The Icon and the Axe

Solov'ev's conception of renovation was, in many respects, even more revolutionary and Utopian than that of the Marxists. No less than the materialist Plekhanov, the idealist Solov'ev offered an absolute, monistic philosophy to the new generation. "Not only do I believe in everything supernatural," he wrote, "but strictly speaking I believe in nothing else."54 The material world was "a kind of nightmare of sleeping humanity."55 But just as Plekhanov's materialism appealed to the younger generation because it was a dynamic, historical form of materialism, so does Solov'ev's idealistic supernaturalism have a dynamic, historical cast. It is based on the

belief that all things in the world are in search of a unity that is bound to be realized in the concrete world through sophia. The sophia of his visions is the feminine principle of Jacob Boehme's theosophy as well as the "divine wisdom" of the Greek East. In seeking a kind of mystical erotic union with sophia, man puts himself in communion with the ideal "all-unity" (vseedinstvo) which pervades God's cosmos. Solov'ev does not, however, advocate a contemplative retreat from the world. On the contrary, the striving for "all-unity" impels one into the world of the concrete. God himself seeks "all-unity" through his creation, which is an intimate form of God's own self-expression. Man must seek this same unity and self-expression through art, personal relations, and all other areas of creative experience. Solov'ev's bete noire in the Russian intelligentsia is Tolstoy, whose later philosophy sought to deny man's sensual and creative nature. Like Dostoevsky, Solov'ev was haunted by the problems of division and separation; but the Tolstoyan idea that human striving was itself the cause of evil was deeply repellent. Whereas Tolstoy, the exuberant lover of family life, ended up denying the validity of sexual desire, Solov'ev, the lonely bachelor, saw in it one of the positive impulses through which the sense of division in humanity was overcome. Tolstoy's morality is shallow because it seeks to repress rather than engage the passions of men; because it is general and abstract rather than concrete and specific. Solov'ev pointedly entitled his long philosophic treatise of 1880 A Criticism of Abstract Principles. Abstraction followed from the separation from God, which had produced "The Crisis of Western Philosophy" (the title of his first major philosophic treatise of 1874).

A new integral philosophy was still possible in the East, Solov'ev felt, if Russia were willing to be "the East of Christ" rather than "the East of Xerxes." God demonstrated His own approval of the urge toward the concrete and sensual by taking on human form through Christ; and this act was only the first in the divinization of the world and the transfiguration of the cosmos. His famous lectures on God-manhood, which were delivered in the first half of 1878, affirm bluntly that "Christianity has a content of its own, and that content is solely and exclusively Christ."50 The important thing is not Christ's teachings-as Tolstoy might have said-for these, Solov'ev agrees, are all contained in the higher ethical pronouncements of other great religious teachers. The important thing about Christ was the concrete, integral fact of his life and mission in overcoming the separation between man and God. Men are drawn to Christ-and thus to the possibility of overcoming their own separation from God-not by the abstract thought that He is the word (logos) incarnate but by concrete attraction to the goodness and beauty of Christ's life. Man is attracted thus to the quality

of sophia in Christ Himself; for sophia is "the idea which God has before him as Creator and which He realizes" in his creation.57

But how is one concretely to find sophia, to help attain God's "all-unity" on earth? Solov'ev offered a variety of programs and ideas for overcoming conflict in the course of the late seventies. He began by donating the substantial amount of money that he received for his twelve lectures on God-manhood to the Red Cross on the one hand and to the fund for restoring the Santa Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople on the other. Practical steps to alleviate immediate suffering and renewed reverence for the older spiritual unity of Christendom-these were the main points in his program. In May, 1878, he joined Dostoevsky (who had attended his lectures) on a pilgrimage to visit the elders of the Optyna Pustyn. The death of his father in October, 1879, further intensified his sense of spiritual

calling.