The Icon and the Axe

The split between science and faith could be overcome by less dogmatic philosophies in both fields. He proposed a "free and scientific theosophy" which-following Boehme-would recognize as equally valid and ultimately complementary three methods of knowledge: the mystical, the intellectual, and the empirical. The split between East and West could be overcome if each recognized that it had something to learn from the other. The East believes in God but not humanity; the West believes in humanity without God. Each needs to believe in both. Secular humanism cannot survive on a philosophic base which contends in effect that "man is a hair-Jess monkey and therefore must lay down his life for his friends.58 But the Orthodox East is equally doomed with its contention that man is made in the image of God and must therefore be ruled with the knout. Russia must learn from the West, and particularly from Auguste Comte's humanistic positivism. In Comte's religion of humanity and his identification of humanity as le Grand Etre, or as a kind of feminine goddess, Solov'ev detected an idea strikingly akin to that of sophia. The Comtian idea that history moved from a theological to a metaphysical to a final "positive" stage and a rational, altruistic society seemed entirely compatible with Solov'ev's concept of God Himself moving toward self-realization in the concrete world of men. The good society is for Solov'ev, as for Comte, that of "normal" man; and the divisions in humanity are only passing and irrational holdovers from the senseless doctrinal quarrels of the past.59

In the late seventies Solov'ev began to speak out sharply against excessive chauvinism, denouncing, for instance, the proposal made by some Pan-Slavs for using chemical warfare against the Turks. His famous lecture after the assassination of Alexander II, in which he urged the new Tsar to forgive the assassins and thus usher in a new era of Christian love in Rus-

sia, was received with tears of joy by a large audience, including Dostoevsky's widow, who assured Solov'ev that her husband would have approved. As a result of this experience, Solov'ev was publicly reprimanded and temporarily prohibited from giving public lectures. He decided to resign from his teaching position and also from a post in the ministry of public education. Like Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov'ev used the period of reaction in the eighties as one of "withdrawal and return": of intellectual reassessment in order to provide new answers for Russia's problems. Like Miliukov and Plekhanov, Solov'ev acquired a new appreciation for the importance of change in the social and political sphere; but he advocated neither liberal democracy nor proletarian socialism but "free theocracy." This highly original conception, which Solov'ev sought to perfect throughout his writings and travels of the eighties and early nineties, was designed to reconcile total freedom with a recognition of the authority of God. God was to have three earthly vicars: the Tsar, the Pope, and the Prophet. The Tsar would bring into the new age the ideal of a Christian ruler, the Pope of a unified church, and the prophet would speak in the poetic language of the higher unity yet to come. Free theocracy would come about not through coercion but through man's free impulse toward "all-unity" through sophia, "to whom our ancestors with wonderful prophetic feeling built temples and altars without yet knowing who she was."60

He urged Alexander III to become "the new Charlemagne," who would unite Christendom politically; and he was blessed by the Pope and leading Western Catholic officials, many of whom were deeply impressed by his project for reunification. Solov'ev was perhaps the most profound and searching apostle of Christian unity in the nineteenth-century world. For, although he was in his later years more sympathetic with Catholicism than with Orthodoxy or Protestantism, he had (almost alone in nineteenth-century Russia) a sympathetic understanding of all three branches of Christendom. Moreover, he conceived of the problem of unification not in terms of conversion but in terms of leading all the churches to a higher form of unity that none of them had yet found. The Catholic Church was admired as the germ of a social order that transcended nationalism. The isolation and persecution of the Jews in Russia was condemned not only for humane reasons but also because the coming theocracy needed the prophetic spirit and interest in social justice that the Jews had kept alive:

Their only fault perhaps is that they remain Jews and preserve their isolationism. Then show them visible and tangible Christianity so that they should have something to adhere to. They are practical people-show them Christianity in practice. . . . The Jews are certainly not going to accept Christianity so long as it is rejected by Christians themselves. . . .61