Vladimir Soloviev is the Russian philosopher Steiner names as the representative of the European East, whose spiritual experience speaks as priestly speech translated into philosophy.
Vladimir Soloviev in Anthroposophy is the Russian philosopher (1853-1900) whom Rudolf Steiner presents as the living representative of the European East in the threefold picture of modern philosophy he drew in The Impulse for Renewal in Culture and Science (GA 81, Berlin, 1922). Steiner sets three figures side by side: Herbert Spencer speaks for the West as the man of the world who builds his world view from natural science, Hegel speaks for the Middle as the teacher who lives wholly in thought, and Soloviev speaks for the East as the priest, in whom priestly speech is translated philosophically. In Soloviev, a direct, still half-dreamlike experience of spirituality itself survives, and the Christ experience stands as an independent experience alongside the Father experience. For Steiner this Eastern inheritance carries the seed of the bridge between knowledge and faith that anthroposophical research works to build. Scholars of Russian sophiology study him today.
When Rudolf Steiner surveyed the philosophic situation of the early twentieth century, he placed Vladimir Soloviev at its eastern pole. Spencer observed, Hegel thought, but Soloviev experienced spirituality directly, in a manner Steiner compared to the old priest who lived in higher worlds. Understanding this Russian thinker shows why anthroposophy treats the bridge between East and West as a philosophic task, not a political one.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we now go to the East, we have in Vladimir Soloviev a man who is able like no other philosopher, to become gradually more the content of our own philosophic striving, who must now become so important to us because we allow the particularities of his character to work in on us. We see in Soloviev both the European-eastern way of thinking, which is of course not Oriental-Asiatic. Soloviev absorbed everything which was European, he only developed it in an Eastern fashion. What do we see being developed in terms of human scientific striving? Here we see how actually this method of thinking, found mostly in the West by Herbert Spencer, which Soloviev basically looked down on, is something against which the truth and knowledge he was seeking, could so to speak be illustrated. In comparison, what he actually presents is a full experience of spirituality itself.
What it Means Today
The figure Steiner set at philosophy's eastern pole has become a serious subject of Western scholarship. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, professor of Slavic languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gathered Soloviev's writings on Divine Wisdom in Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Cornell University Press, 2009), translating the texts in which the philosopher recorded his encounters with Sophia: as a boy in Moscow, in the reading room of the British Museum in 1875, and in the Egyptian desert months later, meetings he finally versified in the late poem Three Meetings (1898). Kornblatt's edition lets English readers test Steiner's characterisation against the primary texts.
What they find is the pattern Steiner described in Berlin in 1922: a thinker who borrows the conceptual skeleton of Hegel and the Western philosophers, yet whose actual content is a direct experience of the spiritual world, received rather than deduced. Thalira synthesis: Soloviev is the clearest modern case of what we call priest-speech, language whose grammar is philosophical but whose source is vision, and Steiner's East-Middle-West triad gives the diagnostic for hearing it. Read Soloviev's Sophia texts beside Steiner's lecture and the division of labour becomes practical: the East contributes the experience, the Middle contributes the living thought that can carry it, and the West contributes the discipline of exact observation. The reader who wants to work with this does not need Russian; Kornblatt's translations, and Steiner's Berlin lectures, are enough to begin.
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