Quotes of the Week: Vladimir Solovyov
In order to save the world which ‘lieth in the evil one,’ Christianity must mingle with the world; but in order that the human representatives of the divine fact, the earthly guardians and instruments of transcendent truth and absolute holiness, may not compromise their sacred dignity in the practical struggle against evil, nor forget heaven in their desire to save the earth, their political action must be indirect. As the divine Father acts and manifests Himself in creation through the Son, His Word, so too the Church of God, the spiritual fatherhood, the universal Papacy, must act and manifest itself externally by means of the Christian State, through the Kingship of the Son. The State must be the political organ of the Church; the temporal sovereign must be the ‘Word’ of the spiritual sovereign. In this way, the question of supremacy between the two powers is solved: for the more each is what it should be, the greater their mutual equality and freedom. When the State, confining itself to the exercise of secular power, asks and receives its moral sanction from the Church, and the latter, while asserting its own supreme spiritual authority, entrusts its external action to the State, there is an intimate bond between the two, a mutual dependence, and at the same time all conflict and oppression of the one by the other is excluded. When the Church guards and expounds the law of God, and the State devotes itself to the carrying out of that law by the transformation of the social order in accordance with the Christian ideal and the creation of practical conditions and external means for realising the divine-human life in the whole range of earthly existence, then it is clear that all conflict of principles and interests must vanish to give place to a peaceful division of labour in the common task.
Vladimir Solvoyvov, Russia and the Universal Church. Trans. Herbert Rees (London: Geoffrey Bles: 1948), 204.
But in order to constitute Social Man, the individual element, reintegrated by true Marriage, must be reunited to the fixed collective form. The individual is inwardly separated from society by the desire for preeminence and external domination in the name of his own personality. He re-enters the unity of society by the moral act of renunciation, the subordination of his will, his own interests, his whole ego to the will and interests of a superior being recognized as such. If married love is essentially a coordination of two equal though different existences, social love is bound to express itself by a definite subordination of social units of different orders. Here it is not the brutal egoism of Man which must be shattered by an intense emotion impelling it to identification with another being; that has already been done by sexual love. It is the individual existence which must be linked to a general hierarchy whose gradations are defined by the formal relation existing between the whole and its pats of greater or less significance. The perfection of social love cannot then consist in an intensity of subjective feeling, but in its conformity with objective reason which tells us that the whole is greater than any of its parts. The obligation of this love is therefore infringed and the realisation of social Man is hindered, not only by mere egoism, but also chiefly by that particularism which draws distinctions between the interests of lower groups, to which we are more immediately attached, and those of higher and more extensive groups. When a man separates his love for the family, the trade union, the social class or the political party to which he belongs from his love for country, or when he is ready to serve the latter without regard to mankind as a whole or the Universal Church, he is putting asunder what God has joined in one, and is becoming an obstacle to the integration of social Man.
The type and basic reality of this integration are given in the ecclesiastical hierarchy formed by the Sacrament of Order. It is the triumph of social love, for no member of this order functions or acts for himself or in his own name; each one is ordained and invested by a superior representing a wider social unit. Here, form the humblest priest up to the Pope, the servant of the servants of God, all are absolutely free, as far as their sacred ministry is concerned, from self-asserting egoism or isolated particularism; each one is simply a distinct organ of a united social whole, the Universal Church.
Ibid., 212-3.
Comments are closed.
I thought these quotes are very apropos this week — though, of course, I think the last section of this book as a whole would have been apropos this week. Solovyov was Russian Orthodox yet believed in the Papacy. But what I wanted to show here is the witness of the past, of the ideals of the past, of how the world was seen in the past by Christian thinkers/authorities. It’s quite different today — and I think we lost something because we have lost the notion of the reintegration of humanity as one. We like division – but such division is founded upon sin and if we are going to heal sin, we must heal division not reinforce it.
Of course, this means it must be done right. I think the 20th century forced those who were right on principle see the prudence they chose was in error. Now we have better prudential notions to tie with the principles. This was necessary. But I fear, we will not follow through with them. Alas.
“….we have lost the notion of the reintegration of humanity as one.”
I think that, more accurately, we have lost the hope of the future integration of humanity as one. “Reintegration” implies a time when humanity actually was one. But such a condition occurs only in myth; and in extremely primitive myth, at that. There is no evidence of it ever having occured in history.
We no longer seem to believe that this is possible. And we do, as you correctly point out, “like division.” It seems that we are hardwired to like it.