Софиология

Humanity dawns by redeeming material nature, viz. by spiritualising the physis. In Christian terminology, spiritualisation signifies a sort of transfiguration that brings redemption. Redemption became a Biblical metaphor for describing the saving work of Jesus delivering humanity from sin and evil by His transfiguration, by the sacrifice of his natural body out of love to man. Christ′s transfiguration anticipated the transfiguration of all material being. Self-sacrificing love is central in Solov’ëv′s theosophy, too. Self-sacrificing love transfigures and herewith redeems. His early La Sophia (1876, Sophia) brings to mind a threefold typology of love. There is «all forgiving love» (cf. Kor. 13) conform to «amor dei intellectuals.» Forgiveness obviously needs overcoming of egotism, of self-administered justice, of personal insistence on righteous, legitimate punishment. As it were, «all forgiving love» is human acting that aspires to the Divine and seeks to correspond to Divine grace. Secondly, there is, as Solov’ëv continues, corporeal love, love′s strongest form. Yet, erotic love is as exclusive as it ends in exclusivity, namely in family founding that in turn brings forth a third, a «familial» form of love. Already at this early point of his intellectual career, the young Solov’ëv wondered whether the first and the second forms of love intersect at a certain point and hence share common ground. This certainly is a question beyond tradition, for standard sociology regards the family (-tribe) as basic cell of all social formations: family ties are prototypical. Social relations profit from familial bonds that is prolonged into society. By contrast, «all forgiving love» is so to speak faceless in character; agape rather describes a general attitude face to face with humanity. It is a regulative idea in the Kantian sense, not a personal form of love directed at a specific person for specific individual reasons. Solov’ëv wondered how could this self-less love profit from eroticism′s power that is possessive and self-centred.[130] At this point of his intellectual career, in 1876, he did not yet find an answer on this seemingly paradoxical question. Love is, as he posited in general terms, a sense of ascendance, viz. participation in the Absolute. The absolute Divine is, as already the idea of bogochelovestvo implies, as much inherent in man and in nature as it is transcendentally located outside of him in immeasurable height. To encounter the Divine by loving ascendance effectuates love that descends, for the beloved Absolute lovingly gives away spiritual abundance to the lower being.

Eighteen years after he had written La Sophia, Solov’ëv took up the Meaning of Love again and discussed it more comprehensively on about eighty pages. «In the main, the arguments in this writing balance on the borders between philosophy, science, and poetry, promising fresh interaction between these three discourses.»[131] As is commonly known, this writing is a sort of polemic paper against Lev Tolstoj′s and Arthur Schopenhauer′s views on (physical) love as to merely guarantee reproduction and continuation of species[132]. The matured philosopher finally completed his early self-given task and was successful in systematically reconciling amor dei intellectuals with the eros that he radicalised significantly. In Plato, the eros prescinds from all physicalness whereas Solov’ëv, as we have seen already, targets at the physis′ deification by transfiguration and hence redemption. As he now argued, eros′ true task consists in personality′s "redemption[133]." The Solovё′vian eros does not designate either a purely natural or purely spiritual event, but, again, rather signifies a spiritual challenge to transfigure human nature. Solov’ëv suggests a paradoxical situation: spiritually, the corporeal unification of the masculine and the feminine should bring forth a metamorphosis, namely create androgynous spirituality.[134] Spiritually, also erotic love must above everything else ascend to the Divine and hence receive descendent love that never regards either race or sex.[135] Solov’ëv denies the Platonian variant of the eros,[136] for he – a consequent thinker – admits the possibility of nature′s spiritualisation. If nature′s dematerialisation is a principle call spiritualisation must be ubiquitously valid. True erotic love hence strengthens personality, for deification implies the loss of sex and acquisition of androgyny instead. Until his lifetime, as he regretted, love had unfortunately not yet flowered out. Love′s development was at the same low stage as the development of reason within the animals′ kingdom. Love still is the greatest cosmic enigma there is[137].