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The Revelation of Sophia

Born in Moscow on January 28, 1853, Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov—one of the most exotic Russian converts to Catholicism—was marked from childhood by a strange and controversial spiritual experience: the mystical vision of the divine Sophia. With a personal revelation of such magnitude at the core of his thinking, he became one of those rare philosophers for whom philosophy is truly a “love-for-Wisdom” (φῐλο-σοφῐ́ᾱ).

The Sophianic axis of Solovyov’s life can be described by summarizing his three encounters with the celestial friend. The first, at the tender age of nine, was triggered by the sentimental rejection of a young girl. Shortly thereafter, saddened, Vladimir attended the Holy Liturgy. Under a visage of indescribable beauty, the celestial Sophia appeared to him for the first time. Eleven years later, a brief, unfulfilled romantic passion became the occasion for another heavenly encounter. While traveling by train to meet his cousin, Katia Romanova, Solovyov fell into a short-lived Sophianic ecstasy, sparked by a beautiful fellow passenger who awakened his overwhelming passion. That was all. Later, between 1875 and 1876, while studying in the famous British Museum library, Sophia surprised him again, revealing herself as he was engrossed in Gnostic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic texts. Feeling called by her to Egypt, Solovyov set out for the land of the pharaohs in the winter of 1875. After numerous adventures that nearly cost him his life, he reunited with his faithful divine friend at the base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Here, he had a unifying vision of the entire creation.

Alongside these three luminous, celestial visions, it is also worth mentioning that the Russian philosopher had one last mystical experience, this time demonic. Driven by nostalgia, he returned to Egypt in 1898, hoping to find peace through a new vision. Instead of Sophia, he was visited by a terrifying group of dark spirits. Until August 13, 1900—the hour of his departure to the heavenly realm of divine wisdom—Vladimir Solovyov had no further Sophianic encounters.

Living his life under the sign of a personal revelation of Sophia, Solovyov rediscovered long-forgotten dimensions of philosophy, such as its ritualistic and mystagogic foundations, as revealed in the course of his first vision during the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. There is also the spiritualized erotic charge, which transformed ‘friendship’ (φιλία) into a strong bridge that connected the lover of wisdom to the object of his love. Among all his undeniable merits, the greatest achievement of Solovyov’s Sophianism is the rediscovery of the mystical aim and soteriological purpose of philosophy.

In a ego-centric culture, where every thinker can define the object of his discipline according only to the measure of his own mind, philosophy is catastrophically eclipsed by relativism. This chronic disease can be observed by consulting Anton Dumitriu’s work, Philosophia mirabilis (1974), where the author lists no fewer than twenty (20!) highly contradictory definitions of philosophy. Reading them, one thing is clear: the persistent confusion in the minds of postmodern thinkers. And how could it be otherwise, in the absence of an unequivocal identification of the object and, especially, the purpose of philosophy?

Supported by a centuries-old tradition, Russian Christian culture reminds us, through thinkers like Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy (1862–1905), the martyr-priest Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), or the highly controversial Father Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), of the true object of philosophy: the divine Wisdom (Σοφία). Although, unlike their master, these figures did not convert to Catholicism, they were guided by the revelation received by Vladimir Solovyov, whose biblical and patristic foundations are indisputable. Indeed, the Sophianic experience of the author of War, Progress, and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ (1900) is not at all original. Pavel Florensky showed that Russian spirituality has long known Sophia-Wisdom, the first great witness to the archetype of the intelligible world being Saint Cyril (826–869), nicknamed ‘the philo-sopher.’ Like Solovyov, he had a vision of the celestial Virgin in his childhood and would later create the Novgorod model of her icon.

The next Sophianic theologian attested by Russian folk traditions is the Venerable Sergius of Radonezh (1314–1392), who highlighted the indissoluble connections between divine Wisdom and the Holy Trinity, assimilating the doctrine of the uncreated energies of Saint Gregory Palamas. Knowing such Sophianic episodes recorded in the history of Orthodox Russia, we understand that Solovyov was not an eccentric troubled by strange, surrealistic dreams, but rather the witness of an ancient tradition. His essential vocation is singular: that of a preserver and continuer of that ancient philo-sophia which, following Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, firmly believed—declaring that wisdom belongs only to the Divine—in the divine origin of Sophia.

Solovyov’s Plato

Between 1873 and 1874, Vladimir Solovyov was a student at the Theological Academy of the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius. During this time, he attended with great interest the speculative theology courses of Professor Viktor Kudriavtsev, a passionate editor and exegete of Plato’s dialogues. This period marked Solovyov’s first profound encounter with the philosophy of the wise Athenian. Many years later, in 1897, he embarked on translating Plato’s works in their entirety, at the invitation of the editor Soldatenkov. Although he did not have enough time to complete such an extensive project, the Moscow philosopher maintained a consistent interest in Plato’s thought.

Despite this, Solovyov’s name is absent from the works of scholars of classical Greek philosophy. This omission is due to the much-discussed ‘conflict of interpretations’ (Paul Ricoeur). While modern scholars apply a demythologizing, positivist, and textualist approach to Plato’s dialogues, Solovyov’s interpretation is extra-textual, strongly influenced by his Christian existential mysticism. For him, Socrate’s disciple was a real and ideal partner in speculative dialogue, a primary source for his own Philo-Sophia, which creatively integrated major concepts of Platonic origin. To illustrate this, I will now present Solovyov’s speculations on the ‘World Soul,’ observing how the Russian philosopher reinterprets fundamental themes of Platonism.

The work in which Solovyov’s conception of the World Soul is fully expounded is Russia and the Universal Church (1889). This essay is a small treatise on Universalist ecclesiology that contains the theoretical foundations for the long-dreamed-of Catholic (i.e., Universal) Church, anchored in the Judeo-Christian cosmology described in the book of Genesis from the Old Testament. In the first chapters, Solovyov develops his doctrine of Divine Wisdom, defined as the “absolute unity of the whole,” a manifestation of the Holy Trinity, in which the three divine Persons are consubstantial.

The first crucial aspect of Solovyov’s metaphysical speculations is the inclusion of the entire creation within Divine Wisdom. As the supreme and absolute Artist, God conceives of creatures in His incomprehensible eternity, beyond the limited minds of angels and humans. The potential, virtual state of Divine Wisdom, external to the Trinity, is alterity, “undetermined and anarchic plurality, chaos,” the indeterminate abyss (ṯōhū wāḇōhū—Hebrew: תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ) in Genesis 1:2 over which the Holy Spirit hovered. In a manner reminiscent of the doctrine of “divine contraction” (tsimtsum—Hebrew: צמצום) theorized by the Ashkenazi Kabbalistic mystic Isaac Luria (1534–1572), Solovyov asserts the necessity of a space external to divinity, an abyss in which God can create the Cosmos and man. Thus, through the act of creation, He proves “that everything beneficial truly belongs to Him, that He has always possessed within Himself an infinite treasure, composed of all real forces, all true ideas, all graces, and all gifts.”

As the antithesis of Sophia, the World Soul is defined as “a creature, the first of all creatures, the materia prima and the true substratum of our created world.” In other words, the World Soul is the universal nature (φύσις) of creation. While Wisdom exists in actuality within God, the soul exists within it as pure potentiality, not existing by itself. Another defining characteristic of the World Soul is its equivocal nature: it “can desire to exist for itself, outside of God, to place itself on the false side of chaotic and disorganized existence, but it can also perish before God, freely unite with the Divine Word, return all creation to perfect unity, and identify with eternal Wisdom.” Developing Plato’s obscure theory from the dialogue Laws in his own way, the Russian philosopher shows that the World Soul can be good or evil, depending on its relationship with Divine Wisdom—the active principle of creation.

Solovyov subtly distinguishes three stages of the World Soul’s relationship with Divinity. The first is its original pre-existent ‘germinal’ status in God the Father, where it existed before the beginning of creation as pure potentiality. This stage represents, in relation to the current one, the past of the soul—not in a historical, temporal sense, but in a strictly ontological one. The second stage, discernible in the present, is the separation from God through the energy of the desire to transcend the disharmonious life specific to pre-cosmic chaos. Finally, the third and final stage of the World Soul is characterized by the aspiration to reunite with Divinity, an ideal of a future whose proximity is unknown.

After successively describing Divine Wisdom and the World Soul, Solovyov addresses the relationship between these two metaphysical realities, emphasizing their qualitative distinction: the first is uncreated, the second is created. They are not identical; “the World Soul is only the vehicle, the medium, and the substratum of her (i.e., Wisdom’s) realization.” Sophia approaches the soul through the action of the Word, achieving its most intimate communion with the created being—under the discreet action of the Holy Spirit—through the Incarnation of Christ. Using an image worthy of a Raphael painting, the father of Sophianism completes his psycho-cosmogonic speculations:

“Divine Wisdom is not the soul, but the guardian angel of the world, covering all creatures with its wings, to gradually raise them to their true being, just as a bird incubates its eggs. It is the substance of the Holy Spirit, borne over the dark waters of the created world.”

Using the symbolic language of the Holy Scripture, Solovyov identifies the soul with the element “earth,” aspiring to merge with “heaven”—Divine Sophia, while simultaneously being threatened by the destructive action of the anti-divine principle. This evil principle, unable to directly oppose Wisdom and the supreme Creator, attacks the inferior ‘antitype’—the World Soul. This soul is the battlefield between the Divine Logos and the fallen angel, Satan, the medium where the principles governing the world of disembodied spirits manifest. When the soul manages to resist demonic attacks and, in complete humility, renounces all resistance to the Divine Word, it becomes humus, fit to unite with Wisdom to establish the Kingdom of Heaven (the celestial Jerusalem). “This state of humility,” says Solovyov, “this absolute predisposition of terrestrial Nature is the objective result of Man’s creation (humus—humilis—homo); the sensitive soul of the physical world becomes the rational soul of humanity.”

After briefly describing Solovyov’s pan-psychism, I can establish the similarities between his vision and Plato’s conception of the same subject. First of all, as with Plato—who in Timaeus and Laws postulates the identity between the World Soul and physis (φύσις)—for Solovyov, the soul is the very nature of Creation. Along with Platonic panpsychism, Solovyov’s sophianism also absorbs the ponerology (= doctrine of evil) associated with this theme, theorizing the ambivalence of the soul, which can be good when it submits to the Logos, or evil when it is conquered and dominated by the demonic principle. Finally, the last specific note of the master’s conception from the Academy, integrated into Vladimir Solovyov’s own Philo-Sophia, is subsumed under the Platonic principle of cosmo-anthropological unity or the analogy/correspondence between the macro-anthropos (i.e., macro-cosmos) and the micro-cosmos (i.e., particular man).

In Solovyov’s thought, we find the natural unity of the World, of the Universal Man, and of the Particular Man. The axis that connects the three hierarchical levels of Creation is the soul, understood here not in its personalist dimension, but in its physicalist dimension.

Similar to the doctrines professed by Philo, Saint Denys the Areopagite, Origen, and Saints Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, Solovyov’s Platonism, though faithful to the texts, is critical and reflective, building itself through an interpretation of Plato’s dialogues indebted to Judeo-Christian theology and mysticism. Meditating on Judaism, Platonism, and Christianity, Vladimir Solovyov rediscovered the main lines of a profound Christian exegesis of the divine Athenian’s work.

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The featured image is a portrait of philosopher Vladimir Solovyovin (1885) by Ivan Kramskoi, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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