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Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics by V. S. Soloviev
Vladimir S. Soloviev (1853–1900), moral philosopher, social and literary critic, theologian, and poet, is considered one of Russia’s greatest philosophers. But Soloviev is relatively unknown in the West, despite his close association with Fyodor Dostoevsky, who modeled one of his most famous literary characters, Alyosha Karamazov, on Soloviev. In The Heart of Reality , Vladimir Wozniuk offers lucid translations, a substantive introduction, and careful annotations that make many of Soloviev’s writings accessible for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Soloviev worked tirelessly in the name of the mystical body of the Universal Church. The vast bulk of his writings can be construed as promoting, in one way or another, the cause of ecumenism. His essays also display the influence of Platonic and German Idealism and strands of Thomistic thinking. Wozniuk demonstrates the consistency of Soloviev’s biblically based thought on the subjects of aesthetics, love, and ethics, while at the same time clarifying Soloviev’s concept of vseedinstvo (the unity of spiritual and material), especially as applied to literature. Containing many previously untranslated essays, The Heart of Reality situates Soloviev more clearly in the mainstream of Western religious philosophy and Christian thought.
244 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2003
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About the author
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov
136 books136 followersVladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Russian: Владимир Сергеевич Соловьёв) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, poet, pamphleteer and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and in the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.
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May 23, 2023
Solovyov’s writings are often exquisitely brilliant and creative, but also obscure and unsystematic. Because of this—and because some days passed between when I finished the book and when I was able to write about it—I present in lieu of an adequate review two brief synopses of the most significant (to my mind) essays in this collection: “The Meaning of Love,” and “Beauty in Nature.”
The Meaning of Love
Solovyov begins this celebrated essay by dispensing with the most banal and spiritless supposition on the purpose of love: that it is merely the subjective feeling that accompanies the procreative instinct. In fact, he says, there seems to be in the order of life an inverse relationship between fecundity on the one hand and the depth and intensity of sexual love on the other. Simpler organisms breed prodigiously: among some species of fish, for example, a female secretes thousands of eggs which are then fertilized by males outside of the body. Fish are prolific breeders; yet it would be transparently absurd to conclude from this that fish embody sexual love more fully than do human beings, for whom love is uniquely personal and individuated and is thus consummated in a communion of virtually limitless profundity.
For a fish, neither love nor even sexual attraction figures prominently in the reproductive process; love acts only externally and unconsciously, obliterating the individuality of each particular fish, since the latter lacks the rational consciousness necessary to assimilate Truth—the positive all-unity Idea towards which love is oriented—to its individuated existence. Human beings, uniquely “the center of a universal consciousness of nature,” possess just such a capacity. Man is a microcosm—a great cosmos within a small one—and as such is capable of realizing Truth within himself: assimilating to his consciousness his oneness with everything. And this assimilation of the all-unity does not destroy his individuality, but rather completes it. Man only finds himself as the hypostatic center of nature by losing himself in his merely animal, egoistic aspect: in his superficial, empirical perception of himself as a totality separate from the “All,” or “outside truth.” This sacrificial self-realization, this death of the fleshly ego and resurrection of the spiritual self, this rebirth from above, is accomplished in love, which Solovyov defines as “Truth…as a living force that takes possession of the inner essence of man and effectively leads him out of false self-affirmation…the effective abolition of egoism…a valid justification and redemption of individuality.”
Love completes its course in man, realizing the plenitude of existence only in him; most perfectly in the form of male-female sexual love, in which an identity in kind is paired with difference in every particular, allowing for the complete self-othering through which love abolishes fragmentary egoism and redeems wholistic individuality. Yet as the troubadours, the tragedians, and the very biological precarity of human reproduction teach us, love in no way demands reproduction—or even physical consummation—as an internal necessity. Even the most passionate love affairs commonly produce no offspring, while the human and animal worlds are both filled with examples wherein couples reproduce abundantly in the weakness or absence of sexual love. Love and the reproductive instinct are distinct forces with distinct ends, and they intersect only incidentally. This is particularly apparent in the individuated love of the human world, where individuals unite themselves with the opposite sex not in the abstract, as would be sufficient for the satisfaction of a reproductive urge, but in the form of this or that particular person, in whom the lover recognizes an unconditional significance, elevating him or her above the pure mundanity of everyday life. Thus sexual love “does not exert a direct effect on the historical process…its positive significance must be rooted in individual life.”
When a human being is in love, he assigns to the object of his love, as said, an unconditional significance. He idealizes (and thus eternalizes) the beloved, seeing more than its empirical, transitory existence. And in the very act of exceeding his own empirical boundary to live beyond his superficial self in another, the lover manifests his own unconditional significance—his own proper life in Truth. Love thus reveals to both lovers their complete ideal image, in which the male and female principles are united in a “free unity,” while both parties remain distinct personal centers of nature. By the lover’s faith in the ideal image behind the empirical manifestation of the beloved, he is inspired to transform the empirical essence—of the other, of himself, and of the world as a whole—in a manner that realizes, or incarnates, this image.
The ideal essence of the beloved is not an idol; the lover does not worship the beloved in place of God. Rather, by affirming the unconditioned eternality manifested in the object of love, the lover affirms the existence of the beloved in God, and by extension, his own personal centeredness in God as well. But since God is indivisible, and for Him “all is in one,” the beloved individual cannot be affirmed in God as a kind of discrete object, but only “in everything, or more precisely—in the unity of everything.” Love for the one individual thus becomes love for the unity of all in one and the plurality of one in all: the all-unity Idea: the Kingdom of God. The beloved becomes the face of the All, of “absolute content”; and by transferring his own life beyond his egoic, superficial self, living in the beloved, the lover is filled with this absolute content, redeeming and immortalizing his true individuality.
The object of true love is revealed to be two distinct but indivisible essences: the human essence that “provides the living, personal material” for the realization of the ideal essence, and which in turn is idealized by it. Love ascends and descends between these planes like the two Aphrodites identified by Plato in the Symposium. It works synergistically, incarnating the ideal absolute content—which Solovyov identifies with the “eternal divine femininity”—in the lovers (and, through them, in the world as a whole, since they in a sense become the whole world to one another) and bestowing upon them (and the world) its own immortality. The physical, customary, and spiritual dimensions of love—that is, physical union, legal union, and union in God—are coessential to human life; but our relation to love within our fallen state goes awry when we make two fundamental errors: we invert their proper order, putting physical union first when it should be last; and we separate them, idolizing one dimension to the exclusion or diminishment of the others.
In our fallen world, “the ideal meaning of love is not implemented in reality.” But this does not mean that the full incarnation of love is an impossibility; only that its realization, the positive union of all things in God, is a still-unfolding process which we grasp only rudimentarily.
“For man, love is, for the time being, the very same thing that reason was for the world of animals…”
Beauty in Nature
Solovyov defines beauty as the embodiment of Idea: the mutual penetration of ideal principle and material essence. Beauty is realized to the extent that a material content of greater or lesser complexity embodies absolute Idea. “Idea” is defined here as “that which in itself is worthy of existence,” “an absolutely perfect or unconditional entity, completely free from every limitation and shortcoming”. Idea, put simply, is the Absolute: that which is absolved of every condition or qualification. But for Solovyev, the Absolute itself must be a mutual incorporation of the universal and the particular. Any particular entity embodies Idea to the extent that it incorporates the universal, while the universal embodies Idea to the extent that it incorporates the particular. Solovyov thus defines Idea more formally as “the absolute freedom of constituent parts in a perfected unified whole.”
If Idea is the mutual inherence of unity in the whole and freedom in the particular—all-unity—then beauty is the realization of this all-unity in material substance:
These two criteria do not always coincide. A higher ideal content can be weakly embodied, while a simpler content can be more fully and perfectly expressed in matter. A worm, though possessing a higher form of the all-unity Idea than a diamond (since it represents a greater whole in which its constituent parts realize their freedom), manifests this content less completely, and thus is outshone by the diamond, which more perfectly realizes a simpler idea: that of stone made transparent; light being—at least aesthetically—the principal representation of Idea as a supra-material reality.
Beauty is realized in the cosmogonical process by the increasing transparency of matter to light/Idea; their ever-greater mutual inherence. Idea illuminates inanimate matter externally, and the latter reflects it as light. With the advent of living organisms, however, the union of light and matter becomes more profound. Living beings don’t simply reflect light from without; they manifest it from within, as life. In life, Idea and matter become one, fully permeating one another, sharing a single, intrinsic existence. With the development of more sophisticated lifeforms, Idea embodies itself more completely in matter:
The culmination of this process occurs in man, who possesses supreme beauty (at least in potential: with higher forms of life come a greater capacity to willfully embrace the ugly) because in him is “the highest intrinsic conversion of light and life that we call self-consciousness.” Man is the culmination of beauty in nature, because in him alone may be realized (through the kenotic death and resurrection of love discussed above) “the absolutely objective Idea of all-unity.”
The Meaning of Love
Solovyov begins this celebrated essay by dispensing with the most banal and spiritless supposition on the purpose of love: that it is merely the subjective feeling that accompanies the procreative instinct. In fact, he says, there seems to be in the order of life an inverse relationship between fecundity on the one hand and the depth and intensity of sexual love on the other. Simpler organisms breed prodigiously: among some species of fish, for example, a female secretes thousands of eggs which are then fertilized by males outside of the body. Fish are prolific breeders; yet it would be transparently absurd to conclude from this that fish embody sexual love more fully than do human beings, for whom love is uniquely personal and individuated and is thus consummated in a communion of virtually limitless profundity.
For a fish, neither love nor even sexual attraction figures prominently in the reproductive process; love acts only externally and unconsciously, obliterating the individuality of each particular fish, since the latter lacks the rational consciousness necessary to assimilate Truth—the positive all-unity Idea towards which love is oriented—to its individuated existence. Human beings, uniquely “the center of a universal consciousness of nature,” possess just such a capacity. Man is a microcosm—a great cosmos within a small one—and as such is capable of realizing Truth within himself: assimilating to his consciousness his oneness with everything. And this assimilation of the all-unity does not destroy his individuality, but rather completes it. Man only finds himself as the hypostatic center of nature by losing himself in his merely animal, egoistic aspect: in his superficial, empirical perception of himself as a totality separate from the “All,” or “outside truth.” This sacrificial self-realization, this death of the fleshly ego and resurrection of the spiritual self, this rebirth from above, is accomplished in love, which Solovyov defines as “Truth…as a living force that takes possession of the inner essence of man and effectively leads him out of false self-affirmation…the effective abolition of egoism…a valid justification and redemption of individuality.”
Love completes its course in man, realizing the plenitude of existence only in him; most perfectly in the form of male-female sexual love, in which an identity in kind is paired with difference in every particular, allowing for the complete self-othering through which love abolishes fragmentary egoism and redeems wholistic individuality. Yet as the troubadours, the tragedians, and the very biological precarity of human reproduction teach us, love in no way demands reproduction—or even physical consummation—as an internal necessity. Even the most passionate love affairs commonly produce no offspring, while the human and animal worlds are both filled with examples wherein couples reproduce abundantly in the weakness or absence of sexual love. Love and the reproductive instinct are distinct forces with distinct ends, and they intersect only incidentally. This is particularly apparent in the individuated love of the human world, where individuals unite themselves with the opposite sex not in the abstract, as would be sufficient for the satisfaction of a reproductive urge, but in the form of this or that particular person, in whom the lover recognizes an unconditional significance, elevating him or her above the pure mundanity of everyday life. Thus sexual love “does not exert a direct effect on the historical process…its positive significance must be rooted in individual life.”
When a human being is in love, he assigns to the object of his love, as said, an unconditional significance. He idealizes (and thus eternalizes) the beloved, seeing more than its empirical, transitory existence. And in the very act of exceeding his own empirical boundary to live beyond his superficial self in another, the lover manifests his own unconditional significance—his own proper life in Truth. Love thus reveals to both lovers their complete ideal image, in which the male and female principles are united in a “free unity,” while both parties remain distinct personal centers of nature. By the lover’s faith in the ideal image behind the empirical manifestation of the beloved, he is inspired to transform the empirical essence—of the other, of himself, and of the world as a whole—in a manner that realizes, or incarnates, this image.
The ideal essence of the beloved is not an idol; the lover does not worship the beloved in place of God. Rather, by affirming the unconditioned eternality manifested in the object of love, the lover affirms the existence of the beloved in God, and by extension, his own personal centeredness in God as well. But since God is indivisible, and for Him “all is in one,” the beloved individual cannot be affirmed in God as a kind of discrete object, but only “in everything, or more precisely—in the unity of everything.” Love for the one individual thus becomes love for the unity of all in one and the plurality of one in all: the all-unity Idea: the Kingdom of God. The beloved becomes the face of the All, of “absolute content”; and by transferring his own life beyond his egoic, superficial self, living in the beloved, the lover is filled with this absolute content, redeeming and immortalizing his true individuality.
The object of true love is revealed to be two distinct but indivisible essences: the human essence that “provides the living, personal material” for the realization of the ideal essence, and which in turn is idealized by it. Love ascends and descends between these planes like the two Aphrodites identified by Plato in the Symposium. It works synergistically, incarnating the ideal absolute content—which Solovyov identifies with the “eternal divine femininity”—in the lovers (and, through them, in the world as a whole, since they in a sense become the whole world to one another) and bestowing upon them (and the world) its own immortality. The physical, customary, and spiritual dimensions of love—that is, physical union, legal union, and union in God—are coessential to human life; but our relation to love within our fallen state goes awry when we make two fundamental errors: we invert their proper order, putting physical union first when it should be last; and we separate them, idolizing one dimension to the exclusion or diminishment of the others.
In our fallen world, “the ideal meaning of love is not implemented in reality.” But this does not mean that the full incarnation of love is an impossibility; only that its realization, the positive union of all things in God, is a still-unfolding process which we grasp only rudimentarily.
“For man, love is, for the time being, the very same thing that reason was for the world of animals…”
Beauty in Nature
Solovyov defines beauty as the embodiment of Idea: the mutual penetration of ideal principle and material essence. Beauty is realized to the extent that a material content of greater or lesser complexity embodies absolute Idea. “Idea” is defined here as “that which in itself is worthy of existence,” “an absolutely perfect or unconditional entity, completely free from every limitation and shortcoming”. Idea, put simply, is the Absolute: that which is absolved of every condition or qualification. But for Solovyev, the Absolute itself must be a mutual incorporation of the universal and the particular. Any particular entity embodies Idea to the extent that it incorporates the universal, while the universal embodies Idea to the extent that it incorporates the particular. Solovyov thus defines Idea more formally as “the absolute freedom of constituent parts in a perfected unified whole.”
If Idea is the mutual inherence of unity in the whole and freedom in the particular—all-unity—then beauty is the realization of this all-unity in material substance:
“The criterion of worthy, or ideal, existence in general is the greatest independence of the parts in the greatest unity of the whole. The criterion of aesthetic worthiness is the greatest perfected and multifaceted embodiment of this ideal moment in a given substance.”
These two criteria do not always coincide. A higher ideal content can be weakly embodied, while a simpler content can be more fully and perfectly expressed in matter. A worm, though possessing a higher form of the all-unity Idea than a diamond (since it represents a greater whole in which its constituent parts realize their freedom), manifests this content less completely, and thus is outshone by the diamond, which more perfectly realizes a simpler idea: that of stone made transparent; light being—at least aesthetically—the principal representation of Idea as a supra-material reality.
Beauty is realized in the cosmogonical process by the increasing transparency of matter to light/Idea; their ever-greater mutual inherence. Idea illuminates inanimate matter externally, and the latter reflects it as light. With the advent of living organisms, however, the union of light and matter becomes more profound. Living beings don’t simply reflect light from without; they manifest it from within, as life. In life, Idea and matter become one, fully permeating one another, sharing a single, intrinsic existence. With the development of more sophisticated lifeforms, Idea embodies itself more completely in matter:
“The creative principle of the universe (Logos), reflected by matter from without as light and from within as life ignited in matter, arises in the form of distinctive animal and plant organisms and stable forms of life, which, proceeding gradually all the while to greater and greater perfection, can serve in the end as the material and the means for the actual embodiment of completely indivisible Idea.”
The culmination of this process occurs in man, who possesses supreme beauty (at least in potential: with higher forms of life come a greater capacity to willfully embrace the ugly) because in him is “the highest intrinsic conversion of light and life that we call self-consciousness.” Man is the culmination of beauty in nature, because in him alone may be realized (through the kenotic death and resurrection of love discussed above) “the absolutely objective Idea of all-unity.”
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July 21, 2023”Previously, art distracted man from the darkness and rage that rule the world; it carried him away to its serene heights and entertained him with its pure images; today’s art, on the contrary, attracts man to the darkness and spite of the humdrum with a sometimes obscure desire to illuminate this darkness, to calm his rage.”
Reading Soloviev can be as rewarding as it is taxing. Writing a review can be exhausting. There is already a really great top rated review, highlighting the two most interesting essays, I direct your attention there, for I am on vacation and far too lazy to put the correct effort into giving this book its proper due.
Took me a while to finish, but I am glad I got through it eventually.
September 19, 2021
nice
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews