- "Christianity has a content of its own, and that content is solely and exclusively Christ. In Christianity as such we find Christ, and Christ only—this is a truth very often uttered but very little assimilated."— Vladimir Solovyov, God, the Divine Basis of Creation and Man
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Russian: Влади́мир Серге́евич Соловьёв; 28 January [Old Style 16 January] 1853 – 13 August [Old Style 31 July] 1900) was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and writer who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century and the spiritual renaissance of the early 20th century.
Solovyov (also transliterated as Soloviev, Solovieff, and Solovioff, among others) was born in Moscow to a large family of intellectuals: his father was historian Sergey Mikhaylovich Solovyov (1820–1879), and his mother Poliksena Vladimirovna (d. 1909) was a pious noblewoman and a descendant of the Ukrainian Cossack poet and philosopher Grigoriy Skovoroda (1722–1794).
Solovyov grew up during a period of political and intellectual unrest coinciding with the epoch of the social reforms of Alexander II, and when the German idealist philosophy, first discussed widely in Russia in the 1830s, became deeply entrenched in the university where his father taught. Solovyov, brought up an Orthodox Christian, absorbed the teachings of positivism and utilitarianism; he became an atheist, materialist, and socialist at the age of fourteen, and passionately advocated for these ideologies. When he entered the Imperial Moscow University in 1869, first entered the Faculty of History and Philology, but transferred to the more "materialist" Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, which proved to be a mistake. Within three years of study, Solovyov eventually petitioned to withdraw and switch back to the Faculty of History and Philology, where he took his examinations as kandidat, and he received his degree in June of 1873. A year and a half later, he wrote his master's thesis, The Crisis of Western Philosophy (Against the Positivists (1874), having renounced his earlier materialism and returned to the Christian faith when he was eighteen; he remained a devout Christian for the rest of his life.
In 1877, Solovyov moved to Saint Petersburg, where he became a friend and confidant of Fyodor Dostoevsky. However, unlike the stridently anti-Catholic Dostoevsky, Solovyov was very sympathetic to the Catholic Church. He was in favor of healing the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, even accepting the Filioque (that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son rather than just from the Father, at least given a very nuanced understanding of what it means to "proceed from"), the Immaculate Conception (that the Blessed Virgin Mary is conceived without original sin), and Papal infallibility (that the Pope, when he speaks ex cathedra, is protected from error when defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals in the Church), all of which are doctrines Orthodox Christians disputed or even deemed false. That said, he very likely did not join the Catholic Church, believing that converting would be "harmful to the universal cause" (the union of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches), though he added that he could not "throw a stone at converts" who do so from sincere "even if mistaken conviction". He was also an active member of the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia, learning to speak Hebrew, struggling to reconcile Judaism and Christianity, and defending Jewish civil rights in tsarist Russia in the 1880s.
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov should NOT be confused with the journalist and propagandist of The New Russia Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov.
