Divine Sophia in Russia

My name is Hadi Fakhoury, and I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to today's event, the fifth in a new series

on the divine feminine and its discontents. This series is part of a wider initiative the Center has launched on transcendence and transformation. If you're interested in learning more about the initiative, please visit our website and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Our last event featured Professor Anne Klein, who gave a talk on Yeshe Tsogyyal, the leading feminine presence of Tibetan Judaism. The video of that event is now available on our website.

Last semester, as some of you will recall, Professor Sean McGraw gave a talk exploring the figure of Sophia, or divine wisdom, in the works of two German thinkers, the 16th century mystic Jakob Böhme and the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Schelling, one of the leading figures

of post-Kantian idealism. Today's presentation resumes with a theme of Professor McGrath's lecture, by following the fortune of Sophia in the Eastern Christian world, specifically

Russian orthodoxy, from ancient icons of divineov, as well as his 20th century heirs.

If Yakov Berme, as Hegel had it, is the first German philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov can be described as Russia's first systematic philosopher. Solovyov had a far-reaching influence on Russian

literature, theology, and philosophy, but also beyond the Russian-speaking world. In the spring, this panel will be hosting a conference on a figure who, to some extent, might be considered Soloviev's

spiritual heir, that is the French theologian and scholar of Islamic mysticism, Henri Courbet. Our guest for today, Judith Deutsch-Kornblatt, retired

from a long career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was affiliated with the Department for Slavic Languages and Literature, the Religious Studies Program, the Program for Jewish Studies, and the Center for Russia,

East Europe, and Eurasian Studies. She currently teaches part-time at the University of Tel Aviv. She has published extensively on subjects as diverse as the Cossack in Russian literature and Soviet Jewish baptism in the Russian Orthodox Church,

as well as on Russian religious thought. She's the author of Divine Sophia, the Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Soloviev, published by Cornell University Press in 2009, which I have here. Professor Cornblatt, Judith, I have already said this to you,

but allow me to tell you again what a privilege it is for me to be able to host you today. Your work was and remains hugely important for my research and has become increasingly important for many of us here involved in the Transcendence and Transformation project.

In fact, the Center is currently hosting a reading group devoted to Russian Sociology and we have just finished reading your book Divine Sophia, which remains one of the best introductions to Solovyov's thought. So we are happy that Professor Kornblatt accepted our invitation to speak to us about Divine Wisdom and Sola Fio.

Right now, I'd like to invite Judith to appear on screen. Hello.

Hello there.

Good to see you. Okay, Judith, it's all yours. The floor is yours. You can share your screen and I'll reappear at the end of your presentation for discussion. Thank you very much once again.

My pleasure. I want to thank you, Adi. I want to thank everybody at the Center for the Study of World Religions for this opportunity. And I hope for those of you who have just finished

reading my book, I'm not going to be a little bit too repetitious, but we'll see. Before we start, I actually want to have a moment of silence for what's now happening in the area of the world where I had spent my career,

about which I'd spent my career studying, both for those who are suffering in Ukraine, but also for those who are suffering from misinformation in Russia,

and for those journalists and other people in the media who are also suffering from their stances so just like to take one small minute for one small half a minute for that all right so i'm going to start out just with my title the writing of

wisdom divine sophia in russia um and explain something that those of you who are not russian speakers or aware of russian culture might not know and that is in russia you don't only write a treatise or write a book, write an article or write a story, you also write an icon.

Писать икону. And with that I'm going to be looking at both verbal and visual expressions of the Divine Sophia. Or Божественная Примудрость, as it is called in Russian. know my work it'll be no surprise that i'm going to center my talk on the religious philosopher

poet playwright short story writer journalist public intellectual and eccentric vladimir soloviov to do so i will introduce you to some of soloviev's writings with an eye to the multiple

influences on them in byzantine and russian iconography as well as references to Christian and Hebrew scriptures, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and the works of the mystics that those of you who heard last fall's

presentation know about. And finally, I will be talking about his own private discussions with Sophia, who communicated with him through automatic writing. We'll be coming back to this slide later in my talk.

Let's use Skov and Solveig's foray into the more mystical sciences. Remember that this Russian Orthodox religious philosopher lived at the height of fascination with the occult

in late 19th century Europe as a whole. And although he announced that most mediums were charlatans or cranks. He did not abstain from frequenting seances in at least three countries.

So Silvio wrote about Sophia in poetry, humorous play, and short story, as well as in possibly his all-too-serious philosophical texts. It is some of these genres that I will analyze to show the complexity of his intuition and his articulation of Divine Sophia.

In the last section of the presentation, I'm going to briefly explore Solovyog's legacy in Russian culture, including how his Sophieology wrote the future of Russian theological discourse into

Europe and into the 20th century as part of what has of the 20th. A school that focused on a reframing

of orthodoxy as a way of acknowledging the necessity of engagement with the world around us. And at this point, I want to acknowledge my friend and mentor, Paul Valliere, for all

he taught me in this area. I know he's one of the listeners now. At the end, I will just hint very briefly at what became of Sophia in the later 20th century, both what became of its serious theological side and

its more wacky mystical streak. So that's the structure. Here's the thesis. Soloviov's attempts to write Sophia in his poetic and philosophical works were always buttressed by his personal experiences with her or him or it in its multiple

forms. Ultimately for Soloveyov, the Divine Sophia was not a fourth hypostasis as some of his followers were accused of introducing into the Trinity. And despite the description

of her appearance, she was not really a person, divine or otherwise, but an energy, an energy that unites into a whole the multiplicity of reality we'll be going over this quite a bit

nor is she one member of a member of any binary such as plato's aphrodite uranus and aphrodite pandemus but again she is an energy a process not a place or thing or person divine wisdom is

and brings to us wholeness and multiplicity all all in one, what Solovyov called Sir Yedinstvo. So I recognize now that not only might Solovyov be foreign to many here,

but also that the entire culture and practice of Eastern Orthodoxy might be a bit outside the wheelhouse of many of you. So I will start with a contemporary of Solovyov, a figure perhaps closer to your center of comfort, William James.

Soloviov could not have read about visions and mystical experience in James' influential varieties of religious experience, for this was not published until two years after Soloviov's death.

But the American philosopher, psychologist, and spirit seeker was already well known in Soloviov's day for his writings. And many of them were published in a journal for which Soloviov was one of

the original founders. James called himself a piecemeal supernaturalist. He wrote, if one should make a division of all thinkers into naturalists and supernaturalists,

I should undoubtedly have to go along with most philosophers into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined division that most philosophers

at the present date long. Refined supernaturalism, he says, is universalistic supernaturalism. For the crasser variety, piecemeal supernaturalism would perhaps

be the better name. It admits miracles and providential leanings and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal with the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that

causally determine the real world's details. Had James known Soloviov, he would no doubt have included the Russian in his short list of contemporary piecemeal supernaturalists.

The Russian visionary's multiple expressions of a figure he identified as Sophia live side by side with his own crass belly laugh, which was attested too many times. Soloviov's visions of Sophia, like James' attraction to manifestations of the spirit,

remain fully grounded in the mundane world of reality. As we will see, I hope, Soloviov's various articulations of Sophia in written form make full use of all aspects of this material world, including the variety

of verbal genres with which we articulate our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. For Soloviov, the Sophia so often evoked in the traditions he studied from Platonism to Gnosticism, from Philo to Kabbalah, from Dante to Goethe, she is the active bridge between

the opposing worlds of matter and spirit, and she is more, the transfigurer of them both, the instigator and the model of a new, integrated, organic whole. I'll begin with a poem by Solovyov, published in 1875, when he was only 22,

and two years before the 12 public lectures on God-manhood, or divine humanity, or on Bogochelovichesko, of Hichester that launched Solovyov's career as a public intellectual in which he articulated his theological take on Sophia. So here's the poem.

My Tsaritsa appeared to me today wrapped all in azure. My heart beat with a sweet delight, and in the rays of approaching day my soul shone with a quiet light, while smoldering in the distance rose the fierce flame of earthly fire. I start with this early articulation to introduce you to some of the physical aspects of Soloviov's Sophia, here called by the Russian royal designation Tsaritsa,

including her association with the color azure, sky blue, the rising sun, as well as her effect on the visionary, for he, like she, begins to shine like the light of the sky that is he is transfigured by her vision and in this light

he experiences a sweet delight and here's the beginning of another poem written at the same around the same time that adds the colors gold and silver the gnostic roses and lilies in a green

garden a reflection with the sense of seeing and re-seeing and being seen and seeing oneself and also a palace with seven pillars and that's going to be

important pretty soon to us my study has a lofty palace with seven golden golden pillars my saritsa has a seven pointed crown with countless precious stones my saritsa's green garden in my

sarita's green garden fair roses and lilies bloom and a silvery stream catches the reflection of her curls and brow in its transparent waters. So had some of you had a vision of Divine Sophia before he revised, as I say, the vision in his writings?

According to him, yes.

Although the only evidence we have of it, if you can call it evidence, is a rather self-mocking narrative poem written at almost the very end of his life in which he describes

three encounters and that's the name of the poem three encounters he describes those three encounters with an unnamed female essence who is very similar to the tsaritsa that we see here the first vision according to his revision in the 19 in the 1898 poema took place in church

maybe this one quite possibly this one but i can't say for sure. This is the Cathedral of the Dormition or the Assumption as it's in the Orthodox world, the Uspensky Sabor.

He had this vision, he claims in the poem, when he was nine, nine years old, and apparently feeling jealous of another boy for the attention that was paid to this other by his little girlfriend, Julinka. And here's the poem, at least this part of the poem about the vision.

The altar's open, but where's the priest and the deacon? And where's the crowd that milled around for prayer? Stop here for a second and tell all of you who have not been in a traditional Orthodox and people indeed milled around, bowed, lit candles, kissed icons, and milled around some more.

Where is this crowd? He continues, my flood of passions, and that is his puppy love for Yulinka, as well as his anger at this other boy who was pointing in on his friendship with the girl.

So he writes, my flood of passions drained all of a sudden as azure fills my soul and fills the air transpierced throughout by rays of gold and azure unearthly flowers clasped within your hands

you smiled before me full of radiant favor then nodded as he went for other lands so note again the azure the rays of golden sun the flowers and the effect of the viewer who is transpierced by the color of sun and sky

and the air around him and inside him fills with azure. So let me perhaps set the scene a little bit more. And again, this is largely for those who haven't spent a lot of time in Eastern Orthodox churches,

although I'm sure you all know about the presence of a conestasis an icon stand in those churches what you might not realize is like unlike a catholic or protestant church the altar is generally not visible to the worshipers

the altar is behind this a conestasis um the conestasis itself um there are some smaller ones with only one door but they often have three doors. Here's one that's

open, right? Here's another one over here. And in the center, where you can't see behind here, is usually an icon of Jesus Christ. So why, you might ask, does this vision that

he writes of occur specifically when a door of the iconostasis is open? That is, the door is open and allowing the worshippers to see into the altar, to see into the Holy of Holies.

This is also a time, a very dramatic time in the church service, when the priest or the deacon will enter or leave from the Holy of Holies and come to be with the worshippers or vice versa,

will leave them and go behind, sometimes to pick up the Eucharistic elements, sometimes to pick up a copy of the New Testament for a reading that's going to come in. The whole service is orchestrated as a kind of dramatic event.

So thinking about that, what's it like when the door of the Echinostasis is open and the altar is visible, we're led to a crucial series of early,

all right, young is nine and probably younger, so early decidedly Orthodox imprints on the young Valoisios Soloviov that we need to take a look at more closely. So some Orthodox theologians,

we already made a brief allusion to this, so some Orthodox theologians have been at pains to prove that Soloviov's Sophia is non-colonical, unorthodox, and even

heretical. And the elaborated sociology of Soloviov's heirs provoked the most extensive reproach, and I'll mention this again later. For them, Soloviov's visions of a beautiful woman with azure eyes and a golden aura have nothing in common with the New Testament

references to the male Christ as wisdom. Is Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God, from 1 Corinthians? Instead, her, say her detractors, her female allure makes her pagan,

sometimes they say, or Catholic, sometimes they say, or God forbid, Jewish and Kabbalistic, and decidedly Western. As one emigre theologian wrote, Soloviov simply had no knowledge of Sophia of the Church.

He knew the Sophia of Burma and his followers, the Sophia of Valentinus and the Kabbalah, and this Sophia is heretical and uncanonical. So my purpose in this section of my presentation, you'll see on icons, is to show that Soloviov's sources for Sophia were not all foreign, not by any means, and that orthodox tradition

in the form of popular local icons indeed could have been an important influence on Soloviov's visions. Here are some samples of Sophia icons. What we should know at the beginning is that the symbolism of Byzantine

and Russian icons of the Divine Sophia is far from standardized and decidedly ambiguous. She, he, or it actually never existed as a real being, like the saints or disciples or Jesus and

Mary, who themselves are the subjects of most icons. Even the gender of Sophia in these traditional icons is questionable, as the personified figure of Sophia is sometimes associated with Christ, and here obviously Christ, the wisdom of God, but sometimes with Mary, or depicted as an androgynous angel, usually Gabriel.

of Christ sometimes appear on one icon.

I mean, coming back to the Schenetta in a bit, I just want you to take a look here at something you might not see, and that is the star that is behind Sophia here in the middle. It's also the same star that's behind Christ.

I'll put her up above.

This is called the Wisdom Star. And so, in part because of it, Sophia is often associated with icons of the Transfiguration. Here you see the star shining forth of the

Transfiguration but also associated with icons of the Holy Trinity. This is a very famous one and that's because of the Eucharistic references in the wisdom icons and this obviously retains the Christ reference.

And here you see on this very popular icon that I'm going to show you bigger in just a minute,

you see the table here set for the Eucharist.

So it is true that the first Byzantine wisdom icons were clearly associated with the New Testament passages. passages and this is no doubt as many of you know the intention behind the naming of the cathedral of hajia sofia in constantinople and that is there that this ninth century mosaic labeled

christ holy wisdom is found in the narthex however the symbolic representation of proverbs 9 14th century became extremely popular especially in russia and here we read wisdom has built her house she set up her seven pillars the verses were read as i said as an announcement um of the

mystery of eucharist thus retaining the christological theme but wisdom as we can see here This is the close-up of it, is personified as female. Actually note again the wisdom star behind her head.

So I'm going to focus the remainder of this detour on icons and another extremely popular Russian icon, often called the Sofia Angel or the Novgorod Sofia icon. There is one version of it, so another version of it in the opening slide.

And this is the version that I'm going to look at right now. And so if it's okay with you, I'm going to pause share. It says stop share.

It says new share.

Stop share. All right. So hopefully you can see me. And what I'm going to show you is actually this icon on a board,

this Sofia Novgorod icon or icon of the Novgorod-Glorion form. And you'll see that she is here in the middle,

and she is flanked by the Mother of God here,

oops, the Mother of God here, and John the Baptist here. This is a traditional

actually shaping of the deesis with usually Christ in the middle, and we couldn't see the Christ door in the iconostasis I showed you before, but there was a traditional flanking of Christ

in this spot here, flanked by the Mother of God and by John the Pre precursor as he's called in russia um she is surrounded by a an aureole of rays and above her head christ the pentachriter blesses the angel and above him

rests the lord of hosts with a symbol of Christ.

So in this sense, all images of Christ come together, including the medallion on the mother of God's chest of the baby Jesus, Christ Emmanuel.

All right.

I'll give you a little break from the screen, but you're going to have to go back now.

Hopefully. This is the schemata that we looked at before, where you see all different manifestations of Christ here and here and here and also obviously here.

So we know indeed that some of you have seen this icon. An icon of Sofia of the Novgorodian type could be found in the sanctuary of the main cathedral of the Dormition, which we looked at before.

And here it is from the inside. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of where the Sofia icon is. But also there was a fresco on the external wall of the same cathedral. And this was a cathedral that very likely his parents went to and there

are other examples of places where we know he did go. So did an icon of divine wisdom revealed at a dramatic moment such as the opening of the iconostasis doors, did it inspire to see an azure and gold Sophia,

and himself to become filled with her aura. Well, I would say, ask you who can say yes, but who can say no? So L'Avion's second vision, according to this poem,

apparently took place in the British Museum, where the now young scholar had gone, he said, to study Indian Gnostic and medieval philosophy. And we know that he was seen in the library reading Kabbalistic texts.

The poetic eye of the poem, the narrator, is very closely based on Soledad. And as I said before already, it's a humorous narrative poem. So this eye invokes Sophia with the

words, O Radiance Divine. And we read, these words have just appeared within my heart when the room all fills with azure with gold before my eyes she shines but only partly alone alone i see her face

to the speaker or the viewer or the visionary uh we the gold, the shining, and the bliss or delight.

The third vision, also self-mocking, allegedly took place shortly thereafter in the desert beyond Cairo, where Soloviov, inspired by his reading of Kabbalah, Burma, Swedenborg,

and others, where he had gone after London, and where, in fact, the Saritsa, the Sophia, Finnear had told him to get thee to Egypt. This vision took place in the early morning,

after a night during which the front coat, top hat-wearing poetic persona

was accosted by Bedouins and, it says in the poem,

who mistook him for the devil and left him there to die.

We know that an incident like this actually did happen to Soledad as he wrote to his mother the next day about it. But then 25 years later, it becomes transformed in this poem.

There in the desert, Soloviov has his third vision. I fell asleep when I awoke and fazed the scent of roses filled earth and heaven's sweet. And in the purple of the skies were splendors, your brimming eyes o'erflowed with azure blaze. We looked about like the first radiance of creation's universal day of days. What is, whatever will be was there embraced in one motionless gaze

below when blew the rivers in the sea and alpine snows and distant forest waves what is what was whatever will be was there was there embraced in one motionless days

below one blew the rivers in the sea and alpine snows and distant forest waves. I saw it all and all I saw was one, a single image of all female beauty, the immeasurable encompassing itself. You stand alone before me and within me.

That desert day I saw you in your fullness, oh radiant one, you have deceived me not. The roses

in my soul shall ever flourish from now no matter where I'm tossed about. But then the sun's orb moves above the skyline. A moment, and the vision hid away. The glorious sounds of bells perpetual chiming, the desert silent as my soul prayed.

So yet again, we find the radiance, the dawn, the female beauty, the roses from the Tsaritsa's garden, and perhaps most telling, the mystical reality of multiple unity, where I saw was one. A unity that both surrounds and suffuses the eye, right?

The eye of the poem, the talk, the speaker.

For you stand alone before me and within me, and we remember from the first vision, as azure fills my soul and fills the air. Again, consider the Novgorod-type Sophia icon. The rosy face, the azure, the gold, the radiance.

And remember the goal of an icon, to enter into the viewer, to make the viewer, the worshiper, shine. The experience, the similarity between the iconography of the Sophia icon and the imagery of Solveig's wisdom texts suggests very strongly that the experience of a worshipper on viewing an icon.

And here it's explained by Solovey's heir, Pavel Florensky, that he remembers the prototype. The visual experience awakes for the viewer, here Florensky's talking about icons in general,

the visual experience awakes for the viewer the bright clarity of a spiritual vision and brings the thing seen into an immediately felt experience. So this could be the description, this poem,

of a true experience, a true encounter, these three true encounters.

So looking for other visual clues

of Soloviov's revision of Sophia, I have just a couple more images in the section to show, the section on poetry. So here's the reading room of the British Museum in 1875. She was taken then, and that was the year where Soloviov went to the British Museum reading room to study Kabbalah and other sources on Sophia.

It's not hard to imagine a vision of light and radiance in such a room, for indeed electric lights came to the British Museum only four years later in 1879,so that the reading room was really closed to readers whenever the light was not coming through the windows in just this way.

The dome was repainted several times over the following century but the reopening of the reading room just in the year 2000 reveals what some of you himself would have seen and this is sale, if you'd like it, at the shop, now the British Library, where I read that it's a

magnificent interior has been carefully restored, including the repair of the paper mache interior

of the dome and reinstatement of the azure blue cream and gold decorative scheme.

Here it is looking up, and we remember his line from the second vision, I see your face, I see your face alone, with the azure eye in the middle. Such an esteemed reading room, like the icon-filled church in Solovio's memory,

not to mention the endless gold sand and azure sky of the Sahara, would be an ideal space for an encounter with Sophia. Next section, moving on to prose. When traveling home from Egypt via Italy,

some of you have wrote his parents that, I quote, I'll stay for a month in Sorrento,

Italy, where in the quiet of solitude, I will finish writing a kind of work of mystical,

theosophical, philosophical, theurgic, political content in a dialogic form. It continues later, as for my essay, I absolutely must publish it, since it will be the basis of all of my future endeavors.

In fact, he aimed to publish it in English so that it would be more widely available.

And he wrote, I can do nothing without referring to it.

Well, this work of mystical, philosophical, philosophical, theoretical, political content turned out to be much more, but also much less, than an ordinary essay, and he had apparently intended to submit it for his doctoral thesis

at the university, but ultimately recognized that it might be a little bit too wacky for

that.

What is preserved in the manuscript includes several chapters of differing lengths of completeness, filled with notes to himself, snippets of barely decipherable automatic writing, gnostic and other mystical terminology, and incorporating a substantial dialogue between a speaker called Sophie and a philosophe.

The La Sophia was in French, written in French. So Sophia, given a voice for the first time here, instructs her in interlocutor in the meeting of the genuine universe.

So if Slobiel's choice of dialogic form does more than evoke Plato, although the religious philosopher poet clearly trumpeted this classical source and continued to study and write about Greek philosophy throughout his life and

in fact his first published poem was in fact a translation of what he believed

to be a poem by Plato. Here in the dialogue by giving Sophie a voice he also continues the process of personifying the abstract figure of wisdom. In his poetry as we saw she appears as a person and once the subject of the poems but also the immaterial power

of inspiration mysteriously entering the poet in the light of dawn and transfiguring him he first apparently so first apparently intended to call the entire hybrid prose work by this person named Sophie, but we see now in the manuscript he crossed out

that title above the monologic more philosophical, maybe we should say theosophical chapters, and reserved Sophie only for the dialogues. Despite Sophie's personal voice, which is often sarcastic by the way, it's in the dialogues and

through the dialogic form that Somerville presents the clearest explanation of how divine wisdom can paradoxically partake

in both divine and human worlds.

In a discussion of why we can know the essence of things or being in itself, Sophie unites the seemingly contradictory philosophical schools of idealism and empiricism, telling

the philosopher that he should neither radically separate nor carelessly confuse inner truth without her appearance. And she says, do you know me? Do you know who you're speaking with? The philosoph answers, as if I could not know you.

She continues, you no doubt know me as a phenomenon

that is insofar as I exist for you,

for in my external manifestation. You cannot know me as I am in myself, that is, my thoughts and intimate feelings,

as they are in me and for me. and intimate feelings as they are in me and for me.

You know them only when they manifest themselves outwardly in the expression of my eyes, in my words, in my gestures. These are external phenomenon, and yet,

you hear the philosophical interrupts, and yet, he says, when I look into the deep azure of your eyes,

when I hear the music of your voice, is it outward phenomena of sight and sound that I perceive?

My God, I know your thoughts and feelings,

and by your thoughts and feelings, I know your thoughts and feelings and by your thoughts and feelings I know your inner being. And here Sophie, channeling Socrates I think, says, and this is the way, sums up, and this is the way that all beings know each other.

So although it's some of the previously used poetic in Kantian terms, right, phenomenon, intelligible character, being,

a thing in itself, he could just have easily used theological terminology at this point to make reference to Gregory Palamas, the theologian of hesychasm, and I'm going to have

to leave this little bit of section out, but you're wanting me to talk about it later.um if there is time um i will wanted to do a little side talk on the transfiguration on the feast of transfiguration but that's just going to have to wait so knowing the essence

through the energies does not mean an eschatism or in soliloquy does not mean confusing the material or sensual with the metaphysical or spiritual so just as christian believers say that one could know Christ as human and God,

simultaneously we can so know divine and earthly wisdom to use Soloviov's favorite theological trope, undivided yet unmerged. Mirazdilna and Isliana. The divine wisdom that Soloviov revisions from the Sophia, La Sophia,

takes both, partakes both of the physical world explored by the materialists in the latter part of the 19th century when the philosopher lived,

and partakes of the spirit world,

also sought sometimes by the very same researchers. And as in the poetry, she speaks in and of the language of her precursors in biblical verse, in Jewish and Christian mysticism, and in philosophy.

We can see her as the bridge and the bridge builder, or the priest, to use Soloviov puns, the pontifex, who unites the opposing tendencies of the day as well as the distant past with the present and promised future. So Soloviov speaks even more intimately to Soloviov in the La Sofia manuscript and a different discourse

that I've already pointed out to you, automatic writing. And I also have a little bit that I can say about actually the process of automatic writing. But I'm going to just let you look at this and see how it worked with Soloviov. through his pen, right? In the either blank pages or the margins of his manuscripts.

Not only La Sofia, but even later ones.

And we need to recognize that unlike the fellow spiritualists in the 1870s and 80s and 90s and on, Solveig did not use this practice of automatic writing to connect loved ones who had passed over into the spirit world that's how it

usually is used the seances became ever more popular they sometimes turned into as you know parlor games in which participants thought so at concrete evidence of life after death people were in there with the new technology of cameras and reporting technology to get this But Soloviov's adressant had never lived a life before death, nor had she died a death at the end of life.

She has no limits, either before or after, but is an eternal all.

She was not a lover of his, or a mother, or a friend, but rather a belief, or an idea, or an intuition, or a vision

that had been developed for centuries in a variety of mystical and spiritual systems. We might be somewhat taken aback by the rather mundane nature of Sophie's written communications with her earthly correspondent. With a signature that alludes to the personal

name for Sophie in the dialogues, but writing sometimes in Cyrillic, the script of Solovio's mother tongue, wisdom in these examples expresses concern about his health, his eating habits,

and his feelings. And most surprising, she herself seems capable of physical feelings, lamenting a headache at one point. For Soloviov, the very earthiness of the written chatter must have seemed perfect,

both material and spiritual, both concrete and somehow ethereal. In speaking directly to him,

divine wisdom shows herself to be the mediating force uniting opposites. As in the poetry, Sophia, in Sylvio's examples of automatic writing,

dialogue, she is both the medium and the message, both the articulator and the articulated. More prose, we'll speak about it for five seconds. It is lectures on divine humanity

or lectures on divine, on God-manhood, we translate it anyways. ways um apologizing i'm going to have to leave you on your own to explore this as well as others in this sophia texts wisdom text here in this work

soloviev asserts that human nature participates in divinity striving ever to interact with god yet he claims that we should look first for the divine not above but within the middle section here, before one can know the unconditional content as a reality outside of himself, one must recognize it as an idea within himself.

In truth, little aside for him, the visionary is always male, saying, in this case, a female vision. the created world and with god so that this real mutual interaction of god and man is what soloviov calls the divine the human process the bhagat chalegicheski princess therefore sophia

who appears to inspire soloviov from without also arises but within the poet and poetic or the writer and creation is thus a prime example of the bhagilla-Vizhti process, the divine union process itself.

What is more, Sophia is not only the inspiration but also the subject, as we saw in the works we've examined so far. She is the vehicle for that creativity in written form and the goal of Mr. Youth, from 1892, reprieves the light of dawn in its title, obviously, as well as the light surrounding a beautiful female figure and then shining from within the hero.

This semi-autobiographical, again, humorous account describes of the girl he had a crush on when he was nine.

So despite the fact that Sylvia here pokes fun at the skeptical ardor of his young self, he says, with the serious air of a mentor, as befitted a 19-year-old philosopher, right? And also pokes fun at his companion, Julie, who is an obviously, he writes, shallow woman with whom he had just, quote, surrendered to the earthly principle.

Nonetheless, the writer describes a vision of what elsewhere Soloviov termed divine wisdom. While reading this, regaining consciousness, I saw only the bright sunlight, a strip of blue sky, and bending over me in that light and against the sky, the image of a beautiful woman.

She looked at me with wondrous and familiar eyes and whispered something quiet and tender. Without a question, this was Julie. Those were her eyes, but how the rest had changed.

What a rosy light burned in her face.

How tall and majestic she was. Something wondrous took place within me. It was as though my entire existence, all my thoughts, feelings, and desires had melted and flowed together.

Oops. Give me that.

Flowed together into a single, endless, sweet, bright, dispassionate sensation. A single wondrous image was motionlessly reflected in that sensation as in a pure mirror,

and I felt and knew that in that one was all.

So the rosy light radiating from Julia or Sophia's face, the wonder, the sweet sensation, the eyes, the reflected image, the tender whisper, are all familiar from the earlier poems, as is of course the beautiful and royal female form.

Next, Solovio's influence in the 20th century, and I am coming to of stimulus poets painters actually here you see

a wonderful painting called sophia wisdom by the pager and i want to thank here my friend marilyn smith for bringing this

picture to my to my knowledge because it's just perfect um so this entire generation generation of creative writers and painters as well as religious philosophers and theologians

were stimulated by his wisdom writings and they took their their own revisions of divine wisdom into emigration after the revolution where they thrived for several decades according to the major symbolist theoretician and poet vyan vacheslav ivanov so luvia was

So Louviere was, and I'm quoting here, the true educator of our religious aspirations, a lyricist, a porphyrius, the bearer of the principle of creative order. Yet ten years after his death, we are engaged in neither the continuation own nephew, Sergei Solovyov, whom I have no photo.

It's only because as I looked on the internet, for one, the internet was blown up with items about Sergei Solovyov, the film director who just died at the end of last year. So I didn't get one of this Sergei Solovyov. of yours. They all turned to Sophia for inspiration in their poetry. And in fact, in the name

of Sophia, they created a short-lived love triangle between Bloch, Biele and Bloch's wife, Yebov Manderieva. His first name Yebov actually was Lara. Bloch's first book of poetry,

Verses on a Beautiful Lady, obviously draws on the figure of a beautiful Sophia. And likewise, Biele's first collection, Golden Azure, takes its title from the colors we've seen most frequently

associated by Solovyov with his visions. Onto the Sophieology of Florensky and Bulgakov, about which I suspect many of you here have been more likely for red instead of Solovyov.

As I've tried to show, Solovyov's Sophia is both personal and universal. Florensky's is more formally so, and I will point you to your own reading of his fascinating and long

symbolist treatise, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, an essay in Orthodox Theodicy in twelve letters, and it's the tenth letter that is called Sophia, that he expresses a

Sophia image vision most clearly. Father Sergei Bulgakov actually himself did more to bring sociology to the West than anywhere else,

where he had been forced to emigrate after the revolution and where he founded the St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. Bulgakov, like Solovyov, began as a Marxist

and published on political economy, then moved to idealism before returning to the faith of his fathers and being ordained as a priest in 1918.

He published his early The Philosophy of Economy in 1912,

four years after Soloviov's death,

and already shows a very strong debt to Soloviov and contains a lengthy discussion of Sophia. But it's in his second dogmatic trilogy,

The Lamb of God, The Comforter, and The Bride of the Lamb,

that he most fully expressed is a sophiology. And it's for this that he was condemned by the Orthodox establishment and immigration. And for a discussion of this scandal, but even more for an excellent analysis of Bulgakov's words,

I want to point you to Paul Bollier's Modern Russian Theology, Orthodox Theology in a New Key. Sophia for Bulgakov, in fact, was always part of his philosophy of economy,

which is what he called material reality. So theology was, in fact, an attempt by contemporary Russian theology, and, in fact, contemporary Russian theology really only began,

or modern Russian theology only began in the 19th century,

just before Sylvio. It was an attempt to deal with the real world,

to accept material reality,

and to move out of the static Byzantine medieval Russian past.

What Professor Volger shows is that the scandal that led to calls for Bulgakov's condemnation perhaps had less to do with Sophia and her alleged encroachment on the integrity of the

Trinity, although it did have to do with that, but more, or equally as much, it had to do

with an historical, political, and with social forces that were battering the fate of the Russian church outside Russia in a fight for survival, in part against the patriarchy of Moscow,

which remained in the influence of the Soviet Union. In the fight, Neopetristos won and Sofia went underground. So did she stay there? Some contemporary Western scholars

have occasionally rediscovered Bulgakov and others, and Soloviov herself emerges briefly, often in theological and feminist discussion outside of the world of orthodoxy, very little within.

And I suspect that that is a phenomenon that's reflected in the interest of a number of you here today.

She can be seen in the attraction of both Protestant laypersons and clergy, in the mystical aspect of Orthodoxy, which also, obviously, This is not my area. I can try to point you

in other directions for it, if you like.

Something I know a modicum more about,

as I read the whole damn book,

we can find her somewhat contorted in the odd prose work of poet, writer, and Christianistic Daniil Andreev called The Rose of the World.

And again, perhaps in the short-lived cult of the great white brotherhood of Maria Demetrius Stas that peaked in 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union, when according to one scholar, people emerged,

quote, with the most indefinite eclectic worldview, with a heightened interest in Eastern religious teachings and spiritualism, in modern parascientific and para-religious mythology, built around parapsychology, UFOs, etc. And I myself

ran into this at what I thought was going to be a serious convention on the writer Nikolai Fyodorov, but in fact

turned out to be much more about UFOs. A friend, colleague, former student of mine, Elliot Bornstein, wrote about this spiritual

atmosphere in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union and the following.

Today's God-seeking Russian faces a veritable spiritual smorgasbord whose likes had not been seen since the Silver Age of 1880 to 1917, that is exactly the years of influence of Solymyov.

Spiritual seekers in contemporary Russia are equally syncretic, if not to say omnivorous, in their approach. The program of the most noteworthy post-Soviet cult, the Great White Brotherhood, was a new age gouache of chakras, karma, kabbalah, and even music theory.

So where are we left?

In the 20th century, and certainly in the tragic current events of today, the focus of intellectuals, believers, and wackos alike is elsewhere. So, this is some shameless advertisement.

So will the Russian divine Sophia reemerge in the future in her or his or its more substantial form or perhaps even wiser? Some of that depends on scholars and theologians who are willing to go back to Selenium with an analytic eye to take his revisions of Sophia seriously and to continue the search as Vyacheslav

Ivanov encouraged us to do. Thank you very much and I look forward to talking with you. I'm going to stop sharing my screen and leave it to Aghi now.

Judith, thank you so much for your talk. Very rich, fascinating material. I see the questions are coming in. How many questions? As many as you want.

How many questions can I answer? I'll have a little of this. Oh yes, good.

While you do that.

It's evening here where I am.

Yes, I wish I could have that as well. I should have prepared. Okay. Well, here's something that struck me.

You said at the beginning that

Sophia is not a person but an energy.

And yet,

in so many of Salafiya's works, the poems you read, his visions, the unpublished manuscript, she's clearly identified as a person, and not just as a generic person, but with golden hair and zero eyes.

Now, I see in Yaakov Böhme, whom we read a little bit in this reading group before getting to Salafiya, identifying Sofia as a person, probably because of some worry of the Trinity.

So how important is it that Sofia is a face, a voice?

Could you say a little bit more about why you think she's not a person despite all the evidence to the contrary in some of the pieces of evidence is the number of different ways that he tried to articulate this experience that he had of Sophia.

And yes, in the poetry for sure there is a very clear personification. But he also spoke of her in many, many other ways.as i tried to say at one point he not only uses poetic diction but he uses

both conscient and galen terminology he's constantly wandering around and much more so that is milling around right there's one word in the church the idea as trying to find numerous ways, numerous genres to express what this intuition he has. So only one of the ways is in this personification.

So I do think that he did feel her as he felt he was talking to her, but he also believed strongly that this was more than her. than a heart it was an energy that would allow him to feel both the the world connected both within

him and outside of him and both material and before divine so he need there was a very little way to talk about the divine there were much more ways to talk about the material aspects yes and by

energy uh what was helpful is when you mentioned the hezekiahistic distinction between essence and energies in Palamas. So you mean energy in that latter sense specifically,

perhaps, or possibly?

I mean it in that specific sense and more.

And one of the ways in which I would teach

about Eastern Christianity and Russian Orthodoxy

to students who, American students, who were clearly, almost all of them,

much more aware of what their, if they were Christians, much more aware of either their Catholic childhood or their Protestant childhood.

Most of my students, although I wasn't legally

supposed to ask what faith tradition they came from,

they'd say, I'm a lapsed Catholic, or yeah, my parents went to a Baptist church or whatever. So we would talk about the difference between, for instance, the Messianic Creed that adds an and from in it

to make it look like God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit

were in a sort of direct declension.

and the figure of a triangle is much more appropriate instead of a line to talk about the orthodox understanding of the three members of the Trinity. And what Sophia turns out to be, in my reading, and I think in Soloviov's intuition, the energy that's on the legs of that triangle, not the three points, but that which connects all three of them, in fact, to each other. And then if you go now to read the lectures on the lectures on divine humanity,

you can see how he then takes that model and brings it down into various realms, down to human behavior. So that all of us are engaged somehow in this connecting the three points of a stable triangle rather than what one might see as a less stable vertical force.

So it's that energy that I refer to.

Does that make sense?

That does make sense.

here the uh um yakub is on the election of faith in his own description of sophia uh she does seem as in some passages described as also the she's active through all three persons and in the relation among each other and uh so she's she's both first and fourth and uh she comes out in

various ways um i'll ask one more question which I must ask because several people have asked me to put it here, and I see it's come up again.

And then we can perhaps ask something else, but still within that Trinitarian, cosmological frame,

what is the relation to this energy specifically to Christ?

I mean, one could say that Sophia, in some icons you've shown, she's associated with the Star of transfiguration, so there's conflated perhaps the function of the Holy Spirit, the third person, and in some places with the second person.

Not really ever with the first person, it's true. That's right. Could you address that? I guess that's always a question. with Christ very clearly in that, in fact,

he's not the only one to do that.

The author of 1 Corinthians does exactly the same thing, associating wisdom with Christ, also associated with the transfiguration,

with the Holy Spirit.

Luckily, I'm not in a position to have to declare Soloviov a heretic or not a heretic. and there is no easy answer to that.

Unless someone actually of our listeners has an answer, I would be very happy to answer that.

Perhaps some people have information, but yes, this is a difficult question to answer. Good.

All right, I have several more questions,

but I need to start fielding in questions from the audience in the limited time that we have. So I don't know if you can see some of them on your screen. Let me see.

I can turn on question. Yeah, OK.

So here's a question.

The Theosophical, there's a beard here.

Right, there was a question by Charles that some of that Solovyov rejects the spiritualist emphasis on automatic

quieting, or

does he reject that automatic quieting, the same way that Blagatsky did?

And I would add to that question,

could you say a little bit more about the relation between Solovyov

and the Theosophical Society of Blagatsky

and that milieu, because there seems to be many parallels, and

there's a lot of interest in the initiative here in the Theosoph the philosophical societies as well. Could you address that?

Some of you are very specifically condemned the writings of Lovatsky, saying that what the theosophists were doing was blending everything all together,

whereas his emphasis was always to be undivided yet unmerged, right? Neres dilna nisviana. That as traditions are compared, his emphasis would be

to emphasize, he would emphasize that their integrity remains separate.

So just as the way that the three members of the Trinity can be both separate and one, multiple and one at the same time. And so he very specifically condemned them. As you know, there was a woman who presented herself as the trinity um he was kind to her but certainly did

not accept her so did he reject this more uh new well i guess old age new age a blending of all kinds of spiritualism or spiritism together he did reject it which of seances and he probably did want to believe.

So again, those two contradictory things can sit side by side mutually in peace with him. Yes, there was this passage in the dialogue with Sophie which really stood out for us, and we discussed it in the reading group, where

Solovyov discusses the true universal religion, which is his preaching. He calls it, it is both the final product of Christianity,

Christianity in its perfection, also it is the positive synthesis of all religions, and even further

the synthesis of religion, philosophy, science, of the internal spiritual sphere

and the external sphere with political life and social life it includes it includes everything in itself this is i was quoting solovion's passage here so obviously the

questions are not like oh this seems similar to what moratsky is doing but i that so long you have a very different taste than yours for me very different and also i do a disservice to

solo yoga by spending so much time on that on the la sofia manuscript, because it really was unfinished and it really is, you know, a mixture of notes to himself at all times, contradictory and, you know, what we would say goes off the deep end at a number of places and a number of places just sort of gets mixed up in his own terminology.

So it's not as fair of us to take a single quote out of that. Yes. If we might, out of one of his more polished and... That's right.

That text has to be read very carefully in context

and not as definitive statements made by Solovion, although I could see parallels in those statements

with what Schelling was saying,

the notion of the philosophical religion and some of other Solovom's works.

This connects this question with a question that Sean McGrath, our previous speaker,

who spoke on Shelling and Bermet,

he's just spoken for us here. So how, thanks Judith, really, how are we to distinguish rigorous sociology

from wacko, your word, sociology?

Because toward the end of your talk, is this really the, you know, are these really the spiritual heirs of sociology, this Maria and how do we distinguish between the two?

No, I mean, I hoped in my tone I was able to show that those are not the serious heirs, but I think there will be times when we can't distinguish the two. And the other thing to remember also with Soloviov himself,

it'd be a different letter that would be getting close to his. He did grow throughout his life.

And those first intuitions, including La Sofia, were when he was still a fairly young man. He didn't live till a ripe old age, but he lived another good 25 years after that.

And he might have rejected more of his earlier stuff.

He never did end up publishing the Sophia Dialogues. He did not at all reject his poetry.

But he was more comfortable than maybe we are the coexistence of the unknowable and the more serious,

I forget what it is in the question, what the term was, the more rigorous of theology. Well, rigorous of course.

He's rigorous of theology.

Soloviov himself was willing to experiment with everything, whatever brought up for him the sense of fullness, the all being connected and yet maintaining the integrity of each

individual part of multiplicity.

So we maybe can never really know if anything is the true heir of Soloviov. The true heir of Soloviov, right.

I guess it depends on also personal preferences, but one does get this, I mean, Soloviev is often described as the first systematic,

he's a systematic thinker, as well as a mystic,

a joke and a prankster and all of that.

But I think part of what he's doing,

this idea of uniting the opposite science and philosophy,

that has to do with the rigorous side of it. And if that is absent, then it's not perhaps fully in line with this project. And actually, I think I can tell a little personal anecdote here that I had thought when I was thinking about what to write my dissertation on a couple years ago that I would write about Solovey.

But as I read more and more of his works, because I did not write my dissertation on Sol knowledge was so much greater than mine was,

and he would mention a philosopher that I hadn't even heard the name of at that point,

or he would mention a spiritual tradition that I had no idea existed. And so he himself, this might be a way to recognize rigor, he himself had the background, had the scholarly

background to speak authoritatively in a way that Blavatsky, let's say, did not.

Or, you know, Maria de Christos did not.

And so I think that that's one way that we can, we often say that it's important to know that Picasso started out writing a drawing, there's the writing of icons, drawing very realistic paintings.

And from that very strong basis in the history of art and artistic technique, from there he moved on to his more abstract and impressionistic kinds of works.

And I think that if you can feel that background in an articulator of Sophia,

you will be finding rigor. Okay, that's a very good question and answer.

And maybe it partly answers another question here

by Henry Jameson. Did Solovey have a thorough going cosmology that could be, and could he account for his encounter with Sophia in a way that could be applied as a method? So basically the application of Sophia as a method so basically the application of Sophia's method what you just said

points toward that there's a there's a kind of a philological scholarly rigor

to just to Soloviov to what he's doing could you say a little bit more about the application of Soloviov if he how did he intend his message to be practiced, lived, applied?

This philosophy. It's a very difficult question.

Yeah. He does often fall back on different cosmologies. And you can feel the Neoplatonic cosmology

and our Gnostic cosmology and a Kabbalistic cosmology. He never really articulated his own in any totally clear way. I think his whole,

maybe this is just my tuition, that his whole goal in life was to try, continually try to articulate that which can't be articulated. So any particular cosmology is only going to be

one articulation of what reality of the universe is. And that's why I think it's important to do what some of his heirs did not, and that is read all of his work. Because it's easy in Sylvio to say, oh, he

was a political philosopher. Oh, he was a social gadfly. Oh, he was a wacko. Or, oh, he was a Gaelian. Or, he was a Kantian. He was all those things. Because he was constantly trying to articulate his feeling of reality in different terms.

Okay. Judith, I would like to convey this question by my colleague, co-host of the series, Nili Winick. Thank you for a wonderful and vivid talk. Could you expand on whether the 19th century feminism or discussions of the woman question influenced solo sociology

and did it influence 20th century feminisms this is again a question that has come up again in our

just private discussions here i think definitely both of those things um the the sort of women's movement began in in imperial russia long before it began in um in western Europe and certainly in the United States.

And many of you there here in our virtual reality

might have read the work by Chernyshevsky called What Is To Be Done that's very centered on the liberation of women.

What happened in the 1880s, 1890s, is that feminists in Russia became very closely associated with revolutionaries.

And the term prostitutka, prostitute, became associated with that. So you have a little trinity there of feminist, revolutionary, and prostitute in the public imagination.

And so that was always also behind the then development of feminism in late imperial Russia. it also in Blanc and Bielian similists focus on the beautiful woman because they also found

let's see if I still have it in this so I can read what I crossed out here maybe yes maybe no so the similist revision of Soloviov's revisions proved more abstract than Soloviov's multivalent expressions of Sophia

and soon fell into a binary that he eschewed. She became debased in images such as Bloch's famous stranger, Ms. Neklonka,

that some of you might know.

But I write that Bloch's beautiful woman in this poem, Ms. Neklonka, turns out to be a prostitute. That fact suggests the symbolist's disillusionment in their ability to create a bridge between the

binaries of mundane reality and spiritual world of beauty but it does not disprove sophia's just does not disprove sophia's own ability to do so so i think what happened through the um in russia

through this this initial very strong push for women's rights is that sort of ambivalence and disillusionment with both the end of the

Tsarist regime and the beginning of the Soviet regime tainted the legacy of that and debased it, and it became a black and white,

this or that, and that's not how Solovyov had seen it. But I do think that Solovyov was very aware of that movement in Russia in the 1870s and on,

and that it also, that movement also, picked up on Solovyov's thought.

Yes.

What that has.

Gibbons has a book on the social context of Ya'aqob Bermet and Beminism as well

and he does suggest that the development of sociology has to do with the social transformation of women in 16th, 17th century England so perhaps something similar is happening in Russia

although in the dialogue in the Misi Youth, I don't know whether he's describing

his earlier views or it's always not very clear in Saladiya, or it is clear, but one has to read the whole thing to get the flavor of what Saladiya is saying. He expresses very negative views toward the emancipation, you know, in the early passages.

Yes.

I don't know to what extent, irony he's playing on both registers was lost among some of his followers,

himself really, to emphasize one direction over the other.

And often the ultra-serious direction, whereas for Solomiorov, the laughter, and also the silence?

Because there's a question about the silence, the role of silence in the three meetings. And at the library, he speaks of the sacred silence.

And after this question, I will finish with the last one.

So, Judith, thank you for your patience.

So, it serves me right for not rereading my article on laughter in some of you need to read that okay but very um very much so he describes laughter in a sophianic sense um and he erroneously

says quotes um the greeks are saying that humans are the only animals that laugh it's It's shown that that's not actually the case, but he wanted to show that laughter itself is a divinely human process.

And it's associated with, it's related to creation. And he himself was known to have this really actually pretty obnoxiously loud guffaw.

And none of his contemporaries noted that and he was always looking for something funny and so I think again this was a falling into binaries where some of his heirs saw only the serious side of him

and missed that in fact it was the humorous side of him that captures Sophia even more just

sense of combining that which is unspeakable ineffableable, right? You know, often a joke is something that can't really be expressed in other words,

but also can be very, very serious. And I think that's how we sell after.

And the silence would be the ineffable part, I guess, which... Yes, because also I think that that's a more typical mystical image of that which is true and that which is truly real.

So that when he has this vision, everything else is silenced, and it's just that vision. So all of the chatter around him goes away, and he just hears the bells and the ringing of her voice.

I think that's a pretty typical mystical image. Yeah.

I took that, I mean, when he speaks about laughter, he speaks about it in that passage, in that dialogue with Sophie, as a kind of stoic disdain for material.

But I think there's, this is only one part of what he means by laughter.

Right, because his laughter was a real, real Hardy-Billy laughter, right? Very rich. Exactly. Very rich indeed.

So, okay, thank you. And maybe I'll end with one last question uh you did say that uh paul valier was among our uh audience and i'm very happy to hear that i did see his face

i think you should invite him for a talk at some point that would be lovely so i want to salute him because his work was very important for me as well i'm very happy to hear today and um

uh he in a in a kind of classic description uh describing what the Russian school was attempting to do, the Russian school of orthodox theology,

I'm going to read it here and ask you to comment on it.

He says that the Russian school grappled with the challenges facing all faith communities in modern times, such as the tension between tradition and freedom, the challenge of modern humanism, the mission of the church to modern society,

the status of dogma and modern intellectuality and the significance of religious pluralism. This engagement reflected an interest in philosophy not just as a specialized academic pursuit, but in the most basic sense of the word, the quest for Sophia, for wisdom, for insight

into the meaning of life. I love this description about the Russian school as a whole as a dogma attempting to do.

So where does this leave us today? I mean, you know, what they were trying to do, their challenges are also our challenges today. Nothing has changed. Or if anything, these polities have been accentuated.

So how, yeah, what's the message today from Solopjo that we can take? Where?

I think the message is that we can't ignore the contradictions. We should actually enjoy the contradictions. And we certainly cannot ignore the very real

and sometimes painful realities that surround us because those are also connected as one

with a larger world, something beyond us. Although it looks like maybe one man

is bombing certain places. In fact, it's all connected um it's all it's all on on um undivided but on not on merged

and i i couldn't agree with you more i couldn't agree with paul more um uh that it is the story of our day as well um and i think we do you know many ways history goes you know in whether it's cycles and waves or whatever image

you want to you want to have will often come back to to what kind of culture that we humans have lived through before yes and perhaps our very interest in this Sophia and Sophia today as an evidence of this cyclical nature

of these questions as they come up. I think so. I think so.

OK, I think we're out of time. Judith?