However, not being able to understand Solovyov's teaching on the unity of church and state, Anthony was well versed in the fact that all papism is based precisely on the identity of spiritual and secular power. After all, in reality and historically, the popes have always and everywhere dreamed of extending their power, in addition to the spiritual, also to the entire secular life of mankind. Vl. Solovyov understood perfectly well that the existing relations between church and state, full of all sorts of shortcomings and outright ugliness, should be guided by a more spiritual and more ideal understanding of the matter. But what he did not understand at all was that papism was his blind infatuation, his romantic utopia, and his uncritical approach to whole periods of European human history. And Anthony understood this best of all, and here he was helped by a much more sober and critical assessment of Roman Catholicism. He imagined the Catholic teaching on the infallibility of the Pope only as a pitiful replacement of the one and truly divine leader of the Church by an ordinary sinful man. And in general, Anthony believes that a huge exaggeration of the excessively humanistic beliefs of Vl. Solovyov is the result of his loss of the Christian feeling of love[343]. According to Antony, it turns out that if Vl. Solovyov puts the public in the foreground, then he does not need such love, which would be based on concepts higher than human ones. Such love, of course, loses all its content for Anthony and becomes only an impersonal humanism.

Finally, it is worth quoting another important judgment: "All those reproaches with which Solovyov heaps upon our Church and our confession of faith are applied not to the Church, but to the religious life of society." And in general, the book analysed by Anthony seems to him to be an "ugly, extreme deviation"[345] from the right path in Russian society.

It is possible that Vl. Solovyov once responded to this criticism from Antony. But the materials that we have at our disposal do not contain such an answer. However, there is something else. The fact is that in the following year, 1891, an article by Vl. Solovyov's "On Forgeries" (VI, 327-340), in which he, without at all having Anthony in mind, criticizes various kinds of incorrect approaches to Orthodoxy among many thinkers, calling these views "forgeries." And it was to this article that Anthony replied with a special article, which he called "Forgeries of Vl. Solovyov"[346]. The article is written in simple language, although with a lot of quotations from the New Testament. Her thoughts boil down to the following.

First of all, he attacks the central idea of Solovyov's views, which he rightly calls the idea of the kingdom of God. Indeed, for Vl. Solovyov of that period, this idea occupies a central place. And, in spite of a certain kind of one-sidedness, Anthony quite correctly brings to the fore in this idea its social-state character. According to Anthony, Vl. According to Solovyov, it turns out that the Kingdom of God exists, but there is no real God. After all, the Christian teaching about the kingdom of God is based on the teaching about love, that is, about love for God and love for our neighbors. Where is this teaching about love in Vl. Solovyov? Anthony cites the following very characteristic quote: "True and genuine Christianity is neither dogma, nor hierarchy, nor worship, nor morality, but the life-giving spirit of Christ... the spirit embodied in the religious forms and institutions that form the earthly Church"[347]. And indeed, if we seriously draw all the demarcations between the kingdom of God and the neighboring regions, it becomes incomprehensible what kind of "spirit" this "spirit" by which the kingdom of God lives. Anthony simply believes that this is nothing more than a non-religious and only legal organization. The Gospel, he says, is relegated "to the category of ordinary, purely conventional systems of social-state organization." He asserts that the divine teaching about the kingdom of God "does not have a legal, formal character at all, but understands in this concept the moral content of Christianity" [349]. And in this regard, it should be noted that from the point of view of Orthodoxy, he is apparently quite right. Vl. Solovyov, in essence, of course, did not even think of reducing the Church to a juridical organization. However, in those of his works that Anthony has in mind, Vl. Solovyov is indeed too carried away by social ideas, which were almost entirely absent in the official theology of that time. And in his criticism of this enthusiasm, Anthony is undoubtedly right, if, of course, we stand on his point of view and on the principled position of Orthodox theology in general. This is what the orthodox were officially supposed to say, finding in the theology of Vl. Solovyov is only "forgeries full of gross arbitrariness"[350].

As a result, Anthony in the teaching of Vl. Solovyov does not see any call to a new life about the Kingdom of God, but only finds a regulating principle for a purely earthly and completely secular life: "The Kingdom of God, or the Church, according to V. S. Solovyov, must have all special political functions and progress, that is, wage legal wars, collect excise taxes, punish and reward. Probably, it also assumes improved prostitution from the sanitary point of view, better regulated gambling and other necessary companions of socio-political culture? For our part, we would advise our politician one thing: to hide St. Catherine as far as possible for the sake of consistency. Scripture and to mention it as rarely as possible. This will be consistent not only for the full use of the Roman hierarchy, dear to his heart, but also as a kind of precaution so that readers do not call his system irreligious."

Such a characterization, in spite of all its correctness from the orthodox point of view, should not confuse the historian of Russian thought, who is obliged not to stand on the positions of Vl. Solovyov and not on the positions of the official theology of that time, but exclusively on the positions of fidelity to historical facts. Basically, Vl. Solovyov does not defend the understanding of the Church and the Kingdom of God as mere legal organizations, but he is undoubtedly carried away by the social side of the matter, and this passion of his is quite rightly criticized by Anthony. In the same way, the latter, who justly criticizes Vl. Solovyov in this point is completely wrong in her ignorance of Solovyov's philosophy as a whole. And as an example of a more business-like approach to the essence of the issue, we cited the work of P. Y. Svetlov[352].

4. P. Y. Svetlov. P. Y. Svetlov is based not only on the French books of Vl. Solovyov, but also on those of his works which by the time of Anthony's speech had long been published and which it would not be bad for the latter to know. First of all, it costs nothing for P. Y. Svetlov to point out the many statements of Vl. Solovyov, which completely contradict the juridical understanding of the Church and the Kingdom of God. For example, in his "Spiritual Foundations of Life" he wrote: "The same faith in the Kingdom of God does not allow us to be satisfied with the present reality. For in this reality there is still unrighteousness, strife, and calamity; But the Kingdom of God is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit"[353]. In the "Readings on God-manhood" we read: "Being the body of Christ, the Church is not yet His glorified, wholly deified body. The present earthly existence of the Church corresponds to the body of Jesus during his earthly life (before the resurrection), a body which, although it manifested miraculous qualities in particular cases (which are now inherent in the Church), is in general a mortal, material body, not free from all the infirmities and sufferings of the flesh, for all the infirmities and sufferings of human nature are accepted by Christ; but just as in Christ all that is weak and earthly is swallowed up in the resurrection of the spiritual body, so must it be in the Church, His universal body, when it has reached its fullness"[354]. In the work "The Great Controversy and Christian Politics" we read: "As the true body of the God-Man Christ, the Church must be, like Him, an unmerged and inseparable combination of the Divine and the human. In Christ, his human, rational will, was in everything and to the end subject to the will of the Father. Through this feat of self-denial, he subdues his material nature, heals, transforms and resurrects it in a new spiritual form. In the same way, in the Church, the holiness of God, accepted by the will and reason of mankind, through the feat of self-denial of people and nations, must be carried out into the entire composition of humanity, into all its natural life, and through this into the life of the whole world to its healing, transfiguration and resurrection."

After such statements, one can ask: where is the church as a juridical institution, and where is the kingdom of God as a liberally humanistically formed state? All this gives P. Y. Svetlov the full right to give the following kind of assessment of Solovyov's doctrine: "The great merit of Vl. Solovyov and other like-minded writers must recognize this energetic reminder to us of the main thing on which the success in the great cause of the unification of the churches depends—the necessity of mutual Christian love as a path to the unification of the churches." This means that it is a matter of love, and not of legal organization.

P. Y. Svetlov is absolutely right in that he puts in the foreground the inner disposition of Vl. Solovyov, which, for all its scholarship, is reduced to the simplest and most naïve dream of every believer. Namely: Vl. Solovyov desires at all costs that the entire external life of man, that is, all his social and state life, and all his spiritual hopes placed in the Church, should be united in one and indestructible whole, where the external and internal life of man will be determined by the living, rational and peaceful unification of two independent organizations, the state and the church. This is what he called a theocracy, the doctrine of which can be reproached with romanticism, utopianism, and fairy-tale fiction, but which can in no way be reproached either for reducing it only to a juridical organization, or for ignoring the general Christian commandment of love. P. Y. Svetlov writes: "The theocratic idea a) permeates the entire Christian worldview of Vl. Solovyov and b) serves as a guiding principle for the Christian solution of almost all practical problems of complex church social life, represented by possible questions, such as ecclesiastical, socio-economic, national, Jewish, Polish, etc." [357]. And the further words of P. Y. Svetlov are very characteristic: "Here the idea of the Kingdom of God clearly appears before us as an all-binding principle in Christianity, by which the abstract theoretical in Christianity is organically linked into a single whole the abstract theoretical with the practical, dogmatics with ethics, Christian beliefs with journalism" [358].

It seems to us that the above materials do not need any special comment. They perfectly show both what Anthony is right and wrong about from his personal, pan-Orthodox and Solovyov point of view, and what Vl. Solovyov personally from his own point of view, from the general Orthodox point of view, and from the special Antoniev point of view.

5. M. M. Tareev. M. M. Tareev[359] gives the following general description of Vl. Solovyov: "With the originality of his mystical mood, his mystical contemplations, with the brightness of his artistic work, Solovyov always stands in his philosophical constructions on the firm ground of an objective view, historical perspective and indestructible logic. He created a harmonious system of religious philosophy. He didn't seem to have a weakness that would give him strength, but his strength undoubtedly hid his weaknesses. He was too dialectician. Where he did not lose sight of the shores, he had in his dialectic a victorious weapon, he was an invulnerable publicist. But when he embarked on the boundless ocean of metaphysics, his philosophy became a play of concepts, historical persons and events were formed for him into mere symbols of ideas, and he did not so much listen to reality as pronounce laws for it. His goals are excessively remote, ignoring everything conventional, seeing the absolute in everything erases the colors from the horizon. The logical formula of the highest synthesis has been brilliantly worked out by him, but there is still doubt whether it is not hanging in the air."

Thus, M. M. Tareev is a supporter of the old and, we would say, rather ugly church tradition of reducing everything to faith alone and denying any significance of reason. But this is precisely what Vl. Solovyov fought all his life. He had always thought that you couldn't believe in what you didn't know and couldn't say a word about, and you couldn't develop a system of mind that hung in the air and wasn't based on any reality. M. M. Tareev never tires of singing the praises of religious mysteries. But this is precisely what makes him find in Solovyov's philosophy only rational idle talk.

Developing his position, M. M. Tareev discusses the mysteries of faith in the following way, turning his reasoning into a kind of real hymn.

"To look at a fact religiously means to look at it with a double gaze: one to see in it what the simple positive consciousness sees, and the other to see the higher reality behind this shell.