In the World of Quests and Wanderings

In epochs of great upheaval, people’s hopes and expectations become very intense. A time of “revelations” ensues, and prophetic passion is ignited. Agitated and troubled consciousness experiences what is going on as something unprecedented, like nothing that has ever happened before, something entirely untested, incommensurable. History seems to have broken up, to have split in two over contemporaneity; something ultimate seems to be happening in reality. Secrets hitherto unknown and concealed are disclosed to the searching look, as if times and dates had been “fulfilled.” This is how terrifying apocalyptic presentiments—about the “approach of the bloody sunset”—and radiant, carefree, reconciled hopes for the millennial kingdom are born. They are linked and united by an intense “sense of the end.”

In the course of humanity’s historical existence there have been many such eschatological outbursts, when it seemed that “the sky was smoking,” that the storm of judgment was approaching, and that somewhere in the distance the dawn of the longed-for day of renewal was already rosy. These illusions of spiritual vision are usually explained by contemporaries’ inability to grasp the genuine dimensions and scale of what is taking place and their inevitable tendency to exaggerate and overestimate; the cause of the optical deception seems to lie in the observer’s excessive closeness to the phenomenon. This explanation could hardly be correct or precise. The eschatological appraisal of the moment being lived through, the sharp separation of the present day—as something exclusive—from the unbroken historical fabric, rests on a conscious or unconscious comparison with what formerly was and leads us beyond the limits of immediate perception. This is less an error of sight than an error of interpretation. Eschatology—both joyous and mournful—is always the product of some historiosophical meditation and not pure experience; “experience” here is frequently mediated by thought, which reworks it on the basis of its own initial premises. In trying to guess the meaning of various eschatological insights, we must first of all separate perception from interpretation, demarcate the seen from the imagined, contemplation from dream.

Since the bloody maelstrom of the last war we have experienced a phase of eschatological utopias. The whole world war proceeded “under the sign of the Apocalypse.” It was experienced not as an “ordinary” war, not as one of the many armed clashes of nations that are repeated from time to time. It was supposed to have been the last war; after it a time of “external” and inviolable peace was to begin. The war was carried on for extraordinary and exclusive objectives; it was a war against war, against the very principle of militarism, a war to exhaust all militaristic ardor. Such a war is actually something unprecedented, unique and exclusive, in the strictest and literal sense of those definitions. It is truly an apocalyptic war. Here we are dealing with a typical “earthly paradise utopia.” This “military chiliasm” has taken on a messianistic cast: the nations, the participants in the world war, represented the bearers of higher choices, the accomplishers of higher wills, as they created the “universal deed.” In the Russian consciousness this messianistic tendency was very strong. Indeed, it seemed to many that “the era is Slavophile,” that the war was a “spontaneous combustion” that exhausted itself and ossified “European civilization,” that with it “Europe” was coming to an end and a new epoch in Russia’s worldwide historical glory and might was beginning. These proud and majestic dreams were shattered so brutally and mercilessly by reality that they have already been effaced from our memory. Meanwhile, psychologically, out of them, out of this “military chiliasm,” the revolutionary chiliasm and messianic imperialism of “the greeters of the revolution” were born. The world war turned into the Russian Revolution, and it was dreamed that, “great and bloodless,” it would accomplish what was so avidly desired, that it would give to the world peace and “brotherhood among nations,” the ultimate resolution of life’s contradictions. This dream persists. Some have already been able to cast off its spell and understand that there is no worldwide historical apocalypse in the Russian Revolution at all; others even now are still in the grip of chiliastic illusions and await the descent of paradise to earth. 

These utopian dreams must be distinguished from genuine tragic experiences. Both in war and in revolution many profound displacements, much that was irreparable, and relatively final, did happen. We are living through an era of historical surprises and kaleidoscopic changes; amidst them it becomes especially clear that history is the “struggle between the two Cities.” But from this it does not in any way follow that now is the end of history and that what is happening is the ultimate appearance of the all-solving words.

I have already had an opportunity to speak about the catastrophic moods of the present day. I tried to isolate and accentuate two fundamental characteristics: in the first place, the vivid and intense naturalism of this disposition and experience of world as an elemental spinning and gusting; in the second place—and this is the fundamental thing—the predominance of dream over perception, of the contrived over the “given.” In their internal connections and mutual attractions, both these characteristics emerge with very great precision in the kind of “declaration” of program with which Andrei Bely last summer inaugurated Epopeia, his new magazine. This gives me occasion to return once more to the theme now under discussion.

By the very name of his magazine, Bely wishes to emphasize that the present day is “epic” and “heroic.” But he is not content with characterizing the experienced moment as an “earthquake of falling forms under the pressure of what is jutting out from under the past of the heroic epic, or the New Epos.” He is trying to determine the historical meaning of the epos being created in the perspective of the ages, in its connection and relation to the life and development of European humanity Here his historiosophical a priori, without which “perception” itself for Bely is impossible, is distinctly revealed.

In its formal aspect, his historiosophy is a cyclical scheme of history. In his conception the historical process is not a unitary, linear, and steady ascent but an alternation of ascents and descents, of rises and new falls, new descents. The life of mankind is like a journey across an undulating plain intersected by mountainous ridges. The culture of Greece from the sixth century B.C. to the first century is the first ascent, of which, Bely says, “the apex reached was the ‘Alexandrine period’”—in his characterization, the time of Philo Judaeus, the sources of Neoplatonism, and Christ. Then, a new descent. In the second century humanity is again in a “valley,” and starting with the sixth century a new ascent begins. This time no summits are reached, only plateaus. The “Renaissance” is not a genuine apex; it “rises only part way to the level of the first century, to misunderstood Alexandrinism.” What is reborn is not Greece but Rome, not Plato but Plotinus, although “under . . . the pseudonym of Plato and Greece.” Starting with the sixteenth century a descent again takes place—“into the valley” of “bourgeois culture”; the “hero” of the Renaissance grows shallow, is transformed into a competent liberal, a humane “statesman.” Hence first comes the Declaration of Rights and later the political French Revolution. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are a time of formed and solidified civilization. Here, “at the end of the nineteenth century, the mountainous skeleton intersected the paths of man’s journey”; suddenly it was felt sharply that limits had been reached. An ascent began—to the ridges and passes from which the radiant vision of the new culture would be revealed.

“All the agonies of the prewar years (the turn of the century),” says Bely,

An “heroic epoch” begins and is being experienced, an epoch of partings and separations, an epoch of ends—but at the same time an epoch of beginnings, of hopes and forewarnings.

Bely is quite right in trying to re-examine our retrospective surveys of the general European past and to hammer landmark posts into them. The epochs and periods he notes in general are defined perceptively and successfully. But the historical process has not yet been exhausted by the alternation of cultures and civilizations, the succession of epochs. Here the initial naturalism of the perception of history leaves its mark. For Bely, history is only an impersonal, elemental stream, swift and mighty. That people live in history and that these people participate in it freely and creatively, this he does not know or feel. His perception is monistic. . . . In his consciousness there are no evaluative categories. And there is no category of freedom. It is difficult to say what comes first: the absence of volitional support or the solution of the obligatory in the “real.” Bely completely lacks an individualistic illumination. He does not acknowledge man as a creator who is active and therefore subject to moral law. He does not acknowledge the creatively determining participation, volitional and free, of each individual person in the creating of historical life. In his conception, individuals are swallowed up completely by abstract, elementally consistent existence. Humanity, that “pie-bald half-god,” as Herzen once expressed himself, is a substratum of history.

For Bely, man is essentially passive in history. Even prophet-poets “are organs of breathing,” “of collectives,” and only that. Persons and generations are drawn somewhere in the stream of general life and can only note, hear, guess, and wait. What is happening has to accept its irresistibility. In this sense Bely approaches the limit fearlessly. Prophesying the unprecedented, welcoming it, he openly confesses that he does not know what it will be like; moreover, its meaning and content are in general unknown. The new culture will take shape only toward the end of the twenty-first century. Only “in the thirties will the meaning of the quakes in which we live be specified. Until 1933 it is impossible to draw any conclusions; one can only observe.” Action, in and of itself, a limine, is exclusive. Bely hails the new life not because it is better than past life but because it is new. He rejoices in the “epicness” of what is happening: “We overheard this epos. . . . And not being capable of inducing its act of birth artificially, we still put our ear to the dull tremors of the ground: and we await … the Fata trahunt.” Herein for Bely is the entire “meaning of history.” “Let us hail the inevitable,” he exclaims; “let us welcome ‘Epos,’ let us welcome the heroic, titanic, epos taking shape in the subconscious of everything vital and creative.” Slavish submission, this is the only way Bely knows of relating to what is happening. 

True, Bely dreams of and constantly affirms heroism. But he himself defines it as “heroic cosmism.” Personal will, personal and conscious audacity, which sets and responsibly chooses its own objective. Bely does not know; he knows only burning, passionate attractions, natural and for that reason impersonal and irresponsible. For him there exists only elemental, cosmic will, overflowing everywhere, and in relation to it every individual is only submissive, plastic material; in himself he is will-less. Bely awaits the advent in the world of titans, great and powerful people: he waits for “the dark masses of twentieth-century humanity to rise to heroism.” This will be the “Inter-Individual, which surmounts the Inter-National.” But he hopes that they will be tossed out—like a gift—by the seething element of cosmic life. For good reason he compares the present day with the birth of the chthonic cults in ancient Greece. Bely is subjectively alien to any volitional passion, and this is why he does not understand that observation and “sensitivity,” submission to “essence” or “nature,” do not engender “heroes.” Nor does he understand that in general heroes are not born. Heroes create themselves. They form and forge their spirit in intense volitional deed, the deed of free self-definition toward a precise and clearly stated objective. Heroism is not only a formal psychological category, not only a style of the spirit, but also by its essence, by its content, a certain definition of it. Heroes are made of those who have defined themselves for a “higher calling.” Heroes appear in life only when the higher and sole genuine individualism, religious individualism, is recognized and empirically known, when, in the miserable and aching breast, the agony of suspense is replaced by the “will to will” and the paths of God and Evil—in all their real oppositeness—are outlined.

Then eschatological temptations will grow dull and pale, for the extra-historical and “supernatural” nature and essence of that “fatherland” that for man is in heaven will be recognized. Apocalyptics serves the timid “decadent” will with quiescence. Confidence in the immanent necessity of fulfilling a definite, all-encompassing, and vital meaning replaces the pain of choice, appraisal, and decision; the triumphal magnificence of apocalyptic anticipations blocks out the valuable vacuity of historical perception. If the oncoming inevitable transposes us—thorough the deed and intensity of personal quest and choice in the irresistible rhythm of life—to a land of miracles, to a region of heavenly accomplishments, then, of course, one can shut one’s eyes and lose heart and devote oneself serenely to the will of the infallible forces of attraction. But if the “end” is still distant or is not at all—if “history goes nowhere” and leads nowhere so that each man must not only actively go but also seek where he is going—then the question of the meaning and appraisal of what is happening arises in full force. Apocalpyse charms the faithless and the weak-spirited. Bely’s example reveals with absolute precision the softening and enervating nature of every chiliasm, of every hope for an end and a “fulfillment” of history, for the millennium as something advancing in the order of cosmic, naturally necessary, and supra-individual fulfillment.

In Bely’s historiosophical consciousness, the inevitable contradiction of every chiliasm is stripped bare the irreconcilability of the irresistibly benevolent direction of the historical process itself as such, taken as a whole and overall, and the freedom of choice and action. At its base this opposition is antinomial; the meaning of history and the meaning of personal action must somehow be reconciled irrationally and suprarationally in the overriding synthesis. Bely does not notice this antinomianism and avoids its explanation of the world, sacrificing personal will and personal impulse to the “elements.” The person as actor vanishes from the field of vision. The passion of chiliasm is rooted in this essential impersonality of world perception, and it is no longer important how the necessity of historical events is explained—be it by logical measure and systematic predestination of existence or by the natural rhythm of the primordial cosmic potentialities of existence—in the gradualness of what unfolds in time. In the final analysis, the conception of self-realizing Reason and the conception of “vital impulse,” Hegel’s panlogism and Bergson’s “creative evolution,” coincide. The elemental vis a tergo or the logical a priori equally enslave the spirit and engulf the personality in the “despotic ocean” of faceless all-unity. In contrast to what are not frequent hopes, it needs to be emphasized that the overcoming of the “worldwide historical point of view,” the overcoming of the idea of linear progress, still does not exhaust those contradictions that—from the standpoint of the ethics of the creative personality, of the ethics of active will—are hidden in every “comprehension” of history as a whole. The theory of historical cycles and the concomitant theory of cultural historical types fall under all those objections that corrupt from within the current forms of the “theory of progress.” The creative personality vanishes, dissolves in some kind of collective, and it is immaterial that [only] “people” or “types” and historical cycles (a chronological part of history) take the place of “humanity” and all of history. The most determining significance is that the conclusion of life—in the evaluative as well as in the temporal sense—is seen as occurring within a unitary, irresistible, and all-encompassing regularity.

The meaning of personal life and of the personal creative deed is vindicated only within the bounds of that world view that allows for breaks in natural historical necessity. Man proves to be a genuinely free and creative “element” of life only if his existence is not reduced to general and abstract characteristics, if he is not only a notorious “generic being” (Marx’s Gattungswesen), if he not only “listens for” and “awaits” but also transcends—is able to transcend—the limits of his own “time” and “environment,” and not only in the sphere of “evaluation” but in the sphere of action as well. To put it another way: [it is as] if historical (summary and faceless) events were things morally indifferent, not in the sense that they lack ethical value or that history as a whole lacks “meaning,” but in the sense that spatio-temporal conditions are irrelevant both as critiera and as constructs, in the content of the individual ideal of life guided by will and consciousness. Or, in still other words, no objective result of the general historical process can exhaust (or replace) the moral tasks of personal duty. This is what historians and naturalists do not keep in mind. For them the maxim of genuine religious individualism is mute: What does it profit a man if he gain the entire world and lose his own soul? This is why the specter of the “earthly paradise” or “integral life,” objectively realized in one or another concrete form, blocks the postulate of personal perfectibility in their consciousness.

Of course, both history as an integral process and cosmic existence in its dynamic are subject to religious comprehension, vindication, and appraisal, and the lie of chiliasm is not in the attempt to provide these. Its lie is that the ideal is reduced to general characteristics, that it conceives of the possibility of an “ideal epoch,” “ideal daily life,” “ideal culture,” and so forth. These concepts are intrinsically impossible. There cannot be even an ideal tone or style of life because even these are formal and abstract definitions. There can only be “ideal people,” and the "fulfillment” of life is only in everyone’s becoming perfect, as the Heavenly Father is perfect. From the standpoint of strictly conducted, consistent individualism, the value of the “collective” can only be a derivative value, and therefore the true Kingdom of God cannot be “not of this world,” cannot not lie outside history. The Kingdom of God is a society of saints, and moreover holy saints outside the conditions of spatial and temporal limitation; this is why its logical and real chronological precondition is the “end of history” and the Resurrection of the Dead. These mysterious and embarrassingly capacious dogmas of the Christian faith are recognized by the religious-philosophical reflex as the inevitable premises of genuine individualism; and a certain genuine, mysterious and profound insight lies at the base of N. F. Fyodorov’s strange and odd appeal to “resurrect our ancestors,” however much naturalistic passion there is in it.

The Kingdom of God, the “epoch of faith,” cannot be one stage in the historical process, neither interim nor final. For no one who has “pleased God” can be crossed out of the “Book of Life.” Heavenly bliss cannot be confined to one historical epoch, even if it is infinite in the sense of unrestricted continuity, if it has been preceded by centuries and millennia of death, decay, and empirical evil. The “epoch of faith” as a value and, consequently, a task of the will is a subtle chiliastic temptation. Simple faith, meek in its audacity, like the genuine “exposure of invisible things,” overcomes all experience in its entirety, and for this reason apocalyptic temptations and curiosity toward τὰ ἔσχατα are alien to it. Intense eschatological mediation is always the fruit and sign of the religious sickness of the soul. A lack of faith is disclosed in it, the search for rational supports and logical arguments for faith. As historical reality, as something familiar and possible, the “epoch of faith” does not stand in any kind of connection with the goals of history and eschatology. There are epochs when there are more believers, when they are a majority, when, therefore, all creation, all life, is steeped in faith, saturated with religious illumination. Such epochs can be called “epochs of faith.” But they happen more than once; they have their beginnings and their ends, never encompassing all of humanity or all people, never realizing the “social ideal.” No “epoch” accommodates the “meaning of history.” Genuine apocalypse does not so much “fulfill” as end, break off, empirical history; its genuine “fulfillment” lies on the other side, “when time will cease to be.” The meaning of history will be realized after its end. This verbally contradictory expression is perfectly precise; it means that no part (chronological) of the historic, and cosmic, process is the valued goal of the entire process. The whole world, as an existence, as a whole, will be judged “on the last day,” “at the last trumpet.” The Temporal as such is replaced by the Eternal.

Historical naturalism is overcome by this at its roots. History is not a continuation of nature; it is not only evolution, not only a natural, regular, cause-and-effect process of disclosing performed potentials. There is a certain upper world, a world of eternal and essential existing values, and it is revealed to man in the unconditional and infinite commands of evaluative consciousness. Man as such, as a kind of amphibian, as an individual endowed with and possessing freedom, can and must overcome nature, climb beyond its limits, “in the radiance of eternal truth,” and establish relations and ties with that which is “not of this world.” Inasmuch as he accomplishes this, inasmuch as he becomes the bearer and conductor of transcendent, supernatural, non-worldly principles into the world, he becomes the creator and builder of life, a positive or negative factor in “humanity’s” historical becoming. In the evaluative order it is not history that sets the requirements and tasks for man, but man for history. Over the world of natural things and events he erects a world of meanings; he animates nature and transforms it into a “world out of beauty.” But only the personality, the individual, faces absolute and categorical imperatives; in man there is the image of ineffable Divine Glory, but there are no unconditional norms and tasks of collective cumulative life. Only in the personal deed does heaven bow down to earth. Only the personality possesses—in actu or in virtu—unconditional dignity.

This does not mean that beauty and good can be imagined and expressed only in the human soul or in the individual life. Man introduces the seen and the examined into nature, into “social life,” but only he discloses the eternally valued in the world; only through the personal deed of human creativity are “ideas” and “meanings” realized in life. The unconditional, timeless requirements of autonomous religious and moral “legislation” address only the individual will, but man’s action does not have to address it alone, its isolated personality alone. Its chief task is to teach each of these small ones and to prepare all creation for its liberation from enslavement to the vanity of decay into the freedom of the glory of the Son of God. Man’s valuable and creative activity must be directed toward the entire world’s expanse. For man’s activity an “element” is merely plastic material—plastic but not amorphous. Nature is not stagnant and shapeless Platonic matter; it possesses harmony and regularity. But even within the limits of this iron world-order there is place and expanse for personal volitional effort, for the creative deed of integral and creative construction.

The opposition between “nature” and “man,” between the “person” and the “environment,” between “matter” and “form,” is not reduced to or determined by “the basic dualism of the social historical process” (P. B. Struve’s expression), which lends it the sense of a freely created becoming.

Man brings not form but meaning into history and life. The dualism of social historical life is determined by the essential duality of existence, not by the dualism of spirit and matter, soul and flesh, but the two-dimensionality of nature and value, of “reality” and “meaning.” There are two worlds, “this” and “the other,” the “intelligible” and the “phenomenal.” Both are “real” and both possess an existence in, of, and for themselves. But they are real with different realities. Herein lies the pledge of freedom, that there is this initial duality, that the world is not all-one, is not an organic whole. Any monism inevitably entails the passion of necessity. “Absolute realism,” which reduces everything to ontological categories, placing the characteristic of “being” above all else, destroys the autonomy of the evaluative consciousness, brings it down either to the level of a hopeful dream, easing the bitterness of “low truths” through elevated deceptions, or to the level of optical instrument, magnifying the power of judgment of elemental and impersonal imminent events. In both cases, there is no place left for moral action, for the volitional application of freely elected values. Of course, the new and unprecedented, the unexpected and incalculable occur in nature as well; but this is not creativity, and there is no freedom here. Freedom does not consist in the fact that after A comes B, which follows it not always and, perhaps, had never followed it yet, and not in the fact that AB instead of the usual C defeats the as yet unheard-of E. Breaks in “natural-historical necessity” do not consist of the fact that out of two or many equally possible results one specific one occurs, accidentally and arbitrarily; such a break would be a sham one; the accidental is always explainable out of maximally concrete individualizations of circumstance and environment. Freedom consists in the fact that “the light will shine forth in the land of mortal protection,” in the fact that out of A is born that B that in general cannot in any way whatsoever arise out of it in the causal-consequential order, for it belongs to a different plane of existence. Freedom and creativity consist in the fact that the natural event turns out to be a “meaning” and a “value,” a manifestation of “other worlds.” Here the bonds, the knots, of existence are broken, and Eternity breaks into the sphere of decay and descends. Here a genuine miracle is accomplished—and it is only in miracle that freedom is realized, not freedom from anything, but self-essential positive freedom.

The birth of any value is free; it is accomplished through the creative deed of the personality. This is possible only because self-worth exists. Here once again the naturalistic temptation arises to interpret values as other-natured essences or as substances of the “actual” and to understand phenomenal “existence” as a simple, amorphous restriction, a limit, a passive, not an active, obstacle to the fullness of realization. Then once again the becoming of worth in life is transformed into a ghost. Nature has not yet been overcome by the organizing and regulating activity of the Demiurge. History is not only the formulation of the chaotic given and the gradual manifestation of the essential, existing, underlying cause of the actual. The two worlds do not join up “naturally” or necessarily or according to the principles of cause and effect or “sufficient reason.” Human activity is not a phenomenon of nature, not only because “value” is “external” and “accidental” to nature and lies beyond its bounds but also because in the actual there is something that actively fights against the “valuable.” If evil and ugliness lack any proper content, possess only a depriving nature, and are only transitional, phenomenally “outside” for the time being, by their natural incompleteness, added to the positive content of genuine existence and eliminated in the process of the self-perfection and self-fulfillment of life and there is only an absence or vanishing minimum of the good and the beautiful, then the highest law remains the naturalistic law of “development,” and values once again dissolve in the homogeneity of natural existence. Then the possibility of action, of activeness, vanishes once again; in man and through man irreconcilable and fateful tendencies of natural “progress” will be fulfilled, but he himself having become an “entelechy” of life, will cease being its creator, will lose his will to the benefit of elemental will. Man’s becoming will be genuinely creative, free, and for that reason responsible only when Good is opposed by Evil as an objective qualitativeness of existence, as an “actual force ruling our world by means of temptations” (Vladimir Solovyov). Deed and struggle assume the opponent’s reality. Struggling against mirages and ghosts would also be transparent. Herein is the lie of Monophysitism. Man is creatively free precisely because he cancels (can and must cancel) through his action the truly evil and affirms (can and must affirm) the truly good. Here we come to the sharpest and initial moral-metaphysical antinomy: evil is real and effective. It is a force and not an ens privatum; empirically it is no less real than good. Evil not only can tempt but can subdue, can rule man, ruin him. Along with this, the reality of evil consists in its denial and repudiation of all existence; evil is essential “non-existence.” It is not rooted in eternity; its existence is phenomenal. Its nature is in perversion, in the distortion of the actual, and for the actual this is “accidental.” Evil enters the actual by the back door. There is no metaphysical necessity whatsoever to the existence of evil, and that very antinomial duality engenders the fundamental paradox of the ethics of will. Deed is the becoming of the personality, the disclosure and realization of its genuine “best I.” It is possible because the ideal is present to a certain extent, is given to becoming a person. If the goal—ideal were something utterly external, then not only would it be unattainable, but any attainment of it would be morally meaningless, insignificant. For the personality would not be transformed; it would only dress up in clean clothes without washing itself. Or the real identity—unity of the subject of becoming would be violated. But alongside the whole force, meaning, and essence of deed is the leap—across the real abyss. The entire significance of deed is in its insecurity and, even more so, in its impossibility. Credibile nam impossibile! The freedom of the deed is that “there are no guarantees from the heavens,” and that attainment through any generally significant, regularly repeated ties is not connected with aspiration, in that “recompense” is not from deeds and is given as a gift. Deed is an ascent into the upper reaches, and only from above can Jacob’s miraculous Ladder be thrown down. The attempt to rise up to the heavens from earth, out of the terrestrial, through local forces, not only does not lead to the goal but takes it infinitely and entirely further away; such was the construction of the Tower of Babel. Deed is genuinely disinterested striving—with the self-conscious awareness that there are no equivalents between the world’s “events” and hoped-for “alms,” that no constancy in the gradus ad Parnassum can overcome the hiatus between the “actual” and the “obligatory.” The task is simultanesouly given and unattainable, for evil is simultaneously insignificant and powerful; and there is, there is “non-existence.” This antinomy is logically and discursively unresolvable, for discourse always conceals the necessary connections and cannot (and does not try to) conceal the others. The recognition of freedom is the recognition of the unsubstantiated, and for this reason it is equivalent of a refusal of discursive “vindication.” Proofs are replaced by visions. One world view must be replaced by another. Freedom is not proven, and the logical problem of “freedom of the will” is internally contradictory. Freedom must be experienced. “Know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” In religious experience the essential, real freedom of the world in God is disclosed: the freedom of creation, protected and watched over by the mercy of the Creator’s love. Faith does not liberate one from prejudices and fears; it gives the experience of freedom, and in this experience the contradictions of thought, which does not accommodate the ineffable mysteries of the world, are resolved.

The “vindication of the personality,” in its creative freedom, leads us to the initial “premiss,” to Christian theism, to the belief in the Triune Personal God, as well as to the biblical doctrine of the creation of the world out of nothing. In religious experience, Divinity is revealed as unconditionally otherworldly, inaccessibly beyond the bounds, and the world appears in its concentration on God. In its self-authenticity and highest realism, religion is the intimate experience of the miraculous freedom of “causeless,” “unsubstantiated” encounters between the world and God. The world is God’s creation, that is, His essentially non-necessary making; divine causality is “causality through freedom,” described and expressed only negatively and relatively. To put it another way: for the unconditional there is no fate or “compulsion” in the existence of the other, conditional, and finite existence alongside it. The concept of the Absolute Existence in no way gives rise to the evidence of creation; and from the believer’s point of view the “deduction” of the world from Divine Love is utterly blasphemous, resting as it does on the necessity of a “worthy” object for It, without which It could not be disclosed. And proceeding from the existence of finite things, it is impossible to infer God, although for the believer’s gaze “the heavens shall declare the glory of God.” It is impossible because any ascent from effects to causes presupposes an unambiguous and necessary sequence of links, that is, the necessary connectedness of Absolute Existence with finite existence and, moreover, with given (specifically qualitied and uniquely individualized) existence, which radically contradicts the very sense of religious experience and the “concept” of God as otherworldly and Creator. This inference bears an open pantheistic character, as it relates the Divinity to things of nature as “first among equals,” surpassing everyone through the might or “size” (Nicholas of Cusa’s omne est quod esse potest) of the “necessary and sufficient” precondition of the others, and thereby “vindicating” and absolutizing everything as a phaenomenon bene fundatum, at the same time transforming the finite into a ghost and a shadow, depriving it of its freedom. In the religious perception, the world, being essentially unoriginal in both provenance and tenure, being preserved only through the will and mercy of the Most High, is at the same time unconditionally closed and original and a. kind of “other,” and otherworldly for the Divinity. For precisely this reason the Incarnation of the Word of God is confessed as a miracle. But being internally closed, that is, submitting to immanent necessity, the world is at the same time transparent to Divine Love and can become involved with freedom, through illumination by the rays of the unearthly light, through the miraculous charity of grace. It can accept grace and oppose itself to it by force of its real otherworldliness from Absolute Existence. The world is natural and unoriginal, but it is not only a phenomenon having a “beginning” and an “end” in time, created and caused. The world will not perish, will not disappear; it will “change” and be transformed when “time is no more.” The righteous will surge up in the joy of the Lord and eternal life; sinners, in the “everlasting fire” of eternal torment. Nature will be bared in its noumenal beauty (for it is “very good”). The “resurrection of life” and the “resurrection of judgment” are not the dying out of the finite in Nirvana. Hence the duality of evil: real and insignificant simultaneously. Being “nothing” with respect to divine existence, being “non-existence” for creation, which has affirmed itself in Good and thus regenerated itself, evil for creation as real existence is a real possibility, a real path. It is the path to destruction—but real destruction. Evil is mysterious because it is the fruit of freedom, and for that reason it cannot be explained or “justified”; evil is not inevitable or “accidental” in the universe and so is not linked to the harmony of the world. 

Evil is a real moment in the other world, having appeared first in it and existing only in it. The appearance of evil is not inevitably linked to the appearance of the creature; the natural and finite are not necessarily “bad.” To speak crudely, the world could “get along” without evil. This is expressed in the idea of Divine “tolerance.” This fundamental idea of the religious world view is usually assimilated with great difficulty, by force of the instinctive pull toward “explanation.” The difficulty is resolved in the religious sensation of the creatureliness and God-forsakenness of the world, in the experience of freedom. Man must sense evil as evil and turn away from the affairs of darkness. Human action is a struggle, an overcoming of evil in the world, and the turning toward that which lies beyond the bounds of any creativeness of the Life-Bearing Source of Good.

“Existence” is neither “total unity” nor an “organic whole,” for it is torn by the hiatus and abyss between the Absolute and the creature; these two worlds are joined only by “causality and freedom.” In its concrete phenomenality, the world is not a projection in time of the primordial Divine intention, which predetermines all details of its formation and the sequence of steps of its becoming. Divine freedom makes it understandable, as the early foreknowledge of everything that is to happen in the world does not destroy the world’s freedom or the self-definition of the creature. The “imperfection” of the world and worldly vanity are not generated in the order of inevitability by the refraction of the Eternal in time. The finite, while not ceasing to be finite, can become a vessel for the Eternal, can overcome the force of decay; and without losing their individualization, on the judgment day the sons of the bridal chamber will sit according to the promise at the Throne of God. In the final events the creature is not abolished but affirmed through the transformation of glory. Now, meanwhile, until the onset of the “fullness of time,” the creature as such is not an harmonically correct “whole”; it stands hesitating at the crossroads between stubborn assertion of exclusive necessity and reverential self-renunciation in the acceptance of Divine grace. The world is not yet complete and stable, not in the sense of natural looseness and amorphousness, but in the sense of the continually arising task of the evaluative and volitional choice between Good and Evil. This choice is made by the human personality, and by it alone. Through its freedom, “sin enters the world, and through sin, death.” The volitional fall is expiated and healed through volitional repentance and deed. Man redeems not only himself but the world as well, all creation, “not voluntarily submitting to vanity but subjugating it by his will.” Thus the personality and its effectiveness is “substantiated.” Attainment is accomplished in submissive acceptance “causelessly”—as a gift—of given grace, revealing to the world that which is above the world. Grace is given only to the seeker; it cannot be gained by theft or force, for the anointing of grace is the overcoming of necessity and the escape into the Divine world of freedom. It is found only in the act of naïve, childlike faith, the “faith of the collier.”

We come here to the profound root of utopian quietism. Man’s separate thoughts and “convictions” are linked in a kind of vicious circle, and not by accident were the resolutions of separate problems suggested by the general world view. The weakness of personal will, the faint-hearted quest for “grounds” and “justification,” approach Docetic individualism, and its basis is in the pantheistic ignorance of the Divine Personality. If there is no God, as a Person, but there is only the “divine,” then there is no (it cannot be observed) person in man. And if there is no Divine creation, then man cannot create either. Schelling already had a clear sense of the radical opposition between the intuition of “movement” and “action,” between development and creation (Bewegung and Handlung). But the awareness of powerlessness and restrictedness forges man’s will; it is undermined and extinguished only by a naturalistic sense of self, by a sense of utter inclusion in the “organic” link of nature, in the “endless chain” of automatically proceeding births, deaths, and metamorphoses. It has to be sensed that above “this world,” the world of incessantly seething and all-devouring “elements,” there is something “different”—but not simply a “world of ideas,” a world of eternal forms and prototypes, but a world of noumena that “appear” in this reality. Above the world stands Divinity, One God—Love, triune in its faces. And in this “sense of self” is revealed the possibility of audaciously humble creative transport and effective will. For “all is possible to the believer” in the deed of ascending “to the honor of higher knowledge,” in the deed of a sacrificing love for one’s neighbor.

For Bely the naturalistic interpretation of contemporaneity is not accidental. In contemporary utopian catastrophism the results of a long religious-ideological process that the Russian consciousness has lived through but not yet lived out are summarized and revealed, results of an entire period of Russian social development. Here are the conclusion and exhaustion of the era of Russian “God-seeking,” which replaced positivist nihilism at the dawn of the present century. The new impression of the changed epoch are introduced here into old and accustomed limits, and are taken for prophetic conjectures, prophetic forewarnings of the as yet unknown oncoming newness. But new wine exposes the decrepitude of old skins. . . . In the trials of recent years spiritual vision has sharpened, and what was sighted with difficulty so recently is now visible. Herein lie the “newness” and extraordinariness of epoch, not in the definitive appearance of complete truth but in the collapse of former temptations.

The spiritual failure of Bely, Alexkandr Blok, and their entire “generation,” the “storm and stress” of religious-philosophical quests that entered the stream of Russian life in the early ‘90s, and those fateful impasses to which these quests led turn out thought to the initial principles of their world view. A concrete task arises before us: “new religious consciousness” was to a significant extent the development and extension of the religious metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov, of what ought to be called his “first metaphysic,” the gnostic mysticism and the external theocratism closely linked with it of his early and middle years. In Solovyov’s personal spiritual becoming, this metaphysic was outlived and repudiated. It must be remembered that in Povest ob Antikhriste [The Tale of the Antichrist] Solovyov places in the mouth of that “religious pretender,” inspired by the spirit of evil, his own former intentions of an all-encompassing, reconciling, organizing synthesis, as the way of doing a great favor to humanity and overcoming forever all the evil suffering of universal life. But according to the “irony of destiny,” Solovyov’s “first metaphysic,” which he himself repudiated, became the model and source of inspiration for the generation that succeeded him. Herein is his fateful and ambiguous role in the history of Russian religious-philosophical self-awareness. Now we are faced with the task of disclosing Solovyov’s “second metaphysic,” his “philosophy of the end,” a philosophy of struggle, miracle, and freedom only hastily implied in the images and symbols of his dying creations, Tri Razgovora [Three Conversations] and Povest ob Antikhriste [Tale of Antichrist]. Meanwhile it is also necessary to exhaust completely and recognize the temptations of his early speculations.

Genetically, Solovyov’s philosophy was linked to Western European pantheism (Spinoza, Schopenhauer), to ancient and new gnosticism (Alexandrinism, the Kabbala, “German mysticism”), and to impotent attempts at the speculative overcoming of rationalism (in Schelling and Baader). Solovyov’s own mystical experience was essentially non-ecclesiastical and has a clearly sectarian tendency: his insights about the Eternal Feminine are qualitatively incommensurate with the ecclesiastical experience of Sophia engraved primarily in the iconography. Solovyov is fathomlessly rooted in the “nature-inspired” mysticism of the West, in the “theosophism” of Jacob Boehme, which Schelling still identified as “rationalism.” It was in these years, through getting close to the family of the then already deceased poet Count Aleksei I. Tolstoi, that Solovyov entered the sphere of mystical-theosophical practice. We know what a large role his closeness to the Tolstoi family, especially to the Countess Sophia’s niece, S. P. Khitrovo, played in Solovyov’s personal life. In these personal relations lies the psychological solution not only to his mystical and magical lyrics but also to his doctrine of Sophia and the Eternal Feminine. The unhealthy, demoralizing influence of theosophical naturalism told sharply on his personal experience. However unexpected it might seem, unquestionably Solovyov’s theocratsm did not originate in Catholicism at all. It can be seen with total clarity even in the 1870s (in Filosofskie nachala tselnogo znaniia [Philosophical Origins of Integral Knowledge]) when in denominational questions he adhered to the old Slavophile tradition, saw in the pope the bearer of the “legacy of the Antichrist,” and traced the social decrepitude of the Russian hierarchy to Nikon’s Latinophilism. The roots of the earlier Solovyovian conception of “free theocracy” must be sought in the famous philosophe inconnu, Saint-Martin, in his book Des erreurs et de la verité (1775), and especially in the “Lettre à un ami ou Considerations politiques, philosophiques, et religieuses sur la revolution française” (1795). Saint-Martin’s ideas were interpreted and developed by Baader. From him derive both de Maistre (in his Considerations sur la France, which appeared in 1796), and to a significant extent Svyaschenni soiuz [Holy alliance]. Solovyov is included in this essentially extra-ecclesiastical series of worldly motivated “religious-social” utopias. Moreover, the close and indissoluble link between social-practical tasks—the theocratic ideal as the synthetic combination of all differences—and the naturalism of the metaphysical perception of the world, the doctrine of the world soul, of total humanity and its intelligible original sin, and so on, is characteristic. This link is revealed in detailed form in Solovyov’s followers. Perhaps they did not always understand Solovyov correctly and he is not responsible for all their constructions, but it must be clarified with complete precision how many tempting seeds his own personal metaphysics contained.

Solovyov has already ceased to be a vital treasure house of inspiration; now he is no longer accepted as the “Russian Hegel.” It was discovered that there was nowhere to go after him, that many of his paths ended in desolate impasses. A change of path became a clear inevitability, and the first step is the exposure of old “errors.” Until this “preliminary” work is done, it will be possible only to anticipate where the boundary line runs, only to mark “by the rule of opposites,” so to speak, the direction of impending quests.

Solovyov was too much a “romantic”; his mysticism was too gnostic. In it there was too much “elementalism” and at the same time “logism,” crossing over into vulgar rationalism; in it there was too much organic historicism, which was irrepressibly reduced to the utopian absolutization of temporal and earthly concrete forms and which hindered him from posing religious and ethical tasks simply and precisely. Solovyov wanted to devote to God the whole world, with which he was “in love” with a natural, “erotic” passion; he tried to reveal the divine roots in everything, to set the religious tasks for everything, to change and transform everything through the passion of unity. As a result he arrived at a unique panentheism, indistinguishable from pantheism. The boundary between God, who is “all things in everything,” and the world was erased, the hiatus between “here” and “there” vanished, and in the image of the world as an organic whole everything merged into a naturalistic, elemental spinning and throbbing, pre-formed from time immemorial. 

Hence the painfully decadent character of present-day apocalypticism, the absence of simplicity and directness in the world view of even those who have entered deeply into the Church; too many uncleared and unconnected fragments of extra-ecclesiastical mysticism and bad gnosis remain. At the base lies a definite mistake in the comprehension of the mystery (“problem”) of the personality. The relationship between “empirical” and “intelligible” nature, the link between the “two worlds,” is grasped and defined improperly. Hence, psychologically there is born a kind of fragility of the individual, who has gazed too sharply into the faceless whirl of elements and embraced their will too submissively. To put it another way: the personality has not been recognized in man, and it has not been recognized because the Divine Personality is not felt with sufficient force; and for the time being we do not know which mistake came first. But one thing is clear: only in simple, not “stylized,” ecclesiasticism, in the vital “life of the Church,” in the “communion of prayers and mysteries,” do we feel the genuine tragedy of worldly life. Only intimate Christian faith in the Triune Personality of God allows us to carry unbroken hope and will to deed through our stormy trials. “Cosmic” accomplishments are only an evil, stupefying fog and soul-blinding mirage. Solovyov understood this very well. “Indeed,” he wrote,

*“V mire iskanii i bluzhdanii” originally appeared in Russkaia mysl’, 23, no. 4 (1923). Written when he was still in his twenties and when the Russian intelligentsia’s quest for God was reinforced by the tribulations of the First World War, revolutions, and often exile or emigration, Florovsky took the intelligentsia to task for not accepting the entire body of Orthodox teaching. He was particularly forceful in defending what he considered to be the genuine legacy of Vladimir Solovyov from the interpretations of writers such as Bely, whom Florovsky placed in the eschatological tradition, which was not based on a genuine understanding of Christianity. Writing in 1923, Florovsky argued that there was as much danger to the individual in the irrational stress placed on the community of experience by some symbolist poets as there was in any system that deliberately sought to subordinate the individual. 

Like Solovyov, the Trubetskois, and other idealist philosophers, Florovsky argued that Christian ethics was based on the value of the individual and his personal relationship to God. In his philosophical studies, Florovsky tried to reconcile reason and faith, arguing that each individual could with dignity accept both.

This article is a self-sustained part of a longer essay in which Florovsky expressed his criticism of the intelligentsia’s quest for a humanist Christian religion that failed to emphasize Christ. Florovsky’s best-known work in the field of Russian intellectual history is Paths of Russian Theology, written fourteen years after this piece, in which he presented a critical analysis of dominant intellectual trends in Russia.