Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/273

Rh exercise a fetichistic influence upon his mind), and with the assistance of certain passages from the New Testament (which he gives us not in Greek, but in Latin), to interpret the Christian doctrine of the trinity and the three designations of father, son, and holy ghost, in the sense of strict monarchism (Solov'ev writes "monarchism," not "monarchianism," though the latter form is the one usually preferred by theologians), as energy, truth, and grace, or as power, justice, and goodness, or, finally, as reality, idea, and life.

God, as the absolute, could be self-sufficing, but this would conflict with his grace and goodness. From God and chaos, Solov'ev evolves the world and its history, evolves them as do all mythagogues, notionally and in their reality.

The sophia strives against chaos; this struggle presupposes a soul, the world-soul, the materia prima, the potential mother of the created world. The creation of the world proceeds from the father; the logos brings forth the higher world of ideas, but these ideas are mere contemplative and impassive beings; from the holy ghost originate the pure spirits or angels, which have feeling and will, and possess a higher order of freedom than man.

The cosmic process in its first period is astral, and at this time the stellar bodies are formed; during the second period our own solar system comes into existence; during the third period, within this system, the earth becomes the peculiar stage for mankind, mankind being conceived by Solov'ev as the second absolute. Solov'ev's God takes his delight, not in the angels, but in men. Every living being finds the meaning of his own being in the absolute being of God; the significance of man lies in the union between the divine and the mundane. In man, the world-soul becomes completely conscious of itself.

The fall of the angels and of man is described on Old Testament lines. The fallen angels, possessing a higher freedom than man, side eternally against God; man, with his more limited freedom, is able after the fall, to rejoin himself to God. According to Solov'ev, man possesses freedom of choice, and this is manifested in the choice of evil, not in the following {{dhr|0.5em]] {{smallrefs}}