Lossky, Frank, V. Ivanov,
Merezhkovsky, Alexeyev (Askoldov), Karsavin, Zenkovsky, Florovsky,
Novgorodtsev, I. A. Ilyin, Vysheslavtsev, Spektorsky.
In particular the idea of sobornost or commonalty, so clearly indi-
cated by Kireyevsky, is further elaborated by Khomiakov, Soloviev, the
Trubetskoys and other Russian philosophers.
The doctrine of the Trinity and of consubstantiality is set at the
base of metaphysics by Florensky and Bulgakov; I make use of it for the
purposes not only of metaphysics but also of axiology.
The doctrine of metalogical knowledge as the essential complement
to logical knowledge particularly occupies Florensky, Bulgakov and
Berdiayev; it is developed in the greatest detail and conviction by Frank
in his book The Object of Knowledge. Interest in the metalogical prin-
ciples of existence is closely combined in Russian religious philosophy
with an insistence upon the concreteness and wholeness of existence.
As you see, Kireyevsky's ideas did not die with him. They actually,
as it were, note the programme of Russian philosophy and the fact that
different parts of his programme have been realized by many Russian
philosophers who often were not even acquainted with the works of
Kireyevsky shows that there exists an astonishing superempirical unity
of a nation and that Kireyevsky was a true representative of the inmost
depths of the Russian spirit. That is why I have devoted so much space
to the exposition of his teaching.w

2. A. S. KHOMIAKOV
The immediate successor of Kireyevsky in philosophy was Alexey
Stepanovitch Khomiakov, the most prominent of the Slavophils. Born
on May 1, 1804 he died of cholera on September 23, 1860. Like Kireyev-
sky he came of the class of landed gentry.! His mother, Marie Alexeyevna,
was a Kireyevsky by birth. Khomiakov says that he owed to her his un-
swerving devotion to the Orthodox Church and to the Russian national
spirit. His mother was a woman of great character: her husband lost
19. On I. Kireyevsky see: V. Llaskovsky, Kirtryevslrie, 1899; A. Koyre, La phi/olo-
phie et le probleme national f!n Russie au debut du xix siecle, Paris 1929: I. Smolitseh,
1. Y. Kireoske], Leben und Weltanschauung, Breslau 1934; A. Caats, 1. KireyevJ1c"
Paris 1957; N. Dorn, 1. Kireyevsky; Paris 1938. ~
1. Until the great reforms of Alexander II in the sixties Russian culture was
chiefly represented by the class of the landed gentlY.
SLAVOPHll3
more than a million roubles at cards at the English Club in Moscow;
she took the management of the estates into her hands and restored the
family fortunes. .t\s an expression of her patriotic feelings she built a
church out of her personal savings to commemorate the deliverance of
Russia from Napoleon in 1812.
Khomiakov was deeply religious as a boy; when, at the age of eleven
he was taken to Petersburg he pictured this town as a pagan city and
intended to suffer martyrdom there for the Orthodox faith. At about
the same time he was taking Latin lessons from a French abbe, Boivin;
discovering a misprint in a papal bull, he asked his teacher "how can
}ou believe in the infallibility of the Pope?" Khomiakov was very keen
about the liberation of the Slavs and used to dream of a rebellion
against the Turks. At the age of seventeen he ran away from home in
order to join the Greeks in their struggle for independence but was
caught in the neighborhood of Moscow.
He was educated at the Moscow University and graduated in mathe-
matics in 1822. From 1828 to 1825 he served as an officer in a cavalry
regiment. His commander wrote of him after his death: "He had a
remarkably good education. What beautiful and lofty poetry he wrote!
He never succumbed to the fashion for sensuous poetry. His work is
moral, spiritual and exalted throughout. He was a splendid horseman.
He used to leap over barriers the height of a man. He was excellent at
fencing. When quite young he had the strong will of a man tempered
by experience. He strictly observed all the fasts prescribed by the Ortho-
dox Church and went to all the church services on Sundays and holidays.
There were a good many freethinkers among his comrades and many of
them jeered at church observances saying that they were meant for
the lower orders. But Khomiakov inspired such affection and respect
that no one presumed to mock his faith. When not on duty die never
wore fine cloth and never took advantage of the permission to wear a
tin cuirass instead of the iron one weighing 18 pounds, although he
was short in stature and of slight build. He was a true Spartan in bear-
ing physical pain and hardships.'?
In 1825 Khomiakov retired and went abroad to Paris where he
studied painting and wrote a tragedy, Yermak (Yermak was the leader
of the Kosaks who conquered Siberia in 1582). He went to Italy, Switzer-
land and to the land of the Western Slavs in Austria. In 1828 he joined
a hussar regiment and took part in Russia's war against Turkey. Dur-
ing the war he got to know the life of the Bulgarian people. Khomiakov's
fellow officers said that he was noted for "cold, brilliant courage:' It
2. Count Osten-Saken in the almanach Utro 1866; V. Zavltnevlch, A.. S. Khomi..
koo, I, 101.
A. S. K.HOMIAKOV 81
was remarkable that when going into attack he merely raised his sword
but never struck the enemy as they ran.
When the war was over Khomiakov retired again and took to farm-
ington his estates; the winters he spent in Moscow. In 1847 he went with
his family to Germany and Bohemia. In Berlin he met Schelling and
Neander with a view to find out their interpretation of Christianity but,
as he says, "got nothing out of them." In Prague he met Czech scholars,
Hanka and Safarik and was charmed by them.
Khomiakov's literary heritage consists chiefly of poems, tragedies,
political and religious-philosophical articles. For the last twenty years
of his life he was working at a great book on the philosophy of history
Thoughts on Universal History. His friends jokingly referred to it as
"Semiramis" because Gogol happened to see the ~ a m e ~ f Semiramis in
Khomiakov's manuscript and spread the rumor that it was all about
her,"
His chief philosophical and theological articles are "The Church
Is One" (written in the forties. published after the author's death in
1864) and three pamphlets An Orthodox Christian on Western Denomi-
nations, published in French in Paris in 1853 and in Leipzig in 1855 and
1858 under the name of Ignotus: "The Pamphlet of Mr. Lorancey:"
"The Message of the Archbishop of Paris:" "Certain Romanist and
Protestant Writings." In Russia they were only allowed to be printed
in 1879, though the Emperor Nicholas I had himself read the first
pamphlet and approved of it.
4
Khomiakov was a man of great versatility. M. Pogodin, a Russian
historian, says of him that like Pico Mirandola he could hold disputes
de omni re scibili. He studied theology, philosophy, history, theory of
language (he compiled a dictionary of Russian words akin to the
Sanskrite He Vias a successful farmer and had a number of other practi-
cal abilities; he invented some sort of steam engine and sent it to be
exhibited in London, taking out a patent for it (he had called it a
"silent mover" but when the model was completed, it appeared that it
"screeched dreadfully"); he invented a long range rifle, was extremely
fond of horses and dogs and a good judge of them.
As opposed to Kireyevsky, Khomiakov had a passion for arguing.
He completely crushed his opponents by his brilliant dialectic and
enormous knowledge. He had an excellent memory. In a theological
dispute with Kireyevsky, Khomiakov referred to a passage in the writ-
ings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem which he had read fifteen years before in
the library of the monastery Troitskaya Lavra and which were not to
!. Khomiakov, Completed works, 8 vols.
4. Khomiakov, WorAs" 5rd ed., II, 90.
SLAVOPHILS
be found anywhere else. Kireyevsky doubted the accuracy of the quota-
tion and said jokingly, "You like to make quotations that cannot be
verified." Khomiakov replied that it was on page 12 or 18, in the middle
of the page. The reference was verified later on arid proved to be cor-
rect.s
Khomiakov liked to emphasize his love of everything Russian by
wearing a beard and dressing in the old Russian style.
Like Kireyevsky's, Khomiakov's leading idea is the concreteness and
wholeness of reality. In his two articles about Kireyevsky, Khomiakov
entirely agrees with the latter's condemnation of the formal, dry and
rationalistic character of European culture and with his contention that
ancient Russian culture was inspired by the ideals of reason and whole-
ness (I, 199).
He regarded the philosophy of Hegel as the culminating point of
rationalism, and said that his logic "ascribed spirit to abstractions:'
Hegel, he said, takes "the formula of a fact to be the cause of it" and
thought that "the earth turned round the sun not because of the
struggle of opposing forces but owing to the mathematical formula of
the ellipse.l" Hegel wants to deduce everything from the development of
the thought-i.e., from the laws of thinking-forgetting that "a concept
is that which is conceived by the conceiving mind," that the object con-
ceived precedes the concept and the conceiving subject transcends it;
the laws of thought cannot therefore be taken to be the laws of "spirit
as a whole"T (I, 295).
In order to know objects in their living reality, the subject must
go beyond himself and transfer himself into the object "through the
moral power of sincere love" (I, 272). Thus enlarging his life by another
life he acquires "living knowledge," not cut off from reality but inter-
penetrated by it. Being "inward" and "immediate," living ktfbwledge
differs from mediate cognition as much as the actual vision of light by
a man who can see differs from the knowledge of the laws of light by one
born blind (I, 279).
No "living truth" and especially no Divine truth can be fitted into
the framework of logical understanding (II, 247). It is an object of faith,
not in the sense of subjective certainty but in the sense of immediate
givenness (I, 279, 282). In spite of its being metalogical, faith does not
5. Quoted by V. Zavitnevich, 6. 6. I, 37, 144, 267.
7. Like many other philosophers Khorniakov wrongly interprets Hegel's system
as abstract panlogism (see N. Lossky's article Hegel als lntuitiuist , Blatter fur Deutsche
Philosophic, IX, 1, 19)5. In truth Hegel's philosophy is concrete ideal-realism (see
I. A. Ilyin's book The Philosophy of Hegel as a Concrete Theory of God and Matt,
1917). Hegel's terminology, however, shows that he was not sufficiently conscious of
concrete entities and consequently, underestimated such aspects of reality as force,
individual personal existence, etc.
A. S. KHOMIAKOV ss
c ~ n t r a d i c t understanding (II, 247); indeed, it is necessary that the in-
finite wealth "of data acquired through its insight" should be analyzed
by understanding (I, 282). Only where a harmony of faith and under-
standing is achieved is there "a wholeness of reason" (I, 279, 827). By
the word "faith" Khomiakov obviously means intuition; i.e., the faculty
of immediately cognizing actual living reality, things in themselves. Tqe
word "faith" has been used in this sense in the German philosophy by
Jacobi before Khomiakov, and in the Russian by Vladimir- Soloviev
after him.
Living knowledge gives us knowledge of that which lies at the
basis of existence-force. At the lower levels of reality it manifests itself
in the form of material processes and at the higher, in the spiritual
world, force is free will conjoined with reason. Fbrce cannot be appre-
hended through the understanding because it is not an object; it belongs
to the pre-objective realm. In other words, it is a metalogical principle
(I, 276, S25, 847).
Man is a finite being endowed with rational will and moral free-
dom. Freedom means the freedom of choice between the love of God
and selfishness, in other words, between righteousness and sin. This
choice determines the ultimate relation of finite reason to its eternal
source; i.e., God. But the whole world of finite minds, the whole creation
is in the state of sin, either actually or potentially, having been saved
from it solely by the absence of temptation and by the grace of God (II,
216). In so far as the creature is sinful, it is subject to law, but God has
come down to the creature and showed it the way of liberty and salva-
tion from sin: He entered the historical process as the God-man, He
became "in Christ a limited being" who nevertheless "by the sole power
of His human will realized all the fullness of Divine righteousness."
This is lliThy the God-man Jesus Christ is the supreme judge of the sinful
creature, the bearer of "the righteousness of the eternal Father," awaken-
ing in man the full consciousness of his guilt, but at the same time He
is "the infinite love of the Father." "He unites Himself to every creature
that does not reject Him" (II, 216) and every being that has recourse to
Him and loves His truth is included by Him within His Body the
Church.
These general positions contain the germ of the metaphysical sys-
tem that has subsequently been worked out in detail in Russian philoso-
phy. Khomiakov barely indicated its main principles, yet, starting with
them, it is easy to grasp' the essence of his doctrines about the Church
which form the most valuable part of his theological and philosophic
reflections. He works out the conception of the Church as a truly organic
whole) as a Body the head of which is Jesus Christ. Those who love
SLAVOPHILS
Christ and God's truth belong to the Church and become members of
the Body of Christ. In the Church they find a new, fuller and 'more
perfect life than they would have had apart from it. In order to under-
stand this, we must remember that the Church is an organic whole
spiritualized by OUf Lord Himself. "A grain of sand, it is true, does not
receive any new life from the heap upon which it had, by chance, been
blown." "But every particle of matter assimilated by a living body be-
comes a part of the organism and receives new life and new meaning
It om it: this is the case of man in the Church, in the Body of Christ, the
organic basis of Which is Love." Christ saves mankind not only because
of His atoning sacrifice but because by accepting a sinner who loves
Him into His Body, He unites Himself to him inwardly and allows him
to share in His perfection (II, 112, 217).
Since all the faithful have in common their love for Christ as the
bearer of perfect truth and righteousness, the Church is the unity of
many persons, but a unity in which the freedom of each individual is
preserved. This is possible only because this unity is based upon disin-
terested, self-renouncing love. Those who love Christ and His Church
renounce all self-conceit, all proud claims of solitary understanding and
acquire that rational vision of faith which makes manifest to us the
meaning of the great truths of the Revelation.
A loving union with the Church is a necessary condiuon of under-
standing the truths of faith, because the complete truth belongs only to
the Church as a whole. "Ignorance and sin are the inevitable portion of
every person taken in isolation: fullness of understanding as well as
spotless holiness belong only to the unity of all the members of the
Church" (II, 58).
Such is the paradoxical but nevertheless true conclusion arrived at
by Khomiakov. We must begin by loving "with one's heart" the com-
pleteness of truth and righteousness of Christ and the Church, 'and then
our eyes will be opened and we shall possess "reason in its entirety"
which comprehends superrational principles and their connection with
the rational aspects of existence. Freedom of the faithful is preserved
because in the Church Ulan finds "himself, but not himself in the im..
potence of his spiritual isolation but in the power of his spiritual
wholehearted union with his brethren and His Saviour. In the Church he
finds himself in his perfection, Of, rather, he finds in it that which is per-
fect in himself-namely, the Divine inspiration which is always evaporat-
ing in the coarse impurity of every isolated personal life. This purifica-
tion takes place through the invincible power of the Christians' mutual
love in Jesus Christ, for that love is the Holy Spirit" (II, 111).
Not obedience to external authority but commonalty (sobornost)
A. S. KHuMIAKOV
55
is the basic principle of the Church. Sobornost is the free unity of the
members of the Church in their common understanding of truth and
finding salvation together-a unity based upon their unanimous love
for Christ and Divine righteousness (II, 59, 192; I, 83). "Christianity is
nothing else than freedom in Christ" (II, 192). Those who love God's
truth and find it in Christ and His Church, freely and joyfully accept it,
and this rrea res unity. "Cod is freedom for all pure beings. He is law for
the unregenerated man: He is necessity for demons only" (II, 212).
Hence it is clear that our true connection with the Church is bound to
be free: "In matters of faith a unity by compulsion is a lie, and enforced
obedience is death" (II, 192).
The principle of commonalty implies that ~ h e absolute bearer of
truth in the Church is not the patriarch who has supreme authority, not
the clergy, and not even the ecumenical council, but only the Church
as a whole. "There have been heretical councils," says Khomiakov; "for
instance, those in which a half-Arian creed was drawn up; externally,
they differed in no way from the ecumenical councils-but why were
they rejected? Solely because their decisions were not recognized by the
whole body of the faithful as the voice of the Church." Khomiakov is
referring here to the epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs to Pope Pius IX
(1848), which says: "The invincible truth and immutable certainty of
the Christian dogma does not depend upon the hierarchs of the Church;
it is preserved by the whole of the people composing the Church which
is the body of Chr ist" (A letter to Palmer, October II, 1850. II, 363).
In using the word "Church" Khomiakov always means the Ortho-
dox Church: being the Body of Christ, the Church is bound to be one.
Catholicism and Protestantism have departed from the fundamental
principles of the Church not through distortions of the truth by private
individjeals but as a matter of principle, and he therefore does not
apply the term "church" to t hern but speaks of Romanisrn, Papism,
Latinism, Protestantism, etc. But this by no rneans implies that he be-
lieves the Orthodox Church has realized all the fullness of truth on
earth. 'Thus he speaks, for instance, about our clergy having a tendency
towards "spiritual despot ism," He rejoices that the Ort hodox Church
preserves in its depths the true ideal . but "in reality," he says, "there has
never been a single nation, a single state or country in the world"
which has realized to the full the principles of Christianity (1,212).
He carefully disproves any false accusations against the Orthodox
Church. Thus he shows, for instance, that the Russian Orthodox
Church is not headed by the Emperor. "It is true:' he says, "the expres-
sion the head of the local church has been used in the Laws of the
Empire but in a totally different sense than it is interpreted in other
SLAVOPl-IILS
countries" (II, 351). The Russian Emperor has no rights of priesthood,
he has no claims to infallibility or "to any authority in matters of faith
or even of church discipline." He signs the decisions of the Holy Synod,
but this right of proclaiming laws and putting them into execution is
not the same as the right to formulate ecclesiastical laws. The Tsar has
influence with regard to the appointment of bishops and members of the
Synod, but it should be observed that such dependence upon secular
power is frequently met with in many Catholic countries as well. In
some of the Protestant states it is even greater (II, 36-38, 208).
Although Khomiakov regarded Orthodoxy as the one true Church
he was in no sense a fanatic. He did not believe that extra ecclesiam
nulla salus (there is no salvation outside the church) in the sense that
every Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Buddhist, etc., is doomed to
perdition. "The mysterious bonds that unite the earthly Church with
the rest of mankind are not revealed to us; therefore we have neither
the right nor the inclination to suppose that all who remain outside the
visible Church will be severely condemned, especially as such a supposi-
tion would contradict the Divine mercy" (II, 220). "In confessing one
baptism, as the beginning of all the sacraments we do not reject the
other six;" but in addition to the seven, "there are nlany other sacra-
ments; for every work done in faith, hope and love is inspired by the
spirit of God and evokes God's invisible grace" (II, 14). "He who loved
truth and righteousness and defended the weak against the strong, who
fought against corruption, tortures and slavery, is a Christian, if only
to some extent; he who did his best to improve the life of the workers
and to brighten the wretched lot of the classes oppressed by poverty
whom we cannot as yet make quite happy, is a Christian, if only in part."
"Apart from Christ and without love for Christ man cannot be saved,
but what is meant here is not the historical appearance of C'.rist, as
Our Lord Himself tells us (II, 160, 220): Whosoever speaketh a word
against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh
against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this
world, neither in the world to come" (Matt. XII. 32). "Christ is not
only a fact, He is a law, He is the realized idea; and therefore a man
who, by the dispensation of Providence has never heard about the
Righteous One who was crucified in Judea, luay yet be worshipping the
essence of OUf Saviour though he cannot name Him or bless His
Divine name. I-Ie who loves righteousness loves Christ: he whose heart
is open to love and compassion is His disciple though he does not him-
self know it. All Christian sects contain men who in spite of their
mistaken beliefs (for the most part inherited) honor with their whole
life: with their thoughts, wares and deeds Him who died for the sake
A. S. KHOMlAKOV 57
of His criminal brethren. All of them, from the idolater to the sec-
tarian, are more or less in darkness; but all see in the gloom some
glimmering rays of the eternal light which reaches them in various
ways" (II, 221).
In his criticism of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism Khomia-
k.ov takes for his starting point the principle of sobornost or commonalty;
namely, the combination of unity and freedom based upon the love of
God and His truth and the mutual love of all who love God. In Catholi-
cism he finds unity without freedom and in Protestantism freedom
without unity. In these denominations only an external unity and an
external freedom are realized.
The legal Iorrnalism and logical rationalisrn of the Roman Catholic
Church have their roots in the Roman State. T'hbse features developed
in it more strongly than ever when the Western Church without consent
of the Eastern introduced into the Nicean Creed the filioque clause.
Such arbitrary change of the creed is an expression of pride and lack of
love for one's brethren in the faith. "In order not to be regarded as a
schism by the Church, Romanism was forced to ascribe to the bishop of
Rome absolute infallibility." In this way Catholicism broke away from
the Church as a whole and became an organization based upon external
authority. Its unity is similar to the unity of the state: it is not super-
rational but rationalistic and legally formal. Rationalism has led to the
doctrine of the works of superarogation, established a balance of duties
and merits between God and man, weighing in the scales sins and
prayers, trespasses and deeds of expiation; it adopted the idea of trans-
ferring one person's debts or credits to another and legalized the ex-
change of assumed merits; in short, it introduced into the sanctuary of
faith the mechanism of a banking house. R0111an Catholicism rationalizes
even ths sacrament of the Eucharist: it interprets spiritual action as
purely material and debases the sacrament to such an extent that it
becomes in its view a kind of atomistic miracle. The Orthodox Church
has no metaphysical theory of T'ranssubstantiation, and there is no need
of such a theory. Christ is the Lord of the elements and it is in His
power to do so that "every thing, without in the least changing its physi-
cal substance" could become His Body. "Christ's Body in the Eucharist
is not physical flesh."
The rationalism of Catholicism which established unity without
freedom gave rise, as a reaction againstit, to another form of ra tionalism
-Protestantism which realizes freedom without unity. The Bible, in
itself a lifeless book, subjectively interpreted by every individual be-
liever, is the basis of the Protestants' religious life. This is the reason
why "Protestants have not that serenity, that perfect certainty of pos-
SLAVOPHILS
sessing the word of God which is given by faith alone." It attaches too
much importance to the historical study of the Scriptures. It is a matter
of vital importance to them whether the Epistle to the Romans was
written by Paul or not. This means that Protestantism regards the
Scriptures as an infallible authority, and at the same time as an au-
thoriry external to man.
The attitude of the Orthodox Church to the Scriptures is different:
"It regards the Scriptures as its own testimony and looks upon them as
an inward fact in its own life." "Suppose it were proved today that the
Epistle to the Romans was not written by Paul; the Church would say
'it is from me' and the very next day the epistle would be read aloud in
all the churches as before, and the Christians would listen to it with the
joyful attention of faith; for we know whose testimony alone is incon-
trovertible."
Khomiakov regards the Protestants' rejection of prayers for the
dead, of the worship of the Saints and of the value of good works as the
expression of utilitarian rationalism which fails to see the organic
wholeness of the visible and the invisible Church.
The defects of Roman Catholicism and of Protestantism spring, he
thinks, from the same psychological source: fear, the fear of one to lose
the unity of the Church and the fear of the others to lose their freedom.
Doth think of heavenly things in earthly terms: "<There is bound to be
schism if there is no central po\\-er to decide on questions of dogma:
says the Roman Catholic; 'there is bound to be intellectual slavery if
everyone considers himself bound to remain in agreement with others,'
says the protestant."
Khomiakov describes the difference between the three Christian
denominations as follows:
Three voices are heard more distinctly than others in Europe:
"Obey and believe my decrees," says Rome.
"Be free and try to create some sort of faith for yourself," says
Protestantism.
And the Church calls to the faithful:
"Let us love one another that we may with one accord confess the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost."
What is particularly valuable in Khomiakov's religious and philo-
sophical writings is his emphasis upon the indissoluble union between
love and freedom: Christianity is the religion of love and therefore it
presupposes freedom. The dogmas of the Church are inviolable, as is
clear to everyone who understands the conditions of the Church's life,'
but in matters of "opinion" Khomtakov freely seeks for new ways. UI
often permit myself," he says in a letter to Aksakov, "to disagree with
A. S. KHOMIAKOV
so-called opinions of the Church." It is not surprising that soon after
Khomiakov's death the reactionary paper Moscow News called him a
teacher of heresy..
Khomiakov's views on the historical development of mankind and
on social life are closely connected with his religious philosophy. In his
Notes on Universal History ("Semiramis") he reduces the whole historl-
cal process to the struggle of two principles-the Aryan and the Cushite..
The Aryan principle is spiritual worship of the "freely creating spirit,"
the Cushite principle (the horne of which is Ethiopia) is subjection to
matter, lito the organic necessity determining its products through
inevitable logical laws." The Aryan principle in religion is lofty mono-
theism, the highest expression of which is Christianity. The Cushite
principle in religion is pantheism without a morally determined deity.
The struggle of these two principles in history is the struggle between
freedom and necessity.
The realization of Christian ideals in the historical development
of Western Europe is hindered by their rationalistic distortion and by
the proud conceit of her peoples. Russia received Christianity from
Byzantium in its "purity and wholeness," free from one-sided rational-
ism. The Russian people's humility, their piety and love of the ideal of
holiness, their liking for communal organization in the form of the
village commune and the ariel, based upon the duty of mutual help,
give grounds to hope that Russia will go further than Europe in realiz-
ing social justice and, in particular, will find ~ ' a y s of reconciling the
interests of capital and labor.
Khomiakov attached the greatest value to the Russian village
commune, the mir with its meetings that passed unanimous decisions
and its traditional justice in accordance with custom, conscience, and
inner trij th.
In Russian industriallife the ariel was the parallel of the commune.
In the Law Code an ariel was defined as a company formed for carrying
on certain work or trade by the personal labor of its members, at com-
mon expense and on joint responsibility (X, 1). Khomiakov's follower,
Samarin, thought: that the ancient Russian social and communal life
was an embodiment of the principle of sobornost,
The aristocratic regime of warlike nations was foreign to the Slavs,
an agricultural people, says Khomiakov. "We shall always remain demo-
crats, standing for purely human ideals and blessing every tribe to live
and develop in peace in its own way." Most of all Khomiakov hated
slavery: "Demoralization is one of the chief punishments of slavery.
Speaking relatively, the slaveowner is always more demoralized than
the slave: a Christian may be a slave but Iqust not be a slaveowner." In
SLAVOPHILS
this passage Khomiakov is referring, atnong other things, to serfdom in
Russia, insisting on the necessity of abolishing it (this was done six
years later, in 1861).
In contradistinction to Kireyevsky and K. Aksakov, Khomiakov
does not slur over the evils of the Russian life but severely condemns
them. At the beginning of the Crimean War (against Turkey, France
and England, 1854-1855) he denounced with the fire and inspiration of
a prophet, the Russia of his day (before the great reforms of Alexander
II) and called her to repentance.
Western Europe has failed to embody the Christian ideal of the
wholeness of life through overemphasizing logical knowledge and ra..
tionality; Russia has so far failed to embody it because complete, all..
embracing truth from its very nature develops slowly, and also because
the Russian people have given too little attention to working out
logical knowledge, which must be combined with the superlogical
understanding of reality. Nevertheless Khomiakov believes in the great
mission of the Russian people when it comes fully to recognize and
express "all the spiritual forces and principles that lie at the basis of
the Holy Orthodox Russia." "Russia is called to stand at the forefront
of universal culture; history gives her the right to do so because of the
completeness and manysidedness of her guiding principles; such a right
given to a nation imposes a duty upon everyone of its members."
Russia's ideal vocation is not to be the richest or most powerful country
but to become "the most Christian of all human societies." -
In spite of Khomiakov's, and Kireyevsky's, critical attitude toward
Western Europe it remained for them the treasure house of spiritual
values; Khomiakov speaks of it in one of his poems as "the land of holy
miracles." He was particularly fond of England. The best things in her
social and political life were due, he thought, to the right balance being
maintained between liberalism and conservatism. The conservatives
stood for the organic force of the national life developing from its
original sources while the liberals stood for the personal, individual
force, for analytical, critical reason.. The balance between these two
forces in England has never yet been destroyed because "every liberal
is a bit of a conservative at bottom because he is English." In England,
as in Russia, the people have kept their religion and distrust analytical
reason. But Protestant skepticism is undermining the balance between
the organic and the analytic forces, and this is a menace to England in
the future. In Russia the balance between these forces was disturbed by
the hasty reforms of Peter the Great.
Khomiakov had genuine affection for other Slav races. He con-
sidered them inclined by nature to a communal and democratic or-
K. AKSAKOV-Y. SAMARIN
41
ganization. He hoped that all the Slavs, liberated with the help of
Russia, will form a steadfast union.
The most valuable and fruitful of Khomiakov's ideas is his con-
ception of sobornost. Sobornost means the combination of freedom and
unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same
absolute values. This idea may be applied to the solution of many diffi-
cult problems of social life. Khomiakov indicated its application to the
Church and the commune, In analyzing the essence of Christianity he
put in the foreground the indissoluble connection we find in it between
love and freedom: Christianity is a religion of love, consequently it is
the religion of freedom.
A complete understanding of the connection between love and

freedom, requires a. fully worked out system of metaphysics-a theory

about the ontological structure of personality and of the world, about
the final ideal, the connection between God and the world, etc. Khomia-
kov did not develop these theories. This work was done much later by
Vladimir Solovyov who may be regarded as the first Russian thinker to
have created an original system of philosophy."
3. K. AKSAKOV-Y. SA1vIARIN
After an exposition of Ivan Kireyevsky's and Khomiakov's philo-
sophical theories, a few words should be said about K. S. Aksakov and
Yuri Samarin tb give an idea of the older Slavophils' political views.
Konstantin Aksakov was the son of Sergei Timofeyevich Aksakov,
the author of the famous Family Chronicles He was born on March 29,
1817 and died December 7, 1860. He spent the first nine years of his life
at the Aksakov's country place, described in the Chronicles under the
name o ~ Bagrovo. After 1826 he lived almost all the time in Moscow
with his parents to whom he was devoted, especially to his father. Be-
tween 1832 to 1835 he was a student at the Moscow University in the
Faculty of Arts. From 1833 to 1840 he belonged to Stankevich's circle
from which the so-called "Westernizing" movement originated. He was
greatly influenced by Stankevich and Belinsky, and enthusiastically
8. On Khomiakov see: v. Zavitnevich, A. S. Khomiakou, 2 vols., 190!, 1918; E.
Skobtsova, ~ . Khomiakov, Paris, Y.M.C.A. Press, 1929; N. Zernov, Three Russian
Prophets: Khomiakoo, Dostoevsky, Solouieo, 1937; A. Gratiaux, A. S. Khomiakou, et le
mouvement slauophil, Paris, 1939 (in French); P. Baron, Un Theologien laie orthodox
TWIt! au XIX s.: Alexis S. Khomiakou, Rome, Ponrif. Institutum Orient. Studiorum,
1940; S. Bolshakoft, The Doctrine of the Unity of the Church in the Works of Khomia..
kou and Moehler, London, 1946; N. Berdyaev, A. Khomiakou (in English).
l. Translated into English by Duff as The R,":sian Gentleman and The Russia"
School-boy, Clarendon Press.
42
SLAVOPHILS
studied German philosophy, especially Hegel's. After Stankevich's death
(1840) the members of his circle became increasingly critical of condi-
tions in Russia. Aksakov became intimate with Khomiakov, Kireyevsky
and Samarin, who were close to him in spirit, and parted company with
Belinsky. Aksakov was of passionate temperament, straightforward and
fanatically devoted to his ideas; one day he said to Belinsky that owing
to the difference in their opinions he could no longer visit him. The
breach was painful to both; they kissed each other with tears in their
eyes and parted forever. It should be noted that Belinsky too was
fanatically intolerant; he used to say about himself HI am a Jew by
nature, I can't be friends with the Philistines." In his love for the Rus-
sian people and their ways, K. Aksakov was the first to begin wearing top
boots and the Russian shirt and to grow a long beard; in 1848 the
police ordered him to shave it off.
The historian of Russia. S. Soloviev, who was very good at sharply
summing up people's character, said of K. Aksakov "a powerful creature,
loud-voiced, frank, kind-hearted, gifted, but dull-witted." Aksakov was
of athletic build; Pogodin nick-named him a pecheneg (a nomad of the
steppes), but at the same time there was in him to the end of his life
something childish, infantile; he was a virgin. always lived with his
parents, adored his father. Sergei Timofeyevitch Aksakov died on April
30, 1859; his son Konstantin grieved for him so much that he went into
consumption and died on December 7, 1860 at the isle of Zante in the
Greek Archipelago.
K.. Aksakov's literary and scholarly activities were many: He trans-
lated Schiller and Goethe, whose humanism filled him with admiration.
He wrote poems on patriotic and political subjects (e.g., in praise of free
speech), a drama The Liberation of Moscow in 1612, a play Oleg at
Constantinople} a comedy Prince Lupovitsky in 1856. He also wrote
If'
critical essays. He studied Russian history and philology. In 1840 he
published his master thesis Lomonosov in the History of Russian Litera-
ture and Russian Language. His chief historical works are The Manners
and Customs of Ancient Slavs in General and of Russian Slavs in Par-
ticular (1852); The Hero Warriors of Prince Vladimir, written in 1853,
but owing to censorship restrictions published later; articles about "the
basic principles of Russian history."
In his historical works K. Aksakov argues against the views of
Evers and S. Soloviev that at the beginning of Russian history the social
unit was a kinship group; he says that the clan should not be confused
with the family. The development of the clan life interfered with the
family and the state. The social structure characteristic of the Slavs, and
of the Russian Slavs in particular, combines strongly developed family
K.. AKSAKOV-Y. SAMARIN
45
life not with a clannish or patriarchal system, but with a communal
political order based upon the will of the people. In the case of Russian
Slavs this can be seen in the way the state was founded by calling in the
Varangians, in the institution of the Veche (City Assembly in the Middle
Ages) and later of the Zemski Sobors (Estates General).
The Russian people, according to K. Aksakov, sharply distinguish
between land and state. "Land" means the commune; it lives in ac-
cordance with the inner moral. law and prefers the way of peace, in
keeping with Christ's teachings. But the presence of warlike neighbors
forced the people at last to build up a state. For this purpose the Rus-
sians called in the Varangians and separating the "land' from the state
entrusted political power to the elected sovereign. The state lives in
accordance with external law: it creates external }ules of behavior and
makes use of compulsion. The predominance of external righteousness
over the inward is characteristic of Western Europe, where the state
arose through conquest. In Russia, on the contrary, the state arose
owing to the people voluntarily calling in the Varangians. Hence there
is in Russia a union between "the land" and the state. "The land" has
a consultative voice, the power of "public opinion," but the power of
taking final decisions belongs to the sovereign (e.g., the relation between
the Zemski Sobors and the Tsars in the Moscow period). The reforms of
Peter the Great disturbed this ideal order. Aksakov began by extolling
Peter the Great as the liberator of the Russians "from national exclu-
siveness" but afterwards he came to hate his reforms (see, e.g., his poem
UTo Peter" in Rus 1881), though he was still opposed to national ex-
clusiveness. He thought the Russian nation superior to all others pre-
cisely because the universally human principles were more developed in
it, and it was characterized by a "Christianly human spirit." The West-
ern natjons suffered from national exclusiveness, or, as a reaction against
it, from cosmopolitanism; i.e., a denial of the national principle, which
also is an error.
K. Aksakov idealized Russian history beyond all bounds and said
that it is "a universal confession" and "can be read as one reads the
lives of the saints." The humility of the Russian people finds expression
in the fact that they ascribe their every victory and achievement not to
themselves, but to God, glorifying Him by special church services, pro-
cessions, building of churches, instead of erecting monuments to the
nation and its great men. K. Aksakov's hatred of Western Europe was
as passionate as his love of Russia. Kireyevsky and Khomiakov, though
they pointed out the defects of the Western civilization, were aware of
its achievements; they loved it and insisted upon the necessity of
synthesizing the valuable elements of the Western and the Russian
SLAVOPHILS
spirit. K. Aksakov saw only the dark side of the \Vestern civilization:
violence, hostility, erroneous faith (Catholicism and Protestantism).
tendency toward theatrical effects, "debility."
Aksakov thought that the basis of the high morality of the Russian
life was to be found in the peasantry unspoiled by civilization. He ex-
pressed this idea most vividly in his comedy Prince Lupooitsk, The
prince who always lives in Paris and is an admirer of the Western-Euro-
pean culture decides that he ought to go to his estate in Russia in order
to enlighten the peasants and bestow upon them "the pleasures of civili-
zation." Thus, for instance, he says to his friends: "A Russian peasant
if he wants to help a beggar gives him a copeck in the street; that's crude;
in Western Europe they organize charity balls and concerts, and dis-
tribute the proceeds to the needy." The prince goes to his country place
in Russia and begins by calling his bailiff Anton and talking to him.
He advises him, among other things, to organize in the village a charity
country dance with small money contributions for the poor. Anton
answers that money for the poor is collected in the church, and that if
a dance is organized, the money will be given not for God's sake but for
the sake of amusement. When the prince suggests providing the peasants
with books of various kinds, the bailiff replies that they do occasionally
read very good religious books, but there are few of them in the village.
and that if the prince buys them those kinds of books, that will certainly
be very useful. The prince is particularly interested to know how the
village meeting will deal with the question of providing a recruit for
the army. It is proposed at the meeting to send for a soldier a young
man called Andrey, an orphan, but a much respected peasant inter-
cedes for him, saying that as an orphan he ought to be protected by the
whole commune against injustice. The bailiff Anton has many sons, but
all the villagers are fond of Anton and do not want to grieve him, So the
village meeting 'finds a solution which pleased everyone though it means
a financial burden for the community: It is decided to buy a "recruit's
license" for 800 silver roubles. Aksakov strives to show that the peasants
have a religiously moral outlook, thanks to the Orthodox faith, and in
social matters they aim at justice, trying to satisfy both the interests of
the commune as a whole and of each individual member of it.
s. Vengerov, in his critical study of Aksakov, comes to the conclu-
sion that the qualities which Aksakov praised so highly and ascribed to
the Russian people might be described as "democratic altruism" and
that he was a preacher of "mystical democratism."
K. Aksakov was against the idea of limiting the autocratic power of
the Tsar, but at the same time he championed the spiritual freedom of
the individual. On the accession of Alexander II to the throne in 1855
I.. AI.SAK.OV-Y. SAMARJN
Aksakov submitted to him. through Count Bludov, a report "On the
Inner Condition of Russia." In it he reproached the Government for
suppressing the people's moral freedom and following the path of
despotism which has led to the nation's moral degradation. He pointed
out that this might popularize the idea of political freedom and create
a striving to attain it by revolutionary means. '1'0 avoid these dangers he
advised the Tsars to allow freedom of thought and of speech and to re-
establish the practice of calling Zemski Sobors.
A study of the philosophical and political theories of the older
Slavophils-I. Kireyevsky, Khomiakov, K. Aksakov and Y. Samarin-
shows that it is profoundly unjust to accuse them, as is often done, of
being political reactionaries. They were all convinced democrats and
considered Slavs, and especially Russians, as particularly adapted for
embodying democratic principles in life. True, they defended autocracy
and did not set much value on political freedom. In this respect they
sharply differed from the Westernizers who wanted the political de-
velopment of Russia to follow the same path as that of Western Europe.
The Slavophil doctrine certainly did contain the three principles pro-
claimed by Count Uvarov, a reactionary minister of Public Education
(1833-1849) under Nicolas I, to be the foundations of Russia's life:
Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality. But the older Slavophils interpreted
those ideas in a peculiar and by no means reactionary sense. A Russian
historian, Miliukov, a Westernizer and an impartial scholar, definitely
maintains that the older Slavophils were not at all reactionary. He says
that Orthodoxy meant for them a free community of spiritual Chris-
tians. They defended autocracy because they regarded the state as a
dead and purely external form, merely serving to secure for the people
the possibility of devoting themselves to the search of "the inner truth."
For this 'Purpose they demanded civic liberties-freedom of conscience,
freedom of speech, freedom of the press. The nation was in their view
not "a passive material for governmental measures, but an active force
developing in accordance with its own inner laws; its freedom of self-
determination might be violated but cannot be destroyed:'
It is not surprising that the censorship was suspicious of the Slavo-
phils and prevented them from freely expressing their ideas in the press.
This was the reason, Miliukov thinks, why the Slavophils could not
clearly define in print the difference between their doctrines and the
reactionary views of the professors Shevyryov and Pogodin. Gershenson
in his book Historical Notes makes it abundantly clear how unjust was
the westernizers' interpretation of the older Slavophils' ideals.
Yuri Fyodorovitch Samarin (1819-1876), the son of a Kammerher,
was a student in the faculty of Arts of the Moscow University from 1834
SLAVOPHILS
to 18SS. After writing his dissertation on "Stefan Yavorsky and Feofan
Prokopovich," Samarin began the study of Hegel's philosophy and was
so taken up with it that he wanted to give up his former work, saying
that "the Orthodox Church cannot exist outside of Hegel's philosophy."
As early as 1844, however, Khomiakov cured him of his enthusiasm for
Hegel and drew him to the Slavophil ideas.
Samarin's life was devoted to political and social activities. He took
part in working out the conditions for the liberation of the serfs and
waged a hard struggle against the claims of the Germans in the Baltic
provinces. At the end of his life, in 1876, while staying in Berlin he
became acquainted with Max Miiller's theories of the origin of religion
and wrote two articles against them, published in German. A Russian
version of them is to be found in volume VI of his works, edited by his
son, D. Samarin. In those articles and in a letter to his brother Samarin
says: "At the core of the conception of God lies the immediate percep-
tion of His action upon every human being-the primary form and the
precondition of His further revelation;" hence, the basis of religion is
"personal experience" (485, 505). This gives rise to the idea of Provi-
dence, of the moral vocation and personal duty of each individual.
Providence so orders the events of every man's life that they have a
bearing upon his calling. "Only if there is such a relation between that
which a man ought to be and that which happens to him does each
human life form a reasonable whole" (507).
The protest raised by Samarin, a dilettante, against a famous
scholar is particularly interesting because Samarin's conception of the
origin of religion is a truly scientific solution of the problem, while the
theories of Spencer, Max MUller, Taylor and others, prevalent in the
nineteenth century, are typically pseudoscientific. According to those
theories religion in its early stages is polytheistic, and the trar..sition to
monotheism is slow and gradual. In 1898 Andrew Lang in his book
The Making of Religion} and after him Wilhelm Schmidt in the book
Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, have shown, on the strength of ethno-
graphical research, that the religion of the most primitive tribes is
monotheism. They have thus laid a firm foundation for a scientific solu-
tioil of the problem. Indeed, if God, the Creator of the world and of
man, exists, it is natural to think that the source of religion is religious
experience which in its deep and pure form leads to the conception of
the One Supreme Being, and that only as the life of mankind becomes
more complex is this idea supplemented by various presentations that
distort it.
Chapter 3
WESTERNIZERS
1. P. CHAADAEV
In the history of Russian philosophy and of Russian
political thought it is usual sharply to contrast two mutually opposed
tendencies represented by the Slavophils and the Westernizers. The
Slavophils strove to work out a Christian world conception, basing it on
the teaching of the Eastern Fathers of the Church and on Orthodoxy
in the particular form given to it by the Russian people. They im-
moderately idealized Russia's political past and Russian national charac-
ter. They highly valued the specific peculiarities of Russian culture and
insisted that Russian political and social life had developed and must
go on developing along its own paths, different from those of the West-
ern nations. In their opinion Russia's task in relation to Western
Europe consisted in imparting health to it through the spirit of Ortho-
doxy and Russian social ideals, and in helping Europe to solve its politi-
cal problems, both internal and international, in accordance with
Christian principles.
The Westernizers, on the contrary, believed that Russia had to
learn frgm the West and go through the same process of development.
They wanted Russia to assimilate European science and secular en-
lightenment. They took little interest in religion or, if they were re-
ligions, they did not see the value of Orthodoxy and were inclined to
exaggerate the shortcomings of the Russian Church. With regard to
social problems some of them greatly valued political freedom and
others supported socialism in one form or another.
Some historians of Russian culture believe that these two opposed
tendencies have been preserved to this day under different names and
in different forms. It should be noted that some Westernizers passed
through several stages i.l their development and, either at the beginning
or at the end of their life, considerably departed from the typical
Westernizers' standpoint. The first thinker to be discussed in the present
chapter, Chaadaev, affords a clear instance f> this.
47
48 WESTERNIZERS
Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794-1856), the son of a wealthy
landowner, studied at the Moscow University, but left it before graduat-
ing and went into the army. He took part in the war of 1812 and in the
foreign campaigns that followed it. In 1820 when he was an officer in a
Hussar regiment of the Guards he was sent to the Congress at Troppau
to report to Alexander I on the mutiny in the Semyonovsky regiment.
A few months after this, in 1821, he resigned his commission. Conflicting
rumors as to what had passed between Alexander I and Chaadaev at
Troppau and why he left the army are discussed in detail in Quenet's
book Tchaadaev (54-72). From 1823 to 1826 he lived abroad and there-
lore did not take part in the Decembrist revolt. At Karlsbad he met
Schelling with whom he kept up a correspondence. In France he met
Lamennais.
At the end of 1829 Chaadaev began writing in French a treatise
entitled Philosophical Letters. This work, consisting of eight letters,
was finished in 1831. The letters are ostensibly addressed to a lady who
is supposed to have asked Chaadaev's advice on the ordering of her
spiritual life. In the first letter Chaadaev advises the lady to observe the
ordinances of the Church as a spiritual exercise in obedience. Strict
observance of church customs and regulations may only be dispensed
with, he says, when "beliefs of a higher order have been attained, rais-
ing our spirit to the source of all certainty;" such beliefs must not be in
contradiction to the "beliefs of the people." Chaadaev recommends a
well-regulated life as favorable to spiritual development and praises
Western Europe where "the ideas of duty, justice, law, order" are part
of the people's flesh and blood and are, as he puts it, not the psychology,
but the physiology of the West, He evidently has in mind the discipli-
nary influence of the Roman Catholic Church. As to Russia, Chaadaev
is extremely critical of it. Russia, in his opinion, is neither the West nor
the East. "Lonely in the world, we have given nothing to the world,
have taught it nothing; we have not contributed one idea to the mass
of human ideas." "If we had not spread ourselves from Behring Straits
to Oder, we would never have been noticed:' We do not, as it were,
.. form part of the human organism and exist "solely in order to give
humanity some important lesson."
This first "Philosophic l ..euer," dated December 1, 1829, was pub-
lished in 1836 in the magazine Telescope. The censor who allowed it
to be printed was dismissed from his post, the magazine was suppressed,
and the editor, Professor Nadeshdin was exiled to Ust-Sysolsk and then
to Vologda, whence he returned in 1838. Chaadaev was declared by the
Emperor Nicolas I to be mad; for a year he was a prisoner in his own
house under medical and police supervision. The censors were ordered
P. CHAADAEV 49
not to pass any critical comments on Chaadaev's Letter. It was reprinted
only in 1906 in the magazine Voprosi Filosofii i Psihologii and in
Chaadaev's collected works, edited by Gershenson. Chaadaev's other
Letters have been recently discovered by Prince -D. Shahovskoy and the
second, third, fourth, fifth and eighth were published in in the
Llteraturnoe Nasledstuo, XXII-XXIV. The sixth and the seventh letters
were not printed, probably because in them Chaadaev speaks of the
beneficial influence of the Church; fanatical atheists who rule U.S.S.R.
would regard those letters as "opium for the people."
Chaadaev's philosophical outlook had a strongly marked religious
character. He says that in order to combine "the ideas of truth and of
goodness" one must thoroughly assimilate "the truths of the Revela-
tion." It is best to rely on those not infrequent raoments when, under
the influence of religious feeling, "we fancy that we have lost our per-
sonal power and are involuntarily drawn toward the good by some
higher power which draws us away from the earth and raises us to
heaven:" then "the highest truths of all will flow into our heart of them-
selves" (Letter II, 27).
Two forces are active in our life: one force is "imperfect" and
within us, another, "perfect," outside us, and from it we receive "the
ideas of goodness, duty, virtue, law" (III, 31). They are handed down
from generation to generation, thanks to the unbroken succession of
minds which form one universal consciousness. "There is no doubt,"
Chaadaev writes, "the totality of all beings forms an absolute unity;"
"it is a fact of enormous importance,' "but it has nothing in common
with the kind of pantheism proposed by most modern philosophers"
(V, 46). "As nature is one, so-yin Pascal's imaginative phrase-the whole
succession of human generations is one man who abides eternally" (49).
separates man to some extent from the cosmic unity. Time
and space are forms in which, in consequence of this separation, the
external world appears to us (III, f.), Similarly, there are no quanti-
ties in reality: U Absolute units exist in the mind only" (IV, 38). In reading
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Chaadaev scratched out the title and
wrote instead "Apologete adamitischer Vernunjt:" He evidently meant
that Kant expounded the doctrine not of pure reason but of reason
distorted by sin.
The Christian teaching demands that we should attain "the re-
generation of our being;" "it consists in the abolition of our old nature,
and the birth in us of a new man, created by Christ" (III, 30). "The
wonderful interpretation of life brought to the earth by the Founder
of Christianity; the spirit of self-renunciation; abhorrence of division;
passionate longing for unity; this is what.keeps Christians pure under
50 WESTERNIZERS
any circumstances. This is how the idea, revealed from above, is pre-
served, and through it there is accomplished the great work of merging
the souls and the different moral forces in the world into one soul, 'one
force. Such mergence is all that Christianity is intended for:' The attain-
ment of it is "the Kingdom of God," "the realized moral law" (VIII,
62). "Christianity was established without the help of any book." "The
basis of Christianity is not a book, but Christ Himself" (60). The dogma
of the real presence of Christ's body in the Eucharist "is particularly
important:' It may serve perhaps "as a means of uniting different
Christian denominations" (62).
Serfdom aroused Chaadaev's indignation Illore than anything. His
attitude to monarchy was expressed in a proclamation which he wrote
in 1848 at the time 'Jf revolutions in Europe and hid inside a book in
his library. In this proclamation, written in would-be peasant language,
he expresses joy at the fact that the peoples have risen against their
sovereigns. It ends with the words "We don't want any King except the
King of heaven" (Liter. Nasi. XXII-XIV, 680).
Chaadaev's negative attitude to Russia, expressed so sharply in his
first "Philosophical Letter" became less pronounced under the influence
of Prince Odoevsky and other friends. In 1837 he wrote "A Madman's
Apology" which was published in Paris after his death by a Russian
Jesuit, Prince Gagarin in the book Oeuvres choisies de P. Chaadaie],
1862. Chaadaev came to the conclusion that the sterility of the Russian
historical past is, in a sense, a virtue: the Russian people, unfettered by
petrified forms of life, have freedom of spirit for carrying out a great
task in the future. The Orthodox Church has preserved the essence of
Christianity in its original purity; Orthodoxy can therefore vivify the
body of the Catholic Church which is too much mechanized. The voca..
tion of Russia is to bring about the final religious synthesis. 'Y,hen Rus-
sia, having assimilated all that is of value in Western Europe, begins to
realize her God-given mission, she wi ll be the center of intellectual
Europe.
It must not be supposed that these ideas occurred to Chaadaev for
the first time in 1836, after the catastrophe that befell him. The French
Revolution of 1830 made him less inclined to idealize the West than he
was when he wrote his "First Letter." In September 1831 he wrote to
Pushkin: Mankind has before it the task of realizing "something like
the political program preached by St. Simon in Paris or like the new
kind of Catholicism which a few daring priests try to put in the place of
the old one, sanctified by time." In a letter to A. I. Turgenev in Novem-
ber 1835-i.e., a year before the publication of the first ULetter"-
Chaadaev answers the question as to who is to accomplish that task:
N. STANKEVICH 51
"We need not trouble about the ups and downs of the West, for we are
not of the West.;' "If only Russia understood her mission, she ought to
take the initiative in putting all generous ideas into practice, for she is
free from Europe's ties, passions, ideas and interests." "Russia is too
great to pursue a national policy; her task in the world is the politics
of mankind; the Emperor Alexander understood this beautifully and
that is his greatest glory.. Providence has made us too strong to be selfish,
it has put us beyond national interests and entrusted to us the interests
of humanity; all our thoughts in life, science and art must start from
this and culminate in this; in this lies our progress and our future."
"This will be the logical result of our long solitude: all great things
came from the desert" (Lit. Nasi. XXII-XIV, 16 f.). These ideas of
Chaadaev's which bring him close to the Slavopliils were expressed by
him before the Slavophils had worked out their theory.'
2. N. Si'ANKEVICH
The rise of the "Westernizing" movement in the strict sense is con-
nected with the activity of Stankevich's "circle." It was formed in 1 8 ~ 1
when N. V. Stankevich became a student at the Moscow University, and
consisted chiefly of his fellow students. Hertsen and Ogaryov, who were
also Westernizers, had at that period a circle of their own. Stankevich's
circle included Belinsky, K. Aksakov, the poet Koltsov, the poet Lermon-
tOY, M. Bakunin (from 1835), V. Botkin, Katkov, Granovsky, Kavelin.
Their main interests were philosophy, poetry and music, At first they
enthusiastically studied the philosophy of Schelling, and after 1835 took
up Hegel. In poetry their attention was centered upon Goethe, Schiller,
Hoffmann and especially Shakespeare, and in music upon Beethoven
and Sciiubert. The 'moving spirit of the circle was Stankevich who at-
tracted everyone by his remarkable intelligence, kindness, and his courte-
ous and unaffected manner. Not all the members of the circle became
Westernizersj and probably Stankevich himself would not have remained
one wholeheartedly had not early death from consumption cut short his
spiritual development.
Nikolay Vladimirovich Stankevich (1813-1840) was the son of a
rich landowner in the province of Voronesh. In his student years in
Moscow (1831-1834) he lived in the family of Professor Pavlov. Pavlov
introduced him to Schelling's philosophy of nature, and Professor
Nadezhdin to Schelling's aesthetics. Having begun to study the philoso-
1. Chaadaev's Works and Letters, 2 vols, edited by Gershenson, 1915-14; ~ I .
Gershenson, P. T. Chaadaeo: Life and Thoughts, j908; Charles Quenet, Tchaadaeu et
It'S Lettres Philosophiques, Paris 1931; E. Moskoff, Chaadaeu (in English).
52 WESTERNIZEIlS
phy of Hegel, Stankevich went abroad and in 18S8-1889 attended pri-
vate lectures in Hegel's Logic by Professor Werder in Berlin. Stankevich
published very little. Some idea of his philosophic views may be gathered
from his letters and from the reminiscences of his contemporaries. P. V.
Annenkov published his correspondence and wrote his biography.' In
a letter to M. Bakunin, Stankevich says that the whole of nature is one
single organism evolving toward reason (596). Love is the feeling that
lies at the basis of nature. He regarded woman as a sacred being. It is
not for nothing, he says, that the Virgin and Mother is the fundamental
symbol of our religion (592). In a letter to Miss L. A. Bakunin a propos
of self-education he advises her "not to try crushing out one's defects
one by one; it is to notice their common source, the lack of love,
and to think not of one's imperfection, but of what is beautiful in the
world" (512).
When philosophy recombines that which it has broken up into
elements, it becomes poetry (610). In other words, Stankevich thinks that
philosophy discovers the truth about the real concrete being, and this
being is the living personal spirit; otherwise, as he puts it, we should
have to regard as concrete such things as railways, while actually they
are only means to real being He writes to Granovsky: "Remember
that contemplation is necessary for the development of 'thought ... a
thing can be fully grasped only through general living feeling" (187).
The study of Hegel convinced Stankevich that his conception of the
cosmic process as the development of the Absolute idea is not abstract
panlogism; i.e., not a theory of the dialectical self-movement of im-
personal abstract notions. He detected that in Hegel the bearer of ab-
stract notions always is in the last resort the spirit as a concrete living
person.
Both in Germany and in other countries Hegel's philosophy has
often been interpreted as abstract panlogism. The fact that Stankevich
interpreted it as concrete ideal-realism is an expression of the general
tendency of Russian philosophy toward concreteness, It is significant
that one of the best works on Hegel is that by a Russian philosopher
I. A. Ilyin, The Philosophy of Hegel As a Concrete Doctrine of God and
Man (1918). N. Lossky's article "Hegel As an Intuitivist" is devoted to
the same subject.t
Stankevich was not a convert to Hegel's philosophy. Observing that
Hegel denied personal immortality. he wrote to Bakunin: His philoso-
1. N. V. Stankevich, Corretpondence and Biography, written by P. V. Annenkov,
Moscow 1858. This book is the source of my information about Stankevich's philo-
sophical ideas.
2. Proceedings 01 the Scientific Institute in Belgrade, IX, 1955; "Hegel
ala Intuitivist," euu far Deutsche Fhilosophie, IX, 1.
v. BELINSKY
55
phy now "blows cold on me" (624). There is no doubt that in his
further intellectual evolution Stankevich would have worked out an
original system of Christian philosophy and not have been a typical
Westernizer like Belinsky and Hertsen,
8. V. BELINSKY
Vissarion Grigoryevitch Belinsky (1811-1848) was a gifted literary
critic. While a student at the Moscow University he joined Stankevich's
circle. In it he became acquainted with Schelling's philosophy of nature;
in 1836, under M. Bakunin's influence, he was for a short time interested
in the philosophy of Fichte, and then through and Bakunin
became an enthusiastic Hegelian and remained so from 1837 to 1840.
The way he used Hegel's philosophy in his critical articles may be seen
for instance from his argument about poetry in his article "On Woe
From Wit," "Poetry is truth in the form of contemplation;" hence,
"poetry is the same as philosophy;" it is concerned with absolute truth,
though not in the form of "the dialectical development of the idea out
of itself, but in the form of the immediate manifestation of the idea in
an image."
In 18S9 Belinsky moved from Moscow to Petersburg and began
working for Kzaevich's magazine Otechestuenniya Zapiski. In that year
he published in the magazine three articles on the lines of "reconcilia-
tion with reality," "The Anniversary of Borodino," about the German
critic Menzel and about Griboyedov's Woe Front Wit. He makes use in
them of Hegel's idea that "everything real is rational" and "everything
rational is real." Extolling autocracy, Belinsky writes "with us the Gov-
ernment was always in advance of the people." Monarchic power "al-
ways atted in mysterious accord with the will of Providence-with
rational reality" ("The Anniversary of Borodino"), "A man serves his
Tsar and country from a lofty conception of his duty toward them,
from the desire to be a means for truth and goodness, from the conscious-
ness of being a part of society, of his physical and spiritual kinship with
it-this is the world of reality" COn Woe from Wit").
Belinsky was bitterly attacked for these articles by the opponents
of autocracy. Living in Petersburg he came to know better the reac-
tionary nature of Nicolas I's regime. In June 1841 in a letter to Botkin
he speaks sharply not only against autocracy but against monarchy in
general.
"Reconciliation with reality" expressed in his articles in 18S9
should not be interpreted as a misunderstanding of Hegel's theory.
People with a superficial knowledge Hegel imagine that Hegel
54 WESTERNIZERS
equates "reality" with every empirical fact. It would then have to be
supposed that, e.g., the army punishment of beating a soldier to death,
practiced under Nicolas I, was ureal" and therefore rational. But in
Hegel's complex philosophical system not everything that is present in
the world is called real. Hegel distinguishes three levels of being:
reality, appearance, and semblance; i.e., something like the Hindu
Maya (Wirklichkeit, Erscheinung und Schein).
Belinsky did not know German, but he acquired his knowledge of
Hegel from such experts as Stankevich and M. Bakunin and so he
knew what Hegel meant by "reality." This can be seen from the follow-
ing statement of his: "Reason in consciousness and reason in appear-
ance, in short, the spirit manifesting itself to itself, is reality; whereas
everything particular, accidental, irrational is a phantom as opposed
to reality, and is its negation, a semblance and not being. A man eats,
drinks, dresses himself-all this is the realm of phantoms, since his spirit
has no part in it" ("On Woe Wrom Hlit"). In the same article Belinsky
writes: "Society is always more right than the individual and superior
to him." So little did he value personality at that period of his activity.
Belinsky finally rejected Hegel's philosophy only when he came to
recognize the supreme value of the individual. In a letter to Botkin in
1841 he says: "In Hegel the subject is not an. end in himself, but a
means for a momentary expression of the universal, and that universal
is a kind of Moloch in relation to the subject, for after parading about
in him (in the subject) for a time, it flings him away like a pair of old
trousers:' "Thank you very much, Yegor Fyodorovichs-i-I salute your
philosopher's night-cap, but with all proper respect for your philistine
philosophy, I have the honor to report to you that even if I did succeed
in climbing to the topmost rung of the ladder of evolution, I would ask
you from there to account to me for all victims of accidents, zupersti-
tion, Philip II's Inquisition, etc., etc.; otherwise I will dash myself head
downwards from the topmost rung. I do not want happiness even if it
is given me unless I feel reassured about each of my brothers by blood
-bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," "the destiny of the subject, of
the individual, the person, is more important than the destinies of the
whole world and the health of the Chinese emperor (i.e., of Hegel's
Universality). "4
In 1841 Belinsky was introduced to the French socialism of St.
Simon and Leroux, and by 1848 socialism was for him "the idea of
ideas." The "frantic Vissarion," as he was nicknamed for his passionate
5. A Russianized form of H e K e l ' ~ Christian name.
4. I. Billig, Der Zusammenbrurh des deutschcn ldealismus be; den russischen
Romantikern (Bjelenski, M. Bakumin), Berlin 1930.
55
wrote to Botkin: "I am beginning to love humanity in Marat's style: to
render the smallest fraction of it happy, I believe I could exterminate
the rest of it by fire and sword."5
In 1843-44 one of Belinsky's friends translated for him Feuerbach's
Essence of Christianity which greatly appealed to him. Soviet writers
maintain that at the end of his life Belinsky adopted under Feuerbach's
influence, the standpoint of "anthropological materialism."6 But since
they are directed by the Soviet Government to find as many materialists
as possible among the representatives of the Western-European and
Russian culture, one cannot take their word for it; they consider even
such a philosopher as Spinoza a materialist. Belinsky's writings do not
show that he became a materialist, though it is t r u ~ that during the last
years of his life he completely ceased to refer to the supersensuous bases
of the world's being. In February 1847 he wrote to Botkin: "To the
devil with metaphysics, that word means the supernatural and therefore
an absurdity;" it is necessary "to free science from the phantoms of
transcendentalism and theology." In the article CIA Survey of Russian
Literature," written in 1846 he says: "Psychology not based upon physi-
ology is as invalid as a physiology that knows nothing about the exist..
ence of anatomy." These words about the connection of mental life
with physiological processes Inay be interpreted in several different ways,
having nothing to do with materialism. Indeed, in the same article
Belinsky writes: "The highest in man is his spirituality-i.e., feeling,
reason, will-which express his eternal, abiding and necessary essence."
"When someone you love dies, there does not die with him that which
was best and noblest in him, what you called in him moral and spiritual
-only the accidental, the crudely-material has died." "What is per-
sonalitjs The more clearly I contemplate within myself the essence of
personality, the less I know how to define it in words."
It may also be questioned whether Belinsky really became an
atheist at the end of his life. In a letter to Gogol apropos of his book
Correspondence With Friends, Belinsky speaks most unfavorably about
the Russian Orthodox Church and maintains that the Russian people
"by nature are profoundly atheistic." In France, he says, many who have
renounced Christianity still obstinately cling to some "sort of God" (15.
VII. 1847). But six months after that letter, in the article "Survey of
Russian Literature in 1847," written shortly before his death, he speaks
as follows: "The Redeemer of mankind came into the world for the
sake of all men:' "He-the Son of God, humanly loved men and had
5. Belinsky, Letters, II, 244-247,
6. See M. Iovchuk, Belinski, His Philosopllical'and Social Views} Gosuld. izd. 1939.
56
WF..SIEltNIZERS
compassion for them in their destitution, filth, shame, depravity, vices
and crimes." "It was not in vain that the Divine word of love and
brotherhood was spoken in the world."
In the course of his short but active life Belinsky often changed his
philosophical views, and each of them profoundly affected his writings
as a critic and publicist. He has, however, done nothing to further the
development of philosophy as such, and I have spoken of him at such
length only because he exercised great influence upon Russian culture
as a remarkable literary critic endowed with fine aesthetic taste.
Another Westernizer to exercise great influence upon Russian
political thought and the revolutionary movement was A. I. Hertsen.
4. A. HERTSEN
Alexander Ivanovich Hertsen (1812-1870) was an illegitimate son
of a rich Russian landowner Yakovlev and a German girl Luise Haag
brought by him to Russia from Stuttgart. As a boy of thirteen, during
the coronation of Nicolas I in Moscow after the execution of the De-
cernbrists, standing in the crowd "before the altar defiled by blood-
stained prayers," as he puts it in his Memoirs, he vowed "to avenge the
victims and to devote himself to the struggle against this throne, this
altar and these cannons." Hertsen was a graduate of the Physico-Mathe-
matical Faculty of the Moscow University. As a student he was much
attracted by the socialism of St. Simon, and in 1834 was imprisoned and
afterwards exiled to ,the northeast of Russia where he had to work in a
Government office. In 1842 Hertsen retired, settled in Moscow and de-
voted himself to serious reading and literary work. In 1847 he emigrated
to France. In 1855 he began publishing a magazine Polarnaya Zuezda
(the Polar Star). and then Kolokol (the Bell). Hertsen's on
Russian public life was considerable, but he made no original contribu-
tions to philosophy. The only philosophical things he wrote are essays
on Dilettantism in Science, 1843, Letters on the Study of Nature, 1845,
and Letter To My Son (about freedom of will), 1867.
1
Hertsen's ideology was influenced by St. Simon's socialism, Schiller's
philosophical views, Goethe's works on natural science and afterwards
by the philosophy ofHegel, Feuerbach and finally of Proudhon. Hertsen
was interested not in working out philosophical theories but in applying
them in practice, in the struggle for the freedom and dignity of per-
sonality and for the. realization of social justice.
1. Hertsen, Collected Works, 22 vols., ed. by Lemke, 1920. Hertzen, Selected
Philosophical Works, 2 vols., 1946. In making quotations I shall refer to the
pages in this edition,
A. HERTSEN 57
Lenin characterized Hertsen's ideology as follows: "He went beyond
Hegel, towards materialism, after Feuerbach" ... "Hertsen came right
up to dialectical materialism and stopped short of historical material-
ism. This 'stoppage' was the cause of Hertsen's spiritual collapse after
the revolution of 1848."2 Lenin's words express the typical bolshevik
tendency to regard as a materialist any writer who recognizes the close
connection between mental and bodily processes. In truth, however, one
can only find in Hertsen a negative attitude to religion, to the idea of a
personal God and of personal immortality, but not the classical ma-
terialism according to which mental processes are passive and wholly
dependent upon material processes. Having had a scientific education
Hertsen highly valued the connection between and natural
science, but he maintained that nature should be interpreted not by
the method of "sensuous certainty" only (94), but of "speculative ex-
perience" used by Goethe in his works on natural science (112). Ma-
terialist metaphysicians, says Hertsen, "spoke only about the external
processes; they thought that was all, and they were mistaken: the theory
of sensuous thinking was a kind of mechanical psychology, just as
Newton's view was a mechanical cosmology." "Materialists in general
could never understand the objectivity of reason, ... with them, thought
and existence either fall apart or affect each other externally." Limited
rationalistic thinking leads to "materialism which understands nothing
except substance and body, and therefore does not understand either
substance or body in their true meaning."? "Descartes could never rise
to the idea of life;" the body is for him a machine (239).
Hertsen recognized the presence of objective reason at the basis of
nature and called Hegel's theory that everything real is rational and
everything rational real "a great idea" (78). But he was opposed to the
{al;e of this thesis and attacked those who preached "ac-
ceptance of all the dark side of contemporary life, calling everything
trivial, accidental, outlived, in short everything one comes across, real
and therefore having a right to recognition" (78).
Hertsen was not a materialist either in his youth or at the end of
his life. When his son, a physiologist, gave a lecture in which he argued
that all human and animal activities were reflexes and that conse-
quently there was no free will, Hertsen wrote A Letter To My Son. All
organic expressions, he says, "have a physiological basis, but go beyond
it." "The historical process consists precisely in the constant emancipa-
tion of human personality from one form of slavery after another, one
2. These words serve as the epigraph to L. Piper's book Hertsen's World Con-
ception, Moscow
3. Lectures on the Stud'1 01 Nature/ I, 270, 285f.
58
WESTERNIZER.S
authority after another, until the greatest correspondence is attained
between reason and activity-a correspondence in which man feels free."
"Moral freedom is thus a psychological reality" (II, 281 f.). The con-
ception of freedom developed in this letter is only relative and ap-
parently fitted into a framework of determinism. But a determinist
conception of psychological moral freedom cannot be worked out within
a materialistic system; it presupposes the presence of objective reason
at the basis of nature.
Hertsen sharply criticized the doctrines of the Slavophils, in so far
as they idealized Orthodoxy and supported autocracy; but when, after
the suppression of the revolutionary movement in 1848 he was disap-
pointed with Western Europe and its "petty bourgeois" spirit, he came to
the conclusion that the Russian village commune and the artel hold a
promise of socialism being realized in Russia rather than in any other
country. The village commune meant for him peasant communism.' In
view of this he came to feel that reconciliation with the Slavophils was
possible. In his article "The Moscow Panslavism and Russian European-
ism" (1851) he wrote: Is not socialism "accepted by the Slavophils as it
is by us? It is a bridge on which we can meet and join hands" (I, 338).
Hertsen believed in the future of socialism, but he did not by any
means regard it as a perfect form of social life. In 1849 he wrote: "Social-
ism will develop in all its phases to extremes, to the point of absurdity.
Then once more a shout of protest will break forth from the titanic
heart of the revolutionary minority-and once more there shall begin a
deadly struggle in which socialism will take the place of the present-day
conservatism, and will be overcome by a future, still unknown, revolu-
tion."G
In 1869 Hertsen wrote an article "To an Old Comrade," that is to
M. Bakunin. He says in it that he does not believe "in the oli revolu-
tionary ways" (II, 294) and recommends "a gradual" social development.
This article might well be read at the present day with advantage both
by champions of violent revolutionary measures and by conservatives,
who fail to see the necessity for social reforms ensuring to everyone
material conditions of decent life.
8
4q The Russian People and Socialism, II, 148, 1852.
5. "From the Other Shore:' II, 99.
6. G. Spet, Hertsen's Philosophical World Conceptions, Moscow 1920; R. Gahry,
A. Hertsen, essai sur le [ormation et le deueloppement de ses idees, Paris 1928.
Chapter 4
RUSSIAN MATERIALISTS IN THE
SIXTIES-NIHILISM
I. MICHEL BAKUNIN
There have always been many materialists among Russian revolu-
tionaries. In the twenties of the nineteenth century there were material-
ists among the Decembrists.! They had no significance whatever for the
development of philosophy. In the sixties materialism was preached by
M. Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolubov and Pisarev and also by the
famous physiologist Sechenov who took no part in the revolutionary
movement.. From the end of the nineteenth century down to the pres-
ent day dialectical and historical materialism founded by Marx and
Engels became widespread among Russian prerevolutionary emigrants
as well as in Russia. This variety of materialism will be discussed in a
different chapter.
Mihail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876), the son of a land-
owner, studied at the School of Artillery from 1828-1833, afterwards
served as an officer in the army and retired in 1835. Joining Stankevich's
cir'ile he studied the philosophy of Kant, Fichte and Hegel. A convinced
H e g e l i a ~ , Bakunin interpreted reality as the eternal Divine Life, as the
will and activity of the Spirit. The universal, taken in the abstract, re-
mains lifeless and formal; it must be realized in the life of personality,
in divinely human life penetrated by love. Bakunin interpreted at that
time Hegel's thesis that "everything real is rational and everything
rational is real" in' the spirit of conservatism, and it was under his in-
fluence that Belinsky went through the phase of "reconciliation with
reality."
In 1840 Bakunin went to Berlin for purposes of study. There he
made friends with Arnold Ruge and other "Hegelians of the left:' In
1842 he published in Ruge's magazine an article "Die Reaktion in
Deutschland." He speaks in it of the absolute freedom of the spirit and,
1. Pavlov-Silvansky, Professor of Russian histo12> wrote an article about them in
Byloe
l
VII, 1907, entitled "The Materialists of the I'wenties."
59
60 IlUSSIAN MATE,IlIALlSTS IN THE SIXT1ES-NIHILISM
maintaining that the negative is the condition of the positive, passes
from conservatism to the other extreme and preaches the destruction
of everything old. "Allow us to trust the eternal spirit," he writes,
"which breaks up and destroys only because it is at the same time the
inexhaustible and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for
destruction is a creative passion."
This was the beginning of a stormy period in Bakunin's life. He
took part in many political uprisings, was more than once sentenced to
death, spent many years in prison after being handed over to the Rus-
sian government, was exiled to Siberia and escaped from there in 1861
to England; afterwards he lived in Italy and Switzerland. At that period
of his life he became a materialist and began working out a peculiar
form of anarchism. tn 1868 he wrote in the magazine Narodnoe Delo
which he published in Zurich: "The intellectual liberation of the indi-
vidual is only possible on the basis of atheism and materialism; social
and economic liberation is reached through abolishing hereditary
property, giving the land to communes of laborers, and factories and
capital to associations of workers, through abolishing marriage and
family and organizing public upbringing of children." In his books
Federalisme, Socialisme et Antitheologisme and Dieu et l'Etat he says
that truly free men do not need the power of the state, for it is in their
interest to support one another: they see in this the development of
their own self; this is humane egoism. The social whole must be a free
alliance of free communes.s
2. N. G. CHERNYSHEVSKY
Nicolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) was the son of a
priest and was educated at the clerical seminary at Saratov; from 1846 to
1850 he was a student at the Petersburg University in the Faculty of Arts.
Chernyshevsky's world conception was formed under the influence of
the French eighteenth century materialism, of the philosophy of Hegel,
of the teachings of Proudhon, St. Simon, Fourier, Leroux and especially
of Feuerbach, whose Essence of Christianity he read in 1849. Up to 1848
Chernyshevsky was deeply religious. He also believed at that period
of his life that hereditary unlimited monarchy was specially intended
{or the protection of the oppressed, and transcended all class distinc-
tions.!
2. M. Bakurrin, Collected Works and Letters, 4 vols., 1934-35; Oeuvres, 6 vols.,
Paris 1907-1913; Nettlau, The Life of M. Bakunin, 3 vols., London 1894--1900; A.
Kornilov, M. Bakunin' Youth, 1915; A. Komilov, AI. Bakunin's 1925;
Y. ,.1. Steklov, M. A. Bakunin, 4 vols., 1926; E. Carr, M. Bakunin, London, 19!7.
1. "Diary,1t Literaturnoe Nas)edstvo, Giz. I, 276 r, 1928.
N. G. CHEllNYSHEVSK.Y 61
At the age of twenty he became a materialist, an atheist, a demo-
cratic republican and a socialist. Nonexistence of God was proved for
him by the fact of undeserved sufferings of men in. general and of good
men in particular. Abolition of monarchy by means of a pitiless peasant
revolution was one of the main objects of his life. His revolutionary ac-
tivity led to his arrest in 1862, to penal servitude in Siberia and aftet-
wards to life there as a settler. In Chernyshevsky was allowed to
return to European Russia and to live first in Astrakan, and afterwards
in Saratov,
Hegel's influence upon Chernyshevsky was mainly confined to the
fact that he greatly valued the dialectical method which compels the
admission that "everything in the world changes" oping to the
in life of opposed forces and qualities.s The most difficult problem for
materialism is to explain how material processes can give rise to the
mental. Chernyshevsky solves it by reference to Hegel's doctrine that
quantitative changes result, at a certain stage, in the appearance of a
new quality. His argument about the vibrations of ether and sensations
of color is particularly interesting. In a letter to his sons from Siberia
he says: "Naturalists wrongly imagine that ether waves are transformed
into impressions of color. Color impressions are the same waves that go
on moving along the optical nerve, reach the brain and continue their
movement in it. There is no transformation here whatever."3 If this
statement does not imply an absurd identification between ether waves
and colors, it must mean that even outside the human organism ma-
terial proce_sses contain sensory qualities of color, sound, etc.-i.e., those
qualities are material and not mental realities. This theory is fairly
widespread in modern philosophy.
In biology Chernyshevsky supported the doctrine of Transformism,
but he Wls greatly scornful of Darwin's theory of struggle for existence
as a factor in evolution. He maintained that the struggle for existence,
owing to excessive reproduction and shortage of food, is bad for the
organism and leads to degeneration and not to improvement. If this
were the only factor in evolution, organic life would, he thinks, have
disappeared altogether and been replaced by inorganic combinations,
more stable than organisms.s
In ethics Chernyshevsky defended the theory of "rational egoism."
A rational egoist understands that personal happiness coincides with
the common good. Chernyshevsky propounded his ethical theories most
2. "Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature," Collected Works, II, 122 f.
Steklov, N. G. Chernyshevsky, I, 245.
4. N. G. Chernyshevsky, "Origin of the Theory 0$ a Beneficent Struggle for Life,"
Collected Works, X, part 2.
62 R.USSIAN MATERIALISTS IN THE SIXTIES-NIHILISM
forcibly in his novel What Is To Be Donet One of the characters in that
novel, Lopuhov, in sacrificing himself for the sake of others, says, "I
am not a man to make sacrifices. And indeed there are no such things.
One acts in the way that one finds most pleasant:' A number of people
regard this argument as an incontrovertible proof of the truth of
eudeimonic and even of hedonistic theories of ethics. In truth, however,
it contains the following fallacy of malobservation. The purpose of our
every action is some real or fictitious value, loved by us, and the feeling
of pleasure which we experience is merely a symptom of attaining the
purpose, and certainly not the purpose itself. Materialists cannot ex-
plain the disinterested love for impersonal values such as truth or
beauty or for the value of another's being, and therefore try to interpret
every action as the consequence of striving for pleasure. The fact that
men like Chernyshevsky, who devote their whole life to disinterested
service of impersonal values, tend to explain their conduct by egoism is
often due to a kind of chaste reserve which makes them avoid high-
sounding words like conscience, honor, ideal, etc.
Chernyshevsky's chief object of study was political economy, but
the thesis "he submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the
Petersburg University in 1854 dealt with aesthetics: "The Aesthetic
Relation of Art to Reality." He attacked in it the idealistic German
theories of aesthetics. According to him "beauty is the fulness of life"
(X, 115). The purpose of art is to reproduce reality and to explain it.
The beauty of the living reality is higher than works of art,"
The rejection of the traditional bases of social life expressed in the
works of Chernyshevsky and his co-believer Dobrolubov (1836-1861)
has been aptly called nihilism. 1. s. Turgenev, who coined the name,
said once to Chernyshevsky in speaking about his movement, "You are
a snake, and Dobrolubov is a cobra." The most striking representative
of the movement was Pisarev.
3. D. PISAREV
Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev (1840-1868) was the son of a landowner.
He died early-he was drowned while bathing in the sea near Riga-
but he had written many works that met with great success. He was a
gifted essayist, literary critic, publicist and popularizer of theories on
natural science. Like Chernyshevsky and Dobrolubov, Pisarev was
deeply religious in his early youth. At the university he joined a circle
of religious mystics who made a vow of lifelong celibacy. Perhaps this
very excess of religious fervor was one of the reasons of his losing faith
5. N. G. Chemyshevsky, Collected Works, 10 vols., 1906. Y. M. Steklov, N. G.
CherR'1shevsky, His Life and Works, 2 vols., 1928.
( \ ,
I. SECHENOV 65
two years later.' Having gone through this crisis he became a convert
to the crude materialism of Vogt, Moleschott and BUchner. "One may
make the bold surmise," he wrote, "that diversity of food, resulting in
diversity of blood components, is the ground 'of intellectual many-
sidedness and harmonious equilibrium between the divergent forces and
strivings in a man's character." He explained the lively intellectual ~ c
tivity of the eighteenth century by the introduction of tea and coffee
which act as stimulants.s
Pisarev explained human conduct by egoism and preached the
liberation of the individual from all compulsion. To do good meant,
according to him, to be useful to people and to enjoy such activity; i.e.,
to carry it out freely and not from submission to authority, from a sense
of duty, etc. t
Pisarev was contemptuous of art and philosophy, and declared that
"a pair of bootsis higher than Shakespeare." Like M. Bakunin he preached
destruction: "What can be broken, should be broken; what will stand
the blow, is fit to live; what breaks into smithereens, is rubbish; in any
case, strike right and left, it will not and cannot do any harm." He hoped
that social improvement will be brought about by a great increase in
the number of "thinking realists" who, in building life, will be guided
by the discoveries of natural science.!
4. I. SECHENOV
The physiologist Sechenov (1829-1905), in his book Reflexes of the
Cortex tried to show that all human and animal actions are of the
nature of reflexes. In his view, acts of thought have nothing at their
basis "except a frequent excitation of the sense apparatus and the re-
prcducjjon, connected therewith, of former similar impressions and
their motor consequences."?
He said the same thing about the self as the modern English
philosopher Bertrand Russell-namely, that the self is merely a gram-
matical form mistaken by people for a special psychic reality.s
1. See I. Lapshine, La phenomenologie de la conscience religieuse dans lo
littetature russet Publ. by the Free Russian University, No. 35, 25-28, Prague.
2. L. A. Plotkin, Pisareu and the Literary and Social Movement in the Sixties,
U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, 221, 1945.
5. D. I. Pisarev, Collected Works, 6 vols., 1894: Selected Works, 2 vols., Moskow-
Leningrad 19S4-35; L. A. Plotkin, Pisareu, 1940; F. Barghoorn, UD. I. Pisarev: A
Representative of Russian Nihilism," The Review of Politics, II, April 1948.
l. Sechenov, "Who Is to Investigate Psychology, and How?" Vestnik Europy,
April 1873. p. 597.
2. Sechenov, Reflexes of the Cortex, 1866; PSYfhological Studies 1873; Sechenov,
Selected Works,
64 R.USSIAN MATERIALISTS IN THE SIXTIES-NIHILISM
The doctrine that all human and animal actions are reflexes has
flourished in Russia owing to the work of the physiologist J. P. Pavlov
(1849-1936) and his school, and also of the psychiatrist V. M. Behterev
(1857-1927). In his book Collective Reflexology Behterev tries to in-
terpret the whole of social life as a system of reflexes. Pavlov's. pupil
Savich published in the Review of the Biological Laboratory of P. F.
Lesgaft an article intended to prove that the highest creative manifesta-
tions of the human intellect are merely conditioned reflexes. As an in-
stance he gives an analysis of Darwin's life and activity, attempting to
show that all the great scientist's creative work may be interpreted as a
series of conditioned reflexes.
Chapter 5
RUSSIAN POSITIVISTS
1. P. LAVROV-I. VIRUBOV-E. DE ROBERTY
,
The French positivism of Comte and the English positivism of
John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer had many adherents in Russia.
P. L. Lavzov was an influential representative of this trend of thought.
Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823-1900) was professor of mathematics
at the School of Artillery. Owing to his connection with revolutionary
circles he had to retire in 1866 and was exiled to the province of Vologda;
he escaped from there in 1870 and settled in Paris. His philosophical
views were formed under the influence of Cornte, John Stuart Mill,
Spencer and Feuerbach. According to Lavrov, only facts given in experi-
ence can be objects of scientific study. Science presupposes the real
existence of objects apprehended through the normal activity of our
sense organs, and a causal connection between them. Philosophy is a
creative pursuit critically uniting all branches of knowledge into one
whole. Lavrov called his philosophy anthropologism, because man was
at, the center of it. He believed that a striving for pleasure was innate
in l : ~ ; a"ultured man, however, learns to enjoymoral activity and forms
a conception of the dignity of personality. Lavrov was a determinist,
but he maintained that the birth of consciousness leads to the appear-
ance of a special kind of reality, namely, of personality which regards
itself as free and responsible. The conception of free will is the idealiza-
tion of human nature, necessary for human development. Progress
means the development of consciousness and of critical thought in every
individual and the increase of social solidarity. Social justice will be
achieved by a socialistic revolution. The Russian village commune and
the possibility of realizing in it common cultivation of land and joint
use of the products of labor, made Lavrov hope that the Russian people
will be the first to make a social revolution.'
I. Lavrov's chief works are "Historical Letters" (under the penname Mirtov) and
"Essay on the History of M ~ e r n Thought" (unfinLthed). Collected Works, Petrograd
1918-1920.
66 R.USSIAN POSITIVISTS
G. N. Virubov (1843-1913) and E. V. de Roberty (184S-1915) who
also were positivists, wrote chiefly in French, having spent most of their
life in France. Virubov together with Littre edited in 1867 the maga-
zine Philosophic positive.
2. N. MIHAILOVSKY
Nicolay Konstantinovich Mihailovsky (1843-1904), publicist, critic,
and popularizer of scientific theories, had as much influence on Russian
social thought as Lavrov, For a number of years he was editor of
Russkoe Bogatstuo, the magazine of the "Populists" who eventually
formed the socialist revolutionary party. Mihailovsky described the aim
of his literary activity as follows: "Every time that the word pravda
(truth) comes into nlY mind, I cannot help admiring its striking inner
beauty. I don't think there is such a word in any European language. I
believe it is only in Russian that truth and justice are called by the same
word and as it were merge into one great whole." "Fearlessly to face
reality and its reflection-the theoretical, objective truth-and at the
same time to defend truth as justice, the subjective truth-this is my
life's purpose."!
By objective truth Mihailovsky means the doctrine of mechanical
causality in nature. But he considers that the objective method of in-
vestigation is insufficient in sociology. Man as a being capable of ra-
tional activity "brings a new force with him." He His seldom satisfied
with the combination of sensations and impressions received by him
from the processes and results of the natural course of events.t's He
tries to change reality in conformity with his purposes and ideals, and
this activity of his is subject to moral valuation. Moral categories, how-
ever, are subjective, and therefore in sociology not only the -.bjective
but the subjective method must be used, the last word belonging to the
subjective method.' Mihailovsky does not uphold free will and does not
deny that the historical process is subject to laws, but he nevertheless
gives this advice to the individual: "Make history, move it in the direc-
tion of your ideal, for it is in this that obedience to the laws of history
consists.i'-
Mihailovsky's ideal is a fully developed, many-sided personality and
a society consisting of such personalities, capable of mutual understand-
ing and mutual respect and of combining their powers in social activity
for the attainment of happiness. In defining the conditions of social
I. N. K. Mihailovsky, Collected Works, It 5. Preface to the third edition.
2. "Darwin's Theory and Social Science:' Collected Works, I, S47, 4th ed.
s, "'Vhat Is Progress," i u, ~ I , 164.
4. "Idealism, Realism and Idolatry:' i b i d . ~ IV, 69.
N. MIHAILOVSlty 87
development in its approach to the ideal Mihailovsky distinguishes be-
tween the type of development and the degree of development. By the
type of development he means the totality of the individual's different
faculties, and points out that an individual who makes an almost ex-
clusive use of one faculty, develops it to a high degree of perfection, but
his other faculties become atrophied, so that his general type of develop-
ment is lowered.s Starting with this conception, Mihailovsky attacks
Spencer's theory of evolution and his view of society as an organism.
Mihailovsky points out, on the authority of the zoologist Baer, that
organisms develop and grow in perfection by means of the physiological
division of labor which results in the greater complexity of the organism
through the differentiation of its organs and tissues: every organ carries
out perfectly some special function in serving the' whole which, owing
to this process of development, becomes a more and more complex indi-
vidual entity. According to Spencer society also evolves through division
of labor and specialization of its members' activity. Mihailovsky disputes
this. He says that specialization leads to the regression of personality:
the degree of development reached by a person who cultivates some one
faculty in himself at the expense of other faculties may be very high,
but the type of his development is lowered. In such a process of develop-
ment society "tries to subordinate and to break up personality"; it
transforms a man from an individual person into its own organ. One-
sided specialists cease to understand the inner life of the representatives
of other specialities; this leads to mutual indifference or even hostility,
and a decrease in happiness. To avoid such undesirable consequences,
"a man fights, or anyway ought to fight for his individuality, for the
independence and many-sidedness of his self" (478). Thus a process
that means progress in the life of organisms, means regression in the life
of s'OcieSes. Progress, according to Mihailovsky, is "a gradual approach
to the wholeness of integers," to the greatest possible and many-sided
division of labor between the organs of the body, and at the same time
to the least possible division of labor between human beings,"
Criticizing the Darwinians who apply the law of the struggle for
existence to the life of human society, Mihailovsky says that the human
ideal is not adaptation to environment and elimination of the unfit; on
the contrary, "you must adapt your environment to yourself, you must
not eliminate the unfit, since struggle, natural selection and useful
adaptation lead to the destruction both of yourself and of your society."
The aim which Mihailovsky set himself was to work out a theory
5. "Struggle for Individuality:' ibid., I, 492 If.
6. "What Is Progress?" ibid., I, 166. .
7. "Darwin's Theory of Social Science," ibid., I, !08.
68 IlUSSIAN POSInvISTS
in which "truth-verity and truth-justice should appear hand in hand,
completing each other." This goal is highly attractive. However, the fact
that he was a positivist and therefore denied the possibility of meta-
physics prevented Mihailovsky from giving a clear and consistent solu-
tion of the problem: had he worked out a theory of knowledge he would,
like Kireyevsky, have come to the conclusion that the whole truth, in
which truth-verity and truth-justice support each other, is revealed only
to the whole man, capable of using all the varieties of experience-not
only the sensory but also the experience of conscience, of aesthetic feel-
ing and religious mystical intuition.
K. D. TROITSKY-N. KAREYEV-
N. KORKUNOV
Konstantin Dmitievich Kavelin (1818-1885) was inspired by a
lofty ideal, but like Mihailovsky he could not justify it theoretically.
Kavelin was a scholar and an expert on Russian history, a lawyer, a
publicist and a philosopher. While doing government work he refused
titles and orders of merit. In his youth he was interested in Hegel's
philosophy, but after taking up historical research he learned to set
great value upon the scientific method and came very near positivism;
in his philosophical theories he avoided metaphysics. He wrote two
philosophical works: The Problems of Psychology, 1872, and The
Problems of Ethics, 1885.
Kavelin was opposed both to materialism and to metaphysical
idealism.. and tried to prove the relative independence of mental life.
Consciousness and thought, he said, create an ideal world, lead man out
of "the narrow circle of personal existence, raise him up to the uni-
versal, draw him to perfection, to an ideal ... the freedom of moughts
and actions is an organic property of human nature."! He believed,
however, that the attempts to explain freedom of will had so far been
unsatisfactory, and he did not work out any theory of the connection
between material nature and mental events. Sechenov, a materialist and
physiologist, wrote a long article "Who Is to Investigate Psychology and
How?" as a crushing criticism of Kavelin's The Problems of Psychology.
He concludes that all scientific investigation is based on the analysis of
facts and that mental states are not accessible to scientific analysis, which
can only be applied to physiological processes underlying those states;
hence psychology should be the province of physiologists and not of
psychologists. Kavelin made a detailed answer to Sechenov's article.
Their dispute was published in Vestnik. EUTOPY in 1872-74.
2
1. The 01 Ethics, chap. II. 2. Kavelin, Collected Worb, 1899.
I.. D. lAVELIN-M. TROITSKY-N. K.AllEYEV-N. KOR,K.UNOW 69
The Slavophil Y. F. Samarin gave a detailed criticism of Kavelin's
The Problems of Psychology from a point of view directly opposed to
that of Sechenov. He pointed out that Kavelin had failed to establish
the relative independence of mental life and had made many concessions
to the materialists by exaggerating the importance of bodily processes
for the life of the mind,"
M. M. Troitsky professor at the Universityof Moscow,
worked out a comprehensive system of psychology in the spirit of as-
sociationism. He sharply criticizes the philosophy of Kant and the post-
Kantian German metaphysical Idealism.'
N. I. Kareyev (1850-1931), professor of European history at the
Petersburg University, in dealing with the problems of the philosophy
of history, defended the theory of the significance of the individual in
the historical process.
5
Professor of jurisprudence, N. M. Korkunov (1853-1904), was the
author of The General Theory of Jurisprudence; he expresses in it the
following original and valuable idea. Mental processes have no spatial
fonn. Therefore, although men's bodies are separated by space, their
mental processes are interconnected, and this conditions the possibility
of social life.
s. Vestnik EUTOPY, 1875.
4. M. Troitsky, Science of the Spirit; German Psychology in the Present Century,
2 vols.
5. N. Kareyev, The Fundamental Problems of the Philosophy of History, 3 vols.,
18SS, 1890; Essays on Sociology and the Philosophy 01 History, 1895.
Chapter 6
DEGENERATION OF SLAVOPHILISM
1. N. "DANILEVSKY
"
N. Y. Danilevsky (1822-1885), son of an army general, studied at
the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum from which he graduated in 1842. Being
specially interested in natural sciences, he attended lectures at the
faculty of natural sciences of the St. Petersburg University in 1843-47,
and obtained his master's degree in botany. The ideas of Fourier having
awakened his interest, he joined the revolutionary group of Petrashev-
sky, and was interned for one hundred days at the fortress of Saint
Peter and Paul. It was proved at the inquest that Danilevsky envisaged
Fourier's teaching as a purely economic, and not a revolutionary doc-
trine. He was released, but exiled from Petersburg and forced to work
as a clerk in the offices of the governors f)f Vologda and Samara succes-
sively. From 1853, the Russian government assigned him a series of
missions in order to survey the Volga and Caspian fisheries as well as
those of the Black Sea and of the Russian North. In 1869, he began to
publish in the review Zarya his work "Russia and Europe," which was
later to appear in book-form. N. N. Strakhov, an admirer of
published in 1895 the fifth edition of this book, with a preface devoted
to Danilevsky's life and works.
Danilevsky is considered as an epigon of Slavophilism, which at that
time had entered the period of its decline. He is one of the most typical
representatives of panslavism, In his book, Russia and Europe Danilev-
sky evolved in detail the theory concerning "the cultural-historical types"
of mankind. This theory had previously been outlined by the German
historian Ruckert, and after Danilevsky, It was to become the topic of
Spengler's writings. According to Danilevsky, there cannot be and there
is no such thing as an all-human civilization. There are but various
cultural-historical types of civilization, such as the Egyptian, Chinese,
Assyria-Babylonian, Hebrew, Greek or Roman types. In contemporary
history, Danilevsky was most interested in the Romano-Germanic and
the Slavonic types, the last of which was beginning to take shape. The
70
I. N. DANILEVSKY
7]
foundations of the civilization belonging to one type are not trans-
mitted to another; there might only occur at times a survival of civiliza-
tions in a limited form and only in so far as minor traits are concerned.
The period of growth of a cultural-historical type is undetermined in
length, but the period of its flowering and fruition is brief; it exhausts
once and for all the vital forces of a civilization (chap. V). Mankind,
according to Danilevsky, is an abstract idea, not a living single whole.
The relation of mankind to a people is that of species to kind. Species
is an abstract and poor conception; the people is a concrete and living
substance. The significance of cultural-historical types consists in the
fact that each of them expresses in its own way the idea of man and
these ideas taken as a whole are something all-human. The domination
of one cultural-historical type extended to the entire world would mean
the gradual exhaustion of life (chap. XV).
In our time, Danilevsky believes, the time has come for the de-
velopment of the Slavonic race, as of a peculiar cultural-historical type.
The original trait of this type will consist in the following: many cul-
tural-historical types have one single basis; thus Hebrew culture is
religious, Greek culture artistic, while Rome evolved a political culture.
Romano-Germanic culture has a double basis: it is a political culture
possessing a scientific and industrial character. The Slavonic type will
be the first one possessing fully a quadruple basis: it will be 1) religious,
2) scientific, artistic, technological, industrial, 3) political, 4) economic
and communal (chap. XVII).
In the future development of European history, Danilevsky states,
Austro-Hungary will fall apart; there will arise an all-Slavonic federa-
tion, which will also include other racial bodies: Greece, Roumania and
Hungary (chap. XIII). The Eastern problem will be solved following
thL-stratggle between the Romano-Germanic and the Slavonic world;
Constantinople will become the capital of the Slavonic Union (chaps.
XII and XIV).
In the first pages of his book Danilevsky devotes a great deal of
attention to Western Europe's hostility toward Russia; he refutes the
opinion that Russia is a rapacious conqueror. He demonstrates in de-
tail that Russia never murdered nor mutilated nations (chap, I and II).
Dostoevsky started reading Danilevsky's book with vivid interest
while this work was still appearing in the Zarya installments. But he
was deeply disappointed when he discovered that Danilevsky rejected
the oneness of mankind and the existence of all-human ideals. As we
shall further see, Soloviev bitterly criticized Danilevsky's rejection of
Christian universalism.
At the end of his life, Danilevsky devoted himself to the refutation
72 DEGENERATION OF SLAVOPHILISM
of Darwinism. This work remained unfinished; in 1885, the first volume
in two parts was published, and after the author's death one chapter of
volume II appeared (1889). Danilevsky had presented his book to the
Academy of Sciences in view of obtaining an award, but the latter was
not granted. The Academy declared that this book was a round-up of
the refutations of Darwinism having already been stated in Europe,
though Danilevsky had developed them, adding new examples. Danilev-
sky conceived evolution as the consequence of an "organic goal-pursuing
tendency," directed by a "reasonable cause." The idea and expression:
goal-pursuing tendency (Zielstrebigkeit) were introduced into philoso-
phy and biology by the famous zoologist Karl von Baer, with whom
Danilevsky was on friendly terms.
Danilevsky stated the following aphorism concerning beauty: "God
wanted to create beauty, and so He created matter."
2. N. STRAKHOV-K. LEONTIEV
N. N. Strakhov (1828-1896), having studied natural sciences, pre-
sented a dissertation for a master's degree in zoology in 1857. He did not
choose a teaching career, but devoted himself to writing. His main works
comprise philosophical essays, literary criticism and the study of the
philosophical foundations of natural sciences in relation to Hegel's
philosophy. In his book, entitled The World as a Whole) he demonstrates
that the world is a "harmonious organic whole;" parts and phenomena
of the world are not simply linked together, but submitted to each
other, they form "a hierarchy of beings and phenomena;" the world is
an organism in which the parts "serve each other, forming one whole,"
and man stands at the center. Strakhov struggled with peculiar insistence
against the decline of spiritual culture, a decline manifested both in the
West and in Russia, under the influence of materialism, posizivism,
nihilism. He demonstrated the fundamental error of these movements,
which consists in the fact that they deny the higher spheres of being
and tend to bring them down to the lowest levels of nature.!
K. N. Leontiev (1831-1891), a publicist and a writer, was not a
Slavophil, but his ideas may be considered a degenerate form of Slavo-
philism. Vladimir Soloviev gave a good account and criticism of Leon-
tiev's views in the Russian Encyclopaedia of Brockhaus and Efron.
Berdyaev's book, K. Leontieu (G. Bles, London 1940) is also reliable.s
I. Strakhov's main works are: A Method of Natural Sciences, 1865; The World
tIS (J Whole, 1872; The Struggle Against the West in Our Literature, 5 vols., 1882,
1 8 8 ~ , 1896; Fundamental Ideas of Physiol0t:Y and Psychology, 1886; Eternal Truths,
1887; From the History 01 Literary Nihilism, 1892. Concerning Strakhov, see Chizhev-
sky, Hegel in Russia, pp. 266-288.
2. K. Leontiev, Completed WorAs.. 8 vols.
Chapter 7
PRECURSORS OF VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV
1. P. D. YURKEVICH-;--V. D. KUDRIAVTSEV
Pamfil Danilovich Yurkevich (1827-1874) was professor of philoso-
phy at the Moscow University from 1863 to 1874. Yurkevich sought in
the spirit of platonism to discover behind the ever-Zhanging phenomena
perceived by the senses, tIle eternal idea of the object. In the idea, ac-
cording to his teaching, thought and being are identical. Truth is re-
vealed, not by thought alone, but also by the "heart;" that is in relation
to man's religious and moral tendencies. In this process of ascension
toward truth, knowledge is combined with faith which represents a
factor more powerful than the merely empiric contents of thought,
Without love, he declared, God cannot be known. The highest degree
of the ascension toward the absolute, that is toward God, is mystical
contemplation. That which can exist becomes actual through the media
of that which must be, precisely through the aid of the Platonic idea of
the Good.
Concerning Cernyshevsky's article "The Anthropological Principle
in Philosophy," Yurkevich undertook a fundamental criticism of ma-
terialism. This criticism excited the hostility of the "progressive press"
of his time, which started a slander-campaign against him, Chizhevsky, in
his Book Hegel in Russia, writes about Yurkevich. "His calm and ef-
ficient criticism of materialism (in the same way, he criticized "idealism"
as well) did not encounter other methods of opposition than threats
and imprecations. The most potent arm was slander: the enemies of
Yurkevich discovered in his writings some lines stating that intellectual
moments cannot be sufficiently active as methods of education . . . Life
heeds more energetic foundations and methods than abstract conceptions
~ of science-such as for instance man's dignity, a humane education."
Yurkevich had doubtlessly in mind first of all religious faith and sec..
ondly, feeling. The champions of enlightenment saw in these lines the
defense of corporal punishment. "The satirical press missed no occasion
of attacking the hated philosopher, and the type of satire employed
against him can be gathered from-one of the slurs, comparing Yurkevich
to the excrements of Diogenes. From 1859, to 1862, Yurkevich had pub-
73
74 PRECURSORS OF VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV
Iished eight philosophical works; from 1862 to 1874, the year of his
death, he wrote only one book" (253).
Yurkevich was a teacher of Soloviev who in his writings sympatheti-
cally appraised him, both as man and as philosopher.' Victor Dmitrie-
vich Kudriavtsev (1828-1892) was professor of philosophy at the Moscow
Theological School. Already as a student of this establishment. Ku-
driavtsev manifested exceptional abilities and obtained the Metro-
politan Platon's scholarship; this gave him tile right to add Platonov
to his family name. In his work entitled Religion, lts Essence and Ori-
gin, Kudriavtsev-Platonov explains belief in God and the rise of re-
ligion by God's direct action on the spirit of man and by the religious
experience resulting from this action. In the structure of the world, he
declares, spiritual and material being differ profoundly from each other,
but are nevertheless closely linked together. The attempts to understand
the structure of the world through dualistic philosophy prove unsatis-
factory; they lead to an issue where one of these two types of being is
placed before the other, and the result is either materialism or idealism.
We must discover a third principle which unifies spirit and matter. This
principle is the absolutely perfect being, God, who created the world in
such a way that matter serves as a substrata for the manifestation of the
spirit. The goal of this world process is to draw nearer and nearer to ab-
solute perfection. Kudriavtsev-Platonov gave his theory the name of
transcendental monism,
Kudriavtsev-Platonov's idea was that it is possible to explain how
psychical allel material processes are tied together in spite of their pro-
found difference only by discovering a third type of being standing above
these two processes and uniting them; this idea is extremely valuable.
However, the solution of the problem by reference to God yields no
satisfying answer, as we know from the history of previous attell1-pt4W let
us for instance recall Spinoza's pantheism, which, like all pantheistic
doctrines is logically unsound; let us also recall the various forms of oc-
casionalism, as well as the teaching ol.Leibniz concerning preestablished
harmony. The link between the psychical and the bodily process in the
life of man for instance, is so intimate that we have to discover in man's
very structure the third principle, standing above these two types of
process, and creating them in such a way that they are tied together.s
1. Soloviev, Three Characteristics, VIII. Works by Yurkevich: "The Heart and
Its Significance in Man's Spiritual Life According to the Teaching of God's Word,"
Trudy_ Kiev, Theological School, I, 1860. "The Idea," Journal of the Ministry 01
Public Education, 1860. "Reason, According to the Teaching of Plato and Experi-
ence According to the Teaching of Kant," Moscow Univenity Izuestia, 1885.
2. Collected Worlu Of Kudriautseu-Pkuonou, published by the Theological
School in three volumes, 1892-1894.
N. E. FEnOJlOV
2. N. F. FEDOROV
75
In the evolution of Christian philosophy a place apart is held by
Nikolay Fedorovich Fedorov (1828-1903) whose original ideas are still
very little known, although at the time they made a great impression
on V. Soloviev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
The life of this man deserves a detailed study. There can be no
doubt that he was a really righteous man, an uncanonized saint.
Fedorov, an illegitimate son of Prince P. I. Gagarin, was born in
1828. He studied in Odessa, at the Richelieu Lyceum, was a teacher of
history and geography in provincial towns, then for many years the
librarian of the Rumiantsev Museum in Moscow.A passionate bibliog-
rapher and lover of books he knew the whole contents of the Library
and the places of books in it by heart. His erudition in all fields of
knowledge was enormous, To people of most varied specialties working
in the library he used to give, besides the books they ordered, several
others bearing on the subject of their study, giving them also valuable
advice and information. The accuracy and variety of his knowledge
struck everybody who came into contact with him. In the early nineties
several engineers, who were about to proceed to Siberia to make investi-
gations for the tracing of the Trans-Siberian railway, paid a visit to the
Rumyantsev Library. Fedorov at once referred them to a description
of Siberia of which they had never heard, and throwing a glance at the
projected railway line, found two mistakes in the map: in one' case the
altitude of a mountain was incorrectly given, in the other a rather irn-
portant rivulet was completely omitted. On their return from Siberia,
two years later, the engineers told Fedorov that he had been quite right.
One can hear many similar stories about Fedorov told by historians,
l a w Y e r ~ philologists, physicians, technicians, etc.!
Living an intensive spiritual life and devoting himself entirely to
public service, he reduced his own physical wants to the minimum. He
occupied a tiny room and slept not more than four or five hours a day
on a bare hump-backed trunk, resting his head on some hard object.
His food consisted of tea with hard rolls, and of cheese or salted fish and
often he would do for whole months on end without any hot food.
Money was a nuisance to him. Receiving an insignificant salary (less
than 400 roubles a year) and refusing any increase he used to give away
the greater part of it, every month, to some "stipendiates' of his. He
wanted to possess no property, and never had even a warm overcoat.
Fame and popularity he regarded as manifestations of immodesty.
1. N. F. Fedorou: The Philosophy of Comn&on Cause, a biographical study com-
piled by Ostromirov, I. I ~ fI.f Kharbin 1928.
76 PRECURSORS OF VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV
His articles appeared anonymously, and the majority of them were never
published by him. His friends, V. Kozhevnikov and N. Peterson, pub-
lished some of his writings after his death under the title The Philosophy
of the Common Cause in 480 copies; they sent the book to the libraries
and scientific societies and the remaining copies were distributed free
of charge to all who wished to have it. A new edition of this book was
published by Fedorov's admirers in Kharbin in 1928.
His modesty showed itself also in his refusal to be either photo-
graphed or painted. In order to have his portrait done his friends had
to resort to a cunning device: the well-known painter Pasternak used
to go to the Rumyantsev Library and, surrounding himself with books,
pretend to read while now and then he would throw a glance at Fedorov
and sketch his portrait (ibid., XVIII).
In spite of his austere life he enjoyed excellent health and only fell
ill when his friends compelled him to give up his habits. He never wore a
fur coat and always walked; but in 1903, during severe December frosts,
his friends made him put on a fur coat and take a cab. He contracted
pneumonia and died.
All those who knew Fedorov felt a great respect for him and took
a keen interest in his ideas. V. SoIoviev wrote him: "Your plan is the
first step forward made by the human mind on the path of Christ."
Tolstoy used to say that by his way of life Fedorov was a pure Christian:
"He is very poor, he gives a,vay everything, and is always cheerful and
meek."
Tolstoy's son, Ilya Lvovich, describing his father's relations with
Fedorov, says: "He had extremely lively, keen and intelligent eyes, he
seemed to radiate goodness which bordered on childish naivety. If there
be saints they must be just like this." "It is remarkable that
always grew excited and easily lost his temper in argument, wou1d listen
to Nikolay Fedorovich with particular attention and never lost his
temper with him:'
Fedorov severely criticized Tolstoy's negative attitude toward
higher cultural values, toward science and art. One day when Tolstoy
came to the Library Fedorov started showing him its book treasures.
"Don't people write a lot of silly things, all this ought to be burned,"
was Tolstoy's remark. Fedorov flew up at it: "I saw many silly men in my
life," he said, "but no one as silly as you."
Fedorov connects his- doctrine with the Christian religion, in par-
ticular with Orthodoxy as the religion which attaches especial value
to the idea of resurrection (Easter) and everlasting life. Man's duty is to
enter the path of supramoralism, to realize a synthesis of theoretical and
practical reason and to become the reason of the Universe. Through
N .E. FEDOR.OV 77
knowledge and action man must transform all the forces of nature, at
present blind and often hostile to him, into the instruments and organs
of mankind. Having learned to control nature mankind will be able
to overcome death; which is more, it can and must set itself the task of
achieving resurrection of all its ancestors. After becoming multi-une,
like the Tri-Unity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, mah-
kind will attain such "indivisibility" as to make impossible any disrup-
tion, any isolation-i.e., death.
The unbrotherly, hostile attitude of men and nations to one an-
other is due, according to Fedorov, to the fact that under the pressure of
the menacing, death-bearing forces of nature, every man becomes en.
grossed in the task of self-preservation; owing to this egotisrn the forces
of men are divided and therefore insufficient for the solution of the great
problem of ruling nature. Furthermore, they are to some extent actually
directed to the struggle of man against man and of nation against na-
tion. The social order arising out of egoism Fedorov designates as
zoomorphic; it is based on the separation of the conscious and directing
organs from the executive ones. Hence the distinctions of class and
social standing. Owing to the discrepancy between thought and action
the caste of scholars, engrossed in sheer contemplation, arrives at a
false doctrine of the world and at a false orientation of all their scholarly
activities; a contemplative scholar proclaims the world to be his presen-
tation; he is engaged on the study of only that which is, taken iii isola-
tion from that which ought to be (p. 12); he is not interested in the final
purpose of life; he does not investigate the causes of men's hostile atti-
tude to each other, and so on. The false doctrine that the world is our
presentation leads to false practices, such as e.g. morphinomania as a
mearts M solving for oneself the cosmic problem by transforming un-
pleasant presentations into pleasant ones with the aid of drugs; or
hypnotism as a means of "casting a spell," instead of educating a man's
will and mind (p. 14 ff.), Great scientific discoveries and inventions, e.g.
the explosives, are chiefly used in such a community not for common
good but for mutual struggle.
The ideal social order must be based, according to Fedorov, 011 the
unity of consciousness and action. There must be in it no class distinc-
tions, no military or police coercion. no "derniurgical," i.e., industrial,
activity giving shape to outward materials and relations. Under this
ideal regime, which Fedorov calls "psychocracy," everyone will do his
duty fully aware of the necessity of the tasks with which he is faced.
The scientific activity under this regime will have as its special mis-
sion the study of the blind and deadly forces of nature with the object
78
PRECUR.SORS OF VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV
of turning them into lifegiving ones; all social work will be accom-
panied by the study of the corresponding region of the world.
Having learned to rule the forces of nature and so done away with
hunger and all other wants. mankind, according to Fedorov, will at the
same time do away with the causes of discord between men. It will con-
centrate all its forces on the common task of regulating the nature of the
earth and even cosmos as a whole. The experiments with provoking rain
by gun-firing, carried out in the United States in 1891, just at the time
of the terrible famine in Russia due to drought, made a great impression
on Fedorov. He speaks of the necessity of preserving armies under the
future ideal regime, not for mutual destruction, but for the common
task of regulating the forces of nature.
Fedorov's plans were very ambitious. He spoke of regulating
meteorological processes and thus ensuring good harvests. He spoke
further 'of utilizing solar energy and thus doing away with one of the
hardest forms of industry-the coal-mining industry. But this is not all.
He proposed to get hold of the electromagnetic energy of the earth so
as to regulate its motion in space and turn it into a sort of vessel for
cosmic cruises. The danger of the overpopulation of the earth did not
terrify him, for he foresaw the possibility of colonizing other planets and
heavenly bodies.
The supreme object to which the forces of nature must be made
subservient is the resurrection of all our ancestors. Fedorov regarded
as immoral the positivist theory of progress with its heartless attitude to
the past generations and its building of the welfare of the posterity upon
the corpses and sufferings of the ancestors (18-25). "One must live not
for oneself (egoism) and not for the others (altruisms, but with everyone
and for everyone; this is the union of the living (sons) for the resurrection
of the dead (fathers)" (II, 48). Even people who have no faith-!e.i, the
materialists-cannot prove that it is impossible to bring our ancestors to
life, and have therefore, Fedorov thinks, no right to shirk the task. "Put
together the engine, and consciousness will return to it." he says. The
disintegration of the body and the complete dispersion of its particles
cannot be an absolute obstacle to its reconstitution, for the particles of
the body cannot go beyond the limits of space.
Fedorov designates the resurrection planned by him as immanent;
he condemns the aspiration toward the transcendental existence of be-
yond. The ideal he proposes is the realization of God's Kingdom in this
world.
N. A. Setnitsky, economist and philosopher, who was a professor at
the University of Kharbin, in his book, On the Ultimate Ideal (1982),
says that the bringing together of knowledge and action is being realized
N. E. FEDOROV 79
in Soviet Russia where scientific activity is understood as "a peculiar
mission of expert men for carrying out the task of studying the blind
and deadly forces of nature, in addition to which the demand is put
forward that all people exercising this or that social function (employees
and officials) should at the same time carry out the work of study in the
sphere of activity ascribed to them." Similarly, in many technical plaris
of the Soviet Government he sees "a doubtless influence and fulfillment
of Fedorov's ideas, though for the most part his name, having a strong
religious coloring, is never mentioned and even the meaning of those
works and their connection with Fedorov's plans are not realized. The
most striking example of this is the attitude of the Soviets toward
Fedorov's suggestions concerning the struggle against droughts." "The
same is true of the most recent plans of utilizing the waterways of the
U.S.S.R.'- (the problem of "Greater Volga," irrigation of Turkestan,
etc.-82 ff.),
One could point to some still more daring plans discussed in the
Soviet press; e.g., the plan of warming Siberia by altering the direction
of the Gulfstream and diverting polar icebergs toward England in order
to freeze that country which is the embodiment of hated capitalism.
In reality, as is well known, even the feasible technical projects do
not lead to any increase of material welfare in Soviet Russia. Dostoevsky
has long ago foretold that the attempt to build the "tower of Babylon"
on sheer scientific foundations, "without God and religion," without a
moral justification of social relations, as this is being done by the Com-
I
munists in Soviet Russia, would merely lead to utter destitution and
death.
Fedorov's philosophy strikes one by the singular blending in it of a
d e e p ~ religious metaphysic-e.g., in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity
as the id'eal of loving unity of several persons-with a naturalist realism
--e.g., in the doctrine of the methods of achieving the resurrection of
our ancestors. What is meant is apparently the resurrection of man in a
nontransfigured body, which would still need food; a question arises of
colonizing other celestial bodies, and all this is attained by means of
highly developed science and technique. From this point of view
Fedorov's doctrine is akin to the modern teachings of the naturalists who
think of prolonging life indefinitely through perfecting the art of medi-
cine, improving the hygiene conditions of life, etc.
Fedorov's naturalism, .in its combination with the Christian doc-
trine of the resurrection in the flesh, is inconsistent. Indeed, the body
composed of impenetrable particles (atoms)-i.e., of particles performing
the processes of repulsion in relation to the environment-is of necessity
bound up with the struggle for existence and, therefore, with evil. The
80
PRECURSORS OF VLADIMI1l SOLOVIEV
preservation of such a body for a long time requires a great deal of labor
and a high degree of prevision. But the worst thing about it is that the
_eternal preservation of it, even had it been realizable, would amount to
the perpetuation of evil and of lower forms of existence. Christianity
sets up an infinitely higher ideal: it has in view the transfigured body,
free from the processes of repulsion which create impenetrability; by
its very conception this body is such that no force in the world can be
found, or even conceived, capable of destroying it.
The transfigured body is not created by scientific techniques; it is
created by the spirit of man loving God more than himself, and all other
beings as much as himself, and therefore free from any selfish exclusive-
ness. At the basis of the Christian doctrine lies the conviction that the
moral evil of pride and selfishness in general is primordial, and all the
remaining forms of evil-s-imperfections of the body, the blindness of
nature's forces and man's discord with it-are but a consequence of that
primordial evil. Therefore the redemption from evil cannot be attained
except through the elimination of its principal cause-the severance
from God. Fedorov begs the question when he says that the struggle of
every man for the preservation of his existence creates discord with other
men; in fact, on the contrary, the discord between men and between man
and nature brings about the struggle for existence.
Fedorov's philosophical works leave the impression of being the
ideas of a gifted but untutored mind, not sufficiently systematic and con-
sistent because of lack of learning and an extreme concentration on one
pet idea. Yet they contain a wealth of original and profound reflections
on various questions; e.g., on the imperfection of scientific knowledge
when, severed from practice, of the positivist theory of progress; or, e.g.,
when he compares the old Gothic writing of the Germans and the old
Russian writing with modern shorthand. It is possible that in our days,
when mankind thanks to the extraordinary development of science and
technique begins to set itself ever more daring tasks, Fedorov's philoso-
phy will have a growing influence.
Chapter 8
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
Vladimir Soloviev was born in Moscow on January 16, 1853. His
father Sergey Soloviev was a professor of the University of Moscow and
a well-known Russian historian who wrote The History of Russia, in
29 volumes. Vladimir's grandfather, a priest, was a kind man and an
ardent believer, a genuine Christian. Once, when his grandson was eight
years old he took him to the altar and in a warm prayer blessed him
for Lord's service.
At the age of seven Vladimir began reading, on the advice of his
father, the lives of the saints. His religious feeling was so strong that he
began exercising ascetic feats; sometimes, for instance, his mother would
find him, in winter, lying in bed without a blanket. It was one of the
exercises for vanquishing the flesh.!
In his early childhood Soloviev showed a liking for poetry, knew
many songs and poems of Russian poets, was fond of Russian folklore,
liked the peasants, the coachman, the beggars. A mythical attitude to-
ward nature was very strongly developed in him. Even to inanimate ob-
jects he used to give proper names: his satchel he called Gregory, his
He sometimes had visions and prophetic dreams. In his
tenth year he had a vision which was subsequently twice repeated and
stands in close connection with -his whole philosophical system. It was
connected with his first love. The girl he was in love with turned out
to be indifferent to him. Seized with jealousy he was standing at Mass
in church. Suddenly all the immediate surroundings vanished from the
field of his consciousness, and in the poem "Three Meetings," written
not long before his death, he thus describes the unearthly vision he saw:
he perceived suddenly the blue of the sky all around him, and in his
own soul; and through this blue he saw the "Eternal Womanhood,"
woven as it were of blue ether, and holding in her hand a blossom from
unearthly countries. She nodded in his direction, smiling at him with a
radiant smile, and then disappeared in the mist. His soul became blind
1. See S. Lukyanov, On V, s. Solooieu in his Young Years.
81
82 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
)
to all worldly things, and the childish love which caused his jealousy be-
came repugnant to him.s
That which he saw he subsequently interpreted as the vision of
God's wisdom, Sophia-the Eternal and Perfect Feminine.
At the age of thirteen began the religious crisis in the life of
Soloviev from which he emerged early in 1871 when he was eighteen.
He succumbed to atheism, threw his ikons into the garden, became keen
on Buchner's materialism and Pisarev's nihilism. Socialism and even
communism became his social ideals. He gave up this simplified philoso-
phy thanks to reading Spinola, Feuerbach and J. S. Mill, who convinced
him of the groundlessness of materialism. From Spinoza he turned to
Schopenhauer and then to Schelling and Hegel, and ended
by working out his own philosophical system. During this time (from
1869 to 1873) he was studying science and history and philology at the
University of Moscow; after graduating he studied for a year at the
Moscow Theological Academy.
His first important philosophical work was his master's thesis, "The
Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists," which he sub-
mitted in 1874. In his preliminary speech before the dissertation he said
that absence of religion devastated the soul and led to suicide. He re-
ferred, no doubt, to his own mental crisis. On emerging from it he said
in one of his letters (to Miss E. V. Romanov, of December 31, 1872), that
rational philosophy was darkness, "death in life," but that this darkness
could become a beginning of life: having come to the conclusion that
he is "nothing," man can perceive that "God is everything," and then
he will receive answers to all his questions in the Christian teaching
which is based on Living God and not on abstract conceptions of reason.
Desirous of studying "Indian, gnostic and medieval
and being keen on the problem of Sophia, Soloviev on being sent abroad
to complete his studies went to London in order to work at the British
Museum. In his notebook of that time is to be found a prayer for the
descent of Holy Divine Sophia. Here indeed he had, for the second
time, a vision of Sophia. Its incompleteness did not, however, satisfy
him. While he was thinking of this and eagerly desiring to see her more
{ttlIy, he heard an inner voice which told him: UBe in Egypt!" Giving up
all his work in London, Soloviev went to Egypt and took a room in a
hotel in Cairo. After staying there for a time he went, one evening, on
foot to Thebaide, without provisions, wearing a town dress,-top hat
and overcoat. In the desert, twelve miles from the town, he met some
Beduins who at first were, frightened, taking him for the devil, but then
2. V. Soloviev, God-manhood, translated by P. Zouboff, Introduction by P. Zouboff,
IS.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
apparently robbed him and went away. It was night, jackals could be
heard howling, Soloviev lay down on the ground. In his poem "Three
Meetings" he thus relates what happened at the d a ~ n :
"All that was, and is, and ever shall be
My steadfast gaze embraced it all in one.
The seas and rivers sparkle blue beneath me,
And distant woods, and mountains clad in snow.
I saw it all, and all was one fair image
Of woman's beauty, holding all as one.
The boundless was within its form enclosed-
Before me and in me is you alone."

The philosophical system to the working out of which Soloviev

devoted his whole life may be, in the opinion of many students of his
philosophy, called the philosophy of the Eternal Feminine.
In 1880 Soloviev received a degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the
St. Petersburg University for his dissertation UA Critique of Abstract
Principles."
Soloviev's professorial activity was a very shortlived one. He was
Lecturer at the University of Moscow and then at the University of St.
Petersburg and Professor at the Women's University until autumn 1881.
After the murder of Alexander lIon March I, 1881 Soloviev gave in
St. Petersburg a public lecture which he ended by courageously ex-
horting the Czar to pardon his father's assassins in the name of Supreme
truth and not to inflict capital punishment on them.
After this he believed it necessary to resign from the Science Com-
mittee of the Ministry of Public Education, though the minister, ac-
cepti!!Lhis resignation, declared: "I did not demand this."8
In his curriculum vitae for volume III of the Russian translation
of Ueberveg's History of Philosophy, Soloviev wrote: "In March 1881
I gave a public lecture on capital punishment and was temporarily ob-
liged to leave Petersburg ... In 1882 I resumed my lectures on philoso..
phy at the Petersburg University and at the Higher Women's School, but
after a month I left Petersburg and gave up my teaching for good."!
He wrote to Professor Bestujev.. Ryumin: "I decided to give up my
professor's career, not only because of my wish to have the leisure of
devoting myself to philosophical writings, there were other more press..
ing reasons which made my decision final."6 About two years later he
5. See E. Radlov, "V, Soloviev: A Biographical Essay," Soloviet/s Collected Work.s..
IX, 9.
4. Soloviev's Letters, edited by E. L. Radlov, II, 338.
5. tu, 111, 56.
84 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
wrote to General Kireiev: "My idleness is becoming irksome to me, will
you think of some practical activity for me (except teaching, for I do
not want to resume it)?"6 He could have been a professor as early as
1880, when Nekrassov, dean of the Historical Philological School of
Odessa, offered him a post of assistant professor, and again in 1889 when
tke Warsaw District Commissioner of Education offered him a chair at
the Warsaw University. Soloviev probably rejected a professor's career
mainly because his fighting spirit urged him to discuss the burning
topics of Russia's national politics, church problems, etc. He could not
rest satisfied with a professor's life, demanding concentration on purely
scholarly research.
In the eighties Soloviev took a particular interest in the problem
of the reunion of Clfurches. At the invitation of Bishop Strossmayer, an
eminent Roman-Catholic prelate, he went one summer to Zagreb in
Croatia and there published his book History and the Future of Theoc-
racy. In 1889 he once more visited Bishop Strossmayer in Zagreb and
published in Paris a book called La Russie et l'Eglise Uniuerselle. In this
book Soloviev pronounced himself in favor of the Roman Catholic
Church because it has created a universal super-state organization.
The Catholics regard Soloviev as having renounced Orthodoxy and
joined the Roman Catholic Church. In fact Soloviev had never left the
Orthodox Church: he merely came to the conviction that the Eastern
and the Western Churches, despite the outward breach, had not severed
their mystical bond. Prince Eugene Trubetskoy who was Soloviev's per-
sonal friend says, on the authority of Soloviev's own words, that the
immediate impulse for Soloviev's change of attitude toward the Roman
Catholic Church which he used to regard as the Church of the Anti-
christ's tradition, "was a prophetic dream which he saw a year before
the coronation of the Emperor Alexander III." He had a clecfc"'ision
of himself driving through the streets of Moscow, and he remembered
well both the streets and the house in front of which his carriage had
stopped. While entering the house he met a Roman Catholic ecclesiasti..
cal dignitary whom he at once asked for a blessing. The other seemed
to hesitate, doubting whether it was possible to give a blessing to a
Schismatic; but Soloviev overpowered his doubts by pointing out the
mystical unity of the universal Church which in its essence had not been
shattered by the apparent disunion of its two halves. The blessing was
given.
leA year later the coronation of the Emperor Alexander III was, in-
deed, attended by the Papal Nuncio, and Soloviev relived his dream in
reality. The blessing was asked for and given in exactly the same cir-
6. ius; II, 110.
VLADIMIIl S. SOLOVIEV 85
cumstances, the reality coinciding with the dream down to minor de-
tails. Soloviev recognized the streets through which he had driven, and
the house which he had entered, and the Roman Catholic prelate who
indeed after some hesitation, yielded to the same arguments as in his
dream,"
In reality, Soloviev's new attitude toward the Catholic Church was
formed before this dream and its fulfillment. In a letter to Martynov,
dated July 1 8 / ~ O 1887, he wrote that eight years earlier he had read
for the first time Y. F. Samarin's "Letters on the Jesuits." This work, he
said, "considerably contributed to develop my sympathies toward the
Catholic Church. The gross logical errors and obvious lack of good
faith manifested by the author-otherwise so loyal ~ d intelligent a man
as Yury Samarin-made me seriously reflect upon our attitude toward
Catholicism.l"
Being convinced of the mystical unity of the Roman Catholic and
Orthodox Church, Soloviev did entertain to the former such relations
as might have left the Catholics under the impression that he had re-
nounced Orthodoxy and become a Roman Catholic. It can, however, be
proved beyond doubt that Soloviev remained faithful to the Orthodox
Church.
In 1886, on his return from Zagreb, he wrote to Archimandrite
Antony (the future Metropolitan of St. Petersburg): "To achieve the
reunion of Churches, any outward union and any individual conversion
are not only unnecessary, but would be even harmful. To the attempts
at conversion, aimed at myself, I answered in the first place by con-
fessing and communing (at an unusual time) at the Orthodox Serbian
Church in Zagreb with its curate Rev. Father Amvrosy.-Generally
speakjJlg, I have returned to Russia-if one may say so more of an
Orthodox than when I left her."9
After the publication of his book La Russie et l'Eglise Uniuerselle,
it was rumored that he had joined the Catholic Church. Soloviev's spirit-
ual director, Father Varnava, said to him: "Go to' confession to your
Catholic priests." The fact that Soloviev was for a long time deprived
of the sacraments, which he .deeply cherished, was so painful to him,
that after several years had elapsed, he decided to undertake a very
dangerous step. On February 18, 1896, he went to confession to Father
Nicholas Tolstoy and received communion from this priest who had
become a Catholic, but who shared Soloviev's teaching: the preservation
of mystical unity of the Eastern and Western Churches, in spite of out-
7. Prince E. Trubetskoy, The. Philosophy of V. Solooieu. I. 488fl.
8. Soloviev's Letters, III, 25.
9, Ibid., Ill, 189.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
ward separation. This is why" before receiving communion, Soloviev,
having read the decision of the Council of Trent, could add his declara-
tion that the Eastern Church is the true Orthodox .and Catholic
Church.t?
This means that he performed an act which can be approved
neither by the Orthodox nor by the Catholic Church. Soloviev's further
statements and acts clearly prove that he had not left the Orthodox
Church.
In July 1900 Soloviev came to Moscow where he was taken ill. He
left for the country home of Prince Peter Trubetskoy, located not far
from Moscow, and where his friend, Professor S. N. Trubetskoy, was
staying at that time. Stricken with serious kidney trouble, and aware
that his end was neafr, Soloviev requested on July 30th (the eve of his
death) that an Orthodox priest should be called from a nearby village
to hear his confession and give him communion. Here is what Father
Beliayev, the priest who administered the last rites to Soloviev, was to
relate concerning this event: "One evening, a servant of the Trubetskoys'
household was sent to me inviting me in the name of Serguei Nikolaie-
vich (Trubetskoy) to celebrate Mass on the next day and administer a
sick. gentleman who had arrived from Moscow; I was to bring him the
Holy Eucharist which I would consecrate at the Mass (according to
Soloviev's personal wish)." The next day, "after having recited matins,
I went to the Trubetskoys, Vladimir Scrgueyevitch (Soloviev) made his
confession with the true Christian contrition and said among other
things that he had not received communion during three years; for
when he last went to confession, he had an argument with the priest on
a point of dogma and was forbidden the sacraments." "The priest was
right," Soloviev added, "I argued with him only because of hot temper
and pride; after this we corresponded for some time this
question, but I would not give in, though well aware that I was in the
wrong; now I clearly realize my error and sincerely regret it.""!
According rules of the Catholic Church, a Catholic in ex-
tremis may make his confession to an Orthodox priest and receive com-
munion from him if there is no time or possibility of summoning a
Catholic priest. Therefore, Catholics say that Soloviev's last communion
does not prove that he had remained a member of the Orthodox Church.
Of course, they are mistaken. Soloviev himself put off his confession and
communion until the next day; he would have therefore had the time
to summon a Catholic priest from Moscow. His mention of a dogmatic
argument with an Orthodox priest and the fact of his having been for ..
10. See D. Stremooukhov, Y. Solouieo, sa mission et son oeuvre, 216, 230.
11. See "About Soloviev's Confession," Letters, Ill, 215.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 87
bidden the Sacraments "during three years" prove that after his com-
munion at the hands of Nicholas Tolstoy, he had wished to receive the
holy species from an Orthodox priest; in any case, this shows that he
had only once received communion from a Catholicpriest. This is easy
to understand if we take into consideration his condemnation of indi-
vidual conversions from one Church to another.P
Professor Stroyev heard from a distant relative that several months
before his death, Soloviev, speaking in a circle of his admirers, resolutely
denied his conversion to catholicism. IS
After the publication of his book La Russie et l'Eglise Uniuerselle
in 1889, Soloviev, it seems, grew temporarily indifferent to Church
problems. In a letter to L. P. Nikiforov, probably written during the
last year of his life, Soloviev declared: "I can te!l you nothing about
my works in French. Their fate interests me but little. Though there
is nothing in them that contradicts objective truth, the subjective mood,
the feelings and hopes which filled them when I was writing them, have
been outlived by me."l'
Meanwhile, Soloviev had become a friend of M. M. Stassiulevitch,
director of the liberal review Vestnik Evropy (Courier of Europe) and
devoted himself to philosophical publishing. His major philosophical
writing during that last period of his life, The Justification of the
Good (1897) contains a system of ethics. Two years before his death
Soloviev planned a series of important works. In a letter to Tavernier
(in French) he wrote: "I have published in a review the first chapter
of my metaphysics and I hope to finish writing Iny book in fifteen
months. Moreover, I am absorbed in Plato, whom I plan to translate.
Having finished the Metaphysics, Plato and Esthetics, I shall entirely
concentrate on the Bible . . . I do not know as yet, whether my final
work-Will take the form of a new translation with lengthy commentaries,
or whether this will become a system of historical philosophy founded
on facts, in the spirit of the Bible."15 .
Of all these plans, Soloviev had only time to make the translation of
a few of Plato's dialogues, with introductions leading into them and
several chapters devoted to problems of epistemology (entitled Theo-
retical Philosophy). He moreover wrote his great work entitled Three
Conversations; it is a study of the problems of evil, and in the chapter:
"The Story of the Antichrist" he vividly depicts the union of the three
Churches, Catholic and Protestant, which is to take place at
12. See Letters, III,
I!. Article in Russkaya Mysl, XXIX, 136, 1926.
14. Letters, edited by Radlov, additional volume, 6,
15. Ibid., letter No. 15 to Tavernier, January 1898.
88 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
the end of times, and in which they appear as three organs of the whole,
enjoying equal rights.
A detailed biography of Soloviev is still a work of the future. It is
necessary because Soloviev was a great philosopher; it will be valuable
because Soloviev was an extraordinary personality who was unques-
tionably in touch with the higher world. His friend Prince Evgeny
Trubetskoy writes: "Whoever had the opportunity of seeing Vladimir
Sergueevich Soloviev even once in his life forever retained the impres-
sion of having seen a man quite unlike ordinary mortals. Even his out-
ward appearance, especially the expression of his large and beautiful
eyes struck one by a unique combination of infirmity and power, of
physical helplessness and spiritual depth."
"He was so shortsighted that he could not see that which everybody
saw. Screwing his eyes from under his bushy eyebrows he could hardly
discern the nearest objects. But when his eyes looked into the distance
he seemed to penetrate beyond the surface of things accessible to out-
ward senses and see something of the realm of beyond which remained
hidden from everybody. His eyes shone with some inner light and-looked
straight into the soul." .
"Without being an ascetic. he had an emaciated appearance and
looked like a living relic. His thick curly hair, coming down to his
shoulders, made him resemble an ikon. Characteristically enough, he
was often taken for a priest: 'What, you are here, Fatherl'-people used
to address him. Little children. catching him by the flaps of his fur coat
would exclaim: 'That's Jesus Christl' His ascetic appearance was in
sharp contrast with his loud sonorous voice: it struck one by its mystical
force and depth coming-no one knew from where."16
Strossmayer said of him: "Solouieo anima candida, pia ac uere sancta
est." ...
Soloviev's emaciated appearance was due to his extremely irregular
way of life. Having no family, he had no permanent abode, no fixed
hours for meals, for sleep or for work. Constantly on the move, he
stayed now at some hotel in St. Petersburg or Moscow, now at the coun-
try estate of some friends, now at some boarding house on the shores of
Imatra or Saima Lake in Finland.
"Spiritually he resembled the type of the pilgrim, created by wan-
deringRussia, who, in his search of heavenly Jerusalem, spends his
life in wandering across the whole measureless expanse of earth, visits
and adores all sacred objects of reverence, but does not stay for long
in any earthly abode.v-"
About his homeless condition he wrote to the Jesuit Paul Pierling
16. E. Trubetskoy, The Philosophy 01 Y. Solooieu, I, 3, 18.
,,, J " ' ; ~ 'I ....
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 89
"Why do you not admit the idea that though I am not a monk, I have
no 'abiding city here,' like yourself?" (5/17, II, 1890.)18
Soloviev had no opportunity of creating a family life for himself.
When he was eighteen, he fell in love with his cousin E. K. Romanova.
For several years they considered themselves engaged, but in 1875
Romanova rejected him. In T. L. Sukhotin's confidential album, answer-
ing the question: "Have you been in love, and how many times?"
Soloviev wrote: "Seriously-once; otherwise-27 times:' It is difficult to
say what he means by "seriously": was it his love for E. K. Romanova,
for E. M. Polivanova, S. P. Khitrovo or S. M. Martynovaz-"
More than once Soloviev considered entering monastic life. In 1886,
after his visit to the Troytzky-Serguiyevsky Abbey, he wrote Canon M.
Rachky: "The Archimandrit and the 'monks are l110st attentive toward
me, wishing me to join them, but I will think this over carefully before
making such a decision.
H2o
A year later he wrote Archimandrit An-
thonius: "I would be now very much inclined to become a monk. But
for the present this is impossible. I am by no means in favor of uncon..
ditional freedom, but believe that between such freedom and uncon..
ditional slaoery, there must be an intermediate way, that is freedom
conditioned by sincere submission to that which is holy and legitimate:"
"However, will such freedom be accepted in our midst? Will they not
demand everything without discrimination, no matter whether holy
and legitimate or not. "21
In the following poem Soloviev depicts his life path:
Once in the misty dawn with timid foot
Towards a mysterious strand I walked alone;
The stars were paling in the eastern light,
My soul engaged the host of dreams in fight
~
And prayed to gods unknown.
Now in the cold hard light I tread as then
A lonely path, beside an unknown stream;
The mists are fled, and clearly shows by day
How rough the mountain track, how far away
The haven of my dream:
But till the midnight hour with fearless foot
I travel to the goal of my desires;
Where on the summit, 'neath an alien star,
Along the sacred roof will gleam afar
The line of victory fires.
18. Stremooukhov, 509.
20. Letters, I, 171.
2L ru. rrr. IOL
19. Letters, additional volume, 239.
90 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
Careless of the material side of life, Soloviev was always penniless,
for he freely gave away the money he earned to everybody who asked
him for it. When he was short of money he gave away his things. "1
remember," says Trubetskoy, "once late in autumn I found him in
Moscow suffering from cold. His entire wardrobe consisted at the time
of-a light alpaca suit and a still lighter grey cape; being without money,
he had just given away to someone all the warm things he had; he
counted on earning enough by the winter to buy himself a fur coat."22
Not only men, but animals too, enjoyed his generosity and seemed
to feel his love for every living thing. Barely had he time to arrive at
the hotel where he often stayed in St. Petersburg, when a flight of
pigeons would appear on the window sill of his room.
23
SoIoviev had intimate friends and acquaintances among all sorts
of people. The profundity of his thoughts, the wide range of his in-
terests, his vast erudition and especially his wit attracted to him people
of all classes. "Feasts with him," says E. T'rubetskoy, "were truly Platonic
feasts; his animation communicated itself to the others: who of his
friends does not remember those inspired talks, that wealth of charming
and infectious hilarity!" During friendly conversations he was fond of
drinking wine. "Wine," he used to say to E. Trubetskoy, "is an excel-
lent test, it reveals the whole man: a beast becomes in wine an absolute
brute; a man becomes something more than a nlan."2.
In his preface to Soloviev's letters, his friend E. L. Radlov writes
that he possessed a "childlike gaiety." His letters and poems are full of
puns, good-natured jokes and mocking remarks addressed to "friends
and to himself.' In the dedication to his play The White Lilie, he well
defined the role played by laughter in his own life:
Out of sonorous laughter and muffled sobs
The harmony of the world is created.
Resound then laughter, like a free wave,
And muffle the sobs, were it only for a second.
And thou, poor muse! above the darkened path
Appear, were it but once, with youthful smile
And for a fleeting moment, with kind mockery
Disarm and tame the wickedness of life.
Letters, I.
I have already mentioned Soloviev's VISions in connection with
his threefold vision of Sophia. He looked on dreams, as he himself put
22. E. Trubetskoy, I. 12.
25. Lukyanov, Ill, 1M.
24. E. Trubetskoy, I, 17.
VLADIMlll S. SOLOVIEV
91
it, as upon "a window as it were into another world: in his dreams he
often conversed with the dead, or saw visions, sometimes prophetic,
sometimes queer, fantastic." Even in his waking moments he sometimes
sensed what was happening at a distance. In a letter to Stassiulevitch he
wrote: "Thursday of Holy Week, around eight o'clock in the evening,
while dining with you, I experienced for no apparent reason a deatfily
melancholy, of which I told you both (Stassiulevitch and his wife); I
expressed my conviction that at that very moment a misfortune had
taken place in connection with someone dear to me. Imagine, that ac-
tually at that time, around eight o'clock on Good Thursday evening,
one of my childhood.friends, Lopatin (brother of the Moscow professor)
suffered a stroke after which the doctor declaredjhat he was afflicted
with progressive paralysis of the brain."26
His attitude toward visions that are of the nature of hallucinations
and his peculiar theory of such visions may be seen from the following
story told by E. Trubetskoy: Once "early in the morning, soon after he
woke up, he had a vision of an Oriental man wearing a turban. He
uttered some very silly words about Soloviev's quite recent article on
Japan ("drove along the road, read about Buddhism, there you are
with your Buddhism") and thrust an extremely long umbrella into his
stomach. The vision vanished, but Soloviev felt an acute pain in his
liver which lasted afterwards for three days.... -He nearly always had
after his visions such painful sensations and other morbid phenomena.
Once I said to him in this connection: 'Your visions are simply the
hallucinations of your distress.' He at once agreed with me. But one
must not interpret his agreement in the sense of his denying the reality
of his visions. In his mouth these words meant that a disease makes OUI
mind sensitive to the influences of the spiritual world to which people
enjoying good health remain quite insensible. Therefore he did not
deny the necessity of medical treatment in such cases. He admitted hal
lucinations to be phenomena of subjective and morbid imagination,
But this did not prevent him believing in the objective cause of hal
lucinations which is imaged in us and embodied through the medium
of subjective imagination, and in the external reality." (I, 20 U)
His nephew (S. ,M. Soloviev) says that after 1889, in the period ol
his doubts as to the possibility of the reunion of Churches and of hi!
seeming loss of interest in Church problems "the bright visions of his
youth (Sophia) and of his mature age (hermits) give place to frequent
visions of the devil in different shapes. I have myself heard V. S. Solo-
viev tell of such visions."
The thoughts about the evil principle which found such a masterful
25. Letters, additional volume, 64.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
expression in Three Conversations, seemed to disturb Soloviev and
make him particularly sensitive to it. Professor A. V. Kartashev tells of
the following remarkable story which he heard in 1910 from General
Veliaminov, professor of the Military Medical Academy, at the house of
Baroness V. I. Uexkiill: "Although he was a man in his sixties, a positiv-
ist, even a materialist, he yet kept on friendly terms with V, S. Soloviev.
In his old age, Veliaminov, the cultured skeptic, felt obviously dis-
turbed by the mystery of the spiritual world. He was interested in me
as a religious philosopher and one day told me the following story:
"Once in summer, at the summer residence of Varvara Ivanovna
near Moscow, the 'eternal wanderer,' V. Soloviev, who was staying there,
was somehow in a stLte of particular tension and told us many interest-
ing things about the devil. It was a late summer evening. After a long-
drawn five-o'clock tea we were three of us sitting on the summer veranda;
its floor was of simple wooden boards with rifts. Soloviev sat frowning
in an armchair and I now walked and now stood, still slightly provoking
him with my questions. Soloviev was talking about the devil more and
more concretely and definitely, making us too catch his peculiar mood.
Suddenly, from one of the rifts almost in the middle of the floor there
rose up with a slight noise, reaching almost to the ceiling, a column of
fairly thick brownish smoke or vapor. 'There he is, there he is!' shouted
v. S., pointing to it with his finger. Then he got up and fell into silence,
looking grave and tired as if he had gone through some ordeal. We were
nonplussed too. The smoke quickly disappeared, leaving no trace, no
smell behind. A minute after we began looking for an explanation. I
had been smoking, perhaps I had dropped a burning match and set
something on fire under the floor. But what? And why such an explo-
sion? And why no smell of burning? The investigation made by the
dog and the servants under tile veranda led to nothing. We had to fall
silent too and were left puzzled for the rest of our lives."
"Of course," added the proud skeptic to his puzzling story, "I do
not draw any conclusions from this even now and merely state the fact."
In his youth Soloviev was keen on spiritism, thinking that spiritistic
phenomena could be used for metaphysical purposes. Yet, after having
attended in 1875 several spiritist seances in London, he became disap-
pointed. In his letter to Prince D. Tsertelev he tells of a seance given by
the famous Williams and says that the latter "is rather an insolent than
a skillful trickster. He did produce the Egyptian darkness, but did not
show any other miracles. When the bell flying round the room in the
darkness descended on my head I caught with it a muscular hand whose
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
95
owner did not proclaim himself to be a spirit. After this the remaining
details are of little interest."28
The principal philosophical works of V. Soloviev are the following
(in Russian): . .
The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists), 1874;
The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, 1877.
The Critique of Abstract Principles, 1877-80.
Lectures on Godmanhood, 1877-81.
Three Discourses in Memory of Dostoevsky,
The Spiritual Foundations of Life, 1882-84.
The Great Controversy and the Christian Policy, 1883.
The History and the Future of Theocracy, 18cJ5-87.
La Russie et I'Eglise Universelle, 1889.-
The Meaning of Love, 1892-94.
The Justification of the Good, 1895.
Theoretical Philosophy, 1897-99.
Three Conversations, 1899-1900.
Collected Works, 9 vols.; Letters, 4 vols.
Of Soloviev's numerous writings on political-philosophical ques-
tions I will mention only the following:
The National Problem i11 Russia, 2 parts, ..
China and Europe, 1890.
Soloviev's poems are rather important for the characteristic and
understanding of his work. Some of them express in a beautiful form
his profound philosophical ideas.
works: Three Conversations, 1915; The Justification of
the Good, translated by N. Duddington, 1818; Lectures on God-man-
hood, with an introduction by P. Zouboff, New York, 1944; The Mean-
ing 0/ Love, New York, 1947; Ausgeuidhlte JVerke, 2 vols., E. Diederichs,
1914. Die Deutsche Gesamtausgabe in 8 Sanden, translated by W. Szyl-
karski, Erich Wevel.Verlag, Krailing vor Munchen, 1950-1953.
The principal works on Vladimir Soloviev are:
Prince E. Trubetskoy, The Philosophy of Vladimir Solouieu, 2 vols.,
1913; C. Mochulsky, Vladimir Solooieu, YMCA Press, Paris 1936; D.
Stremoukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev, La mission et son oeuvre, Paris
1935; M. Herbigny, Vladimir Solooieu, a Russian Newman, London
1918; W. Dunphy, The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solouieo,
26. Letters, II, 228.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
Friedrich Muckermann, Vladimir Solouieo, Verlag Otto Walter, Switzer-
land 1945.
Having outgrown his youthful religious crisis, V. Soloviev, as early
as came to think that the truth of Christ alone is capable of re-
generating humanity, of overcoming the coarse ignorance of masses, the
moral devastation of the upper classes, the brute force of the state
(letter to Mme. E. V. Romanov of july 25, 1873).
He explained "the estrangement of the contemporary mind from
Christianity" by the fact that up to now, Christianity had "had an
inadequate irrational form." Today, when through the development
of science and philosophy, Christianity has been destroyed in its false
form, the time has come to re-establish true "Christianity, to bring its
eternal contents a new, adequate, that is entirely rational form.
If "a certain-and were it only a small-part of mankind fulfills ac-
tually and seriously, with a conscious and strong conviction, the teaching
of absolute love and self-sacrifice, will untruth and evil be able to persist
long in the world? But this practical fulfillment of Christianity in life
is still a long way ahead. For the present, we must still work at the theo-
retical aspect, at theological teaching. This is my true mission." When
he entered the school of Theology, he did not want to become a monk:
"The time has come not to run away from the world, but to go into the
world, in order to reform it."27 And at the end of his life, Soloviev
realized that the fundamental issue of culture was "to place humanity
before the dilemma: to accept or to reject truth, after having known it,
that is truth correctly stated and clearly grasped." By stating Christian
truth with precision, thus doing away with theoretical misunderstand..
ings, the decision to go with Christ or to reject Christ becomes a pure
act of the will, it is the decision to be "absolutely moral or absolutely
immoral. "28 -
And indeed it became the work of his life to build up a Christian
Orthodox philosophy revealing the wealth and the living efficacy of
the principal dogmas of Christianity which in many minds had been
turned into dead formulae, severed from life and philosophy. Soloviev
showed what importance they have as a philosophical basis for a. scien-
tific study of nature, as guidance for the moral life of an individual and
as a starting point for working out an ideal of Christian politics.
Soloviev's entire literary work reveals his activism: his theoretical
search of truth always aims at the practical goal of reforming the world,
conquering selfishness, achieving the Christian ideal of love of our
neighbor and of all absolute values. Prince E. Trubetzkoy and D. N.
27. Letters, III, 88.
28. Letters, additional volume, "To Tavernier, May 1896," 220 c.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
Stremooukhoff divide Soloviev's works into three periods, taking into
account precisely the different phases of his activism. Stremooukhoff
describes these three periods as Soloviev's interest in the field of theoso-
phy, that is Christian teaching, then in the field of theocracy, and finally
in theurgy.29 , ~
During the first period, Soloviev hoped that the incarnation in
the world of Sophia, Wisdom of God, can be achieved through Christian
theosophy, that is through the knowledge of God and of his relation to
the world. Soloviev's major writings belonging to that period are Lec-
tures on Godmanhood and Spiritual Foundations of Life. During the
second period, after 1882, Soloviev placed his hopes in the transforma-
tion of mankind through theocracy, that is through the creation of a
just state and a just social order, which realizes Christian politics. His
major works belonging to that period are: The Great Quarrel and
Christian Politics, The History and Future of Theocracy, La Russie et
l'Eglise Uniuerselle and The National Problem and Russia. Finally,
during the third period starting about 1890, Soloviev was absorbed in
the problem of theurgy, that is mystical art, creating a new life accord-
ing to Divine Truth. His major works of that period are the Meaning
of Love and The Justification of the Good. Soloviev's last work, The'
Three Conversations expresses the end of his utopian hopes in the
achievement of good in man's terrestrial life.
The characteristic features of Russian philosophical thought-s-the
search for an exhaustive knowledge of reality as a whole and the con-
creteness of metaphysical conceptions-find a particularly clear expres-
sion in Soloviev's work and are quite definitely formulated even in his
early books, The Crisis in Western Philosophy; The Philosophical Prin-
ciples of Integral Knowledge; and The Critique 01 Abstract Principles.
(-
The empirical theory, according to which all we can know consists
of mere sense-data or appearances, does not satisfy Soloviev, since no
appearances can exist or be known apart from their necessary relations
with other appearances and with that which appears. These relations
can only be cognized by means of thought, which reveal to us the gen-
eral significance or reason of things (ratio rerum) as consisting precisely
in the relatedness of everything to the whole-the whole being under-
stood not as a chaotic multiplicity but as a systematic pan-unity. The
rational character of the contents of knowledge "is not given in experi-
ence, since in experience we are always concerned with the particular
and multiple reality, and never find either the 'all' or the 'unity.' The
29. Prince Eo Trubetzkoy, Soloviev'1 World Conception, I, chaps. 2 and 10;
Slremooukhoff, 8 c.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
reason or meaning of the things we know can only be grasped by the
knowing subject's reason; the relation of a given object to all can only
exist for us in so far as we ourselves contain the principle of pan-unity,
namely, reason." We can thus understand how the theory of rationalism
has arisen. "The criterion of truth is transferred from the external
~ o r l d into the knowing subject: human reason and not the nature of
things or events is declared to be the basis of truth:' Reason, however,
as the principle of the correlation of all in unity is only the form of
truth; every variety of rationalism proves thus to be abstract in charac-
ter and, therefore, invalid. Dogmatic rationalism cannot explain how
our subjective thinking can inform us of the existence of the transsubjec-
tive world. The critical rationalism of Kant gets over the difficulty by
depreciating the value of reason and maintaining that its a priori
truths are the necessary forms of the phenomenal but not of the true
being. This, however, leads to a fresh difficulty: if all knowledge be
reduced to a combination of the a priori forms of reason with the em-
pirical material of sense, and if these two factors be regarded as mutually
independent, their synthesis can not be explained without reference to
some third principle-and yet, according to Kant, no third principle
is accessible to our knowledge. If reason and sensibility are the only
recognized factors, it will have to be admitted that the whole content
of knowledge depends upon its form and is entirely determined by the
categories of reason. This is the line of thought developed in the abso-
lute rationalism of Hegel. But since the form of reason, like every other
form, is nothing apart from the corresponding content, absolute ra-
tionalism sets itself the impossible task of deducing everything from
nothing.
'The final results of empiricism and of rationalism are s0!'pewhat
similar: empiricism leaves us with nothing but appearances, without an
object of which they are appearances and without a subject to whom
they appear; rationalism ends with pure thought; i.e., "thought without
a thinker and without anything to think of." Neither in experience nor
in thought does man transcend his subjective relation to the object and
become aware of the object as an existent, that is, as something which is
more than his sensation or his thought. Neither experience nor thought
can, then, lead to truth, since truth means that which is-i.e., existence.
"But only the whole exists. Truth, then, is the whole. And if truth be
the whole, then that which is not the whole-i.e., every particular thing,
being or event taken separately from the whole-is not truth, because in
its separateness it does not even exist: it exists with all and in all. Truth
then is all in its unity or as one:' "The complete definition of truth
thus finds expression in three predicates: is, one, all" (II, 281). To put
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
9'1
it shortly "truth is the existent unity of all;" that is-not an abstract
idea contained in all, but a concrete principle containing all in itself
(I, 27). .
For Soloviev, then, truth is an absolute value belonging to the pan-
unity itself and not to our judgments or inferences. To understand truth
means to transcend the limits of subjective thought and enter the do-
main of the existent unity of all that is; i.e., of the Absolute. Is man
capable of doing this? The question contains the beginning of its own
answer. The Absolute "as the pan-unity cannot be wholly external to
the knowing subject: there must be an inner connection between them,
by virtue of which the Absolute can be known to the subject and the
subject can be inwardly connected with all that exists in the Absolute
and actually know this All. It is only in connection with that which
truly is, as with the unconditionally real and unconditionally universal,
that the facts of our experience acquire true reality, and the concepts
of our thought-true, positive universality. Taken in the abstract, both
these factors of our knowledge are in themselves completely indifferent
to truth and derive their true significance from a third, a religious prin-
ciple:'
Both empirical and rational knowledge is relative, for it is the re-
sult of communicating with the object from without, from the side of
our phenomenal separateness; it is supplemented by knowledge "from
within, from the side of our absolute being which is inwardly connected
with the being of the object known." Such knowledge is mystical and
absolute. We find in it something more than our thought; namely, an
objective reality independent of us. Soloviev calls this third kind of
knowledge faith, understanding by this term, like Jacobi, not a subjec-
tive conviction of the existence of a reality independent of us, but
intuition; i.e., immediate contemplation of an essence distinct from
our own.
True knowledge, then, is the result of empirical, rational and mysti-
cal cognition in their right interconnection. The rational form of knowl-
edge is not lost but merely supplemented by the addition of the life
principle. A philosophy constructed on this plan "seeks to combine with
the logical perfection of the Western form the fullness of the spiritual
intuitions of the East" (I, 143); its purpose is to realize the universal
synthesis of science, philosophy and religion. The objective significance
of knowledge, its logical necessity and coherence are only possible if
the Absolute principle-God, as the pan-unity-gives the world the
character of a complete organic system. The same intimate connection
between God and the world is to be found in all other positive mani-
festations of existence. A complete knowledze of reality as a whole
98 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
inevitably leads not merely to a religious but to a Christian world con-
ception which centers round the doctrine of the God-man, that is, of
Godhead and Manhood being joined together in Christ "not by con-
fusion of substance but by unity of person."
It has already been said that the Absolute is the unity of all that is.
AS the absolute first principle, it transcends real content and rational
form. Conditioning both content and form and binding them together
by an inner tie, it stands above all determination and all existence, since
determinate existence is always relative. It has the power of existence
and may on that ground be said to exist, though it would be more cor-
rect to say that as the first principle in the strict sense it is above ex-
istence and above PQwer. As incommensurable with any determinations
it is Nothing (the positive nothing, the Ain-Soph of the Kabbala); but
the Absolute is both tv and v xa.i. n:dv.. "The Absolute is all and
nothing: nothing, in so far as it is not anyone thing; and all, in so far
as it cannot be lacking in anything." All existence being relative and
therefore plural is, in relation to the Absolute, its other. But the Abso-
lute would not be itself if it excluded its 'other;' if it did, that 'other'
would tbe the boundary of the' Absolute and, consequently, the Absolute
would be 'limited, exclusive and not free;' that is, it would not be abso-
lute. The Absolute, therefore, is the unity of itself and its opposite. In
so far as it is the denial of itself and the affirmation of its other, it is
love (I, 321).
Thus, two poles may be distinguished within it: first, the principle
of absolute unity and freedom from all determinate being; secondly the
principle of existence, that is, of the mulriplicity of forms. The first
pole-the Absolute in itself or as such-transcends existence and is,
therefore, the positive potentiality of being; the second pole is the striv-
ing for existence, the felt absence of existence, and is, therefore, the
negative potentiality of being, UA,ll or materia prima.
It should be noted that the second pole can be regarded as the
materia prima, or the negative principle, only when taken "in itself and
in its potential separateness." As actually existing, it is determined by
the positive principle and is the bearer of its manifestations, its eternal
image or idea. The interconnection between first matter and the Abso-
lute in its positive aspect brings about the world of existence or ac-
tuality-the world of many determinate beings each of which has a
natural and an ideal aspect. Every entity is, on the one hand, a force;
that is, an independent center of activity and, on the other, the bearer
of the idea of the divine pan-unity in some particular aspect of it. It
thus acquires an individual character, and. its activity is directed to a
rational purpose.
VLADIMItl S. SOLOVIEV 99
Man may be taken as an instance of such an entity. Human per-
sonality is negatively absolute: HIt cannot and will not be satisfied with
any relative, limited content;" it is convinced that "it can attain posi-
tive absoluteness" and "possess the complete fullness' of being.
u80
Man
cannot, of course, by himself create absolute fullness of being; it can
only be reached through a perfect mutual interpenetration of ail
creatures united in love with each other and with God. As a final aim,
it is contained in the idea of every entity, but its realization cannot be
secured mechanically; it must be a free act, based upon love for God
and for all beings. In seeking to attain it, the world-manifold gradually
becomes one whole, i.e., the Absolute. Thus, the world is the Absolute
that becomes, while God is the Absolute that is.
a1

The beings of this world can only rise up to God if they have per-
fect love, that is, if they renounce their exclusive self-assertion. Such
renunciation leads not to the loss of individuality, but, on the contrary,
to finding one's true self and to a perfect life in God. A being that
chooses the opposite path of hatred of God-of rivalry with Him, enters
the realm of satanic being. The realm of the earthly life with which we
are familiar stands midway between these two poles. It consists of beings
who do not struggle against the supreme goal of their existence-the
participation in the divine perfection-but try to attain it without feel-
ing a perfect love for God, without making their will a mere instrument
of the Divine providence; they retain, if only to a small extent, self-will
and the egoistic exclusiveness of selfhood. This leads to disastrous conse-
quences, as we know from the history of the Fall. Rejecting voluntary
obedience to God, man b e c o ~ e s the slave of nature, which also under-
goes a deep change. Beings that preserve egoistic exclusiveness become
impenetrable to one another; i.e., they acquire corporeality in the form
of coarse matter which admits of external relations only and not of
inward unity. The life of beings thus separated from one another
inevitably ends in death; the relations betweeri them are almost entirely
confined to the struggle for existence which necessarily involves suffer-
ing and can never lead to satisfaction, since the fullness of being is not
to be found on this path.
82
What is then this coarse impenetrable matter which sprang up as
a result of the original sin? Soloviev gives an answer to that question
by developing a dynamic theory of the atom; namely, he understands
the impenetrable matter as a manifestation of the interaction of the
:JO. Lectures on God-manhood, II.
!I. The Critique of Absolute Principles II, 305.
32. Lectures on God-manhood, III.
100
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
forces of repulsion and attraction; and these forces themselves he con-
ceives as manifestations of monads.
"Hardness and spaciousness forming matter," writes Soloviev, "exist
only in the interaction of atoms; the atoms themselves must, in ac-
cordance with this be defined as the actual cause of such an action; but
the actual cause of action is that which we call energy." "It is not-energy
which is the attribute of matter, as must be presupposed by mechanistic
materialism, but on the contrary, matter is only the result of energies,
or more correctly speaking, the general limit of their interaction." The
atoms are "immaterial dynamic entities existing in themselves, they are
living energies or monads existing in themselves and acting out of them-
selves.'?" \\
Soloviev's dynamistic teaching concerning matter is confirmed by
the development of modern physics; in order to be convinced of this,
it is sufficient to replace in his text the word atom by the words electron,
proton, etc.
The task of man as a self-conscious being is to overcome all forms
of. evil and imperfection, deriving from the Fall and connected with the
impenetrable corporeality; man has to further the process of the re-
union of all creatures with one another and with God. To do this he
must sacrifice himself for the love of God and of the whole world. But
the great purpose of making the world divine cannot be accomplished
by man alone, since the positive potency of being belongs to God and
not to man.
God has so far been spoken of only as the positive Nothing, tran-
scending all form and content. If the sphere of the Absolute were limited
to this Nothing, there could obviously be no question of its love for,
or reunion with, the world. The Christian doctrine based upon revela-
tion speaks of God as a person, as a Trinity of God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Ghost. In his attempt to interpret the data of
revelation, Soloviev points out that they became intelligible to us in
connection with the philosophical conception of God as the positive
Nothing. God as the Absolute is superpersonal, and for this very reason
the realm of personal being is open to Him, though it does not limit
Him. Entering it He still, on the one hand, transcends existence as the
positive Nothing, while on the other He exists as three Persons which
form a perfect unity. Each aspect of this unity is of absolute value both
in itself and for the cosmos (VIII, 19).
Soloviev bases his interpretation of the Three Hypostases upon the
idea of the self-manifestation of the Absolute, which necessarily in-
volves the following three moments: U(I) that which is manifested in
35. Collected WorJc.s, II, Critique 01 Abstract Principles, chap. 55.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV 101
and for itself, (2) manifestation as such; i.e., the positing of oneself in
or for another. The expression or determination of the manifesting
essence, its Word or Logos; (3) the return of that which is manifested to
itself, or its rediscovery of itself in the manifestation." The first of these
principles is the spirit as the subject of will and the bearer of goodness,
and therefore also the subject of truth and of the feeling of beauty; the
second is Reason (Logos), as the subject and the bearer of truth, and
therefore also the subject of the will for goodness arid of the feeling of
beauty;" the third is the soul "as the subject of feeling and the bearer
of beauty and therefore, and in so far only, capable of will for goodness
and the thought of truth."34 Thus, three absolute values-goodness,
truth and beauty-correspond to the three persons-of the Holy Trinity.
The values of which these persons are the bearers are simply vari-
ous forms of love if by love be meant "every kind of inward unity of
many beings." Thus, "goodness is the unity of all or of everything-
that is, love, as the object of desire;" it is a substantial unity. "Truth is
also love-i.e., the unity of all-as objective thought; it is an ideal unity.
Finally, beauty is love too (i.e., the unity of all) as sensed or mariifested;
it is a real unity."
Each of the three persons of the Holy Trinity possesses the power
of exclusive self-assertion, but freely renounces it and remains in com-
plete unity with the other two, thus realizing goodness, truth and beauty
in their primary form. "Primary goodness is the moral harmony of the
three ultimate subjects or their union in one single will; primary truth
is their intellectual harmony or their unity in one single presentation;
primary beauty is their sensuous or aesthetic harmony-s-their union in
one feeling." "Thus the Absolute realizes goodness through truth and
beautv."85
The Holy Trinity is the realized ideal of consubstantiality on the
basis of perfect love. It was this conception of it that led 51. Sergius of
Radonezh to dedicate the church in his monastery to the Holy Trinity
so that the monks, contemplating the truth of the Divine tri-unity,
should do their utmost to embody it in life.
God is love both within the limits of the Holy Trinity and in re..
lation to the world. The calling forth of the world-manifold is in itself
an act of love; moreover, Divine love participates in all the positive
expression of cosmic existence. The multitude of creatures can only
attain fullness of being by forming one single whole, one living universal
organism. The wholeness of all which ideally forever abides in God
"reveals itself as the all-pervading rationality of the world, so that this
54. The Philosophical Principles 01 Integral Knowledge, 1. 538.
55. Lectures on Goa-manhood" VII.
102 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
rationality is the direct expression or Word (Logos) of the Deity, the
manifested and active God."8ft Even in a world that has fallen away
from God, rational meaning is preserved, at any rate in so far as all
beings have a vague instinctive longing for an all-embracing unity; this
"longing, common to all" transcends the limits of each separate per-
sonality and as the universal inner life of all that exists, may be called
the World..Soul. Thus, even in a state of separation from God, the world-
manifold is a single organism, though an imperfect one. At the begin-
ning its parts are held together by means of an external law, and only,
as the result of a slow historical process, do they gradually come to form
"a new positive combination of elements in the form of an absolute
organism or of an icward pan-unity." The absolute form of that unity,
the eternal divine idea of it, Sophia, is from all eternity contained in
the divine Logos. The Logos is thus "the eternal spiritual center of the
cosmic organism." The birth of the incarnated SOIJhia or of the absolute
organism can only take place "through the concerted action of the
divine principle and the World-Soul." The process of birth is slow and
difficult, because it requires a free act of love for God. "Through a free
act of the World-Soul, the world which it animates fell away from God
and broke up into a number of hostile elements; through a long series
of free acts the rebellious multitude must be reconciled to itself and to
God, becoming regenerated in the form of an absolute organism.t's"
In order to further this process the Divine Logos, whose love never
forsakes the world, descends into the stream of events, and incarnating
itself in the person of Jesus Christ, "from being the center of eternity
becomes the center of history." This act of love resulting in, a perfect
union of God. and man cannot be a mere return to the primeval im-
mediate unity with God, characteristic of man at the stage of innocence.
After the Fall the new unity has to be striven for, and can only be won
by free activity and sacrifice-sacrifice both. on the part of God and of
man. In assuming the limited human consciousness the Divine principle
"comes down, humbles itself, taking upon itself the form of a servant."
It does not wholly confine itself to the limits of the natural conscious-
ness-this would be impossible-but it actually feels them as its own
limits at the moment. This self-limitation of the Deity in Christ liberates
His manhood, enabling His natural will freely to renounce itself for
the sake of the divine principle, not as of an external force (such self-
renunciation would not be free) but as of an inward good, and thus
really to attain that good." We have then before us one divinely human
personality, combining in itself two natures and possessing two wills.
56. The Spiritual Foundations 01 Life, III, 323.
57. L e ~ t u r e $ o ~ vod-man.hood, IX.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 105
This personality Has God, freely renounces divine glory and, by that
very act, as man, acquires the possibility of attaining it. On the path to
this attainment the human nature and will of the Saviour inevitably
meets with the temptation of evil." The act of spiritual heroism in
overcoming temptation inwardly is followed by the act of physical
heroism and the overthrow of physical nature in the form of death and
suffering; the end is resurrection in the flesh, freed from material weight
and impenetrability, transfigured and capable of serving "as the direct
expression and instrument of the Divine spirit, as the true spiritual
body of the resurrected Godman:'38 The normal relation between the
divine, the human and the natural principles, disturbed by the Fall, is
re-established in the risen Christ, in whom dwelleth all "the fullness of

Godhead bodily." Redemption from evil accomplished by the God-man

means the salvation both of the soul and of the physical nature. Trans-
figured matter becomes holy flesh, divine matter, obedient to the de-
mands of the Spirit. .
Soloviev's philosophy is anthropocentric: man is the highest stage
of creation; the regeneration of the world is accomplished by God in
conjunction with man adequately expressing the divine idea of hu-
manity. Such an ideally perfect man is the supreme expression of
Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. But the perfect man appeared in Christ.
Therefore the God-Man Jesus Christ is a combination of Logos and
Sophia.s? In the divine .being of Christ the primary or the generating
unity is, properly speaking, the Deity-God as active force or Logos, and
in this primary unity we have Christ' as strictly speaking a divine being,
but the second generated unity to which we gave the mystical name of
Sophia, is the principle of humanity, is the ideal or normal man. Par-
ticipating through this unity in the human principle, Christ is man, or,
according to the Scriptures, the second Adam."40
SUC}l principle as Sophia has an all-pervading meaning for the
world and can receive various definitions from different points of view.
Sophia as a relatively passive principle, devoted to God and receiving
from Him its form, is the eternal Feminine. "For God," says Soloviev,
"His other (i.e., the universe) has from all eternity the image of perfect
femininity, but He wants this image to be not only for Him, but to be
realized and embodied for each particular being capable of uniting
with Him. The eternal Feminine itself which is not a mere inactive
image in God's mind, but a living spiritual being, possessing all the
fullness of forces and activities. strives for the same realization and
38. The Spiritual Foundations of Life, III. 337, 341.
39. Lectures on God-manhood, VII.
40. tu, VIII.
1M VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
embodiment. The entire cosmic and historical process is a process of
its realization and embodiment in the great variety of forms and degrees."
As a single center of the accomplishment of the Divine idea of the
world, Sophia is the soul of the world and in relation to Logos she is
Christ's body. But Christ's body in its universal aspect is the Church.
Therefore, Sophia is the Church, the bride of the Divine Logos. And
as a feminine individual personality she is also the Holy Virgin Mary.4!
The doctrine of the God-man as a source of regeneration of the
world is used by Soloviev for his interpretation of the history of man-
kind and for a theory of social life. Indeed, the God-man is an indi-
vidual and yet universal being, for it embraces "the whole regenerated
spiritual humanity" .and is present in every "cosmic realm in so far as
unity, goodness, truth and beauty are realized in it.
42
Even the evolu-
tion of the world before man, that is the evolution of nature is already
a process gradually leading toward the unity of the world, which is
indispensable for the achievement of absolute perfection. Therefore,
Soloviev's teaching concerning the evolution of nature must be stated
as premise to the expounding of his ethics, his social philosophy and
his philosophy of history.
According to Soloviev's teaching, the Absolute is the pan-unity
which is} and the world is the pan-unity in the state of becoming. The
world contains the divine element, all-oneness, as a potentiality, an
idea; but it also contains the nondivine, natural, material element, the
dispersed, the multiplex of the particular which is not all-oneness.
However, every particular being tends to become all-oneness and gradu-
ally moves toward that goal, uniting oneself with God (II, 301). The
process of establishing all-oneness in the world is the development of
the world.
MUltiplex being in its dispersion denies pan-unity. However, the
divine principle, as idea, acts in all creatures through the blind, un-
conscious tendency of each being to widen its sphere; it places a limit
to disintegration and dispersion first in the form of outward law, re-
establishing the oneness necessary for the fullness of life; then, on a
comparatively high degree of development, following the rise of con-
sciousness, outward unity in man is transformed into inner all-oneness,
on the basis of ethical principles.
43
Thus we must distinguish two degrees in the development of the
world: before man, development is achieved under the form of the
41. The Meaning of Love, VI, 405: Lectures on God-manhood, VIII: La Russie
et 'Eglise Uniuerselle, 258-262; The Idea of Humanity in ..fugwte Comte, VIII, 240:
The History and the Future of Theocracy, IV, 2S1.
42. The Spi.,.j!uGl Foundations of Life, III, 271.
45. Collected Works.. I, 228, 263; II, 505; III, 154; IV, 505.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV 105
evolution of nature, while in human activities it is achieved under the
form of history. In its final issue, the development of the world is the
establishment of the Kingdom of God, "the reality of absolute ethical
order, or-and this is the same thing-general resurrection and re-
establishment of alL""
The lowest degree of this process, the evolution of nature, is the
creation of preliminary stages and conditions for the oneness of the
world. There are five of these stages: "the mineral kingdom (or the non-
organic), the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, the kingdom of
man, and the kingdom of God." These degrees "represent the most
clearly defined and characteristic steps of ascension of being from the
point of view of ethical meaning, achieved in the divino-material
process." In reality, the characteristic traits of these kingdoms are as
follows: the minerals represent the category of being as inert self-asser-
tion; the plants emerge from this inertia, as representing life, which
"unconsciously tends toward light, warmth and moisture. The animals,
through the media of their senses and free movements, seek the fullness
of sensual being: the satisfaction of hunger, the fulfillment of sexual
life, the joy of existing (play and song). Natural man, in addition to all
this tends rationally through science, the arts and social organization
toward the improvement of his life; he actually achieves this improve.
ment under various aspects and finally ascends to the idea of absolute
perfection. Spiritual mankind, or mankind born from God, not only
grasps with the mind, but also accepts with the heart and through ac-
tion this absolute perfection as the actual beginning of that which must
be in everything, and tends to achieve it fully or to incarnate it in the
life of the entire world." "Every new type presents a new condition}
necessary for the achievement of the highest and final goal-the true
coming into the world of the perfect ethical order of the kingdom of
God or the revelation of the freedom and glory of the sons of God."
Indeed, "in order to achieve his highest goal, or to manifest his absolute
significance, the being must f i ~ s t of all be, then it must be alive, then
conscious, then rational) and finally perfect" (239, 247 c).
Every preceding kingdom serves as material for the next one: it
evolves the instruments and organs on which the next, higher kingdom
will lean in order to achieve a superior, more valuable, more abundant
activity: nonorganic matter is the foundation of vegetable functions;
vegetable functions are the foundation of animal functions; animal
functions are the basis of the mind's activity.
Inasmuch as the lower level is not lost, but unites with the more
perfect activity, evolution "is not only a process of development and
44. The Justification 0/ the Good, 249.
106 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
improvement, it is also a process of unifying the universe": plants physio-
logically absorb the milieu; animals psychologically embrace in their
consciousness and through the senses a still wider sphere of phenomena;
man "includes in himself through reason more distant spheres of being
which are not directly perceived by the senses; he can embrace all in
one, or understand the significance of all; finally, the God-man, or the
Logos, not only understands in the abstract, but actually achieves the
significance of everything, in other words, the perfect moral order, em-
bracing and linking all through the force of living personal love" (248).
Up to this point, Soloviev's evolutionism differs from naturalistic
evolutionism mainly by the fact that the naturalist studies the factual
composition of being, while ignoring the objective values and meanings
(or even rejecting them); Soloviev, on the contrary, is interested in the
entire evolutionary process only inasmuch as one can find in it the
realization of objective and even absolute values and meanings.
This difference of the two viewpoints was immediately and in-
evitably to become even more complex. The naturalist who beholds in
the world only the blind interplay of mechanical forces, believes that
every successive type of natural being is entirely the product of the
preceding types. The philosopher, recognizing the reasonable character
of evolution and seeing in it the increasing incarnation of values and
meanings, cannot admit that such a process should be determined solely
by blind factors inferior in value. "The fact that higher forms and types
are manifested or revealed following the inferior ones," says Soloviev
"by no means proves that they are the product or creation of the in-
ferior realm. The order of being is not identical to the order of phe-
nomena. The higher, more positive and fuller types and conditions of
being exist (metaphysically) before the inferior ones, though they mani-
fest and reveal themselves after them. This does not mean a denial of
evolution; evolution is a fact. But to assert that evolution creates higher
forms entirely out of inferior ones-that is finally out of nothing-
means to found a fact on a logical absurdity. The evolution of inferior
types of being cannot by itself alone create superior types, but it does
create material conditions and offer the necessary milieu for the manifes-
tation or revelation of the superior. Thus every manifestation of a new
type of being is in a certain sense a new creation, but a creation which
can least of all be designated as a creation out of nothing; for firstly; the
natural basis for the birth of the new type is offered by the former one;
and secondly, the superior type's own positive contents does not arise out
of non-being, but exists from all times. It only enters (at a certain point
o ~ the process) into another sphere of phenomena. The conditions of the
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV lQ7
phenomenon depend on natural evolution; that which is revealedde-
pends on God" (245).
The project of a supranaturalistic theory of evolution put down by
Soloviev in its general outlines is by no means a negation of naturalist
research applied to the evolutionary process. Soloviev's supranaturalisI!.!
is able to include in its structure and to appreciate all facts and laws of
nature's development established by the naturalist. Indeed, Soloviev's
theory does not reject the actual conditions of evolutionism, but it adds
to them the latter's ideal foundations; further, this theory borrows
from the natural sciences all the factual aspect of evolution, but in ad-
dition to the facts it studies the aspects of value and meaning attached
to them.
45

In other words, this theory not only fully utilizes the natural
sciences but adds to them a great deal, thus placing everything in an
original and clear perspective.
Soloviev's project is one of the attempts of ideal..realistic religious
philosophy to evolve a full world conception which contains the synthe-
sis of science, philosophy and religion. Encountering apparent contra-
dictions between facts discovered by natural science (or more correctly
speaking by the theories of naturalists) and religious conceptions con..
cerning the world, most people do not even attempt to overcome these
discrepancies and prefer to restrict their own spiritual nature: some
grow indifferent to religion and, plunging into natural-science research
applied to the world, lose the vision of the higher aspects of life.
Others, devoting themselves entirely to. religious interests grow indif-
ferent to positive scientific knowledge. The great merit of systems like
that of Soloviev's philosophy consists in the following fact: even if they
do not offer a final solution of the secret of the universe, they at least
clearly and plainly demonstrate that the human mind has ways and
means for working out fruitfully the problem of combining the doc-
trines concerning the superior and the inferior aspects of the world into
a unified whole.
The evolution of nature creates conditions for the development of
a higher aspect of the world; this aspect is expressed in the history of
mankind, in mankind's ethical behavior and aspiration to improve social
life. Soloviev devoted a great deal of thought to the study of the prob-
lems qf ethics and social philosophy in the spirit of a Christian world
conception.
He considered ethics as an autonomous science independent of
"positive religions," epistemology and metaphysics, as well as of this
45. Concerning the meaning of evolution, see N. Lossky's article: "The Limits
of Evolution," ]oumt.&l 01 Philosophical Studies, II, October 1 9 ~ 7 .
lOS VLADIMlll S. SOLOVIEV
or that solution applied to the problem of free will. "In creating moral
philosophy," says SoIoviev, "reason only develops, on the basis of ex-
perience, the idea of the Good primarily inherent in it (or, and this is
the same thing) the primary fact of moral consciousness, and thereby
does not transgress the limits of its own field....'
SoIoviev is right in the sense that whatever the religious, epistemo-
logical or metaphysical ideas embraced by man are, his conscience in-
creasingly claims the realization of absolute good and under its guidance,
reason can evolve a conceptual system concerning these claims. But as
soon as reason advances further and aims at proving the possibility of
fulfilling these demands and consequently their rational character, it
must necessarily Iinl' the teaching of the Good and of man's consequent
behavior with the complex system of metaphysics, in which the problem
of free will is solved in a positive way. Moreover, reason must epistemo-
logically justify metaphysics, and the system of these metaphysics must
necessarily be Christian: Christianity alone can explain the possibility
of attaining absolute good through the teaching of the Kingdom of
God. All fundamental philosophical sciences are organically linked to
each other. Ethics are also inevitably linked with metaphysics, episte-
mology and religious philosophy. Soloviev's moral philosophy obviously
contains this link as we shall soon see. .
The evolution of nature, according to Soloviev, is the gradual
development of the world's unity, indispensable for the achievement of
Divine Good. A still higher degree of world unity is reached in man's
life especially in the history of mankind.
This close union of God with the world and the establishment in
the world of a perfect harmony is only possible on the basis of mutual
love between God and beings that are capable of voluntary union with
Him and are therefore free, rational and eager for perfection. Man is
such a being when he "voluntarily submits to the action of God as to a
supreme power, consciously accepts the Divine action as true authority
and, finally, independently participates in the action of God or enters
into a living counsel with Him."41
In so far as man enters upon this path, he shares in the work of the
God-man Christ, for "the combination of the three principles that have
found individual realization in the person of the spiritual man Jesus
Christ, must find collective realization in humanity spiritualized by
Him:' It is only collectively that finite creatures can attain the fullness
of being in the Kingdom of Heaven, where the perfect unity of all in
God is realized; and on earth the way to that Kingdom is paved not only
46. The Justification of the Good, Introduction.
47. History and _tbe FlltUT! 01 Theocracy, IV, 502.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV 109
by the single-handed efforts made by each individual at his own risk.
and responsibility, but also by the collective activity of men as members
of rightly organized society. Soloviev represents the ideal of such a
society as a free theocracy in which moral authority belongs to the
Church and its sup-reme representative, the high-priest; power, to the
King; and living counsel with God, to prophets "who have the keys of
the future" (IV, 582). The characteristic feature of this social order is
free submission of the State to the authority of the Church. The leading
part thus assigned to the Church finds explanation in Soloviev's theory
of its true nature. The visible Church is "an actual and objective form
of the Kingdom of God;" it is "the living body of the Divine Logos"
containing humanity, in so far as it is "united with jts divine principle
in Christ."48
As a part of the organic unity of the Church, man rises to a higher
stage of being than in his isolated solitary existence. "Confessing the
faith established by the ecumenical councils," says Soloviev, "we ac-
cept a truth independent of the human mind; admitting the divine
authority of the apostolic hierarchy, we submit to a social form which
is not subject to human arbitrary will-we submit to God's truth;
finally, receiving the holy sacraments, we find a source, unpolluted by
our body of sin, and an immortal seed of new and perfect life." Indeed,
"in order to rule rationally over the material nature, transforming it
into a living medium of higher forces, spiritual and divine-into God's
body, man must already possess in him the embryo of that God's body,
the seed of the new, higher nature and life (spiritual body). That seed
of purity and light, the absolute Iorm of the transfigured matter, is
contained only in Christ's body, and it is only by communing with it
sacramentally that we can receive this embryo of the new life, in which
we too are given Christ's power over all flesh."jg
In his youth (in 1873) Soloviev in a conversation with his friends
thus expressed this idea: Man has a "sideric body" which becomes atro-
phied when one does not go to Communion for a long time.
50
As is always the case when the object is perfect unity in God, this
unity can only be based on a free submission of the members to the
whole. Therefore true theocracy can only be free: it is a free realization
of the unity "without division or confusion" of t\VO powers, the spiritual
and the temporal. In such a social organization Christianity aims at
achieving not only "personal saintliness, but also social justice."51
48. The Spiritual Foundations Of Life, III, 347.
49. tu, III, 550.
50. Lukianov, Journal of tile Ministry of Education, 19, June 1917.
51. The RwsiGn National Ideal, V. SM.
110 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
Soloviev devoted a great deal of study to the problems of Christian
social organization, and especially to the problem of the nation; but
before we become familiar with his social philosophy, let us examine
his teaching concerning morals in the individual relations of men
among themselves. Already in his Lectures on God-manhood, Soloviev
stated that the human person is negatively unconditioned: "He does
not and" cannot be satisfied with any conditional limited contents;" and
this is not all: the human person is convinced that he can achieve also a
positive unconditionality," i.e., that "he can possess the fullness of
being" (III, 23). This fullness of being is the Absolute Good; it is con-
ditioned by nothing outside itself, that is by nothing imperfect; on the
contrary, "it conditions everything and is achieved through everything.
The fact that it is conditioned by nothing ensures its purity; the fact
that it conditions everything ensures its fullness; and the fact that it is
achieved through everything ensures its strength or active character."
The moral significance of life consists in serving this uGo<?d, pure, all-
embracing and all-powerful, "52
Perfect moral good leads to absolute perfection in which we find
indivisibly linked: good, welfare and beatitude. Indeed, perfect moral
good for a person achieving it in all its fullness is "necessarily also wel-
fare;" and all welfare, whichever one desires, must "in order not to be
imaginary and illusory be conditioned by good; this means by the Iul-
fillment of moral claims" (chap. VII, 200 c). So as to achieve such all-
embracing good, man must rise to a level "0 full being." This is possible
for man only "through inner union with that which essentially is all,"
i.e., with God (195). Without this union with God, without God's
creative act, which theology calls "grace," man cannot rise to such a
level of perfection as to deserve deification and to become a member of
the Kingdom of God (IX, 249).
So as to contribute to the perfection of man, God himself has en-
tered the terrestrial historic process in the person of the God-man, Jesus
Christ. "Through his teaching and his life, beginning from His victory
over all the temptations of moral evil and ending with his Resurrection,
that is the victory over physical evil, over the law of death and corrup-
tion, the true Cod-man opened the Kingdom of God to mankind." But
the God-man is an individual'manifestation of the Kingdom of God,
whereas the goal of world history is a universal manifestation of this
Kingdom, "in the collective entirety of mankind." It must be achieved
freely "through mankind's own experience and for this was needed a
new process of the development of the Christian world, a world baptized,
but not having as yet put on Christ" (253).
52. The Justification 01 the Good. 2nd ed.. 18.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV III
Beside grace, beside supernatural Divine help offered to the per..
.Iecting process of man, the latter is aided by three primary moral at-
tributes of human nature: shame, pity and 'reverence! Man is ashamed of
his animality, he manifests sexual shame. The feeling of pity and
sympathy is felt by man toward living beings, "thus manifesting his
solidarity with them," a solidarity which is the indispensable condition
of social life. The feeling of reverence expresses man's proper attitude
toward the superior principle and forms "the individual psychical root
of religion" (chap. I). In these three feelings of shame, pity and reverence
we find manifested man's proper attitude toward that which is below
him, on his own level and above him. The basis of these three feelings,
of all morals, are one: they consist in the tendency tp attain the totality
of man's being, disrupted by the division of the sexes, by the separation
of mankind into a multitude of hostile, selfish entities, and by the
estrangement from the absolute center of the universe," i.e., from God
(chap. VII).
Soloviev expressed a number of original ideas concerning sexual
love. He discovered the significance of sexual love not in the multiplica..
tion of the species, since the preservation of the species can be attained
and is actually ensured in the vegetable and animal kingdom through
sexless reproduction.ss
Soloviev' believes that childbirth is the "process of evicting one
generation by another ... the descendants live at the expense of the
ancestors, they live by the ancestors' death." Moral evil is contained
"in the very act, the carnal act, through which we assert by our own
consent the dark way of nature, shameful for us because of its blindness,
pitiless toward the departing generation. and impious, because the de-
parting generation is that of our fathers." But in this evil there is also
to be found an element of good: the children we have born, will per-
haps "not be like ourselves, they will be better than we."s.
OUf offsprings may rise to thahevel of perfection, where multiplica-
tion of the species will become unnecessary, because they will be im-
mortal and the preservation of the species will thus be ensured. In man,
sexual love has a far higher significance than giving birth to children.
It bears the character of the individual love of two persons of opposite
sex, equal in respect to each other as persons, but possessed with
attributes entirely different and at the same time completing each
other.
11
This love starts with the vision "of the ideal image" of the beloved
55. The Meaning 0/ Low, VI, SM.
54. The [ustificatton of the Good, chap. VII. 5 f.
55. The Meaning of Love, 379.
112 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
face, and its further perfect development can produce "a blending of
two given organic persons which would create out of them one absolute
ideal person. . . . The free unity of the masculine and the feminine
mnciples, each preserving its own particular form, but having sur-
nounted their essential estrangement and disintegration-precisely this
s the true, immediate aim of love" (384). The solution of this problem
s "the justification and salvation 0/ individuality through the sacrifice
of selfishness" (376). Selfishness consists in the fact that the subject
"justly ascribing to itself absolute significance, unjustly refuses to recog-
nize this significance in another." But man can realize his potential
absolute "only by removing from his consciousness and from his life the
inner limits which-separate him from another man" This means
freeing himself from egoism. The force leading toward that goal is
"love, and especially sexual love" (378). Speaking of sexual love and of
its true significance, Soloviev does not mean "the physiological union"
which leads to childbirth and "cannot truly re-establish the totality of
man's being" (393). He means "union in God" (398), that is Platonic
"spiritual love," which transforms man and woman who love each other
into one true person (382), attaining "victory over death;" for the true
spirituality of such a person having re-established his totality is at the
same time "transformation, salvation, resurrection" of the body as well
(400). "The image and semblance of God, that which must be re-estab-
lished, does not belong to half-man, to sex, but to entire man, that is
to the positive union of the masculine and feminine principle; this is
true androgynism, without the confusion of outward form, which is a
monstrosity, and without inner division, which is imperfection and the
beginning of death."GS
The perfect good, toward which we must tend, is good not for one
separate person alone, but for the whole of humanity; it is attained
through the historic process of perfecting. "The spirit of God in man-
kind, in other words, the Kingdom of God, demands for its true mani-
festation the most perfect social organization, which is precisely evolved
by world history."G7
Society, according to Soloviev "is a completed or enlarged person,
and the person is a restricted or concentrated society:' Therefore, "every
degree of moral consciousness inevitably tends toward its personal and
social realization; consequently, society can become a "full and all-em-
bracing realization of ethics." The State "in its aspect of moral signifi-
cance" is "collectively organized pity" (550). Law, according to Soloviev,
is the "lowest degree, or the determined minimum of morality" (460).
56. Plato's Life Drema, VIII, 224.
57. The of Good, chap. VIII, 224.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 115
"Law is the enforced demand of the realization of a determined mini-
mum good and order, which does not permit certain manifestations of
evil." The ideal of perfect good is revealed by Christianity: the goal of
the historical process consists in tile task of contributing to the trans-
formation "0 our entire personal and social milieu in the spirit of
Christ" (312).
The problem of the relation of the separate person to society is
solved by Soloviev through choosing as premise the goal of the historical
process taken as the collective realization of the good. "The degree of
submission of the person to society, he declares, must correspond to the
degree of submission of society itself to the moral good; without this.
the social environment exercises no rights whatever on the individual
#I
person" (XII, 328). Every man is a "moral being or person; he possesses
independently from his social usefulness an absolute dignity and the
absolute right to existence and to the free development of his positive
forces. Every person is something unique and inimitable, and must
therefore be a goal in himself, and not a means or instrument only;
essentially, this right of the person is absolute" (333). The free develop.
ment of man is so essential a condition of the perfecting process, that
law "permits men to be wicked; it does not interfere with their, free
choice between good and evil; all it does, in the interest of the common
good, is to forbid a wicked man' to become an evildoer, dangerous to
the existence of society itself."
A Christian state must have a Christian policy: in international,
relations its object is "the peaceful rapprochement of the peoples." The
formula laid down by SoIoviev for the relations between nations con-
tains an absolutely perfect solution of the problem. And no wonder, for
it is a direct application of Christ's commandment of love for another
man to the mutual relations between peoples: "Love all other nations
as you do your own. "58
Soloviev explains that this demand "does not at all imply a psycho-
logical sameness of feeling, but only the ethical equality of the volitional
attitude: I must ",'ish the real good of all the other peoples just as I
wish that of my own: this "love of good will is the same for the simple
reason that real good is one and indivisible. Of course, this ethical love
is also bound up with the psychological understanding and approval of
the positive peculiarities of all foreign nations; having overcome by our
moral will the senseless and ignorant national animosity, we learn to
know and appreciate other nations, we begin to like them.... When
such an attitude becomes an actual rule, national distinctions will be
preserved and even increased, they will become more pronounced, and
58. The Justification 01 the Good, VII, 374.
114 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
only national differences and offences, which constitute the principal
obstacle to the moral organization of mankind, will disappear."
Christ's commandment of love toward our neighbor could be ex-
tended by Soloviev to the relations of peoples to each other; for he
considered every people "as only a particular form of the universal con-
Lents. living in that contents, filling with it and incarnating it, not only
for this given people, but for all" (362). Soloviev corroborated this thesis
with excellent examples borrowed from the history of most European
nations (chap. XIV).
Christian policy must also be realized within every nation. Its object
in the domain of economic relations must be to do away with economic
slavery and exploitation of man by man, to achieve a fair organization
~
of labor and distribution, etc.: in combating crime it must seek to re-
form the criminal and to create adequate penitentiary institutions, etc.
lSt
In order to create Christian culture and a free theocracy an or-
ganic combination of the positive spiritual principles of the East and of
the West is needed. The first step in this direction must be the reunion
of the Eastern Church, possessing the wealth of mystical contemplation,
with the Western which has created a supernational spiritual power
independent of the State. The reunion of the Church with the political
power of a State, obeying the moral authority of the Church, would lay
down the basis of universal theocracy.
The relation between free theocracy and the past history of man-
kind can be established if we examine the "three fundamental forces"
which govern human evolution. One of these forces is centripetal: its
purp.ose is to subordinate humanity to one supreme principle, to do
away with all the manifoldness of particular forms, suppressing the
freedom of personal life. The second force is centrifugal; it denies the
importance of general unifying principles. The result of the exclusive
action of the first force would be "one master and a dead multitude of
slaves;" the ex' reme expression of the second force would be, on the con-
trary, "general egoism and anarchy, a multitude of separate units with-
out any inner bond." The third force "lends the positive content to the
first two, relieves them of their exclusiveness, reconciles the unity of the
supreme principle with the free multiplicity of particular forms and
elements and thus creates the wholeness of the universal human or-
ganism giving it a peaceful inner life. "80
"The third force. which is called upon to give the human evolution
its absolute content, can only be a. revelation of the higher divine world;
the nation, which is to manifest this force, must only serve as an inter-
59. The Justification of the Good, chaps. XV, XVI. XIX.
60. Three Forces (address of 1877), l, 214.
S. SOLOVIEV 115
mediary between mankind and the world and be its free and conscious
instrument. Such a nation must not have any specific limited task; it
is not called upon to work out the forms and elements of human exist-
ence, but only to impart a living soul, to give life and wholeness to
disrupted and benumbed humanity through its union with the eternal
divine principle. Such a people has no need for any special prerogatives, '
any particular powers or outward gifts, for it does not act of its own
accord, it does not fulfill a task of its own. All that is required of the
people which is the bearer of the third divine force is that it should be
free from limitedness and one-sidedness, should elevate itself over the
narrow specialized interests, that it should not assert itself with an ex-
clusive energy in some particular lower sphere of j-ctivity and knowl-
edge, that it should be indifferent to the whole of this life with its petty
interests. It must wholly believe in the positive reality of the higher
world and be submissive to it. These qualities undoubtedly belong to
the racial character of the Slavs, and in particular to the national charac-
ter of the Russian people. "81
Soloviev hopes, therefore, that the Slavs and especially Russia, will
lay the foundations of a free theocracy. I-Ie also tries to prove this by
the following arguments of a less general nature. "Our people's outer
form of a servant, Russia's miserable position in the economic and other
respects, so far from being an argument against her calling, actually
confirms it. For the supreme power to which the Russian people has to
introduce mankind is not of this world, and external wealth and order
are of no moment for it. Russia's great historical mission, from which
alone her immediate tasks derive importance, is a religious mission in
the highest sense of this word."82
Indeed, the ideal of the Russian people is of religious nature, it
finds its expression in the idea of "Holy Russia;" the capacity of the
Russian people to combine Eastern and Western principles has been
historically proved by the success of Peter the Great's reforms; the
capacity of national self-renunciation, necessary for the recognition of
the Pope as the Primate of the Universal Church, is inherent in the
Russian people, as may be seen, among other things, Irom the calling in
of the Varangians. Soloviev himself gave expression to this characteristic
of the Russian people when he said that it was "better to give up
patriotism than conscience," and taught that the cultural mission of a
great nation is not a privilege: it must not dominate, but serve other
peoples and all mankind.ss
259.
6
1. Three Forces, I, 224; The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, I,
62. Ibid.. 225. Christian Policv . IV. 3.
116 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
Soloviev's Slavophil messianism never degenerated into a narrow
nationalism. In the nineties he was looked upon as having joined the
camp of the Westernizers. In a series of articles he violently denounced
the epigons of Slavophilism who had perverted its original conception.
In the article "Idols and Ideals," written in 1891, he speaks of "the
ransformation of the lofty and all-embracing Christian ideals into the
:oarse and limited idols of our modern paganism.... National mes-
sianism was the main idea of the old Slavophils; this idea, in some form
or other, was shared by many peoples; it assumed a pre-eminently re-
ligious and mystical character with the Poles (Towianski) and with
some French dreamers of the thirties and forties (Michel, Ventra, etc.).
What is the relation of such national messianism to the true Christian
"
idea? We will not say that there is a contradiction of principle between
them. The true Christian ideal can assume this national messianic form,
but it becomes then very easily peruertible (to use an expression of ec-
clesiastical writers); i.e., it can easily change into the corresponding idol
of anti-Christian nationalism, which did happen in fact:'64
In the same article, while advocating freedom of conscience and
freedom of thought-the two principles which, for the older Slavophils
were "a characteristic sign of the Orthodox faith"-SoIoviev speaks of
T'iutchev's poem in which the latter "addresses himself with the follow-
ing thundering accusation to the Popery in the person of Pius IX:
His undoing will not be the earthly sword
Which he possessed for so many years,
But the fatal saying that
"Freedom of conscience is a delirium."65
Soloviev struggled in his works against every dis1:ortion of the Chris-
tian ideal of general harmony; he also struggled against 'all the attempts
made by man to satisfy his selfishness under the false pretense of serving
a noble cause. Such are for instance the aims of chauvinistic nationalism.
Many persons believe, Soloviev tells us, that in order to serve the imagi-
nary interests of their people, "everything is permitted, the aim justifies
the means, black turns to white, lies are preferable to truth and violence
is glorified and considered as valor.... This is first of all an insult to
that very nationality which we desire to serve." In reality, "peoples
flourished and were exalted only when they did not serve their own
interests as a goal in itself, but pursued higher, general ideal goods.
Jls l
Trusting the highly sensitive conscience of the Russian people, SoIoviev
64. Ibid., V, 557.
65. tu, V, 568.
66. The Justification of the Good, 351.
VLADIMlll S. SOLOVIEV
117
wrote in his article "What Is Demanded of a Russian Party?" "If in-
stead of doping themselves with Indian opium, our Chinese neighbors
suddenly took a liking to the poisonous mushrooms which abound in
the Siberian woods, we would be sure to find Russian jingos, who in
their ardent interest in Russian trade, would want Russia to induce the
Chinese government to permit the free entry of poisonous mushrooms
into the Celestial empire.... Nevertheless, every plain Russian will say
that no matter how vital mayan interest be, Russia's honor is also worth
something; and, according to Russian standards, this honor definitely
forbids a shady deal to become an issue of national politics."67
Like T'iutchev, Soloviev dreamed of Russia becoming a Christian
world monarchy; yet he wrote in a tone full of arsdety: "Russia's life
has not yet determined itself completely, it is still torn by the struggle
between the principle of light and that of darkness. Let Russia become
a Christian realm, even without Constantinople, a Christian realm in
the full sense of the word, that is one of justice and mercy, and all the
rest will be surely added unto this:'68
Soloviev saw with a pang that in his time the principle of darkness
was active both in practice and in the ideological field. In practice this
was reflected in the Russian government's program of forced russifica-
tion applied in the borderlands. In the ideological field, the principle
of darkness was expressed in N. J. Danilevsky's book Russia and Europe.
Danilevsky anticipated Spengler; he rejected the unity of mankind, and
evolved the theory of the cultural-historical types of humanity, so
deeply differentiated that the principle of culture of one type cannot be
transmitted to another. SoIoviev declared that such a theory leads to the
"degradation of the moral demands placed before peoples by Christian
universalism. According to the latter, every people must serve the whole
of mankind." In order to defend Christian universalism, Soloviev sub.
mitted Danilevsky's book to shattering criticism stated in a number of
articles.w
The Epigons of Slavophilism turned out to be the champions of na-
tional egoism and Soloviev criticized this movement in a number of
articles. His criticism was most strongly reflected in one of these articles
entitled "Slavophilism and Its Degeneration." He pointed out that the
founders of Slavophilism-Kireyevsky, Khomiakov, K. Aksakov-waged
a "progressive-liberal struggle against the actual evils existing in the
Russia of their time;" they defended the "principle of human rights,
67. The National Problem and Russia, I, V, 69 c.
68. T. 1. Tiutcheo's Poetry, VI, 479 c.
69. See "Russia and Europe;" "The German thp CODY!'
etc., Collected Works", V.
118 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
of the absolute moral value of the autonomous person, which is a Chris-
tian principle," and "in its historical development a mainly West-Euro-
pean idea" (163). Khomiakov evolved a theory concerning the order of
religious life which he expressed in the following formula: "The Church
as synthesis of unity and freedom in love." But unfortunately he op-
posed his idealistic conception to Catholicism and Protestantism, and
did this in such a way as if his ideal had already been achieved in Russia;
whereas in reality, the Russian Church had been brought down to the
level of "a function of State organization" (170). The essential defect
of Slavophilism consists precisely in the fact that it placed at the basis
of its teaching not an ideal to be attained in the future, but the idealiza-
tion of the past, of ancient Russia, of the Moscovite State. The latter
was defined by SoIoviev as of Tataro-Byzantine essence (194 c). This
error of Slavophilism was the cause of its degeneration, which took place
during the period of its ultimate extension. Soloviev recognizes three
successive phases in the history of Slavophilism: (I) "The cult of the
Russian people as of the main bearer of universal truth" (the elder
Slavophiles); (2) "The cult of the people as of the bearer of an elemental
force, independent of universal truth" (Katkov): and finally: (3) "The
cult of national peculiarities and historical anomalies which separate
the Russian people from cultured mankind, that is the cult of the
Russian people founded on direct negation of the very idea of universal
truth" (Yarosh, etc.) (V, 206 c).
In one of his letters to Stassiulevitch, Soloviev characterized in the
following words the disintegration of Slavophilism: CCI believe old
Slavophilism was a mixture of several heterogenous elements, and more
specially of these three: Byzantinism, liberalism and belly-patriotism.
In our present-day quasi Slavophilism, each of these elements has
emerged separately and roams about by itself, like Major Kovalov's nose.
The Byzantine element has found its preachers in T. Filipov, K. Leon-
tiev; the liberal trend has its champions in o. Miller, and especially in
Professor Lamansky, who has retained from Slavophilism only its name.
As to belly-patriotism, freed from all ideological admixture, it has
widely spread among our lowest levels; and it is individually represented
by such writers as my friend Strakhov, whose mind belongs entirely to
the rotten West, and who places his belly alone on the fatherland's
altar."7o
Soloviev dreamed that the historical process would finally lead to
the creation of ideal human civilization-a free world theocracy. This
dream was inspired by Soloviev's social optimism. In The Justification
of the Good he depicts the historical process as if he believed in direct
70. Letters, additional volume, 40.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
119
moral and social progress. He wrote: "From the day when men of vari-
ous nationalities and classes were spiritually united in venerating an
alien Galilean beggar, executed like a criminal in the name of national
and caste interests-s-Irom that day on, international wars, social lawless-
ness and the execution of criminals were inwardly undermined." From
the fifteenth century and especially from the end of the eighteenth,
Soloviev points to "a rapid and decisive progress along the path traced
by Christianity."
Soloviev was acutely conscious of every distortion of Divine truth,
and this awareness is most vividly reflected in the passages of his articles
and books devoted to man's or mankind's history from the angle of their
attitude toward absolute good. And these works of ,soloviev should be
read most attentively. Here, I can only briefly mention some of them.
In Plato's Life 'Drama, Soloviev shows in short and vivid formulae the
greatness of Socrates and the influence exercised by the death of the
just on Plato's life. Soloviev also shows that Plato did not succeed in
solving the problem of absolute good." Elsewhere, Soloviev speaks of
Spain's historical destiny; he explains the decline of Spanish power by
that country's threefold betrayal to Christianity: after having defeated
the Moors, Spain was filled with hatred toward the "Infidels," puffed
up with national pride and chose as highest goal the attainment of na-
tional unity and power.t-
In his speech dedicated to the jubilee of Mitzkevitch, Soloviev
described the noble quality of the great Polish poet's spiritual develop-
ment. Most remarkable are also Soloviev's articles on "Pushkin's Destiny"
and on Lermontov; in the latter writing, he speaks of that great and
unfortunate poet's struggle against God.
In his article entitled "The Russian National Ideal," Soloviev ex-
pressed a series of most interesting ideas concerning Dostoevsky: "In his
moments of inspiration," writes Soloviev, "Dostoevsky really beheld the
all-human ideal of our people" (V, 381). In Dostoevsky's Pushkin-speech,
"the formula of an all-embracing, all-uniting and all-reconciling Russian
and Christian ideal was proclaimed with the greatest solemnity." But
Soloviev cannot agree with "Dostoevsky's attacks on Jews, Poles, French-
men, Germans, on all Europe and on all other religions." Soloviev ex..
plains this duality of Dostoevsky's conceptions by 'the fact that "in the
realm of ideas, he was a visionary and an artist, rather than a logical
thinker, consequent with himself" (382).
According to Soloviev, all peoples and all races are organs of God-
manhood; each people serves in his own way the goal of the Christian
71. "Nemests," VIII, 125.
120 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
faith "to unite the entire world into one living body, the perfect
organism of God-manhood."72
From this point of view, Soloviev took a special interest in the
character and the destiny of the Jewish people. Why was the God-man
Jesus Christ incarnated in a Jew? Soloviev answers this question as fol-
lows: "The national character of the Jews presents a wholeness and
inner unity;" however, three of their typical traits seems at first glance
incompatible with each other: "First of all, Jews possess a deep religious
feeling, a devotion to their God, entailing complete self-sacrifice. Sec-
ondly, the Jews possess an extremely developed self-consciousness, self-
awareness, and a spirit of independent, autonomous action. Every Jew
has an acute feeling and consciousness of his national ego, his family ego
and his personal ego. Finally, the third characteristic trait of the Jews
is their extreme materialism in the widest sense of this word," meaning
the sensuous character of their world concepuon.?"
Where is the link between Israel's religious idea, the human and
autonomous activism of judaisrn and Jewish materialism? "God," ac-
cording to the Jewish conception, is "the perfect person or the absolute
Ego, and religion is not the cult of blind demonic forces; it is a personal
interaction of God and man, an alliance or a pact as of two beings;
these beings are not equal, but of the same essence morally" (394). "The
only true divine-human, Judaeo-Christian religion leads along the direct
royal road, running between the two extreme errors of paganism: pagan
man is either absorbed by God (India) or else God is turned into his
shadow (Greece and Rome)." God who is strong and holy "chooses a
strong man who is able to struggle with him. God who is holy unites
Himself only with the man who possesses holiness and who is capable
of active moral action;" only such a man can become "a friend of God"
(395). Beholding in God the ideal of all perfection, the Jew "demands
that this ideal should be incarnated on earth." In the Easter chant, tell-
ing of the coming of the Messiah, the Jews pray: "God-Almighty, now
build your temple near and soon, soon in our days, the nearest possible,
now build, now build, now build, now build your temple near." "In
this impatience to incarnate the divine on earth we discover the guid-
ing thread for the understanding of Jewish materialism. We must dis-
tinguish three kinds of materialism: practical, scientific-philosophical
and religious." Practical materialism is the result of "the domination
in certain individuals of the lower aspect of human nature, of sensuous
interests, over the spiritual ones." When the negation of spiritual being
is turned into a principle, "practical materialism becomes theoretical,
72. "Nationality and Russia's National Affairs," V, 25.
73. The Historv and the Future of Theocracy, IV. 592.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 121
that is scientific.. philosophical" (397). Both these aspects of materialism
are to be found in all peoples. "But another, special type of materialism
was ever inherent" to the national spirit of the Jews-cca material-
ism radically differing from the first two types, and which I shall roughly
and not quite accurately call religious materialism." It consists in the
fact. that "for every idea and every ideal, the Jew demands a visible and
tangible incarnation, and he expects from it useful and beneficent re-
sults." The Jew "believes in the spirit, but only in a spirit which pene-
trates all that is material, which uses matter as its envelope and as its
instrument" (398). "The Jews' entire religious history was directed
toward the aim of preparing not only holy souls, but also holy bodies
(or the God of Israel" (399). "This is why the J e w i ~ . people are God's
people, this is why Christ was born in Judea" (400). "In spite of the
serpent-like materialism of its nature, in spite of the leprous formalism
of its mind, the Jewish people still remain God's people; for in the
depth of its soul this people desires more strongly and more fully than
any other people the fullest incarnation of the Divine idea" (391).
Therefore, "in the future realization of Christianity, too, a special, out-
standing role will belong to the Jews, according to Saint Paul" (IV, 15).
In anti-Semitic writings we find many allusions to the immoral
rules of conduct prescribed by the Talmud. Soloviev wrote an article
entitled "The Talmud and Contemporary Polemics in Austria and
Germany," which showed how unfounded are such accusations (VI).
We Christians should remember that the two fundamental command-
ments in which Christ summed up His entire teaching-Love God more
than thyself, and thy neighbor as thyself-are taken from the Old
Testament.
Certain Christians assert that after the crucifixion of Christ the
Jews no longer worshipped God but Satan. These Christians forget that
Christ Himself said: "Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of
man, shall be forgiven him: but he that shall speak against the holy
Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in the
world to come" (Matt. 12, 32). I believe that the unfounded suspicion
concerning other men's prayer is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
Alluding to his own passionate desire not only theoretically to dis-
cover divine truth, but also to contribute to its incarnation on earth,
Soloviev often called himself a Jew. Thus, he wrote to Strakhov: "Our
common culture, a purely Russian one (because of our ecclesiastical
origins), does not prevent you from being a Chinaman, and me-a
Jew."14 Before his death, Soloviev prayed for the Jewish people.
Having evolved a system of ethics, Soloviev intended to work out
74. Letters, I, 60.
122 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
a system of aesthetics and an epistemology, but death prevented him
from fulfilling his project. However some time earlier he had the op-
portunity of expressing his fundamental ideas concerning the beautiful.
He did this mainly in two articles, "The Beautiful in Nature,' and
"The general Significance of Art." He conceived the beautiful as an
absolute value of being, and precisely beheld in it "rhe incarnation of
the idea."15 Now the idea or the "noble aspect of being" is "the full
freedom of the composite parts in the absolute oneness of the whole"
(40). "The idea really conceived in the sensuous being is the beautiful"
(41); in other words, the beautiful is the Good, and it is Truth, sensu-
ously incarnated in material being. The highest goal of art is theurgy,
that is creation according to God's will, which is precisely "the creation
of a universal spiritual organism"78 in which absolute good, truth and
beauty are realized.
Soloviev started evolving his epistemology in 1897-99; but he had
only time to write three articles, which were published in the eighth
volume of his Collected Works. These articles appeared under the title,
Theoretical Philosophy. In this work, Soloviev denied the substantiality
of the individual ego; in the last part of Theoretical Philosophy, he
spoke of the thinking ego which conceives truth as of a superindividual
subject (213). In my own article, "The Epistemology of Intuitivism," I
submit to criticism Soloviev's idea concerning substantiality.
Soloviev's conception of religion proves that he was neither an
Orthodox nor a Catholic, nor a Protestant: he stood above tile limita-
tions of these various denominations and strove to be a true universal
Christian. "As long as we assert our religion, first of all in its denomina-
tional particularity, and only after this as ecumenical Christianity,"
Soloviev tells us, "we take away from religion not only its sane logic,
but moreover its moral significance; we thus transform it into an ob-
stacle on the path of man's spiritual regeneration."17 He conceives union
between the Catholic and the Orthodox Church, not as the absorption
of one Church by the other, but' as a "combination, in which each
Church will preserve its formative principle and its particularities, dis-
missing only hostility and exclusiveness.T"
In the Three Conversations, Soloviev already describes the union
of the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Churches as of three branches
of the one Church, all three enjoying equal privileges. In 1892, he wrote
to Rozanov: UI am as far removed from Latin limitations as I am from
75. "The Beautiful in Nature," VI, S9.
76. "The General Significance of Art," VI.
77. The Justification 01 the Good, 844.
78. The Slavonic Problem, V. 67, 1884.
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 128
Byzantine limitations, or the Augsburg or Geneva ones. The religion
of the Holy Ghost which I profess is wider and of a fuller content than
all separate religions: it is neither the sum total nor the extract of its
separate organs:'19
Soloviev does not consider Divine Revelation as something which
has once for all been given and completed in the past of the Hebrew and
Christian Churches. Revelation continues to take place and to be de..
veloped, because God educates mankind in view of its gradual ac-
ceptance of revealed Truth. "God can lead only those who have spirit-
ually come of age into the perfect counsel of His love; and He acts
necessarily on spiritual childhood as force and power; on spiritual
adolescence as law and authority."80 "'
The law, "thou shalt not adore idols," has been often violated by
man, without his even being aware that he is worshipping not the Lord,
but a created being or even some material object or some system of ideas.
For certain people faith in dogma becomes such an idol. Such a faith is
usually linked with denominational vanity, that is one of the aspects of
refined egoism. Soloviev defines this distortion of Christianity, as a
"monstrous teaching which asserts that the only path to salvation is
faith in dogma, and that it is impossible to be saved without it."81 If
love of God and neighbor are replaced by love of dogmatic teaching,
this substitution usually leads to cruel and unjust oppression, and to re-
ligious persecution. Speaking of the fanatical patriot of the Moscow
News and of the laws they suggested regarding Russia's non-Orthodox
populations, Soloviev describes their Orthodoxy as a "Sphinx with a
woman's face and the claws of a beast."82
Evolving his Christian world conception, Soloviev insisted most of
all on the necessity of building the entire culture, as well as the whole
of political and social life on the basis of the principles of Christianity.
"No sanctity can be only personal," he said, "sanctity is necessarily the
love of others, and in the conditions of terrestrial reality, this love is
mostly compassion. . . . We have moralists, who openly declare that the
Russian people's ideal demands personal sanctity, and not social justice.
Personal sanctity, of is used here only as a red herring, the true
aim being to get rid somehow or other of social justice."83
Soloviev observes with bitterness that the social progress which has
marked tlreceding centuries, such as the suppression of torture and
79. Letters, II, 4!J.
80. The History and Future of Theocracy, IV, !J87.
81. Quoted from article "The Jews" (VI, 354), written by Soloviev in answer to
Diminsky's book on the Jews.
82.A Historical Sphinx," Problems of Culture, V, 450.
85. The Russian National V, 584.
124 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
ruthless executions, the end of persecution of religious denominations
and heretics, the abolition of serfdom-all these reforms were achieved
in most cases by unbelievers. "Those who will be shocked by tile thought
that the spirit of Christ acts through those who do not believe in him
will be wrong even from the point of view of their own dogma.... If
t.he spirit of Christ can act through an unbelieving priest in the sacra-
ments of the church, why can it not act in history through an unbeliev-
ing social or political leader, especially if believers cast it out? The
Spirit breathes where it wills."84
In the last period of his philosophical activity Soloviev came to
doubt whether theocracy in the form of a Christian State was the way to
the Kingdom of God, In his remarkable book Three Conversations, and
in the story of the Antichrist appended to it, he represents, in an artistic
form "the last act of the historical tragedy" as an epoch of religious
impostors "when the name of Christ will be appropriated by such forces
in humanity as in their nature and activity are foreign and even hostile
to Christ and His work." He describes the social organization of that
period as a world empire, at the head of which stands a thinker of
genius; he is a social reformer, an ascetic and a philanthropist, but the
true motive of his actions is vanity and not love; he tempts mankind by
the ideal of a social order which will abundantly secure to everyone
panem et circenses. Only a small number of people remain true to the
Christian ideal of overcoming earthly limitations for the sake of the
Kingdom of God; they retire into the desert, bring about the union of
the Churches and go forth to meet the second advent of Jesus Christ.
In his life, as well as in his philosophical creation, Soloviev was the
bold champion of the absolute Good, to be achieved in the Kingdom of
God. He sternly condemned every attempt to justify selfishness by cloth-
ing it in worthy purposes: thus for instance he criticized egoism in na-
tional life when it pretended to serve the people's interests, and in re-
ligious life when it asserted that one faith alone could lead to salvation.
Such an assertion was considered ~ y Soloviev as the manifestation of
confessional vanity. His attacks and criticisms led to sharp controversies,
in which Soloviev often exercised a remarkable sense of humor and a
biting wit. His humor is manifest in SUCll articles as "The Quarrel About
Justice" and "The End of the Quarrel" (V), directed against L. Tikho-
mirov and V. V. Rozanov. And we find an example of Soloviev's sarcas-
tic strain in his article "Porfiry Golovlev on Freedom and Faith," in
which he compares Rozanov to Stchedrin's famous character Yudushka
Golovlev. "The article entitled 'Freedom and Faith' is not signed by
84. The Decline 01 the Medieval World Conception, VI, 357 c.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV 125
Golovlev [writes Soloviev], but all its inner symptoms eliminate all pos-
sible doubts as to its author: to whom, if not to Yudushka, could we
attribute this peculiar, unctious and at the same time cynical babble?"
Further, Soloviev condemns the "systematically dishonest attitude
adopted toward the written word by Yudushka-Rozanov" (V). No wonder
that Soloviev had many enemies in literary circles. Blinded by hatred,
they spread calumnies and accusations, branding him with defects in-
compatible with each other. Thus, in his article "The End of the Quar-
rel," Soloviev quotes the words used by Rozanov in his controversy;
Rozanov calls Soloviev: "a corps-de-ballet dancer," "a pianist strumming
on a broken key-board," "a harlot, cynically playing with theology," "a
thief, having stealthily crept into a church," eta man ~ ~ i l t y of sacrilege,"
"a man born blind," and "a stick thrown from hand to hand" (V, 509).
Some religious publications considered Soloviev as a convert to Catholi-
cism, at the same time denouncing him as a "Protestant rationalist,
mystic, nihilist, old-believer, and finally a Jew."85
Let us now ask ourselves what is the essence of Soloviev's work,
what are the qualities and the defects of his system?
In our enlightened age there are to be found in all Christian
Churches ministers and theologians who are ashamed of the "unscien-
tific" stories of miracles, of faith in the transmuting power of sacraments,
of hope in the resurrection of the body, and so on; their philosophical
education compels them to give up the dogma of the incarnation of the
Logos in Jesus Christ, which is essential to Orthodox Christianity. For
such persons the Christian religion becomes mainly a moral doctrine
and the sacraments are reduced to merely symbolic acts. Such adaptation
of religion to modern science and philosophy is the death not only of
Christianity, but of morality itself. The moral ideal of Christianity is an
absolute, all-embracing love, creating a realm of being in which there
is no struggle for existence, no trace of any kind of violence. Now this
ideal can only have meaning if the laws of physics and physiology-the
laws of our limited earthly existence-are relative, if love is not merely
an individual mental state but a metaphysical principle that actively
transforms the .world, creating a new heaven and a new earth-a city of
God in which, through a mutual interpenetration of all beings, each
one of them is freed from the limitations of the binding natural neces-
sity. In his philosophy Vladimir Soloviev sets himself the task of bring-
ing to light the spiritual foundations of our life on earth which in their
further development lead to the Kingdom of God, that is, to CIa com-
plete realization of the divine and the human nature through the God-
85. UA New Defense of Old Slavophilism." V, 242.
126 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
man, Christ, or in other words, to the fullness of the natural human life
united through Christ with the fullness of God" (VI, ~ O ) .
Modern Western-European philosophy, which has developed out of
the Kantian, the neo-Fichtean and the neo-Hegelian systems, is also
concerned with the study of the spiritual principles of reality. It, too,
designates them by the term Logos, but it understands by that term the
totality of abstract ideal principles, of mathematical principles and
categorial forms that lie at the basis of the world, dismissing as a mere
myth the belief in the Logos as a living personal God incarnated in the
Man Jesus Christ. Russian philosophy, on the other hand, as represented
by Soloviev and his successors, attaches particular value to the conception
of the concretely ~ i e a l living principles (such as Logos, Sophia, Adam
Kadmon and each individual human soul) and their incarnation. Ab-
stract ideal principles are, as such, incapable of giving to the world
unity and definiteness; existence can be made to conform to abstract
ideas only through the instrumentality of living agents, of concretely
ideal principles (the "concrete universals" of the English philosophy),
of persons acting in conformity with the ideal forms. Moreover, abstract
ideal principles condition only the kingdom of law; the kingdom of
grace is the domain of the concrete, individual manifestations of love;
and consequently the uniting principle which makes it into a rational
cosmos must be a concretely ideal being and not an abstract idea.
The problem of the incarnation of these principles makes it im-
perative for a Christian metaphysics to work out a doctrine of the trans-
figuration of the body, of holy corporeality. For if the existence of dense
matter, necessarily connected with the struggle for existence, be alone
recognized, consistently demands that we should either strictly condemn
all bodily life and preach the religion of death, or accept bodily being
without any transfiguration of it, substituting for the Christian ideal
the task of ordering the earthly life on the basis of calculating sagacity
and profitable good will.
Vladimir Soloviev and his successors take Christianity to be a re-
ligion of life and of the absolute fullness of being, both spiritual and
bodily. Soloviev devotes, therefore, much attention to the doctrine of
the transfiguration of the flesh--of spiritualized deified matter and of
resurrection of the body. He interprets the sacraments of the Church as
the means of leading man out of the state of separateness and "connect-
ing him, both physically and morally, with all; thus reinstating the
complete wholeness of the true life in God." In the sacrament of the
Eucharist "through partaking bodily and substantially of the all-em-
bracing body of Christ (in whom dwells all the fullness of Godhead)
and being physically, though invisibly, united with it, man actually
VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV 127
participates in the divinely human and the spiritually corporeal, uni-
versal wholeness." The rudiments of the complete life received by man
through sacraments increase under the guidance of the Church, if man
has love for God and his creatures, and "will eventually lead to the
bestowal of immortal life upon nature as a whole, which is now in a
state of death and disruption. Nature must be united to man as his
living body."B8
Such transfigured nature will lovingly submit to man instead of
hindering and limiting his activity. The doctrine, proclaimed by Ro-
mantic philosophy, of nature's obedience to the perfect man (the ethical
idealism of Fichte, the magic idealism of Novalis) thus finds a place in
the. Christian philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev. It h ~ " been worked out
by him on a much wider basis, namely in the form not of idealism, but
of ideal-realism; that is, a doctrine which, thanks to its realistic aspect,
is much more capable than Fichte's system, of realizing the synthesis of
religiously philosophical teachings with science.
The main influences under which Soloviev's philosophy took shape
were the Christian platonism of his master, Professor Yurkevich (of the
University of Moscow), Schelling's doctrine of the relationship between
the Absolute and the world stated in his Philosophy of Mythology and
Revelation, as well as Schelling's natural-philosophical doctrine of the
evolution of nature toward the creation of an absolute organism. Solo-
viev's search for concrete principles and conditions of complete knowl-
edge is, no doubt, connected with the ideas of the Slavophils Kiieyevsky
and Khomiakov.
The great merits of Soloviev in working out a Christian metaphysics
-e.g., his doctrine of transfigured corporeality as the necessary condi-
tion of the realization of the absolute moral ideal, his conception of
evolution, of the meaning of historical process, etc.-are beyond doubt.
Unfortunately, however, two extremely important doctrines of his,
namely those which deal with Sophia and the connection between the
Absolute and the world, have been given a form incompatible with
Christian religion. At the same time, his view of the Absolute is not
sufficiently justified logically and his view of Sophia is inconsistent. In-
deed, conceiving the world as the second Absolute, namely the Absolute
in becoming, Soloviev contends that this becoming Absolute is indis-
pensable for the first Absolute which, as absolute pan-unity, must be
"the unity of itself and its other."87
This doctrine of the necessity of the world and man for God in-
troduces a pantheistic current into Soloviev's system. It is logically not
86. The Spiritual Foundations 01 Life, III, !45, 364.
87. The Philosophical Principles 01 Integral Knowledge} I, 321.
128 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
justified, for God, being more than an Absolute, namely the Super-
absolute divine Nothing, has no need for man and the world.
God and the world he has created differ so profoundly the one from
the other, that we do not find between them the rational relation, ac-
cording to which two objects differing from each other, still present
necessarily some similar aspect. If such a rational (logical) difference
existed between God and the world, then God and the world would
have belonged together to one and the same system, and would have
mutually depended on each other. But the doctrine concerning God as
the object of negative theology, obliges us to recognize God as the meta-
logical, suprarational principle. This recognition leads us to the teaching
that God is the c ~ ~ a t o r of the world, and that the world is the being
which He has created, and which is absolutely incommensurable with
Him. Between God and the world there is no relation of identity in none
of their aspects whatsoever: they are divided by an ontological abyss.
The difference which separates God from the world is a "metalogical
otherness. "88
The world's being is something existing entirely outside God's
essence; consequently God is not pan-unity. This does not mean at all
that God is a limited being. The relation of limitation is only possible
between two objects belonging to the same species, as pointed out by
Spinoza.
The problem of connection between God and the world is solved
consistently only by the Christian doctrine of God creating the world
out of nothing: according to this doctrine God created the world, both
in form and in substance, as something entirely new, different from
Himself, without using for this creation any material either in Himself
or outside.
Other defects of Soloviev's system also are linked to his teaching
concerning the Absolute as pan-unity, a teaching which lends to Solo-
viev's metaphysics a pantheistic flavor. In his explanation of the world,
Soloviev gives a secondary place to the conception of God as the creator
of world-being; instead, he advances the conception of God only as the
source of the idea of Divine all-oneness, which invests with a positive
significance the world's "attraction or tendency toward being."89
Thus the multiplicity of beings in the world remains unexplained.
Apparently, like Schopenhauer, Soloviev is inclined toward thinking
that the world's "thirst for being" is one, and the multiplicity of beings
is something derivative. In The Justification of the Good he writes:
88. Concerning the conception of metalogical otherness, see S. Frank's book
The Object of Knowledge (in French La connaissance et l'elre).
89. The Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge, I, 352.
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV 129
the attainment of "complete fullness, of which chastity is only the start-
ing 'point ... is slowed down, not checked by the multiplying of man.
Thanks to this new condition, creating man-society, the abiding fullness
of his being is manifested no more in chastity alone, which preserves
him from his natural breaking up into separate parts; it also manifests
itself in social solidarity, w h i ~ h re-establishes through the feeling of
pity the moral unity of man physically broken up" (chap. VII, 198).
Soloviev reasons in such a way as if the multiplicity of individual
human egos is not created by God, but has sprung as the result of sin.
This' idea can only be formed in the mind of a philosopher who denies
the substantiality of the individual human ego, the supratemporal na-
ture of the person's ontological center. Indeed, in ~ i s article "Theo-
retical Philosophy," Soloviev resolutely rejects the ego's supratemporal
nature, for which Leo Lopatin had offered a convincing proof. Soloviev
erroneously believes that the flow of the time process would have been
slowed down by the substances' supratemporal nature. In one of his
humorous poems, directed against Leo Lopatin's teaching, he wrote:
But the fearless Leo threatens me
To take the dynamic substances in a sack
Down to the river, and with its mass invisible
To darn in the flow of Heracleitus' stream.v?
And sensing from afar the sea and freedom,
I quietly utter: panta rei".
Prince E. N. Trubetzkoy, in his book Solouieo's World Conception} ex-
pounds this controversy concerning the ego's substantiality, and sides
with Soloviev. He says that true religious feeling "wants to possess
nothing of its own outside of God. God is felt like an all: this is the
fundamental trait of religious experience." In his Lectures on God-
manhood (Lecture VIII), Soloviev recognized the substantiality of the
human person and the latter's pre-existence before birth. Later, how-
ever, according to Trubetzkoy, Soloviev freed himself from this "error
of his youth, inspired by Origen; H he now envisaged the person not as
a substance, but as "hypostasis," that is as a "support." Trubetzkoy ex-
plains as follows the difference between the "hypostasis" and "substance":
substance is "supratemporal, eternal being, possessing an unchanging,
constant content," which cannot under any circumstances be carried
away by "the river of time:' The becoming hypostases, on the contrary,
precisely lack this attribute of the constant and the unchanging nature
of being completed in itself above time: for their eternal contents is
90. By "Heracleitus' stream," Soloviev meant this philosopher's theory that
"everything flows" (panta rei).
150 VLADIMIR S. SOLOVIEV
not given them, but only offered as a task to be pursued; "it depends
on the hypostasis, on the latter's freedom to choose the way of good or
evil, to fulfill its mission, to establish itself in the eternal, the divine, or
to remain in the earthly and the temporal."91
The fact of replacing the conception of substance by that of hypos-
tasis is due to the erroneous interpretation of the word "substance."
The idea of substance has a fundamental significance for our entire
world conception and even in every act of knowing any concrete object.
The history of the development of the conception of substance is ex-
tremely complex and the meaning with which various philosophers
invested this word is extremely different. The teaching offered by Leibniz
is the most Iruitfri] and confirmed by experience: Leibniz understood
substance as being, creating its manifestations in time and space. In
order to stress this dynamic significance of substance, 1 prefer using the
expression: substantival agent. Experience proves convincingly that
the substantival agent is supratemporal and supraspacial being, creating
its manifestations and lending them the form ol temporality (psychical
and psychoid processes) or the Iorm of spacio-temporality (material
processes). Lopatin cited nlany a proof in favor ol the fact that the
human ego is a supratemporal being. To this we I1lUSt add that the
creative force of substantival agents is supraqualitatioe. The agent
creates its manifestations, lending them a qualitative determination, but
the agent itself stands above the limitation inherent to every quality:
each substantival agent is a metalogicut being, standing above the laws
of identity, contradiction and the excluded middle to which all qualities
and quantities are submitted. It is precisely as the carrier of a supra-
qualitative creative force that the substantival agent is a free being: it
determines its definite qualitative manifestations, but is determined itself
by no one and nothing.
1 understood in the spirit of the above-stated considerations, sub-
stance is the condition of the free creation ot temporal processes, and
not a datu, checking the process of transformations in time. As we see
from his article "Theoretical Philosophy," Soloviev, at the end of his
life found in the composition of the individual ego nothing supra-
temporal; consequently, the "hypostasis," which by nature is not eternal,
but can only merit eternal being, represents a temporal process; but in
such a case, the eternity which it acquires, is also not the supratemporal;
it is but the eternal continuation of the process of life in time. Hence we
see, that during the ultimate period of his philosopher's task, Soloviev
did not discover ideal being in the composition of the world. And this
91. E. Troubetzkoy. II, 250cc,
VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV 1 ~ 1
is not surprising, since during all the preceding periods of his philoso-
phizing, he had no clearly evolved teaching concerning ideas.
Without the recognition of ideal being, and especially without the
recognition of the supratemporality of the ego, it is impossible to evolve
a teaching concerning free will. And indeed, to the very end of his life,
Soloviev had no time to do anything in defense of indeterminism,
though his entire system, as Christian philosophy in general, demands
the recognition of free will.
In Soloviev's doctrine of Sophia there is vagueness and incon-
sistency: he now speaks of Sophia as of a being eternally perfect and
invariably obeying God's will, now as of the world soul temporarily
fallen away from God and then reuniting with Him i ~ the slow process
of creating the "absolute organism."92
Investigating the sources of that doctrine Prince E. Trubetskoy
points out, as Soloviev's predecessors, Jacob Boehme and Baader;
Stremooukhov mentions the influence of Cabbala, but Soloviev's own
mystical experience, of course, is even more important.
The worship of Sophia as the Eternal Feminine can easily lead to
heresies and moral perversions. V. SoIoviev was aware of these pitfalls
of Sophianism and himself mentioned them in the preface of his col-
lected Iloems. "Is not the feminine principle being introduced here into
Deity as such? Without discussing- this theosophical problem on its
merits, I must, in order to preserve the readers from temptation and
myself from gratuitous reproaches, state the following: (I) the transpo-
sition "of carnal, animally human relations into the realm of super-
human is a greatest abomination and the cause of utter ruin (the Flood,
Sodom and Gomorra, the "satanic depths" of the latest period); (2) the
worship of the feminine nature as such-i.e., of the principle of am..
biguity and indifference, sensitive to lie and evil in no lesser degree than
to truth and good-is a great madness and the main reason of the now-
prevailing sloppiness and weakness; (3) the true adoration of the eternal
femininity as having from all eternity accepted the pO,wer of Godhead
and truly embodied the fullness of good and truth and, through them,
the undying glory of beauty, has nothing to do with this foolishness,
nor with that abomination."
"But the more perfect and intimate is the revelation o( true beauty
which clothes Godhead and by His power leads us to salvation from
suffering and death, the narrower is the boundary which separates it
from its false image, from that delusive and impotent beauty which
92. Some valuable considerations about other important drawbacks of Soloviev's
doctrine of Sophia may be found in the work of Prince E. Trubetskoy, The Philoso-
ph., of JI. Solouieu, I, chap. IX.
152 VLADIMIR. S. SOLOVIEV
merely perpetuates the realm of suffering and death. All this has been
predicted, and the end has been predicted: in the end the eternal
Beauty will bear fruit, and from her will come the salvation of the
world, when her illusory images will have vanished as that sea foam
from which the earthly Aphrodite was born. Not a single word of my
poems is meant to serve this one and therein lies the sale indisputable
merit which I may and must recognize in them."
Certain Russians who want to be more Orthodox than the Ortho-
dox themselves (just as there are people more royalist than the king),
regard Soloviev's mystical experience with suspicion; they believe that
his visions of Saint Sophia were "seductions," that is manifestations of
the evil spirit, haeing put on a saintly mask. These persons should re-
call Soloviev's own words quoted above, for he was well aware of the
spiritual dangers of mystical experience. It suffices to take into con-
sideration his acute moral consciousness of every attempt of the evil
power to draw man away from the right path through a subtle mixture
of good and evil; and we shall reject as completely improbable the idea
that while evolving his teaching of the sacred-feminine, he should have
yielded to "seduction." Indeed, there have been among Russian poets,
in particular during their youthful years, examples of yielding to such
a "seduction"; they fell into the abyss of blasphemous erotism, as A.
Biely tells us in his recollections concerning Block. But Soloviev is in
no way responsible for this distortion of the idea. All that is great
suffers distortions on earth, in the mind or conduct of certain persons;
the blame is incurred by those who have allowed such distortions, and
not by the principle which they have distorted.
Soloviev's social philosophy at the time of his interest in the idea
of free theocracy, and even as expressed in his book The Justification
01 the Good, strikes us as a philosophy of extreme optimism. He often
depicts the moral progress, attained in mankind's history, as if society
on earth could become the incarnation of absolute good. P. I. Nov..
gorodzev writes in his book, The Social Ideal (3rd ed., 140), that such
teachings "can only be applied to the suprahistoric, transcendent ideal,
that is to the Kingdom of God;" it is completely erroneous to apply them
to concrete historical reality." True, Soloviev himself clearly realized
this at the eftd of his activity.
Pondering on the historic mission of Russia as the conciliating
and unifying factor of entire mankind, Soloviev believed that the Rus-
sian people does not possess special gifts; if they can become "the
mediators" between the will of God and the world, it is only because
they are "free from all limitations and all onesidedness" (see above the
quotation from the article "Three Forces"). In a letter to Father Pierling,
VLADIMIR. s. SOLOVlEV l!S
Soloviev quotes the following words from the first part of his book
Russia and the Universal Church: "There is no reason to believe in
Russia's great future in the purely worldly (humaine) sphere of culture,
public institutions, sciences, philosophy, art, literature:'93
In reality it had already become obvious at the time that the Rus-
sian people possess moreover a number of special gifts and have begun
evolving a first-rate culture. Such are for example Russian music, Rus-
sian literature, the Russian theater, the Russian form of Orthodoxy, the
Russian literary tongue; such are in the sphere of public institutions,
the Russian courts, the Zemstvos (rural and municipal self-govern-
ments). And after Soloviev's death, the Russian people proved that
they are also capable of remarkable creations in the esphere of science
and philosophy.
There are many shortcomings in the life work of V. Soloviev, and
a great deal has been left to his successors, but in any case he was the
first to create an original Russian system of philosophy and to lay the
foundations of a whole school of Russian religious and philosophical
thought which is still growing and developing.
9S. Letters (November 6, 1887), III, 158.
Chapter 9
EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC _ ~ N D METAPHYSICS
IN THE LAST QUARTER OF TIlE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
1. B. N. CHICI-IERIN
We have seen in the preceding chapters how great was the influence
of Hegel's philosophy both among the Slavophiles and anlong the
Westernizers, and even among the writers who from Hegelianism
turned to materialism and positivism. We can find in D. 1. Chizhevsky's
Hegel in Russia, which is a book worthy of great appreciation, lllany
details concerning Hegel's influence on authors not mentioned here by
us, and who are not closely linked with philosophy.'
We must add to the already mentioned writers the names of two
professors who during their entire university career were faithful to
Hegel's philosophy: P. T. Redkin (1808-1891), a philosopher and a
jurist, professor at the Moscow University, and S. S. Gogotsky (1813-
1889), professor at the Kiev University. Gogotsky gave his own interpre-
tation of Hegelianism, rejecting Hegel's pantheism and defending the
teaching concerning the individual immortality of the human person.
The present chapter will be devoted to Russian thinkers who, start-
ing with Hegel's philosophy, submitted it to a complex and original
transformation. One of these thinkers, meriting special attention, is
Boris Nikolaievitch Chicherin who evolved an entire system of philoso-
phy.
B. N. Chicherin (1828-1903) was the son of a rich landowner of
noble and ancient stock; he studied at the law school of the Moscow
University. A pupil of Professor Redkin and Professor Granovsky, he
became familiar with Hegel's philosophy in his youth. In 1861 he was
appointed professor of the Moscow University, but resigned in 1868 in
protest against the government violating the autonomy of the university.
1. See also in the book, Hegel be; den Slaven (Reichenberg, 1934) the section
dealing with Hegel in Russia, written by Chizhevsky.
184
B. N. CHICHERIN
155
In 1881, Chicherin was elected mayor of Moscow, but two years later
he had to retire at the desire of Alexander III, because he had made a
speech in which he stressed the necessity of "crowning the edifice" of
rural and municipal self-government with popular representation. The
finest Russian scholars and writers such as I. Kireyevsky, Khomiakov
Chicherin awakened the mistrust of the government which feared
all those who defended freedom of thought and who showed a spirit of
independence. And yet many of these men, as for instance Chicherin,
would have been able to Iorm a party of moderate and liberal conserva-
tism; such a conservative party, defending freedom in the framework
fixed by law, 'could have realized the necessary reforms when their time
would have been ripe. Instead of this enlightened c.nservatism, it was
an absurd and brutal conservatism which triumphed in Russia under
the name of "the black hundred."
Chicherin's main works in the field of philosophy are: The History
of Political Doctrines, in five volumes, 1877; Science and Religion,
1879; Mysticism in Science, 1880; Positive Philosophy and the Unity of
Science; 1892; The Foundations of Logic and Metaphysics, 1894; The
Philosophy of Laui, 1900; Problems of Philosophy and Psychology, 1904.
Chicherin wrote memoirs of great interest in three volumes. Posi-
tive Philosophy and The Foundations of Logic and Metaphysics have
been translated into Cerman. These translations were published in
Heidelberg under the title Philosophische Forschungen, 1899.
Like Hegel, Chicherin links metaphysics with logic; this logic is
not formal but dialectical. Formal logic studies the fundamental abstract
laws of thought, while metaphysics is concrete dialectical logic, that is
precisely the passing from one determination of thought to another.
Metaphysics represents a system of categories, that is of logic laws, given
not in experience, but in "pure thought," in speculation. This unity of
dialectical IORic and metaphysics is explained by the fact that the laws
of reason are identical with the laws of being.s Therefore reason knows
objects according to its own laws. However, the laws of reason, known
through speculation, give only the form of being; beside form, there is
also content, known through experience. Consequently, the fullness of
knowledge is attained through the combination of speculation and ex-
perience. Chicherin distinguishes his system from two other one-sided
tendencies, from rationalism and empiricism, and he calls his own teach-
ing universalism." Making a parody of Kant, who said that pure con-
cepts of reason are empty, and that experience is blind, Chicherin
declares that metaphysics without experienceIs empty, and experience
2. The Foundations of Logic and 218.
3. tu, 356.
1 ~ 6 EPISTEMOLOGY. LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
without metaphysics blind: in the first case we have the form without
content, and in the second cace, the contents without understanding.
Metaphysics and mathematics are constructed through pure specula-
tion, but natural science is founded on experience combined with
mathematical speculation, while humanities are founded on experience
combined with metaphysical speculations.
Chicherin considers Hegel's logic as the basis for the further de-
velopment in philosophy; however, he conceives this development not
only as an addition but also as an improvement. While evolving his
logic and metaphysics, Chicherin, like Hegel, starts with the concept of
being and goes on to that of nonbeing, then to becoming, as a synthesis
of being and nonkeing, and after having gone through a series of cate-
gories, he reaches the concept of causality, and finally raises himself up
to the concept of the Primary Cause of all that is, as of an Absolute
po\ver, an absolute potential energy:" this energy being absolute, is not
determined for action from outside, it is determined by itself, that is it
places itself in relation to itself, and that is self-consciousness. Being
which knows itself and determines itself is absolute Reason in two
contrary definitions inherent to reason-as subject and as object. As
subject, this Reason is absolute Power, containing everything in itself
as a possibility; as object, Reason is absolute activity, the reality of
po\ver, that is absolute fullness of being, as final goal, as Absolute Spirit.
And so Chichcrin discovers in the Absolute the triune oneness of
Power, Reason and Spirit. In.regard to the world this is the triune one-
ness of the producing cause, that is of Absolute Power, of formal cause,
that is of Absolute Reason, the Logos, and of final cause, that is the
Absolute fullness of being, of Absolute Spirit (34 I). In the Christian
religion this triune oneness is God-the-Father, God-the-Word.. Reason
and God the Holy Spirit.
What.and how does the primary Cause produce? The final goal of
creation is fullness of being. But beside formal cause, the fullness of
being presupposes moreover material cause, that is being in regard to
another. What is not Absolute is nonbeing; ancient philosophy con-
ceived this nonbeing as matter. The relation of being to nonbeing is a
process, a becoming, that is the putting down of restricting determina-
tions, containing being and nonbeing (342). Restricted determinations
can only be multiple; they represent a multitude of units with contrary
definitions; those units in which there is a preponderance of relation to
oneself are thinking substances, while those in which there is a pre-
ponderance of relation to the other, are material substances. Thus.
4. Positive Philosophy and the Unity of Science, 251, SI6.'.;
5. The Foundations of Logic ana Metaphysics, 271.
B. N. CHICHERIN
157
Chicherin, conceives the creative process as an apportionment of con-
traries (348), but the creation of the world does not stop at this ap-
portionment: since the producing cause is at the same time also the
final cause, the apportioned contraries face the problem of combining
and forming a new perfect unity, and this is attained by way of evolu-
tion, by way of development, as perfecting process. The substance
which serves as the combining principle between two contrary forces,
between reason and matter, is the soul, a suhstance acting purposively,
that is reasonably, though unconsciously; it acts unconsciously like
matter and purposively like reason. The soul organizes matter, it trans-
forms it into organized bodies, for instance vegetable and animal (276,
~ 4 4 ) . Thus Chicherin reinstates the ancient teaching concerning the
vegetable soul.
The process of development leads to the agreement between con-
traries and to the submission of all to the unique goal of attaining
the fullness of being. The supreme spiritual principle of this process
is love (280). The beginning, middle and end of the world are under the
guidance of the Absolute, which is the Father, the Word-Reason and
the Holy Spirit (344). In its entirety, the system conceived by Chicherin
contains two contraries crossing each other vertically and horizontally:
Combination
Unity
Relation
Multiplicity
In the beginning there is undivided unity; in the end divided multi-
plicity, brought back. to unity; in the middle there are the two con-
traries opposed to each other, matter and reason. In all the spheres ol
the world, in all the objects of research, Chicherin seeks and finds the
scheme. according to which there are everywhere three steps, and the:
intermediary step contains two one-sided contraries. The difference
between this scheme and the scheme of Hegel's three-membered dialec-
tics, formed of the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis, consists ir
the fact that in Chicherin's system the intermediary link consists of twc
members opposed to each other.
In the entirety of the world, man occupies an exalted place: as ;
real subject, he is plunged into a relative being, but his consciousness
raises him to the Absolute. and places him into a living, conscious inter-
action with the Absolute, an interaction which is expressed in religion
{ ~ 4 8 ' . Thanks to the fact that he is raised to the consciousness of the
158
EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC AND ME1'APHYSICS
Absolute, man is able to emerge from the sphere of the relative and to
attain freedom. Chicherin borrows from Hegel his teaching concerning
free will. This teaching consists in the following: the reasonable subject
is able to abstract himself (rom all relative determinations, that is he
can attain complete indetermination; he is further able to place de-
terminations, that is to pass from indetermination to self-determination:
and he is at the same time able to remain himself, that is he preserves
the ability to pass from each determination back to complete inde-
termination.s
The reasonable attributes of reasonable subjects, as for instance,
freedom, are metaphysical principles, revealed through speculation.
The life of a reasonable subject contains obvious manifestations of
metaphysical princi pIes. Therefore the science devoted to these rea-
sortable subjects and to the relations they have with each other-in other
words, sociology-cannot possibly do without metaphysics,
After having briefly surveyed the basis of Chicheriri's metaphysics,
we must examine one of their chief defects. While criticizing various
philosophical tendencies, Chicherin struggled on two fronts: on the one
hand, he despised positivism and submitted it to a brilliant criticism in
his book Positive Philosophy and the Unity of Science. On the other
hand and at the same time, he feared mysticism. In 18MO he wrote a book
entitled Mysticism in Science. In it he turned against the young Vladi-
mir Soloviev and his Criticism of Abstract Principles. Under the word
"mysticism" Chicherin understood what lIe believed to be a call to
return to the sphere of undivided unity, that is to the starting point of
development, instead of going forward (as he himself sounded the call)
toward the final ideal of divided harmonious unity in all its pluralism.
It seemed to him that Soloviev's fervent belief in the idea of "whole-
ness" contains this danger of turning back. "This confusing expression,"
he writes, "never serves any other purpose but the one of obscuring the
concepts" (13). Thus Chicherin's philosophy lacks the category of whole-
ness as such an organic unity as would be based on a suprarational
metalogic principle, not submitted to the law of restricted determina-
tions, that is to the law of identity, contradiction and the excluded
middle. Therefore, in his system, there is no teaching concerning God
as object of negative theology, a God who can be expressed in no con-
cept borrowed from the sphere of earthly being. This teaching, placed
at the basis of the Christian doctrine by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopa-
gyte, was largely applied after Soloviev by Russian religious philosophy
in its ulterior development, Every individual person created by God, also
6. Chicherin, Mysticism in Science, 51; Hegel. Philosophie des Rechtes, chaps.
5-7.
B. N. CHICHERIN
1!19
has at his basis the metalogical principle standing above restricted de-
terminations. Hegel's and Chicherin's teaching concerning free wilt
cannot be clearly stated without referring to this principle.
Using merely the rationalists' discursive concepts, Chicherin can-
not imagine any such intimate unity of the world's elements as could
offer a condition for the possibility of intuition. He therefore explains
speculation not as the subject's contemplation of the ideal reasonable
structure of the world in the original; he interprets it as a psychical
process of thought of the subject-individual copying in his mind the
order of the world. Such epistemology is taught by Descartes and
Leibniz. After Kant, this method of establishing jhe right to pursue
metaphysics can no longer be accepted. The philosophers who live after
Kant face the dilemma: either intuition does not exist and therefore
metaphysics as a science of objects in themselves is impossible; or else
metaphysics as a science of objects in themselves is possible, but-in that
case one must prove that man has the faculty of intuition. Overcoming
Kant's criticism, Hegel saw this, and his system of metaphysics is
epistemologically justified: conceiving the world in the spirit of panthe-
ism, as undivided unity of the Absolute idea, he considered thought and
being identical. The highest level of thought, concrete speculation, 'is
in Hegel's mind intuition containing in itself the depth-metaphysical
being in the original. Thus in the system of Hegel whom Chicherin
considered as the most perfect representative of rationalism, there is an
aspect of mysticism; this aspect is linked to the recognition of metalogi-
cal principles, and Hegel is aware of this mysticism of his, and speaks of
it himself. In his little "Logic" his most perfect work and a masterpiece
of the world's philosophical writings (forming the first part of his En-
cyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences), Hegel says: "Reason does not
grasp life, but suprasensual intellectual intuition (39), ... concrete
speculation (157) grasps life and attains truth, which cannot be ex-
pressed in judgements: such concepts, for instance as the whole and the
part are of no avail for the understanding of a living- organism (267);
such a vision of. the speculative whole is mysticism (159)." Chicherin
himself comes very close to suprarational principles: for instance, in
his teaching about substance he starts by saying that substance is unity
of symptoms, but as a true metaphysician, he does not stop at that;
going deeper, he says that substance is the source of principles." Hence,
it is logically necessary to come to the conclusion that substance is a
principle standing above a logically determined being of qualities; i.e.,
that substance is metalogical being; however, Chicherin does not draw
7. The Foundations of Logic and Metaphysics. 70.
140
EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
this conclusion. Another time, he comes even closer to this principle,
adhering to Hegel's idea of freedom as of the subject rising to complete
indetermination, that is to its foundation standing above the three laws
of formal logic. '
It is remarkable, that Vladimir Soloviev, who conceived parts of
the world standing above formally logical determinations and beholding
the wholeness of the world, the understanding of which Hegel himself
calls mystical, actually stands closer to Hegel than Chicherin; but he is
not aware of being 50 close to Hegel, because he interprets him incor-
rectly as a representative of abstract panlogism. On the contrary,
Chicherin, who considers himself close to Hegel is far removed from
Hegel by the very ~ p i r i t of his system: he wrongly considers Hegel as
the typical representative of rationalism and ignores the mystical ele-
ments of Hegel's system. Rejecting rationalism's one-sidedness, Chicherin
completes the world's rational elements by adding to them the irra-
tional contents of experience, that is the irrational standing below the
ratio and receives its form from the ratio. He is not aware that this is
not enough, that outside the rational and the irrational there is the
suprarational; only by taking the suprarational into account are we
saved from the narrowness of rationalism. Thus, in its entire structure
and spirit, Chicherin's system is finally very close to the pre-Kantian
rationalism of Descartes and Leibniz, and fairly distant from Hegel's
post-Kantian suprarationalism.
Both in the case of Chicherin and in that of Soloviev, their incor-
rect appreciation of their own approach to Hegel is due to the following
mistake -inherent in both of them: not only in Russian, but also in
German philosophical writings, Hegel's system was widely considered
as abstract panlogism. Our times have freed themselves of this mistake.
A more correct interpretation of Hegel's system is founded on such
works as I. A. Ilyin's book Hegel's Teaching Concerning God and Man,
As a Concrete Philosophy. As to the development of epistemology after
Kant, a development necessary for the overcoming of Kant's criticism
and for the justification of metaphysics as a science, it is precisely to
this problem that N. Lossky devotes a chapter of his book The Founda-
tion of Intuitioism. This chapter, entitled "The Teaching Concerning
the Perception of the Transsubjective World in Nineteenth-Century
Philosophy," examines various types of doctrines concerning direct
contemplation of the outer world by the knowing subject.f
It must, however, be noted that having known the idea of the or-
ganic wholeness of the world-being, Hegel understood it in the spirit
8. See also N. LossJry's article "Hegel as an Intuitivist," loc, cit.
B. N. CHICHERIN 141
of pantheism. He therefore submerged in the wholeness of the develop-
ing Absolute idea the individual personal being of man and deprived
it of its independence. Having evolved a remarkable teaching about the
freedom of the person, Hegel at the same time degraded the very owner
of that freedom, that is precisely the human person, transforming it
into the mere means of the whole. Let us here recall Bielinsky's pas-
sionate tirade against Hegel's All-oneness (Allgemeinheit) as a Moloch.
We find something different in Chicherin's philosophy: he placed man's
individual personal being on the heights which it deserves, recognizing
him as an eternal and free creator. However, we find neither in Hegel's
nor in Chicherin's theory a liberation from the one-sidedness of uni-
versalism and individualism. In Hegel, due to his.spantheism and his
exaggeration of the wholeness of the world 'linked with it, t h e ~ e is a
preponderance of universalism. On the contrary, in Chicherin, who was
not sufficiently aware of the world's organic wholeness, we find an exag-
geration of individualism, as shown by G. D. Gurvich in his article on
Chicherin, published in Philosophie und Recht, II, 1922. Gurvich op-
poses Chicherin to Soloviev and finds in Soloviev a higher level of the
synthesis of universal and individual principles than in Chicherin.
The difference between Chicherin and Soloviev is most clearly manifest
in the field of ethics reflected in the polemics which arose between them
concerning Soloviev's work The Justification 0/ the Good. Discussing
the problem of social ethics, Soloviev attacked two extremes: on the one
hand he fought against moral subjectivism which asserts that in the
realization of good, the individual, moral will of separate persons alone
is important; on the ather hand, he expressed himself against social
realism which asserts that social institutions alone are of essennal im-
portance, while individual moral will is only of secondary value (chap.
XIII). According to Soloviev; individual, moral will is necessary for
the realization of good; but it is also necessary to perfect social life in
such a way that society should become "organized ethics." One of the
goals of such a development of society is to "ensure to each and all a
certain minimum of well-being, such as would be precisely necessary
for the sustenance-of human life and 'dignity." Chicherin interpreted
Soloviev's doctrines concerning society as a tendency to "bring the
Kingdom of God through compulsory measures, through the action of
the government, and this leads to the complete negation of human
freedom. "9
According to Chicherin, this way logically leads to the imitation
of Torquemade, to the burning of heretics for the salvation of their
9. Chicherin, "The Principles of Ethics," Problems 01 Philosophy and Psychology,
640, 1897.
142 EPIS'fEMOLOGY, LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
soul. "It would be interesting to know," he said, carrying to the absurd
the idea of his opponent, "whether the resurrection of the dead itself
should be carried out by government orders" (644). Here Chicherin
probably had in mind the teaching of Fedorov, who asserted that the
chief moral goal of the descendants is to resurrect the ancestors.
In our days it is of particular interest to read Chicherin's specula-
tions on the problem how to preserve man's freedom in the system of
social life. Under our very eyes a totalitarian social order has come to
life which has assumed the responsibility for all the aspects of the life
of the citizen, but which in reality destroys all persons considered un-
adaptable or disobedient regarding the organs of the state. However,
the moral necessity-of ensuring every person's welfare {s today recog-
nized by all. The problem of our time consists in evolving a system in
which each person's welfare is ensured, while at the same time freedom
is preserved.
TIle mistakes of Chicherin's metaphysics did not prevent him from
producing in detail extremely valuable applications of the speculative
method in all the fields of knowledge. In his book Positive Philosophy
and the Unity of Science, Chicherin submitted Comte's positivism to
profound criticism. He showed that speculation in natural sciences is
a precondition to the understanding of nature's process. The necessity
of speculation in psychology is proved by Chicherin through the analysis
of associationism. No less valuable are Chicherin's ideas in the sphere
of the philosophy of nature. In 1892. founding himself on Mendeleyev's
periodic law, Chicherin evolved a theory concerning the complexity of
the atom and the fact that the structure of the atom is similar to that of
the solar system.l'' In the field of the philosophy of biology, Chicherin
is the author of a remarkable work entitled An Experiment in Animal
Classification, which he wrote in lM83, and which was published in 1892.
This work is based on a careful study of factual material. In it, Chicherin
expresses himself against Darwinism, inasmuch as this doctrine seeks to
explain the origin of the higher complex organisms springing trom the
lower ones by means of the struggle for life. Chicherin points out that
the lower organisms are more fertile; the lower simple organisms are
less demanding and therefore better adapted to environment. Lower
organisms are not destroyed by the higher ones, as should occur accord-
ing to the doctrine of the struggle for life; they continue to live next to
those higher organisms. Hence, Chicherin concludes. the growing com-
plexity of organisms is not due to struggle for life, but arises in spite of
it. Chance, insignificant transformations, he tells us, are not useful for
10. Positive PhilosqJhy, 120.
N. DEBOLSKY 145
the struggle for life and cannot create the systematic unity of a new
organ necessary for this struggle; finally, the struggle for life and natu-
ral selection do not produce anything by themselves; they only con-
solidate that which is created by some other factor. This creating factor
cannot be chance; it can only be an inner force inherent to nature. This
creative force leads to the harmonious perfectioning of organisms: it
determines a passing from undivided unity to divided multiplicity,
brought back to unity. In the details of his classification, Chicherin
attempts to show that the scheme of the evolution of the entire world-
as it is worked out by him-can also be applied to the evolution of
animal organisms. Thirty years after Chicherin, Berg, professor of
zoology at the Petrograd University, worked out a ,,!octrine concerning
the evolution of plants and animals based on an inner law. The book
containing this doctrine is entitled Nontogenesis (1922).
In conclusion we must still point out a conception cherished by
Chicherin. Being a master of speculative research he is well aware of
what is "pure thought," and often uses this term. I recall that around
1910, Professor A. I. Vvedensky developed in his Psychology a theory
concerning pure thought-true, in a Kantian and not Hegelian form.
This teaching was mocked at by Petersburg experimental psychologists-
sensualists. But only a few years elapsed, and experimental psychology
itself, as represented by the Wiirzburg school, established the existence
of nonsensory thought.
While surveying Chicherin's entire philosophical works, we cannot
help admitting that he was an eminent thinker, not sufficiently appreci-
ated in his time of philosophical activity. As a specialist on constitu-
tional law, he was of course highly respected. In 1897, irritated by his
polemics with Soloviev, whose sharp response had been, we must admit,
provoked by Chicherin himself, he wrote that standing on the brink of
his grave, he felt he had the right to declare: "1 worked according to
my strength and ability, I used as I knew best the gift granted me by
God, and calmly offer Him my soul."11
Doubtlessly, Chicherin had the right to pass into eternity with this
majestic calm.
2. N. DEBOLSKY
Nicholai Gavrilovich Debolsky (1842-1918) was trained as a mathe-
matician. In his work The Dialectical Method he makes a distinction
between the formal logical method which is concerned with concepts,
11. "A Few 'Vords Concerning Mr. Soloviev's Answer," Problems of Philosophy
and Psychology, 778, 1897.
144 EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
and the dialectic method, which operates with ideas. He considers all
concepts inwardly contradictory. Rising from the concept to the idea,
the thinker enters the sphere of the infinite which permits contradic-
tions, being a method of an infinite series of syntheses. Debolsky's major
work is entitled The Philosophy of Phenomenal Formalism. In it he
makes a distinction between the Divine Absolute Mind and man's
finite mind. The Absolute mind, which knows both form and content
of being, knows objects in themselves. To man's finite mind is acces-
sible only the formal aspect of Absolute mind applied by him for the
understanding of phenomena. Being closely acquainted with Hegel's
philosophy, Debolsky made an excellent Russian translation of Hegel's
Science of Logic ~ 3 vols., 1916). In his articles devoted to aesthetics
Debolsky is close to Hegel's aesthetics. He perceives the beautiful as a
"suprasensual wholeness expressed in a sensual image."
At the end of his life, Debolsky wrote an article entitled "uncon-
ditional Skepticism as a Means of Improving Philosophy."! The progress
of philosophy, Debolsky declares, is checked by its deep-rooted dogma-
tism, that is by the stating "as axioms of certain propositions recognized
as self-obvious truths" (91). "Unconditional skepticism, which doubts
everything including one's own doubt, is consequently a means of un-
conditional liberation of thought from all dogmatic ties." In particular,
it is a liberation from the "nightmare of new philosophy," that is from
accepting as axiom the proposition that "knowledge as an act of con-
sciousness can have as object only states of consciousness" (109). In his
article, Debolsky, among other things, advances a number of arguments
against intuitivism.>
3. P. BAKUNIN
Pavel Alexandrovich Bakunin (1820-1900) was the brother of the
famous anarchist Michael Bakunin. He was a fine representative of the
idealism of the eighteen forties. During his entire life, Bakunin philoso-
phized, and his attractive personality influenced all those who came
into contact with him. But it was only in his old age that he published
his philosophic findings in two books: A Tardy Echo of the Forties;
Concerning the Feminist Problem, 1881, and The Foundations of Faith
and Knowledge, 1886.
1. Journal oj the Afinistry of Public Education. November 1914.
2. Debolsky's works: The Dialectic Method, 1872; The Philosophy 01 the Future,
1880; The Highest Good or the Supreme Goal 01 Moral Activity, 1886; The Philosophy
01 Phenomenal Formalism, 1, 1892; II, 1895: "The Concept of the Beautiful," Journal
01 the Ministry of Public Education, VIII; "The Aesthetic Ideal," Problems of Philoso-
phy ancl Psychology, ~ V , 1900. ~
M. KARINSKY 145
According to Bakunin's teaching, God is a living and eternal mind,
the principle and the foundation of all that can be grasped, so that
authentic understanding and knowledge are possible only in God and
through God. Thought and being, faith and knowledge are indivisible.
"Life is life only while it breathes the air of eternity," that is while it is
rooted in God. Hence arises Bakunin's teaching concerning immortality.
"Man," he says, "is from the beginning and in his very essence the truly
existing general being." When man dies, he only returns to himself
through the generalizing of death. With man's natural, empiric death,
only that dies in him which has not yet been accomplished in him, which
should still be accomplished, which is imperfect; it is only his empiric
definite existence which passes away or dies, it is on1j his sensual enve-
lope which is destroyed. Pavel Bakunin realized his unwavering faith
in individual personal immortality, when calmly lying on his deathbed,
he gaily talked to his doctor and took leave of his wife.'
4. M. KARINSKY
Michael Ivanovich Karinsky (18-10-1917), Professor at the Theo-
logical Academy of Saint Petersburg, devoted his main research to the
theory of knowledge and to logic.'
In his valuable work, The Classification of Inferences, Karinsky
resolutely opposed logic's tendency to mould all inferences into the form
of syllogism. He demonstrates that such inferences as "A =B" B =C,
therefore A = C" can be artificially transformed into the mood Barbara,
if we add to them, as major premise, the formula of inference, in the
given example, the axiom "two quantities separately equal to a third,
are equal to each other." But he points out that there exist a number
of inferences having such a nonsyllogistic structure, and the addition
to them of the formula of inference does not increase their certitude,
and must therefore be considered superfluous.
Karinsky understands inference as the solution of the problem
concerning the right to transfer the element from one proposition to
another on the basis of the identity or the contradiction between the
separate elements of the propositions. He establishes the fundamental
classes of inferences: the first fundamental class of inferences consists in
1. Concerning Bakunin's time and surroundings, in which lived all the .idealists
of the eighteen forties, see the books by A. Kornilov The Youthful Years of Michael
Bakun;n, 1915 and Tile Years 01 Michael Bakunin's Wanderings, 1925.
1. Karinsky's main works; if Critical Survey of t he Most Recent Period of GerTnan
Philosophy; The Classification 01 lnjerences, 1880; Self-Evident Truths; The Discord
Among the Schools 01 New Empiricism Concerning SelfEvident Truths, 1914. E.
aadloY, M. I. Karinslty: The creator of Russian critical bhilluabhv. 191'.
1.f6 EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
the comparison of the subjects of two propositions, in the establishment
of identity between them and consequently the transference of the
predicate from one subject to another. The second fundamental class
of inferences rests on the comparison of the predicates of two proposi-
tions: if the predicates contradict each other, we must consider the
subjects as also contradicting each other; if the predicates are identical,
then we have the right at least to a hypothetical positive inference con-
cerning the relation of the subjects toward each other. Karinsky further
su bdivides, especially the first class, in to inferences from singular objects
to singular ones, inferences from singular objects to a group of objects
(the logic group or aggregate) and inferences from the group of objects
(logic or aggregatt: to singular objects.
In the system of knowledge, all propositions cannot be proved by
means of inferences. This system must be based on propositions having
the character of self-evident truths and serving as axioms. The problem
of self-evident truths was the main object of Karinsky's research. He did
not give a positive solution of this problem, and main Iy undertook the
criticism of the theories of other philosophers.
In his book Self-Evident 'Truths, he made a fundamental study of
Kant's epistemology, seeking to show that Kant did not prove that the
propositions he calls a priori are universal and necessary. Alexander I.
Vvedensky, professor at the Petersburg University took the defense of
Kant and wrote an article entitled "The Imaginary and the True Kant"
(Problems of Philosophy and Psychology, XXV).
In his book The Discord Among the Schools of New Empiricism
Concerning Self-Evident Truths, Karinsky criticized the empiricism of
John Stuart Mill and Spencer.P The fundamental distinction between
the above philosophers and Hurne, Karinsky states, consists in the fact
that even mathematics is considered by them as a science founded on
experience, and not on speculation. that is not on the taking into ac-
count of an evident link between the subject and the predicate of the
proposition. 'They assert that every proposition is exclusively determined
by the observation of singular facts and that the link between the sub-
ject and the predicate of every proposition is only the association of
representa tions.
Mill believes that the highest premises of knowledge are established
by means of induction per enumerationem simplicem, ubi non reperitur
instantia contradictoria. Such an induction is an imperfect method,
but it can be trusted when its inference is confirmed at all times, in all,
2. 'This book was published in the Journal of the Ministry of Public Education
from 1901 to 1914. and in 1914 appeared in a separate edition. I will quote it accord-
ing to the Journal oj the Ministry of Public Education.
M. KARINSKY 147
places, under all circumstances, so that the number of confirmations is
too large to be ascribed to mere chance. Mill admits, however, that even
the law of causality, thus established, cannot be considered as a truth
for every time and place: it is possible that events are not subject to
this law in far- distant regions of the universe or that it will lose its
significance in a distant future.
Even the formulae of inferences, for instance in the syllogism, are
considered by Mill and Spencer as founded on experience, and not on
the evident link between the premises and the inference, that is on
speculation. But Karinsky points out that it is impossible to prove by
means of experience the adequacy of the formulae of because
in such a proof the formula of inference should have to serve as premise
to the proof of itself. Consequently, tllese formulae, through the conse-
quent development of associanist empiricism, must be considered only
as the condition of faith in the truth of the inferences, and not as a logi-
cally justified thesis."
Evolving his epistemology, Spencer founds it on his teaching that
life is an adaptation of inner to outward relations. Because of the uni-
formity of nature, indissoluble associations of representations arise, in
our consciousness. The fact that the negation of such an association of
representations is impossible, is considered by Spencer as a criterion of
truth. He believes that in the process of evolution, indissoluble associa-
tions are transmitted by heredity, so that a-posteriori propositions of the
ancestors become a-priori propositions of the descendants. Hence, the
impossibility of the negation of any proposition is the consequence of
an infinite number of experiences of many generations of a multitude
of beings, and therefore such propositions can be considered as the ex-
pression of truth, whereas induction described by Mill, rests on a far
smaller number of instances. However, Spencer admits, as stated by
Karinsky, that the correlation of indissoluble associations with the laws
of nature improves through evolution and it fully corresponds to the
laws of nature only by means of the perfect intellect. From this Karinsky
draws the conclusion that indissoluble associations in the mind of man
are not absolutely sure guarantees of truth.! Mill, criticizing Spencer's
teaching, points to instances of impossible negation, which for the next
human generation become possible. Exponing these considerations as
expressed by Mill, Karinsky points out that Mill does not always make
a distinction between the concept of the unthinkable and the concept of
3. Journal 01 the Ministry 01 Public Education, 526 fI., August 1901; 101-1OS,
September 1901.
4. tua; 2, July 1905.
148 EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS
..the unimaginable as applies. to negation. Concerning the unimaginable,
Karinsky proves that much that is unimaginable is thinkable.s
Speaking of mathematical axioms as of generalizations obtained
by means of induction, Mill asserts that in order to establish them, one
can use not only perceptions but also imagined ideas, because mathe-
matical ideas are entirely exact. Karinsky states that by admitting such
means of establishing mathematical axioms, Mill is unaware of the fact
that he is referring to the unthinkableness of the negation of the axiom
-in other words, he expresses the same teaching as Spencer.s
Having established that not only Spencer, but finally also Mill,
uses the unthinkableness of negation as a criterion of truth, Karinsky
shows how untrustworthy is such a criterion. When an indissoluble as-
sociation has arisen in our mind, contradictory instances do not im-
mediately destroy it. Moreover, it often happens that these contradic-
tory to the indissoluble association are established by indirect means,
for instance the teaching that the earth is not motionless but that it
moves around its axis, is proved by indirect means. Therefore, in ad-
dition to the unthinkableness of negation, a methodical research is also
needed.
However, a logically evolved associationist empiricism must, ac-
cording to Karinsky, reach the conclusion that even after such a methodi-
cal research, we do not attain a full certainty in the general truth of
judgement; this is due to the fact that first experience is always limited,
and secondly that even if the law of nature is discovered, the unchang-
ing character of nature is not established.'1
Thus, according to Karinsky, a logically evolved associationist
empiricism, denying the existence of speculative evidence, must lead
to skepticism; however, this skepticism can be tempered by pointing
out that man is not only a knowing, but also an active being.s In practi-
cal life all men use scientific and even practical knowledge in order to
satisfy their needs. Such a faith in scientific theses is practically justified
and psychologically compulsory-in other words it has the nature of an
instinct, as was stated by Hume."
Karinsky winds up his research by analyzing Mill's teaching COD-
cerning the law of contradiction. According to Mill, the law of con-
tradiction is not a speculative truth; it is a generalization drawn from
experience. Karinsky clearly demonstrates that Mill is wrong, and that
the law of contradiction is a speculative truth: this law is "a self-evident
truth, resting on the direct grasping by thought of the relation between
5. Ibid., September-December 1905.
6. Ibid., !24. May-August 1901; 200 f., November 1903.
7. tu, August 1908; September 1905.
8. tu, May 19(-6.
9. Ibil,., August 1908.
N.GROT 149
the meanings of 'the terms which form it;"lO to speak about A which is
not A, means to lose the object of thought, to let consciousness face a
void.
Unfortunately Karinsky did not evolve his own theory of knowl-
edge, but his achievement consists in having produced a strict proof of
the fact that associationist empiricism, which denies speculation, cannot
prove the existence of a logically justified knowledge and inevitably
leads to skepticism. By fully analyzing the theories of knowledge evolved
by Mill and Spencer, he reveals a number of inconsistencies and contra-
dictions these theories contain. He sees the fundamental error of as-
sociationist empiricism in the negation of every speculative evidence.P
Unfortunately both of Karinsky's books conclrning self-evident
truths are written in an extremely clumsy style, with lengthy sentences,
which sometimes run to as many as fifteen lines; to read these pages
involves painful labor.
5. N. GROT
Nicholai Yakovlevich Grot (1852-1899) was a professor at the
Moscow University. In his article "Three Characteristics," Soloviev
states that Grot was first a positivist in the spirit of Spencer, later at..
tracted by the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, and ended by being
drawn by Platonism. Thus, in his philosophical development. he rose
to the heights and plunged into the depths. Grot attempted to' evolve a
teaching concerning the interaction of psychic and material processes.
He believed that next to such types of energy as mechanical, thermal,
electromagnetic energies, there is also a psychic energy. Thus, Grot be-
lieved, the interaction of material and psychic processes does not violate
the law of the preservation of energy: the physical process with energy
A generates a psychical process which sooner or later leads to the rise
of a physical process with a reserve of energy A. This theory is some..
what similar to V. Ostwald's energitism. Professor Vvedensky expressed
himself against Grot's teaching, pointing out that psychical processes
have no spacious forms; therefore the concept of energy in the physical
sense (the overcoming of resistance in a given space) has no meaning
when applied to these psychical processes. Physical models of spacious
energic processes explain more or less the transformation of one energy
into another one; but we could not understand how spacious energy
could be transformed into nonspacious energy.. !
10. tu, 141, November 1914.
11. tu, 146, November 1914.
1. Grot's works: The Psychology of Feelings, 1880; Concerning the Problem 01
'M R'form 01 Logic, 1882; articles in Problems of. Philosof/ly and Psychology, of
which Grot was editor.
Chapter 10
PRINCES S. N. AND E. N. TRUBETSKOY
Prince Serge, Nikolaevich Trubetskoy and his brother Prince
Evgeny were intimate friends of Soloviev despite the fact that they were
respectively ten and eleven years younger than he (S. Trubetskoy was
born in 1862, and E. Trubetskoy in ]863). They both carried on 5010-
viev's work-the working out of an Orthodox; religiously philosophical
conception of the world.
The conditions under which they developed in their youth are
vividly described in the Memoirs! of Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy and,
being highly characteristic of the Russian spiri tuaI cultur e, are worth
dwelling upon.
Studying at a classical gymnasium in Moscow and living in a hig-hly
cultured environment, both brothers, since the age of twelve, conceived
a strong passion for music, especially for classical music-s-Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, and later on also the Russian composers Borodin, Mussorg-
sky, Rimsky-Korsakov and others. In 1877 the Russo-Turkish war broke
out. The Russian public looked upon it as a crusade undertaken with
the object of liberating their Orthodox kinsmen, the Bulgarians and
the Serbs, from the Turkish yoke. The brothers Trubetskoy, who at the
time were passionately keen on the idea of Russia as a grea t nation,
shared in the patriotic enthusiasm which had seized the whole Russian
society.
Soon after, however, when they were in the sixth form at school,
both brothers, like Soloviev and so many other Russian youths of their
time, went through a spiritual crisis involving the negation of all the
old traditions. They lost their religious faith and became keen on H.
Spencer's and J. S. Mill's positivism. The critical attitude to the social
and political regime prevailing in Russia led not only to the condem-
nation of autocracy but to a repudiation, purely nihilist in spirit, of
other \ alues. Although there was a' strict control of the pupils' political
opinions on the part of the school authorities, the two boys, both of
1. Sofia, Russo-Bulgarian Publishing Co., 1921.
150
PRINCES S. N. AND E. N. TRUBETSKOY 151
whom were bright and clever, did not mince matters when it came to
expressing them. The elder, Sergey, would jokingly say to his French
master, a Swiss: "Fedor Fedorovich, what have you got your Mont Blanc
there for, it merely bars the way, no one can go or ride across it, isn't
it a shame! That's what the Republican regime leads tol It's a different
matter with us: had there been such a Mont Blanc somewhere in Russia
at once either the police captain or the Governor would give instructions
for it to be put out of the way-and there would be no Mont Blanc!"
When, later 011, the two brothers began studying philosophy in
earnest they soon came to the conclusion that Mill's empiricism had
long before been refuted by Leibniz in his controversJ with Locke, and
that Spencer had failed to understand Kant's p r o f o L ~ d doctrine of the
a priori bases of knowledge. Having got rid of positivism Evgeny Tru-
betskoy came to profess a skepticism which became a source of torture
to him; he clearly realized, for instance, that dishonesty was something
inadmissible and yet he saw that his reason was unable to formulate
any conclusive proof in favor of the necessity of disinterested conduct.
He found a way out of this crisis when, becoming eagerly interested
in Schopenhauer's philosophy, he came to realize that pessimism was an
indispensable consequence of the repudiation of the absolutely perfect
principle ruling the world. He was faced with the alternative, "Either
God does exist or life is not worth living" (60 ff.). Just at this time two
works were in the course of publication in the review Russky Jlestnik-
Dostoevsky's novel Brothers Karamazov and V. Soloviev's thesis The
Critique oj Abstract Principles. In one of them the same dilemma is
treated artistically, in the other philosophically, and both arrive at an
affirmative solution. About the saIne time the brothers Trubetskoy took
to reading Homyakov's booklets in which he sets forth his doctrine of
the Church as Christ's body. On outgrowing the state of duality be-
tween his will which yearned for God and his mind which denied Him,
Evgeny Trubetskoy felt, as he puts it, "the joy of being healed in the
literal sense of the word," because he "felt the reinstatement of the
destroyed uiholeness of his human being" (67). Brothers Trubetskoy
went back to the Orthodox faith and once more became interested in
the problems of Russian national genius. In 1886 they met Vladimir
Soloviev, and this meeting resulted in a friendship.
The final affirmation of the religious conception of the world in
the mind of Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy dates from a profound religious
experience through which he went during a performance of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony conducted by Anton Rubinstein. "Listening to the
first movement of the Symphony," he says, "I felt as if in the presence
of some cosmic storm; lightnings flashed before my eyes, one could hear
.
152 PR.INCES S. N. AND E. N. TRUBETSK.OY
a dull underground thunder and rumbling which made the foundations
of the Universe shake. My mind was seeking in vain a relief from the
anxiety which had seized it. This anxiety caused by the hopeless universal
suffering and confusion goes right through the first- three movements,
growing, increasing. In the wonderful scherzo with its thrice-repeated,
cruel, harsh strokes, the soul tries to escape from this thickening darkness:
from somewhere comes the trivial melody of discreet bourgeois merry-
making, and suddenly again the same three dry, harsh strokes interrupt
and dismiss it: away with the insipid, imaginary relief, there is no room
in the soul for the Philistine satisfaction, for the prosaic melody, for the
everyday joyl All this discord and chaos, all this cosmic struggle in
sounds, filling one-; soul with despair and terror, demand a different, a
higher climax. And all of a sudden, when you feel yourself to be onthe
very edge of a dark abyss into which the world is about to tumble, you
hear the harsh sound of the trumpets, some accords widening the world,
all imperious call from the altitudes beyond, from another plane of
being. From infinitely far away comes pianissimo a hitherto unheard
melody of joy; the orchestra whispers to you some new and solemn
sounds. But here they grow, they expand, they draw nearer. It is no
longer a presentiment, an allusion to a different future; the human
voices which come in one after another, the powerful chorus which
takes up the victorious hymn of joy-this is already something genuine,
it is the present. And instantly you feel yourself lifted up to the heights
above the stars, above the world, above mankind, above all the sorrows
of existence.
Embrace ye, all nations,
Millions, fallon your knees."
In Beethoven's symphony E. Trubetskoy perceived the same di-
lemma which had been tormenting him for a long time: "either God
does exist, and in Him is the fullness of life above the uiorld, or life is
not worth living at all." But in the Symphony there is also "something
infinitely greater than the putting of that dilemma, there is in it a
living experience of the beyond, a real sensation of dynamic peace.
Your thought takes in the whole cosmic drama from that height of
eternity where all the confusion and horror are miraculously trans-
figured into joy and peace. And you feel that the eternal peace which
descends 011 earth from above is not the negation but the fullness of
life. No other great artist or philosopher in the world has felt or re-
vealed this to the same extent as did Beethoven" (96-98).
In 1900, S. N. Trubetskoy became Professor of Philosophy at the
University of M o s ~ o w . E. N. Trubetskoy was Professor of Philosophy
PRINCES S. N. AND E. N. TRUBETSKOY 15!
of Law, first in Kiev and then in Moscow. Both brothers played a
prominent part in the Russian Liberal movement, championing the
idea of limiting the autocracy. On June 6, 1905, S. Trubetskoy, as a
member of the delegation of the zemstvo and municipal self-govern-
ment bodies, held a speech on the necessity of reforms before the Em-
peror Nicholas II. E. N. Trubetskoy as a philosopher of law was an
active publicist and pronounced himself in favor of the independence
of Church from the State. In politics he fought both the reactionary
forces which were out to "freeze" Russia, and the revolutionary which
aimed at setting everything in Russia topsy-turvy. In his pamphlet Two
Beasts he represents these two forces as two and shows
that the jaws of the Red Beast and the claws of the Black Beast are
equally dangerous.
S. N. Trubetskoy died suddenly in 1905, of internal hemorrhage,
in the office of the Minister of Education-he had come to St. Peters-
burg, in his capacity as the Rector of the Moscow University, to defend
University autonomy.
E. N. Trubetskoy, after the Bolshevik revolution, took part in the
civil war against the Bolsheviks and died, in 1920, in Novorossiysk, of
typhus.
S. N. Trubetskoy who was engaged in professorial work and died
early, had no time or opportunity of working out in full his own philoso-
phy. The most important of his works are t\VO researches on the history
of philosophy: Metaphysics of Ancient Greece and The Doctrine of the
Logos, 1900; and three works in which his own views are stated: On the
\Tature of Human Consciousness, The Foundations of Idealism and
The Belief in Immortality.
Dealing with the conditions that determine the logical character
of knowledge and the objectivity of external reality, Prince Sergey
Trubetskoy maintains that consciousness is superhuman-s-noi in the
sense of being an impersonal, epistemological self, but a superpersonal,
collective unity of the World Soul. In this connection he works out the
doctrine of a universal sensibility, of which space and time are the
forms: such contents of it as color, sound, etc., are independent of the
individual human consciousness. The condition of the logical coherence
of knowledge is the universal Reason; the latter being understood in its
original source not as a complex of abstract ideas, forms, categories, etc.,
hut as a concrete subject, the living Logos, the second person of the
Holy 'Trinity. He therefore calls his philosophy concrete idealism. Like
Soloviev, he explains the knowledge of objective reality, irreducible to
sensations and concepts, by the inner connection between all beings. In
so doing he takes as his starting point the law of correlation
154 PRINCES S. N. AND E. N. TRUBETSKOY
which he applies to the structure of consciousness as well. "Our con-
sciousness," he says, "is determined by the inner correlatedness of things,
based upon the all-embracing unity of the Absolute:' The Absolute
Being itself transcends relatedness, is superrelatiue existence, not merely
existing in Itself and for Itself, but also revealing its hidden substance
in existence for another, in love for the world. He justifies the belief in
immortality by the following reasoning. Having established the super-
temporal character of the ideal aspect of thought, feeling and conduct
(i.e., the supertemporal character of truth, meaning, etc.), he maintains
that tHe spiritual growth of personality involves an increasing knowl-
edge of the t i m e J ~ s n e s s of the abstract ideal principles and a growing
faith in the personal, individual immortality of the subject as the bearer
of these principles. This is due to the development of intuition in and
through which \\e become aware not of the separate functions, but of
the whole indivisible being of man as an individuality of absolute value,
characterized by ideal attributes, both moral and aesthetic. This faith
receives its supreme justification on the basis of the Christian religion
which teaches us to see in our neighbors "the image of Christ."
In its foundations S. Trubetskoy's doctrine is connected with the
system of V. Soloviev which he, however, subjects to a thorough revision
in the light of tlte criticism of knowledge carried out by Kant and of
the post-Kantian metaphysical idealism, especially that of Hegel. Thus,
e.g., the doctrine of universal sensibility represents an attempt at deepen-
ing the Kantian conception of sensibility.
Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy had the opportunity of setting forth his
ideas at greater length than did his brother, especially in his book on
Soloviev where, criticizing the main points of his friend's system, he
gives also an idea of his own conception of the world. His principal
works are the following: The Philosophy of St. Augustine, 1892; The
ldea of God's Kingdom in Gregory VII and the Publicists of His Time,
1897; The Philosophy of V. Solouieu, 1912; The Metaphysical Assump-
tions of Knowledge, 1917; The Meaning of Life, 1918. It is also neces-
sary to mention his two remarkable booklets on Russian ikonography
-Two Worlds in the Ancient Russian Ikonography and Intellectual
Intuition in Color.
In his book, The Metaphysical Assumptions of Knowledge E. 'Tru-
betskoy set himself the task of refuting Kant's theory of knowledge by
the doctrine of the dependence of Truth upon the Absolute; he worked
it out in greater detail than did his brother in investigating the nature
of human consciousness. Knowledge can be absolutely trustworthy,
maintains E. Trubetskoy, only if its basis is superhuman. The judgment
.that "two plus t\,oq equals four" as an absolutely true iudament about
PRINCES S. N. AND E. N. TRUBETSKOY
155
everything presupposes that everything actual and conceivable is subordi-
nate to a certain unity, or, in other words, it presupposes that there is
a pan-unity, an absolute consciousness in which everything knowable is
timelessly determined by thought, so that every truth is eternal.
Singular judgments about fleeting events such as "Brutus killed
Caesar" are no exception to this. The paradox of the eternal conscious-
ness of the temporal is explained by the circumstance that absolute
consciousness is the eternal contemplation of the past and the future as
such; it is a concrete intuition, a synthesis of eternal menlory and abso-
lute pre-vision. OUf knowledge is only possible because of our participa-
tion in the absolute consciousness-because the hUlna" and the absolute
thought are one and indivisible, though distinct from one another. Since
this participation is imperfect and incomplete, we have to make use of
abstraction in order to arrive at the absolute truth. Without abstraction
we could not get rid of the subjective and accidental arrangement of
the immediate data of experience and "re-instate their absolute synthe-
sis," i.e., "the necessary and objective order which binds them in truth."
Abstraction is thus merely a means and an intermediate step in knowl-
edge, the purpose of which is the concrete unity of all. This unity in-
eludes the sensuous contents of perception which both Sergey and
Evgeny Trubetskoy take to be transsubjective.
Prmce Evgeny Trubetskoy expounds his doctrine of the relation
between the Absolute and the world in a work of t\VO volumes, entitled
The Philosophy of Vladimir Solouieu. In the course of a critical examina-
tion of Soloviev's metaphysics, Trubetskoy introduces several important
modifications into it, consistent with the spirit of Orthodox Christianity.
Soloviev's COSl1logony is akin to that of Schelling in the doctrine of the
first matter which lies at the basis of the world, and is at the same time
"the first substratum" of the Absolute-just as with Schelling the basis
of the world is "nature in God." Hence, quite contrary both to Schel-
ling's and to Soloviev's intentions, their theories have a pantheistic
coloring: God and the world prove to be interdependent, and therefore
the doctrine of free will cannot b..e consistently worked out. Evgeny Tru-
Letskoy avoids these defects of Soloviev's theory by insisting that the
creation of the world "is an absolutely free act-s-creation out of nothing."
At the same time, his conception of Sophia as the unity of the Divine
Ideas acquires a different character. Soloviev maintains that the es-
sence of the individual is his Idea; Trubetskoy points out that he, there-
fore, sometimes interprets "the relation of God's eternal Wisdom to
our changing reality as the relation of essence to appearance." If, how-
ever, the Divine principle be thus closely connected with the world, no
explanation can be given of individual freedom and of the orizin of
156 PR.INCES S. N. AND E. N. T),(UBETSKOY
evil. Consequently, Trubetskoy contends that, although Sophia is a
principle real in God from all eternity, for earthly humanity and for
Hall Goers sheep," she is not an essence, but only a norm, an ideal image.
The individual is outside of the Divine life and is free to accept or to
reject the ideal end thus set before him. If he accepts it, he gives realiza-
tion to God's image in himself, and if he rejects it he becomes "a blas-
phemous parody or caricature of it.'? The fact that God's creatures
are external to Him "does not limit the Absolute, for in themselves,
apart from a positive or a negative relation to it, they are nothing."
According to this view, God is free from the world and the world is
comparatively i l ~ ~ e p e n d e n t of God: without such freedom on both sides
the relation between God and the world could not have the character
of love, or, on the part of man, of hostility.
These conceptions are further developed by Evgeny Trubetskoy in
his book, The Meaning of Life (published in Moscow in 1918); they
enable him to interpret Christianity as the only religion "in which
neither the human element is absorbed by the Divine nor the Divine
by the human, but each remaining what it is abides in unity with the
other in all its fullness and wholeness." Their union removes the op-
position between this world and the world beyond: the process of earthly
evolution "is felt to be a transition to a different, to a higher plane:'
The horizontal and the vertical lines of life are combined in the one
"life-giving cross." The upward process which requires victory of self-
hood is impossible without suffering, but for the absolute consciousness
contemplating reality as a completed whole, the bliss of the fullness of
being that concludes the temporal series exists from all eternity. Even
man is capable of participating in the timeless splendor of this truth,
and then "the sense of the nearness of what is far off fills the soul with
joy, the contradictions that have been troubling our hearts and minds
are at once removed by the joyful cry 'Christ is risen.' IJ It is with good
reason that for an Orthodox Russian Easter is "the feast of feasts," fill-
ing the soul with gladness and setting it free, if only for a moment, from
the fetters of the limited earthly existence.
Transfigured bodily life plays an important part in the divine full-
ness of being. Light and sound are a perfect means for the expression of
the spiritual meaning and force of life. "The true source of life will one
day clothe itself with the sun; then our relation to the sun will change
from an external to an internal one; life itself will become sunny
throughout, like Christ's raiment on Mount Thabor-and it is this that
justifies the joy of the woods and the fields at the sunshine. Our present
2. The Meaning. of Life.
PR.INCES S. N. AND E. N. TIlUBETSKOY
157
world contains numberless indications of the symphony of light and
sound in the world to come," says Trubetskoy. Each creature, in his
view, wears the image of day or of night: "the metallic clang of the owl,
the sepulchral howl of the wolf," etc., "sound as the very voice of dark-
ness," while lethe sunny hymn of the lark expresses the complete victory
of the midday sun and the dazzlingradiance of the heavenlyorb."
Recent discoveries have shown that the ancient Russian art of ikon
painting, with its wealth of color, was keenly alive to the connection
between the material and the spiritual reality. "Sophia, the Divine
\Visdom, is painted against the dark blue background of the starry sky.
The reason is clear: Sophia is precisely that which dj,.rdes light from
darkness, day from night, "The roseate face of the creating Sophia stands
out like God's dawn in the midst of the dark starlit sky. And above it
the final victory of light is symbolized by the midday sunlike face of the
creating Christ. Thus all the three moments-the dark blue of the
night, the rosy glow of the dawn, and the clear gold of a sunny day-
which are for us distinct experiences separated by time, and in so far
incompatible, are represented in the ikon painting as eternally coexist...
ing and making up one indivisible harmonious whole. The idea of uni-
versal harmony and of the incarnation of the God of Love in His loving
creatures is realized in the threefold triumph of light, sound and COD-
sciousness. Perfect love reveals itself not only in the fullness of glory, but
also in perfect beauty. This is why the whole idea of the eternal Sophia
is presented in tile Scriptures in an artistic form.:"
Examining the problem of Russia's part in the history of mankind,
E. N. Trubetskoy in his young years, just as Soloviev in his early writings,
shared the Slavophil exaggeration of Russia's mission and dreamed of
a universal theocratic Empire which Russia would found. "Later on,"
he says in his Memoirs, "I became convinced that in the New Testament
all nations, and not anyone particular nation as distinct from the others,
are called upon to be the bearers of God; that the proud dream about
Russia as a chosen nation of God, which is clearly at variance with cer...
tain pass,ages of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, must be given up as
incompatible with .the spirit of New-Testamental Revelation" (69).
!. The artistic and mystical wealth of Russian ikon painting has become more or
less accessible to all nations thanks to the publications of the Seminarium Kondako-
V;atlU1n founded in exile, in Prague, by the disciples of the remarkable Russian his-
torian, N. P. Kondakov. This subject is discussed more fully in Prince E. Trubetskoy's
remarkable pamphlets: Two World,) in Russian lkonography and Intellectual Intuition
in Color.
Chapter 11
THE RUSSIAN PERSONALISTS
I. A. KOZLOV
The philosophical teachings of A. A. Kozlov, L. Lopatin, N. Buga..
yev. E. Bobrov, Astafiev, Alexeiev (Askoldov) and N. O. Lossky present
the character of personalism. All of them are more or less strongly in-
fluenced by the monadology of Leibniz,
Alexei Alexandrovich Kozlov (1831-190I) was the illegitirnate son
of the landowner Pushkin and of his serf girl. He was educated at the
MoscowVniversity in 1850-56. I\S a young man he was attracted by the
socialism of Fourier and Leroux, and sympathized with this movement
to the end of his life. He was first a materialist with a positivist tendency
and had no interest in philosophy. While managing the estate of his
father-in-law, at the age of forty, he happened to read Frauenstadt's
book on Schopenhauer; this philosopher as well as E. Hartmann
awakened so great an interest in him that he began studying philosophy.
He published philosophical works and became in ]876-86 professor of
the Kiev University. Having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and stricken
with paralysis, he was forced to resign and made his home in Petersburg,
where he pursued his philosophical work, The system of his philosophy
is close to that of the Leibnizian Teichmiiller (1832-1888), formerly a
professor at the Dorpat University.
The main work of Kozlov, One's Own Word, consists of five issues
(J888-1898). The author makes a distinction between the concepts
consciousness and knowledge. For instance the perception of the red
color, as long as it is not yet connected with anything, and cannot be
consequently expressed in words, belongs to the sphere of consciousness.
It becomes knowledge after it has been juxtaposed with other contents
of consciousness and distinguished from them. Kozlov establishes the
concept of being on the basis of self-observation and defines it in the
following manner: it consists "in knowledge concerning our substance,
its activities and the contents of these activities in their unity and their
158
A. KOZLOV 159
relation to each other" (53). This being is spiritual substance. The
analogy between our representation of our body and our representation
of other bodies permits us to believe that other bodies are symbols of
other spiritual substances. Material processes exist only as our representa-
tions, arising in us as a result of interaction with other spiritual sub-
stances. Due to this teaching concerning matter, Kozlov calls his system
panpsychism.
Being consists of three aspects: substance, its activities and. the con-
tents of its activities. In the history of philosophy, Kozlov declares, one-
sided movements, which did not consider the three aspects of being, were
widespread. Thus for instance, Parmenid's p h i l o s o p p ~ considers sub-
stance alone; Fichte considers only activity; Greek idealism considers
only the contents of activities, ideas; while Hegel considers activity in
connection with ideas, but without substance.
Like Teichmuller, Kozlov rejected the objective reality of time.
He considered being timeless: the geological periods, the entire history
of humanity coexist as an accomplished whole. But God's infinite con-
sciousness alone contemplates this system as timeless, Due to our narrow
consciousness \\'e evolve a representation of peculiar means of co-
ordination of world phenomena corresponding to the idea of the order
"Iorrnerly, now, after." In this system the past and the future are
mutually adapted: the future depends on the past, but the past also is
dependent on the future, so that the causal and teleological understand-
ing of these links complete each other. Time is conceived by us as an
infinite and as an infinitely divisible. Precisely because of this one can-
not consider it objectively real; if, for instance, one minute were ob-
jectively real, then, being infinitely divisible, it would contain a given,
I ealized infinite, that is a calculated infinite, and this is a contradiction.
Kozlov criticizes Zeno's paradoxes, founding himself on his own teaching
concerning time. In the same way, space is considered by Kozlov not
an objectively real, but a subjective representation of the order of our
interactions with other spiritual substances-s-e.g., when we speak of our
transfer from Moscow to Petersburg.
The image of our body is a representation of the intimate inter-
action we exercise regarding other spiritual substances, monads, less
developed than our ego, and which serve us as organs. Death is the
suspension of our interaction regarding these monads, but probably
after death, our ego enters into interaction with other spiritual sub-
stances and builds itself a new body, corresponding to the degree of its
development. This teaching concerning reincarnation is explained in
the fifth volume of One's Own J'J'ord (132).
The world order is a systemat growing complexity and intensity of
160
THE RUSSIAN PER.SONALISTS
the interaction of spiritual substances, which infinitely draw closer to
(;00, the supreme substance, whose body is the entire world.
Extremely interesting is Kozlov's article "The Consciousness of
God and the Knowledge of God" (Problems of Philosophy and Pry-
chology, XXIX and XXX). In this article Kozlov asserts that God is a
being which we are conscious of as directly as of our own ego. But, found-
ing oneself on this consciousness of God, it is not easy to reach a correct
knowledge of God, expressed in concepts. Along this path, humanity
commits all kinds of errors, for instance, being conscious of force as of
one of God's attributes, man divinizes the crocodile.
Observing. ~ e various currents of Russian social life, Kozlov mocked
at the sentimental attitude of the populists regarding the peasants.'
2. L. LOPATIN
Lev Mikhailovich Lopatin (1855-1920) was professor at the Moscow
University, and after Grot's death, became the editor of the review
Problems of Philosophy and Psychology. In his baric work, The Positive
Problems of Philosophy, and in a series of articles, Lopatin evolves
extremely interesting ideas concerning the substantiality of the conscious
ego and the concept of causality. He understands the world as a single
organism, at the center of which is the One Absolute, God, creating the
multiplicity of world beings. For the knowledge of the nature of world
beings, Lopatin turns to man's inner experience. His speculations con...
cerning this matter are presented in the most concentrated and satisfac..
tory form in his article "The Concept of the Soul According to the Data
of Inner Experience."! The manifestations of psychical life, Lopatin
tells us, vary every second: all that takes place in time, presents the
character of "uninterrupted disappearance" (270). But the ego, which
experiences psychic processes, remains identical to itself: it is supra-
temporal substance. If there were no substances, the world would be
split into a number of momentary worlds, not linked to each other.
Thanks to the fact that substance is at the basis of phenomenas, the
latter do not disappear, and pass into further processes, they are linked
by real ties, as for instance, causal dependence, which Lopatin under-
stands as the creation of phenomena by supratemporal subjects. Most
interesting are Lopatin's ideas concerning the fact that "the conscious-
ness of the reality of time is the most evident, the most precise, the most
indisputable proof of the supratemporal nature of our ego ... time
l. Kozlov's main works (apart from those which have been meutloned above):
Philosophical Studies, 1876; Philosophy as a Science, 1887. Askaldou, A. A. Kozlou, 1912.
1. Problems ol.Philosophy and Psychology,' XXXII. 1896.
N. BUGAYEV-P. ASTAFIEV-E. BOBR.OV 161
cannot be observed and understood by that which is itself temporal ...
the consciousness of time is the substantial function of the sour' (288).
It is difficult to observe one's ego as a substance separate from
psychical processes. Lopatin helps to evolve in oneself the ability to
make these observations, pointing out, for instance, such processes as
the comparison of two objects: this comparison would be impossible
without the ego standing above the two perceptions and juxtaposing
them. Lopatin considered that Soloviev was mistaken when he rejected
data in the experience of the ego, and believed that this mistake was due
to the fact that such philosophers as Soloviev imagine that substance is
transcendental to the processes. However, in reality, t ~ substance and
the process it creates are indivisibly welded together, (hey form a single
whole, in which one aspect is supratemporal substance, and the other
aspect a temporal process. Substance stands above time, consequently
it is eternal: the destruction of substance is unthinkable, because de-
struction is suspension of existence in time.
On the basis of the above-mentioned considerations it is clear, that
temporal processes are possible only as the creation of supratemporal
substance, Therefore, observing material processes in the outer world,
we must admit that supratemporal substances are at their basis. More-
over, Lopatin believes, we must admit that beside material exterior
manifestations these substances have an inner, that is psychical life;
they are the monads of Leibniz.s
In the lithographed publication containing Lopatin's lectures on
"Psychology" we find the supposition, stated independently from Berg-
son, that the excitation of the sensitory organs is not the cause, de-
termining the contents of perception, but only the condition for be-
coming conscious of the object. This idea was long ago expressed by
Schelling in his "System des transcendentalen Idealismus," Collected
l'Yorks" III, 497.
8
3. N. BUGAYEV-P. ASTAFIEV-E. BOBROV
N. V. Bugayev (1837-1902) was professor of mathematics at the
Moscow University; he was the father of the poet Andrei Biely.
Bugayev wrote an article, "Basic Principles of Evolutionary Mona-
dology."! According to his teaching, "the past does not vanish, but ac-
2. One of Lopatin's articles is entitled "Spiritualism as a Logical Hvpothesis,"
ibid., XXXVIII, 1897.
5. Lopatin's major works: Positive Problems of Philosophy. I. 18t46; 2nd ed., 1911;
II, 1891. Collection 01 Articles in Lopatin's Honor, 1911.
1. Problems 0/ Philosoph., and Psychology, 1893.
162
THE RUSSIAN PERSONALISTS
cumulates;" therefore the perfection of every monad and of the entire
world increases; it consists in the growing complexity of spiritual life
and the development of the world's harmony. "The foundation of life
and of the monad's activity is ethical: to perfect oneself and to perfect
others" (36 c). The final goal of the monads' activity is to "transform
the world" into an edifice of art (41).
P. Astafiev (1846-1893) and E. A. Bobrov (1867-1933) were the cham-
pions of the teaching of being as monad, that is, as spiritual substance.P
2. P. Astafiev, Faith and Knowledge in Unity of World Conception, Moscow
1893. E. Bobrov, The Concept of Being, Kazan 1898.
We shall art'vze S. A. Alexeiev (Askoldov) and N. O. Lossky when speaking of
Twentieth CenturyYeligious
Chapter 12
THE RUSSIAN NEO-KANTIANS
I. A. I. VVEDENSKY
Western Europeans sometimes state that Russian philosophical
thought did not go through the test of Kant's criticism and is not conse-
quently on the level of European philosophy. As in Inany other cases,
these Western minds prove their ignorance as to Russia. Kant entered
the field of Russian culture no less than his influence exercised itself
on English and French philosophies.
The Critique of Pure Reason exists in three Russian translations.
The first of these translations was done by Professor Michael Ivanovich
Vladislavlev (1840-1890) of the Petersburg University. Vladislavlev is
the author of the work entitled The Plulosopliy of Plotinus. Another of
his books, Logic, offers an interesting survey of the history of this science.
'The translation of The Critique of Pure Reason, which he undertook
in 1867, is quite satisfactory, except that his style is as cumbersome as
that of Kant himself in the original German. The second translation
was done by N. Sokolov in 1897. Unfortunately this translation is full
of mistakes, because the translator did not possess a thorough knowledge
of philosophy nor of the German language. The third translation was
done by N. Lossky, and the first edition of this work was published in
1907.
We are able to trace throughout the entire nineteenth century a
number of Russian philosophic writings which show a knowledge of
Kant's criticism and offer a serious critique of his epistemology. "rhus
lor instance, Radlov states that in the early nineteenth century, Professor
Ossipovsky pointed out that Kant's dynamistic theory of matter cannot
be conciliated with his teaching on the subjectivity of space and tirne.!
As already stated, Russian society in the first half of the nineteenth
century was attracted not by Kant, but by the metaphysical idealism of
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who overcame Kant's phenomenalism.
'They had achieved this through the teaching according to which the
l. E. Radlov, Outline of the History of Russian 2nd ed., 14, 1920.
165
UK THE R.USSIAN NEOKANTIANS
knowing subject is organically included in the supraindividual world
unity; thanks to this the identity of thought and being is possible. At
the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, the
Russian religious philosophers, starting with Soloviev, evolved, as we
shall see, a system of Christian metaphysics; this system does not ignore
Kant's epistemology, it overcomes this epistemology creatively through
various types of teachings on intuition, that is on man's immediate
contemplation of the world's authentic essence.
Apart from this struggle against Kant, there arose in Russia during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, quite a number of champions
of neokantisrri, ;The chief representative of this movement is Alexander
Ivanovich Vvedensky (1856-1925), who was professor at the Petersburg
University from 1890 to the end of his life. All of Vvedensky's works
find all his courses, devoted to logic, psychology and the history of
philosophy, definitely reflect a philosophical thought based on Kant's
criticism. Vvedensky did not only possess a precise and clear mind, he
was also endowed with exceptional gifts as a teacher. Many thousands
of students attended his classes at the University, The Higher Women's
Courses and at the Military Law Academy, and he inspired them with
his ideas with extraordinary strength. Basing himself on The Critique of
Pure Reason, Vvedensky became a representative of a specific form of
neokantism, which he called logicism. He founded epistemology, as the
science of the limits of human reason, on logic, by means of a theory
concerning inferences and the methods of proving general synthetic
judgements.
The direct setting of the data of experience, Vvedensky declares,
can justify only singular or private judgements. Consequently the
justification of general synthetic judgement is only possible by means
of inlerence; but inference, which proves a general synthetic judgement,
must already contain at least one general synthetic judgement among
its premises: even in inductive inferences the conclusion derives not
directly from separate observations but from their combination with
the principle of the uniformity of nature. Hence, it is clear that the
system of knowledge containing general synthetic judgements, can be
erected and developed only if it has at its base several general synthetic
judgements a priori; that is, not proved and unable to be proved, but
accepted as part of knowledge, because they can serve as the supreme
foundation of scientific knowledge. In combination with definitions
(which Vvedensky as a follower of Kant considers as analytical judge-
ments) and the data of experience, judgements a priori serve as a founda-
tion for inferences which offer in their conclusions new synthetic judge-
ments.
A. I. VVEDENSItY 165
What are the objects concerning which we acquire knowledge by
means of these inferences? Vvedensky answers this question, basing
himself on his teaching on the logical bond and the theory of inferences
built on it. The logical bond (the bond between the subject and the
predicate of the analytical judgement, as well as the bond between the
premises and the conclusion of the inference), Vvedensky tells us, is the
bond requested by the laws of contradiction and of the excluded middle.
Thanks to this bond we are obliged, inasmuch as we accept the premises
of a correct inference, to accept also the conclusion, for in the opposite
case we would enter into a contradiction with the premises. Thus for
instance, having admitted that Hall liquids are that "mer-
cury is a liquid," we cannot say that "mercury is not elastic," for this
would mean that "there are nonelastic liquids." I call this theory ana
lytical, because it regards inference as a .system similar to analytical
judgement; from this theory it follows that inferences are possible only
regarding objects, submitted to the law of contradiction. And such,
according to Vvedensky, are our representations alone; as to thought, it
is not submitted to the law of contradiction: we can, for instance think
of a round square, etc. Therefore. inferences are possible only concern
ing representations, concerning apparent being, (that is being as it
appears to us); as to the world of authentic being (i.e., things in them-
selves), we do not know whether it is submitted to the law of contradic-
tion, and therefore inferences concerning it are impossible. And so
metaphysics as a science cannot be realized. Mathematics and natural
science, on the other hand, can be considered as sciences only if their
object is being as a phenomenon (representation). And Vvedensky adds
that we must come to the same conclusion if we base ourselves on the
considerations which guided Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason; the
proof of general synthetic judgements can be made only with the help
of a-priori principles, but a-priori principles, which can be proved by
no experience, are the thoughts of the knowing subject; therefore they
can submit to themselves not authentic being, but being as it appears
to the subject.
In Vvedensky's logicism there is an element of perennial value;
that is the teaching according to which, in the system of knowledge.
there must exist truths, bearing the character of general and necessary
synthetic judgements. incapable of being proved either inductively or
deductively. Kant gave a complicated and insufficiently clear proof of
this thesis in his transcendental deduction of the fundamental judge.
ments of pure understanding. Vvedensky proved this thesis very simply
in a system of formal logic. in a theory concerning the conditions of the
proof of general synthetic judgements. For o'!e case Vvedensky
166
THE RUSSIAN NEOKANTIANS
gave a special proof of this thesis. In the preface to his book The Theory
of Matter, Built on the Principle 0/ Critical Philosophy, 1888, he proved
with great clarity that the law of causality cannot be founded induc-
tively: one cannot find a single case of a causal bond, without using the
causal bond as premise to research.
The existence of truths, bearing the character of general and
necessary synthetic judgements, unable to be proved either inductively
or deductively, does not necessarily lead to Kant's apriorism: it can
be established also by a different means, for instance, on the basis of
intuitivism, as this is proved in N. Lossky's Logic (73-78).
Vvedensky-js also a follower of Kant in the sphere of ethics. He
admits that beside the knowledge of phenomena, evolved by theoretical
reason, faith in this or that structure of the world of "things in them-
selves" is possible. The man who recognizes the unconditional obliga-
tions of moral law (the categorical imperative), naturally attains through
practical reason a faith in the existence of God, the immortality of the
soul and free will, However, according to Vvedensky, the three postulates
of practical reason established by Kant are not sufficient for the full
understanding of moral behavior. It is moreover necessary to raise the
question of the animateness of others. In his treatise The Limits and
Symptonls of the Animation of Others, 1893, Vvedensky solves the prob-
lem in the spirit of orthodox Kantism; he demonstrates that the obser-
vation of bodily processes does not offer a proof of the animation of
others. Mystical feeling, that is intuition, directly contemplating the
psychical processes of others, is impossible, according to Vvedensky: in
such an intuition he believes, the other would exist in my consciousness
as not another, and this is a contradiction. Thus, Vvedensky comes to
the conclusion that to the three postulates of practical reason should be
added a fourth postulate-the belief in the existence of other e g o s ~ as a
morally established Iaith.s
2. I. I. LAPSHIN
Ivan Ivanovich Lapshin was born in Moscow in 1870. He graduated
at the University of St. Petersburg in the Faculty of Arts in 1893, and
was sent abroad to continue his studies. He worked at the British
~ I useum specializing in Kantianism as reflected in the English philo-
sophical literature. In 1913 he was appointed professor of philosophy at
the Petersburg University. In 1922 he was exiled from Russia by the
Soviet Government and since then has been living in Prague.
2. Works by Vvedensky in addition to those mentioned above: Logic As Part 01
the Theory 01 Knounedg, 5rd _ed. 1917; Psychology Without Any Metaphysics.
I. I. LAPSHIN 167
Lapshin's chief work, The Laws of Thought and the Forms of
Knowledge, was published in 1906. He champions the critical philosophy
of Kant and introduces an original interpretation of it. Lapshin argues
that space and time are not forms of sensuous intuition but concepts or
categories. Further, in contradistinction to Kant he regards all data of
experience, including the data of inner sense--e.g., those that form part
of emotions-as having a spatial form. Logical knowledge depends upon
the applicability of the law of contradiction to objects that are being
cognized. That law, Lapshin points out. is necessarily connected with
the form of time and space: the object can have contradictory properties
at different times, but not at one and the same time, n ( ' t ~ 1 n coexistence;
the present, i.e., coexistence, is "two expressions of one and the same
content, one from the temporal and the other from the spatial point of
view;" thus the applicability of the law of contradiction depends upon
the spatial synthesis or the spatial coexistence (109-112). It follows from
this that only objects with a sensuous content and having the temporal,
spatial, and other categorial forms; i.e., only phenomena given in ex-
perience are knowable; as to "things in themselves," i.e., things as they
exist independently of our experience, we do not know whether they
are temporal or spatial, or whether the law of contradiction is applicable
to them, and therefore we know nothing whatever about them; we do
not even know whether they exist; in other words, metaphysics is im-
possible as a science; thus Lapshin adds a fresh argument in support of
Kant's contention.
Lapshin added as an appendix to his book two remarkable essays,
brilliant in form and extremely interesting in content: "On Cowardice
In Thinking" (an essay on the psychology of metaphysical thinking),
and UOn Mystical Knowledge and Cosmic Feeling." By intellectual
cowardice Lapshin means inconsistency of thought, arising not through
fear of persecution, but through fear of losing spiritual values-such
as faith in God-in consequence of renouncing metaphysics. In the
article "On Mystical Knowledge and Cosmic Feeling" Lapshin com-
pares mystical ecstasies, interpreted as union with God, to experiences
in which the subject is conscious of himself as being merged with nature
and the world as a whole. Having described various types of "cosmic
feeling" Lapshin tries to prove that those experiences must be inter-
preted in the spirit of critical philosophy as something taking place
merely within the subject; i.e., as a totality of subjective presentations
permeated by particularly deep and intense emotions and wrongly taken
by the mystics for an intuition embracing the whole world.
Lapshin's further work in philosophy, especially during his life in
Prague, is concerned with the problems of creativeness in the domains
168
THE R.USSIAN NEOKANTIANS
of philosophy, of science, and particularly of art. Inquiry into these
problems is an inquiry into the mental life of others. But according to
the critical theory we know the external world only as the totality of
events in our own minds; hence it is clear that the question as to the
existence of other selves, of other mental lives is an insoluble problem.
Professor Vvedensky, who taught philosophy both to Lapshin and me
and who was a Kantian, wrote a remarkable treatise "On the Limits and
Expressions of Mentality;" there he cleverly shows that the Kantian
theory of knowledge cannot scientifically prove the presence of mental
life in others. He comes to the conclusion that the recognition of it is
an act of faith by our moral consciousness.
It will readily be seen that the problem of our knowledge of other
mental lives must be a source of serious perplexity to Lapshin. In 1910
he wrote a book The Problem of Other Selves In Modern Philosophy,
giving the history of the subject, and in 1924 an article "The Refutation
of Solipsism.") containing his own answer to it. His theory, briefly, is as
follows: The expression of the human face consists of a number of
sensory qualities, plus another important experience-the total expres-
sion, Gestaltqualitdt (Ehrenfels); "in virtue of former experiences it is
involuntarily associated in me with moods similar to the mental states
of the person I am observing;" and the total impression has come to be
"so intimately interwoven with bodily manifestations that we project
this additional psychical process into another person's body; we see, as
it were, a sad smile, a happy expression of the eyes, a tender look, a
malicious jeer; we objectify total impressions," although in fact they
have a subjective source (52); in this way there arises an illusion, says
Lapshin, that there is such a thing as immediate intuitive apprehension
of the mental lives of others. In fact, however, the transcendental
reality of another self cannot be proved (53), though we have a right to
speak of its immanent reality: my fellow-man speaks "as though he
were animated; I distinguish his words from the manifestations of the
unreal animation ascribed by me to a doll, a tree, etc." Just as in the
physical world I fill up the blanks by presentations that come from
within me, or are beyond my field of vision, so in the psychic world I
fill up the directly un perceivable mental states of others by this "as if."
I need nothing but this "as if" for cognizing "another self." "Another
self is a hypothetical construction which has the same significance for
sciences belonging to the spiritual order as the atomic theory has for
physics" (60). Lapshin ends his article by the foltowing assertion: "Re-
placing the transcendental 'another self' by the immanent presentation
1. Uchoniya Zapiski, I, 1.
I. I. LAPSHIN 169
of a plurality of minds and the co-ordination of all spiritual centers in
the world under one epistemological subject creates so deep and living
a sense of the intimate bond between the microcosmos and the macro-
cosmos as no metaphysical system can give" (66'.).
An epistemological justification of the inquiry into the mental life
of others is essential to Lapshin because he is particularly interested in
the study of creativeness in the various spheres of human activity. His
large work in two volumes The Philosophy of Inventiveness and In-
vention in Philosophs is devoted to the consideration of the general
features of the subject. Lapshin inquires both into the external and the
inner conditions of creativeness. As to the latter, he rejel.;i: the simplified
explanations of discoveries and inventions by reference to a mere as-
sociation of ideas, to happy coincidences and other factors of a mechani-
cal character. He quotes Lagrange's words "In great discoveries chance
favors only those who deserve it." Lapshin quotes a number of instances
showing that the chance observation which gives rise to a theory comes
to a scientist or inventor whose whole apperceptive system is already
prepared in a certain way. who has a rich and uiell-organized memory
and whose attention is keyed up to a particular problem. In addition to
his main book. Lapshin has written a number of valuable articles: "The
Schernatism o( Creative Imagination in Science," "The Unconscious in
Scientific Creativeness," UTIle Genesis of the Creative Guess," etc.
Lapshin has given special attention to artistic creativeness in gen-
eral, and musical creativeness in particular. In 1922 his book Artistic
Creativeness was published in Petrograd; it is a collection of articles of
which the following deserve special notice: "The Power of Transmuta-
tions in Artistic Creativeness," "On Musical Creativeness," "Pushkin
and the Russian Composers," "Modest Petrovitch Mussorgsky," "Philo-
sophical Motives in Rimsky.. Korsakov's Music," "Scriabin's Cherished
Ideas." Those articles contain many valuable remarks and observations;
thus for instance Lapshin speaks of the communal mind of the Russian
composers (using Prince S. N. Trubetskoy's term sobornosts,
Another contribution made by Lapshin to the study of the Russian
culture are his essays on the aesthetic methods of Pushkin, Gogol,
Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. He has also analyzed certain aspects oj
beauty in the works of the great Russian poets and writers- "The
Tragic Element in Pushkin's Works," the comic in the works of Push-
kin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.
Lapshin is also interested in the study of Russian dramatic art; he
has made use of numerous memoirs of Russian actors and written "An
2. Petrograd 1922; 2nd ed., Prague 1924.
170 THE RUSSIAN NEOKANTIANS
Essay on the Russian Actor," containing valuable observations of the
methods by which an actor enters into his part.
The pamphlet La synergic spirituelle is concerned with the problem
of supreme values; Lapshin examines in it the correlation between the
three absolute values-truth, goodness and beauty-proving that in
spite of the difference between them they are organically interconnected.
In two pamphlets La -phenornenologie de la conscience religieuse
dans la litterature russe Lapshin shows, among other things, that such
men as Tchernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and even the most fanatical
representative of nihilism, Pisarev, were deeply religious in youth.
While l i v i ~ ~ n Czechoslovakia Lapshin has been studying not only
the Russian but also the Czech culture. He has written articles about
the composers Smetana and Suk, "On the Spirit of Czechoslovak Art"
and about the greatest of the Czech philosophers, Amos Komensky. In
recent years Lapshin has been widening his subjects of study and even
using a new form of exposition-the dialogue. Thus, at the Russian
Philosophical Society in Prague he read three dialogues: "Modern Dis-
cussions on Freedom of Will;" "Do We Cognize Nature as a Copy or in
the Original?" "The Problem of Death."
In 1948 Lapshin's new book, Russian Music (Ruska hudba), has
appeared in a Czech translation in Prague. Lapshiri's mother, an English
Swiss, was a teacher of music and singing, and Lapshin acquired from
her a good knowledge of music, both Russian and Western European.
Moreover, he has been for years a friend of N. A. Rirnsky-Korsakov. His
book is very readable, well illustrated and full of musical quotations.
In sending it to me he said "almost all that I write about I have not
only heard, but seen, played, and sung."
The Russian adherents of the school of transcendental logical
idealism which arose in Germany as a result of a thorough revision of
the criticism of Kant, will be discussed later, because their views have
been subject to the influence of the Russian religious philosophy of
the twentieth century.
Chapter 13
THE CHANGING MENTALITY OF RUSSIAN
INTELLECTUALS IN THE BEGINNING
OF THE TWENTIETH CENTIJ!tY
Russian philosophy could not develop freely during the first half
of the nineteenth century because the government, fearing that its in-
fluence might be dangerous, persecuted it in all kinds of ways. In 1850
the Minister of Public Education, Prince Shirinsky Shihmatov declared,
"it has not been proved that philosophy can be useful, but it may be
harmful," and abolished the chair of philosophy in universities; only
the teaching of logic and empirical psychology was permitted, on con-
dition that these subjects should be taught by professors of theology. It
was only in 1860 that philosophy was again introduced into the uni-
versity curriculum.
When the Emperor Alexander II carne to the throne there followed
the period of great reforms introduced by him; in conditions of far
greater freedom than ever before the Russian philosophy developed
rapidly and soon reached the level of the Western-European thought.
It is sufficient to recall the names of Chicherin, Debolsky, Karinsky,
Lopatin, and A. I. Vvedensky. In the domain of religious philosophy
Vladimir Soloviev's brilliant name was prominent. In his lifetime, how-
ever, religious problems had but little interest for the Russian intelli-
gentsia. One part of it was morbidly preoccupied with the problem of
abolishing autocracy, and the other was equally one-sidedly engrossed
in social and economic questions and the problem of introducing sociaI-
ism. It was not till the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century that a considerable section of the Russian intelli-
gentsia freed itself from this morbid monoideism. Wide circles of the
public began to show interest in religion, in metaphysical and ethical
idealism, in aesthetics, in the idea of the nation and in spiritual values
in general.
In 190I there 'were organized in Petersburg "Religious-philosophical
171
172 THE CHANGING MENTALITY IN THE EAR.LY 20TH CENTURY
Meetings" attended both by the laity and the clergy. The president was
Bishop Sergius (Stargorodsky), the future Patriarch. The subjects of
discussion included Christianity in public life, the possibility of a "new
Revelation," "the holy flesh" (D. S. Merezhkovsky, Rosa nov, Minsky).
In Moscow too similar discussion meetings were held.
In literature the "decadent" and "symbolist" poets-Alexandr Blok,
Andrey Belyi, Viacheslav Ivanov, D. S. Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius,
V. Bryusov-not only created artistic values but expressed through them
religious and philosophical ideas. In 1906 the editorship of the monthly
magazine Russkaya Mysl was taken over by the economist P. B. Struve,
a man of greaM.earning in every domain of culture. Under his guidance
the magazine fully reflected the wealth of spiritual interests of the
Russian public in the twentieth century. The change that took place at
that time in the intellectuals' mentality found expression in two volumes
of essays-in the book The Problems of Idealism in 1903 and Signposts
(Vehi) in 1909. The first appeared when the so-called "liberation move-
ment" was at its height. The whole of the Russian people from top to
bottom were engaged in the struggle against autocracy that culminated
in the revolution of 1905 after the disasters of the Russo-Japanese war.
In the nineteenth century the struggle for political freedom and social
justice was waged chiefly in connection with the ideology of materialism,
positivism, nihilism and marxism. The authors of the books mentioned
above, while upholding the liberation movement, championed ethical
idealism against materialism, positivism and marxism. I will name those
of them who played a part in the development of Russian philosophy:
P. I. Novgorodtsev, philosopher of jurisprudence, Princes S. N. and
E. N. Trubetskoy, S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyaev, S. A. Askoldov
(Alexeiev), S. L. Frank.
The government suppressed the revolution of 1905 after making a
concession to the popular movement and agreeing to limit the autocracy
of the Tsar. The constitution drawn up by the government was, in the
words of Maklakov, cleverly worked out by the Russian bureaucracy.
v. A. Maklakov, the defense attorney, was a member of the Constitu-
tional Democratic party; in his book The Government and Society Dur..
ing the Decline of the Old Russia he writes: "At that time there were
two forces in Russia. There was the historically formed power of the
government, rich in knowledge and experience but no longer capable
of ruling alone. There was the educated class which was full of good
intentions and had a right understanding of many things but did not
know how to rule anything, not even itself. Russia could only be saved
by the union and reconciliation of these two forces, by their harmoni-
ously working
THE CHANGING MEN"r'ALITY IN THE EARLY 20TH ClNTVllY 17S
Unfortunately, the Russian society was politically completely in-
experienced; consequently, the first two Dumas proved incapable of
co-operation with the government and were dissolved, The worst thing
was that the revolutionary parties continued their fierce struggle against
the government. In 1907 the terrorists assassinated 2543 government
agents! while the Government in that same year executed 782 revolu-
tionaries.s The same lack of political experience made many people
imagii.e that "the revolution had been a failure" and the limitation of
the Tsar's autocracy had not produced the expected results. In 1909 a
group of prominent thinkers brought out a collection of essays under
the titlt.. Signposts, denouncing the defects of the Russiari intelligentsia
which hindered the normal development of the Russian state and
society. Among the authors of the symposium were N. A. Berdyaev, S. N.
Bulgakov, Gershenson (a historian of Russian literature), A. S. Izgoev, a
publicist, B. A. Kistiakovsky, professor of political economy, P. B. Struve
and S. L. Frank.
In his article "Philosophical Truth and Intelligentsia's Righteous-
ness," Berdyaev said that the Russian intellectuals' love of the people
and of the proletariate had become a kind of idolatry. They had no
love of truth: in discussing an idea they asked not whether it was true,
but only whether it furthered the theories of socialism, the interests of
the proletariate, the struggle against autocracy, etc. Bulgakov's article
"Heroism and Spiritual Achievement." denounced the defects of the
Russian intelligentsia and pointed out its good qualities. It will be dis..
cussed in dealing with Bulgakov's transition from marxism to idealism
and then to Orthodoxy. Kistiakovsky, in his article "In Defence of
Legal Justice," accused the Russian intelligentsia and the Russian
people of depreciating the significance of law and order. He quoted
Almazov's humorous verses on the attitude of the Slavophil K. S. Aksa-
kov toward the machinery of the state:
We are devoid by nature
Of juridical commonsense-
That progeny of Satan.
The Russian soul is much too great
To fit its ideal of what is right
Into the trim and narrow form
Of legal justice, legal norm.
1. This figure is quoted by Maklakov in his book The Second Duma (18) who
takes it from official data published by the Bolsheviks in the Krasny Arhiu (Red
Archives).
2. G. Vernadsky, A History 01 Russia, 194, 1944.
174 THE CHANGING MENTALITY IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTUR.Y
Struve in his article "The Intelligentsia and the Revolution" spoke of
the intellectuals having no conception of statesmanship and of their
nonreligious maximalism. S. L. Frank in his article "The Ethics of
Nihilism" described the intellectual standpoint of the Russian intellec-
tuals as nonreligious moralism which denied absolute values and led to
nihilism. The religion of serving earthly needs replaced for them the
religion of serving ideal values. This led to destruction and hatred and
not to creativeness. The Russian intellectual, said Frank, is "a militant
monk of the nihilistic religion of earthly well-being."
In answer to the Signposts there appeared a number of articles in
newspapers and magazines and many collections of essays. The authors
of a symposium entitled Intelligentsia in Russia- were liberal intellec-
tuals, inclined to positivism. They included the leaders of the con-
stitutional democrats, I. I. Petrunkevitch and P. N. Milyukov, profes-
sors N. A. Gredeskul and M. M. Kovalevsky, the economist M. I. Tugan-
Baranovsky, and others. In answer to Bulgakov's contention that the
revolution llad failed and had neither strengthened the state nor im-
proved national economy, Gredeskul rightly observed that the revolution
which brought about the limitation of autocracy could not bear fruit
the very next day. Milyukov argued that the intelligentsia as a whole
could not be accused of being irreligious, anti-state and cosmopolitan.
He admitted, however, that being prevented by the government from
taking part in political life, the intelligentsia developed certain defects;
namely, "too great a love for abstractions, uncompromising radicalism
in tactics, sectarian intolerance towards their opponents and ascetic
strictness in censoring their own morals" (158).
Essays on national questions were collected and reprinted in a
symposium Along the Signposts, devoted chiefly to the discussion of the
intellectuals' and of Russian people's attitude to the Jews.
The authors of the Signposts were right in what they said of the
defects of the Russian intelligentsia but mistaken in thinking that the
revolution of 1905 was a failure. Soon after it, when the government had
suppressed the extreme revolutionary tendencies, there was a marked
progress in every domain of life in Russia. Count V. N. Kokovtsev, who
was for years Minister of Finance and between 1911-1914 President of
the Council of Ministers, speaks in his Memoirs" of "the continuous and
considerable increase in national wealth in all its aspects" between
1904 and 1913. The growth of industry, he writes, was rernarkable; there
was reason to hope that in a few decades Russia would overtake the
U.S.A. Particular importance attaches to Count Kokovtsev's statement
8. St. Petersburg 1910, publ. by Zemlia.
4. From My Past"j2 vols., P,aris 1 9 3 ~ .
THE CHANGING MENTALITY IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY 175
that the third and the fourth Duma were increasingly co-operative with
the government for instance with regard to national defence, to the plan
of introducing compulsory elementary education, and so on.
As already pointed out, many gifted representatives of the intelli-
gentsia got rid of their former one-sidedness with regard to spiritual
problems. In philosophy there appeared many highly complex tenden-
cies. Soloviev's influence made itself strongly felt and gave rise to a
school of religious thinkers who began as his followers but gradually
developed their own theories. During the revolutionary years when it
was difficult to study peacefully in Russia, many students went to Ger-
many and worked in the seminars of philosophers rlpresenting the
Freiburg and Marburg schools of transcendental idealism. On returning
home they founded the Russian section of the periodical Logos. Even
some of the marxists carne under the influence of Mach and Avenarius
and began to understand that materialism was untenable.
All this free blossoming of the life of the spirit was crushed by the
bolshevik revolution. Since then Russian philosophy has been develop-
ing in two sharply opposed directions. In Soviet Russia every philosopher
and indeed every scientist and every teacher has to be an adherent of
dialectical materialism. On the other hand, thinkers who emigrated or
were banished from Russia cultivate for the most part a religious
philosophy.
Chapter 14
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY
The work of Vladimir Soloviev has laid the foundations of an
original school of Russian religious philosophy. It includes a number
of thinkers endowed with most varied gifts and often possessing a vast
erudition. One of the foremost places in this movement belongs to
Father Pavel Florensky.
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was born in 1882. He studied mathe-
matics and philosophy at the University of Moscow, and then at the
Moscow Theological Academy. In 1908 he was appointed to the chair
of History of Philosophy in that same Academy. Priesthood attracted
him not less than the academic work and he took Holy Orders in 1911.
After the Bolshevik revolution, when theological academies were closed
down, Florensky took to work in the technical domain and obtained a
post in the "Glavelectro" (Head Office of Electrical Industry) where he
was engaged in the study of electric fields and dielectrics. Father Pavel
Florensky's personality strikes one by the multiplicity of his gifts. Dur-
ing the German occupation of Pskov V. Filistinsky published an article
about him in the Pskov paper Za rodinu (For Fatherland) under the
title UA Russian Leonardo da Vinci In a Concentration Camp." I will
quote a few passages from it. "I recall the striking figure of a Moscow
priest, Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky: a man of medium height, in a
linen, rather crumpled cassock, with an Armenian type of Iace.! One
wondered when he found time to sleep or rest, with the amount of intel-
lectual work he did. He was professor at the Moscow Theological
Academy; author of the much-talked-of book The Pillar and Foundation
of Truth and a number of religious-philosophical articles; a poet-sym-
bolist, whose works appeared in Vesy (The Balance) and as a separate
volume; a gifted astronomer, defending a geocentric conception of the
world; a remarkable mathematician, author of Fictions in Geometry
and a number of mathematical monographs; an authority on physics,
..
1. ~ f y impression of Father Florensky's face was different: it vaguely reminded
me of Spinoza's face.
176
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY 177
author of the standard book The Doctrine of Dielectrics; a scholar in
the history of art and author of several monographs, especially on
wood carving; a notable electrical engineer, who occupied one of the
chief posts in the Commission for Electrification and went to the Su-
preme Soviet for National Economy in a cassock and priest's cap; profes-
sor of perspectival painting in the Moscow Soviet Arts School; a fine
musician and discerning admirer of Bach and the polyphonic music, of
Beethoven and his contemporaries, thoroughly acquainted with their
work; a polyglot knowing to perfection Latin and Greek, most of the
modern European languages, and also the languages of the Caucasus,
Iran and India.... In 1927 he invented some quite extra'ordinary non-
coagulating machine oil which the Bolsheviks called 'dekanite' in honor
of the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution ... I only twice suc-
ceeded in meeting Father Pavel. The first occasion was in 1928 or 1929
when he read a paper on some highly technical subject at a closed meet-
ing of a group of Leningrad engineers. A friend brought me there. I did
not of course understand a word of the paper, but I was deeply impressed
by the sense of creative power and the thorough mastery of his subject
conveyed by that slender cassocked man who spoke with such power and
confidence before the venerable old academicians and professors of
technical sciences. Yes, Father Pavel was obviously conscious of his
superiority, and the one Christian virtue that seemed lacking in him was
humility. But one could not help sympathizing with his involuntary
pride! A new Leonardo da Vinci was standing before us-e-and we all
were conscious of it .... Many times the Bolsheviks imprisoned Floren-
sky, sent him to the Solovki concentration camp, demanding that he
should cease to be a priest and r ~ n o u n c e holy orders. But Father Pavel
remained true to the Church. In 1934 or 1935, however, the Soviets'
patience gave \\'ay and they rewarded the great scholar and scientist by
condemning him to ten yc.ars servitude in a concentration camp." In
1946 a rumor reached the Russian emigres that Father Pavel Florensky
died there.
I should like to add a few personal reminiscences to B. Filistinsky's
article. In November 1913 Father Pavel sent me his book The Pillar
and Foundation of Truth. That book furthered my gradual return to
the Church, which finally took place in 1918. Naturally I was very eager
to meet Florensky. Unexpected meetings between people, remarkable
coincidences, and, speaking generally, the intersection in time and space
between two mutually independent series of events regarded as acci-
dental, are not really fortuitous. They are purposeful combinations
arising under the guidance of a higher po\ver that holds together distant
sectors of reality. Men of high spirituality, considerably advanced on
178 FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY
the path toward the absolute good, enter into communion with other
men unintentionally and unwittingly at the very moment when they
can be of the greatest assistance to them. It is as though they were
directed by a higher beneficent power. Two incidents in Florensky's life
suggest that he acted precisely as such an intermediary for the divine
power. This was how I met Father Pavel. I believe it was in 1915. Re-
turning home from the University I got into the lift to go to our flat on
the third floor. That lift was rather primitive: it was set going by the
hall porter pulling at a cable, and stopped by his ceasing to pull. In
war time (during the war of 1914-1918) the worn cable could not be
repaired; it had grown too long and the porter could not stop the lift
exactly opposite the landing. On the third floor the lift stopped much
lower than it should. I had great difficulty in placing my right foot on
the landing and was just going to climb out when the porter began to
pull the lift down; the top of the lift was already pressing on my right
shoulder and in another moment I would have been crushed to death.
At that instant I just managed to extricate myself and jumped out on
to the landing. Going into my study I took several turns round the room
thinking with agitation of my narrow escape. Just then t.he front door
bell rang, and Father Pavel Florensky walked into the room. He was
going through Petersburg on his way to the front where he wanted to
be an army chaplain. He stayed no more than half an hour with me;
we spent the time in animated conversation and he engaged my attention
so completely that when he had gone, I recalled with perfect equanimity
the danger I had been through. The fear I had experienced, preserved in
my subconscious, might have given rise later to some neurosis, but
Father Pavel's arrival dismissed it to the domain of the comparatively
unimportant, and cured me.
Another incident relating to Florensky is this. In 1922 our family
was spending the summer at Tsarskoe Selo, in the same town with S.
Lukyanov, professor of pathology and former Procurator of the Holy
Synod. He devoted many years of his life to writing a voluminous
biography of Vladimir Soloviev and was collecting materials about him
from everyone who had met Soloviev. He invited me too for this pur-
pose. In the course of conversation he told me that the horrible crimes
of the Bolshevik revolution had destroyed his love of life. One day he
began a letter to Florensky saying that he no longer cared to live; he did
not finish that letter and never sent it. But a short time afterwards he
received a letter from Florensky who began by admonishing him not to
lose the will to live-as though in some supersensory way Father Pavel
had come to know of his mood.
Florensky's principal works are: The Pillar and Foundation of
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY 179
Truth, 1913 (there is a German translation of it); The Meaning of
Idealism, 1915; article on Khomiakov in the Bogoslovsky Vestnik (Theo-
logical Review) for July and August 1916.
The book The Pillar and Foundation of -Trutli is remarkable for
its subject, its form, and its outer appearance. The author displays in it
an almost superhuman erudition: he is thoroughly at home in the do-
main of philosophy, theology, philology and mathematics, and he also
supports his philosophizing by arguments borrowed from medicine,
psychopathology, folklore, and particularly linguistics. He likes to com-
pare the derivation, in the different languages, of such terms as "truth,"
"faith," "heart," etc. He points out for instance that the 'Russian word
for truth, istina is, according to linguists, to be derived {rom the verb to
be (est =is, istina =estina = that which is), and indicates "the onto-
logical aspect of the idea." The Greek word aAi}th:lU draws attention to
the aspect of unforgettableness or indelibility of truth; Latin veritas
bas the same root as the Russian verb verit, to believe; the ancient
Hebrew word emet emphasizes the aspect of trustworthiness or security.
Florensky frequently appeals to the most abstract sciences-mathematics
and mathematical logic. The notes at the end of his book take up two
hundred pages. They contain many interesting and valuable remarks
as well as a rich bibliography.
Florensky wants to base his theodiey upon "the living religious ex-
perience as the only legitimate method of cognizing dogmas." His book
therefore naturally takes the form of letters to a friend. The exposition
of theological and philosophical problems is sometimes interrupted by
descriptions of nature or of moods inspired by it. And yet that book is a
dissertation submitted for his doctorate]
The exterior of the book is no less striking. The colors of the cover
imitate "the basic colors of the ancient Sophian ikons of the Novgorod
school." Each letter is preceded by a symbolic vignette Irom Ambodic's
book Symbola et Emblemata selecta. The book is dedicated "to the all-
fragrant and all-pure Name of the Virgin and Mother." TIle frontispiece
is taken from Amaris Dioini Emblemata, studio et acre Othonis Vaeni
concinnate. Antverpiae 1660. It represents two angels on one pedestal
with the inscription finis amoris ut duo unum fiant (the end of love is
that two should become one). That symbol expresses the main idea of
Florensky's metaphysics, namely his contention that all created personali-
ties forming part of the world are consubstantial with one another. In a
remarkable way Florensky connects the initial problem of philosophy
-the problem of truth and of its discovery, i.e., the epistemological
enquiry-with the trinitarian dogma and the idea of consubstantiality.
Truth, he says, is the Absolute reality, superrational wholeness; there
180
FATHER. PAVEL FLOR.ENSK.Y
is no place in it for the rational law of identity HA is A/' The formula
of the law of identity, Florensky thinks, stands for deathlike immobility,
static isolation, but Truth as a living wholeness must contain the
transition from A to non-A. In Truth "the other" is at the same time
"not the other," sub specie aeternitatis: tlA is A because, being eternally
non-A, it finds in that non-A its own affirmation as A:' Do we find such
Truth not as an abstract formula but as a living reality? We do, Floren-
sky answers: we have it in the religious experience which testifies that
God is one in essence but tripersonal. In that experience we learn that
love is the basis of the living reality and truth, because love means that
an entity passes from the isolated separateness of A into the other, non-
A, establishes its consubstantiality with it and consequently finds itself,
i.e., A, in it. It is only possible to discover this structure of being and
of Truth if knowledge is directed upon the living reality as such and its
transition from one to the "other": what enters consciousness is not a
subjective copy of the object or a construct of the understanding, as
Kant thought, but the actual object of the external world. In other
words, Florensky maintains that perception of objects is intuition in
Lossky's sense of the term-i.e., direct contemplation of the living
reality as it is in itself.
2
Florensky describes as follows the difference between irrationalistic
intuitivism and the Russian intuitivism which places great value upon
the rational, systematic aspect of the world. Truth is cognized neither
through a blind intuition directed upon disconnected empirical facts
nor through discursive reason which tries to build up the whole from
the parts by adding one element to another; Truth can only enter con-
sciousness through a rational intuition which combines discursive dif-
ferentiation ad infinitum with intuitive integration to the point of
unity. "If Truth is, it is real rationality and rational reality, the Infinite
conceived as an integral Unity." Rational intuition works from above
downwards, from the whole to the infinite multiplicity of subordinate
parts. But such single Truth is possible "only there, in heaven," while
"here there are a number of truths, of fragments of truth." The frag-
mentariness of our knowledge is not so bad in itself, but the worst of it
is that the integral Divine Truth, transcending the law of contradiction,
reconciles A and non-A, while when broken up it results in a number
of truths that contradict one another and are inevitably antinomic.
Thus, for instance, there are many dogmatic antinomies: Divine Oneness
and Trinity, predestination and free will, etc. "Only at moments of
2. In a note on page 644 Florensky mentions a number of Russian thinkers who
regarded knowledge as an act of "inner unification between the knower and the
known."
FATHER. PAVEL FLORENSKY 181
illumination by grace are those contradictions reconciled in the mind,
not rationally but in a superrational way" (159).
Inquiring into the relation between created personalities, Father
Pavel makes use of the idea of consubstantiality in order to make clear
the nature of love.
Victory over the law of identity, a creative transition from one's
self-containedness into the realm of "the other" and a real discovery of
oneself in that other is a fundamental truth expressed in the dogma of
consubstantiality (homoousia). The conception of consubstantiality
must guide us both in considering the relation betwe,en the Three
Persons of the Holy Trinity and the relations between earthly creatures
in so far as they are individual and seek to realize the Christian ideal of
mutual lave. "The end of love is that two should become one" (finis
amoris ut duo unum fiant). Such homoousian philosophy of personality
and of its' creative work is the Christian spiritual philosophy; its op-
posite is the homoiousian philosophy of rationalism which admits
generic likeness only and not numerical identity. "It is the philosophy
of things and of lifeless immovability."
The love that leads to the identification of two beings is not, of
course, a subjective mental process, but a "substantial act which passes
from the subject to the object and has a basis in the object," ontologically
transforming the beings that love one another. This is true of perfect
friendship that leads to the complete unanimity of two beings, making
them into a new spiritual essence capable of knowing the' mysteries of
the Kingdom of God and of performing miracles. Our Lord Jesus Christ
himself said that "if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything
that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in
Heaven:' Why is this? Because two people can be in absolute agreement
with each other only if they follow the will of God; "such agreement
between them is co-ascension into the mysterious spiritual atmosphere
of Christ, participation in His gracious power; it transmutes them into
a new spiritual entity, making of the two a particle of Christ's Body, a
living incarnation of the Church." Such absolute friendship is "the con-
templation of oneself through the friend in God."
Not only friendship between two individuals, but all true love is
impossible without the participation of the Divine power: "in loving
we love in and through God, since love necessarily demands that we
should overcome the limits of selfhood and enter a new realm of being,
which bears throughout the stamp of beauty. Indeed, true love creates a
reality in which three absolute values are realized: in love God enters
the lover's self and there is knowledge of God as Absolute Truth which
182
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY
objectively contemplated by a third, the love for another is Beauty.
Truth, Goodness and Beauty-this metaphysical triad is not three dif-
ferent principles, but one. It is one and the same spiritual life considered
from different points of view." In speaking of the beauty of the world
revealed to the man freed from the isolation of selfhood through love
Florensky bases his argument on the works of great ascetics such as
Macarius the Great, Isaac the Syrian and others, the testimony of pil-
grims, and fine literature. "The holy and eternal aspect of every creature
IS revealed to the inner vision of one who strives after holiness;" he
apprehends aJI creation "in its primordial, triumphant beauty;" his
feeling for nature becomes more acute. "All my surroundings appeared
to me entrancing: the trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the light, the
air;" says a pilgrim Hall seemed to tell me that it exists for man's sake,
bears witness to God's love for man, and all was praying and proclaim-
ing the glory of God." According to Florensky "asceticism produces not
a good but a beautiful personality: the characteristic peculiarity of great
saints is not the goodness of heart which is common among the carnal
and even very sinful men, but spiritual beauty, the dazzling beauty of
radiant, light-giving personality, unattainable by the carnal man weighed
down by the flesh."
Spiritual beauty is accompanied by a holiness of the body, a radi-
ance which suffuses the flesh with light. Florensky is keenly interested
in the stories about tae light that issues from the bodies of saints; sweet-
ness, warmth, fragrance, musical harmony, and, above all, radiant light
are the characteristic marks of flesh permeated by the Holy Spirit.
Cosmic reality as a whole, welded together by the love of God and
illumined by the beauty of the Holy Spirit, is Sophia-the most difficult
subject of theological speculation. Florensky regards it as "the fourth
hypostasis" possessing Inany aspects and therefore interpreted by mystics
and theologians in a number of different ways. He speaks of Sophia as
"the great root of the created world in its wholeness and unity," as
"the original substance of creatures, the creative Love of God in them.
In relation to the created world Sophia is its Guardian Angel, its ideal
personality." Regarded from three points of view with reference to the
three divine hypostases Sophia is (I) the ideal substance of the created
world; (2) the reason of the created world, that is, its truth or meaning;
(3) the spirituality of the created world, its holiness, purity, sinlessness,
that is, its beauty. Further, in relation to the structure of the world
Sophia has a number of other aspects: as "the beginning and the center
of the redeemed creation, she is the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, i.e.,
the substance of the created world assumed by the divine Logos." The
only way in which man ca_n receive from the Holy Spirit freedom and
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY
185
mysterious purification is by participating in the Body of Christ; in this
sense Sophia is the Church, first in its heavenly and then in its earthly
aspect, in so far as the Church includes all persons who have already
begun the work of regeneration. Since regeneration by the Holy Spirit
means purity and humble virtue, Sophia is Virginity; "and the incarna-
tion of Virginity-the Virgin in the proper and exclusive sense of the
term-is Mary, the Blessed Virgin, filled with the grace and the gifts of
the Holy Spirit." Florensky arranges the aspects of Sophia as it were in
a hierarchical order. Thus he says: "If Sophia is the whole creation, then
the soul and the conscience of Sophia pre-
eminently. If Sophia is humanity as a whole, then the soul and the con-
science of humanity-the Church-is Sophia pre-eminently. If Sophia
is the Church, then the soul and the conscience of the Church-the
Church of the Saints-is Sophia pre-eminently. If Sophia is the Church
of the Saints, then the soul and the conscience of that Church is the
Mother of God, the Defender of the creatures, interceding for them
before the Word of God. What has been said of the many-sidedness of
Sophia clearly applies also to the Mother of God. That is why there
exist many greatly revered and miraculous ikons of Our Lady with
many significant names attached to them, for instance "Sudden Joy,"
"Melting of Heart," "Joy of All the Sorrowful," "Seeking Those Who
Are Lost," "Quick to Hear," "Steadfast Wall." "Each legitimate 're-
vealed' ikon of the Mother of God-that is, each ikon signalized by
miracles and so' to speak approved and confirmed by the Virgin Mother
Herself who testifies to its spiritual veracity, is the reflection of one of
Her aspects, a patch of light on earth Irom one of Her rays, one of Her
pictorial names. Hence the existence of many such 'revealed' ikons,
hence the desire to worship different ikons. The names of some of them
partially express their spiritual essence." This is the profound explana-
tion given by Father Pavel to the desire to worship different ikons,
which seems like idolatry to 'persons without the religious experience of
Orthodoxy.
The characteristic capacity of the Russian philosophers to perceive
the concretely ideal principles underlying the world has been strikingly
revealed in the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev. He left unexplored,
however, nlany important aspects of the theory of concretely ideal being.
Valuable additions to his doctrine have been made by Florensky. In his
treatise The Meaning of Idealism (1915) he asks what "seeing an idea"
means to Plato, and in his answer quotes Plato as saying in his dialogue
Philebus that it means seeing that "many are one and one is many" or
in other words seeing the union of "infinity with determinateness" (49).
In an idea "unum' turns toward the other, toward the Scholas-
184 FATHER PAVEL FLOR,NSKY
tics; unum versus alia is precisely" according to their etymology, un;-
versale-singular and general at once" (11).
The most obvious manifestation of an idea is a living being as an
undoubted unity in manifold (31). When an artist attempts to re-create
it in its ideal essence, by the aid of colors in painting, or of marble or
bronze in sculpture, he does not reproduce a momentary position as
does the momentary photography which gives a dead, unnatural, even
though exact, reproduction: he creates something that is the opposite
of photography, namely he blends into a single whole what belongs to
different periods and yet forms a unity. Florensky cites Broder Christian-
sen who in hil Philosophy of Art points out that the portraits of great
Dutch, German and Italian masters contain a synthesis of different ex-
pressions harmoniously blended into a unity, e.g., the lines of the mouth
show "the excitement and tension of the will," and the eyes "the final
calm of the intellect" (38). The famous sculptor Rodin in his talks on
art says the same thing of the statues which breathe of truth-they are
a combination of movements different in time (32). In contemplating
such a work, says Florensky, we have a "synthetic perception," some-
thing like the perception of a three-dimensional body from a four-
dimensional space, its vision being possible at once from outside and
from inside in a four-dimensional contemplation, Picasso in his pictures
-e.g., in Nature Morte-tries to present a violin from different points
of view, from all sides, in order to disclose "more plastically the inner
life of the violin, its rhythm and dynamics" (45).
The synthetic vision, necessary in order to see as a whole even such
a comparatively simple thing as a human face, is imperfectly developed
in us. Still less developed is it in regard to entities of a higher order-such
as a People, a Nation, or Mankind. For our three-dimensional mind the
idea of man is only a general notion, only a class. and our three-dimen-
sional eyes perceive only the disjointed specimen of that class. Yet Man
as an idea is a living whole in which individual men play the part of
organs. It is the "Heavenly Man" as he is present in the religious con-
sciousness of the Mystics, the "Body of Christ" as it is described by
Swedenborg in his treatise On Heaven, on the J1' orld of Spirits, and on
Hell (52).
Many religions, maintains Florensky, attempt to express such ideal
wholes symbolically: the mystical tree of life (der heilige Baum, der
Lebensbaum, also l'Arbre du lvlonde) is the "synthesis of plants revered
in the country, the image of life in its wholeness, or, in other words, the
idea of life" (56 ff.), the elan vital not yet broken up into individual
specimens or species. Florensky takes the same view of the summarized
(composite) a n i m a ~ s such as the Egyptian sphinxes, the Assyrian kirubi
FATHER PAVEL 185
(winged lions or bulls), the Jewish Cherubs. According to the explana-
tion of the Rabbis, the Cherubs supporting the throne of God's Glory in
the vision of the prophet Ezekiel and represented on the Ark of the
Covenant, as well as on the curtain of the temple, embody in themselves
all created life-the reason of man, the strength of the bull, the courage
of the lion and the heavenward aspiration of the eagle (58). Of similar
nature is the tetramorphon (the six-winged Angel combining the same
four aspects of created life) of the Christian ikonography,
The "idea" in the above instances is embodied in, or immanent to,
the phenomena, but Plato speaks of ideas transcendental to the phe-
nomena. Dealing with this distinction Florensky takes :he edge off it
by pointing out that transcendentality and immanence are relative and
interdependent (85): they are two aspects of the idea. The idea in its
transcendental aspect is "the heavenly entity Iorming the earthly" (94).
Many religious and philosophical doctrines admit .0 such principles,
of personal ideas and impersonal forces determining from above our
earthly existence-"here belongs for instance the Hindu doctrine of
Gandharvas or Gandhabbas, which closely resembles Leibniz's doctrine
of the central part of the organism outliving death" (92). The same is
the meaning of the [eruera or fravashi of parsism, of the genii of per-
sons, places and events of the ancient Romans, as well as the spermatic
logos of the ancient Greek philosophy, especially as conceived by Plu-
tarch of Cheroneia. In this higher supraterrestral aspect ideas are not
abstract rules, but "concrete fullness of perfection and supreme reality"
(73). The perfection of this higher reality is manifested most clearly in
the beauty which belongs to it as a concrete living being.
At the opposite pole from the holiness, beauty and blissful rest of
the reality that is complete in God lies the domain of sin, in which self-
hood, enclosed in the identity of I = I, out of relation to its "other,"
that is, to God and all creation, remains in darkness ("light is the ap-
pearance of the real and darkness is invisibility to each other") and in-
stead of possessing the fullness of being, finds itself in a state of dissolu-
tion that approaches metaphysical annihilation. Florensky describes this
condition from personal experience: "Once in a dream I experienced it
with an extraordinary vividness. There were no images, only purely
inward experiences. A darkness without a ray of light, almost palpably
dense, surrounded me. Some force was dragging me to the brink; I felt
that this was the limit of God's being and that beyond it was .absolute
nothingness. I wanted to cry out and could not. I knew that in another
moment I should be thrust into outer darkness. Darkness began to fill
my whole being. I almost lost consciousness of myself and I knew that
this was absolute metaphysical annihilation, In utter despair I cried out
186 FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY
in a voice unlike my own: 'Out of the deep have I cried unto Thee. Oh
Lord, hear my prayer!' My whole soul was poured out in these words.
Some powerful hands seized me just as I was sinking and threw me far
away from the abyss. The shock was sudden and violent. All at once I
found myself in my usual surroundings, in my own room; it was as
though from mystical nonbeing I was transferred to ordinary everyday
existence. Then suddenly I felt that I was before the face of God and
woke up, bathed in a cold sweat."
, Selfish absorption in one's own selfhood leads, paradoxically enough,
not to a g r e a ~ e r integration of personality but, on the contrary, to its
dissolution. "Without love," writes Florensky, "-and for love it is
necessary in the first instance to have love of God-without love the
personality is broken up into a multiplicity of fragmentary psychologi-
cal moments and elements. The love of God is that which holds per-
sonality together." When love is absent, the vision of the organic and
substantival unity of the self is lost. The organism, both the bodily and
the mental, ceases to be an integral and harmonious instrument or
organ of personality and becomes a haphazard conglomeration of self-
acting mechanisms that do not fit in with one another. In short, every-
thing in me and outside of me becomes free--everything except myself.
If modern psychology insists that it knows nothing about the soul as a
substance, this is a very bad reflection on the moral condition of the
psychologists themselves who evidently are, for the most part, 'lost men.'
In such cases, indeed, it is not I who do things but 'things are done to
me;' I do !lot live but 'things are happening to me.' "
A further degree of self-absorption leads to certain neurotic states:
to the experiences of darkness, isolation and remoteness from reality.
The Moscow psychiatrist Nicolay Evgrafovitch Osipov (who died as an
emigre in Prague in 1934) liked to point out in his lectures the attempts
made in psychological literature to trace in the last resort all mental
diseases to moral defects of the patient; Florensky emphatically adopts
this view.
Disintegration of personality may go still further than it does in
certain psychoses, and reach the point described in mystical literature
as the second death. The first death consists in the separation of the
soul from the body; the second death is, according to Florensky, the
separation of the soul from the spirit, the isolation of the selfhood that
has become definitely satanical from the man himself, i.e., from the
originaJ substantival image of God. Deprived of its substantival basis,
"selfhood" loses its creative power, and all its further destiny is de-
termined by the fixed idea of its own sin and the burning agony of
Truth. "Eternal bliss of the self and eternal torment of selfhood are
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY 187
the two inseparable antinomies of the final, the Third Covenant. If
then you ask me 'will there be eternal torments,' I will say 'yes: But if
you ask me 'will there be eternal restoration and bliss?' I will again say
'yes: One and the other: thesis and antithesis."
Sinful selfhood is partially annihilated in a healing, salutary way
through tl!e sacrament of penance, in which the sinful past, definitely
condemned by the penitent is, so to speak, cut away from the soul by
the power of grace, is expelled from it, and ceases to affect man's subse;..
quent conduct.
Father Pavel published an article on Zavitnevich's book A. S.
Khomiakov in the Bogoslousky Vestnik (Theological Review) for July-
August 1916. In this article he criticized Khomiakov's theology. He
rejected Khomiakov's doctrine of sobornost (togetherness) as the prin-
ciple of Church organization. Father Florensky interpreted as altruism
the love which Khomiakov had introduced into his definition of
sobornost. Therefore he said that according to Khomiakov, Church
unity was based "on the immanent powers of men" (539). In reality
Khomiakov's sobornost is a free union of the members of the Church
based upon their unanimous "love for Christ and Divine righteousness."
'This type of love is, of course, supported by the grace of Christ and of
the Holy Spirit, which guides the Church. Berdyaev sharply criticized
Florcnsky's paper in an article entitled "Khomiakov and the Priest P. A.
Florensky.l'" Berdyaev says that Florensky regards Khomiakov as an
adherent of the "immanent' philosophy of the German type, with
Protestant leanings. According to Florensky, Khomiakov "rejected the
authority of the Church," "the principle of fear, of authority and of the
binding character of canonical institutions," and preached "man's free
self-affirmation: he valued above all man's immanent being expressing
itself in the organization of love." But in Florensky's view "the essence
of Orthodoxy is ontologism-e-the acceptance of reality from God, given
by Him and not created by man-s-humility and gratitude."
Berdyaev writes: "We have already renounced Vladimir Soloviev,
and now it is Khomiakov's turn: for both of them, as for Dostoevsky in
the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Christianity was "a religion of love
and freedom," but for Florensky it is "a religion of obedience and not
of love." In his philosophy of history Khomiakov interprets the historical
process as the struggle of the free creative spirit of the "Iranians" with
the materialism of the "Cushites" who denied freedom. Florensky
suspects that Khomiakov's "Iranian" philosophy has a tendency toward
"immanentism." Berdyaev points out, however, that Khomiakov com..
~ . Russkaya Mysl, February 1917.
188 FATHER. PAVEL FLORENSkY
bined traditional Orthodoxy with ideal spiritual strrvmgs, whereas
Florensky replaced the living, everyday Orthodoxy by the worship of
established fact. He "wants to be more Orthodox than Orthodoxy it-
self" being a parvenu in Orthodoxy. Berdyaev accuses him of "deca-
dence" and "aesthetically mystical gourmandise:"
One could have expected from Florensky many fruitful and origi-
nal thoughts had he lived not in Soviet Russia, but in a country where
there is freedom of thought and of the press. A good instance of the way
Christian thought is being passed over in silence is afforded by the Soviet
edition of thF Granat Encyclopaedia (7th edition). We read there that
according to Florensky the principal law of the world is, the principle of
thermodynamics, the law of entropy, i.e., of universal leveling (chaos).
The world is. confronted with the law of ectropy (Logos). "Culture
means struggle against universal leveling (death). Culture (from "cult")
is an organically connected system of means toward the realization and
revelation of a certain value which is taken as absolute and is therefore
an object of faith. Faith determines cult, and cult determines a world
conception from which culture subsequently ensues. The fact that the
universe is determined by laws means the presence of functional de..
pendence conceived as relational discontinuity and discreteness in
relation to the reality itself. This interruptedness and separateness in
the world leads to the Pythagorean affirmation of number as form and
to an attempt at interpreting Plato's 'ideas' as prototypes." Florensky's
Christian philosophy is expounded in such a way as almost to give it
the appearance of agnostic naturalism.
What valuable additions has Father Pavel Florensky made to a
Christian world conception? His chief merit is that he deliberately
made use of the idea of consubstantiality not only in trinitarian theology
but in metaphysics; namely, in his doctrine of the structure of created
personalities. He divides all philosophical systems into two classes ac-
cording to whether they recognize consubstantiality or merely similarity.
A homoiousian philosophy which recognizes merely generic likeness and
not numerical identity is rationalistic: it is "the philosophy of concepts
and of the understanding, of things and lifeless immobility." The
homoousian philosophy which recognizes consubstantiality is "the phi-
losophy of ideas and of reason, the philosophy of personality and of
creative achievement."
There is indeed a profound difference between these two types of
philosophy. The philosophy of mere similarity takes the world to con-
sist of entities whose being is wholly external to one another. They can
therefore be bound together only by external relations. The philosoph)
of consubstantialirv affirms on the contrary that ontologically all entities
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY 189
are closely welded together from within. This point of view makes it
possible for the first time to give a satisfactory solution of many prob-
lems-for instance, to understand the nature of truth, to interpret the
world as an organic whole, to establish the existence of absolute values,
and so on. The philosophy of consubstantiality existed of course long
before Christianity, and later on outside of it. The principle of consub-
stantiality lies at the basis of the teachings of Plato, Aristotle and
Plotinus, of Patristic philosophy and many medieval systems of thought;
in the nineteenth century we find it in Fichte, Schelling and 'Hegel, and
in Russia in the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev and his successors.
Florensky's merit is to have consciously introduced this principle into
the metaphysics of created being, and thus laid the foundation for a
conscious use of it in other philosophical disciplines. Florensky himself
applied it with singular success to his ontological-as opposed to the
popular psych0 logistic-theory of love.
Florensky's teaching that the Ideas of Plato are living concrete
personalities and not abstract notions is also highly valuable. He has
chiefly in view in this connection personalities of higher order than the
human self; e.g., the Race, the Nation, Humanity, and so on. He justly
points out that in many religions such "personal ideas" are recognized
-for instance the genii of events and places among the Romans, sym-
bolic syntheses of plants and animals, etc. In the New Testament such
character attaches to the angels or genii of the local churches. Philoso-
phy is confronted with the vitally important task of developing a theory
about such superhuman personalities at all stages of cosmic being, and
in the Kingdom of God. Christian philosophy appears to be suspicious
of such theories, perhaps because they have been discredited by the
fantastic teachings of anthroposophists, theosophists and occultists, who
furthermore often manifest a morbid interest in superhuman beings
belonging to our sinful realm and perhaps even to the realm of Lucifer.
Father Pavel Florensky has mainly in view members of the Kingdom of
God and especially Saint Sophia as the Mother of God-an absolutely
perfect cosmic entity fulfilling the Divine will as the World Soul. His
teaching is free from the defects of Soloviev's theory which actually ad-
mitted the Fall of Sophia.
According to Father Pavel the ideal of the Christian life is not a
stern contempt for the world, but a joyful acceptance of it, making the
world richer through raising it to a higher level. Writing of St. Cyril
who christianized the Slavs he says: "AII his life is penetrated with
Sophian rays. Unlike the desert saints of Egypt or Palestine who find
salvation through self-exhaustion, he is a man of royal wealth and
splendor whose whole life bestows blessing not upon the cutting off,
190 FATIIER PAVEL FLORENSKY
but upon the transfiguration of the fullness of being. What is charac-
teristic of St. Cyril's achievement is not a sharp turn from sin to purity,
but gracious continuity of development."
Under the influence of Kant, many Russian philosophers in dealing
with the essential problems of world interpretation like to have recourse
to antinomies; i.e., like to express the truth by means of two mutually
contradictory judgements, and then seek ways of reconciling the contra-
diction. Both those antinomies and their supposed solution often prove
artificial. A characteristic instance of this is Florensky's contention that
all will be saved and attain eternal bliss, but at the same time some will
experience e t ~ r n a l torments. Florensky's solution of this antinomy is
obviously invalid. He says that when "selfhood" becomes definitely
satanical "it is cut off from the substantival basis of personality as
originally created, and therefore, being deprived of creative power, is
tortured forever by the fixed idea of its sin and the fiery agony of Truth."
But to undergo eternal torments-s-even uncreatively-is an experience
and therefore belongs to some self who is conscious of it. One is thus
driven to suppose that according to Florensky human personality can..
sists of two sel yes which may be separated from each other, so that one
will be living in eternal torments and the other in eternal bliss-which
is utterly impossible.
Florensky's criticism of Khomiakov is, apparently, unjustified.
Khomiakov says that the Church must be built upon the principle of
sobornost, "togetherness." He means by that term the free unity of the
members of the Church in their communal understanding of Truth
and communal salvation based upon their love for Christ and the
Divine righteousness. Khomiakov attaches special value to every mani-
festation of love, and Christianity is for him indeed the religion of love
and therefore of freedom. This does not in the least imply that he denies
the authority of the Church, the binding character of its canonical struc-
ture or the principle of reverent obedience. The whole of Khomiakov's
behavior testifies to his being a faithful son of the Church. The principle
of sobornost does not by any means lead to canonical anarchy or pre-
vent the excommunication of persons who reject the fundamental doc-
trines of the Church, thus themselves abandoning the unity of the
communal love of it. But of course if our conduct, in accordance with
Christ's commandment, is based upon love for every person, excommuni..
cation must be a mere statement that so and so no longer belongs to the
Church, and involve no hatred or persecution.
Father George Florovsky in his book The Ways of Russian The-
ology sharply criticizes Florensky's book The Pillar and Foundation of
Truth and his wilY of thinking. His reason, Florovsky says, "escapes
(
FATHER PAVEL FLORENSKY 191
from doubts through the knowledge of the Holy Trinity. Florensky
speaks of this with great enthusiasm and reveals the speculative signifi-
cance of the Trinitarian dogma as a rational truth. But strangely
enough he somehow bypasses the Incarnation, and after the chapters
on the Trinity goes on straight to the doctrine about the Holy Spirit.
Florensky's book has simply no christological chapters. Florensky is not
rooted in the Orthodox depths. He remains a stranger to the Orthodox
world. In its meaning his book is essentially Western. It is the book of a
Westernizer who dreamily and aesthetically seeks salvation in the Easf
It is highly characteristic that in his work he seems to step,back, beyond
Christianity, into Platonism and the ancient religions, or to swerve
aside into the realm of occultism and magic. The subjects he set to his
students for their theses were of that nature (on K. Du-Prel, on Dionysos,
on Russian folklore). And he himself had intended to present as his
thesis for Master of Divinity his translation of Iamblichus with notes"
(495).
Stern critical remarks and valuations contained in Father George
Florovsky's remarkable book usually contain at least a fraction of truth;
but in defence of Father Paul Florensky the following considerations
should be taken into account. The diseases of modern civilization-the
loss of the idea of absolute value of personality, of the idea of state
based upon justice, of the ideal of free spiritual creativeness-are due
in the first instance to the fact that the intellectuals, and, following
them, the masses, have forsaken Christianity and become non-religious.
The main task of our epoch is to bring, first, the intellectuals and
through them, the masses, back to Christianity and consequently to
Christian humanism. That purpose may be particularly well served by
religiously philosophic works, written in the new, more or less secular
style, connecting religious problems with modern science and meta-
physical investigations of the higher realms of being which transcend
the human world. Florensky's works belong to this category and there-
fore are highly valuable, whatever defects they may have from the point
of view of the traditional style and content of Orthodox theological
literature.
Chapter 15
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
For the last twenty years Father Sergius Bulgakov occupied a fore-
most place among Russian theologians and philosophers.
Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was born in 1871 in Livny, in the
province of Orel, in the family of a priest. After a course of studies at
the Faculty of Law at the University of Moscow, he became, in 1901,
Professor of Political Economy at the Polytechnic Institute at Kiev,
and in 1906, Lecturer at the University of Moscow. In 1911, together
with many other professors and lecturers of the University, he resigned
as a protest against the violation of the University autonomy on the
part of the Government.
In his youth Bulgakov was a Marxist, but afterwards, like many
other gifted Russian economists and journalists (P. Struve, Tugan-
Baranovsky, Berdyaev, S. Frank) he adopted a more profound world
conception. As early as 1900, in his book Capitalism and Agriculture,
he contended that the law of the concentration of production could not
apply to agriculture, for which decentralizing tendencies are charac-
teristic. Under the influence of Kant's philosophy, Bulgakov came to
the conclusion that the fundamental principles of social and individual
life must be established in connection with a theory of the absolute value
of goodness, truth and beauty. Severing all connection with Marxism
he published, in 1904, a book entitled From Marxism to Idealism. In
1904 S. N. Bulgakov and N. A. Berdyaev decided to have their own
magazine. At first they acquired the Novy Put ("The New Way"), and
later founded Voprosy Zhizni (HThe Problems of Life"). At this time
Bulgakov was undergoing a further evolution from idealistic philosoph)
to the ideal-realism of the Orthodox Church. At first he became in
terested in Soloviev's philosophy, then began to work out his owr
philosophical and theological system, In 1918 Bulgakov was ordainec
priest. In 1922, when the Soviet Government banished from Russi,
over a hundred scholars, writers and politicians, accusing them of ir
100
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
195
reconcilable attitudes to the Soviet regime, Bulgakov was among them, as
well as several other philosophers (Berdyaev, I. A. Ilyin, Lapshin,
Lossky, Frank). At. first he settled in Prague, then took part in the
foundation of the Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, where he
held the chair of Dogmatic Theology from 1925. He died on July 12,
1944 of cerebral hemmorhage.
Bulgakov's principal works, apart from those mentioned above, are
the following: Two Cities, Moscow 1911; The Philosophy of Economics,
1912; The Unfading Light, Moscow 1917; Peter and [ohn, the Two
First Apostles, YMCA, Paris 1926; The Burning Bush (On the Orthodox
I
Cult of the Virgin) YMCA, Paris 1927; Die Tragi.idie der Philosophie,
1927; The Friend of the Bridegroom (On the Orthodox Veneration of
St. John the Baptist) YMCA, Paris 1928; Jacob's Ladder (On Angels)
YMCA, Paris 1929; The Ikon and its Cult, YMCA, Paris 1931; iro-n..
doxie, F. Alcan, Paris 1933; Agnus Dei. The God-Manhood, I, YMCA,
Paris 1933 (translated into French: Du Verbe incarne (Agnus Dei),
Aubier, Paris 1944); The Comjorter, II, Paris 1936 (translated
into French); The Bride of the Lamb, III, YMCA, Paris 1945; Auto..
biographical Notes, YMCi\,_Paris 1947; Philosophy of Language, YMCA,
1948. A detailed bibliography of Bulgakov's works can be found in
L. Zander's pamphlet In Memoriam of Father Sergius Bulgakou, Paris
L. Zander, God and the IVo,-ld, The lVorld Conception of Father
s. Bulgakou, Yl\fCA, Paris 1948.
The relationship between religion and philosophy is formulated
by Bulgakov with profound insight in his book Die Ttagodie der Phi-
losophie: he rejects the medieval formula according to which philosophy
is ancilla theologiae, and substitutes for it a wider and more living
proposition-philosophy, he says, is ancilla religionis. The meaning of
this assertion is as follows: Philosophy deals with the data of experience,
but the data of the lower kinds of experience are completed and receive
their final significance only in combination with the higher form of
experience, i.e., the religious experience underlying Revelation.
Bulgakov himself had this religious experience in the highest
degree. In his book The Unfading Light he relates some important
moments "in the history of a conversion." I will give extracts from it.
"I was in my twenty-fourth year, but for well-nigh ten years faith
had been undermined in my soul, and after stormy crises and doubts
a religious emptiness took hold of it. Oh, how dreadful is this sleep of
the soul which can last a whole life! Simultaneously with intellectual
growth and acquisition of scientific knowledge, Illy soul was irresistibly
and imperceptibly plunging into the slimy mire of self-contentment,
194 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
self-esteem and vulgarity. The light of childhood faded more and more,
giving way to grey twilight. And then suddenly this came ... Mysterious
calls rang in niY soul, and it rushed to meet them ...
"Evening was drawing ncar ... We were driving across the southern
steppe, fragrant with honey-scented herbs and hay, gilded by the kind
light of the setting sun. In the distance the nearest Caucassian mountains
were already showing blue. I saw them for the first time, And staring
eagerly at the appearing mountains, inhaling light and air, I listened to
the revelation of nature. My soul had long ago grown used, with dull
and silent pain, to see in nature, nothing but a dead desert under a
cloak of beauty, as if wearing a treacherous mask; against its own will it
would not reconcile itself to accept nature without God. And suddenly,
at that hour, my soul felt glad and trembled with joyful agitation: and
tohat if there be ... what if it be not a desert, a lie, a mask, not death,
but He, the gentle and loving Father, if it be His cloak, His love ...
What if .. if nlY childish, pious feelings, when I used to live with Him,
to walk before Him, love Him and tremble at nlY own impotence to
approach Him, what if nlY young ardor and tears, the sweetness of
prayer, my childish purity at which I mocked, which I defiled, what if
all that were true, and the other, death-bearing and empty, were blind-
ness and falsehood? But is that possible? Have I not known ever since
nlY seminary days that there was no God? Can there be any question of
it at all? Can I own up these thoughts even to myself, without feeling
ashamed of Iny cowardice, without experiencing a panic fear of "science"
and of its syucdrionr Oh, I was held captive by that 'science,' that scare-
crow set up for the would-be-intellectual mob, for the benefit of the
semieducated crowd, for fools. How I hate that offshoot of semieduca-
tion, that spiritual pestilence of our days, infecting children and youths!
And I was infected then, too, and spread the infection around me ...
"And again you, 0 mountains of the Caucasus! I saw your ice
sparkling from sea to sea, your snows reddening under the morning
dawn, the peaks which pierced the sky, and my soul melted in ecstasy.
And that which had but flashed for an instant to fade away once more on
that evening in the steppe, now rang out and sang, making up a wonder-
ful s'olemn hymn, The first day of creation shone before Illy eyes. Every-
thing was clear, everything was at peace and full of ringing joy. My
heart was ready to break with bliss. There is no life and no death, only
one eternal immovable now. Nunc dimittis rang out in my heart and
in nature. And an unexpected feeling rose up and grew within me-
the sense of victory over death. At that moment I wanted to die, my
soul felt a sweet longing for death in order to melt away joyfully, ec-
statically, into that which towered up, sparkled and shone with the
FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV 195
beauty of the first creation. But there were no words, no Name, there
was no 'Christ has risen' sung to the world and to the heavenly alti-
tudes. And that moment of meeting did not die in my soul, that apoca-
lypse, that wedding feast, the first encounter with Sophia. That of
which the mountains spoke to me in their solemn brilliance,' I soon
recognized once more in the shy and gentle girlish look, on different
shores and under different mountains. The same light shone in the
trustful, half-childish eyes, frightened and meek, full of the sanctity ot
suffering. The revelation of love told me of another world, a world I
had lost. . . ,
"There came a fresh wave of intoxication with the world. Along
with.. 'personal happiness' came the first encounter with the 'West,' and
the first ecstasies: 'civilization,' comfort, social democracy ... And
suddenly an unexpected, marvelous encounter-the Sixtine Madonna
in Dresden. Thou hast Thyself touched my heart and it fluttered at
Thy call. There the eyes of the Heavenly Queen, walking in the clouds
with the pre-eternal Child, looked into my soul. There was in them an
immense poioer of purity and of prophetic self-sacrifice-the knowledge
of suffering and the readiness for free suffering, and the same prophetic
readiness for sacrifice was to be seen in the unchildishly wise eyes of the
Child. They know what awaits Them, what They are doomed to, and
they go freely to give themselves up, to fulfill the will of the Sender-
She to receive the weapon into her heart; He, to the Calvary ... I
could not restrain myself, my head was dizzy, my eyes shed joyful and
yet bitter tears, and with them the ice melted in my heart, and some
vital knot was being untied. It was not an aesthetic emotion, nay, it was
an encounter, a new knowledge, a miracle . . . I (then a Marxistl) in-
voluntarily called that contemplation-prayer.
'1 returned home from my travels abroad having lost the ground
under my feet, and with my faith in my ideals already shattered. In my
soul there grew a 'will to faith,' a determination to make the final jump
to the opposite shore, foolish from the standpoint of the wisdom of this
world-from Marxism and various other 'isms' that followed it, to the
Orthodox faith. Yet, years went by and I was still yearning outside the
pale and had not the strength to make the decisive step, to go to confes-
sion and to take the sacrament for which my soul longed ever more and
more. I remember how one day, on Maundy Thursday, entering a
church, I (then a Deputy of the Duma) saw people receiving Holy
Communion to the accompaniment of the moving sounds of the Eucha-
ristic hymn ... I rushed out of the church in tears and crying walked
along the streets of Moscow, exhausted with my own impotence and
unworthiness. And so it went on till a firm hand l i f t e ~ me up ...
198 FATHER. SER.GI')S BULGAltOV
"Autumn. A solitary hermitage lost in the forest. A sunny day and
the familiar northern landscape. My heart was still prey to confusion
and impotence. I seized an opportunity of coming here in the secret
hope of encountering God. But here my determination left me com-
pletely ... I stood during the Evensong, insensible and cold, and after
it, when the prayers 'preparatory to confession' began, I nearly ran out
of the church, went out, weeping bitterly. I walked, full of anguish,
lfithout seeing anything around me, toward the hostel, and came to my
senses ... in the old hermit's cell. I was drawn thither: I had taken the
wrong direction owing to my usual absent-mindedness which was now
still increased by depression, but in reality-I knew it for sure-a miracle
happened to me ... The hermit, on seeing the prodigal son approach,
once more hurried out to meet him. From him I learned that all human
sins were like a drop in the ocean of God's mercy. I left him forgiven
and reconciled, trembling and in tears, feeling as if I were carried on
wings inside the church gate. In the doorway I met my companion who
had just before seen me leave the church in dismay-he was surprised
and overjoyed. He became an involuntary witness of that which hap-
pened to me-'the Lord has passed,' he used to say feelingly afterwards.
"It was evening again, and sunset, no longer the southern, but the
northern. The Church domes were sharply outlined in the transparent
air, and the long rows of the autumn monastery flowers showed white
in the dusk. The forest receded into the bluish distance. Suddenly, amid
that silence, somewhere from above, as if from Heaven, came a stroke
of the church bell, then all was still, and only somewhat later it began
to peal regularly and ceaselessly. They were ringing for Evensong. As
if for the first time, like one newly born, did I listen to the church bells,
feeling, with my heart aflutter, that it called me, too, to the church of
the faithful. And on the evening of that blessed day, and still more the
next day at the liturgy I looked at everything with new eyes, for I knew
that I too was called, that I too was actually taking part in it all, that
for me and for my sake, too, our Lord had hung on the Cross and shed
His sacred blood, for me, too, the holiest meal was being prepared here
by the hands of the priest, and the Gospel story of the supper at the
house of Simon the Leper and of the pardoning of the woman sinner
who had loved much, concerned me too, and I was given to partake of
the sacred Body and Blood of my Lord ...
"Thus, at the basis of religion lies a personally experienced en-
counter with the Deity, and therein is the only source of its autonomy.
However the wisdom of this age may boast, incapable as it is of under-
standing religion owing to lack of necessary experience and to religious
ineptitude and l i f ~ l e s s n e s ~ t those who have once contemplated God in
FATHER. SER.GIUS BULGAKOV 197
their heart, possess an absolutely sure knowledge of religion. know its
essence. "1
While lecturing on political economy Bulgakov was gradually veer-
ing round from marxism to idealism and then to Orthodoxy. Up to
1911 he wrote several essays on the meaning of history, on the short-
comings of the "scientific" atheistic socialism, on the character of Rus-
sian intelligentsia, on the early centuries of Christianity and its victory
over paganism. 1911 and 1916 he wrote his chief religiously
philosophic work The Unfading Light. Something should first be said
about the preceding essays, collected in the two volumes entitled, respec-
tively, From Marxism to Idealism (Petersburg 1904) anti Two Cities
(Moscow 1911). Bulgakov formulates the conclusions arrived at in the
first volume as follows: HI began simply as a writer on social questions,
but in investigating the basis of social ideals, I discovered that that
basis is to be found in religion. Is there Goodness? Is there Truth? III
other words, is there God?"2
"There are two main paths of religious self-determination:'
Bulgakov: "Theism culminating in Christianity, and pantheism cul-
minating in the worship of man and anti-Christianity" (Two Cities
p. IX). Corresponding to these two paths the historical procf;ss is th
expression of the free activity of the human spirit, and is a struggle
between the two Cities-of the other-worldly Kingdom of Christ anc
the earthly, this world's kingdom of the antichrist. In the passionatel
religious Russian soul, lacking in cultural self-discipline, the conllic
between those two principles is particularly violent and destructive
giving rise on the one hand to dark, reactionary fanaticism, whicl
mistakes itself for Christianity, and on the other to equally fanatica
self-deification of man" (p. XVIII).
At our epoch the chief expression of the self-deification of man i
the socialism of Marx. Having emancipated himself from Marxisn
Bulgakov analyzed its religiously philosophical basis, derived by Mar:
from Feuerbach. In his article "Feuerbach's Religion of Man-Worship
he unfolds and criticizes Feuerbach's main idea expressed in the formul
homo homini Deus est, meaning that "mankind is the god of the ind:
vidual man" (17). The analysis is continued in the article "Karl Mar:
as a Religious Thinker." In speaking of Marx's personal charactei
Bulgakov vividly describes Marx's will to power and shows that hi
prevalent feature was hatred rather than love. Following Annenkov h
calls Marx a "democratic dictator" and notes his "unceremonious au
1. Bulgakov, The Unfading Light, 7-11; sec also 12-14; see further Jacob's Ladde
21, 31 fl.
2. The Author's foreword to the Two au. p. VII.
198 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
tude to the human individuality." "From Marx's point of view men
fall into sociological groups, and those groups in an orderly and well-
regulated fashion form geometrical patterns, as though human history
contained nothing but this measured movement of sociological ele-
ments. This abolition of the problem of personality and of the care for
it, this extreme abstraction is the fundamental feature of Marxism"
{75). Marx "is not troubled by the fate of the individual," he values in
man that only "which is common to all individuals and therefore is not
.individual in them" (76). Marx says that in a socialistic society "man
will become a generic being (Gattungswesen) and then he will emanci-
pate himself..from religion" (93 f.). Marx is bitterly hostile to religion,
especially to Christianity. Bulgakov explains this by the fact that
"Christianity awakens personality, makes man conscious of his im..
mortal spirit; it individualizes man, pointing out to him the goal of
inner development and the way to it; socialism depersonalizes man in
so far as it is concerned not with the human soul but with its social
exterior, and reduces the actual content of personality to social re-
flexes" (II, 30). Militant atheism is one of the means of destroying indi-
viduality and transforming human society "into an ant heap or a bee-
hive" (I, 94). The attempt to put man in the place of God and to glorify
him as a man-god may easily lead, says Bulgakov, to transforming him
into a man-beast (173).
In IM73 Marx declared himself to be a disciple of Hegel. Bulgakov
proves that "there is no link of succession between German classical
idealism and Marxism. Marx's Hegelianism goes no further than verbal
imitation of Hegel's peculiar style." In Bulgakov's opinion it was a kind
of caprice or perhaps coquetry on Marx's part to regard himself as a
disciple of Hegel, In his articles "Primitive Christianity and Modern
Socialism" (1909) and "Apocalyptics and Socialism" (1910) Bulgakov
conlpares Marx's socialism with the Jewish chiliastic utopia (chiliasm
is the name of the millennium utopia-the thousand years of the reign
of saints upon the earth). Confusion between the two planes, the es-
chatological and the chiliastic, says Bulgakov, imparted to the apocalyp-
tic doctrine "the specific character that made it so fatal in the history
of the Jewish people, blunting their sense of actuality and historical
realism, blinding them with utopias, developing in them an adventure-
some attitude to religion and a tendency to clamor for miracles" (II, 79).
Belief in progress has a chiliastic character and "Ior nlany people plays
the part of an immanent religion," especially at our time (76). That is
true of Marx's socialism, Bulgakov says that "socialism is a rationalistic
adaptation of Jewish chiliasm, translated from the language of theology
and cosmology into that of political economy, and all its dramatis per-
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV 199
sonae are therefore interpreted in terms of economics. The chosen
people-the bearer of the messianic idea-or, as later in the Christian
sects, the saints or the elect, are replaced by the proletariat that has a
special proletarian soul and a special revolutionary mission. The part
of Satan and Belial naturally fell to the lot of capitalists, promoted to
the mk of representatives of the metaphysical evil. To the last sorrows
and messianic agonies there corresponds the inevitable and ever-increas-
ing impoverishment of the workers and the increasing antagonism be-
tween the classes. In keeping with the spirit of the times and its beloved
scientific-sounding mythology, the part of deus ex lnachitja, facilitating
the transition to chiliasm is played in socialism by the 'laws' of social
development or of the growth of productive forces which, first, prepare
that transition and then, at a certain stage of the process, by virtue of its
'immanent and inevitable dialectics' forcibly bring about the transition
to socialism and ordain the jump from the realm of necessity into the
realm of freedom" (1] 6-118). The emotional strain in socialism and its
eschatology (the jump into the realm of freedom) shows that "socialism
has both its apocalypse and its mysticism, familiar to everyone who has
lived through if' (39). The religious enthusiasm of Marxism in con-
junction with materialism is "utterly self-contradictory: personality is
transformed into an impersonal complex of economic relations and at
the same time is deified and made into a man-god" (41). "In socialism,
and indeed along the whole line of our civilization, struggle is waged
between Christ and antichrist" (I,.J 04). .
The success of socialism in our time is, in Bulgakov's opinion, "a
punishment for the sins of historical Christianity and a menacing call
for repentance" (II, 46). Christians had taken too little care to reform
the economic system in the spirit of social justice: practical socialism,
Bulgakov wrote in 1909, is "a means of realizing the demands of Chris-
tian ethics" (35, 45 f.). 'This certainly does not imply that in his view
socialism would give mankind final satisfaction. "Inhistory there may
be progress, growth of civilization, increase in material welfare," he says,
Hand yet the immanent result of history is not harmony but tragedy, a
final segregation of good and of evil and thus a final intensification of
the cosmic tragedy" (106). A personality striving for the absolute good
can find complete satisfaction only in the Kingdom of God, after the
transfiguration of the world, and therefore not in the historical process
but in metahistorv (103).
Having gone through the revolution of 1905 people with a sensitive
conscience noticed the satanic aspect of the revolutionary movement
and pondered over the part played in it by the intellectuals. Bulgakov
wrote a number of essays on the character, the faults and the merits of
200 FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV
the Russian intellectuals, reprinted in the second volume of the Two
Cities under the general title "The Religion of Man-Worship Among
the Russian Intelligentsia." The most important of those essays, "Hero-
ism and Asceticism," was first published in the symposium Vehi (Sign-
posts). Bulgakov says in it that "not in a single country in Europe are
the intellectuals as a body so utterly indifferent to religion as in Russia."
They replaced religion by faith in science and by the striving, noted by
Dostoevsky, "to settle down without God finally and forever." As a
member of the second Duma, Bulgakov watched its political activity
and "clearly saw how remote those men were from politics in the proper
sense; i.e., from the prosaic everyday work of keeping the machinery
of the state oiled and in good repair. Their psychology was not that of
politicians, of sound realists and believers in gradual improvement-
no, it was the psychology of impatient, ardent visionaries, looking for
the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth in the immediate future.
They remind one of the anabaptists and other medieval sectarians,
awaiting speedy coming of the millennium and preparing the way
for it by the sword, by popular risings, communistic experiments and
peasant wars; one thinks of John of Leiden with his retinue of prophets
at Munster. Of course the likeness is only in the psychology and not in
the ideas. As far as ideas go, Russia reflects the theories and tendencies
of the present age even more strongly and uncompromisingly than
Western Europe, and it reflects too the cosmic drama of apostacy and
struggle against God, which lie at the core of modern history" (135 f.).
External historical conditions developed in the Russian lntellec-
tuals "a religious frame of mind, sometimes actually approaching the
Christian:' Government persecutions made them feel "like martyrs and
confessors," and the enforced remoteness from life furthered "dreaminess,
utopianism, and altogether an insufficient sense of reality" (180). Bulga-
kov draws attention to the intelligentsia's dislike of "the petty bourgeois
spirit" and to its spiritual traditions inherited from the Church, such
as "a certain puritanism, moral strictness, a peculiar kind of asceticism
and, generally speaking, the high tenor of personal life," giving as
examples the lives of such "leaders of the Russian intelligentsia as
Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky" (182). "Russian intellectuals, espe-
cially of the former generations, had also a sense of guilt towards the
peasants" (182). A Russian intellectual dreams to be "a saviour of
humanity or at any rate of the Russian people. What is necessary to him
(in his dreams, that is) is not a safe minimum but a heroic maximum.
Maximalism is an inalienable feature of the intellectuals' heroism which
is somewhat akin to autosuggestion and to being possessed by an idea, and
leads to enslavpmpnt nf thnt1aht tn deaf to the voice of
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV 201
life;" accordingly "it was the most extreme tendencies that triumphed
ill the revolution" (191 I.),
In its further development atheistic humanism degenerates and
leads to self-deification, to "putting oneself in the place of God and
Providence-not only in respect of plans and ends but also of the ways
and means of their realization. I am realizing my idea and for its sake
set myself free from the fetters of customary morality, I give myself the
right not merely to the property but to the life and death of others,
should that be required by my idea." The next stage of self-deification
is that the heroic "all things are permissible is imperceptibly replaced
by simple absence of any principles of conduct in all thar concerns per-
sonal life" (198).
Leaving aside the extreme perversions of the religion of man-
worship Bulgakov sums up as follows his evaluation of the Russian in-
telligentsia: "Side by side with the antichrist element there live in it the
highest religious possibilities. That intense seeking for the City of God,
the striving to carry out God's will on earth as in heaven, are profoundly
different from the pursuit of stable earthly welfare characteristic of
the bourgeois culture. The absurd maximalism of the intelligentsia
utterly inapplicable in practice, is a consequence of religious perversion,
but it may be overcome through religious recovery." The suffering
image of the Russian intelligentsia "bears traces of spiritual beauty
which liken it to some quite special, tender and precious flower grown
by our gloomy history" (221).
This judgement of Bulgakov's will be resolutely opposed by Rus-
sians whose spirit has been so deeply wounded by the Bolshevik revolu-
tion that they came to hate the intelligentsia and can see nothing but
its defects. The extreme injustice of their attitude will be obvious to all
who know that Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth and the be-
ginning of the twentieth centuries was very high indeed and that its
great attainments were due precisely to the intelligentsia. Everyone
knows of the greatness of the Russian literature, music and theatrical
art, and I am not speaking of that; I am referring to the aspects of Rus-
sian culture unknown to the Western world. Russian municipal and
rural self-government was developing rapidly and along original lines;
the law courts after the reform of Alexander II were better than the
Western European and the American; the gifted and self-sacrificing
work of the Russian doctors is gratefully remembered by the older
generations; mention should also be made of the educational movement
on which Russian intellectuals were very keen and which led to the
formation of many private schools with the most advanced methods of
teaching and training; the Russian universities, especially those of Mos-
202 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
cow and Petersburg were on the level of the best universities of Western
Europe. Those who know and remember this will agree that the Rus-
sian intelligentsia was indeed "a precious and tender flower:'
Believing as he does in the providential significance of every hist'ori.
cal process, Bulgakov tries to find the meaning of European culture
passing through a period of man-worship. He finds it in the fact that
the Christian religion must be freely and consciously adopted by the
human mind. "History comes to real fruition only in the free triumph of
the divine principle in free human creativeness; this is implied by the
divinely human character of the historical process" (I, 176).
In his articles about Christianity written at that period of his ac-
tivity, Bulgakov says a great deal about the relation of Christianity to
social problems and about the historical significance of Christianity for
the development of culture and economics. He particularly insists that
in our time too the Church must take a creative part in every domain
of cultural life. Bulgakov C0111pareS the attitude of church people in our
"nonecclesiastical and even antiecclesiastical humanistic age" to the atti-
tude of the prodigal son's brother in the parable "who met his younger
brother with distinct hostility. TIIOUgh strict and faithful in their serv-
ice they have adopted a haughtily distrustful and pharisaically formal
attitude to their younger brother who in spite of 'having sinned before
heaven and before the Father' during his wanderings preserved a w a r ~
and open heart. '1hat comparison will probably offend many church
people of the old style," Bulgakov goes 011. "They conceive the Church
as the complete fullness of gracious gifts which must merely be pre-
served in accordance with tradition, so that it is out of place in their
opinion to speak of any new creativeness. We are opposed to this in-
terpretation, according to which the function of the Church is merely
to guard and preserve the tradition, the ideal of a creative, growing,
developing Church" (306 .). In Bulgakov's view, even the formulation
of dogmas must continue till the end of history (I, 271). The Head of
the Church. the God-man Christ is not subject to the historical process
of development, but earthly humanity, which forms part of the Church,
rises only gradually through a process of development "to the sphere of
God's Kingdom" (11, 309). In the course of that ascent toward perfec-
tion there must be worked out "a truly Christian, ecclesiastical culture"
embracing all aspects of life. science, philosophy, art. social organiza-
tion. "If social life were at last made to conform to the Christian Church
ideal, socialism would lose its present deadly character, conditioned by
its narrow class basis; it would be a living embodiment of the universal
Christian love and would no longer lead to the spiritual devastation
which the narrowness of its doctrine brings about in the hearts and
FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV 205
minds of its adherents" ( ~ 1 2 ) . Those ideas are expressed with particular
vividness in the article "Church and Culture," a good example of Bulga-
kov's gifts as a writer.
Bulgakov's main religiously philosophical work, The Unfading
Light, written before he had taken holy orders, begins with a general
consideration of the "nature of the religious consciousness." In the
author's view the basic feature of that consciousness is faith. "It is a
free, two-sided, divinely human act: on the one hand it is man's sub-
jective striving, his search for God, and on the other, it is God's answer,
H i ~ objective revelation" (29). "The religious truth being objective and
catholic-i.e., conformable to the whole-is at the same tifue communal.
Its communal character means not merely that it is proclaimed by a
council, but rather that those who seek God attain unity in the whole
and all-embracing truth" (55). The substitution of religious individual-
ism for catholicity is a consequence either of spiritual unripeness or of
morbid decadence. "The most difficult thing of all is to believe in truth
because it is true; i.e., because it demands humble recognition and self-
abnegation; it is far easier to accept that truth as my opinion which I
posit as truth" (54 L). Religious truth revealed in the mystical experi-
ence is "unutterable but that does not mean that it is wordless, alogical
or antilogical; on the contrary, it ever seeks utterance, giving rise to
verbal symbols for its embodiment." Bulgakov points out the enormous
significance "of the ecclesiastical tradition of the historical church, ex-
pressed in dogmas, cult and ways of living, which, in the name of the
mystical church and frequently in the name of its personal mysticism,
always moderates unauthorized claims. We find here a certain antinomy:
bare historicity, external authority in religion, means so to speak the
ossification of the church, while self-willed mysticism means its dis..
solution; neither is needed, and yet both are needed-both ecclesiastical
authority and personal mysticism" (64). "The stern and manly nature of
dogmas" makes it possible to preach religion and not only "to grow
numb in the sweet langor of mystical experience" (73). But of course,
dogmatic formulae made up of concepts never express "the fullness of
religious experience" (70) and therefore in the life of the Church new
dogmas must always be fashioned to supplement those already formu-
lated.
Criticizing the doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Tolstoy and others who
reduce religion to ethics Bulgakov speaks of conscience as of a light
proceeding from God for the discrimination between good and evil; he
expresses that idea with wonderful force in a kind of prayer or descrip-
tion of mystical experience beginning with the words "Thou seest me
always" (46).
204 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
Following Florensky, Bulgakov accepts the doctrine .of the anti-
nomic character of the religious consciousness and makes use of it in
various ways. The first section of his chief work The Unfading Light
is entitled "The Divine Nothing" and is devoted to a detailed examina-
tion of the fundamental antinomy of Goo's transcendence of, and im-
manence in, the world. On the one hand the Absolute is the Divine
Nothing that transcends the world (hence the "negative" or apophatic
theology), on the other hand it "posits itself as God and consequently
renders possible the distinction between God and the world, and man
in it; the Abgolute becomes God for man" and thus "God is born with
the world and in the world, incipit religio. Hence the possibility of
defining God as immanently transcendent, as coming out of His tran-
scendence and absoluteness into immanence and a certain dualism.
Hence the possibility of knowing God and communing with Him, of
entering the domain of positive theology (cataphatic theology) and the
need for dogmas and myths" (102).
"Religious philosophy," says Bulgakov, "has no problem more vital
than that of the meaning of the Divine Nothing" (146). He therefore
expounds in detail various conceptions of the Divine Nothing, begin-
ning with Plato and Plotinus and going on to the teachings of the
Eastern Fathers and of Western philosophy (Eriugena, Nicolas of Cusa,
G. Bruno, Eckehart, Jacob Boehme and others). Even in the works of
Thomas Aquinas he finds a passage wholly in the spirit of negative
theology.
Bulgakov points out the profound difference between the doctrine
of the Divine Nothing in the sense of the Greek ci privativum and in
the sense of It,ll. The first implies the impossibility of definition as a
matter of principle; the second indicates a state of potentiality, of being
yet unmanifested. The first doctrine leads to an antinomic religious
philosophy, opposed to pantheism; the second is the dialectic philoso-
phy of evolution, leading to pantheism. In the first case "God as the
Absolute is completely free from the world;" in the second He is neces-
sarily connected with the world. According to the first doctrine, Uno
self-purification or withdrawal into its own depths (Eckehart's Abge
schiedenheits will enable immanent self-consciousness to overcome it!
relative character and become absolute or find itself in God through
drowning itself in Him, so to speak, and getting rid of all Maya:' Mall
and the world become divine not through the power of divinity which
they possess as creatures, but through the power of grace that is pourec
out into the world; man may become god not by virtue of his owr
nature as a creature, but only god by grace (according to the well-knowr
definition of the Fathers of the Church)" (150). "True religion is basec
FATHEll SlllGIUS BULGAkOV 205
upon revelation; i.e., upon the Deity coming down to the World, volun-
tarily entering it and approaching man; in other words, it is bound to
be the work of grace, of a supernatural or supercosmic activity of God
in man" (151). God as a Person "is known only through meeting Him,
through His living revelation of Himself" in the religious experience.
As to the Christian dogma of God as Tripersonal, it can, in the first
instance be known only through the Revelation (151 f.).
"It is possible to distinguish three ways of attaining the religious
consciousness: the knowledge of God may be gained more
or analytico, more naturali or mystico and more historico -Ir empirico-
i.e., by abstract thought, mystic self-absorption, and religious revelation;
the first two ways acquire their rightful significance only in connection
with the third and become false if accepted in their separateness" (151).
This is the source of such false doctrines as the emanational pantheism
of Plotinus, Erigena, Boehme, Eckehart, of the acosmism and anti-
cosmism of the Hindu philosophy and religion, or, in Europe, of the
philosophy of Schopenhauer, of the dynamic-pantheism of E. Hartmann
and Drews, of the logical pantheism of Hegel, etc. In discussing these
theories, Bulgakov remarks that "the Germanic genius seems to be
doomed to distort Christianity in the direction of religious monism,
pantheism, buddhism, neo-platonisrn, imrnanentism" (162).
The only way to avoid the errors of pantheism and religious irn-
manentism, says Bulgakov, is to admit that the transition from the
Absolute to the relative is effected by the creation of the world out of
nothing. The act of creation "is the transformation of the Olm OV into
the f.A.1t o-v. "The word Olm o'V means here non-being in the sense of
emptiness or absence of being, and JA,il Ov means being which is as yet
completely indefinite. "The transformation of the oVx OV into the ov is
the creation of the universal matter of the cosmos, of the Great Mother
of all the natural world. In and through the act of creation God posits
being in the non-being, or, in other words, through the same act He
posits non-being together with being as its limit, its accompaniment or
shadow" (184). This does not imply, however, that the world is entirely
new being, alongside and outside of God. Here as elsewhere Bulgakov
tries to unite opposites. The world, he says, "is penetrated through and
through by divine energies which form the basis of its being" (148).
"Creation is emanation, a plus, something new, created by the Divine
fiat" (178). "By the side of the Absolute which is above existence there
appears existence in which the Absolute reveals Itself as Creator, mani-
festing or realizing Itself in it; the Absolute thus actually takes part in
existence, and, in this sense, the world is God as becoming. God exists
only in and for the world; in the absolute sense one cannot speak. of
206 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
Him as existing. By the very act of creating the world God throws Him-
self into it, and as it were, makes Himself a creature" (193). The world
is thus both a theophany and a theogony (192). Bulgakov goes so far as
to say that "the creation by the Absolute of the relative is a self-division
of the Absolute" (179). In developing this conception BuIgakov, like
Vladimir Soloviev, is guided by the conviction that the Absolute must
be pan-unity. He believes that being which was external to God, which
existed alongside of Him would limit Him (148). He thinks that his
doctrine provides a solution of the cosmological antinomy that lies
midway between two errors-pantheistic monism and manichean dual-
ism (194).
The antinomic character of the divine and the earthly principles
appears to be even more complex when we come to deal with Bulgakov's
doctrine of St. Sophia, first as it is expounded in The Unfading Light.
St. Sophia is the boundary between God and the world, between the
Creator and the creation, herself being neither tile one nor the other.
She is the Divine "Idea," tile object of God's love, the love of Love.
"Sophia is loved and loves in return, and through this reciprocal love
she receives all, is all" (212)-the ens realissimum, Pan-Unity (214).
Sophia's love differs profoundly from the love of the divine hypostases:
she "merely receives, having nothing to give, she contains only that
which she has taken. By giving herself up to the Divine Love she con-
ceives everything in herself. In this sense she is Feminine and receptive;
she is the Eternal Feminine" and "may perhaps be said to be a 'goddess,'
though certainly not in the pagan sense of the term. As receiving her
essence from the Father she is tile creature and the daughter of God; as
knowing the Divine Logos and known by Him she is the bride of the
Son (the Song of Songs) and tile spouse of tile Lamb (the Gospels, the
Apocalypse); as receiving the outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit
she is the Church and at the same time the Mother of the Son who in-
carnates by the Holy Ghost of Mary, the Heart of the Church; and she
is also the ideal Soul of creation-Beauty. All this together-the
Daughter and the Bride, the Wife, and the Mother, the triunity of
goodness, truth and beauty, the Holy Trinity in the world-is the
divine Sophia'" (213c.). Being above creation she is the Fourth Hypos-
tasis, but since she does not take part in the intradivine life, the Trinity
does not become a quaternity (212).
In relation to the world-manifold Sophia is .the organic unity of
the Ideas of all creatures. Every being has its Idea, which is both its
basis and its norm and entelechy, and Sophia as a whole, "in her cosmic
aspect," is the entelechy of the world, the world soul, "natura naturans
in relation to the natura naturata" (213, 22g). Every creature on its
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV 207
positive side may therefore be called Sophian; but creatures have an-
other, a negative side, a lower "substratum," namely, matter as nothing,
as blank, empty non.. being. That is not the nothing which we know as
an aspect of being or even as its shadow. No, what is meant here is the
complete nothing which God called into being. "How light came to
shine in this outer and total darkness, how being was sown in the abso-
lute nothing, is the unfathomable act of God's wisdom and omnipotence
-0 His creative fiat" (234).
As already said, the universal matter of the world is the Our.. ov
transformed into the ~ d l Oy (184). Material being in which ,non-being is
present is characterized by mutual litnitation and division; it is "indi-
vidual in the bad sense: the basis of individualism here is dividedness,
fragmentariness;" it is the negative sense of individuality. "The ideal,
Sophian world remains on the other side of such being-non-being; in
other words there is no place in it for matter-as-ncthing' (237); "it
contains all principia indiuiduationis in the positive sense, as unique
principles of being, rays in the spectruln of the Sophian pleroma, But
as they enter the world of being-non-being, the kenoma of materiality,
they become associated with 1)rincipia indioiduationis in the negative
sense" (238). "The act of the world creation is realized through the
making of heaven and earth in the Beginning, through the formation
of two centers in Sophia" (239). The Earth created by God is not the
"matter" of Greek philosophy, but it is "nothing which has already
received the outpouring of Sophian-ness and is therefore a potential
Sophia. The nothing has received actual being and has become Chaos,
a real MfIQ()'\' spoken of in the Greek, Babylonian and other rnytholo-
gies. That is 'the native Chaos,' in the words of the poet 'stirring' under
the surface of being and sometimes breaking- through as a destructive
power. The creation of the earth lies outside the six days of creation
and is its ontological prms." The separation of light from darkness, the
appearance of the heavenly bodies, plants, animals-Hall that is the work
of God's creative word and is called forth not out of nothing but out
of the earth, as a gradual unfolding of its Sophian content, of its ideal
fullness. That 'earth' is therefore, as it were, '3 cosmic Sophia' (239 f.),
the feminine principle of the created world. She is the Great Mother
piously worshipped of old by the Gentiles: Demeter, Isis, Cybile, Ishtar.
And that earth is potentially divine, that mother at its ,'ery creation
contains within its depths the future Mother of God, the womb of the
divine incarnation" (245).
The creation of the world in Sophia is Utile separation of Sophia'S
potentiality front her eternal actuality, which gives rise to time and the
temporal process; the actualization of Sophian potentiality forms the
208 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
content of that process" (223). The cosmic process takes place by virtue
of "the earth's eros for heaven. All creature is longing for liberation
from bondage of corruption, for the radiance of Sophian light, for
beauty and transfiguration" (242). That purpose is achieved under the
guidance of Sophia as the World Soul. "She is the universal, instinctively
unconscious or superconscious soul of the world, anima mundi, mani-
festing itself in the wonderful purposiveness of the structure of organ-
isms and the unconscious functions and instincts of generic origin"
(223). The world is animated throughout and is "a great hierarchy of
ideal entities" an ideal organism, and the great merit of occultism (in-
cluding under that heading fairy tales, legends, folklore, beliefs and
superstitions) is its apprehension of the Sophian nature of the 'lifeless
world,' akin to the poetic apprehension of nature in general. The same
may be said to a certain extent of naturalistic pagan politheism which is
so to speak a religious paraphrase of the doctrine of the Sophian nature
of the world and of all creation being animate" (230). "Platonic ideas-
qualities are known to the people's mythological consciousness and are
reflected in its sagas, fairy tales, folklore: that lies at the root of charms,
incantations, spells, of totems and other animal symbolism which plays
such an important part in all religions including Judaeo-Christianity"
(230)_
In speaking of Ideas Bulgakov like Florensky dwells upon the dif-
ference between ideas and concepts, "In an idea both the general and
the individual exist as a simple whole: the individual entity's generic
personality and the collective individuality of the genus are united in
it. In its idea the genus exists both as a unity and as the fullness of all
its individual members in their uniqueness, and that unity exists not
only in abstracto, but in concreto." This is particularly applicable to
man. "Mankind is truly a single Adam, the old and the new, the first-
created and the regenerated in Christ; and the words of Lord Jesus
that He is Himself present in the hungry and the thirsty and the prison-
ers and in the whole of the suffering humanity must be accepted in their
full significance. But at the same time, equal reality attaches to indi-
vidualization, to the contrast between separate human beings as in-
dividuals and the Christ-humanity in them" (231).
The theory that there exist t\VQ Sophias, the Divine and the created,
is hinted at in the Unlading Ligh! and is expounded at length in the
Agntis Dei, The Comforter and The Bride of the Lamb, Bulgakov bases
his doctrine of the Divine Sophia on the difference between the con-
ceptions of the Divine personality and Divine nature (ousia). He says
"spirit has personality and nature; ,t the Divine spirit "has a triune per-
sonality and one I\ature which may be called ousia or Deity. The divine
FATHER SERGltJS BULGAKOV 209
nature is the Divine life, ens realissimum; i.e., positive pan-unity in-
cluding within itself "all, for no limitations of any kind are befitting
with regard to Deity." That "all-qualitative All-in..unity is God in His
self-revelation, is that which in the Scriptures is called the Wisdom of
God, Sophia" (Agnus Dei, 124 f.).
The Divine Sophia has significance not only for God as His life
but for man too, and through him for all creation as his archetype:
"man is created by God in Cod's image, and that image is ens realissi-
.mum in man, who becomes through it a created God" (135). "Divine
Sophia as the panorganism of Ideas is the eternal humanijy in God, as
the Divine archetype and basis of man's being." There exists a certain
"analogical identity" between God and man, archetype and image. The
Logos in Whom the Divine Sophia is hypostasied is the eternal Man, the
Heavenly Man, the Son of God and the Son of Man (136 f.). Sophia as
Deity in God is "the Image of God in God Himself, the realized divine
idea, the idea of all ideas realized as beauty" (126). God's relation to the
Divine Sophia is love: "in Sophia God loves Himself in His self-revela-
tion, and Sophia loves the personal God Who is Love with a reciprocal
love" (127). "She is a live and living entity, though not a personal one"
(128). The Divine Sophia is not a person and yet she is not outside
personality: her hypostasis is the Logos Who reveals the Father as a
demiurgic hypostasis (136). The Logos in Whom the Divine Sophia is
hypostacized is the Eternal man, the Heavenly man, the Son of God and
the Son of Man" (137). .
The created Sophia is an entity closely akin to the Divine Sophia.
"Everything in the Divine and the created world, in the Divine and the
created Sophia is identical in content (though not in the manner of
being)" writes Father Sergius Bulgakov. HOne and the same Sophia is
revealed both in God and in creation. The negative statement that God
created the world out of nothing does away with the conception of any
nondivine or extradivine principle in creation; but its positive implica-
tion can only be that God created the world through Himself out of
His nature. Metaphysically the creation of the world consists in God's
positing His own divine world not as eternally being but as becoming.
In that sense He diluted it with nothing, by plunging it into becoming.
The Divine Sophia became also the created Sophia. God, so to speak,
repeated Himself in creation, mirrored Himself in non-being" (148,
149). "The positive content of cosmic being is as divine as is its basis in
God" (148).
Thus, the positive content of the world is not created by God
anew: it is identical with the content which is in God already. Besides,
the further development of the world is the work o ~ God Himself-the
210 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
Holy Spirit: "the power of life and development is the power of the
Holy Spirit in nature, the natural grace of life. One must understand
and accept this natural grace of creation, inseverable from the natural
world, without fearing apparent paganism or pantheism, the alternative
to which is, in fact, empty and deadly deism separating the Creator from
the creature" (The Comjorter, 24).
"Every creature must be recognized as Sophian in so far as its
positive content or its idea, which is its basis and norm, is concerned;
but it should not be forgotten that creatures have another aspect-the
lower ' s u b s t r ~ t u m ' of the world, matter as 'nothing' raised to the level
of the JLn OV and striving to embody the Sophian principle in itself"
(The Unlading Light, 234,242).
TIle conception of incarna tion is fundamental for the Christian
metaphysics. It necessitates a distinction being drawn between the ideas
of materiality and corporeality. In Bulgakov's view the essence of
corporeality is "sensibility as a distinct and independent element of
life, different from spirit but by no means opposed or alien to it" (249).
"It is different from thought and will, does not admit of any logical
determinations; and can only be apprehended through sensation. Cor-
poreality is essential to everything that may be called real; even Ideas
that belong to the intelligible world of Sophia must be concretely
qualified by having a body. There are many species of corporeality, be-
ginning with our coarse, material one and ending with the transfigured
spirit-bearing corporeality. There may be bodies of different degrees of
refinement, 'astral, mental, etheric,' etc." (251). Once, observing that
Father Sergius was not well, I asked him what was ailing him, and he
answered "my astral is out of joint."
The high significance of corporeality is manifested in the fact that
it is the condition of beauty. "Spiritual sensibility or the perceptible
character of Ideas is Beauty. Beauty is as much an absolute principle of
the world as the Logos. It is the revelation of the Third Hypostasis, the
Holy Spirit" (251). "Bea uty is the sinless, the holy sensibility, the per-
ceptibility of Ideas. Beauty cannot be confined to anyone sense, such
as vision, for instance. All our senses are capable of apprehending
beauty-not only vision, but also hearing, smell, taste and touch" (252).
Bulgakov's teaching about Ideas being embodied reflects a charac-
teristic feature of the Russian philosophy-its concreteness, which I
already pointed out in dealing with Florensky.
In Father Bulgakov's theological work Jacob's Ladder tht doctrine
of the concreteness of Ideas reaches its consummation. In this work
which deals with angelology Bulgakov comes to affirm that angels, in
particular the guardian angels of individual people. churches. nations.
FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV 211
elements, etc., are members of the Created Sophia and correspond to
the principle which Plato designates as the Ideas. "The truth of
Platonism," says Bulgakov, "is revealed only in angelology as a doctrine
of Heaven and earth in their mutual relationship;" Plato's Ideas "exist
not as logical abstractions and schemes of things, but as personal sub-
stances, the angels of the Word" (118 ff.),
Bulgakov's doctrine of the angels is a logical consummation of
Florensky's ideas as set forth above. Florensky works out his conception
of Platonism through philosophical reasoning, while Bulgakov does ft
on the path of theological investigation, namely by analyzjng the texts
of the Scriptures, as well as liturgical and ikonographic data. The fact
that the same results are arrived at by such different methods SllOWS
that "all the roads lead to Rome," that truth can be attained by very
different methods. There is nothing surprising in this: Bulgakov's
theological method consists in making use of the religious experience,
and moreover not of the individual but of the collective experience of
the Church. In speaking of "truth attained" in this connection, I mean
Bulgakov's and Florensky's teaching about the higher beings standing
at the head of different departments of the world, and not their in-
terpretation of Plato, which is utterly untenable.
Connected with the same feature of the Russian philosophy-its
concreteness-is Bulgakov's defense of the cult of ikons, so essential to
Orthodoxy. In his book The Ikon and its Cult he demonstrates the
difficulty of advocating ikon worship which remains theologically un-
justified, for the ikonoclasts proceeded from the obviously right thesis
of the imagelessness of Godhead; basing themselves on the dogma that
in Christ there was no division of substance or confusion of persons they
asserted that an image of His body was not an image of His Godhead and
therefore not an ikon of Christ (24). Bulgakov gets over the difficulty
by setting up three pairs of antinomies (54)-the theological (God is the
Divine Nothing, God is the Holy Trinity), the cosmological (God in
Himself, God in creation), and the sophiological (Uncreated Sophia-
Deity in God; Created Sophia-Deity outside God, in the world). Bulga-
kov solves the problem of the ikon by working out the implications of
his doctrine of the Uncreated Sophia as God's image which is at the
same time the original image of creation; all creatures, and especially
man, being created after the image of God, are therefore, in their posi-
tive characteristics, a living Ikon of the Deity (H3). Consequently, Christ,
a new Adam, "in His flesh took on His own image of Heavenly Adam,
His ikon" (92). The task of the ikonographer, while representing Christ's
body, consists in expressing some of the numberless aspects of God the
Word Who is the Image of images and tile Idea of ideas (93).
212 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
In framing a theory concerning the incarnation of ideal principlej,
it is essential to give an account of the still more mysterious incarnation
of God the Word Himself, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Why
did it happen, and how is it possible? An answer to that question can
be given in connection with the answer to the problem of evil and of
liberation from it.
Neither matter nor body as the vehicle of sensibility is evil, and,
indeed, as originally created the world contains no evil at all; it is
sixiply in the state of childish incompleteness and there lies before it
the task of "making its Sophian character actual" (The Unlading Light,
250). Evil is adeviation frOID this path; it is the result of the self-will of
the creatures that use the powers of being in order to make actual the
non-being which is the world's substratum; evil is therefore a non-
Sophian or an anti-Sophian parasite of being (263). For such "poisoned
being" death, i.e., return to the earth with the hope of resurrection and
of the life of the world to come is a blessing and not a calamity (262).
The resurrection and transfiguration of all creatures is bound up
with the incarnation of God the Word as the Ulan Jesus Christ. Man
thus plays a central part in the life of the world. This is due to the fact
that man is made in the image of God.. He is a personality, a hypostasis,
his nature cannot be exhausted by any definition. Man has an aspect of
"uncreatedness." "Having created man's body out of the dust of the
ground-i.e., having united him to the created nature as man's own
world-God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
became a living soul" (Gen. 2, 7) (Agnus Dei, 114 L). The spirit is un-
created in the two senses of that term: first, as the ray of God's own
glory, and secondly as the self-positing ego: HIn calling His own breath
to personal being and hypostasying the rays of His own glory, God ac-
complishes it by one eternal act together with the personality itself.
God's creative act asks, as it were, the created self whether it is a self,
whether it has in it the will to live, and hears the creation's 'yea' in
response" (114 L). "Thus, Ulan is both uncreated and created" (197);
he is absolute in the relative and relative in tile absolute" (The Unfad-
ing Light, 278). Man is a microcosm: all the world's elements are to be
found in him. "In its psychic pan-organism the human spirit has found
and become conscious of all that is living. Contrary to the Darwinian
theory, man is not descended from the lower species, but includes them
in himself: man is pan-animal, and contains as it were the whole pro-
gram of creation. There is to be found in him eagle-ness, and lion-ness
and other psychic qualities that form the basis of the animal world-
tnat spectruln into which the white light of humanity may be brok ~ n
up. This is the explanation of the partial truth of totemism and of the
FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV 213
combination of the human and animal forms in the images of the
Egyptian gods" (286). It is one of the many instances of what Bulgakov
calk the mystic clearsightedness of paganism, which sees gods where
our "scientific" consciousness can only detect lifeless forces of nature
(326). Generally speaking, paganism "may be said to be the cognition of
the invisible through the visible. of God through the world, the revela-
tion of the Deity in the creation. It is animated by many motives and
is wider in scope than tile Old or even the New Testament, which con-
tains the promise of a Comforter who is still to come. Paganism hat a
living presentiment of 'holy corporeality' and of the of the
Holy Spirit" (330). There is religious truth, too, in the pagan worship of
divine motherhood. "The similarity between Isis weeping over Osiris
and the Mother of God bending over the body of the Saviour" (&'32)
does not disturb Bulgakov; he thinks that the problem of the feminine
hypostasis of the Deity is a mystery that has not as yet received sufficient
consideration in Christianity (331). But in paganism these glimpses of
truth assume the mistaken form of pantheistic naturalism, while in
Christianity emphasis is laid on the fundamental antinomy of the re-
ligious consciousness, "the inseparable unity of the transcendent and
the immanent" (339).
The Christian ideal-the Kingdom of God--eannot be realized
within the limits of the earthly life and earthly community. After the
fall "man became the prey of the lust for knowledge obtained apart
from the love and consciousness of God, the lust of the flesh that seeks
bodily pleasures apart from the spirit, the lust for power that seeks
might apart from spiritual growth:' In his relation to the world "man
has succumbed to the temptation of magic, hoping to gain possession of
the world by external, unspiritual means" (353). The world resists
man's attempts to gain possession of it, and the disharmony between
man and the world leads to the necessity for labor and for economic
activity, which is of the nature of grey magic, "combining in itself the
inextricably interwoven elements of the white and the black magic, the
powers of light and of darkness, of being and of non-being" (354).
A characteristic peculiarity of this dual world is the antagonism
between economic labor and artistic work: "the artist looks down upon
the economic activity, despising it for being calculating, utilitarian and
lacking in creative inspiration. while the producers take up a condescend-
ing attitude towards art because of its dreamy impotence and its in-
evitably parasitic character from the point of view of economic needs"
(356). The ideal unity of these two activities is attained by means of
the art of life which transforms the world and creates life in beauty.
Vladimir Soloviev was wrong in describing such active art as theurgy
214 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
-divine activity. In truth it is a combination of theurgy and sophiurgy;
i.e., the joined effect of God descending into the world and of man
ascending to God.
"Beauty will save the world," said Dostoevsky. This true beauty is
the transfiguration of the world, sophiurgy, which can only take place
"in the bosom of the Church, under the vivifying influence of the un-
interrupted stream of sacramental grace that flows in it, in an atmosphere
of devotional inspiration" (388). This consummation of the creative
work of God is achieved in a new aeon, and not within the limits of
earthly histoi,Y: "the purpose of history leads beyond history, to the life
of the world to come, and the world purpose leads beyond the world,
to a new heaven and a new earth" (410). "Historic failures are beneficial
because they heal men of the tendency to worship humanity, or the.
nation, or the world, and to believe in humanitarian progress, the
mainspring- of which is neither love nor pity but the proud dream of an
earthly paradise" (406).
As already said man is "both created and uncreated, absolute in the
relative and relative in the absolute." Therefore, not being expressible
in any definition, man strives for absolute creativeness after the image
of God, but is unable by his own powers to create anything perfect, a
chef d'oeuvre (279). His created being is made up of being and non-
being; hence "man's nature has the characteristics of genius and of in-
significance. His lower basis is the other side of being, a fictitious
quantity that had reality bestowed upon it. To will one's own exclusive
selfhood, to shut oneself up in one's creaturehood as in the absolute
means to seek the lower depths and become rooted in them. Therefore
the chief character of the lower depths is Satan who loves himself as
though he were god, is rooted in his selfhood and imprisoned in his own
lower depths. He willed to find the divine all in his own non-being and
was forced to shut himself up in the realm of Hades, peopled by shades
and ghosts, believing it to be the dwelling place of a god of light. The
beauty of Lucifer and the demon that so greatly attracted Byron and
Lerrnontov is merely a pose, merely a cover for deception and tasteless-
ness, like somebody else's fine clothes worn over dirty linen, like
luxurious life on borrowed J110ney with no hope of repayment, like
pretensions to genius on the part of an artistic nonentity. The demonic
cloak hides Hlestakov and Chichikov, and the fairy-like demon becomes
a hideous devil with hoofs and a cold in the head. Vulgarity is the
hidden underlining of dernonism" (182). Freedom from all temptation
and from "the anguish of nonabsolute absoluteness can only be found
by man through the heroism of humble love" (280), through com-
munion with the Heavenlv Man, Adam Cadman. in whom the union
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
215
between God and man is realized. The Heavenly Man "embraces in
himself all in positive pan-unity. He is the organized all or a pan-
organism" (285).
How is the perfect union of God and man in one person possible?
The highest task of the Christian world conception is to give a philo-
sophic interpretation of the doctrine of Jesus Christ as a God-man.
Therefore, Father S. Bulgakov's christology, soteriology and eschatology
developed in his voluminous work Agnus Dei, The Comforter and The
Bride of the Lamb may be regarded as the summit of his theological
and philosophical activity. In the book Agnus Dei he examines in detail
the fundamental antinomy of the religious consciousnesf "the indis-
soluble biunity of the transcendent and the immanent" and seeks to
expound the theologically philosophical meaning of the Chalcedon
dogma according to which Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect man.
The indissoluble union "without confusion" of the two natures, the
Divine and the human, in one Person cannot be interpreted as their
alternation or as a mixture and so on (94). The unity of personal life
requires the unity of all its manifestations so that each of them is a
divinely human, "theo-andric" act: Christ's miracles, His insight, His
spiritual power and other expressions of His high perfection must,
equally with His bodily weariness, lack of knowledge, the sense of God..
Iorsakenness, and other expressions of His limitations, be interpreted as
divinely human. The antinomies of the religious consciousness, says
Bulgakov, cannot be solved simply by formulating two sets of judge-
ments logically contradictory of one another (67). We must rise to a
level where the opposition between them is somehow removed. That is
achieved, according to Bulgakov, by kenotic theology (248) which re-
gards the Incarnation as the self-limitation of the Logos, Who renounces
the glory of his Godhead to such an extent that His divine nature be-
comes commensurate to the human nature. That is possible only if,
even before the Incarnation, the Person of the Logos was to a certain
extent akin to man, and the human personality-akin to the divine.
Such "co-respondence between Deity and humanity" (136) exists owing
to the Divine Sophia in God and the created Sophia in the world. "The
Divine Sophia as the pan-organism of ideas is the eternal Humanity in
'God-the Divine archetype and basis of man's being" (136). The Divine
Sophia is hypostasied in the Logos Who is a demiurgic Hypostasis;
hence Logos is the Heavenly Man, the First man, the Son of God and
the Son of Man (137). Man is created by God in the image of that Divine
archetype. Moreover, as already said, man actually has in him an aspect
of "uncreatedness." "The spiritual being which God breathes out of
Himself into man's body is rooted in the Divine eternity; tile created
216 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
spirit is, like it, eternal and uncreated and bears in itself the conscious..
ness both of that eternity and the uncreatedness and, altogether, of its
divine nature; hence spiritual self-consciousness is, at bottom, aware-
ness of God. Moreover the created spirit is aware of itself as a self-
founded, self-posited entity" for it posits itself as a self (115). Thus man
is both a created and uncreated being and "this duality of natures in
man, his original God-manhood makes possible the deification of life,
the communion of both natures in man without division or confusion"
()17, 136 f., 160 f.), That explains how the Second Person of the Holy
Trinity can, through self-emptying (l,enosis) bridge the abyss which
divides the bivine and the created world, for we have here on the one
hand, natura humana capax divini and on the other natura divini
capax humani. Father Sergius's excellent little book The Miracles of
the Gospel is devoted to the exposition of the lofty qualities of the
human nature and especially of the spiritual power of men who fulfill
the will of God.
The union between the divine and the human nature is not, how-
ever, achieved painlessly. The gulf between the two natures has been
made deeper by the Fall of man: "having in himself, as it were, two
centers of being, the spiritual and the created one, man made his choice
by deviating toward the flesh, by subordinating his spirit to its appeals
instead of spiritually mastering it." In consequence nature appeared
before him not in its Sophian, but in its created aspect "0 the fallen or
dark Sophia, in the image of non-being, i.e., of materiality-an undue,
abnormal, perverted condition" (168). "The metaphysical nature of
creation having non-being for its substratum becomes "the source of
undue self-affirmation, of creaturely egoism which is reflected in mutual
spatial impenetrability as the force of disintegration and 'wakeful' and
restless chaos:' Moreover, "a created spirit bears in its secret depths the
satanic temptation of selfhood, of recognizing itself as the archetype"
(170). Owing to the Fall of man, the incarnation of the Logos is "a cross
which He takes upon Himself": being free from sin, He receives of the
Virgin Mary through the Holy Spirit flesh burdened with the "conse-
quences of the original sin," weak and obeying the divine nature only
after intense and continual struggle (271, 200).
The kenotic descent of God into the world consists in the fact that
the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, while retaining the fullness of
Godhead in the "immanent" Trinity, puts off His Divine glory in the
"economic" Trinity (i.e., Trinity in Its relation to the world) and "for
Himself ceases to be God" _(25S). "The timeless-eternal God makes
Himself a becoming God in the God-man, denudes Himself of His
eternal Godhead in order to come down to human life and, in and
FATHER. SEIlGIUS BULGAIlOV
I'
217
through it, to make man receptive of God, living in God, in short, the
God-man" (249). He is conscious of Himself as the Son of man and the
Son of God, obedient to the Father (292-316). He is the link that unites
man to God, for He is consubstantial "with God in Godhead and with
us in humanity" (263). His two natures, the Divine and the human, are
indivisible "for they are not different but identical in their content,
as a nournenon and a phenomenon, as ground and consequence, as
principle and its manifestation" (224). But at the same time there is no
confusion between them, for one of them is the Divine, and the other
the created, Sophia (223); the first is supertemporal, and she second is
realized through a temporal process.
From the point of view of this kenotic theology, according to which
the Logos puts off His Godhead for Himself, it is understandable that
all His manifestations in the earthly life, both the perfect and those
marked by human weakness, are equally divinely human and are not
alternative manifestations now of the Divine and now of the human
element. The miracles worked by Him indicate the norm of the human
spirit's mastery of nature; like the saints and the prophets, He often
manifests wonderful insight but, having put Himself within the limita-
tions of space and time, He manifests ignorance natural to man; He
turns to the Father with prayer for inspiration from above which He
needs, having inwardly confined the manifestations of His own Divinity
within the range of the human nature. On the other hand, however, He
does not renounce His Godhead as such, and that renders intelligible
"the most daring christological paradoxes: the Lord asleep in the boat
sustains the universe by His word; the Lord hanging on the tree and
suffering the agonies of death, is the Creator and Source of life, sustain-
ing by His word all creation; the Lord born in the manger and resting
in the sepulchre is the Lord of all creatures and so on" (255). "In the
God-man there are no nonhuman manifestations of the divine life, and
all that is human is deified, graced, penetrated by the divine light,
though not glorified as yet: everything in Him is divinely human" (284).
"When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made
of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the
law, that we might receive the adoption of sons" (Gal. 4, 4).
The purpose of the Logos's self-renunciation is to regenerate the
fallen humanity, to redeem it from sin and reconcile it with God. More-
over, it has a more general purpose, independent of the Fall, namely the
deification of man, "so as to unite all things, heavenly and earthly,
under one head, Christ." The Incarnation then is not merely a soterio-
logical act (193 ff.). By coming out of eternity into the temporal process
God unites Himself with the world "not STom outside only, as its
218 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
Creator and Providence, but from within." Thus, "the Incarnation is
also the inner basis of creation, its final cause" (196).
Having assumed human nature the Lord "became a historical indi-
vidual," but His individuality "is not bound by any ontological limita-
tions." He had no "individuality in the negative, limiting sense" that
was the consequence of the Old Adam's Fall. "He was a Universal man,
and His personality contained all human images, was a Pan-Personality.
He is equally near and accessible to everyone who contemplates Him ...
Ier He is, for everyone and for all, the image that speaks directly to
heart and m { ~ d and penetrates into the secret depths. That is the basis
of the Gospel's catholicity and its universally human appeal. In His
human nature Christ adopted into Himself the whole of cosmic ex-
istence in so far as man is a microcosm" (229). He is therefore the New
Adam, regenerating the whole of humanity which, together with the
Old Adam, committed the sin of the Fall. Before the Fall, Adam "was
a universal man and in him the whole mankind with all its possible
aspects lived in reality. Being a person, Adam had no individuality in
the negative, limiting sense resulting from disintegrated pan-unity that
becomes the bad infinity of egocentric entities. With the Fall, the image
of universal pan-humanity in Adam grew dim and he became merely
an individual who could only give birth to other individuals" (230).
Christ redeems the world from sin as the Universal man Who takes
upon Himself the sins of the whole world, past, present and future.
This is possible owing to "the1 metaphysical reality of the whole man-
kind, by virtue of which humanity is bound together by the joint respon-
sibility both for good and for evil-all are responsible not only for
themselves, but for all and in all things" (377). "Christ's self-identifica-
tion with mankind that lies at the basis of the dogma of redemption
gives a literal and not a figurative meaning to his words at the Last
Judgment: 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto Me,' and in the negative form 'Inas-
much as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me'
(Matt. 25, 40, 45)" (377). Bearing the sins of the world means not the
defilement of the soul by sin, but the fact that Christ experienced, lived
through and suffered the whole burden of sin and thus overcame it
(380 E.). To begin with, He suffered "from the sins of the world warring
against Him from without; U secondly, He bears the sins of the world
from within through "compassionate love":8 on the night of Geth-
semane He endured the sins of the world as something "terrible and
repulsive which tortured His soul unutterably by its very presence"
5. This is nolnted out by the Metropolitan Antony;
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
219
(389); in the third place, He experienced the consequences that in-
evitably follow from God's justice, namely, the sense of being forsaken
by God: "Divinity is not compatible with sin, It burns it up with Its
fire" (381). Those tortures taken together are equivalent to the punish-
ment which would be appropriate to mankind, i.e., to the torments of
hell. "Christ's taking upon Himself the sins of the world would be ap-
parent and not real if it were not followed by all the consequences that
sin entails, i.e., by the burden of God's wrath and by being cast away
from Him, God has mercy on the sinner but hates sin. God's jusc1ceis
as absolute as His love is infinite. Sin filay and must be'iived down,
rendered powerless and destroyed, for it has no power of life in it, being
a wrongful progeny cf created freedom: God did not create either sin
or death. In the process of getting rid of sin, sin is burnt out by the
wrath of God which means suffering or punishment for the subject of
sin, for its bearer. If sin must be atoned for by suffering, the God-man
who takes sin upon Himself, suffers too. In that sense it may really be
said that the God-man suffers the equivalent of punishment for the sins
of the world, i.e., of the tortures of hell, though in a different way. There
can be no question here of cornmensurabihty in time, for in any case
temporal measurements are not applicable to eternal torments: eternity
is a qualitative and not a quantitative conception. But the short hours
of the Saviour's agony contained the whole 'eternity' of torments in
their full force. And that 'eternity' was such that it could undermine and
wipe out the sins of the world. That is the meaning of redemption and
reconciliation with God" (390 f.).
The last stage of the agony_ol overcoming the consequences of sin
is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. The metaphysical Calvary of
the Logos voluntarily crucifying Himself through His kcnosis inevitably
led to the historical Calvary 01 the God-man being put to death on the
cross (260). "The consequences of the Saviour's taking upon Himself the
sins of mankind could not be confined to spiritual experiences alone-
but were bound to extend to the bodily life as well. Together with the
sins the Saviour had to take upon Himself bodily sufferings and to taste
death, and do so differently from any Ulan who knows only his own
sufferings and experiences his own death. It was necessary for the New
Adam, the Redeemer of all mankind, bodily to experience the essence
of all human suffering and taste the bitterness of all deaths, to accept
Death in order to conquer it, destroying death by death-the universal,
integral death" (395). "Only the deified human nature of the God-man
4. That is the one-sided, and, consequently, mistaken conception of the Metro-
politan Antony.
220 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAltOV
was capable of actually living down the whole of human sin" and of all
death, "and His divine nature and will fully consented to it. Thus, only
the God-man could take upon Himself the sins of all mankind; no man,
however holy, could possibly do it. And yet it was done by the powers
of His human nature, which was in perfect harmony with the divine"
(888). "He reinstates in Himself" the normal "correlation between the
spirit and the body," lost by the Old Adam, namely the power of the
spirit over the body, and yet "it was not an easy victory of the Divine
p o \ \ t ~ : - over human weakness, but was a human victory which alone was
needed andvaluable here, and was accomplished by the God-man" (316).
The Christian doctrine of redemption from sin through the suf-
ferings of Jesus Christ gives rise to perplexity: "How can the sin of one
man be forgiven on the ground of sufferings endured by another? What
truth and justice is there in such substitution? The very way the ques-
tion is put," answers Bulgakov, "errs on the side of individualism and
legalism, for it takes into consideration only separate, isolated personali-
ties to which the principle of abstract justice is applicable. But the
distinction between 'mine' and 'thine' is overcome through love which
knows both the difference and the identity between 'I' and 'thou.' In
relation to every human being Christ is not 'another,' for the New
Adam includes-naturally in His manhood and compassionately in His
love-every individual, and is the universal man. The sin which He
takes upon Himself through the power of love, is not alien to Him but
His own, though not committed, but only accepted by Him. We have
here not a juridical but an ontological relation, based upon the real
unity of human nature in spite of the actual multiplicity of its number-
less separate and yet conjoined personal centers. Christ took upon
Himself the whole of human nature and therefore He can take upon
Himself in and through it the whole sin of all individuals, though
personally He has not committed it" (391 f.). "In Christ everyone may
find himself and his own sin, and the power of redeeming it, if through
his freedom and through his nature of Old Adam he wills to be included
in that power; 'believe and be saved' " (387). Man's freedom is not can-
celled by Christ's redeeming sacrifice. Every man coming to Christ
"with faith, love and repentance" may freely participate in His im-
measurable suffering that renders sin powerless, and then it may be said
of him "I live and yet not I but Christ liveth in me." Salvation must be
objectively realized for everyone through his subjectively receiving (or
not receiving) it on the basis of free, personal self-determination (Mark
16, 16). "Grace is a gift and is given freely, but it does not compel (as
insuperabilis and indeclinabiliss, it does not transform man into an
object of creation: .it convinces, subdues, regenerates. The path of per-
FATHER. SER.GIUS BULGAltOV 221
sonal salvation may be complex, interrupted -and contradictory. But
the Divine love finally overcomes the creature's sin and in the fullness
of time, God shall be all in all" (362).
God's whole relation to the world is an expression of His love. The
very creation of the world is an act of God's sacrificial love; man's re-
demption from sin is even more sacrificial, for "the Author of man's
being takes upon Himself the consequences of His act of creation-the
possibility of sin which has heorne an actuality" (393). Together with
the incarnate Son of God, the Father suffers too, since in letting t ~ n
die upon the cross the Father endures "not death, of cour-e, but a cer-
ta in form of spiri tual dying together in the sacrifice of love" (344). The
Holy Spirit too takes part in that suffering since He is "the actual per-
sonal Love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father ...
and not to manifest I tself to the Beloved is a kenosis for personal love"
(345 f., 393). This conception of the Holy Trinity as a whole participat-
ing in the sufferings of the Incarnation is not heretical, for it is not
an ti trini tarian (401).
The theological and philosophical doctrine of the Incarnation COD-
rains a theodiey. In the Incarnation the Lord "completes His work as
Creator and thereby justifies the act of creation, for apart from this
entrance of the Deity into the created world, the world inevitably re-
mains imperfect, since it has its origin in nothing and, consequently, its
created freedom has a limited and changeable character. Though the
world is perfect as originally created C'very good") it contains the in-
evitable ontological imperfection of createdness and the incompleteness
that ensues therefrom, and God could not abandon such a world to its
own devices (as deists believe). Hence there arises a further task for the
Creator-to overcome the very createdness of the world, to raise it above
its created nature and deify it." The Divine Incarnation is "the price
of creation for God Himself, the sacrifice of God's love in the creation
of the world, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten
Son" (375). The final end-the deification of the creature-s-demands
that Christ should be not only prophet and high priest, but king as
well. His service as prophet consists in His preaching the divine truth
(354) and especially in being what He is as its living incarnation (356);
hence miracles and signs also form part of His prophetic work (362).
He is high priest not only in so far as He redeems mankind from sin
by sacrificing Himself, but in the more general sense of establishing the
basis for "che universal deification of the created human essence" (364).
That basis is the starting point of Christ's kingly service which goes on
throughout the tragic course of human history (451). "Christ is the
King of the world but He does not reign in it as fully,as in the Kingdom
222 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
of God: He is only establishing His kingly power. His kingly service in
the world is still going on" and "takes the form of striving for the king-
dom, of struggling against the prince of this world and the powers of
antichrist." Such struggle is possible because it is not a question of the
power of God the Creator over His creation, but of Christ the God-man,
whose coming into power is "a tragedy of conflict and of division be-
tween light and darkness-the fundamental theme both of St. John's
Gospel and of his Revelation" (447). In so far as the arena of that
stl ub'h1e is the human history, the Logos proves to be not only a derni-
urgic, but a ~ p a historical hypostasis.
Christ's mysterious presence on earth after His ascension is most
really manifested in the eucharistic sacrifice: the supertemporal signifi-
cance of the one sacrifice on the Calvary is made real upon every altar
at every liturgy in a number of different places (435). The final result
of this presence of Christ in the world must be the complete victory of
the good in virtue of the "Sophian determinism." Such determinism does
not violate human freedom and consists in the fact that "Christ upon
His Incarnation "became the law of being for the natural humanity, its
inner natural reality, hidden as yet in the Old Adam, in the old natural
and human world" (462). The complete realization of that Sophian
nature in the world will complete Christ's work as King and lead
beyond the confines of history into the Heavenly Kingdom "that God
may be all in all" (447 f.: I Cor. 15, 28).
The doctrine about the Holy Spirit is expounded by Father Sergius
in his big work The Comforter. The Orthodox Church teaches that
the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through (c'}Ul) the Son; the
Roman Catholic Church speaks of the Holy Spirit proceeding from the
Father and the Son. The addition to the Creed of the word filioque,
made by the Western Church without agreement with the Eastern, gave
rise to a dispute that has lasted many centuries. Bulgakov says that it
cannot be settled so long as the disputants mean by the "birth" of the
Son and "procession" of the Holy Spirit causal generation of the Second
and the Third Persons from the Father (171). In truth the trinity of
Persons in the Divine Absolute Subject can only be understood if we
start with the conception of the self-revelation of the Absolute Spirit
(75). The personal self-consciousness of the Absolute Subject "reveals
itself fully not in a self-contained, single 'I' but presupposes 'thou, he,
we, you'" (66). "The self-revelation of the Holy Trinity" consists in
the fact that "the Son appears to the Father as His Truth and His Word"
(76). "But this diadic relation between the Father and the Son cannot
possibly exhaust the self..determination of the absolute Spirit, which
reveals itself not only as self-consciousness, as being in truth, but also as
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV 225
self-life, as being in beauty, as the experience of its own content. That
vital dynamic relation is not merely a state, and in that sense an ex-
ternal datum of self-determination, which is, altogether out of place in
the absolute subject, but is also a hypostasis" (77). "The Holy Spirit is
the union of love between the Father and the Son" (176). "The union
within the Holy Trinity is a union of tri-personal love or of three forms
of love." All love contains the sacrificial element of self-renunciation,
but the highest aspect of love is "joy, bliss, triumph. That bliss of love
in the Holy Trinity, the solace of the Comforter, is the Holy S p i r i t ~
If we give up the mistaken idea that the procession Jf the Holy
Spirit means generation, says Bulgakov, we may interpret the relation
of the third Hypostasis to the first two in several different ways (181).
In discussing the problem of God-manhood Bulgakov asks whether
in addition to tile incarnation of the Logos there must also be "a special
incarnation of the Third Hypostasis," and answers the question in the
negative. "The Incarnation is made up of two acts: the descent of the
Divine Hypostasis into a human being, and of Its acceptance by the
latter. The first is the work of the Logos sent into the world by the
Father, the second is the work of the Holy Spirit, also sent by the
Father on to the Virgin Mary, in whose flesh the divine incarnation
takes place." This 64111Ust not be understood as a kind of fatherhood on
the part of the Holy Spirit making up for the absence of a husband; on
the contrary, the Holy Spirit becomes as it were identified to a certain
extent with the Virgin Mary in the conception of the Son." Hence "the
personal incarnation of the third Hypostasis is completely excluded"
(Agnus Dei, 200). But the revelation of the Holy Spirit in the Virgin
Mary differs profoundly from the incarnation of the Logos, inasmuch
as the God-Ulan Jesus Christ has only one Hypostasis, namely that of
the Logos, while the Virgin Mary with WhOIU the Holy Spirit after the
Annunciation "remains for ever" (The Comjorter, 2M5) has a human
hypostasis, distinct from the Hypostasis of the Holy Spirit.
Since both the masculine and the Ieminine principles participate
ill the Incarnation, Bulgakov detects the presence of both those prin-
ciples in the Divine Sophia who is "the heavenly archetype of the created
humanity." The human spirit is a biunity: "l,t combines the masculine,
solar principle of thought, Logos, with the feminine principle of re-
ceptivity, 01 creative completion, of being enfolded in beauty. Man's
Sophian spirit is androgynous. TIle masculine and the feminine are
images of one and the same spiritual principle, Sophia, in the fullness
of its self-revelation, after the pattern of the Second and the Third
Hypostases" (Colttforter 218). "This distinction, which is parallel to the
masculine and tile feminine principles, is reflected iq the Incarnation:
224
FATHEll SER.GIUS BULGAltOV
Christ incarnates in the image of a man, and the Holy Spirit is revealed
most perfectly in the image of the Spirit-bearer Ever-Virgin Mary:' In
this connection Father Sergius points out that "Church literature gives
us glimpses of the Spirit as a feminine hypostasis" and quotes a number
of such passages (219).
In his book The Bride of the Lamb Father Sergius repeats his
sophiological doctrine adding little that is new to it; his new and ex-
tremely valuable theological conceptions are developed in the second
parrol the book and deal with death, the state of the soul after death
and salvation.
The created Sophia, like the Divine Sophia, is not personal. Hence
she is the soul and not the spirit of the world (90). She is personalized in
the human personality; accordingly, the cosmos is "cosmo-anthropos"
(96). The two aspects of the human being. man and woman, are the
image of the Logos and the Holy Spirit (99). In Adam all mankind is
one; hence, the Fall of Adam is the fall of each one of us (178), the loss
of wholeness- and the emergence of plurality (89). But this plurality is
not absolute disintegration. The created Sophia acts as the uniting
power of wholeness (89); the New Adam, Christ, re-establishes the
oneness of mankind; the Mother of God, the Second Eve (100) contains
in herself the nature of all personalities and is therefore the Mother of
mankind (328) and "the manifestation in a human hypostasis of the
Holy Spirit" (438).
In speaking of the historical process, Father Sergius says that its
subject is mankind as a whole: the transcendental human subject is
the' pan-human self "in the unity of Adam," in the first instance the
transcendental epistemological self, the subject of knowledge. Similarly,
the subject acting throughout history, say, the subject of economic
activity, is one and the same (343).
The individually qualified human self receives the theme of his
life from God, but at the same time he posits it for himself freely in
the sense that he freely accepts or to a greater or less extent rejects that
theme (106). A man's personal theme, set for him by God, is his "thatness,"
his genius; and a man's talent, his "whatness," consists in the way and
the extent to which he accepts his genius (125). Thus, there exist dif-
ferent degrees of sinfulness (127) and different degrees of evil (164-7).
Victory over evil means that individuality is extinguished by humble
love (109); "individual" being must be overcome (162).
Death is the separation of the spirit and the soul from the body.
Therefore man's post-mortem existence is spiritually-psychic with no
5. The Russian word is ts,flomudrie (lit.: ..the wisdom of wholeness") which also
means continence or chastity.
FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV
admixture of the psychically-bodily life. In that condition man's spiritual
experience becomes richer; he sees the whole of his past life as a synthe-
sis and begins to understand its meaning (388), condemns himself and
gradually-perhaps in the course of aeons of time-overcomes all evil
in himself and is therefore found worthy of entering God's Kingdom.
Thus, there is no everlasting hell, there is only "purgatory and a tem-
porary sojourn in it" (391). As to non-Christians, it is possible for them
"to receive after death the light of Christ" (462).
If eternal paradise had been prepared for some beings, and ~ _
hell for others, it would mean that creation of the world w ~ afailure
and no theodicy would be possible. Father Sergius calls the doctrine of
everlasting torments of hell "penitentiary-criminal code of theology"
(51g).--It is inadmissible that finite and limited sins should be visited
with punishment of infinite duration. "The fact that we have been
created by omniscient God is so to speak an ontological proof of future
salvation" (550, 573).
In conclusion I will summarize the main contentions of Bulgakov's
philosophy of language, valuable not only from the linguistic, but from
the religiously philosophical point of view. It is expounded in a big
volume The Philosophy of Words. Father Sergius read his introduction
to it in 1924 at the Russian Academic Congress in Prague and it ap-
peared in the Festschrift T. G. Masaryk ZU1n 80 Geburtstage (Part I,
1930) under the title Was ist das Wort? According to Bulgakov the
sound mass is the ( 6 ) ~ t a of the word, as the Stoics put it: it is matter
idealized by form, which is meaning or idea. A word idea may have
various embodiments-sound, gesture, written signs, but just as Beetho-
ven's symphonies are written for the orchestra, so the word idea finds its
embodiment pre-eminently in the sounds of the human voice. The
connection between an idea and its incarnation is not an external as-
sociation. Bulgakov flatly rejects all psychologistic theories that reduce
meaning to a psychical process in the human mind and regard the word
as merely a token, external to the meaning, for communicating this
psychic process to other people. At the inception of the word in the
cosmic reality, says Bulgakov, a double process, developing in opposite
directions, takes place: an idea is liberated out of the complex whole of
existence, and creates for itself, in the microcosm of a human individu-
ality, according to man's vocal resources, a new body-the word. The
cosmos itself speaks through the microcosm of man in words which are
living symbols, active hieroglyphics of things, for the real soul of the
word sound is the thing itself; e.g., the soul of the word "sun" is the
heavenly orb itself. The plurality of languages does not exclude the
unity of the "inner word," just as the same Chinese characters are in
226 FATHER. SER.GIUS BULGAKOV
different provinces pronounced in a different way (39). The Babel con-
fusion of tongues means the disintegration of the white ray into a
plurality of spectral colors, but this does not affect the "inner word"-
witness the possibility of translation from one language into another.
Considerable value attaches to Bulgakov's theory that the plurality of
languages is a consequence of the disintegration of mankind in con-
nection with increasing subjectivism and psychologism: i.e., a morbid
concentration of attention on subjective individual peculiarities of
to his reflexions on the attempts of the Kabbalah to regard
letters as "pe original elements of language and at the same time as
cosmic forces.
Bulgakov's philosophy of language naturally implies a sympathetic
attitude on his part to the so-called "imiaslauie" (literally "glorification
of the name")." In The Unfading Light he writes: "The name of God
is as it were a point of intersection between two worlds and is the tran-
scendental in the immanent; hence imiaslavie, apart from its general
theological significance is so to speak a transcendental condition of
prayer, rendering religious experience possible." God as it were con-
firms "His name and recognizes it as His own, not merely answering to
it, but being actually present in it" (22).
Father Sergius's work is remarkable for his creative energy, the
multiplicity of his subjects and the bold originality of tnany of his
doctrines. Especially valuable at the early stages of his activity was his
struggle against man-worship, demonism and other varieties of modern
anti-Christianity. In his speculative system his philosophy of language,
his theory of beauty and of the cosmos as an animated whole are par-
ticularly noteworthy. As to his theology, the greatest value attaches to
his arguments in favor of universal salvation, and his teaching that the
Incarnation is not only a means of saving mankind from sin, but has a
far more fundamental meaning as the necessary condition of the deifica-
tion of created personalities, and that therefore the Son of God is, in
connection with the creation of the world, God-man from all eternity.
Equally valuable are Father Sergius's remarks about the "mystical in-
sight" of paganism, about the spiri tual power manifested in Christ's
miracles and the co-relation between the Holy Spirit and the Mother
of God. The centuries' old dispute between the Rornan Catholic and
the Orthodox Churches about the [dioq ue clause is put by Father
Sergius on a new basis through his pointing out that the words "born"
and "proceeding" used, respectively, of the Son and the Holy Spirit,
indicate not their causal connection with God the Father, but the dif..
6. The doctrine lhat di viae grace is actually present in the very name of God.
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAltOV
ferent aspects of the self-revelation of the Absolute personality. If the
question is considered from that point of view, the dogmatic conflict
between the disputants may become less irreconcilable.
Bulgakov's sophiology and some of his other doctrines have been
sharply attacked by the Moscow patriarchate and the emigre Karlovatsky
Synod. The Moscow patriarch's condemnation and two replies to it by
Bulgakov in which he defends his position have been published in the
book Sophia the Divine Wisdom (Paris 1935). A criticism of Father
Sergius's replies was made by Vladimir N. Lossky in the book ,7:J1e
Dispute About Sophia. A member of the Karlovatsky s y n o d ~ s h o p
Serafim wrote a large book entitled A New Doctrine Abou-t Sophia} the
Divine Wisdom (Sofia] 935). The fundamental defect of Father Sergius's
system is that in his teaching about the Divine Sophia as the nature
(ousia) of God, he affirms the ontological identity between God and the
world. Neither the negative nor the positive theology admits of this.
For the negative theology God is the Divine Nothing not expressible by
any conceptions borrowed from the realm of cosmic being. God and the
world are ontologically sharply divided from each other: it is impos-
sible to find either complete or partial identity between the Divine
Nothing and the world. Nor does positive theology fill up the gulf be-
tween God and the world. True, religious experience testifies that God
is a personal being; moreover, we know from the Revelation that He is
a unity of Three Persons. It must be remembered, however, that even as
a Person, God still remains the same Divine Nothing. Words which
indicate ideas in the earthly realm of being acquire a different sense
when applied to God. We make use of them in view of a certain
similarity between the world and God as the subject of positive theology.
Both the similarity and the difference are, however, metalogical.' Any
two objects that are similar or different in a logical sense are of neces-
sity partially identical or at any rate are necessarily connected with an
element of identity; metalogical similarity is not connected with partial
identity in any sense of the term, Hence it is clear that if ideas of per..
sonality, reason, existence, etc., as applied to God were identical with
the corresponding ideas applied to earthly beings, the Divine Nothing
would be distinct from the Persons of the Holy Trinity: we should then
have to regard It as a higher principle giving rise to the latter as to a
lower realm of being, connected, in its turn, with the world by the rela-
tion of partia1 identi ty.
In rejecting the conception of a higher and a lower God and. conse-
quently, in recognizing that the Divine Nothing coincides with each
7. The conception of metalogical difference is worked out in S. L. Frank's book
The Object 01 Knowledge, 237.
228
FATHER. SERGIUS BULGAKOV
Person of the Holy Trinity, it is essential strictly to adhere to the fol-
lowing position: there is an ontological gulf between God and the
world; pantheism is logically untenable. Father Sergius denies that
position. His contention that in the Divine and in the created world all
is "one and identical in content (though not in being)" (Ago. 148), and
all his theories connected therewith contain too great an ontological
approximation of the world, and especially of man, to God. As already
mentioned that is logically incompatible with the teaching about God
by the negative theology, even if additions be made to it
from the" theology.
If the logical impossibility of identifying the content of God and
of the world be overlooked, this disregard for logical coherence will
involve us in hopeless difficulties. To begin with, the doctrine in ques-
tion minimizes the creative power both of God and of man. It asserts
that although in creating the world God does not make use of any
material from outside, He borrows the whole of the world's content
from Himself; thus there is no real creativeness, but merely a shifting
or externalization of contents already present in God. Man does not
create any positive new contents, either, but merely repeats in a temporal
form the eternal content of the Divine nature. If God and man are
brought ontologically too close together, it belittles them both. Accord-
ing to Father Sergius the creatures' activity can be new only in a "modal"
sense, i.e., can only transfer the possible into the actual; their inspira-
tion is in itself "incapable of bringing something ontologically new into
being, of enriching reality with new themes" (The Comforter, 250 f.).
If the positive content of the human nature were identical with the
Divine, man would have to be recognized as consubstantial with God.
According to the Christian dogma, man draws nearer to God through
the Mediator God-man Jesus Christ. Having two profoundly different
natures miraculously combined without confusion, the Divine and the
human, Jesus Christ is through one of these natures consubstantial to
the Father and the Holy Spirit and, through another, consubstantial
to us, men. In Father Sergius's view it is no_t the fact of Christ being
made man that brings man nearer to God, but, on the contrary, the
consubstantiality between God and man helps the Logos to become
man. Consider, too, in this connection his doctrine that man's spirit-
uality is uncreated, but has its origin in God "breathing into" man
"the breath of life;" God gives to this "breath," to this outpouring of
His own essence, personal being. Does this not imply that man, being
uncreated as a person, stands in this respect on the same level as God
the Son and the Holy Spirit: the Son is born of the Father and not
created; the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and man emanates from
FATHER. SER.GIUS BULGAK.OV 229
Him? Fortunately, Father Sergius does not go to such extremes, for he
considerably modified his doctrine in his later works. In the Agnus Dei
it was asserted that man at his creation "receives his personality from
God breathing into him the Divine spirit and thus becomes 'a living
50\11: a living man, a self for which, and in and through which. his
humanity lives" (136). In The Comforter this doctrine is changed as
follows: "Man is a supercreational element in the world having in him-
self the spirit that came from God, and a personality which though
created is in the image of God" (244). These words,
be interpreted in the sense that the spirit which came God
and formed man is spirituality and not man's actual self; as to the
actual personal self to which that Divine spirituality is given, it is
created by God in His image and partly self-created. Even this concep-
tion of man's supercreatedness, however, is of little avail if we recall
that according to Father Sergius creation itself and especially creation
in the image of God is, in its positive content, mere externalization of
the Divine Sophian content. Father Sergius.himself, particularly in his
book The Comforter) often says that his system may appear pantheistic
and to a certain extent agrees with this, observing "yes, in a sense it is
pantheism too, but quite a pious one, or, as I prefer to put it in order
to avoid misunderstanding, it is panentheism." Pantheism, he says, "Is
a dialectically inevitable aspect of a Sophian cosmology" (232).
Like many other theologians Father Sergius interprets the words
"God created the world out of nothing" as though they referred to
some "nothing" out of which God made the world. In truth, however,
those words express, it seems to me, the following simple thought: the
Creator does not need to take any materials either from within or from
outside Himself in order to create the world: He creates the world as
something new, that has never existed before and is utterly different
from Him. Only such appearance of something new is true creativeness.
Father Sergius's systemdoes not allow for such creativeness: in his view
God creates all the positive content of the world out of Himself; the
nondivine aspect of the world proves to be so characterless that his
theory really must be regarded as a peculiar variety of pantheism. It is
not surprising, therefore, that it exhibits the main defects of pantheism:
(1) it is logically unfounded; (2) it cannot explain freedom; (3) it can-
not account for the source of evil.
As already pointed out, it is logically impossible to admit any, even
partial identity between God and the world, while maintaining that
God is the Divine Nothing. Father Sergius fails to see this because he
does not fully appreciate the peculiar nature of apophatic theology and
thinks of God as the Absolute (407). But ill truth, God is the Super-
ISO
FATHER. SR.GIUS BULGAKOV
absolute: He is not the Absolute as co-relative to the relative. There is
also another, positive, reason which leads Father Sergius to the view that
God and the world are partly identical. He believes that the Divine
nature as the Ens realissimum must be a positive unity of all, including
everything within itself, for otherwise-Le., if there existed any positive
nondivine content-God's nature would prove to be limited and im-
poverished. That idea is widely prevalent in philosophy in general, and
in Russian philosophy in particular: we find it in Soloviev, Karsavin..
t r a t t ~ : '\nd yet it is erroneous. As Spinoza pointed out long ago, limita-
tion is a m ~ t u a l relation between two objects of the same nature. But
God and the Divine life within the Trinity is something metalogically
different in comparison with the created world; hence, the fact that the
created world is outside of God does not in any way diminish the full-
ness of the Divine life.
The two other important defects of panentheism (as well as of
pantheism) are its inability to give a reasonable explanation of the
presence of evil in the world, and of the freedom of the created agents.
Evil is not merely a lack of the fullness of being, i.e., a relative nothing.
It has a certain peculiar content which represses other positive contents
and thus, in the last resort, leads to decreasing the fullness of Iife. No
doubt, evil is always a parasite of the good and is realized only through
utilizing the powers of goodness; but this very inability to do without
the good presupposes creative inventiveness on the part of the evil agents
and the fact that in their vital manifestations they are free from God
in spite of having been created by Him. The agents who have entered
upon the path of evil do really bring something new into the world if
only in the form of a new combination of the already existing world
elements, and that something new is not to be found in the Divine
being-which proves that created agents are capable of independent
creativeness. Father Sergius cannot explain evil and therefore unques-
tionably extradivine creative activity, and the creatures' freedom from
God, because in creation he finds nothing but the Sophia and the
nothing which becomes J.L'l) \tv. But the JA,Tt Ov cannot be a free anti-
divine agent. Christian experience clearly testifies that the beings who
enter upon the path of evil are not SOIne mysterious meons, but crea-
tures that assert their self and proudly, or at any rate egoistically op-
pose their self to God and the world. That fact alone proves that Ens
realissimum does not include everything and that there is existence not
identical with the Divine Sophia in its content. Father Sergius's system
is particularly lacking in any explanation of the nondivine aspect of the
world; we suddenly find him talking of the "dark image of Sophia"
FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV 251
(The Comforter, 234) and even of "the fallen Sophia" but it is
scarcely possible to give the name of Sophia to a fallen being.
Sergius, the Metropolitan and later the Patriarch of Moscow,
severely criticized Father Sergius Bulgakov's teaching and on the strength
of it the Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate pronounced his sophiology
to be CIa doctrine, alien to the Holy Orthodox Church of Christ" and
warned against it "all the Church's faithful servitors and children"
(see the book Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, ]9). 'When Father Sergius
replied to this criticism in a paper submitted by him to the
tan Eulogius in Paris, Vladimir Lossky wrote a book The About
Sophia in which he explains the Metropolitan Sergius's criticism, add-
ing his own considerations to it.
In criticizing BuIgakov's doctrine of the Divine Sophia as the
"eternal feminine" in God, the Metropolitan Sergius remarks, "in
order to be spiritual and all the more to be Divine, love, even if it be
feminine and passive love, must be conscious, i.e., belong to a Person"
(8). The Divine Sophia interpreted as God's ousia would thus be a
fourth hypostasis in God. The Metropolitan Sergius further objects to
distinguishing "within the simple essence of God two principles, mascu-
line and feminine" and also to Bulgakov's connecting "the Divine image
.in man precisely with the duality of the sexes. This is not far removed
from the deification of the sexual life such as we find in some of the
Gnostics" (9).
Equally weighty is the accusation that Father Sergius "lays special
stress on man's createdness as the cause of his fall, i.e., on the imperfec-
tion of the nature given him by the Creator" (16). Vladimir Lossky ex-
plains that this idea of Father Sergius arose from his teaching that the
creation of the world by God consists in "the mergence of Sophia with
nothing. The creation of the world becomes on that interpretation not
the making of something new and perfect in its createdness ("very
good"), but the warping of the already existing Divine world (Sophia),
its deterioration and imperfection, i.e., an evil" (The Dispute About
Sophia, 55).
The problems discussed by Father Bulgakov are among the most
complex and difficult problems in Christian metaphysics, Each of them
is open to a number of different solutions, and every solution is so
interconnected with numberless other problems that it cannot be final
but needs further elucidation, limitation or completion. That can only
be done if many persons are able calmly to discuss the subject. Disputes
about such matters can only be fruitful in an atmosphere of good will,
tolerance, and spiritual discipline that holds passions in check. Most
252 FATHER SERGIUS BULGAKOV
unfortunately, a calm discussion of the sophiological problem has been
made almost impossible by the Moscow Patriarchate and the Synod of
the Russian Church at Karlovtsi sharply and hastily condemning Father
S. Bulgakov's theories before they have been debated in philosophical
and theological literature.
Replying to the Metropolitan Sergius's criticism, Father S. Bulga-
kov said in his report to the Metropolitan Eulogius: UI solemnly declare
that as an Orthodox priest I profess all the true dogmas of Orthodoxy.
has nothing to do with the actual content of those
dogmas, blh. merely with their theological interpretation. It is my per-
sonal theological belief to which I have never ascribed the significance
of a generally binding church dogma" (51 f.),
Indeed, Father Sergius never opposes the dogmas of the Orthodox
Church. The criticisms made by his opponents, e.g., their contention
that his doctrine of the Divine Sophis brings in a fourth Hypostasis into
God's being, is a deduction from Father Sergius's teaching-a deduc-
tion which he never intended to make. Therefore, everyone who values
the freedom of theological thought must admit that Father Sergius's
doctrines might be criticized or definitely rejected by his opponents,
but could not be condemned by the Moscow patriarchate. The friendly
attitude to Father Sergius's activity on the part of his bishop, the Metro-
politan Eulogius, is therefore highly instructive. At Father Sergius's
burial the Metropolitan Eulogius spoke as follows: "Dear Father
Sergiust You were a Christian sage, you are a teacher of the Church in
the pure and lofty sense of the word. You were enlightened by the Holy
Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Reason, the Comforter, to
Whom you dedicated your learned work.
u 8
The work of every original ecclesiastical thinker calls forth bitter
disputes, and only after a certain lapse of time the positive and negative
aspects of his theories are sorted out in the life of the Church. The same
fate awaits the teaching of Father Sergius Bulgakov who will un-
doubtedly be recognized as one of the outstanding Russian theologians.
8. See L. A. Zander's booklet To the Memory of Father Sergius Bulgakov.
Chapter 16
N. BERDYAEV
Nicolay Alexandrovich Berdyaev, the best-known of modern Rus-
sian philosophers, was born in 1874 in the province of Kiev. He studied
at the Kiev University in the faculty of Law but did not graduate there,
for in 1898 he was arrested for taking part in the socialist movement. In
his youth he thought of combining marxism with neo-kantianism, but he
soon gave up both those theories, became interested in Vladimir Solo-
viev's philosophy and then began independently to work out a Chris-
tian world conception. A similar evolution took place in the case of
Sergey Nikolaevitch Bulgakov who in 1901 was professor of political
economy at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, in 1918 became a priest
and in 1925 was appointed professor of dogmatic theology at the Ortho-
dox Institute in Paris. In 1 9 0 ~ Berdyaev and Bulgakov came to Peters-
burg in order to found a new journal Voprosi Zhizni (Problems of Life).
They asked me, as ODe who was less compromised politically than the
others, to obtain permission in my name from the Government to pub-
lish the journal; I complied, but unfortunately the journal continued
for one year only. In 1922 the Soviet Government arrested more than a
hundred professors and writers accusing them of being in disagreement
with their ideology and exiled them from Russia. Among the philoso-
phers in that group were Berdyaev, Bulgakov, I. Ilyin, Lapshin, S. Frank,
Karsavin and myself. At first Berdyaev settled in Berlin and afterwards
moved to Paris where he worked chiefly at the Y.M.C.A. From 1926 till
the end of 1 9 ~ 9 he was the editor of the religious and philosophical
journal Put. Nicolay Alexandrovich died suddenly, while working at
his writing table, on March 24, 1948.
Berdyaev wrote a great many books and articles. Most of them have
been translated into many languages. I will mention only some of the
most important of his books: Subjectivism and Idealism in Social Philoso-
phy: A Critical Study of N. K. Mihailovsky, 1900; Sub specie aeternitatis,
1907; The New Religious Consciousness and Society, 1907; The Philoso-
ph, 01 Freedom, 1911; The Meaning 01 CreaJiveness, 1916; Dostoevsky's
255
2M
N. BERDYAEV
World Conception, The Philosophy of Inequality, The
Meaning of History, 1923; New Medievalism, 1924; The Philosophy 01
the Free Spirit: Christian Problematics and Apologetics, 2 vols., 1929;
The Destiny of Man, an Essay in Paradoxical Ethics, 1931; The Self and
the World of Objects, 1934; Spirit and Reality, the Foundations of the
Divinely Human Reality, 1937; Man's Slavery and Freedom, an Essay
in Personalistic Philosophy, 1939; The Russian Idea: The Main Prob-
lems of the Russian Thought of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
1946; An Essay in Eschatological Metaphysics, 1947.
principal translated works are the following: Christianity
and Class War, Sheed and Ward, 1933; The Bourgeois Mind and Other
Essays, Sheed and Ward, 1934; Dostoevsky, Sheed and Ward 1934; Free-
dom and the Spirit, G. Bles, London 1935; The Meaning of History, G.
HIes 1936; New Medievalism; Spirit and Reality} G. Bles 1934; Solitude
and Society, G. Bles 1938; K. Leontieo, G. Bles 1940; A. Khomiakou;
Slavery and Freedom, Scribner's Sons 1944; The Russian Idea; An Essay
in Eschatological Metaphysics; Autobiography. V.M.e.A. Press, Paris
1949 (available in English). O. F. Clarke, Introduction to Berdqaeu,
Matthew Spinka, Nicolas Berdyaev: Captive of Freedom, West-
minster Press, Philadelphia 1950.
According to Berdyaev, the fundamental opposition with which
we should start in formulating a theory about the world is that between
spirit and nature, and not between the psychical and the physical. Spirit
is the subject, life, freedom, fire, creative activity; nature is the object,
thing, necessity, determinateness, passive endurance, immobility. To
the realm of nature belongs all that is objective and substantial (by
substance Berdyaev understands unchanging and self-contained being).
multiple and divided in time and in space; not only matter but mental
life on that view belongs to the realm of nature. The realm of spirit is
of a different character: in it division is overcome by love; hence, spirit
is neither an objective nor a subjective reality (Philosophy of the Free
Spirit, chap. I). Knowledge about the spirit is attained not through
concepts of reason or logical thought but through living experience. All
philosophical systems not based upon spiritual experience are natu-
ralistic; they are expressions of lifeless nature.
God is a spirit. He is really present in the life of the saints, the
mystics, men of high spiritual life, and in man's creative activity. Those
who have had spiritual experience need no rational proofs of God's
existence. In Its deepest essence the Deity is irrational and superrational:
attempts to express it through concepts are inevitably antinomic; i.e.,
the truth about God has to be expressed in pairs of judgments that are
contradictory to each other, The Deity transcends the natural world and
N. BERDYAEV 255
can only reveal Itself symbolically. Symbols in religious philosophy are
necessarily connected with myths, such as the myth of Prometheus, of
the Fall, of redemption and the Redeemer. This interpretation of the
symbolism of religious truths must not be confounded with -modernism
according to which symbols are merely subjective expressions of the
inmost reality. In Berdyaev's view symbols are the actual natural
reality taken in connection with its supernatural significance. There-
fore, the birth of the God-man from the Virgin Mary, His life in
Palestine and His death on the cross are actual historical facts ..
the same time they are symbols. Thus. Berdyaev's is not
Docetism: it does not lead to iconoclasm or undermine Christianity. It
is a real symbolism. He calls such events as the birth of the God-man
from the Virgin Mary and His death on the cross, "symbols" because
they are an expression in the earthly reality of relations between spirit
and the nonspiritual principle which subsist in a still deeper and more
primary form in the domain of the Divine life itself (Freedom and the
Spirit, chap. II).
According to Berdyaev, man's spiritual being is closely connected
with the Divine spirituality, and he opposes his view to dualistic theism
and to pantheism, regarding both those theories as the outcome of a
naturalistic religious philosophy. His conception of the relation between
God and the world can be gathered from his doctrine of freedom.
Berdyaev distinguishes three kinds of freedom: primary irrational
freedom, i.e., arbitrariness; rational freedom, i.e., the fulfillment of
moral duty; and finally, freedom permeated by the love of God. Man's
irrational freedom is rooted in the "nothing" out of which God created
the world. That "nothing" is not emptiness; it is a primary principle
prior to God and the world, containing no differentiation, i.e., no
division into a number of definite elements. Berdyaev borrowed this
conception from Jacob Boehme (German mystical philosopher, 1575-
1624) who designated this primary principle by the term Ungrund
(the groundless, the abyss). In Berdyaev's opinion Boehme's Ungrund
coincides with the conception of the "Divine Nothing" in the negative
theology of Dionysius the Areopagite and with the teaching of Meister
Eckhardt (1260-1327) who distinguished between Gottheit and Gott,
Godhead and Cod.'
1. The Christian teaching about God falls into two parts: the negative (apothatic)
and the positive (cataphatic) theology. In negative theology, based upon the works
of Dionysius the Areopagite, all determinations borrowed from the realm of cosmic
being are said to be inapplicable to God: God is not a person, is not reason, is not a
being, etc. In that sense God the "Divine Nothing." But that UNothing" is above
all determinations: God is superpersonal, superexistept, and so OD. Positive theology
saya of God that He is a Person, that He is Love, Spirit, and.so on. The difficult tuk
236 N. BEllDYAEV
Berdyaev says: "Out of the Divine Nothing, or of the Ungruntl,
the Holy Trinity, God the Creator is born." The creation of the world
by God the Creator is a secondary act. "From this point of view it may
be said that freedom is not created by God: it is rooted in the Nothing,
in the Ungrund from all eternity. The opposition between God the
Creator and freedom is secondary: in the primeval mystery of the
Divine Nothing this opposition is transcended, for both God and free-
dom are manifested out of the Ungrund. God the Creator cannot be
t e ~ ~ l ? l e for freedom which gave rise to evil. Man is the child of God
and the Ch\tld of freedom-of nothing. of non..being, 'to .....~ Ov. Meonic
freedom consented to God's act of creation; non-being freely accepted
being" (The Destiny of Man, 34). Hence it follows that God has no
power over freedom which is not created by Him: "God the Creator is
all-powerful over being, over the created world, but He has no power
over non-being, over the uncreated freedom" (ibid.). This freedom is
prior to good and evil, it conditions the possibility of both good and
evil. According to Berdyaev, the actions of a being possessing free will
cannot be foreseen even by God, since they are entirely free.
Berdyaev denies God's omnipotence and omniscience and main-
tains that He does not create the cosmic entities' will, which springs
from the Ungtund, but merely helps that will to become good; he is
led to that conclusion by his conviction that freedom cannot be created
and that if it were, God would be responsible for cosmic evil. A theodicy
would then be impossible, Berdyaev thinks.
Evil arises when the irrational freedom leads to the violation of the
Divine hierarchy of being and to separation from God owing to the
pride of the spirit desiring to put itself in the place of God. This results
in disintegration, in material and natural being, and in slavery instead
of freedom. But in the last resort, the origin of evil remains the greatest
and most inexplicable mystery (An Essay on Eschatological Afetaphysics,
127).
. The second freedom, that is, the rational freedom which consists
in submission to the moral law, leads to compulsory virtue. i.e., again
to slavery. The way out of this tragedy can only be tragic and super-
natural: "The myth of the Fall tells of this powerlessness of the Creator
to avert the evil resulting from freedom which He has not created.
Then comes God's second act in relation to the world and to man: God
appears not in the aspect of Creator but of Redeemer and Saviour, in
for the Christian teaching is to show that the negative and the positive theology are
not contradictory but, strictly speaking, complementary to each other. Thus. God,
being One in essence is a Trinity of Persons. Hence it is dear that the conception of
personality as applied to God is different from the conception of a created personality
and is used in theology simply as an "analogy."
N. 8ER.DYAEV
237
the aspect of the suffering God Who takes upon Himself the sins of the
world. God in the aspect of God the Son descends into the abyss, into
the Ungrund, into the depths of freedom out of which springs evil as
well as every kind of good." God the Sort "manifests Himself not in
power but in sacrifice. The Divine sacrifice, the Divine self-crucification
must conquer the evil meonic freedom by enlightening it from within,
without forcing it, without depriving the created world of freedom"
(The Destiny of Man,
This doctrine, Berdyaev says, is not pantheism. "Pantheism JOi!S
contain some truth, and that is the truth of negative But the
falsity of pantheism lies in rationalizing the mystery and translating the
truth of negative theology into the language of the positive" (The
Destiny of Man, S5).
Berdyaev is particularly concerned with the problem of personality.
Personality, he says, is a spiritual and not a natural category; it is not
a part of any whole; it is not a part of society-on the contrary, society
is only a part or an aspect of personality. Nor is it a part of the cosmos:
on the contrary, the cosmos is a part of man's personality. Personality
is not a substance, it is a creative act, it is unchangeable in the process
of change. In personality the whole is prior to the parts. Being a spirit,
personality is not self-sufficient, not egocentric, it passes into something
other than itself, into "thou" and realizes a universal content which is
concrete and different from abstract universals. The unconscious ele-
mental ground of human personality is cosmic and- tellurgic. The
realization of personality means the ascent from the subconscious,
through the conscious, to the superconscious. The human body as an
eternal aspect of personality is a "form" and not merely a physico..
chemical entity, and it must be subordinated to the spirit. Bodily death
is necessary for the realization of the fullness of life; that fullness pre-
supposes resurrection in a perfect body. Sex means bi-section: an inte-
grated personality has no sex, it is androgynous. Man's creative activity
is complementary to the Divine life; hence it has a theogonic and not
merely an anthropological significance. There is eternal humanity in
the Deity and that implies that there also is Divinity in man.s
Man's essential nature is distorted because he fell away from God;
beings separated from God and from one another have no immediate
experience of spiritual life; they sutler from the disease of isolation.
Instead of the immediate experience which reveals the life of the sub-
ject, of the existential self, distorted reason develops a way of cognizing
the world in an objectified form. Man exteriorizes his subjective sensa-
2. These ideas are to be found in the article "The Problem of )(an, Put .. No. 50,
12-26. 19!6.
258
N. BERDYAEV
tions, projects them and builds out of them objects which stand over
against him, form a system of external reality, forcibly act upon him
and enslave him. The world system created by such objectivization is
nature as opposed to spirit; it is the world of appearances, of phenomena,
while the true, fundamental reality is spirit, the world of noumena, i.e.,
a world cognizable in and through immediate spiritual experience and
not through objectivizarion.s
Berdyaev takes it to be a great merit of Kant's to have drawn a
between the phenomenal and the noumenal world, but
was mistaken in regarding the noumenal world as un-
knowable: the defect of his philosophy, in Berdyaev's view, is that he
failed to explain why man makes use of knowledge in its objectified
form. According to Berdyaev this form of knowledge arose as a conse-
quence of the sin of falling away from God which leads also to a mutual
severance between persons.
Does nature consisting of objects exist in man's mind only, as Kant
thought, or is it a special cosmic realm generated by sin? Berdyaev says
"the subject is created by God, the object is created by the subject" (An
Essay on Eschatological Metaphysics). This does not, however, by any
means imply that he, like Kant, regards nature studied by the natural
sciences as merely a system of our presentations. To understand Ber-
dyaev's position it is essential to remember that in his view sin leads
not merely to objectivization through cognition but actually creates
nature as a lower realm of being. "Evil gives rise to a world bound by
necessity, in which everything is subject to causal relations" (Spirit
and Reality). "If the world is in a fallen state, this is not the fault of
the mode of cognizing it-as L. Shestov maintained, for instance-the
fault lies in the depths of the world's existence. This can be best pic.
tured as a process of splitting up, division and alienation which noume-
nal subjects undergo. It is a mistake to think that objectivization takes
place in the cognitive sphere only: in the first instance it takes place
in reality itself. It is produced by the subject not only as a knower but
as a living being. The fall into the objective world took place in the
primary life itself. But as a result of this we regard as real only that
which is secondary, rationalized, objectified, and doubt the reality of
the primary, the not..objectified and not-rationalized" (An Essay on
Eschatological Metaphysics, 77). Nature as a "system of relations be-
tween objects" has the following characteristics: (1) the object is alien
to the subject; (2) the personal, the unique and individual is submerged
by the general, the impersonally-universal: (3) necessity, determination
5. It is not correct to transcribe the word as nurnet,: in Greek it is spelled
woU,uvov. 10 that the 0 not be omitted.
N. BERDYAEV
259
from without is predominant, freedom is suppressed and hidden; (4)
life adapts itself to mass movements in the world and in history, and
to. the average men: man and his opinions are socialized and that
destroys originality. In this world of objects life is lived in a time which
is divided into the past and the future, and that leads to death. Instead
of "existence" as a unique and individual creative activity of the spirit,
we find in nature mere "being" determined by laws. The use of general
ideas about this uniformly recurrent being serves as a means of com-
munication between the isolated selves which create social institutions;
but in this sociality, subordinated to conventional rules, 3le subject
remains solitary. Fortunately, however, in his "existential depths" man
still preserves the communion "with the spiritual world and the whole
cosmos" ibid., 61). Man is a "dual entity, living both in the phe-
nomenal and the noumenal world" (ibid., 79). Hence "the noumena can
break through into the phenomena, the invisible world into the visible,
the world of freedom into the world of necessity" (ibid., 67). That vic-
tory of spirit over nature is achieved through sympathy and love over-
coming isolation by the communion of the "I" and "thou" in the
immediate spiritual experience which is of the nature of intuition and
not of objectivization, "This knowledge is 'the conjugal' union of
personalities based upon true love" (Solitude and Society, 118). There
can be no marriage between universals, between "objects": marriage
is only possible in respect of "I" and "thou" (ibid., 109). Spiritual
knowledge is the meeting between two subjects in the "mystical experi-
ence in which "all is in me and I am in all" (ibid., 115, 148). Berdyaev
designates such direct spiritual communion by the term "communalty."
It creates unity on the basis of love. Love is a free manifestation of the
spirit. Hence it is a communal, soborny unity, to use that term in the
sense Riven to it by Khomiakov. "The free spirit is communal, and not
individualistically isolated" (An Essay on Eschatological Metaphysics,
21).
Regeneration of the fallen man means his deliverance from nature
as created by the objectifying process: it means victory over servitude
and death, the realization of personality as a spirit, as an existence
which cannot be an object and cannot be expressed by general ideas.
Therefore Berdyaev call: his philosophy existential or personalistic.
But he thinks that true personalism is to be found not in Heidegger
or Jaspers but in St. Augustine who put into the foreground the con-
ception of the "subject."
The society, the nation, the state are not personalities; man as a
person has a higher value than they. Hence it is man's right and duty
to defend his spiritual freedom against the state and society. In the life
240 N. BERDYAEV
of the state, the nation and society we often find a dark, demoniacal
force which seeks to subordinate man's personality and make it merely
a tool for its own ends (Solitude and Society, 177). In social life man's
conscience is distorted by the process of objectivization and by con-
ventional rules. The pure, original conscience can only manifest itself
in and through personality; everything must be submitted to the
judgment of that "existential" conscience, unspoiled by objectivization.
In his ethics Berdyaev struggles against the imperfect good de-
velcped in the social life on the basis of objectivization, He expounds it
in his boou The Destiny of Man which he calls "an essay in paradoxical
ethics." As an epigraph to this remarkable book Berdyaev chose Gogol's
saying "It is sad not to see any good in goodness." The whole of
Berdyaev's ethics boldly reveals the sad truth that "there is very little
good in goodness, and this is why hell is being prepared on all sides"
(The Destiny of Man, 358). The fundamental paradox of his ethics is
that the very distinction between good and evil is, according to him, a
consequence of the Fall which is "a manifestation and trial of man's
freedom, of man's creative vocation" (ibid., 362). The experience of
good and evil arises when irrational freedom leads to severance from
God: "The world proceeds from an original absence of discrimination
between good and evil to a sharp distinction between them and then,
enriched by that experience, ends by not distinguishing them any more"
(ibid., 47); it returns to God and His Kingdom which lies beyond good
and evil (ibid., 371). The paradox is this: "It is bad that the distinction
between good and evil has arisen, but it is good to make the distinction,
once it has arisen; it is bad to have gone through the experience of
evil, but it is good to know good and evil as a result of that experi-
ence" (ibid., 49).
Berdyaev gives the name of "ethics of law" to ethics which takes
cognizance only of the middle part of the course, l.e., only of the distinc-
tion between good and evil. In analyzing legalistic ethics and legalistic
Christianity Berdyaev shows that they are adapted to the requirements
of social everyday life and therefore are full of conventions and lead
to hypocrisy and tyranny. He proposes to evaluate the rules of this
ordinary morality from the point of view of "pure conscience" and not
of man's temporary needs. He wants to create a "Critique of pure
Conscience" similar to Kant's "Critique of pure Reason." Berdyaev
makes use of the Freudian discoveries to show up the sadistic elements
in legalism, and the impure subconscious sources of the rigorous de-
mands made by many champions of "the good;" for instance, he traces
all fanaticism, all concern for the "far off" at the expense of the "neigh-
bor,' to a lack of real love, namely of the love for the concrete indi-
N. BERDYAEV 241
vidual person and to replacing it by a love of abstract theories, pro-
grammes, etc., backed up by the pride of their authors and champions.
Berdyaev does not by any means propose to cancel the ethics of law
or the legal forms of social life. He merely demands tolerance in the
struggle with evil and points to a higher stage of moral consciousness
than the ethics of law. That higher stage is expressed by the ethics of
redemption and the love of God; it is based upon the descent of the
God-man into the world and His acceptance of suffering out of love
for the fallen. Berdyaev pictures this descent of God as the tragedy o ~
God's love for all creatures. As already mentioned, he mair-eains that
in so far as the world contains irrational freedom, it is not created by
God, but is rooted in the Ungrund, a potency which is independent of
God and is the basis both of God and of the world. In God this ir..
rational freedom is overcome from all eternity; in the world it is not
overcome; it plunges the world into evil and makes its history a tragedy.
Irrational cosmic freedom is not subject to God. Hence God's love for
the creature inevitably acquires a tragic character: the Son of God can
only help the world by personally entering the world tragedy so as to
realize from within the world the unity of love and freedom which leads
to the world's transfiguration and deification. This aspect of God's
relation to the world is specially emphasized in Berdyaev's book Freedom
and the Spirit: the victory of the Logos over darkness, the "nothing" is
only possible if the Divine life be a tragedy (I, 240). "God Himself longs
to suffer with the world" (251). The coming of Christ and redemption
are "a continuation of the creation of the world, the eighth day of
creation, a cosmogonic and anthropogonic process" (254). Transfigura-
tion and deification are only possible through ascent to the third kind
of freedom penetrated by the love for God. Hence it is clear that they
cannot be achieved compulsorily: they presuppose man's free love of
God. Hence Christianity is the religion of freedom. In all his works
Berdyaev fervently and insistently defends man's freedom in matters of
faith. Chapters VI-X of Freedom and the Spirit are specially devoted to
the subject of freedom and free creativeness which God expects
of man as His friend. The Church, Berdyaev says, must give a re-
ligious sanction not only to the holiness that seeks personal salvation,
but also to the genius of poets, artists, philosophers, scientists, social
reformers who consecrate themselves to creativeness in God's name (230).
"In the salvation of the soul man is still thinking of himself" (64), but
creativeness in its inner meaning implies thinking of God, of truth, of
beauty, of the higher life of the spirit. In his book The Destiny of Man
Berdyaev repeats that not only the ethics of redemption, but also the
ethics of creativeness is a way to the Kingdom, of God.
242 N. BERDYAEV
Social life, Berdyaev maintains, is an organization based to a
greater extent upon falsehood than upon truth. Pure truth is often not
safe but destructive; it acts as an explosive and leads to judgment being
passed on the world, and to the endof the world. Pure truth is existen..
tial; in social life, we use objectivized knowledge which arrives at
truth which is no longer existential, but is adapted to the needs of
millions of men (Freedom and the Spirit, 57). In the state and in the
church as a social institution we often find not the existential spiritual
xeality but conventional symbols: "Titles such as Tsar, General, Pope,
metropohtan, bishop are all symbols. All hierarchical grades are
symbols. In contradistinction to them we have such realities as saint,
prophet, creative genius, social reformer. Thus the hierarchy of human
qualities is real" iibid., 64).
The Kingdom of God is permeated with love Ior all creatures,
both holy and sinful. "The morality of the transcendent good does not
by any means imply indifference to good and evil or toleration of evil.
It demands more and not less;" it aims at "enlightening and liberating
the wicked" (The Destiny of Man, 372). Hence, true moral conscious-
ness cannot rest content while there exist wicked souls suffering the
torments of hell. "Moral consciousness began with God's question: 'Cain,
where is thy brother Abel?' It will end with another question on the
part of God: 'Abel, where is thy brother Cain?' " (ibid., 351). "Paradise
is possible for me if there is no everlasting hell for a single being that
has ever lived. One cannot be saved singly, in isolation. Salvation can
only be a communal, universal deliverance from torments" (An Essay
on Eschatological Metaphysics, 205). Berdyaev is convinced that ways
of redeeming evil and conquering hell can be found and believes in
universal salvation, apocatastasis. He regards the development of
creative activity as one of the best ways to combining freedom and love.
In Freedom and the Spirit there is a chapter called "Theosophy
and Gnosis" in which Berdyaev subjects to a scathing criticism modern
"theosophy." He points out that in theosophy there is no God, but only
the divine, no freedom, no understanding of evil; it is a species of
naturalistic evolutionism. It attracts people by its fictitious gnosis, by
its claim to the knowledge of the Divine world. The Church must op-
pose to it the real gnosis and free itself from antignosticism which has
in a sense become identical with agnosticism. With regard to ancient
gnosticism the Church feared that it was allied to magic, but the
modern man who has passed through all kinds of temptations can no
longer be protected against them by artificial barriers. "The method of
protecting these little ones from temptation has been grossly abused in
N. BEkDYAEV 245
the history of Christendom,' says Berdyaev, as he calls for free creative
development of the human spirit in the name of God.
Berdyaev's social theories are closely connected with his religious
philosophy. Many of his works deal with the philosophy of history or
with the philosophical aspect of political problems-e.g., The Meaning
of History, The Philosophy of Inequality and New Medievalism. The
historical process, according to Berdyaev, consists in the struggle of
good against irrational freedom and is "a drama of love and freedom
unfolding itself between God and His other self, which He loves an4
for whose reciprocal love He thirsts" (The Meaning of H1ttOry, 52).
"Messianism is the fundamental theme of history-true or false, open
or secret messianism" (An Essay on Eschatological Metaphysics, 174).
The credit for discovering this truth belongs to the Jewish nation.
"Three forces operate in world history: God, fate, and human freedom.
That is why history is so complex. Fate turns man's personality into the
playground of the irrational forces of history. At certain periods of
their history nations are particularly subject to the power of fate;
human freedom is less active and man feels forsaken by God. That is
very noticeable in the fate of the Russian people, and in the fate of the
German people. Christianity recognizes that fate can be overcome-but
it can only be overcome through Christ."
When irrational freedom gains the upper hand, reality begins to
disintegrate and revert to the primeval chaos. This is depicted with the
greatest vividness by Dostoevsky, especially in his novel The Possessed
(see Berdyaev's Dostoevsky's World Conception, one of the best things
he wrote). In social life revolution is an extreme form of the return to
chaos. Berdyaev's works contain many valuable ideas about the nature
of revclution and the character of its leaders. "Revolutions," he says,
"are preceded by a process of disintegration, a decline of faith, the loss
by the people of a unifying spiritual center of life. As a result of it the
people lose their spiritual liberty, become possessed by the devil;" the
leading part among them is played by the extreme elements, Jacobins,
Bolsheviks, Olen who imagine themselves to be free creators of a new
future, but in truth are passive "mediums of formless elements; they
are really turned not to the future but to the past, for they are slaves of
the past, chained to it by malice, envy and revenge" (Philosophy of
Inequality). Hence, revolutions can do nothing but destroy; they are
never creative. Creativeness begins only in the periods of reaction that
come after a revolution: the new forms of life for which the people
had been prepared by their past then come to be realized. But even the
creative epochs of history have never achieved the ends men had set
N. BER.DYAEV
before themselves. "Not one single project elaborated within the histori-
cal process has ever proved successful" (The Meaning of History, 257).
In the Middle Ages the compulsory Catholic and Byzantian theocracy
was a failure. True, it is to the credit of that period that it hardened
man's will by the discipline of the monastery and of chivalry; thanks to
the medieval Christianity man rose above nature; his bond with the
inner life of nature was severed: "The great Pan was dead" for him
and man came to look upon nature as a dead mechanism. But he
severed himself not only from nature: at the period of the Renaissance
and of humanism he also fell away from God. The watchword of our
own time is "the liberation of man's creative powers;" the center of
gravity is transferred from the Divine depths to the purely human
creativeness which seeks to perfect life by subduing nature without
God's gracious help. Regarding nature as a dead mechanism, modern
man has worked out a positivistic science and technics which interpose
machinery between man and nature. The power of machine helps man
in his struggle with nature but at the same time it disintegrates him: he
begins to lose his individual image, "is depersonalized and submits to
the artificial machine-made nature which he himself lias called into
being." Thus the epoch of extreme individualism ends by the loss of
individuality; nonreligious humanism leads to the dehumanization of
man. Such an end was to be expected, because man who is severed from
the higher principle, who has ceased to strive for the realization 01 zhe
image of God in himself, is doomed to be the slave of the lower elements.
New forms of slavery are threatening man; they are t:he result of
socialism which replaces true "togetherness" (sobornost) based llPOl1
love and the religious transfiguration of the creature, by the false,
based upon the compulsory service of the individual to society for
the sake of satisfying its material needs. It is significant that modern
socialism has been founded by a Jew, Marx, a representative of the
nation which "passionately demanded the fulfillment of truth and
happiness on earth" and rejected the true Messiah because he came in
the form of a servant and not as an earthly king-liberator. The Jews
are still expecting paradise on earth and are wholly turned to the future;
hence, they are ready to declare war on all historical and sacred tradi-
tions, on all that has been handed down through the ages from one
generation to another; a Jew easily becomes a revolutionary and a
socialist (The Meaning of History, 199).
It must not be. imagined, however, that Berdyaev is an anti-Semite.
Like Vladimir Soloviev, he thinks very highly of the Jewish people.
There is no trace of anti-Semitism or of undue fear of socialism in his
teaching. He readily points out the valuable aspects of socialism. He
N.BERDYAEV 245
champions a special variety of it which he calls personalistic and main-
tains that socialization of the economic life can only be useful if "the
supreme value of the human personality and its right to attain the
fullness of life be recognized" C'The Problem of Man," l.c.). But the
efforts to realize socialism will transform it "into something quite dif-
ferent from the socialist ideal." Socialism will reveal fresh discords in
the human life. It will never achieve the liberation of human labor
which Marx sought to achieve by binding labor, it will never give man
wealth or establish equality, but will merely create new enmity between
men, new separateness, and new, unheard of, forms of oppre;sion (The
Meaning of History). The elimination of hunger and destitution "does
not solve the spiritual problem;" man will be "faced as before with the
mystery of death, of eternity,' of love, knowledge and creativeness. In-
deed it may be said that when the social life is more rationally organized,
the tragic element in life-the tragic conflict between the individual
and society, the person and the cosmos, personality and death, time and
eternity-will grow in intensity" (Spirit and Reality).
Berdyaev points out, however, much in the same way as"Bulgakov,
that it is precisely the historical failures which lead to true achieve-
m e n t ~ : the failures rouse the will to a religious transformation of life
(The Meaning of History, chap. X), to transferring the center of
gravity from the disrupted earthly time to the eternal time in the
Divine life. In that Divine life universal resurrection is achieved-the
necessary condition of solving the moral contradictions of the earthly
life. Even man's economic activity must undergo a profound change:
basing itself on "the love for nature's inner being" it must become a
force that leads to resurrection, whereas the modern technics remain
in the realm of death (Philosophy of Inequality). "The only kingdom
which can be successful is the Kingdom of God" (An Essay on Eschato-
logical Metaphysics). That kingdom is not in the historical, but in the
existential time. The difference between these two kinds of time is this:
the historical time "may be symbolized by a line stretching forward to
the future, to the new," but in the existential time "there is no distinc-
tion between past and future, beginning and end." Hence life in the
Kingdom of God is not a part of history, but is metahistorical, The
meaning of history lies "beyond the confines of history," in meta-
history. It must not be imagined, however, that history and metahistory
are entirely separate: "Metahistory is continually present as the back-
ground of history. That which is metahistorical breaks up both the
cosmic endless sequence of events and the determinism of the historical
process: it disrupts objectivization. Thus, the coming of Jesus Christ is
pre-eminently a metahistorical event; it tosk place in the existential
248 N.BEIlDYAEV
time" (ibid.). In the same way all true creative activity on the part of
man "takes place in the existential time" and is "divinely human" (ibid.).
But the realization of the creative impulse in history-i.e., in our ob-
jectified world-is always imperfect and always ends in tragic failure.
"World history knows the most terrible creative failure-the failure of
Christianity, of Christ's work in the world. The history of Christendom
has been but too often a crucifixion of Christ." It must not be supposed.
however, that human creativeness, distorted by objectivization, is com-
pletely wasted. "The Resurrection as the end which includes all indi-
vidual creative achievements" imparts meaning both to the personal
and to the historical existence. That end is the metahistory of the King-
dom of God in which objectivization is overcome, and the opposition
between subject and object holds no longer. In our world "the sun is
outside of me" and that "indicates my fallen condition" but in the
transfigured world "it must be within me and radiate from me" (ibid.).
A personality capable of worshiping the Holy and serving it follows
the path that leads to the perfection of the Kingdom of God. It de-
velops within a community containing an infinite multiplicity of beings,
sharply distinguished from one another in quality and hierarchically
interrelated. Berdyaev devotes a whole book, The Philosophy of In-
equality, to proving that the egalitarian strivings of democracy, social-
ism, internationalism, etc., lead to the destruction of personality and
are prompted by the spirit of non-being, of envy, resentment and malice.
All the distortions of personality that take place in our fallen
world are overcome through a long process of development in many
world aeons. "If we refuse to accept the slavish and terroristic doctrine
of everlasting damnation, we must admit the pre-existence of souls on
another plane before their earthly birth and their passing through other
planes after death. The theory of reincarnation on one plane is in-
compatible with the wholeness of personality and the unchangeability
of the very idea of man, and is untenable; but the idea of reincarnation
on many planes, which makes man's destiny dependent upon his ex...
istence on planesdifferent from that of the objective phenomenal world,
may be accepted. Leibnitz rightly spoke of metamorphosis and not of
metempsychosis" (ibid.). Final liberation from the distortion of the
world of objects will only be reached "at the paracletic aeon and will
be the revelation of the Spirit" (ibid.).
Berdyaev wrote often and at length about Russia. He says that "as
intended by God, Russia is the great integral unity of East and West,
but in its actual, empirical condition it is an unsuccessful mixture of
East and West." He traces the origin of Russia's ills to the wrong cor-
relation in it of the masculine and the feminine principles. At a certain
N. BERDYAEV 247
stage of national development among the Western peoples, in France,
England and Germany "the manly spirit rose up and imposed form
upon the elemental forces of the people organically and from within"
(Philosophy of Inequality). There was no such process in Russia, and
even the Orthodox religion failed to provide that discipline of the
spirit which Catholicism with its firm and clear-cut lines built up in
the West. "The Russian soul remained unbounded, it was not conscious
of any limits and spread itself out indefinitely. It demands all or noth-
ing, its mood is either apocalyptic or nihilistic and it is therefore in,
capable of building up the half-way kingdom of culture." In atcordance
with these national characteristics the Russian thought, too, is directed
chiefly "towards the eschatological problem of the end, is apocalyptically
colored" and penetrated by a sense of the impending catastrophe (this
phrase was originally used by Ern and Prince E. T'rubetskoy), The
eschatological bent of the Russian mind and its lack of interest for
the "half-way kingdom of culture" is fully expounded in Berdyaev's
book The Russian Idea. He particularly has in mind Dostoevsky,
Vladimir Soloviev, K. Leontyev, N. Feodorov, and Prince E. Trubetskoy.
Berdyaev himself is one of the most striking representatives of this trend
of the Russian thought.
Even Christian-minded philosophers in reflecting on the significance
of their own nation in the historical process fall into the temptation of
naturalism, in the sense of attaching too high a value to the empirical
national character. In his book on A. S. Kliomiakou Berdyaev notes this
defect among the Slavophils in so far as they have a tendency to admire
the Russian people's natural characteristics and the historical forms of
their national life. Modern Russian philosophers are on their guard
against this tendency.
Berdyaev belongs to the group of thinkers who strive to develop a
Christian world conception and whose work is the most original expres-
sion of Russian philosophical thought. It was begun more than a
hundred years ago, with the founders of the Slavophil movement Ivan
Kireyevsky and Khomiakov, but came into its own much later, ~ r
the influence of Vladimir Soloviev. A whole galaxy of religious philoso-
phers appeared after Soloviev. Among them are Prince S. N. Trubetskoy,
Prince E. N. Trubetskoy, N. Feodorov, Father Pavel Florensky, Father
Sergius Bulgakov, Ern, Berdyaev, Karsavin, S. L. Frank, S. A. Alexeyev
(Askoldov), I. A. Ilyin, Father Vassili Zenkovsky, Father G. Florovsky,
Vysheslavtsev, Arsenyev, Novgorodtsev, Spektorsky. Some of those phi-
losophers, for instance Father P. Florensky, Father S. Bulgakov, Ber-
dyaev, Karsavin, Frank, have worked out entire systems of Christian
philosophy, Some of their ideas are not in .strict conformity with the
248 N. BERDYAEV
traditional doctrines of the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches; more-
over, it may be said with regard to some of their theories that they
disagree with the data of religious experience and intellectual intuition,
and should therefore be rejected in the course of further development of
the Christian world conception. One of such theories is Berdyaev's
teaching about the Ungrund as a primordial principle giving rise on
the one hand to God and on the other to the will of the cosmic entities.
Berdyaev is wrong in thinking that his Ungrund is identical with
the "Divine Nothing" of Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Noth-
ing in eVery respect transcends all possible determinations and is so
perfect that it cannot be adequately expressed by means of our con-
ceptions. When the Areopagite passes to the positive theology-for in-
stance, when he interprets the Supreme principle as personal and at the
same time superpersonal-he does not rationalize it, but still remains
true to the negative theology: thus, if the one God is tripersonal, the
word "person" can only designate here something that is analogous to
the idea of a created personality, but not identical with it. Mystical ex-
perience, so admirably described in Otto's book Das Heilige, wholly
confirms Dionysius the Areopagite's teaching of the "Divine Nothing"
as a primordial and absolutely perfect principle.
Neither mystical experience nor intellectual intuition find any
evidence of a "nothing" existing independently of God and utilized by
Him for the creation of the world. Philosophers and theologians
wrongly interpret the statement that "God created the world out of
nothing" by supposing that some kind of "nothing" served as material
out of which God created the world. That statement has a very simple
and at the same time a much more significant meaning: God creates the
world without borrowing any material either from within Himself or
(rom without; He creates cosmic entities as something ontologically
entirely new as compared with Him, The will of the created beings is
also His creation. It is free because in creating a personality God en-
dows it with a superqualitative creative force, giving it no empirical
character whatever-neither goodness, nor wickedness, neither courage
nor cowardice, and so on. Each personality freely develops its own
empirical character, or its essence (essentia) and transcends it in the
sense that it remains capable of freely working it out afresh. Having
created our will as free, God never forces it, because freedom is a neces-
sary condition of the attainment of perfect goodness by the person, but
at the same time of course it conditions the possibility of evil.
Freedom of the creatures' will is quite compatible with Divine
omniscience. God is a supertemporal being. He therefore is not sepa-
rated from the future by (the relation of precedence; He cognizes the
N. BERDYAEV 249
future as well as the present and the past not by means of inference but
through contemplation or direct perception. This was pointed out as
early as the sixth century A.D. by Boethius,
During the many years of our friendly intercourse, Berdyaev and I
disputed over questions of epistemology. Berdyaev affirms that there are
two kinds of knowledge: intuition with regard to spiritual reality and
objectivization with regard to nature. I maintain, on the contrary, that
both the higher and the lower realms of being are known through in-
tuition, i.e., through direct contemplation (see e.g., my booJe. on The
Sensuous, the Intellectual and the Mystical Intuition).
As already pointed out, Berdyaev's doctrine of the Ungrund and of
the creatures' will not being created by God, cannot be accepted as a
part of a Christian philosophy. But this by no means implies that the
rest of his system must be rejected also; the main content of it is un-
affected. The essential theme of Christian philosophy is the doctrine of
the absolute good, realizable only in the Kingdom of God, and of the
imperfections of our sinful world. Berdyaev's greatest merit lies in
showing in a highly original way "how little good there isin our good-
ness," in our individual, social, and even ecclesiastical life. Like L.
Tolstoy he boldly denounces the wrongs of our way of living and
teaches us to detect those of them which, through force of habit, we
fail to see. He vividly depicts the whole of the historical process as a
struggle between good and evil, the end of which can only be attained
beyond history. He convincingly shows that everything earthly must
perish except the rays of the Kingdom of God which find their way
into the historical process because the God-man Jesus Christ does not
withhold from us His gracious help.
Highly valuable, too, is Berdyaev's contention that the doctrine of
terrible torments of hell, hopeless and lasting for ever, has a sadistic
character. No theodicy can be formulated apart from the doctrine of
apocatastasis or universal salvation. A noble feature of Berdyaev's
philosophy is his defense of the truth that Christianity is a religion of
love and therefore of freedom and tolerance. Great credit is due to him
also for his criticism of socialism, communism, the bourgeois spirit, and
for his struggle against any attempts to make relative values absolute.
He criticizes modern class struggle from the point of view of the Chris-
tian ideal. As to the principles of social life, Berdyaev champions the
traditions of the Western-European and Russian humanism, namely,
the absolute value of personality and its inalienable right to spiritual
freedom and decent conditions of life. He convincingly shows that
those principles can only be consistently substantiated on the basis of a
Christian world conception.
250 N. BERDYAEV
There are people who in their wish to be more Orthodox than
Orthodoxy itself condemn Berdyaev's work as dangerous to the Church.
They forget that the historical life of Christianity, ecclesiastical practice
and traditional theological teaching suffer from many defects which
have driven wide circles of society away from the Church. In order to
bring them back, much work is needed by such laymen as Berdyaev who
show that those defects may be removed without damage to the founda-
tions of the Christian Church. By expressing the essential truths of
ehristianity in new and original terms, different from the style of the
...
traditional theology, such philosophers as Berdyaev awaken an interest
in Christianity in many minds that had turned away from it, and may
succeed in drawing them back to the Church. Men like Berdyaev lend
powerful support to the work of preserving and developing the civiliza-
tion that defends the absolute value of personality-and for this, all
praise and honor to theml
Chapter 17
THE INTUITIVISTS
1. N. LOSSKY
Nicolay Onufrievich Lossky was born in ]870 in the village of
Kreslavka in the province of Vitebsk. He graduated both in the faculty
of Science and of Arts at the University of St. Petersburg, where subse-
quently he was professor of philosophy. In 1922 he was exiled from
Russia by the Soviet Government and lived in Prague until 1942. From
1942 to 1945 he was professor of philosophy at Bratislava in Czechoslo-
vakia. At the present time Lossky is residing in America and is professor
of philosophy at the Russian Theological Academy in New York.
Lossky's chief works are the following: The Fundamental Doctrines
of Psychology From the Point of J1'iew of Voluntarism, 1903; translated
into German in 1905 as Die Gtundlehren der Psychologic vom Stand-
punkt des Voluntarismus; The Foundations of Intuitiuism, 1906; in
German Die Grundlegung des Intuitiuismus, Halle 1908; The Intuitive
Basis of Knowledge translated by N. Duddington, Macmillan, London
1919; The World As an Organic Whole, Moscow 1917, translated into
English by N. Duddington, Oxford University Press, 1928; The Funda-
mental Problems of 1919; Logic, 1922, translated into
German as Handbuch der Logik, Teubner, 1927, and also into Serbian;
Freedom of Will, Y.M.C.A. Press, Paris 1927; translated into English by
N. Duddington, William Be Norgate, London 1932; Value and Existence:
God and the Kingdom of God As the Basis of Values, Y.M.C.A. 1931;
N. Lossky and John S. Marshall, (translated by Vinokurov): Value and
Existence, Allen Be Unwin 1935; Types of World Conception, Y.M.e.A.
1931; Dialectical Materialism in U.S.S.R., Y.M.C.A. 1934; Sensuous,
Intellectual and Mystical Intuition, Y.M.C.A., ]938; the first part of
this book appeared in German in the Archiu fur gesamte Psychologie,
LXXXVII, 1933, under the title "Der Intuitivismus und die Lehre von
der Transsubjektivitar der sinnlichen Qualitaten," and in English in
five booklets published by the Universite libre Russe in Prague
1938; Intuitiuism; Transsubjectivit'Y of Sense lntp]]prl.Jn] t.
251
252
THE INTUITIVISTS
tuition and Ideal Being; Creative Activity, Evolution and Ideal Being;
Mystical Intuition; God and World Evil (a theodicy) 1941; The Con-
ditions of the Absolute Good (ethics) in Slovak 1944, translated into
French by S. jankelevitch, Les conditions de la morale absolue, La
Baconniere, Neuchatel: Dostoevsky and His Christian fVorld Concep-
tion, in Slovak, 1945; The World As the Realization of Beauty (in
press). Full bibliography will be found in Festschrift N. o. Losskij zum
60. Geburtstage, F. Cohen, Bonn 1932.
calls his epistemological theory intuitivism. He designates
by that word the doctrine that the cognized object, even if it forms part
of the external world, enters the knowing subject's consciousness
directly, so to speak in person, and is therefore apprehended as it exists
independently of the act of knowing. Such contemplation of other
entities as they are in themselves is possible because the world is an
organic whole, and the knowing subject, the individual human self, is
a supertemporal and superspatial being, intimately connected with the
whole world. The subject's relation to all other entities in the world
that renders intuition possible is called by Lossky epistemological co-
ordination. That relation as such is not knowledge. In order that the
object should be not merely connected with the self but also cognized
by it, the subject must direct upon it a series of intentional mental acts
-of awareness, attention, differentiation, etc.
According to the intuitive theory the objects' sensory qualities-
colors, sounds, warmth, etc., are transsubjective; i.e., belong to the
actual objects of the external world. They are regarded as mental and
subjective by the adherents of the causal theory of perception according
to which the stimulation of sense organs by the light rays, air waves, etc.,
is the cause that produces the content of perception. Lossky has worked
out a co...ordinational theory of perception; he shares the view expressed
by Bergson in Matter and Memory with regard to the part played by
physiological processes in perception. The gist of it is that the stimula-
tion of a particular sense organ and the physiological process in the
cortex are not the cause producing the content of perception, but
merely a stimulus inciting the knowing self to direct its attention and
its acts of discrimination upon the actual object of the external world.
External objects are co-ordinated with the knowing individual in
their wholeness, in all the infinite multiplicity of their content, but all
that wealth of the object is only connected with the human self sub-
consciously. We cognize only an infinitessimal part of the object;
namely, only those aspects of it which are of interest to us and which
we discriminate against the background of the actually present and the
remembered of being. Human powers are limited and we can-
N. LOSSlty 255
not at once perform an infinite number of acts of discrimination. There-
fore our perception as awareness of the object in a discriminated form
is only a selection from the object; hence, our knowledge is always
fragmentary. Differences in the perception 'of one and the same object
by different persons are mostly due to the fact that the selection from
the whole content of the object of aspects which are raised from the
subconsciousness to the realm of consciousness and knowledge is done
differently by different people; hence, two observers will often find pro-
foundly different contents in the same object.
Lossky accepts Bergson's theory of dream memory and interprets
memory as the immediate contemplation by the subject of his past as
such. Illusions and hallucinations may therefore be explained as subjec-
tive syntheses of the remembered transsubjective data of past experi-
ence.
Lossky gives the name of ideal being, in the Platonic sense of the
term, to all that has no spatial or temporal character. It includes the
contents of general notions, all relations such as the connection between
a quality and its bearer, quantitative forms and relations (number.
unity, plurality, etc.) and so on. All events-i.e., all that has a temporal
or a spatially temporal form-are called by Lossky real being. Real
being can arise and have a systematic character only on the basis of
ideal being. In order to emphasize this aspect of his conception of the
world, Lossky calls his theory ideal realism. Besides the ideal and the
real being, there is also metalogical being; i.e., being which transcends
the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle, for instance,
God. Ideal being is the object of intellectual intuition (speculation). It
is contemplated directly, as it is in itself; hence, discursive thinking is
not the opposite of intuition, but a species of it. Metalogical being is
the object of mystical intuition.
Lossky's intuitivism differs profoundly from that 'of Bergson. Ac-
cording to Bergson, real being is irrational, whereas Lossky considers
the rational and systematic structure of being an essential aspect of
reality, observed by means of intellectual intuition.
Cognitive acts are performed by the supertemporal and superspatial
agent, the subject. It is not the epistemological self of Rickert's or the
transcendental self of Husserl's philosophy but the individual human
self creating its individual mental acts of attention, remembering, de-
siring, etc. Being superspatial and supertemporal, the human self is an
ideal entity and may be designated by the term substance, or for the
sake of greater clarity, by the term substantival agent. Not only cognitive
acts but all events, all processes-i.e., all real being-are created by sub-
stantival agents: the singing of a tune, the experiencing of feelings or
254 THE INTUITIVISTS
'/
desires is the manifestation of some self. Acts of attraction and repulsion
and movements in space are produced by human beings and also by
electrons, protons, etc., in so far as substantival agents also lie at their
basis.
Events that have a temporal but not a spatial form. are psychical
processes. Events that are both spatial and temporal are a corporeal
reality. If they include processes of repulsion they are materially cor-
poreal.
The human self is an agent which produces not only psychical, but
material processes of attraction and repulsion and these form its bodily
sphere; or, to put it more exactly, the human body is the result of co-
operation between the human self and a number of other substantival
agents at a lower stage of development. Thus. there is not the slightest
need to admit, as Descartes did, two different substances one of which
is the cause of mental and the other of material processes. Adopting a
dynamistic theory of matter-i.e., recognizing that material reality is
not a substance but merely a process of creating sense qualities and acts
of repulsion and attraction-one can understand and admit that one
and the same agent is the source both of a mental process (e.g., disgust
at the smell of a decaying plant) and of a material process (repulsing
that plant). A substantival agent is an ideal, superspatial and super...
temporal entity and as such transcends the distinction between mental
and material processes: it is a "metapsychophysical" entity (this term
is used by W. Stern in his book Person und Sache).
Being supertemporal, a substantival agent can correlate the past.
the present and the future; it carries out its activities on the basis of
the past it has experienced for the sake of the future it desires; in other
words, its actions are purposive. The simplest type of an agent's mani..
festations are the activities of attraction and repulsion which form its
material corporeality, Activities which are spatially temporal in form
can only be realized under the guidance of the same subject's purely
temporal activities: at a higher level of development they are the mental
processes of striving and effort connected with the ideas of past and
future and the emotional experience of values; at the lower stages of
development they are psychoid unconscious strivings and efforts. On
this view, every material process is psychomaterial or at any rate
psychoidly material. The psychic and the psychoid processes are not a
passive superstructure. over the material processes but an essential con..
dition of the material processes being possible; they guide it, i.e., de..
termine its direction, composition, and meaning or purpose.
Lossky's doctrine of agents carrying out purposive psychophysical
processes resembles Leibniz's theory of monads or W. Stern's conception
N. LOSSKY
255
of personality. A substantival agent always is an actual or at any rate a
potential personality. An agent becomes an actual personality when he
is sufficiently developed to apprehend absolute values, especially moral
values, and recognizes the duty of realizing them in his conduct. Such
a theory may be called personalism. Lossky's theory differs from the
personalism of Leibniz, in the most popular version of it, by the
realistic (and not subjectivist) interpretation it gives of the material
processes. It also differs both from Leibniz's and from Stern's in so far
as it denies psychophysical parallelism and recognizes the dependence
ot material processes upon the psychical. Thirdly, it differs'still more
profoundly from Leibniz's theory by recognizing the consubstantiality
ot substantival agents.
In creating his manifestations a substantival agent makes them
conformable to the principles of the structure of time and of space, to
the mathematical laws of functional dependence, and so on. Those
principles have an abstractly ideal character. The profound difference
between substantival agents and those abstract ideas consists in the
fact that abstract ideas have a limited content, whereas every substanti-
val agent is infinitely rich in content and cannot be exhausted by any
combination of abstract ideas. Substantival agents may therefore be
said to be concretely ideal entities. Besides, abstract ideas are passive;
of themselves they are incapable of imposing Iorrn: there must be an
agent to impose form on real processes in accordance with abstract
ideas. This is precisely what a substantival agent does: -belng endowed
with creative power he produces real processes and informs them in
accordance with abstract ideas. Thus, concretely ideal agents are the
bearers of abstractly ideal forms.
All agents create real processes in accordance with the same ideal
forms of time, space, etc., which are not merely qualitatively but
numerically identical. This implies that in a certain aspect of their
being substantival agents are not separate but identical, i.e., consubstan-
tial. The fundamental difference between Lossky's personalism and
Leibniz's monadology is that Lossky denies the separateness of the
agents-denies Leibniz's idea that monads "have neither windows nor
doors." As bearers of creative powers substantival agents are distinct
and independent, but as bearers of basic abstractly ideal forms they are
identical and form one being; therefore even in their independent
aspect they are mutually co-ordinated to an extent which ensures the
possibility of intuition, love, sympathy (in the true sense worked out
by M. Scheler), i.e., of direct intimate communion,
In so far as .the agents' identical aspect consists solely in abstractly
ideal principles, their consubstantiality may J>e called abstract. In im-
256
THE INTUITIVISTS
posing form upon their activities in accordance with identical principles,
agents create numerous systems of spatiotemporal relations which do
not fall apart into separate worlds, but form one single system of the
cosmos. At the head of that system stands a highly developed substanti-
val agent, the World Spirit.
Communion between agents within the framework of the cosmos
is subordinated to general forms that condition the possibility of the
cosmic process; but the nature of their communion is not predetermined:
,the agents may combine their powers for living in love and unity or in
hostile opposition to one another. The latter course results in various
stages of disintegration which do not, however, destroy the general
formal framework. of cosmic unity determined by tile abstract consub-
stantiality.
Abstract consubstantiality is the condition of the cosmic process
having meaning, i.e., of the realization of absolute values in it. The
all-embracing absolute value is the absolute fullness of life. It may be
attained by agents through their being complementary to one another,
through their participating in one another's life, adopting one an-
other's purposes by means of love and intuition and refraining from
mutual hostility that limits and impoverishes life. Such unanimous life
means concrete consubstantiality, The totality of principles that con-
stitute abstract consubstantiality and, when rightly used, lead to con-
crete consubstantiality may be called the Abstract Logos of the World.
The combination of several agents which have adopted at any rate
some of one another's strivings in order to realize them together is a
means of attaining more complex stages of existence. Remarkable forms
of such consubstantiality arise when a group of agents subordinates itself
to one agent standing at a higher level of development and becomes its
organs. That results in such a hierarchy of unities as an atom, a mole-
cule, a crystal, a unicellular organism. a multicellular organism, a com-
munity of organisms like a beehive or a nest of termites; in the sphere
of the human life there are nations and mankind as a whole; further,
there is our planet, the solar system. the universe. Each subsequent
stage of unification possesses higher creative powers than the preceding
and is headed by a personality on a higher stage of development. Thus,
Lossky's metaphysics, like Leibniz's monadology, is a hierarchical per-
sonalism.
The group of agents subordinated to a more highly developed
agent and serving as organs to it is that agent's body. The agent's
separation from his allies is death. Usually, the word "body" has a
different connotation and means the spatial system of Ilrocesses produced
by the agent together with his allies. In order to distinguish between
N. LOSSlty 257
these two meanings, one might call the group of agents subordinated
to the chief agent by the term "the agent's allied body." As to spatial
processes, they Dlay be called the agent's material body, if they include
processes of repulsion which give rise to comparatively impenetrable
bulk. In most cases, however, there is no need to use these terms, for
it is clear from the context which body is meant.
A world system composed of a number of creatively independent
agents welded together by abstract consubstantiality which provides.
the single framework of the cosmos, cannot be conceived as
the ground of its own existence. It necessarily points beyond itself to a
principle which does not belong to the world system and is not in any
sense a system of many elements, because a system of relations would
presuppose the existence of another, still higher principle which would
be its ground. Thus, the ground of the world system can only be a
Principle which is above and beyond the world, and transcends all sys-
tem. It is incommensurable with the world and therefore in speaking of
it one has to characterize it by negative predicates only ("negative
theology") or by predicates qualified by the word "above." It is not
reason. but is above reason, it is not personal but is above personality,
and so on. Even the term Absolute is not applicable to it, for the
Absolute is correlative with the relative, i.e., with cosmic being. In
other words, it means that the Supracosmic principle is free from the
world: there is no necessity whatever for It to be the ground of the
world. The world cannot exist without the Supracosmic principle, but
the Supracosmic principle could exist without the world. Philosophy
discovers It through speculation about the world; i.e., through intellec-
tual intuition directed upon the world and leading to mystical intuition
directed beyond the world to the Supracosmic metalogical principle.
The Supracosmic principle is incommensurable with the world;
therefore It is the Ground of the world, not through dialectical de-
velopment or emanation or any other species of relation admitted by
pantheism, but through absolute creation, i.e., creation out of nothing.
This biblical doctrine, grammatically badly expressed, should not be
taken to mean that God took some "nothing" as a material out of which
He created the world. Those words should be understood more simply:
in order to create the world God had no need to take any material
either from Himself or from outside; He creates the world as perfectly
new being, other than Himself.
This conception of the Supreme principle is purely philosophical.
It must he supplemented by the data of religious experience. In inti-
mate and especially in devotional communion that principle reveals
itself as the Living God, as a Person. In to religious experi-
258
THE INTUITIVISTS
ence, philosophy must also take account of the Revelation which tells
us that God, being One in substance, is a Trinity of Persons: He is
God the Father. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Philosophy has
a right to make use of the Trinitarian dogma because it imparts a lofty
meaning, connectedness and consistency to the rest of our world con-
ception. In the living religious experience, based upon the Revelation,
man discovers God as the absolute fullness of life in the Three Persons,
concretely consubstantial in their perfect mutual love. All these de-
terminations belong to God as the Divine Transcendence, inexpres-
sible by any words or notions. It should therefore be borne in mind that
they are not identical with notions applicable to created beings and are
used only as a metalogical analogy. In that case, positive (cataphatic)
theology does not contradict the negative (apophatic), but contains it
within itself.
In religious experience God reveals Himself not only as the abso-
lute fullness of being, but also as the supreme absolutely perfect value.
as the Good itself or rather the Supragood; namely, as Love, Moral
goodness, Truth, Freedom, Absolute fullness of life and being, Beauty.
The most important aspects of God's perfection are expressed by such
attributes as Almighty, All-good, Omniscient, Omnipresent.
God in His Triune life is the absolute fullness of being, the primary
and all-embracing intrinsic value. Each personality created by Him is
endowed with qualities which, if properly used, enable it to attain the
absolute fullness of life. Hence, every created personality is, at any
rate potentially, also an all-embracing and absolute-but not primary
-intrinsic value. All the necessary aspects of the absolute fullness of
being, love, beauty, truth, freedom, etc., are also absolute intrinsic
values, but being merely aspects of a whole they are partial absolute
values. Each of them is existence in its significance for the absolute full-
ness of life. That means that value is not an addition to existence, not
a quality which it has alongside of other qualities, but the organic
unity of existence and meaning. That theory, Lossky says, is an onto-
logical theory of values. Existence that brings us nearer to the absolute
fullness of life is a positive value, and that which draws us away Iron, it
is a negative value.
The All-good, Almighty and Omniscient God creates the worAd as
a system of entities tha t has the highest meaning, for it consists of
entities capable of creating, with His gracious help, the highest good-
the Divine fullness of life. Only personal beings are capable of this:
hence, God creates personalities only.
The final end of every personal being's life is the absolute fullness
of being. The first and fundamental condition of realizing that end is
N. LOSSKY
259
the participation of the created personality in the perfect fullness of
life of the Lord God Himself. To render this possible, the ontological
gulf between God and the world has to be bridged: in creating the
world and loving His creation God has come down to the world; the
Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God. the Logos, has
united human nature to His Divine nature and become the God-man.
By1te words "human nature" Lossky means the nature of every created
personality in general. From all eternity since the creation of the world
the Logos exists both as God and as the Heavenly Man; i.e., '3S ideally
perfect man, such as he is in the Kingdom of God. As God the Son He
is consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and as man He is
consubstantial with all created personalities. If we accept the ontological
theory of love worked out by Father Pavel Florensky, it follows that a
created personality which loves the God.. man with a perfect love, i.e.,
more than itself, becomes concretely consubstantial with the God-man
in His human nature; therefore, with the help of the incarnate Con-
crete Logos it contemplates God "face to face" and is vouchsafed
deification by grace. The totality of such deified persons constitutes a
special realm of being-the Kingdom of God.
However intimate the communion of the dwellers in heaven with
the Lord God may be, passive contemplation of His perfection does not
as such mean the living fullness of being for the contemplator. That
fullness is attained through participation in the Divine Good by means
of the person's own creativeness free from all taint of selfishness, and
devoted to producing absolute values-moral goodness, beauty and
truth.
Life in God cannot be creativeness isolated from the creativeness
of other beings: perfect love for God, Who created the world lovingly.
necessarily includes love for all entities created by Him. Hence it fol-
lows that the creativeness of all beings that live in God must be com-
pletely unanimous, soborny (communal). Every member of the Kingdom
of God must make his individual, i.e., unique. unrepeatable and un-
replaceable contribution to the communal creativeness: only in that
case will the members' activity be mutually complementary, creating
a single and unique beautiful whole, instead of being a repetition of
the same actions. This implies that every created entity, in its ideal
essence corresponding to God's will, is an individual persoll, completely
unique and unreplaceable by any other created entity.
In the Kingdom of God there is no egoism and consequently there
are no acts of repulsion and therefore no material processes. Members
of the Kingdom of God have spatial bodies, .but they consist solely of
Iiehr. sound. warmth and other sensory Qualities }Vhich embody and
260 THE INTUITIVISTS
express absolutely valuable spiritual contents. Such a spiritually bodily
whole has the value of absolutely perfect, ideal beauty. The trans-
figured bodies of the dwellers in heaven are not isolated from one
another, but are mutually interpenetrated. As to the "allied" body,
each member of the Kingdom of God is connected through perfect
love with the whole world and therefore has a cosmic body: the whole
world serves him as his body. In his article "Resurrection of the Body"
(Anglican Theological Revie-w, 1949) Lossky tries to show that all the
difficulties of the problem of the resurrection in the flesh are solved by
this theory of the cosmic body. There is no death in the Kingdom of
God because its members are bound together by perfect love and per-
form no acts of repulsion, so that their transfigured spatial bodies are
not accessible to any destructive influences.
The conduct of the dwellers in heaven is morally perfect: it is
guided by the love of absolute values in accordance with the hierarchy
of values. God is the highest value and therefore He must be loved
more than anything in the world. Next in the order of value is every
created personality as an individual, unrepeatable as an existent and
unreplaceable by any other value if we take into consideration his pos-
sible creativeness in the Kingdom of God. Therefore one should love
every person as one's own self. Further, we ought to love impersonal
absolute values such as truth, moral goodness, freedom, beauty, which
are the constituents of the absolute good of the fullness of life, and are
subordinate to the value of persons.
Love can only be a free expression of personality. Determinists
deny freedom of the will on the ground that every event has a cause.
They mean by causality the order of temporal sequence of one event
after other events and the uniformity of that sequence. Causation,
generation, creation and all other dynamic aspects of causality are
ruled out. Lossky proves that the will is free, taking as his starting point
the law of causality but defending a dynamistic interpretation of it.
Every event arises not out of itself, but is created by someone; it cannot
be created by other events; having a temporal form events fall away
every instant into the realm of the past and have no creative power to
generate the future. Only supertemporal substantival agents-i.e., actual
and potential personalities-are bearers of creative power; they create
events as their own vital manifestations. According to the dynamistic
interpretation of causality it is necessary to distinguish anlong the con-
ditions under which an event takes place the cause from the occasion of
its happening. The cause is always the substantival agent himself as
the bearer of creative power, and the other circumstances are merely
occasions for its manifestations, which are neither forced nor prede-
N. LOSSK.Y 261
termined by them. The agents' creative power is superqualitatiue and
does not therefore predetermine which particular values an agent will
select as his final end. That selection is the agent's free act. Conse-
quently, the temporal order of events is not uniform even in the in-
organic nature. It is quite possible that although some two electrons
have millions of times repulsed each other, they will not do so the next
time. But functional connections between ideal forms conditioning the
existence of the world as a system--e.g., mathematical principles and
the laws of the hierarchy of values and their significance for conduct.
conditioning the presence of meaning in the world-are independent
of the agents' will. Violation of these laws is unthinkable, but they do
not destroy the agents' freedom: they merely create the possibility of
activity as such and of its value. Those laws condition the cosmic struc-
ture within the framework of which there is freedom for an infinite
variety of activities. The system of spatiotemporal and numerical forms
provides room for activities that are opposed to one another in direction,
value, and significance for the world.
The absence of rigidly uniform connection between events does
not make science impossible. It is sufficient for science that there should
be a more or less regular connection between events in time. The lower
the agents' stage of development, the more uniform are their manifesta-
tions. In those cases there may be statistical laws.
Many misunderstandings of the doctrine of free will are disposed
of by distinguishing between [ormal and material freedom. Formal
freedom means that in each given case an agent may refrain from some
particular manifestation and replace it by another. That freedom is
absolute and cannot be lost under any circumstances, Material freedom
means the degree of creative power possessed by an agent, and finds ex-
pression in what he is capable of creating. It is unlimited in the King..
dom of God, the members of which unanimously combine their forces
for communal creativeness and even derive help from God's omnipo-
tence. But agents outside the Kingdom of God are in a state of spiritual
deterioration and have very little material freedom, though their
formal freedom is unimpaired.
Life outside of the Kingdom of God is tile result of the wrong use
of free will. An agent may direct his love upon sorne value preferring it
to all else, regardless of its rank in the hierarchy of values.. Thus, while
loving the perfection of the absolute fullness of life an agent may strive
for it in and for himself, preferring hitnself to all other beings. This is
simply ordinary selfishness. It deserves condemnation, because a selfish
love Cor oneself violates the hierarchy of values indicated by Jesus
Christ in the two main commandments: love God more than yourself,
262 THE INTUITIVISTS
and your neighbor as yourself. The failure to fulfill these command..
ments is the Fall.
There is another kind of selfishness which violates the hierarchy of
values rnuch more: some agents who strive for perfection and the abso-
lute fullness of being and even for the good of the whole world are
determined to do it in their own way, so that they should occupy the
first place and stand higher than all other beings and even the Lord
God Himself, Pride is- the ruling passion of such beings. They enter
into rivalry with God, thinking that they are capable of ordering the
~ o r l d better than its Creator. Pursuing an impossible aim, they suffer
defeat at every step and begin to hate God. This is what Satan does.
Selfishness separates us from God in so far as we put before us
purposes incompatible with God's will that the world should be perfect.
In the same way selfishness separates an agent in a greater or lesser
degree from other agents: his aims and actions cannot be harmonized
with the actions of other beings and often lead to hostility and mutual
opposition. The spatial bodies of selfish beings contain processes of
mutual repulsion which create comparatively impenetrable bulk; in
other words, they are material bodies. Accordingly, the whole cosmic
domain to which such agents, including human beings, belong is called
by Lossky the psychophysical realm of being. He designates by the terms
"psychical" or "mental" such nonspatial processes in and through which
relative values are created or assimilated; i.e., values that are good in
some respects and evil in others; hence mental processes always have an
admixture of selfishness. Lossky gives the name of "spiritual" to non-
spatial processes in and through which absolute values are created or
assimilated. In the Kingdom of God only spiritual processes and their
incarnation in transfigured bodies are to be found; but in the psycho-
physical realm there are both mental and spiritual processes and their
incarnation in material bodies.
The creative capacity of a selfishly-minded substantival agent is
diminished, since his powers are not harmoniously combined with the
power of God and of other beings. Hence selfishness impoverishes the
life both of the agent himself and of other beings in the psychophysical
realm. Consequently, selfishness is an evil, and a primary evil, giving
rise to all kinds of derivative evil necessarily connected with the relative
separation of agents from one another and leading to ruptures and dis-
solution. That is the explanation of disease, monstrosity, death, and
also of social conflicts and imperfections. Moreover it is the explanation
of natural catastrophes-storms, floods, volcanic eruptions. According
to the theory of personalism the whole nature consists of entities which
would have been members of the Kingdom of God had they not entered
N. LOSSKY 263
the path of egoism. Owing to this fall and to mutual disconnectedness
many of them have become not actual, but merely potential personali-
ties forming the lower kingdom of nature. both organic and inorganic..
The fundamental positions of Lossky's ethics and theodicy are as
follows. The primary act of the creation of the world by God, preceding
the six days of the world's development and described in the Bible by
the phrase "in the beginning God created heaven and earth" consists
in God's creating substantival agents and endowing them with the
properties of being supertemporal and superspatial, with the principle,
of Abstract Logos and with superqualitative creative power. Those
qualities are the image of God in the creature. God has not given them
any empirical character. To work out one's charactcr-e-i.e., one's type
of life-is the task of each entity's creative activity. The agents who at
once entered the path of right conduct in accordance with the moral
law which demands love for absolute values alone in their hierarchical
order, have from the first been found worthy of life in the Kingdom of
God and had deification bestowed upon them. They are the "heaven."
Beings which entered the path of egoism formed the realm of imperfect
being in which they are freed from their defects-by means of a slow and
more or less painful evolution. In view of this destiny awaiting them,
the Bible describes them as "the earth."
Instead of the fullness of life, selfish-s-i.e., sinful beings create for
themselves a limited, impoverished existence; disappointments result..
ing from selfish activities are the immediate immanent sanction of the
moral law. Preserving the instinctive striving for the fullness of life,
selfish agents continually struggle to work out new types of existence,
more complex and occupied with more significant activities. To achieve
this, they enter into alliances with one another; they combine their
powers, giving up to some extent their exclusive egoism and submitting
to some agent who has invented a more complex type of life.. They
form the "allied" body of this more developed agent and serve him as
his organs. This is how there come to be, for instance, atoms-e-i.e., such
types of life as oxigen'eity, phosphor'eity etc.: at a higher stage mole-
cules appear-i.e.. , such types of life as water, salt, etc. An enormous
step towards greater complexity and wealth of life has been taken by
agents who invented organic life, vegetable and animal.. The further
stage of the development of life on earth is the appearance of man.
Earthly man is a creature that rises from animality to spirituality. Life
of the earthly human type has been invented by agents who on the
basis of all their previous experience, first. of the inorganic, and then
of the plant or animal life, have risen to the awareness of absolute
values and of the duty of creating them in their conduct. At the former
264 THE INTUITIVISTS
stages of their development those agents were only potentially per-
sonal; having reached the human stage they became actual persons.
The assertion that one and the same agent Inay evolve from the electron
to the human type of life and rise above man, for instance, in the form
of a social ego, is nothing other than the doctrine of reincarnation.
Lossky champions the doctrine of reincarnation as worked out by
Leibniz under the name of metamorphosis.' Leibniz considered that
doctrine acceptable to Christian theology since he admitted that the
sransition of the monad (substantival agent) from the animal to the
rational human stage is achieved through a complementary creative
act of God which he called "transcreation." Such a conception of the
origin of man combines the theory of the pre-existence of the soul with
that of creationism.
The development of the types of life described in the Bible as the
six days of creation takes place through the free creative activity of
sinful beings, not quite independently, however, but with the co-opera-
tion of the Lord God. All the good that is produced in the world is
achieved through the combination of "nature" and Divine "grace."
Lossky says that in the process of reincarnation all agents sooner
or later overcome their selfishness and are vouchsafed deification
through grace. But since the process of development is carried on by
means of free creative acts, it frequently is not a direct ascent to the
Kingdom of God, but contains temporary falls and deviations. Lossky
gives the name of normal evolution to the line of development which
leads straight to the threshold of the Kingdom of God.
It is only in the Kingdom of God that a substantival agent fully
realizes his individuality as an absolutely valuable element of the world.
Since every agent is co..ordinated with the whole world in its present,
past and future, an agent's subconsciousness contains the anticipation
of his future perfection in the Kingdom of God. That future is for every
agent his individual normative idea. An agent's conscience is the
evaluation by him of his own conduct from the point of view of his
normative individual idea. The agent's personal identity is preserved
in spite of his numerous reincarnations because even at those stages of
development at which he does not remember his past life, he preserves
the habits and capacities acquired in it in the form of instinctive
sympathies and antipathies, faculties and innate skill. But the point of
I. See N. Losskv, "Leibniz's Doctrine of Reincarnation as Metamorphosis" (in
Russian). in the. Symposium published by the Russian Scientific Institute in Prague
v. II 1 9 ~ 1 ; in German, "Leibniz's Lehre von der Reinkarnation als Metamorphose,"
-Arcni far Geschichte der Philosophie, XL, 1951.
N. LOSSK.Y
265
particular importance is that this whole process of development takes
place in connection with one and the same normative individual idea,
thanks to which all the stages of an agent's existence form one single
individual whole.
Lossky rejects the doctrine that God creates the world in ac-
cordance with His Divine ideas which form part of His being, because
God and the world are ontologically entirely different from each other
and have no identical aspect whatever. Ideas that necessarily enter from
the first into the constitution of the world, such as mathematical ideas.
are created being and not states of God. Lossky considers his conception
of God and the world the extreme opposite of pantheism, i.e., the purest
form of theism.s It preserves the poetical character of pantheism be-
cause the ontological gulf between God and the world does not prevent
God always and everywhere entering into relation with His creatures
as a loving Father. That relation can be particularly intimate because
God the Son, the concrete Logos became from the first, at the very
creation of the world, the God-man, namely-the Heavenly man, and
everything good, especially the absolute perfection of the Kingdom of
God is realized only with the gracious co-operation of the God.. man.
As the Heavenly man, the God-man is intimately near to the mem-
bers of the Kingdom of God, but is still little understood by us, sinful
-men, members of the psychophysical realm of being. Therefore, having
in the course of history, prepared for His coming beings that had at-
tained rationality the God.. man subjected His heavenly divine-humanity
to limitation (Kenosis) and assuming "the form of a servant" realized
the second stage of incarnation appearing on our planet as an earthly
man Jesus Christ.
Christian conception of the world is anthropocentric because it
puts the God-man at the head of the world. In doing so it is generally
concerned with the sin.. warped nature of the earthly man. Such a con-
ception of the world may therefore be called micro-anthropocentric. In
Lossky's doctrine of the God-man the primary divine incarnation is
understood as the creation and the realization by the Logos of the
ideally perfect all-embracing man; such a world conception may be
called macro-anthropocentric. It is not contradictory of the micro-
anthropocentric, but contains it as a part.
The God-man Jesus Christ is intimately near to our psychophysical
realm thanks to His earthly life in Palestine. His gracious influence
upon us is made much easier when we become His members in the
2. See N. Lossky, "The Creation of the World by God," Put 1937: "Ueber die
Erschaffung der Welt durcb 'Colt," Schildgtnossen 1959.
THE INTUITIVISTS
Church of which He is the head. We then live under His present in-
fluence and take part in His life on earth as vividly depicted in the
Gospels and continuing concretely to exist for us in the liturgy.
Jesus Christ's co-workers in guiding our life are the angels and the
saints, members of the Kingdom of God. At the head of the whole
world, next to Christ as His closest co-worker stands a created being,
the World Spirit, St. Sophia. The Virgin Mary is the earthly incarnation
of St. Sophia who has thus served the work of the Incarnation of Jesus
Christ.
it will be seen that Lossky accepts the sophiology of Russian re-
ligious thinkers, but only in so far as it is concerned with the created
Sophia standing from all eternity at the head of all creature and having
no part in the Fall.
Lossky works out the problems of aesthetics on the same plan as
those of axiology and ethics, i.e., taking as his starting point the con-
ception of: the Kingdom of God. The first chapter of his aesthetics deals
with the problem of ideal beauty realized in the Kingdom of God. By
ideal beauty he means perfect spiritual life devoted to creating and
assimilating absolute values and having a bodily incarnation so that it
can be sensuously apprehended. Starting with this idea, he solves the
problems of aesthetics in our realm of being where beauty is always
limited: every object in the realm of sinful being has an aspect of beaut}'
and at the same time an aspect of ugliness. That leads to the existence
of such an erroneous theory as relativism in aesthetics.
In his books and articles dealing with religious problems, Lossky
is less concerned with theology than with the task of working out a
system of metaphysics necessary for a Christian interpretation of the
world.
2. S. L. FRANK
Semyon Ludwigovich Frank was born in Moscow in 1877, studied
at the Moscow University in the Faculty of law and continued his edu-
cation in Berlin and Heidelberg where he took up philosophy and
sociology. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Saratov
and subsequently of Moscow. In 1922 he was banished from Soviet
Russia and is at present living in England. In his early youth he was a
Marxist, then passed on to idealism and eventually to Christian ideal-
realism. S. Frank died in London in 1950.
S. L. Frank's chief works are The Object of Knowledge, 1915 (trans-
lated into French as La connaissance et I'etre, Aubier 1937); The
Human Soul, 1917; The Methodology of Social Sciences, 1922; The
s. L. FRANK 267
Spiritual Foundations of Society, Paris 1930; The Unfathomable, Paris
19S9; God With Us (in English), London 1946.
It is impossible to work out a systematic philosophical world con-
ception, especially of a religious character, apart from a theory of
knowledge. Original Russian thinkers from the time of the Slavophile
onwards were always inclined to maintain that the knowing subject
has a direct apprehension of the transsubjective reality. This theory of
direct apprehension has been worked out in detail by N. Lossky who
gave it the name of Intuitivism. He called his first work on the subject,
"The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge," originally published in the maga-
zine Voprosi Filosofii (Problems of Philosophy) in 1904--5, as a propae-
deutic theory of knowledge. He based his theory solely on the analysis
of consciousness and therefore recognized that it required supplement-
ing by a metaphysical conception of the organic unity of the world
which would explain the possibility of intuition, I.e., of immediate
apprehension. Such a conception would provide the basis for an "onto.
logical theory of knowledge." Lossky worked out such a conception in
nis book The World As an Organic Whole which first appeared in
Voprosi Filosofii in 1915. At the same time Frank was writing his book
The Object of Knowledge. In a letter to Lossky Frank said that in the
Intuitive Basis of Knowledge the fact of intuition is used as a starting
point, but the conditions of that fact remain unexplained; the object
of his book is to discover the ontological conditions of the possibility
of intuition as a direct apprehension of a reality independent of our
cognitive acts. Frank explains the possibility of intuition by pointing
out that individual being is rooted in the Absolute as "Pan-Unity," in
consequence of which every object, prior to all knowledge of it is in
immediate contact with us, since we are "united with it not by means
of consciousness but through our very being" (177). Abstract logical
knowledge is only possible because of the intuition of this all-embracing
unity.. A logically determined object is an object subordinated to the
laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle: it is A in contra-
distinction to all else, i.e., to non-A. Thus the determinateness of A is
only thinkable as "forming part of a complex (A + non-A)." Such a
correlation can only have its ground in a whole which transcends the
determinations A and non-A? and consequently is a metalogical unity
(237), i.e., a unity not subject to the law of contradiction. It belongs to
the realm of the "coincidence of opposites" (coincidentia oppositorums
Of, rather, there are no opposites in it at all, so that "the law of contra-
diction is not violated, but simply inapplicable to it" (220). Determina-
tions can only be differentiated out of that unity; hence, logical knowl..
edge is only possible on the basis of another, rnetalogical knowledge, on
THE INTUITIVISTS
the basis of "the intuition of integral being" (204, 241). That integral
being is absolute unity or pan-unity (239); it is not correlative with
plurality, but contains multiplicity within itself: it is therefore the
unity of unity and plurality (257, 320).
Logical knowledge deals with elements that have been differentiated
out of the whole, and is always abstract; it relates to the lower level of
being, discrete and having no life in it; it is given through contemplative
intuition. All living being, unfolding itself in time as continuous
.creative becoming, belongs to the realm of the metalogical; it is ap-
prehended not through contemplative intuition, not through knowl-
edge as thought, but through living knowledge, or knowledge as life,
attained at moments when our self "not merely contemplates an object
(i.e., has it supertemporarily) but lives by it" (370-431).
The philosophical basis of psychology is worked out by S. L. Frank
in his book The Human Soul. He examines in it the realm of mentality
as existence interpenetrated by subjectivity, and studies the changes
that occur in it when it becomes recognized as an object; he draws a
distinction between the spiritual and the mental, and through tracing
the ways in which our mental life is interrelated with the world as a
whole by means of cognitive activity on the one hand, and of super-
individual interests on the other, shows that the human soul is a
microcosm.
Doctrines expounded in the Object of Knowledge and The Human
Soul are further elaborated in The Unfathomable. The domain of the
fathomable includes all that is rational; i.e., subject to the laws of
identity, contradiction and excluded middle, all in which there are
identical, recurrent elements belonging to the world familiar to us and
expressible in concepts (9). That domain stands over against us as
"objective being" (19); our conceptual knowledge of it is abstract (9)
and rationalistic (15). Knowledge of objects does not embrace all that
reality contains: mystical experience reveals to us a deeper sphere,
inexpressible in concepts and "unfathomable;" the only knowledge we
can have of it takes the Iorm of docta ignorantia, to use Nicolas
Cusanus's term. Frank discovers the presence of this sphere "on three
levels of being": (1) in objective existence; (2) in our own being as our
inner life, both mental and spiritual; (3) "on that level of reality which
as the primary basis and all-embracing unity somehow unifies these two
heterogenous worlds and provides a basis for them" (19).
Objective existence is not exhausted by successive acts of cognition:
there always remains an infinite remainder of the still unknown and
inexhaustible because our powers are limited (34). Such a remainder is
unfathomable for us. But Frank is concerned with the unfathomable
s. L. FRANK 269
as such. The ideal of knowledge is an object as a "sum or system (even
if it be an infinite system) of determinations;" what we call the objec..
rive world consists of such univocally d e t e ~ m i n e d contents (41). Con...
tents of reality as expressed in abstract ideas are not reality itself: they
are rooted in that which contains them, in something which may be
designated as "fullness," "primary inner unity," "concreteness," "vi-
tality" (42); it cannot be broken up into definite contents and is trans-
rational and essentially unfathomable (43). In the Object 0/ Knowledge
it has already been shown that determinations subject to logical laws
presuppose a more fundamental metalogical reality (45 f.). In the same
way the systematic nature of rational knowledge, i.e., the presence of
relations between its different parts, is the result of the analysis of "the
integral continuous unity" (45). Thus we have as it were not one, but
two kinds of knowledge: secondary, abstract knowledge through judg-
ments and concepts, and "the direct intuition of the object in its
metalogical wholeness and continuity" (primary knowledge). There is
no logical identity, but only a "metalogical similarity" between the
two (47); "the concrete image of existence is translated by us into the
language of ideas," somewhat in the same fashion "as a scheme of a
material three-dimensional body can be drawn on a flat surface" (48).
The determinate is the definite, but the concrete metalogical reality is
transdefinite (52); it is unique, i.e., individual (54); being greater than
any given, i.e., any definite magnitude, it is "transfinite" (58). Every
segment and every point of being has at the base of it "the undefinable
abyss of the transfinite." This is particularly clear with regard to be-
corning. Conceptual knowledge has in view "nontemporal," "identical,"
"stable" contents (61). In becoming, however, there is something chang-
ing and dynamic; for instance, in movement, every point of space con-
tains neither the being nor the non-being of the moving body (61).
Being which contains an element of becoming is potentiality, latent
power (62). All that is new in it arises not out of a definite ground,
which as determinists suppose, necessarily predetermines the future, not
out of A, but out of A-X; i.e., out of the transfinite essence of reality
in so far as it is partially determined by the presence of A (65). Hence,
potentiality always contains an element of indefiniteness and inde-
terrninateness, i.e., of freedom (67). Reality includes the unity of
rationality and irrationality, i.e., of necessity and freedom (68). The
one-sidedness of the rational knowledge of reality has to be overcome
through dialectical thought (53).
Objective existence, i.e., the world of fact, combines ideal non-
temporal being with the temporal in a way which may be accounted
for bv the theories of ideal realism (85); but the connection between
270 THE INTUITIVISTS
these two aspects of objective existence presupposes a deeper principle
which has just been mentioned-the all-embracing unity as nonobjec-
tive, unconditional being (86 f.), All determinations spring from this
"mysterious and unfathomable maternal womb" (88). "By comparison
with every definite 'thing,' it is nothing," an X, a mystery (89). Per-
vading everything as an all-embracing unity of all, it is "an antinomic
coincidence of opposites,' not in different respects, but unconditionally,
for it is a case of "absolute and indivisibly simple being" (90). That
'explains why skepticism is legitimate in reference to all theories and
judgments (90 f.).
Absolute being as an all-inclusive pan-unity cannot be contem-
plated, since "that which is contemplated presupposes outside of itself
the act of contemplation and the contemplating subject" (91). The
potentiality of thought, knowledge, or consciousness is an element of
absolute being not as "given," but as "given to itself," as "possession"
(92): "Absolute being is ipso facto 'being for itself' ,. (93). That is the
solution of the problem of transcendence: all-embracing being is pres-
ent in every "I aID," and is "with us and for us" and we are conscious
of it "through its own self-revelation in us" (93). Frank designates this
all-embracing being characterized by its absoluteness by the term
"reality," As the unity of truth and existence it is "immediacy itself"
which "silently expresses itself in mute, unutterable experience" (94).
It is the primary and inexpressible unity of "I am-there is," the
brahman and ahtman of the Hindu philosophy (95), the concrete full-
ness, not divided into the outer and the inner world; it is life in general
(96).
After saying a great deal about the unfathomable, Frank asks how
is it that mystics who recognize that God is beyond our knowledge
give us nevertheless much information about Him. His answer is as
follows. Rational knowledge is attained through distinguishing by
means of negation (99). The unfathomable lies beyond negation: it
contains the reinforced negation and is the sphere where negation itself
is negated or overcome; in the words of Nicolas Cusanus its categorial
form is "not-otherness." It cannot be said of the unfathomable that it is
"either this or that;" as all-embracing fullness it is "both this and that"
-it is the principle of tolerance, of spiritual breadth (101). Though in-
deed this too is not exact: although pan-unity is the unity of unity and
plurality, "the deepest level as primary unity must be something abso-
lutely simple, inwardly one;" consequently, it is "neither this nor that;"
it is absolutely detached being, not all-embracing fullness. but rather
"nothing," "a still desert,',' A bgeschiedenheit of Master Eckhardt (102).
If we stopped at this "nothing" and "the pure ignorance" to which it
s, L. FRANK 211
gives rise, negation would not be overcome but posited in the absolute
as "an all-destroying monster" (103); thus, even in a reinforced form
negation is not a means of cognizing the superlogical and the trans-
rational (103). In order to cognize it, let us consider what the negation
of negation means: its purpose is to do away with the destructive effect
of ordinary negation, but to preserve its positive significance-the con-
nection between distinct. differentiated entities (106), and thus ascend to
the universal "yea," to the all-embracing acceptance of being, including
the negative relation as well as that which is negated, and perceiving
"the relativity of all opposition, of all disharmony" (107); struggle and
opposition "can never totally disappear and be replaced by the smooth,
conjoint, unquestioning affirmation" (108). To ascend to this trans-
rational principle that conditions all rationality we must turn to
transcendental thinking which discovers the general conditions of ob-
jectivity and of formal logic (109 ff.), In such thinking knowledge is
not judgment, but pure "contemplation through experience" (112),
self-revelation of the transrational reality (I 12). There cannot be in it
any judgment or definition; hence, this knowledge is "wise ignorance"
(112). This living knowledge may be expressed in judgments by "trans-
posing, as it were, the immediately self-revealing reality into a different
key" (114). This is done through "the unity of positive and negative
judgments" (115) in antinomic knowledge which is "the logical form
of the wise, knowing ignorance." Antinomic knowledge is not a com-
bination of. two contradictory judgments (116) or impotent wavering
between them but free ascent "between or above these two logically
unconnected and unconnectable judgments" (116). In giving expression
to such a pair of judgments we must humbly renounce logical synthesis
(116): the supreme truth "speaks of itself in silence" (117). The highest
point that can be reached in antinomic knowledge is antinomic
monodualism: "one thing is not the other. and at the same time it is that
other. Thus, reality is always trinitary or triune; but the third, the
highest level, the synthesis, is absolutely transrational.. inexpressible in
any concept or judgment, and is, as it were, the very embodiment of the
unfathomable" (119).
The unfathomable has proved to be direct being-for-itself, a reality
which reveals itself to itself and to us in so far as we participate in it
(121). We know this reality as mental life, and we live in two worlds,
"public" objective, and "private" subjective (124). That inner being is
the true reality, but in a certain sense it is experienced as "subjective,"
dreamlike, or "unreal" (125). By the subject in this connection is meant
the experiencing self and not the subject of knowledge which, in Frank's -
opinion, does not coincide with the real self besause the cognitive func-
272 THE INTUITIVISTS
tion is "the most impersonal aspect of personal being;" it is the logos.
the knowing light (126), and our knowledge is a gift acquired "through
the communion of the personality with the light which is external to it"
(127).
Inner being is the unity of the experience and of the experienced,
both conscious and subconscious (127); it is life as being-for-itself (128)
in the form "1 am." Is it the same unfathomable, Frank asks, which has
revealed itself to us as the all-embracing reality? He answers that the
transdefinite essence of the untathomable "never is the same or self-
identical, at every moment and in everyone of its concrete manifesta-
tions it is something absolutely new, unique and unrepeatable." The
form "I am" is one of the modes of being, one of the instances of
antinomic monodualism (131): man both "is and is not the absolute
reality" (132); "all is in me-and I am in all" (133); selfhood as self-
affirmation is opposed to everything else, but in its depth it is flat one
with the absolute" (134); and yet, it is not pan-unity in general, but one
of such unities (135). unlimited in a limited form, one among many
and yet unique and unrepeatable (135), a monad (136). The one all-
embracing "consciousness" or "selfhood" generates "a number of inter-
connected particular selhoods which mutually limit one another." This
immediate being-for-itself is "actual potentiality or power" which we
have already found at the basis of objective being; in itself that prin-
ciple is "absence of ground," Ungrund (137), Tyutchev's "chaos," blind
freedom which leads to slavery in contradistinction to real freedom
which is self-determination through self-conquest (139). Without such
self-determination immediate being-for-itself is not the fullness of
reality (140); it is only "a striving towards being," "subjectivity similar
to a dream" (141) that requires completion, that must transcend itself
in order to gain its soul through losing it (142). The most general form
of such transcendence, the cognitive, is merely ideal; there must also be
real transcendence, a going outwards to "thou" and inwards to the
spirit (145).
Immediate being-for-itself, Frank maintains, can only become "my"
self as related to a thou which really enters into the me in the experi-
ences of love, hate, etc., or indeed at the mere encounter between two
pairs of eyes (153). Such real interpenetration between the "I" and the
"thou" which nevertheless retain their opposition is another instance of
antinomic monodualism (167). In love, "two become one" (170) and
this is possible because in "their inmost depth," in the pan-unity they
are one (171). The unity of "I" and "thou" is "we," a unique aspect of
rea li ty (172) which lies at the basis of society and is deeper than the "I"
( 1 7 ~ f.). Christianity had' this reality in view in accepting St. Paul's con-
s. L. FRANK
275
ception of the Church as a living body of which human beings are
members and Jesus Christ the head (174). Every self is eooted in the
pan-unity of "being-for-itself" which is "the kingdom of spirits or of
concrete bearers of immediate being-for-itself" (156).
The soul frees itself from self-willed ungrounded "subjectivity"
(197) by transcendence inwards, into the depths, toward spirit which is
"objective being" not in the sense of being an object, but of being
actual, completed, stable reality (184) having value in itself and there-
fore imparting meaning to our mental life as well (188). Personality is
"selfhood as confronting higher, spiritual, objectively significant powers,
as penetrated by them and as representing them" (198); it is "the image
of God (200), the principle of supernatural being manifested in the im-
mediate being-for-itself. It is capable of true freedom which means
"being at one's self' (198).1 It is individual, for it is unique and unre-
placeable (201).
In spite of the sharp distinction between objective existence and
immediate being-for-itself, both belong to the same world, and there
must exist, accordingly, a common source of them, a unity which em-
braces them both (206). A way of overcoming the opposition between
the outer and the inner world is suggested by the perception of beauty
as harmony, as inner completeness that has absolute value (211). The
primary basis of this all-reconciling unity may be found through "going
deeper into the realm of the inner life" (220). When we attain the
primary basis of all, we transcend the limits of existence, as Plato and
Plotinus pointed out (227); that principle is the unity of existence and
value (229), the unity of the real and the ideal, more powerful, pro-
found and significant than all actual existence; it combines being and
justice, truth-verity and truth-justice (225). As the unity of opposites
this superexistential principle is unfathomable as such (230). It is best
to describe it as The Holy or Deity, reserving the word "God" for a
definite form of the revelation of The Holy (232). Our thought can, as it
were, only "circle round" this unfathomable principle trying to de-
termine the sense in which it "is," to account for its essential relation
to everything else and delineate the forms in which It manifests itself
in us and in the objective world. In the usual sense the word "is" is
applicable only to particular entities ( 2 ~ 4 ) ; the Deity not is but "abides
in divinity, hallows and creates being as such" (235). The presence of
the Deity is self-evident (236) and therefore cannot be proved either
deductively or inductively (237). The ontological proof alone is on the
right track if it be understood to mean that the idea of God and the
content of that idea are inseparable. The adeouate exnression of that
1. Heger. bei-sich-selbst-sein,
274 THE INTUITIVISTS
proof "is formulated not by Anselm, but for instance by Bonaventura,
Nicolas of Cusa and Malebranche" (236). Nicolas of Cusa shows that
"in denying the existence of some particular object we presuppose
existence as such from which the object in question is excluded through
our negation; hence negation is inapplicable to existence as such." God
is "the essential potentiality or power of all that exists or does not exist
and therefore it is self-contradictory to think of Him as nonexistent"
(238 f.).
The Deity "cannot be separated from the rest of reality, for Its
essence consists in being the ground and the source of it" (245); in
positing the rest of reality "outside of Itself," the Deity still has it "in
and through Itself." The Deity is "God-with-us" (Emmanu-el), the
hi-unity of "God and me" without division or confusion (246). "God-
with-me" is the primary "thou" (249), the transcendental condition of
the form "thou" (248) creating the relation of love which is always
religious: the love of God is the primary basis of love for one's neighbor
(249). My hi-unity with the eternal "thou" of God implies, in the first
place, the absolute self-evidence of God which is greater than that of
my own existence (St. Augustine) and, secondly, the preservation of my
being, my immortality (250 f.).
How is it possible for the Deity which is the Absolute and the First
Principle to be a "thou"? Frank answers this question as follows. The
Deity is a superpersonal principle, but It turns to me that aspect of
Itself in which It is personal as well (259). As love, God infinitely en-
riches me by His self-surrender and creates life as "being of the self
with God," which contradicts all "that is certain for logical thought"
(271). In the life of "the self-with-God," the first shall be last (first not
only in wealth, power, or fame, but in moral and intellectual attain-
ments and even in right belief), and the last shall be first; to those who
have it shall be given, and from those who have not it shall be taken
away; strength is weakness, and infirmity is strength; suffering is the
joyful way to bliss, and material welfare leads to perdition and so on
(278).
As a stream of love, God creates me and provides the ground for
me; "He contains me within Himself, as it were from the beginning.
Hence the profound idea of the Eternal or Heavenly Man. found in all
the deeper religions" (280 f.).
Mystical religious experience interpreted by philosophy is the
eternal universal revelation of God. It should be distinguished from
concretely positive revelation interpreted by theology and consisting in
the fact that "God's 'thou' itself enters earthly, temporal being" (254 fI.).
In addition to the problem of "God-and-I" we are {aced with the
s. L. FRANK.
275
problem "God and the world." The world, says Frank, is a certain "it"
(285), actual and impersonal being. Until quite recently it appeared
rational in form, but chaotic and meaningless in content (286). Worse
still, it is indifferent to good and evil, andindeed rather hostile to the
good. It is all the more important, therefore, to solve the question as to
the world's ground-not the metaphysical problem of its cause (Frank
thinks that problem objectless) but of the sense in which it may be said
to arise out of its Primary basis (289 L). Emanatory theories which pre-
suppose substantial identity between God and the world are untenable,
for they "rationalize the transrational." Truth must therefore be sought
for in the religious idea of "creation:' The doctrine of the creation of
the world out of nothing cannot, however, be accepted literally: to
begin with, the "nothing" out of which the world is supposed to be
created His simply a word which does not denote anything;" secondly,
"the origination of the world already presupposes time, but time itself
can only be significantly thought of as an element or a dimension of
cosmic being:' On those grounds Frank comes to the conclusion that
God's "calling the world forth into being" consists in bestowing upon
it value and meaning: "the world has its real basis and its ideal ground
in God-and this is precisely what the createdness of the world means."
The world lasts immeasurably in both directions in time, and yet it has
an absolute beginning and end, not in time, of course, but in so far as
it has an absolute ground and an absolute purpose (290). Thus, the
idea of emanation also contains some truth: the relation between God
and the world is "the inner unity of both" or "the duality of one. This is
applicable both to the world's essence and-to its existence." The essence
of the world consists in its being a distant likeness of God, and this is
felt in the apprehension of its beauty (293). The world is a theophany
(296), God's self-revelation (294), "the garment" of God or His expres-
sion-somewhat after the same fashion as the bodily form is the ex-
pression of the spirit (295). Thus, beside the God-manhood there is
revealed to us the "theocosrnism" of the world (297). But the world as
empirically given contains evil as well as good. Hence arises the problem
of theodicy (298).
The presence of evil does not affect the truth of God's existence
because the reality of God "is more self-evident than the reality of
facts" (299); and it is "the reality of God as omnipotent and all-merciful"
(300). It follows that the connection between God and the "bad"
empirical world is "antinomically transrational, and self-evident only
as unjathomable;" In other words, "the problem of theodicy is abso-
lutely insoluble rationally, necessarily and essentially insoluble in
principle." Indeed, to explain evil would mean to find its ground, its
276 THE INTUITIVISTS
meaning, i.e., to justify it. "But that contradicts the very essence of
evil" as of that "which ought not to be." Hence, "the only right attitude
to evil is to reject it, to banish it, and certainly not to explain it" (SOO).
It is possible to describe evil, but not to make hypotheses about it.
Evil is present wherever reality itself "wants to be groundless and
makes itself such, affirming itself in its groundlessness;" it then "falls
away from being, and pan-unity becomes a 'split unity'" (301). This
implies that reality has immeasurable "depth, inaccessible to us" in
which "absolutely everything is possible-including the logically and
metaphysically unthinkable:" Such an assertion is "a simple confession
of the inability of philosophical thought to decide the problem, it is
docta ignorantia (312). "The positive, individualizing not becomes the
excluding, the completely segregating not-not as absolute division;"
in this way "the paradox of actual, existent non-being is realized;"
limitation becomes "a defect, a deficiency." The particular individual
entity "mistakes its own inward center in its isolation from all else, for
the absolute ground of reality. That is the perversion which constitutes
the essence of evil as existent non-being" (304). The particular "becomes
for itself a fictitious Absolute, a kind of pseudo deity. Not being all
and needing a great deal, it strives to appropriate everything:' Self-
assertion and pride are accompanied by insatiable cupidity and lust
(804 f.). Hence the struggle of all against all, plunder, murder and
suicide-tithe hellish torments of earthly existence" (305).
Who is to blame for evil? Frank refuses to explain the origin of
evil by the freedom of choice, for choice already presupposes the ex-
istence of evil. Besides, we freely strive only toward the good which
constitutes "the true inner basis of our being;" as to evil, we are on the
contrary, "involuntarily drawn to it" (308). There is thus an antinomy
between my own responsibility for evil, on the one hand, and the power
of evil affecting me, on the other ( ~ 0 8 ) .
I' am both a tiny particle of the world-whole and its center in
which "it is present as a whole. Hence, the cosmic fall is my Call, and my
fall-the fall of the world. I am subject to the world's demonic forces
and at the same time all the demonic forces of the world exist in me"
(309). Evil, however, "is unable to destroy universal being as such," for
since evil means isolation and division flit is always connected with
suffering and perdition, not only of the victim but of the bearer of evil
as well," and that is a proof, as it were, of God's absolute omnipotence."
But this truth does not solve the problem of theodicy (311). On the
contrary, says Frank, it leads us "to the admission that in some ultimate
and profoundest sense evil, or at any rate the primary source of it is
hidden in the unfathomable depths of God Himself." Frank points to
s. L. FllANK 277
Jacob Boehme's and Schelling's intellectual intuition of evil. "The
responsibility for evil rests upon that primary element of reality which,
though in God (for everything without exception is in God) is not God
Himself, or is something opposed to Him" (312). "Evil springs from the
unutterable abyss which lies as it were at the dividing line between
God and not-God" (313). Frank evidently has in mind the conception
of the Ungrund in Jacob Boehme and of "nature in God" in Schelling.
In Russian philosophy the same idea is found in Vladimir Soloviev and
Berdyaev.
HIn living experience,' Frank writes, "this abyss is given me 'as my
own self,' as the bottomless depth which both unites me to God and
separates me from Him." That is why I am conscious of being guilty
of sin and of evil; that consciousness leads to overcoming and-extinguish-
ing evil by reinstating the violated unity with God (313). "Apart from
suffering," says Frank, "there is no perfection" (316); there is suffering
in God Himself, in the God-man. But "the falling away from being,
i.e., from God," and the split in the pan-unity exists "only in our
human aspect" (318). In the Divine aspect pan-unity "remains forever
unviolate, for all its cracks are immediately filled up by positive being
flowing from the Primary Source itsel." In the aspect of His eternity
God "is all in all. In spite of all the problems of evil the world in its
ultimate basis and meaning is transfigured being-the Kingdom of
God" (319).
In his book God With Us Frank expounds the main basis of Christi..
anity and shows that its essential content rests upon the religious ex-
perience, upon "the encounter of the human heart with God" (20) and
the living communion with God. He distinguishes between two con-
ceptions of faith-faith as confidence, i.e., as trust in authority, and
faith as certainty, i.e., faith as knowledge, and points out that trust in
authority presupposes experiences which testify that the authority really
does express the truth about God. Hence even faith in authority rests
upon faith as knowledge based upon religious experience. In the same
way he proves that our confidence in "the positive revelation" is con-
nected with our immediate religious experience (114-119).
God is not our judge but our Saviour. Man passes judgment on
himself in his own conscience, but God saves man and shows more love
for the sinner than for the righteous because the sinner needs it more
(145 ff.), God is "beyond good and evil" (149). God is Love, and Chris-
tian religion trains man for sacrificial love and for entering the way of
the Cross, in imitation of the God-man Jesus Christ. By eternal torments
Frank means not the duration of torments in time but their quality
(209).
278
THE INTUITIVISTS
There is much to be said for the distinction Frank draws between
the mystical church which contains the fullness of perfection and is not
divided into different denominations and the empirical church which
has many defects (244-261). In speaking of our epoch, abounding in
deflections from Christianity, Frank says that it is not pagan but
demonical (282). There must be a reunion of churches if this evil is to
be combatted successfully (286).
Frank has written also about the problems of social philosophy. I
have chiefly in mind his pamphlet An Essay on the Methodology of
Social Sciences, his article 1 and We (in the symposium dedicated to
P. B. Struve, 1925), and his book The Spiritual Foundations of Society-
Society is, according to him, a primary whole. a single entity. Starting
with his theory of knowledge and his conception of the human soul, he
shows that the minds of different individuals are not isolated, but always
to a certain extent merged together (e.g., in the perception of one and
the same portion of reality) and that communion between them is lea
primary quality, a constitutive feature of every consciousness" (e.g., in
the experiences of love, friendship, hatred, etc., and in all knowledge of
the mental life of others which can only be a direct knowledge). Indi-
vidual consciousness is not primary, it is but gradually differentiated
out of consciousness in general, never severing itself from the whole, so
that "the individual is in the fullest and deepest sense derived from
society as a whole" (Essay, 68). "I" is impossible without opposing it to
"thou," but the opposition is overcome in "we" which is the unity of
categorically heterogenous personal being (1 and We, 422). Thus, "I"
and "we" are the primary categories both of personal and of social
being. Since they are correlative, a theoretical knowledge as well as a
practical realization of them can only be attained through ascending to
a still higher, absolutely primary principle, God, "Who. is at one and
the same time a unity embracing from outside and determining from
within the essence of all being. True 'me: as well as true 'we'-and
therefore their true biunity-are only realized when 'I' give myself,
and 'we' give ourselves to the supreme principle-God. That makes
clear why and in what sense all social existence must be based upon the
religious consciousness of its members; the ruin of social and personal
existence tossed about between despotism and anarchy is the inevitable
result following sooner or later from atheistic, self-assertive interpreta-
tion of life" (447).
Arguing against psychologism in social sciences Frank shows that
social life cannot be merely the sum of socially psychological events:
everything psychical takes place in individual minds, but social phe-
nomena are superindiuidusl, both because they exist for many persons
s. L. FRANK 279
at once, and because their duration does not depend upon the duration
of human life. "Laws, customs, institutions, etc., as aspects of social
existence are distinct from the' existence of social feelings, opinions and
so on, connected with them" (Essay, 47 ff.). Every social phenomenon
has an ideal aspect (the idea of law, of marriage, etc.) which is normative
in character; i.e., it acts upon human will as the consciousness of the
duty to realize the norm (77). Frank calls such ideality, indissolubly
connected with concrete reality, "a living idea" and regards all social
phenomena as ideally real (76 ff.), The superindividual character of
social phenomena is due precisely to their ideal aspect.
This conception of social philosophy is worked out in detail in
Frank's book The Spiritual Foundations of Society. Particular value
attaches to his analysis of the dual character of society, of the presence
in it of two layers-the inner and the outer. The inner layer consists in
the unity of the "we," and the outer "in that unity being split up into
division, opposition and struggle between many selves" (98). Frank
describes those two aspects of social being by the terms sobotnost (to-
getherness) and "external sociality" (110-119). He deduces from them
the inevitable presence in society of organic unity on the one hand, and
mechanism, compulsory external organization on the other, a dualism
of morality and legal justice, grace and law, the Church and the world.
Moreover, in morality itself and in legal justice, too, Frank discovers
the presence of those two aspects, pointing out for instance the dif-
ference between the "concrete, individualizing indications of conscience
and the stern universality of abstract duty" (172 ff.).
Frank defines the end of social development as "the fullest possible
embodiment in communal human life of the fullness of Divine righteous-
ness, the realization of life itself in the all-embracing fullness, depth,
harmony and freedom of its divine primary basis" (222). He deduces
from this the hierarchical structure of the principles of social life,
giving first place to the principles of service, solidarity and individual
freedom as man's primary duty, for without freedom there can be no
service of God (238).
The state, according to him, is "the unity of the systematically
organizing, social will" (292). The central power in the state must con-
tain the unity of two principles-supertemporality and temporal de-
velopment. "The most perfect realization of this concrete biunity is, so
far, the dualistic system of constitutional monarchy" (281).
Frank's theory of knowledge is extremely valuable. He proves that
consciousness is not the highest conception in epistemology: being does
not depend upon consciousness, but on the contrary, consciousness
depends upon being. Further, he proves that discursive thinking is
280 THE INTUITIVISTS
always based upon the intuitive contemplation of integral being. It is a
prevalent doctrine in modern epistemology that every judgment and
every inference is an organic whole: they can be analyzed into their
elements, but cannot be built up out of them by adding concepts to one
another. Recognizing as he does the close connection between discursive
thinking and intuition, Frank works out this view far more perfectly
than for instance, Cohen does in his Logik der reinen Erkenntnis. Such
an interpretation of judgment and inference results in the tendency to
deny that there is a difference of kind between analytic and synthetic
judgments and to regard both as synthetic systems. not to be explained
by mere reference to the law of contradiction. To prove this, it is neces-
sary to show that definitions are synthetic judgments. The Marburg
School is developing in this direction; thus Kassierer, discussing in his
Substanz und Eunktionsbegrif] Leibniz's teaching about genetic defini-
tions, shows that a concept is the product of such definitions and not
their starting point, ready-made for analysis. But one cannot stop half-
way: it is necessary to show that in this respect all definitions are similar
to genetic definitions, and that they all are synthetic judgments. The
main lines of the argument are set forth in Frank's The Object of
Knowledge where he proves that the subject of a definition is the object
as an intuitively observed part of reality, and the predicate is the
totality of the object's characteristics as aspects of the universal whole
"through relation to which the place of the definiendum is univocally
determined within the whole" (273). The relation between the subject
and the predicate in such a judgment is that of the whole to its parts;
this relation cannot be reduced to partial identity, and therefore a
judgment of that type is not analytic.
Such an interpretation of definition presupposes a preliminary
inquiry into the conception of whole and part. That inquiry has been
carried out by Frank and forms one of the most valuable sections of his
book, important not only for epistemology, but also for the solution of
all the problems involved in an organic world conception. The merits
and defects of Frank's theory of knowledge have been examined in
detail in my book The Fundamental Problems oj Epistemology (225-
247, 1919).
Here I will critically examine those theories of Frank which I
regard as mistaken and, besides, as leading to conclusions incompatible
with a Christian world conception.
According to Frank, all determinateness-i.e., everything subject
to the law of identity-is a nontemporal content of knowledge (The
Object 0/ Knowledge, 244). "AII logical determination is something
completed. immovable, se1f-contained" he says (198 f., 364, 366, 405);
s. L. FIlANK. 281
all that is subject to the laws of identity and contradiction he takes to
consist of isolated contents (210): i.e., he apparently regards such con-
tents as discrete (240), because he insists that continuity is one of the
qualities discoverable by ascending into the sphere of absolute being
Hence logical knowledge-i.e., knowledge of contents which are subject
to the laws of identity and contradiction-cannot as such inform us about
relations, transition, movement, etc., and is altogether impossible apart
from intuition which gives us "metalogical knowledge" about "the origi-
nal unity which is prior to particular determinations" .(204).
There is a great deal of vagueness and inconsistency in this view of
logical determinateness and of the need for two kinds of knowledge.
The first impression it gives one is that Frank, like Bergson, regards
logical knowledge as subjective, as merely a construct in the subject's
mind. But Frank does not really depreciate the value of logical knowl-
edge to that extent. He thinks that abstract knowledge does express the
actual content of being, but only of the lower type of being. "There are
levels of reality that have different epistemological and, therefore, dif-
ferent ontological value, and accordingly it may be said that whatever
corresponds to the lower and the less true, does not correspond to the
absolute or the highest reality:' Consequently, "the system of ,abstract
or self-contained determinations is not a fiction but an adequate
representation of reality in so far as reality is such a system" (819).
I think Frank's contention could be expressed as follows: the world
contains a stratum of life and a stratum of lifeless being: logical knowl-
edge is knowledge about lifeless being. But in that case, why should
logical knowledge be inadequate to its object? Surely the inadequacy
would arise if we used living knowledge for studying lifeless, determi-
nate being, for in that case we would be attempting to impart life to
what in fact is lifeless. Frank anticipates such a question, and answers
it by saying that logical knowledge is inadequate in the sense that "truth
about secondary or derivative being cannot in any case be a self-con-
tained truth," since "in the last resort all knowledge has only one
object-the All-embracing Unity itself' (319). But the objection must
still be urged that if there exist two levels of being, the higher, absolute,
and the lower, derivative from it, there is not one object of knowledge
but at least two, and although the truth about the lower depends upon
the truth about the higher, it is not submerged by it: if logical de-
terminations are really lifeless, the representation of their lifelessness
is the truth; if, however, there is in reality no lifeless being, logical
knowledge is merely a subjective construct of the human mind. It can
be seen how closely Frank comes to this admission from the comparison
he draws between rational knowledge and i flat drawing of a three-
282 THE INTUITIVISTS
dimensional body (The Unfathomable, 48). He says that there is no
relation of logical identity between the primary intuition of reality as
continuous. and secondary, abstract knowledge (47).
The very opposition between the subject and the object which lies
at the basis of all knowledge about determinate being seems to be re-
garded by Frank not as the condition of knowledge out as the product
of "the essentially primary act of cognition" (The Object of Knowledge,
258), namely, of attention. Attention, he says, "may be defined as a state
of directedness, as the differentiation of consciousness into the subject
and the object; all other kind of directedness-through volition, valua-
tion, etc.-is based upon this primary directedness of attention by virtue
of which the duality between the subject and the object, and the rela-
tion of the former to the latter, is first posited" (259; see also 4 ~ I f.),
We are thus driven to the conclusion that subject and object are only
posited as distinct from one another in knowledge and not in the reality
which is prior to it. In Frank's description the individual life approxi-
mates so closely to the life of the absolute, that he actually regards it as
merely a segment of the absolute's own continuity (176) differentiated
from it in inadequate knowledge only. He ventures to say that "we are
absolute being itself, but only in a potential, unclarified form" (431). In
his book The Unfathomable he expresses the same idea: "the ultimate
depth of our inner being" is, he says, that which in Hindu thought is
called "brahman" and "atman" (95).
Too close an approximation between the world and God is also
found in his doctrine that not only the world cannot exist apart from
Deity, but Deity is inseparable "Irom all the rest of reality, in generating
the ground of which its own being consists" (245). Accordingly, he
sympathetically quotes the lines of Angelus Silesius: "I know that God
could not exist without me for one instant: if I perished, God would
have to die for need of me" (246).
Frank wrongly interprets the idea that God created the world out
of nothing in the absurd sense that God took "nothing" and created the
world from it as from some material given to Him. Rejecting such a
view, Frank replaces it by a theory which while retaining the words
"Creator" and "creation" deprives them of their proper meaning. As
already said. when he speaks of the world being called into being by
God he means that "God imparts value and meaning to it" (290 f.). My
question is, to whom or to what does God impart meaning and value,
and where does He find that to which value and meaning are to be
imparted? Frank's book contains no answer to that question. We have to
surmise that God finds it in Himself as pan-unity and, more precisely,
in His Ungrund. In that case, God's creation of the world consists
s. L. FRANK. 288
merely in demiurgic shaping of the Ungrund through bestowing spir-
itual meaning and value upon it (290). This makes clear why Frank,
while rejecting the rationalistic theory of emanation according to
which God is partially identical with the world (289), says nevertheless
that "a certain-amount of truth contained in it" should be taken into
account, but interpreted transrationally (293).
The creation of the world out of nothing ought to be understood
as meaning that God does not need any material either contained in
Himself or given Him from without, since creation consists precisely
in producing something completely new, which was neither in the
Creator nor outside of Him. Those who adopt this interpretation,
sharply distinguish God from the world as Creator from creature and
understand the relation between them as a one..sided dependence of
the world upon God: the world cannot exist without God, but God
does not in the least need the world's existence. He creates the world in
His goodness so that there should exist beings capable of actively par-
ticipating in His perfection. Ontologically He and the world are abso-
lutely different, for the difference between them is not logical, but
metalogical. When the difference between two objects is logical, it is
always possible to find in them an identical aspect as well, e.g., .an ele-
phant and a snail contain an element of identity in so far as both are
animals. But if the difference between two objects is metalogical, no
identical element can be found in their make-up.
Too great an approximation between God and the world, inevitably
involved in the conception of the Absolute as pan-unity, leads to
insuperable difficulties with regard to the origin of evil and individual
freedom, as is always the case with pantheistically-colored theories.
Frank discovers the primary source of evil in the Ungrund, in the prin-
ciple which "in God is not God Himself" (312). No philosopher who
recognizes such a principle, says that it has been created by God-nor
does Frank. In "living experience" he finds the source of sin and evil in
man's own self ( 3 1 ~ ) , and that self, he says, is not merely a small particle
of the world, but also its center, so that my fall is the sin of the whole
world, and vice versa. Moreover, "my 'self' is the point of intersection
between God and the world, the point where God and the world meet"
(309). There is only one step from this to admitting that the Deity
itself as pan-unity has a part in the origination of evil. Frank does not
take that step, but I think a consistent working out of antinomic
monodualism should lead to affirming the antinomy: God is not, but in
a certain sense He also is, the source of evil. The Buddhist philosophy,
in which there is no conception of God as the Creator of the world,
does. strictlv soeakinz, come to this conclusion: rezardine all cosmic
2M THE INTUITIVISTS
existence as an evil, i ~ maintains that that existence is the consequence
of "agitation," "disturbance" or "clouding" in the Absolute principle.t
Through exaggerating the unity between God and the world Frank
cannot isolate God from evil, but does not venture to introduce evil
into God; he therefore has to maintain that "a theodicy in a rational
form is impossible, and the very attempt to build it is not only logically,
but morally and spiritually inadmissible" (317). "The first answer, the
most general and indefinite," he says, "evidently is that reality has
infinite. immeasurable depth" and in that depth "in some sense abso..
lutely everything is possible-including the logically and metaphysically
unthinkable. This is simply seeking refuge in wise ignorance. If one
likes to put it so, it is simply an admission that philosophical thought is
incapable of solving this problem" (312). Frank is aware that in this
context he uses docta ignorantia in a different meaning than elsewhere:
in other passages it meant "rising above" two antinomic positions, and
here it consists in simply refusing to tackle the problem.
Through that same overemphasis on unity. individual entities in
Frank's system are not delimited from one another, and therefore the
fall is not the individual act of every separate self, but the common
guilt of the world as a whole. The Christian experience of the Kingdom
of God and the experience of personal life compel us to adopt another
view, according to which God creates personalities as entities ontologi-
cally distinct from Himself and from one another, so that every person
is a comparatively independent, free creator of his actions and is solely
responsible for them. Therefore it certainly cannot be maintained that
all created entities have committed the act of fall. The Kingdom of God
consists in the first instance of an innumerable multitude of angels who
are its members from everlasting to everlasting without participating in
any sin. Frank has no such conception of the Divine Kingdom. That is
evident not only from his teaching about "the fall of the whole world"
( ~ 0 9 ) but also from his saying that "apart from suffering there is no
perfection" (316). That idea is partly connected with Frank's concep-
tion of negation as conditioning the rational determinateness of being
and the existence of opposites. Frank says: "Neither the negative judg-
ment, nor the attitude of struggle and counteraction, corresponding as
they do to the very structure of being, can ever wholly disappear or be
replaced by a smooth, conjoint, finally reconciled affirmation" (108).
He confuses here two kinds of opposition, which I carefully distinguish
in my book The World As an Organic Whole (49)-the ideal or the
differentiating opposition necessary for the world's richness, complexity
and diversity, and the real opposition of mutual struggle which hampers
2. o. o. Rosenberg, The Problems of Buddhist Philosophy, 77.
s. L. FRANK.. 285
and impoverishes the life of the struggling entities. It is quite thinkable
that real opposition should completely disappear while the ideal dis-
tinctions, capable of interpenetrating and. completing one another,
would be preserved. That is precisely how the structure of the' King-
dom of God should be conceived.
The explanation of evil by the misuse of human freedom under-
stood as a power to choose between good and evil does not, in Frank's
opinion, go to the root of the matter, since it already presupposes the
existence of evil. His criticism would be just if the explanation were
really such as he takes it to be. In truth, however, it does not assert
that man has to choose between ready-made good and evil, spread out
before him, somewhat like pears and apples might be, so that he has
only to take the one or the other. Those who uphold the view in ques-
tion maintain that an entity committing the act of fall creates freely
and for the first time good or evil conduct. And even when they speak
of free choice, what they mean is choice between the idea of possible
good or bad conduct, ending in favor of evil and bringing about its
realization which leads to evil becoming for the first time actual.
Frank's doctrine of freedom is not satisfactory--owing to the same
reason-to too great a unity between God and the world and of all
entities with one another. Frank maintains that we never do evil freely:
"We are involuntarily drawn to it." He think.s that only the striving
toward the good is truly free because the good "coinciding, in the depths
of reality with existence, forms the true inner basis of our being;" the
conception of freedom which "essentially coincides with holiness" as
"[ree devotion to the good only" (308) does not strike him as absurd.
Freedom, just as "being-at-one's-self" is the state when "selfhood for-
sakes itself and becomes rooted in something, other and higher" (199).
Hence it is clear that freedom means for him entire dependence of
conduct upon the inner basis of personality, and since that basis is
reality as the Good, freedom in his view means what is usually called
rational freedom. Both these conceptions of freedom are species of
determinism. The extent to which Frank approaches determinism can
be seen from the fact that, in regarding evil conduct as not free and
only good conduct as free, he does not appreciate formal freedom; i.e.,
the creative power of personality which is not predetermined to any
content of action and therefore conceals in itself the possibility both of
good and of evil. Even the highest kind of material freedom, connected
with an unlimited power of creating absolutely valuable being, includes
formal freedom as a possibility of creating any content of reality. Of
course Frank's philosophy cannot sink to the level of real determinism
286 THE INTUITIVISTS
and believe that the world wholly consists of "determinations." The
true conception of freedom is hinted at in the early part of Frank's
book where he speaks of "potentiality" and "dynamism" as freedom
(The Unfathomable, 67).
The defects of Frank's system, due to connecting too closely God
with the world, and the created beings with one another may be
remedied, first of all, by renouncing the conception of the Absolute as
pan-unity. The supercosmic principle, God, as the metalogical subject
of negative theology constitutes quite a special realm standing high
above the world.. He is the ground of the world in the sense that He
creates the world as something completely different from Himself, new
in comparison with Him and external to Him-not in the sense of
absence of communion, but in the sense of the total ontological dif-
ference between Him and the world.
Frank may raise the objection that if the Absolute be not conceived
as pan-unity, it is put on a level of limited entities distinct from it, and
itself becomes one of such entities, subject to the law of determinateness.
This objection, however, has no force: to have something external to
oneself does not, in this case, mean to be limited. Limitations are only
possible in the realm of homogenous, i.e., of rational being in which dif-
ference between any two objects coexists with their likeness in some
respect. But difference between God and the world is metalogical and
excludes all identity between them.
Among the world's constituents, substantival agents alone, as
bearers of superqualitative creative power, belong to the domain of the
metalogical and the superrational; all their manifestations in space and
time, Le., the whole of their life, as well as all the abstract ideas belong.
ing to them in accordance with which they act, form part of determi
nate being subject to the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded
middle. Frank has a different conception of the world's structure: he
maintains that every manifestation of life, dynamism, becoming, change,
movement, being continuous, belong to the domain of the metalogical
and unfathomable. He arrives at that conclusion because he regards all
being subject to the laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle:
as nontemporal. static, discrete, lifeless (The Object of Knowledge
198 f., 210, 240, 244, g64, S66, 405; The Unfathomable, 6], 46 f.).
I regard this interpretation of determinateness as erroneous. 111
order to avoid the error, it is essential in the first instance to be cleai
about the meaning of the law of identity. The usual formula of it i ~
~ =A or A is A. The repetition of A may be a source of misunderstand.
ing. It is necessary to distinguish the law of identity as an ontological
law from the law of identity as a law of thought; Frank admits this. A!
s. L. FRANK.
287
an ontological law, the law of identity refers to the self-identical charac-
ter of every finite aspect of the world, ideally excluding all the rest of
the world's content and therefore being something unique and strictly
determinate. It is impossible to find unambiguous abstract term for the
exact expression of this highly abstract idea, and so one has to use the
symbol A in the formula of the law of identity to illustrate its meaning,
and word it as follows: "Every finite element of the world is something
determinate, e.g., A" (Le., it has the character of A'ity, or B'ity, or City).
The symbol A in this case ought on no account to be repeated, for
what is meant is not the identity of two instances of A (which would be J'
impossible if they are two) but of the self-identity of A, Le., of the self-
identity of every determinate content. When, on the basis of this onto-
logical law of identity we formulate the logical law, concerned with the
nature of. truth and of judgments expressive of truth, it should be
expressed as follows: "In all judgments the objective content A always
remains identical with itself as A." In this formulation the symbol A-
is repeated, but it too, refers not to two instances of A, but to two or
many intentional acts of judgment directed upon the one, literally the
same A. This absolute identity of the object preserved for the conscious
mind in spite of the numerous acts of judging about it or of remember-
ing it, and so on, is, on the one hand self-evident and on the other very
difficult to explain. Few systems of philosophy can clearly show what
structure of the world and of consciousness makes it possible for many
different intentional acts (apprehending, remembering, etc.) to be
directed upon literally one and the same A.
The self-identity of the determinate content, referred to in the
ontological and the logical law does not in the least require nontemporal
being: the swiftest change in every phase and in the whole of it is
something strictly determinate, l.e., self-identical. Repeated cognitions
and recognitions of that change may contain the truth about it only if
those numerous mental acts have for their observed object both the
dazzling swiftness of the change and its absolute numerical self-identity.
How is this possible? The intuitive theory of knowledge gives a very
simple answer to the question. Suppose that in recalling the past I say
"when my neighbor's house was struck by lightning, it was almost in-
stantly enveloped in flames:' As supertemporal I, the knowing subject,
can long after apprehending an object direct my acts of remembering
many times upon absolutely the same event as it was and contemplate it
afresh; my acts of apprehension, recognition. etc., are new events, but
the object of which I am conscious is absolutely the same unique event.
Philosophical systems unable to account for the possibility of such
absolute identity in case of memory, judgment and inference cannot
288 THE INTUITIVISTS
explain the truth of the simplest inferences and judgments-which
proves that they are llntenable.
Doubts as to the applicability of the laws of identity and contra-
diction to continuous change in time arise, partly, owing to the follow..
ing reason. Reflection upon such an event as, e.g., the flight of a cannon
ball compels us to admit that at a given moment of time the ball oc-
cupies a definite position in space and cannot be said to be elsewhere;
hence the conclusion is drawn that at one moment of time the ball rests
in a definite place, at the next moment it is at rest again and so on. By
summing up states of rest it is impossible to arrive at motion. And so it
is concluded that if motion exists, it is not subject to the law of contra-
diction: at each moment of time the moving ball both is and is not at
a definite point of space. a
This argument contains the following error. A moment of time is
the dividing line between two fractions of time and has no duration; it
is quite true that at a moment of time the cannon ball occupies a defi-
nite position in space and does not move from it, but that does not mean
that it is at rest: rest implies abiding in one and the same place during
a fraction of time however short it may be, e.g., during one-thousandth
part of a second; in our analysis, however, we were concerned not with
a fraction but with a moment of time, which is an ideal aspect of time.
It belongs to its structure being a limit between its parts, but is not
itself a part of time.s It is therefore quite possible that in time a body
is in continuous motion, but in relation to a moment of time it is at
rest; that would not convert movement into a sum of positions at rest,
because time is certainly not a sum of its moments. The objection may
be urged that we thus ascribe to the moving body both motion and rest.
That is true, but there is no contradiction in it, since both movement
and rest belong to the body in different respects. There is no more con-
tradiction in this than in saying, as we watch a car rushing alongside a
train at the same speed, that the car is at rest in relation to the train,
but in motion in relation to the sign posts.
Frank is right in maintaining that continuity of becoming is im-
possible apart from a metalogical principle; but all it comes to is that
the metalogical substantival agent, owing to his supertemporal charac..
ter, is able to create his manifestations in time not by piecing together
their discrete fragments but as a continuous process. But the process as
such is wholly determinate, i.e., subject to the laws of identity and con-
tradiction, so that it is only the substantival agent in his inmost super-
temporal essence who belongs to the realm of the metalogical.
5. See e.g, Hegel, Collected Works, 2nd ed., IV, 67.
4. All these questions are discussed in my Logic, SO-56 (on logical laws of thought).
s. L. FRANK
289
If then only God and supertemporal substantival agents belong to
the metalogical realm, while all the cosmic life of the agents taking place
in space and time, as well as its abstractly ideal principles, is determi-
nate, rational knowledge has the greatest value. It gives us correct in-
formation about the world, on condition, of course, that the metalogical
sources of the processes in it be pointed out; otherwise, rational knowl-
edge becomes too pretentious and promotes temporal forms of life to
the rank of immutable laws of nature.
According to Frank not only the Deity and the inmost essence of
personality, but also all continuous processes, all becoming and move-
ment belong to the reahn of the unfathomable, the metalogical. Where,
then, are we to find what he calls objective being, accessible to rational
knowledge? Even that department of nature which is studied by physics
and chemistry consists of continuous activities of electrons, protons,
atoms, etc., of innumerable movements, i.e., of that which Frank in-
cludes in the domain of the metalogical. We are left to suppose that
rational knowledge proceeds by singling out of the world discrete, non-
temporal fragments and therefore gives us a profoundly erroneous im-
pression of it. Frank must regard such distortion of reality not as an
error of this or that particular thinker, but as a necessary characteristic
of rational knowledge following from its very nature. And indeed the
whole content of his book The Unfathomable convinces the reader that
not one of the fundamental problems of philosophy can be solved
through rational knowledge and even suggests that the truth about any
realm of being cannot be expressed in the form of rational knowledge.
The principle which, in The Unfathomable, solves the fundamen-
tal philosophical problems is that of antinomic monodualism. Accord-
ing to Frank the domain of the absolute contains a "coincidence of op-
posites." Does it mean that the laws of identity and contradiction are
violated there? No, Frank himself in his The Object of Knowledge says
that "the law of contradiction is not violated, but is simply inapplicable
here" (220). In The Unfathomable too, Frank does not say, when mak-
ing two antinomic assertions, that superrational truth is a pair of mu-
tually contradictory judgments; he says it is attained by rising above
both such judgments and lies "in the inexpressible midway between
them" (116). As to the continuous temporal processes such as move-
ment, I have shown above that there is no reason to regard them, with
Hegel, as an embodied contradiction, or with Frank, as a metalogical
supercontradiction: everything temporal belongs to the realm of "de-
terminate" being, accessible to rational knowledge.
Now I want to go further and attempt to show that even problems
relating to the Deity cannot be solved by means of antinomic mono-
290
THE INTUITIVIS'rS
dualism. The laws of identity and of contradiction, if properly under-
stood, are absolutely inviolable. The law of contradiction would be
really violated only if we could discover a definite A'ity which, in its
very A'ity was not A'ian, for instance if we could say "the number nine
is divisible into three" and add that at the same time, in the same re-
lation and in the same sense "the number nine is not divisible into
three." As soon as we try to utter two such judgments, we see that in
doing so we say nothing about the object. Once we understand this
emptiness of two mutually contradictory judgments, we understand
that there is no point in "rising above" it; if we dwell upon it, it simply
means that we waver between two ideas, and Frank justly rejects such
wavering. When two antinomic judgments uttered together do not pro..
duce an impression of emptiness, that shows that they both contain
truth, but not fully thought out truth, that is, they are concerned with
a property which belongs to the object in one respect but not in an-
other; the task of further inquiry is to discover these two different re-
spects. As soon as this is done, the two judgments will prove not to be
mutually contradictory at all. This is the case not only with reference
to created temporal being, but also to its connection with superrational
principles, with God and substantival agents. The superrational is on
all sides surrounded by the rational and connected with it by rational
relations. Hence, to express an idea in an antinomic form is a clear sign
of not having thought it out to the end. That is reflected even in the
verbal form of it: Frank generally expresses one of the mutually con-
tradictory antinomic assertions not in a straightforward form, but tones
it down by adding "somehow," "in a way,' or words to that effect. For
instance, in speaking about the distinction between God and the hu-
man self and at the same time of their mutual interpenetration, Frank
says "my self is somehow rooted in God's own being" (278). We may in-
quire into that "somehow" and point out in what respect God and the
self are absolutely distinct on the one hand, and on the other in what
perfectly definite sense they are mutually interpenetrated. In all such
cases fully thought-out inquiry results in a complete absence of am-
biguity, in a strictly definite "yes" or "no."
In science it is very seldom necessary to reflect upon metalogical
principles; violations of the law of identity and contradiction are ab-
solutely unthinkable; hence the assertion that the domain of the meta.
logical exists and that it transcends identity and contradiction is utterly
unintelligible to many minds. To make it more comprehensible I would
use the following analogy: mathematical triangles are not subject to
the laws of chemistry; that does not mean that they violate chemical
laws; they simply contain nothing which may be subject to the laws
s. t. FRANK.
291
of chemistry. Similarly, metalogical principles contain nothing which
could be subject to the law of contradiction.
It is still more difficult to understand that metalogical principles
are independent of the law of identity. Frank tries to make it clearer by
saying that the unfathomable, absolute reality "never is the same, i.e.,
unchangeably identical with itself, hut on the contrary transcends all
identity and therefore at every moment and in its every concrete mani-
festation is something absolutely new, unique and unrepeatable" (131).
Frank speaks here of the absolute reality, consequently of the Deity too,
as though It were something temporal, dazzlingly changeable and there-
fore not subject to the law of identity. I affirm on the contrary that
everything temporal, even the most changeable, is always subject to the
law of identity and that everything metalogical contains no change
whatever, for it is supertemporal. Thus, God is a supertemporal prin-
ciple. It may appear that in that case He is pre-eminently subject to the
law of identity in so far as He is eternally and unalterably stationary.
Such an idea is due, to begin with, to a wrong interpretation of the law
of identity and secondly to a confusion between supertemporality and
infinite duration in time; it is imagined that the supertemporal is to-
day the same as it was millions of years ago and as it will be millions of
years hence. That is an absurd idea, for the supertemporal is not in
time and there is for it no "was," "is" or "will be." The independence
of metalogical principles from the law of identity should be explained
as follows. In order to be subject to the law of identity one must be a
finite "this," belonging to a system of numerous finite entities mutually
interconnected by the relations of sameness and difference: the meta-
logical is not a member of such a system and therefore is not subject to
the law of identity; but it does not violate it, since it has no aspect of
finiteness to which the law of identity is applicable.
That which is not subject to the laws of identity and contradiction
and yet does not violate them, certainly is unfathomable for logical
thought. But it is comparatively seldom that we have to turn to that
domain with the purpose of gaining knowledge about it-it has to be
done only when we must have to deal with the metalogical as such in its
own essence. \\Then we are led up to it by logical necessity we must con-
template it in silence and not utter antinomic judgments about it;
Frank himself rightly says that the highest truth "speaks of itself in si-
lence, expresses itself and reveals itself" (117)_ The silent contemplation
of that which is unutterable provides us with the ground for numerous
logica1 deductions with regard to the structure and- the properties of
the logically apprehensible rational It is only occasionally
that WP ouohr to have recourse in nhilosonhv tn silent. llnllttPT:lhlp
292
THE INTUITIVISTS
knowledge, and then immediately return from it to rational speculation
which is the true domain of philosophy.
A Christian world conception cannot be worked out without the
help of metaphysics as a science. After Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
metaphysics can only be epistemologically justified on the ground of
an intuitive theory of knowledge, i.e., of the doctrine which shows that
human knowledge is based upon experience as the direct apprehension
of actual reality. Frank's book The Object of Knowledge is a highly
valuable contribution to the literature on Intuitivism and therefore is
a substantial help to the building up of a Christian world conception.
Frank himself makes admirable use of it for expounding the funda-
mental positions of Christianity in his book God With Us. A writer of
outstanding literary gifts, he presents in it a heartfelt and convincing
defense of the Christian religion.
3. A. LOSEV
A. F. Losev (born in 1892), a distinguished philosopher, now living
in U.S.S.R. His main works are: The Ancient Cosmos and Modern
Science, 1927; The Philosophy of the Name, 1927; The Dialectic of Ar-
tistic Form, 1927; A Logician's Interpretation of Music, 1927.
Losev is a passionate, adherent of.. the dialectical method which in
his works appears as a combinarion of Hegel's dialectics (concrete specu-
lation) with Husserl's eidetic vision (Wesensschau) .. Possessing a great
erudition in ancient philosophy, especially in neoplatonism, Losev in
his book, The Ancient Cosmos and Modern Science, has set out to
present in a new light the history of ancient speculative philosophy in-
terpreting it in the spirit of concrete eidetic dialectics. His main object
is the study of the "ancient doctrines of cosmos and of the building up
of spatial forms in the ancient Greek dialectics." With that object in
view he subjects to an analysis chiefly Plato's Patmenides and Timeos,
making especial use of Proclus's works and resorting to various com-
mentators-Simplicius, Damascius, Philopon, etc.
Dialectics is defined by Losev as "logical construction of the eidos,"
meaning by eidos "the complete logical image of a thing:' containing
"a fusion of contradictory properties, organically transformed into the
living and real organism of the thing." Formal logic dismembers and
disjoins all these elements considering each element as something in-
dependent and separate from the rest, whence follows its formal nature,
though it is not less real than in the eidos, The main law of formal
logic, the law of contradiction, does not exist for dialectics which makes
use of a diametrically opposite law of coincidence of the opposites.
A. LOSEV
Dialectics explains only the eidetics of the connections between the
categorial definitions of a thing; therefore it is not the highest stage
of knowledge; above it stands mythology} I.e., that "complete and full
knowledge which operates with living things and living world, apart
from any abstractions."
In the orphic cosmogonies and in Pythagoreanism Losev discovers
the dialectics of the "one" and "many;" with Plato it becomes more
mature. In his dialogue Parmenides the starting point of dialectics is
"one." So long as one is conceived only as one it is "neither identical
with itself nor with the other, nor different from itself or from the
other;" under these conditions it "does not exist," it is above existence,
it is a thought about the unthinkable (53 ff.). This superexistent Noth-
ing is that principle which is called the Divine Nothing and serves as
the object of the negative (apophatic) theology.
From the superontological One, conceived as inaccessible to
thought, Losev passes to its manifestation, to the One as an existent
something, and shows that it is thinkable only in connection with the
nonexistent, the meon, the formless plurality as the principle of evolu-
tion and separateness (60); then he passes to the category of becoming,
and so on.
Looking at Plato's speculations in Patmenides and at Proclus's
speculations from the point of view of the dialectics of the eidos, Losev
opens up before his readers a fascinating prospect-of learning to see
the structure of spiritual being, to contemplate intuitively the eidos of
a thing, its meaning as an organic whole interpenetrated, not only by
different, but by opposite categories. Many thorny problems of the
history of ancient philosophy are thus presented in a new light: e.g.,
Plato's doctrine of the soul ( i ~ Timeos) as a unity of the identical in
itself and the other (307); Plato's doctrine of the elements as containing
a physico-mathematical, dialectical, mythological, and aesthetic mo-
ments (186); the ancient doctrine of the heterogeneous nature of space
and time as the basis of astrology, alchemy and magic (229), and the
dialectical condition of the modern theory of relativity, etc.
The principal difference between Platonism and Aristotelism is
seen by Losev in that the system of Plato is dialectical, and that of
Aristotle formally logical. "For Plato the thing and the idea are both
different and identical, and their interrelatedness is construed by de-
ducing one conception from the other; that is, for Plato the thing and
the idea are dialectical categories. According to Aristotle, the thing and
the idea are also both different and identical, but their interrelatedness
is construed by deducing the idea from the fhing; i.e., the thing and
the idea are not dialectical principles. Things are taken as they have
THE INTUITIVISTS
been created by the existing reality, which can only be explained by
empirical science; the task of logic or philosophy consists merely in the
eidetic fixation of things whose origin is unknown, i.e., only empirically
known. In Platonism- the idea is a self-developing meaning, itself
positing its 'other: i.e., its opposite, within itself, and thus giving
origin to all other forms and categories of meaning, including also the
category of expression of meaning. In Aristotelianism the idea is an
immovable form of an actually existing thing, so that the whole mobility
of this form consists in the imrnova bly eidetic reflection of the mobile
actuality of the thing. In Platonism the idea is throughout an antinomi-
cally interpenetrating meaningful play of meanings, so that meaning
passes into its 'opposite' and its 'opposite' into it. In Aristotelianism the
idea has the static nature of thinghood and in this respect it is absolutely
immoveable, and there is no transfusion of meanings; there is a static
meaning poised on the immoveable power of facts, so that there is no
complete freedom in the dialectical play of meaning with itself" (396 ff.),
Plotinus' doctrine is a synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism:
"Aristotle's dynamism is understood by Plotinus dialectically and para-
deugmatically, and Plato's eidology and antinomics-e-dynamically and
energically" (407).
In his book entitled The Philosophy of the Name Losev works out
a philosophy of language akin to Bulgakov's and representing a sketch
of a whole philosophical system, dialectically constructed. The word,
according to Losev, is the outward appearance of the eidos of a thing,
arising with dialectical necessity in the process of the evolution of being
which arrives at being for itself, i.e., self-consciousness. Every essence as
a definite entity, differing from its "other," from the meon (from the
principle of indetermination) and consequently containing in itself that
other, includes the following three aspects: (1) the genological aspect
or the aspect of unity which transcends existence and comprises all the
existing and the nonexisting, meonic aspects of a thing; (2) the eidetic
aspect, or the aspect of form, the manifestation of the meaning or idea
in a thing; and (3) the genetic aspect, or the alogical becoming.
A conception of the world which starts with its apophatic essence
is symbolism. The revealed eidos of an entity is a symbol: it does not
contain all its essence, for it is "more unfathomable and deeper than
its appearance," but at the same time "all the essence is wholly present
in it, because it is solely owing to this permanent, ubiquitous and whole
presence, that the appearance ill the form of a single entity is possible"
(165). ~
The essence as an eidetic symbol full of meaning is the inner word
of the world; it i ~ npceSS(frily supplemented by the outer uiord, when it
A. LOSEV 295
enters into its material "otherness" (mean as matter) and becomes an
embodied fact (99)tt in the body the ultimate realization is attained.
The body, says Losev, is "the moving principle of all expression, mani-
festation, realization." Thus, Losev's ideal-realist symbolism is also
pansomatism, similar to the one we find in Stoics.'
The eidos which has reached expression in corporeal "otherness"
is the outer word, the name, which forms the new symbolical moment of
the world, symbolical in the sense of the objectivity 0/ the name (104).
"In the name as a symbol the essence for the first time appears to every-
thing else, for in the symbol flow those very energies which, without
leaving the essence, partially reveal it to all which surrounds it" (104).
The whole world is, according to this doctrine, a word. "If essence is a
name and a word, then this means that the whole world, the universe,
is a name and a word, or names and words. The whole being is words,
some more living, and some more dead than others. Cosmos is a ladder
of different stages of verbality, Man is a word, animal is a word, inani-
mate object is a word. For all this is meaning and its expression" (166).
"T'he intelligible name 0/ an object is the object itself in so far as it is
manifested and understood" (172). Yet a word taken isolatedly, even in
its "human" stage, is still devoid of ontological fullness: "In my word I
know only myself from within and do not know the other; the other I
still know only outwardly. And intelligence means awareness of oneself
as all and of all as oneself. It is only in the myth that I begin to know
the other as myself, and then my word is magic. I know the other as
myself, and can direct and use it. Only such a word, a mythically magic
name, is the full dwelling of the essence in the other, and only such a
word is the summit of all other words" (170 ff.),
The plurality of words as psycho-physio-physical processes for ex-
pressing one and the .same object (e.g., a Greek calls truth, aA:r;tEla., and
a Roman, veritas) does not impair this doctrine, but merely shows that
now one now another moment can be emphasized in the same cosmic
word (the Greek emphasizes the "unforgettableness," the everlastingness
of truth, and the Roman the trust in it) (191).
In his book Losev hardly deals with any particular problems of
linguistics. But had there been linguists capable of understanding his
and Father S. Bulgakov's philosophy of language they would come
across some quite new problems and might be able to explain in a new
and fruitful way many features in the development of language. Among
other things, they would find a way to get rid of associationism and ex-
treme psychologism and physiologism in the theory of language.
l , See N. Lossky's article "The l\fetaphysics of tqe Stoics as Unconscious Ideal
Realism:' Journal 01 Philosophical Studies, IV, 1929.
296 THE INTUITIVISTS
4. D. BOLDYREV-S. LEVITSKY
After N. o. Lossky and S. L. Frank had worked out a system of
integral intuitivism, i.e., the doctrine that all species of knowledge are
an immediate contemplation of reality by the knowing subject, some
of their followers pursued the subject further. Among them D. V.
Boldyrev and S. Levitsky should be specially mentioned.
Dmitri Vassilyevich Boldyrev (1885-1920) was a lecturer at the
University of Perm. During the civil war he fell into Bolshevik hands
and died of typhus in the Irkutsk prison. His chief work, Knowledge
and Existence remained unfinished and was published by his widow at
Harbin in 1935 with an introduction by N. Lossky. In this book
Boldyrev develops a highly original conception of "intensive magni-
tude," i.e., of the degree of an object's reality which varies as the object
recedes in time and in space. In other words, Boldyrev maintains the
omnipresence of an object-image in space and in time in varying degree
and formulates the position that "all exists in everything" which is of
fundamental importance for his "objectivism" and intuitivism. The
intimate interconnectedness of all objects with one another and the
continuous transition from one to another, which lies at the basis of
the similarity between them, are made use of by Boldyrev in his original
doctrine about fantasy and the nonsubjective character of its images.
While working out his theory of fantasy as the vision of other-
worldly objects, Boldyrev spent the summer of 1914 in the Pyrenees
with the idea of being near Lourdes in the surroundings in which
Bernadette had her vision of OUf Lady. He described his impressions in
an article "The Bath of Fire" (Russkaya Mysl" 1915) which shows that
he had a distinct literary gift.!
Epistemological inquiry in the spirit of intuitivism was continued
even in Soviet Russia in the early days of the Bolshevik regime when its
tyranny had not yet completely crushed all philosophic thought that
did not conform to the materialistic pattern. In 1926 there was pub..
lished in Moscow a symposium The Ways of Realism by B. Babynin,
A. Ognyov, F. Berezhkov and P. Popov. They called their line of thought
"intuitive realism" in view of the similarity between Lossky's intuitivism
and Anglo-American realism of Alexander, Laird, Montagu and otherS.
Both these theories assert that perceived objects enter the field of the
knowing subject's consciousness as they are in themselves and are there-
fore cognized as they exist independently of the act of cognition.
Sergey Alexandrovitch Levitsky left Russia after the Bolshevik
1. See Boldyrev's Obituary in the magazine M y s l ~ No.1, 1922.
v. KOZHEVNIKOV 297
revolution. While studying at the University of Prague he became a
follower of Lossky's intuitivism and personalism. He was awarded a
doctorate in philosophy on submitting a thesis in which he argued that
freedom of will is a necessary condition of the critical attitude to judg-
ment apart from which truth is unattainable. After the Second World
War he has been living in Germany as a D. P. but succeeded in writing a
book The Foundations of an Organic World Conception. He expounds
in it in a lively and talented manner the essence of intuitivism, per-
sonalism and morally social theories of "solidarism."
5. V. KOZHEVNIKOV
Vladimir Alexandrovich Kozhevnikov (1850-1917) lived and worked
in Moscow as an independent scholar and philosopher. He was chiefly
interested in problems of religious philosophy and in beauty in nature.
In 1873 he published a study of religious teachings in Greek philosophy
of the second century A.D. He also wrote The Philosophy of Feeling
and Faith in the Eighteenth Century; Marxism and Christianity (1907);
Darwinism and Vitalism, and an extremely valuable work Buddhism
Compared to Christianity, 2 vols., 1916.
With the help of many quotations from Buddhist Iiterat.ire
Kozhevnikov vividly depicts the Buddhist absolute rejection of the
world, their teaching that all cosmic being is an evil and that the
source of personal existence is self-love. The Buddhist ideal is therefore
a complete annihilation of the world and in the first instance of
personal being-self-annihilation. Kozhevnikov well describes the exer-
cises worked out by the Buddhists for the destruction of personal being
and concludes his book by the following argument. "Neither before nor
after the appearance of Buddhism has anyone ventured to take so de-
cisive a step towards utter hopelessness; and this constitutes the tragic
grandeur and the educative value of its achievement unsurpassed in
history. Perhaps this was its providential mission in the evolution of
man's religious experience. One is inclined to believe that in the com-
plex and mysterious plan of Divine world guidance, by the side of so
many ways of seeking God, Truth, Righteousness, Bliss and Beauty, of
so many hopes that gave wings to the human soul in the strenuous
search, it was necessary to show in all its comfortless force another path:
the refusal to seek all this because of an utter absence of hope in the
triumph of anything positive. More deeply and acutely than anyone else
the Buddhists understood the truth of the tragic cry of the suffering man
'I am weak,' and that is the universally historical achievement of
Buddhism, the educationary, admonishing .value of which is not ex-
298
ry'HE IN'fUITIVIS'rS
hausted to the present day. But Buddhism is completely blind to the
second truth that directly follows the first; it has not heard or did not
want to hear the second call of the human soul-the call of the be-
lievers in salvation by the grace of God. In Buddhism the creature has
forgotten and rejected its Creator and Provider; having lost faith in
the Creator, it lost faith in itself; pride and disbelief prevented it from
joining in the third call of the sick soul, needing help and salvation:
being Thy creature and work of Thy hand I despair not of my salvation
(A prayer of St. Basil the Great). At this point the comforting and
healing spiritual force and moral beauty of Christianity stands out
clearly in all its grandeur. Having renounced the proud and inconsistent
pretensions to self-salvation through self-annihilation, a Christian ap-
peals to God who is Love and who calls us through the Meek and
Lowly in heart: 'Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden
... and ye shall find rest unto your souls'-not the rest of the nirvana or
eternal non-being, but of life in God, eternal life" (II, 754-756).
Kozhevnikov wrote about philosophy of feeling and faith because
he was in sympathy with Jacobi's theory of knowledge. Jacobi was op-
posed to Kant's agnosticism and overcame it by the theory that in ad-
dition to sense perception and logical thought man also has the faculty
of mystical intuition; i.e., of direct contemplation of the reality of the
individual being of others.. Unfortunately Jacobi inappropriately called
this mystical intuition "faith." His theory of knowledge is intuitivism,
though not total but partial, somewhat similar to the intuitivism de-
fended by Vladimir Soloviev in his early works on philosophy..
Detailed information about remarkable men like Kozhevnikov will
be available when the "iron curtain" is lifted and the activities and
libraries of Moscow become accessible.. Some data about Kozhevnikov
are to be found in N.. S. Arseniev's book Holy Moscow, p. 137-142, 1940.
There is a French and a German translation of this book.
Chapter 18
L. P. KARSAVIN
Lev Platonovich Karsavin was born in 1882. His father was a ballet
dancer; his sister is the world-famous ballet dancer Tamara Karsavina;
he too, as a child, went to the ballet school. He received higher educa-
tion at the Petersburg University where he specialized in medieval
Western-European history, and eventually occupied the chair of history.
In 1922 he was exiled from Russia by the Soviet Government. After
that he was professor at the Kovno University in Lithuania, and then
at Vilna where he is at present.
Karsavin's main works are the following: Essays on the Italian
Religious Life in Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, 1912; The Founda-
tions of Medieval Religion in Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (with
main reference to Italy), 1915; Saligia or a brief and edifying treatise
on God, the world, man, evil, and the seven deadly sins, Petrograd 1919;
East, J V e s t ~ and the Russian Idea, 1922; Roman Catholicism 1922;
Medieval Culture; Monasticism in the Middle Ages; Of Doubt, Science
and Faith; The Church, the Individual and the State: Dialogues, ]923;
Giordano Bruno" 1923; The Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church
(the exposition of Orthodoxy in their works) 1926; The Philosophy of
History, Berlin 1923; OnFirst Principles, Berlin 1925; On Personality,
Kovno 1929; The Poem of Death.
Like Frank, Karsavin bases himself on Nicolas of Cusa and builds
his philosophical system on the conception of the Absolute as pan-unity
and coincidentia oppositorum. "Absoluteness," he writes, "transcends
our understanding and our conception of the absolute as necessarily
opposed to the relative" (The Philosophy of History, 72 f.). He lays
down "the conception of true absoluteness as the perfect pan-unity of
the absoluteness of God-the Creator, the Redeemer and the Perfecter
-,vith the 'other' which is built up by it out of nothing" (351). That
"other't-s-i.e., created being and more particularly, every personality
that forms part of it-may be absolutized and become a perfect pan-
unity embracing all time and all space, because the Absolute is Absolute
soo L. P. KARSAVIN
Goodness which gives itself entirely to its creatures. In so far as a
creature is deficient in willingness freely to appropriate the Absolute
Good, it retains its character of contracted pan-unity, of empirical
being, limited in time and in space. The Absolute Goodness does not
forsake its creation even in this its pitiable state: "through the Divine
Incarnation this self-limitedness of man in his insufficiency becomes an
element in the Deity;" it is redeemed and "fulfilled" in the God-man
(358). Hence, Karsavin distinguishes between four meanings of pan-
unity: "(I) Deity as absolute and perfect pan-unity; (2) perfected or
deified (absolutized) pan-unity of creation, different from God, for when
it is present, there is no God, and it itself is 'nothing' which has become
God; (3) completed or contracted pan-unity of creation striving for
perfection as its ideal or absolute aim and, through it, for mergence
with God: striving to become God and to disappear in God; (4) the
incompleted pan-unity of creation, i.e., comparative plurality and unity
which becomes perfect through completion, or pan-unity in its limited
aspect" (48 f.).
Karsavin maintains that his religious metaphysics transcends the
opposition between theism and pantheism. It differs from pantheism,
because he affirms the creation of the world out of nothing and the
finite nature of the created entities, as well as the eternal and un-
changeable being of God (351). But the creation of the world out of
nothing does not mean for Karsavin that God creates anything dif-
ferent from Himself. "It is usually supposed," he says, "that God creates
a certain something, a certain reality which, though derivative, is quite
other than He, and that that something places itself in harmony or out
of harmony with God" (First Principles, 37). Karsavin rejects such a
positive "something." "Apart from God and without God there is no
'me,' absolutely not" he says. "By myself and in myself I do not exist.
But in so far as I think, will, exist-s-i.e., in so far as I participate in God
and become God-I confront Him as another substratum of His
Divine content, so inseparable from Him that without Him, apart from
Him, in my own self, I am nothing, I do not exist" ( ~ 7 ) .
According to Karsavin the creation of the world is a theophany or
epiphany. In Itself, as an eternal and unchangeable principle, God is
unfathomable; in that aspect He is the subject of negative theology, the
Divine Nothing inexpressible in ideas; by limiting Himself, He realizes
self-creation as Divine Becoming, as a relative something (20) which is
realized in a temporal and spatial form and becomes knowable (42).
But it should be remembered that, as distinct from God, "this something
is nothing" (20).
In his book First Principles Karsavin develops his system as fol ..
L. P. KARSAVIN
301
lows: the creation of the world is a theophany; the Absolute gives the
whole of itself to the "other" which is absolute nothing, but in receiv-
ing the Divine content becomes "the created something," "a second
subject" (45). It must not be imagined, however, that the created sub..
ject is endowed with creative pow,-=r even in the sense of creating his
own vital activities. "The creature:' Karsavin says, "cannot create out
of nothing, and only God Himself creates in it" (39). "Our every thought,
feeling, desire, or action is nothing other than God and we cannot see
in them anything but God" (20). Although the whole content of the
created subject and his whole life are thus asserted to be divine, he
cannot be said to be God. Karsavin actually speaks of the free origina-
tion of the creature: "God's creation of llle out of nothing is at the same
time my own free self-generation" (37).
Having created finite subjects the Absolute gives Itself to them.
The self-surrender of the Absolute is an expression of Its all-goodness
owing to which the finite created world can be made infinite and
deified by means of a process that is a kind of Divine circle: "At first
(not in a temporal sense) God only, then God narrowing and annihilat-
ing Himself in His self-surrender to the creature, God the Creator
limited by His creature, and creature becoming God in its self-assertion.
Then creature only which has wholly become God, All-Goodness and
therefore 'again' God only, Who has re-established Himself in and
through the creature and Who has been re-established by it" (48).
The pantheistic nature of Karsavin's system shows itself in the fact
that in it the relation between God and the cosmic process is a kind
of game that God plays with Himself: "In so far as creature is also God,
God in surrendering Himself to it receives back from it and in it that
which He gave it. He fulfills Himself to the extent to which He empties
Himself. He actively empties and annihilates Himself as God in the
creature; the creature actively re-establishes Him, And since creature is
also God, its active rehabilitation of God is also His active self-rehabilita-
tion" (39).
Karsavin distinguishes his system from pantheism by pointing out
that in his view every creature is not God, since, having "nothing' as
its basis, creatures are finite, temporal and changeable, whereas God,
the Absolute, is eternal and unchangeable (The Philosophy of History,
851).
It should be remembered. however, that every created entity is a
manifestation of God: all created contents come to be through God's
self-surrender, so that not only our good thoughts, feelings, desires and
actions are divine; "our anger and envy and hatred are divine too; not
only bliss, but suffering also is divine. Otherwise God would .not be
L. P. KARSAVIN
pan-unity and there would exist some other evil deity-which is an
absurd and impious supposition" (FiTst Principles, 21). Thus, with
Karsavin the solution of all problems is dominated by the idea of pan-
unity as a principle which is truly all-embracing. Like many other
Russian philosophers-Vladimir Soloviev, Father S. Bulgakov, Frank-
Karsavin supposes that if something, even a created something, were
ontologically external to God, it would limit God. Hence Karsavin
staunchly maintains that God is pan-unity, and creature is nothing (7).
He foresees the objection that God is not absolute in the sense of being
correlative with the relative and therefore of standing in the relation
of interdependence with the relative. He knows that there are philoso-
phers who recognize God as Superabsolute and accordingly maintain
that nothing external can limit Him. But Karsavin argues that if God
be not pan-unity there could exist outside Him another, a third ...
a tenth God (8).
Inquiring into the Divine reality and into the domain of the
created being Karsavin finds triunity everywhere. He bases this con-
ception upon the doctrine of the Absolute as the all-embracing pan-
unity: if he discovers a principle involving opposition to another prin-
ciple, he shows that they enter into the relation of opposition through
forsaking the primary unity and severing themselves from one another;
the severance leads to a striving for reunion and to establishing the
unity of opposites.
Karsavin demonstrates the triunity of God by different methods-
by analyzing God as Truth, then as Love and then as All-Goodness.
Thus for instance in love he detects the elements of (1) self-assertion that
demands complete possession of the beloved (destructive love); (2)
self-surrender to him (sacrificial love); and (3) resurrection in him. All
these inquiries lead to the investigation of the ultimate and funda...
mental problem-of the connection between indeterminateness and
determinateness. As the First the unfathomable, truly all-embracing
pan-unity is Indeterminateness; as the Second, it is Determinateness,
opposed to it, and as the Third it is their reunion. Thus, triunity and
the Trinitarian dogma proves to be the basic and all-illuminaung truth
of the Christian world conception.
In Karsavin's book. On Personality the doctrine of the coincidence
of opposites is applied not only to the Divine triunity, but to every
personality in so far as it perfects i tsel and attains deification. Accord-
ing to Karsavin's definition personality is a "concretely spiritual, cor-
poreally spiritual determinate entity, unique, unreplaceable and many-
sided" (2). The unity of personality is its spiritual, and the plurality is
c
L. P. KARSAVIN
its corporeal nature. Since the unity of personality is the unity of
plurality, personality is "wholly spiritual and wholly corporeal" (143).
In its mere corporeality-i.e., in its plurality-it is givenness, necessity,
and in its spirituality it is the overcoming of necessity, self-deterrnina-
tion, i.e., freedom. The relativity of these definitions shows that per-
sonality contains "something higher than its unity, freedom and neces-
sity-namely itself" (4). As such, the principle of personality is indefinable
(37), it is ousia, essence, in relation to the determinate primary unity,
the Father, to the self-dividing unity, the Son, and to the self-reuniting
unity, the Holy Spirit. The principle of personality is indefinable,
since determination is only possible where there is division; it lies at
the basis of a determinate primary unity of personality correlative with
its self-division and, further, with its self-unification. TJ:1us, in the Abso-
lute the indefinable primary unity is a triunity; in theological language
it is ousia: the determinate primary unity is the Father, the self-dividing
unity is the Son, the self-reuniting unity is the Holy Spirit, the tri..
personal Holy Trinity (39).
The Divine Triunity is, strictly speaking, unique personal being
(85); it reveals and determines itself chiefly in the Second Person, the
Logos, which as self-division, is the Body of the Holy Trinity (145).
In his book On First Principles Karsavin says that the created self
is (1) original unity; (2) its division into the subject and the object; and
(3) their reunion in consciousness (99). The reunion attained through
knowledge is incomplete: in it the unification is less than the divided-
ness. We know about this incompleteness and therefore it seems to us
that our being and self-consciousness is "something unreal, a kind of
dream" To become aware of this illusoriness of one's being means
to define it from the point of view of higher being; it implies that in
addition to my lower being I am also a higher being, namely, I am that
perfected pan-unity which I possess in the God-man. As soon as we
cease to concentrate on our lower being, as soon as we empty ourselves,
"become conscious of our nothingness, we see God in our self-conscious-
ness, and the whole of our self-consciousness, the whole of our knowl-
edge becomes a spiritual prayer the sweetness of which increases in
proportion to our humility" (108).
In this higher aspect of ourselves we are all-spatial and all-temporal,
but in the lower we are reduced to the limited temporal moment that
comes into being and perishes, and to a finite position in space (130).
The theory that my self has an all-spatial aspect implies that a particle
of mv body on leaving me and becoming an element in the body of
another being does not forsake me "Stamped bv me. it is
L. P. KARSAVIN
my own self and in the all-temporal and all-spatial reality remains 'me'
forever and everywhere, though it also becomes something else-the
world as a whole" (139).
In his book On Personality Karsavin elaborates his doctrine about
the created self. Strictly speaking. creature is not a personality: it is
created by God out of nothing as a Iree-e-i.e., self-generated out of
nothing-indefinable substratum, and in itself does not constitute any-
thing; in assimilating the Divine "content" it first becomes a personality.
In so far as the creature receives all its content through its participation
in the Logos, the whole of the created world is a theophany (85. 175).
Evil and imperfection of the creature is merely a lack of Goodness
in it, incomplete assimilation by it of the Divine content: "Having
begun its existence in God and in itself, the creature at once began to
center in itself, replaced humility by pride" and desired the impossible
-a part of being instead of the fullness of being; but "what is impos-
sible to man is possible to God-God fulfilled the absurd desire of the
creature" and, respecting its freedom, gave it the half-being, half non-
being it desired, incomplete death and incomplete life, the bad infinity
of dying (195 ff.). That incomplete life is a consequence of our sloth
and inertia which prevent us assimilating the fullness of the Divine
being which God gives us in His sacrificial love. OUf repentance for
this guilt may correctly be expressed by the words: eel have not suffi-
ciently desired" to accept Divine being into myself. This sinful "weak-
ness" is not a special force; to believe that it was would be Manicheism,
says Karsavin; weakness is simply a lack of desire to assimilate God
(35 if.): Evil as guilt is always accompanied by evil as suffering which is
both the punishment for the guilt and its redemption (30). Repentance
in one's guilt is not, strictly speaking, self-condemnation: it consists in
the condemnation of the action by the 'Higher standard' and not by
my own self (23). Indeed, in self-condemnation one theophany opposes
itself to another, the greater to the lesser, the one that symbolizes the
fullness of Godhead to the less full: "We condemn ourselves for not
having apprehended God fully" (34 f.),
Every sin, according to Karsavin, is incompleteness of theophany.
Thus, pride is an attempt to affirm oneself in one's own self; in so far
as it exists, it is a theophany (49). because "possession is a reflection of
possessing everything in God," but it suffers from incompleteness; a
proud man is a foolish thief (51): he wants to possess everything, he is
grasping and greedy, but he does not attain to the possessions in God
that belong to a self which desires to possess truly everything-i.e.,
"desires that all, including God, should possess the gifts which he
possesses" (52).
L. P. KARSAVIN 305
Karsavin deduces from this conception of evil that the way to
perfection lies "not in the struggle with some nonexistent evil, but in
the fullness of our love for God and with God" (68). "Judge not," says
the Jlord (68); do not sever yourself from one another through condem-
nation and, "in overcoming weakness, you will understand that there is
no evil" (69). "Resist not evil, for there is no evil," but "do good," de-
tect in what is called evil 'fa faint glimmering of good, and fan that
small flame till it sets the world on fire" (69). Cognize "good only, for
there is no evil" (75).
"May be it shall fall to your lot to defend the weak by violence,
to save life by killing the guilty" (70); "1 think that God sends such a
trial only to men with no understanding" (71). "There is such a thing
as righteous killing and a righteous war," Karsavin admits, but in de-
ciding this in actual life one must beware of the voice of the Antichrist
(72).
The imperfection of the creature may be such that it will have
only embryonically personal being (animals) or even merely potentially
personal being (things) (On Personality, 127). The perfection of per-
sonality depends in its completely assimilating Divine' nature, i.e., in its
attaining deification. The ontological sequence in the process of God's
self-sacrifice for the creature and of the creature's self-sacrifice for God
is as follows: "At first-only God alone, then-the dying God and the
creature coming into being, then-only creature alone instead of God,
then-the dying creature and the rising God; then-a-again only God
alone. But everything 'at first' and 'then' and 'all at once': God is also
the God-man" (161).
This unity between God and man in the Divine Hypostasis is
rendered possible by the incarnation of the Logos, consisting in the
fact that He freely becomes imperfect, having willed not imperfection
as such, but only the existential aspect of it, i.e., imperfection as guilt-
less suffering and death (224). Since Christ's humanity is not external to
His Person, but is "within it," Christ's suffering and death are a Divine
tragedy in spite of the resurrection; indeed, even patripassionism (the
doctrine that the Father suffers as well as the Son) contains a certain
element of truth (192).
Creature deified through grace is the true God, but that does not
lead to a pantheistic identification of God and the world: there is a
most profound ontological difference between "is not which comes from
is and after is" and "the is which comes after is not and from is not"
(160).
Karsavin has an interesting theory about corporeality which he
defines as plurality in a self-dividing ronditioning Jhe de-
!06 L. P. KARSAVIN
terminateness of the self. That determinateness necessarily is "the cor-
relatedness of my body with other bodies, not their external co-position
or contact, but their interpenetration and intermergence. My body con-
tains corporeality external to it, and external corporeality contains
mine. All that I cognize, remember or even imagine is my corporeality,
though not only mine, but also external to me. The whole world, while
remaining a corporeality external to me, becomes' my corporeality as
well" (128).
By means of this theory Karsavin, true to his principle of the co-
incidence of opposites, overcomes the difference between phenomenalism
and intuitivism (79 f.). For him the whole world external to the indi-
vidual body of an imperfect personality is to a certain extent its body
also, but an "external" one (131 ff.): he tries to make use of this concep-
tion for explaining such things as psychometry, exteriorization of
sensibility, etc. He explains the presence of sensation in amputated
limbs by urging that parts and particles of the body separated from it
do not lose all connection with it (130). Karsavin therefore maintains
that the method of disposing of the corpse is not a matter of indiffer-
ence to us. A materialist curses himself in discovering his folly when
his body is being burned to ashes in accordance with the last word of
technics in a godforsaken crematorium.
The difference between an imperfect and a perfect personality con-
sists in the fact that the first has both an individual and an external
body, and for the second the whole of its external body is merged with
its individual body (134).
Karsavin's The Philosophy of History is a particularly valuable
work. In it Karsavin formulates the fundamental principles of historical
being and considers "the place and the significance of the historical
in the world as a whole and in relation to absolute being" (5). He re-
gards it as "the highest aim of historical thinking to apprehend the
whole cosmos, the whole created pan-unity as a single developing sub-
ject" (77). History in the narrow sense of the term is concerned with
"the development of mankind as a single all-spatial and all-temporal
subject" (75). By "development" Karsavin means a process in which
some whole (an organism, a mental life) is continually changing, "con-
tinually becoming qualitatively different-becoming from within, from
out of itself and not through addition of something from outside" (10).
The continuity of development shows that the developing object
does not consist of separate parts, of atoms, but forms a single subject)
who is not distinct from his development, but real in it and therefore
all-temporal, all-spatial, all-qualitative, all-embracing (11). (Karsavin
rejects the idea of substance as a principle distinct from the process.)
L. P. KARSAVIN 30'1
Such a subject is a personality potentially all-embracing, and even every
qualitative aspect of it is "an contracted pan-unity:' The development
of the subject is the transition from one of its aspects to another, con-
ditioned by the dialectical nature of the subject himself and not by
impacts from without. Karsavin rejects external relations in the domain
of historical being. Every historical individual (a person, a family, a
nation, etc.) is in his view the world-whole itself in some one of its
unique and unrepeatable aspects; thus, the domain of historical being
consists of subjects that interpenetrate one another and nevertheless
develop freely, since each of them contains everything in an embryonic
form, and there are no external relations between them. This leads to
conclusions that are of importance for the methodology of history. Thus,
Karsavin rejects, in historical research, the conception of causality as an
external infiuence. If two nations affect each other in the course of
their development, that is only possible because they are both aspects
of a higher subject which embraces them both (culture, mankind, the
C08n10s), and therefore that which is "alien" to a nation is in a certain
sense "its own," so that development takes place continuously and
dialectically out of the idea of the nation itself and is not made up like
a mosaic Irom external impacts upon it (64). The influence of nature
on the life of a people is not an external influence either, according to
Karsavin: the nature of a country like all material elements of existence
(e.g., dress, the size of individual allotments, etc.) affects the historical
process not as such, not as taken separately, but only.in so far as it
is reflected in consciousness and transformed into a socially psychic ele-
ment (95-100); this is possible because nature, like humanity is the
individualization of a higher subject, the macrocosm: true, it is less
complete than humanity, but nevertheless through that higher subject
it forms part of man's mentality (347).
Karsavin's argument that "everything new in historical process
always springs from non-being-otherwise it would not be new" (237)
is also of great importance to the methodology of history. On the
strength of it he rejects genetic explanations which reduce the new to
recombinations of the old, as is done for instance in the attempt "to
deduce" Christianity from the "synthesis of the Jewish and Hellenic
culture" (180). The conflict between the individualizing and the gen-
eralizing method in history is not irreconcilable for Karsavin, since for
him universality means individualization of the higher subject in a
plurality of lower subjects; a universal is itself a concrete individual,
it is "not abstract, not isolated from its concrete expressions" (191).
Certain historical objects may be definitely placed in a hierarchical
order in relation to one another: such for instance are the ill'lividual,
L. P. kARSAVIN
the family, the nation, civilization (Indian, Greek and Roman, Euro-
pean, etc.), mankind, the world. In the empirical development of every
historical individuality the following periods may be distinguished ac-
cording to Karsavin: (1) potential pan-unity of the historical" personality
-"the transition from non-being to being;" (2) the primarily differenti-
ated unity-i.e., division into elements, decrease in unity, but not a
marked one since "the elements easily pass into one another," are
interchangeable and in that sense have the character of "superorganic
individualities;" (3) organic unity-i.e., the period of functional limita-
tion and comparative stability of individual features; (4) degeneration
of the organic unity into systematic unity and then its destruction
through disintegration (211 ff.),
The purpose of development is the realization of the cosmic pan-
unity of creation as the Absolute individuality. We have already seen
that in the empirical world that purpose is unattainable; it is realized
in superempirical order, in so far as the Absolute as Absolute Goodness
gives itself entirely to the world, redeems the world through the In-
carnation and makes it perfect. Thus the whole of the historical process
is Divinely human. Perfection is not the chronological end of develop-
ment: from the point of view of the imperfect subject the ideal always
stands before him, is eternally realized "in the infinite number of
individualizations, but that does not in the least prevent the ideal from
being also a reality, higher than the aspect of becoming which it con-
tains or than the empirical historical process." In the pan-unity "at every
point of it, becoming and completion, perfecting and perfection, coin-
cide" (86 1I.).
Thus, Karsavin's conception of development differs sharply from
the positivist conception of progress. In the pan-unity every moment of
development is recognized as qualitatively equivalent to every other and
not one is regarded as merely a means or a stage of transition to the
final end; empirically, the moments have a different value according to
the extent to which the pan-unity is revealed in them. The history of
every individual contains a moment of the fullest revelation of pan-
unity and that is the apogee of its development. The criterion for de-
.ciding which moment is the apogee may be found by inquiring into the
religious character of the individual in question, meaning by that its
"specific relation to the Absolute" (to truth, goodness, beauty). Since
historical development as a whole is a Divinely human process, the
criterion of its approximation to the ideal is to be found in the per-
sonality which most fully expresses the Absolute in the empirical realm
-namely, in Jesus. The whole history of mankind is the "empirical
becoming and perishing o( the earthly Church of Christ" (214). Hence
L. P. KARSAVIN 309
historical science must be religious and, moreover, orthodox (175, 856).
Karsavin formulates his theory about the Church in relation to
the state in a pamphlet entitled The Church, the Individual and the
State. The Church is the Body of Christ, the perfection of the world
saved by the Son of God (3). The world freely transfigures itself, becom-
ing the Church. The catholicity of the Church is not universality but
sobornost-togetherness (5), "One in all and according to all"-i.e.,
the lovingly harmonized unity of many expressions of the Truth (6).
The Church is an all-inclusive personality containing the symphonic
personalities of local and national churches (7 f.).
The state is the necessary self-organization of the sinful world. If
a state strives to follow the truths and ideals of the Church, it is Chris..
tian (12). In so far as man and the state are sinful, acts of violence,
punishments, wars are inevitable, but they still remain a sin; they can
only be overcome through union with Christ (13). But to renounce
war, reckoning on a miracle, means to tempt God and is a serious crime,
endangering the good of the citizens and of posterity (14). Tolstoy's
absolute "nonresistance to evil by violence" shows lack of understanding
the world's imperfection. To avoid using violence in struggling against
evil is in truth an indirect and hypocritical resistance by violence, since
other people wage wars and persecute criminals, and I leave it to them
to do, while I stand aside. Only the person who is suffering from evil has
a right not to resist it by violence; this is not nonresistance, but self-
sacrifice, the best means of victory- (28). A world striving. for perfection
contains inner contradictions that lead to tragic conflicts (30).
The state must strive to become a personality within the Church,
but empirically it is only to a small degree Christian (67). The Church
blesses not the activities of the state as such, in their partly evil nature,
but only the good in them, thus, e.g., it prays for the Christ-loving
army. In war time the Church prays for the Divine justice to prevail,
and not for the empirical victory over the enemy. Thus, for instance, the
feasts of the Intercession of Our Lady, so much loved in Russia, is con-
nected with a miracle which led to the defeat of the Russians by the
Greeks (19).
The modern idea of the separation of the Church from the state
is absurd, says Karsavin: (1) a state separated from the Church would
arrive at a religion of humanity, or at self-deification, or at relativism.
(2) Such a separation is impossible in so far as a state has true ideals
which are potentially Christian. But it is essential to delimit the ac-
tivities of the Church and the state. The task of the Church is to urge
the state freely to perfect itself for the Kingdom of Heaven, to de..
nounce evil, to bless the good, but not to undertake political gpidance.
510 L. P. KARSAVIN
The state must secure for the Church independence in its own sphere
of activity-theological, educational, moral, missionary, liturgical; the
Church must have the right to denounce wrong, to have rights of
property, but it must not have the economic support of the state, or use
the power of the state for persecuting heretics; the state must defend
the Church against aggressive propaganda (23). A symphony between
the Church and the state is the ideal relation between them.
Karsavin discusses the problem of the peculiarity of the Russian
spirit in his pamphlet The East} the West and the Russian Idea. The
Russian people, he says, is a unimultiplicity of peoples subordinated to
the Great-Russian nation (7). The Russian people are great in the
future which they must build and in what they have done already-in
their state organization, spiritual culture, church, science, art (23).
The essential aspect of the Russian people according to Karsavin
is their religiousness, including militant atheism (15). To find the cen-
tral idea of Russian religiousness he compares East, West and Russia,
and also draws a distinction between three ways of understanding the
Absolute or God in relation to the world-theistic, pantheistic, and
Christian (18). By "East" he means the non-Christian civilizations of
Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, of the Greek and Roman natu-
ralism and also barbarian nations (17); the West and Russia are the
civilized Christian world. Theism means for Karsavin the doctrine that
God transcends the world and stands in an external relation to it (18).
He gives the name of pantheism to the view that the Deity is immanent
in the world; it is not, however, the world as such that is divine, but
only "the true essence of everything" (26 ff.), in the indeterminate
potentiality without individual differentiation (the doctrine of Taoism,
Buddhism, Brahmanism). Christianity is the doctrine about the Abso-
lute triunity as the principle of pan-unity, irreducible to the undif-
ferentiated potentiality of all things, as in pantheism (31). According to
the Christian teaching, the relative is both distinct from the Absolute
and one with it; everything actual is divine, it is a theophany: the
creature receives God into itself (32). Such interpretations of Christi-
anity, Karsavin says, are sometimes regarded as pantheistic, but that is
not correct, especially on Karsavin's own definition of pantheism.
Christianity affirms the absolute value of personality in its concrete
rea lization: it furthers the development of culture and takes the pur..
pose of life to be universal transfiguration and resurrection (35 f.).
The religion of the West, which has included in its creed the
filioque clause-i.e., the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit
both from the Father and the Son-contains a perversion of the main
basis of (ihristianity. Indeed, such a doctrine presupposes that the Holy
L. P. KARSAVIN Sit
Spirit proceeds "from that in which the Father and the Son are one;"
in that case, there is a special unity of the Father and the SOD, not in
substance or personality, but superpersonal. It follows then that the
Holy Spirit is below the Father and the 'Son, which is "blasphemy
against the Holy Ghost." But apart from the Holy Spirit the creature
could not be deified; hence, belittling the Holy Spirit leads to belittling
Christ in His humanity and to the idea that empirical existence can-
not be wholly deified or become absolute; an impassable barrier is
fixed between the absolute and the relative; knowledge is recognized
to be limited (41). If man admits the weakness of his reason and will,
he needs unquestionable truth on earth and an invincible earthly
church; hence there arises an earthly organization of the church in the
form of a hierarchical monarchy with the Pope at its head, having
secular power (46). Further, this leads to renouncing the heavenly life,
concentrating upon earthly welfare, to the flourishing of technics,
capitalism, imperialism, and finally to relativism and self-disintegra-
tion (47 f.).
In Eastern Christianity-i.e., in Orthodoxy, which has not adopted
any new dogmas after the seventh Ecumenical Council-there is no
severance between the absolute and the relative (54). The relative is to
be deified wholly and be made absolute; there are no limits 'to knowl-
edge; knowledge is not only thought, but "living faith," unity of
thought and activity; hence the problem which split the West into
Catholicism and Protestantism does not arise (55). Redemption is not a
juridical restitution achieved by Christ's sacrifice. Repentance in the
Orthodox view is a transfiguration of the whole person and not an
exact compensation for sin by a corresponding quantity of good works.
Hence indulgences and the doctrine of purgatory are impossible in
Orthodoxy (56). Orthodoxy is cosmic; in Orthodox ikons this is ex-
pressed by the symbolism of colors, the symbolism of cosmic life.
A characteristic feature of Russian thought is the struggle against
empiricism and rationalism, and interest in metaphysical problems
(57). Russian artistic literature is "heroic in character." In Russian
foreign policy from the time of the Holy Alliance to the present day the
ideological element is put in the forefront (58). The Russian ideal is
mutual interpenetration between the Church and the state (70). But the
Church represents the pan-unity of humanity as a whole. Since the
Church has been divided into the Western and the Eastern, we must
wait for the reunion of the churches before beginning our common
task (70 f.). Meanwhile the task of Russian culture is to "actualize the
potencies preserved since the eighth century," to accept the potencies
actualized by the West (Ueuropeanization") and complete thenswith its
812 L. P. KARSAVIN
own principles. Reunion of the churches is not merely a formal act, but
a union of cultures which is unnoticeably taking place already (73).
The defect of Russian Orthodoxy is its passivity and inaction;
much that is valuable in it is merely "a tendency towards development"
(58). Russians "contemplate the Absolute through a haze of dreams"
(59). "Confidence in the deification to come renders the present sterile."
The ideal is not attainable through "partial reforms and isolated efforts
(62), and a Russian always wants to act in the name of something abso-
lute or raised to the level of absolute." If a Russian doubts the absolute
ideal, he can sink to complete indifference to everything or even to
brutishness; he is capable of passing "from incredible law-abidingness
to most unbridled total rebellion." In his striving for the infinite a
Russian is afraid of definitions as limitations; hence the Russian genius
for transmutation (79).
Karsavin's system is a form of pantheism. He regards the Absolute
as the all-embracing unity. In criticizing the conception of pan-unity in
the philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev and Father S. Bulgakov, I have
been pointing out that God is a supersystematic principle creating the
world system as something ontologically external to Him. He does not
in consequence become a limited being, because the relation of limiting
is only possible between homogenous objects. Karsavin says that if
God is not a pan-unity, there may be another, a third ... a tenth God
beside Him. That objection is not convincing. We arrive of necessity
at the conception of God as a supersystematic principle conditioning
the existence of the world system with its actual and possible content.
The world system together with the supersystematic principle, God,
contains all that Karsavin includes in his conception of pan-unity. Just
as his pan-unity is unique, so is the supersystematic principle, God, to-
gether with the universe whose ground He is. When Karsavin says that
alongside such a God there might exist a second, a third . . . a tenth
God, I ask him where does he find a second, a third ... a tenth universe
which compel us to admit the existence of a second, third or tenth God.
No one can point out such universes; hence, the admission of many
Gods is an arbitrary flight of fancy.
Karsavin distinguishes his system from pantheism by pointing to
his theory of created being; but he himself explains that God does not
create any positive "something" with a nature of its own. A created
entity is in his view "nothing" to which the Absolute gives Itself, and
in so far as that "nothing" receives the Divine content it becomes a
"created something," "a second subject." This attempt to escape from
pantheism is utterly unsatisfactory: "nothing" is not an empty vessel
that can receive anything or still less to manifest pride which prevents
..... 0
L. P. KARSAVIN
it from accepting the fullness of the Divine life. That explains why in
his system the creature, as Karsavin says himself, is not strictly speaking
a personality: it receives all its content from the Divine pan-unity, it
does not create anything itself, so that the whole of the created world is
according to Karsavin a theophany (85, 175). The conception of
theophany may be found in a theistic system as well, but there it means
the manifestation of God in His works, namely in His creating entities
ontological1y distinct from Him, whose being nevertheless testifies that
He exists as their creator. For Karsavin the word "theophany" means
something different, namely, the manifestation of God in the creature
in the sense that all the positive content of the creature is the content of
the Divine being; the creature in so far as it is something is ontologi-
cally identical with God, as at any rate a part of the Divine being.
In criticizing Father S. Bulgakov's doctrine I have pointed out that
pantheism is logically untenable. In Karsavin's: system its logical im..
possibility is particularly clear since he refers absolutely everything real
to God, leaving merely "nothing" to the creature. Like all forms of
pantheism his system" fails to explain the created entities' freedom in
the sense of their independence of God and even of proud opposition
to Him. He means by freedom simply being "self-grounded" or "self..
conditioned." Nor can his system give a satisfactory answer as to the
origin and nature of evil. To be consistent, Karsavin is bound to under-
stand evil and the imperfection of the creature as merely incompleteness
of the good. Such an interpretation is in sharp opposition to the real
nature of evil which often has an evil content such as personal hatred,
by no means reducible to insufficient love. It is not surprising therefore
that Karsavin denies the existence of the devil: if he did not, he would
have to admit that God realizes a theophany which consists in His
hatred for Himself.
Karsavin is a personalist. He regards every entity as either poten-
tially personal, or embryonically personal (animals), or actually per-
sonal. He thinks that nations, cultural units and mankind are symphonic
personalities. Each of these personalities, however, is one and the same
pan-unity, though "contracted" in every one of them in a different way.
Accordingly, he has no conception of true and eternal individual
uniqueness as an absolute value: all development consists in the fact
that a created entity which existed alongside of God, becomes God, and
in the end of development there exists "once more only God alone."
Karsavin rejects the conception of the subject as an individual sub-
stance; i.e., as a superspatial and supertemporal and therefore eternal
agent. This is not surprising, for such a conception would be in contra-
diction to his pantheistic monism. He wants te replace the supeespatial
314 L. P. KARSAVIN
and the supertemporal by the all-spatial and all-temporal; that means
that for him the world entirely consists of events; i.e., of temporal and
spatially temporal processes, though an entity that has attained to the
highest stage of being realizes those processes in all time and in all
space. It is not hard to show that the conception of being in all space
and in all time cannot explain certain aspects of the world, which be-
come intelligible on the view that the self, i.e., the substantival agent,
is superspatial and supertemporal. Every event lasting in time, if it be
only one second and occupying space even if it be only one millimeter,
consists of an infinite number of segments that are external to one an-
other. It can only be one whole on condition that it is created by a
supertemporal and superspatial agent who unifies it. Even the percep-
tion of a temporal process such as a melody as something that happens
in time requires that it should he apprehended at once, as a single
whole-s-and this is only possible because the perceiving- subject is super-
temporal.
These objections against some of the fundamental positions of
Karsaviri's philosophy should not prevent one from attaching con-
siderable value to several of his doctrines such for instance as his con-
ception of history, of symphonic personality, of the Divinely human
process, of the independent development of every entity, of the external
and the individual body and so on.
Chapter 19
STUDIES IN LOGIC
Considering what a comparatively short time ago Russian philoso-
phy began to develop, it must be admitted that a great deal has been
done in the field of logic. Karinsky's Classification of Conclusions is an
approach to the logic of relations and a theory of nonsyllogistic in-
ferences. Vvedensky's Logic As a Part of Epistemology may be said to be
a classical instance of a system of logic in the spirit of Kant's critical
philosophy, Lossky's Logic is a theory of inference in the spirit of
comprehensivism, contrasted with existentional theories. All this has
been mentioned already; now something must be said about the works
of Povarnin and N. A. Vassilyev.
S. I. Povarnin, a lecturer at the Petrograd! University, expounded
his system of logic in two books The Logic of Relations and Logic
(printed in the Annals of the Petrograd University Faculty of Arts,
1915). In these books Povarnin pays even more attention than does
Karinsky to the nonsyllogistic inferences. His theory is based on the
idea that judgments are expressions of IDany and various relations be-
tween objects, e.g., relation of causality, equality, unequarity, succes-
sion, coexistence, etc. A judgment, he says, is an idea "about two objects
joined by a relation." On this interpretation the conception of affirma-
tion or negation becomes of secondary importance, and primary signifi-
cance is attached to the relation between two objects. Starting with this
theory Povarnin formulates his doctrine of the classification of in-
ferences.
Professor Lapshin discusses Povarnin's works in a long monograph
Epistemological Studies (in the Annals of the Petrograd University
Faculty of Arts, 1917). It contains interesting information about the
history of logic, especially the logic of relations. Lapshin notes the con-
nection between Povarnin's theory and symbolic logic.
Nicolay Alexandrovich Vassilyev, the son of Professor Vassilyev
who held the chair of mathematics at the University of Kazan, was a
1. During the First World 'Var St. Petersburg was ;'enalned Petrograd...
316 STUDIES IN LOGIC
lecturer at that University.. In his article "Imaginary (non-Aristotelian)
Logic"2 he lays down the foundations of a new system of logic.
"Our Aristotelian logic," says Vassilyev, "is only one of many pos-
sible systems of logic." Just as Lobachevsky created a non-Euclidean
system of geometry without the axiom about parallel lines, so W ~ may
think out a non-Aristotelian logic without the law of contradiction.
Such a logic might serve the purposes of knowledge in a world different
from ours. "The law of contradiction expresses the incompatibility of
affirmation and denial. A red object is not blue, because red in incom-
patible with blue" (212). "Incompatibility is the only logical basis of
negation" (2I4). This implies that the possibility of a non-Aristotelian
logic may be proved on epistemological grounds as follows. We learn
about incompatibility from experience. Hence, the law of contradiction
in Aristotelian logic is "an empirical and real law:' It is real because
It refers "not to ideas, but to reality, not to judgments, but to objects."
Consequently, Aristotelian logic is not purely formal. "Formal laws of
thought are concerned with thought only and not with reality-with
judgments and not with objects" (221). "But if the law of contradiction
is a real and empirical law, we can dispense with it in thinking, and
then we shall arrive at an imaginary logic." That logic denies the
ontological law according to which "there is no contradiction in ob-
jects," but retains the formal law "judgments must not be mutually
contradictory. "
"To construct a logic without the ontological law of contradiction
means to construct a logic in which there would be no negation in our
sense of incompatibility. It is possible that in some object the grounds
both for an affirmative and for a negative judgment may coincide"
(216). In that case it would be necessary to recognize the possibility of
judgments expressive of the contradiction present in the object, namely,
of saying that "S both is and at the same time, is not, A." Vassilyev calls
such judgments "neutral." Thus in his imaginary logic judgments
would be divided in quality into three kinds; positive. negative. and
neutral.
Vassilyev goes on to show that in his logic which denies the onto-
logical law of contradiction it is possible to develop a theory of the
syllogism. He shows in the case of the first figure of the syllogism, how
his theory would differ from the traditional logic.
Vassilyev compares the peculiarities of non-Aristotelian logic with
those of non- Euclidean geometry. Mathematicians have given a real
interpretation of that geometry, and in a similar way he tries to show
that "given a certain arrangement of the world or of our faculty of
2. the [oui nal 01 the Jylnistry 01 Education, August 1912.
STUDIES IN LOGIC 517
perception, logic is bound to be non-Aristotelian." In our world, he
says, all sensations are positive. "Sensations due to negative causes are
positive too: stillness, darkness, rest are no less positive than sound,
light, movement. Darkness becomes a negation of light only secondarily,
through being incompatible with it. Hence, negativeness is something
external to sensations, something that is added to them if they are con-
sidered in relation to other sensations. But we could conceive of a
world with negative sensations, pure non-A. Such negation would be
absolute" in contradistinction to our relative negation. It is conceivable
that in such a world "some object S would at one and the same time
give us both positive sensations A and negative non-A" and then we
should have to form a neutral judgment "S is and is not A at one and the
same time" (238f.).
N. A. Vassilyev develops his theory of the possibility of a non-
Aristotelian logic cleverly and consistently, but it is founded upon an
error. Lossky explains in his Logic that the law of contradiction is cer-
tainly not the expression of the incompatibility of any two qualities,
such as red and blue. It expresses something far more fundamental,
namely, that "red is not not-red," or that "redness in so far as it is red-
ness is not the absence of redness!' Thus understood, the law of contra-
diction is an ontological law discovered through intellectual intuition
and absolutely inviolable. Accepting this interpretation, Lossky shows
that all attempts to prove the possibility of violating the law of contra-
diction, made, e.g., by Hegel, S. L. Frank, Vvedensky, Lapshin, dialecti-
cal materialists, are invalid.
Chapter 20
TRANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN
RUSSIA AND ITS CRITIC, V. ERN
1. REPRESENTATIVES OF TRANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL
IDEALISM
Throughout the nineteenth century most Russian philosophers,
however original their line of thought might be, kept in touch with
the German post-Kantian philosophy. In the twentieth century this
intellectual intercourse was particularly close, for a number of young
Russians worked in Germany in the seminars of Professors Windelband,
Rickert, Hermann Cohen, Natorp, Husserl-prominent representatives
of that form of neo-Kantianism which may be called transcendental-
logical idealism. The chief Russian champions of this theory were
S. Hessen, G. D. Gurvich, F. Stepun, V. Sezeman, B. Yakovenko, G.
Lanz, V. Savalsky, N. V. Boldyrev, G. Shpet. On returning to Russia
these young men founded in 1910 the Russian section of the inter-
national journal Logos under the editorship of Hessen, Stepun and
Yakovenko.
Transcendental-logical idealism arose in Germany on a neo-Kantian
basis and is a very radical modification of Kant's theory of knowledge,
It resembles Kant's theory in so far as it too asserts that all objects of
knowledge are objects of consciousness built up by the very process of
cognition. Like Kant's theory it is a form of epistemological idealism.
But in contradistinction to Kant the philosophers in question maintain
that the knowing subject is not the individual human self, but a super-
individual subject; at the same time they interpret the logical condi..
tions of knowledge as neither mental nor physical but as belonging to
the realm of ideal being, first discovered by Plato. They differ from
Plato, however, in regarding ideal being not as a metaphysical reality,
but as merely a logical condition of knowledge. This is why they can
be best described as transcendental-logical idealists. The difference
betwee-i their theory and Kant's is fully discussed in Lossky's Introduc-
S18
TRANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN RUSSIA 819
tion to Philosophy, Part I: "Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge.'
Lossky gives in this book two versions of Kant's critical theory, having
in view the interpretations of The Critique of Pure Reason in the spirit
of psychologism and phenomenalism, on the one hand, and of transcen-
dental logic on the other hand. Lossky's purpose is to show that only
the first interpretation gives a correct idea of Kant's theory of knowl-
edge, while the transcendental-logical interpretation, which frees the
Critique from all psychologism and phenomenalism-c-as e.g., Cohen
does in his Kant's Theorie der Erjahrung-s-is a profound modification of
Kantianism.
Transcendental-logical idealism was a development of neo-Kantian-
ism tending to bring epistemology closer to ontology and thus to lead
in the end to a revival of metaphysics, \Yaluable reflections upon this
transition stage of transcendental-logical idealism are to be found in
S. A. Alexeyev (Askoldovj's article "The Inner Crisis of Transcendental
Idealism," in Vopiosi filosofii, 125, 1915, and S. L. frank's article "The
Crisis of Modern Philosophy," in Russkaya Mysl, September 1916.
The same evolution was taking place in the Russian transcen-
dental-logical idealism, as one of its representatives S. Hessen pointed
out in his article "Nejnovejsi ruska filosofie" in a Czech journal Rucli
filosoficky J I, 1923.
Russian young men studying philosophy in Germany were in
lively contact both with their teachers and with the German students,
and imparted to them information about Russian philosophy. It nlay
therefore be said that at that time 110t only the German philosophy
affected the Russian, but also Russian ontologism and intuitivism be-
gan to influence the German. This probably is the source of the "erno-
tional intuitivism" in M. Scheler's theory of values. It is difficult to
estimate this kind of influence with any certainty, but there can be no
doubt that the Russian representatives of transcendental-logical ideal-
ism were affected by Russian intuitivism and ideal realism; this can be
seen from the comparison between their earlier and their later writings.
As they passed from the problems of epistemology to those of axiology,
ethics and social philosophy, they came up more and more against the
question of the knowledge of living .reality, discussed in the metaphysics
of concrete ideal realism, Since the time of Kant, philosophy has been
faced with the following alternative: either there is intuition as the im-
mediate contemplation of tile object in itself, and then metaphysics is
possible, or, as Kant thinks, there is no intuition and then, as he says,
metaphysics as a science is impossible. As soon as the Russian transcen-
dental-logical idealists felt the need of metaphysics they developed a
tendency toward intuiuvism. Some of them wdrked out the t h e ~ y that'
320 IDEALISM IN RUSSIA
there are many varieties of knowledge and experience, others admitted
the existence of a practical as well as of a theoretical intuition. This
change in point of view is particularly pronounced in the works of S.
Hessen, G. D. Gurvich, V. Sezeman, F. Stepun, B. Yakovenko.
Sergey Iosifovich Hessen (1887-1950) received his. philosophical
education in Germany and at first was an adherent of Rickert's norma-
tive criticism. The thesis he submitted for his doctorate was called Ueber
individuelle Kausalitiit; he dealt in it with the problem of individual
causality 011 the basis of the distinction between "ideographic" and
"nomothetic" sciences. After returning to Russia he was professor of
philosophy at Tomsk and after the revolution at Warsaw and at Lodz,
S. Hessen's chief works are: "The Philosophy of Punishment,"
Logos, 1912-1913; The Foundations of Pedagogics, 1924; "The Problem
of Constitutional Socialism," Sovremenniya Zapiski, 1924-1928; "The
Tragedy of the Good in the Brothers Karamazov," Sovremenniya
Zapiski, 1928.
In his inquiry into the problem of punishment Hessen says: "On its
Iormal side a crime is the violation of the law by a responsible subject:'
A crime is a symptom of disharmony between legality and life. When a
law is just and therefore ought to stand, justice which has suffered from
the violation of it, is re-established when the legal norm is confirmed by
the condemnation of the crime. This is the pure form of punishment.
"Like every activity intended to establish justice in society, punishment
serves the law and, consequently, the criminal himself, who is being
punished as a subject possessed of legal rights. Punishment is inflicted
upon him in his own interests, for, possessing rights, he is as much in-
terested in the re-establishment of justice as are his judges." As a rule the
matter of punishment is added to its form; Le., the criminal is deprived
of some concrete rights such as the right of property, freedom of move-
ment, etc.
The question "what precise rights must be taken away in each
particular case is decided entirely on the strength of material con-
siderations. The decision is determined by reference to extraneous pur-
poses such as the defense of the state and society from dangerous Indi-
viduals, intimidation, correction, etc.;" the means which the state has
at its disposal have also to be taken into consideration, as well as the
individuality of the concrete psychophysical persons committing the
crime.
On the strength of defining punishment as an act of legal justice
Hessen determines its lower and upper limit; transgression of the:
upper limit means forsaking the domain of law and making punishment
an act Cof vengeance, a measure of public safety, and not an act oj
TRANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN R.USSIA 521
justice. The lower limit of punishment is a public declaration of the
sentence. The upper limit is "the deprivation of the criminal of all
rights except one, which still allows him to be regarded as a subject of
rights." Hence, complete deprivation of rights, "outlawry" or "sur-
rendering the criminal to be despoiled" is not an act of legal justice.
Similarly, "however wise it might sometimes seem from the point of
view of the state to execute a man, it must be definitely recognized that
capital punishment is opposed to the conception of legal justice." Death
penalty destroys the subject of rights, and punishment ceases to be an
expression of justice. "Or rather, it is not the subject of rights who is
destroyed (like all that has significance, he is indestructible), but the
possibility of his realization" (228).
In his book The Foundations of Pedagogics Hessen expounds the
philosophical basis of the problem of education and upbringing, making
a clever use of the dialectical method. The purpose of education is, in
his view, to put a person in touch with the cultural values of science,
art, morality, law, economics, and to make the natural man into a cul-
tured man. He ends his book by the words "to overcome the past through
connecting it with the eternal which constitutes its real meaning is the
true aim of education" (368).
In working out the problems of ethics and social philosophy Hessen,
like G. D. Gurvich comes close to intuitivism and seeks to enlarge it by
the conception of practical conative intuition which he calls "volitional
vision" (Willensschau). In his writings on the subject he approximates
more and more to the general spirit of Russian concrete ideal realism.
This can be seen, for instance, in his essay "The Tragedy of the Good
in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov:" According to Hessen's interpreta-
tion the three brothers, Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha, are the embodiments
of the three stages of the good and of the corresponding three telnpta-
tions of evil; evil itself, as represented by Smerdyakov, acts the part of
servant to the three perverted images of the good. Dmitri Karamazov
stands for "the natural basis of morality" expressed by the semi-instinc-
tive feelings of shame, pity, and reverence (Soloviev's theory). Ivan
represents the good which has become an object of reflection, and seeks
for the rational meaning of life. It is the Kantian autonomous good,
consisting in the free fulfillment of duty without love. The highest
degree of goodness-the good as love-is embodied in Alyosha who
loves every living being in its individual wholeness, "for nothing:' and
is at each given moment creatively participating in other people's life.
Hessen regards Father Zossima as representative of the superethical
holy life. He interprets Father Zossima's idea that "everyone is respon-
sible for everyone else" as an indication that the Kingdom of. God and
522 TRANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN RUSSIA
the Principle in which it is rooted transcend the opposition between
good and evil. Father Zossima, in his view, stands above the moral
sphere, and Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov-below it.
Hessen's extensive work The Problem of Constitutional Socialism
deserves consideration as an attempt to give a synthesis of the valuable
aspects of the individualistic structure of society with the valuable
aspects of the socialist ideal. Hessen strives to show that such a line of
development will lead not merely to preserving, but actually to giving
a more perfect expression to the values of religion, nationality, the
state, legal justice, freedom and even of private property.
George Davidovich Gurvich (born in 1894) was in his youth an
adherent of transcendental-logical idealism. He left Russia after the
Bolshevik revolution and was professor of philosophy at Strasbourg; at
present he is living in Paris and working at sociology. Gurvich's chief
works are: Fichtes System der konkreten Ethik, 1924; Socialism and
Property (Sovremenniya Zapiski, 1928); L'idee du droit social, 1931;
Le temps present et l'idee du droit social, 1931; Morale theorique et
science des moeurs, 1937.
G. D. Gurvich, like S. Hessen, came under the influence of in-
tuitivism and concrete ideal realism. He maintains the existence of
practical intuition which he calls "volitional vision" or "l'intuition
uolitive:" He has made an original attempt to work out the conception
of a special kind of property which he describes as "soborny property."
He designates by that term property which belongs to a group of mem-
bers, so that both the group as a whole and each co-member is the
subject of property; each co-member (or several of them together) "has
secured to him as his inalienable property a certain ideal part of the
object, and he has a right to demand compensation for it if he leaves
the group, which he is free to do. Since the whole group is as much the
subject of property as each co-member, the property always remains in
the hands of the group, and an individual member, on leaving it, re-
ceives only a money equivalent of his part."
Vassili Emilievich Sezeman (born 1884) was professor of philosophy
at the University of Kovno in Lithuania and is now at Vilno.
His chief works are: "Platonism, Plotinus, and Modernity," Logos
1925;- "Zum Problem des reinen Wissens," Philosophischer Anzeiger
1927; Uebergegenstiindliches und ungegenstiindliches Wissen, com..
mentationes ordinis philologorum (Lib. II) of the Kovno University,
1927; Beiiriige Zum Erkenntnisproblem, Das Logisch-Rationale, Eranus,
commentationes societatis Philos. Lituanae, v. I, 1930; Die logischen
Gezetze und das Sein, 1932.
In working out a doctrine of the different species of experience
TRANSC:!NDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN R.USSIA 525
v. Sezeman distinguishes objective knowledge, Erkenntnis and nonob-
jective cognition, Wissen. In objective knowledge there is opposition
between subject and object, a distance between the knower and the
known; that knowledge is reached by removing all subjective elements
from the reality that is being cognized; the logical formulation which
leads to objectification (Vergegenstiindlichung) expresses the content of
knowledge by a concept and tends, so to speak, to stiffen in its verbal
form, i.e., tends to assume the character of thinghood: objectification
degenerates into "hypostacising abstractions." A typical form of objec-
tive knowledge is to be found in natural science. The nonobjective
cognition of spiritual realities-s-e.g., the moral, religious, and aesthetic
experience-is of a different nature. In it there is no separation be-
tween the subject and the object: the subject participates in the reality
he apprehends; the given contents of experience are inevitably con-
nected with self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Such a cognition of
experiences "in its primary form can never become knowledge formu-
lated by means of concepts."
According to Sezeman, nonobjective cognition covers the whole
domain of the subjective-the subject himself and all his mental and
spiritual living activities; it also includes all activity on the part of
others, all living, creative manifestations of reality. Objectiveknowledge
through concepts has a universal character, but is divorced from reality;
it makes reality undergo a perspectival distortion. Nonobjective cogni-
tion, on the contrary, is plunged in reality, but is not universal. The
absolute ideal of knowledge could only be attained in an absolute self-
consciousness in which the object would not be transcendent to the
subject, and reality would be directly revealed in all its wholeness. This
ideal is unattainable for us, finite beings; our limited self-consciousness
can only serve as the basis and the starting point of the knowledge of
the world's existence (Dasein); but in order to know its manner of being
(Sosein) we are compelled to objectify the data of experience. A philoso-
phy which by means of self-consciousness discovers the defects of this
objective knowledge incites us again and again to go beyond it and to
establish new, nonobjective points of view. This is how we advance
toward the ideal- of absolute knowledge.
A criticism of "volitional vision" and Sezeman's theories is to be
found in Lossky's articles "Fichte's konkrete Ethik im Lichte des
modernen Transcendentalismus," Logos 1926 and "Die intellectuelle
Anschauung als Methode der Philosophie," Der Russische Gedanke,
I, 1929.
Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was born in 1884. He left Russia after
the Bolshevik revolution and was professor at the Dresden PoJytechni-
324 TR.ANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN RUSSIA
cum. Stepun's chief works are: "The Tragedy of Creativeness," Logos
1910; "The Tragedy of Mystical Consciousness," ibid. 1911; Life and
Creativeness, 1923; The Basic Problems of the Theater, Berlin, Slovo,
1929.
Stepun, like Sezeman, works out a theory of his own concerning
the advance toward the ideal of absolute knowledge by distinguishing
between two types of experience: the experiences of creativeness and
the experiences of life. The former are subject to the dualism of the
subject.. object relation, while life is expressed by the idea of positive
all-unity. The process of civilization is characterized by the struggle
between the creative efforts of the spirit, marked by dualism, aad the
striving to rediscover the primary unity of life.
Boris Valentinovich Yakovenko (1884-1949) lived during the First
War and the revolution in Italy and afterwards settled in Prague. In
1929-38 he edited the magazine Der Russische Gedanke, and later oc-
casional volumes of the Bibliotheque Internationale de Philosophie.
Yakovenko's chief works are: "What Is Philosophy? An Introduc..
tion to Transcendentalism," Logos 191I; "Immanent Transcendentism,
Transcendent Immanentism and Dualism in General," ibid. 1912; Vom
Wesen des Plutalismus, 1928; "Die Grundvorurteile des menschlichen
Denkens," Der Russische Gedanhe, 1929; Zur Kritik de'S Psychologismus;
The Critique of the Russian Intuitioistic Ideal Realism, the Works of
the Russian Popular University in Prague, vol. II, 1929; Dejiny Ruske
filosofie, Praha 1939.
Yakovenko's approach to ontologism is different from that of
Sezeman and Stepun. His aim is to get rid, through critical analysis, of
the network of dogmatic schemata and preconceptions which envelop
reality in practical life, in sense apprehension, scientific hypothetical
thinking, "religious" faith, etc., and ascend to an intuition in which
"the absolute multifarious all is present as it actually is in itself."
Yakovenko calls his philosophy critical or transcendental intuitivism and
also philosophic absolutism in contradistinction to all relativism and
agnosticism. Yakovenko's comprehensive work The History of Russian
Philosophy has been published in Czech in Prague.
Gustav Gustavovich Shpet (born 1879) was professor of philosophy
at the University of Moscow. His chief works are: Appearance and
Meaning, 1914; History As a Problem of Logic, 1916; Aesthetic Frag-
ments, 1922; An Essay on the Development of the Russian Philosophy,
I, 1922; Introduction to Ethnical Psychology, 1927.
In his book Appearance and Meaning Shpet upholds Husserl's
theories. Shpet was the first to write a valuable and detailed work on
the histerv of Russian pbilosophy, but his contemptuous attitude to
SHESTOV'S IRRATIONAUSM
525
volume was published, the second was forbidden by the Soviet Govern-
ment.
Henrich Ernestovich Lanz (died 1946) left Russia after the Bolshevik
revolution and was professor at the Stanford University in U.S.A. He
wrote a book Das Problem der Gegenstiindlichkeit in der modernen
Logik in 1912 and an article "Speculative Transcendentalism in Plo-
tinus," in The Journal of the Afinistry of Public Education, I, 1914.
Leonid Yevgenyevich Gabrilovich (born 1878) left Russia after the
Bolshevik revolution and at present is living in New York. In addition
to many articles concerned with various cultural problems, literary
criticism, politics, etc., Gabrilovich published two purely philosophical
essays: "The Conceptions of Truth and Certainty in the Theory of
Knowledge" in Voprosi filosofii i psychologii, IV, 1908; "Ueber Bedeut-
ung und Wesen der Elementarbegriffe," Archiv fur system. Philos., XV,
4, 1910.
The cognitive act which is the starting point of knowledge and
which excludes all doubt is, according to Gabrilovich, a statement of
"actual experiences." Their verbal expression such as UI am warm" or
"this circle is yellow" has the form of judgment although in truth it is
not even a judgment but a statement of "actual givenness" (466, 468).
Investigating the conditions of certainty with regard to judgments about
not-present experiences Gabrilovich distinguishes "conditions of con-
creteness" and "conditions of reality." The condition of concreteness
is that the opposite cannot be represented even in imagination, thus,
e.g., a square with uneven diagonals is not representable. Those condi-
tions are expressed in judgments of pure mathematics and geometry.
The certainty of judgments the opposites of which are representable
depends upon the conditions of "thinghood, objectivity or reality;"
those judgments must not contradict the principle of causality.
Gabrilovich's article is an introduction to a book which was to
have been an inquiry into truth, concreteness, and reality, but has never
been published.
2. SHESTOV'S IRRATIONALISM
Lev Shestov (1866-1938) whose real name was Schwarzman emi-
grated from Kiev after the Bolshevik revolution and settled in Paris.
Shestov's chief works are: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, 1903; -Apotheo-
sis of Groundlessness, 1905; The Idea of the Good in Tolstoy and in
Nietzsche, 1907; Potestas clauium, 1923; La nuit de Gethsemanie, 1925;
On Job's Balances, 1929; Athenes et [erusajem, 1938. See N. Lossky,
"Shestov's Philosophy" in Russkiya Zapiski, 1939.
S26 TR.ANSCENDENTAL-LOGlCAL IDEALISM IN R.USSIA
Extreme skepticism manifested by Shestov in his work from the
first has its source in the ideal of unrealizable superlogical absolute
knowledge. In the book Apotheosis of Groundlessness Shestov disproves
mutually contradictory scientific and philosophical theories, leaving
the reader suspended in the void. In the book Athens and Jerusalem he
contrasts rational thought dating back to the Greek philosophy with the
superrational biblical apprehension of the world which denies the law
of contradiction. The idea of God's omnipotence leads Shestov to affirm,
like the medieval philosopher, Peter Damiani, that God can make the
past to have never been; e.g., it is in His power to ordain that Socrates
did not drink the cup of poison in the year 399 B.C.
3. V. ERN
Vladimir Franzevich Ern (1882-1917) worked in close contact with
the Moscow philosophers S. Trubetskoy, Lopatin, and P. Florensky.
His chief works are: The Struggle for the Logos, 1911; G. S. Skouoroda,
Moscow 1912; Rosmini and His Theory of Knowledge, 1914; The
Philosophy of Gioberti, 1916.
See also S. Askoldov (Alexeyevj's article on Ern in Russkaya Mysl,
May 1917.
Ern was mainly concerned with combatting West-European ra-
tionalism and the tendency to mechanize the whole structure of life
and to subordinate it to technics. He opposes to these factors of civiliza-
tion the Logos of the ancient and the Christian philosophy. This
Logos is a' concrete living Being, the Second Person of the Trinity,
incarnate and present in the historical process. Ern calls his philosophy
"Logism." His book The Struggle for the Logos is a collection of essays
in which he contrasts two philosophical tendencies-rationalism and his
"logism." Rationalism is concerned with the subjective data of experi-
ence and their elaboration in accordance with the formal rules of
logic, i.e., of understanding. It is a dead philosophy for it severs the
knowing subject from the living reality. Logism, on the contrary, is the
doctrine of the unity of the knower and the known, the vision of living
reality. In the rationalism and empiricism of modern philosophy there
is no conception of nature. In ancient philosophy, in the Middle Ages
and during the Renaissance nature was taken to be an integral being,
creative and having an inner life of its own: such is Aristotle's physis as
the principle of change having a creative entelechy; the spermatic logos
of the Stoics; the natura creata creans of Eriugena; the archeus of
Paracelsus and Jean Baptiste van Helmont. In Descartes, on the con-
trary, macerial nature is devastated: it has no inner life; matter has only
V.ERN ~ 2 7
external properties, extension and movement as change of position in
space. This is but one step to Berkeley's theory that matter does not
exist and is merely a subjective idea. After him, Hume interpreted the
soul, too, as merely a bundle of perceptions and not as a living prin-
ciple. All this is a meonic myth. Kant developed meonism to its final
limit: his immanent philosophy transforms the whole of the knowable
world into a system of lifeless presentations. During the First World
War Ern published a pamphlet From Kant to Krupp. He explains in
it the destructive technique which menaces the whole of our civiliza..
tion by the influence of Kant's meonic philosophy.
When in 1910 young Russian converts to transcendental-logical
idealism came home from Germany and founded the Russian section
of the international periodical Logos, Ern wrote a propos of this an
article called "Something About Logos, Russian Philosophy and the
Scientific Mind." He drew attention to the fact that the cover of the
magazine had on it an image of Heraclitus and a design from the frieze
of Parthenon, under which was written in Greek logos. The appearance
of such a magazine in Russia which lived by the religion of Logos, the
Word, might be welcomed had it meant the Logos corresponding to
the true Russian culture based upon the tradition of the Eastern
Fathers of the Church. But in analyzing the tendency of the new maga-
zine Ern found that its Logos was profoundly different from the ancient
Greek and the Christian Logos. Under the Greek mask we can see the
familiar phrase "made in Germany." The magazine stands tor rational-
ism, meonism, schematism. The Greek speculation led to the personal,
living and Divine Logos in whom thought and existence form an
indivisible unity. Therefore original Russian philosophy connected
with Orthodoxy has the character of ontologism and not of epistemologi-
cal idealism. In the West, too, the philosophy of the Catholic church
is ontologie. A culture based upon the Divine Logos does not reject
logical discursive thought. The Logos has three aspects expressed in
the three domains of culture: (1) the Divine, expressed in religion
which trains the will to realize moral good; (2) the cosmic, expressed in
art the aim of which is to reveal the world as one in beauty; (3) the
discursively logical, expressed in philosophy, the purpose of which is
to comprehend the world-whole in the unity of theoretical thought.
But in contradistinction to rationalism. in logism thought is not severed
from integral reason it contains within itself Existence, Goodness and
Beauty.
According to Ern, only a philosophy based on the Divine Logos
can guide life and establish its final end; it works out for the first time
the true conception of progress. The positivist idea of progress as a
528 TRANSCENDENTAL-LOGICAL IDEALISM IN RUSSIA
quantitative increase of material goods is "a bad infinity." The true
idea of progress indicates movement toward an absolute completion,
the Absolute Good, i.e., to the Kingdom of God. Entrance into that
Kingdom is the end of history which takes place through a catastrophic
cataclysm and a transition into a qualitatively different realm of being.
Ern formulates the main points of his philosophy in the following
statements: logism is (1) not re-ism (not a system of things), but per-
sonalism; (2) not mechanism or determinism, but an organic structure
of the world, freedom; (3) not illusionism or meonism, but ontologism;
(4) not schernatism, but a realistic symbolism; (5) not a negative, but an
actual infinity; (6) it is discrete, catastrophic; (7) not static, but dynamic.
Ern was interested in the philosophy of Rosmini and Gioberti be-
cause it was a form of ontologism that grew out of the Catholic culture.
Early death from tuberculosis prevented Ern from working out his
theories in detail; but his book The Struggle For the Logos is highly
valuable for it is an attempt to define the peculiar characteristics of the
Russian philosophy.
Chapter 21
SCIENTIST.PHILOSOPHERS
Prince Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was educated at
the Corps des Pages and afterwards graduated at the Petersburg Uni-
versity. He did scientific research in geography and geology. When in
1872 he went abroad he was converted to socialism and anarchism.
After returning to Russia he took part in the revolutionary movement,
was arrested in 1874, spent two years in prison, in 1876 made his escape
and left Russia. Kropotkin's chief works are Anarchy, Its Philosophy
and Its Ideal) 1902; Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, 1912 (published
in English in 1902); Ethics, I, 1922.
In the book Mutual Aid Kropotkin gives a number of instances of
mutual aid between animals, both of the same and of different species.
He argues that struggle for existence leads not to greater perfection, but
to the survival of more primitive organisms. Creatures that largely
practice mutual aid greatly multiply, and thus mutual aid proves to be
the most important factor in evolution.
Struggle for existence does not explain the origination of new
characteristics of an organism: it only explains their prevalence or
their gradual disappearance. Nor is mutual aid, which Kropotkin
values so highly, a factor capable of creating new characteristics. But
owing to mutual aid creatures that have developed new qualities, e.g.,
capacity for aesthetic creativeness, for intense intellectual activity, etc.
-qualities that are often accompanied by a decrease in biological
strength-find it possible to live and multiply. Thus mutual aid
furthers the richness and fullness of life and the development of super-
biological activities.
Kropotkin sought to found ethics upon the data of natural history
and not upon religious metaphysics. Mentioning that Darwin pointed
out the existence of mutual sympathy between animals, Kropotkin says
that social life engenders social instincts both in human beings and
animals. This instinct contains "the beginnings of the feeling of good
will and of partial identification of the individual with his group, which
!29
S30
is the starting point of all lofty moral sentiments. On this basis there
develops a higher feeling of justice or equal rights, equality; and then
that which is usually called self-sacrifice" (14).
Kropotkin devoted a number of pamphlets; speeches, and articles
to preaching anarchism.
The conception of the world as an integral whole containing
higher organizing principles is developed in the Russian literature not
only by religious philosophers, but also by some naturalists who apply
it to the solution of the main problems of the philosophy of nature.
Special mention should be made of V. Karpov, professor of histology at
the Moscow University. In his book The Fundamental Features of an
Organic Interpretation of Nature (1910) he applies the conception of
organic wholeness to all kingdoms of nature and all individual forma-
tions in it. K. Starynkevich, a botanist, wrote a book The Structure of
Life which was published after his death by G. V. Vernadsky with an
introduction by Lossky in 1931. To explain organic wholes Starynkevich
establishes the conception of a "primary intuition" which connects
every organism with the rest of the world and provides a basis for the
development of physiological self-regulation, instinct and reason. He
also works out a doctrine about living units which are higher than the
individual body of a plant or an animal, e.g., such units as a bee-hive, a
forest, a marsh, and particularly about the organic unity of life upon
earth and even in the cosmos as a whole.
Schultz, professor of zoology at the Harkov University, wrote a very
informative book Organism As Creativeness, in the series called "The
Theory and the Psychology of Creativeness," VII, 1916. He argues that
the development of forms in an organism come under the definition of
instinctive acts.
Sergey Ivanovich Metalnikov (1870-1945), a specialist on immunity,
who after the Bolshevik revolution worked in Paris as a member of
the Pasteur Institute, maintained on the strength of his observations
of unicellular organisms that even a reflex act is a creative way out of a
situation in which an organism finds itself in its particular environment.
His study of immunity reactions enabled him to prove that they may
be developed into conditional reflexes. He introduced cholera microbes
into the abdomen of a rabbit, while striking a tuning fork; after a series
of such experiments he sounded the tuning fork without introducing
cholera microbes, but on cutting open the rabbit he found that the anti-
cholera blood corpuscles had appeared all the same. He thus proved that
immunity reaction is a centrally conditioned process; he actually found
in insects the nerve ganglion which must be intact for preserving the
different kinds of immunity essential to insect-, In his article "Science
SCIENTISTPHILOSOPHF,RS SSI
and Ethics" Metalnikov speaks of love as an evolutionary factor.
Toward the end' of his life he proposed to work out a theory of evolu-
tion proving that evolution is conditioned by a reason which lies at
the root of nature. Illness and death prevented him from doing this.
Alexandr Gavrilovich Gurvich (born 1874), a professor in the Uni-
versity of Moscow, who discovered the mitogenetic radiations of or-
ganisms, built up an organic theory of the factors involved in life
processes; he did so very cautiously, avoiding conceptions that could
not be clearly defined; thus, he used statistical methods in studying the
development of the embryo.
L. S. Berg, a professor in the Petersburg University, in his pamphlet
Theories of Evolution and a detailed monograph Nomogenesis, pub-
lished in 1922, proves that the evolution of organisms is not due to the
accumulation of accidental changes, but is a nomogenesis, i.e., a process
of regular change in a definite direction.
The psychiatrist Nicolay Yevgraovich Osipov (died 1934) left
Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and while living in Prague aimed
at recasting the psychological theories of Freud in the spirit of Lossky's
personalistic metaphysics. He thought that love was a basic factor in
cosmic life, far earlier than sexual passion and not reducible to mere
physiological attraction. "The empirical value of Freud's research will
not be affected," Osipov writes "if the central place is ascribed not to
physiological attraction, but to Love in the eidetic sense as an absolute
value. In our spatiotemporal world Love is embodied in varying
degrees, beginning with the very lowest, that of identification (I love
this apple and, in virtue of that love, eat it, i.e., destroy it). Then love
expresses itself in sensuality-genital and extragenital-and tenderness.
Finally it finds expression in special experiences of intimacy between
people-the highest form of Love's manifestation in the human world."
Unfortunately, illness and death prevented Osipov from developing in
detail his theory of love which was to explain the connections between
persons in a way different from that of the Freudians with their
tendency to pansexualism.
Osipov's works that have a bearing on philosophy are the follow-
ing: Tolstoy's Kindheitserinnerungen, Imago Verlag; Revolution and
Dream ~ o r k s of the Russian Popular University, Prague, 193]); "The
Sick and the Healthy in Dostoevsky," in the Revue v nevrologii a
psychiatrii, 1931; see also Lossky's UN. E. Osipov As a Philosopher," in
the symposium Life and Death in memory of Osipov, V. I, Prague 1935.
Mihail Mihailovich Novikov was professor of zoology at the Mos-
cow University and then at Bratislava and is. DOW living in Munchen,
In his treatises The Limits of Scientific Knowledge of Living- Nature,
332 SCIENTIST
1922, and Problems of Life, Berlin 1922, he tries to arrive at a compro-
mise solution of the dispute between vitalists and mechanists. He ac-
cepts Bergson's view about the difference between rational and intuitive
knowledge and believes that biology as an exact science must continue
rationalistic physicochemical study of organisms in order to establish
mechanistic uniformities, remembering, however, that on this path the
mystery of life must remain insoluble; attempts to solve it require
intuition and therefore, since they lie beyond the confines of exact
knowledge, must be left to philosophers.
The academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (died in 1945), a
geologist and mineralogist, devoted many years to the study of the laws
of the biosphere. At the end of his life he began, like the French mathe-
matician Le Roy, to talk of man as a great geological power, namely as
of the creator of the "noosphere." He means by that term the reconstruc-
tion of the biosphere in the interests of thinking humanity.'
1. "The Biosphere and the Noosphere," A merican Scientist, XXXIII, 1945,
"Scientific World Conception," Voprosi filo$ofii i psychologii, No. 65, 1902.
Chapter 22
JURIST-PHILOSOPHERS
Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev (died 1924), professor at the Uni-
versity of Moscow, left Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and was
dean of the Russian faculty of Low in Prague. His chief works that
have a philosophic significance are: Kant's and Hegel's Theories of Law
and the State, The Crisis of Modern Juridical Consciousness,
1909; The Social Ideal, 1917; HUeber die eigentiimlichen Elemente det
russischen Rechtsphilosophie,' in Philosophic und Recht" II, 1922-23.
The impossibility of realizing a perfect social order in the condi-
tions of earthly existence, insisted upon by Russian religious philoso-
phers, was explained long ago in the works of Novgorodtsev. He bases
it upon the analysis of relations between the individual and society.
Novgorodtsev is concerned not with the generic notion of man but with
concrete individual persons, and he brings incontrovertible scientific
evidence to prove that "the antinomy between the personal and the
social principles" cannot be solved within the limits of earthly existence:
"The harmony between the individual and society is possible only in
the intelligible realm of freedom where absolute and all-pervading
solidarity is combined with infinite individual differences.. In the con-
ditions of historical life there is no such harmony and there cannot be."
This explains the fact, pointed out by Novgorodtsev, of "the collapse
of faith in the perfect constitutional state" and also of faith in socialism
and anarchism, in short, "the collapse of the idea of earthly paradise."
Novgorodtsev does not deny that the attainments of the modern con-
stitutional state, as well as the strivings of socialism and anarchism are
relatively good, but he shows that they are incommensurable with the
ideal of the absolute good. Therefore, if we are to avoid a hopeless
impasse, we must build our ideal of the earthly society with a view to
"the freedom of the infinite development of personality, and not the
harmony of completed perfection" (Social Ideal, Srd ed., 25).
Yevgeny Vassilyevich Spektorsky the last elected
Rector of the Kiev University, left Russia after the" Bolshevtk revolu-
3'5
JURIST-PHILOSOPHERS
tion He was professor at Ljublyana in- Yugoslavia, and since 1947
is a professor at the Russian Orthodox Academy in New York.
Spektorsky's main works are: Essays on the Philosophy of Social
Sciences, 1907; The Problem of Social Physics in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury, 1910; Christianity and Culture, Prague 1925; Christian Ethics.
In his book Christianity and Culture Spektorsky makes abundantly
clear the high positive significance of Christianity for all the spheres of
spiritual, social, and even material culture-for philosophy, science and
art, for the development of the idea of personality, of legal justice, the
state, etc.
In Russian jurisprudence there was a strong movement against
naturalism; after the Bolshevik revolution it has been carried on by
the emigres. As in Germany, the opposition to naturalism was first based
upon post-Kantian metaphysical idealism or upon modern transcen-
dental idealism. In the Russian philosophy naturalism is opposed on
even deeper grounds in connection with a religious interpretation of
the world. An excellent analytic survey of the literature on the subject
is made in the magazine Philosophic und Recht in a special supplement
Russische Rechtsphilosophie, 1922-23 (Heft 2). The tendency to base
jurisprudence on religious principles is described in Novgorodtsev's
article "Ueber die eigentiimlichen Elemente der russischen Rechts-
philosophie." G. Gurvich in his article "Die lwei grossten russischen
Rechtsphilosophen Boris Tschitscherin und Wladimir Ssolowijew"
compares the views of Chicherin based upon Kant's and Hegel's idealism
with the views of Soloviev that have their source in religious meta-
physics; he also explains the significance of the works of Novgorodtsev
who tries to synthesize these two tendencies. Petrazhitsky's psychologism
is expounded in an article by G. Landau. Finally, the article "Ueber-
sicht der neueren rechtsphilosophischen Literatur in Russland" gives
an idea of the Russian philosophy of law as a whole. It speaks of B.
Kistyakovsky's works based upon the transcendental idealism of the
Freiburg school, of Iosif Pokrovsky's ethical personalism, of the quest
for the ideal bases of jurisprudence in the works of Spektorsky, N. N.
Alexeyev and others.
Chapter 23
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF
POET-SYMBOLISTS
1. ANDREI BELYI
The following four of the symbolist poets have written most on
philosophical subjects: Andrei Belyi, Vyacheslav Ivanov, N. M. Minsky,
and D. S. Merezhkovsky.
Andrei Belyi (1880-1934) is known under this penname. His real
name was Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev. He was the son of professor
Bugaev who held the chair of mathematics at the Moscow University.
He studied natural sciences as well as the humanities. His chief philo-
sophical work is Symbolism, published by Musaget, 1910.
According to Andrei Belyi symbolism is the world conception
which provides a basis for symbolic art and embodies "certain features
of Taoism in a realistic philosophy" (49, 106). Symbolism is a synthesis
of India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and the Middle Ages (50). Being under
the strong influence of Rickert, Andrei Belyi maintained that exact
science gives no interpretation of the world as a whole: it works by
limiting the object of knowledge and therefore "systematizes the ab-
sence of knowledge." Life reveals itself not through scientific knowl-
edge, but through creative activity which is "unanalyzable, integral
and omnipotent;" it is only expressible in symbolic images which clothe
the idea (72). The unity of life is expressed by such symbols as Adam
Kadmon of the Kabbalah, the Atman of the Hindu philosophy, the
Logos-Christ. On the whole Andrei Belyi's philosophy is a variety of
pantheism.
In the process of cognitive or creative symbolization the symbol
becomes' reality. The living word is intimately connected with reality
and therefore has magic. power (see chapter "The l\fagic of Words").
Poetry, says Andrei Belyi, is connected with the creation of words-a
gift which he himself possessed to a remarka.ble degree. Some of the
words he invented ought to be introduced into zeneral usage. but others
3!5
356 POET-SYMBOLISTS
express such subtle and fleeting shades of the subject he is describing
that theycould only be used once in a life time. A considerable part of
his book is devoted to the analysis of the style of various poetical works,
to the discussion of the significance of metrical forms, rhymes, allitera-
tion, assonance, etc.
2. V. IVANOV-N. MINSKY
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (born 1866) left Russia after the
Bolshevik revolution, became a Catholic and is living in Rome. His
chief works that have a bearing on philosophy are the following: By
the Stars, 1909; The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God, 1910;
Boundaries and Furrows, 1916; A Correspondence Between Two Corners,
Ogonki, Moscow-Berlin 1922; Dostojewskij, J. C. B. Mohr, 1932.
According to V. Ivanov symbols are suggestions of a reality inex-
pressible in words; they give rise to myths which express the truth in
the form of images.. This truth must lead to a theurgic synthesis of the
personal and the communal principles. V. Ivanov's social ideal j:;
communal (soborny) anarchy.
A Correspondence Between Two Corners consists of twelve letters
exchanged between V. Ivanov and Gershenson in the summer of 1920
when they shared a room in a Moscow sanatorium. Mihail Osipovich
Gershenson (1869-1925) was a gifted historian of Russian literature and
culture. In their correspondence those two remarkable representatives
of Russian and universal culture discussed their relation to history and
civilization. V. Ivanov says that "the universal and the ecumenical in
me" is a "bright guest who made his abode with me," and that "if I do
not forsake God, He will raise me and give me immortality" (Letter I).
Gershenson answers that he too does not doubt personal immortality,
but that he would like "to plunge into Lethe" and wash off his soul
all the past, all religions, all knowledge, all arts" (II). Ivanov remarks
that this is a wrong path based on the feeling "that culture is not a
living treasure house of gifts but a system of subtle compulsions; for
me," he adds, culture is "a hierarchy of reverences, and my reverences
are free" (III). He describes Gershenson's negative attitude to history as
utopian anarchism and cultural nihilism: it was Tolstoy's path of
"simplification" which was inferior to Dostoevsky's path of rising above
one's environment, rather than of forsaking it, and of "fiery death in
the spirit" (XI). Gershenson, however, expresses a hope that his path too
will lead to the same goal as V. Ivanov's: "In the Father's house the
same mansion is prepared for you and me" (XII).
In his book. on Dostoevsky V. Ivanov speaks of two phases in the
D. MEREZHKOVSKY 357
development of Satan's activity. Lucifer is the devil at the height of his
energies, engrossed in a lively struggle against God. Ariman is the
devil in a state of hopeless dejection and longing for non-being, after
the experience of a long series of failures and disappointments. With
regard to great saints Ivanov thinks that they not merely enter into
individual communion with particular people, but also affect entire
historical epochs. He sees a connection between St. Francis of Assisi
and the work of Dante, and detects the influence of St. Seraphim of
Sarov's spirit in Russian art and thought of the nineteenth century.
N. M. Minsky (born 1855) whose real name was Vilenkin, was a
poet. Like many other Russian writers of his time he was carried away
by Nietzsche's doctrine of the superman and in 1905 wrote a book The
Religion of the Future. Minsky called his theory a "meonic philosophy"
because he designated the absolute by the word "non-being" contrasting
it with our being. This led him to conceive of the whole of our life and
civilization as permeated by contradictions.
3. D. MEREZHKOVSKY
Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky (1865-1941) was a very prolific
and many-sided writer. He left Russia after the Bolshevik revolution
and settled in Paris. In all his writings-artistic, critical, political-
Merezhkovsky invariably touched upon religious problems and ex-
pressed his religious and philosophical views. He always wanted not
merely theoretically to work out definite religious doctrines, but also to
bring practical influence to bear on the life of the Church, the clergy
and the general public. Together with Filosofov, Rozanov, Mirolyubov
and Ternavtsev, Merezhkovsky organized in 1901 "Religious and Philo-
sophical Meetings" with the object of bringing together "the intellec-
tuals and the Church:' At those meetings the attitude of the Church
to the state and to autocracy was so sharply criticized that they were
closed by the Government in April 1 9 0 ~ ; but after the revolution of
1905 the meetings were renewed.
Merezhkovsky's chief works that have a bearing on religion and
philosophy are: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, 1905; The Birth of the Gods,
Prague 1925; The Mystery of Three, 1925; The Mystery of the West:
Atlantis-Europe, 1931; Jesus the Unknown, 1932 (translated into
English by Helen Matheson, Cape, and Scribners &: Sons, 1934). The
three novels that form the trilogy "Christ and Antichrist" are: The
Death of the Gods: [ulian the Apostate; The Risen Gods: Leonardo
da Vinci; Antichrist: Peter and Alexis. Merezhkovsky's collected works
comprised fifteen volumes in 1914.
POET..SYMBOLISTS
Three problems came from the first into the foreground in Merezh-
kovsky's thought: the problem of sex; in connection with it, the prob-
lem of holy flesh; the problem of social justice and its solution through
the christianization of the life of society. Merezhkovsky introduces
these problems even into the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In his book
The Mystery of Three he says that the mystery of One, of God the
Father, is the mystery of the Divine Self, of personality; the mystery of
Two is the relation between the Self and the not..Self; the not-self
excludes me, kills me or is killed by me, except in one point-sex: in
sex there is the entrance of one being into another, "of another body
into mine and of mine into another." Hence the birth of a new being;
in the Trinity it is the birth of the Son. Thus, the mystery of the
Second Person is Sex (50). The mystery of Three is the mystery of the
Holy Spirit, the unity of the Three Persons in the Spirit; thus, it is the
mystery of Society, the image of the Kingdom of God.
Merezhkovsky dwells on the idea of sex because through sex the
highest unity is attainable: "I am conscious of myself in my own body-
this is the root of personality; I am conscious of myself in another's
body-this is the root of sex; I am conscious of myself in all other
bodies-this is the root of society" (58). "The twain shall be one flesh"
is said not only of marriage, but of the Divine society: "That they all
may be one." The highest unity, the Divine society is connected with
the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. In Aramaic the
word "spirit," Rucha, is of feminine gender. One of the agrapha-i.e.,
of the sayings of Our Lord preserved in oral tradition only-runs thus
"My mother is the Holy Spirit:' This is how Merezhkovsky interprets
the nature of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, Mother-Spirit. The Third
covenant will be the Kingdom of the Spirit-Mother. We should pray to
the "warm Protectress of the cold world" (Jesus the Unknown, 112 f.),
The division into two sexes is according to Merezhkovsky the decay
of personality, its halving. A complete division is so impossible that "in
every man there is a secret woman, and in every woman-a secret man"
(Weininger's idea). The ideal of personality is for Merezhkovsky, as for
Soloviev and Berdyaev, an androgyn, a man-woman (The Mystery of
Three, 187). The idea is repulsive if an androgyn is taken to mean a
hermaphrodite, i.e., a being combining the physical characteristics of
both sexes. Merezhkovsky says it should not be understood so crudely;
earthly sexual love is a unity, and yet "it is, and it is not" (189). "Divine
androgynism is neither masculine nor feminine." Merezhkovsky puts
the question whether sinful sex is annulled or transfigured by holy sex
(196). That question is of, essential importance: on the first alternative,
the ideal''is supersexuality, Le., the abolition of sex; on the second, the
D. MEIlEZHKOVSKY 559
&'4"'_" &yo .he transfiguration and therefore, in a sense, the preservasion of
sex. Merezhkovsky gives no final answer to this question.
He closely connects with sex the problem of the flesh. Much is said
about it in his remarkable book Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, He discovers
in Tolstoy a religious contemplation of the flesh, and in Dostoevsky a
religious contemplation of the spirit; Tolstoy is a seer of the Ilesh,
Dostoevsky of the spirit. Merezhkovsky highly values paganism for
understanding the dignity of the body and religiously hallowing it.
The ideal for him is not incorporeal holiness but holy flesh, the King-
dom of God in which the mystical unity of the Flesh and the Spirit is
realized. In Christianity and more particularly in the Gospel Merezh-
kovsky discovers three mysteries relating to the problem of the holy
flesh: the Incarnation of the Son of God, the partaking of His Body and
Blood in communion, and Resurrection in the flesh. He accuses the
Christian church of overestimating asceticism and bodiless spirituality,
of not attaching sufficient value to the marriage union, and on the
other hand of submitting to "unholy flesh"-the pagan state.
Merezhkovsky finds two infinities in the world, the upper and the
lower, the spirit and the flesh, which are mystically identical; accord-
ingly he is fond of repeating in his trilogy Christ and Antichrist the
lines:
Heaven above, heaven below,
Stars above, stars below.
All that's above is also below.
This idea, interpreted in the spirit of certain representatives of
gnosticism, leads to a diabolical temptation of believing that there are
two ways to perfection and holiness-that of bridling one's passions
and, on the contrary, of giving them full rein. Merezhkovsky under-
stood that he was on the brink of an abyss. HI know," he said, "that my
question contains the danger of a heresy which might be called, in
contradistinction to asceticism, the heresy of astartism; i.e., not of the
holy union, but of blasphemous confusion and the pollution of the
spirit by the flesh. If this is so, let those who stand on guard warn me."
This probably is the reason why in his later works Merezhkovsky
ceased to make use of the idea of "heaven above and heaven below:'
The final union of the two infinites, the Flesh and the Spirit, will
lead, in Merezhkovsky's idea, to the true realization of Christian free-
dom which is "beyond good and evil." The danger hidden in this
thought is explained away by Merezhkovsky's definition of Christian
freedom: "One day people will give up eating meat, not because they
ought, but solely because they want to do s;', because their tlearts are
POETSYMBOLISTS
drawn to this freely and irresistibly; not because such is the law, but
because such is freedom." In other words, Christian freedom is present
wherever there is love of the good, of absolute values. This is why the
unknown name of Christ is the Liberator (Jesus the Unknown, 58).
Christianity is salvation through freedom, anti-Christianity is salvation
through slavery. "To fear freedom, to disbelieve in it means to dis-
believe in the Holy Spirit," says Merezhkovsky,
He thinks that a new revelation and new dogmas are needed if the
mystery of holy flesh is to be revealed and the Divine society realized.
That will be the era of the Holy Spirit, the T'hird Covenant, "the
eternal Gospel,' of which Joachim of Flore spoke. "The Father has
not saved the world, the Son has not saved it, the Mother shall save it;
the Mother is the Holy Spirit" (The Mystery of Three, 364). The pur-
pose of the historical process is to make mankind and the whole world
realize the Kingdom of God, not in the world beyond, but here on
earth as well, At one of the Religious Philosophical Meetings Merezh-
kovsky said that the earth is a place of preparation not only for heaven,
but for the new, righteous earth. At the present time the problem that
has come forward in this process of perfecting the earth is the social
problem. the quest for social justice. This is the creative task of Christi-
anity.'
The Church is to blame for not having worked in this direction.
Seeing that "in Christianity there is no water to quench the social
thirst" a number of people have turned away from the Church, and
atheism is widely prevalent. There have appeared "learned troglodites"
with diabolical miracles, the most savage of savages, for they "do away
with personality" and absolute ideals (The Mystery of Three, 10-16).
They act upon nature from without "by mechanics;" in the Atlantis,
Merezhkovsky thinks, man acted upon nature magically, from within,
through organic power over it (Jesus the Unknown, 259).
In our era, Merezhkovsky says, the struggle of the man-god against
the God-man has grown more fierce than ever. This is the secret of the
whole Russian culture of the future-the struggle between the Eastern
and the Western spirit, "the spirit of war and the spirit of grace"
(Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I, 10). In that struggle the love of the God-
man Christ leads to the miracle of multiplying the loaves, or more
exactly, to the brotherly satisfaction of the common need; in the king..
dom of the man-god there takes place the diabolical miracle of the
diminution of loaves (Jesus the Unknown, II, 185). In the kingdom of
1. See z. Hippius, "The First Meeting:' in the newspaper Latest News, February
I!. 19'1.
D. MER.EZHKOVSKY 541
atheistic socialism love for the individual is replaced by "the will for
the impersonal" and an ant heap is being built (The Mystery of Three,
55); instead of the sacrament of communion there is cannibalism. If
the man-god wins the victory on the earth, that will mean that humanity
has been a failure. Then the button maker will be needed," the button
maker who came to Peer Gynt in order to recast him because he was
not himself. (ibid.) 59). Merezhkovsky pictured this recasting as the
conflagration in which Earth will perish. In his later years he had more
and more often a presentiment of such an end of the Earth and of human
history: "The world has never yet been conscious of such a yawning
abyss in itself, ready to engulf everything at any moment; the axe is
laid unto the root of the trees" (Jesus the Unknown) I, 116). This does
not mean, however, that humanity will disappear: the fiery end of the
second, after.. the-deluge, humanity may not be the end of the world:
there shall be a third humanity, a hiliastic one foretold in the Apocalypse
(ibid., II, 94). It will be the kingdom of the saints, the kingdom of love
and freedom.
The whole of Merezhkovsky's religious philosophy is based upon
the idea of Christianity as the religion of love and therefore of freedom.
This combination of love and freedom brings him close to the religious
and philosophical movement which was begun by Vladimir Soloviev.
The ideal of personality, according to Merezhkovsky, and also
according to Soloviev and Berdyaev, is an androgyn, i.e., one integral
personality which combines both man and woman. Such a theory can
only be adopted by philosophers who deny the substantiality of the
self, that is, who fail to recognize that the individual self is a super-
temporal and superspatial entity. By virtue of its substantiality the
self is an individual in the exact sense of that term; i.e., a being which
is absolutely indivisible and not made up of two halves. Both man and
woman are persons, imperfect only in the sense that a man has
spiritual qualities which as a rule are lacking in a woman, and a woman
has spiritual qualities which as a rule are absent in a man. The ideal
of personality consists in combining in oneself the niasculine and the
feminine virtues; it is realized through the development of one's own
self and not through an impossible mergence of two selves into one.
That ideal is wholly realizable in the Kingdom of God, in which the
transfigured bodies have no sex organs or sex functions. Consequently,
in that Kingdom persons are supersexual and not bisexual. Similarly,
the Persons of the Holy Trinity are neither men nor women.
2. See Ibsen's Pen G,nt.
~ 4 2
POETSYMBOLISTS
4. V. ROZANOV
Vassili Vassilyevich Rozanov (1856-1919) after having graduated
in the Faculty of Arts at the Moscow University taught history and
geography in provincial Russian towns; he found his work very irksome.
For many years, as he puts it, "he was bored with high-school atheism,"
but when he was thirty-five there was a sudden change in him which
brought him to religion and to a decision to live in accordance with
God's will. Thanks to N. N. Strahov he managed to move to Petersburg
in 1893 and get a post in the Excise Department. In 1899 he retired,
became a regular contributor of the conservative newspaper Nouoe
J'remya and wholly devoted himself to literary work. Rozanov was not
a poet, but like the poet-symbolists he was "a seeker after God."
Rozanov's chief works are the following: About Understanding,
Moscow 1886; The Legend of the Great Inquisitor} 1893; Essays on
Marriage, 1898; The Twilight of Enlightenment, 1899; Literary Essays,
1899; Religion and Culture, 1901; In the Realm of the Vague and the
Uncertain, 1904; Near the Church Walls, 1-906; The Dark Image: Meta-
physics of Christianity, 1911; Fallen Leaves (English translation by
Koteliansky, London 1929); Solitaria, 1916; The Apocalypse of Our
Time, 1918.
In 1922 Erich Hollerbach wrote a book V. V. Rozanou which is
translated into English.
Rozanov had a great literary gift and was a highly original thinker
and observer of life. His writings are not systematic or even coherent,
but often show flashes of genius. Unfortunately his personality was in
many ways pathological; the most striking instance of this was his
abnormal preoccupation with sex. He might have been a character in
one of Dostoevsky's novels. Erich Hollerbach in his book gives a magnifi-
cent characteristic of Rozanov. He says that in his striving to penetrate
into the depths of the human soul Rozanov was interested in other
writers' "domestic affairs," in their "underclothes." I know something
about this from personal experience, Rozanov's three daughters at-
tended a High School for girls the headmistress of which was my mother..
in-law, Madame Stoyunin. Our flat adjoined the school. When Rozanov
came to the school on business, he always called on me. As soon as I
said "come in" in answer to his knock, he would quickly open the study
door, rush to my desk on which a book lay open and peep to see what I
was reading. He may have tried to catch everyone unawares in the same
way so as to learn their real interests.
Rozanov's book About Understanding is the only one of his works
V.R.OZANOV
concerned with purely philosophical questions. He tries to work out a
conception of "understanding" which would overcome 'the antagonism
between science and philosophy. Reason, he says, contains 'speculative
schemata which are seven: the ideas of existence, of essence, of property,
of cause (or origin), of consequence (or purpose), of similarity and dif-
ference, and of number. By combining speculation and experience we
arrive at "understanding" as "integral knowledge." The human spirit
is an independent, immaterial entity, capable of creating various forms,
i.e., ideas" and imposing them upon material substance; such forms are,
e.g., sculpture, music, the state, and so on. The spirit is "the form of
forms." After the destruction of the body, the spirit survives as ..the
form of pure existence, not confined to any limit." The book is written
in a dull, colorless style, very different from Rozanov's other writings
which clearly show his literary gift and originality.
Rozanov's books and articles are largely taken up with criticism of
Christianity. He regards the bright Christianity of Father Zossima and
Alyosha Karamazov an invention of Dostoevsky's. The true, historical
Christianity is in his view, a gloomy religion of death, preaching
celibacy, fasting and asceticism. Instead of love for man it devoted
itself to theology: the final result of such a religion is the Old Believers'
self-immolation by burning themselves or being buried alive as in 1896
near Tiraspol (it happened among the Old Believers who feared the
national census, regarding it as the work of antichrist). Rozanov wants
a bright religion, but he does not know spiritual joy because he does
not know Christianity as a religion of light; he wants the pagan carnal
joy. The Old Testament attracts him more than the New. In the Old
Testament, he says, "punishment is short and physical," and at bottom
Israel is never afraid. There is a wonderful spirit of freedom and even
of unruliness in it, and it is as though Jehovah and the prophets liked
that unruliness. They struggle with it as a groom struggles with a vicious
horse, or a mother with a child of genius; but they would be horrified
at the idea of making something timid and obedient out of the ardent
and lively "that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life" (Dark Image,
285). The Old Testament religion attracts Rozanov by its care for man
and its love for family life. But the pagan cult of the flesh, especially
the phallic cult attracts him even more. The phallus is in his opinion
"the source of all inspiration." Hollerbach says that by deifying sex,
Rozanov "transforms religion into sexual pantheism" (46).
In spite of his praises of the Old Testament Rozanov at one time
wrote as an anti-Semite. Such duality on his part was ascribed to a lack
of principle, and in 1 9 1 ~ he was expelled from the Petersburg Re-
POETSYMBOLISTS
ligious and Philosophical Meetings. As Hollerbach puts it, Rozanov
was psychologically a Judophil and politically an anti-Semite, so that
he was not "double-dealing" but rather "double-faced" (98).
After the Bolshevik. revolution Rozanov lived at Father Pavel
Florensky's in the Sergiev Posad by the Monastery of St. Sergius. He
was writing there his Apocalypse of OUT Time in which he went on
denouncing Christianity. Indignant at this, Father Pavel, a lecturer of
the Moscow Theological Academy Andreyev, and another person whose
name I have forgotten, came to see Rozanov. Andreyev told me, they
said to Rozanov that if he went on attacking Christianity they would
not be his friends any more. Rozanov answered to this, evidently
conscious of some demoniacal power in himself or near him: "Don't
interfere with Rozanov; it will go badly with you." And indeed in the
course of the following year all these three persons had serious mis-
fortunes happen to them. Rozanov died, however, as a good Christian.
Before death his heart was full of joy at Christ's Resurrection. Several
times he received holy communion and extreme unction. He died while
the last rites were being performed.
Chapter 24
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
1. HEGEL'S DIALECTICAL METHOD
Marxists say that their philosophy, dialectical materialism, is
historically connected with the philosophy of Hegel, namely with his
conception of the dialectical method. They point out, of course, that
their philosophy profoundly differs from Hegel's: Hegel defends ideal-
ism and maintains that the ground of the world is the Absolute Spirit,
while Marxists are materialists and believe that the only reality is
matter. In spite of this difference, however, an exposition of dialectical
materialism should he preceded by a discussion of Hegel's dialectical
method and a critical examination of the Hegelian and the Marxist
doctrine of the identity of opposites.
On Hegel's view the cosmic process is the development of the
Absolute idea or the Absolute Spirit. Thought and existence are identi-
cal in this process. Since the cosmic process develops dialectically,
philosophical interpretation of it develops by means of the dialectical
method which is nothing other than objective dialectic itself, attaining
self-consciousness in the philosopher's mind.
The starting point of dialectic is a one-sided and limited concep-
tion of the understanding, determined in accordance with the laws of
identity and contradiction. It cannot remain in its one-sidedness: its
own content compels it to transcend its limits and to become its op-
posite which is also rationalistic, limited and one-sided; thus the con-
ception passes from the thesis to the antithesis. But it cannot rest there:
the content of the antithesis also demands self-transcendence and
transition into its opposite. This transcendence-i.e., the negation of
the negation-takes the form not of a return to the thesis, but of a
further development of the idea and of ascent toward synthesis-i.e.,
to a conception in which the identity of the opposites is realized. This
identity is not the abstract identity of the understanding, but a concrete
identity of reason: it consists in the fact that living reality is not afraid
of contradiction, but on the contrary gives embodiment to ~ .
M5
346 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
The third level of development, the synthesis, proves on closer in-
spection to contain in addition to the living identity of opposites some
further elements of rationalistic one-sidedness which requires a new
negation, and so on; thus the self-development of the idea takes place
every time in the form of a triad-i.e., along the three stages of thesis,
antithesis, synthesis.
An example of it is to be found at the beginning of Hegel's Logic.
Starting with pure being and finding no content in it, Hegel identifies
it with nothing. "Thus," he says, "the beginning contains being and
nothing, it is the unity of being and nothing, for it is non-being which
is at the same time being, and being which at the same time is non-being."
Hegel discovers the true expression of this identity between being and
non-being in becoming (Werden).!
According to traditional formal logic everything is subject to the
laws of identity, contradiction and excluded middle, so that "every A
is A" and "no A can be non-A." Hegel regards such logic as an expres-
sion of rationalistic abstractions inapplicable to the concrete living
reality in which, on the contrary, everything is contradictory and "every
A is B," since the presence of contradictions, conflicts and struggle
between opposed principles compels being to progress and develop,
Dialectical logic thus sharply differs from the logic of the understanding.
For purposes of criticism, let us take a more concrete instance,
namely, the relation between the outer and the inner. Hegel discusses
it in his Logic with reference to force as the inner form of reality, and
to its external manifestation as the form of being; he tries to show that
in this case the inner and the outer is "only an identity" (nUT eine
Identitdt ausmachen).2 He expresses the same idea, though less em-
phatically, in other sections of his Logic, e.g., when he speaks of inner
sensations (feelings) and their bodily expressions in weeping, laughter,
etc.
8
Let us take some particular instance of mental states and their
bodily expression. Suppose two rival and mutually hostile thinkers
engaged upon some philosophical problem are having a lively discus-
sion. One of them succeeds in proving that his opponent's theory
obviously contains an absurdity. He demolishes his rival's arguments,
conscious of his own superiority, his head held high, and a jerky sar-
castic laugh escaping him from time to time. It is certainly impossible
in this case to speak of the identity between the inner and the outer,
between the mental experience and its bodily expression. The bodily
1. Hegel, Wissenschait der Logik, I, 68, 77-80. (Vol. III, ed.)
2. II, sec. 2, chap. 3, 178. (Vol. IV, 1834 ed.)
The of Pllilosophical Sciences, 895-400.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
347
expression .consists of spatial processes: changes in the position of the
head, periodical contractions and expansions of the chest, movement
of the particles of air, sound waves, and so on. The inner mental ex-
perience of the disputant-the expression of his own self-is proud
delight in his own superiority and ironically contemptuous triumph
over his rival. All his intimate, inner, i.e., mental processes have only
a temporal form, and the outer, i.e., bodily expression are spatiotem-
poral, Separating one side from the other by intellectual analysis, one
can easily see that the qualitative difference between the psychical and
the physical is enormous. An inability to concentrate attention now
chiefly on the one and now on the other, in order to detect the difference
between them, leads to their confusion, which is as absurd an error as
it would be to assert the identity of color and extension when looking
at a red disk, and not being able mentally to distinguish its redness
from its spatial Iorm (the circle).
The profound difference between the psychical and its physical
manifestation does not prevent them forming the closest possible unity,
closer even than the unity of the red color and its extendedness. In the
instance we have been considering there is interpenetration between
different and even opposite processes (inner and outer), though it is
not an identity of opposites but only their unity. Identity of opposites,
violating the law of contradiction, is absolutely unrealizable because it
is absolutely meaningless. The violation of the law of contradiction
would mean, for instance, that "redness in its very redness is not red."
An absurdity of this kind can be merely verbally expressed as a puzzle,
but it is absolutely impossible to realize it even in thought.
Hegel considers every change to be an embodied contradiction. In
truth, however, every change is a unity of opposites, but not their
identity violating the law of contradiction.
2. DIALEC'I'ICAL MATERIALISM
In U.S.S.R. the state compulsorily upholds a certain philosophical
system, namely, the materialism of Marx and Engels called dialectical
(abridged form diamat). Up to 1925 many Soviet philosophers, espe-
cially the naturalists, while emphasizing their loyalty to Marxism were
not sufficiently clear in their minds about the distinction between
dialectical and mechanistic materialism. In 1925 there was published for
the first time Engel's manuscript The Dialectics of Nature (written in
1873, 1878-1882), which caused a sharp division of Soviet Marxists
into "dialecticians" and "mechanistse" A fierce struggle "on two fronts"
broke out against "menshevik-minded idealism and mechanistic ma-
U8 DIALECTICAL MATllIAUSM IN THE U.S.S.fl.
terialism." The outlines of dialectical materialism were clearly defined,'
Let us see first of all what its adherents mean by the term "material-
ism." Engels, and Lenin following him, say that philosophers are divided
into materialists, idealists and agnostics. For the materialists. says Lenin,
matter, nature (physical being) is primary, and spirit, consciousness,
sensation, the psychical .. is secondary. For the idealists, on the contrary,
spirit is primary. Agnostics deny that the world and its basic principles
are knowable.s
"There is nothing in the world but matter in motion, and matter
cannot move save in space and time" (Lenin). The fundamental forms
of all being are space and time; being outside of time is just as much of
an absurdity as being outside of space" (Engels, Anti-Diihring, 4th
Russian ed., 39).
On the strength of this it may appear that dialectical materialism
is based upon as clear and definite a conception of matter as the mecha-
nistic materialism: matter is extended, impenetrable being, moving, i.e.,
changing position in space. We shall see, however. that this is not the
case.
"The conception of matter," says Byhovsky, "is used in two senses.
We distinguish between the philosophical and the physical conception
of matter. They are not mutually contradictory.. but they define matter
from two different points of view" (78). Following Holbach and Plehanov
and quoting Lenin he defines matter from the philosophical, epistemo-
logical point of view as that "which acting upon our sense organs pro-
duces sensation; matter is the objective reality, given to us in sensation"
(Lenin, 116). This definition contains merely the recognition of the
objective reality of matter, i.e., of its existing independently of our
consciousness, and asserts that "our knowledge of it originates through
the senses" (Byhovsky.. 78) but does not indicate its nature. One would
expect that this would be done by the definition of matter from the
point of view of physics. Vain hopeI "What is meant by giving a 'defi-
nition'?" ask Lenin, Byhovsky and others. It means first of all to sub-
sume a given concept under another, a more inclusive generic one, as
1. In my exposition of dialectical materialism I shall be referring chiefly to the
following books and articles: Engels, The Dialectics of Nature, with an introduction
by D. Ryazanov, 4th ed., 1930; Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, )908, Col-
lected Works, X; Deborin, Hegel and Dialectical Materialism, introductory article in
the translation of Hegel's Collected Works, I, 2nd ed., 1929; B. Byhovsky, An Outline
01 the Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism; I. Luppol, On Two Fronts, 19!O; V.
Posner, Dialectical Materialism-the Philosophy of the Proletariat, 1933; M. A. Leonov,
An Outline 01 Dialectical Materialism.. 1948. In referring to these books I will not
give their full titles.
2. Lenin, Materialism !Jnd(o Empirio-Criticism; the references are to the English
translation*"QY I. Ilvitko, Marks &: Lawrence, 1927; Engels, Ludwig Peuerbach.
DIALECTICAL MATEIlIALISM A9
one of its species and indicate its specific difference (e.g., in the definition
"a square is an equilateral rectangle," "rectangle" is a generic notion
and "equilateral" the specific distinguishing characteristic). But "matter
cannot be defined per genus et diDerentiam since matter is all that
exists, the most general conception, the genus of all genera. All that
exists is some aspect of matter, but matter itself cannot be defined as a
particular instance of some genus. For the same reason it is impossible
to indicate the specific difference of matter. If matter is all that exists, it
is unthinkable to seek for the characteristics that distinguish it from
something else, since that something else could only be nonexistence,
i.e., it could not exist:'.
Dialectical materialists have thus greatly simplified their task of
providing the grounds for a materialistic world conception. Without
any proof they affirm that "matter is all that exists, being from its very
nature is a material category" (Deborin, XLI). This makes it possible,
in accordance with the requirements of modern science and philosophy,
to ascribe to "being" all kinds of manifestations, properties and facul-
ties which are very far from being material, and yet to call one's theory
materialism on the ground that "matter is all that exists." Engels in his
Dialectics of Nature indicates the way which may lead us to the knowl-
edge of what matter is: "Once we have come to know the forms of the
motion of matter (though our knowledge of this is still very deficient,
since natural science is of recent origin) we have come to know matter
itself, and this exhausts the knowledge of it" (17). This statement sounds
very materialistic if the word motion is taken in the sense, generally
accepted in science, of transposition in space. On the very next page,
however, Engels explains that in dialectical materialism motion means
"change in general" (18, 163). All dialectical materialists accept this
use: by the word "motion" they designate not merely transposition in
space, but also every qualitative change. Thus so far all we have been
told about matter is that matter is everything that exists and changes..
But we need not despair: the consideration of the "dialecticians"
struggle against mechanistic materialism and of their other theories will
give us a more definite idea of the nature of their philosophy.
A metaphysical philosophy, says Engels-including under this term
mechanistic materialism-is concerned with "unchangeable categories,"
and dialectical materialism with "fluid" ones (1 I.). Thus, e.g., accord-
ing to mechanistic materialism the smallest particles are unchangeable
and uniform. But, says Engels, "natural science that strives to discover
matter as such and to reduce qualitative distinctions to purely quantita-
tive differences in the composition of identical tiniest particles is doing
3. Byhovsky, 78; Lenin, 118.
550 DIALECTICAL MATERIAIJISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
the same thing as it would be doing if it sought for fruit as such, instead
of cherries, pears, apples, etc., if it sought for a mammal as such, instead
of cats, dogs, sheep, etc., or if it sought for gas as such, for metal as
such, for stone as such, for chemical fusion, or for movement as such.
This one..sided mathematical point of view according to which matter
is only quantitatively determined is the point of view of French
eighteenth century materialism" (Engels, 103; Luppol, 146 f.). Dialecti-
cal materialism is free from the one-sidedness of the mechanistic view,
since it is guided by the following three laws of dialectics derived "from
the history of nature and of human society: the law of the transition of
quantity into quality, and vice versa; the law of the mutual interpenetra-
tion of opposites; the law of the negation of negation" (157).
The second and the third law have been mentioned in connection
with Hegel's dialectical method; the first law is that at a certain stage
quantitative changes result in sudden changes in quality. Besides, speak-
ing generally "there is no quality apart from quantity, and no quantity
without quality" (Deborin, XX).
Motion-i.e., every kind of change-is dialectical through and
through. "The chief basic feature of every change consists, as we know,
in the fact that a certain thing is negated in its movement, that it ceases
to be what it was and acquires new forms of existence. In its transition
into a new quality, in the process of the appearance of the new, the
former quality is not destroyed without a trace, but enters into the new
quality as a subordinate element. Negation is "lifting," to use a custom-
ary dialectical term. "Lifting" is a form of negation in which a thing
comes to an end and at the same time is preserved at a new level. "This
is how food or oxygen is assimilated by the organism and transmuted in
it, this is how a plant preserves the nutritive elements of the soil, this
is how history of science and art absorbs the legacy of the past. That
which remains of the past is subordinated to new laws of development,
comes into the orbit of new movements, is harnessed to the chariot of
the new quality. The transformation of energy is at the same time the
preservation of energy. The destruction of capitalism is at the same
time the absorption of technical and cultural results of capitalist de-
velopment. The appearance of higher forms of motion is not the
destruction of the lower, but their sublimation. Mechanical laws exist
within the limits of the higher forms of motion as subsidiary, subordi-
nate, sublimated:'
"How does the further development take place? When a particular
thing has been changed into its opposite and its preceding state been
sublimated, development continues on the new basis, and at a certain
stage of bt the thing again for a second time changes into its opposite.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM SSl
Does this mean that, with the second negation, the thing returns to its
original state? No, it does not. The second negation or, in .dialectical
terminology, the negation of negation is not a return to the original
state. Negation of the negation means 'lifting' both of the first and the
second stage of development or rising above both" (Byhovsky, 208 f.),
"It is not a circular but a spiral movement.t's
The opposite into which a thing is transformed in its development
is "something more than mere difference," Byhovsky explains. Opposi-
tion "is qualified difference, an inner, essential, necessary and irrecon-
cilable difference in a certain definite respect. The world as a whole is
nothing other than the unity of such opposites, a divided unity, contain-
ing polarities. Electrical and magnetic processes are an instance of the
unity of opposites. Matter is the unity of protons and electrons, the
unity of a continuous wave and discrete particles. There is no action
without counteraction. Every origination is at the same time necessarily
a destruction of something. The survival of the fittest is the dying out
of the unfit. A class society is a unity of opposites. The proletariat and
the bourgeoisie are social categories, the distinction between which
amounts to opposition" (Byhovsky, 211). Thus "the moving world is a
unity containing contradictions" (Byhovsky, 213). The basic principle
of the dialectical interpretation of the world is that "the world is a
unity divided in itself, a unity of opposites, the bearer of inner contra-
dictions" (Byhovsky, 213; Pozner, 59). "Objective dialectics," i.e., move-
ment by means of contradictions, "reigns throughout nature" (Engels,
42: Deborin, LXXXI).. "Detection of the unity of opposites in nature,"
says Lenin, "conditions the possibility of knowing all the processes of
the world in their self-movement" in their spontaneous development, in
their actual life."6
At this point the, profound difference between the dialectical and
Ihe mechanistic materialism becomes apparent. "For a mechanist,"
Byhovsky points out, "contradiction is mechanical, it is the contradiction
of conflicting things, or of mutually opposed forces. On a mechanistic
interpretation of motion, contradiction' can only be external and not
inward, it is not contained and does not take place in a unity, there is
no inner necessary connection between its elements. The theory of
equilibrium (A. Bogdanov, N. Buharin) is a clear instance of a meth-
odology based upon the substitution of the mechanical principle of
conflict between forces moving in opposite direction for the dialectical
principle of the unity of opposites." According to that theory "equilib-
4. Lenin. "Karl Marx," Collected Works, 2nd ed. XVIII, 11.
5. Lenin, "The Question of Dialectics," Under tbe Danner of Mar'jjsm, V-VI,
14. 1925.
352
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R..
rium is the state of a thing in which it cannot change its condition of
itself, without the help of an outside force. Disturbance of the balance
is the result of conflict between mutually opposed forces;" i.e., of the
forces in some system and its environment. The fundamental differences
between this mechanistic view of balance and the dialectical theory are
as follows: in the first place, "according to the theory of equilibrium
there is no immanent origination of differences, no immanent splitting
up of the unity, no mutual interpenetration between the opposites.
Opposition is severed from the unity, the antagonistic elements are
mutually independent, alien and external, their contradiction appears
accidental. Secondly, inner contradictions as the moving power of de-
velopment are replaced by external contradictions, by the conflict
between a system and its environment. Self-movement is replaced by
movement caused by an impetus from without. Internal relations in a
system are reduced to the level of derivative and made dependent upon
external relations. The inner uniformities of qualitatively determined
things are regarded as a function of external relations between objects
and not as the moving force of development. Thirdly, the theory of
equilibrium reduces all the multiplicity of the forms of movement to
mechanical impact between bodies. The conception of equilibrium
borrowed from mechanics does away with the wealth of the higher,
supermechanical (biological and social) forms of development. Fourthly,
in the theory of balance the relation between movement and rest is
reversed. Equilibrium is said to be mobile and relative; thus motion in
this view is a form of rest, and not vice versa. It is not motion that
bears within it rest and balance, but on the contrary, balance proves to
be the bearer of movement. Fifthly, the theory of equilibrium is the
theory of abstract quantitative change. The greater force determines
the direction 9 the lesser. Transmutation into a new quality, the ap-
pearance of new forms of development, of new uniformities-all this
cannot be fitted into the flat crude scheme of equilibrium. Finally in
the sixth place, the negation of negation, the "lifting" of the positive
and the negative movements of development, the appearance of the
new, is replaced, on the mechanistic theory, by the reinstatement of
equilibrium between the system and the environment" (Byhovsky, 237 f.).
In so far as change is dialectical self-movement, based upon inner
contradictions, it deserves the name of "development" and, as Lenin
says and Deborin repeats after him, has an immanent character. "The
object necessarily develops in a definite direction, but may develop in
another direction owing to its essence or immanent nature" (Deborin,
XCVI).
Accordingly, it is not surprising to find Lenin pointing out that
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM 555
development has a creative character. He distinguishes "two conceptions
of development (or evolution): development as increase and .decrease, as
repetition, and development as the unity of opposites (the division of
a unit into mutually exclusive opposites and the interrelation between
them). The first conception is dead, poor, arid. The second is vital; it
alone explains the self-movement of all that is, the sudden changes, the
breaks in continuity, the transformation into the opposite, the destruc-
tion of the old and the birth of the new."?
In his article on "Karl Marx" Lenin points out the following
features of the dialectical theory of development: "Development re-
peats, as it were, the past stages, but in a different way, on a higher level
(negation of the negation), proceeding so to speak along a spiral and not
in a straight line; development is catastrophic and revolutionary, by
sudden jumps: there are breaks in continuity, quantity is transformed
into quality; there are inner impulses to development, given by contra-
diction, by the conflict between different forces and tendencies affecting
the given body, or acting within the limits of a given fact, or of a par-
ticular society; there is interdependence and the closest possible, indis-
soluble bond between all the aspects of every event (and history keeps
discovering new aspects)-a bond which results in a single, uniform
cosmic process of movement, These are some of the characteristics of
dialectics as a theory of development, more significant than the usual
theory."? ,
If, according to Lenin, evolution is creative, and is immanent and
spontaneous self-movement containing "inner impulses," it is clearly
possible to speak of the transition from some stages of being to others as
having value and not merely being a fact. "Every process of develop-
ment," says Deborin, "is an ascent from the lower forms or stages to the
higher, Irorn abstract determinations comparatively poor in content to
the more concrete, with a richer and fuller content. The highest stage
contains the lower as "sublimated," i.e., as no longer independent. The
lower form has developed into the higher; in doing so it has not disap-
peared without a trace, but has itself become a different and higher
form" (Deborin, XCV). Further, it is clear frOID this that dialectical
development may be called a historical process. "The higher form is
connected with the lower," Deborin goes on, "and therefore a result
does not exist apart from the path of development that has led to it.
Every given event or every given form must be regarded as having de-
veloped} as having become)' i.e., we must regard it as a historical forma-
6, Lenin, "The Question of Dialectics," 15.
7. Lenin, "Karl Marx," 11.
354 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
tion." As Ryazanov puts it, "Marx and Engels establish the historical
character of events in nature and society.l"
Even inorganic nature is in a state of development and transforma-
tion. Ryazanov quotes the following words of Marx: "Even elements
do not remain in a state of rest. They continually change into one
another, and this change forms the first level of the earth's life-the
metereological process. In the life of the organism all trace of the dif-
ferent elements as such disappears."? These words clearly express Marx's
conviction that the higher stages of cosmic being profoundly differ from
the lower in quality and therefore cannot be interpreted as merely more
and more complex aggregates of the lower, simple elements. This idea
is strongly emphasized in the Soviet dialectical materialism. It sharply
distinguishes it from mechanistic materialism. "To reduce the complex
to the simple means refusing to understand the complex," says Byhov-
sky, "To reduce the whole multiplicity of cosmic laws to mechanical
ones means refusing to understand any laws except the simplest mechani-
cal ones; it means limiting one's knowledge to the elementary forms of
motion. An atom consists of electrons, but the laws of an atom's ex-
istence are not limited to the laws of motion of the separate electrons..
A molecule consists of atoms, but it transcends the laws of an atom's
life. A cell consists of molecules, an organism consists of cells, a bio-
logical species consists of organisms, but their life is not confined to
the laws that determine the life of their conlponents. Society consists of
organisms, but its development cannot be deduced from the laws that
govern the life of organisms. There exist three chief, fundamental realms
of being: the inorganic world, the organic world (in which the appear-
ance of consciousness marks a break of the utmost significance) and the
social world. The forms of movement in each of these realms are
qualitatively unique and irreducible to other forms, though derived
from them." A mechanistic materialist reduces organic laws to the
mechanical Hand at the same time, social laws, reduced to the biological,
are also absorbed in the laws of mechanics." Sociology becomes for him
a collective reflexology (Behterev). In reality, however, each higher stage
is subject to special laws of its own, and these "specific uniformities,
these supermechanical kinds of development do not contradict mechani-
8. Deborin, XCV f.; Ryazanov, XVIII. The conception of historical development
as a system in which the present arises under the influence of the past itself and not
only of its c o n ~ e q u e n c c s immediately adjoining the present is discussed in N. Lossky's
essay "Bergson's Intuitive Philosophy."
9. The quotation is taken by Ryazanov from Marx's article "On Class Comrnis-
sions in Prussia."
DIALECTICAL MATER.IALISM 555
cal laws and do not exclude them, but transcend them as secondary and
subordinate.t"
Engels says: "Each of the higher forms of motion is always neces-
sarily connected with real mechanical motion (external or molecular),
and at the same time produces other kinds of motion; chemical activity
is impossible without electrical changes and changes in temperature,
organic life is impossible without mechanical, molecular, chemical,
thermic, electrical and other changes. But the presence of these second-
ary forms does not exhaust the nature of the main form in each case. We
shall no doubt one day 'reduce' thought to molecular and chemical
changes in the brain; but will that exhaust the nature of thought?"
(Engels, 18). Thus everything is subject to the laws of mechanics, but
not to them alone.
The view that the laws of the higher forms of being cannot be
completely reduced to those of the lower is widely prevalent in philoso-
phy. Thus, it is to be found in Comte's positivism; in German philoso-
phy it is connected with the theories that the higher stages of being are
based upon the lower but are qualitatively distinct; in English philoso-
phy it takes the form of the theory of "emergent evolution;" i.e., of a
creative evolution that builds up new stages of being, the qualities of
which are not merely due to the qualities of their components.tt
Those who maintain that "matter is all that exists" and at the
same time recognize creative evolution must endow matter with the
capacity for 'creative activity. "Matter," says Yegorshin, "is extremely
rich and has a variety of forms. It does not receive its qualities from the
spirit, but has itself the power to create them, including spirit as well"
(168).
What, then, is this mysterious matter, so rich in potencies and
faculties and yet left without any ontological definition in dialectical
materialism? Let us ask the question essential for ontology (the science
about the elements and aspects of being) whether matter is a substance
or merely a complex of events, i.e., of temporal and spatiotemporal
processes. If it is a substance, it is the bearer and the creative source of
events-a principle which is as such more than an event.
Revolutionary materialists who study philosophy not out of love
for truth but for the strictly practical purpose of acquiring a weapon
to break up the old social life avoid questions that require subtle
10. Byhovsky, 202-204; Yegorshin, Natural Science, Philosophy and Marxism,
1~ 8 , 1930; Pozner, 62, 64.
11. Cf., e.g., Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution; S. Alexander, Space, Time and
Deity; and others.
556 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
analysis. Nevertheless Lenin in his attacks on Mach and Avenarius, who
deny the substantival bases of reality, provides some data for answering
the question we are concerned with.
In criticizing Mach and Avenarius, Lenin says that their rejection
of the idea of substance lands them with "sensation without matter, and
thought without brain" (138). He regards as absurd a theory in which
"instead of the thought, idea and sensation of a living man, a dead
abstraction is posited, that is, nobody's thought, nobody's idea, nobody's
sensation" (225). But perhaps Lenin thinks that sensitive matter (brain)
is itself merely a complex of motions? No, in the paragraph entitled
"Is Motion Without Matter Conceivable?" he sharply criticizes all at-
tempts to conceive of movement apart from matter and quotes Engels
and Dietzgen in support of his view (223). "The dialectical materialist
not only regards motion as the inseparable property of matter but re-
jects even the simplified interpretation of motion" (226); i.e., the view
according to which motion is "nobody's" motion: "It moves-and that
is all" (224). Deborin therefore is right in intro-iucing the term sub-
stance (Hin a materialistic system of logic the central idea must be that
of matter as substance") and in supporting Spinoza's conception of
substance interpreted as a "creative force" (XC. XCI). Lenin himself
does not use the term substance; he says it is "a word which the profes-
sors like to employ for the sake of 'importance' instead of the clearer
and more exact word 'malter'" (138); but the passages that have been
quoted show that he had sufficient insight to distinguish two important
aspects in the structure of reality-events on the one hand, and the
creative source of events on the other. He ought therefore to have under-
stood that the term "substance" is needed for clearness and definiteness,
and not for "importance" sake.
Let us now pass to the question which is of decisive importance
both for the defense of and for the disproof of materialism, as to the
place of consciousness and psychical processes in nature. Unfortunately,
in speaking about this dialectical materialists do not distinguish between
such different subjects of inquiry as consciousness, psychical process
and thought. They also include in this series sensation as the lowest
form of consciousness. A few words should be said about the difference
between these facts so that we may form a better idea of the theories of
the dialectical materialists. Let us begin with the analysis of human
consciousness.
Consciousness always has two aspects: there is someone who is
conscious and something of which he is conscious; let us call these two
aspects, respectively, the subject and the object of consciousness. In the
case of human consciousness, the conscious subject is the human self.
DIALECTICAL ~ { A TERIALISM
857
The nature of consciousness consists in the fact that the object of it
(the joy that is felt, the sound that is heard, the color that is seen, etc.)
exists not only for itself but in some intimate way for the subject as
well. Most modern philosophers and psychologists maintain that for
cognition to take place there must be, in addition to the subject and
the object, a special mental act of awareness directed by the subject
upon the object (upon the joy, the sound, the color). Such mental acts
are called intentional: they are directed upon the object and have no
meaning apart from it; they do not change the object, but bring it-into
the field of the subject's consciousness and knowledge. To be conscious
of an object does not as yet mean to know it; a member of a victorious
football team may be wildly excited with joy without in the least ob-
serving that feeling in himself while engaged in giving a lively account
of the game. If .he happens to be a psychologist he can concentrate
attention on his feeling of joy and cognize it as, e.g., elation with a tinge
of triumph over the vanquished opponent; he will then have not only
the experience of the feeling, but an idea of it and even a judgment
about it. In order to gain this knowledge about the feeling, it is neces-
sary to perform, in addition to the act of awareness, a number of other
supplementary intentional acts such as an act of comparing the given
feeling with other mental states, an act of distinguishing, etc.
According to the theory of knowledge which I call intuitivism my
cognition of my feeling in the form of a presentation or even of judg-
ment does not mean that the feeling is replaced by an image, a copy, or
a symbol of it: my knowledge about my feeling of joy is a direct contem-
plation of that feeling as it is in itself, or an intuition directed upon
that feeling in such a way that through comparing it with other states
and tracing its relations to them, I can give to myself and to others an
account of it, discriminate various aspects of it (mentally analyze it) and
point out its connection with the world.
One may be conscious of a mental state without directing upon it
intentional acts of discriminating, comparing, etc.: in that case there
is awareness of it, but not knowledge. The psychic life may, indeed, take
an even simpler form: a mental state may exist without an act of
awareness being directed upon it; then it remains a subconscious or an
unconscious mental experience. Thus, a singer may make critical re-
marks about her rival's performance under the influence of an uncon-
scious feeling of envy, which another person. may detect in her expres-
sion and the tone of her voice. It would be quite erroneous to say that
an unconscious mental state is not mental at all, but is a purely physical
process in the central nervous system. Even ..so simple an act as an un-
!l58 DIALECTICAL MATERIALiSM IN THE U.S.S.R.
piece of bread lying before me cannot be regarded as a purely physical
process unaccompanied by inner psychical states and consisting merely
of centrifugal currents in the nervous system. It has already been
pointed out that even in inorganic nature an act of attraction or repul-
sion can only take place on the strength of a preceding inner psychoid
striving to attraction or repulsion in a given direction. If we are con-
scious of such an inner state as striving, and of such an external process
as transposition of material particles in space, we see with absolute
certainty that they are two profoundly different events, though closely
welded together.
Thus, consciousness and mental life are not identical: there may
be an unconscious or subconscious mental life. Indeed, the difference
between "the conscious" and "the psychical" goes even further. Accord-
ing to the theory of intuitivisrn, the knowing subject is able to direct his
acts of awareness and of knowing not only upon his mental states, but
also upon his bodily processes and upon the external world as it is in
itself: I can be directly aware and have a direct knowledge of the fall
of a stone and of a weeping child who has trapped his finger in the
door, as they actually are apart from my acts of attention, etc., directed
upon them. The human self is so closely bound up with the world that
it can look right into other entities' being.
According to this theory, when I watch a stone falling, this material
process becomes immanent in my consciousness while remaining tran-
scendent to me as a knowing subject; i.e., it does not become one of my
mental processes. If I am conscious of this object and know it, my acts of
attending, distinguishing, etc., belong to the mental sphere, but that
which I distinguish-the color and form of the stone, its movement, etc.
-is a physical process. In consciousness and in knowledge distinction
must be drawn between the subjective and the objective side: only the
subjective side, i.e., my intentional acts, are bound to be mental; the
objective side may be anything in the world-s-material processes, other
mental lives, my own mental states, social phenomena, ideal being
(nonspatial and nontemporal), and so on.
It is clear from this that "the mental" and "consciousness" are not
identical: the mental may be unconscious, and consciousness may con-
tain nonmental elements.
Thinking is the most important side of the cognitive process: it is
an intentional mental act directed upon the intelligible (nonsensory)
or the ideal (i.e., nonspatial and nontemporal) aspect of things, e.g.,
. upon relations. The object of thought such as relations is present in the
knowing c ~ n s c i o u s n e s s as itt is in itself and, as already said, it is neither
a mental nor a material process: it is ideal.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM 559
What is the sensation, say, of red color, of the note 1a3' of warmth,
etc.P Obviously colors, sounds, etc., are something radically different
from the subject's mental states, from his feelings, desires and strivings.
They are physical qualities connected with mechanical material proc-
esses; e.g., sound is connected with air waves or in general, with vibra-
tions of material particles. Only the acts of awareness, the acts of sensing
directed upon them are mental processes.
After this long digression we may try to sort out the confused
theories of dialectical materialism with regard to mental life.
"Sensation, thought, consciousness are the highest products of
matter organized in a certain way. This is the doctrine of materialism in
general and of Marx and Engels in particular," says Lenin (34). Lenin
seems to identify sensation with thought, consciousness, and mental
states (see e.g., page 34 where he speaks of sensation as thought). He
maintains that "sensations are images of the external world" (83);
namely its copies, A bbild or Spiegelbild, according to Engels. "Save
through sensations, we cannot know of the existence of forms of sub-
stance, or of forms of motion; sensations are produced by the effect
of matter in motion upon our sense organs" (258). "The sensation of
red reflects ether vibrations whose frequency approximately amounts to
450 trillions per second. The sensation of blue reflects ether vibrations
whose frequency is approximately 620 trillions per second. The vibra-
tions of the ether exist independently of our visual sensations. Our
visual sensations depend upon the effects of the vibrations of ether upon
our organs of vision. OUf sensations reflect objective reality, something
which exists independently of humanity and' human sensations" (259).
This would seem to imply that Lenin holds the "mechanist" view,
according to which sensations and mental states in general are caused
by mechanical p r o c e ~ s e s of motion taking place in the sense organs and
the cortex (e.g., 36). That doctrine has always been regarded as the
weak point of materialism. Dialectical materialists understand this, and
reject it, but there is nothing clear and definite that they put in its place.
Lenin says that the real materialistic doctrine "consists not in the deriva-
tion of sensation from the movement of matter or in the identification
of sensation with the movement of matter, but in the recognition that
sensation is one of the properties of matter in motion. On this particu-
lar question Engels held. Diderot's views. Engels opposed the vulgar
materialists, Vogt, Buchner and Moleschott because they assumed that
thought is secreted by the brain as bile is secreted by the liver" (28).
Logical consistency requires us to admit further, that in addition
to movement, sensation (or some other, simpler, but analogous inner
state or psychical process) is also a primal)' characteristic. of matter.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
This is precisely the idea we find in Lenin: "Materialism]
ment with natural science takes matter as the prius; regarding conscious-
ness, reason and sensation as derivative, because in a well-expressed form
it is connected only with the higher forms of matter (organic matter).
It becomes possible, therefore, to assume the existence of a property
similar to sensation 'in the foundation stones of the structure of matter
itself.' Such for example is the supposition of the well-known German
naturalist Ernst Haeckel, the English biologist Lloyd Morgan and
others, not to speak of Diderot's conjecture, mentioned above" (26).
Obviously Lenin is here referring to what I have called psychoid proc-
esses. V. Pozner, quoting Lenin, also says that "the sensing faculty" is
the property of highly organized matter but that nonorganized matter
too has inner states (46). The adherents of metaphysical and mechanistic
materialism fail to see, he says, that consciousness, i.e., "the faculty of
reflecting, cannot be simply reduced to an external transposition of
material particles; it is connected with the inner state of matter in
motion" (64). At the same time he attacks Plehanov for holding a
hylozoistic theory about matter being animate (64), and does not even
attempt to show in what way Plehanov's view differs from Lenin's COB-
tention that even nonorganized matter has inner states analogous to
sensation.
Byhovsky is equally vague. He says that "consciousness is the
property of a definite kind of matter, of definitely organized matter, ex-
tremely complex in structure, that comes into being at a very high stage
of evolution. Consciousness inherent in matter makes it as it were two-
sided: physiological objective processes are accompanied by their inner
subjective reflection. Consciousness is an inner state of matter, an
introspective expression of certain physiological processes. What kind
of connection is there between consciousness and matter? Can it be said
that consciousness is causally determined by material processes, that
matter affects consciousness and produces changes in it? A material
change can only result In another material change." Admitting that
mechanical processes are not the cause of consciousness and of mental
states, Byhovsky comes to the conclusion that "consciousness and matter
are not two heterogenous realities. The physical and the psychical are
one and the same process considered from two sides. That which on
the face of it, from the objective side, appears as a physical process is
apprehended from within by the material entity itself as a fact of will,
or as a fact of sensation, as something spiritual" (Byhovsky, 83-84). He
goes on to say that "this faculty of being conscious is a property con-
ditioned by the physical organization similarly to its other properties"
(84). This rtaternent contradicts his assertion that "a material change
DIALECTICAL MATER.IALISM
861
can only result in another material change." The only way to avoid
inconsistency is to interpret his words as follows: The material ground
of the world (not defined in dialectical materialism) creates, first, its
mechanical manifestations and then at a certain stage of evolution-
namely, in animal organisms-ereates, in addition to the external
material processes, also inner psychical processes. With regard to this
interpretation the difference between Lenin's and Pozner's theories on
the one hand and Byhovsky's on the other, is this: according to Lenin
and Pozner the material ground of the world creates from the very
beginning, at all stages of evolution, not only external material proc-
esses but also inner processes or sensations, or at any rate something very
similar to sensations; according to Byhovsky the material ground of the
world superadds inner processes to the outer only at a comparatively
high level of evolution. But whichever of these alternatives be adopted,
the question to be answered is this: if the principle at the basis of
cosmic processes creates two series of events which form a single whole
but cannot be reduced one to the other-namely, external material and
inner psychic (or psychoid) events-what right have we to call this
creative source and bearer of events "matter"? That principle obviously
transcends both series and is a metapsychophysical principle. The true
conception of the world is to be found not in one-sided materialism or
one-sided idealism, but in ideal-realism, which is indeed a unity of op-
posites. It is significant that Engels and Lenin when speaking of the
ultimate reality often call it nature which implies something more
complex than matter.
The use of the term "matter" with reference to the primary reality
might be defended on the strength of the doctrine that the psychical is
always secondary in the sense of always being a copy or "reflection" of
the material process; i.e., of always serving the purposes of knowledge
about material changes. SUCll an intellectualistic theory of psychical life
is, however, obviously untenable: the foremost place in psychical life
belongs to feelings and conative processes which, clearly, are not copies
or "reflections" of material changes with which they are connected. As
we have seen, striving is the starting point of all interaction, even of so
simple a form of it as impact.
Dialectical materialists understand that psychical processes are
something sui generis, different from material processes. It must now be
asked whether in their opinion psychical processes have any influence
upon the further course of cosmic changes, or are purely passive so that
there is no need to refer to them in explaining the world's develop-
ment. According to Lenin, materialism does not by any means assert
"the lesser reality of consciousness" ( 2 ~ 8 ) ; consequently, copsciousnesa
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
is as real as material processes. One would have thought this implies
that psychical processes may have a bearing upon the course of material
processes, just as the latter have a bearing upon the origination of
mental events. Marx maintains, however, that consciousness does not
determine existence, but existence determines consciousness. And so all
dialectical materialists invariably repeat this dictum, understanding
by the word "consciousness" all mental processes. If Marx's dictum is
taken to be a law of nature it would compel us to admit that all the
higher expressions of mental and spiritual life, religion, art, philosophy
and so on, are a passive superstructure over social material processes.
The essence of historical and economic materialism preached by Marx-
ists consists precisely in the doctrine that the history of social life is con-
ditioned by the development of productive forces and relations. Eco-
nomic relations, Marxists say, are the real basis of social life, while
political forms, law, religion, art, philosophy, etc., are only a superstruc-
ture over this basis, and dependent upon it.
Marx, Engels, and true social democrats held this doctrine, be-
lieving that social revolution will take place in highly industrialized
countries where the dictatorship of the proletariat will arise spontane-
ously, owing to the enormous numerical preponderance of workers and
employees over the small group of property owners. But Russia was
industrially a backward country, and the communistic revolution in it
was made by a comparatively small Bolshevik party. The revolution
has resulted in the development in U.S.S.R. of a terrible forrn of tyran-
nical state capitalism; the state is the property owner and, concentrating
in its hands the military and police force as well as the power of wealth,
it exploits the workers to an extent undreamed of by bourgeois capital-
ists. Now that the state has shown itself in its true colors and the peasants
have been transformed from small landowners into Collective Farm
laborers, there can be no doubt that the Soviet regime is supported by a
small group of communists against the will of the enormous majority of
the population; to preserve it, those in authority must exert their will
to the utmost and use skillful propaganda, advertisement, care in bring-
ing up the young and other methods which clearly prove the importance
of ideology and of deliberate voluntary activity for the maintenance and
development of social life. Accordingly. Bolsheviks have now definitely
begun to talk of the influence of ideology upon the economic basis of
life. Political and legal relations, philosophy, art and other ideological
developments, says Pozner, "are based upon economics, but they all in-
fluence one another and their economic basis." Curiously enough he
says on the same page that "it is not people's consciousness that de..
termines tlJeir existence but. on the contrary, their social existence de-
nfALECTICAL MATERIALISM
termines their consciousness" (68). And then he goes on to say "when
the enormous productive forces will create a classless society, there shall
be planned, conscious guidance of the process of social production and
of social life as a whole; there will take place then, according to Engels,
a leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom" (68).
Luppol says that Lenin admitted "final causes" to be real and knowable;
i.e., he maintained that certain processes were purposive or teleologi-
cal (186).
Byhovsky, who is on the whole more systematic than Pozner, proves
to be just as vague with reference to this question. "According to the
materialistic interpretation of society, t, he writes, "it is not the social
consciousness in all its forms and aspects that determines social existence,
but material conditions of human existence determine social conscious-
ness. The reason or the will of individuals or peoples, or races, or na-
tions do not determine the course, the direction and the character of
the historical process, but on the contrary they are merely the product,
the expression and the reflection of the conditions of life. They are
merely a link in the objective course of historical events; i.e., a result of
the way in which the relations between nature and society, and inter-
social relations are formed independently of human will" (Byhovsky,
93). Further on, however, he declares that Hit is a malicious and false
caricature of the Marxist interpretation of society to affirm that it re-
duces all social life to economics and denies all historical significance
to the state, science and religion, transforming them into shadows that
accompany economic changes. Materialism does not deny the reciprocal
influence of the superstructure on its basis, but explains the direction
of that influence and its possible limits. Thus, religion is not merely the
outcome of certain definite social relations, but affects them in its turn,
influencing, for instance, the institution of marriage. Manifestations
of social life that are more remote from the economic basis than other
manifestations of it depend upon the latter, but affect them in their
turn. On the basis of a given method of production and of economic re-
lations corresponding with them there grows up a powerful system of
interacting and interconnected relations and ideas. A rnaterialist inter-
. pretation of history is by no means favorable to arid schematism" (106).
Finding that other sociologists (Jaures, Kareyev) "maintain that ex-
istence affects consciousness, but consciousness also affects existence," he
declares that their view is but he feels justified in saying the
same thing himself because his materialism "explains the direction" of
the influence of consciousness and "its possible limits." As though his
opponents overlooked the direction of the influence of consciousness
or imagined that this influence was unlimited!
!64
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.s.R.
The vagueness of the dialectical materialists' conception of con-
sciousness is due both to their determination at all costs to subordinate
nonmaterial processes to the material and to the fact that they do not
discriminate between "consciousness" and "mental process." Conscious-
ness means the existence of some reality for the subject; it is conscious-
ness of reality. In this sense all consciousness is always determined by
reality. In the same way, all knowledge and thought has reality for its
object and, according to the intuitive theory, actually includes it in it-
self as directly contemplated; hence, all knowledge and thought is al-
ways determined by reality. The psychical side of consciousness, knowl-
edge and thought consists solely of intentional psychical acts directed
upon reality but not affecting it; therefore consciousness, knowledge and
thought are, as such, determined by reality and do not determine it. But
other psychical processes-namely, conative processes always connected
with emotions, strivings, attractions, desires-powerfully affect reality
and determine it. Moreover, in so far as acts of will are based upon
knowledge and thought, through them knowledge also vitally affects
reality.
The fact that modern Marxists admit the influence of mental life
upon material processes clearly shows that dialectical materialism is in
reality not materialism at all. We know from the history of philosophy
that one of the most difficult problems for human thought is to account
for the possibility of influence of mind upon matter and vice versa.
Monistic and dualistic systems of philosophy cannot solve this problem
because of the profound difference in kind between physical and mental
processes.
The only way to account for their interconnection and for the pos-
sibility of their influencing each other without being causally interre-
lated is through discovering a third principle which creates and unites
them and is neither mental nor material. According to the theory of
ideal realism, delineated above, this third principle is concretely ideal
being-superspatial and supertemporal substantival agents.P
Being opposed to mechanistic materialism, dialectical materialists
are not prepared to replace philosophy by natural science. Engels says
that .naturalists who revile philosophy and reject it are, unconsciously
to themselves, enslaved by poor, homemade philosophy (25). He thinks
that for developing the faculty of theoretical thinking it is necessary
to study the history of philosophy. Such study is needed both for im-
proving our powers of theoretical thought, and for working out the
science of epistemology. Byhovsky says that "philosophy is the theory
12. See N. Lossky's books, ';rypes 0/ World Conception (in Russian); The World
As an Organ; Whole and Freedom of Will.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM 565
of science" (9). According to Lenin "dialectics is the theory of knowl-
edge."18
The dialectical materialists' interest in the theory of knowledge is
understandable. They struggle against skepticism, relativism and agnos-
ticism, and insist that reality is knowable. If they are to vindicate their
contention, they must work out a theory of knowledge.
Referring to Engels. Lenin says: "Human reason in its nature is
capable of yielding and does yield the absolute truth which is composed
of the sum total of relative truths. Each step in the development of science
adds new fragments of truth, and from this the absolute truth is con-
stituted, but the limits of the truth of each scientific statement are rela-
tive, now expanding, now shrinking with the growth of science."14
Lenin thinks that the source of true knowledge is sensations; i.e.,
data of experience interpreted as "the action of matter in motion upon
our sense organs." Luppol rightly describes such a theory of knowledge
as materialistic sensualism (182) (sensus-sensation). One would have
thought this necessarily leads to solipsism; i.e., to the doctrine that we
know only our own subjective states produced by an unknown cause,
and perhaps not in the least like it. Lenin, however, does not make this
deduction. He confidently asserts that "our sensations are copies of the
external world" (79). Like Engels, he is convinced that they agree with
or correspond to the reality outside us (88). He contemptuously rejects
Plehanov's contention that human sensations and ideas are "hiero-
glyphics," i.e., are "not the copy of real things and nature's processes,
not their images, but only arbitrary signs and symbols of them" (195).
He understands that "the theory of symbols" logically leads to agnos-
ticism and insists that Engels is right when he speaks "neither of symbols
or hieroglyphics but of copies, photographs, images, mirror reflections
of things" (195). Engels "constantly and exclusively speaks in his works
of things and their mental images or reflections (Gedankenabbilder). It
is obvious that these mental images arise only from sensations" (22).
Thus. Engel's and Lenin's theory of knowledge is a sensualistic
theory of copying or reflection. It is obvious, however, that if truth wer-e
a subjective copy of transsubjective things, it would be impossible in any
given case to prove that we possess an exact copy of a thing, i.e., the
truth about it, and the very theory of copying could never be really
proved.
Indeed, according to that theory all we have in consciousness are
copies only and it is utterly impossible to observe the copy together with
13. "The Question of Dialectics," 16.
14. Lenin, Mattrialism and Empiric-Criticism, lQ6; similar arguments are ad-
vanced by Engels in Anti-Diihring.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
the original so as to establish by direct comparison the degree of like-
ness between them-as one can do, for instance, in comparing a marble
bust with the person whom it represents. Besides, for materialism the
case is further complicated, for how can a mental image be an exact
copy of a material thing? To avoid the absurdity of such an assertion
one would have to adopt the theory of panpsychism; i.e., to admit that
the external world entirely consists of psychical processes and that my
ideas, say, of another person's anger or striving are exact copies of that
anger or striving.
The example given by Lenin of sensation as a "reflection" of reality
gives him away completely. "The sensation of red," he says, "reflects
ether vibrations whose frequency approximately amounts to 450 trillions
per second. The sensation of blue reflects ether vibrations whose fre-
quency is approximately 620 trillions per second. The vibrations of the
ether exist independently of our visual sensations. Our visual sensations
depend upon the effect of the vibrations of ether upon our organs of
vision. Our sensations reflect objective reality, something which exists
independently of humanity and human sensations" (259). The red and
the blue color cannot in any sense of the term be said "to resemble"
ether vibrations; and considering that, according to Lenin. those vibra-
tions themselves are only known to us as "images" in our mind com-
posed of our sensations, what possible grounds can there be for asserting
that those images correspond to an external reality? Plehanov under-
stood that theories of reflection, symbolism and so on cannot account for
our knowledge of the properties of the external world or indeed prove
the existence of that world. He was therefore driven to the admission
that our belief in the existence of the external world is an act of faith
and argued that "such faith is a necessary precondition of critical
thought in the best sense of the term."15
Lenin is aware, of course, of the comic nature of Plehanov's con-
tention that critical thought is based upon faith, and he does not agree
with it. We shall see in a moment what his own solution of the difficult,
is, but let us first conclude our examination of his sensualistic theory,
Does human knowledge really consist of sensations alone? Relation.
such as the unity of the properties of an object, causal connection anc
so on, cannot possibly be sensations; it is absurd to say that the yellow
ness, hardness and coldness of an apple are given us in three sensation:
(visual, tactile and thermic) and the unity of those qualities is a fourtl
sensation. People who have a better knowledge of philosophy thar
Lenin, even if they be dialectical materialists, understand that knowl
15. Plehanov, Commentary on the Russian translation of Engels' book or
Feuerbach::86, 1918 (Geneva Edition, Ill, 1905).
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM ~ 6 7
edge includes nonsensory as well as sensory elements. Thus Byhovsky
says, "Man has at his disposal two main instruments by means of which
knowledge is attained-his experience, i.e., the totality of data acquired
through his sense organs, and reason which systematizes and works out
those data" ( l ~ ) . "The data of observation and experiment must be un-
derstood, thought out, PlJ.t together. The connections and interrelations
between facts must be established by means of thought; they must be
systematized and estimated, their laws and principles must be dis-
covered. In such thinking many general notions are used by means of
which connections between things are expressed, defined and scien-
tifically evaluated. Those notions and logical categories are an absolutely
essential element in every cognitive process in all branches of knowl-
edge. Their significance for science cannot be overestimated and their
part in forming knowledge is enormous" (18-19).
Knowledge of these aspects of the world is obtained of course by
abstraction from experience; "the forms of being cannot be drawn or
deduced by thought from itself, but only from the external world," says
Lenin quoting Engels.!" This is true, but it means that experience cer-
tainly does not consist of sensations alone and that nature from which
ideal principles are abstracted contains those principles in its very struc-
ture. Deborin rightly says that categories "are simply reflections, results
and generalizations of experience. But observation and experience can
by no means be reduced to immediate sensation and perception. With-
out thought there can be no scientific experience" (XXIV).
These quotations from Byhovsky and Deborin show that having a
certain knowledge of Kant, Hegel and modern epistemology they cannot
defend pure sensualism or deny the presence of nonsensuous elements in
knowledge; but they are unable to account for those elements, The
habits of mechanistic materialism have too great a hold upon them, For
mechanistic materialists the world consists of impenetrable moving
particles, the only interaction between which is impact; our sense organs
react to those impacts by sensations; the whole of knowledge, on such
a theory, is obtained from experience produced by impacts and consists
of sensations only (Lenin develops exactly the same theory as the mech-
anistic materialists; e.g., 80).
For dialectical materialists true knowledge consists of subjective
mental states which must copy external reality. But why do they suppose
that this miracle of material things being copied by mental processes
really takes place? Engel's answer to the question is as follows: "Our
subjective thought and the objective world are subject to the same laws
and therefore in their final results they cannot contradict each other but
16. Enzels. Anti-Diihrine,
~ 6 8 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
must be in agreement" (94). This assertion, he says, is the "preconcep-
tion" of our theoretical thought (94). Pozner, quoting Lenin, says that
dialectic is the law of objective reality and at the same time the law of
knowledge (34).
The doctrine that the subjective dialectic corresponds to the ob-
jective cannot be proved if we adopt the dialectical materialists' theory
of knowledge. According to that theory we always have in consciousness
the subjective dialectic only, and its correspondence to the objective
dialectic must forever remain a hypothesis incapable of proof. Moreover,
this hypothesis does not explain how truth about the external world is
possible. The law of dialectical development is held by the dialectical
materialists to have a universal application. Hence, not only thought but
all other subjective processes, such as for instance imagination are sub-
ject to it. But if the subjective process of imagination does not copy ex-
ternal reality, although it is subject to the same law, the subjective
process of thought may not copy it either.
In trying to establish the criterion of agreement between the sub-
jective knowledge of the external world with the actual structure of that
world Engels, following Marx, finds it in practice, namely, in experi-
ment and industry. "If we can prove the correctness of our idea of an
actual occurrence by experiencing it ourselves and producing it from its
constituent elements, and using it for our own purposes into the bargain,
the Kantian phrase Ding an Sich (thing in itself) ceases to have any
meaning. The chemical substances which go to form the bodies of plants
and animals remained just such a thing-in-itself until organic chemistry
undertook to show them one after the other, whereupon the thing in
itself became a thing for us as the coloring matter in the roots of the
madder, alizarine, which we no longer allow to grow in the roots of the
madder in the field, but make much more cheaply and simply from coal
tar."!?
Dialectical materialists were greatly pleased with this argument of
Engels; they repeat it with delight and develop it further (Lenin, 77,
109-114; Byhovsky, 69 f.), And indeed, successful practical activity and
its progressive development gives us a right to affirm that we can have a
true knowledge about the world. This, however, leads to a conclusion
unfavorable to a sensualistic theory of "copying" reality. It is essential
to work out a theory of knowledge and of the world which would rea-
sonably explain how a subject can have true knowledge not only about
his experiences but about the external world in its real nature inde-
pendent of our subjective acts of cognition. The dialectical materialist
16.
17. Quoted by Lenin on page 75, from Engel's L. Feuerbach, 4th German edition,
\')
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
369
theory of knowledge, according to which only our subjective psychical
processes (images, reflections, etc.) are immediately given in conscious-
ness, cannot explain how true knowledge about the external, especially
the material, world is possible. It cannot even explain how, starting with
its subjective psychical processes, the human self could ever have arrived
at the idea that matter exists at all.
Modern epistemology can help the materialists with regard to this
point, but only on condition that they renounce their one-sided theory
and admit that cosmic being is complex and that, although matter does
form part of it, it is not a basic principle. Such a view of the world is to
be found for instance in the intuitive theory of knowledge combined
with ideal realism in metaphysics. The doctrine of ideal realism implies
among other things "pansomatism:" i.e., the conception that every con-
crete event has a bodily aspect.
Lenin who admitted "at the basis of the very structure of matter"
the existence of "a faculty similar to sensation" apparently approached
the ideal-realist position. He says, "From the point of view of the crude,
simple, metaphysical materialism philosophical idealism is sheer non-
sense. But from the point of view of dialectical materialism philosophi-
cal idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, iiberschuidnglichesw (Dietzgen)
development of one of the features, aspects or facets of knowledge, mak-
ing it into an absolute, severed from matter and deified.l't?
It should be added, however, that an adequate expression of truth
free from a one-sided exaggeration of anyone particular element of the
world is to be found neither in idealism nor in any form of materialism
(including dialectical materialism) but only in ideal realism.
Dialectical materialists reject traditional logic with its laws of
identity, contradiction and excluded middle and want to replace it by
a dialectical logic, which Byhovsky calls "a logic of contradictions" be-
cause "contradiction is its distinguishing principle" (32). It has already
been shown above that attacks upon the traditional logic are due to a
wrong interpretation of the laws of identity and contradiction.P?
Materialists who seek to base their whole world conception upon
experience and at the same time are compelled by their theory of knowl-
edge to assert that matter is not given in experience, but only mental
images of it are given, find themselves in a desperate predicament. It is
therefore to be expected that an attempt should be made to put an in-
tuitivistic interpretation upon Lenin's words that "all matter has a
property essentially akin to sensation, namely, the property of 'mirror..
ing' or reflection." Such an attempt has actually been made by a Bul-
18. Expansive, swelling out.
20. E.g. Byhovsky, 218-:-242.
19. "The -Quesrion of Dialectics," 17.
!70 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
garian, T. Pavlov (P. Dosev) in his book The Theory of Reflection,
published. in Russian in MoSCOW.
21
In this book Pavlov attacks the intuitivism of Bergson and especially
of Lossky. Bergson's name occurs in his book fifteen times, and Lossky's
more than forty times. And yet in discussing the relation between "a
thing and the idea of a thing" Pavlov says "dialectical materialism does
not create an impassable gulf between the ideas of things and the things
themselves. Its solution of the problem is that in form (that is, in being
present in consciousness) ideas differ from things, but in content they
coincide with things, though not completely or absolutely and not at
once" (187); but this view is precisely Lossky's intuitivism.
Party fanaticism like every strong passion, is accompanied by a
lowering of intellectual power, especially of the capacity to understand
and criticize-other people's ideas. Pavlov's book is a striking instance of
this. He continually draws absurd and utterly unwarranted deductions
from Lossky's theories. For instance he says that Bergson and Lossky
have discredited the word "intuition" and that for intuitivists discursive
thinking "has no really scientific value." Pavlov fails to notice the
fundamental difference between the intuitivism of Bergson and that of
Lossky. Bergson's theory of knowledge is dualistic: he thinks that there
are two essentially different kinds of knowledge-the intuitive and the
rational. Intuitive knowledge is the contemplation of a thing in its true
living essence, it is absolute knowledge; rationalistic knowledge-i.e.,
discursive conceptual thought, consists, according to Bergson, of symbols
only and therefore has but a relative significance. Lossky's theory of
knowledge is monistic in the sense that he regards all species of knowl-
edge as intuitive. He sets a special value upon discursive thinking, in-
terpreting it as a highly important species of intuition, namely, as in-
tellectual intuition, or contemplation of the ideal bases of the world
which impart a systematic character to it (e.g., the contemplation of the
mathematical forms of the world).
The following circumstance shows how superficial is Pavlov's knowl-
edge of the theories he criticizes. Professor Mihalchev, a Bulgarian
admirer of Rehmke's philosophy, says in his book Forms and Relations
that Lossky has borrowed his theory from Rehmke while pretending to
have discovered it himself. Pavlov quotes these words, adding that
Mihalchev "has uttered a holy truth" (98). As a matter of fact, however,
Lossky devotes a whole chapter in his Intuitive Bases of Knowledge to
the consideration of his predecessors' views: "The Doctrine of the Im-
mediate Apprehension of the Transsubjective World in the Philosophy
of the Nineteenth He finds the doctrine of the immediate
21. TeofiQ otrazheniya, Socekgiz, 1936.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM 571
perception of the external world in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopen..
hauer, in positivistic empiricism (e.g., in R. Avenarius), in Schuppe's
"immanent philosophy," in Rickert's "normative criticism" and, of
course, in Russian philosophy, in Vladimir Soloviev and Prince S. N.
Trubetskoy. Lossky mentions Rehmke alongside of Schuppe, regarding
him as an adherent of "immanent philosophy" on the strength of his
book Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und BegrifJ; German historians of
philosophy regard him in the same way. How Mihalchev and Pavlov
(Dosev) could have missed such an important chapter in the Intuitive
Basis of Knowledge is a riddle that might be an interesting subject of
inquiry for psychologists investigating the workings of the human mind.
In spite of being philosophically untenable, materialism attracts a
great number of people. It must therefore be supposed that it contains
a grain of truth which is hard to express in a clear form and, if in-
sufficiently analyzed, is easily misinterpreted in a materialistic sense.
This truth is as follows. All agents forming part of the world perform
not only inner spiritual and mental actions but also external actions
that have a spatial form; i.e., have the character of corporeality. Thus,
everything spiritual and mental is incarnate. This doctrine may be
described: as pansomatism (soma =body). Of course the truth of pan-
somatism is profoundly different from materialism. AlII that exists has
a bodily aspect but is not exhausted by it; moreover, this bodily aspect
is not a basic manifestation of being but a derivative one, realized under
the guidance of inner, spiritual and mental processes. At the lower
stages of evolution in inorganic nature the inner processes are so
simplified that it is very difficult to establish their presence. Through
misunderstanding, the truth of pansomatism may be expressed in a
form that suggests materialism; for instance, the metaphysics of the
Stoics is apparently materialistic, but in reality it is a variety of ideal
realism.P The type of ideal realism worked out in N. Lossky's books
and briefly indicated above includes pansomatism in the sense just de-
fined.
Many people get accustomed, especially under the influence of
their occupation, to concentrate attention solely on the corporeal aspect
of reality and thus develop a tendency to a materialistic interpretation
of the world; this is the case, e.g., with factory workers, engineers, doc-
tors, etc.
One may thus discover psychological motives inclining certain
persons toward materialism, but it is impossible to find logical reasons
showing it to be true. We have seen that dialectical materialism is based
upon the arbitrary assumption that "matter is all that exists." But in
.
22. N. Lossky, "The Metaphysics of the Stoics," Journal 01 1929.
S72 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
working out this theory dialectical materialists endow this basic reality
with such properties as "the faculty akin to sensation," creative activity,
the power of immanent spontaneous development which proceeds in
a definite direction and creates more and more valuable grades of
being subject to laws irreducible to the laws of the preceding lower
stages of evolution. Berdyaev rightly says that "the dialectical material-
ism of Leninist Marxists' endows matter with divine attributes:'23 It is
incomprehensible on what grounds they call such a basic reality "mat-
ter."
Not being materialists in the true sense of the word, Marxists make
their world conception appear materialistic because they leave things
unsaid or make vague and inaccurate statements. They derive much
help in this respect from the word "motion" which they apply both to
transposition in space and to creative acts producing new qualities. The
word "nature" often used by them instead of "matter" also proves very
useful. Their specific doctrine borrowed from Hegel's dialectic, about
the identity of opposites and therefore of the realization of contradic-
tions is in truth simply an inaccurate expression of the idea of the unity
of opposites which does not in the least cancel the law of contradiction.
Dialectical materialists themselves almost understand this. Lenin speaks
of "the identity of opposites (or perhaps it would be more true to say
'their unity').">' It is not surprising therefore that very often dialectical
materialists put those terms side by side and speak of "identity or in-
separability" (e.g., Engels, 24) "identity or unity." M. Leonov who pub-
lished his Study of Dialectical Materialism in 1948 no longer speaks of
the identity of opposites but only of their unity (285, 287).
It is much to the credit of dialectical materialists that they strive
to get rid of the poverty-stricken mechanistic theory and to do justice to
the wealth of the individual content of events, as for instance Lenin
does in the quotation cited above from his article on "Karl Marx:' But
dialecticity which necessarily implies complexity, and materialism which
leads to narrow one-sidedness are as impossible to mix as oil and water.
The fear to lose their hold on materialism compels Marxists to cling
to materialistic theories which inevitably impoverish the world. I will
point out the following of them: the world must be interpreted as a
monistic system (Byhovsky, 32 f.): all reality must be conceived as spatial
and temporal; the contents of consciousness are to be interpreted in the
spirit of sensualism, i.e., reduced to sensations; consciousness must be
regarded as passive (consciousness is determined by existence, and not
2S. Berdyacv, The General Line oj Soviet Philosophy and Militant Atheism, 16,
ParisY.M.C.A. 1932. ~
24. "The ~ u c s t i o n of Dialectics," 22.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
vice versa); determinism is compulsory, the doctrine of free will must
be rejected. .
These materialistic preconceptions lead either to one-sided theories
or to inconsistencies:
(1) Dialectical materialists preach monism, while truth is to be
found in the synthesis of monism and pluralism: the fundamental prin-
ciples and the meaning of existence are a unity, and its qualitative
contents a plurality. Their attempts to admit a creative evolution pro-
ducing qualitatively different grades of being is incompatible with the
theory that the ultimate reality is matter.
(2) The temporal process presupposes a combination of temporal
and nontemporal elements; the spatial process presupposes a combina-
tion of spatial and nonspatial elements; in other words, one-sided
realism which admits only spatial and temporal being is an error; the
truth about the world is to be found in ideal realism.
(3) While virtually admitting the wealth and diversity of the world,
dialectical Marxists want to reduce the whole content of experience to
sense data (sensualism); in truth, however, experience combines
sensuous and nonsensuous data. But dialectical materialists are afraid
even to mention the non-sensuous aspect of the world: recognition of
the non-sensuous is connected with the recognition of the spiritual, and
they fear the spiritual as the devil fears holy water.
(4) Engels and the modern dialectical materialists S,ly that Hegel's
dialectic was abstract and idealistic, and that they replace it by a con-
crete one, since they have sensuous reality in view (see e.g., Deborin,
XXVII f.). As a matter of fact, sense data such as colors, sounds, etc.,
taken as particular "here and now" realities, .apart from their intercon-
nection with a11 the other rich and complex content of the world, are
as poor and abstract as the discursive notions, e.g., as mathematical
ideas. Dialectical materialists are aware of two extremes only. which
are both abstractions: discursive general notions on the one hand, and
particular sense data on the other, they do not see the depths of mental
and spiritual being, for in speaking of it they generally have in mind
not the whole wealth of the mental and the spiritual life but only one
comparatively unimportant function of it, namely, abstract thinking.
They have not the remotest idea of true concreteness which is the full-
ness of spiritual and mental creativeness, of the emotional experience
of personal and cosmic values, of voluntary purposive participation in
the life of the world, and of embodying all these functions in physical
life. Hegel who was in fact not an idealist but an ideal-realist, though
he failed to give adequate expression to t h i ~ aspect of his philosophy,
was infinitely nearer the truth than dialectical materialists.
S74 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
(5) The paucity and one-sidedness of dialectical materialism are
particularly apparent in the treatment of the historical processes which
are the most complex of all. As we have seen. its adherents verbally
admit that "manifestations of social life that are more remote from the
economic basis than other manifestations of it depend upon the latter,
but affect them in their turn. On the basis of a given method of produc-
tion and of economic relations corresponding to it there grows up a
powerful system of interacting and interconnected relations and ideas.
A materialistic interpretation of history is by no means favorable to arid
schernatism" (Byhovsky, 106). In fact, however, we find in all their
writings a boring, arid, and at the same time superficial and futile
schernatism. The most various and profound spiritual tendencies that
have an abiding significance are explained by the influence of "the
feudal system," of "the bourgeois society," of "the landed gentry," of
the "development of commercial capital," and so on.
A good instance of this way of thinking is the use Pozner makes of
the theories of psychoanalysis: "The pettiness of the German bourgeoi-
sie, its cowardice and incapacity for a decisive struggle with feudalism,
have led to a fine flowering of literature and philosophy by which it
seemed to compensate itself for what it had failed to attain in the
political domain" (16). Apparently, it is sufficient to be cowardly in
order to create a fine literature and philosophy-as though a negative
condition could account for creative achievements requiring complex
positive abilities.
Materialistic philosophy is so obviously invalid and superficial that
the stubbornness and fantastical intolerance with which the representa-
tive Russian Bolsheviks uphold and defend it can only be explained by
some deep psychological motives and enthralling passions. The chief
of those motives is that materialism is more closely and directly con-
nected with atheism than any other theory; it is most suitable for
destroying all Christian religious feelings and ideas and is therefore
particularly attractive to the Bolsheviks who furiously hate Christianity.
Christianity preaches love and consideration for other people even when
struggling with them; it fosters respect for tradition, for the older
generation, for authority, and a healthy conservatism which is not op-
posed to progress but avoids violent destruction of the past. Bolshevism
is characterized by qualities which are the direct opposite of the Chris-
tian culture. It preaches hatred for the past. This connection of the
Bolshevist mentality with the past rather than with the future is made
admirably clear by Berdyaev. The Bolsheviks live by hatred for the
former society-not of its .unsatisfactory institutions" but of its actual
representatives-e-the bourgeois, the gentlemen, the priest, the idealist
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
375
philosopher. Hatred of actual individual people is a satanic feeling;
Scheler justly remarks that it is accompanied by sorrow at observing the
other person's good qualities and malicious joy at his defects. Such a
feeling is never inspired by noble motives. With the revolutionaries it
is based upon personal injuries deeply buried in the subconscious:
social and family wrongs, wounded self-love, pride, vanity, love of
power. Those motives of conduct find clear expression in the Bolshe-
viks: they carry out the destruction of the old without any compunc-
tion by the most cruel means and with utter contempt for human
personality; the new social order by which they intend to benefit
humanity is introduced by them against the will of the "beneficiaries"
in the proud conviction that they know best what is good for people. In
their conduct they are guided by the conviction that "all things are per-
missible" for attaining their aim. Materialism and atheism is just the
philosophy that gives them the sanction they want.
Dialectical materialism is more convenient for the Bolsheviks than
the mechanistic. Being entirely centered upon social and economic
problems they want to be independent of natural science in their
domain (see e.g., Ryazanov, XI f.). The conviction based upon the
principles of dialectics that all levels of being are changeable is a good
weapon for the revolutionary destruction of the actual state of things
(Pozner, '30). The freedom to violate the law of contradiction is particu-
larly useful. However absurd the results of the Soviet mismanagement
might be, however much their policy might be opposed to their own
ideals, they only have to call the contradiction "vital," and their ac-
tivities are justified. Thus, e.g., the Bolsheviks are breaking up Russia
into a number of autonomous national republics, artificially cultivating
the language and literature of tribes not in the least inclined to inde-
pendent national development (apparently, this policy is based on the
idea divide et impera!). Stalin said a propos of this in one of his speeches
that it is necessary for national cultures to develop in order to be
merged "into one common culture with one common language." Ac-
cording to Marxism the state is always a form of exploitation of society
and should be totally abolished; Stalin says of it "the greatest develop-
ment of the power of the state as a preparation of conditions for the
disappearance of the power of the state-such is the Marxist formula
... this contradiction is vital and entirely reflects the Marxist dialectic"
(see Pozner, 50).
It is not truth that Bolsheviks seek in philosophy, but only a con-
venient weapon for attaining their revolutionary aims. This is why,
following Lenin, they sing praises of "party loyalties" in philosophy.
"From the beginning to the end Marx and Engels were 'partial' in
376 DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM IN THE U.S.S.R.
philosophy; in each and every 'new' tendency they were able to discover
deviations from materialism and an unwarranted indulgence in idealism
and fideism" (293). Under the influence of party loyalties independent
observation and inquiry become atrophied and the only thing that
develops is interest in defending petrified dogmas at all costs. The
means of defense grow more and more naive: there is either appeal to
authority, or abuse, denunciation, threats. Luppol in his book On Two
Fronts directed against "menshevizing idealism" and "mechanistic ma-
terialism" calls these deviations from Marxism "sabotage" which ought
to be liquidated and describes their supporters as "secret wreckers" (9).
We know that Bolsheviks liquidate "wreckers" by shooting or concen-
tration camps. Tornstein is even more bitter: she says in her book (4)
that to ignore Leninism which is the highest stage of dialectical ma-
terialism is "planned sabotage."
The style of Bolshevik writings is strikingly offensive. It is not un-
comnlon to find in them such revolting metaphors as that used by
Lenin "a hundred thousand readers of Haeckel meant a hundred
thousand expectorations into the face of Mach's and Avenarius's phi-
losophy" (306).
But even more disgusting than malice is sneaking servility largely
characteristic of Soviet writers, anxiety not to lag behind "the general
line of the party" and to testify their orthodoxy by everything they say.
Thus in the whole social structure of the U.S.S.R. and in all Soviet
theories the foremost place is given to the communal as against the
personal individual being. And so Pozner, repeating Lenin's words that
sensation is the image of the corresponding external event, goes on to
say "dialectical materialism goes further; it teaches that sensations arise
not simply as a passive result of the action of external objects upon our
sense organs, but as the result of the active influence of the social man
upon nature and of his reaction to his environment" (47). One would
have to suppose that the yellow color of the sand can be perceived not
by an individual man, but only by a member of a gang of workmen
digging a pond.
The above exposition and analysis of dialectical materialism gives
us the right to draw the following conclusion. True materialism, i.e.,
the doctrine that the ultimate reality consists of impenetrable particles
of matter moving through space, and that mental events are the passive
product of matter in motion, is a poor theory incapable of further de-
velopment. Dialectical materialism in speaking of matter or nature as
the primary reality richly endows it with qualities and faculties, but has
no right whatever to call it matter. It assumes the guise of materialism
partly owing to its terminology, partly through inconsistently holding
.,
DIALECTICAL M.\TERIALISM 577
on to certain fragmentary dogmas of genuine materialism, and partly
through vagueness and confusion of thought. In the U.S.S.R. dialectical
materialism is a party philosophy concerned not with the quest for
truth, but with the practical needs of the revolution. So long as the
U.S.S.R. is ruled by a power that suppresses all free inquiry, dialectical
materialism cannot develop as a philosophy. Unhampered thinking
would soon transform dialectical materialism into some complex sys-
tem of ideal realism.
Chapter 25
THE INFLUENCE OF E. MACH AND
R. AVENARIUS ON MARXISTS
The French and English form of positivism-the theories of
Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill and Spencer-were widely prevalent in Rus-
sia in the second half of the nineteenth century but toward the end of
it and the beginning of the twentieth there developed a tendency to
seek new and more subtle forms of it. This was the case, for instance,
with V. V. Lesevitch.
Vladimir Victorovich Lesevitch (1837-1905) received his higher
education at the Petersburg School of Engineering and the Academy of
the General Staff. For his political activities he was exiled first to
Siberia and then Kazan, Poltava and Tver (1879-1888). In his youth
Lesevitch was a follower of Comte as interpreted by Littre and Vyrubov
but later he adopted the theory of empirio-criticism. R. Avenarius's
Kritik der reinen Erjahrung (Critique of pure experience) became for
him the pattern of scientific philosophy.!
The influence of Mach and Avenarius was particularly prevalent at
the beginning of the twentieth century among Russian Marxists. For
the most part they adhered to dialectical materialism. But some of them
had a gift for philosophy and a good training in the subject. They
understood how untenable was the theory of knowledge expounded by
Engels under the name of the theory of reflection. They gave up ma-
terialism and began to seek for Marxism an epistemological basis con-
sistent with the recent developments in philosophy. Bogdanov in par...
tieular has given much attention to the subject.
Alexandr Alexandrovich Bogdanov (his real name was Malinovsky,
1873-1928) graduated in medicine. When he took up philosophy, he
came under the influence of Mach and Avenarius and worked out a
theory which he called empiriomonism. According to it, knowledge is a
1. Lesevitch's writings include A Critical Inquiry Into the Fundamental Prin-
ciples of Positivist Philosophy, 1877; Letters on Scientific Philosophy, 1878; What
Is Scientific .fhilosophy1 1891; Collected Works, 2 vols., Petrograd 1915.
378
THE INFLUENCE OF MACH AND AVENARIUS 579
social adaptation, aimed at giving as exact as possible a description of
experience under the conditions of the greatest possible economy of
thought. Bogdanov claims that his theory differs from empirio-criticism
by its monistic character: the psychical is the individually organized
experience, and the physical the socially organized experience. Thus
the psychical and the physical are simply the differently organized ele-
ments of one experience. That which has social significance for a given
epoch is regarded as true. Since 1913 Bogdanov took up the subject of
"techtology": he gives that name to the general science of organization,
and it is dealt with in his book Universal Organizational Science. All
the problems which confront mankind are problems of organization.
Man must transform the world into an organized whole. Philosophy
must be discarded and replaced by techtology. The difference between
"I" and "thou" exists only in so far as there exists a conflict of in-
terests. When complete universal harmony is reached, the conception
of the HI" will disappear.P
Other writers who came under the influence of Mach and Ave-
narius were A. Lunacharsky (1873-1933), Bazarov, P.. Yushkevich, I. A.
Berman (born 1868), S. A.. Suvorov (1869-1918), N. Valentinov (born
1879).
Vladimir Alexandrovich Bazarov (his real name is Rudnev) was
born in 1874; like Bogdanov he is a relativist in epistemology. In the
book Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism he criticizes dialectical rna-
terialism; in Sketches of a Realistic World Conception' (1904) he attacks
idealism as it is presented in Almanach's Problems of Idealism (1902).. In
1906 Bazarov, Lunacharsky and Yushkevich together with some ad-
herents of dialectical materialism published a symposium Literary
Disintegration} containing a critique of Russian and Western-European
philosophical and literary works incompatible with Marxism.. a
Pavel Solomonovitch Yushkevich (born 1873) calls his theory ern-
pirio-symbolism. He regards the data of sensuous experience and also
conceptional theories as symbols. In addition to the human reason he
admits the existence of a supreme reason, the Logos, the bearer of
highest empiric-symbols or laws of nature.s
2. Besides techtologv, Bogdanov's works include The Basic Principles of the
Historical View of Nature, 18Y9; Knotuledge Front the Historical Point 01 View, 1901:
Empiriomonisni, 3 vols., 1905-6; The Aduentures 01 a School of Philosophy, 1908;
The Philosophy of Living Experience, 1922.
~ . Bazarov, Essays on the Philosoph of Collectivism, 1909; On Two Fronts, 1910:
011 the Way to Socialism (a collection of articles), 1919. A. Lunacharsky, Religion and
Socialism, 1903.
4. Yushkevich's works: Materialism and Critical Realism, 1908; New Currents,
1910; The World Conception and World Conceptions, 1912.
THE INFLUENCE OF MACH AND AVENARIUS
The Marxists who fell under the influence of Mach and Avenarius
were sharply attacked by Lenin (under the assumed name V. Ilyin) in
his book Materialism and Empiric-Criticism (Moscow 1909). All schools
of thought that reject materialism are pronounced by him to be reac-
tionary.
Chapter 26
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN
RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
1. S. ALEXEYEV (ASKOLDOV)
Sergey Alexeyevich Alexeyev (pennarne, Askoldov, 1870-1945) was
the son of the philosopher A. A. Kozlov. He could not inherit his
father's name for the following reason. Kozlov as a young man was an
ardent "Populist" and married a peasant. He soon parted from her, but
his wife would not divorce him. When he fell in love with Marya
Alexandrovna Chelishchev, a girl of noble birth and a cultured family,
and formed a stable marriage alliance with her, his children could not
legally bear his name, and his son's surname had to be Alexeyev, i.e.,
son of Alexis.
After graduating in the Faculty of Science at the Petersburg Uni-
versity, Alexeyev took a post in the Department of Customs and Excise
as an expert in chemistry hoping that he could devote all his spare time
to philosophy. It appeared, however, that conscientious work at his job
left him little time and energy for philosophy. Accordingly, at the age of
forty Alexeyev decided, like his father, to take up academic work. In
1914 he wrote a book Thought and Reality for which he obtained the
degree of M.A. in philosophy at the Moscow University. After the
Bolshevik revolution he had of course to abandon the hope of professor-
ship.: In 1921 Alexeyev founded a secret religious and philosophical
society known as S. A. Askoldov's but in 1926 it was renamed "The
Brotherhood of St. Seraphim of Sarov." In 1928 the Soviet Government
arrested all the members of the Brotherhood and Alexeyev was exiled to
the Zyrian Region (Kama Basin) where he lived in very trying condi-
tions. In 1935 he was allowed to move to Novgorod. In 1941 when
Novgorod was occupied by the Germani Alexeyev found himself on
this side of the "iron curtain" and wrote a few articles against Marxism.
In 1944 he received a premium for his book The Critique of Dialectical
Materialism. During the last years of his life Alexeyev suffered from a
581
!82 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
severe form of angina, which he bore with great fortitude. He died at
Potsdam.'
Alexeyev (Askoldov) was a highly gifted philosopher but circum-
stances did not give him a chance fully to express his ideas in print. His
chief works are the following: The Fundamental Problems oj the Theory
of Knowledge and Ontology, 1900; "In Defense of the Miraculous,"
Voprosy Filosofii i psikhologii, V, 1903; "On Love For God and For
One's Neighbor," ibid., 1,1907; A. A. Kozlou, 1912; Thought and Reality,
1914; Consciousness As a Whole, 1918; '''Time,'' M y ~ l , III, 1922; "Spizit
and Matter," in the symposium Noviye Vehi, No.2, Prague 1945.
s. A. Alexeyev, like his father A. A. Kozlov, is a representative of
personalism, closely approaching Leibniz's monadology. In his book
Thought and Reality he argues against Lossky's absolute intuitivism,
but to a certain extent he himself is an intuitivist, for although he
regards sense qualities as subjective, he admits the presence of a trans-
subjective element in perception. The intuitive part of perception, how-
ever, is according to him "too insignificant in relation to the whole
content of perception" and is only "a kind of scanty framework clothed
by the act of apperception with a variegated and multicolored garment,
numerically different for every percipient" (chap. X).
In his article on "Time" Alexeyev distinguishes between ontologi-
cal, psychological and physical time. He says that physical time, with
which the modern theory of relativity is concerned, is obtained by
measurement in connection with movement in space. It is a relative time,
considered not sub specie mundi, but only sub specie mensionis (83).
Ontological time is cognized by thought apart from connection with
movement in space; in that time there exists a "now" univalent for all
world systems (84).
Alexeyev's conception of overcoming time is as follows. In our
time new contents of being crowd out the old ones, and they die. There
may, however, be a higher temporal order in which the past does not
fade away, but retains its vitality alongside of the ever-increasing new
contents. In the realm of being where time is of such a type tithe sting
of death is taken out" (94).
Alexeyev's article "In Defense of the Miraculous" is particularly
valuable in our day when among the Protestants there are persons even
among the clergy who, under the influence of pseudoscientific ideas,
deny the possibility of miracles. According' to Alexeyev's defini tion "a
miracle is an event happening within the domain of objective human
experience, but conditioned by the powers of higher spiritual beings and
I. Information about Alexeyev's life and activity after 1922, when I was exiled
from U . S . S , ~ , has been given me by Professor I. M. Andreyevsky.
v. SZYLKARSKI
not following from the laws of material nature" (440). He divides the
objections against the miraculous into three categories-epistemological,
metaphysical and ethical, and shows that they are invalid. Particular
importance attaches to his argument that the individual self is one of
the causes of events and that the activities of the self have the character
of individual causality and not of a uniform law.
On the ground of his metaphysics, closely akin to Leibniz's theories,
Alexeyev admitted reincarnation. At the end of his life he wrote a book
On Reincarnation. Before his death he said in a letter to Professor
Andreyevsky: "As I prayed to Father John of Kronstadt and to St.
Seraphim, I felt that I must burn my book on reincarnation. I may be
right in theory, but they would have rejected my work. And I cannot
pray to them without first destroying that which they would have con-
demned in the sense of saying 'don't!' pronouncing it 'not wanted.' I've
burnt it today!"
2. V. SZYLKARSKI
Vladimir Semyonovich Szylkarski (born 1882) was Professor at the
Yuryev (Dorpat) University; after the Bolshevik revolution, was profes-
sor at the Kovno University in Lithuania and at present at the Univer-
sity of Bonn.
Szylkarski's chief works are The Typological Method in the History
of Philosophy, 1916; The Problem of Being, 1917; Solouieo's Philosophic
der All-Einheit, 1932; Teichrniillers philosophischer Entwicklungsgang,
1939; Adolf DyroU, 1947.
In his book The Typological Method in the History of Philosophy
Szylkarski considers the typical philosophical conceptions as stages in
the self-knowledge of our active "self." He recognizes four such stages:
naive realism, concerned with material objects of the external world;
sensualism, dealing with sensations; intellectualism, concerned with the
activity of thought and leading to abstract idealism as, e.g., in the
philosophy of Hegel; concrete idealism which is concrete spiritualism.
Those stages express the movement of philosophic thought from the
periphery to the center, from objects of the external world to the sub-
stantival human self. A philosophy that puts the substantival self at
the basis of its interpretation of the world is personalism.
Dmitri Ivanovich Tschizewski (Ch\Zhevski), born 1895, emigrated
after the Bolshevik. revolution, and for a number of years was professor
at Halle. He has written many books and articles on the history of
philosophy of the Slav peoples. His chief works are: Philosophy in the
Ukraine, 1926; Formalism in Ethics (Works of the Russian Popular Uni-
884 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
versity in Prague, I, 1929); The Problem 01 the Double in the symposium
on Dostoevsky edited by A. Behm, I, Prague 1929; The Philosophy 01
Skouoroda, 1934; Hegel in Russia, Paris 1939; also in German in the
symposium Hegel bei den Slaven, edited by Chizhevski, Reichenberg,
1934.
In his article on Formalism in Ethics Chizhevski expounds an origi-
nal plan of developing ethics in the spirit of concrete ideal realism. In
his study of Dostoevsky's creative work Chizhevski has made valuable
suggestions on the problem of "the double" explaining this strange
phenomenon by the moral decay of personality.
~ . L. KOBILINSKY
Lev Lvovitch Kobilinsky (1874-1947) who wrote under the name
of Kobilinsky-Ellis, left Russia in 1911. The instructive story of his
emigration is told in Andrey Bely's Memoirs. He became a disciple of
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, As he listened to his
lectures, he began to wonder whether Steiner worshipped the powers of
light or of darkness. One day, while waiting for the lecture to begin,
Kobilinsky asked the German ladies, followers of Steiner, whether he
served Christ or Beelzebub, and they answered "Wir sind ein Luciierian-
isches Volh" ('we are a Lucilerian people"). Then Kobilinsky re-
nounced anthroposophy, became a Catholic and settled in Switzerland
at Locarno-Monti. 1 know about Kobilinsky's attitude to Steiner from
his letters to me.
Kobilinsky-Ellis's chief works are: Monarchia Sancti Petri, Christ-
liche Weisheit
l
1929; ] ukowski.
Kobilinsky's Christian world conception is not always in accord
with traditional Christianity; thus, he maintains tllat the plurality of
selves is a consequence of sin; a believer in reincarnation, he expressed
his view one day to his father confessor, a Capuchin monk, The Capuchin
replied: "Almighty God can send a man's soul to be born on earth three
hundred times if it is necessary."
Kobilinsky wanted to acquaint Western Europe with the lofty spirit
of Russian literature; he published in German a book on Zhukovsky
and wrote a long monograph on Pushkin which he had not had time to
publish. In this monograph Kobilinsky convincingly proves, by analyz-
ing such poetical works as Mozart and Salieri, Boris Godunou, The
Avaricious Knight, etc., that Pushkin was a realist, but he depicted
reality in the light of the Divine truth.
B. VYSHESLAVTSEV
4. B. VYSHESLAVTSEV
Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev was born in 1879. He was professor of
philosophy of law at the University of Moscow. After leaving Russia
he worked in the Russian section of the Y.M.C.A. Press in Paris. At
present he is living in Switzerland.
Vysheslavtsev's chief works are Fichte's Ethics, 1914; The Heart 01
Man in the Indian and Christian. Mysticism, Y.M.C.A. Press, Paris 1929;
,
The Ethics of Transfigured Eros, Y.M.C.A. Press, Paris 1932.
The small but very valuable book The Heart of Man is concerned
with a problem that occupies a prominent place in modern philosophy.
The German philosopher Max Scheler in his book Der Formalismus in
der Ethik und die materielle Wertethik worked out a theory of "emo-
tional intuitivism" according to which feeling is an intentional mental
act directed upon objective values and bringing them into the subject's
consciousness. Scheler's theory drew many philosophers' attention to
Pascal's conception of the "logic of the heart" different from the logic
of the intellect. In the Russian philosophy that problem had been
raised long before: recall, for instance, Yurkevich's philosophy and
Soloviev's article about it. D. Chizhcvsky in his History of the Ukrainian
Philosophy points out that one of the characteristics of Ukrainian
thought is its preoccupation with the philosophy of the heart, and de-
votes a whole chapter to the subject.
Vysheslavtsev states the problem in all its implications. In ac-
cordance with the teachings of Christian and Hindu mystics he means
by the heart not merely the faculty of feeling, but something far more
significant, namely the ontological, .superrational principle which
forms the personality's real selfhood. Indian mysticism interprets that
principIe as the identical basis of all living creatures, while Christianity
insists that individual selves are a plurality from the first. This is the
explanation, Vysheslavtsev thinks, of the difference between Christian
love and Buddhist "compassion without love."
Transcending the division between soul and body the metaphysical
principle finds realization in the heart which is both the source of love
and of creative freedom and the most important bodily organ. This
leads Vysheslavtsev to see the meaning of the Catholic cult of the Sacred
Heart. He defends it from the charge of materialism made against it by
"false spiritualism," though he points out that the particular setting of
that cult makes it unacceptable to the Orthodox religious feeling.
In conclusion Vysheslavtsev examines the antinomy of the heart
which is both an infallible judge and the source of evil as well as of
S86 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN R.USSIAN PHILOSOPHY
good; he finds the solution of the antinomy in the concept of freedom
as the essence of the self.
In his book The Ethics of the Transfigured Eros Vysheslavtsev
shows, by quoting a number of passages from the Gospel and from- St.
Paul's Epistles that Christianity i.I meant to be a religion that replaces
slavery to the law by the freedom of grace, and the ethics of law by the
ethics of sublimation, of the transfigured Eros. Law cannot be the
highest guide in life, for it is merely an abstract norm forbidding crimes,
a negative norm devoid of creative power. The worst of it is that the
imperative character of law and of the conscious effort of will is that it
provokes the spirit of resistance which rises from the depths of subcon-
scious instincts and strivings, in accordance with the loi de l'eDort con-
verti discovered by the Nancy school (Coue, Baudouin), Christianity
points out another path: it directs man's spiritual powers toward the
Absolute, toward God and the Kingdom of God as the fullness of being,
as absolute beauty and perfection which calls forth our love and in-
creases the power of free creativeness. That power finds a right solution
in each concrete case of moral conflict. It is the path of the sublimation
of the soul through Eros for the Logos (86). The highest and holiest
values appear to the Christian mind not in the form of abstract law but
as concrete living images of the actual Person of the God-man Jesus
Christ and of His saints whom He loves and finds "loveable." Imagina-
tion transforms the instincts by introducing beautiful images into the
dark realm of the subconscious and arousing love for them; it thus
leads to their embodiment, to tIle magical creation of a new reality (75-
82).
By the beauty of tile Divine image, imagination sublimates Eros
in which distinct stages may be distinguished: Eros may be physical,
mental, spiritual, angelic and divine. The doctrine of Dionysius the
Areopagite and St. Maxim the Confessor about Eros leading up to the
Absolute and to deification by grace is, Vysheslavtsev thinks, the Chris..
tian theory of the sublimation of the soul.
In contradistinction to the Nancy school, Vysheslavtsev maintains
that sublimation is reached not through the activity of imagination
alone, but through the power of free will. It is not imagination but free
will which decides whether man is to enter the path of the sublimation
or the profanation of Eros (153). Having made the choice, the will calls
in the help of imagination so as to overcome in an indirect way the
resistance of the flesh and the still more dangerous satanic resistance of
proud self-well (143). Here as elsewhere man rules over nature by obey-
ing it (134). The freedom of the personality striving for perfection is
preserved .'>ecause God wants us to do His will not as slaves, but "as
I.ILYIN 387
friends and sons" (180): grace cannot be simply given, it must also be
freely taken by man (147). .
Vysheslavtsev's doctrine of sublimation is of the utmost value. The
terrible discoveries made by Freud and his school may prove fatal to
man unless ways are pointed out for transfiguring the low instincts
lurking in the realm of the subconscious. Particular importance attaches
to his arguments that this purpose can only be attained through connect-
ing our imagination and will with the concrete goodness of the Abso-
lute, the living personality of the God-man and the saints. Vysheslavtsev
shows that the training of imagination, feeling and will in the spirit of
Christianity is the only way of attaining the fullness of perfect life. He
succeeds in finding new arguments to prove that Christianity can only
serve this purpose if it is interpreted as truly the religion of love and
freedom, as the good news of the kingdom of grace, and not distorted by
legalism or fanatical intolerance.
5. I. ILYIN
Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin was born in 1882. He was professor of the
philosophyof law in the Moscow University, was exiled from Russia by
the Soviet Government in 1922 and is now living in Switzerland. His
chief works are: The Philosophy of Hegel as a Concrete Teaching About
God and Alan, 2 vols., 1918; Of Resistance to Evil by Force, Berlin 1925;
The Religious Meaning of Philosophy, Paris 1925; Of Perfect Art, Riga;
The Path of Spiritual Renewal, Paris 1937.
Russian philosophers have a distinct tendency toward concrete
ideal realism. It is therefore not accidental that they should have pro-
duced works about Fichte and Hegel pointing out the concrete character
of those thinkers' teachings. Vysheslavtsev studied the concrete ethics of
Fichte in the last period of his creative development, and Ilyin proved
the falsity of the prevalent conception of Hegel's philosophy as a sys-
tem of abstract panlogism. He has demonstrated that the idea is for
Hegel a concrete principle, i.e., what Lossky calls a concretely ideal
entity; further, he has shown that Hegel's concrete speculation is in..
tuition directed upon concretely ideal being. The meaning of philoso-
phy consists for Ilyin in the knowledge of God and the divine basis of
the world, namely, in the study of truth, goodness and beauty as having
their source in God. Ilyin explains the decadence of modern art by the
lack of religion among the people of the present day, and hopes that
there will again come a period of religious revival, when art will flourish
anew.
Ilyin's inquiry into Resisting Evil by Force is a valuaJlle piece of
sal RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
work. He sharply criticizes in it Tolstoy's doctrine of nonresistance.
Jlyin says that Tolstoy calls all recourse to force in the struggle with
evil "violence" and regards it as an attempt "sacrilegiously" to usurp
God's will by invading another person's inner life which is in God's
hands. Ilyin thinks that Tolstoy's doctrine contains the following
absurdity: "When a villain injures an honest man or demoralizes a
child, that, apparently, is God's will; but when an honest man tries 'to
hinder the villain, that is not God's will."
Ilyin begins the constructive part of his book by pointing out that
not every application of force should be described as "violence," for it
is an opprobrious term and prejudges the issue. The name "violence"
should only be given to arbitrary, unreasonable compulsion preceding
from an evil mind or directed toward evil (29 f.). In order to prevent
the irremediable consequences of a blunder or of an evil passion a man
who strives after the good must in the first instance seek mental and
spiritual means to overcome evil by good. Bnt if he has no such means
at his disposal, he is bound to use mental or physical compulsion and
prevention. "It is right to push away from the brink of a precipice an
absent-minded wayfarer; to snatch the bottle. of poison from an ern-
bittered suicide; to strike at the right moment the hand of a political
assassin aiming at his victim; to knock down an incendiary in the nick
of time; to drive out of a church shameless desecrators; to make an
armed attack against a crowd of soldiers raping a child" (54). "Re..
sistance to evil by force and by the sword is permissible not when it is
possible, but when it is necessary because there are no other means
available;" in that case it is not only a man's right but his duty to enter
that path (195 f.) even though it may lead to the malefactor's death.
Does this imply that the end justifies the means? No, ce.rtainly not.
The evil of physical compulsion or prevention does not become good
because it is used as the only means in our power for attaining a good
end. In such cases, says Ilyin, the way of force and of the sword "is both
obligatory and unrighteous" (197). "Only the best of men can carry out
this unrighteousness without being infected by it, can find and observe
the proper limits in it, can remember that it is wrong and spiritually
dangerous, and discover personal and social antidotes for it. By com-
parison, with the rulers of the state happy are the monks, the scholars,
the artists and thinkers: it is given to them to do clean work with clean
hands. They must not, however, judge or condemn the soldiers and
politicians, but be grateful to them and pray that they may be cleansed
from their sin and made wise: their own hands are clean for doing clean
work. only because other people had clean hands for doing dirty work"
(209). UIf th-e principle of state compulsion and prevention were ex-
VASSILI ZENKOVSK.\' S89
pressed by the figure of a warrior) and the principle of religious purifica-
tion. prayer and righteousness by the figure of a monk-the solution of
the problem would consist in recognizing their necessity to each other"
.
The possibility of situations that inevitably lead to the contradic-
tion between a good purpose and imperfect means is man's moral
tragedy, as Ilyin and other thinkers sharing his view express it.
6. FATHER VASSILI ZENKOVSKY
Vassili Vassilyevich Zenkovsky was born in 1881. He was lecturer
at the Kiev University. Since 1925 he has been professor of philosophy
and psychology at the Orthodox Theological Academy in Paris, and in
1942 was ordained priest.
Zenkovsky's chief works are: The Problem of Psychical Causality,
1914; The Hierarchical Structure of the Soul) in the Scientific works of
the Russian Popular University in Prague, II, 1929; "Die religiose
Erfahrung," in Der Russische Gedanke, II, 1930; "The Overcoming of
Platonism and the Problem of Sophia in the Created World," Put,
XXIV, 1930; "0 the Image of God in Man," in the symposium Ortho-
dox Thought, II, Paris 1930; Questions of Education in the Light of
Christian Anthropology) Y.M.C.A. Press, Paris 1934; "The Problem of
the Cosmos in Christianity," in the symposium The Living Tradition,
The Fundamental Principles of Christian Cosmology; The History Ql
Russian Philosophy) 2 vols,
After a thorough investigation of the problem of psychic causality
Zenkovsky concludes that such causality is a fact, and turns it to good
account in his further works. In his article on religious experience
Zenkovsky means by experience contents of consciousness that can be
described as "given," that are conditioned by the interaction between
the subject and the object, and are related to an object. He argues
against Durkheirn, Freud and others who attempt to explain religious
experiences as derivative from other experiences. Thus, Diirkheim
deduces them from the experiences of social tics, but those experiences
already contain a religious element. It must be admitted that there are
to be found in consciousness religious data which are not derivative and
can only be explained by the interaction between the subject and a
transsubjective principle. As to the nature of that principle, it is given
in mystical experience as a conceptually inexpressible, all .. embracing
all, which leads many religious minds to interpret it in a pantheistic
spirit. Humanity does not, however, stop at that form of religious ex-
sorne neoole have also the experience of communion with a
890 llECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN R.USSIAN PHILOSOPHY
higner principle as a personal or superpersonal Being which makes itself
known to us through the Word and the Revelation as a Supercosmic
transcendental principle. True, there are many revelations and to some
extent they contradict one another, but this does not prove that revela-
tion is subjective-any more than the existence of hallucinations and
illusions compels us to regard all sense perception as false. Zenkovsky
gets over the contradiction between the pantheistic and the theistic re-
ligious experience by interpreting the pantheistic experience as the
vision of the Sophian created aspect of the world, mistaken for the vision
of God Himself. He does not wholly reject Troeltsch's conception of a
special religious a priori, but points out that it cannot be developed
within a system of immanent philosophy: transcendental functions do
not generate the contents of experience and can only be realized in
connection with data which point to a transsubjective source.
Zenkovsky maintains that the soul has a hierarchical structure and
that the highest element in it is "the heart," understood in accordance
with Christian anthropology-as the lite of feeling that establishes a
spiritual bond with God and the divine Ioundauons ot uie world.
In dealing with the problems ot Christian cosmology Father Vassili
argues against a-cosmism, pantheism and atheistic naturalism. '1'hose
mistaken theories can only be avoided, he says, it we have a correct Call-
ception 01 the creation ot the world by God. Following Father Sergius
Buigakov, though considerably mouitymg his doctrine, Zenkovsky works
out a theory ot the Divine Sophia and the created Sophia. Divine
Sophia, tile \Visdom of God, is the totality of ideas about the world,
as God's cOllceptl0n 01 the world; ideas that lie at tile
basis ot cosmic processes are the created Sophia. The ideas in God are
related to the ideas in the world as "primary images" to "images:' To
avoid confusion, Father Vassili gives the nanle of "ideas" to primary
images only, and calls images "Iogoses;' he has in mind the Stoic and
the Patristic doctrine of the spermatic logos. (f'undamental Problems,
65 f.) World Soul contains the logoses in their unity. The concep
tion of the World Soul has been discredited in the eyes of many of the
Fathers of the Church by its connection with pantheism, In truth, how..
ever.. it can be worked out apart from pantheism and be used for over-
coming mechanistic naturalism (60 f.).
Acosmism and occasionalism can only be disproved if we recognize
the existence of active, though created substance in the world (73).
Father Vassili distinguishes two kinds of activity: the empirical and the
substantial causal correlations (causae ad fieri and causae ad esse of the
scholastics)", Empirical causality manifests itself in the transition from
FATHER GEORGE FLOROVSKY
one event to another, and substantial causality embraces a parucular
entity's whole cycle of being (66).
The doctrine of the creation of the world by God compels us, in
Father Vassih's opinion, to admit that time is in God, since the idea
that time begins in the world "leads us to inquire about the time
which was before the beginning of the present time" (69).
The tendency of certain theologians to interpret all activity as
proceeding from God and to explain everything good in man solely by
the action of God in him leads, Father Vassili says, to a-cosmism and
occasionalism. Those fallacies can be avoided by recognizing the exist-
ence of active created substances and the active nature of the Divine
image in man.
Zenkovsky's inquiry into the problems of Christian cosmology is of
great value, but it is impossible to agree with him that the idea of the
beginning of the world and of time in it compels us to recognize the
existence of time in God before the creation of the world, The word
"beginning" does not always mean the appearance of process A after
the process B; it may also mean the first moments of the process A.
7. FATHER GEORGE FLOROVSKY
George Vassilievich Florovsky was born in 1893. He graduated in
the Faculty of Arts at the University of Odessa and did post-graduate
work in philosophy under Professor N. Lange with a view to becoming
a university lecturer. He left Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and
in 1925 was appointed professor of Patristics at the Orthodox Theologi-
cal Academy in Paris; since 1947 he occupies the chair of dogmatic
theology and patrology in the Orthodox Theological Academy in New
York. He was ordained priest in 1932. Father Florovsky is active in the
modern ecumenical movement.
Father George's chief works are as follows: Human and Divine
Wisdom, 1922; "The Foundations of Logical Relativism," Uchoniya
Zapiski, I, Prague; The Death on the Cross, Paris 1930; "Creature and
Createdness," Pravoslavnaya Mysl, I, Paris 1930; "Evolution und Epi-
genesis," Der Russische Gedanke, 1930; The Eastern Fathers of the
Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Paris; The Ways of Russian Theology,
Y.M.e.A. Press, Paris 1937; "The Problems of Christian Reunion," Put,
1933; The Eastern Tradition in Christianity, Hewett Lectures, 1949.
Florovsky's relativism differs profoundly from that of Protagoras:
he simply means by it that human knowledge is formal and unfinished
and its progress is in indefinitum.
Father George is the most Orthodox of modern Russian theologians:
S92 I RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
he is ~ n x i o u s strictly to adhere to the Holy Writ and patristic tradition.
He rejects the doctrine of God as pan-unity: in creating the world, God
creates a reality that is different from Hirn. He is definitely opposed to
the Sophiology of Father Pavel Florensky and Father Sergius Bulgakov
and thinks that liturgic texts and Orthodox iconography do not con-
firm their theories.
The creation of man as a free agent is a kenosis of the Divine will
due to God's love for the creature. Man's soul and body are two aspects
of one single living entity. In consequence of sin the connection between
soul and body becomes unstable; man becomes mortal, and death is not
simply the separation of the soul from the body, but the death of man
himself, since "the soul without the body is a phantom. Man's death be-
comes a cosmic catastrophe, for in the dying man nature loses its im-
mortal center and itself as it were dies in man" (Death on the Cross,
157). Victory over death is achieved by Christ. When in accordance
with His human nature He died on the cross, His soul and body were
parted, but His Divinity remained inseparable both from His soul and
His body, says Father George on the authority of St. John Damascene.
Consequently His body was not subject to corruption after death and
was resuscitated by Him. His descent into hell means the descent not
into the nethermost pit, but into Hades (sheol), the abode of the Old
Testament saints; it signifies "breaking the fetters of death." Thanks to
Christ who reestablishes the unity of the soul and body, our death too is
no longer death, but "falling asleep" as St. John Chrysostom says.
Father George emphasizes the historical character of the Christian,
as opposed to the Greek, conception of the world and ascribes great
value to it: For the Greeks everything temporal belongs to the lower
realm of being; there is no creativeness in time, but only cycles, periodi-
cal repetitions of all the past. On the Christian view time is not a circle,
but a line that has a beginning, end, and aim. The historical process is
unique in time and consists of creative acts that determine the fate of
the human personality. Father George denies reincarnation and main-
tains that universal resurrection is not universal salvation; one life on
earth is sufficient for man to make his choice and to manifest either a
striving toward the good or a stubbornness of will that deserves con..
demnation and eternal torments.
Father George confirms all his important theological statements
by references to the Eastern Fathers and says that his purpose is to make
a "neopatristic synthesis." In his articles "The Problems of Christian
Reunion" he argues against "the theory of church ramifications." He says
that there are Uno branches with equal rights" but admits that "the sick
branches do .not dry off at once" (IS I.). Speaking of the Roman Church
FATHER GEORGE FLOROVSKY
he says that in it "there is no sufficiently firm and clear expression of the
feeling that even after ascending into heaven Christ really and directly,
though invisibly, abides in the earthly historical Church and governs it.
Hence the need and the possibility of the idea of the Vicar of Christ
who in a sense replaces Him in history" (II ). For Christian reunion
"actual work. in common is more important than the direct approach to
the question of reunion. In this respect collaboration in theological
studies and exchange of knowledge is indubitably a real act of union in
so far as it is an expression of solidarity in striving for Christian truth"
(14).
Father George has done great service to the development of Rus-
sian theology by his remarkable work The Ways 01 Russian Theology.
At the beginning of his book he asks the interesting and significant
question as to the reason for "the late and belated awakening of the
Russian thought?"-a surprising fact, for the Russians are a gifted
people. TIle Russian ikons, for instance, "testify to the depth, com-
plexity and subtlety of the ancient Russian spiritual experience and to
the creative power of the Russian spirit." To answer that question
Father George inquires into the religious life of the Russian people
throughout their history as well as into their theology. lie depicts that
life as an arduous struggle, first, with external, and afterwards, in
modern times, with internal obstacles. In the first chapter "The Crisis
of Russian Byzantism" he gives a vivid account ~ f the conflict "be-
tween the two truths," that of Iosi Volokolamsky and of Nil Sorsky,
Equally stirring is his presentation of such moments in the spiritual life
of the nation as "The Meeting with the West" in the sixteenth century,
of "the contradictions of the seventeenth century," the two wrongs-s-the
Old Believers, and the reforms of Nikon, the influence of Peter the
Great's reforms upon .the life of the church, and the significance of the
masonic movement in the eighteenth century. His description of the
events in the Russian religious life from the time of Alexander Ion-
wards throws much light on the present position: he deals with tile
half-century long struggle for the translation of the Scriptures into
Russian from the Slavonic, the activity of the Metropolitans Philaret
of Moscow, Philaret of Kiev and Philaret of Chernigov, the Slavophils,
nihilism, the works of the "historical school" in the second half of the
nineteenth century, the activity of K. P. Pobedonostsev, the Procurator
of the Holy Synod, the teachings of Vladimir Soloviev, the religious
and philosophical works of his numerous successors, the argument about
dogmatic development, and finally the treatment of religious subjects
in the works of the "decadent" and "symbolist" poets at the beginning
of the twentieth century.
394
t
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
Father George quotes some remarkable facts relating to the youth
of Pisarev, Dobrolyubov and other outstanding persons, showing that
the Russian intellectuals, even when they CODle to reject the Church and
tile historical religion are, for the most part, deeply religious by tempera..
ment. In their passionate search for new ways leading to the fullness
of truth Russian people often find themselves at the edge of an abyss;
thus, e.g., Merezhkovsky began to fear that he was falling into the
"heresy of Astartism, which means not the holy union between the spirit
and the flesh, but their sacrilegious confusion and pollution of the
spirit by the flesh."
Father George gives much information about valuable works that
were never published or long delayed owing to the immoderate-vigi-
lance of the State and the Synod. For instance, "a brilliant book by
Professor 1\1. D. Muretov against Renan was stopped by the censor, for
the author began by giving an exposition of the false doctrine which he
proceeded to criticize, and that was not considered a wise thing to do.
The public went on reading Renan in secret, and Muretov's attack on
him was delayed by some fifteen years. Thus the impression was pro-
duced that prohibitions were due to the inability for self-defense. Be..
sides, only too often attempts were made to defend that which could not
be defended, and this undermined confidence. People lost heart when
the duties of an envigilator were substituted for the vocation of the
teacher" (421).
Father George's book contains many pointed and clever remarks
about prominent people, events and tendencies of the religious life.
One cannot always agree with them: often they are too severe, for in-
stance when the author accuses many of the persons whom he criticizes
of having no sense of the meaning of history or of the reality of the
Church. But his judgments are always interesting and attract the reader's
attention. The book has an extensive bibliography occupying fifty-four
pages.
At the end of his book Father George asks why the history of the
Russian culture has so many breaks in it, so many instances of rejecting
the old and passionately embracing the new, so many disappointments
and lacerations. Among other things, he points to the Russian "uni-
versal responsiveness" as a "fatal and ambiguous gift." Too impressive
a mind produces a "syncretion" instead of the longed for synthesis. He
accuses the Russian national character of instability and inconstancy
in love, of the tendency "to languish on fateful crossroads" without
venturing to make a responsible choice. Divided love, he says, often
brings the Russian soul to the tragedy of demoniac possession. The way
out of the\e calamities is to be found in spiritual discipline, and, for the
V. LOSSKY 395
-------o--al thought in particular, in the return to the style and the
methods of the Fathers. He does not by any means suggest neglecting
the Western thought. On the contrary, his advice is to utilize "the cen-
turies old experience of the Catholic West/' the great systems of "high
scholastics," the experience of Catholic mystics and the theological
experience of modern Catholicism because "theology is in its essence a
Catholic task." A new era has recently begun in the history of the
Christian world, says Father George; it is characterized by the enormous
range of godless rebellion and struggle against God. One of the ways to
combat it, to heal people's minds from possession by evil forces lies in
the development of theology, the task of which is to work out an in-
tegral system of Christian thought.
Father George's book is a valuable contribution to the study of the
history of Russian culture. The questions he asks in it concerning the
peculiarities of the Russian religious life and its development, and his
answers to them may also be helpful for the understanding of other
domains of Russian culture.
8. V. LOSSKY
Vladimir Nicolaevich Lossky, the son of the philosopher N. o.
Lossky, was born in 1903. He studied at the Faculty of Arts of the Petro-
grad University, continued his studies in Prague and finally graduated
at the Sorbonne in Paris where he specialized in medieval philosophy.
His chief works are Essai sur la theologie mystique de l'Eglise
d'Orient, Aubier, Paris 1944; Meister Eckehardt (in the press).
The work on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church is of the
type of a "neoparristic synthesis," to use Father George Florovsky's
term. Lossky confirms all the main contentions of his book by references
to patristic writings. Theology and mysticism, he says, are closely inter..
connected in the' tradition of the Eastern Church" The aim of that
theology is not theoretical but practical: it leads to that which is above
knowledge, "to the union with God, i.e., to deification, the 1)0]0"; of the
Greek Fathers" (7). The main portion of the book consists in showing
that apophatic theology interpenetrates all the fundamental doctrines
of the Eastern Fathers. He dwells at length upon the mysticism of
pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the doctrine of St. Gregory Palama
about the Divine "energies." The apophatic theology of Dionysius the
Areopagite differs profoundly from lhat of Plotinus. According to
Plotinus, God is unknowable because He is simple; hence he regards
ecstasy as /LtA.(t)(1t; (simplification, 29) in which the original ontologi-
cal unitv of the human soul and God is made manifest; a ~ o r d j n g to

~ 9 6 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

Dionysius, God is unknowable because He is ontologically superior to
the world, and union with God is deification; i.e., a new state never
before attained by the natural man (36).
Cataphatic theology does not essentially differ from the apophatic.
"It may even be said that they are one and the same path trodden in
two different directions: God comes down to us in His energies which
manifest Him to us, and we ascend to Him through a series of unions,
while He remains unknowable in His own nature. Even the highest
theophany, the perfect manifestation of God in the world through the
incarnation of the Word, retains for us its apophatic character" (37).
God's unknowability does not lead to agnosticism; it demands "contem-
plative theology leading the spirit to realities which are above reason.
That is why Church dogmas often appear to the human reason in the
form of antinomies." This is particularly true of the Trinitarian dogma
(40 f.), Plotinus has a doctrine of the Trinity (the One, the Spirit and
the World Soul), and even uses the expression "to be consubstantial."
But Plotinus's Trinity is a descending hierarchy of three principles,
while the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the contemplation of
the unity and the difference of the Three Persons that are co-equal.
The \Vestern theologians in dealing with the Trinitarian dogma
usually start with the conception of the Divine nature passing from it
to the conception of the Three Persons, while the Greeks proceed in
the reverse order, from the Three Persons to a single nature; but there
is no question of the superiority or priority of nature over personality or
vice versa. The case is different with the Western doctrine of the proces-
sion of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son (Filioque), which
led to the schism between the Western and the Eastern churches. The
Greeks detect in this formula a tendency to put in the foreground "the
unity of nature at the expense of the real difference between the Per-
sons: the relations of procession, not directly connecting both the Son
and the Holy Spirit with one single source, the Father, become a system
of relations in one nature and prove to be logically posterior to nature."
The Holy Spirit is for the Western theologians "the bond between the
Father and the Son." Nature "becomes in the Trinity a principle of
unity differentiated by relations. Relations, instead of being the charac..
teristics of the Persons, are identified with them." St. Thomas Aquinas
says "a person's name signifies relation" (56 L). Teachings which put the
nature of God in the foreground "put the universal above the indi-
vidual" (61); this- leads to impersonal apophatic mysticism, e.g., Master
Eckehart's doctrine of Gotth eit ( f ) ~ ~ ) . "In insisting upon the monarchy of
the Father as the sole source and principle of the unity of the Three
v. LOSSKY ~ 9 7
Persons, the Eastern theologians were defending, as they thought, a
more concrete and personal conception of the Trinity."
It may be asked whether according to such a triadology the con-
ception of the Person is higher than that' of the Divine Nature. V.
Lossky thinks this is the fallacy of Father Sergius Bulgakov's sophiology,
for according to him the Divine nature is the manifestation of all the
Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Eastern Fathers do not fall into
either extreme: they maintain that in the Holy Trinity nature and per-
sonality are apophatically equivalent. Their conception of the monarchy
of the Father is not subordinationism. The difference is reflected even
in the doctrine of beatitude: for the West, bliss is contemplation of
the Divine Nature, and for the East it is participation in tile Divine life
of the Holy Trinity (61--64).
V. Lossky devotes special attention to the doctrine of the Divine
"energies," which was worked out in detail by S1. Gregory Palama, but
was foreshadowed by Athenagoras, St. Basil, St. Gregory the Divine,
Dionysius and 51. John Damascene. God dwells "in the light which no
man can approach unto," but in His "energies" He comes outwards,
manifests and gives Himself. "The Divine grace that gives deification,"
says St. Gregory Palama, "is not God's nature, but His energy;" it is
"the rays of Divinity" which penetrate the world, "the uncreated light"
or "grace": God is not limited in His energies: He is wholly present in
each ray of His Divinity; this manifestation of Him is "the glory of
God" (72).....Union with God in His energies, i.e., by means of grace,
allows us to participate in the nature of God, but our nature does not
therefore become God's nature." In deification the creature "remains
creature, while becoming God through grace" (84).
Western theologians deny the distinction between God's nature
and energies, but admit other distinctions such as the created light of
grace, the created supernatural gifts and so on. "The Eastern theology
recognizes no supernatural order between God and the created world,
added on to the creature as a new creation." The difference lies in the
fact that the Western conception of grace contains the idea of causality
-grace is understood as the effect of a Divine cause, 'but for Eastern
theology grace is the radiation of the Divine nature, i.e., of "energies":
it is "the presence of the eternal and uncreated light" in the created
world, "the real omnipresence of God in all things, greater than His
causal presence" (85 f.). In the world nature and grace "are mutually
interpenetrated, one exists within the other" (121).
The "nothing" to which we must descend in thinking of the
creation of the world by God is, according to V. Lossky, as much of a
mystery as the Divine Nothing to which we must ascend insapophatic
'98 kECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN R.USSIAN PHILOSOPHY
theology (88). The creation of the world by God is an act of creating
absolutely new being, not contained in God's nature. "Creation is the
work of God's will and not of His nature" (89). The ideas in accord-
ance with which the world is created are not within the na-
ture of God: in the words of Dionysius they are not in the Divine
Nature (as Father Sergius Bulgakov teaches) but "in that which comes
after nature," in the Divine energies. Containing within them the will
of God, ideas are dynamic: they are ideas-volitions external to the
creature and predetermining the different stages of the creature's par-
ticipation in the Divine energies. The world is "a hierarchy of real
analogies" called to deification through "synergy;" i.e., through free
co-operation of the created will with the Divine ideas-volitions (92 L).
Eastern theology is always soteriological. Bent on the problem of
union with God, it does not enter into alliance with philosophy as does
scholasticism (99). Man is by nature connected with the whole world.
If Adam had been guided by the love of God and had wholly given
himself to God, he would have united the whole world and led it up to
God, while God in His turn would have given Himself to man, who
would then have received through grace all that God has by nature
(St. Maxim). But Adam failed in his cosmic task and it was taken over
by the Son of God, the God-man, the Second Adam. Eastern thought is
always concerned with the world as a whole. "This finds expression in
theology, in liturgic poetry, in iconography, and perhaps most of all in
the works of the Eastern Church ascetic teachers of the spiritual life"
(105). The whole of the world's history is regarded as "the history of
the Church which is the mystical basis of the world" (106 L),
The words of Genesis that in creating man God "breathed" into
him the breath of life should not be taken to mean that the spirit of man
is a particle of the Deity. That would imply that man is "God burdened
by a body" or "a combination of God and animal;" then the origin of
evil would be incomprehensible and "God Himself would have sinned
in Adam:' The words of the Bible should be interpreted as meaning
that "the spirit of man is intimately connected with the grace of God"
(112 f.),
In man as in God distinction must be drawn between nature and
personality. Nature is the same in all men. Adam before the Fall was a
universal man, but owing to the Fall human nature was broken up and
divided between many individuals (115 f.). Each personality is unique,
and is undefinable and unknowable in its perfection as the image of
God, according to St. Gregory of Nissa. "Personality is not a part of
the whole, it contains the whole" (102); it is capable of being free
from its nature and of subordinating it to itself. Because of the
v. LOSSKY
Fall man loses his true freedom- and acts in accordance with his natural
qualities or his "character;" he becomes less personal, a "mixture of
personality and nature." This mixture is called in the ascetic literature
of the East "selfhood." The reinstatement of personality is achieved
through the renunciation of selfhood, through a free sacrifice of one's
individual will. In ceasing to exist for itself, the personality "expands
infinitely and is enriched by all that belongs to all." It becomes the
perfect image of God and acquires Divine likeness; i.e., becomes "a
created god" or "god by grace." This deification is attained through
the co-operation of two wills-the will of the Holy Spirit bestowing
grace, and the will of man receiving the grace (122).
Sin, nature and death must be conquered if deification is to be
attained. Those three obstacles have been overcome by the God-man
Jesus Christ, the New Adam who united together the created and the
uncreated being. His body is the Church in which two aspects must be
distinguished-the christological and the pneumatological, the organic
and the personal (181). In its christological aspect the Church is a
theo-andric organism "with two natures, two wills, t\VO activities, in-
separable and yet distinct from each other." Therefore in the history
of dogma all christological heresies are repeated in ecclesiology (183).
The work of Christ is directed upon human nature the whole of which
is unified in His Person. The pneumatological aspect of the Church
consists in the fact that the Holy Spirit endows every personality with
the fullness of divinity in accordance with its unique individual charac-
ter (162 f.). The oneness of human nature is connected with the Person
of Christ, the multiplicity of human persons-with the grace of the
Holy Spirit (180). The work of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit
are inseparable from each other. The "catholicity' of the Church con-
sists in the harmony or, to a certain extent, in the identity, of unity and
multiplicity: the fullness of the whole is not the sum of the parts, since
each part possesses the same fullness as the whole. The Holy Trinity is
the ideal of this catholicity, "the canon of all canons of the Church"
(173 f.). The Church with its sacraments is the objective condition of
our union with God, and the subjective conditions depend upon our..
selves.
Christ is the head of the Church in the same sense in which the
husband is the head of the single body of the two partners in marriage:
the Church is His Wife, and the heart of the Church is the Mother of
God. St. Gregory Palama says that in the Virgin Mary "God united all
the partial aspects of beauty distributed, among other creatures and
made her the common adornment of the kingdom of all beings, visible
and invisible. Through her men and angels obtain grace" (J89 ff.).
400 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
Deification must begin on earth by our fitting ourselves for the
eternal life, and however much we may succeed in this, we cannot make
a merit of it. "The conception of merit is foreign to the Eastern Church
tradition" (194). In order to begin the spiritual life we must direct our
will toward God, renounce the world, and attain a harmony between
reason and heart. "Without reason the heart is blind, without the heart
which is the center of all activity reason is impotent:' Reasonable con-
sciousness, "vocation," is the necessary condition of ascetic life (198 f.),
The soul cannot be healed unless man turns his will to God with
perfect faith in prayer, which is "a personal meeting with God" and
trains us in the love of God (204). At first prayer finds expression if'
words but at the higher stages, when the will is fully given to Gor'
spiritual prayer takes place without words: it is contemplation, "absi
lute rest and peace, participation in the energies of the Holy Spirit"
says St. Isaac the Syrian. Prayer must become continuous. The ascetics
of the Eastern Church have worked out the practice of inner or spiritual
prayer known as itauX<loJ..t(L (206). The short prayer to Jesus "Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner" is repeated all the
time and becomes the monk's second nature. The purpose of that
prayer is to attain continual "standing before God" (207 L). Prayer
must not be accompanied by the desire to experience ecstasy or to have
sensuous images of the angels, Christ or Our Lady. Nilus the Sinaite
gave warning against this mistake as early as the fourth century (208 f.).
Free renunciation of one's own nature and union with God leads
to a, perfect realization of the human personality with the help of grace,
to full consciousness or "gnosis," and makes man into a "son of light"
(Ephes. V, 9-14). Holy Writ is full of expressions relating to light, and
God Himself is called Light. St. Simeon the New Theologian says that
"the light of the glory of God precedes His face." In the fourteenth
century there were arguments about that light between the Eastern
Tornists and the adherents of, the Eastern Church tradition. They were
discussing "the reality of the mystical experience, the possibility of con-
sciously contemplating God, the created or uncreated nature of grace."
S ~ Gregory Palama says that "God is called Light not in His nature but
in His energies" (218). That light is "the visible character of the Deity,
of the energies or grace by which God makes Himself known. That light
fills simultaneously the senses and the intellect, revealing itself to the
whole man and not only to some one of his faculties." 'Therefore St.
Simeon the New Theologian calls that light invisible and at the same
time affirms that it can be seen (219). It is the uncreated immaterial
light of the glory of God. That light was always inherent' in Christ's
body invjsibly to men, but on Mount Thabor the Apostles' nature
v. LOSSKY 401
underwent a gracious change necessary for mystical experience and for
the vision of that light" (221 f.). At the eschatological end of history this
transfiguration of personality and its union with God "will be mani-
fested differently in each human being that has acquired the grace of
the Holy Spirit in the Church. But the limits of the Church on the other
side of death and the possibility of salvation for those who have not
seen the light in this life remain for us a mystery of God's mercy, upon
which we dare not reckon, but which we may not limit in accordance
with human standards" (234). ,
At the conclusion of his book V. Lossky says that the apophatic
theology of the Eastern Church striving for the perfect fullness of
being rises from concepts to contemplation and transforms dogmas into
the experience of the unutterable Divine mysteries. Christ always ap-
pears in the Church "in the fullness of His divinity, triumphant and
glorified even in His passion, even in the sepulchre." The worship of
Christ's humanity is foreign to the Eastern tradition or, rather, His
deified humanity appears in it in the same glorified form in which the
Apostles saw it on Mount Thabor. The saints of the Eastern Church
never had stigmata" but they "were often transfigured by the inward
light of uncreated grace and appeared radiant as Christ at the Trans-
figuring" (24I f.). "Awareness of the fullness of the Holy Spirit, given to
each member of the Church in proportion to his spiritual growth,
banishes the darkness of death, the fear of Judgment, the abyss of hell,
and directs our gaze solely upon the Lord approaching in His glory.
This joy of resurrection and the eternal life makes the Easter night the
feast of faith when everyone shares in however small a measure if only
for a few moments in the fullness of the eighth day to which there shall
be no end." Therefore every year at Easter Matins there is read aloud
the sermon of St. John Chrysostom in which he says that the Lord God
receives with equal love those who come at the eleventh hour as those
who come at the beginning (246).
Chapter 27
CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF
RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy is a science and therefore, like every other science, it
seeks to establish truths that have been strictly proved and are therefore
binding for every thinking being and not only for a particular people
or nation. It must be borne in mind, however, that philosophy is a
unique kind of science differing from other sciences in two following
ways. In analyzing the nature of cosmic being, philosophy aims at
carrying this analysis to its furthest limits, i.e., it is concerned not only
with sections of the world but also with such aspects of it as are not
further analyzable and form the content of ideas and judgments of the
highest degree of generality. To carry out this task successfully a
philosopher must have the faculty of speculation, i.e., of intellectual
intuition, developed even more fully than, e.g., a mathematician's. On
the other hand, having studied the basic elements and aspects of the
world, philosophy must detect the interconnection between them which
forms the world-whole. Moreover, the world-whole, studied by the
.branch of metaphysics called cosmology, contains concrete individual
elements of such significance as for instance, the biological evolution, the
history of humanity-and philosophy must answer the question as to
their meaning and their place in the world..whole. In dealing with such
problems a philosopher finds it helpful to use the faculty of aesthetic
contemplation of concrete unities. Thus, the highest achievements of
philosophy require the union of two opposed and not easily combinable
faculties: the highest degree of abstract thinking and a high degree of
concrete contemplation of reality.
The tasks of philosophy are so stupendous and the faculties neces-
sary for carrying them out are so little developed in man that philosophy
up to the present stands at a much lower level of development than,
e.g., mathematics or physics. This can be seen from the fact that there
exist many schools of philosophy, sometimes sharply opposed and
bitterly hqstile to one another and at times indeed scarcely capable of
402
CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY 405
mutual understanding.. The worst thing is that even the most important
philosophical systems contain. together with great achievements, un-
questionable errors. Not infrequently there appear schools of thought
that are strikingly one-sided.. It is not surprising that in contradistinc-
tion to special sciences-i.e.. , sciences about particular sections and
aspects of the world-philosophy bears the stamp of the character and
interests of the different nations concerned with it. One may speak, ac-
cordingly, of the national peculiarities of German, French, English,
American, Russian philosophy. The differences between the philosophy
of different nations depend upon the particular choice of subjects for
study, the greater or lesser capacity for philosophic speculation, the
greater or lesser degree of confidence in the different kinds of experi-
ence such as the sensuous or the religious experience, and so on..
It is generally said that the Russian philosophy is chiefly con-
cerned with ethical problems, but this is not the case.. All departments
of philosophy-c-epistemolngy, logic, ethics, aesthetics. the history of
philosophy-were investigated in Russia before the Bolshevik revolu-
tion. A certain amount of truth contained in the idea that Russian
philosophers are particularly interested in problems of ethics will be
dealt with later. Let us begin with the question of epistemology, a
science that is of vital importance for all other philosophical problems,
both as regards their nature and their solution.
The view that the external world is knowable is widely prevalent
in Russian philosophy, and indeed is often stated in its extreme form,
namely, as the doctrine of intuition or immediate contemplation of ob-
jects as they are in themselves.. A keen sense of reality, opposed to re-
garding the contents of external perception as mental or subjective,
seems to be a characteristic feature of Russian philosophy.. The Slavo-
phils already urged that our knowledge of reality was immediate.! un-
fortunately they described such knowledge by the misleading term
"faith." Different forms of mtuitivism in epistemology, varying in
degree of completeness, have been worked out by V. Soloviev, Prince S.
Trubetskoy, Prince Eugene Trubetskoy, N. Lossky, Florensky, S. Frank,
Babynin, Berezhkov, Ogniev, Kozlov (in his teaching about the appre-
hension of God), Ern, Losev, D. Boldyrev, S. Levitsky. I. A. Ilyin and,
partly, Karsavin, Even the representatives of transcendental logical
idealism, S. Hessen and G. D. Gurvich may be included in the list, in
so far as they admit the existence of "will-intuition:' Thinkers like
Kudriavtsev, Nesmelov, who maintain that religious faith is the
highest form of knowledge also belong to the same group..
I. As pointed out by E. Radlov in his article "The Slavophils' Theory of Know}..
edee,' The Iouinal of the Miuistry of Public Education, February 1916.'
404 CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN PI-IILOSOPHY
In contradistinction to Kantian epistemological idealism Russian
intuirivism is a form of epistemological realism. It found expression,
among other things, in the fact that Russian philosophy as represented
by the brothers Trubetskoy forestalled the Western in discarding the
doctrine that sense data are subjective mental states of the observer,
and admitted their transsubjective character. Another expression of
this realism is the Russian philosophers' confidence ill the mystical
intuition which gives knowledge about metalogical principles.
The ideal of integral knowledge-i.e., of knowledge as an organic
all-embracing unity, proclaimed by Kireyevsky and Kholniakov-ap-
pealed to many other Russian thinkers; but it can only be attained if
the subrational aspect of the world (sense qualities), its rational (or
ideal) aspect, and the superrational principles are all given together in
experience which combines sensuous, intellectual and mystical intui-
tion. The whole truth is only revealed to the whole man, said Kireyevsky
and Khomiakov, It is only through combining all his spiritual powers
-sense experience, rational thought, aesthetic perception, moral ex-
perience and religious contemplation-that man begins to apprehend
the world's true being and grasp the superrational truths about God. It
is precisely such integral experience that underlies the creative work of
nlany Russian thinkers-V. Soloviev, Prince S. Trubctskoy, Prince E.
Trubetskoy, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, N. Lossky, S. Frank, Kar-
savin, Losev, I. A. Ilyin, and others; in connection with it they attempt
to work out a philosophy which would be an all-embracing synthesis. A
striking instance of the spiritual path that leads to integral experience
is provided by the biography of the brothers T'rubetskoy: they both
suffered from the spiritual devastation which results from living solely
by theoretical thought based upon sensuous experience, and both found
the fullness of life and a wealth of thought when in working out their
world conception they made use of all the varieties of experience, in..
eluding such subtle forms of it as aesthetic apprehension, moral can.
sciousness and religious contemplation,
It is remarkable that even the most important of Russian positivists,
Lavrov and Mihailovsky, developed their I)hilosophy with the object
(insisted upon by Mihailovsky) of combining theore-tical truth with
truth as righteousness, thus showing their absolute confidence in the
testimony of moral experience. This explains why Russian thinkers are
opposed to the doctrine of the struggle for existence as an evolutionary
factor. Not only Mihailovsky, Kropotkin, Danilevsky, Chicherin, but
even the materialist Chernyshevsky, definitely reject such a conception
of evolution. The assertion that Russian thinkers are pre-eminently
concerned 'Nith ethics contains a certain amount of truth, for even
CHARACTERISTICS OF R.USSIAN PHILOSOPHY 405
when they are dealing with departments of philosophy remote from
ethics they do not, as a rule, lose sight of their subject's connection with
ethical problems. Father Vassili Zenkovsky, the author of History of
Russian Philosophy, the first volume of which he submitted as his M.A.
thesis at the Paris Theological Academy, says that "Ethics has a special
importance for the development of Russian philosophical thought.
Even the champions of extreme naturalism and positivism assign to
ethics an independent and indeed a dominating position: the primacy
of ethics is fully clear in Hertsen, anq still more so in Lavrov, Mihailov-
sky, Tolstoy and others. Down to our own day ethical personalism is
perhaps the most characteristic standpoint of Russian thought."
The connecting link between the subrational sense data and super-
rational principles is abstractly ideal being; it is cognized by means of
speculation, i.e., of intellectual intuilion. The speculative faculty is as
highly developed in the Russian philosophers as in the German. True,
positivism and mechanistic materialism were widely prevalent in Russia,
but a tendency to such views existed, and no doubt still exists, as in all
other countries, among scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers and other
educated people who are not philosophically minded, and they are
always in the majority. As to professional Russian philosophers, not
many of them were positivists or materialists.
The striving for integral knowledge and a keen sense of reality are
bound up in Russian philosophy with confidence in all the varieties of
experience, both sensuous and more subtle, which go deeper into the
structure of being. Russian thinkers trust intellectual intuition, moral
and aesthetic experiences which reveal the highest values, and above all
they trust mystical religious experience that establishes man's connec-
tion with God and His kingdom.
The main task of philosophy is to work out a theory about the
world as a whole, based upon all the varieties of experience. Religious
experience provides data that are most important for this purpose,
giving final completeness to our world conception and revealing the
supreme meaning of cosmic existence. A philosophy that takes this ex-
perience into consideration inevitably proves to be religious. Since the
highest and most complete stage of religious experience is that attained
by Christianity, it, is natural that a philosophy that probes into the
inmost depths of being should have a Christian character. The most
characteristic feature of the Russian philosophy is that in it a number
of thinkers devote their energies to working out a comprehensive Chris-
tian world conception'. Some of them, e.g., Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov,
are remarkable for their wide erudition; many have a distinct literary
gift; many have written a number of various works that a5e translated
406 CHAR.ACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
into English, French and German. If all this is taken into consideration,
it will be seen that the development of Russian philosophy aiming at a
Christian interpretation of the world is a fact of considerable impor-
tance, capable of noticeably affecting human culture.
I have only expounded the religious teachings of philosophers who,
like Soloviev, started with the general traditions of European philoso-
phy and worked out a Christian world conception in a style different
from that which is usually adopted in theological Academies and
among the clergy. Alongside of them one might mention valuable
works approaching the traditional style of the Russian Orthodox
Church-for instance those of Bishop Feofan Vyshinsky, Metropolitan
Antony Hrapovitsky and others. Most of those works are discussed in
Father George Florovsky's extremely informative book The Ways of
Russian Theology which I commend to my readers.
These general remarks on the peculiar nature of Russian christian
philosophy may be supplemented by pointing out the following specific
features of it. The Christian systems of the thinkers referred to are
decidedly realistic. In their teaching about sacraments, redemption,
grace, deification, the Church, Russian Orthodox philosophers are op-
posed to one-sided moralism and subj.ectivism: they put into the fore-
ground ontological combinations and changes in the personal and
cosmic life, leading to changes in the moral and mental conditions.
They maintain that concrete entities form the basis of reality and that
the world is an organic whole.
In their teaching about God and His connection with the world
Russian philosophers rely not so much upon inferences as upon the
living experience of "personal encounter with God." Striking descrip-
tions of mystical experience are to be found in Soloviev, Prince Eugene
Trubetskoy, Father P. Florensky and Father S. Bulgakov.
Many religious philosophers are chiefly concerned with cosmologi..
cal problems, and their Christianity as a whole acquires a cosmological
character. A particularly clear instance of this is afforded by Sophiology
-a doctrine highly characteristic of Russian religious philosophy. It
is combined with interest in superhuman spiritual beings. Vladimir
Soloviev was the first exponent of Sophiology; it was further developed
by Father P. Florensky, Father S. Bulgakov, Father V. Zenkovsky, but
met with decisive opposition on the part of the Moscow Synod and also
of Father G. Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky and others. Nevertheless in a
modified form, consistent with the dogmas of the Orthodox Church, it
is sure to playa significant part in the future development of religious
philosophy.
The couception of consubstantiality introduced into metaphysics
CHAIlACTERISTlCS OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY l07
from Trinitarian theology by Father Pavel Florensky is of vital im-
portance for theories about the structure of the world. This conception
existed before Christianity and outside it. Thus Plato, Aristotle and
Plotinus recognized the presence of intimate ontological connections
between all the entities in the world--eonnections that overcome the
divisions in time and space. The same idea is found in all Christian
thinkers-the Fathers of the Church and the great scholastics and also
in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and all Russian religious
thinkers. But Florensky's merit is to have deliberately introduced the
principle of consubstantiality into metaphysics on the analogy of its
theological meaning and thus given an impetus to a systematic applica-
tion of it in every possible way. Florensky himself made it the basis of
his doctrine of Christian love as the bond between personal beings that
brings about their real transfiguration. Other Russian philosophers
have made use of it in working out a theory of intuition, a theory of
values and many other problems.
The idea of sobornost developed by Khomiakov is also of great
importance. Sobornost means a combination of unity and freedom of
many persons on the basis of common love for God and for all absolute
values. It will be easily seen that the principle of sobornost is of value
not only for the life of the church but also for solving many problems in
the spirit of synthesis between individualism and universalism. Many
Russian philosophers have begun to make use of it in discussing various
questions of spiritual and social life. This principle is so valuable that
it ought to be designated by a special term. It is best to introduce for
the purpose the Russian word sobornost which already is used some-
times in English, French and German literature. The Anglican-Ortho-
dox Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius publishes a magazine called
Sobornost,
Many Russian religious philosophers are concerned with the mean-
ing of the historical process. They criticize positivist theories of progress
and point out that within earthly conditions it is impossible to realize a
perfect social order. Every new social order brings about only partial
improvements and at the same time contains new defects and possibili-
ties of abuse. The failures of history show that the purpose of historical
process is to prepare humanity for passing from history to meta-history
-to the "life of the world to come" in the Kingdom of God. The essen-
tial condition of perfection in that Kingdom is the transfiguration of
the soul and body or deification by grace.
'People who are out of sympathy with metaphysics and especially
with religion say that in the Russian history there was no period similar
to that of medieval scholasticism when people's intellectual energies
408 ' CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY
were entirely devoted to working out systems of Christian philosophy.
They think that Russian society at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century entered for the first time into the
phase of thought corresponding to the Middle Ages, and regard it
therefore as backward. Such a view leaves out of account the fact that
culture develops not along a straight upward line, but along a spiral;
the upper curves of the spiral contain processes parallel to the lower
and similar to them but more subtle, perfected by the preceding process
of development. Russian religious philosophy is not a repetition of
scholasticism; it makes use of all the achievements of science and
modern philosophy, especially of the highly developed epistemology
of our day. It may therefore be said to be a progressive achievement
capable of giving a new impetus to Western thought,
Russian Orthodox people accustomed in dealing with religious
problems to the traditional style prevalent in the old Theological
Academies will regard with distrust philosophical works which intro-
duce into religious thought many features of secular literature. They
should be reminded, however, that in our time a number of people
in all nations and at all levels of society have fallen away from the
Church and believe that a Christian world conceptionIs incompatible
with science and philosophy, In order to combat this error it is essential
that religious and philosophic literature should include works of dif..
ferent types to suit the requirements of different social circles. The
literature we have been considering is useful for arousing a sympathetic
interest in Christianity in the minds of highly cultured people who have
grown indifferent to religion under the influence of the general charac-
ter of modern civilization.
In the life of society every ideological tendency develops against
the background of another, opposite tendency with which it has to
struggle. At the present time in t ~ e U.S.S.R. all religious philosophy is
furiously attacked by the adherents of dialectical materialism. All
Soviet philosophers whose works appear in print belong to that school.
The significance of this fact for the history of Russian culture should
not, however, be exaggerated. Dialectical materialism is the only philoso-
phy allowed by the Soviet Government. A philosopher who attempted
to write a book or an article in a different line of thought could not
have his work published and moreover would be in danger of being
sent to a concentration camp. As soon as Russia becomes free of the
communist dictatorship and has freedom of thought, there will at once
appear many different schools of philosophy just as in any other free
and civilized country.
Russian philosophy contains many valuable ideas not only with
CHARACTERISTICS OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY 409
regard to religious problems, but also in the realm of epistemology,
metaphysics and ethics. Acquaintance with them will be useful for the
development of universal human culture. But the history of the philoso
phy of a whole nation is so complex a subject that justice cannot be
done to it in one single work. It is to be hoped therefore that there will
soon appear surveys of Russian philosophy ~ y writers who hold othei
views than the author of the present book. Such works will supplement
and correct one another.
INDEX OF NAMES
Hyphenated page numbers refer to the places where the doctrines of the
philosophers listed are discussed.
C. S., 26, 38. 40, 41--45, 51, 118.

S. T., 41, 42
\lexander I, 48, 51, 89S
\lexander II, 17, 29, 40. 44, 171, 201
\lexander III. 84, 1
Samuel. 296, !55
\lexeyev, N. N., 3M
\lexeyev (Askoldov), S. A., 29, 158, 160,
162, 172, 247, 319, S26, 581-585
i\lnlazov, B. N., 17!
-\mbodic, 179
Andreyevsky, I. M., 385
Angelus Silesius, 282
Annenkov, P. V., 52, 197
Anselm of Canterbury, 274
Antony (Hrapovicky), 218, 406
Antony, 85, 89
Arbeneva, N. P., 16, 18
Aristotle, 189, 293, 294. 126, 407
Arndt, Johann. II
Arsenicv, N. S., 14, 247, 298
Askoldov, see Alexeyev, S. A.
Astafiev, P., 158, 162
Athenagoras, 397
Avenarius, R., 175, 856, 571. 576, 578,
379, 380
Baader, F., 131
Babynin, D., 296,
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 177
Baer, Kar] von, 67, 72
Bakunin, L. A., 52
Bakunin, Michael A., 51, 52, 5!, 54, 55,
58. 59-60, 63, 144
Bakunin, P. A., 144-145
Barghoorn, F., 63
Baron, P., 41
Barsukov, N. P., 18
Baudouin, Charles, gS6
Bazarov, V. A. 379
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 51, 150, 151,
152, 177
Behterev, V. M., 64, !54
BeJiayev, 86
Belinsky, V. G., 41, 42, 51, 55-56, 141
Belyi (Bugaev), Audrey, 1 172, !!5-

Berdyaev, N. A., 14, 29, 41, 72, 172, 17!,
187, 192, 193, 233-250, 277, 5!8, 541,
372, 374, 404
Berezhkov, F., 296, 403
Berg. 1... S., 143,
Bergson, Henri, 161, 252, 253, 281, 870
Berkeley, George, Bishop, 827
Berman, I. A., 879
Best ujev- Riumin, C. N., 83
Block, A., 132, 172
Bludov, D. N., 45
Bobrov, E. A., 158, 162
Boehme, Jacob, 10, 11, 13, 131, 204,205,
277
Boethius, 249
Bogdanov (Malinovsky), A. A., 851, 878-
379
Bogolubov, V., 11
Boivin, 30
Boldyrev, D. 'V., 296, 408
Boldyrcv, N. V., 318
Bolshakoff, S., 41
Borodin, A. P., 150
Bossuet, J. B., 22
Botkin, V., 51, 54
Bruno, Giordano. 149, 204, 299
Bryusov, V., 172
Buchner, L., 63, 82, 859
Bugaev, N. V., 158, 161-162
Buharin. N., 351
Bulgakov, Sergius, 14, 26, 29.. 172, 175
174, 192-232, 245, 247. 294, 295
302, 512, 81!. 390, 392, 404, 405, .06
Byhovsky, B., 548, S49, ..551. 352, 554
411
412
INDEX .
355, 360, 361, 36S, 364, 365, 366,
368, 369, 374
Byron, George, %14
Caats, A., 29
Carr, E. H., 60
Cassirer, E., 280
Catherine' the Great, 11
Chaadaev, P. Y., 47-51
Chelishchev, M. A., 3tH
Cher nvshevsky, N. G., 59, 60-62, 73, 170,
200
Chicherin, B. N., 134-143, 171, 334, 404
Chishevskv (Tschizevski), D. I., 10, 72,
73, I 383-384, 385
Christiansen, Broder, 184
Cohen, 11., 280, 318
Comte, Auguste, 65, ]04, 142, 355, 378
Coue, Emile, 386
Cousin, Victor, 23
Damascius, 292
Damiani, Peter, 326
Danilevsky, N. Y., 70-72, 117,404
Dante, 337
Darwin, Charles, 61, 64, 66, 72, 329
Debolsky, N. G., 143-144, 171
Deborin, 348, 349, 350, 351, S52,
354, 356, 366, g67, 373
De Roberty, E. V., 66
Descartes, 22, 57, 139, 140, 2!l4, 826
D'Herbigny, M., 93
Diderot, 359, 360
Dietzgen, Josef, 369
Diminsky, 123
Dionysius the Areopagite, 10, 138, 235,
248, 386, 395, 396, 397, 398
Dobrolubov, N. A., 59, 62, 170, 200, 394
Dorn, N., 29
Dostoevsky, F. 17, 71,75,79,93, 119,
151, 169, 187, 200, 214, 233, 234, 243,
247, 252, 321, 325, 336, 337, 389,
340, 342, 343, 384
Drews, Arthur, 205
Duddington, N. A., 93, 251
Duff, Jarnes, 41
Dunphy, William H., 93
Du-Prel, K., 191
Durkheim, Emile, 389
Dyroff, A., 383
Eckehart, Johann, 204, 205, 285, 270,
395, 396
.. Ehrenfels, Christian von, 168
Elagin, A. A., 15
Engels, Friedrich. 59, 547, M8, 549, 5!tO.
854, 356, 359,
367, 368, 372, 373, 375, 378
Eriugena, John Scotus, 204, 205, S26
Ern, F., 10, 14, 29, 247, 318, 326-328, 403
Eulogius, Metropolitan, 231, 232
Evers, 42
Ezekiel, 185
Fedorov, N. F., 14,75-80, 142,247
Fenelon, Francois, 13, 22
Feofan (Prokopovich), 10, 46
Feofan (Vyshinsky), 406
Feuerbach, Ludwig. 55. 56, 57, 60, 65, 82,
197. 348, 366, 368
Fichtc, J. C;., 13.22,53,59, 127, 159,
189, 203, 822. 323, 371, 385, 407
r:ilipov, 'T., 118
Hlistinskv, V., 176, 177
Fi losofov, D., 337
Florensky, Pavel, 14, 26, 29, 176-191,204,
208, 210, 247, 259, 326, 344, 392, 408,
404, 405, 406, 407
Florovsky, George, 14, 29, 190, 191, 247,
391-39l>, 406
Fourier, Charles, 60, 70, 158
Francis of Assisi, 337
Frank, S. L., 14, 29, 128, 172, 173, 174,
192, 193, 227, 230, 233, 247, 266-292,
296,299,302,317,319,403,404
Freud, Sigmund, 331, 387, 389
Cabrilovich, L. E., 325
Gabry, R., 58
Gagarin, P. I., 75
Gagarin, Prince, 50
Calich, A. I., 13
Gershenson. M. 0., 45, 49, 336
Giobertl, 326, 328
(;ippius, Zinaida, 172. 340
Goethe, J. 'V., 42, 51, 56, 57
Cogol, N. V" 31, 55, 169, 240
Gogotsky, S. S., 134
Colubinsky, N. 10
Granovsky, T., 24, 51, 52, 134
Gratiaux, A.. 41
Grcdeskul, N. A" 174
Gregory VII, 154
Gregory the Divine, 397
Gregory of Nyssa, 398
Gregory Palamas, 395, 397, 399, 400
Griboyedov, A. S., 53
Grot, N. Y., 149, 160
Curvich, A. C., 331
Curvich, G. D., 141, 318, 320, 821, !221
334, .08
Guyon, I!, 22
,INDEX
Haag, Luise, 56
Haeckel, Ernest, 360, 376
Hanka, 31
Hartmann, Eduard, 158, 205
lIaydn, F. J., 150
Hegel, Georg W. F., 13, 16, 22, 23, 32,
42, 46. 51, 52, 53, 51, 56, 57, 59. 60, 61,
68. 72, 73. R2, 96. 134. 135, 136, 137,
139, 140, 141, 144, I.rj4, 159, 163.
I 19R, 205, 288, 289, 292, 317, 333,
334, 345, 346,' 34R, 3!jO, 367, 371, 372,
3i3, 3R3, 387. 407
11<'1I11ont, Jean Baptista van, 326
Hclvct ius, 11, 12
11('1 arleitus, 129, 327
lIcrder, I. G., ) 1
Hertscn, A. 1.,17, 51, 56-58,40:;
Hesson. S. I., 31H, 319, 320-322,403
Hoffmann, F.. T., 51
Hollerbach. E., 312. :\43, 344
I-hllne, David, 146, 148, 327
Hu--erl, E., 253, 292, 318, 324
lamhlichus. I
Ib.cn, Hcnrik, 311
Ilvin, I. A.. 14, 29, 32, 52. 140, 193, 233,
217, 3R7- 3R9, 403. 404
Io.if Volokolamsky. 393
Isaac the Syrian, 182. 400
Ivanov, Viachcslav. 29, 172, 335, 336-337
Izgocv, A. S., 173
.Ta< obi. I;'. 1-1., 33. 97, 298
jauri-s. Jean. 3G:l
Joadlinl of Floi e, 340
John Chrvsostom, 392, 401
John Damascene, 10, 3f)2. 397
John of Kronstadt , 383
John of Leyden, 200
John of the eros" 1J
Julian the Apostate, 337
Kant, I.. 13.49,59. 69. i4, Do. 13:;, 139,
140, 146, 1!lI, 154, 163, 164, 166.
167. ) 70, 180, 190. 192, 203, 23R, 240,
292, 298, 319, 327, 333. 334,
3(i7
Karcvev. N. I., 69, 363
Karinskv, 1\1. I., 145-149, 171,
Karpov, V., 330
Karsavin, L. P., 14. 29, 233. 247.
2!)9-314, 403, 404
Karsavina, 'r., 299
Kartashev, A. V., 92
Karkov, 1\1., 51, 118
Kavelin. K. D., 51, 68-69
Khitroveo, S. P., 89
Khomyakov, A. S.. 14, 21, 25, 26, 29-
40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 117, l18, 127,
Itll, 179, 187, 190, 239, 247, 404,
407
Kireyevsky, T. Y., 13, 14, 15-29, 31,
40,41,42,43,45, fiR, 117,127,135,247,
404
Kircvcvskv, Marie A., 29
Kistiakovskv, B. A., 173,
Kobi linsk y.'Ellis, L. L.,
Kokovtsev, V. N., 174
Kolt-ov. A., 51
Komensky, AtTIos, 170
Kondakov, N. P., 157
Ko rk unov, N. 69
Koi nilov. A. A., 50, 145
Ko-hclcv, A. I., 18, 23. 26
Kovalcvsk v, M" 174
Kovre, A.: 29
nikov, V. A., 76, 297-298
Kovlov, A. A., 1.1J8-160, 381, 382, 403
Kracvich, 53
Kropot kin, P. A., 329-3!J0. 404
Kudriavtscv-Platonov, v. D., 74,
Lagrange, Joseph Louis, 169
Laird, John, 296
Lamansky, 118
) amennais, H. de, 48
Landau, G., 334
Lang, Andrew, 46
Lange, N., 391
Lalli, G. E., 318, g25
Lapshin. I. 1., 12, 63, 166-170, 193,
315, 317
La vrov, P. L., 65,66.404,405
Leihniz. Gottfried, W.. 11, 12. 22, 74,
139, 140, 151, 158, 161,185,246.
254, 2,1:):', 2:>6. 264, 280, 382, 383
Lem n. Viani mir, 57. 348, 3t9, 352,
35;', 3.=i6, 359, 3()O. 3tH, 363, 365, 366,
369, 372. 375, 376, 380
leonardo da Vinci, 176, 177,337
Leonov, A., 372
Leout icy, K. NOJ 16, 72. 118, 234, 247
Lei mo ntov, M., 51,119.214
Leroux, P.. 54, 60, 158
P. F., 64
Lesevitr h, V. V., 378
Levitsky, S. A., 296, 297, 403
Li askovsky, V., 29
Litrrc, F.lnile, 66, 378
Lobachevsky, N. I., 316
L(H ke, John, 11, 151
Lomonosov, M.D., 42
4t4
INDEX
Lop '\ M., 129, 158, 160-161,
171, !26
Lorancey, sI
Losev, A. F., 292-295, 403, 404
Losskv, N. 0., 12. 14, 26, 29, 52, 52, 107,
140, 158, 162, 166, 180, 251-
266, 267, 295, 296, 297, !18,
319, 323, 330, sn.
g70, 371, 395, 403, 404
Lossky, V. N., 227, 231, 395-401, 406
Lukyanov, S., 81, 109, 178
Lunarharskv, A., 879
Luppol, I., # !48,
Macarius the Great, 182
Mach, Ernst, 175, 35e, 376, 378, SSO
Makarius, Bishop, 26
Makary, Rev., 17
Maklakov, V. A., 172,
Malebranche. Nicolas, 274
Marat, P. 55
Marshall, John 5., 251
Martynov, 85
Marx, Karl, 59, 197, 198, ?44, 245
J1
M7,
351, 354, !62J
Masaryk, T. G., 225
Maximus the Confessor, 10, 15, !86, S98
Mendeleyev, D. 142
Menzel, Wolfgang,
Merezhkovsky, D. S., 29, 172, 335,
341, 594
Metalnikov, s. I.,
Michelet, K. L. 16
Mihailovsky, N. K., 66-68, 404, 405
Mihalchev,
Miliukov, P. N., 45, 174
John Stuart, 65, 82, 146, 147, 148,
149, 150, 151,
Miller, Orest, 118
Minsky, N. l\f., 172,
MiroIyubov, SS7
Mitzkevitch (Mickiewicz), 119
Mochulsky, G.,
Mogila, Pyotr, 10
Moleschott, Jakob, 63, :i59
Molinos, Miguel de, I
Montague, William P., 296
Montesquieu, 11
Morgan, Lloyd, 3.65,
Mozart, W. A., 150
Muckermann, F., 94
Miiller, Max, 46
Muretov, M. D., !94
Mussorgsky, M. P., 150, 169
Nadezhdin, N. rs, 48, 51
Natorp, Paul, !18
Neander, !I
Nekrassov, 84
Nesmelov, 40!
NettIau, 60
Newman, Cardinal,
Newton, Isaac, 57
Nichola.. I, 16, 17, 45, 48, 5!, 54, 56
Nicholas II,
Nicholas of Cusa, 204, 268, 270, 274, 299
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 325, 337
Nikiforov, L. P., 87
Nikon, S93
Nil Sorsky, !9!
Nilus the Sinaite, 400
Novalia, F., 121
Novgorodtsev, P. I., 14, 29, 1!2, 172, 247,
S-'S, 334
Novikov, M. M., 551-3!2
Novikov, N. I. 11
Odoevsky, V., Prince, 16, 50
Ogaryov, N. P., 51
Ognyov, A., 296, 40!
Oken, L., 16
Origen, 13, 129
Osipov, N. E., 186,
Ossipovsky, 163
Osten-Saken,
Ostromirov, 75
Ostwald. W., 149
Duo, Rudolf, 248
Palmer, William, !5
Parnphilius, 1s
Paracelsus, 326
Parrnenides, 159
Pascal, Blaise, 22, 27, 49
Pasternak, 76
Paul I, II
Pavlov (Dosev), T., 370-571
Pavlov, I. P., 64
Pavlov, G., 15, 51
Pavlov-Silvansky, 59
Peter the Great, 10, 40, 4!, 115, 337. 39S
Peterson, N., 76
Petrashevsky, M. B., 70
Petrazhitsky, L., 554
Petrunkevitch, I. I., 174
Philaret (Metropolitan of Chernigov),

Philaret (Metropolitan of Kiev),
Philaret (Metropolitan of Moscow), 393
Philaret (hermit), 24
Philip II, 54
Philo judaeus, 10
Philopon. 292
INDEX 115
Picasso, r'ablo, 184
Pica de Mirandola, 51
Pierling, Paul, 88. 152
Pisarev, D. I., 59, 62-6!, 82. 170, !94
Pius IX, 55, 116
Plato, 20, 74, 87, 112, 119, 185, 185, 188.
189, 204, 211, 27!, 292, 294. 518,
407
Platen, Metropolitan, 74
Plehanov, G. V., M8, S60, 565, 566
Plotinus. 189, 204. 205. 275, 294, 522,
595, 596, 407
Plotkin, L. A., 65
Plutarch, 185
Pobedonostsev, K. P., S9!
Pogodin, M. P. 16, n, 42. 45
Pokrovsky, I . !54
Popov, P., 296
Pordage, 15
Povarnin, S. 1., !lIS
Pozner, !60, 561. S62, S6!J, 568, 574,

Proclus, 292, 295
Protagoras, !91
Proudhon, P.]., 56,60
Pushkin, A. S., 50, 119, 169, 584
Quenet, 48
Rachky. M., Canon, 89
Radishchev, A. N., 11-)2
Radlov, E. L., 87, 90, 145, 163, 405
Redkin, P. T.,
Rehmke, J.,
Renan, Ernest, !94
Rickert, H., 253, !71
Rimsky-Korsakov, N., 150, 169, 170
Rodin, Auguste, IS.
Rornanov, E. K., 82,89,94
Rosenberg. O. 0., 284
Rosmini, 326, !28
Rousseau, J. J., 11
Rozanov, V. V., 122, 124, 125, 172, 557,

Rubinstein, Anton, 151
R uckert, Friedrich. 70
Ruge, A., 59
Russell, Bertrand, 68
Ruysbruck, 15
Ryazanov, D. 548, 55., S75
Safarik, 51
Saint-Martin. 10. 11
saint..Simon, Claude Henri. 50, 54, 56, 60
Samarin. D. Y., 46
samaTin, Y. F., 39, 42, .5, 46,. 69, 85
Savalsky, V., 518
Savich, 64
Scheler, M., 28, S85
Schelling, Friedrich W., 15. 16, 28,
si. 48, 51, 82, 127, 155, 161. 165. 189.
277. g71, 407
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel, 19. 20
Schiller, Friedrich, 42, 51, 56
Schmidt, Wilhelm, 46
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 82, 128. 151. 158,
205,
Schubert, Franz, 51
Schuppe,
Schwarz, I. G., II
Scriabin, N., 169
Sechenov, I., 59, 68
Seraphim, Archbishop, 227
Seraphim of Sarov, g85
Sergi us of Radonezh, 101, 407
Sergius, Metropolitan, 172, 2g2
Setnitsky, N. A., 78
Setschkareff, V.,
Sezeman, V., 818, !24
Shahovskoy, D., 49
Shakespeare, W., 51,
Shestov, L., 238,
Shevyrev, N., 16, 45
Shirinskv-Shihrnatov, Platon A., 171
Shpet (Spet), G. G., 58,
Simeon the New Theologian, 400
Simplicius, 292
Skobtsova, E., 41
Skovoroda, Gregory, 10, gS4
Smetana, B., 170
Smolitsch, I., 29
Soloviev, S. M. (historian), 42, 81
Soloviev, S. M. (nephew of Vladimir S.
Soloviev), 91 '
Soloviev, Vladimir S., 14, 26, 29, 41,
71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80-1 140,
141, 148, 149. 151, 154, 155.
157, 161, 164, 171, 175, 176. 178, 18!.
187, 189, 192, 206, 21g, 2,
247, 277. 298, 302, 821, !!J8,
403, 404, 405,
406
Spektorsky, E. V., 14, 29, 247,
Spencer, Herbert, 46, 65, 67, 146, 1.7,
148, 149, 150, 151, 878
Spengler, Oswald, 70, 117
Speransky, M. M., 12-1S
Spinoza, 22, 74, 82, 176, 2!O, !56
St. Alban, 407
St. Augustine, 154. 27.
St. Basil, S97
St. Bonaventura, 274
INDEX
St. Cyril, "Apostle of the Slavs," 189, 190
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, 31
51. Methodius, 1
St. Paul, 38, 157, 272, 386
Stalin, J." 375
Srankcvich, N. V., 24, 41, 42, 51-53, 54,
59
Starvnkevich, K.,
Stasslulevich. M. M., 87, 91, 118
. Sl( hedrm, E., 124
Steiner, Rudolf.
Steklov, Y. ?\f.. 60, 62
St cp un, F. A., sts. 323-324
Stet n, \Villiam. 254
Stovunin, Marie, 342
Strakhov, .. 70, 72, 121. 342
St rcmooukhov, D., 86, 89, 93, 95, 131
Strossmavcr, Bishop of Zagreb, 84, 88
Struve, P. B.. I i2, 173, 192, 278
Suk, J., 1iO
Suvorov, S. A., 379
Sweden borg, Emanuel, 184
S\ nesi 13
Szylkai ski, V. S., 93, g8S
T'aulcr, J., 13
Tavernier. 87, 94
Teir hmuller, G., 158.
'Tcrriavtsev, 337
'Thomas Aquinas, 204, 396
'Thomas a Kern pis, 10, 13
'Tilhomirov, L., ]24-
'Tiutchev, F. J.. 116, 117, 272
1 olstoy, Leo N., 75, 76, 169, 203, 249,
325, 33], 336. 337. 339, 340, 388, 405
"'oJliilOY, Nicholas, Rev., 85, 87
Tornsrein, 376
Torqucrnada, 141
TowianC\ki, 116
Troe-lisrh, Ernst, 390
T'roir skv, fi9
T'rubctskov, E. N .. 14, 29, 84, 85, 88, 90,
91. 93, 94, 95, 129, 130, 150-157,
172.247, 403,404.406
Truberskoy, Peter, 86
T'rubctskoy. S. N., 14, 29, 86, 1.50-1!)4.
155. ) fi9. 172. 247. 326, g7L 404
D. I., see Chizhevsky
Tserrelev, D., 92
Tugan-Baranovsky, M. I., 174, 192
Tukalevsky, V., II
Turgenev, A. I., 50
Turgenev, I. S., 62, 169
Uexkiill, V. I., 92
Uvarov, S. S., 45
Valcnt inov. N., 379
Vai nava. 85
Vassilyev, A., 315
Vasvilvev, N. A., 315-317
Vcliaminov, 92
Vellansky, D. 1\[', 13
Vcncvit'inov, D., 16
Vengerov, S. A., 44
Vcrnadvkv, G. V'
J
11, 173, 330
Vcrnadskv, V. I., 332
Vi rubov, 'G. N., os. 378
Vladhlavlev, M. I., 163
\'ogL K., 63, 359
Volraii e, 10, 22
Vvedenskv, A. I., ]43, 146, 149, 163-166,
168, 171, 3I.f') , 317
Vvr-lgorskv, 18
Vysheslavtsev, B. P., 14, 29, 247,
Weininger. Otto, 338
Werder, K., 52
'V\'il1<leJband, 'V., 318
Yakove-nko, B. V., 318, 324
Yakovlcv, A., 56
Yarosh, II H
Yavorvk y, Stefan, 46
Yegorshm. 3!)!J
Ye'lr.hani nov. .\., 13
Yu rkevir h. P, n., 73-74, 127, 385
Yushkevich, P., 379
Zander, L. A., 232
Zavitnevk h, V., 30, 32,41, 187
Zenkovskv, Vassi li, 14, 29, 247, 389-391,
405, 106
Zeno of Elca,
Zernov, x.. 41
Zhukovsky, V. A., 15, 17, 19, g84
ZoubofT, P. P., 82, 93