W. Goethe was an Orthodox priest who converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy in his time, criticized all Catholicism with pathos and preached official Orthodoxy with great enthusiasm. And the questions of Vl. Solovyov, and W. Goethe's answers to them from a historical point of view are very valuable material. But it must be said that the questions of Vl. Solovyov is by no means an adornment of his work. These questions are somewhat casuistic in nature and are aimed at ensuring that answers to them are possible only in the spirit of Catholicism, but not in the spirit of Orthodoxy. T. Stoyanov writes bluntly: "Fr. Vladimir, as is obvious, recognizes these questions not as conciliatory, but as Latin, only disguised by the mask of impartiality."

Here are two or three examples of the proposed nine questions. Vl. Solovyov formulates it as follows: "Does the word Hyiiioya, added to the original text of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, inevitably contain heresy? If so, what Ecumenical Council condemned this heresy?" If heresy is understood as a false teaching condemned at the Ecumenical Council, then Ңі^ie in this sense is not a heresy at all. And there could be no condemnation of this teaching at the Ecumenical Councils, since it took noticeable forms, and even then barely and not at all as a dogma, only in the era of Charlemagne, that is, not earlier than the eighth and ninth centuries. The most important thing is that heresy should not necessarily be considered that which is formally condemned at an Ecumenical Council, but that which is heresy in its very essence. And in this sense, the Hyiii is undoubtedly a heresy, since one-man rule is ascribed here not only to the Father, but also to the Son[329]. And, of course, in this answer W. Goethe is absolutely right.

In his fourth question, Vl. Solovyov asks that if the teaching of Fr. Maximus the Confessor was not condemned at any Ecumenical Council, then how can it be ignored if St. Maximus the Confessor has a positive judgment about it? Goethe will give a ruthlessly destructive answer to this question. For this purpose, he studied the corresponding texts of Maximus the Confessor in the original and did not find in these texts a single hint of such a teaching. It turns out that to the question of a certain presbyter Marinus about the procession of the Holy Spirit, Maximus answered only one thing: "The Father is the beginning, the Son appears from him through birth, and the Holy Spirit through the procession." Where is Maxim Gii^ie? [330] It can be said that with this answer W. Goethe downright put to shame Vl. Solovyov.

In his fifth question, Vl. Solovyov asks what other heresies were in Catholicism and, if so, at what Ecumenical Councils they were condemned. However, these heresies, of course, are well known to him (the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the infallibility of the Pope). He is also well aware that after the eighth century there were no Ecumenical Councils at all. And this means that the fifth question is posed purely sophistically, and it cost W. Goethe nothing to answer it. He added only that "the heresies of the Church of Rome are innumerable."

In his seventh question, Vl. Solovyov wonders whether it is possible not to recognize Roman Catholicism if there are no heresies in it and it is not in schism, and whether in this case it is not necessary to recognize the Roman Church as "the main component of the One Catholic Church of Christ." And here he adds: "Thus, the division of the Churches has no truly religious basis for itself and is only a matter of human politics." Goethe does not even consider it necessary to answer such a question, because the Roman Church is full of heresies and in its time departed from Orthodoxy not at all for political reasons, but because of the "arrogance and autocratic pretensions" of the papacy, which "created the division of the Churches."

As a result, it must be said that these questions do not do honor to Vl. It was not difficult for Solovyov to answer them to W. Goethe. It should be noted, in addition, that Vl. Solovyov initially asked A. M. Ivantsov-Platonov, who was not only a prominent spiritual figure, but also a professor at Moscow University. Probably, from him, who published works on the question of the division of the churches, Vl. Solovyov learned about all such problems for the first time. A warm friendship was established between them, which was repeatedly interrupted in connection with the Catholic sympathies of Vl. Solovyov. Since these questions first appeared in 1886 in French, it is possible that A. M. Ivantsov-Platonov did not answer them in print. But on the other hand, W. Goethe honorably fulfilled this not very difficult duty of answering such unfortunate questions.

A direct continuation of these materials is an article by a certain S-v, in which there is every reason to find the same T. Stoyanov. This article is called "Fr. Vladimir Goethe's Judgments on the Latest Activities of Mr. Vl. Solovyov in favor of the unification of the Eastern and Western Churches"[333]. It is interesting for us primarily because of its references to various kinds of judgments about the confessional teaching of Vl. Solovyov, which by that time had already been expressed in the French and Russian press. Whoever investigates this question in all its historical details will have to make use of these French and Russian references. As for us, there is no need to expound this question with all the details of the literary polemics of that time.

However, some of this controversy still deserves mention. First of all, W. Goethe was not only a Catholic cleric, but also a most learned historian of the Church, who printed many volumes from this area before his conversion to Orthodoxy. This great and deeply specialized scholarship allowed him to argue from a much more thorough historical position. Vl. Solovyov was undoubtedly a great polymath in the field of church history. But, apparently, W. Goethe had many advantages in this respect. It cost him nothing to cite a mass of irrefutable historical facts testifying to the long-standing Caesar-papist tendencies of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as to characterize Byzantine Orthodoxy in an anti-papist spirit, citing the indisputable facts of the emergence of the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch or Jerusalem on the basis of completely equal and fraternal mutually located autocephalous churches, as opposed to papist absolutism.

W. Goethe cites numerous examples of the persecution of dissidents in Catholicism, including inquisitorial fanaticism, the burning of heretics and the "Index of Forbidden Books", in relation to which Russian practice incomparably more often and more deeply pursued freedom of faith. Persecution here, according to W. Goethe, was basically political rather than religious. And if Vl. Solovyov finds in the thousand-year-old Roman Catholicism the triumph of religious freedom, then the scholar-historian of the church W. Goethe did not cost anything to destroy the naïve conviction of Vl. Solovyov, who either did not know the relevant historical facts, or deliberately ignored them.

In the opinion of this author, Vl. Solovyov resolutely recognized the freedom of conscience of all opponents of Russian Orthodoxy, including not only some shundists, Uniates, but even notorious anarchists, who preached the literal destruction of everything that existed and had absolutely no positive ideals. And only, you see, the Holy Synod and the Russian Emperor could not defend the Orthodox faith, since this defense, they say, contradicted the freedom of conscience.

The article by W. Goethe which we have quoted undoubtedly contains some purely newspaper arguments, quite external and unspeakable. On the whole, however, this article is dictated not only by great historical scholarship, but also by a deeply convinced and pronounced church-historical pathos. And it must be said that with all due respect to the lofty aspirations and dreams of Vl. Solovyov, after reading this kind of critical analysis, has to agree in many respects with his opponents and admit that the philosophical depth of his views sometimes did not in the least interfere with his too hasty, if not downright frivolous assertions.

2. Criticism of Vl. Solovyov from the point of view of canon law. Later, and this is also very soon, we also find in literature criticism of the specifically theocratic views of Vl. Solovyov.

In his article "The Theocratic and Hierocratic Views of Vladimir Solovyov and Fyodor Dostoevsky Before the Court of Canon Law of the Orthodox Church," Solovyov's understanding of Christian theocracy is criticized in detail and in detail. The author pays much less attention to the hierocratic views of F. M. Dostoevsky, which we will not talk about here.

Vl. Solovyov believes that the church has the legal (divine) right to prevail in the state as an organ of divine-human power. In form, this authority is a theocracy, since the ecclesiastical authority, and from it any other, is the conductor of divine power. He sees the goal of theocracy "in the perfect reciprocity of the free divine-human union, not in the fullness of power, but in the fullness of love" (VI, 633), in the realization of "the complete internal and external reunion of heaven and earth, the free union of the Creator with creation." A necessary consequence of the establishment of a worldwide Christian theocracy, the foundation of which was Jesus Christ, he considers the destruction of independent earthly power and its subordination to the source of all authority, the God-man.