68 Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 7 Conclusion It has become a rather common feature in the literature about Soloviev to consider him a “mystic,” thus conveniently summing up the seemingly diverse strands of his exceptional personality. Considering Soloviev a mystic is true but can easily be misunderstood: the term “mysticism” in colloquial use can imply something irrational or phantasmagorical. Regarding his religious philosophy, Soloviev owed to his mystical experience of Sophia his idea of vseedinstvo, the focal point of his thinking. From this mystical core, the rest of his religious philosophy developed as a magnificent work of reason, tirelessly refining, digesting, and applying the principles in his system of faith until it virtually coalesced with Catholic dogmatic teaching. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has written (2004, 284): The muddy stream [note: of Gnosticism, Kabala and modern sophiological literature] runs through him as if through a purifying agent and is distilled in crystal-clear, disinfected waters answering the needs of his own philosophical spirit, which can live and breathe only in an atmosphere of unqualified transparency and intelligibility. Soloviev’s poetry and religious philosophy thus most likely originated in a genuine mystical experience – his three mystical encounters with Sophia. These most likely comprised all his mysticism in the narrow sense of the word. However, it should be remembered that he was an artist, a poet. As Losev has argued (2011, 443), much of Soloviev’s mysticism was in fact his aesthetic sensibility and capacity to grasp things in a poetic imagination by an allegorical personification of the ideal. Notes [1] The name Владимир Сергеевич Соловьёв is variously transcribed from the Russian Cyrillic into the Roman alphabet. For all Russian names and words, this study uses the modified Library of Congress transliteration system (ALA-LC) with omission of diacritical marks and ligatures common in academic studies. The ALALC system is used with two exceptions: first, in the case of Soloviev, “i” is substituted for the apostrophe indicating the Russian soft “ь.” This usage respects the transcription of Soloviev’s name in his original French publications and has remained its most prevalent form in international literature; accordingly, “Soloviev” (rather than “Solov’ev”) is used consistently in the main body of the text. Second, in Russian names and surnames, the suffix “-ий” is transliterated as “-y” in accord with popular English usage (thus “Dimitry” rather than “Dimitrii;” “Lossky” rather than “Losskii”). However, in the footnote references of the translations of works by Soloviev and other Russian authors, the different choices of transcription by publishers are retained. This explains occasional discrepancies in spelling of Russian names between the footnotes and the main text. [2] For other appraisals of Soloviev’s work and personality referred here, see the works in the reference section by Vasily Zenkovsky, Konstantin Mochul’sky, Dimitry Stremoukhov, Johnatan Sutton, and Paul Marshall Allen. [3] Since 2000 the Russian Academy of Sciences has issued a new critical edition of Vladimir S. Soloviev’s collected works edited by A. A. Nosov et al. with the title V. S. Soloviev: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moskva: Nauka, 2000); to date, four volumes of the projected twenty-volume collection have appeared. All quotations from Soloviev’s work are from the older collection Sobranie sochinenii V. S. Solovieva, the second edition of the ten-volume collected works of Soloviev edited by S. M. Soloviev and E. L. Radlov (St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911), reprinted in 1966 by Zhizn’s Bogom in Brussels with two additional volumes with Soloviev’s letters, poems, translations and miscellaneous texts. [4] The textual analysis of the poem Tri svidaniia in this article follows the English translation of the poem by Boris Jakim, The Religious Poetry of Vladimir Solovyov (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2008), 99–107. [5] The references to Soloviev’s La Russie et l’Eglise universelle are to the original French text published in 1889 in Paris by Albert Savine. In the 12-volume Brussel edition of Soloviev’s collected works in Russian, this work was included in Russian translation by G. A. Rachinsky. [6] The Greek expression hen (Gr. ἕν) means “one”, pan (Gr. παν) means “all”, “everything.” Acknowledgement The study is a partial outcome of the research projects VEGA 2/0015/22 Reception of Biblical Family Terminology and Motives in Slavic Cultural Ambience, and APVV-20-0130 Biblical Text and its Terminological Discourses in Modern Colloquial Language: The Example of the Pauline Letters.
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