Vladimir S. Soloviev and the politics of human rights.

In the preface to a corrected and enlarged second edition of his well-known book, Justification of the Good, the Russian philosopher-theologian Vladimir S. Soloviev (1853-1900) declared a major purpose of his moral philosophy to be "to establish in absolute moral principle the intrinsic and multilateral connection between true religion and sensible politics."(2) Yet it could be argued that Soloviev established a connection between "true religion and sensible politics" more convincingly in his commentary on current affairs than in his formal philosophy. Soloviev's current affairs commentary, in which he repeatedly raised the issue of the political plight of Russia's ethnic and religious minorities, actually won him wider recognition than did his formal philosophical treatises; and his relentless preaching about the basic human "fight to a dignified existence" influenced many who found little of interest in his formal philosophical work.(3) Accordingly, the Russian Academy of Sciences accepted Soloviev into its ranks not only as philosopher but also as "current affairs commentator," an honorific which his obituary employed as well.(4) Nevertheless, scholars in the twentieth century (especially in the West) have largely neglected this significant part of Soloviev's legacy, in effect often consigning it to the ranks of parochial Russian "polemic" by default.(5) Moreover, although the difficulty in categorizing Soloviev's wide-ranging intellectual endeavors has been recognized, efforts to do so have resulted in the unfortunate relegation of significant parts of his work to an incoherent "no man's land" in Russian debates between Slavophiles and westernizers.(6)

This essay suggests that focusing on what might be called "the politics of human rights" in Soloviev's current affairs commentary may help to avoid this perceived problem of incoherence and also to elucidate the purpose of certain other of his philosophical, theological, historical, and literary pursuits. Soloviev's largely neglected but voluminous commentary on current affairs, much of which appeared in the last decade of his life, provides a unique window onto the politics of ethnic and minority rights in the Russia of his day. In this writing, Soloviev questioned the authority of the tsarist regime and the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the political agendas of both Russian conservatives and secular liberals, concerning diverse issues impinging on human rights and social order. Soloviev himself emphasized the importance of some of these essays a few months before he died in his observation that they belonged among "the most felicitous that were ever written by me."(7)

This portion of Soloviev's writing might also assist in providing an alternative explanation for a purported "new turn" towards apocalyptic pessimism in the last year of his life.(8) I suggest how, rather than reflecting pessimism, the eschatological dimension of Soloviev's thought, which has confounded his critics and admirers alike, may instead be understood as embodying optimism. Specifically, this optimism concerned the possibility of moral regeneration for human community at the "end of history" through political and religious reconciliation based on equitable ethno-religious rights unencumbered by any institutionally-imposed religious and political orthodoxies.

I. QUESTIONING AUTHORITY ON HUMAN RIGHTS: SOLOVIEV AS "TERTIUM QUID"

A close friend to Fyodor Dostoevsky in the last years of the great novelist's life, Soloviev would nonetheless after Dostoevsky's death in 1881 take stands in direct opposition to that writer's well-known anti-Western views, soon also breaking with the parochial religious fundamentalism of Russian Slavophile conservatism over a number of issues, including legal rights for Russian Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities.(9) However, the combination of Soloviev's rejection of violence, his stress on a genuine, revitalized Christian political morality for the Russian state, and his vision of a reunified Church, East and West, tended to alienate him from secular westernizers as well as Slavophiles. Representing a kind of progressively liberal religious heterodoxy, Soloviev not only became one of the first voices in Russia to espouse ecumenism publicly, but also the first to advocate a social gospel for Russia.(10)

Soloviev often took issue, directly or indirectly, with governmental policy that cut against the grain of his biblically-based ethical principles, as can be seen most vividly in the famous human rights stand against capital punishment that the young philosophy professor took early in his career after the imposition of the death penalty upon Tsar Aleksandr II's assassins in 1881, when he confronted the regime directly in a public forum.(11) As a result, he was banned from giving public lectures and ended up resigning his university post. According to one of Soloviev's biographers, what motivated the philosopher in such actions was his faith "to serve Christ not only in word, but in deed" and "to suffer for the truth."(12)

Many years later, while writing on the relationship of law to morality, Soloviev explained that he had acquired this firm opposition to the death penalty directly from his father, the respected historian Sergei M. Soloviev, who, while his son was yet an adolescent, responded to the child's "revulsion to the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed man" with the "inspiring definition" that:

"the deatht penalty is a loathesome thing, it is a betrayal of Christianity!" Since that time, the denial of this "loathesome thing" became in me a steadfast idea, which required later only a precise logical expression and factual corroboration.(13)

But while Soloviev may have eschewed blind obedience to tsarist authority, as his public protest suggested, he also spent the next eight years trying to justify theocracy as indispensable to social order in Russia.(14) This decade-long, unsuccessful attempt to justify theocracy found him attempting to hold contradictory positions regarding the primacy of church over state. According to the somewhat convoluted logic of his theocratic idea, a "Christian" state "must voluntarily" submit to a higher moral authority, but church and state would eventually have to become completely independent of one another. And while voluntary secular submission would not constitute clerical interference in state affairs, subordination of state authority was meant to insure that the state would "not lose sight of the kingdom of God."(15)

Soloviev's failure to have any palpable impact on regime policy through his theoretical efforts to justify a theocratic polity--what he called his "theocratic leviathan"--suggests an important reason why this project disappeared from his agenda by the end of the 1880s.(16) The attempt to build a Christian theory of the state based on what he called "free theocracy" achieved a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion in La Russie et l'Eglise Universelle (1889); a subsequent assessment of this project to build a "practical Christian politics" on the basis of the theocratic principle as "a most fantastic utopia" does not seem exaggerated.(17)

In an essay titled "Plato's Life-Drama" (1898),(18) which on the surface presented itself as concerned with the origins of Platonic philosophy, Soloviev provided a key to understanding how he resolved this tension in his biblically-based worldview between the antithetical demands of respect for authority(19) and the moral imperative to defend and promote human rights, including, most importantly, what he understood to be the divinely-bestowed, unqualified sanctity of human life. This essay cast Socrates--the first "philosopher" recorded as questioning the authority of those who would lead others--in the role of tertium quid, a mediating force attempting to save his beloved Athenian civilization, the foundations of…