Why Did Philosopher Vladimir Solovyov Believe that Russia Will Unite All Humanity?
Why Did Philosopher Vladimir Solovyov Believe that Russia Will Unite All Humanity?
By Boris Mezhuev
An introduction of sorts to Boris Mezhuev’s following meditations on Vladimir Solovyov (1853 – 1900) can be found in our separately-published “A Conservative Russia? This Means War!” by Paul Grenier. Here we will add only a few quick points.
First, in the United States, a lengthy article on such a topic would likely appear only in a specialized philosophical or theological journal. In Russia, it has just appeared in Lenta.ru, which, to our knowledge, is the largest mass-audience internet magazine in the entire nation. This suggests, among other things, that Russians today are deeply interested in understanding their own ideational heritage and are in search of unifying ideas. The following, in other words, is also of some considerable interest from the perspective of philosophical anthropology and sociology.
Second, Vladimir Solovyov can arguably be viewed as the prophet of what might have become a non-secularized ‘European Union.’ Significantly, one of the ideological forefathers of today’s actual European Union, a Russian émigré who simplified his name to Alexandre Kojève, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the topic of Solovyov’s religious philosophy. Despite this study, Kojève interpreted religion in a Marxist vein and in a spirit of Feuerbachian humanism. Both Solovyov and Kojève were deeply influenced by Hegel. Both sought a unified humanity. Unlike Solovyov, Kojève had no use for metaphysics — or Christ.
Boris Mezhuev is professor of the history of philosophy in the department of philosophy at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU) and a long-standing friend and colleague of the Simone Weil Center. We are extremely grateful to him for permission to translate and publish this important philosophical conversation which was first published by Lenta.ru on Sept. 11, 2023. – The Editors
Philosopher and poet, zealous Slavophile, supporter of the merger of the Orthodox and Catholic churches and the unification of all humanity, while at the same time an opponent of pacifism and cosmopolitanism -- all this can be found in Vladimir Solovyov. Throughout almost his entire life, he remained for his contemporaries the number one thinker in Russia. In the 19th century, he predicted the coming unification of Europe, the rising power of China, and even the confrontation between Western countries and the Islamic world. In many ways his philosophy has turned out to be prophetic: he foresaw such contemporary realities as the emergence of new religious movements and of artificial intelligence. Vladimir Solovyov’s so-called philosophy of unity is based on the conviction that the Good is found in integrity, whereas evil lies in fragmentation. He foresaw a future of humanity in which all Christians were unified, and this unity would bring an end to war. The key role in this unification was to be played by Russia and by the Russian people as the most integral bearer of the principle of oneness.
Lenta.ru, as part of its “History of Russian Thought” project, spoke recently with Boris Mezhuev, Ph.D., associate professor at the department of history of Russian philosophy at Moscow State University and learned from him how Vladimir Solovyov explained the contradictions between the West and the East and what future he saw for the Russian people.
Lenta.ru: What is the importance of Vladimir Solovyov for Russian philosophy and why is he relevant today?
Boris Mezhuev: Solovyov is the creator of the first Russian philosophical school. One might even say, of the only major philosophical school in Russia.
Russia in general is not rich in philosophical schools; we have individual great thinkers, but we have produced only three schools (not counting Marxism), and two of them derive from Vladimir Solovyov.
Lenta.ru: What schools are we talking about?
Boris Mezhuev: The first is the philosophical school of total-unity. Vladimir Solovyov served as its founder and its continuing source of inspiration. The second is the neo-Leibnizian school, for which he was an important catalyst, in as much as one of the major representatives of this school is Lev Lopatin, a student and younger friend of Vladimir Solovyov. And then there is the third school, existentialism, to which Solovyov had no direct connection, but which, in the Russian context, came together as a result of efforts to break free from Solovyov’s influence.
If in the Russian press of the late 19th century someone wrote the words “a philosopher” without specifying which one -- then more often than not they were referring to Vladimir Solovyov. He was the philosopher per se (in its purest form – Lat.) of his time.
Just as Alexander Pushkin is Russia’s poet with a capital P, Russia’s philosopher with a capital letter is Vladimir Solovyov. What is more, he had a very vivid literary style, the ability to express thoughts with great clarity. In Russian philosophy there is literally no one comparable to him in this regard. Practically no one else was capable of expressing themselves in Russian so clearly, simply and intelligently about complex matters; even though there were other good philosophical writers (which is not the same thing as being good philosophers), they were writing for a more professional, academic audience.
A third point worth emphasizing is the social significance of Vladimir Solovyov. He wrote both about foreign policy and about purely internal Russian matters. Solovyov tried to exemplify, in his own person, a particular version of Christian liberalism, though his was not liberalism in the modern sense of the word.
From the point of view of today's liberalism, and indeed the liberalism of his own time, Vladimir Solovyov is undoubtedly a conservative; in a sense, even a reactionary.
His was a liberalism in the broadest sense, because he truly fought for freedom of conscience, for freedom of religion and speech, and for the rights that belong to the human person. He opposed the death penalty and was against overt and gross forms of inequality.
His philosophy attempted to combine Christianity and public service. We cannot find another figure who so combined a liberal social temperament – again, in the broadest sense of the word ‘liberal’ -- with Christian faith.
All of this makes him the number one philosopher in Russia.
I cannot think of a single Russian philosophical tradition (other than Marxism) which was not impacted by Solovyov. If Pushkin infected Russia with love for the beauty of poetry, it was Solovyov who infected Russia with love of philosophy.
Vladimir Solovyov brought together Russia and philosophy and gave them a sense of kinship with one another. Before Alexander Pushkin there had been Russian poets, but is was under Pushkin’s influence that poetry became Russian. Likewise, philosophy in Russia had existed before Vladimir Solovyov, but it was thanks to Solovyov that philosophy found a home here. It is impossible to philosophize in Russia, and in the Russian language, and to ignore Solovyov.
Everything here that is in any way marked by the philosophical eros is related to Vladimir Solovyov and uses his ideas as its starting point. Everyone who considers Solovyov uninteresting somehow either ends up outside of Russia -- or outside of philosophy.
Lenta.ru: Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophical concept was based on the idea that humanity shares a common goal of development. What did he view as that goal?
Boris Mezhuev: He called this goal “Godmanhood,” by which he meant the unification of humanity with God. The philosopher’s thought was that humanity is in an undesirable state, which is caused by a certain event that happened in the distant past, even before original sin. For him it was associated with the separation of the essence of Sophia (in other words, in the present context, the Soul of the world) from God.
“… the Universe has moved away from the Creator, and it must be returned to its proper state. For this to happen, humanity needs to make certain efforts of its own …
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What he is saying is that the Universe has moved away from the Creator, and it must be returned to its proper state. For this to happen, humanity needs to make certain efforts of its own, analogous to how God undertook efforts during the course of “cosmic evolution” leading to the emergence of life on Earth and, eventually, to the emergence of reason.
This evolution was guided by the divine Logos but then, starting from a certain moment, everything changed, and humanity received the opportunity to determine its destiny independently.
Lenta.ru: Under what conditions can this unification of humanity with God occur?
Boris Mezhuev: One of the preconditions for this is a prior synthesis and unification – note the important idea of an integral whole -- which idea so closely relates Vladimir Solovyov to the romantic tradition of German philosophy.
To achieve unification with God, humanity itself must become united. And for this to occur, first Christians themselves must unite, that is to say, Christianity must become as one, because what we presently have in the form of isolated and fragmented Christian (for Solovyov primarily the Catholic and Orthodox) churches is a wrongful state of Christianity.
What kind of unification of all humanity can one even talk about if Christians themselves (and Vladimir Solovyov considered Christianity to be the main principle of this unification) are in a divided state?
The Schism in Christianity
Therefore, he saw the unification of churches as a necessary condition for the coming synthesis. But this is only the first step.
Additionally, he also considered it necessary to unite Christianity and Judaism. The Jews, as a people, having accepted Christ, should, according to Solovyov, also be included in the future association which he would later call “a free theocracy.”
Lenta.ru: So, the unification of humanity, for Solovyov, is the same thing as the unification of the churches?
Boris Mezhuev: No, in addition to unifying the churches, there must also occur a unification of the entire society, in the institutional sense, with the church.
There should not be what is called “civil society” in the sense of an assemblage of private interests with the state as the highest principle. That is, it is precisely the church that should become the principle of unification in society -- that is the whole point of theocracy.
The church should, as it were, control all of society as a whole, and yet it must do so freely, and not, as was the case in the old theocracies, through the use of church violence -- through violence that was accepted as a matter of principle.
Society itself must, as it were, become ‘enchurched,’ it must become a church. This idea, by the way, was later expressed by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, and this clearly is an idea that Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovyov shared with one another.
Lenta.ru: What did Vladimir Solovyov expect from such a union?
Boris Mezhuev: Unification according to such principles would determine the direction not only of historical, but also of cosmic evolution.
These ideas belong not only to Solovyov. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, there is a movement called “Teilhardism.” Its supporters were close to the idea that cosmic evolution was leading humanity to cosmic unification.
But Vladimir Solovyov expressed this idea very clearly and on a large scale in the Russian-speaking world. To be sure, in the 80s of the 19th century, the idea that the church should be something more than a place where people gather to pray and receive the sacraments was quite popular. Vladimir Solovyov believed that the church is much more than an institution: it was the principle of organization of the entire universe.
It was on this basis that the philosopher developed the idea that the church itself was the ideal solution to social issues and contradictions.
Many serious people both in Russia and in Europe were extremely worried at that time about the class struggle, the clash between the propertied classes and the propertyless workers. They could not see a way out: how was one to avoid class conflict while at the same time maintaining the dynamics of societal development?
“ … following Fyodor Dostoevsky, [Solovyov] expressed the idea that … a solution can be found in the transformation of the state into a church …
________
And so, Vladimir Solovyov, following Fyodor Dostoevsky, expressed the idea that such a solution can be found in the transformation of the state into a church -- into a “free theocracy” within which all classes will unite and find their purpose, and the relations between classes instead of being antagonistic will become fraternal.
Lenta.ru: But is it the church as such that is supposed to take the first step towards such a unification?
Boris Mezhuev: Yes, but for this something needs to change, all churches must abandon what divides them and abandon those principles that deprive them of the opportunity to feel fraternal unity.
This is where Vladimir Solovyov began a serious polemic with Orthodox fundamentalists and nationalists, those who believed that Orthodoxy has a monopoly on the highest principle, and that all other churches (and primarily the Catholic one) are dogmatically flawed.
The main idea of Vladimir Solovyov is very Christian in its essence: a perception of Christianity as a certain principle that has not yet been realized in history, but which, if realized correctly, would change the whole world and all of humanity.
And this was more important to him than the interests of the Slavs or the interests of Russia, although he directly connected these interests with the implementation of this highest idea.
Lenta.ru: Did the Russian people have some special role to play in the realization of this Christian principle?
Boris Mezhuev: Indeed, they did. For most of his life, especially in the early period of his work, when he was an ardent Slavophile and supporter of not just the Russian, but also the Slavic idea; and even continuing into the second period, when he associated this Slavic idea with the unification of churches, he continued to believe in the mission of the Russian people to realize the idea of a free theocracy.
For Vladimir Solovyov, the Russian people are the people of the Tsar; they are a monarchical people. And this is an important moment for him, because it is the Russian Tsar, from his point of view, who is the legal successor of the Byzantine Emperor, and the Byzantine Emperor is the true Emperor, unlike the German Emperor.
Therefore, the idea of the Third Rome in principle was not alien to Vladimir Solovyov.
The Concept of “Moscow - the Third Rome”
Another important point is that the Russian people in the 18th-19th centuries were living on the same territory together with the Jewish and Polish peoples. Solovyov interpreted the Russian idea as requiring a reconciliation with Catholicism and Judaism within the Russian Empire, and a reconciliation with both of these peoples and the ideas that stand behind them.
It was for this reason that Russia could become the prototype for theocracy, even without annexing other parts of Europe, although, apparently, Vladimir Solovyov did hope that Russia would become a world empire or at any rate an all-European empire.
Lenta.ru: It is known that over time his views on the concept of universal unification began to undergo a transformation. What caused this?
Boris Mezhuev: Towards the end of his life, he began to reconsider his views on the role of Russia, since he considered freedom of conscience one of the cornerstones of his theocracy. But in the Russian Empire of his day no such freedom existed, and Orthodoxy remained an obligatory religion for those born into Orthodoxy. The church itself was actually an institution within the public administration system. It was forbidden to convert from Orthodoxy to other confessions, and there also existed the forced conversion of non-Orthodox peoples, especially Uniates, to Orthodoxy -- a practice that bothered Solovyov enormously.
Uniatism and the confrontation with Orthodoxy
It was his strong support for the Uniates that more than anything else distanced Vladimir Solovyov from the official Russian state, even though, right up to the end, he never abandoned his support for the idea of autocracy.
It was autocracy in its ideal form that he supported -- an autocracy of conscience, one where the autocrat is guided by an enlightened (or ‘higher’) Christian consciousness and where his power to rule is limited by the power of a high priest independent of him -- and Solovyov considered that ‘high priest’ to be the Pope.
Lenta.ru: To what extent did his contemporaries accept Vladimir Solovyov and his ideas?
Boris Mezhuev: Solovyov was often difficult for them to accept. First of all, because Russian society was deeply divided. The liberals fought with the conservatives; the Westernernizers fought with supporters of Russian nationalism.
Vladimir Solovyov opposed a Russian constitution and was deeply indifferent to the question of popular representation, and yet he was, without any doubt, an opponent of Russian nationalism and a supporter of freedom of conscience.
Therefore, toward the end of his life, he gravitated toward the liberals, but he never became one of them; moreover, there were many things about the liberals that not just irritated but, I believe, alarmed him. Meanwhile, different segments of society were doing their best to pull the philosopher over to their side.
It is no exaggeration to consider Vladimir Solovyov a genius, and as is usual with persons of that stature, the people around them are thinking about how to mobilize the brilliant person to promote their own pet cause. Matters of philosophical depth, subtleties – all that ends up being of little concern to anyone.
Most of society looked at Vladimir Solovyov through the prism of who he was aligned with at any given moment: the liberals or the conservatives. Again, they were mostly indifferent to his philosophical concerns.
It was only in the twentieth century that he acquired a circle of followers who were excited precisely by his philosophical ideas.
During Vladimir Solovyov’s life, however, what mostly interested the press was how closely he “fell in with the Jesuits, [or] with the Jews,” or, conversely, how radically he broke with them. Vladimir Solovyov, for his part, tried to make clear that he did not belong to any party. In liberal magazines he published articles justifying the autocratic Byzantine idea; in conservative magazines he defended freedom of conscience and thereby quite clearly demonstrated that he was “a warrior for neither camp.[1]”
Lenta.ru: What kind of Russia did Solovyov, as a philosopher, want to see?
Boris Mezhuev: Vladimir Solovyov was a statist and certainly championed the external greatness of the Russian empire.
But this external greatness could only be ensured by changes within Russia itself. He saw the first important change in the abolition of serfdom, the second was to be the abolition of “spiritual slavery” – treating membership in the Orthodox Church as a matter of loyalty to the state. Vladimir Solovyov considered the latter unworthy of Christianity and, in general, considered this position the main sin of Russia, a sin which, moreover, prevented it from realizing in practice that unifying mission which he termed the Russian Idea.
At the end of his life, he himself began to gravitate toward Uniatism. In 1896, it appears that he accepted the sacraments in a Uniate community, but it was quite a strange community -- there were only a few members, probably no more than ten. These were Russian Catholics of the Byzantine rite, and the community was headed by a former Orthodox priest, Father Nikolai Tolstoy -- a man, judging by his later texts, of rather right-wing convictions.
The Russian Catholics who belonged to this community advocated the preservation of Orthodox rituals and dogmas, but at the same time they advocated the acceptance of the Pope as the head of the church. Vladimir Solovyov considered this community as the embodiment, in compressed form, of the great Slavic idea of unifying the Christian churches through the national unification of all the Slavs.
Lenta.ru: Is this why Vladimir Solovyov paid so much attention to the Polish question?
Boris Mezhuev: Yes, for him, Poland as part of the Russian Empire should have become a bridge between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and was key to the unification of the Slavs. Solovyov found a fateful meaning in the annexation of Poland under Catherine II. However, he opposed the policy of Russification in Polish lands, believing it necessary to find common ground with Polish society and to achieve a theocratic unity with Poland within Russia.
The Polish question in the Russian Empire
If the Russian Empire were to declare a union with the Vatican, he believed, then Polish nationalism would lose its meaning, and the best representatives of Poland would support the Russian monarchy.
Actually, it was exactly the same with the Jews -- they too, he felt, are called upon to become an organic component of the world theocracy, because the latter must be led by a tri-partite leadership (trinities in general are one of the main paradigms of his philosophy): the high priest, the king and the prophet.
A theocracy, in addition to an emperor (who is the secular head) and a high priest (the spiritual head), must also include a certain principle of a third kind: what Vladimir Solovyov called the “prophet.”
As was the case in the Old Testament theocracy, first were chosen the high priests from the tribe of Levi, then the king -- first Saul, then David -- and at the same time, in addition to the kings and high priests, there were also some who were not included in either the secular or the spiritual hierarchy – these were the prophets.
It is evident that Vladimir Solovyov believed that the prophetic principle had been and should be associated with Jews. I think, and for this same reason, that he was not concerned about the fact that Jewish capital to a great extent owned the press in European countries.
The prophetic principle, in his view, was the representative of society. That the leaders of society would be people of Jewish nationality did not concern him -- it was like a natural compensation for the exclusion of Jews from medieval theocracy, a circumstance which predetermined its self-destruction.
Prophets are people who can see the future, who understand it and speak on its behalf. They lead humanity in the right direction. They don’t need political power, but they must have freedom of expression.
He believed, furthermore, that this was the mission of the Jewish people: from them come the prophets, and through them God, as it were, continues to speak to humanity. This is also why Vladimir Solovyov fought for the abolition of the Pale of Settlement and for the inclusion of Jews in the social life of the empire.
Lenta.ru: So are you saying that he saw Russia as a kind of bridge between the Western world of Catholicism and the Eastern world of Judaism?
In a certain sense, yes. And yet Russia’s role is broader than that. For him, the main task of Russian statehood is world statehood, because the Russian Tsar is a true Roman emperor. And the rest of the tsars need to understand that their own legitimacy is not very great compared to that of the Russian tsar.
Of course, Vladimir Solovyov did not think that Russia would conquer the whole world. But he did consider it possible to unite other peoples around Russia to form a kind of European Union based on Christianity and monarchical values, and headed by the Russian Tsar.
But toward the end of his life he came to the conclusion that in order to be the leader of this unification process, the Russian Empire must turn to the east so as to participate in the Europeanization of China. And if Russia were to win a victory over China, it must become a truly Christian state.
If we prove able to rise to this task, then Russia will fulfill its mission; if not, then Russia as a project will turn out to be a great historical failure. Here the philosopher largely followed the ideas of his father, the famous historian Sergei Solovyov, who believed that Russia’s mission was to defeat the Ottoman Empire, to defeat the East, and to save the West from the East (because the West itself was incapable of this).
Vladimir Solovyov no longer considered the Ottomans a problem; he saw China as the main object of our cultural and political influence.
Lenta.ru: Is that why he wrote so much about the “danger from the East” and the “Yellow Peril”?
Boris Mezhuev: Vladimir Solovyov believed that the war between East and West was the meaning of European history, and therefore of history in general, because he was a Eurocentrist and for him world history was the history of Europe.
He considered the Trojan War the first war between East and West, with the Trojans representing the East, and the Achaeans the West.
The war between China and Europe should become the final war between East and West, a kind of final Armageddon.
In this sense, Vladimir Solovyov truly managed to discern something in our 21st century, in which the confrontation between China and the collective West has become a matter of utmost importance. At the same time, he was surprisingly blind to the historical trends that created the 20th century as it actually unfolded.
The main question for him was in what condition Europe would approach this war, and whether it could defeat China.
Vladimir Solovyov believed that Europe’s divisions and fragmentation, and lack of firm spiritual beliefs, would lead to its eventual defeat.
To be sure, he was also sure that eventually – albeit only after its historical defeat in this same Armageddon -- Europe would finally unite and still win, but the Europe that would win would no longer be the one on which he had pinned his hopes. It will be a non-Christian Europe, heavily influenced by secular values and ruled by a secret elite consisting of members of Masonic lodges.
… when we read about this future European Community foreseen by Solovyov, what we find is something painfully reminiscent of the current European Union.
________________
Again, when we read about this future European Community foreseen by Solovyov, what we find is something painfully reminiscent of the current European Union. And, according to Solovyov’s prophecies, the victory of these secular forces will lead to the appearance of the Antichrist in the heart of this false Europe.
Lenta.ru: Is this the exhaustion of the historical potential of the West that Vladimir Solovyov wrote about?
Boris Mezhuev: Yes, the exhaustion of Europe and of the West in general. Solovyev believed that Europe had failed to find the principle of unification and that it was being torn apart by national interests. In Europe, the principle of unity had ceded place to the principle of divisive heterogeneity (including national and religious).
And this fragmentation, which is a fragmentation not only of nations but also of social classes, would lead to Europe’s defeat in its clash with China and bring about some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe which would ultimately give rise to the anti-Europe – Europe without a Christian foundation.
If you will, this vison of Vladimir Solovyov, pointed to a postmodern Europe that is interested in Eastern occult practices and spiritual searchings of a quasi-Buddhist sort.
Vladimir Solovyov was very leery of the theosophy already fashionable in his time (mish-moshes of varied spiritual practices that didn’t rise to the level of a religion), with the old Rosicrucian ideas no longer being applied to Egypt, but now to India and Tibet.
And here again he has turned out to be almost a prophet: in today’s West, something similar exists in the New Age movements. Here we have neither Christianity nor materialism but something vague that includes ideas about alternative universes, the afterlife of souls, and magical practices that allow one to influence reality.
Lenta.ru: At the same time, Vladimir Solovyov noted that Western civilization also had its own project regarding how to unite humanity, and yet that project failed. What did the philosopher see as the reason for that failure?
Boris Mezhuev: Precisely the victory of the principle of plurality over the principle of unity. The principle of self-expression of the parts, individualism, defeated the syncretic principle.
There was no specific integrating mechanism within the West that would allow Europe to be united. He found this principle of unity in Russia.
Lenta.ru: However, he clearly separated this idea of a “unified humanity” from cosmopolitanism. What did he see as the main difference between them?
Boris Mezhuev: If by cosmopolitanism is meant indifference to one’s fatherland, then Vladimir Solovyov was of course in no way a cosmopolitan. He opposed nationalism, but he also opposed renouncing one’s nation and nationality.
The nation had a familistic meaning for him, and he considered it right for a person to take care first of all of his compatriots, his fellow citizens.
Lenta.ru: Why did Solovyov criticize nationalism?
Boris Mezhuev: Precisely because nationalism leads to the particular prevailing over the general in the sense of the whole.
Nationalism for him is an example of the principle of fragmentation, the process whereby a part, instead of correlating with the whole, places itself above and in opposition to it.
Lenta.ru: How then, according to his conception, will the Russian people be able to preserve their integrity, uniqueness and national distinctness, if nationalism as a phenomenon is viewed as harmful?
Boris Mezhuev: Well, it all depends on how you understand the meaning of national distinctiveness.
From Solovyov’s point of view, the true identity of the Russian people lies in self-denial in the name of the whole. We renounced paganism for the sake of Christianity. Similarly, we must also renounce a certain sense of national identity in the name of free theocracy. It is the latter that is our true identity. And here once again Vladimir Solovyov turned out to be prophetic.
Not that long after Solovyov’s passing away the Russian people again abandoned an earlier sense of their national identity in the name of a communist utopia.
Again, this was not at all what Vladimir Solovyov was calling for, but he did correctly intuit a certain national tendency. However, we cannot rule out that the communist period was the swan song of Russian universalism. Today I don’t see any special signs of it.
Lenta.ru: The idea of the need for Christian reconciliation is a consistent theme of Solovyov’s philosophy, and yet he cannot be termed a pacifist. We know that he believed that wars could be “necessary and useful.” What is the difference between Solovyov’s concept of Christian reconciliation and pacifism?
Boris Mezhuev: There was nothing at all of pacifism in Vladimir Solovyov. In 1895, he wrote the article “The Meaning of War,” which had a mostly negative impact on his reputation.
In it he wrote that war is the path to peace and the path to creating an empire, which alone can ensure lasting peace.
Vladimir Solovyov considered that the creation of this empire would be possible only by means of the victory of European Christianity over China.
The publication of the article caused a scandal, including in circles close to the philosopher. At that time, the ideas of Leo Tolstoy were very popular in liberal society, and people sincerely embraced the idea that all wars contradict the teachings of the Gospel; they believed that war is always evil by its very nature. But Vladimir Solovyov, of course, did not agree with this.
In 1898, he wrote the article “Nemesis,” dedicated to the Spanish-American War.
In it, he further strengthens his “justification of war” theme and argues that war can be morally cleansing, that it can lead to love and respect for one’s enemies and a search for mutual understanding.
This theme continues in Solovyov’s last work, “Three Conversations: War, Progress and The End of History,” and in the first of these conversations, pacifism is categorically condemned. In the unexpected popularity of pacifism Solovyov saw a harbinger of the philosophy of the Antichrist.
Lenta.ru: Why did Vladimir Solovyov believe that those who oppose all war and see war as an absolute evil ultimately achieve the opposite results?
Boris Mezhuev: Vladimir Solovyov believed that war is the path to the emergence of a unitary world governance; without war it would be impossible to get there. Of course, he was a supporter of peace, but for him, true peace was possible only on the condition that there was a single planetary state with a single emperor. He gleaned these ideas from Dante Alighieri's De Monarchia (On Monarchy).
From Solovyov’s perspective, those who oppose this world empire are catapulting us towards a catastrophe and delaying historical tasks.
Lenta.ru: How did Vladimir Solovyov justify his position that participation in war does not contradict Christian thought?
Boris Mezhuev: Leo Tolstoy made this task much easier because he denied the legitimacy of all wars, including defensive ones, and it was on the basis of this radicalization of the Christian idea of non-resistance to evil through violence that Tolstoy built his whole teaching.
In this respect Tolstoy, for Solovyov, was an easy opponent. By arguing with Tolstoy, he seemed to be defending the legitimacy of defensive war.
However, the hidden pathos of the great novelist was his condemnation of warfare when viewed as an ordinary profession, in other words, Tolstoy was condemning colonial wars.
But if one looks deeper, one is forced to admit that Vladimir Solovyov professed the perspective of what we now call “the white man’s burden.”
European culture, in his opinion, even when it expanded through military force, did something to ennoble the morals and social mores of the native population.
Today, of course, we would denounce this as having a colonialist consciousness. But he was not just a man of his time, he was a “Russian Victorian,” or, more precisely, a slightly late-born liberal of the 1840s -- in the spirit of his father.
He cited the example of the Indian ritual of burning widows, which was abolished by the British colonial authorities after the conquest of India. From this he concluded that even colonial wars are permissible, because they bring peoples who carry out barbarian practices under the influence of European civilization.
Lenta.ru: The 19th century was an era of rivalry between the great European powers, with Russia being one of those powers. Did Solovyov view the contradictions between these powers as simple geopolitical rivalry or as a civilizational conflict?
Vladimir Solovyov, unlike Nikolai Danilevsky, never proceeded from the premise that war between Russia and Europe was a possibility.
________
Boris Mezhuev: Vladimir Solovyov, unlike Nikolai Danilevsky, never proceeded from the premise that war between Russia and Europe was a possibility. Let us recall that Solovyov was born in the same year the Crimean War [2] began – a war that he subsequently viewed as a tragic accident. He did not think deeply about it, nor delve into the origins of that war, and he remained deaf to the arguments offered by Nikolai Danilevsky about the inevitable hostility of Europe towards Russia.
Therefore, he did not see the prospect of a civilizational conflict between Russia and European countries. He considered the enmity between Orthodoxy and Catholicism to be a real historical fact, and it was precisely this enmity, according to Solovyov, that needed to be removed by means of a “Christian politics,” by approaching the Slavic world in the correct manner.
His Russian Idea consists precisely in this reconciliation of the West with the East, a reconciliation which it was the mission of the Slavs to achieve.
The very need for reconciliation, of course, speaks to the reality of the existing contradictions which brought the split about. But if the possibility for reconciliation exists, then these contradictions are not fundamentally antagonistic.
Lenta.ru: But then where did the uncompromising ideological character of current world politics come from?
Boris Mezhuev: As I noted earlier, Vladimir Solovyov was in some ways blind to what was coming in the twentieth century.
He saw far into the future and was able to see many events of the 21st century: the confrontation between the West and China, the unification of Europe, the war with Islam, the spread of New Age teachings …
But he did not foresee the 20th century with its clash of ideologies. And this blindness cannot be wholly reduced to something lacking in his psychological intuition. His philosophy itself contained something prophetic, but also something short-sighted. He was also nearsighted in the purely physical sense, incidentally. Many of his ideas are very relevant today, but for his own time they were completely irrelevant.
I see in him a prophet who, perhaps, did not always understand what he saw, could not always sufficiently comprehend it on the theoretical level.
Lenta.ru: Today, many countries in Asia and Africa are looking to Russia as the vanguard of a new world order. Can we say, against this background, that Vladimir Solovyov’s ideas about “the unity of all humanity” and Russia’s role in the implementation of this concept are once again becoming relevant?
Boris Mezhuev: In a sense, yes. Even if the “unity of all humanity” he was thinking about is not exactly what we are talking about now. For him it had a Christian character and was inextricably linked with Christianity. Theocracy is needed not only to stop wars, but, above all, to ensure that everyone joins the Christian Church.
However, today’s collective West is also not the realization of his dreams, but rather the embodiment of his fears, because it is de-Christianized.
NOTES
[1] An allusion to the poem by Aleksey Tolstoy (1817-1875) ‘Dvukh stanov ne boiets’ (A warrior for neither camp). The first few stanzas read as follows:
A warrior for neither camp, only a random guest;
I’d gladly raise my sword in cause of truth
But it’s my secret lot to argue with them both
[2] The Crimean War (1853 – 1856) was waged between the Russian empire, on one side, and the allied France, United Kingdom and Ottoman Empire on the other. During that ferocious war the port city of Sevastopol was placed under siege for eleven months. During WWII, Sevastopol was again placed under siege, by Hitler’s armies, and Soviet/Russian losses came to a total of up to 200,000 casualties and prisoners of war.