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Rule of Faith Orthodox Journal
Volume 1 — November 2019
V. S. Soloviev and the Russian Roots of
Personalism
Personalist philosophy is generally understood to have emerged in
the middle of the last century. But an earlier antecedent of this
important school of thought has been overlooked.
by Dylan Pahman
While the importance of thinkers such as N. Berdyaev, S. L. Frank, and other
Russian émigrés to the development of twentieth-century personalist
philosophy is widely acknowledged,1 one major influence on their respective
religious philosophies is often ignored in discussions of their contributions to
personalism: the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Vladimir
Soloviev.2 While Soloviev does not speak of himself as a personalist, several
essential aspects of what came to be called personalism can be found in his
thought: viz. the inviolable dignity of the human person, understood in terms
of Kant’s categorical imperative; the importance of free human action; and the
relational nature of persons, advocating a middle way between atomistic
individualism and collectivism.3 Soloviev’s personalism is significant not only
for its incorporation of German antecedents such as Kant4 but also for its use
of insights from the Western saint Thomas Aquinas as well as from Eastern
Christian sources.5 This paper examines the three personalist aspects of his
thought listed above—(1) human dignity, (2) human agency, and (3) human
relationality—as he employs them in his magnum opus of moral philosophy,
The Justification of the Good.6
Human Dignity
While Soloviev’s philosophy has many di erences from that of Immanuel
Kant, Soloviev credits his German predecessor with being “[t]he founder of
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moral philosophy as a science.”7 Taking a more theological stance, Soloviev
formulates his own “unconditional principle of morality”:
In complete inner harmony with the higher will and recognizing the
absolute worth or significance of all other persons, since they too are in the
image and likeness of God, participate, as fully as in thee lies, in the work of
making thyself and everyone more perfect, so that the Kingdom of God may
be finally revealed in the world.8
However, when explaining what this means for our social relations, Kant’s
influence can be heard loud and clear:
Pity which we feel towards a fellow-being acquires another significance
when we see in that being the image and likeness of God. We then
recognise the unconditional worth of that person; we recognise that he is
an end in himself for God, and still more must be so for us. We realise
that God Himself does not treat him merely as a means.9
For Soloviev, the categorical imperative comes from taking a God’s-eye view
of our neighbor, so-to-speak, always looking to the dignity of the human
person: “I pity in that being not merely his su erings but the cause of them—I
regret that his actual reality falls so short of his true dignity and possible
perfection.”10 As such, the categorical imperative cannot be fulfilled from an
individualistic point of view, but requires social and even political action:
[N]o human being can alone realise either in himself or in any one else
that absolute fullness of perfection in seeking which we are likened to
God…. Consequently it demands that we should take part in the
collective organizations—especially in that of the state as inclusive of
all the others—by means of which the historical process is, by the will
of Providence, carried on.11
So as not to be misunderstood as overly statist, however, Soloviev clarifies,
“Not every one is called to political activity or to the service of the state in the
narrow sense of the term. But it is the duty of every one to serve, in his own
place, that same purpose—the common good—which the state ought to serve
also.”12
We might recognize here the Thomistic claim, reflected in Catholic social
teaching, that the state is “the means of promoting the common good in civil
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society”13—a claim that, of course, must be understood in light of the principle
of subsidiarity.14 We will see below that the same is true for Soloviev as well.
For now, we need only note his own grounding of the principle: “The only
moral norm is the principle of human dignity or of the absolute worth of each
individual, in virtue of which society is determined as the inward and free harmony
of all.”15 Thus, human dignity is understood as that God-given worth which
requires us to limit our treatment of our neighbor and respect her freedom as a
rational animal, because to do otherwise would be to treat her as a mere means
to our individual ends.
Human Agency
Soloviev objects to the idea of absolute freedom as a requirement for morality.
Determinism, on his account, is grounded in the principle of su cient reason
that “everything that happens … is determined … by su cient reasons, apart
from which it cannot take place, and given which it happens with necessity.”16
He outlines three di erent kinds of determinism: mechanical (inorganic),
psychological (irrational), and “rationally ideal.”17 The last of these he a rms
to be not only compatible with rational freedom but necessary for morality.
The first is “exclusive of morality” and the second at best only “allows for
some moral elements.”18 Minerals are bound by mechanical necessity,
irrational animals by psychological. However, since animals have some power
of self-determination, freedom is not su cient for morality to Soloviev: Their
actions may be regarded in moral ways—they may be ferocious or meek, brave
or cowardly, but they “are not aware of these qualities as either good or bad.”19
Human beings, conversely, are able to make such judgments. As such, moral
action cannot rely on absolute freedom where, quoting Duns Scotus, “nothing
except the will itself causes the act of willing in the will.”20 Rather, when it
comes to moral action, such actions are determined by the good. We might say
that Soloviev’s moral necessity is a species of Aquinas’s “necessity of end”21
and in that sense it cannot be arbitrary or absolutely free. Indeed, for Soloviev
only evil actions can be arbitrary: “When I choose the good, I do so not because
of my whim but because it is good, because it has value, and I am capable of
realising its significance.”22 Again, as Aquinas put it, “the good understood is
the object of the will, and moves it as an end.”23 Soloviev stipulates, “A
su cient knowledge of the good in combination with a su cient receptivity to
it necessarily determines our will in the moral sense.”24 Under these two
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conditions,
The good determines my choice in its favour by all the infinite fulness
[sic] of its positive content and reality. This choice is therefore infinitely
determined; it is absolutely necessary, and there is no arbitrariness in it
at all. In the choice of evil, on the contrary, there is no determining
reason, no kind of necessity, and therefore infinite arbitrariness. The
question then assumes the following form: given a full and clear
knowledge of the good, can a rational being prove to be so unreceptive
to it as to reject it utterly and unconditionally and choose the evil? Such
lack of receptivity to the good that is perfectly known would be
something absolutely irrational, and it is only an irrational act of this
description that would truly come under the definition of absolute
freedom or of arbitrary choice.25
To be morally and rationally free, to Soloviev, is to be free from the lower
forms of necessity—mechanical and psychological—and bound to the ideal of
the good. However, moral freedom, which Soloviev regarded as “an ethical
fact” is not the end of his understanding of the importance of human agency.
He also a rmed “political freedom” as “an ethical postulate.”26 To examine
this, I turn to human relationality.
Human Relationality
Despite his high claims for the state elsewhere, Soloviev claims that, first and
foremost, “the Church” is “the fundamental form of the moral organisation of
humanity.”27 In its catholicity, the Church is the fulfillment of the moral
meaning of our natural dependence upon one another:
The individual does not find true freedom when his social environment
weighs upon him as external and alien to him. Such alienation is
abolished by the conception of the universal Church alone, according to
which each must find in the social whole not the external limit but the
inward completion of his liberty. Man in any case stands in need of such
completion by the ‘other’; for in virtue of his natural limitations he is
necessarily a dependent being, and cannot by himself or alone be a
su cient ground of his own existence. Deprive a man of what he owes
to others, beginning with his parents and ending with the state and
world-history, and nothing will be left of his existence, let alone his
freedom. It would be madness to deny this fact of inevitable
dependence. Man is not strong enough and needs help in order that his
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freedom might be a real thing and not merely a verbal claim. But the
help which man obtains from the world is accidental, temporal, and
partial, whilst the universal Church promises him secure, eternal and
all-su cient help from God. It is with that help alone that he can be
actually free, that is, have su cient power to satisfy his will.28
Soloviev transitions from the role of the universal Church to the role of the
state through examining the conversion of the Roman centurion Cornelius in
Acts 10:
If the centurion Cornelius, having become a real Christian, remained,
nevertheless, a soldier, and was not divided into two alien and
disconnected personalities, it is clear that he must have become a
Christian soldier. A collection of such soldiers forms a Christian army.
Now the army is both the extreme expression and the first real basis of
the state; and if a Christian army is possible, a Christian state is
therefore even more possible.29
Admittedly, the idea of a Christian state was far more plausible at the close of
the nineteenth century than it is today. Indeed, Soloviev’s own political vision
assumes a monarchy with close and positive church-state relations. However,
for the purpose of demonstrating his personalism, that context is irrelevant.
And in any case, his insights transcend it.
As already noted, Soloviev understood human persons to be “dependent
rational animals,” to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre.30 Solidarity is a
demand of morality due to our natural relation to all other human beings:
Every single individual possesses as such the potentiality of perfection
or of positive infinity, namely, the capability to understand all things
with his intellect and to embrace all things with his heart, or to enter
into a living communion with everything. This double infinity—the
power of representation and the power of striving and activity, called in
the Bible, according to the interpretation of the Fathers of the Church,
the image and likeness of God—necessarily belongs to every person. It
is in this that the absolute significance, dignity, and worth of human
personality consist, and this is the basis of its inalienable rights. It is
clear that the realisation of this infinity, or the actuality of the
perfection, demands that all should participate in it. It cannot be the
private possession of each taken separately, but becomes his through his
relation to all.31
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Our fundamental relationality is the basis for the realization of our moral
development. The good of the individual cannot be fulfilled apart from the
common good, and vice versa: “subordination to society uplifts the individual”
and “the independence of the individual lends strength to the social order.”32
There is a certain resonance here with the Roman Catholic articulation of
subsidiarity as “a graduated order” that enables the state to “more freely,
powerfully, and e ectively do all those things that belong to it alone.”33 Social
atomism is an idle fantasy to Soloviev:
isolated individuals do not exist and therefore do not grow in perfection.
The true subject of moral progress—as well as of historical progress in
general—is the individual man together with and inseparably from the
collective man or society. In other words, the relation between the true
significance of the individual and the true force of society is a direct and
not an inverse one.34
As for politics, “The order of the state is a relatively higher but by no means a
perfect form of social life, and it therefore has only a relative advantage over
the organisation based upon kinship.”35 The state does not abolish the
primitive clan but rather transforms it into the family as we know it, which
retains certain rights by virtue of natural law.36 And the state is not the highest
form of social organization: as I have already noted, for Soloviev this place is
held by the spiritual communion of the Church.
Once again, in explaining the morally essential nature of human society in
accordance with the categorical imperative, Soloviev reiterates what makes
humanity superior to other animals, such as ants, who also have some form of
society:
The right of the person as such is based upon his human dignity
inherent in him and inalienable, upon the formal infinity of reason in
every human being, upon the fact that each person is unique and
individual, and must therefore be an end in himself and not merely a
means or an instrument…. Society, therefore, can compel a person to do
something only through an act of his own will,—otherwise it will not be
a case of laying an obligation upon a person, but of making use of a
thing.37
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Soloviev thus walks a careful line. While insisting on the essential dependence
of the individual on society, the inherent relationality of human persons, he is
careful not to lose sight of the personhood of the individual as a free rational
animal in the social whole that is the basis for her moral fulfillment.
This personalist perspective has wide-reaching social-ethical implications,
helping Soloviev a rm, for example, the moral good of patriotism while
simultaneously and without contradiction denouncing the moral evil of
nationalism.38 The individual has a duty of piety to the nation, but the nation
too must serve the common good, not only of its individual members but of the
rest of the world as well. How to walk that line between globalism and
nationalism, to be of one’s country yet for the common good of all, is perhaps
the most important question facing the world today, and Soloviev’s insights,
grounded in, and themselves grounding, the personalist tradition, remain as
salient for our own time as they were for his.
Conclusion
By the mid-twentieth century, fifty years after Soloviev, Jacques Maritain
could write of a “‘personalist’ current” sweeping across a wide variety of
philosophical schools throughout the world. While we should remember
Maritain’s caution that personalism is not monolithic, we can see in Soloviev
the general “phenomenon of reaction against [the] two opposite errors” of
atomistic individualism and totalitarian collectivism that characterized later
personalist philosophy.39 Through his likely influence on the Russian émigré
community in Paris and elsewhere,40 and due to the clear resonance of his
philosophy with the emergent personalism of the time, we are overdue to
acknowledge Soloviev as a significant font of Maritain’s “personalist current.”
Nor should his work any longer remain obscure to personalist philosophers
and theologians of today.
Dylan Pahman is a research fellow at the Acton Institute. He holds an M.T.S. in
Historical Theology from Calvin Theological Seminary. A version of this paper was
originally presented in July 2017 at the Second Triennial Dominican Colloquium in
Berkeley, California.
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Notes
1. See Robert Bird, “Concepts of the Person in the Symbolist Philosophy of
Viacheslav Ivanov,” Studies in East European Thought 61, no. 2/3, The Discourse
of Personality in the Russian Intellectual Tradition (August 2009): 89-96;
Kristina Stöckl, “Modernity and Its Critique in 20th Century Russian Orthodox
Thought,” Studies in East European Thought 58, no. 4, Orthodox Christianity
(December 2006): 243-269; Gasan Gusejnov, “The Linguistic Aporias of Alexei
Losev’s Mystical Personalism,” Studies in East European Thought 61, no. 2/3,
The Discourse of Personality in the Russian Intellectual Tradition (August
2009): 153-164; Philipp Fluri, “Personalism: A New/Old Trend in Postmarxist
Russian Philosophy,” Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and
Foundations of Science, Segunda Epoca 8, no. 19 (November 1993): 149-155;
Helmut Dahm, “Russian Philosophy: Traditional and Contemporary
Accounts,” Studies in Soviet Thought 22, no. 3 (August 1981): 165-173.
2. Richard Hughes, for example, makes no mention of Soloviev in his overview
of Berdyaev’s personalism. This is no criticism for Hughes but simply
illustrative of the common trend. Richard A. Hughes, “Nikolai Berdyaev’s
Personalism,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 6, no. 3 (2015): 63-80.
It should be noted herein that Russian names admit of various transliterations
in Roman characters. Thus, “Soloviev,” “Solov’ëv,” and “Solovyov” are the
same person. I here use “Soloviev” in the body of this paper because that was
his own preference. See Vladimir Wozniuk, “Vladimir S. Soloviev: Moral
Philosopher of Unity,” Journal of Markets & Morality 16, no. 1 (Spring 2013):
323-329.
3. In his accessible introduction to personalism, Jonas Mortensen identifies
the three fundamental values of personalism as “Humans are relational”;
“Humans are beings that engage”; and “Humans have inherent dignity.” Jonas
Norgaard Mortensen, The Common Good: An Introduction to Personalism, trans.
Benjamin Marco Dalton (Frederiksværk, Denmark: Boedal Publishing, 2014),
16, emphasis original. I follow him herein by focusing on human dignity,
action, and relationality.
4. Soloviev’s German preceptors also included Leibniz and Schelling. See
Randall A. Poole, “The Neo-Idealist Reception of Kant in the Moscow
Psychological Society,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 2 (April 1999):
319-343.
5. Soloviev cites the Eastern Church Fathers throughout The Justification of the
Good. On his use of Aquinas, see Vladimir’s Wozniuk’s notes on the last chapter
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of the Justification: V. S. Soloviev, “The Moral Organization of Humanity as a
Whole,” Journal of Markets & Morality 16, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 339n14, 340n15.
6. All quotes from this work herein are from Vladimir Solovyov, The
Justification of the Good: An Essay in Moral Philosophy, ed. Boris Jakim, trans.
Natalie Duddington (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2005).
7. Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, lxix.
8. Ibid., 152, emphasis original.
9. Ibid., 154, emphasis original.
10. Ibid., 154.
11. Ibid., 154.
12. Ibid., 154.
13. Pope John XXIII, Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris (April 11, 1963), 136,
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii
_enc_11041963_pacem.html.
14. See Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (June 29, 2009),
67.
15. Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, 231, emphasis original.
16. Ibid., 12, emphasis original.
17. Ibid., 12, emphasis original.
18. Ibid., 12.
19. Ibid., 14.
20. Ibid., 16.
21. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ Ia 82.1.
22. Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, 18.
23. Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ Ia 82.4.
24. Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, 18, emphasis original.
25. Ibid., 18.
26. Ibid., 18n-19n, emphasis original.
27. Ibid., 373.
28. Ibid., 373, emphasis original.
29. Ibid., 380.
30. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings
Need the Virtues (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1999).
31. Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, 176-177, emphasis original.
32. Ibid., 180.
33. Pope Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Quadrigesimo Anno (May 15, 1931), 80.
34. Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, 352, emphasis original.
35. Ibid., 185-186.
36. See ibid., 185-190.
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37. Ibid., 229.
38. See ibid., 239-258. See also, Greg Gaut, “Can a Christian be a Nationalist?
Vladimir Solov'ev's Critique of Nationalism,” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (Spring
1998): 77-94.
39. Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J.
Fitzgerald (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1946), 12.
40. I look forward to future scholarship indicating the precise character of
Soloviev's influence on Berdyaev, Frank, et. al.
Copyright 2019, Rule of Faith Orthodox Journal
Dylan Pahman