The Burning Bush

Writings on Jews and Judaism

Vladimir Solovyov, Gregory Yuri Glazov

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268093044
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Vladimir Solovyov, one of nineteenth-century Russia's greatest Christian philosophers, was renowned as the leading defender of Jewish civil rights in tsarist Russia in the 1880s. The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism presents an annotated translation of Solovyov's complete oeuvre on the Jewish question, elucidating his terminology and identifying his references to persons, places, and texts, especially from biblical and rabbinic writings. Many texts are provided in English translation by Gregory Yuri Glazov for the first time, including Solovyov's obituary for Joseph Rabinovitch, a pioneer of modern Messianic Judaism, and his letter in the London Times of 1890 advocating for greater Jewish civil rights in Russia, printed alongside a similar petition by Cardinal Manning. Glazov's introduction presents a summary of Solovyov's life, explains how the texts in this collection were chosen, and provides a survey of Russian Jewish history to help the reader understand the context and evaluate the significance of Solovyov's work. In his extensive commentary in Part II, which draws on key memoirs from family and friends, Glazov paints a rich portrait of Solovyov's encounters with Jews and Judaism and of the religious-philosophical ideas that he both brought to and derived from those encounters. The Burning Bush explains why Jews posthumously accorded Solovyov the accolade of a "righteous gentile, " and why his ecumenical hopes and struggles to reconcile Judaism and Christianity and persuade secular authorities to respect conscience and religious freedom still bear prophetic vitality.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Solovyov and the Origins of This Work

Vladimir Solovyov was one of nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest Christian religious philosophers, mystics, poets, political theorists, social activists, debaters, and satirists. He taught that there are two absolutes: God and that world which he wills and works in Wisdom to realize. People who encounter Solovyov’s writings commend the powerful arguments by which he communicates the sense that this Wisdom (Sophia) informs the world and its history. Those familiar with his poetry, politics, and life also know him as Wisdom’s knight who, having a heightened sense of evil, fought this evil energetically, believing that its fragmenting forces would be conquered through the alliance of the human with the divine will.

Solovyov’s preoccupation with Wisdom and the alliance between the human and the divine, reflected frequently in his use of the term “Godmanhood,” follow on his philosophical and theological reflections. These he grounded in biblical teaching, especially in Old Testament salvation history revolving around divine-human covenants and wisdom teaching and in the New Testament’s proclamation of Christ’s sanctification and redemption of the world through his incarnation and resurrection. In these he discerned God’s calling to humanity to be his steward in the world and transform it through wisdom, hope, labor, and love. Solovyov also disparaged as “abstract” and “medieval” those Christian expressions of commitment to the Gospel that failed to put Christ’s teaching to love neighbor and enemy into practice and by this failure devolved into attempts to impose Christian beliefs by force. Conversely, he aspired after an “integral” Christianity, a political ideal that he called theocracy but that may more accurately be called theopraxy. This aspiration impelled him to campaign for freedom of conscience and religious and civil liberties and to call upon church and state to do the same.

As a Russian Christian, he was embarrassed by the lack of religious freedom and civil liberties in tsarist Russia, especially that touching the Jews, since he believed their plight was consequent to and a prime symptom of Christian failure to believe in and practice the Gospel. The problem became more pressing after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, when pogroms swept the country and state-sponsored repeals of recently extended Jewish freedoms commenced. Solovyov devoted his lectures, books, pamphlets, letters, protests, political action, and prayers to combating this evil and thereby, as a patriotic Russian Christian, to purging his country’s and his church’s complicity in it.

Solovyov’s contemporaries had difficulty classifying and controlling his allegiances. He was Russian Orthodox but believed that Orthodoxy lost moral strength and succumbed to nationalism by repudiating the primacy of the bishop of Rome. Catholics welcomed his ecumenical efforts but, like most Orthodox Christians, were frequently alienated by his interest in esoteric and seemingly heterodox religious, philosophical, and mystical deliberations on Sophia. He reportedly furnished Dostoevsky with the prototype for the pious brother-hero of The Brothers Karamazov (1878–80), Alyosha Karamazov. But his biographers surmise that he was also the model for the God-spurning, Jesuit-educated master dialectician brother, Ivan, introduced in the opening chapters as the author of a book espousing a “theocratic idea” and later presented as the author of the famous Christ-rejecting chapter, “The Grand Inquisitor.”¹. Whether or not Dostoevsky, by means of this portrayal, voiced suspicion of Solovyov’s Catholic leanings toward social justice, Solovyov explicitly repudiated Dostoevsky’s infamous nationalism and antisemitism. In this respect, his politics brought him into closer alignment with the other contemporary giant of Russian literature, Count Leo Tolstoy, who was the first of ninety prominent signatories of Solovyov’s petition to the tsar to improve Jewish civil rights. Despite this alignment, Solovyov and Tolstoy engaged in a lifelong debate. A fervent Russian patriot committed to the principles of just war, Solovyov argued that Tolstoy’s pacifist ideals were counterfeits of Christianity and sought to persuade him of this through dialogue, letters, and parody, best seen in Solovyov’s swan song, Three Conversations: On War, Progress and the End of History, including the Tale of the Antichrist and Addenda (1889–1900).

Despite these differences with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Solovyov embraced their opposition to capital punishment, but in his case this opposition assumed a much more public form and ended up taking a serious toll on his social status, finances, and health. On March 28, 1881, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Solovyov presented a public lecture appealing to the new tsar to spare the lives of his father’s assassins and by means of a heroic Christian act of forgiveness model the way to the healing of Russia’s social ills. The tsar, thanks to his chief councillor, the Ober-Procurator of the Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who denounced Solovyov as a madman, reportedly found the lecture insulting. In consequence, Solovyov was prohibited from giving further lectures and publishing on ecumenical and Christian-Jewish relations. He responded by continuing to criticize, wherever and whenever possible, policies that subordinated the church to the state, denied freedom of conscience, and repressed religious liberty and civil rights, especially where the Jews were concerned. His campaign on their behalf led him in 1890 to compose a public protest petitioning the tsar to broaden Jewish civil rights and religious freedoms. When publication of the Protest was banned in Russia, he presented another public lecture denouncing as “medieval” the establishment’s position on civil rights and religious freedoms but was denounced again to Pobedonostsev, who in turn demonized him to the tsar. Solovyov’s poetry on Old Testament and Jewish themes, written at significant watershed moments of this campaign, shows him finding hope and support in typological applications of Old Testament salvation history to Russia and playfully modeling himself and his enemies on the heroes and villains of Israel’s salvation history: the patriarchs and prophets and Nebuchadnezzar, respectively.

It was my father, Yuri Glazov, who introduced me to Solovyov. My father was Jewish, a specialist in Oriental languages and Russian literature, history, and culture. A member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he was deprived of this membership and blacklisted. He was barred from employment for championing human rights and protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. This struggle occurred after my father’s conversion to Christianity, especially its Roman Catholic form, and the tightening of relations between my parents and well-known human rights activists, or “dissidents,” humanist, Jewish, and Christian. Among the latter was Fr. Alexander Men’ (1935–1990), the renowned Russian Orthodox theologian of Jewish background who acquainted the Russian intelligentsia with the Gospel and the heritage of Russian religious thought, including that of Solovyov.². My father welcomed the intellectual vigor and ecumenism of Men’, frequently quoting his belief that the divisions between Catholicism and Orthodoxy do not reach up to heaven. In August 1966, he asked Men’ to baptize our family into the Russian Orthodox Church and to be our godfather.³. By this time, Men’ had begun to be harassed by the KGB. The harassment persisted through the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1980s he received death threats that were tinged with antisemitic sentiments. On September 9, 1990, he was brutally murdered. The failure and passivity of the state security’s efforts to solve the case, coupled with bizarre leading questions posed by its interrogators to his friends, such as the insinuation that he may have been ritually murdered by Jews in the context of a broader preoccupation with the extent of his relationships and plots with Jews and Catholics, inclined his friends and family to suspect the KGB, working in tandem with ultranationalists who resented his ecumenical vision in general, evidenced by his friendly relations with Catholics and the welcome his parish offered to Jewish converts.⁴. This suspicion was corroborated by the renowned academic Vyacheslav Ivanov, who related that Vadim V. Bakatin, in 1991 the last official chairman of the KGB, personally told him that the KGB killed Men’.⁵.

The funeral of Father Men’ was conducted by Metropolitan Juvenaly, serving as the representative of Patriarch Alexei II, a fact that testified to the recognition the church accorded Men’. Friends and family members who were present recall that Juvenaly’s homily was free of criticism but that when he read a special message from the patriarch, all who had ears to hear were struck by one phrase, which they, not accustomed to hearing theoretical judgments of the departed in settings of mourning, found in bad taste.⁶. The dissonance of the phrase, however, harmonizes with the subsequent negative reception given by the church hierarchy to Men’, ranging from lack of involvement in conferences dedicated to him to creating conditions that turned his books into underground theological literature to their official burning.⁷.

The murder of Alexander Men’, the subsequent failure to find those responsible, and the coldness with which the official church in Russia has treated him and his legacy resonate with and amplify the troubles Solovyov had with church and state in his day. What happened to Alexander Men’, especially as understood by his friends and family, demonstrates that Solovyov’s diagnosis of Russia’s national, political, and ecclesial ills retains all of its relevance. To underscore this, I include later in this introduction my translation of an introductory lecture Father Men’ gave in 1989 to Solovyov and his writings.

In commending Solovyov to me in my late teens, my father spoke of his brilliance and regarded him as a Russian analogue to St. Thomas Aquinas and a trailblazer for Russian Orthodox Christians seeking unity with the West and Catholicism. Appreciating the might and insight of Solovyov, I returned to reading his works on Judaism and the Bible after completing a DPhil in Jewish and Old Testament studies at Oxford University. In time, while teaching for the Dominicans in Oxford, I developed an introductory course on the Old Testament that was to include lectures on biblical anthropology and Israel’s election. Into these lectures I injected Solovyov’s insights about the meaning of bodily shame in Genesis and about Israel’s soul traits. For the latter, I translated the first portion of Solovyov’s “Jewry and the Christian Question.” Shortly thereafter, I met Michael Waldstein, rector of the Pontifical University of Gamming in Austria, who told me that Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, then president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, which oversees Jewish-Christian relations, was seeking a translation of Solovyov’s writings on Judaism. Michael asked me for a list and translation of the loci classici. I translated many of the key works and presented, at his invitation, a series of seminars about them at Gamming in 2000. This explains the genesis of this project. Since Catholics engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue had a role in encouraging the project, I want to explain briefly why these writings hold special interest for them.

Catholic leaders and theologians began to express interest in Solovyov in his own day. The interest goes back to his ecumenical, “theocratic” vision and efforts to build bridges between Orthodox, Catholics, and Jews. As explained above, these efforts alienated him from the tsarist-Orthodox establishment. Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, under Pobedonostsev’s guidance, demonized him and prohibited the publication in Russia of many of his writings, especially those that commended rapprochement with Rome and greater Jewish civil rights and freedoms. In consequence, he published these works in France and turned for support to Catholic bishops abroad. Bishop Strossmayer of Zagreb introduced him to Pope Leo XIII as an “anima candida, pia ac vere sancta” (pure, pious, and truly saintly soul). Pope Leo, on reviewing Solovyov’s L’Idée russe (1888), intended as an introduction to La Russie et l’Église universelle (1889), called his leading idea “bella … ma fuor d’un miraculo, e cosa impossibile” (fine … but impossible save by a miracle).⁸.

In the decades that followed, Catholic writers described Solovyov as Russia’s analogue to Aquinas and John Henry Cardinal Newman. The comparison with Aquinas rests on Solovyov’s systema...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Selected Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Commentary and Portrait of Solovyov’s Encounters with Jews and Judaism
• Part III: Primary Texts
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Biblical, Christian Magisterial, and Rabbinic Index