Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, Solovyov also spelled Soloviev (born Jan. 16 [Jan. 28, New Style], 1853, Moscow, Russia—died July 31 [Aug. 13], 1900, Uzkoye, near Moscow), Russian philosopher and mystic who, reacting to European rationalist thought, attempted a synthesis of religious philosophy, science, and ethics in the context of a universal Christianity uniting the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches under papal leadership.
He was the son of the historian Sergey M. Solovyov. After a basic education in languages, history, and philosophy at his Orthodox home, he took his doctorate at Moscow University in 1874 with the dissertation “The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists.” After travels in the West, he wrote a second thesis, a critique of abstract principles, and accepted a teaching post at the University of St. Petersburg, where he delivered his celebrated lectures on Godmanhood (1880). This appointment was later rescinded because of Solovyov’s clemency appeal for the March 1881 assassins of Tsar Alexander II. He also encountered official opposition to his writings and to his activity in promoting the union of Eastern Orthodoxy with the Roman Catholic church.
Solovyov criticized Western empiricist and idealist philosophy for attributing absolute significance to partial insights and abstract principles. Drawing on the writings of Benedict de Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, he regarded life as a dialectical process, involving the interaction of knowledge and reality through conflicting tensions. Assuming the ultimate unity of Absolute Being, termed God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Solovyov proposed that the world’s multiplicity, which had originated in a single creative source, was undergoing a process of reintegration with that source. Solovyov asserted, by his concept of Godmanhood, that the unique intermediary between the world and God could only be man, who alone is the vital part of nature capable of knowing and expressing the divine idea of “absolute unitotality” in the chaotic multiplicity of real experience. Consequently, the perfect revelation of God is Christ’s incarnation in human nature.
For Solovyov, ethics became a dialectical problem of basing the morality of human acts and decisions on the extent of their contribution to the world’s integration with ultimate divine unity, a theory expressed in his The Meaning of Love (1894).