Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 51 Ján Dolný, Róbert Lapko 3 Soloviev’s Catholic Profession and Last Rites Living as a Russian Orthodox believer publicly professing Catholic views in tsarist Russia was a severe test for Soloviev’s conviction about the fundamental unity of faith shared by the communions. He was a target of much calumny in the press, while his own attempts at response by publishing his religious views were barred by the official censorship. On account of his frank criticism of the Orthodox Church, Soloviev regularly faced the threat of criminal prosecution by the Russian government. Soloviev confronted the Russian Orthodox Church neither on the points of doctrine, nor sacramental worship; his challenge concerned strictly the Orthodox hierarchy on account of its alliance with the civil government. Soloviev presented this challenge most forcefully in La Russie et l’Eglise universelle, where he claimed that the Russian Orthodox Church preserved the apostolic succession and the validity of the sacraments “despite the absence of any lawful Church government.” As he further elaborated (2003, 51): “All our bishops are nominated in a manner absolutely forbidden and condemned by the third canon of the seventh Ecumenical Council, a canon which in the eyes of our own Church can never have been abrogated (for lack of subsequent ecumenical councils).” Soloviev’s alienation from the Russian Orthodox hierarchy reached its zenith when he was denied the sacraments in Orthodox churches, apparently on the basis of a directive by the Orthodox authorities. Information about the existence of such a directive was provided by Nikolai Tolstoi, a former Russian Orthodox priest who under the influence of Soloviev’s religious philosophy became a Catholic. As Soloviev’s nephew commented in his biography (2000, 434), “This fact exerted a strong influence on Soloviev’s psychology and definitely placed him in statu belli with the Greco-Russian Church.” In February 1896, Soloviev made a Catholic profession of faith to the same Fr. Tolstoi, and received the sacraments from Fr. Tolstoi at a celebration of the Eastern Catholic rite liturgy. An account of this event was published by Nikolai Tolstoi in 1910 in the French magazine L’Universe and the Russian magazine Russkoe slovo. The event was later confirmed by two eyewitnesses, Princess Elena Vasil'evna Dolgorukova and Dmitry Sergeevich Novsky. Tolstoi had to flee Russia soon after the event to escape imprisonment. Soloviev, on his part, did not subsequently avail himself of the opportunity to attend sacramental worship with any of the Western rite Catholic communities in Russia. As Gregory Glazov has suggested (1997, 133), Soloviev “suffered his ostracism in the Orthodox Church as a martyrdom to his cause of liberating Orthodoxy through unification with Rome.” Evidently, he only received the sacraments again with the last rites on his deathbed from a Russian Orthodox priest, whom he explicitly requested to visit, rather than from a Catholic priest of foreign nationality. In regard to the controversy regarding Soloviev’s ecclesial affiliation, Catholic authors have considered his profession of Catholic faith before Fr. Tolstoi as evidence of Soloviev’s formal entrance into the Catholic Church; Orthodox writers have emphasized Soloviev’s explicit wish to be administered last rites by the Russian Orthodox priest. Catholic writers have insisted that according to Catholic sacramental discipline, Soloviev, as a Catholic, was allowed to receive the last rites from an Orthodox priest due to the circumstances of his imminent death. Orthodox writers have argued that in death Soloviev repented his former Catholic profession of faith. This supposition was based on the testimony by Rev. S. A. Beliaev, the priest who administered the last rites to Soloviev, who in reaction to Tolstoi’s testimony on Soloviev’s reception into the Catholic Church published an account about Soloviev’s last confession in Moskovskie vedomosti (Ru. Moscow News) in 1910, under the pseudonym N. Kolosov. According to Beliaev, Soloviev admitted that he was wrong on “a dogmatic issue”– not specified explicitly – in the controversy with an Orthodox priest who several years ago had withheld the sacraments from him (Mastiliak 2003, 124). It can only be guessed what constituted the “dogmatic issue” that Soloviev disowned when receiving the last rites. As the account of the events in Soloviev’s biography suggests (2000, 510–522), this issue most likely involved Soloviev’s conviction that he maintained his membership in the Orthodox Church even after his formal submission to Rome. At any case, suggestions that Soloviev might have repented any of his Catholic tenets at the end of his life – or his profession of the Catholic faith to Fr. Tolstoi – seem to omit the meaning of Soloviev’s martyrdom-testimony in abstaining from sacraments in the final years of his life, as well as the total orientation of his religious work, his legacy, and his mind of a poet and philosopher of universal unity.
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