Vladimir Solovyov 1853 – 1900

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet, the most important Russian philosopher of the nineteenth century and the founder of modern Russian religious philosophy. His Lectures on Divine Humanity and the Justification of the Good developed a metaphysics of total-unity in which all things are reconciled in Christ, and his Three Conversations grappled with the problem of evil at the end of his life. He was the first to articulate the vision of Sophia, the divine wisdom, that would shape later Russian thinkers including Bulgakov and Berdyaev. His friendship with Dostoevsky was deep and mutually transformative.

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was born in 1853 in Moscow, the son of the historian Sergey Solovyov. He took his first degree in mathematics at Moscow before turning to philosophy, studied at Moscow Theological Academy, and spent 1875-1876 in the British Museum and at Egyptian sites in pursuit of the visions of Sophia, the divine Wisdom, that had visited him from childhood. He took his doctorate at St Petersburg in 1880 with a Critique of Abstract Principles.

His teaching career was ended at twenty-eight when his public appeal for clemency for the assassins of Alexander II forced him from his university post. The remainder of his life was spent in literary and philosophical-religious writing: The Spiritual Foundations of Life, the Lectures on Godmanhood (1878-1881), Russia and the Universal Church (1889), The Meaning of Love (1892-1894), the late Justification of the Good (1897), and the apocalyptic Three Conversations and Tale of the Antichrist (1900).

Solovyov is the central figure of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: he reimagined Christian theology around the concept of Godmanhood, sought reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches, and argued for a Christian foundation for ethics and politics. His friendships with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and his impact on Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and the Russian Symbolists were decisive. He died at Uzkoye in August 1900.