Чтения о богочеловечестве (Lectures on Divine Humanity)

The twelve lectures open with a challenge to the audience's assumptions: Solovyov says at the outset that he will speak of the truths of positive religion, subjects very far from the interests of contemporary consciousness, and proceeds to argue that the modern rejection of them rests on a misunderstanding of what is being rejected.

The argument builds toward the concept that gives the lectures their name — Bogochelovechestvo, usually rendered Divine Humanity or Godmanhood: the union of the divine and the human in Christ, understood not as an isolated miracle but as the pattern and goal of the whole created order and of history.

The lectures were a public event in St Petersburg, drawing large audiences, and they established Solovyov as the leading religious philosopher of his generation. They shaped Russian religious thought — Bulgakov, Florensky, Berdyaev — for the next half-century.

Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), son of the historian Sergei Solovyov, passed through militant materialism as a schoolboy and returned to Christian faith at around eighteen, taking degrees in history, philology and theology.

He delivered these lectures in his mid-to-late twenties, and spent the rest of his life on the project of a universal Christianity reconciling East and West — a position that left him without a party. He died in 1900.