Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal (Russian History and Culture)

Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal

Russian History and Culture VOLUME 3

Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal The Philosophers and the Freudians

By

Anna Lisa Crone

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: St. Petersburg, Alexander column, Arch of the General Staff, photo by Benjamin Dolnik. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crone, Anna Lisa. Eros and creativity in Russian religious renewal : the philosophers and the Freudians / by Anna Lisa Crone. p. cm. -- (Russian history and culture ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18005-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religious thought--Russia-History--19th century. 2. Sublimation (Psychology)--Religious aspects--Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’--History of doctrines--19th century. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)--Religious aspects--Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’--History of doctrines--19th century. 4. Religious thought--Soviet Union--History. 5. Sublimation (Psychology)-Religious aspects--Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’--History of doctrines--20th century. 6. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)--Religious aspects--Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’-History of doctrines--20th century. 7. Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich, 1853-1900. 8. Rozanov, V. V. (Vasilii Vasil’evich), 1856-1919. 9. Berdiaev, Nikolai, 1874-1948. 10. Vysheslavtsev, B. P. (Boris Petrovich), 1877-1954. I. Title. II. Series. BX485.C76 2010 230’.19092247--dc22 2009039917

ISSN 1877-7791 ISBN 978 90 04 18005 5 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To my beloved daughter, Liliana M. Donchik

CONTENTS Author’s Note ........................................................................................... xi Publisher’s Note ....................................................................................... xii Preface ....................................................................................................... xiii I. Introduction. Towards Christian Renewal: Eros, Sublimation and Creativity in Modern Russian Religious Thought............................................................................................. A Transvaluation of Christian Values Conducted from Within .................................................................................

1 1

PART ONE

RUSSIAN THEORIES OF SUBLIMATION BEFORE FREUD Introduction to Part One ...................................................................... 15 II. Solovyov on Eros and Creativity: “The fullest sounding chord…” ........................................................................... Solovyov and Plato—the 1890’s ................................................. Eros: The Force which Spiritualizes/Christianizes the Flesh ....................................................................................... Solovyov’s Texts Relating to Eros and Creativity ................ Caveat: Against an Overly Traditional Reading of Solovyov, the Christian .......................................................... Aesthetics—Beauty as a Relationship, “Beauty in Nature” .... From Eros to Aesthetics—Love and Creativity as Parallel Versions of Sublimation. ............................................................ Solovyov’s Poetic Expression of the Connection of Eros and Creativity ................................................................. Solovyov on Fet’s Love Poetry ...............................................

16 24 27 27 33 37 40 42 44

Transition. Rozanov and Solovyov ........................................................ 55 III. Eros and Creativity: From Solovyov’s “Love” to Rozanov’s “Sex” ................................................................................ 58 Rozanov on Sex and Love. The Move to the Family Topic .... 66

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contents Rozanov’s The Family Question in Russia ................................. Distortions or Expansions. Rozanov’s Emended Version of Solovyovian Principles ........................................................... From Sex to Creativity: Rozanov’s Answer to Solovyov ........ Rozanov and Freudian Sublimation .........................................

69 73 75 80

PART TWO

THE TWO MEANINGS OF CREATIVITY: PERSONALITYCONSTRUCTION AND THE PRODUCTION OF SUBLIME WORKS Introduction to Part Two........................................................................ 89 IV. Sublimation in the Atheist Sigmund Freud: Religion and Sublimation in Carl G. Jung and Otto Rank ................................ 95 The Sexual Basis: Pan-sexualism .............................................. 99 Sublimation and Creativity in Freud ........................................ 101 Two Types of Backsliding into Religion: The Contrasting Cases of Jung and Rank ............................................................. 104 V. The Creative Genius and the Beloved: Inner-directed and Outer-directed Eros................................................................. 118 Quantity and Quality: The Freudians and Berdyaev vs. the Other Religious Thinkers .............................................. 118 Freud, Jung and Rank................................................................. 120 Either/Or or Both/And .............................................................. 120 Rozanov’s Practical Testimony on Idealizing Love ................ 121 Dependence and Independence—the Personality as Partial and Whole .................................................................. 125 Perfect Sublimation in Freud .................................................... 126 Inappropriate Love Objects and Creativity ............................. 129 Rank on Romantic Love in the Creative Genius .................... 130 Flesh (Biological Life) versus Spirit (Creative Life) ............................................................................. 131 Types of Erotic (and Anti-erotic) Energy (in Freud, Rank, Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev)......................... 134 Freud and Rank ...................................................................... 135 Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev ................................. 135 Religious Monism and Religious Dualism: The Uniqueness of Berdyaev ..................................................... 136 Berdyaev and the Freudian School on Creativity ................... 145

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Love Relations in Dostoevsky. The Berdyaev-Rank Position versus the Bakhtin-Solovyov Position ...................... 147 The Self-in Relationship versus the Self as Self-Sufficient Microcosm ................................................................................... 150 PART THREE

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A CORRECTIVE TO CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY Introduction to Part Three ................................................................. 153 VI. Berdyaev’s Conflicted Engagement with Freud and Psychoanalysis .............................................................................. 159 Ambivalence about Man ........................................................ 159 Utopianism and Dualism in Berdyaev ................................. 161 Defensiveness and Ambivalence about Freud ..................... 163 Ambiguous Attitudes towards Freud .................................... 169 Critique and Emendation....................................................... 174 Failure to Leave Nietzsche Behind? ...................................... 182 VII. Christianizing Freudian Sublimation via Jung: Vysheslavtsev’s Turn to C.G. Jung ..............................................188 The Why and the How: Biographical Sketch of B.P. Vysheslavtsev ............................................................... 188 Vysheslavtsev’s Goal: “Not psychoanalysis, but psychosynthesis.” Why Jung is so Useful for Russian Christianity ............................................................................... 194 Vysheslavtsev’s Works and his Theory.................................. 202 The Ethics of a Transfigured Eros (1931): Freudian Law and Jungian Grace ...................................................... 204 The Judaic Basis ................................................................... 205 C.G. Jung—the New St. Paul ............................................. 210 Vysheslavtsev’s Modified Jungian Structure of the Self.............................................................................. 212 Sublimation and Creativity and the Mechanism of the Creative Process (Hierarchy of the Self) ............... 212 Hierarchy of the Self ........................................................... 213 How to Sublimate One’s Self—Vysheslavtsev’s Christianization of Jungian’s Individuation, Vysheslavtsev’s Mechanism of the Creative Process....... 217 Role of Freedom .................................................................. 219

x

contents Vysheslavtsev’s Unexpressed Appeal to Jung .................. 223 “The Image of God in the Substance of Man” (1935) and its Emendations in 1954 ............................................. 224 Two Treatments of the Inefficacy of Christianity in the Modern Age................................................................... 227

VIII. Conclusions. Changes in the Godman as a Model for the Christian Creator ......................................................................... 229 Phase One: Attack on the Overly Spiritual (Non-sexual) Nature of the Godman ............................................................ 229 Jung’s Reprise of Solovyov’s and Rozanov’s Critique: Demonization of the Flesh/Nature ................................... 231 Convergences of Rozanov and Jung in Specific Texts .... 236 Phase Two: The Importance of an Idealizing Love Relationship for the Creative Christian ................................ 244 Berdyaev and Rank on the Creative Man ........................ 245 Phase Three: Unconscious Man versus the Super-Rational and Omniscient Christ ................................ 251 Selected Bibliography ............................................................................. 255 Index of Names ....................................................................................... 261

AUTHOR’S NOTE I wish to express my special gratitude to Dr. Elizabeth A. Ginzburg. Interest in this book appeared when I was already extremely ill. I would never have been able to present the final version of the manuscript without the generous help of Liza Ginzburg, my former graduate student at the University of Chicago. Her kindness to me in this has been beyond all measure and inspired me even in my cancer struggle. Her extensive knowledge of the period I treat in the book and her expertise in the poetry of Tiutchev, Fet and Solovyov made her contribution to my monograph invaluable. Anna Lisa Crone

PUBLISHER’S NOTE Brill wishes to thank Dr. Elizabeth A. Ginzburg for copy-editing the footnotes and for compiling the bibliography and index.

PREFACE This book has been a labor of love. I first read Solovyov, Rozanov and Berdyaev when I was 18 in a course offered by Professor James Scanlan at Goucher College. Some 40 years later Professor Scanlan, a leading American specialist in Russian philosophy (Emeritus, Ohio State University) agreed to read the first version of this work and his astute critique helped me to concentrate my focus on Eros and Creativity in their intimate connection with religious renewal in modern Russia and how Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev, who knew Freud, used psychoanalytic insights to deepen their understanding of man. This book reflects my years of teaching and studying the Russian religious-philosophical tradition and long-standing interest in sublimation and psychoanalytic theories of human creativity. As a Western scholar who has long lived with and loved these Russian thinkers, I hope my attempt to bring these trends together will cast light on an important philosophical tradition that is only very slowly being recuperated in Russia proper. It is a rich legacy which shows the brilliance and originality of the Russian philosophical mind. Anna Lisa Crone, Chicago, June, 2009

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION. TOWARDS CHRISTIAN RENEWAL: EROS, SUBLIMATION AND CREATIVITY IN MODERN RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT A Transvaluation of Christian Values Conducted from Within The fate of Freudian thought in Russia in medical psychiatry and even in political ideology in the early years of the Soviet Russian state has been studied extensively.1 The engagement with “proto-Freudian” and Freudian thought by Russian Orthodox religious thinkers has not had the same fate. Nevertheless, there were four major Christian religious thinkers in Russia who considered all forms of higher human creativity to be a sublimation or transmutation of the sexual instinct or drive. These were Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853–1900), Vasily Vasil’evich Rozanov (1856–1919), Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948) and Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev (1876–1954). The first two advanced a theory of sublimation similar to Freud’s before Freud first articulated his view in 1896, and did so with no knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis. The latter two thinkers knew Freud’s works before they left Russia permanently in 1922, and they came to know psychoanalysis even better while in Paris as they were there at the height of the impact of Freudian thought in the Western world. Quite predictably, the majority of Russian religious thinkers, like their Western Catholic and Protestant counterparts, rejected most of Freudian thought as radically atheist, scientific, and materialist, and saw it as possibly useful only for the clinical treatment of the seriously mentally ill. Two notable exceptions were Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev, both of whom were deeply interested in human creativity and saw Freud’s discoveries as valuable for a better understanding of man, i.e., for a more profound Christian anthropology. 1 Aleksandr Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psichoanaliza v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Meduza, 1993). English version: Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, tr. Noah and Maria Rubins (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), further referred to as Etkind; Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and Martin Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

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In the face of Freud’s intransigent atheism and materialism, and despite their own, rather original but deep Christian allegiances, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev engaged seriously with the Freudian ideas of the dominance of the irrational/the unconscious and of the centrality of the sexual in man, in addition to accepting the basic premises of his theory of creativity, the so-called “sublimation hypothesis.” Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev were both deeply influenced, positively and negatively, by the philosophies of creativity of their older contemporaries, Solovyov and Rozanov. Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev attempted to incorporate what was useful and beneficial in Freud’s thought into their own theories of Christian creativity. Berdyaev did this at certain pivotal points in his career.2 His close associate and colleague of decades, Vysheslavtsev, made the “Christianization of Freud” virtually his life’s project. In fact, the views of these four religious thinkers on human creativity form a discrete, but continuous tradition on Eros and Creativity within Russian religious thought, one that is occasionally alluded to in part, but never treated as a 60-year developing tradition from the early 1890’s to the 1950’s. This “Christianization of Freud,” amounts to a translation of the pre-existing metaphysical-religious ideas about Eros of Solovyov and Rozanov into more modern psychoanalytic terms, while maintaining their strong religious emphasis—one already so marked in Plato—on man’s spirituality and ability to transcend his physical/biological nature. It is the aim of the present book to trace this tradition of Eros and Creativity chronologically, inasmuch as each Russian thinker’s ideas polemicize with, incorporate and change those of his predecessor over the six decades. In the first movement of this ongoing tradition Solovyov and Rozanov made human sexuality a metaphysical and religious subject, an all-important one that had to be clarified in Christian metaphysics. When Freud, and even Otto Weininger, whose one major work Sex and Character, was known in Russia before Freud3 declared the centrality of sexuality to an understanding of man and his creativity. Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev had inherited this view from Solovyov and

2 Nikolai Berdyaev did this especially in the 1920s and 1930s, his first decade in the emigration. 3 Otto Weininger, Geschlect und Character first published in Vienna in 1903. Editions: Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005). Russian translations: Pol i kharakter, tr. V. Likhtenshtadt (St. Petersburg: Posev, 1908); tr. A. Gren (Moscow: “Sfinks”, 1909); tr. G. Namiot (St. Petersburg: Sotrudnik, 1912).

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Rozanov and had no impulse to dispute the importance of sex. We shall attempt to show that they accepted Freud’s ideas 1) because after Solovyov and Rozanov sexuality was a legitimate religious subject in Russia and 2) because they were steeped in and had accepted Solovyov’s and Rozanov’s pre-existing sexual theories of sublimation into their thought prior to becoming acquainted with Freud and his followers. Consequently, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev attempted both 1) to learn what they could from Freud and his followers to improve what they considered Russian Christianity’s inadequate and incomplete understanding of man and 2) to “Christianize” the thought of Freud and his followers by critiquing and emending Freudian ideas. Sublimation was originally a religious concept; it was a term from Christian theology and Christian alchemy, sublimatio (“the raising”), a deverbal noun from the Latin verb sublimare (“to raise”,“exalt”).4 Freud’s concept of sublimation, which has attained such popularity in modern parlance is a limited secularization of the religious concept. It is therefore of cardinal importance that sublimation in the work of Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev is not a return to Platonic, pre-existing Christian, Neo-Platonist or alchemical formulations, but rather an attempt to Christianize secular Freudian sublimation and make it consonant with Christian values and a Christian worldview. It insists, as Freud does, on the sexual, libidinal nature of the energy that is transformed, or even transfigured, in the creative process. The primacy of sexuality in Freudian psychoanalysis was the reason for resistance to his thought generally and to his theory of creativity by most religious thinkers of all stripes, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. Psychoanalysis even met with resistance in medical psychiatry in the first two decades of the twentieth century, as Freud’s official biographer, Ernest Jones, points out.5 It is remarkable therefore those thinkers from the generally conservative Russian Orthodox tradition engaged productively with the ideas of the primacy of the unconscious and irrational in man, and the sexually-based view of human psychology many decades before their Western counterparts. Here the theologian Gregory Palamas, who saw man as a “creator,” played a major role.6

4

Sublimare, Latin, to raise. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, in three vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953, 1955, 1957), further identified by volume and page. See Jones, I, 397ff. 6 Gregory Palamas is the theologian of the Eastern Church who based man’s being in the image and likeness of God on his creative capacities. 5

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Needless to say, Freud’s view of man clashed very directly with the theory of man—the anthropology—upon which most Christian doctrine had been based. In Catholic (Thomist) and Protestant theology man was seen as a creature “in the image and likeness of God” by dint of his rational mind and reflective consciousness, not mainly because of his irrational unconscious or imaginative, creative capabilities (pace Gregory Palamas). The focus on man as a rational being like the rational deity was only increased and strengthened in the Enlightenment and in Kant and Hegel. To be sure, there were mystics and dissenters from this view of man in Catholicism and even in Protestant theology. But the great irrationalist reaction in the theory of man came in the Romantic period which paradoxically preceded and coincided with great advancements in rationalist science. So much did science undercut religious belief in the mid-nineteenth century that Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead,” by which he meant that, given the advancements in scientific knowledge, highly educated people could no longer believe in the God of traditional religion.7 Nevertheless, it was Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom the German thinker discovered in Nice in the 1880’s and praised as “the only psychologist that I have anything to learn from,”8 who so emphasized the huge irrational component in man’s psyche. Dostoevsky for his part was influenced by the Russian Slavophile religious philosophers Ivan Kireevsky and Aleksei Khomiakov,9 who began as Hegelian rationalists (as Hegelians), but under the influence of the late Schelling came to place religious feeling, the non-rational capacities of faith and religious intuition above strict reason. This was part and parcel of the general Romantic worldview which posited a small visible world of day (reason) swimming on an enormous sea, “the world of night” (not permeable to reason).10 7 The seminal “God is dead” passage is in Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), (Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1882/1887), no. 125. Discussion of its meaning, see Henri Lubac, The Drama of Atheistic Humanism (New York, Meridian Books, 1953), p. 168ff; on Nietzsche and Feuerbach see Lubac, pp. 3–35. See also “The Death of God and the Revaluation,” in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York: Meridian Books, 1966), pp. 80–100. 8 Ibid. 9 Details of Ivan Kireevsky’s biography and his religious conversion are treated in Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy. History of a Conservative Utopia in nineteenth-century Russian Thought, tr. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 122–178, further Walicki. See especially pp. 123–134: “Kireevsky: From Lover of Wisdom to Slavophile.” The influence of his pious brother, Petr Kireevsky, is discussed on pp. 122–123. His conversion under his wife’s influence is discussed on pp. 132–133. 10 This imagery is taken from Fedor Tiutchev’s poem, “Day and Night,” in: F.I. Tiutchev, Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972), p. 137.

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In this poetic imagery we see a proto-formulation of the Freudian, or for that matter, Jungian, conscious ego, resting on the much greater part of the human psyche, the unconscious. For the Romantics man’s ability to know his deeper self as well as the unseen deeper metaphysical underpinnings of the visible world (Kant’s noumena) lay in his non-rational mental states: intuition, mystical visions and insights, even madness, hallucination, and superstition. These were seen as the wellspring of religious faith, revelation and spiritual knowledge. In Romanticism they were privileged over cold reason as conduits to deeper realities and deeper truths about man and the universe. The Russian Slavophiles were Romantics, but they did not discount Reason or science as they were philosophically trained Hegelians. Yet the highest form of knowledge in their epistemology was the religious concept integral cognition—characterized in seemingly oxymoronic formulas such as believing reason, or reasoning faith.11 Such a knowing subject for them possessed the integral human personality tsel’naia lichnost’12 in which the heart, faith, irrational knowledge was dominant over, organized and integrated the reflective, rational aspect of their consciousness as well their conscious processing of immediate sensory experience. Needless to say, in the exceptional, creative man, the creative genius, in the arts and letters (the cult of the poet-genius) very prominent in Romanticism, the irrational component had always been given greater precedence, much more than it had been in creativity in science, mathematics, or philosophy. The Christian thinker Dostoevsky is often viewed as a latter-day Slavophile and Solovyov’s philosophy grew out of and was a further development of Slavophile thought. We mention this because Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky placed major emphasis on man’s irrationality and both were major influences upon Freud and his disciples. They are, moreover, the two major influences that the Russian thinkers and psychoanalysts I treat here all shared. The other common influences are the nineteenth-century psychologists and sexologists who dealt with mental illness, hysteria and criminality in terms of sexual deviations. These include Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso with his studies in criminality, Charcot, under whom Freud studied in France, and Otto

11

Walicki, pp. 151–155; see also pp. 201–207: “Aleksei Khomiakov. Epistemology,” Walicki, pp. 559–579: “The Autonomization of Philosophical Romanticism: Vladimir Solov’ev.” 12

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Weininger,13 who, very significantly, treats the sexual nature of creativity and the libidinal component in the life of creative individuals. As we indicated, Weininger’s work (1903) was earlier translated, went through multiple editions in Russian and was better known in Russia than Freud in the first two decades of the twentieth century. While not a member of Freud’s immediate circle, Weininger had a close friend, Henryk Swoboda, who was Freud’s psychiatric patient. Freud himself read Weininger’s manuscript and declined to publish it before it appeared in Vienna in 1903.14 Thus Solovyov and Rozanov, as well as Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev later, were well aware of late nineteenth-century European psychology and of the enormous literature of sexually-related case histories that were published at the time.15 Both Solovyov and Rozanov were especially steeped in, refer to and cite this sexology. It in part may have been what prompted Solovyov to rethink the Eros, of Plato’s “Symposium,” which he did in his seminal 1993–1994 five-article work “The Meaning of Love.”16 It certainly was a major determinant in the thought of Vasily Rozanov. We believe that what we term “the Christianization of Freudian sublimation” was predicated on the work of Solovyov and Rozanov, who were seminal influences on Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev. Beyond Freud himself, these religious thinkers engaged with the works of the Freudian disciples, especially Carl G. Jung, who made religious experience very central to his psychology of man in all epochs, and especially to the spiritual malaise of the modern Christian.17 The thought of Otto Rank,

13 There is an excellent discussion of the publication history of Otto Weininger’s book in Russia in Joanna Trzeciak, “Visions and Re-visions: Nabokov as Self-translating Author” (Diss. University of Chicago, 2005), see the chapter entitled “The Hermeneutics of Otchaianie/Despair: from Russified Weininger to Americanized Freud,” pp. 132–199. A bibliography of the translation history of Weininger’s Sex and Character into Russian is given on p. 137. 14 Jones, I, 55–57. 15 These were the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Grundzüge der Criminalpsychologie. (Leipzig: F. Enke, 1872) and Psychopathia sexualis (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1886); Jean-Martin Charcot, Clinique des maladies du système nerveux (Paris: Publications du Progrès médical, 1892–93). Also: Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons du Mardi à la salpêtrière (Paris: Publications du Progrès médical, 1889–1892) and Leçons sur les localisations dans les maladies du cerveau (Paris: Adrien Delahaye and Émile Lecroisnier, 1876– 1880); Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man. (New York: Putnam, 1911) and Criminal Woman. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), among others. 16 See in Chapter II Solovyov’s treatment of Plato and discussion of “The Meaning of Love.” 17 Recall Jung’s title of the late twenties: Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, 1933), further referred to as Jung, Modern Man.

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a second psychoanalyst who recognized the religious impulses behind creativity and the suitability of the Christian worldview as a great, perhaps the greatest, cultural ideology for genius-like creation in the arts,18 will be treated when it converges with or has an important relation to insights the Russians expressed before he did. There is no evidence that Rank exerted major direct influence on the Russians. Berdyaev alludes only to one of Rank’s books, and Vysheslavtsev to the French psychoanalyst, Charles Baudouin who was influenced by Rank’s works on creativity.19 Nevertheless, Rank, as the psychoanalyst most involved in issues of the creative man and the artistic genius, like the Russians, raises many issues and ideas that directly converge with those that the Russian thinkers came to by radically different paths. Accordingly, Part One of the work which follows is entitled “Russian Theories of Sublimation before Freud” and includes two chapters. In the first we shall elucidate the sexual theory of sublimation of Solovyov in the context of his entire religious philosophy (Chapter II). Chapter III will treat Vasily Rozanov’s very similar theory of sublimation in the context of his more extensive “religious metaphysics of sex.” Though Rozanov was loathe to give full credit to Solovyov, we shall emphasize how and where his views coincide with or are directly influenced by Solovyov’s theory and show how Rozanov modifies and develops Solovyov’s concepts in different directions. Part Two is entitled “The Two Meanings of Creativity: PersonalityConstruction and the Production of Sublime Works.” Under the inspiration of Nietzsche’s theory of the unbounded potential of man to be “more than he had been in history,” the idea of the Superman, both the psychoanalysts and the Russian religious thinkers wanted to foster man’s intellectual and spiritual evolution, to see man attain greater heights of intellectual attainment or spiritual consciousness. As a rigorous scientist, Freud attacked religion as the baggage of man’s naïve and infantile past and therefore as detrimental to the spiritual/intellectual advancement of humankind. His younger disciples, Jung and Rank, after they broke with Freud, saw religious feeling, not the adherence to any particular religious faith, however, as inherent in the human unconscious and basically irradicable. For them the religiousness of the 18 See in Chapter IV the discussion of Rank’s view of Christianity as an artideology. 19 Charles Baudouin refers to Rank in the opening chapter of his Psychanalyse de l’Art (Paris: Alcan, 1929).

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unconscious was an observable scientific fact. As such it was inseparable from and essential to man’s creativity, self-transcendence/selfcreation and spiritual/intellectual advancement. Jung and Rank took man’s religious unconscious into account as a factor usable in therapy to promote the patient’s return to psychic health. The religious thinkers directly proclaimed the sublimation of one’s self an ethical imperative. Thus, the creative acts of sublimation for them included two aspects: 1) the further spiritualization, perfecting of one’s self along Christian lines (rather idiosyncratically interpreted), but always amounting to the strengthening and spiritualizing of one’s own personality, and 2) the necessary expression from the depths of that personality of creative acts and products in the form of contributions to some field—be it science, philosophy, great masterpieces of art and literature, religious philosophy or religious activity, political activity or statesmanship. Part Two also comprises two chapters. The first, Chapter IV, treats sublimation in the atheist Freud, and the “backsliding” into religion of Jung and Rank. It discusses Freud’s major texts treating of sublimation and the contradictions inherent in his theory, as well as Jung’s theory of self-transcendence and the role of the “religious instinct” or function in the development of the personality, as well as Rank’s psychoanalytic theory of creativity as religiously motivated. Chapter V, “The Creative Genius and the Beloved: Inner-directed Eros and Outer-directed Eros,” raises the role of the Other in the individual’s spiritual self-development. Here we will discuss why, on the one hand, the religious thinkers Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev, see an exalted Romantic love relationship with a full-valued Thou/ Other as necessary to the fulfillment/sublimation of the personality and as a catalyst to creativity. On the other hand, it shows how Freud and his disciples see the genius-creator as maximally independent of the outside world and other human beings, as creating from within his complex independent personality. It further considers why the most internally contradictory Christian thinker, Berdyaev, is closer to the psychoanalysts on this issue. Part Three, “Psychoanalysis as a Corrective to Christian Anthropology,” deals with Berdyaev’s and Vysheslavtsev’s embrace of the Freudian and Jungian concept of the primacy of the unconscious in the human psyche. It includes three chapters which show in detail how these two thinkers emended Freud and used Jung in their attempt to salvage Freud’s sublimation and other seminal psychoanalytic concepts for Christianity.

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Chapter VI, “Berdyaev’s Conflicted Engagement with Freud and Psychoanalysis,” treats the Russian’s addition of a new concept to Freud’s topography of the psyche and discusses Berdyaev’s religiousphilosophical reservations about psychoanalysis. Chapter VII, “Christianizing Freudian Sublimation via Jung: Vysheslavtsev’s “Turn to C.G. Jung,” describes this philosopher’s complex involvement with modern depth psychology and shows how he uses Jungian concepts to “re-Christianize” Freud’s theory of creativity. Chapter VIII is entitled “Conclusions: Changes in the Godman as a Model for the Christian Creator.” Jung deals with the sexless or celibate status of the Godman, Jesus Christ, and the possible broadening and flexibility of the concept of Imitatio Christi in this school of thought. This raises the question whether the traditional ascetic model of Christ was the best or only model for the creative genius to emulate or whether there exist other models of imitation of Christ that do not require celibacy from a sexual being such as man. Or was the celibate model of Imitatio Christi emphatically harmful for human creativity? Did the addition of Freudian psychoanalysis to the pre-existent Russian theories of creativity undermine or invalidate the celibate model of the Christ or increase the number of models for the creative Christian life? In this final chapter, the changes in the Godman model that the Russian thinkers suggest are shown to anticipate, at times in great detail, the critique of Christianity and the Godman model the analytical psychologist Carl Jung proffered several decades later. The Russian thinkers subjected Christian concepts to rational philosophical analysis, while Jung, and Rank also, analyzed it psychoanalytically and in terms of its contribution to psychic health in the clinical situation. It is very striking therefore that these highly divergent types of analysis led to a large area of agreement and overlap, such that the Russian thinkers at times appear as forerunners of the psychoanalysts, and the latter read like scientific corroborators of the views of Solovyov, Rozanov and Berdyaev. Convergences in the thought of Vysheslavtsev, an avowed disciple of Jung, well acquainted with the ideas of the Zurich School, are more to be expected. The recuperation of Freudian thought for the purpose of bringing about Christian renewal is undertaken here by the Russians. We shall definitely show that it is predicated on Berdyaev’s and Vysheslavtsev’s immersion in earlier Russian religious philosophy. They could and did seriously engage with the Freudians on the issues of Eros and Creativity because Solovyov and Rozanov had elaborated a home-grown theory

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of sexually-based sublimation on religious grounds (an element that was apparently lacking or less significant in the Catholic religious West). Berdyaev did this in a more internally-contradictory and negative mode, to be sure, but Vysheslavtsev carried it out in a positive, constructive and highly creative manner, incorporating Solovyov’s theory and Rozanov’s extensive embroidering upon it as his underlying assumptions. Certainly, the points of departure of the psychoanalysts and the religious thinkers were strikingly at odds. The former were focused on the clinical treatment of seriously ill mental patients, the alleviation of their suffering and symptoms and the return of these people to normal sexual and social functioning. Theirs was a missionary zeal. For them creative achievements in any field, like their own attainments in psychology, were useful gifts to mankind and applauded as evidence of the spiritual-intellectual evolution of mankind to which they all strove to contribute. The religious thinkers had an activist ethical agenda which aimed at the Christianization, i.e., spiritualization over history of mankind and the whole natural world. Called by Solovyov bogochelovecheskii protsess (“the divine-human process”), this return to spirit or re-divinization of everything and reunification of all disparate matter with spirit was nothing less than the total reversal of the Fall. Christian man was called on to be involved in this creative agenda—it was an ethical imperative. Not only did God call on man to enact it, God needed this creative activity from man to help the re-divinization of the world and matter move forward. Man was proclaimed “godlike” not because he was rational, but because he could create new things from the givens of the world. And Christian creation in any field would move the divine-human process forward. This creative ethical activity, proclaimed by Solovyov in the early 1890’s, was called by Berdyaev in several books “the anthropological revelation from below.” These four thinkers form a fascinating discrete tradition of thought about creativity in modern Russian religious philosophy that has not been delineated sufficiently before, and has, in fact, been noted only sporadically (and apart from its full Freudian context). It certainly has not been examined in the detail it deserves. The discovery and highlighting of this developing tradition is valuable and interesting in itself. But, placing these Russian religious theories of creativity in the Freudian and post-Freudian, Jungian and Rankian, contexts does much more: it

introduction

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reveals the exceptional originality, synthetic capacities and even “modernity” of what Fedotov has called “the Russian religious mind.”20 Needless to say, we saved the most vexed question, that of the Godman, for the final chapter. Therein we review how the Christ image and the Christian life propounded by our four thinkers, bears traces of “Nietzschean contamination,” and yet, paradoxically, is directed towards the defeat of a frankly Nietzschean worldview and Nietzsche-derived anti-religious sense of the creative life. The most radical re-conceivers of the Christ, or the Christ-ideal, are Dostoevsky and Rozanov, but Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev do not lag far behind them. All feel not only that has man not achieved all he could in potential, but agree that an intransigent Church, dominated by a backward theology and formalistic ritual obsessions, has prevented Christ Himself from being revealed in all His fullness. The age of the Russian Religious Renaissance,21 which coincides roughly with Serebrianyi vek, the Silver Age (1890 circa to 1930), is one of untapping the divinity not only of man, but also of the true Christ. In creating himself, the artist or philosopher-hero is also—to one degree or another—re-creating the Christ that historical Christianity—Catholic, Lutheran, and Orthodox— has handed down. That these newly conceived “Christs” and new Christianity often conflict with the dogmas of the official Church goes without saying. Yet none of our thinkers feels his personal philosophy and creativity excludes him from the Christian or Orthodox fold as a whole. The creative “summons,” the call for man to “be all he can be,” asks him to overcome the old level of spirituality or religious consciousness and forge a new, higher one. This religious renewal passes under the aegis of our two crucial matrices—Eros and Creativity. Eros includes various versions of Christian Platonism, the heavenly and the earthly Aphrodite. Different conceptions of human creativity treat it as the aspect of man that confers upon him “the image and likeness of God.” This tradition from Solovyov to Vysheslavtsev is indeed a transvaluation of Christian values conducted within Christianity.

20

G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960). See Nikolai Zernov, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1963). 21

PART ONE

RUSSIAN THEORIES OF SUBLIMATION BEFORE FREUD

INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE In the two chapters which follow we present the two major Russian theories of sublimation which pre-existed Freud’s, that of Vladimir Solovyov and that of Vasily Rozanov. We present the theory of sublimation in each case as it fits in to the thinker’s overall Religious Philosophy. Solovyov is an overarching influence on the religious thought of each subsequent thinker. Thus, many of the ideas of Solovyov discussed in Chapter II will be carried forth in the same form or updated and modified in subsequent chapters first by Rozanov, whom we treat in his connections with Solovyov’s thought in Chapter III. Their combined influence on Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev will be seen throughout the book, with especial emphasis on Nikolai Berdyaev in Chapter VI “Berdyaev’s Conflicted Engagement with Freud and Psychoanalysis” and on Boris Vysheslavtsev in Chapter VII “Christianizing Freudian Sublimation via Jung”.

CHAPTER TWO

SOLOVYOV ON EROS AND CREATIVITY: “THE FULLEST SOUNDING CHORD…” Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900) was without doubt the greatest system builder (in the spirit of Schelling and Hegel) and the greatest religious philosopher of the 19th century. His purely philosophical writings fill numerous volumes. Moreover, his philosophical positions change in different periods of his life22 and permeate his journalistic and scholarly writings, as well as his original poetry in each period. Here we shall first characterize his worldview generally and then focus on the specific works which appear to anticipate the Freudian notion of sublimation— the connection between sexuality and creativity. The unwieldy vastness of Solovyov’s oeuvre makes it difficult to find a single central concept from which his system could be derived. V.V. Zen’kovsky, in the balanced and detailed treatment of Solovyov as a philosopher first and foremost23 agrees with Sergei Bulgakov, who said that Solovyov’s system “was the most full-sounding chord that was ever struck in the history of real Russian philosophy.” Zen’kovsky goes on to say that it is just that, a chord—the sounding together of heterogeneous notes. The question Zen’kovsky, an academic philosopher and Orthodox priest, poses is this: is it a harmonious or a cacophonous chord? And perhaps more importantly: is it a Christian chord? Let us consider Zen’kovsky’s serious explication and assessment. Zen’kovsky begins by a detailed treatment of the separate “musical notes” in this chord. They are six: (1) The general influence of the positivist—naturalist 1860s, the Nihilists and Populists (Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mikhailovsky)

22 The two main periodizations are those of E. Trubetskoi (three periods) and D. Stremooukhoff (four periods), see Evgeny Trubetskoi, Mirosozertsanie Vl.S. Solovyova (The World-Conception of V.S. Solovyov), two vols. (Moscow: A.T. Mamontov, 1913), and Dmitry Stremooukhoff, Vladimir Soloviev and His Messianic Work, tr. Elizabeth Meyendorff (Belmont, Mass: Nordland, 1980). 23 “V.V. Zen’kovsky, Vladimir Solovyov,” in A History of Russian Philosophy, two vols., tr. George Kline (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), II, 469–531.

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whose materialism was coupled with an idealist ethics. “The social element was ever-present in his journalistic writings.” (2) His philosophic desire “to put Christianity into a new and suitable, i.e. rational and absolute, form.”24 These were his exact words to his fiancée, E. Romanova, and are indicative of his intentions: “It is now as clear to me as two times two is four that the whole great development of Western philosophy and science, apparently indifferent to and often hostile to Christianity, has in fact merely elaborated for Christianity a new form—one that is worthy or it.” Zen’kovsky deems this an approach to Christianity “from without,” which he sees Solovyov attempting to overcome.25 (3) Slavophilism, a deeply Orthodox Christian movement and within it especially Kireevsky’s (and Khomiakov’s) idea of integral cognition (tsel’noe znanie), in which religion (faith, the heart), philosophy (reason, the mind) and science (empirical life experience) would be integrated, but, in Kireevsky’s theory with Faith, not Reason, as the dominating integrative force. (4) A sense of history: the “meaning of human life can be discovered only as the human spirit reveals itself in history.” This involves a utopian view of the evolution of the human spirit and consciousness towards the good, a quantitative progress over time, which was qualitatively accelerated when Jesus Christ entered human history. Solovyov sees Greek philosophers proclaiming monotheism and the biblical Hebrews consolidating and spiritualizing this trend. Solovyov’s evinces a great respect for Judaism, and the cabbala, which directly influences his own system.26 In this evolutionary view the contemporary state of the religious consciousness is superior to that of previous ages (his article on the limited medieval religious consciousness.)27 All pre-Christian history was an evolution towards monotheism (in Greece, Anaxagoras, etc.), the Messiah idea in Jewry and the advent of the Godman—the central

24

Ibid., 481. Ibid., pp. 482ff. 26 This is seen in his study of Hebrew, his interest in and even incorporation of Cabbalistic ideas into his philosophic constructions and his attack on anti-Semitic writings in Austria and Germany. 27 Solovyov, “Ob upadke srednevekovogo mirosozertsaniia” (On the Decline of the Medieval Worldview) in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1988), I, 339–350. 25

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and defining event in his historiosophy is a qualitative step towards Total-Unity, total spirit. (5) The concept of Godmanhood, (Bogochelovechestvo) a fundamental theoretical construction of Solovyov, one of the dominant notes in the “chord” of his system, that is viewed by many as the unifying concept. Zen’kovsky himself points out that Godmanhood “unites Solovyov’s cosmology, anthropology and historiosophy”28 and is a more central theme than All-Unity (vseedinstvo), which rather “crowns” the system as the end (telos) towards which all is directed. (6) The idea of Sophia—the world soul, which Zen’kovsky sees as a later and secondary philosophical construction, is one that differs in diverse periods. In relegating Sophia to a secondary position, Zen’kovsky differs from many followers of Solovyov, such as Sergei Bulgakov and Semen L. Frank. Of cardinal importance in any consideration of Solovyov is the relative relation in it of religion and philosophy. Zen’kovsky points out that at first Solovyov appears to fly in the face of the secular tendency of modern philosophy to assert itself as an autonomous sphere, what he terms “a radical secular autonomism.”29 In his early work The Crisis of Western Philosophy, Solovyov stressed that philosophy had centered purely on “the knowing subject, not on the desiring subject.”30 Calling for a synthesis of science, philosophy, and religion appeared to be a return to a religious worldview. The relative autonomy of philosophy would be in the service of the universal and of knowledge, as defined by theology. Zen’kovsky writes that this point from Solovyov’s Master’s Thesis, The Philosophical Foundations of Integral Cognition, “indicates unequivocally that philosophy is a function of the religious sphere, which it serves.”31 There is no doubt that the early work of Solovyov exhibits an intention and desire to have philosophy serve Christianity, but Zen’kovsky does not think that the goal of this utopia—“integral life” or “the kingdom of God” will be achieved in Solovyov through God’s grace, as in Christian doctrine, but rather as a result of historical development. Solovyov recognizes religion as a universal human need: “there is in 28 29 30 31

Zen’kovsky, II, 483. Ibid., 480. Ibid., 487. Ibid.

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man a universal, higher need,”32 which philosophy most certainly is not. But in Solovyov’s project, though philosophy is said to be subordinate to the religious life, Zen’kovsky does not believe that Solovyov succeeded in harmonizing science, philosophy, and religion, and states that he does not achieve the synthesis he sought. For Zen’kovsky there are too many extra-Christian concepts in Solovyov that are conveniently, and superficially, draped in Christian clothing. The need for Christian Revelation is substantiated by Schelling’s Intellektuelle Anschauung (p. 490) (intellectual or ideal intuition), knowledge which is open to the human spirit via philosophy alone, without religion. For Zen’kovsky Solovyov’s project of proving that the Orthodox “faith of our fathers” coincides with the eternal and universal truth can only refer to a “truth arrived at through philosophy, independently from religion.” Solovyov then emerges in Zen’kovsky as a secular philosopher who wants to be fully religious, but cannot quite manage it. Zen’kovsky concludes that Solovyov’s achievement was “a bringing together of philosophy and faith, but not their fruitful synthesis.” He feels in the end that Solovyov, the philosopher (not the human being) remains secular, despite his sincere faith. This is stated unequivocally: “The truth is that Solovyov’s religious constructions do not flow from his religious intuitions. He merely assimilated his philosophic constructions to the latter. This is not a religious synthesis…for religious experience is not the final court of appeal…”33 Indeed, the “full chord” of Solovyovian thought comes out quite discordant in Zen’kovsky’s 50-plus-page exposition and assessment. Another way of viewing this would be to say that Solovyov was much more successful if one looks at his career from the point of view of his own definition of religion as seeking, so-called “God-seeking” (Bogoiskatel’stvo). Solovyov’s own assessment of his career is not overly optimistic, but more sanguine than Zen’kovsky’s. We find intimations of Solovyov’s self-assessment in his very late article “The Life Drama of Plato,”34 which I read as a largely autobiographical, confessional text, as

32

Ibid., 489. Ibid., pp. 490ff. 34 Vladimir Solovyov, Sochineniia, 8 vols. (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia pol’za, 1901–1903). See “Zhiznennaia drama Platona” (The Life Drama of Plato) in volume VIII, 246–290. Unless otherwise indicated, the great majority of references to Solovyov’s philosophical works and other texts are to this widely available first edition (by volume and page.) The major exception is the references to Opravdanie dobra (The Justification of the Good). 33

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much about its author and his age as it is about Greece of Sophocles’ day. There the role of Socrates and Plato, who are largely conflated, on the Athenian philosophical scene is strikingly like Solovyov’s own in Russia. On the one hand, there are traditionalists, preserving the “faith of the fathers”, traditional Greek religion (parallel to the Orthodox Church in Russia and dogmatic theology and dead formalism) and, on the other hand the skeptic Sophists who in this depiction sound like the Russian Nihilists and materialist Left, the rational men of the 1860s, who can critically deconstruct any posing of time-honored values and who propound rationality, understood as purely practical benefit, as the only thing worth pursuing (the Sophists’ success is likened to the utopian socialism of the Crystal Palace). In this lightly veiled “Greek” presentation of the Russian ideological climate of his age, Solovyov emerges as the lonely Socrates-Plato, struggling together with a small handful of disciples. Socrates-Plato’s drama is Solovyov’s personal drama. He is not accepted by the Orthodox establishment or more Orthodox philosophers (Tareev and here, Zen’kovsky) and totally unacceptable to the profoundly secular, even atheist Left. The truly synthetic searching and decisiveness of Socrates—the tertium quid in the picture, hated by both schools— in the article conveys Solovyov’s sense of his own position in the pessimistic final years of his life and the hopeful prediction that his few disciples will, like Plato, make him better understood in posterity. It is clear here that Solovyov felt that he had achieved much more of a synthesis than anyone understood or gave him credit for in his lifetime. What he says in the article that Socrates was attempting is what he endeavors to accomplish in contemporary Russian thought. This is the overcoming of secularism (Western philosophy) and its crisis, on the one hand, and of the bankruptcy of a deadened “faith of the fathers” with its own inner crisis, on the other. The crisis of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy that Solovyov feels keenly is rather diminished by Zen’kovsky. Solovyov proclaims that the “faith of the fathers” (in Socrates’ world) and in Russia of the 1890’s had “ceased to be believable” to educated, modern people.35 35

Solovyov’s actual words (“Zhiznennaia drama Platona,” VIII, 251–252): Faith when it in only a fact accepted as tradition is something extremely unstable, and easy to assail from all sides. And thank goodness that this is so! A purely factual blind faith is incommensurate with human dignity. It is more common in demons, who believe and tremble, or speechless beasts, who, of course, take

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There is a tendency among some avowedly Christian readers of Solovyov to see his use of Christian concepts as fitting much more organically into his system than Zen’kovsky does. This is clearly the case with philosophers who knew him intimately, such as the Trubetskoi brothers and his nephew, Sergei Solovyov,36 both authors of early monographs on him. Thus Trubetskoi in his early study The Worldview of V.S. Solovyov (1903) writes of the primacy of Christian religion for Solovyov: “Integral cognition on the whole unavoidably leads not only to a religious, but to a Christian [italics mine—ALC] worldview, which is founded on the teaching of Godmanhood, that is the deity and man, incarnated in Jesus Christ.” The history of that incarnation is Christian history “and naturally is completed in the personal unification of the living God with man’s whole essence, with his rational soul and his material body.”37 Such a more Christian reading is certainly legitimate and we shall encounter it here below in the acceptance of Solovyov, by Rozanov after 1900 (see Chapter III here) and by Nikolai Berdyaev and Boris Vysheslavtsev throughout their careers. A contemporary of Zen’kovsky’s, the philosopher Nikolai Lossky, represents another opposing balance to Zen’kovsky’s view, making a strong case for the Christian nature of Solovyov’s concept of history. Lossky maintains that what is in a state of

their life on faith, without reflection […] without ‘useless, empty doubts.’ I mention demons and beasts not rhetorically, but as a historical reminder that religions that are based solely on a factual, blind faith, or which have rejected other, better foundations, always lead to diabolical bloodthirstiness, or swinish shamelessness […]. A blind, unquestioning faith is, in the first place, an insult to its object, its very deity, who does not demand such faith from man. Unlimited goodness, alien to envy, while it makes a place for demons and beasts, draws its joy not from them, but from the ‘sons of man.’ And that this joy may be perfect it gave men a special gift of which demons and beasts know nothing. Most important are those gifts through which the first image of human, not animal life was glimpsed—gifts we call Enlightenment. Into the corporeal image of human society God places man’s living soul and the mover of life—philosophy—not for man to receive the eternal truth and bliss ready-made, but so that man’s path to truth would be fenced off from two sides—from the superstitious trembling of demons and the non-reflectiveness of beasts. That is why people who are ignorant would have others also be so […] and they direct their constant, persistent, though pointless hatred against philosophy, as if it undermined faith. Yet in fact, philosophy undermines only a primitive, ignorant, an immobile and lazy faith. (translation mine—ALC) 36 Sergey Solovyov, Zhizn’ i tvorcheskaia evoliutsiia Vladimira Solovyova (Brussels, 1977). English version: Vladimir Solovyov. His Life and Creative Evolution, tr. Aleksei Gibson (Fairfax, Va.: Eastern Christian Publications, 2000). 37 Trubetskoi, I, 334.

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becoming in Solovyov’s philosophy, what is evolving in the world is the Christ or Christianity, the Christianization of man and the world below.38 Thus, by his brilliance and great national stature as a thinker, Solovyov, like Socrates, was the great sower of controversy (as Dostoevsky had been a controversial artist-thinker, in the older generation). By stating that Orthodoxy (the historical church) and even the Christ is in a state of becoming, of evolving to what it should ultimately be, and in essence is, Solovyov throws the traditional timehonored dogmas and rituals into the uncertainty and flux in which we find them in the second half of the 19th century. Thus, Solovyov’s radically critical philosophy or religion opens the path for other less polite thinkers to take on a free creative attitude towards Christ and the national Church/religion. In this period of renewal, recreation and revamping, the terms “religion” and “Christian” lose a fixed meaning and take on new ones with the subjective coloring and positions of the speaker or writer. This is unavoidable and Solovyov unleashes several decades of turbulent discussion, that is, initially at least, upsetting the traditional believers and theologians. Solovyov is a major catalyst in the discussions of what is Christian and what is Christian love/Eros. Given this fluid state of affairs, we can justify retreat from decision concerning how well or poorly the “non-Christian” notes or elements of Solovyov’s thought, which for Zen’kovsky, as well as Trubetskoi in parts of his critique of Solovyov, are entirely “too many,” meld with Christian ones. Nor can we pass definitive judgment on the success or failure of Solovyov’s attempted subordination of philosophic interests to religion ones. We can, however, aver that this was what he endeavored to do. In bringing together philosophic constructions that fit with, match, or may be derived from Christian religious doctrine, often mystical aspects thereof, the intimate connection into which he brought them makes it well nigh impossible to determine whether Christian doctrinal or philosophical concerns came first. Zen’kovsky’s contention that it was usually a reversion to Christian notions merely to “illustrate” a philosophical concept arrived at outside of Christianity, seems doubtful and remains unproved. Nor, for that matter, is recasting Christianity

38 Nikolai Lossky, The History of Russian Philosophy (New York: International University Presses, 1951), pp. 125ff.

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“from without” so clearly a non-religious service in a world fraught with doubts, atheism, and religious disaffection like the one of Solovyov’s day. He was appealing to the lapsed and the lost and trying to amend his own doubt and alienation by using the accepted, most privileged intellectual discourse of his day, that of positivist science and rationalist critical thought. Zen’kovsky’s own faith has a very different personal, emotional quality from Solovyov’s, to be sure. The crisis of faith disturbs him less. Reason and mystical faith, as well as passionate feeling (love, passion) in Solovyov’s personality have been a conundrum for many years. A.F. Losev in the last major monograph on Solovyov,39 the man and the thinker, quotes V.V. Rozanov as the person who sensed him as a personality best: how strange was Solovyov’s laughter, strident and, perhaps masking his constant sadness. If anyone was intensely ‘not happy and privileged in Russia’ it was Solovyov… [p. 540] His grandfather’s priestly blood, his father’s scholarly and academic concerns and, finally, the whole spiritual layer of the 1860’s with its hectic projects, noisy negations and basic Russian ‘simple’ character–all were reflected in Solovyov. He was a kind of unordained priest, still bearing his responsibilities, liturgical ones. One could feel this in his psychology. It was as if he was talking to us, droning on and then he would go home, put on his cassock and begin to prepare for tomorrow morning’s service. References to Holy Writ, to the Fathers of the Church, constantly came up in his conversation. [p. 541] ‘I am not a psychologist,’ he said to me using different words and it was clear that he regretted not having that trait. Really, there was in him the blindness and recklessness of the cavalry, compared with the slowness of the infantry and artillery. He was a sharpshooter. He began many things, never had time, or didn’t finish them and even came back from where he had headed. But if his ‘ends’ were unsuccessful, they were the aims of a genius and greatly needed by Russia, and his ideals, his initiatives, his first steps bring glory to his name. [p. 545]

It is interesting to note that Rozanov came very slowly to this view. In his own more strictly Orthodox early period, he felt Solovyov as not sufficiently Orthodox and engaged with him in bitter polemics about faith and freedom. Later in his own more rebellious period, Rozanov became keenly aware of the prevalence of doubt and unbelief and of a sense that Russian Orthodoxy needed very serious overhauling and improvement. It was somewhat belatedly that he praised V.S. Solovyov

39

A.F. Losev, Vladimir Solovyov i ego vremia (Vladimir Solovyov and His Time), (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2000). Pages are given in parentheses in the text.

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enthusiastically and Solovyov’s critical concept of religious faith. In “Ob odnoi zasluge V.S. Solovyova” (“One of the Merits of V.S. Solovyov”) (1904)40 Rozanov quotes the prominent academic philosopher. L.M. Lopatin41 who had written: “He [Solovyov] was the first one to occupy himself with the subjects and themes of real philosophy, and not with the opinions of Western philosophers concerning these themes. That is why he is the first real Russian philosopher.” Rozanov continues: “…Whether to write Isus or Iisus, this is a religious opinion, and not even a religious opinion relating to God…The Abyssinians argued about subjects, they penetrated to the substance of things; they didn’t write about errors of opinion. Anyone will admit that issues having a real relation to the essence of religion did not even come into Russians’ heads…It is Solovyov who brought the Russian mind to the real religious themes” (p. 373). Rozanov characterizes the reaction of Russians, and therefore rejection of Solovyov’s initiatives, thus: “You are destroying our forms and we live only by forms. Outside of forms we have nothing [p. 374]…and thus Solovyov passed like an ice-cutter over our religious formalism because he was aflame with a true enthusiasm for genuine religious themes, for the essence of religion.”42 Solovyov and Plato—the 1890’s Thus we choose to attempt to understand Solovyov’s own notion of his project, as reflected through his sense of “Plato’s drama.” as indicative of his own. Admitting that his dynamic understanding of a critical religious consciousness and sense of living religion—religious creativity— does not yield any comfortable synthesis of a secure monism, a harmonic, mellifluous chord, it is still within Solovyov’s own notion of his project that the tradition of Eros and Creativity in Russian thought is born. Indeed, there is no “new religious consciousness” at the Russian fin de siècle without the creative emendation of the “faith of the fathers.”

40 Rozanov, “Ob odnoi zasluge Vladimira Solovyova” (On a Certain Merit of Vladimir Solovyov), in Okolo tserkovnykh sten, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Vaisberg i Gershunin, 1906), II, pp. 383ff. 41 See L.M. Lopatin on Solovyov in “Filosofskoe mirosozertsanie Solovyova”// Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, January-February, 1901, 45–91, and “Pamiati VI. S. Solovyova”//Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii, 1910, no. 5, Book 105, pp. 625–627 quoted in Losev, p. 545. 42 Rozanov, “Ob odnoi zasluge…,” pp. 373ff.

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To Zen’kovsky’s objection that Solovyov included too much that was “alien,” (chuzhoe), Solovyov presents the picture of Greek state religion with the center besieged from the periphery (as Russian Orthodoxy is by foreign Western influence), the Greek colonies, but the center, the native tradition, was rotting from within. The unshakeability of the Truth of the official Orthodox religion could no longer be sustained because, gazing at the “alien,” he [the Russian] had to doubt the worthiness and significance of the “native,” since the latter “changed too often before his very eyes, and, sometimes, with his own participation.”43 Religious zeal towards the native tradition, as to something higher and unconditional, was bound to collapse at the first blows of critical thought.”44 Solovyov saw himself as reliving the drama of Plato and Socrates, thus it is not surprising that in this very period he was establishing new philosophical principles in “The Theoretical Foundations of Philosophy” (3 articles) (1893)45 and had once more to confront the problem of the Good and the Beautiful, by elaborating both an aesthetics and a theory of Eros/Love. Thus he effected his own return to two dialogues, The Symposium and The Phaedrus where love and beauty in all their manifestations were treated by Plato. Eros in Plato’s Symposium is a very broad concept, many-faced Aphrodite, embracing physical sexuality and procreation, family and the more spiritual “heavenly Aphrodite” which includes the most idealistic Romantic love and human creativity. In the speeches of Diotima, Eros emerges as the unifying bond between the knowing subject (which Solovyov said philosophy had exclusively focused upon) and the desiring subject. To know the beautiful is to desire to possess it, to achieve happiness. Hence, exalted love is love of knowing, of wisdom (the True and Good) the business of philosophy (Russian/Slavic liubo-love mudrie-wisdom). Philosophy is motivated by a desire, deemed common to all rational beings,46 and akin to Solovyov’s “universal religious

43

Solovyov, “Zhiznennaia drama Platona,” VIII, 254. Ibid. 45 Solovyov, “Teoreticheskaia filosofiia” (The Theoretical Foundation of Philosophy), VIII; “Pervoe nachalo teoreticheskoi filosofii” (The First Principle of Theoretical Philosophy), pp. 148–186; “Dostovernost’ razuma” (The Verifiability of Reason), pp. 187–202; “Forma razumnosti i razum istiny” (The Form of Rationality and the Reason of Truth), pp. 202–221. 46 Plato, “The Symposium,” in The Works of Plato (New York: Modern Library, 1956), pp. 332–397. References given in the body of the text. 44

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need of men.” Both love and philosophy are creative, erotic activities. Diotima says: “There is poetry which as you know is complex and manifold. All creation or passage from non-being into being, is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of the arts are all poets or makers” (p. 372). It is pointed out that only a small part of Poetry (that which has formal traits, such as rhyme and meter) is called poetry: “And the same holds for love.” For Plato and Socrates, not all that is Eros/love is included when the word is used. This leads to Solovyov’s 1895 treatise on the meaning of love. Plato concludes that love “may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good” (p. 373). The “generation in beauty” (rozhdenie v krasote) is of body and soul in Plato; he writes: “Sexual procreation is a divine thing” (p. 373). It is a “sort of love of immortality…Marvel not at the love men have for their offspring, for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality” (p. 375). Of creative Eros it is said: “There certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies…and such are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor” (p. 376). Plato’s explanation of the root of heterosexual desire is couched in the myth of a pre-existing Androgyne, but not merely as a two-sexed body, but as a two-sexed soul. And when one of these meets his other half, the actual half of himself […] the pair are lost in an amazement of love, friendship and intimacy…these are the people who pass their whole lives together, yet they could not explain what they desire of each other [italics mine—ALC]. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse (the sexual act), but evidently of something else which the soul of each desires, but cannot tell and of which she (the soul) has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. (p. 376)

It is clear in Plato that the feeling of other “halves” can be homosexual, Lesbian or heterosexual. Here Solovyov Christianizes this Androgynism in “The Meaning of Love.”47 His heavenly Eros is definitely heterosexual; while he does not denigrate homosexuality, friendship or other types of love, he exalts heterosexual sexual love above all others. This Androgynism by definition excludes homosexuality. It interacts with Weininger’s complex renewal of the same subject in Sex and Character 47

In “Smysl liubvi” (“The Meaning of Love”), VI, 364–418, Solovyov exalts heterosexual love, not all forms of sexual love.

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which was to reappear in many versions in Russian thought in the next decades. The fact that Solovyov, like Plato, was dealing with Eros and Creativity at the same time, as is done in the Symposium and the Phaedrus leads the Russian thinker to proclaim these two dialogues as the most important for Plato. Solovyov is by no stretch the only student of Plato to claim this, but he appears to do so because of his own preoccupations and interests in the decade in question—Eros/love and philosophical-religious and artistic creativity. Having thus related his own current activity to Socrates’ and Plato’s— though never explicitly—he concludes by outlining the task that remains to be done, by himself, a Christian. “In the Symposium and the Phaedrus he [Plato] clearly and definitely separates and juxtaposes the lower and higher activities of Eros—his action in the animal-instinctual man and in the super-animal (spiritual) man. Yet one must recall that even in the higher man, Eros acts, creates, generates, and does not merely think and ratiocinate. Here, too, his/Eros’ main object is not intellectual ideas, but full, bodily (telesnaia) life.”48 Plato raises the question (p. 280), which Solovyov rephrases thus: “What does bodily (sexual) love aspire to? To the endless repetition of the … appearances and …disappearances (the natural birth-death cycle), the same infernal ugliness, death and decomposition, or to give beauty immortality and indestructibility to real bodily life?” (VI, 280). Clearly Plato does not enunciate a clear answer. Solovyov endeavors to give it in “The Meaning of Love,” where, as we shall see, the goal is to give the real, concrete earthly existence immortal life. For whatever Zen’kovsky may say about dissonant, extraChristian elements in Solovyov in general, his is a very Christianized Platonism! Eros: The Force which Spiritualizes/Christianizes the Flesh Solovyov’s Texts Relating to Eros and Creativity Inasmuch as Plato in the Symposium (and the Phaedrus) had explicitly extended the term Eros beyond sexual love and procreation (which latter he had also termed “divine”) to include the soul’s Eros, the activity of the makers, artists, inventors, philosophers, one can ask how Solovyov

48

Plato, “The Phaedrus,” in The Works of Plato, pp. 263–332. See also Solovyov, “Zhiznennaia drama Platona,” VI, 278.

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has extended or added to the Platonic notion. Hence, we shall first discuss Solovyovian Eros as presented in “The Meaning of Love” (1892– 94) and then move to his slightly earlier aesthetic articles “Beauty in Nature” and “The General Meaning of Art,” as well as “The First Step to a Positive Aesthetics.”49 We shall conclude with the crowning works in this series, his treatment of the poetry of Tiutchev as the ideal combination of philosophy and art, and Fet’s as the ideal marriage of Eros/ sexual love and poetic creativity. It must be pointed out at the start that Solovyov attributes more dynamic activity than Plato does to sexual love in its highest manifestations of a mutual, ideal-Romantic love of the type Plato had described. Whereas Plato used the myth of a pre-existing Androgyne, Solovyov is more focused on a future Androgynism as a model firstly for the reunification of mankind’s broken halves—the male and the female—albeit at the level of two individuals=one complete human, and secondly, as the first necessary step towards a much more far-reaching unity. In Solovyov this unification of two individuals is central; it is the emblem and means-energy that leads to the regeneration and unity of all humanity. On the personal level it is an individualization of all-unity (vseedinstvo). The all-embracing unity is communicated to us in and through the form of the beloved (VI, 252). Love overcomes the spiritual isolation of man that is egoism (selflove): “There is only one force that can undercut egoism from within, at its root, and does not eradicate individualism; that force is love, and mainly sexual love.” Such overcoming of egoism is for Solovyov the core act that moves towards reunion of all mankind. It must be stressed that Solovyov does not mean by sexual love just any sexual coupling, but only in circumstances of “being in love” (vliublennost’) exalted Romantic desire and high valorization of the other, preferably mutually experienced. In “The Lectures on Godmanhood”50 Solovyov aimed both to 1) show how we humans relate to the divinity or Absolute Good; and 2) show how God relates to us—how the mystical-spiritual, the transcendent, relates to the natural, material corporeal. (John 3:16) According to the

49

Solovyov, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva” (The General Meaning of Art), VI, 69–77, and “Pervyi shag k polozhitel’noi estetike” (The First Step towards a Positive Aesthetics), VI, pp. 483ff. 50 Solovyov, “Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve” (“Lectures on Godmanhood”) in Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Solovyova, III.

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Bible, God (the Father) so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son both to redeem it through love and grace and indicate how it could reunite, return to the transcendent sphere. In the “Lectures on Godmanhood” we are told that in the beginning, long before Christ’s appearance in history, God created the first Absolute and then a ‘Second Absolute—a realm of ideal creation not unlike the Platonic world of ideas—and that the lower natural world fell away. Yet the lower world (the result of the Second positing of the Absolute) resembles the first positing, retains all the same elements but, as a result of its fallen state those elements are in a chaotic disorder and dispersion. God created both Absolutes as Others because God-as-love desires an object to lavish his love upon. Solovyov goes so far as to say that idealized sexual love of the kind he treats in “The Meaning of Love” is the nearest approximation humans can experience of God’s divine love for his creation. Eros-sexual love in man is at root noble and flooded with divine potential, far more than other aspects of natural life. A great fan of Tiutchev’s poem “Ne to, chto mnite vy, priroda…”51 (Nature is not what you think it is…), Solovyov comments at length on the poem to show that the natural world is much more than it is commonly thought to be, and one can easily extrapolate from this that sex also is far more and has far more metaphysical depth than is commonly thought. Hence, Solovyov begins his 5-article disquisition on the meaning of love not by listing various forms of the God Eros or Aphrodite, as Plato does, but by demolishing all other lesser meanings ascribed to human sexuality. He excludes the standard (Schopenhauerian) “natural” justification of sexual coupling—nature’s need to continue the human species. As concerns the reasons for the particular attraction of one individual to another he demolishes the Darwin-tinged notion that special individualized selection of a partner produces superior progeny, geniuses, people important to the race and world-historical progress. In article one we read that geniuses and exceptional people are often born to marriages without special love; that happy, thriving specimens of humanity are produced in loveless marriages and the truly great loves often go unrequited and unconsummated, and are often without issue.

51 Fedor Tiutchev, “Ne to, chto mnite Vy, priroda…” (Nature is not what you think it is…).

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Solovyov even advances the theorem that in the mammals, those animals who have intercourse, there is lesser economy in reproduction. He especially emphasizes that in humans when there is the greatest sexual pathos and passion, there is often a diminution of animal desire (repeating Plato’s notion that that the lover’s desire is not the usual intercourse—or that it is not “enough” for them). The economy of reproduction in humans, one child every 9–10 months, is deemed small for multiple progeny to be the meaning-cause of sexual desire. Thus Romantic love in humans is claimed to have some other, higher purpose that he slowly unveils. He, of course (p. 367), makes it clear that the “free human personality”—an end in itself —whose perfection is part of the goal of the divine-human process cannot be a tool or a means for the race (pp. 377–8). He attributes sexual shame in certain types of sexual relationships to this sense of “being used by nature.” This position is much more developed in Part VII of Book I of The Justification of the Good and we shall discuss it in connection with Rozanov in Chapter III below. Animal, instinctual sex (with unloved partners) he deems an evil, “the dark path of nature, shameful for us because it leads us blindly (like animals)… but in this evil (the race) there is an element of goodness, because the children thus engendered will possibly “be different from us, better than we are.”52 Man’s consciousness/reason and moral sense—self-consciousness, that allows him to reflect on his biological and psychic life makes for the possibility that sex in man has a hidden, higher purpose.53 In the second article the physical separateness (osobennost’) of each human body (osob’) is discussed first not as personality, but as part of a dispersed enormous human organism, part of the lower world, and it cannot be “in truth” by itself. As Zen’kovsky points out, there is a strong strain of impersonalism in Solovyov, in which he treats not the individual person, but the faceless mass or evolution of the entire group.

52 Solovyov, Opravdanie dobra. The whole book is in a later, second edition, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Solovyova, in ten vols., eds. S.M. Solovyov and E.L. Radlov (St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911–1914), VIII, 516 pp. See especially the section entitled “Polozhitel’noe znachenie chelovecheskogo liubovnogo pafosa kak ukazanie na tainuiu tselost’ cheloveka i na zadachu ego tseleniia” (The positive meaning of human love pathos as an indicator of the mysterious wholeness of man and of the task of his cure), pp. 169–178. 53 Solovyov, “Smysl liubvi” (The Meaning of Love), VI, 364–418. Pages given in the body of the text.

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This is to be expected given his reunification project for all being. Nevertheless, given Solovyov’s penchant for dialectical thinking this impersonalism is balanced by a strong personalist strain and genuine love is a prerogative of the individual human personality who experiences fully his belonging to the whole with and through his beloved. One can wonder, if man is part of an enormous multi-million suprapersonal organism called “ideal mankind,” what possible efficacy his individual love for another individual could have? But its power and efficacy is triumphantly affirmed as a victory of spirit over matter. Each individual has the task of escaping his own egoism, which he can best do through genuine sexual love which becomes the energy and the basic building block for the future spiritualization-divinization of all humanity. This is explicitly stated as its meaning — its task (zadacha). Love is “such a combination of two given united beings which could create one absolute, ideal personality” (p. 384). Love’s meaning is “the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism” (p. 376). The task of love “is to make real […] this unity or create the true human as the free union of the male and female principles, which retain their formal individual-ness [separate bodies], but overcome difference and disintegration.” Thus, the power of possible reaffirmation of the divine in man and reunification of dispersed matter and spirit is impossible at the present state of man’s development without this form of sacralized sexual love. Such love is associated directly with Judeo-Christian imagery. In Christianity we find the androgynous image and likeness “of God who created man originally not as one separate part [gender] (p. 400) of the human being but as the true unity of his male and female sides.” Man thus feels lack in his physical separateness and longs for his ideal state, which he can achieve only in such relationships. This mutual love of man and woman not only emblematizes, but allows man to experience the divine love for the world, to participate in that divine love. This is extremely important in Solovyov’s system, where love is a binding or rebinding energy/force: “As God relates to his creation, as Christ relates to his Church, so the husband relates to his wife” (p. 400). “A man can achieve/constructively reinstate his lost divine image in the living object of his beloved and only thus can he achieve the divine image in himself.”54 54 Here end the citations from “The Meaning of Love,” most of which are given by page number in parentheses in the body of the text.

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In article four there is qualification of the concept, to clarify further that all sexual coupling is not this kind of exalted love. This is a very limited retreat from the very forceful, even extreme, sacralization of heterosexual Eros that is upheld in and permeates this 5-article series. The very same sacralized sex is presented in the vliublionnost’ treated in Justification of the Good, as that which destroys all sexual shame. Being in love is essentially/substantially different from animal passion by dint of its individualized, super-racial character— it loves this particular person, and it aspires to immortalize not the race, but the beloved and itself with the beloved. It further differs from other types of individualized love—paternal, fraternal, friendship— by the especially melded/blended unity of the spiritual and physical aspects in it [italics mine, ALC]: “it relates as no other love to the whole person. For the beloved the psychic and bodily being of the beloved are equally of interest, equally dear and important. The lover is attached to all aspects of the beloved with the same intensity of feeling” (VI, 171). Here it is highly significant that Solovyov himself footnotes his earlier “The Meaning of Love” which shows that he views these two discussions of sexuality and love as complementary,55 as two parts of his treatment of this issue. In the footnote he asserts the identity of the sublimation of Eros in both texts. Here in his major ethical treatise he continues: what does all this mean from the moral standpoint? At the moment of the flowering of all his powers, there opens up to man a new spiritualphysical force which fills him with ecstasy and heroic aspirations and a voice from on high tells him that this force is given him not in vain, that he can use it for something great, that this true and eternal union with another person, the pathos of his love demands, and which can restore to both lovers the image of the perfect man, and begin that restoration in all mankind. The ecstasy of heterosexual love is the other, the positive side of sexual shame …The pathos of love places man on the necessary path and provides the exalted goal for the surplus force which inheres in such pathos of love. When a man directs this higher force toward procreation, he spends it in vain…for procreation in humans does not require it… when for the attainment of a result c, the action of b is sufficient, if one employs the double action of a + b, obviously the force of a is expended in vain. (VI, 171–172)

55 In the footnote on p. 171 of Opravdanie dobra, Solovyov refers to his own article “The Meaning of Love” and shows the intimate linkage of these two treatments of love in his oeuvre.

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Caveat: Against an Overly Traditional Reading of Solovyov, the Christian Some of Solovyov’s very traditional Christian critics, such as his friend, the philosopher Prince Evgeny Trubetskoi, in his important two-volume work The World Concept of Vladimir Solovyov (1903), in my view end up pulling Solovyov much more into a traditional, less mystical, and very dualist version of Christianity, which robs his system of much of its dynamism and originality. This overly traditionalized Solovyov, as Berdyaev pointed out in his 1913 review of Trubetskoi’s book (see: http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1913_170.html), is more the Prince’s “correction” of Solovyov and Trubetskoi’s own version of what he would have liked Solovyov to be, and it ignores and rationalizes away much of Solovyov’s mysticism and his pantheistic immanentism. As Trubetskoi’s book has been and continues even now to be very influential,56 we must remember that Trubetskoi is but one of the major interpreters of Solovyov’s variegated legacy, others being Zen’kovsky, Lossky and Losev. The latter disagrees with Trubetskoi’s reading of Solovyov’s writing on Eros, which Trubetskoi terms his “Erotic utopia,” and goes so far as to say that “Trubetskoi is probably wrong” (Trubetskoi vriad li prav).57 In my interpretation of the erotic underpinnings of creativity in Solovyov in what follows, I shall adhere to a more immanentist reading of Solovyov as a more faithful one, agreeing in large part with Berdyaev’s 1913 critique. If Solovyov were as Trubetskoi rather one-sidedly depicts him, his influence on speculative religious thought in the twentieth century would never have been so great. In his 1891 essay on “On the Decline of the Medieval Christian Sense of the World,” Solovyov expresses his rather immanentist sense of the gradual development of man’s religious consciousness over history: I do not speak of the factual compromise between absolute Truth and our reality. All our past, present and future life until the end of History is in each given stage a compromise between the higher ideal principle that is being realized in the world and the material medium in which it is being realized, which does not correspond to it. When it will be completely realized, there will be an end to all compromise, but that will be the end

56 Signs of Trubetskoi’s continuing influence is seen in the title of Olga Matich’s recent book. It is taken from Trubetskoi’s description of Solovyov’s theory of love/Eros, see: Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); her discussion of Solovyov, “The meaning of The Meaning of Love,” pp. 57–88. 57 A.F. Losev, pp. 474ff.

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chapter two of history and the end of the entire world process. As long as there is still some imperfection in the world, that is to say, the compromise between opposing principles—what is imperfection if not a factual concession of the higher principle to the lower?—True perfection requires only that the ideal principle penetrate deeper and deeper into the medium that resists it, and that the ideal principle achieve fuller and fuller power over that medium.58

Such a gradualist notion of the world-historical process would contradict Trubetskoi’s notion that Solovyov advocates in “The Meaning of Love,” i.e., that man’s practical life should pass in a perennial state of sexual desire that is never consummated, a life of celibacy, eros turned inward, until the End of History when all mankind will participate in one orgasmic sex act, bringing about the transformation of the flesh by the combined huge reserves of sexual energy. While this is a possible reading, a kind of “big bang” theory where sexual energy plays the role that scientific thought plays in Fyodorov’s theory of “resurrecting the dead ancestors,” it renders too much of “The Meaning of Love” illogical, silly (the image, Trubetskoi’s, of angelic pairs copulating in Heaven) and treats Solovyov’s treatise as a practical manual for present-day life, which is far from his aim in a philosophical treatise. Neither in “The Meaning of Love” or in The Justification of the Good, does Solovyov appear as a general advocate of celibacy, in fact he indicates with humor that celibacy has not transfigured the flesh (overcome death) any more than procreation has. In philosophical treatises, such as these, Solovyov is writing about erotic love in terms of its very deepest metaphysical meaning, i.e., philosophically, not practically. One could, of course, interpret his warning at the end that great love of two people could turn into egoisme à deux or egoisme à trois, as practical advice, as a warning for those possessing such love to pour it out into the world, onto other human beings, to increase love in the world as a force directed first to the beloved who makes it possible and then outwards. Of course, Solovyov does imagine that in some distant future stage of man’s spiritual development the bodily interpenetration of lovers (reunited Androgyne) of which human coitus is a temporary emblem, may cease to exist. That, however, in a philosopher so opposed to the inpenetrability of matter—of which a total celibacy is a prime example—makes it unlikely that he would advocate absolute abstinence at the present of writing when there is the true mutual personally 58

Solovyov, “Ob upadke srednevekovogo mirosozertsaniia,” p. 352.

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integrating love between two human beings. “Two bodies cannot occupy the same place,” wrote Solovyov, but in coitus they are interpenetrating and united for a brief period in the lost androgyne and may have a taste of “wholeness” for that fleeting moment. Solovyov’s characterization of sex as “a gift from God” and his tendency to see God acting in Nature militates against any unambiguous treatment of Nature, and sexuality therefore, as evil and depersonalizing in all situations. True, Solovyov outlines the many circumstances in which sex is depersonalizing, in which the person is being used by the “race” (procreation without special love), but he was writing against the Tolstoyan pro-celibacy position in The Kreutzer Sonata, not in favor of it. Sexuality, like any imperfect aspect of our bodily lives, should be more and more permeated with idealizing love, slowly perfected over history, not abandoned in favor of total celibacy. Celibacy can hardly be advocated in cases of true (even if not lasting) vliublionnost’ (conditions of powerful absolute love). We have evidence from his published lectures that Solovyov worried about the falling birth rates in the Russian Empire, especially among ethnic Russians. Expressed in “Russia One Hundred Years from Now,”59 these worries would hardly be assuaged by a total ban on sexual intercourse, and the idea of an abstaining cultural-religious elite which eschews sex and a “lower” group that engages in it and replenishes the human race (as in some Gnostic sects and among the Albigensians) would mean using the sexually active group as a means and is too demeaning of the absolute value of each and every human personality, which is so important to Solovyov. Written in 1897, Solovyov’s worried thoughts about depopulation remind us of his statement in The Justification of the Good that “childbirth can be a Good. The child may be better than the parents.” Trubetskoi’s interpretation and critique of “The Meaning of Love” strips it of all immanentist mysticism, which inheres not only in his theory of love, but in his aesthetics. It does not tally with the way Solovyov, despite all the attempts of his family and certain friends to mythologize him as a monk, lived his own life. Though many documents concerning the philosopher’s love life have been suppressed and destroyed, the documents published in 1993 in the journal De Visu,60 59 Solovyov, “Rossiia cherez sto let,” in Solovyov, Sochineniia, second edition, in 10 vols., X, 73–74. 60 M.A. Kolerov, A.A. Nosov, and I.V. Borisova, “K istorii odnoi druzhby: V.S. Solovyov i kn. S.N. Trubetskoi: Novye materialy,” in De Visu, 8, 1993, 5–41.

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frank letters and humorous obscene poems, sent to intimate male friends, have exploded once and for all the myth of the celibate Solovyov, a myth already cast into serious doubt for decades by the publication of his amorous poetry. “The Meaning of Love,” written after the failure of a love affair with a married woman, Sophia Martynova, can be read as a reminder, even to Solovyov himself, in a period of love depression, of what sexual love in its final and deepest meaning is/ should be. The spiritual and physical aspect of this active love, had great meaning, as “seeing God through the medium of the other person, and in oneself through that person’s responding emotion” and has value as an earthly prefiguration of divine love, meaning that is valid, even if the love ends or is a failure. This sexual love is not the definitive divine experience but a catalyst towards its realization, without which the divine-human process was be totally stalled. Therefore, we shall read Solovyov here as a gradualist who does not see All-unity being achieved in “big-bang” events, but in small progressive increments, like Darwinian evolution, which he constantly uses as an analogy for it. A very private person, Solovyov made fun of himself in the obscene poem and of the fact that the journal The Pilgrim had likened him to Origen who had himself castrated. His confession to Stasiulevich of having “sinned” with Martynova in railroad hotels, could just as well refer to her being a married woman, as to any possible sin attaching to the sexual act per se.61 His multiple and renewed proposals to Sophia Khitrovo after her husband died in 1896 and justifying them on the Church’s permitting widows to remarry, do not in any way imply that he was seeking a friendship-type “celibate” marriage while still in his early forties. Even his excessively generous, even profligately generous, personality and personal habits of character as described by Trubetskoi and others do not tally psychologically with the notion of a carefully guarded virginity or celibacy. There is something too openhearted, giving and excessively idealizing about Solovyov’s attachment to the women he loved, as we shall see in the love poems treated here below. While we can agree with Trubetskoi that Solovyov was seeking for an impossible feminine ideal that these women failed to live up to in life, this did not stop him from “compromising” with the reality that 61 Here I disagree with Matich’s interpretation that Solovyov found coitus repulsive per se and agree with Solovyov’s friend Iakov Grot, who stated that the former was ambiguous on the issues of coitus and procreation. See Matich, 2005, Chapter Three, footnote 71, p. 293.

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his love objects presented him with and he remained in love, emotionally loyal and anxious to marry them for rather long periods. He had an amorous disposition and in Trubetskoi’s own words was numerous times “heatedly and passionately in love.” His strong self-irony which stems from a down-to-earth realism about the figure he cut in the world, perhaps made him comprehend why, for all his intellectual fame, the two married society women he loved best, elected not to marry him, or even divorce for his sake. Having an illicit affair with Martynova is a very realistic compromise for one in love in these circumstances and the elaborate secrecy around his years of relationship with Khitrovo, her husband perennially abroad and Solovyov often at her side, lead one to believe that he, given his generous nature, made even bigger “compromises” with reality in the case of the most serious love of his life than in the Martynova case. On the most ideal of spiritual planes, of course, Solovyov was well aware that neither asceticism nor sexual love had yet managed to transfigure the flesh. It is therefore significant that he sees more power in the heterosexual metaphysical bond between a man and a woman than in the celibate model of the Christ. As a result of this Trubetskoi finds his “erotic utopia” anti-Christian, against the dogma of the official church. Be that as it may, hope in the efficacy of a highly spiritualized, but still bodily, heterosexual love is the central pathos of Solovyov’s famous five-part essay in our view. And the fact that most humans are not spiritually advanced enough to “transfigure the flesh” in 1893 is not a sufficient reason to postpone all sexual life until the end of history. Aesthetics—Beauty as a Relationship, “Beauty in Nature” Since Solovyov looks at the world as a complex hierarchy of levels as natural science and Darwinian evolutionism do, we are not surprised in the least that his aesthetic work begins with beauty and aesthetic feeling in nature: “From the two realms of beauty, nature and art, we shall begin from the more extensive of the two, which is simpler in its contrast and obviously precedes the other. The aesthetics of nature will give us the necessary foundations for a philosophy of art.”62 In this article Solovyov gives his definition of beauty: a transformation 62 Solovyov, “Krasota v prirode” (Beauty in Nature), VI, 30–68. Page references are given in the text.

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(preobrazhenie) of matter through the penetration into it of another, super-material principle” (VI, 37). In nature this principle is light, refraction through light. This does not mean that light can cause beauty in any natural object or creature. What is important is that beauty (like love) is a relationship, a mutual penetration of two essences, “which is to say, beauty, which does not inhere in the material body, the diamond, nor in the ray of light, is the product of their interaction” (VI, 36). He goes on to say that light is a natural, not an ideal essence nor can we view a natural object as a thing in itself “absolutely devoid of all ideal attributes and completely independent/unrelated to all spiritual principles” (VI, 37). This is to say, that an extreme idealism (Schopenhauerian in this case) is as big an error as an extreme realist materialism. Matter is not spirit, but can be penetrated by a higher spiritual principle and become (in Tiutchev’s words) “more than we think it is.” This is the Platonic “birth in beauty” which is always regeneration to a higher state, a transfiguration of it as we read here above. In this “the ideal/idealizing factor takes dominance over the material fact, becomes incarnate in it, and the material fact, incarnating in itself the ideal content is by dint of that transfigured and illuminated” (VI, 38). It is very easy to see in this the very lowest level of that Incarnation which will come in Christ’s entrance into human flesh as Godman, on the one hand, and how bread and wine in Holy Communion are transubstantiated into Christ’s flesh and blood. Solovyov makes it manifestly clear that “beauty in nature” is not the expression of just any content, but only of ideal content. Beauty is the “incarnation of the idée/idéal.”63 If this transformation can happen with lower, inanimate forms, the higher creatures, animate mammals, are all the more susceptible to it (VI, 43). Here Solovyov treats the nightingale’s song, beautiful to us, and presumably to other members of his species, as sublimated sexual instinct. Here he further hazards a guess as to what “God” had in mind: “though the life-giving Creator of the world process throws aside his unsuccessful attempts…nevertheless He values not only the end of the process, but values each of its numberless gradations, as long as they in their measure and way incarnate positively the idea of love.”64 Sublimation of the sexual instinct is clearly prefigured when we read “at each new stage/gradation of world development, with each new

63 64

Ibid., p. 39. Italics are Solovyov’s. Ibid., p. 52.

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essential deepening and complication of natural existence, [there appear] more perfect incarnations of the world idea in beautiful forms…” (VI, 56), we see we are moving towards beauty in the human sphere, in art. And, indeed, the very next year (1890) Solovyov publishes his treatment of art “The General Meaning of Art.”65 We preface treatment of this article mentioning to the reader that all these theoretical articles are enhanced by aesthetic proofs of theory in the form of poetic quotations, mostly from Tiutchev, but at times from Solovyov’s own poetry. These poetic texts are not deemed redundant by Solovyov—they are there as more convincing proofs of what he is saying in rational, philosophic language. This is completely in consonance with Solovyov’s views in the 1890’s and the fact that in him personally there lived a philosopher and an artist-poet. Thus, we read “Research into the theoretical elements of the sprit brings us only to the defining of the task and the general principles of true knowledge. The execution (poetic art) of this task, the realization (osushchestvlenie) of these principles— this I define as the task of art. I find its elements in works of human creativity and therefore I move the problem of the realization (revealing of truth in the world to all men) of truth to the domain of aesthetics.”66 Here the general task and what Solovyov would call meaning (smysl) is clearly set forth. “The General Meaning of Art” can be read as a more detailed preface of this statement. As he often does, Solovyov begins here by discrediting those aesthetic theories he deems wrong and inadequate—theories of reproduction or imitation of nature— and he concludes by stressing the transformatory mission and power of art. “In truth, the aesthetic link between art and nature is profound and very meaningful…it consists not in the repetition [of nature] but in the furthering of that artistic task which is begun—in nature…the transformation of nature, the lower by the higher” (VI, 69). Here the general penetrability of all these things by the action of higher, more ideal principles is strongly defended and the idealization in artistic creation and in love are brought together. “If this general mutual penetrability, which is the essence of moral good, stops in the face of matter (a rock, a stone), if the spiritual principle which overcomes human egoism fails, then this is an inadequate force of good and love” (VI, 72) (italics mine—ALC). “For its 65 Solovyov, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva” (The General Meaning of Art), VI, 69–83. Page references given in the text. 66 Solovyov, Opravdanie dobra, Book I, 352–3.

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true realization good and truth must become a creative force in the subject, one that transforms reality, and does not only reflect it” (VI, 73); “…in like manner the light of reason cannot limit itself to knowledge alone, but must incarnate the meaning of life it has cognized artistically in a new real form, more corresponding to that meaning [in artistic products—ALC] … Thus before one creates in beauty [tvorit’ v krasote = Plato’s rodit’ v krasote] or recreates non-ideal reality into ideal reality—one must know the difference between them, not only in abstract reflection, but most of all in direct feeling, which is the prerogative of the artist” (VI, 73). “The full sensual realization of general solidarity or positive all-unity—perfect beauty is not only the reflection of the ideal in matter, but the deepest and most intimate interaction of the inner or spiritual being and external material being” (VI, 75). Beauty in human art is higher and more transcendent than beauty in nature. “The task, which cannot be carried out by physical life alone must be carried out by the means of human creativity” (VI, 77) (italics mine—ALC). Hence art’s three goals: 1) direct objectivization of the deepest inner attributes and qualities of the living idea; 2) spiritualization of natural beauty thereby and 3) immortalization of nature’s individual phenomena.67 From Eros to Aesthetics—Love and Creativity as Parallel Versions of Sublimation The human creativity which immortalizes a piece of marble such as Michelangelo’s “Moses,” or saves another person from death, by immortalizing love/Eros, is not only similar to beauty as a relationship, but virtually the same. Plato had understood this when he said some people are more creative in their souls (Leonardo) and some in their bodies (lovers). We should add to this that some humans are both! To love a person in “The Meaning of Love” is an imaginative, creative act and to create great music, poetry, art is, by the same token, an idealizing act of love, an erotic act. The best illustrations of Solovyov’s new aesthetics-in-action are his late articles “The Poetry of F.I. Tiutchev”68 and “On the Lyric Poetry of

67 68

Solovyov, “Obshchii smysl iskusstva,” VI, 69–77. Solovyov, “Poeziia F.I. Tiutcheva” (The Poetry of F.I. Tiutchev), VI, 463–480.

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Iakov Polonsky and Afanasy Fet.”69 We indicated above that most of Solovyov’s aesthetic treatises are riddled with poetic quotes, mostly from Tiutchev. This is because Tiutchev represents for the critic the perfect metaphysical poet, what Solovyov himself strove to be: the poetphilosopher. Tiutchev’s aforementioned poem on Nature, the lower world “Ne to, chto mnite vy, priroda” includes in its first lines Solovyov’s, at times seemingly pantheistic, view of the world. Nature is not what you think it is, Not a plaster cast, not a soulless countenance, It has a soul, it has freedom, It has love, it has its own language. [italics mine—ALC]

Lines one, three and four represent deep, objective Truth and with the rest of the poem are a refutation of hapless positivists and materialists who do not know this: They [the materialists—ALC] see and do not know, They live in the world as if in darkness For them the sun does not move And there is no life in the sea’s waves. Rays do not penetrate their souls Spring never sang in their breasts. The forests never spoke to them And stars in the night were dumb And the waves, forests and rivers Did not hunger In the night the thunderstorm did not commune with them.70

Solovyov even refutes Schiller’s poem on how Nature dies with the loss of belief in the Greek gods, as a result of which Nature is now a “dead machine” (a plaster cast, a soulless countenance). Solovyov sees Tiutchev, the Slavophile, even more than Schiller, as in total harmony with the life of the soul (the divine) in nature. “The profound and conscious conviction of the real, not only artistically depicted, animacy of nature freed our poet from inner division between thought and feeling, [a division] which from the last [18th] century and up to the present day affects most artists and poets. Simplemindedly accepting 69 Solovyov, “O liricheskoi poezii. Po povodu stikhotvorenii A. Feta i Ia. Polonskogo” (On Lyric Poetry. Concerning the Poems of A. Fet and Ia. Polonsky), VI, 214–240. 70 Prose translation of the Tiutchev poem and all other poetry in this book by the author.

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the mechanistic worldview as scientific truth and as beyond doubt, they do not believe in their own creations” (italics mine—ALC). In Tiutchev’s poetry everything is alive, free, dynamic—the dark root of earthly things is penetrated by light and dynamism. Solovyov emphasizes the limitless chaos underlying and within nature as well as the divine principle in it. The dialectic of light from darkness, light penetrating matter and rendering it beautiful and divine, is borne out in multiple examples from Tiutchev. True to his dialectic nature Solovyov stresses: “Chaos, ugliness itself, is the necessary background of all earthly beauty and the aesthetic meaning of such phenomena as a turbulent sea, a night thunderstorm, results from the very fact that chaos rumbles beneath them” (VI, 473). “This presence of the chaotic, irrational principle in the depth of being gives various natural phenomena their freedom and powers, without which there would be no life and no beauty” (VI, 472). Clearly these elements are not to be destroyed: “For beauty it is not necessary that the dark force be destroyed in the victory of world harmony; it is sufficient that the light principle (prosvetlenie) exert a strong influence over it, subordinate it to itself, incarnating itself in it to a degree, but not destroying its freedom and its resistance.”71 The image of a dynamic struggle of all things natural, material against spirit and the slow victory of the Good, the light, the slow spiritualization of matter in this struggle is the world process towards All-Unity. Solovyov presents his own Tiutchev-inspired erotic version of the struggle of light and dark in the poem “We came together for a reason (not by Chance).” Solovyov’s Poetic Expression of the Connection of Eros and Creativity Given Solovyov’s tendency in his later oeuvre to sprinkle poetic passages throughout his philosophical works, Solovyov does the same in his discussion of the sexual basis of creativity in The Justification of the Good. His illustrative poem there is the 1892 love poem to Martynova “We came together for a reason.” He quotes the final stanza which begins “Light from darkness.” Not surprisingly, Rozanov, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev all three quote this same poem (some of them more than once) in their discussions of sex and elevated Eros and sex and creativity. Since it is used as the thematic poem for the entire subject, we shall cite it here in full in English translation and present a brief analysis of its salient connection to Eros and Creativity. 71

Solovyov, “Poeziia F.I. Tiutcheva,” VI, 468–472. Pages given in the text.

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We came together for a reason, And like a fire My passion burns. These flaming torments— Are only the faithful security Of the power of Being. Into the abyss of fiery darkness Eternal Love Pours its living stream. From that flaming prison I shall once again retrieve The Firebird’s feather for you. Light from darkness O’er the black clod of earth, The faces of your roses Could not arise, If their dark root Were not submerged in the twilight bosom of earth And did not drink of it.72

All three subsequent thinkers here—Rozanov, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev—recur to the third stanza where the dominant image of the “dark root” = sexuality is so prominent. Addressed to the last great passion of Solovyov’s life, this is an amorous poem first and foremost. Since this was not a requited passion, the repeated images of fire in a dark environment realize both meanings of the word strast’—passion and suffering. Still the repeated imagery of fire in a dark environment, where it is difficult to breathe, convey the notion of a lower principle, even a hellish underworld, penetrated by a higher one, light—fire light in this case. The power of “being” in the first stanza is both the world of nature and the world of divine being trapped and dispersed here below. Love of all kinds (but especially sexual love) is the true force which brought these people together, not only on a physical but also on a metaphysical level. The real existence of such eros is experienced as fiery torments = sexual desire. If one had any doubt concerning this reading, the second stanza is more explicit: “Into the dark abyss (wombs) it pours its streams,” appears as overtly sexual until we learn that the subject of the pouring is Eternal Love. Here the seamless passage from sexuality to higher

72

Solovyov, “My soshlis’ s toboi nedarom,” in Vladimir Solovyov, Stikhotvoreniia i shutochnye p’esy (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’), 1974, p. 92, further referred to as Stikhotvoreniia….

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Eros occurs in one sentence. This illustrates Solovyov’s view that sex, though natural and biological, is holy when individualized and personalized. This stanza continues with fairy tale imagery and plot from the Firebird.73 The beautiful image of the Firebird (as the beloved) will be pursued in the dark night and tamed as in the tale by the young man who takes its feather after which it does numerous miracles at his bidding. The personae here are doubled—as the beloved is the one for whom the feats will be performed—he will retrieve the feather for her and she is at the same time the passionate firebird that he desires and pursues. He is the pursuer and the benefactor and beneficiary of the Firebird’s magic powers. This exemplifies poetically the mutuality of such love. The concluding stanza that all our thinkers cite sums up the statements about sexual love and exalted Eros that Solovyov was soon to write about in “The Meaning of Love” and The Justification of the Good. There are no beautiful roses (often an image of eternal love), and no aesthetic products, unless the dark root—dark chaotic underworld being, sex-fire—burns. That fire at first is purely biological, but is tempered, sublimated into eternal love. The roots of all eternal beauty are deep in the earth and must drink of the power of being that is immanent in the earth. Only thus will light and beauty be produced. It is manifestly clear that the beauty of the red roses of love would be impossible if sexual desire did not exist, were their roots not deep in the dark chaos of the earth. These roses can represent the fruits of civilization, the arts, men’s contribution to God’s universe, his creative products. Or with Robert Burns,74 the roses can represent true, exalted heterosexual love. This poem is unquestionably the thematic work of the eros and creativity theme in modern Russian religious thought. In it the free, irrational chaos of sexuality is the indispensable basis of idealizing love and higher creation of all kinds. Solovyov on Fet’s Love Poetry The final article we shall treat here comes last because it brings the two streams of creativity—the work of the artist, poet, philosopher and that

73 The Russian fairy tale of the Firebird was used as a basis for Igor Stravinsky’s celebrated ballet. Page references are given in the body of the text. 74 Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose,” in Six Centuries of Great Poetry, eds. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (New York: Dell Publishing, 1955), p. 325.

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of Eros-the lovers—together: “The Lyric Poetry of Iakov Polonsky and Afanasy Fet.” The themes of Eros and creativity are everywhere close and everywhere infiltrate each other in the last decade of Solovyov’s life. What he says about nature’s dark root includes the dark, chaotic side of human sexuality of which he is very aware (not so much in a prudish Victorian way as in a high Romantic and medical, scientific matter-of-fact manner). Called in the previous article the “dark root” and “the mysterious basis of all life,”75 it appears in this article on the lyric poetry (1890) as a clear anticipation—or early formulation—of Freudian sublimation. We read: “The general meaning of the universe reveals itself in the poet’s soul in two ways: 1) from the outside, as the beauty of nature, and 2) from the inside, as love, in its most concentrated and intense form, as sexual love.”76 The poetic art of Horace and other great poets is said to be “from the material aspect, a transformation of the sexual instinct” (VI, 228) which Solovyov metaphorizes scientifically, stating “as mechanical movement can be turned into warmth and light” (VI, 228) so the sexual instinct can become a divine light. The transformation of sexual instinct into a total transfiguration of sexuality is demonstrated on creative products, poems to Fet’s long dead mistress, Maria Lazich who was believed to have committed suicide because of the end of this affair (“There a human being burnt up…”),77 just as Fet probably committed suicide himself. Fet continued addressing passionate love poems to this, his great love, into deep old age and it is these poems from Evening Fire that Solovyov addresses. Solovyov attempts to show not only that human love can be so spiritual and transcendent as to inspire such poems, transform the poet, so, it can, because of its compelling truth and transformatory power exert a force upon a susceptible reader, or even those who are skeptical, to make them believe in the reality and immortalizing power (victory over decomposition and death) of such love. In some of the most inspired pages Solovyov ever wrote, comparable to the pathos behind some of his best love poems to Martynova, we see 75

Solovyov, “Poeziia Tiutcheva,” p. 471. Solovyov, “Fet i Polonsky,” p. 228. 77 Fet, “Tam chelovek sgorel…” (“A human being burned up there…”), see the final line of the poem: “Kogda chitala ty muchitel’nye stroki…” (“When you read those tormenting lines…”) in Stikhotvoreniia, (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1970), p. 443. 76

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Solovyov’s belief in Fet’s immortal love for Lazich and hers for him, as well as belief in the occurrence and power of such Eros, the heavenly Aphrodite on earth. Especially strong is his analysis of the poems “You suffered to the end, I still suffer” and “I do not see the beauty” Solovyov shows how such exalted love incarnates unearthly speeches (nezdeshnie rechi) in everyday Russian and sensible objects. The strength of such love across-the-grave, across the earthly-transcendental boundary renders time and death powerless to destroy it. It overcomes “one’s entire being—the ray (of love) uproots all darkness from the night of the soul.” (VI, 230) The apogee of this victory and its expression in an artistic creation is: I do not see the beauty of your indestructible soul Nor your luscious hair or caressing eyes… [note: not with earthly eyes] With greetings rising from the grave Test the greatness of the heart’s mysteries We shall both waft through eternal life together. No, I have not been unfaithful to you And will not be ‘til deep old age. And you and I shall meet now, Though (memory)/common sense claims That a grave stands between us. I cannot (bear to) believe that you have forgotten me, When you stand before me as you stand at this moment…78

The love that inspired these poems, and which breathes in them for all who read them to experience, no longer exists in the lower reality (nature) alone; it now has no physical object here; real active love is akin to Absolute truth and God. The divine image is cognized in Reason, but in love it is known actively and virtually. Tiutchev revealed nature’s true face in immortal poetry. Fet in his love saw the divine in the face of Maria Lazich and she in his. Made manifest, experienced in poetry about this love, its reality is doubly proved. The true idea of the beloved object/person, although in moments of erotic passion it shines through a real person, first appears clearer as an object of imagination (p. 403). Such loving is like an aesthetic creation of another in life; here it is reincarnated in poems. Fet has affirmed it again, taking it from the private personal, subjective sphere to the objective, universally applicable and effective one. The universal validity/Truth of

78

Ibid., p. 362.

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this love is this double Eros—sexual love transformed in life and then in art and it has transformatory force upon others—this is upheld by Solovyov in its non-subjectivity: “The concrete form of this loving imagination, the ideal image in which I creatively envelop the person whom I love at that moment, [of the actual experience of that love] is, of course, created by me, but it is not created out of nothing and the subjectivity of this image in no way proves the subjective (i.e., eventually for me alone) character of the object of my imagination […].” The defense of the created objects in love and art is complete. “If, on this side of the transcendental world, a certain ideal object seems only the figment of my (the artist’s) imagination, this in no way diminishes its reality in a higher sphere of being.”79 We have presented Solovyov’s interpretation of the metaphysical love poetry of Afanasy Fet, for many years a close friend of Solovyov, who sometimes edited and commented on Solovyov’s own poems and poetic translations from the Latin, and with whom Solovyov enjoyed an intellectual and creative friendship during protracted visits at Fet’s country estate, Vorob’evka. This interpretation and his close knowledge of Fet the man, despite Solovyov’s modesty concerning his own poetic talents which he considered vastly inferior to Fet’s, forces us nevertheless to consider Solovyov’s own intimate lyrics (love poetry) in light of what he says about Fet. If Fet’s late love lyrics represent the highest that such poetic art can achieve, we can assume that Solovyov intended to employ lessons learned from Fet in his own practice. Solovyov’s own most important love lyrics are addressed to his two greatest loves, the married niece of A.K. Tolstoy, Sophia Khitrovo,80 whom he knew for some 23 years, and his late unrequited passion for S.M. Martynova (1892–94). The poem we analyzed above “We met not by chance” written in 1892, is part of the so-called “Martynova cycle.”

79

Ibid., p. 404. See in Losev’s book on Solovyov: Sophia Petrovna Khitrovo, Countess, nee Bakhmet’eva—the great love interest of Vladimir Solovyov; author of memoirs largely about her uncle, Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy. S.P. Khitrovo, “Vospominaniia Sofii Petrovny Khitrovo,” unpublished manuscript. Used by S.M. Luk’ianov in his research (1918) on Solovyov. His description of the manuscript materials was republished by Losev in an Appendix II to his book entitled S.M. Luk’ianov, “O zapiskakh S.P. Khitrovo, urozhdennoi Bakhmetevoi” (About the Notes of Sophia Khitrovo, nee Bakhmeteva), Losev, pp. 596–609. This contains some interesting material about the personality and upbringing of Countess Khitrovo. She was likewise characterized by the Vicount Eugène Maria Melchior de Vogüé in his Russian travels, published as Journal du Vicomte de Vogüé. Paris—St. Petersbourg (Paris: B. Grasset, 1932). 80

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Though the excessively pious atmosphere of the Tolstoy household and estate, Pustyn’ka, where Solovyov met Khitrovo and where their relationship developed, may have led to the poems dedicated to her appearing more modest and less “passionate” than those to Martynova, we emphatically disagree with the view of contemporary critic V.F. Savodnik in his study The Poetry of Vladimir Solovyov (1901) where he writes that the poems are characterized “by a complete absence of the sensual element” and that love in Solovyov “refers [only] to the Eternal Feminine, which in living reality finds only a pale and incomplete incarnation.”81 Khitrovo was a very human presence to Solovyov, praised by him to his sisters who were not happy that he loved a married woman with children, and the sensual element that made him at one time convince her to divorce her husband and marry him, manifestly against the wishes of her pious aunt, were sources of earthly elements that creep into these poems, however much the poet may have wished to keep them to a minimum. The slightly greater modesty of the Khitrovo poems, when compared to those to Martynova, can be explained by his great respect for Tolstoy’s widow, upon whose sufferance he was able to spend so much time at Pustyn’ka, for more than adecade his only “settled home” in Russia.82 The three poems written at the time of the major break-up with Sophia Khitrovo (in January 1, 1887, April 3, 1887, and September 18, 1887) are set on the boundary between this world and the next world, that of earthly love and divine love. The first poem reads: The dénouement of a joyless love, Of a love whose fire has gone out, is Not a quiet sadness but the hour of mortal torment. Even if [people say] life is an evil deception My dying heart, weary and in pain, Still burns with the fire of a love already extinguished in eternity. (p. 78)

This poem about his suffering shows that his earthly body is still tormented by an “eternal” fire that has supposedly gone out (on its higher eternal level) but still torments the body here. The paradox of being burned by a fire that is “extinguished,” but still torments his body, still burns, clearly presents the physical aspect of spiritual suffering. 81 V.F. Savodnik, Poeziia Vladimira Solovyova (The Poetry of Vladimir Solovyov), (Moscow, 1901), pp. 16–18. Given quote is from p. 32 of Z.G. Mints, “Vladimir Solovyov—The Poet,” in Solovyov, Stikhotvoreniia…, pp. 5–56. 82 Losev, pp. 53ff.

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The second two poems about this break and the couple’s relinquishing hopes of every marrying extend his compassion to her suffering and pain, which he portrays as similar to his own. In the poem of April 3, 1887, of which he said anyone reading it might think him a “pagan,” he presents himself as a dying Adonis and her as Aphrodite, himself as Perseus and her as Andromeda. These pre-Christian pairs “have sung a funeral dirge to their love,/But in the distance in a crimson sunrise, its rays have shone red once more.” Their love refuses to die, on earth at any rate The last poem written in September of that year expresses even more tenderness towards her suffering: Poor friend, your path has wearied you, Your gaze is dark, your crown/wreath is smashed. (p. 79)

Her darkened gaze, (she usually had been very bright-eyed in his poems), and her crown as his queen are general poetic imagery for the Beautiful Lady. But the smashed crown has a more realistic meaning in their circumstances, the trampled crown is the one that will not be held over her head in an Orthodox marriage to Solovyov: it is a realistic “symbol” of their dashed hopes. The love dialogue between them hardly needs words: “You just utter my name and I speechlessly clutch you to my breast.” The final stanza depicts them as victims of Time and Death: Everything, whirling about, disappears in the haze The only thing fixed is the Sun of Love. (p. 79)

This sad consolation defines love as in Shakespeare’s 116th sonnet: “That is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark….”83 Here it remains such though devastated by time and death, the forces of change/“alteration.” The intervening period of Solovyov’s passion for S.M. Martynova (1892–94), and the whole contents of the album dedicated to her, present love in a somewhat more earthly fashion. Leading Soviet scholar Zara G. Mints notes: “On the whole the mystic-ascetic strain [in Solovyov’s love poetry] is predominant in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s (Khitrovo period) and at the very end of his life, in the verses dedicated to meeting the Queen in Egypt and those addressed to Khitrovo. In the late 1880’s and early 1890’s other moods are evident.”84 83 84

William Shakespeare, Sonnet no. 116. Solovyov, Stikhotvoreniia…, pages given after each of my translations.

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Thus the “Martynova cycle,” though it has some poems in a markedly mystic tonality, also contains those in which there is only an earthly, human spirit (“On the occasion of our falling out of a sleigh together,” “Your heart is too tight with no place for me,” “I have not seen you for three whole days, my angel”).85 Most interesting is the poem of February 29, 1892, written at a midpoint of his courting Martynova, when he had realized her coldness towards him, a poem he planned to entitle “Dénouement” or “Resignation”: I do not fear death. I do not need to live. The queen of my thoughts has no need of me. Mortal love won’t bring her happiness And my clumsy verse brings her no words [of joy] … But my eternal spirit, powerful and free… Will not leave her for a moment. And it will light her up with eternal love, And with a holy fire melt the dark element (the earthly, sexual). (p. 88)

In the midst of the Martynova cycle Solovyov learns that the old manor house at the Tolstoy estate, where he had stayed along with Khitrovo and her children, had burned to the ground and he writes the poem “Memory” which he gives Martynova, though she can hardly be seen as its main addressee: Rush me memory, on your ever youthful wing To that land so dear to my heart I see her/it. [the feminine accusative pronoun eë is used, referring to the land and the woman, Khitrovo] Smoldering on a pyre. In the winter twilight her/it alone. My soul is rent with bitter longing, Two lives burned up there, Something new begins in the distance In place of the spring that has perished. Away from me, memory! On a quietly-wafting wing Send me a different image… Of her in a greening meadow In the bright summertime. Of the sun playing above the wild Tosna [the river at Pustyn’ka] Of the steep high shore, The familiar tall pines, The whitish quagmire. Enough, Enough, Memory! All the sadness I experienced 85

Mints, p. 31. See footnote 81 above.

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Has again possessed my soul As if those tears poured forth then Pour forth again now in a resurrected wave.86

Though included in Martynova’s album, only the lines about “something new in the distance” have reference to her and this memory comes well after that “something new” has begun and, as we have seen, does not hold very high hopes for a happy resolution. “Memory” is a virtually total re-evocation of Sophia Khitrovo, as person and as place, written when he learned of the recent fire at Pustyn’ka. It is striking in the midst of a new sexual passion and a harbinger of returned proposals of marriage to Khitrovo after the parting with Martynova. The general tendency in scholarship to make Solovyov a chaste and celibate Romantic lover, especially in the case of Khitrovo, is unwittingly belied in a source that was calculated to make him appear just that—his sister’s, Bezobrazova’s, memoirs of the period in 1883 when his hopes of marrying Khitrovo were at their peak. He was at his family seat, calling her “my fiancé” constantly, carrying about a tiny bootie of her baby son Riurik and waiting every moment for letters or telegrams from her. He came down with serious typhus during this visit which occasioned Sophia’s only visit to the Solovyov home, during which they closed themselves in a room for hours and, despite the seriousness of his illness, three weeks later he was well enough to leave and join her and her little boy Riurik at the Tolstoy’s second estate Krasnyi Rog and joke about her son’s reaction to his shaved head.87 Again Zara Mints seems to us the most objective in her reading of Solovyov’s own, and his family’s, attempts to make the Khitrovo attachment look innocent and not at all like a liaison. A Petersburg Countess of the highest society (comments on her of De Vogüé), Khitrovo was extremely well-versed in the social proprieties and very far from a candidate for a future role as Anna Karenina. Upon her diplomat husband’s sudden death in 1896, however, Solovyov again began proposals of marriage and certainly would have married her had she consented. Mints writes about his attitude towards earthly love, sex where a religious union is considered: “If a dialectical gaze sees ‘light’ where there is ‘darkness’, then there can be nothing ‘low’ in earthly love. In it appears the unification of the Eternal Feminine and real earthly passion and

86 87

Ibid. See also Solovyov’s poem “Razviazka,” p. 91. “V.S. Solovyov i Sofiia Khitrovo,” in Losev, pp. 532–537.

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at times the dissolution of the exalted love in that very earthly passion (italics mine—ALC). The latter in Solovyov’s poetry shocked his religious interpreters and may well have embarrassed Solovyov himself and forced him into his mitigating explanations to his readers, his critics and to himself ” (p. 32). Mints continues: “Especially against Solovyov’s mystical and ascetic declarations stand his translations of Hafiz which are replete with a clearly hedonistic sense of the world and rendered in the tradition of the Russian anacreontic lyric. The contrast there is one of philistine hypocrisy against true love, the injustices of life and the joys of earthly love” (p. 32). Mints’ conclusion fits with “The Meaning of Love”: “Despite all his protestations and poetic declarations [“I love you with a non-earthly love,” the mystical “Woman, clothed in the Sun” from Revelations] his love is endowed with undeniable earthly traits. The image of ‘feminine beauty’ is at times painted in tones of such a strong love-passion that she seems almost an antithesis to what he had written earlier, the heavenly, distant coldness is juxtaposed to earthly passion to which all that is brightest and most significant is linked.”88 The last love poem written to Sophia Khitrovo without dedication, dates to August 26, 1897, during a visit a year after her husband’s demise, at the time when Solovyov was justifying his renewed proposals to her on the right of the widowed to remarry in the Russian Orthodox Church. This very autumnal poem (summer is usually the seasonal equivalent of the height of their love, as we saw in “Memory”): I am lit up by your autumnal smile, It is dearer to me than the laughter of the heavens, Out from behind the vague unstable crowd [of clouds or other people?] There beams a ray and suddenly disappears. Weep, Autumn, weep! Your tears bring joy! The trembling forest and sobs that went to heaven! Roar, O, Storm! [a very Tiutchev-like line], Roar all your threats! To exhaust them on the earth’s breast. O, Mistress of the Earth, the skies and sea! I hear you through all this dark moaning And here your gaze, fighting with/dispelling the hostile haze Has suddenly lit up the horizon which now has seen through [things] to the truth [prozrevshii nebosklon]. 88

Mints, p. 32.

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Here we have the love sadness of the smiling female figure, presented in a totally earthly mode and piercing through (as a ray from the other world in Zosima’s speech), but streaming from the earth below up to heaven! This explains the linkedness of heavenly and earthly love to the higher world and the higher love. The higher idealizing love here is very “confused,” wrapped in haze and the male figure in his confusion is lit up by her earthly image —warmth, sadness and tears, the earthly storms and passion (threats) make it possible to cross the boundary— nebosklon—which sees through to the higher side, thanks to the earthly emotions, linked to the temporal cycle, autumn. This is a particularly good example of what Mints called “dissolution of the heavenly love in the earthly one.”(p. 30) Solovyov did write that these poems dealt only with Plato’s “heavenly Aphrodite” in his Introduction to the Poems.89 Yet Solovyov, as a Hegelian, “has no philosophical reason to separate Plato’s heavenly Aphrodite from the lower Aphrodite (beyond personal motives of propriety). The unity of the cosmos and the historical process subjected to the laws of thesis-antithesis-synthesis and moving triadically from lower stages to higher is affirmed throughout his work to such a degree that he is often accused of pantheism. In Solovyov’s case this system became not only a philosophy but, because he believed philosophy should not be passive wisdom but proactive upon the world, it became a religion.”90 In the above analyzed poems we see how Solovyov himself turned a spiritual-and -earthly love into works of art, as he said Fet had done. It is not surprising, as we shall see, that Rozanov felt that Solovyov, unsuccessful in many things in life, was “most fully himself ” in his poetry. *** Thus, we have attempted in this chapter to place Solovyov’s thoughts on eros and creativity in the context of his philosophy as a whole. Solovyov’s ideas on sublimated love and art are the basis Russian religious thought on sublimation in the twentieth century. These included his extension or Christianization of Platonic Eros, his specific aesthetics which grew out of Platonic Eros and Christian love, and a consideration of the main philosophic texts and exemplary poems in which these ideas were propounded. The truly personal and erotic character of Solovyov’s love 89 90

Pointed out in Mints, p. 30. Ibid., p. 19.

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experiences and his incarnating his beloved, as Fet had done, in works of art leaves little doubt that his idealizing love and the poetic works which stemmed from it were examples of sublimated sexual instinct, as he had once said of the nightingale’s beautiful song. The link of Eros with poetic (and other) creativity is triply affirmed in Solovyov: in theoretical articles, in life experience and in aesthetic works that communicate that love experience to others and may infect them with such love. In Chapter III below we shall treat Vasily Rozanov’s concept of sublimation both as a continuation of and elaboration upon Solovyov’s ideas and at times as an exaggeration or distortion of those ideas in a vein peculiarly Rozanov’s own.

TRANSITION. ROZANOV AND SOLOVYOV As we stated in the final pages of Chapter II, we see Solovyov as the founder of the important treatment of the issues of Eros and Creativity in Russian religious thought and in Russian late 19th century thought generally. Thus, we take the “Solovyovian” views on the special connectedness of Eros sexuality and creativity as the Russian religious “thesis” on sublimation. In the second stage of this 60-year dialogue, which coincides with the Russian Silver Age (1890–1925 circa) and its aftermath, the three most important inheritors of the Solovyovian legacy on these two most closely related issues are, in our estimation, Vasily Vasil’evich Rozanov (1856–1919), Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948) and Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev (1877–1954). While some of the great Symbolist poets can be viewed as followers of Solovyov in one aspect or another, the most important and consistent contributors to the dialogue about Eros and creativity are undoubtedly Rozanov, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev. Aleksandr Blok, Dmitry Merezhkovsky Andrei Bely and Viacheslav Ivanov91 were also under Solovyov’s influence and were active creative artists. All three were influenced to a greater or lesser degree by Solovyov’s and Rozanov’s views on these issues. Having established Rozanov, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev as the major philosophical continuers of Solovyov’s legacy on our subject of sublimation, it must be emphasized that despite overwhelming influence, none of them is a slavish follower of the Solovyovian doctrines set out here in Chapter II. They very creatively read, misread, or even misconstrued (willfully misunderstood) Solovyov, at times while still evoking his name and grounding their thoughts on his posthumous authority. This misreading is directly in the spirit of what Harold Bloom calls “misprision” and describes as a common creative reaction to an inspirational “father figure.”92 91

The exclusion of several thinkers very close in their following of Solovyov was necessary in this book due to our goal of treating one subject, Eros and Creativity, in Russian religious philosophy in its connections with Freudian sublimation. The great Symbolist poet Alexander Blok, especially in his first period, was inspired by Solovyov’s concept of the Divine-Sophia and wrote greater poetry than his inspirer, but said little of theoretical value on the issues treated here. Viacheslav Ivanov, another poet much influenced by Solovyov, did write on creativity, but his work on this subject, treated in detail in Robert Bird, Prospero (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), is less of a departure from Solovyov than Berdyaev’s and he was rather predictably hostile to Freud and psychoanalysis. D.S. Merezhkovsky, the strongest candidate for inclusion in this volume, was excluded in that many of his ideas on sexuality and creativity were penned at a time when he was generally considered to be under the powerful influence of V. Rozanov, during the period of the First Religious-Philosophical Meetings. The choice in favor of including Rozanov was a fairly easy one, though we treat Merezhkovsky in some detail below in Chapter IV. 92 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (New York: OUP, 1975).

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Thus, while it might generally be thought that Rozanov contributed more to the theory of sexuality and Berdyaev more to that of creativity, a close consideration of their massive oeuvres show them to be major Russian contributors to both. Thus, Rozanov, if he thought a great deal about Solovyov in life when they were physically apart, thought about him much more and with much more unmixed admiration after his death, especially between 1900 and 1910. He comments in his funeral speech to this effect: “It is noticeable that his obraz, image (Solovyov’s) grows better, is purified after death; just as if he had been preparing for it.”93 All this adds up to Rozanov’s feeling that closer intellectual and intimate relations with Solovyov were one of the major missed opportunities of his intellectual and religious life, for which Rozanov largely blamed himself and upon which he dwelt emotionally for some ten years. Posthumously, Rozanov understood Solovyov’s loneliness and inner sadness. He saw the elder thinker as a lone wanderer: “Here was a real wanderer, in the intellectual, ideological and in the quotidian, even residential sense!” (Solovyov’s not having a fixed domicile and often living at the home of friends). Rozanov continues: “The son of a professor with every reason to expect a University Chair, he did not receive one due to his personal circumstances [perhaps an allusion to his public statement calling for the forgiveness of the assassins of Tsar Aleksandr II, after which Solovyov was deprived of a professorship in Russian universities for the remainder of his life—ALC], grandson of a priest […], he was very constrained in his desire to be published in academic clerical journals; as a journalist, he bore religious-ecclesiastical ideas, finding a cool welcome for them in editorial offices. He entered through a crack in the door, waited like an intimidated guest, ready to take wing and flit away at any moment with his ambiguous laughter. ” (p. 540) Given Rozanov’s admiring view of Solovyov after the latter’s death, one cannot help but feel that when Rozanov in his response to Solovyov’s “Beauty in Nature” (“Krasota v prirode”) wrote so movingly on human genius he had the man he was addressing in this mild polemic in mind, V.S. Solovyov: Rozanov defines a genius as someone surpassing most of mankind in his spiritual evolution. He is, as it were, a leap to the end of the “long process of development in each chain link of which numerous minds of different capacity have labored; [the chain] suddenly closes with a creature [or geniuslike creation], a genius before whom we are forced to stop, amazed at the fullness of the internal harmony of [his] parts. The absence of any insufficiency is the main thing that strikes us in genius […]. The 93

Losev, pp. 544ff. Pages given in the text.

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creature/creation of genius [person or created product—ALC] is like a ray (of divine light) sliding across the earth from other worlds (Zosima’s words) and people are drawn to it because through the contemplation of men of genius man realizes what is most profound and mysterious in his very (human) nature.”94 This is followed by paragraphs on the solitude and “homelessness” and the poignant suffering of genius among mere mortals, how genius is both recognized and repulsed by ordinary men and unable to fit in with less spiritually advanced mankind. The genius will never “be at home in the world” (pp. 92–93), no matter how great his desire: Solovyov’s wish to be a guest and not a mere observer or outsider at the “feast of life” and his perennial wandering and solitariness in Rozanov’s posthumous commentaries, dovetails perfectly with this earlier description of genius in general, so much that Rozanov may have consciously, and certainly unconsciously, had Solovyov in mind.95 His conclusion is that the semi-prophet, Solovyov, was not heard/ accepted in his own land and wandered from pillar to post, like Nekrasov’s peasants, being for Rozanov the person definitively who “was not happy or privileged in Russia” (p. 540). Nekrasov’s question: “Komu zhivetsya veselo, vol’gotno na Rusi?” (“Who can live happily, with full freedom in Russia?”)96 could not be answered in the affirmative for Solovyov, and in fact is answered with powerful negation. 94 Rozanov, “Krasota v prirode i ee smysl” (Beauty in Nature and its Meaning) in Priroda i istoriia (St. Petersburg: 1900), pp. 90–91. 95 This dwelling on Solovyov is clear from his writings between 1900 and 1910. The quotes are from Rozanov, cited in Losev, pp. 539–544, with pages given in the text, especially from “Na panikhide Vladimira Solovyova” (At the Funeral of Vladimir Solovyov) and “Ob odnoi zasluge Vladimira Solovyova” (Concerning one of the Merits of Vladimir Solovyov). It is stressed in Valery Fateev’s highly detailed biography Zhizneopisanie Vasiliia Rozanova (The Biography of Vasily Rozanov), (St. PetersburgKostroma: G.U.I.P.P., 2002). Another important Russian contribution to Rozanov scholarship appeared in a small edition in 1994. This work, V.K. Pishun and S.V. Pishun, Religiia zhizni V. Rozanova (Rozanov’s Religion of Life), (Vladivostok: Izdatel’stvo Dal’nevostochnogo universiteta, 1994), avails itself of an extremely extensive bibliography, including pre-revolutionary, Russian émigré, the émigré Soviet and vaster field of Western Slavistic work on the writer, as well as unpublished archival materials. This book treats the writer’s philosophy very interestingly under several important headings. As concerns the connections between Rozanov and Solovyov, the authors take Losev to task for spreading, even to some limited extent, the notion, initiated by P. Pertsov, Rozanov’s publisher, that Rozanov was the antithesis of Solovyov. Losev does once use the word “enemies” (Losev, p. 518). These authors, Pishun and Pishun, list some nine very convincing general similarities in the religious and philosophical views of Rozanov and Solovyov, including the following: “On the culturological plane, Solovyov’s attempt to synthesize various spheres of the human spirit in the metaphysic of All-unity is in intertextual dialogue (pereklikaetsia s) with Rozanov’s aspiration towards mutual self-absorption (vzaimopogloshchenie) in sex …” (p. 62). 96 “Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho” is the poet Nikolai Nekrasov’s long narrative poem about the suffering of the peasantry in Russia.

CHAPTER THREE

EROS AND CREATIVITY: FROM SOLOVYOV’S “LOVE” TO ROZANOV’S “SEX” As we saw in The Justification of the Good, Solovyov associates creative genius with sexuality. Rozanov claimed, and some (Fateev) believe him, never to have read the seventh section of Book I Part I of Solovyov’s long ethical work, yet we have ample evidence (see below) that Rozanov did read it and it was distasteful to him as a way of writing about sexuality in man. Fateev does attest to Solovyov’s probable distaste for the way Rozanov was to write about sexuality.97 (Rozanov’s comments in 97 Fateev, Zhizneopisanie Vasiliia Rozanova, p. 163. Here Fateev speaks of a letter now lost in which Rozanov informed Solovyov of his views on “sexual shame” and shared some of his ideas on the sexual theme with Solovyov, prior to their appearing in print. He surmises the following about Solovyov’s reaction: “We do not know Solovyov’s reaction to this letter, but one can hypothesize that if Rozanov’s ‘candid admissions’ did not shock Solovyov, neither did they elicit his admiration.” Later at the end of the section entitled “More about Solovyov,” pp. 262–266, Fateev writes: “Further on Rozanov speaks about his main disagreement with Solovyov—their views of sexuality. Solovyov’s view that ‘the veils of Isis should not be torn off ’ is certainly opposed by Rozanov who said that ‘religion in general originates in this dearest and most intimate aspect for man.” The present author, along with such a Solovyov expert as A.F. Losev, emphatically disagrees with this surmise of Fateev. While Solovyov may never have liked the style in which Rozanov sometimes wrote about sexuality, had he lived to read the bulk of what Rozanov wrote on sex as a religious topic, he would have seen more communality than disagreement. There is no doubt that Trubetskoi, who had a distaste for Solovyov’s sexual utopia, and for Solovyov’s views on love and the ethical meaning of sexuality, represents the more traditional “Christian modesty” on this subject. The philosopher B.N. Chicherin scoffed at the idea that sex was a source of shame in man, unless he had some sexual insufficiency. And he disagreed that sexual shame awakened ethical feeling in man. See also Fateev, p. 164, concerning Rozanov’s insult to Solovyov in failing to write a review of Opravdanie dobra and giving the book to Fedor Shperk to review. This does not mean that he gave it away hastily without reading it. He reacted to the book too soon in print to be characterized as “not having read it.” What is true is that Rozanov was never fair about Solovyov’s section on sexual shame as a source of ethical feeling in man in that book, nor was he openly praiseful of “The Meaning of Love,” much of which he could subscribe to and “The Meaning of Love” is clearly an influence upon him. Rozanov had a visceral reaction to seeing the words “sex” and “shame” together. But when Chicherin attacked Solovyov’s idea, Rozanov found Chicherin’s argument superficial (neglubokomyslennyi), “Semia i zhizn’,” p. 168. There is very little written at this time on sexual issues of which Rozanov was unaware. He expresses his coolness towards Opravdanie dobra’s seventh part, which is motivated by a distaste for Solovyov’s tone in handling the sexual issue, not so much the substance of what Solovyov says. He does not react significantly to “The Meaning of Love.” The present author is convinced that “The Meaning of Love“ was a major influence on Rozanov.

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The Family Question in Russia and elsewhere). Nevertheless, Solovyov’s statement about the sexual, physiological basis of human creative genius is exactly in line with Rozanov’s views, to be expressed only a few years later. We quote Solovyov: We call geniuses people whose vital creative energy is not spent completely on external fleshly procreation, but is expended further on internal acts of spiritual creation in some field (poprishche) or other. A genius is one who in addition to the life of the species immortalizes himself personally and is preserved in posterity, even if he did not have children himself. The meaning of genius in the generally accepted sense is only a hint of what really happens. The true genius inherent in us speaks to us most loudly in sexual shame […] it demands much more than gifts for the arts or sciences. As true genius is related to the whole species (genus) though standing above it, it appeals not only to an elite of the chosen, but to each and every person, warning us all against the vicious circle in which nature eternally, but vainly founds life on dead bones.98

The physiological basis of all creativity could not be clearer, as part of our shame at our animal nature, which impels us to rise above nature, to redirect our sexuality, one of our greatest links to the natural world, (along with eating, breathing) somewhere beyond procreation. It is further clear from Chapter VII of The Justification of the Good that sexual shame does not inhere in the external aspect of the organs or the means of coupling (Solovyov did not find the human body repulsive) or childbirth as a bad thing. “Childbirth is a good,” he writes with emphasis. The shame about sex comes in the sense that in it nature is using us as a means to its ends,—continuation of the human race. Shame comes from the sense of being depersonalized, dehumanized in sex. And from this sense of sexual shame and the redirection of the sexual instinct in love, religious and other creativity, man affirms his human and divine essences. Sublimation of sex catalyzed by the emotion of shame makes man a critical being, hence is central to the formation of his own individual character, his Godmanhood, his personality. The tone of Chapter VII with its emphasis on the importance of shame sounds far from Rozanovian, as it might appear to tend to askesis. But Solovyov does not validate askesis above sexual bonding in love. He validates highly selective heterosexual love above all human attachments. Moreover, he depicts the genius as having a greater supply of 98

Solovyov, Opravdanie dobra (Justification of the Good), Book VII, 167–168.

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vital energy, enough for a normal sexual life and a creative life. Solovyov was a man capable of love and who definitely wanted to marry— Khitrovo and others. Herein lies a very significant similarity to Rozanov and a major difference with Freud and the materialist atheist thinkers about sublimation. Solovyov does not posit a limited amount of sexual energy—which must be repressed (askesis) for it to be used on other higher forms of creativity. There is no economy of sexual energy—there is a surplus of it in creative genius of any sort—perhaps rendered unquantifiable because it comes from God and any creation is “creation with God,” out of what God has endowed us with. Losev in his disagreement with Erik Gollerbakh over the similarities between Rozanov and Solovyov states: “Rozanov’s beauty (read: artistic creativity) is born from sexual energy, not subject to the laws of time and space—hence, his idea that sex is the source of all genius—and here Rozanov coincides with Solovyov—sex transmuted in a genius is incarnated in spiritual creativity and ‘liberates the spirit from the chains of matter’.” “But,” concludes Losev, “here ends the similarity of Rozanov and Solovyov on the physiological nature of genius”99 (italics mine—ALC). Losev’s aim in his book is to give a wide-ranging overview of Solovyov’s thought. For him this “similarity” may seem secondary, but for our subject of sublimation, it is pivotal, a very momentous similarity indeed. The further notion that sexual shame is the impulse for man to develop and affirm the non-animal aspects of his nature, gives sex again a central role, as catalyst to ethics and personal morality—to creating himself as an ethical being. This is the point of convergence for our topic. Rozanov, of course, was trying to remove shame from the sexual sphere altogether and is no advocate for shame about sexual intercourse, or the genitalia, though he feels repulsion at their appearance comes from a sense that one is part of an Androgyne, literally split off from one’s wholeness which one experiences in coitus. Frank physiological talk about sexual matters was viewed as shameless and even erotomaniac or pornographic in Rozanov’s day. He nevertheless revolted against shame about the very manner in which men were conceived and came into the world. This revolt against such shame led to his enthusiastic advocacy of family, childbirth, parenting, praise of the sexual act, and the sinlessness of illegitimate children.

99

Losev, p. 419.

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Rozanov did see “shame” in prostitution and the non-loving, nonindividualizing forms of sex and in not loving one’s sexual partner. True love for him, as well as for Solovyov, wipes away shame and sin from sexual intercourse. Love can exalt sex. The right kind of sex with the right feelings and partner can fill one with more love and even “overcome death.” Yet, as we saw in Chapter I, in these same years when Solovyov was writing about sexual shame as a source of conscience and ethical feelings in his treatise on ethics, Solovyov also wrote “The Meaning of Love,” where he extolled heterosexual love—idealizing, sublimating of instinct, but still earthly love, as the greatest love men could experience, as the closest approximation to divine love—God’s love for his creation and men. We have discussed the main thesis of “The Meaning of Love” here below in Chapter II. If The Justification of the Good could be read as tending to pull sex in the direction of askesis, “The Meaning of Love” pulls it toward heterosexual love, just as Solovyov’ reading of Fet’s love poetry does. Though he wrote passionate love poems to several women, Solovyov wrote about actual sexuality in a non-personal fashion. A much more private person than Rozanov—witness the destruction by Solovyov and S. Khitrovo of any letters or documents revelatory of their intimate life—and her desire to take his body and bury it and his request that she do so—(vehemently rejected by the Solovyov family) bespeaks a sense that she was in many senses the rightful possessor of his earthly shell and she may well have felt that he was the possessor of hers.100 No one really knows the facts of their actual love life. The amount of time he spent with her and her children and his ever-renewed proposals of marriage certainly bespeak a very serious attachment. Desire to marry her and long years of being deeply in love with her certainly do not lead one to conclude that there was absolutely no “love affair” between these two people. Earthly sexuality could be a divine religious and mystical experience for Solovyov. Its religious meaning is that it enables man to break out of egoistic loneliness and solitude, to make man whole by infusing him with the proof of vital feeling (actual experience) of his belonging to the whole, which fastens people to each other and to the All-in-All, which is part of the process of reunification (vseedinstvo).This

100 See discussion in Losev concerning this pact, pp. 538ff. It is also discussed by Solovyov’s nephew, Sergei Solovyov in his biography of his uncle.

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understanding of love certainly would not lead Solovyov to abstain from it in the right circumstances of idealizing love, circumstances in which he found himself more than once (and certainly with Khitrovo) in his relatively short life. One could ask further how Solovyov could be so convinced that heterosexual love was the greatest force of all loves— without ever experiencing it himself. “The Meaning of Love” is certainly not the product of disappointment with sexual experience in love. Is it, as some think, the purely imaginary product of no sexual experience in love whatsoever? It is Solovyov’s poetry, as we observed in Chapter II, and mainly his love poetry, that Rozanov much preferred and probably texts like “The Meaning of Love.” These Rozanov could and did accept and used as a bolster—if not explicitly—for his own myriad variations and at times seemingly extreme extrapolations of Solovyov’s theses. Still, it was Solovyov who initiated a metaphysicization of sex/heterosexual Eros, and Rozanov who was its most extreme and influential exponent. Here one must agree with Gollerbakh that Rozanov agreed with Solovyov on this major issue—the one that was most central for Rozanov. Losev, in claiming that this was a limited similarity, fails to see that this convergence was more important than all the small doctrinal questions on which Rozanov disagreed with Solovyov. Their positions (Solovyov’s first) posits human libido—sexual, instinctual desire—as the source of genius and creativity. Solovyov is always and ever advocating the desiring subject over the thinking subject in philosophy. Solovyov repeats Plato who said some men are “more creative in their souls than their bodies,” “the makers, the poets, creators among us.” (quoted in full above) Solovyov, then, after Plato, anticipated the Freudian hypothesis of sublimation by several years. Rozanov was the Russian who widened and developed it—both did this independently of Freudian influence. Rozanov developed it to a level of pan-sexualism rivaling Freud’s, but by focusing on sex in a mystical, religious light, in addition to its biological-functional aspect. He in fact proclaimed the biological to be sacred, divine. Therefore, Rozanov draws conclusions from his pan-sexualism which are radically different and even opposed to 1) Freud’s, 2) those of historical Christianity in general and 3) to those of the Russian Church. But are Rozanov’s views really seriously different from Solovyov’s and if so in what way? For the latter man’s consciousness of his sex and of the reproductive forces within his physiology, and the concomitant

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feeling of being a part of nature and of being used by it as a means to its ends— the endless multiplying of mortal creatures, is: (1) The source of a shame that fosters the development of man’s moral, ethical nature—the sense that man must be different-“higher” than the animals, specifically in sex where his difference is not physiologically manifested, except in the non-seasonal habits of human copulation; (2) the source of genius and creativity and (3) the glue-energy, which unites and frees humans from egoism to render them fully human—whole and active participants in the reunification of all being. Rozanov’s stance toward all three Solovyovian premises set out here above would not be outright rejection of any of them; he repeats the same three propositions in numerous places in his voluminous oeuvre. Of course, Rozanov’s tone, especially in his more sensationalist books The Dark Face and Men of the Lunar Light,101 both on the metaphysics of Christianity, differs markedly from Solovyov’s more staid, academic, and at times almost medical tone. Rozanov introduces a tone of frankness, cutting through what he deems prior hypocrisy, so much so that his candid and sometimes playful attitudes (as opposed to Tolstoy’s seriousness) were shocking in his age—he reduces the unspeakable to the commonsensical. The question remains: is this surface difference just that—only skin deep or does it bespeak underlying differences in his understanding of the divine, religious meaning of sex from those of Solovyov? Its role in creativity broadly conceived? I shall submit that Solovyov’s Victorian reticence about matters sexual, certainly mild for the period, led to his aesthetic sense that “Isis should always be veiled” (his own words), a sense somewhat contradicted in his own academic, physiological discussions of human, animal and even entomological and plant reproductive processes. On the other hand, the tone of Solovyovian idealistic Platonic “heavenly” Eros again differs from Rozanov’s. I believe this is more a matter of two contesting, but complementary styles of treating sex (pol) that Solovyov’s treatise vacillates between in a pendulum-like fashion. Here Mochul’sky’s observation that Solovyov 101 Rozanov, Temnyi lik: Metafizika khristianstva, with introduction by George Ivask (Würzburg: JAL-Reprint,1975), (see footnote 350 below), and Liudi lunnogo sveta: Metafizika Khristianstva (St. Petersburg: Novoe vremia, 1913).

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in his articles is excessively scientific and then suddenly and surprisingly lyric and poetic in his presentation of one and the same thing, is especially apt.102 He so couches the philosopher-poet Tiutchev, a great national “natural resource,” in naturalistic terms that the reader expects a discussion of Siberian soil or diamond reserves, rather than of a great poet! “They say that in the bowels of the Russian land many natural resources are hidden, which remain unexploited and even undescribed. This may, of course, be explained by the immensity of the Russian territory” (VI, 463). Having compared Tiutchev to an untapped natural resource, (a spiritual one), he goes on to stress that his main value lay in his conviction of the life, vitality of nature, that “Nature is a living organism and not a dead machine” (VI, 464). Of course, Tiutchev’s belief, for Solovyov is not just in the physical vitality of nature but that it has a soul and participates, like all that lives in the divine and is gradually becoming and being spiritualized. The moves from the concrete, material to the religious-spiritual planes involve for Solovyov a mystical leap of faith: “Of course, many poets and artists feel the life of nature and present it in animate images. Tiutchev is superior to them in that he fully and consciously believed in what he felt, the vital beauty he sensed in nature Tiutchev took not as an imaginative fantasy but as ultimate truth” (VI, 464). Solovyov heartily concurs.103 As in the example above, in a majority of treatments of matters of sex, Solovyov’s harsh physiological treatment is so balanced with or in counterpoint with an idealistic, romanticization of the same topic, as to leave the impression that the material, crude aspects of the matter have been “sensitized” or sentimentalized away. This stylistic imbalance in his frequent use of natural science, physics, chemistry and mathematics (all of which he knows like a positivist of the 1860’s!) leaves a nonmaterialist, “poetic” impression, as a result of which the reader may undervalue the materialist part of what he has said—its underlying meaning. His Isis is veiled, but only rhetorically so. Rozanov as a reader of Solovyov and perhaps as an expander and amplifier of Solovyov’s ideas on sex does something closely related to what Solovyov executes, but his texts are less stylistically balanced. The “mystical biologism,” one of Zen’kovsky’s definitions104 of Rozanov’s 102 Konstantin Mochul’sky, Vladimir Solovyov. Zhizn’ i uchenie (Vladimir Solovyov: Life and Teachings), (Paris: YMCA Press, 1951), passim. 103 What Solovyov says about Tiutchev here, he says of himself repeatedly in the 1890s. 104 In Zen’kovsky, I, 458ff.

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worldview, is an oxymoron or a coicidentia oppositorum, but one that can be used to described Solovyov’s “mystical roses” which have a dark root in the “womb” of mother Earth. Rozanov often first 1) “materializes,” biologizes sex to such extremes that it loses all poetic qualities: “Isis is denuded, even scandalously disrobed and defiled.” But the more dramatic “decadent” Rozanov denudes Isis only to then 2) re-envelop her in the most idealistic, spiritual and poetic terms. Having, as it were, brought her so firmly and humorously down in works like Men of the Lunar Light—especially with voluminous quotes from the sexologists and medical psychiatrists, Charcot and Kraft-Ebbing, Rozanov then exalts sex more intensely and even more highly than Solovyov. What has been brought down, the divine, as in Blok’s Neznakomka (both the poem and the drama)105, is at times unrecognizable, but it is still Sophia-the Eternal Feminine. Many of Rozanov’s descriptions and treatments of “plain sex” are constantly equated, and often in the most poetic of terms with the most divine, with God. In this divinization of Eros, or apotheosis of sex (something admittedly already achieved to some degree in the pagan fertility cults he studied so assiduously in his declining years) Rozanov, on the one hand, seems to bog Solovyovian Eros down into family, childbearing and parenthood and to bring about a more powerful metaphysicization of the sexual act-coitus to a degree perhaps extreme enough to be called a distortion of Solovyov’s views. The very stylistic treatment of the issue has resulted in the general notion that while Solovyov is treating love, Rozanov is treating “raw sex.” In what follows we shall examine the degree to which Rozanov’s distortion of Solovyov’s formulas and the terms in which he speaks about these issues is “Old Solovyovian wine in new bottles” and how and to what degree it is doctrinally different. This goes to the question of whether love-sex is more of a unifying force of all being in Solovyov or Rozanov? Does the apparent treatment of everything as a transformation of sex in Rozanov’s more actively dynamic presentation of the world process-world becoming 1) distort Solovyov’s premises or 2) restate them for a more raucous and sexually “liberated” age?

105 Aleksandr Blok, Sochineniia v odnom tome (Moscow: G.KH.G.L., 1946). See “Neznakomka” the poem on p. 46, and the lyric drama on pp. 329–340.

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One thing is certain, just like Solovyov’s Tiutchev, Rozanov does not merely fantasize about sex, he believes in its centrality to all matters human and divine. We are thus re-examining Gollerbakh’s argument as summed up by Losev: Gollerbakh sees the root of all the contradictions and malicious arguments of Rozanov and Solovyov in their peculiar approached to being […] V. Solovyov takes his philosophy of all-unity into practical life, not acknowledging the one-sidedness of some individual principles when taken abstractly and exclusively. Rozanov makes the power of sexuality his central concept and the primary source of spiritual life, thereby making it the fundamental law of Being [appearing to] turn religion into sexual pantheism. Rozanov actually raises sex to the level of [Solovyovian] ‘positive All-Unity.’106

Gollerbakh is quite correct in his vision of the underlying closeness of Solovyov and Rozanov on these issues and Losev, in my opinion, is led into error by the occasional crudeness of Rozanov’s language and concrete references. The possible difference is one of the degree of dynamism of the sexspirit concept. Solovyov sees sublimated sex as a rebinding energy, an active force towards all-Unity. Rozanov asserts the unity as achieved almost a priori, as plot’-dukh (=Being), but it is an active, dynamic unity, a unity-as-process, a spiritual principle in Rozanov that is present but must still be activated and affirmed. Rozanov on Sex and Love. The Move to the Family Love Topic It is customary for those who treat Rozanov partially to focus on his pan-sexualism and his most sensational writings on sex, best exemplified in People of the Lunar Light, which as we indicated, includes translated passages about sexual aberrations in human psychiatric patients from Western sources, as well as anecdotal material from Russian physicians. The impression given is that Rozanov was always obsessed with sexual topics. In fact, he moved to them in the mid-90’s about the time of the appearance of Solovyov’s “The Meaning of Love,” large parts of which Rozanov should have liked, but hardly ever mentions. Rozanov begins to speak of sublimation only shortly after Solovyov and thus

106

Losev, p. 420 quoting Erikh Gollerbakh.

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close to the same time when Freud (1896) was reaching the conclusion that sexuality was a primary factor in everything human. In the mid-1890’s in the article “The Seed and Life” Rozanov put forth his belief in the sacredness of sex, the innocence and holiness of children. In that striking article he once and for all opposes the rampant notion that he was a sexual materialist primarily interested in the physiological, purely sensual side of sex. “To treat sex as an organ or a function is to destroy man.”107 The personal, unique and unrepeatable aspect of each individual’s sex organs and sexual being is made clear there. He even parallels rape to murder, indicating that what is violated in rape is the human person, not just his reproductive organs. He suggests this “killing of the person” in rape is why this sexual offense is often punishable by the death penalty, like any form of murder. From the start Rozanov treats man’s sexual side as not only the most intimate, but also the most personal thing about him. Hence, Zen’kovsky is correct to attack those who class Rozanov as sunken in biology, the animal, and the lowest aspects of man.108 Not only did Rozanov feel one’s sex was personal, he felt the human soul was gendered, that gender contributed to the individual’s character and personality. The article “The Riddle of the Human Soul”109 sets forth the masculine and feminine soul, not as abstract categories, but as determinants of the nature of an individuality. Rozanov did not view men as body and soul, but saw the two inextricably linked. “The flesh is the body of the spirit” and “the soul is the spirit of the body,” he wrote later and this union of self without any hierarchy was consistent in his oeuvre.110 Clearly Solovyov in most of his writings would hierarchize the human self with spirit above soul above flesh, viewing them as a more stratified unity. In Rozanov they are so melded as to be one and the same thing. Both thinkers recur to Biblical passages such as “[…] And God created them, male and female […]” and those that see the union of husband and wife as an amalgam of the doctrine that the Church is the “bride of Christ.” 107 Rozanov, “Semia i zhizn’” (“The Seed and Life”), in Religiia i kul’tura (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Merkusheva, 1899), p. 173. 108 Zen’kovsky, I, pp. 459ff. 109 Rozanov, “Iz zagadok chelovecheskoj prirody” (From the Riddles of Human Nature), in Rozanov V.V. V mire neiasnogo i nereshennogo (In the World of the Unclear and Undecided) (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), pp. 21–39. 110 Rozanov, Uedinennoe (Solitaria) in Ausgewählte Schriften. (München: Neimanis Buchvertrieb, 1970), passim. He uses the expression soul-body (dusha-telo) in Opavshie list’ia (Fallen Leaves), vol. I, p. 136. See footnote 370 below.

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The Russian reading public—shocked by the sensationalism of Rozanov’s open discussion of sexual physiology and his, for them, blasphemous proclamation that it was sacred, even that “God” inhered in sex—was either unaccepting or prurient and titillated, viewing his writings as pornography. Nevertheless, as Alexander Etkind points out, Rozanov wrote about these subjects so poignantly and so poetically, that he was not ultimately dismissed as a crackpot.111 He was taken seriously either as brilliant and in the right, or else as very dangerous to the morals of youth and the Orthodox Church. Many were unprepared, publicly at least, to accept Rozanov’s repeated thesis that sex, gender, and the sexual act were gifts of God and that God created them and deemed them good. More careful readers, even among the clergy and certainly among the artistic intelligentsia, realized that under all this perhaps titillating “fluff,” Rozanov conflates sex and family with the committed, monogamous relationship of two people who love and respect each other and are deeply and intimately bound—people who are first pure “lovers,” and only later parents. Rozanov complains that, unlike Tolstoy, Solovyov never spoke about family. Yet what Rozanov himself means by family, a long-term committed relationship with the same partner, not a short-lived grand passion, is painfully close to what Solovyov calls heterosexual love in “The Meaning of Love.” Rozanov is more optimistic than Solovyov concerning the duration of such a relationship because of his fortunate relationship with Varvara Rudneva. But Solovyov’s long pursuit of Sophia Khitrovo and the poems to her that attest to it probably convinced him also that “being in love” can be a smoldering flame that does not go out quickly. When Rozanov speaks of family love, he does not have in mind enforced relationships such as marriages of convenience or the sadistic infliction of pain, which he experienced in his marriage with the femme fatale, Apollinaria Suslova.112 Full-bodied and full-spirited, a love which involves the whole person, was for both thinkers the core situation in which God via nature reveals the divine force of unity, allowing an exit from

111 Alexander Etkind writes on p. 42: “Sex as intellectual subject matter was introduced to the general Russian public by Vasily Rozanov. Rozanov quoted at length from shocking case studies that he found in popular German psychiatric texts on sexual psychopathology, at the same time deeming it appropriate to expose his own erotic fantasies, which were more than a little racy, but which, due to his literary artistry, astonished rather than aroused his readers.” 112 On Rozanov’s marriage to Suslova, see Fateev, pp. 70–80.

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separateness, isolation and egoism. Rozanov was clearly more positive about the issue of such a love, the shared child. Rozanov’s The Family Question in Russia The two enormous volumes of The Family Question in Russia113 are where Rozanov first turns to issues of sexuality, especially in the second half of volume II. The barriers against divorce, remarriage and the impossibility of making his budding family (three, then four children) legitimate moved him to wage a crusade against the Church and State for all people in his situation, and there were thousands of such people. The main issues of this, generally viewed as righteous, crusade (Berdyaev’s repeated fulsome praise) were: 1) the plight and physical and psychological sufferings of the innocent, “bastard” child, shunned and stigmatized throughout his life for the “sins of his parents”; 2) the loss to the mothers of these children, whom Rozanov counted “among the best young girls in Russia,” which included a) enforced turning the child over to a cold state-run orphanage; b) stigma if she kept the child; c) rejection by her own family; d) the sense that she was a pariah or “sinner”; e) the impossibility of ever marrying later in most cases—lifelong punishment in other words; 3) the suffering of those fathers who wished to recognize their offspring, give them their family name and pass their property or money to them after death. The latter was legally obstructed even if the man had no legitimate heirs; 4) the plight of non-officers in the army, who were not allowed to marry and forced to turn to prostitution or non-Church-sanctioned cohabitation. The book FQR which consists of Rozanov’s articles, articles by priests and others pro-contra and in-between, letters from people who suffered these problems or had friends in these situations. The religious establishment weighed in with all these positions: 1) that legitimizing such infants would undermine Orthodoxy and the Christian family; 2) that the parents were sinners, but the word “illegitimate” should be removed from the birth certificate of such infants—a half-way measure; 3) total agreement with Rozanov that the Church was being not only cruel, but “un-Christian” in its treatment of masses of people.

113 Many of the articles in Rozanov, The Family Question in Russia, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1903) were reprinted from newspapers and journals. (Hereafter FQR)

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Presenting such a variety of nuanced positions, this work is not polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense of an apparent equal weight/authority among the different voices and positions. The articles and positions included that are most opposed to Rozanov and denigrating of him are countered in brilliant polemical footnotes on the same page. The poignant confessions and sufferings of individuals are presented straight and strategically placed. These materials, gathered under the rubric “Materials Towards the Solution of the Problem” are marshaled so as to support Rozanov’s positions, to make him appear the righteous advocate for the innocent sufferers against the heartless Church and State. And Rozanov won the day, the grossest iniquities in the situation were changed in Law and there was a wave of sympathy for people in these predicaments that provoked a widespread negative feeling of the unChristian spirit of the Russian Church itself. This was perhaps the sharpest aspect of this polemic and foreshadowed Rozanov’s future willingness to take on the Church as a flawed and fallible earthly institution for years to come. Moreover, Rozanov pushed ahead with almost prosecutorial advocacy, with several ideas from which he never wavered 1) his non-acceptance of the doctrine of original sin and sense that men were born good and learn evil; 2) the Dostoevskian theme of the innocence of children and the evil of their suffering; and 3) an intolerance for what he, Rozanov, deemed useless, pointless suffering. Rozanov, like Dostoevsky, could accept reasonable, meaningful suffering as a part of life; the suffering caused by gratuitous abuse of power, unnecessary suffering, Rozanov could never accept and it made him question Christ’s goodness. Having won this battle, convincing many that the Church should not visit the “sins” of the fathers on innocent children, Rozanov did not rest there. Having removed the taint of conception by illicit intercourse, he went to work to remove all taint of sin from the sexual act itself. This was a harder project, which he pursued relentlessly during the first Religious-Philosophical Meetings and on the pages of Novoye Vremja and a host of journals. The suffering of illegitimate children was now replaced by the suffering of Christians in Russia due to the stigmatization of sexuality in general, which he deemed one of the greatest gifts of God. This matured into the wholesale attack on Russian Christianity with its devaluation of the world, its asexual Christ and its putative worship of asceticism and death. In the strongest article on this topic “Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the Earth,” he defines family: “When the monk clings to

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the girl and says ‘I love her and I will not give her up, when he clings to the [illegitimate] child [he has sired] and refuses to drown him, family begins and Christianity ends.”114 We indicated that Rozanov views sin as something added to sex by man when he defiles it. “Sins against sex” (it defilement) for him included: 1) the seduction and abandonment of young women; 2) using any person sexually without love. Here he appeals to the Old Testament “if you do not love her, do not touch her.” Touching, lovemaking, called in this text “prileplenie polov,” should occur in a freebodied and full-spiritual-emotional involvement of the whole self with and in the other person. Divorce should be allowed as people are often forced to marry for wrong reasons—and then meet their true love—for him true husband or true wife—belatedly. He supports these views with statistics throughout the book—there are 193,000 young women in the capital, who are destined never to wed (because they have illegitimate children)—and should be allowed to work to support themselves—one third of all children in the capital in 1898 were born illegitimate. Overall, what Rozanov called family, in Jewry or Christendom or in pagan cultures, was always informed with what Solovyov called Love with a capital L in his articles of the 1890s. Rozanov ascribed to both “be fruitful and multiply” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and with equal force. He championed like no one else the position that asceticism was needless suffering for most healthy people.115 At the same time he was unusually tolerant towards homosexuality, deeming it a physical, innate, not willfully acquired state, and objected to it only when it was tinged as in Weininger’s Sex and Character with misogyny or advocated as a way of life to be generally emulated. Rozanov’s “sodomites” were not homosexuals as a group; they were rather a group of suppressors of healthy sex, an anti-sex league. Rozanov’s dear friend and confessor, Father Pavel Florensky, was after all a non-practicing homosexual. Rozanov also believed that some people were born without any libido, sexually neutral. These he called “O-sex.”116

114

Rozanov, “Ob Iisuse Sladchaishem…” in Rozanov, Temnyi lik, p. 254. Rozanov, Liudi lunnogo sveta. see footnote 101 above. 116 This view is put forth in the long section of Liudi lunnogo sveta entitled “Kolebliushchiesia napriazheniia v pole” (Vacillating tensions in sex), pp. 60–206, especially the section entitled “Peredvizhenie pola iz polozhitel’nykh v otritsatel’nye tiagoteniia” (Movement of sex from positive to negative attractions), pp. 151–236. 115

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The great proclaimer of the centrality of sex in Russia, Vasily Rozanov, was like Freud, a loving husband and father, a bourgeois paterfamilias, adored his wife and children and was doted on by them. Strikingly different is Freud’s self-imposed celibacy after the age of 40, about which we shall speak here below.117 Rozanov opposed the seventh chapter of Opravdanie dobra where Solovyov speaks of sexual shame as caused by the sense that in the sexual act one feels used by “the race,” that one is not an end but a means to nature’s ends, the procreation of the race. Rozanov argues that “sexual shame” is not natural, but produced socially and by the Church and that man psychologically enjoys and affirms his animal nature (be it his virility or femininity) and must be taught such “shame.”118 He scoffs at Solovyov’s notion that sexual shame is the means of awakening the ethical nature in man—a means, not an end in itself. In this work Solovyov appears to Rozanov to be depersonalizing sex, but it is clear that when the ethical nature is born in man, he sublimates sex by personal individually directed love. At least once in Opravdanie dobra, as we have indicated, Solovyov utters the Rozanovian view that perhaps the offspring of the androgynous marital union—the third being—is better, overcomes the defects of both parents. But continuation in the flesh is not a major topic in Solovyov, and he tends with Fyodorov119 to view the procreation of more people as “racial,” generic on the whole. More realistic than Fyodorov, Solovyov points out that sexual intercourse is still the only means of procreation at the present stage of man’s physical and spiritual evolution. Hence, we must conclude that Rozanov is no more inclined to view sex only in purely materialistic, physiological terms than is V.S. Solovyov. “Matter” in the positivistic sense exists in Rozanov; “stones” are an example. Yet Rozanov so spiritualizes the biological processes that they lose their one-sided materiality. Rozanov, following Solovyov, quotes “Nature is more than you think it is,” using it in the exact same spirit as Solovyov. Rozanov sees God immanent in all matter, but not

117

Howard Gardner, Creating Minds (New York: Basic Books, 2001), passim. Rozanov, “Semia i zhizn’,” in Religiia i kul’tura, pp. 167ff. On p. 168 he defends Solovyov somewhat against Chicherin’s attack on his interpretation of sex in Opravdanie dobra. Chicherin did not believe that the sexual instinct was a catalyst to ethical feeling in man. See also p. 267. 119 Nikolai Fedorov was in favor of resurrecting the dead generations, the ancestors, and resolutely against generating more human beings, thus his emphasis on brotherhood, and marked hostility to the nuclear family as an egoistic institution, egoisme a deux. 118

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consubstantial with it. He is in it and above, beyond and outside of it at once. One must agree with Zen’kovsky’s assessment that, among Russians up to that time “No one had a deeper sense of man’s ‘sacredness’ than Rozanov” and it hinged upon “the sacred mystery of sex.” Sex is not biological or psychological for Rozanov: in man it is religiously metaphysical, as it is for Solovyov. Rozanov, however, embroiders on the subject far more than his predecessors, but his views, despite his graphic and very carnal descriptions at times, lead back directly to Solovyov’s “Svet iz t’my” (Light from Darkness) which Rozanov refers to in FQR in the same spirit as Solovyov does in Opravdanie dobra—as the “dark root” from which are all things “bright and beautiful,” all roses, necessarily emerge: “Sex is not the body” writes Rozanov in FQR, “it whirls about the body and in and out of it […].” This dynamic dancing-dervish image of human sexuality, is not only poetic, it is profoundly non-materialist. We must therefore concur with Zen’kovsky’s general assessment of Rozanov on these issues: “[…] no one has felt the mystery of sex and its connection with the transcendent sphere (God) more profoundly than V. Rozanov.”120 This leads us to argue that Rozanov developed Solovyov’s insights in “The Meaning of Love” and was profoundly influenced by Solovyov’s views in that article, as well as “Beauty in Nature,” “The Poetry of Tiutchev” and “On Lyric Poetry” (about Fet and Polonsky). The metaphysics of sex, posited by Solovyov on a Platonic basis in the last decade of his life, gets its fullest, most extreme and only somewhat distorted development in V.V. Rozanov. Distortions or Expansions. Rozanov’s Emended Version of Solovyovian Principles Inasmuch as we have shown that both thinkers agree on the sexual basis of all creativity—religious, philosophical, artistic—i.e., agree that spiritual, cultural values are sublimations of sexual instinct—let us look at the relation of Solovyov’s sexual love to Rozanov’s sex. Does the latter become so amorphous as to be too literal a reading and, if so, what is the role of Rozanov’s great admiration of Solovyov’s poetry in this?

120

Zen’kovsky, Rozanov’s Anthropology,” I, 461.

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I believe that Rozanov wished to Christianize, i.e., spiritualize sexuality, re-sexualize religious life and consciousness, but without forfeiting its specifically Christian qualities. Rozanov is like Merezhkovsky who set paganism and Christianity as two conflicting poles between which art, culture, beauty (aesthetics) were tensely pulled to and fro. The quality, the “feel” of Russian Orthodox life and folkways had to permeate Rozanov’s “sex” and a certain erotic earthiness had to characterize ecclesiastical life. His suggestion, viewed as scandalous, that newlyweds should be left alone to spend their wedding night in the church sanctuary is one of the more dramatic examples of such resexualized Orthodox mores. Rozanov’s deified, wide-ranging sex is a new and very poetic (modernist aesthetically) creation: it must be material to be dematerialized, spiritualized. It must be physiological sex in the first place to require sublimation. Whereas Solovyov speaks in theory of sex/matter as capable of penetration by spirit in a love relation/process, as an almost chemical process as the “in which heat becomes light,” this is a process moving from matter to spirit, to a possible future unio oppositorum. Rozanov likewise speaks of such transformations, but in fact he goes further. For Rozanov sex is not only a potential process (a possible act), but something created by God as a bond, a fusion. Sex is divine spirit, the human soul is sexual/gendered. It does not have to undergo much development to become divine; it was created divine and is less tainted by the Fall in Rozanov than perhaps in any Russian religious thinker. The plot’-dukh fusion/bond can be and often is debased, as can befall anything sacred. Such defilement is a sacrilege and sex remains in essence what it perennially is. In my view, one major reason for Rozanov’s preference of Solovyov’s metaphysical poetry over his theorizing and rational constructions is that in that poetry, as we saw in the poem “We came together for a reason (not by chance),” analyzed here in Chapter II, the plot’-dukh bond is less developmental in Solovyov and the “dissolution of the heavenly love in the earthly one,” of which Zara Mints speaks, presents human love more as Rozanov conceives it–as a dynamic, pulsating unity of interacting opposites. The sexual roots of eternal being as eternal love in that poem posit the pre-existent, preordained love bond, proof of the mysterious, sexual power of being. Since the love bond is attested more as Rozanov himself experiences it in the poetry, he asserts that the true or “best” Solovyov, the one Rozanov cares most about, and probably the Solovyov of the mystical “love utopia” (Trubetskoy’s term) is there.

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From Sex to Creativity: Rozanov’s Answer to Solovyov Admittedly, Rozanov’s more physiological and titillating descriptions of sex, the organs, copulation may look like a one-sided empirical emphasis and he does not deny, in fact rejoices in, its physiology, pleasure and results—children, a “creativity” that most of humanity can share and participate in; but creation of a human child, is certainly not the only path of human creativity for this writer. Rozanov who said his texts were written in human semen and who claimed to hold his organ while actually writing was a great lover of everything artistic, poetry, especially verbal creation, music—the fruits of civilization, elite civilization in all periods were dear to Rozanov and gave him almost ecstatic pleasure. Moreover, in accordance with Freudian sublimation, he saw them as other, additional “emanations of the sexual impulse” and in Rozanov this is more explicitly written out than in Freud or his followers. “Before creativity we must be silent,”121 writes Freud in his article on Dostoevsky, and he proceeds to give us a medical diagnosis of the writer. Rozanov who experienced in his own person the “creative” flowing out of semen and of words from himself was more explicit about the “spiritual physiology of the creative act” (as experienced by himself personally). In his 1891 answer to Solovyov’s “Beauty in Nature” he opens by praising Solovyov’s article, and then proceeds to explain his differences with his predecessor. V. Fateev overstates things considerably for our purposes when he says that this article is in a totally Solovyovian mode.122 It is, true, in general agreement on what creativity—the creation of beauty is in nature and in man but the points in which it differs are very central to our subject—how beauty comes about or is created. Both, in their teleological evolutionary treatment of spirituality in nature and man, use Darwin, not only The Origin of Species, but also his book on sexual selectivity The Descent of Men and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in England in 1871.123 Solovyov uses this as a guide for analysis in his arguments. The more “sexually-oriented” and supposedly physiological Rozanov rejects it. The move from the order of nature to the order of history, which implies

121

Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide,” p. 175. Fateev, pp. 163ff. 123 Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (London: J. Murray, 1869), and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: J. Murray, 1871). 122

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the human order (Sartre: “there is no human nature, there is human history”) is equally strong in Solovyov and Rozanov. Yet, Rozanov offers three definitions of beauty: the first one is identical to Solovyov’s in “Beauty and Nature” and closely based on Konstantin Leont’ev’s aesthetic conception from “The Triune Process of Development,” a doctrine heavily influenced by Leont’ev’s own medical training.124 Solovyov uses this definition and Rozanov in the early article. “The Part and the Whole”125 says that the parts of All-being experience or feel their partialness as a lack and strive to become one with the whole. This sense of a dispersion or lost wholeness and the thrust of the whole article are related to this notion of beauty as a firm harmonization of parts. Let us consider the three definitions of beauty that occur in Rozanov’s oeuvre: Beauty: Type I. For Leont’ev beauty is the greatest variety of autonomous free parts in the greatest unity. By the logic of his thought, the greater the complexity of the construction, the more parts are unified, the greater the beauty it produces, or which emanates from it. We find a similar concept of Beauty in Solovyov’s 1890 article. There he concludes in Leont’evian fashion: “beauty is the complete freedom of the parts in the perfect unity of the whole.”126 Beauty: Type II. The second type of beauty is what we termed in Chapter II, “A relationship,” a mutual penetration of one thing in another: “The transformation of matter through the incarnation in it of the supernatural principle” (this could be called the incarnation of the idea, The Platonic idea). This is not the interpenetration of equally valorized elements, but the penetration of the ideal, higher elements into the lower, more material ones: “Beauty is not the expression of just an idea,” but only of ideal content127 (example, light rays on the water). Given the requirement of ideal, good content for all creation Solovyovian aesthetics is ethics. Here we see the juncture of the human sexual impulse, ethical behavior and artistic creation. The creative beauty of the sex act comes from uni-directional love of the lover, 124 Konstantin Leont’ev, “The Triune Process of Development” in Against the Current. Selections from the Novels, Essays and Letters of Konstantin Leontiev. ed. George Ivask (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969), pp. 147–169. 125 Rozanov, “Chast’ i tseloe” (The Part and the Whole), in Priroda i istoriia, pp. 106–115. 126 Solovyov, “Krasota v prirode,” VI, p. 39. 127 Leont’ev, Pis’ma k Vasiliiu Rozanovu (Berlin: Gutnov, 1922).

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compounded and mutually supported and increased by the responding love of the other lover. Both are lovers and both are beloved. The spiritual principle, individualized love, penetrates the material body of the each partner, just as the light ray penetrates water in natural beauty. To the lover, the beloved’s body is not just plot’ but odukhotvorennaia plot’ (spiritualized flesh), permeated by spirit, just as the body Jesus Christ entered was by the Incarnation made perfectly spiritual; the idealizing, elevating and beautifying force of one body upon another, one spirit upon another. The force from the lover infiltrates the other person, or, in non-sexual creativity it pours its spirit into a piece of stone, wood, into everyday human speech or any other material or medium, transforming and elevating it. Beauty: Type III is a concept of Rozanov’s own devising. We do not diminish the dynamism of Leont’ev’s and Solovyov’s creative concept in that a good deal of power is needed to unify a very disparate, complex creative product. Nor do we when we say that Rozanov, who also used the concepts of beauty here designated as Types I and II, has a more dynamic concept of beauty based on tension and intensity, the increase and ebbing of vital forces. In its depiction it diverges significantly from the other two. Beauty: Type III is a cyclical concept. Rozanov says that beauty in nature, as well as in human culture—understood, though not strictly emphasized here—appears “there where vital energy is heightened.” The beautiful in nature is not a means to anything and in its creation there is neither arbitrariness nor goal-directedness. Beauty is then a special form into which energy is transformed or transfigured at moments of the intensity and power of vital forces: “In the existence of each individual and in the life of the entire organic world we observe, however, how the heightening and lowering of vital energy is accompanied by the burgeoning and feeling of external beauty, no matter how that beauty may be expressed—in color, sounds, words, or the lines and contours of the visual arts.” Rozanov then goes on to describe the creative process, in which vital energy accumulates to a culmination point and then sharply wanes. The vital energy is greater in quantity and concentration the more complex the organism, man being, obviously, the most complex being—the greatest number of individual parts or functions the greater the beauty that can be produced. For Rozanov in Type III the greatest beauty occurs just prior to the waning, just prior to the release of life energy, as in sexual intercourse or the delivery of a child. Speaking here of artistic and cultural creation,

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Rozanov writes: “The realization of a conception (here in the figurative sense) is still dimly inactive (pre-arousal, early arousal) when the object attracting one is distant. It is more tense (aroused) at those moments, when it is being realized and turns into a passion, an impulse, when the object of possession or attainment (the aesthetic product or the new discovery in science) is right before the eyes as a thing being executed, almost ready.”128 “This description of the creative process is but a lightly veiled analogue of the sexual act itself. In it there occurs an elevation of organic ‘vital’ energy and with it coincides a resultant manifestation of beauty in nature […] The beauty of form, flower and sound increases towards the moment of coupling, continues all during it and immediately wanes after the release (of a part of one’s individual flesh-spirit, not only biology semen) into the product.”129 Rozanov believed that in sex, children, the product, receive not only the biological traits of the parents, but the combined “spiritual” ones, character, disposition, talents, proclivities, a host of non-material “gifts” from both parents and by the grace of God, who is ever-present in the process. Since in the specific discussion quoted above he was not speaking of sex and childbirth, but of the creative act in music, or intellectual concepts, he feels the same “spiritual,” psychic and highly individual aspects of the creative self pour into the product, shaping its form-content. Rozanov, like the Russian Formalists, did not differentiate form from content. As in Solovyov—form transfiguring the material—they were as unified as body and spirit. In verbal art the form, actual words and intonations of an utterance were more determining—in fact all-determining—over the denotative, semantic message. Berdyaev notes the seductiveness of Rozanov’s verbal art. Zen’kovsky, Berdyaev, D.S. Mirsky and many other critics consider Rozanov the most talented writer among Russian philosophers. Rozanov sensed his tremendous, copious literary talent as part and parcel of his personal vitality, which for him was ultimately sexual and divine. He remarked upon the need for self-expression, for expressing words that flowed so incessantly and copiously in him, numerous times in his trilogy, “Ia dolzhen zhit’ literaturno. Ne mogu zhit’ bez slov, rasstat’sia s slovom” (I must live literarily, in Literature. I cannot be parted from words).130 His frequent metaphor of eating and swallowing the words of others (Pushkin) contributes to the physiolog-

128 129 130

Rozanov, “Krasota v prirode i ee smysl,” pp. 49ff. Ibid., p. 59. Rozanov, Opavshie list’ia. Korob vtoroi, p. 220.

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ical sense of the creative act that was akin, for him, to the sexual act, paralleled to it and an extension, as everything was for Rozanov, of his many-faceted, in fact all-comprehending, notion of sex (pol). Because Rozanov is the only Russian religious thinker to give sex the same prominence as Sigmund Freud did, we shall compare and contrast Rozanov’s metaphysical views with the decidedly non-metaphysical pan-sexuaism of his more famous Viennese contemporary. As we have seen above, both Solovyov and Rozanov quite independently of Freud, and in the same decade, elaborated a sublimation of sexuality hypothesis of their own. Yet because Rozanov carries Solovyovian views on this to such elaborate extremes that virtually everything is sex-related in his thought, it is Rozanov not Solovyov (dies 1900) who is often called “the Russian Freud.” Siniavsky in book Rozanov’s Opavshie list’ia outlines the differences between Freud and Rozanov: the one is an atheist and positivist and the other mystical and metaphysical, a sui generis believer. This is perfectly correct.131 Siniavsky does not focus on our issue of sublimation, as his aim is an overall treatment of Rozanov. Perhaps for this reason, Siniavsky does not feel the need to cover the importance of the unconscious, the Id and the repression of sexual material, as in the case of the etiology of hysteria in Freud (1896). Rozanov recognizes, like Dostoevsky and Freud, the enormous part of the psyche that is irrational, actions inexplicable in cause-effect, or logical terms, where the divine mystery resides and/or abides. Rozanov several times finds himself speaking words that are 131 Andrei Siniavsky, “Opavshie list’ia” V.V. Rozanova (Paris: Sintaksis, 1982), pp. 17–47. There is no developed notion of the unconscious of the Freudian type. Zen’kovsky formulates Rozanov’s sense of irrational thought better than anyone, quoting Rozanov’s comment: “ ‘Reality is higher than the reasonableness/rationality of truth’ and he goes on to interpret this reality theistically … Just as there is a conceived world [by reason— ALC] which corresponds to the conceiving reason … so there is an intuited deity answering to religious intuition.” This passage demonstrates Rozanov’s sense of parallel “thought processes,” rational consciousness, disciplined ones and uncontrollable ones, ungraspable by reason, which could be likened to Freud’s unconscious or preconscious. Many of Rozanov’s observations about himself in his trilogy demonstrate his strong awareness of these unconscious processes in himself. He points out how he uttered words that he did not plan to say; that he would sit down planning to write one thing and actually write something quite different. He is the constant listener to his own “wild thoughts,” so much that he defines true concentration as being absent-minded and, as it were, attuned to the unexpected in one’s own thought processes and imagination. Rozanov’s observations of his own psychic life attest to a heightened awareness of unconscious mental processes/thought. His many voices, which give the impression at times of a dissociated personality, are treated in Anna Lisa Crone, Rozanov and the End of Literature (Würzburg, JAL Verlag, 1978).

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not what he consciously “wanted to say,” words that seem to erupt from some deep recesses of his being, de profundis, which is to say, from something akin to the unconscious. Semen Frank in his strongly anti-Freudian “Psychoanalysis as a Worldview,”132 points out that the prominence of the unconscious in Freud is a reassertion of the Romantic notion of man as an irrational being, but he does not stress the qualitative difference in it and the Freudian, Jungian hypothesis about the unconscious and its determining role in our lives. Still, there is a qualitative leap, a different character of presentation of the irrational in man discovered by Romanticism and the Freudian and Jungian developed “scientific” notion of the unconscious. Rozanov, while perfectly aware of the unconscious as the irrational, mysterious part of sex, perhaps more than most writers of his day, still he is somewhere post-Dostoevsky and pre-Freud. He appeals to the conscious part of his reader, trying to make that reader aware of what sex is. Sex, the ineffable, secret aspects of it (repressed or unfaced in social life) is the unconscious, the irrational spirit-self that one feels, intuits, but cannot express. This is Rozanov’s equivalent of the unconscious, or the Id. The cardinal difference between Rozanov and Freud is in the fact that for Freud the Id is the source of negative, destructive impulses, and in Rozanov, it is the source of good, the irrational God.133 This cardinal difference over the inexplicable is what makes Rozanov an antiFreud. Rozanov and Freudian Sublimation As we have seen, Rozanov totally subscribes to the idea that creativity is redirection of the sexual impulse to other activity, yet he is, as we saw above, much more descriptive of the creative act than Freud, writing in his case about it as an activity of arousal and release of an erotic sort.

132 Semen Frank, “Freidianstvo kak mirovozzrenie” (Freudianism as a Worldview), in Put’, 1, 1925, 22–46. 133 Siniavsky writes on p. 33: “Rozanov gave sex the role of our highest, our most mystical guiding force and he strove to place God above sex, to give sex a religious foundation. In this he is Freud’s opposite—his antipode. As is well known, Freud reduced the higher and lower psyche of man to the sex organs, transplanted already to the brain and deeper, into tings beyond our awareness and the movements of our unconscious” (translation mine—ALC).

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The most significant difference from Freud in Solovyov’s and Rozanov’s concept of sublimation is that Freud, like Nietzsche, believed that this world and the material-psychic man was all that existed—that any otherworldly transcendence was unfounded idealism, an illusion. In Nietzsche most emphatically these religious illusions are shown to deprive man of the fullness of his earthly life and potential. Focused on the earthly man, Freud as a scientist felt each individual’s libido, or vital energy, was limited (though not quantifiable). Man had only so much sexual energy; therefore to direct it into artistic or intellectual creativity necessarily implied the suppression of actual sexual activity. Rozanov and Solovyov, who acknowledge a God, creator of all things, and associate the sexual drive and erotic love and aesthetic activity with “co-creation with God,” with the divine aspect of man, both see the outpouring of energy in loving sex or in artistic creativity as a religious force towards the reunification of all being. In other words, these religious thinkers add an otherworldly dimension to sublimation, which widens significantly the horizons of human creativity and increases its potential exponentially. Since all creation is human-and-divine and “in God all things are possible,” the mystical element of spirit is much more transformatory of sexual energy, even transfigures it, and is not subject to the physiological economics of a limited energy as Freud’s was. Direct sex for Freud had to be suppressed if it were to be used for noninstinctual civilizing purposes, “finer and higher” things. Jung, who largely accepted Freud’s view before their rift in 1913,134 likewise sees things in terms of economics. For him, the relation between the content of ego and what remains in the unconscious is a closed system that can be balanced or unbalanced. This tendency to analogize the spiritual to the physical affected all our thinkers, as they lived in a scientific and technological age. Its occurrence in Jung and Freud, medical doctors who strove to be scientific, is even more understandable than it is in Solovyov and Rozanov. They were attempting to establish psychiatry and depth psychology as positivist science. Freud began his career as a physiologist of the brain. Rozanov’s and Solovyov’s view of everexpanding reserves for creation and love, however, implied synergies and increases in energy that medical science had no basic to predict and no language to explain.

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Jung, “Differences with Freud,” in Modern Man, pp. 115–124.

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Unlike Tolstoy, Rozanov, as indicated, was always and ever a lover of high culture and the fruits of enlightenment/civilization were a source of pleasure and joy for him. Despite his sexual emphasis he was quite reconciled to the “discontents” Freud sees as necessary to civilization. Rozanov would never have written Civilization and its Discontents as in the Russian Orthodox, less individualist religious idea; he was much more of a community-oriented person than the average Western intellectual. The Russian sobornost’ concept of a collective ecclesiastical community implies, indeed demands, the frustration or relinquishment of certain egoistic desires and this was deeply ingrained in the psychology of the neo-Slavophile Rozanov. He in fact believed that the discontents of the individual (razobshchennost’) were greater in the more individualist European nations. He would have written and constantly did write on the theme “Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy and its Pointless Suffering” because he was obsessed with what seemed to him the unreasonable suffering Russian religion caused. He considers both the satisfaction of desire and its transformation into other pleasures—the reading of Gogol’ or of Russian poetry—to be the joys of the earth and he often lines them up in a series as equivalent fruits of the world. Though he admits that some laughter may have an evil tendency—be “from the Devil”—in Gogol’s oeuvre and in his own, he counters that man suffers so much, “gets so tired,” that he needs more naughty pleasures now and then.135 The democratic Rozanov understands that not everyone can enjoy the rarified pleasures of the elite and places the pleasures that all men are heir to very high (as a result of this he is accused of being overly “petty bourgeois”). Rozanov felt that the ascetic model of the Christ-like life advocated in Russian Orthodoxy was too difficult and downright unhealthy for the majority of human beings. He could accept and understand that God endowed some individuals for the celibate life (his “zero sex”) and that the libido of individuals differed. For Rozanov sex and sexuality were a manifestation of health and a source of continuing health. He had less interest in sexual pathology than Freud. Because of the divine aspect of sex it is a semi-divine energy and therefore it brims over in the creative person. A loving wife, as he mentions in some descriptions of contemporary creative people, is a catalyst to greater creative energy. Inasmuch as 135 Rozanov, “Sviatost’ i genii v istoricheskom tvorchestve” in N.A. Berdyaev: pro et contra, in two books, Book 1 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo Gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1994), pp. 270–275.

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artistic creation is an act of love, transformed sex, a happy sexual relationship based on mutual love is more likely to increase one’s creativity. One need not forego sex in order to redirect a limited amount of sexual energy. All forms of creativity (including love and procreation) were signs of health and sources of joy and jubilance in Rozanov and he exults in them and expresses this in his exalted attitude toward them all. He wants his writings to free his readers’ positive energies and reproduce this same love of life in them. Rozanov would have instinctively understood Roland Barthes’ Le plaisir du texte. Readers did derive great enjoyment from Rozanov’s writing styles and this includes a very broad spectrum of the Russian public, ranging far beyond the aristocrats and the intelligentsia. His inclusion of letters from his readers, including the long series from a certain Kostia Kudrjavtsev, demonstrate this inclusionary and sincerely communicative aspect of Rozanov the writer, as does his love of the argot of thieves. Many readers spoke of his writing in sexual terms as a seduction and a temptation, a naughty transgressive enjoyment. But few denied themselves the private pleasure of reading Rozanov. Yet this does not make of Rozanov a hedonist or a non-tragic individual. There is a deep core of sadness, anguish, and tragedy in Rozanov’s creative activity. The transformation of erotic energy in Rozanov is aimed as high as possible and though he boasted “Na mne i grjaz’ khorosha” (On me even dirt is beautiful) he did not always believe in his own creations and kept revisiting the same subjects and issues trying to “get it right,” to make the expression and the idea adequate to his exalted, emotionally held sense of things. This pathos of impatience with and lack of faith in his own creations is what Solovyov had sensed in Lermontov and Baratynsky. Rozanov was well aware of Otto Weininger’s famous book and mentions Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis and mentions Charcot several times. He describes Weininger as a misogynist, and a lover of men, quite pertinent for Weininger’s chapters on feminine sexuality. Berdyaev took Weininger’s book more seriously, both in his quite positive review of 1904136 and in his incorporation of much of Weininger into his concept of the female principle in the human Androgyne. As indicated above, to the modern reader Berdyaev sounds vastly more old-fashioned, i.e., 136 Berdyaev, “Po povodu odnoi zamechatel’noi knigi” (Concerning a Remarkable Book), in Nikolai Berdyaev, Eros i lichnost’. Filosofiia pola i liubvi (Eros and Personality. The Philosophy of Sex and Love), Moscow: “Prometei,” 1989, pp. 52–59.

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“male chauvinist” than Rozanov. Berdyaev is more enamored of a dominating, “activist” rational masculinity, man’s form-giving traits as opposed to the irrational, formless feminine element. This presentation of the feminine “person” is especially clear in “On the Eternally Womanish” in Russian culture, the feminine passivity Berdyaev attributes to Rozanov, V. Ivanov, V. Ern and others.137 This smacks, as do many of Berdyaev’s discussions of empirical womanhood, of mild misogyny. Weininger as an unhappy shame-filled homosexual and selfhating Jew did nevertheless associate homosexuality—for him sexual abnormalcy with heightened creativity—as if the latter were compensation for a physiological or other lack. Given Freud’s assessment of Dostoevsky as a person who sublimated very severe neuroses into great works of art on eternal themes, Freud is predictably closer to Adler (his short-term disciple) with his theories of artists and others compensating for organ deficiencies or other “sexual” difficulties; it smacks of Adler’s most popular concept that has become a household word, “the inferiority complex.” Rozanov, too, had spoken of an “insufficiency” (nedostatochnost’) in the procreating parents that is overcome in the newborn infant. Moreover, Rozanov’s own obsessive revisiting his own subjects time and again stemmed in part from his dissatisfaction or inferiority feeling vis-à-vis the literary embodiment in his own works, as we indicated above. Rozanov, who concedes the greatness of other writers with alacrity and openhearted generosity, and usually can freely identify and acknowledge his mentors and formative influences, seems mostly to be in competition with his own medium (words) that is to say, with himself. His sensitivity to the “genius” of V.S. Solovyov may also have some reference to himself as a man “out of time” or rather ahead of his time. Rozanov, intermittently at least, felt himself sufficiently original, different and powerful as a thinker and writer to withstand the opprobrium of the contemporary Leftist intelligentsia and seemed even to thrive upon it. We forget how shocking Rozanov’s writings were in 1910–12 until we read contemporary apologists for Rozanov such as Zakrzhevsky and Griftsov.138 After Freud, his school and the tumulus of psychiatric 137 Berdyaev, “O vechno-bab’em v russkoi dushe” (On the Eternally Womanish in the Russian Soul), in Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii. 3 vols. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1989), III, 349–362. 138 Aleksandr Zakrzhevsky, Karamazovshchina. Psikhologicheskie paralleli (Karamazovism. Psychological Parallels), (Kiev: Iskusstvo, 1912), and Boris Griftsov, Tri myslitelia (Three Thinkers): V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovsky, L. Shestov (Moscow: Izdanie V.M. Sablina, 1911).

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and psychoanalytic literature in the 20th century it is hard to sense how “out of step” with the sexual mores and proprieties of the times Rozanov’s frank and sometimes detailed physiological treatments of sex were. Yet Rozanov’s sense of insufficiency concerned his own writings and the level of religious consciousness of the Russian of his day (including his own religious doubts).This inferiority complex in Rozanov is counterbalanced by frequent fits of megalomania or healthy belief in his adequacy to his mission. He is never paralyzed by self-doubt and his self-revelatory (and revelatory of the contemporary post-Christian Russian man) literary masterpieces, his baring of himself and contemporary man and his crisis – under the name of V.V. Rozanov– was an act of self-confidence, self-assertion and health which both embarrassed and impressed his contemporaries and later writers like D.H. Lawrence,139 another inquirer into the mysteries of human sexuality and personhood. Of course, Rozanov’s religious convictions (his sense of “God with him”) played an inspirational role in his prodigious productivity. His faith in a loving Father and his search for the true nature of the sonChrist as well as his conviction that the things of the world were good and full of seeds of higher being (inye miry) is palpable in much of his writings. Thus, Rozanov’s interest in sexual abnormality was minor. His imaginatively voyeuristic enjoyment of the varieties of sexual experience and their detailed description (most represented in Ljudi lunnogo sveta) has become a fashionable topic in Rozanov studies, but even in his writings about such topics there is both tolerance and a strong undercurrent of interest not in sexual sickness but in sexual health and its relation to human creative life and creativity in general. Sexual abnormalities and no sex-ascetic sublimation he saw as, for most people, non-creative “dead ends.” He saw creativity as a product of love and health. Love, as associated with the ability to see the ideal in a person and in general in the world of nature (the artist as seer) was thoroughly imbued with Solovyov’s love, as the ability to see the ideal (God) in the person of the beloved. His religion was always aesthetically colored. His love and admiration for Jesus are expressed in aesthetic terms of the

139 D.H. Lawrence, “On Dostoevsky and Rozanov,” in Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction, ed. Donald Davie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 95–103.

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beauty of Christ’s gentle face and the sublime horror of his “dark face.” Aesthetic values are religious in Rozanov and they are his very highest priorities. As is quite clear from the general stance and the particulars of Ljudi lunnogo sveta Rozanov sees little health or beauty in the “mortification of the flesh” that occurs in Russian monasteries. These practices are unhealthy to Rozanov and at times the seamier sides of enforced celibacy are presented as abhorrent. Only in rarer cases does sexual abnormality lead to an exalted life or to great monastic writers. When it does Rozanov is the first to praise it, for example: his adoration of the works of John Damascene and many of the Fathers of the Eastern Church, the writings of Martin Luther and Saint Francis of Assisi or the painter Fra Angelico. Rozanov covers many bases in his discussion of sex in that work and the Russian scholars (Igor’ Kon and Alexander Etkind) have treated these insights. Evgeny Bershtejn has written most interestingly about Rozanov’s treatment of homosexuality140 Rozanov was not at all charmed by the image of the suffering monk—which for him represented a “death before actual death,” nor did the image of the suffering artist hold much interest for him. The productive deployment of vital energy, physiological or psychic-creative has little in Rozanov to do with sexual repression. What Rozanov observed in the monasteries and in Russian society were manifestations of human suffering at the hands of Christian civilization. This suffering was unnecessary and left most human beings creatively “barren.” To conclude, Rozanov in the main saw sexual energy (and loving sex) as 1) healthy and 2) always religiously involved and colored. Art for him by its very nature is religious. Philosophical or literary activity are joyful “transformations of sex,” implying an expanding surplus of God-given vital energy. When Berdyaev says Rozanov wrote in blood and semen, that his writing was physiological, he in his squeamishness about sex means to debunk Rozanov. Rozanov would and did welcome those descriptions as Berdyaev’s recognition that Rozanov really succeeded in pouring himself—his soul, blood and guts—which for him were one—into his artistic word.

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Evgeny Bershtein, “Tragediia pola: dve zametki o russkom veiningerianstve” (The Tragedy of Sex: Two Notes on Russian Weiningerianism), NLO, 65, 2004.

PART TWO

THE TWO MEANINGS OF CREATIVITY: PERSONALITYCONSTRUCTION AND THE PRODUCTION OF SUBLIME WORKS

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO The psychoanalysts and religious thinkers in this study use the word “creativity” in two distinct, but not unrelated, meanings. The first, personality-construction, signifies the willful strengthening or perfecting of the individual’s own personality, a use that can be an ethical—a moral imperative, or therapeutic one, in the sense of effecting a mental or spiritual “cure.” The second meaning is the more common usage, in which creativity denotes the activity of producing sublime works of art or other significant contributions to civilization. When this second meaning is intended, there is often a qualifying adjective, such as “artistic,” “intellectual,” “scholarly,” denoting the area or field to which the created products belong. Since both the psychoanalysts and religious thinkers frequently use the term in both meanings without clarification, a brief overview of how each of them uses the notions of “creativity,” creative acts, etc. is in order. Freud. Creativity is a fairly narrow term in Freud. He very rarely refers to sublimation and creativity in the first sense, of an analyst-guided reforming of personality in which the analysand actively participates. He usually refers to self-improvement in therapy as “work” rather than creativity. Sublimation, which is a much broader term in his oeuvre, is the elevation or transmutation of a basic biological instinct or drive. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud speaks of Romantic love for one individual as a sublimation of the sexual instinct, a sublimation of which the average person is capable. In general the sublimation of our instinctual drives is part of the socialization of every human being. Sublimation is often associated with the created products of the activity, as seen in his studies of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Dostoevsky. When mentioned in connection with creativity, sublimation refers to a tiny elite of geniuses and highly talented and exceptional individuals, who can sublimate/transmute their sexual energy into products—scientific discoveries or theories, inventions, masterpieces of art, music or literature, or philosophical ideas that move civilization forward and benefit all mankind. Freud treats creative geniuses as being born with gifts and capacities that most

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men lack. There is not a major focus on the highly creative in Freud’s very voluminous oeuvre. Hidden Influence of our Russian Thinkers on Freud: Merezhkovsky Although creativity studies was far from Freud’s major interest, it is in this area of his oeuvre that a largely hidden influence of the Russians treated in this book, V.S. Solovyov and V.V. Rozanov did occur. Dmitry S. Merezhkovsky, whom we did not treat in great detail, because his contribution to our subject was not as great as that of Solovyov and Rozanov, did exert a major influence on Freud, and one which Freud openly acknowledged. Although this has been mentioned in the margins by a few scholars, the significant treatment of this issue came only in 1993, with the appearance of James L. Rice’s book Freud’s Russia.141 Rice is the first scholar to treat Dostoevsky’s manifold influence on Freud in the necessary depth as well as the influence of Merezhkovsky. The latter authored numerous works of Dostoevsky scholarship that were available in German and cataloged in Freud’s personal library. These include Merezhkovsky’s monumental study Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and his introductions to four volumes of the 1910 German language edition of Dostoevsky. Especially important for Freud was Merezhkovsky’s introduction to The Brothers Karamazov which Freud considered the greatest novel in all world literature. Rice also treats the direct influence of Merezhkovsky’s novel The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (Russian edition 1902, German edition 1903) on Freud’s treatment of sublimation in his own book on Leonardo’s creativity. In the early 1900’s when Merezhkovsky was writing this novel, his religious worldview was permeated with Solovyovian influence, and in matters connected with sublimation he was deeply under the influence of Rozanov’s pan-sexualism. It is possible that Freud heard the names Solovyov and Rozanov from his several Russian patients and colleagues, his contact with their ideas probably came only through the conduit of Merezhkovsky’s works. This Russian thinker was a highly acclaimed critic of Russian literature and culture in Germany and all Europe in Freud’s lifetime.

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In his studies of Leonardo and Dostoevsky Freud diagnosed the neuroses out of which these geniuses created works of surpassing greatness, advancing no clear theory as to how they did it. He merely demonstrates, especially in the case of Dostoevsky, whom he considered after Sophocles and Shakespeare the world’s greatest writer, that this genius had neuroses that would totally cripple most men, and yet managed to turn them into great and lasting creative works. Analyzing Dostoevsky’s complexes decades after the author’s death and on insufficient materials, Freud did not think of their cure, but related them to the prominence of parricide in Dostoevsky’s life and oeuvre, a theme particularly central for psychoanalysis. Jung. Creativity in the work of Jung has much more reference to the clinical therapeutic process, with helping the patient overcome his neuroses and become/realize his fullest and best self. The doctor helps the patient learn to penetrate his personal and collective unconscious where the self-the totality of the individual psyche resides. Jungian therapy means integrating one’s unconscious being into his conscious ego and this process of self-discovery and selfharmonization is seen by Jung as creative work. Deep access to one’s personal unconscious and the collective unconscious (archaic mind and archetypes) which are common to all men, is the first task of ongoing individuation,142 the path to psychic health and balance that are central to Jung’s theory. This coincides with the first meaning of creativity above. Creativity in the second sense of the production of works of cultural significance is, of course, also found in Jung. Such cultural creativity for Jung, however, is not “personal” or necessarily reflective of a healthy, balanced psyche.143 Many creative geniuses are, like Dostoevsky and Leonardo, unbalanced and tragically unhappy figures. The creative genius for Jung is a man who is maximally able to give form to the images of the collective unconscious, and create works that are meaningful to all men.144 Jung speaks much more of the creative self-transcendence in the therapeutic process of “individuation” (self-realization), the first meaning of creativity here, than he does of the creativity of rare geniuses.

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Rank. Otto Rank, who studied the exceptional man-creative genius and the highly talented more than the other two psychoanalysts in this book, uses creativity in both senses and relates the first kind—personality-formation or restructuring to the second. In Rank’s work “creativity” in the second sense of the production of sublime works is the result of a creative willful re-organization of one’s psyche/personality. The genius and exceptional creative man willfully “makes himself ” and has little need of therapy.145 In his creative structuring of his unique personality, the genius manages to control or sequester his sexual and other drives, (his impulse-ego) and the neurotic traumata of his personal life so that they can be used in the creation of sublime works. Those genius-like creations that express his highly individual inner world, a world that is alternative to the given world of nature and society and can change it. When he expresses his inner world out onto reality in his oeuvre, the genius aims to immortalize himself by changing or making an indelible impression upon the outer world. Thus Rank links the two meanings of creativity intimately: the strong-willed genius creates his personality by structuring it in a certain way and, having done so, he expresses it in palpable or sensible forms-creative products in the generally accepted sense. The religious thinkers use “creativity” in the sense of character-/or personality-formation as an ethical category, rather than a clinical one. Solovyov. Solovyov clearly sees man’s ethical sense calling him to accentuate his spiritual side over his carnal side, along Christian lines—to perfect himself and present gifts to the world that emanate from that more perfect self. As we saw above, shame about the non-individualized, indiscriminate practice of sex apart from idealizing love, awakens ethical feeling in man and is the catalyst to his self-improvement, his raising himself above nature (super Naturam). Broad-based creativity, in the second sense of making something in Solovyov follows Plato’s “Symposium” where the philosopher speaks of the creativity of the body (procreation) and of the soul (sublime products). Rozanov. Rozanov, who, as we saw, treats man’s s sex and spirit-soul as a total fusion, does not use creativity in the first sense, primarily as a re-structuring of one’s God-given individual personality. Creativity for him, as for Freud, is the expression and affirmation of the unique

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self God created. That creativity is self-expression in literary or artistic form and treated as an almost physiological-spiritual function. Rozanov says “My tears fall literarily,”146 and that he wrote his works in human semen, forging a parallel between human procreation and artistic creation. Of course, Rozanov stresses that his personality and what he creates can and should be improved, and, just as in Solovyov, this can happen when he overcomes egoism via genuine love and is subject to the improving influence of a beloved other147 (see Chapter V here below). Berdyaev. Berdyaev, while he is aware of the Solovyovian notion that self-perfection requires exit from the vicious circle of egoism and bonding in love with a full-valued other, has the least faith in the power of human love to accomplish this. For him human heterosexual love is too “fallen” to be the approximation of divine love that the other three Russians experience it as. He, therefore, feels called upon to purify and perfect himself as an ethical imperative, but he strives to better himself on his own by acts of will that strengthen his personality. He subdues his passions in this process—this is for him a creative act. He also uses the term creativity in the second, more usual, sense of acts in and upon the world, or which lead one “out of the conditions of the world.” Creativity in Berdyaev is the process which produces his religious philosophy, his concepts and ideas that he expresses from his rather enclosed, solipsistic and independent selfhood, products that “add new creation/being to the world that has never existed before.” Berdyaev, “the philosopher of creativity,” uses the term constantly and in both meanings outlined above. Vysheslavtsev. Being an avid follower of Jung, and later a self-professed religious Jungian, Vysheslavtsev has a strong ethical focus on the deepening, balancing and harmonizing of the self, which is for him the Christianizing of the personality. Like Solovyov and Rozanov, he sees love for a full-valued other as a necessary component of this. Though he speaks a great deal of creating products in varied fields as “creativity” (tvorchestvo), towards the end of his life self-creation via love appears more important to Vysheslavtsev, just as it is to Jung. Creation of cultural products in Vysheslavtsev’s hierarchized scheme of man can be done at the second highest level of existence. The “hidden man

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of the heart,” the most transcendent spiritual man is a creature who emanates purified love. His possible creative products, which are presumably the most sublime creations, of which man is capable, are not emphasized.

CHAPTER FOUR

SUBLIMATION IN THE ATHEIST SIGMUND FREUD: RELIGION AND SUBLIMATION IN CARL G. JUNG AND OTTO RANK Freud’s two main additions to the theory of man—the primacy of the unconscious and the centrality of sexuality, were set forth by him early in his career. His masterwork The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), with its all-important early section “The Project,”148 aimed to put the theory of the unconscious on a scientific footing once and for all, or at the very least, on a firmer scientific footing than anyone had placed it hitherto. Ernest Jones in the first volume of his biography of Freud emphasizes that medical psychology had been groping towards the theory of the unconscious—the idea “that all one’s mental capacities could be in full usage without consciousness being called up” (words of British psychologist Sir Samuel Wilkes)—for at least two decades before Freud’s epoch-making book appeared.149 Though Freud cites a host of psychologists who wrote on the unconscious, Berlin psychologist Theodor Lipps was one of his most important predecessors. As early as 1883 Lipps had written the following: “We not only assert the existence of unconscious mental processes alongside the conscious ones. We further postulate that the unconscious processes are the basis of the conscious ones. [italics mine—ALC] In the proper conditions unconscious processes rise to consciousness and then return to the unconscious.”150 Freud underlined this passage in his copy of Lipps’ article which is in his personal library and this is what Freud went on to prove scientifically in his 600+-page work. There he posits a whole mechanistic topography of the human mind—a theory of mind in which there are psychic energies and forces that govern the mental/psychic system in a way analogous to the theory of the conservation of matter in the physical universe. The psychic apparatus is characterized by psychic energies

148 For a detailed discussion of Freud’s “The Project” see “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in Jones, I, 379–404. 149 Samuel Wilkes, cited in Jones, I, 397. 150 Theodor Lipps, Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (Bonn, Germany: Cohen, 1883), p. 149.

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and forces—pressures, acting and reacting forces (cathexes), that move through pathways/passages all tending towards stabilization and balance. The normal psyche then is an equilibrium of conflicting forces such as we find in nature. The fact that these energies and forces cannot be seen or measured with the instruments available to Freud in his time was to him a technological limitation (no means to quantify accurately), but the effects of these psychic forces were observable to the scientific investigator. Freud assumed the physical/electrical nature of the forces as part and parcel of his training as a medical doctor and brain physiologist. One must never lose sight of Freud’s firm grounding in the physical and biological/medical sciences, as it is so important to his selfconception as a man of science/naturalist/medical doctor and to his lifelong attempts to make psychoanalysis and psychology full-fledged Science with a capital S. In this aspect Freud is a materialist of the first order. With the mind, just as with other natural phenomena, Freud believed that what existed was “masses in motion,” invisible energies, to be sure, but energies, comparable to electrical, chemical and physical ones. It is because of this steadfast commitment to science that Freud avoided ascribing quality to the phenomena he observed.151. Psychic forces for him, like their chemical, physical counterparts, had quantity only. A scientific fact or discovery was a truth about reality, which meant the natural, empirical world, a datum which had no inherent value in itself. In this Freud differs markedly from his contemporaries, the phenomenologists in philosophy, in that for him all quality is added to phenomena by the human consciousness and therefore is a subjective accretion with no scientific validity. Hence, so many of the qualities and values that society or individuals or human civilization and cultural traditions have espoused over centuries are called “illusions” by Freud and even hallucination plays a major role in his epistemology.152 The human individual/psyche, confronted with the difficult realities of life which it must negotiate, forms illusions, fantasies, which make that life more palatable, acceptable or pleasant. Empirical experience may provoke pleasure or pain, comfort or discomfort for the organism and its psyche, but these are objective and value-free. 151 Volney P. Gay, Freud on Sublimation. Reconsiderations (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992) pp. 45–91 and 113–118. 152 Ibid, 74–75.

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Emotions—secondary mental processes where the individual has invested his own valuations into things are a much less central subject in Freud’s writings as they are harder for him to talk about with the desired scientific rigor. The scientific/materialist stance that all qualities are added to matter by human consciousness is the basis of Freud’s perennial attacks on superstition and religion as illusion, as the baggage of mankind’s backward childhood period. We quote a typical Freudian defense of his scientific worldview and epistemology from his 1932 “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” a series of metapsychological texts directed towards the general educated lay audience to promote and popularize his new science. Here Freud revised and amplified his Introductory lectures of 1910. In the lecture entitled “A Philosophy of Life” he attempts to answer the charges that Psychoanalysis was setting itself up as a sort of religion or Weltanschauung. His response shows him to be the implacable atheist he had been in The Future of an Illusion (1927). He delineates three Weltanshauungen or philosophies of life—the philosophical, the religious and the scientific—and states that he as a scientist, and Psychoanalysis as a science, belong wholly to the scientific worldview and, consequently, have need of no other. Speaking briefly of the philosophical worldview which “interests a small number even of the thin upper stratum of intellectuals, while all the rest find it beyond them,”153 he moves on to attack the religious worldview which he sees as the main opponent of the scientific one he so ardently espouses. This scientific worldview is distinguished by negative characteristics: “by a limitation at any given time to what is knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe, but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration” (p. 874). The religious Weltanschauung is the main stumbling block to the total success of the scientific worldview: “of the forces which can dispute the position of science, religion alone is a really serious enemy.” The Arts are not deemed inimical to science: “Save the case of a few people who are, one might say, obsessed by Art (those few who have a virtual religion 153 Freud, “A Philosophy of Life” in “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis,” see Great Books of the Western World, ed. William Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 54, 874.

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of aesthetic beauty and creation), it [Art]never dares to make any attacks on the realm of reality.”154 Freud goes on to sketch in some detail what he calls “the gradual crumbling of the religious Weltanschauung.” His attack is scathing: “in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside ourselves as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical demands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other (non-religious) foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. It one attempts to assign religion a place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”155 Freud acknowledges in these public lectures that some of his audience may be shocked by and/or disagree with this assessment of religion, and he repeats the arguments religion’s defenders usually advance, demolishing some and showing forbearance towards others. He accepts, here and elsewhere, that for some, even very brilliant individuals (such as Dostoevsky and his own former professor Brentano156), religion undoubtedly has had emotional value. Freud vents his anger against religion for its active hostility to the scientific worldview and its claim to be above thought. It hampers the free thought of the professed members of religious groups. In other words, Freud throughout and up until the very end of his life remained not only an atheist but an outspoken enemy of any religious worldview. This attack on religion as a childish illusion from the nursery follows hard upon his attack in 1927,157 in which he hopes and semi-predicts that with man’s educational and intellectual progress—his becoming 154

Ibid., p. 875. Ibid., p. 878. 156 Franz Brentano, a leading Catholic thinker, was one of the professors most influential upon the young Freud while he was a student the University of Vienna. On Brentano and Freud ‘s attitude towards him, see Paul C. Vitz, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York: Guilford Press, 1988), pp. 50–56. 157 Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition, XXI. 155

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more rational—the illusion of religious belief will wither away in time as Marx hoped for the withering away of the State. Freud hopes that rationalist Science, his own “philosophy of life” will prevail. The Sexual Basis: Pan-sexualism Before discussing the problems Freud’s rigorous scientific stance brought to his theory of creativity—the theory of sublimation or the “sublimation hypothesis”—we must consider his other major contribution to the modern understanding of man: the primacy of sexuality. In the nineteenth century symptoms of mental illness and all manner of criminal, psychotic and neurotic behavior were being understood as having a sexual etiology—in the work of Krafft-Ebing, Charcot and Lombroso, to mention a few major names.158 The extended notion that sexuality—libido (the life drive) — is an overwhelming factor not only in deviant behavior but also normal human behavior is usually ascribed to Freud. He states his pan-sexuaist position as early as 1896 in his first public medical presentation “The Etiology of Hysteria” (and repeats it in various forms for decades thereafter). In time it becomes generally accepted by a large spectrum of the lay public, as well as the psychiatric and medical establishments: “Whatever cause and whatever symptom we take as our point of departure, in the end we infallibly come to the field of sexual experience.”159 Although in this 1896 paper sexuality is identified as the underlying cause of hysterical symptoms, of neurosis or mental illness, Freud very soon extrapolates the centrality of sexual factors and causes to the behavior of absolutely everyone, the normal as well as the abnormal in works such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.160 This revelation is only surprising or shocking because the seat of the sexual, libidinal drives is the powerful unconscious. People are conscious are unaware of it. Freud attributes what can only be called a negative, judgmental characterization to the human unconscious, which is comprised of largely sexual desires for domination, possession, power and pleasure: domination over others and the world, chaotic and destructive drives, which, taken as a whole, characterize man as an egoistic, predatory and somewhat wild animal, whose

158 159 160

See footnote 15 above. Quoted in Gardner, p. 60. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in The Standard Edition, VI.

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underlying nature must be curbed and controlled for him to be able even to survive and live in society. The forces which socialize the very sexual human child, the taming and controlling forces which he must undergo to be able to live in society and achieve a fully human stature, connected with the social repression of the superego (conscience and tradition), lead to the “discontents” with civilization in his work of 1930.161 There the civilized consciousness of the normal mentally healthy adult is shown to have undergone a process of growing control over his unconscious, uncivilized Id, making the “trade-offs” necessary to normal social and sexual functioning. Freud totally shares the high valuation of Reason which marks Western culture from the Greeks to the Enlightenment and continues in the 19th and 20th centuries with the great strides of rationalist science. That society as Christian had for centuries devalued sexuality and even demonized it. Freud’s anti-Enlightenment emphasis on the primacy of the unconscious mental processes in man in the first place and the sexual content he ascribed to the unconscious in the second led to considerable opposition to both his key contributions, even in the psychiatric medical establishment and most certainly in the religious one. Freud’s conception of man as a creature with an enormous irrational (unconscious) component, who had to make special efforts to be rational, was a far cry from the innately rational creature Christian theology and dogma had been based on for almost two millennia. Freud’s pan-sexualist metaphysic—the notion that all manifestations of human behavior and even religious belief could be reduced to the sexual-biological drives, instincts and impulses was bound to scandalize the faithful both in Christianity and Judaism. The idea that belief in God was some manner of prolonged Father complex, an atavistic holdover from mankind’s infancy, was a direct insult to religious belief. Freud’s views both of the unconscious and of its sexual substrate were attacked with equal enmity as a new form of “sexual materialism,” which was trying to supplant religion and the religious understanding of man. The central Godhead of Christianity was celibate, not a pagan sexual god. St. Paul had exalted abstinence over marriage in his Epistles. Celibacy in the clergy and chastity and abstinence in the laity had been championed in Catholicism

161

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, in The Standard Edition, XXI, pp. 64–144.

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from the Middle Ages on, and there was celibacy in the upper clergy in Anglicanism and Russian Orthodoxy, all this despite the fact that Christian marriage was a sacrament. These facts spoke eloquently of the status of human sexuality in the Christian religion. Sublimation and Creativity in Freud Freud mentions sublimation some 330 times in his oeuvre,162 denoting the process whereby sexual, libidinal impulses/energies are turned into civilizing forces. He gives it a very positive evaluation. Romantic love as a sublimation of the sexual drive is a clear example. Dr. Volney Gay, a major scholar of Freudian sublimation, writes the following on the issues raised in Freud’s essay “Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908): “Societal institutions require a store of energy. Therefore individuals, the only source of power, must forfeit some of their (sexual) energy to the group’s demands. The unquenchable sexual appetites of human beings place extraordinarily large amounts of force at the disposal of civilizing activity and it [via sublimation] does this in virtue of its especially marked characteristic of being able to displace its aim without materially diminishing its intensity.”163 The sublimation of sexuality is its partial or very major desexualization, which is paradoxical in Freud’s doggedly materialist theory. How can Freud be certain the intensity of the sexual energy is maintained when it undergoes changes? Freud’s early clinical practice was with seriously ill (psychotic) mental patients who had alarming symptoms, not with people of exceptional talent or genius in creative fields of endeavor. The latter were never his primary focus, never the main group towards which psychoanalysis was pitched. Returning the seriously ill to normal social and sexual functioning was his main goal for decades, which meant the alleviation of all manner of disturbing symptoms. This, as we have indicated, is a far cry from the most exalted instances of sublimation, where the problems of artistic and intellectual genius and creativity or those of helping blocked geniuses or talented neurotics overcome periods of blocked creativity come into play. Freud points out in Civilization and its Discontents that 162 163

Gay, p. 108. Gay, p. 110.

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this most exalted form of sublimation—the displacement of libido from its sexual object to other goals as a means of providing pleasure and satisfaction—was a method open to a very small group of the especially gifted: “it presupposes gifts and dispositions that are far from common.”164 Indeed, it was Freud’s long-time associate the psychoanalyst Otto Rank who, from his book The Artist (1907) to his late masterpiece Art and the Artist. The Urge to Create and Personality Development165 showed the most consistent and intense interest in the exceptional and creative man and his sublime works. Since he cannot bridge the gap from the quantitative-sexual libidinal energies which are transformed into products of quality and value for mankind and he cannot account for quality at all except as subjective, as internal to the individual or collective mind of a given cultural group, Freud says, “psychoanalysis must lay down its arms”166 when faced with the surpassing greatness of certain artists and their products. He contents himself with diagnosing the neuroses of such geniuses and admits he cannot explain how they succeeded in sublimating their sexual energies into such great works, despite their neuroses. The case of Dostoevsky’s massive neuroses and the greatness of his creative oeuvre has Freud especially stumped. With all that it is very important that in sublimation the libidinal energy is released, deployed or used up, not dammed up as it is in repression, and that it changes/is altered in the course of being expended. This is manifestly clear in Civilization and its Discontents where sublimation is defined thus: a technique of fending off suffering (producing a sense of pleasure) by the employment of the displacement of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains much flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual (read: sexual) aim in such a way that it cannot come up against frustration from the external world. In this sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance; one gains the most if one can heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychic and intellectual work […] a satisfaction of this kind, such as the artist’s joy in creating, in giving his fantasies body, or the scientist’s in solving problems or discovering truths has a certain quality […] of which we can say at present only figuratively that such satisfactions seem ‘finer and higher’…167 164

Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, pp. 79–80. Rank, Art and the Artist. Creative Urge and Personality Development (New York: Norton, 1968). 166 See footnote 151 above. 167 Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 80. 165

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Freud’s inability to explain the movement of a changing energy from the sexual impulse to the art-object has been noted by many, Rank among them, and Freud was perfectly aware of it himself. The sketchiness the theory of sublimation, when compared with others of his concepts such as the theory of repression, is seen as its great drawback and has led some psychoanalysts to want to reject the theory of sublimation altogether as useless for clinical practice. Dr. Volney Gay’s lengthy “reconsiderations” of sublimation in his 2002 book and Paul Riceour’s enormous phenomenological-religious study present rich material on the problems with the theory of sublimation.168 Freud does in fact proffer one very interesting hypothesis on the mechanism of sublimation in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id: If we need a sexual object, yet are forced to give it up, a change takes place in our ego […] often this change can be described as the introjection of the object into the ego […] the ego facilitates and makes it possible to give up the object. Perhaps this identification is the general condition under which the Id relinquishes its objects of desire…It allows us to hypothesize that the character of the Ego is comprised of the residue of these relinquished object-attachments, that it contains the history of such relinquishments.

Freud goes on to relate this process to all sublimation: Another approach shows that such transformation of the libidinal object into a change in the Ego is the path by which the Ego takes power over the Id and deepens its relationship to the Id, true, at the expense of the Id’s sufferings. Taking on the traits of the desired object, it is as if the Ego forces itself on the Id as a love object and tries to recompense the Id for its loss, as if saying to the Id: ‘Look, you can love me instead. I am very like the object of your desire.’ The transformation that occurs in this case of object libido into narcissistic libido obviously brings a certain desexualization and is therefore a type of sublimation. Moreover, there arises a question that deserves study and consideration: is this not the usual path of sublimation? Does not every sublimation occur by means of the intervention of the Ego, which first changes object libido into narcissistic libido so that it can later set a different object (goal) for that libido?169

168 Cited and discussed in Gay, p. 122. See also: Paul Riceour, Freud and Philosophy, tr. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970). The sections on sublimation are pp. 128–9, 175–78, 217–223, and especially “The Implicit Teleology of Freudianism: The Question of Sublimation,” pp. 483–492. Ricoeur highlights the texts Three Studies of Human Sexuality (1905) and The Ego and the Id that are most consequential for the theory of sublimation and points out its deficiencies as a theory in the discussion on pp. 483–492. 169 Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition, XXI.

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Unfortunately, Freud did not return to flesh out this hypothesis on the mechanism of sublimation sufficiently; nevertheless, it stands as one of his most interesting speculations on sublimation. Inasmuch as Freudian sublimation, and sublimation in all the thinkers here, treats of a transformation of libidinal energy into ideational or material products that are “finer and higher,” the value judgments Freud wishes to keep out of science inevitably creep into this concept. The steadfast scientistic refusal to ascribe any quality to objects in the world casts light on and indeed is a major reason for Freud’s inability to bridge conceptually the gap between the sex impulse and its “real” object, on the one hand, and the art-work creative product, on the other (Rank’s formulation of the problem.)170 Sublimation is about raising or transforming something quantitative (a certain amount of sexual energy) to something qualitative—a cultural or intellectual product with far-reaching value or benefit for mankind and civilization,—that is to say, into something of an entirely different order/category than the normal sexual release of that same energy would produce. Sublimation means in essence the change of quantity to quality and necessarily implies value judgments and a hierarchy of values. These are present whether Freud explicitly acknowledges them or not. However much Freud strives to keep his values and prejudices out of his strictly scientific studies and papers, those value judgments are, as we have seen, everywhere present in his professions de foi and metapsychological texts, such as popularizing introductions to his new science and Civilization and its Discontents. His values everywhere consist in deep admiration of the rationalism of Greek and Western civilization, pro-secular rationality and scientific rigor in investigation: observation, detailed description, even measurement. While he identifies much that science cannot yet understand, he fastidiously eschews all irrational, mystical, religious, all non-rational modes of explanation as superstition and childish retreat from the problems life poses. Two Types of Backsliding into Religion: The Contrasting Cases of Jung and Rank Carl G. Jung and Otto Rank were the two disciples, closest to the early Freud, and are unquestionably those, whose defection from orthodox 170

Rank, Art and the Artist, p. 26.

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psychoanalysis (when they eventually branched out into their own independent theories of personality and modes of clinical practice) was most painful to Freud and felt by him as personal betrayal. Jung’s attitudes towards religious experience were the most opposed to Freud’s. Rank’s was a positive evaluation of religion’s importance for man in creativity. Neither believed man’s unconscious could be tamed by his reason. Both believed that man’s unconscious was by nature religious and would remain so. Jung, who broke with Freud in 1913 and went on to establish his own school of “analytical psychology,” was Freud’s most beloved disciple whom he claimed to feel as “his own son.” Their break was equally wrenching for both men and Jung suffered serious, perhaps even psychotic, withdrawal for some three years after it occurred.171 In the subsequent years Jung began to propound theories and ideas that Freud could only perceive as “backsliding into religion.” Indeed, Jung criticizes Freud for his “over-emphasizing” the pathological aspect of life and for interpreting man too exclusively in light of his defects. A convincing example of this in Freud’s case is his inability to understand religious experience, as is clearly shown in his book The Future of an Illusion. In his essay “Freud and Jung—Contrasts” Jung emphasizes his positive attitude towards religious experience and its centrality to understanding the human psyche: “I attribute a positive value to all religions. In their symbolism I recognize those figures which I have met in the dreams and fantasies of my patients. Ceremonial, ritual, initiation rites and ascetic practice, in all their forms and variation, interest me profoundly as so many techniques for bringing about a proper relation to the forces of the inner life.”172 Jung even posits a religious instinct in the human spirit, and posits it as the integrating uniting function of that spirit “man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression and the human psyche has from time immemorial been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind and whoever chooses to explain it away, or ‘enlighten it away’ [reference to Freud—ALC], has no sense of reality.”173

171 Jung’s breakdown and general crisis after parting company with Freud is best covered in Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), pp. 168–204. 172 Jung, “Freud and Jung—Contrasts,” in Modern Man, p. 122. 173 Ibid.

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Jung, who was son of a Swiss Reformed pastor, was not a great enthusiast of the religion of his heritage, but, having treated many patients of very diverse religious backgrounds, he used their religious faith to bring about a cure rather than trying to dispel it as baggage of mankind’s infancy or a neurotic crutch unworthy of a modern civilized being. Never openly professing any particular religion, he treated religious beliefs a psychic realities for his patients. He went as far as to proclaim in the essay “Psychotherapists or the Clergy”: “During the past thirty years I have treated hundreds of patients […] Among all my patients [those] in the second half of life—over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem was not that of finding a religious outlook. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which living religions of every age have given their followers and none of them has been haled who did not recover his religious outlook. This, of course, has nothing to do with a particular creed or membership in a church.”174 Having postulated in the same period that the unconscious of man had virtually a religious instinct, Jung further felt that psychic health would only come with the assimilation of the material of the patient’s unconscious to consciousness, making therapy a real dialogue of the unconsciousness with the rational ego consciousness. Jung treats dreams as the “utterances of the unconscious” which for him often has much more to tell the patient and the therapist about the psyche than the conscious mind. He advocates “a mutual interpenetration of conscious and unconscious contents and not […] a one-sided valuation, interpretation and deformation of unconscious contents by the conscious mind.”175 This latter is Jung’s characterization of what Freud’s attempts to tame and control the unconscious amount to. He continues, going a long way to rehabilitate the negative unconscious of Freud’s theory: “It is well known that the Freudian school presents the unconscious in a thoroughly depreciatory light, just as it looks upon primitive man as little better than a wild beast.”176 Parrying Freud’s attack on him in this connection, he writes: “I was recently reproached with the charge that my teaching about the assimilation of the unconscious, were it accepted, would undermine cultural values and exalt primitivity at the cost of the highest values. Such a belief can have no other foundation than the erroneous belief that the unconscious is a monster […]. The unconscious is not a demonic monster, but a thing of nature that is 174 175 176

Jung, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy” in Modern Man, p. 229. Jung, “Dream-Analysis” in Modern Man, p. 16. Ibid.

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perfectly neutral as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste and intellectual judgment go.”177 In fact, for Jung everything good and virtuous in man, as well as everything morally reprehensible, has its roots in the unconscious and the very individual part of selfhood, that which makes every individual in the world different from every other, has its roots, or mainly resides, in his/her unconscious. “[E]very dream is a source of information about the deepest, essential self] and a means of selfregulation, and that is why dreams are our most effective aids in the task of building up the personality.”178 For Jung the unconscious is a veritable treasure trove of content. Agreeing with Freud that it has important sexual content, Jung attributes to it much other varied content and, as we have seen, a religious character. This being the case, Jung is much more relaxed about the unconscious and open to its contents and positive significance to psychic balance and health. We can therefore imagine that sublimation for Jung is not merely the transformation of low drives into something higher, but even that much sublimation may occur in the unconscious in the interaction and mutual influences of the lower content with the more exalted content that is found there. In Freud the seat of the personality is undoubtedly the conscious ego. In Jung the unconscious, positively evaluated, plays a much more decisive role. In Jung the self—the totality of the psyche—is never, nor ever can be, fully conscious. Unlike Freud, Jung speaks a great deal of the human spirit and the spiritual cravings of modern man, a notion quite consonant with his notion of an unconscious religious need or instinct. In his words modern man is “in search of a soul,”179 [his own soul or “self ”], a formulation Freud would certainly find sentimental and unscientific. Feeling that man needs “religious experience,” Jung is maximally tolerant towards all religions and, as doctor and scientist, does not profess or espouse any given creed. He treats traditional religious dogmas and rituals as structures which, in the “living religions,” help man to minister to his spiritual needs and attain psychic health. At the age of 60 in 1935 Jung returned to the myths, symbols and rituals of the Christianity in which he was reared and continued a psychological critique of Chri up until the very end of his life. Murray Stein, the leading scholar of this part of Jung’s oeuvre, treats Jung’s 177 178 179

Ibid., p. 17 Ibid., p. 18 To wit, the very title of his collection of articles.

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analysis of the central Western religion as the psychoanalysis of Christianity as a “sick patient” in his excellent doctoral dissertation Jung’s Treatment of Christianity (1984) and the book (1985) which grew out of it.180 Indeed, in the pre- and post-war period German Protestantism was losing many adherents and an atmosphere of alarming spiritual malaise appeared in Europe. He saw a return of Europe to barbarism and the denigration of Christian values, so great that it seemed Europe had never been Christianized in the first place. Not only does Jung analyze such doctrines as the Virgin-Birth, the Trinity, the Christ ideal or archetype, and the Ascension of the Virgin in terms of their original doctrinal meaning, he makes far-reaching conclusions as to what they mean for the human unconscious, why many Christian doctrines have become empty formalism which does not minister to modern man’s deep needs. One reason is the excessive spiritualization of the religion which increased over many centuries. Treating Christian dogma and ritual thus in terms of their implications for psychic health, Jung critiques them quite radically and suggests recipes for the religion’s overhaul and greater spiritual effectiveness in the modern age. In this his ideas coincide with many of the critiques of the “historical Church” that we find in the Russian Religious Renaissance that occurred under the leadership of D.S. Merezhkovsky and V.V. Rozanov roughly half a century before. We shall show the remarkable convergences in Jung’s critique of Christianity with Rozanov’s, which was expressed so many decades earlier (see our conclusions in Chapter VIII below). As a result of Jung’s thirty-year foray into religious studies, some religious thinkers, such as German Jewish theologian Martin Buber, accused him of poaching on the preserves of religion when he should have remained within the confines of the science of psychology,181 and others decided that he was a sui generis Christian thinker. Among our Russian religious thinkers, Vysheslavtsev, as we shall see, wished Jung 180 Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of Religious Tradition (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications, 1985), further referred to as Stein. 181 Martin Buber claimed that “Jung had overstepped the boundaries of psychology by defining religion as ‘a living relationship with psychical events independent of and beyond consciousness in the darkness of the psychical hinterland. This would mean that religion cannot be regarded as a relationship with a primordial being and presence that remains transcendent. If God is an ‘autonomous psychic content,’ he has no reality outside the human psyche,” quoted in Hayworth, p. 421. This is the same objection Vysheslavtsev had early on that God cannot be only esse in anima, a psychic reality for a single individual.

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would openly profess a Christian faith. Jung desisted from doing this, although his anxiety about the loss of Christianity or it becoming completely irrelevant made him appear “pro-Christian” to many. A great advocate of the psychic necessity of religious experience for spiritual health, Jung is the opposite of Freud in the high seriousness with which he treats all the world’s religions. Jung was quite reticent about the mechanism of sublimation, the creative process of the artist or poet. He gives some credit to Freud’s seeking the causes and sources of the character of the artistic work in the personality of the artist in his article “Psychology and Literature,”182 but makes no definitive statements about the connection between personality traits of an artist (his peculiarities or neuroses, for example) and the artistic product, nor about how his vital psychic energy is transformed into a particular theory, idea or palpable or verbal form. He connects the poet in the man or the artist in the man less with that person’s individuality than with the collectively human. This leads him to call great art “impersonal.” Jung softens Freud’s sexual libidinal energy to the vaguer “vital energy” and does not add much to Freud’s sublimation hypothesis. He is most important for our study in two aspects: 1) in his quest to facilitate the individual’s maximal spiritual self-realization, to help him achieve his most essential selfhood, and 2) in his recognition of the importance of religion to man’s unconscious and his desire that the Christian religion be beneficial to the psychic health of modern man. As we indicated above, the desired harmony of self and selfrealization, so important to the individual, is viewed by Jung as an act of self-creation, a creative act, but not seen as the common attainment of all great artists, many of whose lives he envisions as fraught with suffering and victimization, as unbalanced and sacrificed to his creative artistic urge and achievement.183 Jung’s many brilliant analyses of Christian doctrine and Christian heresies, such as Gnosticism and alchemy, are vital for our present study as they in numerous cases converge with or echo unawares the insights of Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev about Christianity. Most notably, Rozanov arrived at some of the same conclusions as Jung by different means. These unexpected convergences in the ideas of Russian

182 183

Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in Modern Man, pp. 152–172. Ibid., pp. 171–172.

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religious metaphysicians and psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung and Rank constitute some of the most interesting discoveries of this study.184 Moreover, Jung’s two contributions to the balancing and integration of the individual personality, and his critique of Christianity, aimed at making it more conducive to the spiritual needs and health of modern man, can be used to correct or “Christianize” Freudian sublimation, to recuperate it for religion, which is the conscious task of Boris Vysheslavtsev that crowns this study. Like Jung, Otto Rank (pseudonym of Otto Rosenfeld, 1884–1939), as we indicated, came after his break with Freud to agree with Jung that the unconscious was “religious” in its very nature. He also considered the motivation of primitive artists to be the desire to immortalize the collective to which they belonged. The modern individual artist had the parallel motivation of immortalizing himself as an individual through his artistic creation. The idea that a man can give his soul immortality by living in a certain way is central to Christianity and to certain other religions (the cult of Mithras, etc.). Yet Rank, a very humanistically educated non-religious Viennese Jew, who converted to Catholicism once to marry and reverted to Judaism later, could hardly be construed as a religious nature. He evinced an early interest (as did Freud himself) in myths and symbols, including those in various religions, as expressed in folk cultures as well as in refined artistic, sculptural, literary or musical form. Receiving his doctorate in Comparative Literature in Vienna in 1912 with a dissertation on the incest motif in world literature and myth, Rank authored numerous structural psychoanalytic analyses of major literary myths (The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, The Lohengrin Saga, The Myth of Don Juan185), most of them approved by Freud and published by him or under his auspices. Rank’s contribution to cultural and literary criticism lies in these exceptionally broad cross-cultural studies of form and function. They appear as precursors to functional studies in

184

See Chapter VIII below. Otto Rank, Das Inzest Motiv in Dichtung und Sage (Vienna: Deuticke, 1912). English version: The Incest Motif in Literature and Legend, tr. Gregory C. Richter (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), further referred to as Rank, The Incest. Other books by Otto Rank include: Der Mythus der Geburt des Heldens (1909); Die Lohengrinsage (1911); “Der Doppelgenger,” in Imago, 1925; “Psychologische Beitragen zur Entsehungsgeschichte des Volkepos” and “Das Volkepos”, 1917 in Imago. He wrote the most analyses of such literary myths and cultural materials. 185

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Russian formalism, such as Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk Tale.186 These early works stem from Rank’s orthodox psychoanalytic period, which lasted much longer than Jung’s.187 Rank’s interest in religion, and in Christianity in particular, was not as a body of belief or even as a moral system. He was strongly opposed to the proscriptive morality of Judaism and Christianity. For him Christianity had two major advantages: 1) it was a religion of optimism and self-love (as contrasted with the Judaism of his heritage,188 and 2) it was the dominant cultural ideology of the Western world of which he was a part and he considered it the cultural ideology most conducive to the creation of great art. Rank thought of himself and his involvement in the psychoanalytic movement as an artistic endeavor “I am an artist,”189 as the very type of creative individual that was his major focus. Working for decades in the shadow of Freud, as his beloved protégé, first as secretary of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society and later of the International one, Rank’s departure from Freud, which occurred in the mid-1920s, ended, lamentably, more quickly than Jung’s, with his untimely death in 1939, a few months after Freud’s own. Though best known to non-German reading audiences for his 1924 The Trauma of Birth,190 his interest for our study lies in his sustained focus on the creative individual, his internal “urge to create” and the products of this activity. The average normally adjusted person, as well as the very sick neurotic who has no special gifts, left Rank cold. He was interested in very talented and gifted neurotics whose complexes left them blocked, unable to create. These he called artistes manqués and he wished to determine what personality factors allowed one person with traumata and neuroses to be a creative genius and another talented person to be completely overwhelmed by them. A very simplified answer to the question of what differentiates the flourishing creator who is Rank’s hero from the gifted person who is his patient is the strength of his will-ego and its dominance over what Rank calls his impulse-ego. In late works, such as Will Therapy, Rank

186 Vladimir Propp, Morfologiia skazki (The Morphology of the Folktale), (Leningrad, Academia, 1928). 187 Rank’s orthodox Freudian period lasted into the mid-twenties. 188 Rank, Beyond Psychology, this was a posthumous collection of Rank’s latest work published by his friends. See E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 359ff. 189 Lieberman, p. 18. 190 Rank, The Trauma of Birth (Toronto: Dover, 1993).

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goes a long way to distinguish the normal conformist individual from the would-be creator blocked by his neuroses and the triumphant successful creative man who dominates his impulse-ego and leaves a great work behind him.191 Rank’s greatest masterpiece and his most valuable contribution to creativity studies is his late book Art and the Artist. The Urge to Create and Personality Development, written after his break with Freud in the United States and originally published in English by Alfred Knopf in 1932.192 This excessively erudite and massive study shows Rank’s mastery of archaeology and anthropology—the primitive cultures from Australia to Africa to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt—and his equal mastery of the history of Western art, literature, architecture and music. Thus Rank provides a history of human soul-ideologies (religions) in intimate connection with the art works that were produced in support of each of them. This wealth of information about primitive/collective and individual artistic creators and products is used to bolster and exemplify Rank’s theory of the creative personality and his attempt to bridge the gap Freud left in the sublimation theory—from the sexual impulse to the refined art-work. Very early in the book (p. 26) Rank remarks upon the insufficiency of Freud’s concept of sublimation and spends several hundred pages on how the creative genius restructures his own personality so as to release his sexual and vital energies into great products. The creative genius forges his strong will, beginning with his overcoming the trauma of birth. His first painful experience of separation and independence is from the mother. In his early childhood such a creative man resists the dictates of parental authority, the first testing of his strong conscious will. In adolescence he must master the even more disturbing sexual impulses from within his own body. This is followed by further consolidation of his independence from other individuals until he is able to create his own independent world from his inner resources. He pits that inner world against the world into which he was born and acculturated. No one describes a psychological type who dances more “to the beat of his own drum” than Rank’s genius creator.

191

Rank, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, tr. Jessie Taft (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1964). See especially the Chapters “Total Ego and Partial Ego,” pp. 134–150, “The Birth of Individuality,” pp. 209–220, “Will and Force,” pp. 221–231, “Creation and Guilt,” pp. 270–291 and “Happiness and Redemption,” pp. 292–305. 192 We are using the 1968 reprint here.

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We have indicated that in Rank’s view the artist is motivated to immortalize his individual soul, not his physical self, a desire totally consonant with and supported by a Christian religious worldview. The unconscious of man for Rank, as for Jung, is religious in its very essence and no amount of rational overlay can ever change the religious nature of the human unconscious. Of Christianity as a cultural ideology Rank writes: “Christianity spiritualized the idea of spiritual self in the son by deifying the son, Christ. Thus the Father-Son-Spirit of the Christian Trinity is less of problem for Rank as an impregnation by and of spiritsoul and not of flesh. Of Platonic religion he says: “…in Greek boy-love [as amply described in Plato—ALC] which represented a spiritual lovefriendship, the adult sought to impress his own spirit, his real soul upon the beloved youth … In boy-love man fertilized the youth both spiritually and physically [italics mine—ALC], the living image of his own soul, which seemed materialized in an ego (the boy’s) as idealized and as much like his own body as was possible.”193 It is quite clear that Solovyov in Christianizing, i.e., heterosexualizing, this spiritual lovebond harks back to the same dual fleshly-spiritual concept. Rank’s understanding of man’s basic religious instinct is obvious. It is not just the organizing principle of a harmonized selfhood, or a balanced dialogue between man’s conscious self and his much larger unconscious self, with its archaic, collective racial content and memory. Almost like a religious thinker, like our Russians, Rank believes that man, especially in his highest manifestations of strong will and strongest will (creative genius), is much more a spiritual being than a carnal one. The balance is off in those men who approach genius and tips towards the spiritual. Of course, in therapy in the contemporary period Rank is in favor of a rebalancing of the neurotic personality, but that balance is directed towards making him accept his own anti-world, his anti-collective personal will. He sees no reason to balance the productive genius through therapy because each highly successful creator has through exertion of his own will organized his personality himself and accepted his willing, his selfhood, in such a highly individual way so that his will=his real self-constructed “soul” is impressed not upon one person (as in personal love where the responding will of the other, the beloved, might

193 Rank, Psychology and the Soul (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), p. 43.

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limit it), but on the external world. The creative genius’s inner world is an alternative world placed in the external pre-existing, so-called “God’s world,” benefiting mankind, correcting that world and, at times, changing that world utterly. Rank’s basic, virtually “religious,” belief that man, as a spiritual being, wants immortality of his soul first and foremost, and is motivated by that, is an article of conviction that he undoubtedly shares with Solovyov, Rozanov, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev. This, according to Rank, is what clearly conditions all his strivings and attainments, all his creative activity. As a result Rank can accept the spiritualization of the Christ/ Godman, and his concomitant desexualization, more readily than Jung, since immortality of the flesh is not man’s sine qua non, not enough for man. Rank writes a great deal about the human soul, but not as a gift from a deity; he believes the soul is an early “creation” of man in the pre-individual period of his development. He writes: “Let us turn to […] Christianity which should tell us much about the spiritual belief in the soul and upon the nature of and decline of the sexual era. In primitive man’s progressively despiritualized world and in the godless world of antiquity from which Christianity developed, every man finally became a proxy for the fructifying deity, and every woman a keeper and bearer of the soul (what she had formerly been in many matriarchal religious cults). In other words, husband and wife, as earthly personifications of the spiritualizing agents, became spiritualizing agents not only of their child, but of each other.”194 Jung, too, sees the Christian religion arising in a very unspiritual period when greater spiritualization was a historical/psychological need of mankind. But its continuing increased spiritualization over two millennia has rendered it “too spiritual” for modern man. Rank’s view in this passage recalls Rozanov’s notion of the sacred human Christian family, and the final phrase “spiritualizing agents to each other” describes Solovyov’s sense of the spiritual religious heterosexual bond in true love that we treated in Chapter II above. Rank’s formulation is very close to Rozanov’s sense of plot’-dukh and a firm bond—sex is fleshly and spiritual at once. Rank continues: “In this development one may hopefully find the origin of spiritual love as we see it in remnants in fairy tales of the

194

Ibid., p. 56.

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Psyche type.”195 Apuleius in The Golden Ass gives a frequent version of this myth, in which Psyche and Eros are a loving couple, who have been separated for a long period. Psyche undergoes a series of trials and, purified by suffering, she find Eros and the lovers are restored to one another for ever. (p. 49) Rank treats the situation of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, fully a human woman (even if immaculately conceived in Catholic doctrine) but fructified by God via the Holy Spirit. Her nuclear family situation seems to fit what Rank writes: “… it had originally been […] a religious honor for woman to be fertilized by the divine soul before giving herself to mortal man (in this case the carpenter Joseph).”196 In Christianity, God gave the child a divine soul in potentio, confirmed in Christian baptism into the faith, and his earthly mortal father gave him the body which housed this soul during its earthly sojourn. Thus Rank has less problem with an asexual Christ; the soul is conferred via the Holy Spirit and Mary remains a Virgin-Mother. The entire account of the history of human spirituality, i.e., religion, in Rank’s Art and the Artist where religious attitudes move man to creative, artistic acts, renders Rank much more accepting than Jung of the excessive spiritualization of Christ, the Godman. Rank sees in Christianity a major retainer of the all-important belief in individual immortality in the modern age and that does not necessarily mean for him resurrection of the fleshly body in the literal sense. It may mean immortality in the artistic or other creative products of the human soul which instantiate, or give palpable proof of the genius’s individual soul and immortality, and they usually last much longer than his biological children or even grandchildren. The works live on in posterity as the spiritual immortality man craves. The fully spiritual children of any creative genius—his creative works, live as gifts to civilization and all mankind into which his bodily energies and spiritual essence, his full being— spiritual, psycho-sexual, etc. were poured. In our foregoing discussion here Rank is described as much less disturbed than Jung by the excessive spiritualization and abstraction of official Christian theological concepts and doctrines. That does not mean the fleshly, human earthly side of the Godman was left out in Rank. The balance is achieved in Christian art products; the human

195 196

Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 57.

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side of Christ is filled in by that art which is, in his words, “the laymen’s province.” The extremely spiritual one-sided Godman or other concepts, as it were, dialectically generate their own human side in the art man creates to give them “figuration.” Since the art-product itself gives “flesh” and greater humanity to an overly spiritual Christ, a humandivine balance is re-established. Rank sees the Christian art-ideology as incorporating and blending the tragic individuality of the Greek hero with the suffering, self-sacrificing Christ. When men in the Renaissance, and especially the Gothic age, in his words, “after centuries of relinquishing their will to God, learned how to will again, as the Greek hero formerly had, they became ‘repaganized.’ Michelangelo was for him ‘still Christian and already pagan.’ ”197 He emerges once more as the individual genius artist type=the heretic individual. He creates, as it were, against the background of a great ideology that he cannot ever totally leave behind. The same is seen in Rank’s understanding of “the Christian and the Hellene” struggling within the personality of Nietzsche. In the nineteenth century, with the decline of Christian belief, Rank sees the powerful willing individual “nominating himself to genius status” and practicing “a religion of which he himself is the god.” He presents a long history of art ideologies, each of which overlap with the subsequent one. The cult of Romantic genius, the religion of artist’s self, is according to Rank the last ideology that is still capable of leading to great art. He interprets Nietzsche as destroying Christianity in himself, but retaining much of it willy nilly. Very significant is Rank’s view that the Godman in Christian art is given his fleshly human side in the palpable, physical (from the elements of nature, this world) product, the expression of the highly individualized and unique will of the genius creator. This oeuvre—musical, philosophic, artistic, intellectual, etc.—is produced out of a largely unconscious drive to attain individual immortality entirely on one’s own terms, through one’s own efforts. What one immortalizes is called one’s “inner world” which one expresses out and imprints upon the preexisting given world, so-called God’s world. For Rank, any specific religious or other creed the individual creative type may or may not consciously subscribe to or profess is immaterial; the sacrifice of so much of one’s biological life, including sexual life, that such works of genius entail, attests for Rank to the creators’ unconscious soul-belief in their own possible personal immortality; without

197

Rank, Art and Artist, p. 291.

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it they would never have spent themselves and their life this way, and created so much. They “live” this faith no less than any martyr who gives up his biological life to save his soul in a traditional Christianity or Islam. In Rank’s psychology humans need deeper meaning, a special ideology that enables them to endure life. For this man tends to elevate an ideology above reality. This for Rank is a kind of striving for a “beyond.” Though he never articulated any theistic doctrine and treated psychological phenomena with scientific objectivity, Rank in the thirties placed a very high valuation of the role of religion in human life and in cultural creation. He valued Christianity as an ideology for reasons which in numerous cases are quite close to those of the Russians we treat here. We must now consider how the implications of the theories of Jung and Rank throw light on our four Russian Christian philosophers who emphasize human creativity so strongly and are so very productive in their creative lives, lives guided in each of them by a version of the Godman concept and deemed by each a Christian, creative life.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CREATIVE GENIUS AND THE BELOVED: INNER-DIRECTED AND OUTER-DIRECTED EROS While all the exponents of sublimation treated in this book agree that creativity is the activity whose products are new, original additions to the arts, science, philosophy, religious and even political ideology/ statecraft and the organization of society, contributions that change and advance human civilization, they present very different models of the kind of personal and sexual life that is conducive to the productivity of creative geniuses. Is great love for another individual harmful or helpful for creativity? The psychoanalytic exponents of sublimation differ markedly in their views on this question from the majority of the religious thinkers. We must therefore consider how Solovyov’s and Rozanov’s religious conceptions of the sublimating creator differ from those of Freud himself and from the models of creativity of his renegade disciples who acknowledged the importance of religion in psychic life, C.G. Jung and Otto Rank. These differences fall into three areas 1) the quantity of libidinal energy available to any given creative person and 2) how that energy is changed in quality/nature when it is released in creative acts and 3) how the energy is directed when released. Quantity and Quality: The Freudians and Berdyaev vs. the Other Religious Thinkers As concerns quantity, for Freud and the post-Freudians each individual has a fixed and finite amount of libidinal/sexual energy (termed by Jung “vital energy”). Berdyaev of the religious thinkers is the only one who seems to feel there is a limited, finite amount of libidinal energy that can be expended on the sex act or on the production of spiritual products. To spend it in the sex act “fractionalizes” the personality/ psychic integrity in Berdyaev, and the energy is lost to creativity. Solovyov. Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev, who is a Solovyovian of the first water, posit the erotic energy as potentially unlimited and able to be increased, especially when the creator is involved in a relation of

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individualized Romantic love.198 Why does the love relationship increase the amount of libidinal energy available to the creator? The answer is “the God factor.” The lover, who is at the same time the beloved, receiving extra spiritualizing energy from his beloved, experiences the earthly approximation of divine love in this process. He experiences “God” through the concrete person of the beloved other, and his energy is not only qualitatively changed (spiritualized), but increased in quantity. This is why Solovyov speaks explicitly of a “surplus” of such energy in the genius, the surplus that can be expended on the spiritual product. The religious thinkers are treating spiritual, not fleshly creativity, and Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev extoll the benefits of the Romantic love relationship. Sublimation in alchemy involves the ennobling of baser metals. All our thinkers here treat the ennobling of the quality of the energy, which is changed from what it would be in the most animal sexuality. In his article on “The Psychology of Love” Freud seems to imply that sexual energy is weakened when civilized, limited in Romantic love to one individual. Yet the religious thinkers’ emphasis on the role of a Romantic love for the Freudians implies a more active sexual life that would leave less energy for creative acts. In Freud’s view the Romantic love passion and its socialization in marriage and procreation is likely to drain a large part of his finite store of libidinal energy away from the creation of “finer and higher” cultural products. The ascetic sublimator like Leonardo da Vinci is therefore the person best able to sublimate the maximal amount of such energy into creative endeavors. Accordingly, Freud, who was certainly fond of his wife, endeavored at age 40 to curtail his sexual life in order to maximize the amount of libidinal energy he could direct into scientific work.199 Our three Russian religious thinkers who believe a highly individualized passion for a particular person of the opposite sex increases libidinal energy bringing about a surplus of such energy in the creator proffer this as the best model for the creative person. They realize that there are ascetic creators, that some great creative geniuses were monks. (examples, Fra Angelico, Andrei Rublev, Martin Luther in his revolutionary youth and Copernicus) but still hail this model as the most

198 199

On increase of energy, see discussion of Solovyov, Chapter II. Gardner, Creating Minds, passim.

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desirable. Idealizing Romantic heterosexual love allows the exit from egoism that completes the person, providing for the full integration of the masculine and feminine sides of his soul-personality. This integration makes the love relationship a positive catalyst to the individual’s increased and qualitatively enhanced creativity. For them a change in quality—sublimated eros—increases the quantity and force of the energy. Freud, Jung and Rank Jung is reticent about the effect of Romantic love on creativity. Rank, who is consumed with issues of creativity, has a complex and comprehensive view of its role and presents several models some of which have surface similarities to the views of the religious thinkers, but ultimately Romantic love does not increase the amount of libidinal energy in the person of either lover in Rank’s thought. Thus, he adheres to the idea of a fixed/limited quantity of energy and remains closer to Freud’s original views. Either/Or or Both/And Freudian, and Rankian man (in what he considers the majority model) is faced with a binary choice—either to live a full, vigorous biological life and create less, or to become an ascetic to maximalize his creative potential. Man for Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev faces no such either/ or decision. He can be both “creative” in the flesh, siring children and creative in his chosen field of endeavor. Solovyov’s father, the great historian, Sergey Solovyov, had many children which did not prevent him from being an extremely prolific scholar and academic. The pathos of the love passion for one person and his partner’s responding love, which bolsters the creator and affirms him, both increases his rate of productivity and improves its quality. The religious thinkers, in short, believe in a double or two-stage sublimation: Stage One—the physiological sexual energy is sublimated as Romantic love/eros which frees one from egoism and the responding love from the Other integrates the personality and increases the amount of energy, and Stage Two—the sublimated energy, as Plato’s higher Eros, quantitatively increased and qualitatively enhanced, can be expended into/onto creative products.

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We have suggested that this major difference occurs in the religious thinkers because of the “God” factor, the divine element in genuine human love. Solovyov believes that in individualized Romantic love the lower earthly Aphrodite is transmuted into the heavenly Aphrodite which is a much stronger and divine power. We saw in Chapters II and III that Solovyov as philosopher looks at love in terms of its ultimate telos—what it will be in its final form—and in “The Meaning of Love” he determines that in its ultimate form heterosexual love is the experience of divine love in and through the person of a concrete “other” of the opposite sex, whose responding love spiritualizes us and thereby contributes to the changed quality and increased power of the energy. (2) In the interpenetration of the two selves/persons in love, both spiritualize the “flesh,” material body, of the other. Rozanov’s Practical Testimony on Idealizing Love The Solovyovian understanding of such heterosexual love is even more emphatically presented in the oeuvre of Rozanov. We pointed in Chapter III above that for Rozanov the “divine” is always present in physiological sex a priori; sex is already a transcendental potency, that man can only defile or degrade, by expending it on unloved objects. Used properly, in genuine love, it retains its pristine God-given divine force. This position clearly exculpates Rozanov from accusations of sexual materialism or even “biological mysticism.” For Rozanov, the fleshly products of sex-in-love, the shared infant (and for that matter any innocent infant, a new personality born into the world), is largely divine, as are the artistic, cultural products of creative genius. Rozanov inherits and intensifies Dostoevsky’s notion of the innocence of children which he expresses beautifully in the essay “The Seed and Religion,”200 where the newborn comes into the world “trailing clouds of glory” from his heavenly father’s realm, as he does in Wordsworth’s famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.”201 Works of painting, literature, sculpture, etc. have the same transcendental quality for Rozanov as the divine erotic force is likewise released into them.

200

Rozanov, “Semia i zhizn’”, pp. 174–5. William Wordsworth, “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood,” in Six Centuries of Great Poetry, eds. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (New York: Dell Publishing, 1955), pp. 341–346. 201

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A newborn infant or a beautiful sculpture is for Rozanov “a transformation of sex” (preobrazhenie pola). Let us consider several passages from Rozanov’s celebrated late confessional works that illustrate that his understanding of the power of the metaphysical love-bond in conjugal love is a practical version of Solovyov’s theoretical formulations on this matter. Many, including Berdyaev, had taken Rozanov’s excessive enthusiasm for birth, childrearing and family, to mean that he was “sunken in biology, in the material.”202 These late passages make it clear that Rozanov places the metaphysical bond—a divine bond with the spouse/wife above that with the offspring and agrees with Solovyov that the energy from the deeper metaphysical bond is what changes/raises the quality of the energy that goes into own creative products. It is well to recall that Rozanov was not overly productive in his tormented first marriage to Apollinaria Suslova; that he felt himself shut off and radically alone, entrapped in a vicious circle of egoism of the very sort Solovyov describes.203 This is virtually a leitmotif of the work Solitaria (Uedinennoe) where Rozanov describes himself most pointedly: “Ia—chelovek solo,” “nesovokupliaiushchiisia chelovek” (I am a solo person, a non-copulating person).204 Written of himself when he was already father of four children, “non-copulating” is not used here in its direct physiological meaning, but as a spiritual metaphor for a person in a negative, “not optimally warm and loving” relation to his fellow man. As such an egoistic loner, sounding like the man from underground, he announces brazenly and antagonistically to the reader on the first page that the thoughts in Solitaria are for written for himself alone, and that he will not care if the reader tosses the book out or never cuts open the pages.205 Beginning the trilogy thus as a man shut off from deep loving relations with others, Rozanov traces in the in the two sequels Fallen Leaves, Basketful One and Basketful Two how this changed when he fell in love with Varvara Rudneva and she became part of his life. In later passages Rozanov presents his personal life as a living confirmation of what Solovyov had written about idealizing

202

See discussion here in Chapter III. Berdyaev is one who very often accuses Rozanov of being sunken in material questions, in biology, etc. 203 Marriage to Suslova discussed in Fateev, pp. 70–80. 204 Rozanov, Uedinennoe, passim. 205 Rozanov, Uedinennoe, p. 3.

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Romantic love for one person, specifically, that it changes and fulfills the creator as a person and it changes and improves his creative product, in Rozanov’s case, his literary art. He writes: “I do not feel that I am metaphysically bound to my children, except, perhaps, to Tania…With one’s children there is no ‘mystery which binds’ [the so-called ‘mystery of the two’], no enigma, no pain, all of which exist between me and my friend [his name for his wife], only my relations with her are a metaphysical bond. If she should die, my soul will die. Whatever remains of me will just drag around… Perhaps I may still write…but I will no longer exist [as myself]. The bouquet will go out of the wine and there will be only water.”206 Here we see the sense that the lover cannot be his fullest or best self without the beloved and vice versa. This description of the less than metaphysical ties, that come with paternity, places procreation and childrearing below the spiritual bond of marriage. This again agrees with Solovyov’s view that the spiritual lover-beloved bond is the most exalted, closest earthly analogue to divine love, superior to parental love. The Christian-religious aspect of the bond is clear in the metaphor of water and wine from Christ’s miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. The death, loss being severed from the divine- fleshly bond “kills” the soul of the one who remains alive and reverses or undoes the miracle, turning wine back into water. This imagery recalls that used to evoke the partings of lovers in certain of Solovyov’s sad love poems of “resignation.” Earlier in this book the “Solo-man” Rozanov speaks of how his union with Varvara Rudneva-Rozanova helped him exit from egoism, which Solovyov sees as the role of true love, and how it changed him as a man and as a creator-writer: “I just could never ‘imagine my reader’ […]. I knew people read me, but it was as if they didn’t. I just don’t ‘feel’ them. I try to catch onto them, to reach them. It’s as if I want to utter some word to them. But the emptiness doesn’t carry the sound…”207 Isolation in a metaphysical void and criticism of himself for this egoism fills him with the sense of an ethical imperative to break out of it and offer his best self to his readers: “the essence of that wall [that surrounded me] was ‘I m not needed’. ‘I don’t need to publish’. Oh, that ‘not needed’ is so terribly frightening, so pitiful, it reduces you to tears—

206 207

Rozanov, Opavshie list’ia, II, 265–266. Ibid., p. 223–224.

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it [lonely egoistic isolation] is such a metaphysical void where you can’t live, where everything chokes you like carbon monoxide.” His love relationship helps him write in a new and enhanced way: Why did I publish Solitaria? It was necessary to do it… Something pushed me to publish it and I found myself almost mechanically numbering the pages and sending them off to the publisher. And here is where my attachment to my friend (wife) came in, I should say, my ‘dependence on her’ …since there still was ‘breath’ in me. My friend [wife] made it possible for me to breathe. And Solitaria is my attempt to breathe fully and freely, and break through to people whom I really do love sincerely and deeply… (p. 224)

This metaphorization of literary expression as free breathing (a poetic one from the Romantic era) and the breath-word that choked or could not find sound until true love intervened, not only describes sublimated love as giving new life (breath) to the writer, but sublimated love leads to sublimated poetic breathing = literary creation, enhancing its quality. These passages are exactly in the spirit of Solovyov’s idea that the pathos of such individualizing heterosexual love opens up forces in the lover-creator that were dammed up before, and something inside him which demands that he become better and create better things for the beloved—expending his surplus of erotic energy on new beauties for the beloved and for others. The energy has a dual direction-outwards to the beloved, and inwards in artistic and intellectual creativity, which ultimately (as gifts) is directed out to all mankind once more. While Rozanov had reservations concerning Solovyov’s cold theorizing, as Losev has aptly pointed out, he expressed a very marked preference for Solovyov’s poetry, so much of which is about love and exudes an erotic spirit. This may be due to the fact that in poetry perhaps Rozanov felt that Solovyov gave adequate expression to his idea that “sexual love is the type and ideal of any other love…Only in erotic love does the person love completely, in his spiritual and material substance, only in it is the opposition of spirit and matter resolved, and the material becomes the medium for the incarnation of spirit” (VII, 16). “The power of spiritual-fleshly creativity in man is only a transformation or turning inwards of that same creative force that in nature, [meaning: in the sexual act[is] directed outwards…”208 We have seen that it moves in both directions. 208

Solovyov, Opravdanie dobra, (Book VII, 16 and 60).

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Dependence and Independence—the Personality as Partial and Whole Genius-like creativity as a transformation of sexual instinct is enhanced by the mutual love and union of two people dependent upon each other in the view of the Russian religious thinkers because this bonding with one person, one ideal relationship, is the building block of the eventual reuniting with all mankind, the goal of man in the “divine-human process” on which Solovyov wrote extensively and to which Rozanov also subscribes. Christian man must strongly develop/perfect the spiritual side of his personality but this self-improvement is not a end in itself. Self-perfection is cultivated in order to be able to give a more perfect self to the beloved other- as two interpenetrated beings who then can devote more energy to the common task, increasing love in the world which is the world- unifying energy. The concept of belonging to and being dependent upon a larger whole, which is all mankind and the entire creation, permeates Russian Orthodoxy and is expressed in the concept of the collective ecclesiastical consciousness (sobornost’). The most difficult and supreme overcoming of egoism is the complete bonding with another person in body and spirit and it is necessary—one must give one’s whole self to gain and be one’s full and best self. In the Catholic and Protestant West where the atheistic psychoanalysis of Freud and Rank and the analytical psychology of Jung, developed, the main emphasis is on the individual as a whole, with inner problems and on his functioning as an independent being. In Rank from the first separation, the trauma of birth, throughout life and maturation- the development of a strong ego in the creative man means undergoing and mastering a series of separations, with the goal of attaining maximal independence of others and of so-called “reality.” The development of a strong ego in the creator emphasizes his independence from reality and other people, more than his dependence upon beloved others. Freud’s sublimating creative person as described in Civilization and its Discontents can provide intense pleasure for himself without reliance on others or objects in the real world. The pleasure he takes in fantasies and the products of his imagination is not diminished by the fact that he knows they are not real. He can provide himself imaginative pleasure—surrogate pleasure without dependence on reality or others. The creative genius in Freud and, especially, in Rank’s thought, is unusually independent of other people and of the real world.

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The description of the possible functioning of sublimation in The Ego and the Id (quoted at length in Chapter IV above) shows the ego as the receptacle of relinquished Id-attachments. Here the ego forces the Id to give up the libidinal objects in the outer world that the Id desired/and needed. The Ego strengthens and develops itself by introjecting a substitute libidinal object and forces the Id to direct its libidinal energy towards that intrapsychic, narcissistic object. Thus, the Ego is filled with substitutes of objects the Id relinquished. In this way Ego gains control over the Id which must suffer in the process. The energy from the Id which goes to the narcissistic object is internal, desexualized by the neutral forces/energies of the Ego. If, as Freud hypothesizes, this is the usual path of sublimation, and a de-sexualization of libidinal energy occurs in the sublimation process, the libidinal energy naturally directed out to the external object (and dissipated in it) can be said to be diverted inward to the introjected substitute object called narcissistic libido (object). The new object-goal is internal to the psyche, intrapsychic, not in the outer world. The transformed energy then is expended back into the ego and it can as well be directed in a desexualized form into a creative work in material or verbal form. It must be remembered that sublimated energy is not dammed up and repressed energy, but released energy, whose quality changes as it is being released or expended. In Freudian sublimation then the ego creates an alternative intrapsychic (narcissistic) object for the energy and the desexualized, but not diminished, energy goes into it and expresses it as a work. The work produced can be seen as a product of eros directed inward, into, as it were, the expressed image/introjected object. The product created is a material, verbal or ideational expression of the latter. Freud had always posited neutral energies which support the ego and they are here the ones which alter the nature of the primary libidinal energy and divert it inward. This sublimation emphasizes the independence of other people/sexual objects and real objects in the outside world. Their role is very much diminished.

Perfect Sublimation in Freud Freud’s treatment of Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest world artists, as a totally abstinent ascetic, and latent homosexual, is helpful here. Leonardo is the perfect sublimator the “rarest and most perfect creator

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because his libidinal energies were sublimated from the beginning” (italics mine—ALC). Thus he escaped the common fate of repression with its burdens of inhibition and control: “Leonardo succeeded in sublimating the greater part of his libido into his urge for research.”209 The greatest creative genius by these lights is a person who can employ the energy of powerful infantile drives and escapes repression, when most children must expend (libido) to control the upsurge of infantile/ sexual (Id) urges, Leonardo avoids this fate. By sublimating rather than repressing his infantile urges, he gained a double measure of creative energy.” Jung is even more reticent about the mechanisms of sublimation than Freud and hardly draws a connection between a Romantic love relationship and creativity. He does speak of the male soul image/ animus in woman and the female soul image/anima in men’s psyche, which resides in the personal unconscious. These soul images of the opposite sex do play a role in whom we marry, but the personal unconscious is less important for artistic creativity in Jung that it is in Freud. Jung does grant Freud’s search in the personal neuroses of the artist-creator (in the book on Leonardo or the article on Dostoevsky) some validity, but declares it inadequate to explain an individual’s creativity. The great creative artist is giving form to much more than repressed material from his own personal complexes. Moreover, significant works of art are not for Jung always produced by well-balanced individuals and certainly not by those in happy loving relationships. Understanding great works of art by individual creators for Jung requires the concept of the common collective unconscious. For Jung the great artist is the one who can give artistic, musical, verbal form to the content of the collective unconscious which is the general patrimony of mankind. Such art speaks to the many, to whole societies and may have universal appeal. Of course, the unconscious content of the artist’s personal neuroses (in his personal unconscious) plays some role in the created product, but the product will be great only if the material of the personal complexes

209 Freud, “Leonardo,” pp. 80–81. Note that Merezhkovsky’s book Leonardo da Vinci in German translation is cited by Freud as one of his favorites and influenced his understanding of Leonardo as a creative genius, Berdyaev also knew Merezhkovsky’s very popular book (the second volume of his most popular trilogy) and this, may account for the fact that both Freud and Berdyaev use Leonardo as the example of the most perfect sublimation.

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interacts powerfully with the archetypal content of the collective unconscious. Jung can therefore call great creations “impersonal.” The product of such interaction is significant because the artist gives individual, i.e., his own expression to the unconscious life of the multitude, of the society at large. Of all our thinkers Jung speaks most of suffering, unhappy artists, who nevertheless may produce great works. The combination of their personal neuroses and the common archetypes is felicitous (a neuroses which succeeds!), but this has little to do with personal happiness in the world and even less with a felicitous love relationship. (We shall see below that the important thing Jung adds for Christian creativity is his more positive, or at least neutral, concept of the collective unconscious. In Jung the unconscious is a rich treasure trove of elements and like anything in nature, neutral in itself and able to be turned to the good and virtuous on the one hand, or the evil and unvirtuous. We shall see in Chapter VII how Vysheslavtsev uses these pliable concepts of the personal and collective unconscious is his theories on how sublimation works.) Jung’s notion is that the great artist gives form to the content of the collective unconscious mainly, that his rational ego consciousness is not so closed to that content, and his unconscious imagination which carries its images can more easily invade his ego consciousness, which actively receives it, and can give it form. Jung believes that the overdeveloped rationalist ego consciousness that is highly evaluated and prevalent in Western culture, an ego consciousness that is unaware of, or very negative towards and closed to, the content of the collective and personal unconscious, is less healthy than a more balanced psyche, where there is productive dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious (through the activity of imagination.) This overdeveloped ego-consciousness, which he thinks Freudian therapy contributes to, has two results for man in general and for the artist: modern man is one-sided, psychically impoverished and imbalanced, and vulnerable to being overwhelmed or rendered mentally ill by the unconscious content of his own psyche. This Western mindset has led to the more balanced artist type being considered primitive, primordial, less “developed” than the excessively conscious rational intellectual. From neither of these premises does it follow, however, that great artists and creators are all balanced or happy individuals. Great works of art are not for Jung necessarily produced by well-balanced individuals and or by those in loving heterosexual relationships.

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Inappropriate Love Objects and Creativity Rank in his comprehensive treatment of the sublimation of incest desire, assumed in the orthodox Freudian manner that the incest drive is universal to mankind. In his doctoral dissertation and subsequent book Rank shows how artistic geniuses—from the anonymous creators of collective myths to great individual artists such as Goethe and Schiller–transformed, i.e., sublimated, the incest desire into some of the world’s greatest literary works. His approach in the book on The Incest Motif in Literature and Legend (1912)210 has this in common with Jung: that what is given form lies repressed in the unconscious of all men. In Rank’s treatment more than in Jung’s the artists seem to achieve some lessening of the pain of the frustrated desire via sublimation, sublimation produces the pleasure of which Freud speaks. The poets/creators who sublimated their incest desire in different imagined plots may have weakened the incest desire in themselves, compensated for it, derived some pleasure while creating beauty, something sublime, from a painful inner drive, assuaging the, perhaps partly conscious, and certainly unconscious, guilt that is attendant on the incest desire. etc. This is especially clear in those cases where through imagination they create situations that remove the central pain of frustration, allowing the amorous desire to be fulfilled in the fiction. In life the artist desires his sister or mother sexually, loves an object whom he cannot have, thus he sublimates this taboo desire into a socially acceptable solution—he marries a double of his sister or a mother look-alike. Or, in his play or novel the character representing the mother turns out to be an imposter or the beloved sister turns out to be adopted and not a biological sister, so that his love can be consummated in the fictional version. Fictional plots in these cases mitigate the pain of the situation in the author’s real life. They provide a beautiful wish-fulfillment version that allows a secondary pleasure to be derived from the imaginative activity as in daydream, a happy delusion substitutes a dire reality. The obsessive return to the incest motif by certain writers and the great variety of modes of solving it in complex plots that Rank recounts shows the amount of imaginative activity required to decrease the pain. As in Freud, these works have permanent and universal appeal because of the universality of the desire for incest in all places and

210

Rank, The Incest.

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times. This masterwork shows a great variety of individual patterns of coping with the incest desire in its sublimation. Rank some 17 years later criticized Freud for his inability to cope with creativity in the genius-individual—Freud’s inability to take individual differences properly into account in dealing with the Oedipus Complex and other psychic traumas, in patients generally, but especially in great artists.211 Rank in his treatment of the plot patterns generated by particular artists is beginning to cope with the individual creator’s experience of the universal incest desire and taboo. While the incest desire deals obviously with frustrated libidinal desire, it is nevertheless Otto Rank who was most immersed in great art of many cultures and many types, who knew the most creative biographies of geniuses. It is therefore he among the Freudians, who has the most complex commentary on the role of Romantic love in the lives and works of creative geniuses. On the one hand, Rank’s genius creator is a man whose powerful will-ego succeeds in dominating his impulse-ego. His impulseego (biological drives), if it dominates him makes him very dependent on sexual partners in the outside world. Rank’s genius- creator, in stark opposition to this seeks maximal independence from reality and the given world. His impulse ego is dominated and controlled by his will ego, which creates an inner world within himself—his will-world that is strong enough to stand as an alternative to the world and seeks to change it. In Rank the reality principle, so important in Freud, has currency only where the “average person” is concerned, the ungifted individual who can do no more than conform to the social and cultural environment. The talented and blocked neurotic—his failed artist—and the successful genius artist live in independence from and rebellion against reality. The neurotic is made mentally ill by his non-acceptance of reality. The energy expended on opposing it is lost to creativity. The great genius thrives on his opposition to reality, and expends his libidinal energy changing it, by imprinting his inner world upon it through his creative work. Rank on Romantic Love in the Creative Genius Agreeing with Freud, as all our thinkers here do, that creative energy is sexual at base, Rank is forced to confront the issue of Romantic love for a single individual of the opposite sex—the sublimation of libidinal 211

Rank, Art and the Artist, pp, 26ff.

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energy into erotic love, and he does so in Art and the Artist. For Rank, as we have seen, the creative genius lives in his own world (anti-world); Rank conceives the genius as possessor of a stronger will and greater freedom than most humans, having through that will “overcome” others and prevailing influences from the outside community, including the community of specialists in his own field. He is one who in his creative life can treat the majority of “others” as to a very large extent 1) dominated and defined by his creative self; 2) as projections of his own creative will, (i.e., as that will’s “creatures”), which is to say, not as selves in their own right with responding freedoms and wills that would oppose his own and even curtail or change him as a result of interaction. In his actual “biological or impulse-life” the artistic genius, of course, may have close interpersonal relations like anyone else. He has, as it were, two lives, in the same body: the creative life of the will-ego and the biological life of the impulse-ego and they are in tension in Rank’s thought: the one always threatens to engulf the other. Too much involvement in creativity will consume the body-the creator will die into his work. What the creator immortalizes in his oeuvre, on the other hand, is some part of his biological life. The latter is sublimated, lifted out of the biological series into the spiritual series, raised “super Naturam.”

Flesh (Biological Life) versus Spirit (Creative Life) This pitting of the biological life against the creative life separates the two sublimations of sexual energy 1) the sublimation of eros in love for a spouse with whom one has children and a sexual life against 2) the spiritual sublimation of libido that results in artistic creation. No such conflict was observed in the religious thinkers who see the two sublimations as mutually self-supporting. Rank says that this conflict leads for most creators to a parallel division between the woman the creative person lives with, his partner in procreation, and the person who functions as his Muse—a catalyst to his art/creativity. The Muse is usually an idealized projection of his own will-ego and has no freedom in her own right; she is wholly his “creature,” not a free personality, at least as far as he or his creative work is concerned. From this we can surmise that Rank would be very skeptical of the notion that Romantic love and marital relations increase (rather than drain away) creative forces, or act as a catalyst to increased creative productivity. He tends to agree with Freud that for the most part they do

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not. While he recognizes the sexual, impulsive basis of any creativity, he sees higher spiritual creativity as the result of subduing the sexual passion, and in his later years often says that creation is asexual. Rank expresses this clearly when he discusses the contesting demands of life vs. those of art in love relationships: “[The creative man] usually needs two women or several […]. He undoubtedly loves both these persons in different ways, but is usually not clear [to him] the part they play… Because the Muse (who is usually a real person, but distant) means more to him creatively he thinks he loves her the more. This is seldom the case in fact, moreover it is psychologically impossible […] the women who from purely human or other motives he loves more, he often cannot set up as his Muse […]. For to the Muse for whom he creates, or thinks he creates, the artist seldom gives himself [sexually].”212 The artist’s relation to woman [in general] has a more ideological than a sexual significance (p. 61). “To make a woman his Muse, or to name her as such, amounts to transforming a hindrance (which would draw him too much into life, i.e., sexual relations and marital love) into a helper— a compromise which is usually in the interest of productiveness, but renders no service to life.”213 “Service to life” in this context means family, children, treating a woman as a full-valued other and would involve a contest of wills between the lover and the beloved. Those things according to Rank are for many, but not all creators, better sequestered off and fully controlled by the creative personality. The independent nature of the creator is made very clear in statements such as: “There are artists for whom even a feminine Muse represents a potential homosexual relationship” (p. 60) of which we learn: “From the standpoint of the ego (of the creative genius) the homosexual relation is an idealizing of oneself in the person of the other” (italics mine—ALC).214 This is clearly a narcissistic, self-enclosed model of the creator. As we have indicated here, Rank’s conception of Romantic heterosexual love in its connections to creativity is the direct opposite of what we see in Solovyov and Rozanov. For Rank it is a hindrance that can be neutralized by setting another woman up as the Muse-helper. For Rozanov and Solovyov being in love with a certain individual is a great “help” as he “depends” on her responding love. In the first place they see

212 213 214

Ibid., pp. 60–61. Ibid., pp. 59–60. Ibid., p. 61.

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the creative person as made whole and fulfilled by the beloved’s “creation of them.” The beloved and the Muse are the same person, the one for whom one creates, who is the addressee of the work, or the “character” created in it. Rank admits this model as possible but only in a tiny minority of cases. In Rank the female Muse is, in the main a creature of the artist’s will, a passive object, an emanation or expression of the artist’s will-ego. Rank admits that his narcissistic model—Eros turned inward onto a Muse who is a creative projection of the self—is the most common case. For him the model extolled as best by the religious thinkers Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev, is much rarer than the totally celibate model exemplified in Freud’s treatment of Leonardo da Vinci. In addition to the “two or several women” model, Rank derives from psychoanalyst Oswald Lenk yet another type of genius creator—“the sexual superman.” He expends himself in sexual activity with many women and then becomes overwhelmed with guilt that he is burning himself out. He then retreats into an ascetic posture for intense creative periods to compensate for the non-creative “sexual” period. This type exhibits a pendulum-like vacillation between concessions to the impulse-ego followed by periods of making amends to the will-ego. Romantic love relationships, real or imaginary, play little part in this model.215 The energy that pushes the sexual superman into frenetic fits of creativity is the force of guilt. This is a complex variation on the ascetic model, where frantic attempts are made to make up for losses of the artist’s limited amount of libidinal energy. These are both variations on what is ultimately an affirmation of asceticism, a Christian religious model. We should not be surprised to find them in Rank. He, after all, considers the artist’s deepest unconscious motive in creation to be immortalization of oneself in the spirit and not in the flesh. Because Christianity codified and preached just such immortalization of the soul-spirit, Rank considers it an excellent cultural ideology for the creation of great art. Moreover, he wrote that at the height of the Christian period of art history, before the Renaissance, the great artists relinquished their will and expressed love for God directly—a love which was not mediated through love for an earthly woman with whom they were in relationship. Later, with the decline of Christian faith in the modern period, love for God was transformed in the genius creator

215

Ibid.

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into “a religion of which the artist was himself the god,”216 which leads to the narcissistic Muse as projection-of self model that we have analyzed here above. On the basis of the foregoing discussion we must conclude that the signal difference between the sublimation of Freud and his renegade disciple Rank, on the one hand, and the Russian religious thinkers on the other, is that the Freudians see sublimation as a transformation or transmutation of the erotic energy—a change that occurs by natural laws, in this case psychic/psychological laws. The neutral ego— supportive energies—desexualize the libido. The religious thinkers by contrast see sublimation as a transfiguration of erotic energy -something that occurs not by natural law, but by divine intervention. It requires a “God-function” in which the beloved other stands in for the divine. Freud calls the products of sublimation “finer and higher,” whereas Rank would call them “spiritual.” Rank does not totally exclude what Solovyov and Rozanov proffer—the case in which the Muse and the wife-sexual life partner are one and the same person, yet he favors the model in which the artist-Muse relationship turns the woman into an object, a projection of the ego of the creative person. This is not a mutual ongoing interactive relationship as in Solovyov and Rozanov, but a one-way street. The religious thinkers see sublimated Romantic love in which the Muse is same person as the beloved as a perpetually self-sustaining system in which the two types of sublimation -Romantic love and creation of cultural products feed and support each other. Rank’s opposing model pits Romantic love and cultural creativity against each other in a harsh struggle. Types of Erotic (and Anti-erotic) Energy (in Freud, Rank, Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev) Let us review the various thinkers’ concepts of types of energy that are observed in the transmutations and/or transfigurations that occur in sublimation. Since the energies as treated by the psychoanalysts and the religious thinkers have an analogue in sublimation in alchemy, rendering baser metals nobler, we shall differentiate them graphically.

216 Rank, Art and the Artist, passim. This idea of the genius-artist as the “god of own religion” is tantamount to what Dostoevsky and the Russians call Man-godhood (chelovekobozhestvo), and adamantly condemn.

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Freud and Rank “__”: Primal libidinal energy which leads to the normal sexual act and to reproduction “- -”: Neutralizing ego-supportive energies “~~”: Sublimated libidinal energy In the model Freud provided in The Ego and the Id,217 when finer and higher cultural products of all kinds are produced, the first energy (__) is desexualized by the second (--) producing the sublimated energy (~~). Something similar happens in the weakening of sexuality in sublimated Romantic love. In “The Psychology of Love” Freud wrote: Thus we may perhaps be forced to […] the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization […] the [sexual]non-satisfaction that goes with civilization is the necessary consequence of certain peculiarities which the sexual instinct has assumed under the pressure of culture. The very incapacity of the sexual instinct to yield complete satisfaction as soon as it submits to the first demands of civilization becomes the source, however, of the noblest achievements which are brought into being by ever more extensive sublimation of its instinctual components. […] It seems then that the irreconcilable difference between the demands of two instincts—the sexual and the egoistic—has made men capable of every higher achievements… (p.190)218

This is in complete agreement with the idea of a limited energy, here diverted from sexual activity. Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev The religious thinkers who posit the possibility of a transfigured eros treat of the following types: “__”: the basic libidinal energy. “++”: a higher erotic energy, like Plato’s exalted Eros, ultimately an endowment from God. This is the person’s spiritual force—a spiritual energy. “**”: the highest type of purified eros in man for the religious thinkers is transfigured erotic energy

217 218

See discussion in Chapter IV. Freud, “The Psychology of Love,” p. 190.

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Hence we have this rule in Solovyov and some other religious thinkers: normal physiological sexual energy (__) when acted upon by spiritualized energy in sublimated Romantic love (++) changes into transfigured eros (**). (__) plus (++) combine to produce (**). Vasily Rozanov, who believes sex is so spiritual or divine a priori presents the spirit-flesh fusion from the outset that does not require a spiritual energy to act upon it. Thus we have sexual energy that is, in and of itself, from, God (++). The underlining here indicates that the physiological libido is seen as one and the same force with the spiritual eros in Rozanov. He does allow that the divine sexual energy can be defiled and misused and degraded by individuals to pure physiological libido (__). This is the defilement of sacred sex in certain individuals who practice sex without individualized love. Rozanov says of himself at one very depressed period in failing married life with Suslova that he had meaningless sexual encounters (Fateev): “That was mere physiology.”219 He sees this as a crime against something that was created sacred. He accuses the Russian church of a systematic defilement of (++). This defilement which makes what is sacred (++) profane (__), is, of course, the diametric opposite of sublimation, it is destructive and creatively barren–a de-sublimation, as it were. We shall now move to a discussion of sublimation in Nilolai Berdyaev, who characterizes himself as a Christian thinker, but conspicuously almost lacks the transfigured erotic energy (**) we find in Solovyov and Vysheslavtsev, as well as the fused physiological-spiritual energy (++) found in Rozanov. Religious Monism and Religious Dualism: The Uniqueness of Berdyaev Solovyov, the founder of the tradition of religious sublimation that we are studying here, is a religious monist, and in this Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev are his true followers and heirs. They see the world below as permeated with divine spirit, thus the separation of the world divine from the world earthly can be and is constantly being overcome by man’s creative efforts. God, the divine, as the energy of divine love is immanent in the created world, in Nature. This is not full blown

219

Rozanov, cited in: Fateev, p. 102.

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pantheism because God is both in the natural world and beyond it and outside it, exceeding it. Sergei Bulgakov called this panentheism.220 In Solovyov’s monist philosophy every strong distinction between the transcendent and the immanent is overcome in the depths of the spiritual life. Somewhat ironically, it was Berdyaev who characterized this very brilliantly in his article defending Solovyovian monism against its dualist misinterpretation in Evgeny Trubetskoi’s book The WorldConcept of Vladimir Solovyov. Berdyaev himself wrote in 1913: “the idea of Godmanhood is not a separating of the world and God, a thisside and a that-side, but rather a unifying […] The idea of Godmanhood demands acknowledgment of this, that from man there ought to be a positive gain in the kingdom of heaven, that man ought to have his say[…] Godmanhood presupposes man’s freedom and his creative power[…] divinity is inherent in him[man] […] man is not only falling away and sin.”221 This is what is reflected in the two types of energies attributed to the religious thinkers above. Berdyaev clearly understands that Solovyov believes in a transcendental eros, but has a strong tendency to dualism. Religious dualism is, of course, the opposite idea that God and spirit are external to the world and that the world and matter are so fallen that they cannot attain to divinity. In his study of Dostoevsky222 and in many other works Berdyaev defines the period of religious dualism, which he places in Judaism and early and Medieval Christianity: At that time “man was bereft of spiritual depth which was removed to the inaccessible heights of a transcendent plane” (p. 36). The Church “relegated the spiritual life to another world. The transcendent world itself was pushed back to the unknowable and all ways to it were closed to man […] [who was] shut up in a material and psychological reality” (p. 36). Shut up in this reality, man would dispose only of the types of libidinal energy Freud and Rank treat, that is the basic libidinal energy (__) and its de-sexualized form in sublimation 220 Pantheism is the equation of God with the created universe. Panentheism has the strong sense of God’s immanence in the created universe, but retains the notion of God as creator above and outside the universe. In it unlike pantheism there is a strong notion of the creator and the createdness of the universe maintained. Zen’kovsky stressed that panentheism is a better characterization of Rozanov’s position, that he is not a pantheist, (I, 463–464). 221 See reference on page 33 on Berdyaev’s Review in English translation: N.A. Berdyaev, “Concerning Earthly and Heavenly Utopianism (As Regards the Book of Prince E. Trubetskoy ‘The World-Concept of VI. Solov’ev’)”, http://www.berdyaev. com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1913_170.html. 222 Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, tr. Donald Attwater (New York: Living Age, 1957), page references are given in the text.

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(~~). These are the two types of erotic energy man disposes of in Berdyaev’s thought. The transfiguration of eros which we indicated thus (**) hardly occurs in human creation in Berdyaev. In endeavoring to explain this we must first recall that the other three Christian thinkers here had deep and abiding roots in a mystical Russian Orthodoxy. Solovyov and Rozanov underwent only brief periods of religious doubt in their adolescence, and Vysheslavtsev was always a believer. Berdyaev, on the contrary, was brought up without any religious education and was a Marxist thinker in his youth. Though he was profoundly influenced, positively by Solovyov and both positively and negatively by Rozanov, Berdyaev differs from the others because in his religious consciousness there dwell both a monist and a dualist and he quite inconsistently see-saws back and forth between these two opposed religious positions. He owns this fact of his intellectual make-up to himself in the first book in which he qualifies himself as a Christian, The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916). The following passage, though rarely cited at length, has value as a key to understanding his double-voiced style of argument. Thus we cite it here in its entirely: “I know I may be accused of a basic contradiction which tears apart (Dionysian tragic lacerated spirit of modern man) my whole sense of the world. I shall be accused of combining an extreme religious dualism with an extreme religious monism” (Solovyov, Rozanov and all the uni-totality thinkers are monists and rigorously eschew dualism). Berdyaev’s dualism: “The ‘world’ is evil, it is without God and not created by Him. We must go out of the world, overcome it completely, the world must be consumed […] freedom from the world is the pathos of this book […]. There is an objective source of evil (the world) against which we must wage a heroic war. Over against the world stands freedom in the spirit, life in divine love, in the Pleroma.” (p. 17) In the same paragraph with no transition at all Berdyaev presents his monist self: “…I also confess an almost pantheistic monism. The world is divine in its very nature. Man is by his nature divine. The worldprocess is self-revelation of divinity. God is immanent in the world and in man. Everything which happens with man happens with God. There is no dualism of diviner and extra-divine nature, no dualism of God’s absolute transcendence of the world and man.”223

223 Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, tr. Donald Lowrie (London: Gollancz, 1955), pp. 16–17.

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Clearly, Berdyaev’s monist position is directly influenced by Solovyov’s notion of vseedinstvo and close to Rozanov’s, which we have seen in the two foregoing chapters. The statement that “The worldprocess is the self-revelation of divinity” is a rephrasing of Solovyov’s more Hegelian-sounding, “The world is the absolute in a state of becoming.” The general ontology of the monist Berdyaev is close to that of the other three Russian thinkers in this book. The dualist Berdyaev is strikingly at odds with many of their positions. This is an important key to Berdyaev’s internal dialogue, intellectual division and perhaps divided selfhood which he calls his special brand of antinomianism: “I am conscious of this antinomy of dualism and monism and I accept it as insurmountable in consciousness and inevitable in religious life.”224 This inner struggle of monism and dualism makes Berdyaev unique in the group inasmuch as the other religious thinkers here do not share this experience. Moreover, Dostoevsky who diagnosed man’s divisions so brilliantly in his fictional characters, came finally to Christ through a “furnace of doubt” in a passage Berdyaev repeatedly quotes from his Notebooks: “No other expression of atheism has ever had such force in Europe, as my own[…] I learnt to believe in Christ and confess his faith. My Hosanna has burst forth from a huge furnace of doubt” quoted by Berdyaev.225 Dostoevsky presents the tragedy of man’s dualist-monist dichotomy in his characters’ fates, yet he personally suffers through to the Christian position, overcoming in his own personal voice the tragic “tornness” and anguish of the path. Berdyaev does not — he presents the dualist-monist division, albeit in different measures of balance, virtually throughout his career. This perpetual “tornness” leads him to a very tragic sense of human life and all human endeavor. Everything natural and the attempts to ascend to spirit are fettered and fraught with tragedy. The prevalence of Berdyaev’s dualist side in certain periods casts a pessimistic pall over his works, even about the possibility of any overcoming evil in the world and a despair at the possibilities of attaining anything else. In those periods he is guilty of what he accuses the historical church of in his book on Dostoevsky—of an inability ever to find exit from “the darkness and horrors of division and catastrophe”226 which he says is part of the path to truth. His indecision stalls him on that path.

224 225 226

Ibid., p. 16. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, p. 31. Ibid., p. 72.

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This vacillation between the Monist and Dualist positions has obvious consequences for Berdyaev’s attitudes towards sexuality, the power and efficacy of Romantic love and of human creativity, and therefore sublimation. His first explicit mention of Freud and sublimation in found in his very important work The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916). The two chapters in this book dealing directly with sexual subjects are VIII: “Creativity and Sex, Male and Female, Race and Personality” and IX: “Creativity and Love. Marriage and the Family.”227 The former is of somewhat greater interest in that the second deals more with social institutions, including the historical Russian Orthodox Church which he views as an enslaving institution little superior to Judaism. Most of the institutions treated there for Berdyaev belong so firmly in the categories of “Slavery” and Objectivation—the using of man’s free absolute personality as an object, a means to some societal or other end-its reification- as to be quite predictably negative—violations of free personality. As part of Berdyaev’s evolving idiosyncratic Christian consciousness he feels a need to discuss creative acts in relation to divine love. He opens the chapter “Creativity and Love” in a decidedly Rozanovian mode, in fact this passage reads like two pages of vintage Rozanov: The strong feeling of the centrality of sex is characteristic in our epoch […] Man’s concept and feeling of the world depends on sex. Sex is the source of being […] the polarity of sex is the foundation of creativity/creation, [italics mine—ALC] The sense of being, its intensity and coloring, has its root in sex. With ever-increasing acuity man has begun to recognize, scientifically (Freud), philosophically (Solovyov), and religiously (Rozanov), that sexuality is not a special differentiated function of the human being, that it is diffused throughout his whole body, penetrates all his cells and determines the whole of his life. Today we cannot separate sex from the whole of life, we cannot assign to it merely the function of the organism.

Anyone familiar with Rozanov’s works between 1899 and 1904 would say immediately that these ideas are Rozanov’s. Moreover, Berdyaev adopts here Rozanov’s very relativistic for the period attitudes on sexual normalcy, which are made more explicit in People of the Lunar Light. Berdyaev continues in a Rozanovian vein: “We cannot draw a

227 Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, Chapter 8 “Creativity and Sex. Male and Female: Race and Personality,” pp. 180–204 and Chapter 9 “Creativity and Love: Marriage and the Family,” pp. 205–224. References given in the text.

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sharp line scientifically between the normal and natural in sex and the abnormal and unnatural.” The lines have rather been drawn by social (read: Christian church) morality: “Man’s sexual nature cannot be placed on the same level with other functions of the organism, in man’s individuality (personal, private, individualized!) sexuality we observe the metaphysical roots of his being. Sex is the meeting point of two worlds in the human organism. In this point of sex is hidden the secret of his being. We cannot escape from sex. We may leave aside the differentiated function of sex [actual intercourse], we may conquer and deny this natural function, but in this case man’s sexual function is merely transferred—and man remains a sexual being” (p. 181). This is one of Berdyaev’s first formulations of sublimation. Berdyaev goes on to elaborate further on sublimation: “Weakness or lack of interest in the sex act is not proof of the weakness of sex in man for the sex energy flowing through man’s entire being may have many expressions and take many directions. When it is said that man has conquered the power of sex in himself by the power of creativeness, this formula is only the surface of the phenomenon. In such a case, sex has not been overcome, but sex energy has merely been given another direction—it has been directed towards creativity” (p. 182). This large passage is vintage Rozanov co-opted by Berdyaev’s monist voice as Berdyaev’s position, and it is used to set up the discussion of sublimation as a whole. A mere nine pages later we read in the voice of the dualist Berdyaev a severe undercutting of the above position. Eros/ sex still permeates man but here sounds very degraded in general and sublimation sounds less possible in the world. In other words, Berdyaev still maintains, with Freud, that sexual energy lies at the root of creativity, but it is a rotten root, damaging to the quality of that creativity: “Sex life in the world is so radically defective and spoiled.” We hear that sex even between loving partners, “who thirst for union,” is always a disappointment and destructive of the integrity of their respective personalities. They pour, as it were, sexual energy out into each other to no purpose: “The sexual act is the highest and most intense part of contact between the polarized sexes; in it each goes out of himself into the other, steps over the boundary of his own sex. Is union attained at this point? Of course, not (p. 191). Attempted interpenetration (à la Solovyov) brings about no spiritualization of the flesh of the beloved other. In this doomed seeking for a Platonic or Solovyovian androgynous unity, for an exit from egoism, Berdyaev sees a disintegration of the personality. He views coitus as ultimately a cold and self-dissolving

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activity. He advocates virginity and celibacy—as the conservation of one’s vital sexual energy and of one’s personal wholeness: “Chastity is through and through a sexual phenomenon. Man’s integrality […] is best maintained in chastity when human sex-energy is not expressed in the fractional function of the sexual act […] which is a loss of integral sex-energy from the integral being of man” (p. 182). Supposedly, sexual acts drain man’s potential creative powers out of him. Thus, we have a view close to Freud’s, that if one uses one’s fund of libidinal energy in sexual practice there will be less available to sublimate into more refined creative activity. As we have seen, this is far from the case for Solovyov and Rozanov for whom man out of or apart from a love relationship cannot feel or experience optimal wholeness/integrality. Man for them feels longing to reunite with a whole, be it an androgynous male-female unity or the whole of mankind. Man can and does achieve that wholeness in mutual love both spiritually and in the flesh. There is not only a sense of mutual completion in this “I-Thou” sexual bonding, but a positive increase of love and sexual energy, which can then pour forth onto other people, increasing love in the world, or be redirected into creativity. Sex does not fractionalize or diminish the sexual potential of the person, but integrates him and increases his creativity, generating more creative potential. As we pointed out, there is no clear answer as to how this extra sexual energy is generated in loving sexuality, but it is strongly implied that “God-as-Love is there,” is immanent in this form of heterosexual love more than any other (the others being paternal love, fraternal love, Platonic love, caritas, and agape, etc.). Berdyaev’s self-protection against sexual intercourse sharply differs. He rarely, if ever, sees a religious experience of God’s love for his creation in sex, even with a beloved partner. Berdyaev so much associated original sin and the fall of Adam with sex. Since he is convinced by Freud and Rozanov that the human creature is sex-permeated and sex is sinful and degraded, man’s best hope for salvation comes in the form of a new askesis (claimed to be a new type) and vigorous sublimation of his lower instincts. This sublimation is a de-sexualization of libido close to the Freudian type. The sexual instinct is subdued and redirected by will power. This is not to say that Berdyaev in his monist phases totally rejects the possibility of true idealizing love on earth between a man and a woman, but when it does occur it is extremely fragile and therefore doomed to tragic non-fulfillment. Triumphant human love has little

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currency in his oeuvre and cannot be satisfied in this world. This theme is repeated over and over. Sublimation is the positive and eminently espousable goal: There is an attempt to spiritualize libidinal energy in a “creative upsurge” to turn it into (++) which is divine and aims to create non-worldly spiritual value, but it always falls flat, back to (__). A desexualization of Eros of the Freudian type (~~) is the proposed exit from man’s tragic dilemma. Berdyaev, then, espouses a notion, not of interpenetration of souls/ bodies as in Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev, but of “saving of one’s semen,” of remaining impenetrable. This is Freud’s abstinence, inasmuch as wasting one’s libidinal energy on sexual intercourse “fractionalizes” the self, leading to loss of personality. Berdyaev after 1916 in his very frequent dualist phases is not only pessimistic about the realization of ideal Romantic love on earth, creativity and sublimation in his thought become equally tragedy-ridden and not much easier to achieve than truly spiritualized heterosexual love. The creative upsurge is characterized as often similarly unsuccessful to true union in love. “The creative upsurge is spiritual (++) and associated with the divine in man-but its products—what is created by man—like his erotic aspirations “is degraded and spoiled” (p. 191). The strongest Christian critic of Berdyaev’s theory of creativity is the philosopher Father Vasily Zen’kovsky. Zen’kovsky demonstrates very clearly how the radically dualist Berdyaev falls into illogicality with his negative view of sexual energy and sexual love and thus of the only very rare efficacy of sublimated sexual energy when it is poured forth into statuary, painting or other artistic work or idea-constructs. Being Eros at its root, Berdyaev’s creative activity is heir to all the tragedy of Berdyaev’s erotic love. It is frustrated just as regularly: “the creative upsurge […] is divine […]” but “there is little real creativity”(p. 129); “the Romantic creative urge is related to the Christian feeling of life, to the Christian idea of another world” (p. 119). Yet it is all too often doomed to the lower world: “In essence creativity is painful and tragic. The purpose of the creative impulse is the attainment of another life. But the result is another book, another picture …” Herein we see the tragic disconnect between the aims and results of creative effort. Instead of Being (another world)”, culture is created. The subject (personality) does not pass into the object—the subject’s sublimated sexual energy (~~) again gets “fractionalized” in creative work just as it does in erotic love acts. And goes from (~~) to a “de-sublimation” (__). The subject is dragged down to a lower level, if not to the animal, racial level, the

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personhood is violated and remains in this world. Most products of human creativity in that they use earthly materials (stone, wood, human language, human ideas, concepts at best) lose the spiritual force (of sublimated Eros) that was directed into their creation. A small tinge of that divine force (++) may still adhere to them in their form, hence their tragedy and fallenness—the tragedy of incomplete incarnation, of misspent effort. Berdyaev does allow for the creation of “true Being rising from the earth.” He sees Freud’s favorite sublimator, Leonardo da Vinci, as one who does achieve it: “There are very few ‘real pictures’; a real picture or poem no longer belongs to the physical plane of being—they have no material weight, they enter the free cosmos” (p. 165). This highest form of erotic energy which we would have to treat as transfigured Eros (**) is extremely rare in Berdyaev. A more sanguine Christian creator, like the poet and religious thinker Viacheslav Ivanov, a more faithful student of Solovyov, describes the creative ascent (__) ® (++) and the descent of the created product into human and natural materials. In his model much more divinity or spirituality remains in the creation (__) ® (++) even after it is completed on earth. It is spiritualized material. Father Vasily Zen’kovsky feels Berdyaev’s dualist tendencies overwhelm by far any lip service he pays to monism. From 1916 on Zen’kovsky’s remarks on the impasse in Berdyaev’s theory of creativity which is particularly acute in Slavery and Freedom 228 written in the late 1930s in the shadow of World War II and one of his most pessimistic books. Yet as we see in the contradictory passages above, the same problems inhere in his theory in 19l6. Zen’kovsky’s logic is devastating, but solely applicable to the dualist Berdyaev, whom he sees as the true or “main Berdyaev”: “Berdyaev sees a conspiracy against man and the free spirit everywhere […] This conspiracy is called objectivation. His abhorrence of objectivation forces him to wall himself off from the objective (the material and natural world in which all men live) Berdyaev does write: “every expression of creative action in the external world […] falls into the power of the world.”229 Because of this, creativity “which strives to master the world […] loses all meaning since the products of creativity bind us to a fallen world once more, Berdyaev for a long time failed to notice that his personalism that alienates the

228 229

Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, tr. R.M. French (New York: Scribner’s, 1939). Ibid., p. 127.

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individual from the world not only gives creativity a tragic quality, but empties it of all meaning” (Zen’kovsky’s italics). If creativity merely fastens us to a “fallen world it is not worthwhile to strive to create anything in the world. And is there creativity for man outside this world?”230 Zen’kovsky concludes: “Berdyaev, having renounced the fallen world, […] still cannot make creativity intelligible.”231 What Zen’kovsky disregards here is the residual presence of the monist Berdyaev, who is the one who goes on “trying to create” until the end despite the odds and his impossible standard that non-worldly “new being” must be created, and despite the tragic paradox that the creator is a fallen sex-permeated creature. By his energetic example, irrespective of what one thinks of his at times faulty logic, and his insistent proclaiming of a new creative epoch on the horizon, he may inspire others to feel more creative and perhaps to be or become so. This would account for the popularity of his books on creativity. True, his monist voice, which believes “new being” can be created is often drowned out by his dualist one, but never completely. Zen’kovsky can hardly hear his monist voice. Berdyaev and the Freudian School on Creativity The concrete consequences of Berdyaev’s attempts to straddle the internally contradictory monist-dualist positions, not unsurprisingly, bring his theory of sublimation quite close to Freud’s own. The atheist Freud, of course, believes that there is no transcendence above and out of this world. The dualist Berdyaev believes that there is transcendence elsewhere, but that man is so fallen, so sunken in matter that he almost never manages to attain to spirit and transcendence. This brings their respective theories of sublimation close, but, as we shall see, they are not the same. We indicated that Berdyaev was the first Russian religious philosopher to accept Freud’s early theory of sublimation as explanatory of creativity, and as Freud’s contribution to an age that was finally “clarifying the mysteries of sexuality.” He embraced the idea that creative energy was altered sexual energy with such alacrity that it seems it had been patently obvious to him (probably from Solovyov and Rozanov) before he ever read about it. In The Meaning of the Creative Act Berdyaev fairly consistently holds to this idea from 1916 to the late 230 231

Zen’kovsky, II, 771. Ibid.

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1930s, and does so as firmly as Jung and Rank, both of whom accepted that libido was an important psychic force in creativity, but not the only energy. Freud by making the ego so important in sublimation in 1923 brings the neutral energies which support the ego in to de-sexualize the libido. Something similar can be seen in Rank’s forces of the will which make creativity markedly “anti-sexual”; those forces de-sexualize, individualize and spiritualize the energy. The nature of Berdyaev’s acceptance of sublimation appears closest to Freud’s concept. Clearly he believes like Freud that the person has a certain limited—if unquantifiable—amount of sexual energy, a large part of which must be diverted from actual sexual activity (intercourse) for it to be sublimated into higher and finer forms of human creativity. In his 1916 book, as we saw above, he accepts sublimation as virtually the only Christian thing for man to do with this biological energy— transmute it into spiritual products. In these ideas Berdyaev is also surprisingly close to the early Rank, who up to the mid-twenties was Freud’s closest associate. We speak here of the dualist Berdyaev, who differs so markedly from Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev. One of the reasons why the dualist Berdyaev is closer to Freud himself in his understanding of the creative process may be Berdyaev’s deep and often described experience of another atheist who mentions sublimation, Friedrich Nietzsche, and who had influenced Freud. Berdyaev views him as the great genius-creator of the late 19th century. Nietzsche for Berdyaev represents the limit of Humanism, because his creations represent the highest man can achieve without the Grace of God, the extreme limit of sublimation from below.232 In all this the question inevitably arises: how necessary is the Grace of God, “divine intervention” to Berdyaev’s creativity? Berdyaev, like Freud, is a great believer in rational control, of dominating the chaotic, Dionysian forces of the unconscious. An opponent of mysticism which he stresses very strongly in his autobiography, the dualist Berdyaev is a rationalist, a voluntarist and like Freud puts major emphasis on rational consciousness. The unconscious, which Berdyaev recognizes as an all-important component of the human psyche is for him, as for Freud, full of very negative chaotic content (“the sexual passion—the most fallen of the passions”), and the cause of much inner division and neurotic illness in man and therefore should be submitted

232

See discussion of Berdyaev’s view of Nietzsche in Chapter VIII here.

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to consciousness, rationally evaluated and “controlled” to the extent that that deepens self-knowledge and strengthens the conscious ego and will. Love Relations in Dostoevsky. The Berdyaev-Rank Position versus the Bakhtin-Solovyov Position Berdyaev’s discussion of Romantic love relations between men and women in the novels of Dostoevsky gives us an object lesson in his differences from Solovyov and the other religious thinkers here. Berdyaev, like Rank, posits the unconscious as the seat of modern man’s drive for his soul’s individual immortality, a drive which renders the unconscious religious and consonant with the hopes of Christians. For Rank the drive for individual immortality in the spirit is stronger than the sexual drive. Among the points Berdyaev has in common with Rank is the strong focus on creativity, on the powerful free will, that will’s rejection of the given, material world and its attempts to supplant that world, so-called “reality,” with the individual creator’s inner world. Both configure the creative self as very independent of other people and self-sufficient. This leads to remarkable similarities in the view of Berdyaev and Rank on the relations of the creative genius with beloved others, the subject of the present chapter. Berdyaev’s uncanny closeness to Rank’s view of the disconnect between Solovyovian Romantic love and creativity is very well exemplified in his discussion of “Love” in Dostoevsky’s creative work.233 Berdyaev sees Dostoevsky creating female characters, who, just like Rank’s Muses, are pure projections of Dostoevsky’s male ego and the male ego of his respective characters: “Love in Dostoevsky’s novels […] has no value in itself […] but only serves to show man his tragic road […]. Woman never appears as an independent being, for…Dostoevsky is interested in her only as a milestone on the path of man’s destiny. His anthropology is masculine: the soul is primarily a masculine principle in mankind and the feminine principle is the inward theme of man’s tragedy, his temptation” (p. 112). This makes the sexually desired woman what Rank said she was, a hindrance to his creative self-development (pp. 112–113). Berdyaev says Dostoevsky does not subscribe to the Solovyovian version of heterosexual love, which he formulates thus: 233

Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, pp. 112ff. Page references given in the text.

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Dostoevsky does not show, and therefore does not believe in, “the supreme love which achieves totally oneing (Attwater’s word for union) and fusion.” Rather “He takes an individual (male) exactly at the moment in his history when the foundations of his life are undermined and love serves only as an index of his inner division” (p. 113). The insulation of the male towards the other is complete in Berdyaev’s view: “Dostoevsky’s men remain shut up in themselves without any escape towards another being, a woman; the drama of passion is played within the man and the woman concerned is only an item in what may be called the drawing up of the [man’s] interior balance-sheet” (p. 115). “[…] Passion remains […] a matter between the man and himself. […] It can never unite him with the desired woman […]. Love is a tragedy from which there is no way out” (p. 115). The difference from Solovyov and Rozanov is clear: “he [Dostoevsky] did not believe that the final expression of human nature is androgynous, […] Dostoevsky’s human being was not androgynous, he was male” (p. 115). For Berdyaev Nastassia Filippovna and Aglaia are not sufficient beings in themselves but objects illustrating Myshkin’s inner division between pity for the former and sensual feelings towards the latter. Berdyaev brings up Solovyov’s all-important function of sexual love a second time, only to emphasize that it is not present in the works of Dostoevsky: “The impulse towards another which is needed for the recovery towards a whole personality”; “[…] sensuality and compassion […] indulged in moderation and justified by the beauty of the beloved; and above all they must be irradiated by seeing the dear face in the light of God and associating together in His presence. This is true love” (p. 127). But, such love is not to be found in Dostoevsky: “his achievement was to make an impressive contribution to the study of the tragic side of love” (p. 127). We submit that the absence of love and real dialogical relationships in The Idiot is Berdyaev’s reading and heavily colored by his own very pessimistic view of love relationships in the world. It is very questionable that this reading is correct. To wit, an equally sensitive critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who subscribes to the Solovyovian understanding of human love took (in The Poetics of Dostoevsky) the very same relationships and passages in the same novel and drew conclusions diametrically opposed to Berdyaev’s. In the very novelistic relationships where Bakhtin sees the mutual penetration of souls and bolstering of souls, the man of the woman and vice versa, Berdyaev sees the woman as devoid of personality altogether: “Woman never

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appears as an independent (of the man) being.” (p. 112) In the relationship between Myshkin and Nastass’ia Filippovna Bakhtin sees the real meaningful interaction of two full-valued free persons, and evokes the concept of the penetrative word (proniknovennoe slovo). For Bakhtin Dostoevsky’s Nastass’ia Filippovna is as full-valued an individuality as Myshkin, has her own internal dialogue and freely reacts to the Prince’s words in dialogue: “Myshkin is the bearer of the penetrating word, that is a word that can act upon the internal dialogue of the other person, helping him/her to recognize his/her own voice […]”234; this is said in relationship to the mutual relations of Myshkin and Nastass’ia. He writes: “At the moment of the sharpest inner struggle of different words inside Nastass’ia Filippovna […] Myshkin interposes an almost decisive word into her internal dialogue.”235 Nastass’ia’s response is well known. She says she is not like that, meaning as defined by others at her birthday party and by her own behavior as “fallen woman.” Myshkin helps her find and be her true self, something that for Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev is fostered by being-in-relationship. Thus, where Berdyaev and Rank in the Muse and woman depicted in art, see no dialogue, other than the internal dialogue of the masculine ego, the women are completely incorporated into the man, Bakhtin studying the very same relationships and pages of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot sees the living dialogue of two full-fledged selves, two freedoms, who are mutually defining each other and being defined dynamically themselves. Here it is shown in the case of Nastass’ia that being and knowing oneself depends on the gaze of the loving other who is capable of seeing one’s highest, better or ideal self. As a result of the dualist Berdyaev’s pessimism in 1924 about man’s ever achieving true spiritual union in heterosexual love and his ever fashioning creations that are truly spiritual, i.e., his doubts about man’s ever successfully affirming his spiritual side in the fallen world, his models of sublimation are close to the natural non-transcendent ones of Freud and Rank presented here above. Only later when he becomes more knowledgeable in psychoanalysis will Berdyaev critique and “correct” the psychoanalysts’ sublimation by adding his own new concept to it.

234 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Poetics of Dostoevsky, trs. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 325. 235 Ibid.

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The Self-in Relationship versus the Self as Self-Sufficient Microcosm As we saw in our chapters on each of them, Solovyov and Rozanov, and, as we shall see, Vysheslavtsev, apparently under Hegelian influence, see the self as part of a greater whole, as socially constructed, in dialogue with others. For them the interpenetration of full-valued “selves” is essential to the fullest realization of the self, and this achievement of full selfhood is possible here on earth and totally positive. It follows from this that the individual, apart from such a love relationship, is excluded from the supreme self-unifying experience, always partial and mired down in a vicious circle of egoism. Berdyaev, on the contrary, tends very strongly to a Cartesian concept of the individual self as a microcosm, as a whole “I am the whole world,” a small universe inside the larger macrocosm. Personhood in Berdyaev, then, is conceived as more whole than partial. The same must be said of Otto Rank and Freud and, in practice, of Jung. While they as psychoanalysts admit from the outset the importance of relationships for personality formation (especially those in the nuclear family, parents and siblings) they in fact focus largely on the separate individual and his internal “personality dynamics.” This is doubtless heavily influenced by the nature of the clinical situation of one-on-one analysis. The therapist/scientist has direct knowledge and can theorize only about the psychic life of the individual patient. What he knows about “significant others” in the patient’s life comes solely from the patient’s experience and verbal report about them.

PART THREE

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A CORRECTIVE TO CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY

INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE The “New Religious Consciousness” which Solovyov inspired in large part and to which Rozanov, Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev belong, is admirably described in an article of that title written by leading American specialist on Russian philosophy James P. Scanlan. The period between 1905 and 1907 when Berdyaev was most closely associated with the Merezhkovsky-led Religious Philosophical Meetings presents a motley picture of Berdyaev’s vacillating espousal now of monist views, now of dualist ones. Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky led the Religious-Philosophical Meetings. These first public meetings took place between 1901 and 1903 and were attended by the leading religiously-interested philosophers, intellectuals and artists of the period and the intellectuals of the St. Petersburg clergy, many professors of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary. The meetings passed under the aegis of Merezhkovsky’s version of a revamping of Russian Christianity: the resolution of the conflict between paganism and Christianity. James Scanlan characterizes the thinkers, of whom Rozanov was for some the second in importance (after Merezhkovsky) and, in Berdyaev’s view, the most prominent, in the following manner: a small group of religious rebels who drew their inspiration from neither of the reservoirs of earlier Russian culture, the radical intelligentsia and the Orthodox church. Their […] guide was not Nicolai Chernyshevsky but Friedrich Nietzsche who showed them the sanctities of paganism and classical antiquity. Their religious inspiration came not from the established Church [dubbed by them the historical Church—ALC], but from Vladimir Solov’ev in whose mystical Christianity the spiritual took on sensuous, earthly form. The earthly and the heavenly, long divided in Russian cultural life, began to come together for these thinkers in a strange blend of paganism and Christianity.236

236 James Scanlan, “The New Religious Consciousness,” Canadian Slavic Studies, Vol. 4, 1970, 17. The Russian Religious Renaissance, led by Merezhkovsky, as described by Scanlan is

a remarkable renaissance in Russian art, literature, religion and philosophy in the first decade of the twentieth century […] a small group of religious rebels who drew their inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche, who showed them the sanctities

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Merezhkovsky, flanked by his wife, Zara Gippius, and their close associate Dmitry Filosofov, preached a Christianity revitalized by “paganism,” which meant the interests of this world, and of secular culture. He called his version of Neo-Christianity “Christianity of the Third Testament.” Merezhkovsky delineated three historical stages of Judeo-Christian tradition: the First Testament was the Judaism of the Old Testament, the Second Testament was the Christianity of the New Testament and the third was the dawning Christianity of the Third Testament, which constituted the “new religious consciousness” of the Silver Age Period of Russian Culture (1890–1930 circa). Merezhkovsky’s three historical stages clearly influenced Berdyaev’s own tri-partite division of religious development.237 Berdyaev speaks of The Age of Obedience (parallel to the First Testament/Old Testament), The Age of Redemption (parallel to the Christ-dominated stage, the Second Testament = New Testament), and the Post-Redemptive period of Creativity, which corresponds to Merezhkovsky’s forthcoming Third Testament Period of religious consciousness and cultural creativity. The dominating view of the flesh-spirit controversy in these famous meetings, one shared by Rozanov and Merezhkovsky, is the monist view Scanlan formulates very succinctly in the following manner: Paganism exalted the flesh at the expense of the spirit […] with the coming of Christ the spiritual dimension appeared and the seeming opposition of flesh and spirit was established. Christ himself, indeed, preached and embodied not only their seeming opposition but their actual unity; that is the meaning, Merezhkovsky argues, of the three great Christian mysteries of the Incarnation (the Word made flesh). Communion (the sacrament of flesh and blood), and the Resurrection (flesh made eternal). But the Christian church [the historical Church is intended—ALC], false to this teaching […] has exalted spirit at the expense of the flesh. Hence the historical Church’s asceticism […] its glorification of chastity and

of paganism and classical antiquity. Their religious inspiration came not from the orthodox church but from Vladimir Solov’ev in whose mystical Christianity the spiritual took on sensuous, earthly form. The earthly and the heavenly, long divorced in Russian cultural life, began to come together for these thinkers in a strange blend of paganism and Christianity…The result was an intoxicating new vision of the world—a ‘new religious consciousness’—which not only made body the equal of spirit, but prophesied an imminent golden age in which that equality would transfigure the earth. 237 Berdyaev outlines his three periods in The Meaning of the Creative Act, in Chapter XIV “Three Epochs: Creativity and Culture, Creativity and the Church and creativity and Christian Renaissance,” pp. 320–338 and passim.

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celibacy…only through inconsistency has the historical church failed to condemn everything physical.238

This imbalance in which the heavenly is so spiritual that the human and fleshly can never attain to it brings about the dualism that Berdyaev often exhibits, as we saw in Chapter Five above, and that he claims was dominant in the early Church of the pre-humanist period.239 Clearly this excessive exaltation of the spiritual at the expense of the bodily/ fleshly, which meant the interests of “the world” and the earth, was the problem with Russian Christianity that Merezhkovsky, Rozanov and the other so-called “religious rebels” at those Meetings set about to redress. They aimed to reform the pre-existing Russian version of Christianity, bringing to its doctrines a new mystical synthesis much influenced by the monism of Solovyov. Since we have seen that Berdyaev by his own express admission in his 1916 book The Meaning of the Creative Act feels himself to be a monist and a dualist at the same time, it is not surprising that we should find evidence for this claim in his articles of the period immediately preceding that self-characterization. And this is the case. His answers to Rozanov’s strong attacks on the celibate Christ are in a decidedly dualist mode,240 yet his review of Evgeny Trubeskoi’s two-volume study The

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Scanlan, pp. 18–19. See Chapter V here. 240 Especially “Khristos i mir. Otvet V. V. Rozanovu,” in Dukhovnyi krizis intelligentsii (The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia), (Moscow: Reabilitatsiia, 1988), pp. 230–235. Rozanov died in 1919. Despite this fact, Berdyaev was actively polemicizing with him up until his third re-publication of his “Khristos i mir. Otvet V.V, Rozanovu,” in a form changed and strengthened from its original version of 1907. Because of this Berdyaev kept the name of Rozanov and a somewhat negative (by no means always) and certainly very incomplete version of Rozanov alive to the émigré reader, who has lost access, in most cases, to the enormous corpus of the complete original Rozanov. As we have mentioned heretofore, Zen’kovsky’s long article on Rozanov in the first volume of his History of Russian Philosophy finally published in English in 1953 is by and large a correction of the views Berdyaev held of Rozanov or an attack on the Berdyaevan view. Zen’kovsky placed Rozanov far above Berdyaev as an original thinker, and certainly as an Orthodox thinker, and felt Rozanov contributed vastly more that was original to Russian religious thought. Zen’kovsky had much more personal contact with Berdyaev than he ever did with Rozanov, from their common youthful period in Kiev and later in long years in Paris. After Berdyaev’s death Zen’kovsky, by then an Orthodox priest, wrote a species of confessional article on his personal contacts with Berdyaev and not on the whole positive feelings towards Berdyaev the man. These feelings may have colored the treatment of Berdyaev in Zen’kovsky’s history and his confessional piece is an interesting human document. It is safe to say that from 1916 and 1917 Zen’kovsky did not like Berdyaev’s version of “Neo-Christianity,” as he calls it. 239

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World-Concept of V.S. Solovyov attacks Trubetskoi241 for an overly dualist interpretation and misunderstanding of the philosopher, and this article shows Berdyaev’s monist side. Berdyaev initially embraced the need to solve the problems of the flesh, to set the Church’s demonization of sexuality aright, a position admirably presented in his early (1904) article “The Metaphysics of Sex and Love.”242 Yet even as early as 1905, in his article “On the New Religious Consciousness,” Berdyaev can be seen to be recasting the thrust of Merezhkovsky’s and Rozanov’s thought in the direction of a dematerializing/spiritualization of Merezhkovsky’s concept of “flesh.” There Berdyaev writes: “The fact is that the religious problem of ‘spirit and flesh’ does not coincide at all with the philosophical problem of spirit and matter […] The ‘flesh’ of which Merezhkovsky speaks is a symbolic concept; it signifies the earth in general, all culture and social community (the ‘body’ of mankind),all sensuality, and sexual love. In this ‘flesh’ there is too little of what we in philosophy call ‘matter.’ ”243 This article by Berdyaev is largely a misinterpretation of Merezhkovsky’s positions in 1905 and, in fact, Scanlan goes on to show convincingly that there is vastly more in Merezhkovsky and Rozanov in 1905 that philosophy would indeed call matter, the physiological sexual basis is certainly present. Scanlan discusses the rather strange circumstance that Merezhkovsky accepted Berdyaev’s article as “the best thing written about him” despite the fact that it was largely a misconstruance of his thought and the “new religious consciousness” as manifested at the meetings. This article is one of Berdyaev’s early attempts to posit another “unfleshly” flesh, so-called “noumenal flesh” which he adds. It is a superfluous concept not really required by the ideas of Merezhkovsky and quite misleading where he is concerned. Berdyaev’s symbolizing interpretation here has a definite dualist direction. After Rozanov’s harsh attack on the celibate/sexless Christ in “Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the World” (1907), which we treat in detail in Chapter VIII on the Godman below, Berdyaev grows to feel that Merezhkovsky, and certainly Rozanov, have gone too far in their defense of “paganism”—the earthly, the physical and the material. Where Rozanov is concerned, the dualist Berdyaev appears even more

241

Berdyaev, Review of Trubetskoi book, see Chapter V, n. 25. Berdyaev, “Metafizika pola i liubvi” (The Metaphysics of Sex and Love), in Eros i lichnost’. Metafizika pola i liubvi, pp. 17–51. 243 Berdyaev, “O novom religioznom soznanii,” cited in Scanlan, p. 17. 242

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strongly in his “Christ and the World: Answer to V.V. Rozanov” (1907) where he expresses shock and anger at Rozanov’s public reading of “Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the World.”244 at a session of the Meetings that Berdyaev himself organized. That article, as indicated, is Rozanov’s strongest single defense of the interests of man and the world against historical Christianity’s and its Christ’s deleterious effects upon the earth and mankind. Both the reading and Berdyaev’s answer date to 1907. In this attempt to savage Rozanov, Berdyaev paints him as almost a materialist, as one defending only the most material aspects of “the world” and “not those aspects of the world that are able to experience transcendence.” Only towards the very end of this very polemical piece, does Berdyaev retract the charge of materialism, largely contradicting many of his own statements. Needless to say, unlike Merezhkovsky, Rozanov did not take this misconstruing of his ideas lying down and fired back a polemical attack at Berdyaev for his very dualism. There he states that there is the world, i.e., flesh, as most people experience it, and a fanciful figment of Berdyaev’s imagination that he terms “Berdyaev’s world.”245 The actual world for Rozanov is the one and only world here below and flesh is the one and only flesh here below, which, as we have seen, is very capable of transcendence in Rozanov’s view. With all that Rozanov’s complex and so multiply and variously described sex and flesh and all the mysticism attending thereto are the only “flesh” that might possibly correspond to the “noumenal flesh” (a flesh that it not only phenomenal flesh, but material and spiritual at the same time) Berdyaev evokes in his article about Merezhkovsky. There are, as we have emphasized in Chapter III above, passages on sex and the flesh in Rozanov that sound so transcendent, symbolical and mystical that they might well merit the description “noumenal flesh.” What disqualifies them as noumenal flesh in Berdyaev’s sense is that they are never separated off from the most physical material flesh, but absolutely fused or bound up with it, in Rozanov’s dukh-plot’ (flesh-spirit) concept. With Solovyov’s (died 1900), Rozanov’s and Merezhkovsky’s thought in the vanguard, the first two decades of the twentieth century were a period of philosophical reappraisal of historical Christianity’s excessive spiritualization and the low estimation in which it held sexuality and all the pleasures of the earth. 244 245

Rozanov, “Ob Iisuse Sladchaishem i gor’kikh plodakh mira,” p. 262. Rozanov’s answers to “Khristos i mir” were very numerous.

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It was in the same, reforming at its mildest, and rebellious and heretical at its strongest, spirit of the correction, overhauling and improvement of pre-existent Russian Christianity that both Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev turned to the recent attainments of psychological and medical science in the works of Sigmund Freud and his followers in their philosophical attempts to reform or assist an ailing official Russian Orthodox Christianity, which both felt had a woefully inadequate understanding of the human person to whom it attempted to minister. We shall discuss these fascinating attempts to update the Church’s anthropology and its central deity, the Godman/Christ in this section in three chapters beginning with Berdyaev’s engagement with psychoanalytic thought in Chapter VI, Vysheslavtsev’s more extensive one in Chapter VII, and the results this had for the concept of the God-man in the concluding section, Chapter VIII.

CHAPTER SIX

BERDYAEV’S CONFLICTED ENGAGEMENT WITH FREUD AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Ambivalence about Man Nikolai Berdyaev is the twentieth-century Russian religious thinker best known in the West and most translated into Western languages (some 15 languages). He was known both as the “philosopher of freedom” and the “philosopher of creativity,” as these concepts are the perennial focus of his voluminous oeuvre. Though much is written on Berdyaev’s philosophy of freedom and his philosophy of creativity in a general way, especially by his disciples and admirers (Lowrie, Vallon),246 our placing his views of Eros and creativity in relation to atheistic psychoanalytic theories of sublimation makes our exposition point up aspects of Berdyaev, the man and the thinker, that other narratives avoid. A central insight about Berdyaev that emerges from a study of his ambivalent engagement with psychoanalysis and his views on sublimation and creativity is one that is bound to be unpopular with his many Christian admirers. And this is the conclusion that Berdyaev, more than any of the Russian religious thinkers treated here, is the most ambivalent about the human personality in which he is so invested—he is the most fearful that Freud, the Freudians, the humanists and Nietzsche in his atheist humanism and as well as the most traditional dualist version of Christianity that sees man as only a weak natural being, may be right! Expressed in intellectual terms as his simultaneous embrace of optimistic religious monism and pessimistic religious

246 Donald Lowrie, The Rebellious Prophet. A Life of Nicholas Berdyaev (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1962); Michel Alexander Vallon, An Apostle of Freedom: Life and Teachings of Nisholas Berdyaev (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960); Laurent Gagnebin, Nicolas Berdiaeff ou de la destination créatrice de l’homme (Lausanne: L’Age de l’Homme, 1994); E. Edgar Leonard Allen, Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950); Piama P. Gaidenko, “The Philosophy of Freedom of Nikolai Berdyaev,” in Russian Thought after Communism. The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage, ed. James P. Scanlan (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 104–120.

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dualism, this ambivalence about man and his potential for transcendence leads to extravagant requirements that man create new “spiritual being” that is totally transcendent, on the one hand, and emphasis on the tragic fact that such a lowly and sex-permeated creature as man may well aspire to achievements of which he is constitutionally incapable. Though he would never admit with the atheist Sartre that “Man is a useless passion,” Berdyaev’s defensive “protesting too much” in his extravagant vaunting of man’s divine potential and capabilities and the rampant contradictions that he leaves unresolved in his works, lead one to conclude that, however great his hopes for man, his confidence in man was less than that of Solovyov, Rozanov or Vysheslavtsev. Though his strong Christian critic, the philosopher Vasily Zen’kovsky, accuses Berdyaev of anthropolatry—a virtual religion of man, the man of whom he speaks in such elevated tones seems as abstract, distant and a creature of some future more perfect world, and to have as little resemblance to the ordinary human specimen as Nietzsche’s Superman does. The fallen creature Berdyaev calls “man” in his pessimistic moments is more flawed than the average person, and Berdyaev’s exalted Man is so superior to the typical human that he can be compared only to the rarest genius or someone approaching divine status. As we discussed at length in Chapter V above, Berdyaev was a more complicated, conflicted and even internally inconsistent thinker than Solovyov or Rozanov, or indeed Vysheslavtsev. Berdyaev’s surface tendency to self-repetition and his apparently clear style of writing may obscure the very considerable degree of internal conflict in his oeuvre (two Berdyaevs—the monist and the dualist). Indeed, it has led Zen’kovsky, who is highly critical of such inconsistency, unpardonable to him in a philosopher, to state that the reader is often hard put to explain why one of Berdyaev’s sentences follows upon another. Berdyaev’s self-assessment as a Romantic in his autobiography is adopted by Zen’kovsky to characterize his “moralism.”247 Berdyaev’s special romanticism includes the following traits “the primacy of the subject over the object, opposition to any determinism by the finite, aspiration towards the infinite, no faith that there can be perfection in the finite […] anti-intellectualism and the understanding of knowledge as the act of the whole spirit, the exaltation of creativity in human life,

247 See Zen’kovsky, II, 779–780, “Appraisal of Berdyaev’s Creative Activity,” and also p. 763.

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hostility to all norms and legalism, the opposition of the personal and individual to the power of the general…”248 Romanticism in his case certainly does not mean that he subscribed to the worldview of German Romantic Nature philosophy as he felt Schiller and Schelling erred in their idealization of organic nature. What Zen’kovsky means by a Romantic is a thoroughgoing subjectivist, who really proceeds as though the “world were his own representation” (to co-opt Schopenhauer’s title), as if it really were as he imagines or conceives of it. This stems, of course, from the core Romantic idea that the most deeply felt subjective experience holds the most truth—is the most profound and most “objective.” Utopianism and Dualism in Berdyaev We must point out that what Berdyaev means by creativity and the products of creativity is a completely different than the concept of our other three religious thinkers and the psychoanalysts, for that matter. To appreciate this, Russian scholar Iury Cherny offers a better characterization of Berdyaev as a utopian. Basing himself on Ernst Bloch’s notion in The Principle of Hope, he dubs Berdyaev an “abstractlyutopian thinker” who sees the history of culture as the development of a utopia which indicates the path to the future, to being which “has not yet happened” (“noch nicht sein”). Such thinking evinces “knowledge about the future which permits the thinker to leave the framework of the ordinary and foresee that which does not yet exist.” And we see this in the superhuman traits he projects upon Man in his sanguine moments. Bloch describes an abstract utopia as “a mental and emotional ‘jumping forward’ to a perfect future, in effect a flight from the actual developing reality or present.”249 This certainly characterizes the forward-looking, future-oriented nature of Berdyaev’s new epoch of religious creativity. Berdyaev from 1916 on is proclaiming the imminent advent of an epoch when creativity will not produce what it did in the course of past history—great art, great music and philosophy, etc. but “new being,” something altogether superior to

248 Berdyaev, Dream and Reality (Samopoznanie), tr. Katherine Lampert (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 58. 249 Iury Cherny, Filosifiia pola i liubvi N.A. Berdyaeva (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), p. 24.

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anything created in the Epoch of Redemption (Christian history thus far). In fact, the creation of new being had previously been the prerogative, not of man but of the deity! This utopian creation of “new being” differs radically from the creations Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev have in mind. For them the divine-human process is one in which man is gradually becoming more spiritual (on the model of the Godman-Christ, variously understood) and creating from the given material world and human mind products which increase spirit in the world and slowly move mankind and nature back to their spiritual source in the deity, to all-unity. This collectively elaborated process is possible in the given natural world, moves forward gradually, and man is called upon to contribute his God-given talents to it. The apocalypticism of a Solovyov or a Rozanov consists in the fear that the End of the World may come before the divine-human process is sufficiently far advanced. The same is true of Vysheslavtsev. Berdyaev by contrast both predicts and declares the dawn of a period of perfection where man will create “new being.” For certain religious thinkers this is dangerously close to a Nietzschean deification of man. Such a utopian approach leads Berdyaev to an unfair denigration of man’s achievements in history thus far as “merely cultural” or “just another painting, just another book” and to the idea that there is something in Christianity that harms creativity. When Berdyaev wrote in The Meaning of the Creative Act that “freedom from the world is the motivating passion of my book…The world is evil, we must leave it,”250 he opens a period of dualism in his oeuvre that Zen’kovsky thinks he never leaves.251 This proclaimed (in words) sudden jump into a utopian spiritual world renders the world God created too fallen and damaged to ever return to spirit—God. As formulated by Marina Tsvetaeva: “the bone is too bony, the spirit is too spiritual”252 and never the twain shall meet. To refute any immanence of spirit in the world below in such a manner is what Freud and materialist science do. Berdyaev differs from Freud only in that he imagines and at times appears to mentally inhabit a totally other world of true being-spirit that a few creative geniuses may attain to. Freud would consider this a childish wish-fulfillment and totally illusionary.

250 251 252

Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 11. Zen’kovsky, II, p. 766. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Naprasno glazom—kak gvozdiom…,” in “Nadgrobie” (1934).

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Defensiveness and Ambivalence about Freud Berdyaev, who, as we indicated above, knew and read Freud while in Russia, was forced to emigrate with many other leading pre-revolutionary intellectuals in 1922. Thus, he reached first Berlin and then Paris in the heyday of Freud’s popularity and that of “depth psychology” in general. Berdyaev’s acceptance of Freud’s sublimation hypothesis as early as 1916 in his The Meaning of the Creative Act as true and correct, was never one that sat easily in Berdyaev, and his conflicted attitudes towards the sexual sphere caused great vacillation in his level of interest in psychoanalysis, and acceptance or rejection of the discoveries and insights emerging from Freud and his disciples. With his usual ability to accommodate contradiction, he could claim that atheistic psychoanalysis dragged man down into the mud with its “sexual metaphysics,” and a few pages later praise Freud as a great genius whose “living psychology” provided invaluable insights into human personality. A more detailed treatment of this topic must be prefaced by a general discussion of Berdyaev’s thought as it impinges on the role of sexuality in creativity. Berdyaev’s life in Germany and France in the 1920s brought him into contact with a host of Western thinkers and ideas (Max Scheler, the Catholic thinker, was an important contemporary influence) and he gained a deeper conversance with psychoanalysis at this time. He read Freud, Jung, Adler and Rank, Janet and Baudouin (of the psychoanalytic School of Nancy) among others. He had continued intellectual intercourse with the leading Russian émigré thinkers, among whom Lev Shestov, a professor at the Sorbonne, and Boris Vysheslavtsev, his colleague at his own Religious Academy and co-editor in the journal Put’ were among the most enriching and beneficial to his thought.253 By 1923 Berdyaev has for some time been calling for the creation of a new Christianity, which he sees inchoate in Dostoevsky’s strong focus on man, stronger than on the deity—an anthropological revelation, as he had said earlier, because God lies within, is immanent in man: to affirm God (Jesus Christ) who does not devour man, and the man who is not dissolved in God but remains himself throughout all eternity.254

253 On the journal Put’, see Antoine Arjakovsky, La génération des penseurs religieux de l’émigration russe. La Revue la Voie (Put’, 1925–1940), (Paris-Kiev: L’Espirit et la Lettre, 2002). 254 Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, p. 65.

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This for Berdyaev is “Christianity in the deepest sense of the word.” As we pointed out above, it is obviously not that of the existing Orthodox Church or any other church. It is the product and goal of Berdyaev’s religious creativity, a Christianity in which “the human person/(-ality) is affirmed with all the more strength in the heart of his exaltation; man, with all his dynamism and contradictions remains himself all through, indestructibly man […] Man has a part in eternity […] Dostoevsky safeguarded (as Berdyaev endeavors to) the image and likeness of God in the least and most abandoned human creatures.”255 Berdyaev’s 1923 book, the culmination of his reception of Dostoevsky in his Russian period, states very clearly that Dostoevsky has the most profound understanding of the phenomenon of man of all Russian thinkers. In the chapter “Man” he writes: “Dostoevsky devoted the whole of his creative energy to a single theme, man and man’s destiny. He was anthropological and anthropocentric to an almost inexpressible degree: the problem of man was his absorbing passion.”256 He continues further: “Dostoevsky was more than anything else an anthropologist, an experimentalist in human nature, who formulated a new science and applied to it a new method hitherto unknown. His artistic science […] or his scientific art studied that [human] nature in its endless convolutions and limitless extent, uncovering its lowest and most hidden layers.”257 As we indicated, this portrait of Dostoevsky mirrors to a large extent Berdyaev himself and his intellectual focuses before his greater exposure to Western views of the great writer and the whole panoply of Western intellectual life. Berdyaev’s further writings of the 1920s continue to represent a revamping of Russian Christianity, particularly as concerns the official Church’s defective anthropology. Berdyaev was quite consistently dismissive of the field of psychology in his early works, but after about ten years in Europe a certain greater flexibility can be observed in his intellectual attitudes. A period of hopeful optimism visited him in the early 1930s (circa 1930–1935) when he was a mature and acknowledged thinker, at the height of his powers and success. This period is reflected in his 1933 book The Destiny of Man,258 the work that spells out in

255

Ibid., pp. 64–66. Ibid., p. 39. 257 Ibid., p. 45. 258 Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). 256

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greatest detail Berdyaev’s own anthropology, the one he is proffering to the Russian Orthodox Church as a corrective to its gravely defective understanding of the human person, to whose vital and spiritual needs, after all, religion is supposed to minister. Certainly, The Destiny of Man is the work in which Berdyaev is at his most open and flexible towards psychoanalysis. We shall consider here how Berdyaev turns in this work to the psychoanalysts as scientists to glean what he can for a deeper understanding of man. Not unsurprisingly, this period is most interesting for the fleshing out of his views on sublimation. In between the monograph Dostoevsky (1923) and The Destiny of Man (1933) Berdyaev expostulates a new theodicy under the influence of the German mystic Jakob Boehme in the book Freedom and the Spirit (1925).259 As we shall see below, that theodicy exalts man and debunks the God of traditional religion. According to Berdyaev, historical Christianity presents the following three theories of man: 1) “The Catholic view [that] man is created as a natural being, lacking in the supernatural gifts of the contemplation of God and communion with Him”(p. 46). These latter are conferred on man by special Grace; 2) “According to the classical Protestant conception, the Fall has completely ruined and distorted human nature, darkened man’s reason, deprived him of freedom and made all his life dependent on grace. From such a point of view human nature can never be hallowed, transfigured and […] naturalism is victorious once more” (pp. 46–47); 3) “The Orthodox view of man has been but little worked out, but the central point is the Divine image and likeness in man […] that man is created as a spiritual being” (p. 47). It is this third, Russian Orthodox conception, which Berdyaev undertakes to elaborate himself (pp. 46ff.). The problem he sees in the Roman Catholic and Protestant pre-existent conceptions of man is that he is defined as a “creature” of nature, rather than a “creator” under God. This humiliates and insults man who 259

Berdyaev discovered Boehme before he left Russia. His interest in Boehme increased after the appearance of several books on him which Berdyaev reviewed in Put’ in 1926. This is reflected most in his book Freedom and the Spirit, tr. O.F. Clarke (London: Bles, 1935). References given in the text.

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rebels against it. He proclaims more than once that the rebellion traditional Christian theology provokes in man leads to atheism. By “atheism” he means rebellion against God, such as we observe in Ivan Karamazov; not disbelief in the existence of God, but non-acceptance of God’s nature and God’s world. According to pre-existing theology in all three branches of Christianity God can only do Good which diminishes the power of evil, making it, in the doctrine of Privatio boni— merely “the absence of the Good.” Thus, evil has no independent ontological status. Berdyaev writes: “Traditional theodicy does not solve the problem of evil. If Satan is entirely subordinate to God, and is the instrument of Divine Providence, or, if God makes use of Satan for his own ends, evil does not really exist.” What appears evil to man must be accepted without questioning as good, as the higher mysterious workings of God. Man, too, when he does good or evil is only a tool in God’s hands. Every bit as much as Satan, man is “used” by God to fulfill his divine plan and is not at all the free author of free acts. Everything in such a view is determined by God and freedom is an illusion. Such a theodicy is anathema to Berdyaev, who with the Slavophiles and Solovyov considers the human personality to be created by God as an absolute value and as free, able to make free choices and act as a fully ethical being. This view accords with Dostoevsky’s in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, where Christ emphasizes the freedom of man (sometimes called by existentialists the “terrible freedom”) to choose for or against God, between good and evil. For Dostoevsky, as for Berdyaev, both Good and Evil in the world are entirely real; both have a powerful ontological status. Insofar as the official Church views man only or largely as a natural being (unspiritual) and as a submissive one, who is a slave and a tool of the Deity, it insults man, who, in truth, is both spiritual and a free autonomous moral agent. Ivan Karamazov rebels furthermore against the teaching that God is Almighty and Good. If he is good, why does he tolerate the suffering and evil which befall the righteous and the innocent (children) in the world? Being all-powerful, He can put an end to it at any moment. If He is indeed good, God must not be all-powerful, able to control/stop the evil in the world. If He is all-powerful, Ivan rejects him as not Good. According to this logic, He cannot be both. Berdyaev not only raises this paradox, he resolves it, retaining a Deity who only does the Good but is not all-powerful. For this he incorporates the God-concept and other elements of the theodicy and metaphysics of Jakob Boehme.

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This metaphysics is important to us because, in Berdyaev, the mode of existence of the whole creation—the macrocosm—is mirrored in the microcosm—man; the metaphysics of the whole creation has an analogue in man and thus the theory of man—his being and personality— closely resembles it. According to Boehme, and then Berdyaev, non-being preceded the Creation in the form of chaos, arbitrary freedom, elemental passions, wild nature, etc. This he calls the Ungrund—groundlessness or bottomless abyss. Out of it God created positive Being. In Berdyaev’s words “God is all-powerful with relation to being but not to […] freedom… .”260 Thus, God’s attribute of absolute goodness is vouchsafed at the expense of his Almightiness. That same Ungrund, radical freedom, lies in the microcosm-man at the basis of every human personality, and is the part of man that is uncontrollable by God and makes him a free and ethical being. Sin, evil in the world is brought about largely by man and Satan, beyond the control of God. Creativity, which is profoundly spiritual, is the use of that freedom for the Good. Berdyaev does not consider evil activity “creative.” It is sin. Just as Dostoevsky emphasizes that suffering and pain come with consciousness, so does Berdyaev. In a state of Paradise, primordial innocence, man was “in the realm of the unconscious. His freedom has not yet unfolded, has not yet expressed itself, or taken part in creation” (p. 39). In this pre-Christian stage man does not even distinguish himself from God. Knowledge of good and evil, which led to man’s expulsion from Paradise, also brought him to consciousness, the ability to distinguish between good from evil, to make valuations and choices. This was “a transition to a higher consciousness and a higher state of existence.”261 Knowledge of his freedom and thus responsibility for his own acts frightens man: “The genesis of spirit [in man], consciousness of valuation and distinction inspires us with unreasoning and groundless fear—fear of the mystery of the divine life from which man has fallen away.”262 On the level of the individual human personality;“Man’s fear of God is fear of himself, of the yawning abyss of non-being in his own nature” (p. 41).

260 261 262

Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit, p. 160. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, p. 38. Ibid., p. 41.

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Early in the book Berdyaev begins to relate the suffering consciousness of man to Freudian concepts. Though we pointed out earlier that Berdyaev’s early formulations of sublimation in 1916 specifically sounded very Freudian, a closer examination of Berdyaev’s anthropology and his topography of the personality in The Destiny of Man by 1933 show it to differ quite significantly from Freud’s. The most obvious aspect of Freud’s anthropology is that it casts man as a natural creature largely biologically determined and man’s subjective sense of his free will can be very illusionary in Freud. Of course, Freudian man is endowed with some freedom—specifically, with a capacity between childhood and maturation to increase his rational consciousness and control over his destiny. Berdyaev’s viewing any kind of determinism (social, economic, biological) as objectivation of the human person is sufficient reason for us to expect that Berdyaev will find Freudian concepts inadequate to cover the part-spiritual, part-natural creature of Berdyaev’s conception of man and the ontological nature of man’s freedom. Freud’s earlier topography of the psyche includes the large unconscious part of the human mind, the preconscious, which is a barrier region between the unconscious and the consciousness and the conscious mind. His later elaboration of the Id, Ego and Super-ego (1923) gives us three concepts of which the Id is unconscious with instinctual drives, the Ego largely conscious, but not entirely so, which has the forces of self-preservation, and the Super-Ego, which is the part of the psyche that represents values of the society and cultural tradition in which the human individual was socialized. Its inhibiting force (guilt feelings and complexes) exerted on the Id’s desires can be both unconscious and conscious. All these parts of the psychic mechanism of the human mind are natural and derivatives (the super-ego) from the social nature of the human animal. While sublimation as a civilizing force produces things that are “finer and higher” than the instinctual drives that they transform, for Freud they are always reducible to the instinctual drives that underlie them. In his studies of the psychology of love and elsewhere, Freud does make clear his enthusiasm for sublimation. He states that over mankind’s long development certain instincts, including the sexual drive have been weakened in man, making him an unusual civilized animal: “Thus we may be forced to become reconciled to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the

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demands of civilization […]. The very incapacity of the sexual instinct to yield complete satisfaction as soon as it submits to the first demands of civilization becomes the source, however, of the noblest cultural achievements which are brought into being by ever more extensive sublimation of its instinctual components.”263 This passage shows that Freud is not that happy about his central insight that sexuality is so dominant in man, with all that he believed it to be scientific fact, and he is very enthusiastic about the civilizing processes, i.e., sublimation, that raise man above his rank natural status. Ambiguous Attitudes towards Freud Berdyaev states over and over that “sex” is the most fallen of human passions. And he admits repeatedly to a certain squeamishness and prudishness about sexuality in general and human procreation and family. Since he consistently accepts Rozanov’s and Freud’s notion of the pervasiveness and importance of sex in man, his negative assessment of the whole sexual sphere complicates his estimation of man and his concept of sublimation considerably. Often keen on showing that atheistic science has reached conclusions corroborated by or close to those of Russian religious thought, Berdyaev appeared in 1916 to accept Freud’s formulation of sublimation. He even accepted Freud’s so-called “pan-sexualism,” which in a sense corroborated what Rozanov had been saying all along about the centrality of the sexual in man. Believing man was a highly sexual being, Berdyaev grew to regret this more and more over the decades. Nothing biological or material could ever be a metaphysical substrate for Berdyaev. In The Destiny of Man he tries to fit his structure of human personality to the Freudian one. This is surprising because if Catholicism and Protestantism, as Berdyaev holds, treat man mainly as a natural being, Freudian psychoanalysis reduces everything spiritual to natural biological processes. Berdyaev will certainly introduce a corrective for Freud’s biological determinism. The very idea that man’s behavior and even his consciousness is largely directed by a series of drives that he neither controls nor is fully aware of so limits man’s blessed freedom of which Berdyaev is such a champion. On the other hand, Berdyaev is 263

Freud, Psychology of Love, p. 190.

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a great enthusiast of Freud’s sublimation concept and applauds the degree to which Freud is optimistic about man’s ability to transform his base drives into higher things and about man’s ability to penetrate his unconscious and gain control over it through the exercise of his reason. We shall first show how Berdyaev relates his structure of personality to the well-known Freudian one and then presents his own addition of a new part to the personality, the superconsciousness, which is “from God” and the organ or seat of self-sublimation, other sublimating creativity and hence of all self-transcendence. The fit is far from perfect but the attempt to adapt Freud to a Christian concept of personality is remarkable in itself. In Freud, a naturalist-scientist, there is no justification for an intricate hierarchization of the regions of the psyche and given Freud’s avoidance of invidious valuations, the consciousness, pre-conscious, unconscious and super-ego are best conceived as a system on one level. Berdyaev, by contrast, has a strongly hierarchized concept of the human personality. The lower portions of the human mind in Berdyaev therefore correspond roughly to Freud’s although Berdyaev gives them slightly altered names. The Freudian unconscious and Id seem to Berdyaev obvious equivalents to his Ungrund—the wild abyss of arbitrary freedom in man, which man is vaguely aware of and which he fears, is clearly placed in the unconscious. The content of the unconscious is the negative Freudian one and emphatically not the Jungian and Rankian more differentiated libido, which has just as much positive content as negative. Berdyaev calls it: “libido, unsatisfied sexual cravings, inherent in man from birth, we find there a continually defeated striving for supremacy and power” (p. 70) which has a very Adlerian sound. In this book for the first time Berdyaev tells us that man’s allimportant freedom which cannot be controlled by God, resides in the unconscious. He agrees with certain psychoanalysts that “the unconscious is always free and that direct struggle with it is fruitless” (p. 70). The recalcitrance of the free unconscious which will not submit to dictates from the conscious mind or ego is an important psychoanalytical concept that Berdyaev (and Vysheslavtsev, who may well have introduced it to him) accepts. The great rebelliousness of the free unconscious, attested by Dostoevsky in The Notes from Underground, is the premise of the “Law of reversed Effort,” advanced by Nancy psychologist

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Coué264 and popularized by Baudouin. This is the psychoanalytic equivalent of the notion that the irrational core of man’s individuality will always resist any rational dictate or attempt to control it. We recall that the underground man’s “most advantageous advantage” is to assert his freedom and individualism at all costs and even to his own physical detriment or practical best interests. The fact that Alfred Adler is the Freudian disciple265 closest to Berdyaev’s heart is a further proof of our contention that Berdyaev is very ambivalent about man and has a shakier confidence in man’s capabilities than he often states. He writes: “still greater (than Freud’s) 264 Émile Coué (1857–1926) with full acceptance of the Freudian concept of the unconscious as propounded in The Interpretation of Dreams. Dr. Coué, the leading figure in the school of Nancy in France, introduced a method of psychotherapy, healing and self-improvement, whereby the patient cultivated techniques for accessing his personal unconscious, using autosuggestion and self-hypnosis. Fully accepting the notion of the greater power of the unconscious and the inability of the conscious will to oppose it directly, he elaborated his theory of “La loi de l’effort converti” (the law of reverse effort) that any attempt to compel the unconscious or the imagination, which is largely unconscious, will backfire and fail. The harder one tried to force it, the more will it refuse to obey. The unconscious for Coué can only be suggested to, on a regular, even daily, basis and then we can access it, “know” in some non-rational sense and access its powers, which are after all, part of our own personality of which we are normally unaware. Charles Baudouin—a student of Henri Bergson and the psychologist Pierre Janet, who developed the ideas of Coué in his doctoral dissertation (Geneva, 1920) “Suggestion and Autosuggestion,” which later appeared as a book in French and English. In his book “La Psychanalyse de l’Art,” published in English under the title Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, he applied the Freudian concept of the dream and the dream-work (condensation and displacement) placing Freud’s notion of the sexual aspects of the unconscious in brackets, as not always the case and not invalidating the value of the discovery of the unconscious. Using Otto Rank’s early work Der Künstler (The Artist), where poetic creativity is likened to the dream, “Traum und Mythus“ (Dream and Myth) and “Traum und Dichtung” (Dream and Poem), Baudouin, recognizing the greater role of conscious craftsmanship in art/poetry analyses many French poems as products of imagination. He points out that the imagination, largely residing in the unconscious, is one: “…properly speaking, there is no such thing as aesthetic imagination or poetic imagination—but simply imagination.” See Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, p. 27. The theories of Baudouin had a great influence on Vysheslavtsev’s notions of accessing the unconscious wealth of the personality and religious creativity. 265 Alfred Adler’s departure from Freud is covered well in Lieberman, Acts of Will, pp. 122–129. He writes in the section “Adler: A Dissenter Cast Out”: “As time went on Freud became less and less tolerant of Adler and Steckel. By November he was grumbling about them both, wishing he could get rid of them and not seeing how…Freud wished to avoid the appearance of despotism, but he feared that Adler’s deviations would come to be regarded as an alternative psychoanalytic position, one which contradicted Freud and was more palatable and popular. In letters to Jung, Freud confided his dismay at the way Adler’s theory minimalized the sexual drive. This modification left out what Freud considered to be the essence of his discovery. Ironically, Carl Jung,

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psychological truth is to be found in Adler’s theory of the instinct of power and mastery and his contention that man is unable to reconcile himself to his humiliating position” (p. 70). Adler’s theory that man feels his weakness and inferiority very keenly and strives to overcompensate and achieve power and dominance over forces that make him feel weak and small speaks to Berdyaev as it explains man’s rebelliousness and ever-striving nature, “to be more than just man, more than man has been in history” (p. 70). Freud, of course, had subsumed the will to power and all manner of destructive, sadistic drives into his general libido. Adler’s book The Neurotic Constitution probably read for Berdyaev like a diagnosis of the malaise of the man from underground and resonated with the latter’s outbursts and the vicious circle of his embittered egoism. Berdyaev, himself a rebel and non-conformist, is also enamoured of Jung’s introvert type from Psychological Types,266 the man who is out of harmony with his environment, and whose consciousness is not such a strong censor of his unconscious as to make him “normal.” Disharmony with society, institutions and “this world” in general for Berdyaev “may be the result of spiritual depth” (pp. 71–72). But in fact what is most desirable in the healthy introvert is the high level to which he is attuned to his inner life, his unconscious and his superconsciousness. In his dualistic phases when he rants against the forces of objectivation that conspire to turn man into an object, and when describing his own character in his autobiography Berdyaev comes off as the type of the introvert. He never positively values “fitting in” or “accommodation to this world” and being in agreement with groups, movements is suspect to him. Not belonging and going it alone is for him in general a sign of “spiritual depth and superiority.” (Here he does admit that extreme introversion in some neurotics may paralyze them for practical life and for any sort of creative activity.) Freud’s Ego and Super-ego are called by Berdyaev “man’s civilized consciousness.” The Super-ego is the most inimical Freudian concept for Berdyaev as it burdens the individual with guilt and enslaves him to society’s and tradition’s ready-made morality, making man a selfwhose sexual emphases and theory is much weaker than Freud’s defected from Freud’s movement in 1913 Soon Freud found himself in full command of his theory but with a smaller company of supporters” (pp. 123–124). Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, I, covers the personal aspects of the break with Adler in exhaustive terms, far beyond what is of essence here. 266 Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types in Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), VI.

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for-the-other, whereas man should freely create his own values, his own ethics. Berdyaev is most enthusiastic about Freud’s discovery of the unconscious despite the fact that he gives it Freud’s largely negative, “sinful” content including sexual content. That enthusiasm is at times unreserved: “The true founders of a living, concrete psychology are Janet, Freud, Adler, Jung and Baudouin.”267 He puts them in the company of those thinkers whom he esteems highest: Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Bergson and Max Scheler. “The old psychologists were wrong in assuming man was a healthy creature…Man is a sick being with a strong unconscious life, therefore psycho-pathology has more to say about him…” (p. 68). “Freud ascribes a central and all-embracing place to libido and builds up a false pan-sexuaistic metaphysic, but his main conception (the unconscious) bears the mark of genius and his method is fruitful” (p. 70). Berdyaev finds the notion of conflict between the unconscious and the conscious mind, the dynamic conflict of energies and their ideaformations vying to enter consciousness and being censored by the ego-supportive power of repression, to be a fruitful way of understanding human psychology. Berdyaev calls Freud’s repression “the hiding and concealing of wounds of the personality” and sees it with Freud working both 1) as a protector of the Ego-self-conception against disintegration of personality, and 2) as a hindrance to deeper self-knowledge, and very importantly, as a hindrance to spiritual self-knowledge (p. 69). He points out several times the richness of psychoanalytic insights which have contributed much that is new to the understanding of man’s psyche: “The conflict between the civilized mind (Freud’s ego) and the archaic [mind] (Freud’ and Jung’s archetypes) the infantile (remnants of which are always with us in Freud and Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, which Berdyaev specifically praises) and pathological elements (in all of the above) results in the wonderful complexity of the soul.”268 Reading this psychology “man realizes how much he deceives others […] and how much his conscious mind deceives him, how much he deceives himself ” (p. 68). It is clear that the discovery of the unconscious by Freud is a knife that “cuts both ways.” Showing signs of considerable familiarity with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Berdyaev writes that man “defends himself against the chaos of the unconscious mind by the censorship

267 268

Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, p. 68. Pages references are given in the text. Ibid., p. 73.

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of consciousness…” (p. 69). This is positive on the one hand: “the consciousness does good work vis-à-vis the unconscious, subduing its wildness […] and preventing the disintegration of the self into illness or madness…” (p. 69). But the “censorship of consciousness,” which is Freudian repression, “on the other hand prevents his [man’s] full understanding of his unique, unrepeatable selfhood.” The censorship of consciousness is “so strict that he [man] has lost the power to study and understand his own subconscious” (p. 69). With this censorship man lies to himself under the pressure of societal norms, Church morality and other imperatives that civilization and communal life impose. The ego consciousness thus protects man from the chaos within, as a “defense against the abyss of sub-consciousness” (p. 69). In this we recognize rationalization, repression and the defense mechanism. It, moreover, keeps man ignorant of the best and deepest, the spiritual part of himself: consciousness “is inclined to deny the existence of superconsciousness and to close the way to it. Frequently, instead of transfiguring and sublimating the subconscious, consciousness simply represses it…” (p. 69). There is, of course, no superconsciousness in Freud. The problem of the super-ego is clear: “The social consciousness, which triumphs in civilized communities, demands that man should altogether suppress his subconscious thoughts, banish them from his memory and make them conform to the censorship of consciousness” (p. 70). All this causes illness: “Subconscious cravings banished from consciousness make a person ill and divided against himself ” (p. 70). Here the Freudian notion that suppressed or repressed sexual energy leads to mental illness is embraced by Berdyaev: as it cannot “be uprooted and destroyed” (p. 137). “This applies in the first instance to the most fatal of man’s fallen passions—that of sex. It is impossible simply to destroy it, and it is useless and even dangerous to concentrate on a negative struggle with it” (pp. 137–138). The sexual drives are declared as always free and indestructible in the living organism: “there is no sexlessness. Sexlessness is as bad for creativity as is the waste of sexual energy on the sexual passion” (p. 138). Critique and Emendation Given that sublimation of sexual instinct is the one salvationary path, Berdyaev, its great advocate, declares it impossible in Freud’s description of the human personality. So he moves to add to Freud the element

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that would make sublimation intelligible for man as conceived in his Christian terms. The one thing missing in Freud’s topography of the mind is a positive, spiritual unconscious which corresponds to Berdyaev’s God-created spiritual aspect of the human being, the seat of absolute personality. This he called the Superconscious and he points out that it is a separate sphere from Freud’s unconscious which he recognizes as the locus of man’s wild, uncreated freedom. He criticizes Freud and his followers for leaving the superconscious out: “Freud discovers an infinity of sinful cravings in man but he does not see the human soul. Psychoanalysis treats man’s mental life as though the [immortal] soul did not exist […] They [psycho-pathologists—ALC] know the unconscious in its lower forms and they know consciousness; but they have no knowledge of the superconscious and do not even discriminate between the subconscious and the superconscious” (pp. 72–73). The superconsciousness is part of the personality that remains unconscious in many men. In Berdyaev man’s conscious Ego must not only probe and integrate his unconscious, as in Freud, he must become conscious of and integrate his superconscious, where his really divine potential lies, into his conscious life. There is a double-pronged searching into two unconscious parts of the self here. A probing downwards and also upwards. The addition of the superconscious—the virtuous, spiritual unconscious—is Berdyaev’s main correction to Freud, as a result of which his hierarchized structure of personality would look comprise these levels: Superconscious: Man’s the spiritual creative ability/potential. Consciousness: Conscious will. Civilized consciousness, conscience. Preconscious: Place of censorship Unconscious: Wild, destructive, sinful drives and instincts. Arbitrary freedom. According to Berdyaev, without the superconscious and its activization, there would be no locus for sublimation to take place—no possibility of hallowing or transfiguring physiological and biological energies. It is quite clear that that is what sublimation entails for him: “It is necessary to attain qualitative states (by acts of will?) into which the passions will enter in enlightened, transfigured form, instead of being uprooted and destroyed” (by repression). Later in the book, in the chapter on “Hell” he speaks of the upward movement of energy in sublimation again. Hell consists in remaining the sick prisoner of nightmares

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from one’s lower unconscious “the phantasms of hell mean the loss of the wholeness of personality and the synthesizing power of consciousness [the Ego], but the disintegrated shreds of personality and the broken up personal consciousness goes on functioning…” (p. 270) (in a species of spiritual or mental illness, of course). The process of sublimation requires the full integrated personality as he writes: “Liberation from the nightmare hell and painful dreams which are a state between being and non-being consists […] in the victory of the complete consciousness (or, one might say, the super consciousness). Wholeness and fullness are attained only in the superconscious life” (p. 270). Freud’s analysis of the working of the lower regions of the mind, then, is adopted by Berdyaev as correct and valuable. Berdyaev, like Freud, is a champion of the conscious will and likes the concept of the Ego or civilized consciousness, which for Him, as for Freud, is rational and the part of personality that may achieve awareness of the superconscious. Teetering between a non-spiritual conformist life and a repressed life that leads to neurotic illness, sublimation is a salvationary path, possible if one adds the superconsciousness to the scheme of personhood, and it becomes the productive and creative way to expend what is for Berdyaev, as for Freud, a finite amount of sexual energy. In the chapter “Man” in The Destiny of Man we have Berdyaev’s longest and most technical discussion of sublimation. His treatment of sublimation as a psychoanalytic concept is very clear in this book and treated as such in detail: “Without passions, without the unconscious element in life and without creativeness, human virtue is dry and deadly dull…” (p. 137). This passage appears in the context of a Freudian-like theory that there is a finite amount of energy, as we saw, that one can direct that energy into sexual practice or sublimation activity. It will not be destroyed and attempt to do so—suppression or repression—will harm the personality—go into the unconscious and cause mental illness. To summarize, Berdyaevan sublimation requires an awareness both of the lower unconscious and of the superconsciousness within the Ego—the civilized consciousness. The model of perfect sublimation is given in The Meaning of the Creative Act where Berdyaev speaks of the immortal creations of Leonardo, the same figure Freud had chosen to represent the apogee of human creativity. We quote this passage in full. While it allows that there may be evil in the unconscious Id of the artist it is sublimated away, burned away in the ecstasy of the creative ascent up through the superconscious of the artist: True creativeness can never be demonic: it is always a movement out of darkness. The demonic evil in human nature is burned up in the creative

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ecstasy, transforms itself into another kind of being…a creator may be demonic and his demonism may leave its imprint upon his creation. But great creation cannot be demonic, neither can creative value and the creative ecstasy which gives it birth. I think that there was some demonic poison in the[human] nature of Leonardo. But in his creative act the demonism was consumed and transformed into another kind of being, free from ‘this world.’ The demonism in Leonardo’s nature can be glimpsed in the Gioconda and in ‘John the Baptist.’ But are the great creations of Leonardo’s genius to burn in the fires of hell? No, for in these creations the evil in Leonardo’s nature has already been consumed and his demonism is transformed into another kind of being, by passing through the creative ecstasy of the genius….The beauty which is born in the creative act is already a transition from ‘this world’ into the cosmos, into another form of being and in it there can be no shadow of the evil which was in the sinful nature of the creator. A real picture or poem no longer belongs to the physical plane of being—they have no material weight-they enter the free cosmos. (pp. 164–165)

It is clear that this Berdyaev’s most perfect model of sublimation and hence creativity, involves the redirection of what lay in the lower unconscious and may have been tinged with sin, even demonism, upwards in the creative ascent to the free superconscious, where it is completely purified in its transformation and then moves back into the consciousness where the craft/artisanship part of the actual execution in form and color, paints, etc., takes place until a sense of completion is achieved. We recall that da Vinci’s creative standards were so high that he took years on a single painting and was very slow to pronounce a work finished. The spiritual part of the personality is where the redirected Eros is “consumed and transformed” so that the resulting work of art is virtually devoid of its sexual underpinnings and has become something like the heavenly Eros that created beauty in Plato. In creative production that is less ideal than Leonardo’s of which Berdyaev writes a good deal the creative ascent carries something from the unconscious upwards to the superconscious, where it is transformed and purified, but the incarnation of the spiritual conception in materials or words in the “cooling down” phase of execution often results in a product vastly inferior to the inspired conception. In one of his most pessimistic books, in which he emerges as a very dualist thinker, Slavery and Freedom Berdyaev speaks of creativity in much less sanguine tones. There he writes of the tragedy of the creative ascent, its doomedness to failure as an incomplete incarnation: “Every expression of creative action in the external world…falls into the power of the world […] Creativity which strives to master the world […] loses all meaning because the products of creativity bind us to a fallen world

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once more.”269 On human cultural creativity up to 1916 Berdyaev gives this assessment: “Up to now the creativeness of ‘culture’ has been only a preparatory hint, the sign of the real creativeness of another world [to which he believes man is called]. […] In the creativeness of culture there is expressed only the tragic dualism of human nature, struggling to escape from the fetters of necessity, but not yet attaining another sphere of being.”270 The creative upsurge is spiritual and associated with the divine in man, but its products—what is created by man—like his erotic aspirations are “degraded and spoiled” for Berdyaev. If creativity of the type exemplified by Leonardo is so rare and human creativity is usually damaged and its products sink back into the earthly materials in which the creative conception is carried out, one can legitimately ask why Freud’s concept of sublimation is insufficient as an explanation for the usual “damaged creativity.” The answer is that Berdyaev is interested not only in new products of culture or beauty but in creativity that adds not traditional beauty but divine spirit to the world. He preaches, moreover, as we indicated the birth of a new Religious Epoch of Creativeness, of which he is the midwife, an epoch when surpassing creativity of Leonardo’s type will be the norm. Thus, he both uses Freud’s concept and spiritualizes it to make it fit his concept of man as partly divine and account for his future more divine creativity “under God” in which the total almost magic transfiguration of erotic energy takes place. We indicated earlier that sublimation of eros in creativity in Berdyaev’s thought is almost always the optimal ethical choice: “Modern psychology and psychopathology talk about sex’s sublimation. And it appears there are many ways in which man can struggle with (redirect) the sinful sexual passion. Every form of creative inspiration and deep spiritual feeling overcomes and transfigures it. The experience of intense erotic love may weaken passion and make man forget the physiological craving.”271 (This had been pointed out by Solovyov.) The energy of sex transfigured and sublimated may become a source of creativeness and inspiration. Creativeness is unquestionably connected with the energy of sex, the first source of creative energy, which may assume other forms, just as motion passes into heat. Creativeness is bound up with the ultimate source of life (sex) and indicates a certain

269 270 271

Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, p. 127. Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 103. Berdyaev, Destiny, p. 137ff.

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spiritual direction […] and thus it will save spiritual forces from being wasted on sexual passion […] No purely negative asceticism, no effort of will aimed at suppressing the sexual passion instead of replacing it by something positive, can be successful […]. This is because the unconscious drives are always free…it is defeated by what modern psychology calls ‘la loi de l’effort converti’. The only thing that can help is a change of the spiritual direction (love for a beloved creature or creative activity) the sublimation of passion and its transformation into a source of creative energy. Love may overcome the sexual passion and its suppression of the sake of creative work may be a source of creative energy. (p. 137)

We have noted that as in Freud there is a binary free choice for the positive use of the energy, which choice appears to be effected by the conscious will to a large degree. He states the danger of the sexual contents of the unconscious and of the dissipation of personality in sexual practice in Rozanovian-Freudian fashion: “for most people there is no sexlessness. Sexlessness is as bad for creativity as the waste of vital energy on the sexual passion” (p. 138). Thus, while Berdyaev certainly acknowledges intuition and the unconscious intellectually as the basic resources of the personality, he says man fears the unconscious—the abyss within—and he himself evinces this fear in his drive for control over the passions and irrational forces in himself. In fact, he is always on his guard and never relaxed about the unconscious. As in Solovyov, the transformative force in his sublimation is called love: “thus the search for knowledge (scholarly pursuits) [as most notably in Freud’s book on Leonardo da Vinci] is love directed in a certain direction and the same is true for philosophy, which is the love of truth. […]. Love is not merely the font of creativeness, but is itself creativeness […] and in this respect it is like grace, which is given freely, not for merit […] for nothing […] not as a means to save one’s soul… […] Creativeness is generous and sacrificial, it means giving one’s powers […]. Therefore the positive mystery of life found in love, is sacrificial, giving, creative love. All creativeness is love and all love is creative.” (pp. 138–141). The opposing elements in man’s soul (the Heaven, and the Hell) discussed by Berdyaev in more metaphysical terms in the Dostoevsky book272 and elsewhere are here placed by him in man’s unconscious (the hell) and the “superconscious” (the heaven).

272

Ibid., p. 69 derogatory to psychology in Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, pp. 11ff.

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Such attempts to relate psychoanalytic descriptions of the life of the psyche to the religious-philosophical description of the workings of the human soul show how psychoanalysis aided Berdyaev in deepening his anthropology. He points out the personalistic aspects of consciousness/the Ego and that its awareness of its own freedom and its formative influences on personality are to some degree dialogical, “conscire the root word for consciousness is in part social and plays a dual formative and repressive role in the personality’s development” (p. 69). Berdyaev, who was derogatory towards psychology in general in earlier books, saw the Freudian school as useful for a better Christian anthropology. Yet he feels it deals best with the unconscious and the natural aspects of man. Though it delineates sublimation of lower instincts, it does not deal with the part of the soul where sublimation takes place and its creative products are formed, the superconscious, the seat of man’s self-transcendence. Thus without serious emendation it cannot be part of his theory of creativity. Accordingly, he enumerates the shortcomings of scientific psychoanalysis in a sober and matter-of-fact tone: “Scientific psychology is powerless […] to defend man’s dignity and discover the image of God in him. These sciences are concerned not so much with personality as with its disintegration.” 273 The latter accusation is partly unfair. Freud was initially dealing with the seriously mentally ill, whose personalities were already in a state of disintegration, and then inferring back from abnormality to normalcy. Berdyaev, who acknowledges this, nevertheless engages with psychoanalysis as a universal theory of mind applicable to the mentally healthy and the potentially creative person. His criticism that it cannot cope with the divine and spiritual aspects of the human person (aspects which Freud hardly acknowledges scientifically at all) is the obvious objection any religious thinker will have to Freud. Since Jung and Rank give such a central place to religious experience and religious art, this assessment in the end sells short certain of Freud’s disciples whom Berdyaev knows and mentions by name. By the time he wrote this book Berdyaev was aware of Jung’s positive attitude towards his patients’ religious beliefs, if only from reading Vysheslavtsev’s book reviews and articles, such as “Etika sublimatsii kak preodolenie moralizma” (The Ethics of Sublimation as the Overcoming of Moralizm), which deals with Jung’s attitudes towards religion as well as Vysheslavtsev’s book

273

Ibid., p. 72.

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The Ethics of Transfigured Eros (1931). Most of these were published by Berdyaev himself. To summarize then, Berdyaev sternly criticizes the psychoanalysts for not differentiating the superconscious from the unconscious. “They (the psychoanalysts) have no knowledge of the superconscious and do not even discriminate between the unconscious and the superconscious” (p. 72). This is undoubtedly the case, because they consider that the finer things in life, great achievements of human creativity, move from the unconscious (and instinctual) “upwards” into consciousness and are then expressed out in works into the world. All the psychoanalysts are extremely aware that gifted men can do this, and are fascinated by it, but as founder of a medically based method to cure the seriously ill Freud focuses less on the genius or highly exceptional creator. This is the major difference in Berdyaev’s appropriation of psychoanalysis and Vysheslavtsev’s more fundamental and far-ranging engagement with the achievements of the Freudian school Thus Berdyaev at this juncture and partially under the influence of Vysheslavtsev, accepts numerous psychoanalytic insights as useful to a corrected Christian anthropology. Along with its more accepting attitude towards Freud and the Freudian school, The Destiny of Man is more sanguine than earlier books about the possibilities of that other form of sublimated libido, individualized human love “the mystery of the two,” which appears much more possible on earth here than in the earlier treatments such as in the chapter “Creativity and Love. Marriage and Family” of The Meaning of the Creative Act. Despite the psychoanalysts’ omission of the superconscious, Berdyaev accepts the Freudian-Jungian notion of the significance of tension between the conscious and unconscious in the human psyche: “The conflict between consciousness and the unconscious is the greatest discovery of the school of Freud and is true quite apart from Freud’s pansexuaism. […] His school studies the symbolism of which our life is full […] The life of the unconscious is symbolically reflected in consciousness and this symbolism must be understood” (p. 73). Probably a nod to Jung’s brilliant work with myth and symbol as well as Totem and Taboo, a Freudian work which Berdyaev found “marvelous,” this is still not enough for Berdyaev to quell his ambivalence. For him, psychoanalysis cannot be a metaphysics of life. The ultimate truths escape it. Whereas he does not ever retreat fully from sublimation as a way to redeem the natural and material, the ominous world events of the late

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1930s cast a pall over his earlier optimism. In his next important book Slavery and Freedom, he is forced to admit directly that he had been too sanguine about the imminent dawn of a new epoch of Free Creativity and “modern man’s” great creative potential. The interesting engagement with depth psychology in The Destiny of Man does not develop or receive more elaboration in Berdyaev’s book. The latter presents us the dualist Berdyaev as much stronger than the monist and thus a whole host of issues including sublimation and its possibilities of success in this world—are treated there with much more pessimism and negativity. Failure to Leave Nietzsche Behind? We have seen that Berdyaev among our religious thinkers has some strong similarities with Freud—specifically, in his belief that there is a limited amount of vital, sexual energy given to man and that he will lose it from his integral personality by expending it on the sexual act. It is, of course, an act of self-mastery and creative activity to sublimate it into intellectual products, something Freud claimed a small elite of humans could do. Though Berdyaev says that every kind of love, even maternal love, is creative, he clearly gives his highest valuation to love that is transmuted into creative activity as the best example of man’s divine essence. Friedrich Nietzsche exerted an enormous influence upon Berdyaev, as he did upon the psychoanalysts. The influence of Nietzsche and his firm “No” to Christianity had a profound effect on the latter: it is discernible in Freud. Adler seems to be adapting his Wille zur Macht to everyman’s psychology;274 Jung knows Nietzsche’s thought but disagrees with him as to the effects of a religious consciousness on psychic health. Otto Rank mentions Nietzsche most often and sees Nietzsche most positively, as we shall see in detail below, as the very example of the Romantic genius artist, and as an alternative sacrificial Christian model. Berdyaev’s Christian critics, Zen’kovsky, Rozanov and later Shestov, who of these knew Nietzsche best (his 1902 comparative study of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche), appear to feel, although only Shestov comes out and says it explicitly, that Berdyaev, perhaps unbeknownst to 274

Adler and Nietzsche’s concept will to power.

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himself, stands shakily between a Dostoevskian Christianity and a Nietzschean, anti-Christian Humanism and that his theory of Creativity, for all his protestations of his own sui generis Christian belief, feels too Nietzschean. Clearly no one called man to new creativity, to be more than he had been in history, more than Friedrich Nietzsche. He writes in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science): “since there ceased to be a God […] the man who overtops the rest must set to work [italics mine—ALC]. He must produce out of himself—out of nothingness— something with which to transcend humanity.” One must live: “To live is to invent. One must appraise. To appraise is to create.”275 Though in Berdyaev God is not said to be “dead,” as we saw, the philosopher moves in the direction of weakening God. Berdyaev’s calls to man are future-oriented and sound Nietzschean: “Man can no longer be just man.” He cannot be “dissolved in a divinity,” which is what would ultimately happen if monist All-unity were attained. Berdyaev’s experience of Nietzsche was very much part of his philosophical formation. Only about Dostoevsky does he wax so eloquent: “Nietzsche’s creative work shatters all norms and all barriers; the creative act overflows all the classic riverbanks. The philosophy, the morals and the art of Nietzsche are final—they reach the limit […] Nietzsche considered Christian morality slavish, plebeian, he said many things about Christianity, noble and moving, valuable for the moral rebirth of man for he was surely one of the greatest moralists of all time.”276 Though he ultimately feels bound to find Nietzsche wrong and to have produced no positive values, the passion and power with which he enjoins everyone to engage with Nietzsche is striking and repeated: The world’s culture must come to a new religious life, freely and immanently. We cannot hold back from Nietzsche—we must experience him and conquer him from within. Coming out of Christian guardianship (a Christianity of the Obedience kind which Nietzsche critiqued) means entrance into religious maturity the full expression of a free religious life. The creation of culture has past through a period of God-forsakenness [NB: it sounds here more like a forsaking of God—ALC] through the splitting asunder of subject and object. Religion (in this context

275

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, no.125. This is discussed in Lubac, pp. 120ff. These issues are also discussed in Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky i Nitsshe: Filosofiia tragedii (Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy), (Berlin: Skify, 1922). Originally published in 1903. 276 Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act on Nietzsche, pp. 121–122.

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chapter six Nietzschean religion) itself was division, a break with God, a pathos of distance.277

Berdyaev is not alone in treating Nietzsche as a religious thinker. In 1899 Solovyov had praised similar qualities in the German thinker, evaluating Nietzsche as the most important light of the Russian intelligentsia over Karl Marx and Lev Tolstoy, whose moralism was too abstract for Solovyov’s tastes. Solovyov focuses on the positive aspects of the superman idea for man’s spiritual and religious development— the fact that man can act to change and shape his own circumstances, “perfect” (Solovyov’s word) his own individual personality by acts of will. This summons to man to uplift himself was very positive to Solovyov. Only on the last pages of the article does he point out Nietzsche’s blindness in failing to see that the Superman—all man can be—has already been revealed in Christ in all fullness.278 The proper understanding of Nietzsche’s message is calling man to creativity and self- perfection in all areas. Nietzsche’s call is beneficent, despite the fact that Nietzsche failed to understand Christ. This is in the vein that the engaged atheists are often closer to God than the unthinking believers, something Dostoevsky repeated over and over. Solovyov, like Berdyaev, senses the passion and fervor of Nietzsche as an inverted, but religious mood. It is interesting that this borders on a perverse Christianization of Nietzsche, not that different from Otto Rank’s which is treated below in Chapter VIII. Nietzsche is in revolt against a dead, legalistic and formalist Christianity as Berdyaev points out, not against true Christianity. He adds that Godmanhood, as well as the Godman, in no way hinder man’s creativity, thought, or anything else; nor does it spew out imperatives to the free human person. He may make his own choice as concerns how to express love or creativity. If Christ does not hinder man’s free creativity, why is the Redemption epoch not sufficient for human creativity? This is the question the Christians ask repeatedly. Zen’kovsky in his 1917 discursive review of The Meaning of the Creative Act entitled “The Problem of Creativity”279 cannot accept that the epoch of Redemption has produced an inferior kind of creativity and that Berdyaev’s proclaimed post-Redemptive Epoch of Free

277 278 279

Ibid., 324–325. Solovyov, “Ideia sverkhcheloveka,” in Sochineniia, VIII, pp. 310–319. Zen’kovsky “Problema tvorchestva,” pp. 284–305.

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Creativeness will produce a superior form of creativity or creative products. In the middle of the highly creative Silver Age it must have seemed strange to proclaim so much great art and poetry “defectively creative.” Moreover, Zen’kovsky defended the marvelous creativity of the Christian era, and refused to accept that Christian revelation has hampered man’s creativity. Rozanov in one of his reviews of the same book in 1917 “Holiness and Genius in the History of Human Creativity”280 chimed in with the exact same criticism. Both felt it unfair to take the reign of Nicholas the First in Russia, for both a very low watermark in the many centuries of Christian creativity, to attack the latter. Rozanov evokes the names of John Damascene, Fra Angelico, Dante and others as proof that being Christian did not mean belonging to a “pre-creative” epoch. And the powerful creativity of Orthodox iconography, as well as Raphael’s painting were so great that they could almost turn Rozanov away from the world that he loved so much and fixate him of the beautiful countenance of Christ. Creativity was alive and well in the Epoch of Redemption as far as both critics were concerned. The Redemption in Berdyaev’s scheme appears as a stage of little creative moment that must be gotten beyond. Nietzsche would also recognize the Christian epoch as something that one needed now to get beyond. But he certainly did not denigrate it in toto, or its great artistic achievements. Berdyaev’s elevation of the genius-sinner, Pushkin, above the saint Seraphim of Sarov281—that the latter sacrificed himself and gave cultural values to the world whereas the other merely “perfected himself ”— and the claim that Pushkin’s sacrifice is “dearer to God” is rejected by Zen’kovsky and Rozanov. Could not Nietzsche’s sacrifice and achievement as a major sinner stand in for Pushkin’s as still dearer to God? Here, too, the passivity of Christian man, perfecting himself, saving his own self/soul and creating nothing for the world and his fellow man is repeatedly referred to by Berdyaev. Zen’kovsky is right to see in this a rewording of Nietzsche’s critique, the Epoch of Redemption makes man meek, fearful obedient and passive. Zen’kovsky admits that some Christians have been spiritually lazy but he calls them poddelki (fakes).282 Zen’kovsky asserts that Berdyaev’s concept of the Christian 280

Rozanov, “Sviatost’ i genii,” pp. 270–275. Genius and Sinner section in Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, entitled “Creativity and Asceticism: The Genius and the Saint,” pp. 160–179. 282 Zen’kovsky, “Problema tvorchestva” on poddelki, pp. 290ff. 281

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as fearing for his own soul and selfishly adhering to moral strictures and fear is an outdated and unfair characterization of modern Christian consciousness among enlightened Christians. Whereas for both Zen’kovsky and Rozanov Dostoevsky experienced the true freedomgiving Christ and embraced him, neither, despite Rozanov’s harshness to the historical Church is as hard on it or sees it as so frozen in an age of Obedience as Berdyaev tends to do. Berdyaev, who thinks he has made the same choice as Dostoevsky has, for Zen’kovsky and Rozanov and certainly for Shestov remained too much under the star of Nietzsche and has veered into a Nietzschean humanism dressed in Christian clothes. Berdyaev, though he does admit in “The Metaphysics of Sex and Love”283 and in his book on Dostoevsky that it is hard for modern educated man to believe in the Christian god, does not proclaim that God is dead, rather that he can be experienced only via man, that he is immanent in man (Nietzsche would never have admitted that God existed anywhere, except in the psyche of man as an illusion). Rozanov, Shestov and, for that matter Kierkegaard, expressed doubts concerning God, but they wanted to believe in Him and conceived Him as almighty, as powerful. Berdyaev, without proclaiming God dead, by his incorporation of Jakob Boehme’s idea of an uncreated freedom prior to God which God cannot control, makes God “good but weak.” Putting all responsibility for evil in the world upon man exalts man exponentially vis-à-vis God, taking back from God some of the prerogatives of man that Feuerbach and Nietzsche felt man had surrendered to God. Berdyaev then comes down halfway between a full Christian or Jewish conception of the deity and a Nietzschean-Feuerbachian one (God is a human creation, an illusion made up of human traits). Man is elevated, God is debunked in Berdyaev’s thought or less than centrally relevant to his free creativity. Man is free to choose between good and evil by definition, not because Christ granted him his freedom through grace. The destruction of God is proclaimed to be a destruction of man, but the relative strength of God and man is so altered, God’s need for man so emphasized, that man almost becomes a God. For all his protestations Berdyaev looks like a humanist, but not an unconflicted heroic one like Nietzsche, but a half-hearted one still cloaking his Nietzscheanism in Christian garments. In Shestov’s words:

283

Berdyaev, “Metafizika pola i liubvi,” pp. 49–51.

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Berdyaev did not reject the idea of Godmanhood. But undoubtedly in the two-part formula Godman the emphasis is transferred to the second part…the second part is promoted at the expense of the first. The first term is so impoverished that Godmanhood threatens in Berdyaev to become Man-God hood…284 […] It is strange that Berdyaev in the book The Destiny of Man comes so close to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in his thought about good and evil, even the structure of the second part of the book which he entitles ‘Ethics on this side of good and evil’ reminds one of Nietzsche and he [Berdyaev] doesn’t even ask himself once what pushed Nietzsche, a soft and mild-mannered character, to praise cruelty so?285

Noting the strong influence of Nietzsche on Berdyaev, Zen’kovsky in the 1950s sees his humanism becoming anthropolatry, i.e. the setting up of man as an object of worship: “This,” he writes, “applies to no Russian philosopher more than to Berdyaev.”286

284 Lev Shestov, “Nikolai Berdyaev. ‘Gnosis i ekzistentsial’naia filosofiia’,” in Sovremennye zapiski, 1938, LXVII, p. 198. 285 Ibid., pp. 217–218. 286 Zen’kovsky, II, 763 and 767.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHRISTIANIZING FREUDIAN SUBLIMATION VIA JUNG: VYSHESLAVTSEV’S TURN TO C.G. JUNG The Why and the How: Biographical Sketch of B.P. Vysheslavtsev One of the most important thinkers of the Christian philosophical movement centered around the journal Put’ (Paris, 1925–1940), Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev (1877–1954) was the Russian religious thinker most knowledgeable of and actively engaged with psychoanalytic thought in general and Jungian analytical psychology, in particular. Despite his signal importance for modern Russian religious thought, Vysheslavtsev is much less well known than the other Russian thinkers treated here, thus a brief biographical sketch is in order.287 Born in Moscow in 1877, he received his law degree from Moscow University in 1899. After a brief period of legal practice, he abandoned the Law to study legal philosophy under Professor Pavel Novgorodtsev, after which he was appointed Professor of Law at his Alma Mater. Receiving the Russian doctorate in 1908, he was sent to Germany to do further philosophical research. After periods in Berlin, Heidelberg and Paris, he settled at the University of Marburg where he defended his dissertation “The Ethics of Fichte” in 1914 (published in Moscow in Russian that same year). He received a Chair in the History of Political Thought at Moscow University in 1916, and taught philosophy simultaneously at the Moscow Commercial Institute. Openly opposed to Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution, he lost his professorship in 1917 and was expelled from Russia in 1922 in the 287 The fullest biographical articles on Boris Vysheslavtsev are S.A. Levitsky, “Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev” in Boris Vysheslavtsev. Sochineniia. Fikosofskaia nishcheta marksizma (Moscow, Raritet, 1995), pp. 5–12; V.V. Sapov, “Filosof preobrazhennogo Erosa,” in Vysheslavtsev B.P. Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa (Moskva: Respublika, 1994), pp. 5–12; Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy, pp. 385–387; V.V. Zen’kovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, II, 814–819; Arjakovsky, pp. 675–677 and passim. There are lacunae and sometimes conflicting data in the biographical sketches of Vysheslavtsev. Arjakovsky’s is the best researched sketch and it confirms data of the other main biographical sources. The letter from Vysheslavtsev to E. Medtner (in Russian Metner) is quoted in V.V. Sapov, p. 9. The letter is in the Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library. Fund 167, K13.

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now famous group of intellectuals Lenin permitted to leave at that time. Along with Nikolai Berdyaev he re-opened The Academy of Religious Philosophy in Berlin in 1924 (closed down in Moscow by the Bolsheviks) which was relocated to Paris shortly thereafter. From 1925 he was Berdyaev’s right hand man as main co-editor of the journal Put’ (1925– 1940), one of the most illustrious periodicals in the entire history of Russian journalism. Teaching moral philosophy at the St. Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, Vysheslavtsev was a leader in the Russian Christian Student Movement and Christian ecumenical movements in general. In the latter capacity he traveled and lectured widely throughout Europe in the interwar period and met a host of leading intellectuals including André Malraux, Rudolph Otto, Max Scheler, Jacques Maritain, and most importantly, Carl Gustav Jung. Vysheslavtsev was the editor and preparer of the second, third, and fourth volumes of Jung’s works translated into Russian, a project he took over from Russian Jungian Emily K. Medtner upon the latter’s death. In a letter to Medtner of February 9, 1936 he wrote: “There is something even beyond psychology that links me to Jung […] it lies in pure philosophy (in dialectics) and in a sense of the limits of psychology and anthropology. I would not want to speak about this publicly without talking to Jung about it first.” In 1937 he published an article “Zwei Wege der Erlosung” (Two Paths to Salvation) in Jung’s celebrated Eranos Jahrbuch.288 We shall discuss that article below in our demonstration of why and how Vysheslavtsev brought Jung to bear on Freudian sublimation and on the entire religious tradition we are dealing with here. Vysheslavtsev is the author of the most psychoanalytical Christian theory of creativity and therefore the pivotal figure in the fate of Freudian sublimation in Russian religious thought, whose contribution crowns and completes the tradition that we have set out here. Vysheslavtsev is pivotal firstly because he knew Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Baudouin and Coué better than almost all other Russians of a religious persuasion, saw the genius of their work and admired them. In his dialectic intellectual approach, he used traditional Orthodox Christianity with its defective theory of man as his thesis, the Freudian unconscious and Freudian sublimation as their antithesis, and then

288 Boris Vysheslawtseff, “Zwei Wege der Erlosung,” in Eranos Jahrbuch, 1936 (Zürich: Rhein Verlag, 1957), pp. 287–329.

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used the Jungian collective unconscious and Jung’s views of the creative and religious man—to provide a new Christian synthesis at a deeper level. Sublimation in Jung as in Vysheslavtsev is both the spiritualization (gradual perfecting) of one’s selfhood/personality (in this case along Christian lines) and that transformed and transforming personality’s production of great artistic and intellectual works. Like Solovyov, Vysheslavtsev exhibits considerable knowledge of and maximal tolerance towards other religious traditions, as seen in his involvement in Christian ecumenical movements and his interesting book on the heart (as seat of feeling and emotion) in Indian religion. He is also very interested in positivist science and higher mathematics, of which he, like Solovyov, is an ardent enthusiast. Quietly proud and deeply knowledgeable of the Eastern Orthodox Fathers of the Church and native Russian religious traditions including sects, he is able to exude a gentle ecumenism in his religious interests and tastes. In Chapter VI we examined how Berdyaev289 looked to psychoanalysis 1) for its deeper understanding of the human psyche; 2) because he agreed with Freud that the fallen human creature was permeated with sex, and 3) because despite his desire to be a monist like Solovyov and Rozanov, he has powerful dualist tendencies, and when his dualism dominates he sees man, much as Freud does, as a largely natural animal who aspires to “be more than man” and copes tragically with that desire. In accordance with his self-proclaimed monist-dualist antinomianism, Berdyaev also emphasizes that Russian Orthodoxy conceives of man as a spiritual creature in the image and likeness of God by dint of his creative potential, an assumption shared by all four thinkers here. As we have seen, in the Eastern Church it is based on a famous passage from the theologian Gregory Palamas, which is so central to our study that we repeat it here: We are one of those creatures who in addition to our logical and intellectual substance, have also sensuality. Sensuality when united with the 289 Berdyaev exhibits the greatest interest in and knowledge of Freud and the Freudians in The Destiny of Man which mentions in addition to Freud, Jung, Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, Baudouin and Coué, all important to Vysheslavtsev’s book which had just appeared in 1931. He also cites Vysheslavtsev’s article on the Christianization of sublimation on p. 85 and again on p. 143. The others thinkers are discussed in greater detail than in Berdyaev’s other books: Freud: 38, 49, 60–70, 72–77, 150, 181, 249; Jung: 49, 68–69, 71, 73, 159; Adler: 49, 68, 70–72, 150, 181; Janet: 68, 72, 75; Baudouin: 68, 138; Rank: 64.

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Logos creates the variegation of the sciences and arts and comprehension: it creates the ability to cultivate the fields, to build houses and in general to create what does not exist (but not out of nothing which is the prerogative of God alone). And all this is given to man alone. And although nothing created of God perishes nor does it arise on its own, nevertheless, by man’s combining those things together, through his activity they receive new forms. And the invisible word of the human mind not only submits the movement of the air to itself and becomes the sensation of hearing, and it can even be written down and seen by the body. All this God gave to man alone, realizing the bodily advent (the Incarnation) and bodily appearance of the Logos for the sake of our faith. The angels never had anything similar.290

What is important for Solovyov, who discusses this very passage, and for Vysheslavtsev is this: because man is a carnal “natural” creature, a part of nature, he can help in the transformation of the natural and aid in its return to spirit. According to Vysheslavtsev, “precisely the fact that man includes within his make-up all the lowest stages of being (chemical, sexual, etc) makes his freedom creative freedom.” They have great optimism about the spiritual raising of that “fallen” creature, Man. By sublimating his own human nature and acting creatively upon the material world around him, he can forward the spiritualization process. This is the basic conviction of Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev, and of our thinkers it is only Berdyaev who affirms this principle intermittently, but seems overall, as we have pointed out, to fear man’s carnal-natural element and to doubt the advantages of man’s being ensconced in nature. From the mid-twenties Vysheslavtsev, whose education in Marburg meant he had spent many years in a German-speaking intellectual milieu, began to show increased interest in Freud and in Jungian analytical psychology and to move towards the integration of the achievements of psychoanalytic thought (Freud, Jung and the French psychoanalytical School of Nancy, Baudouin and his predecessor, Coué) into a renewed and more efficacious Christian anthropology. Coming last in our series then, Vysheslavtsev fully embraces Godmanhood in Solovyov’s immanentist spirit and believes in man’s 290 Gregory Palamas, Patrologa graeca, cited in Vysheslavtsev, Vechnoe v russkoi filosofii, in its English version: The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, trs. Patricia Burt and Ol’ga Meerson (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman’s, 2002), pp. 288ff. Originally in theological treatise by Palamas written on the subject of physics, theology and morals, see Chapter 63 in Saint Gregory Palamas. The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, ed., tr. and study by R. Sinkewicz. Toronto, 1988.

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ethical call to increase beauty and spirit in the world, i.e., in Solovyov’s concepts of love and creativity. He is moreover a student of Rozanov, and exhibits no squeamishness, prudery or shame when accepting the centrality of sex for man and its transcendental potential, if not the transcendental spirit Rozanov attributes to it. This calmness about sex distinguishes Vysheslavtsev, as we have seen, from Berdyaev, and led Alexander Etkind to quip that “Vysheslavtsev is not even afraid of sex.”291 More faithful to the inheritance of Solovyov and Rozanov, Vysheslavtsev is not afflicted by the religious and philosophical hesitations of Berdyaev. While he is heavily influenced by Dostoevsky and his freedom-granting Christ, he does not subscribe to a Boehmian theodicy which weakens the Deity. While it is sometimes said that Vysheslavtsev was influenced by Berdyaev, the latter, as we indicated in Chapter VI, appears to have taken a greater interest in depth psychology in the late 1920s and early 1930s under Vysheslavtsev’s direct influence. While Vysheslavtsev is less openly hostile to the official Russian Church than Berdyaev, he was distressed at the falling away from Christianity of his own countrymen in the emigration and felt the crisis of European Christianity very keenly. His articles “Forsaken of/by God” (1939) and “The Religious and the Irreligious Spirit” project his sense of the spiritual “lostness” that marked the European consciousness in the interwar period.292 Vysheslavtsev tries to explain Christian traditions to modern man, directing his works to lapsed believers and atheists alike, to modern European man of whose deep psychic suffering he appears maximally aware. The restrained tone of his address and the razor-sharp argumentation with which he bolsters his positions leave the impression of Vysheslavtsev as a deeply calm and untramelled religious spirit for most of his career. One feels neither the tragic apocalypticism of the late Solovyov, the anxious doubts of Rozanov, nor the nervous see-sawing between monism and dualism of Berdyaev in the clear and calm voice of this consummate intellectual. His sense of the crisis of the official church, that he often sees as bogged down in the Ethics of Obedience (Old Testament Law) and a rigid dead formalism, is, if anything, stronger than Berdyaev’s. 291

Etkind, p. 73. B.P. Vysheslavtsev, “Religiia i bezreligioznost’,” in the collection Problemy russkogo religioznogo soznaniia (Berlin, 1924), pp. 7–51; “Bogoostavlennost’,” in Put’, 1939–1940, no. 61, 15–21. 292

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The intellectual project of Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev, who, like his better known colleague Berdyaev, felt the anthropology of the Russian Orthodox Church was radically defective, was a thoroughgoing blending of Solovyovian Godmanhood with psychoanalytic insights, an attempt at the Christianization of Freudian sublimation using the analytical psychology of Jung and the psychoanalytic concept of suggestion, popularized by the School of Nancy in France (Baudouin and his teacher, Émile Coué). If Berdyaev approached atheistic psychoanalysis with reservations that never left him, convinced in his monist moments that it could not get at the essential metaphysical depth of man, Vysheslavtsev who knew psychoanalysis much more deeply, did not. The reason why Vysheslavtsev turned to psychoanalysis was because the contemporary Church—both the Russian church and Christianity in the West—failed to fathom the complex inner life of man, especially the mystery of his irrational arbitrary freedom, which allows man to chose between good and evil and thus makes him an autonomous ethical creature. In depth psychology he found detailed descriptions of the inner workings of the personality, especially the irrational, unconscious part of man, which he believed with Jung was the greater part of man’s selfhood. He devotes his philosophical inquiry to a deeper understanding of the unconscious and of how to sublimate man’s erotic-tending attractions (Eros) (erotiko-tendiruiushchie vlecheniia) and his arbitrary freedom towards the exalted and good, while leaving them both in tact. Vysheslavtsev believes, and, as we shall see, finds confirmation for this in the thought of Jung, that Eros naturally draws man higher and higher, to transcend himself over and over.293 While not expecting man to create “new being” that is part of another world, as Berdyaev does, he believes man capable of good and great things and constant selftranscensus. Deeply interested the “inner, spiritual man” and the complex workings of the human soul, his writing exudes a love for Christianity and its traditions. Interestingly, many solutions he finds for Russian Christianity’s problems lie within the religion itself! —in its forgotten or overlooked texts and rituals and in the thought of certain of its great theologians. His Jung-inspired ethics of creativity seems

293

Vasily Zen’kovsky, “B. P. Vysheslavtsev kak filosof,” Novyi zhurnal, 1955, XL, 261.

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more to be offered in a spirit of helping the ailing Church than supplanting it with a “Neo-Christianity” of his own. Vysheslavtsev’s Goal: “Not psychoanalysis, but psychosynthesis.” Why Jung is so Useful for Russian Christianity Jung’s assessment of what is wrong with Western culture, the Western mindset and Western religion appears as a modern psychoanalytical reworking of the ideas of Russian Slavophilism about integral cognition and the integral personality, in which reason and intellect are dominated and organized by faith and feeling. Let us consider the Slavophile idea of the integral religious personality and then consider its closeness to Jung’s notion of the harmonious individuated or realized self. The first Slavophile thinker, Ivan Kireevsky, in certain of his philosophical fragments and in his “On the Necessity for New Principles in Philosophy” presents his idea of the integral consciousness, believing reason and integral personality. For Kireevsky, who began as a strict Hegelian rationalist, these positions represented a transcending of his previous rationalistic Hegelian worldview that occurred when after marriage to a very religious woman and deeper acquaintance with the writings of the Fathers of the Eastern Church, he underwent a religious conversion. In one of these fragments Kireevsky writes of the harmonized integral consciousness in terms strikingly close to the way Jung writes about the whole, integral or harmonious selfhood—with the difference that Jung observes it in patients and professes no belief in the Christian patient’s God himself. In one of his clearest statements of the striven-for-integral personality Kireevsky says this: The consciousness of the relationship of the living divine personality to human personality is the basis for faith, or, more correctly, faith is that very consciousness, more or less clear, more or less direct/unmediated. It does not comprise purely human knowledge, nor a particular concept in the mind or the heart, is not housed only in the cognitive capabilities of man, does not relate only to logical reason or only to the heart’s feelings or the suggestions of conscience, but embraces all the wholeness of the man and manifests itself only in the moments when that wholeness is achieved and to the degree that that wholeness is achieved. For that reason the main character of believing thought lies in its striving to collect all the disparate parts of the psyche/soul into one force, to find that inner concentration of being, where reason and will, and feeling and conscience, and the sublime and the true, and the marvelous and the desired, and the

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just and the merciful, and the whole volume of the mind unite in a living unity, and in this way the substantial personality of man is reinstated in its primordial indivisibility.294

“It is not the form of thought which precedes (the rational approach) which produces this concentration of forces in the mind; it is rather from mental integration (of this kind) that meaning emerges which gives real reasoning to thought.” This striving for harmonized spiritualmental life sounds very like the formulas Jung will later articulate. Elsewhere Kireevsky wrote: …theological studies are not necessary for everyone […] but for everyone it is possible and necessary to link the direction of his life with his root convictions and faith, to harmonize with it his main activity and each specific act, so that each act would be the expression of the one striving, that each thought would achieve one basis, that each step would lead to one goal. Without that the life of a man would have no meaning: his mind will be a counting machine, his heart, a collection of soulless strings in which an arbitrary wind whistles (no harmonious music of the soul). No action of such a man will have moral character, and as a man, he will not exist. Because a man is what he believes in.295

If one-sided rationalism (the head over the heart which has lead to the loss of faith is the main problem the Slavophiles see in contemporary spiritual life in the 1840s, an excess valuation of rational consciousness without giving the unconscious (emotional life) its value and due is seen by Jung as the cause of the mental malaise and crisis in modern culture. For Jung, as for the Slavophiles, the two systems—consciousness and the unconscious—are in a state of dangerous imbalance in modern man, especially Western man: “The separation between the psychic systems, which becomes intensified in the course of development leads more and more to a defensive attitude of consciousness over against the unconscious, and to the formation of a cultural canon that is oriented more toward the stability of consciousness than towards the transformative […] with the dissolution of the primitive group and the progress of individualization dominated by ego consciousness, religious ritual and art become ineffectual.”296 The rationally-dominated

294 Ivan Kireevsky, “Otryvki,” in Izbrannye stat’i, ed. V.A. Kotel’nikov (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1984), pp. 338–339. 295 Ibid., p. 339. 296 Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 159.

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worldview undervalues the creative and the religious man as “more primitive than the rational man: One of the basic fallacies in regard to the creative principle springs from the accent on a human development progressing from the unconscious to consciousness. As long as the development of human consciousness is regarded as identical with differentiation and development of thought, the creative man, and the group which in ritual and festival comes in contact with the depths of the unconscious must appear to be immersing themselves in worlds of archaic symbolism […] even if the regenerative character of this phenomenon is understood […] it is still held that this regressive archaic mode should and can be overcome with advancing development. (p. 169)

This is what Jung considers wrong with the one-sided rationalism of Freudianism: “This attitude underlies every so-called scientific view of the world, including psychoanalysis, for which all symbolic creative reality is essentially a ‘pre-scientific’ phase that must be superseded […] the symbol-creating man represents an atavistic human type.”297 For Jung and for Vysheslavtsev, too, devaluation of the creative and the religious man is not only unfair but dangerous. The unconscious, collective and personal, cannot be willed away: one must slowly integrate the unconscious to the conscious gently and gradually, else the consciousness will be overwhelmed by the enormous unconscious contents it tries to shut out: “For if devaluation of the symbol-creating unconscious brings with it a severe split between the rational consciousness and the unconscious, the ego consciousness, unbeknownst to itself, will be overcome by the powers it negates and seeks to exclude. Consciousness will become fanatical and dogmatic or, in psychological terms, it is overpowered by unconscious contents […] it is subjected to processes which, because they are archetypal are stronger than itself…”.298 This is Jung’s explanation for the formation of evil myths and movements in the twentieth century such as Nazism and Communism. They constitute the uncontrolled irruption into consciousness of primordial material that could have been slowly transformed and tempered had there been a true openness to the unconscious and a true dialogue with it. Psychological health for Jung demands an openness to the unconscious and an acknowledgement of its role in the whole life-selfhood of 297 298

Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 171.

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every individual. This means a high respect for religious symbols and rituals and creative symbols which, though non-rational, promote health and balance in the psyche of individuals and nations. Vysheslavtsev registers this complaint against Freud’s analysis of religious faith in the following: “To explain God psychoanalytically as the transfer of a Father complex onto the Superego (Ueber-Ich), does not mean, as Freud believes, that faith is turned into a subjective illusion, to esse in anima, to purely immanent images and experiences. The existence in my psyche, my consciousness and unconscious of a VaterKomplex and a Mutter-Komplex (Freud) and of archetypes of the father and mother (Jung) does not in the least mean that there are not real fathers and mothers transcending my psyche, and that their existence can be reduced to my complexes and to an existence in my psyche alone.”299 Freud’s notion that religion is the fixation of a Father complex on God, an Absolute, leads man, like all religion, to become the slave of an illusion, and hinders his intellectual, rational development altogether is everywhere repulsive to Vysheslavtsev. M.A. Bliumenkrants, the recent translator of Freud into Russian, writes the following of psychoanalysis: “Aldous Huxley named Marx and Freud as the creators of ‘the brave new world.’ One can accept or reject them as the architects of the cultural space of modern society, but no one can deny their huge contribution to our contemporary existence. In my view, Freudianism, as the concept of the worldview of the human personality and as a methodological approach to the problems of our culture, is one of the most frightening symptoms of the spiritual crisis mankind is now experiencing. But at the same time it [Freudianism/psychoanalysis] is a necessary stage on the path to the overcoming of that spiritual crisis.”300 He goes on to compare the “creator of psychoanalysis’” explanation of all the fullness of spiritual life and cultural life [as a sublimation of] the ‘lower levels’ of the human psyche” with the final (materialist) argument of the Grand Inquisitor, saying “the wiping away of the spiritual underpinnings of human existence is carried by Freud as far as it can go. Beyond it stretches only the Great Spirit of destruction and nonbeing.”301 299

Vysheslavtsev, The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, p. 49. M.A. Bliumenkrants, “Burevestnik psikhoanaliza,” in Zigmund Freid, Ia i ono (Moscow: Folio, 2005), p. 6. 301 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 300

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Here Bliumenkrants, like a Russian maximalist, presses the idea that the negation (of human spirit) must be taken to its Dostoevskian extremes, as in Freud’s biological reductionism, before a healthy return to synthesis, psychic health and spiritual harmony can be possible. We cite this passage because here Bliumenkrants enunciates more than half a century later (in 2005) the very position Vysheslavtsev, as a dialectician, took in the period from the 1930s up until his death in 1954. In his article on two resolutions to the tragic in life in the Eranos Jahrbuch Vysheslavtsev shows the Hindu one, that treats suffering as illness to be dispelled and reduced to “illusion,” to be comparable to the Freudian treatment of moral/ethical dilemmas as “illness to be cured” or: “symptoms to be alleviated.” “The task of psychoanalysis is not to look upon suffering as a reaction to or as the result of a difficult spiritual choice, that is, as an ethical problem, […] but as an anomaly, as illness. Instead of salvation and spiritual healing, psychoanalysis offers anesthesia, which pushes the man who has fallen into the depths of human existence back onto its surface […] with its norm of psychosexual health it offers man an unimpeded sliding along the surface of life, all the while failing to notice that he is sliding into nothingness.”302 Vysheslavtsev’s critiques of Freud’s atheistic-rationalistic onesidedness, as we shall see presently, agree wholly with Bliumenkrants’ assessment. Berdyaev once stated very pithily: “Our period does not need psychoanalysis, but psychosynthesis.”303 It was Vysheslavtsev, then, not his more famous colleague Berdyaev, who saw how Freudianism with its reductionist attitude towards and even negation of the reality of human (and certainly divine) spirit was the necessary first step, the analytic step that must come before any higher spiritual psychic synthesis. He points this out in his last book, while emphasizing his roots in the dialectical thought of Solovyov. In the introduction to The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, published shortly after his death in 1955, he first clarified his allegiances as a direct heir of Solovyov, a devotee of the “Lectures on Godmanhood” and a monist, a Uni-totality thinker of the first water. He shares Solovyov’s interest in the characterization of Eros in Plato’s “Symposium.” With Solovyov he believes philosophy should serve religion, a notion which in Vysheslavtsev stems directly from

302 303

Ibid., p. 12. Berdyaev, cited by Bliumenkrants, p. 7.

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Solovyov’s article “The Life Drama of Plato” (discussed in Chapter II here above), to which he refers multiple times in his oeuvre. In a Solovyovian vein he mentions Hegel’s saying “The object of philosophy is the same as the object of religion.”304 In his words: “In the person of Skovoroda (an ancestor of Solovyov’s on his mother’s side) all the aspirations and sympathies of Russian philosophy are embodied, and they were later reincarnated in the personality of Vladimir Solovyov and our whole pleiad of philosophers of the epoch of the Russian religious Renaissance…” (p. 154). He then identifies himself as one of “those few of us who can still remind the younger generation of the spirit and tragedy of Russian thought […] and try to carry it forward in the emigration” (p. 154). Explaining how Russian philosophical thought and religion differ from their Western counterparts he writes: “some Western philosophers were irritated by the religiousness of our philosophy and others—mainly the strict Thomists, were irritated by the so-called “vagueness” of our apparent mysticism in religion.”305 These critiques derive from Western philosophy’s and religion’s excessive one-sidedness, excessive devotion to rational consciousness and exclusion of the unconscious. Vysheslavtsev is not at all inclined to apologize for Russian religion. As a Russian Christian thinker he believes in and hopes for the complete reunification of dispersed and fallen matter with spirit: Solovyov’s religious goal. Christianity is for him the religion of greatest hope which desires and holds the promise of the greatest “fullness of being.” Nor does he apologize for the religious character of Russian philosophical thought, and he uses Jungian psychology to explain it: “Everything has been changed with the discovery of psychoanalysis, which explains a great deal in the Russian manner of philosophizing.” The explanation Vysheslavtsev finds is that the two systems, reason and faith, consciousness and the unconscious, are not so separated in the Russian as in Western man: “the collective unconscious of the Russian people is closer to the surface of consciousness, it has not been as repressed from consciousness, or overwhelmed by consciousness as it has in the West. We are a younger, more barbarian nation and for that reason, of course, we are more students in philosophy: still there is much that the West can learn from us.”306 304 305 306

Vysheslavtsev, The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, p. 154. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid.

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As we have seen heretofore, Freud was the scientific discoverer of the unconscious, but he feared it and its contents in some measure and, in Jung’s words, thought it to be a “monster.”307 Freud did not deny the archaic content of the human psyche, but he mainly deals with the personal unconscious of the individual patient and, as in the case of his book on the creativity of Leonardo, with the childhood sufferings and personal unconscious of the artist. Meanwhile Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious present in every individual’s psyche is the allimportant unconscious element that is missing in Freud’s one-sided reason-/and ego-dominated conception. The scholar Patrick Mullahy described the collective unconscious thus: “Jung believes that the human mind contains archaic remnants, residues of the long history and development of mankind […]. Those primordial images are the most ancient, universal ‘deep thoughts’ of mankind. Since they embody feeling as much as thought, they are properly ‘thought feelings’ (nonrational-the unthought known). The collective psyche represents a part of every person’s mental function which is fixed and automatic in its action.”308 This fixed and automatic quality means it is always functioning and is irrepressible, an attitude very clear in Vysheslavtsev. Thus, the individual has not only memories of his own personal unique history (personal unconscious) but the primordial images/the archetypes by virtue of his membership in the human family, inherited potentialities of the human imagination”309 These latter are of inestimable importance for human creativity and human religion. The collective (sometimes called impersonal) unconscious, delving into it, being in touch with it and working to coordinate it with consciousness, is essential to l) finding and realizing/creating one’s true self—a difficult process of psychic growth and establishment of psychic harmony in the self which Jung call’s individuation, and 2) equally important for creating anything worthwhile for mankind—in the words of the Jungian Erich Neumann: “Whenever the complex of the ‘personal unconscious’ has led to an achievement and not to a neurosis, the personality has succeeded spontaneously or reactively in going beyond the ‘merely personal and familiar’ element in the complex to attain a collective significance, i.e. become creative […] when this happens, the feeling of 307

See discussion in Chapter above. Patrick Mullahy, Oedipus. Myth and Complex (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948), p. 145. 309 Neumann, pp. 156–157. 308

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inferiority or the mother complex was only the initial spark that led to the achievement in religion, art, science, politics, or some other field.”310 Clearly the meaningful creativity comes about as an interaction between the fantasies and images of the personal unconscious with the archetypal material of the collective unconscious: “These fantasies (which develop around the personal complex) consist in a connection established by the unconscious itself between merely personal complexes and unconscious representations, which [may be] interpreted as wish images and representations of omnipotence…” (p. 158). All important, however, is the “constructive effect of the fantasies that are always bound up with archetypal contents. These fantasies give the blocked personality a new direction, start the psychic life on a new advance, and cause the individual to become productive. A relation to the primordial image, the archetypal reality brings about a transformation that must be designated as productive.”311 Constant transformation and change is pivotal in Jung’s dynamic conception of psychic life and health, so much so that his brilliant disciple Erich Neumann said Jung’s entire oeuvre was dedicated to elucidating the meaning of the word transformation.312 Whereas creativity of things valuable for mankind at large and individuation or self-realization are quite separate in Jung and religious creativity is only one of many possible types, for Vysheslavtsev they are totally intertwined and bound. As a committed Christian Jungian, the main archetype in the collective unconscious that he tries to integrate or bring into consciousness is the “Christ-ideal” and Christ/perfect man archetype, described in detail by Jung and by Vysheslavtsev himself in his 1935 article “The Image of God in Man’s Substance”313 before Jung’s articles on it appeared. As the Christ-ideal or Ideal-man archetype within the collective unconscious is absolute, the presence of the Absolute is one of Vysheslavtsev’s core ideas. He writes: “Man lives, exists, thinks and acts only in relation to the Absolute. Everything in man is harnessed to the Absolute, whether he knows it or not, whether he wishes it or not.”314 Vysheslavtsev personally had a constant, abiding experience of the

310 311 312 313 314

Ibid. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 149. Vysheslavtsev, “Obraz bozhii v sushchestve cheloveka,” in Put’, 1935, nos 10–12. Zen’kovsky, “B.P. Vysheslavtsev kak filosof,” p. 252.

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Absolute = God that informs his religious worldview and whose existence or presence he never called into question. This sense, like Rozanov’s feeling that “God was always with him,” is the mystical, religious experience. In Vysheslavtsev’s words, “The presence of the mystery of the Absolute which surrounds us is obvious and indubitable. […] In all of his judgments, acts and feelings man always has the absolute before him […]. The Absolute, being irrational underlies and grounds the rational […] the irrational Absolute is not an abrogation or denial of Reason; on the contrary, reason itself leads to this irrationality […] Negation which ignores the irrational is anti-rational: such rationalism, being ignorant of the limits of reason, is a self-imposed limitation.” “The irrational depths of being [which] bear down upon us from all sides” is another description of this experience.315 This irrational Absolute is clearly a religious metaphysical concept, it is the divine within man and all around him. It is another name for God or the Allin-All. Vysheslavtsev’s Works and his Theory Vysheslavtsev’s unfinished book on sublimation The Ethics of a Transfigured Eros (1931) was prefigured by several important articles in Put’ in the 1920s. These include: 1) an incredibly enthusiastic review article of the first volume of Jung’s works in Russian; 2) a review on the methods of the psychiatrist Letschinsky in Switzerland; 3) an article on the suggestion techniques of the school of Nancy entitled “Suggestion and Religion”; 4) a review of Charles Baudouin’s La Psychologie de l’Art, and 5) an article entitled “The Ethics of Sublimation as the Overcoming of Moralism.” In these articles part of the basic framework of the future book is sketched.316 In 1935, four years after the appearance of his major book on creativity, Vysheslavtsev published one final article which appears to suggest how he thinks Jung himself should treat Christian symbolism. In the forties Vysheslavtsev wrote two books on the crisis of modern

315 Zen’kovsky, II, 818–819 discusses Vysheslavtsev, Problemy Zakona i Blagodati. (Paris: YMCA, 1931), pp. 243ff. 316 Vysheslavtsev articles in Put’: 1) “Religiozno-asketicheskoe znachenie nevroza,” 1926, no. 5, 128–130; 2) “Vnushenie i religiia,” 1930, no. 21, 63–75; 3) “C. Baudouin. Psychanalyse de l’Art,” 1930, no. 22, 135–139; 4)“Etika sublimatsii kak preodolenie moralizma,” 1930, no. 23, 3–24.

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culture, The Philosophical Poverty of Marxism (1952) and The Crisis of Industrial Culture. Marxism. Neo-Socialism. Neo-Liberalism (1953)317. Shortly before his death in 1954 Vysheslavtsev completed a book entitled The Eternal in Russian Philosophy which specifically returns to the topic of sublimation and creativity that constitutes his main original contribution. In that final book we see that over the intervening two decades the Russian thinker became aware of Jung’s writings on Christianity up to that time. In this book he makes significant changes to his 1935 article, “The Image of God in the Substance of Man,” which, we believe, represented to Vysheslavtsev how a fully re-Christianized Jung should write his works on the Christ-symbol or ideal-man archetype in the unconscious. Though Jung’s analyses of Christian and Biblical tradition, most of which appeared after 1940, differ somewhat from what Vysheslavtsev did in the 1935 article, it is interesting that Vysheslavtsev sees fit to change the article in his last book, under the influence of what Jung had done in the meantime. Analytical psychology continues to inform Vysheslavtsev’s writing until the very end of his life. We shall focus here of necessity on his 1931 book, universally considered his best work, as it directly treats of Eros and creativity and what Freudian sublimation should and can be as a religious concept. It shows the evolution of his ideas towards the end of his life in his last book. Vysheslavtsev finds keys to the secret of a sublimated Christian life within Holy Writ and the texts and concepts of theologians. By translating these religiously inspired texts—the Law of Moses, the revolt of Job, the Jewish prophets and the teachings of St. Paul or Maxim the Confessor—into modern psychoanalytic terms, he blends them with psychoanalysis. Thus he strives not only to give them new relevance for the modern age, but he has an even larger goal: a spiritual cure for modern man. Vysheslavtsev’s two books, Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa and Vechnoe v russkoi filosofii, which deal with the Christianization of Freudian sublimation incorporate the curative and therapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis. The 1931 book is not only a work for silent philosophical study. In it Vysheslavtsev presents his sublimation as a Christian-scientific therapeutic method that can be used by an 317 Vysheslavtsev’s six books are: The Ethics of Fichte (1914); The Heart in Christian and Indian Mysticism (1929); The Ethics of Transfigured Eros (1931); The Philosophical Poverty of Marxism (1952); The Crisis of Industrial Culture. Marxism, Neo-Socialism, Neo-Liberalism. (1953); The Eternal in Russian Philosophy (1955).

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ailing Christian to “cure himself ” spiritually and move his life more firmly onto a Christian path. The Ethics of a Transfigured Eros (1931): Freudian Law and Jungian Grace Vysheslavtsev’s sense that sex can be readily transformed into higher states comes from his embrace of Rozanov, which Arjakovsky318 has duly noted. Rozanov, as we saw, viewed almost everything—human and animal—in life as “transformations of sex,” and held a deep belief that everything God made was good, including sexuality. Vysheslavtsev’s acceptance of Dostoevsky’s grace-granting, freedom-granting Christ further gave him the sense that all sins had been, or could be, forgiven (the meaning of the Redemption) and sexual foibles did not stand very high in his hierarchy of evil or sin. Vysheslavtsev shows little sense of shame concerning sex, the human family and procreation—the race. He shares Rozanov’s sense of the sanctity and innocence of early childhood and points out that there is much more family- related symbolism in Christianity that Rozanov failed to exploit or even overlooked. Neither Rozanov nor Vysheslavtsev can embrace a religion of fear. Freedom, trust in the forgiveness of sins, and the sense that faith could stand to be tested by all manner of rational argument were all principles set forth clearly by Solovyov in his important late article “The Life Drama of Plato,” an article which Vysheslavtsev considered very important, even in the 1950s. Vysheslavtsev and Rozanov saw Christian dogma as partly a human creation that could be and should be improved in time, as man’s religious consciousness becomes more advanced. They submitted Christian dogma to rational and other tests because they believed that God would understand the spirit of their honest questioning and forgive them. Characteristically, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev are not very interested in justifying man, as Berdyaev is. For them the Redemption means largely that man is justified, has his strong basis in God’s love, and though he is called to better himself, his creative task, he will only be hampered in carrying it out in an anxiety-ridden mood of fear of God. If Rozanov had grave doubts about the Christ the Russian church preached, and he did, he imagined (via negation) a very different Christ

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Arjakovsky, pp. 675–677 and passim.

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which he believed was the true one, more loving and forgiving, as in Dostoevsky’s Legend and in the living example of Father Zosima. Vysheslavtsev seems to assume a Christ such as the one Dostoevsky imagined and evoked. Interestingly, for the understanding of Christ’s “psychology,” Vysheslavtsev studies the nineteenth-century German theologian Ritschl,319 exactly the same figure Jung will turn to and study in the same connection later. Vysheslavtsev’s very loving and gracegranting Christ is his own Dostoevsky-like conception that underlies all he says about Christ in his writings. The Judaic Basis Vysheslavtsev shows the rudiments of something like modern psychology and philosophy in the written texts of St. Paul, St. Augustine and certain Fathers of the Eastern and Western Church (Maxim the Confessor, Dionysius the Areopagite, Isaac the Syrian, etc. Duns Scotus). Thus he begins his book by showing how these theologians were moving towards concepts which received their full illumination, and perhaps even scientific grounding in twentieth-century depth psychology. St. Paul especially appears as the first psychologist and first philosopher of Christianity. Vysheslavtsev, like Berdyaev, is censorious of any ethics of Obedience, Old Testament moralism, as frustrating of free creativity. Any moral Law, the Torah or Kant’s categorical imperative is doomed to failure because it appeals only to man’s conscious will and consciousness, i.e. to a small part of man’s psyche and ignores his unconscious and unconscious will which is the greater part of his selfhood. Yet he does not feel that the Law is all there was to Old Testament Judaism. Ever mindful of the fact of Christianity’s Judaic heritage—Moses’ monotheistic faith and the fact that Christ appeared in Jewry and as a Jew—he elevates Judaism as the most spiritually advanced religion of the ancient world. Whereas Berdyaev denied even the consciousness of freedom and thus free personality among the Biblical Hebrews, Vysheslavtsev sees great religious imagination and free individual creative religious feats occurring in their midst.

319 Vysheslavtsev quotes Ritschl and discusses his work (Albrecht Ritschl, Gesch der Altkatholischen Kirche, 1850, pp. 34–35) in Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa, pp 33 and 37. Jung wrote the article “Thoughts on the Interpretation of Christianity with reference to the Theory of Albrecht Ritschl” in Jung on Christianity, pp. 46–56.

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Despite the Law and (as Vysheslavtsev is a dialectical thinker) because of it, and because of the distant, vengeful and frightening Jehovah, the collective Jewish religious imagination created the Messiah idea, of a different, gentler, nearer more forgiving God, one that a man could not only look upon, but who would come among his people and even assume their bodily form—a God of Grace and forgiving love. The idea of the Messiah as another hypostasis of the deity arising in the works of the prophets was a Jewish idea. Vysheslavtsev is likewise a great admirer of the revolt of Job against the slavery of the Law—a Law which Job had not broken, and of Job’s questioning of God’s justice (Law). God is shown by Vysheslavtsev to send his son because of the failure of the Law: “For God so loved the world […] that when he saw that the Law had been weakened by the flesh, he sent his son to redeem the world… .” Vysheslavtsev’s Biblical exegesis consists mainly of a very original reading of the Epistles to the early churches of the apostle Paul with the major theme of Grace—of Christ as a god who put man above the Law, citing passages such as “The Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath,” and “The truth shall make you free.” He implies something like “When I was a child…I saw through a glass darkly (in Jewry) […] now (in religious maturity) I see face-to-face.” The childhood of man is succeeded by his maturity in Christ as a full, free person. St. Paul, of course, expatiated a good deal on the shortcomings and failures of the Law, which led to the increase of sin. The Law did not save man: “The Law judges and condemns.” Its failure occurs because “even if man wills to submit, man will not submit to coercion.” Here Coué’s principle, popularized by the psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin, of irrational resistance to any coercion “La loi de l’effort converti,” is brought firmly into play. The more man wills to obey the law, the more the spirit of contradiction in man rebels. Thus the Law only defines sins and crimes, but fails to combat them. Vysheslavtsev sees St. Paul anticipating by almost 2,000 years the insights of the man from underground about his “most advantageous advantage,” his own irrational will, and the French psychoanalyst’s observation. As is clear from this, St. Paul, who had been a rabbi and became a Christian through a miraculous conversion experience, was the perfect mediator between Judaic tradition and Christian, the best interpreter of Law and Grace. He appears here as the psychologist of early Christianity, the founding father of a Christian anthropology. The failure of all Law is proclaimed as its tragedy: it always elicits that which it proscribes. “The Law is right in what it commands, but wrong in that by

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its imperative form it elicits the opposite of what it demands, it elicits crime.”320 The reason given for Christ’s Incarnation as Godman, as we saw, was the emendation by God of the failure of the Law. By the concept of flesh (plot’) Paul, according to Vysheslavtsev, understands not just a contrast to the reason, mind (um), as reason and body do not comprise the whole of man, who is more than the body and the conscious will. The Judaic Law’s shortcoming is that it appealed only to the conscious will, which psychoanalysis has now proved to be only a very limited part of man. (Romans 7:14) “The Law is good, but I am of the flesh, sold to sin and evil.” Vysheslavtsev reads Paul’s plot’ as not just carnal flesh—the physical body, but plotskie pomyshleniia (carnal thoughts), a psychological concept which clearly belongs to the emotional, erotic part of the psychic sphere: “The law of sin which is in my limbs.” (Romans 7:23) Carnal thoughts, according to Paul, lead to behavior that is inexplicable to conscious reason: “I do not do what I will to do.” Or: “The desire to do good is in me, but I do not find in myself the wherewithal to accomplish it” (p. 11). The Law, addressed to the conscious will of man, did not take into account the unconscious and the unconscious will, which the apostle called the “Non-I, because the “I” for him is the conscious man. But the ‘Non-I” is still part of the “inner man” (vnutrennii chelovek), Paul’s term, seen by Vysheslavtsev again as a psychological concept. The unconscious depths of man in the Bible are further called by Vysheslavtsev the “heart,” seat of feeling and emotion: “Profound is the heart of man…and who can know its depths?” The answer is: “God alone.” Only God penetrates the “hearts and wombs.” The word “heart” is associated with the more noble content of the unconscious and the “wombs” with the darker, chaotic, sexual content thereof, the erotictending drives, in Vysheslavtsev’s terminology (erotiko-tendiruiushchie vlecheniia/stremleniia), in Freudian terms, libido. He writes: “This inner world of man is very often overlooked and not even cognized by its bearer”321 He concludes that it is mixed: “The unconscious is a sphere of endless possibilities, out of which every sin and every virtue is born; it is matter (in the Greek sense) which can assume beautiful or hideous form; it is that ancient “native chaos” (Tiutchev) which trembles below the threshold of man’s consciousness with its rational norms and

320 321

Vysheslavtsev, “Etika sublimatsii,” p. 8. Ibid., p. 14.

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rational will. We have seen that the Law is unable to give form to this matter and only elicits its resistance.” At this point a second great (and Jewish), Moses figure enters the scene—Sigmund Freud, who lays down for us the Law of the human unconscious. The epochal importance of Freud’s contribution is indisputable to Vysheslavtsev. Modern psychoanalysis has given Christian religion and anthropology what it rather desperately lacked—a key to understanding the larger part of man, the irrational, unconscious man. Freud is like Moses, the great genius and Father of the movement, without whom the sons—Jung, Adler, Rank and the School of Nancy (Baudouin and Coué)—would not have appeared. Vysheslavtsev accepts Freudian libido, sexual impulses, as extremely important to understanding man’s psychic and religious life, and after Rozanov spent decades informing Russians of its importance, he is not surprised, but rather gratified to see that atheistic science confirms the religious intuitions of a Russian thinker. Freud is praised for bringing the unconscious to the fore as a scientific concept, something Rozanov had called more vaguely “the world of the unclear and the undetermined.” Vysheslavtsev, predictably perhaps, critiques Freud’s theory for the same things that he criticized in the Jewish Law—its non-individual, one-size-fits-all aspect that does not sufficiently value free personality. Every male child has an Oedipal complex; every female experiences penis envy, all have a primal scene, etc. But how does each individual in his depths react personally and individually to these experiences? Freudian man is too biologically determined, too much in the thrall of his primal drives and instincts. Every psychic manifestation, including religious feeling, has a bio-sexual source and explanation. Nor does Vysheslavtsev see the unconscious as having mainly a wild and destructive, anti-social content -negative content only. He believes that man’s freedom is both unconscious and conscious and like Jung that all man’s instincts for good also reside in the unconscious. As concerns Freud’s hypothesis that all good and noble aspects of man’s character are sublimated libido, Vysheslavtsev agrees, but finds Freud’s reasoning about sublimation hopelessly circular and meaningless in the context of such inflexible biological determinism and lack of a spiritual metaphysics. Still he defends Freud against the attack of religious thinker L. Semen, who says that Freud has opened up “the treasure of profound psychic life that Freud cannot deal with philosophically.” Vysheslavtsev counters that this is a “facile criticism” and implies that Freud wanted to deal with it medically and therapeutically

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and did not fancy himself a philosopher (p. 109). He indicates further that even if Frank is right, the philosophical critique of naturalism and materialism—if one chooses to call Freud’s views “sexual materialism” as Frank does,—has already been and is being undertaken in philosophy and is not the urgent task of the present as Vysheslavtsev sees it. Sublimation—the transmutation or even transfiguration of lower drives into higher tendencies, images, thoughts feelings is the central concept of a modern ethics and the first order of business for moral philosophy is the clarification of sublimation itself and its role in the religious sphere, to which his book and project is dedicated. He says of Freud’s philosophical errors that they stem from inability to conceive of higher categories, higher stages of being and a misapprehension of their interrelations with the lower categories. The explanation of the higher by means of the lower is a typical infringement on the law of the hierarchy of categories, formulated by Nicolai Hartmann. An example would be the attempt to explain organic life in terms of mechanics and chemical formulae, or free creative activity in terms of the law of cause and effect.322 Freud is practicing a typical naturalist’s reduction to the lowest common denominator. His critique follows: “But how can a lowering sublimate? The premise that everything can be explained in terms of lower categories negates the independent existence of the higher ones, denies the hierarchy of stages of being and the hierarchy of values. But if there is no longer a higher category, how can one elevate or raise what is lower?” He concludes: “The most serious reproach to Freud’s theory of sublimation is that it is impossible in his worldview. It would be possible only if there were a sublime, an Erhabene (Hegel’s term).” Vysheslavtsev, like many religious thinkers, is incensed by Freud’s 1927 attack on religion “The Future of an Illusion”: When for Freud love for the Absolute (religion) and individualized love are termed an illusion (a superstructure on a sexual base), when the only thing that is not an illusion is ‘the sexual drive and its normal functioning,’ where do these ‘moral ideas’(in Freud) come from which [Freud says] attempt to control and direct the sexual drive and which carry out repression (Verdrangung), and those which carry out sublimation? In Freud’s system those forces do not exist. Thus we have, as Max Scheler indicated, a vicious circle: all higher moral feelings are reduced to sublimated sexuality and, on the other hand, the sublimation of sexuality

322

Vysheslavtsev, Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa, p. 109.

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“Sublimation is the raising of the lower to the higher. To understand this raising one needs a system of categories of being, a hierarchy of values. This is something of which the Freudian school has no conception. Freud’s failure is summarized: Freud categorically fails to understand that the higher form—the refined product (for example, Dostoevsky’s novels which Freud so appreciates) is something absolutely new, a new, a higher category in which the lower one is in a sense ‘destroyed’ and in a sense ‘preserved,’ but most importantly, raised, ist aufgehoben!”323 The absence of a hierarchy of values and universal reduction to the sexual/biology are Vysheslavtsev’s main philosophical objections to Freud. This is not to say, that he is squeamish about the sexual, animal component in man. When he speaks of the “wombs,” he recurs to the well known Solovyov poem, “We met not by Chance,” in which it is clear that what is elevated is dark and sexual in nature: Light from darkness, The faces of your Roses could not ascend If their dark root were not submerged In the twilight bosom (of the earth) and did not drink of it.324

A Christianized interpretation of the libido as a Platonic Eros, that naturally tends to rise and rise, instead of Freud’s more instinctual one, is a corrective Vysheslavtsev thinks Freud needs. C.G. Jung—the New St. Paul Freud is the giver of the inflexible and not totally effective Law of the unconscious man, which is deemed too unable account for individual personal differences, just as the Jewish Law had been. Here again Vysheslavtsev does not interest himself in the actual treatment of individual patients where the adaptation of Freud’s theory to individual cases would mitigate its one-size-fits-all aspect. Vysheslavtsev further

323 324

Ibid., p. 110. Vladimir Solovyov, “My soshilis’ s toboi nedarom..,” in Stikhotvoreniia…, p. 92.

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forgets that Freud is dealing with very torn personalities, psychotics and very dysfunctional neurotics, and Vysheslavtsev is applying Freud’s theories as a description of the unconscious of everyone, even the generally healthy individual. One can only say that Vysheslavtsev believes that modern man is “spiritually sick” in the majority. This is obvious in several of his articles, most clearly in “The Religious Spirit and the Irreligious Spirit.”325 Carl Gustav Jung, himself a lapsed Swiss Reform Christian, Freud’s most brilliant disciple and chosen heir apparent, is for Vysheslavtsev the psychoanalytic St. Paul. He is well aware of Jung’s early period as an orthodox Freudian and practitioner of the “Law,” and one very dependent on the master, who often claimed to feel like Freud’s “son.” Vysheslavtsev also knew of the severe almost psychotic crisis Jung underwent after breaking with Freud in 1913 and apparently interprets that mental breakdown as his “Road to Damascus” experience. Jung had in common with Paul an intimation that the “Law” must be modified and softened and that he was the one appointed by fate to do it. Here the phrase: “He came not to destroy the (Freudian) Law, but to fulfill it” fits Vysheslavtsev’s understanding of Jung’s role perfectly. It is Jung who brings the needed “Grace” to the (Freudian) Law, who softens its rigidity. Vysheslavtsev is a great enthusiast of Jungian analytical psychology. His 1929 review of the first volume of the Russian translation of Psychological Types, edited by Emily Medtner and translated by Sofia Loria326 is perhaps the most ecstatic embrace of anything psychoanalytic to emerge from the pen of a Russian religious philosopher. Published in Put’, in which Vysheslavtsev authored virtually all reviews of psychoanalytic and other psychological texts, it names Jung and Charles Baudouin as the bringers of grace to Freudianism: “Freud is dry and narrow in the genius of the one-sidedness of his discoveries,” he writes “but the books of Jung and Baudouin amaze one with the inordinate richness which they reveal in the human soul, that ‘mirror of the universe.’ Everything here is new, mysterious, full of unknown forces and potential.” The concept of the unconscious clearly is the unknown land that Vysheslavtsev had called the irrational Absolute and which was very central to his

325

See footnote 293 above. Vysheslavtsev, Review of Iung Izbrannye trudy po analiticheskoi psikhologii. Psikhologicheskie tipy. Tom I, Put’, 1930, pp. 111–113. 326

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feeling of the world. He continues: “[it is] the source of magic, of the medium, of fantasy, art, mythopoeisis and religion,” in effect, a new word for the Absolute and God. He claims that modern psychology is “the alchemy of the soul (referring to Jung’s interest in alchemy) which teaches us how baser affects can be turned into ‘noble metals,’ into true ‘diamonds of the spirit’ ” (p. 111). The superiority of Jung’s broadening the libido to include the traits of Platonic Eros had already been pointed out in “The Ethics of Sublimation,” his 1927 article. There is it clear that Jung steps in as the Paul to Freud’s Moses. Vysheslavtsev writes: “The necessity of broadening Freud’s libido is felt by all significant thinkers of his school. C.G. Jung understands libido as psychic energy […] Baudouin calls this psychic energy potential affectif. ”327 For Adler the motive force of libido is the hunger for power and dominance. Vysheslavtsev’s Modified Jungian Structure of the Self If for Jung the consciousness or conscious ego is a rather small function floating upon a much larger unconscious, from which it is derived, so, in the Jungian scheme, the personal unconscious is small and limited within the psyche, when compared to the much larger collective unconscious, which Jung describes as “the ‘mother foundation’ or matrix upon which all personal differention (personal unconscious and conscious ego) exists. The greater the harmony and coordination—not identity of the unconsciousness with consciousness—the more healthy one is.”328 The racial memory, the collective unconscious with its primordial material, and most importantly, the archetypes that mankind inherits by dint of being human, is a psychic heritage totally parallel to his physical/racial heritage. Sublimation and Creativity and the Mechanism of the Creative Process (Hierarchy of the Self) As we indicated, Vysheslavtsev set himself the same task of probing the mechanism of Freudian sublimation as Otto Rank had, and he did it some two years before Rank, under greater Jungian influence, but with

327 328

Vysheslavtsev, “Etika sublimatsii,” p. 16. Mullahy, p. 153.

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a thoroughness close to Rank’s. That is to say, he theorized about a similar, and even more detailed, bridge from the sex-impulse to the art-work that Rank called for in Art and the Artist. Vysheslavtsev presents this hierarchy of the human person in 1931 and 1954. In it each higher level includes all levels below it and overcomes the oppositions that inhere in the level immediately below. Hierarchy of the Self Level 7: Irrational and superconscious; a very high level of achieved self-transcensus; I-Myself—the deepest level of the self; a united selftranscendent vis-à-vis all levels below it. “The hidden man of the heart”; that which is placed above the conscious Self called by Jung “the unknown and standing higher Subject” (Jung, p. 264)329 or “the Great man in the self,” etc. This deepest self cannot be understood by rational thought nor its existence proved according to Jung, but we sense and are aware of its presence. Here the “image of God within the self,” towards which one strives in sublimation of the self, is maximally realized. At the basis of level 7 lie the consciousness and the unconscious. It is important that spirit exists as a potential to be affirmed at the levels below 7, where the seeds of the spiritual are present as well as the dark roots. At level 7 proper the spirit-matter opposition is overcome and the unity of the whole is realized; almost all that is non-spiritual is sublimated away. Level 6: The spiritual consciousness/spiritual personality: the part of the self that is the creator of culture, not the egocentric ego. Level 5: Consciousness, the conscious soul/psyche, also called the egocentric ego, the non-spiritual “animal” psyche. This ego-consciousness is the closest to Freud’s ego. It has interests “that are egocentric, seeking pleasure and involving all things related to the physical vitality of the person.” Level 4: Personal unconscious which resides upon the larger basis of the collective unconscious.

329

Jung quoted in von Franz, pp. 264ff.

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Level 3: The collective unconsciousness. The psychic energy which is the basic soil out of which levels 4, 5 and 6 of the individual soul grow. The Christ-archetype, Christ-ideal in the self lies here. Level 2: Living energy, the biological being of the body, live cells. Level 1: Physical-chemical energy These levels fit Jung’s scheme of individuation. In fact, Vysheslavtsev’s sublimation of the self is a markedly Christian version of individuation. He does not speak specifically of confronting one’s shadow or anima, but they are in no way excluded. Like Jung, Vysheslavtsev postulates unending self-transcensus in man. According to Vysheslavtsev, man feels the presence of something (God, the irrational absolute) which transcends the highest level of his human development and continues to strain to better himself towards it. This process of selftranscensus is sublimation. The mediating mechanism between the unconscious and consciousness is the imagination which works not by force or fiat, but through suggestion, in his religious terms, by Grace rather then Law, wandering from the unconscious up into the conscious and back down again. This is what Jung terms “active imagination.”330 While most Russian and Western religious thinkers rejected Freudianism, it was Vysheslavtsev who saw that the Freudian-Jungian discovery of the irrational Unconscious implied much more than the lowest instinctual aspects of man, but that it was the locus of man’s freedom and of the presence of the Absolute within the depths of the human person. He recognized Freudian depth psychology, even though

330 Jung has comparable concepts and treatment methods developed on his own in the early years after his break with Freud in 1913, that also appear to have influenced Vysheslavtsev, prior to his deeper knowledge of the School of Nancy. The leading scholar of this aspect of Jung is Joan Chodorow, who edited and wrote the introduction to the volume Jung on Active Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Especially interesting for the subject matter here in that volume is Chodorow’s “Introduction,” pp. 1–20; Jung’s “The Transcendent Function,” pp. 42–60; Jung’s “Confrontation with the Unconscious,” pp. 21–41 and his “Tavistock Lectures” (1935) where he first spoke about the method of self balance as “active imagination.” This method, which uses dance, sculpting, poetry and other creative activities to express and bring to awareness unconscious material, is used for the cure and balance of the psyche of patients. These are the ideas put forth in 1916 in “The Structure and Dynamic of the Psyche,” especially the part entitled “The Transcendent Function.”

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it was formulated scientifically and not-metaphysically, as a brilliant way of probing the Absolute that lies within. In his review of Jung’s Psychological Types we learn of further improvements to Freud brought about by Jung, whom Vysheslavtsev claims to love: “In the end the reader begins to love this writer, to be carried away by him as one is carried away by a musical work that contains an infinity of emotional problems; the secret of Jung’s enchantment lies in the [feeling of] the ebb and flow of the unconscious, which has no fixed borders and everything is reflected in a new way […]. Reading it we are shown our own selves in a new way.”331 The main Jungian principles that Vysheslavtsev will adopt in his major book (to appear several years later) are the following: 1. the principle of psychic life as the interrelations (dialogue) of the conscious and the unconscious; 2. Jung’s thesis that the psyche is “torn and divided by contradictory aspirations and drives (stremleniia/vlecheniia), conscious and unconscious ones, but that it seeks, both consciously and unconsciously, harmony, unity, health; 3. the notion that the way to penetrate (enter) the unconscious is through the imagination: “there is one ability of the psyche/soul that magically penetrates the unconscious—that is the power of the image, the imagination”; 4. For Vysheslavtsev there is no imagination apart from the image it embodies. Deriving his understanding from Jung and from the morphology of the Russian word voobrazhenie (vo—into, obraz— image, enie—verbal active suffix.) There is no empty imagination apart from the concrete image it is incarnating “Imagining is incarnating”. 5. Lastly and most importantly, Jung places the religious image above all others. Remaining a scientist and a doctor, he does not profess any religious faith, though he deals with the symbolism of many, but he affirms the psychic reality (not an illusion for the believer) of the religious imagery and belief and affirms that man has a deep religious need, almost a religious instinct. As concerns religious experience, Jung calls it an objectively observable scientific fact. This notion of a soul seeking its own wholeness for a Russian religious thinker harks back to the “collected consciousness” of the 331

Vysheslavtsev, Review of Jung, p. 112.

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Slavophiles and to integral cognition and especially the integral personality, elaborated by Kireevsky and Khomiakov in the first half of the 19th century. There religious faith was the factor which harmonized reason and experience. We shall see that a very similar idea will inform Vysheslavtsev’s reading of Jung’s personality dynamics: “Jung attests that the image of God in man’s soul is the image of greatest value and greatest reality, the only image capable of concentrating all our psychic forces within itself, and which is able to grasp and resolve with unifying force all the contrary aspirations of the unconscious.”332 Jung calls the religious image a “uniting symbol,” giving this term two meanings: 1) a symbol is a “uniting” of opposites, a resolution of the tragedy of the soul, and 2) a symbol is the expression of the rationally uncomprehended, of the ineffable. Scientific psychology (in the person of Jung) has come here to an amazing result: “it holds that the human psyche is by its nature religious, that the ‘salvation’ of the soul from tragic chaos is vouchsafed by the religious ‘symbol’ ‘the symbol of faith’ in the image of God. Never before has positivist science arrived at such an evaluation of religious feeling!”333 This is clearly music to Vysheslavtsev’s ears. He became a devotee of Jung, a kind of free-lance religious Jungian, wrote to Jung in Zurich, promised to undertake editing and oversight of the last three volumes of the Russian-language Jung after the death of the E. Medtner and carried this work to conclusion. It appeared between 1930–40. Vysheslavtsev interprets Jung in terms of his own idea of sublimation: for Jung “the whole problem of the soul, the problem of life and creativity is the problem of the sublimation of the lower unconscious drives, i.e., their transformation and harmonization” (p. 112) applied in the process of self-realization or individuation and in the creation of sublime art and other cultural products of great value. This is the impulse behind and the thrust of Vysheslavtsev’s 1931 book. Vysheslavtsev’s 1935 article “The Image of God in the Substance of Man” is Jung-inspired and presents Vysheslavtsev’s original idea of what Jungian analysis should ideally be, a completely faith-based Jungian analysis and individuation process, something which Jung still demurred from doing. It is clear in Vysheslavtsev’s earlier writings that he wanted Jung to re-embrace his religious faith, and he attributes an

332 333

Ibid. Ibid., p. 114.

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unconscious desire to do this to Jung himself. Jung did return at the age of 60 (in 1935) to an almost exclusive analysis of the images and symbols of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In some sense, Vysheslavtsev is anticipating this part of Jung’s oeuvre. How to Sublimate One’s Self—Vysheslavtsev’s Christianization of Jungian’s Individuation, Vysheslavtsev’s Mechanism of the Creative Process Let us consider the possible life trajectory of a sex-impulse in Vysheslavtsev’s idea of the creative process and, for the sake of argument, let us say a rapacious, destructive one. This impulse is born in the deepest unconscious. There it interacts with all manner of other impulses, positive and negative, and is changed and modified in this interaction long before it ever becomes conscious. It generates an image or images in the unconscious imagination, which images undergo changes/modifications for a considerable period. It is very important that much sublimation and creativity therefore, occur in the unconscious. At some point in the creative process this image comes up into the conscious imagination and the consciousness, in becoming aware of it, is usually surprised and feels it to be alien, to be “not its own.” The conscious imagination may try to exert influence over it, which influence will be damaging to it if it is not suggestion. Gentle influence over a free image from the unconscious is the only path. Coué’s rule that “in any confrontation between the will and the imagination, the imagination always wins,” is always followed by Vysheslavtsev. One cannot destroy or control the unconscious, one can only “suggest” to it. And if there is nothing in the unconscious that is similar to what is being suggested, the suggestion will fail: “Suggestion is always autosuggestion.” Suggestion from the outside, from the world and from God-religion is possible, but it, too, will be rejected, if there is not already soil for it in the deepest self. Remaining in the imagination, the image goes below consciousness again and is further modified and developed, continuing this up and down movement until it occurs in the consciousness in what is felt to be a more or less finished form. Here begins the part of the creative process that is mostly conscious, but even during the execution there is a tug o’ war between the conscious and the unconscious. The technical process/execution is completed and, if the sublimation is successful, the product is a new spiritual value, and cultural value, something

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entirely new added to the world. The role of suggestion in this (grace) is as elaborated by Charles Baudouin in his books Psychologie de la suggestion et de l’Autosuggestion and La Psychoanalyse de l’Art.334 It is understood by Vysheslavtsev in the following terms reported in his article on Christian use of the ideas and methods of the School of Nancy, entitled “Suggestion and Religion”: Sublimation of unconscious eros via imagination is suggestion—an ideaimage is thrown into the unconscious and there in the subsoil of psychic life (level 3: the collective unconscious and level 4: the personal unconscious) it lives and grows unconsciously, absorbing other affects that are there transforming them and being transformed by them. The image of God in the substance of man is present as an archetype in the collective unconscious and man’s arbitrary freedom is manifest at both levels of the unconscious. After this sublimation work that occurs in the interaction of the two levels of the unconscious, the transformed image grows out and appears in the consciousness (level 5), and in the best of cases the spiritual consciousness (level 6) and is integrated, changing the consciousness thereby, or, at level 6 it can turned into creative manifestations or acts/products. Suggestion then has a three-part rhythm: 1) idea-image thrown into the unconscious, as a word which contains a suggestion in it; 2) the unconscious life and work upon the image; 3) a series of acts and changes that are the result of suggestion. The second part of this occurs entirely without conscious knowledge of the artist/creator.

Suggestion can be chance, arbitrary and non-arbitrary—when one’s conscious will is involved. Baudouin defines suggestion as “the unconscious realization of an idea.”335 Vysheslavtsev describes why suggestion works: “Suggestion affects nature (the unconscious in man) while submitting to its ways. This is what the Christ of Grace does, influence by example, and not by dictating to man. The unconscious is always free. And in a being (man), whose unconscious is much greater than his consciousness, man’s radical freedom will always manifest its presence, autonomy and thus resistance.”336 Sublimation of an image in artistic creation, for example, or of the self in the process of self-realization, occurs by the same creative process. In the second case, it occurs by means of an image which, in

334

Ibid., p. 112. Coué ’s rule is invoked multiple times by Charles Baudouin in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, trs. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1924), see “Introduction,” pp. 3–41. This is the English translation of the work entitled Psychanalyse de l’Art. 336 Quoted in Vysheslavtsev, “Vnushenie i religiia,” p. 65. 335

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becoming part of consciousness, changes the self, or brings one closer to the “greater Man within,” the better self, the totality of the psyche. The process of self-sublimation or individuation means the rising of images up from levels 3 and 4 (the unconscious) to levels 5 and 6 which is the level where sublime creation becomes possible, and finally to level 7, the highest spiritual level man can attain. Role of Freedom In this model of sublimation the unconscious contains man’s radical freedom which he becomes aware of in ethical conflicts and decisions when the images thrown up from the unconscious involve alternative or competing values that are in contention. Freedom is a moral category only in the consciousness. Vysheslavtsev discusses this in the most detail in his major book under the chapter heading “The Mutual Action of Two Aspects of Sublimation: Conscious Will and Unconscious Tendencies or Attractions (vlecheniia).” There he mentions that Jung’s model of sublimation/ individuation tends to affirm the freedom of the unconscious and ignore the issue of conscious freedom.337 The important passage is this one: “How from the materials (images) of unconscious affects is my conscious will with its choice of a goal-orientation formed?” The answer is that when the unconscious process of sublimation throws images into the consciousness, the conscious will, conscious freedom, choice and decision come into play. [a] conflict of emotions and aspirations arises. They contradict each other, conflict with one another. A simple reaction is impossible. Each affect on its own directly realizes itself, reacts without thought or doubt. But all the affects together threaten to sunder the unity of consciousness, the unity of the organism. Doubt as to how to act arises and doubt is always a problem of ego-consciousness and conscious will. […] Here one must choose, settle by decision a practical doubt, the act of preference which gives the advantage to one of the conflicting aspirations, one of the values. When there is no act of decision, there is no unity of self-consciousness, no Ego, only a chain of aspirations, because they confront each other and rip each other apart (a picture of total mental disarray and disassociation) and only the ego can bind then together.338

337 338

Vysheslavtsev, Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa, p. 106. Ibid., pp. 106–107, emphasis mine—ALC.

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Just like other images the libidinal or other instincts impress on the unconscious imagination which brings them up to consciousness, that freedom must be sublimated if the self to achieve the highest level of spirit. In fact the sublimation of man’s arbitrary freedom, making it freedom for the good, making it in its freedom chose the good is every bit as important as the sublimation of the sexual content and goes hand in hand with it. This necessity to sublimate one’s freedom, which is the basis of one’s status as an ethical being, is a concept entirely absent from Freudian determinism. Biological determinism is so strong in Freud that freedom of the individual is very limited, and he may imagine himself much freer than he actually is—his freedom may be an illusion. Nevertheless, the dominant role of the unconscious processes in Jung’s and Vysheslavtsev’s Sublimation or Christian Individuation almost dwarfs the role of the conscious controlling will so important in Freud and in Rank’s concept of creativity.339 Vysheslavtsev stated that “successful suggestion is autosuggestion,” i.e., it succeeds because it answers/supports something already present in the deepest self. 339 Vysheslavtsev’s mechanism of the creative process—compared and contrasted with that of Otto Rank. It is remarkable that it was a Russian religious thinker who elaborated in 1931 in his Etika preobrazhennogo erosa an even more detailed bridge from the sex impulse to the art-work of the kind Rank called for in 1932. Rank’s 1932 masterwork Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artist) only recently appeared in the German, but it originally appeared in English (Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. (New York: Knopf, 1932), 431 pp., after Vysheslavtsev’s book had been written and appeared in print in Paris. Vysheslavtsev certainly knew Rank’s more famous book The Trauma of Birth. Vysheslavtsev’s 1931 book on sublimation, therefore, anticipates and is independent of Otto Rank’s project of emending and correcting the Freudian notion. Otto Rank is so important for any study of creativity because he is putatively the early Freudian who devoted the most effort to the study of creativity, genius, and to the exceptional man. Rank pointed out the limitations of Freud’s sublimation hypothesis in terms not very different from Vysheslavtsev’s which we discussed here above Speaking of Freud’s treatment of blocked creative patients Rank writes:

Pure psychoanalysis undertaken for the removal of the inhibitions [to creative productivity] did not help at all for the psychological understanding of the creative process. The only tangible statement which Freud’s theory could give was that which asserted that the impulse to artistic creativity originated in the seximpulse. But it is easy to see that this explanation (which I myself accepted in my first work on the psychology of artists) takes us no further in reality, being a pure paraphrase of the individual meaning in the very concept genius (genere = to beget). But psychology could not explain how from the sex impulse there was produced, not the sex act, but the art-work and all the ideas called in to bridge the gulf [between the individual artist’s sex impulse and his individual artistic product] …were only psychological transcriptions for the fact that we have here something, different, higher and symbolical.

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This makes the conscious self more than a passive medium. He also stated that because “the sovereignty of selfhood (samost’) is restored, the sovereign rights of its freedom. Every suggestion thus rests on the deepest part of selfhood in its Ungrund, its freedom. This for him restores the balance of conscious will and unconscious will—the latter being the greater and more individual part of selfhood anyway: “In creativity I put myself in the position of a passive perceiver—but what I am perceiving is my deepest self, listening to my unconscious in the end, I am the one who suggests.”340

(This closely repeats Vysheslavtsev’s critique concerning a “category problem.” The art product itself imposes the existence of a higher category. As for Vysheslavtsev, the art work is the result of sublimation “upwards.” Perhaps as a scientist Rank does not posit the higher category a priori, as Vysheslavtsev appears to, but creates it in response to the factual appearance of higher and finer “products.” The higher category can potentially be reached by any creative person and is realized when successful sublimation takes place. Rank’s 1932 study is focused on what differentiates the unsuccessful creative person, the artiste manqué, from the creative genius. Neither is “normal” and Rank has little interest here in “curing” them, but rather wants to explain the mechanism that leaves one blocked and the other highly creative. In his view the genius creator has a very strong ego that he himself glorifies (very different from Adler who sees creative people overcoming an inferiority complex); he says such a creator “appoints himself to genius status.” The successful creator is one who is able to 1) “separate off his traumas and repressed material from his personality” (not destroy or analyze this material away, but sequester it), to keep it from his “life problems”; 2) give it form, and 3) impress that form on language, stone, sound, etc. and 4) express that formed material into the world in art works. The unconscious material so sequestered is essential to the work, as the content that is formed. The strength of the artist lies in his unconscious creative source that is channeled by a mainly conscious will and ends in the victory of the urge to create, which for Rank stems from the will to immortalize the self as individual. The will to immortality, to remove the self from the natural cycle, is clearly a religious one, or one to which religion attempts to foster and Rank accepts the notion of art as mainly religious. The creative exhilaration, inspired state in artistic creative acts comes from the sense that the transformatory dynamic is occurring in one’s own being, experienced very individually by each artist. The anxieties of the artist concern the conflict between life on the one hand—practical living which would involve sexual activity and creating on the other–which is a transmutation of some part of one’s life into art, perhaps to the detriment of one’s biological life. Rank sees the ability to dominate one’s unconscious material and transform it as described here by acts of creative will as a self-generated restructuring of the personality in the creative person. It is opposed to the notion of the psychoanalytic cure where that material is raised to consciousness and “dealt with,” so that it ceases to interfere with normal functioning. Here those drives are left in tact, controlled to the degree that they can be given form and turned into something “higher.” Rank is perfectly aware that in the artiste manqué this cannot be done and the person is weighed down by the unconscious material and creative activity is inhibited. What for a weaker willed talented person is a hindrance, for the strong creative will is an advantage. And for the latter the expression of the work out into the world may have a compensatory salubrious effect on the whole personality. 340 Vysheslavtsev, The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, pp. 82ff.

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Such a relaxed attitude towards the unconscious will and unconscious imagination could never be found in a Berdyaev. Vysheslavtsev has the calm confidence that he is in the hands of God, the great source of all suggestions and that what will eventuate will be good. Creativity here as for Jung and Rank is the attainment of a certain type of balance in the whole psyche, thus creative activity and the urge to free creativity occur in those who have reorganized their psychic life in a certain way—in Rank by a unique form of willful control and in Vysheslavtsev by the achievement of wholeness and balance which is the sublimation of one’s psychic life, the transformation and in case of genius-like creation the transfiguration of one’s eros and the sublimation of one’s arbitrary freedom. Jung’s statement in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul that it is usually patients with religious faith or a religious worldview who achieve the wholeness which he seeks for them—across religions and traditions—is totally consonant with Vysheslavtsev’s experience and understanding of higher cultural and religious creativity. It is clear from what we have said that Vysheslavtsev, unlike Berdyaev, elaborated a theory of creative self-integration by turning the usual mode of Freudian psychoanalysis on its head. Insofar as the Freudian treatment assumes that repressed unconscious material causes the neurotic and psychotic behaviors (symptoms) of the patient, therapy tries to bring that material to consciousness so that the ego can assimilate it, deal with it rationally and emotionally in the hopes that the symptoms may be alleviated or cured. The unconscious material is often considered to be detrimental to the normal functioning of the individual or comprising the “wounds of the ego.” In Jung and Vysheslavtsev a large part of the contents of the unconscious, including the personal unconscious, has very positive and indispensable value in itself. Vysheslavtsev’s method of communing with the personal and collective unconscious inverts the Freudian procedure. It assumes that there is no real willful control of unconscious material and that it cannot be dissolved in the conscious mind by a talking cure. The unconscious is and will remain free and much of the material in it is valuable and can be affected by gentle suggestion, so that the valuable part can be strengthened and the bad, which he calls “weeds,” can be overcome— that is, tamed by Grace (suggestion), just as traditional Christian morality assumed that man could improve morally if grace and love were lavished upon him, that he would slowly move towards a more Christian life. When a level of self-integration is achieved, one will be a

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good loving Christian in one’s life and the talented will create works of value in the area of their gifts. They may well, as Berdyaev suggests, even sacrifice themselves in producing things of value for all mankind. Art, cultural values are very important for Vysheslavtsev, but religious art and philosophy stand highest for him. Vysheslavtsev’s Unexpressed Appeal to Jung Although Boris P. Vysheslavtsev met Jung in Paris more than once and wrote at least one and probably several letters to C.G. Jung in his capacity as editor of the materials Medtner left unpublished, these are not known to be extant. In his writings in Russian, a language Jung did not know or read, Vysheslavtsev not only critiqued Jung, but made suggestions to Jung that the latter probably never knew of. Though he was very gratified that Jung as a scientist had arrived at the notion of a religious instinct in man and had come to value the religious experience of patients and religious symbolism as vital to psychic health, Vysheslavtsev could not from his believer’s perspective help but make some suggestions of his own to Jung. He modestly appeals to Jung in various Russian-language writings to go further, to speak of his own religious beliefs, and reembrace his own Christian faith. Jung does not ever completely do this, although he does make some vague statements at the end of his life about believing in God’s existence. Vysheslavtsev’s critique is strong: Jung remains on the plane of experimental science […] he makes no metaphysical judgments about God, not saying whether or not he believes in the religious symbol himself. As a scientific method this is understandable. But in this very point it is easy to show that the transition from experimental science to metaphysical judgment is necessary for the man. The fact is that a religious symbol ‘saves’ only when taken absolutely seriously. The scientific analysis of a religious symbol, as if it were a phantasm, as an immanent (to some individual’s psyche) symbol, means the destruction of religion as an illusion. And what is recognized as illusion loses all sublimating force. This certainly is not what Jung wants. Herein lies the internal contradiction of psychologism and immanentism with respect to religion. Is religion not then just “an elevating deception”? What is shown to be illusory ceases to sublimate. And, on the other hand, that which truly sublimates is not a deception but an axiological truth. 341

341

Vysheslavtsev, Review of Jung, pp. 112–113.

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That Jung did not want the powerful God or perfect man symbols/ archetypes to be rendered ineffective in his Christian patients is certainly the case. Vysheslavtsev’s dissatisfaction with Jung is best seen in his 1935 article “The Image of God in the Substance of Man” and in earlier articles. “The Image of God in the Substance of Man” (1935) and its Emendations in 1954 C.G. Jung’s description of an individual’s personality dynamics and his acceptance of “symbols of faith,” “Ideal-man” or God-images or the Christ archetype in his unconscious as inborn catalysts towards wholeness and selfhood, which suggest to man the feeling of a transcendent self, called “I-myself,” (samost’), precipitated a move in Jung towards a rapprochement with religion. Full selfhood could only be embodied in images, symbols and myths and never reduced to the categories of science. Vysheslavtsev’s impatience with Jung, at times a bit strident, stems, as we saw, from the fact that Jung does not ground his uniting God symbols in a Christian metaphysics and retains a positivistic immanentism where they are concerned—religious belief as esse in anima, but “real” for the believer. Vysheslavtsev wants Jung to do is to relinquish his scientific, rationalist position and fully go over into religion. This article “The Image of God in the Substance of Man” focuses upon the Godlikeness of man and the commensurabilities that exist between God and man—man as sharing the most divine traits of all creatures in the world, man not as God, but as Godlike, a micro-Theos grounded in a grand macro-Theos. Immanentism of the Freudian kind can lead man to the dangerous dead end and vicious circle of Mangodhood, as seen in the philosophies of Feuerbach and Nietzsche, and warned against so forcefully in Dostoevsky. It is not enough for Vysheslavtsev that Jung from a seemingly immanentist perspective sees the image of God as a uniting symbol that enables man to achieve wholeness in himself—to be his fullest self which exceeds rational understanding and has a very large non-conscious and non rational component, a felt sense. Interestingly enough, Jung will begin to satisfy Vysheslavtsev’s reservations about him with his articles on the God-image and the Christ Ideal and the Christ-archetype which he begins to publish in 1941 and continues writing through to the 1960s. Vysheslavtsev died in 1954 in Jung’s homeland, Switzerland, and it can be safely assumed that

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Vysheslavtsev was aware of all of Jung’s publications on Christianity up to that date. It was probably this familiarity that softened his later critique of Jung. Moreover, in 1935 Vysheslavtsev feels Jung is too locked in upon the internal dynamic of the individual patient’s psyche and not focused enough on sublimated Christian love: “The mysterious depth of selfhood is understood in its feeling of itself and its feeling towards/for other selfhoods. But this mystical feeling (and N. Lossky is right that the man who lacks this feeling, is trapped in stony unfeelingness as if ‘he has no heart’ and loves neither his fellow man nor his own self). Such a man has no concept of his ‘I-Myself ’/Selfhood. Because a heart and a pure heart can be understood fully only by another heart, i.e., purified of that which is not I-Myself in the deepest sense.”342 This sublimated selfhood which can love is Solovyov’s “meaning of love” with its interpenetrating full-valued selves, revisited. Vysheslavtsev writes: “the bliss of the feeling of seeing God in a fellow person (the beloved), of seeing his or her Godlikeness. The Godlikeness of love with its symbol “the heart” reveals the far end of the profundity of selfhood/I-Myself far better than the Godlikeness of reason, or even the Godlikeness of creative freedom […] the final, seventh stage of man’s substance is not the knowing man, nor the acting man, it is the hidden man of the heart. Here the final depth of man and his likeness to the Absolute (absoliutopodobnost’) comes in “Man is an ‘I-Myself ’ and the Absolute is an ‘I-Myself.’ ”343 It is perfectly correct that in 1935 Jung has not gone this far and it is moot whether he ever does. Here confirmed Christian interpreters of Jung and objective scholars such as the Murray Stein in his doctoral dissertation and his many publications on Jung and Christianity will differ. Jung’s Trinitarian studies and analyses of the Christ-archetype and the ideal man-archetype appear to remain inside the individual’s psyche, and do not emerge beyond the individual very often to the interaction of independent selfhoods and the Russian issues of overcoming egoism in community, although he is very much aware of these. Jung keeps the main thrust of his work on the clinical goal of helping the individual psyche in its own striving for wholeness. While Jung does not exclude the Solovyovian mutual bolstering of selfhoods in

342 343

Vysheslavtsev, Vechnoe v russkoi filosofii, pp. 279–280. Ibid.

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sublimated love, as a source and result of wholeness and a religious world outlook as something which increases the ability of man to love, his focus is on the individual. In his final, posthumously published book (1955) The Eternal in Russian Philosophy Vysheslavtsev includes large verbatim portions of the 1935 article “The Image of God in the Substance of Man” under a new title as Chapter 11 “What am I Myself?” After another 18 or so years of awareness and study of Jung’s intervening analyses of Christian symbols (1941–1954 circa) and Jung’s Yale lectures on Christianity and Psychology delivered as a series in 1937, Vysheslavtsev is less hard on Jung. Jung is no longer accused of the kind of immanentist psychologism that he was in the first version. Freud still is, but Jung is said to “direct his irony towards it [that is, psychologism]. The Absolute (implied for Jung) is precisely that which infinitely surpasses any ‘only’ the human being always transcends himself and his psyche” (p. 143). Selfhood-divine humanity (Solovyov’s Bogochelovechestvo) is unreachable by human science: “Science and the rational cannot reach or give proof of selfhood as Jung has now clearly proclaimed. (p. 145) Selfhood is meta-psychical and meta-psychic, in every possible sense of the word transcensus. Only revelation and mystical intuition can point towards the ultimate depths”(p. 149). At the very end of his life Vysheslavtsev expressed this assessment of Jung’s analytical psychology: Analytical psychology is the only psychology that can open up and illuminate the selfhood which transcends itself. All other psychological teachings were immanent, the psychology of the consciousness only, and knew only the conscious Ego. The unconscious is already transcendent vis-à-vis the consciousness. But this transcensus means the “subconscious” which lies at the basis of consciousness as its foundation, as the condition of its possibility. But there is another transcensus, so to speak, in the other direction, leading not to the subconscious but to superconsciousness. This opens something greater, which therefore stands above consciousness; placed above the conscious Ego “the unknown and higher-standing subject” (Jung). At its basis lie the consciousness and the unconscious—and it transcends their contradiction by constantly resolving it and bringing about the unity of the self (totality of the self).This is the mysterious, unfathomable and all-transcending selfhood. The greatest philosophical accomplishment of analytical psychology is the distinction it draws between the conscious Ego and true selfhood.344 344 It comes up very importantly on the final pages of his last book The Eternal in Russian Philosophy (2002).

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Two Treatments of the Inefficacy of Christianity in the Modern Age Jung did make precisely such statements in the 1940s, early 1950s and beyond, and knowledge of this is what softened Vysheslavtsev’s assessment of him—in his analysis of his own Christian tradition Jung did move quite a bit in the direction Vysheslavtsev had wished for in the 1930s. Yet the thirty years of Jung’s study of his own Christian tradition was an analysis showing doctrinal Christianity as largely unaware of its own dark, unconscious side and unable to appeal to modern man because of this. Murray Stein’s doctoral dissertation can be seen as Jung’s analytical psychological treatment of Christianity as a patient needing a cure. In his deep engagement with Christian theology and ritual practice Jung continued to find problems in the Christ archetype, in the Christian relation to nature and the feminine element (the patriarchalization of Christianity) in its denial of the substantitiveness of Evil—the privatio boni is a favorite brunt of Jung’s attack. In parallel fashion Vysheslavtsev, too, had been, critiquing traditional Orthodox Christianity very strongly from within. His major point was that Christian anthropology was radically defective, that it took into account only the conscious will of man, not his all-important unconscious being and his unconscious will. Christianity, therefore, needed the help of Freudian psychology and especially of Jungian thought. Failure to take the discoveries of modern psychology into account explains in large part Christianity’s failure to appeal to and hold modern man, who is “very aware of his freedom and autonomy.” Another major psychoanalytic correction he suggests to Christianity is the use of Baudouin’s “la suggestion” as the psychoanalytic equivalent of Grace to influence the unconscious in the process of sublimating one’s own selfhood towards the Christian spiritual model. As a believer and active exponent of the Christian life, Vysheslavtsev effects a strong rehabilitation of the unconscious with its sexual/erotic and other contents as the source of all good and virtue (as well as evil tendencies). He views it as the seat of radical individuality (lichnost’) and treats selfhood, like Jung, as a constant dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. Vysheslavtsev’s warnings to Christianity and fear that the religion might become extinct are less conflicted, but similar in spirit to Rozanov’s. If Christian anthropology does not integrate the discoveries of psychoanalysis, modern man’s striving for balance and harmony, towards the Godman “I-himself,” or “I-myself.” will go awry. Christianity is in serious danger of degenerating into an empty formalism, of ceasing

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to be a living faith. These warnings to Christianity are directly parallel to those of C.G. Jung. As a member of the International Society of Analytical Psychology, Vysheslavtsev received a visa to Switzerland during the war and died there in 1954. To date only one of Vysheslavtsev’s six important books has been translated into English. His complex use of Jungian and other psychoanalytic ideas, and a full intellectual biography of this fascinating Russian Orthodox philosopher have yet to be undertaken.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CONCLUSIONS. CHANGES IN THE GODMAN AS A MODEL FOR THE CHRISTIAN CREATOR In all three major divisions of this study—Part One (Chapters II and III), Part Two (Chapters IV and V) and Part Three (Chapters VI and VII)—a major aspect of the modern Russian religious-philosophical critique of traditional Russian Christianity was at issue. In this final chapter we shall comment on each phase in detail, adding important material that fleshes out the meaning of that particular critique. This additional material shows convergences in Solovyov and Rozanov with the thought of Jung and of Berdyaev with the thought of Otto Rank and Freud. Presenting it in our chronological narrative would perhaps have confused our attempt to place the Russian thinkers’ overhaul of Christianity in the psychoanalytic context. Only now that that has been achieved can the ancillary material be introduced as further demonstration that the Russian philosophers and the renegade Freudians, Jung and Rank were critiquing the same aspects of Christianity. As we have repeatedly indicated all, four Russian religious thinkers were dissatisfied with the theory of man (anthropology) upon which Church doctrine was based and each in his own way set about changing or correcting that anthropology. In all periods these emendations had far-reaching results for the conception of central Godhead of the religion, Jesus Christ, especially in his capacity of a model for the creative man. Phase One: Attack on the Overly Spiritual (Non-sexual) Nature of the Godman The Russian critique of Christianity in Part One dealt with the overspiritualization of Christianity and was repeated in its general contours, and in some cases in minute detail, some fifty years later by Carl G. Jung. As we outline it here, we will indicate the very striking convergences in the thought of Solovyov and Jung and especially those of Rozanov and Jung. In Chapters II and III above we saw that Solovyov, and especially Rozanov, felt the Christ model was too spiritual and insufficiently carnal (fleshly) to be a suitable model for

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human emulation. Solovyov, a great advocate of the doctrine of Christ’s two natures (human and divine), emphasized that his human, natural aspect was a direct advantage to him in his creative, religious task of respiritualizing Nature.345 In an age of rampant secularism and falling away from traditional Christianity, Nietzsche had called upon man to “be more than he had been in history,” to transcend himself, to become a Superman. Solovyov read this as a religious summons, albeit a humanist one, and was well aware of the attractiveness of the striving creator of new values, Zarathustra, to the secular and the religious individual. In his largely praiseful article “The Idea of the Superman” Solovyov acknowledges that Nietzsche’s influence in Russia far surpasses that of other contemporaries, such as Tolstoy, and he stresses that Nietzsche’s summons to man to raise himself was positive, except that he forgot that the true Superman, the pinnacle of what is human, Jesus Christ, who would always be the highest ideal for man, had been ovrlooked by Nietzsche, not understood by Nietzsche.346 Solovyov in his conviction that the Christ model was too spiritualized, set out to rehabilitate religiously the aspect of the human the official Church most condemned: sex. Since man was a carnal, sexual creature the deep metaphysical (i.e., religious) meaning of his sexuality had to be clarified and God’s divine purpose in making man a sexual being (for Solovyov—a catalyst to moral awakening via shame and the power of idealizing love in man)347 must be brought to the fore. Rozanov in the same decade chimes in, not only agreeing with Solovyov that the sexual instinct can be spiritualized, i.e., sublimated, and a great force for good, he further exalts sex as already divine from the word go.348 This conviction—that the historical Church has willfully demonized sacred sexuality, underlies his entire anti-Christian campaign, which begins gradually in the late 1890s and reaches its peak in his religious answer to Nietzsche’s The Antichrist),349 and the collection The Dark Face (Temnyi Lik)350 Since this is the most devastating Russian

345

See discussion of Solovyov on Christ’s two natures. Solovyov, “Pervyi shag k polozhitel’noi etike,” “Ideia sverkhcheloveka” (“The Idea of the Superman”), in Sochineniia Vladimira Solovyova, VIII, pp. 310–319. 347 See discussion in Chapter II. 348 See discussion in Chapter III. 349 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” in Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, tr. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968). 350 Rozanov, Temnyi lik (see footnote 101 above) consists of the following articles: “V temnykh religioznykh luchakh” (In Dark Religious Rays),vii–xv; “Trepetnoe derevo” 346

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attack on the person of the official Christ of the Russian church and such a central doctrine as the Trinity,351 we shall present major ideas of Rozanov here, comparing and contrasting them with the conclusions about Christianity that C.G. Jung arrived at through analytical psychological techniques. Jung’s Reprise of Solovyov’s and Rozanov’s Critique: Demonization of the Flesh/Nature In Solovyov’s, Rozanov’s and Jung’s critiques it becomes clear that over 2000 years an imbalance has occurred in the doctrine of Christ’s two natures, with excessive emphasis on the divine nature of Christ and underplaying of his human nature, which doctrine had once been very central to Russian Orthodoxy—the doctrinal fullness of the Incarnation seemed to have been forgotten. Jung sees this excessive spiritualization (dominance of spirit over flesh) expressed directly in the doctrine of the Trinity, which established an abstract spiritualized triad FatherSon-Holy Spirit over the naturally occurring triad Father-MotherSon.352 The systematic exclusion of the carnal from the once incarnate Godhead makes Christ-likeness an overly difficult or unattainable ideal for most mortals. As Christ’s human nature was gradually spiritualized away in Church doctrine, a radical dualism developed: there is too much spirit and matter seems hopelessly unable to attain to it. Solovyov’s campaign in favor of restoring balance to the divine and human aspects of Christ and man anticipates Jung’s advocacy of a balanced flesh-spirit, a unio oppositorum.353

(The Quaking Aspen), pp. 1–4; “Po tikhim obiteliam” (Through Quiet Monasteries), pp. 5–60; “Sviatost’ i smert’” (Holiness and Death), pp. 61–66; “Khristos i bogatyi iunosha” (Christ and the Rich Youth), pp. 67–73; “Sluchai v derevne” (An incident in a Village), pp. 75–97; “Kupol khrama” (The Temple’s Cupola), pp. 98–226 (the final section which deals with the Trinity is Temnyi lik (The Dark Face) including “Khristos— Sudiia mira” (Christ—Judge of the World), pp. 227–251); “Ob Iisuse Sladchaishem i gor’kikh plodakh mira” (On Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the World), pp. 252– 268, and “Trevozhnaia noch’” (An Alarming Night), pp. 271–285. 351 See previous footnote. 352 See C.G. Jung on Christianity, ed. with an Introduction by Murray Stein (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), further referred to as Jung-Stein. Jung discusses the psychological implications of the Trinity in “Father, Son and Spirit,” “Christ as Archetype,” see pp. 119–126 and pp. 75–106, respectively. 353 Jung on the unio oppositorum-specifically that the human psyche should be a unity of physical and spiritual, good and evil, male and female, etc. Murray Stein writes that “Jung would prefer a doctrine of God as Unio oppositorum as this would take evil into account without splitting or creating a dualism…,” see Stein, p. 152. See footnote 180.

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The exclusion of man’s bodily nature–sexuality, instinct, all the natural drives and desires man is heir to, turns the body into an inimical trap, which man cannot escape except though death and which gives rise to painful divisions within him. It further leads to the systematic exclusion of the feminine element (women being half of mankind) from the godhead, seen in the emphasis on unnatural birth processes (virginal birth, immaculate conception). The rehabilitation of the feminine in all aspects is a principle Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Rozanov wish to reassert. They with Jung, who posits an anima (feminine soul function) in every male individual and an animus (masculine soul principle in every female, believe in the spiritual and psychical bisexuality of every human being. quite apart from his/her physical gender.354 The female is as much a human-divine creature as the male of the species, just as much an heir to Godmanhood. When the Roman Catholic Church in 1950 approved the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption into heaven, Jung considered this an important step forward for the religion. Mary’s Ascension as virtually divine for him answered a deep and long-standing psychic need of both sexes and was an evolutionary step away from the ingrained patriarchalization of the religion that had become entrenched over centuries, a step towards the restoration of psychic balance of man’s feminine with his masculine natures. Solovyov and Rozanov were at the vanguard of the re-feminization of Christianity in Russian thought. Solovyov’s cult of the Divine Feminine and his emphasis on the human being as androgynous, quite predictably not sanctioned by the official Church, is a prime example of this, as is Rozanov’s sanctification of motherhood, childbirth, and the child in The Family Question in Russia and in his many essays between 1899 and 1904. Rozanov’s anti-patriarchal tendencies are seen in his strong condemnation of monasticism and celibacy in the Catholic clergy, and in Orthodox monasticism. Rozanov, with his cult of the sanctity of the newborn infant and his resistance to the doctrine of original sin, was incensed by the fact that a female infant cannot be

354 Jung on the Assumption of the Virgin in Roman Catholicism, see “The Sign of the Fishes,” pp. 213–234; “From ‘Answer to Job’, ”especially pp. 264–267 in Jung-Stein. The importance of making this Church dogma in 1912 under Pope Pius XII is defended by Jung as answering a psychological need in mankind for feminization of the divinity. Stein remarks: “He considered the promulgation of this doctrine (Assumptio Mariae) to be the most important religious event since the Reformation, for it signified that there was a movement within the collective psyche of Christendom aimed towards a ‘second mixture’.” (Stein, pp. 176–177).

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carried onto an Orthodox altar, while a boy baby can. The anti-sex, monastic tendencies in Orthodox Christianity were condemned as leading to the demonization not only of family, but of the feminine in general. The low status of the inner, true (sexual and loving) content of family life, which was strictly and cruelly regulated by the Church, was especially emphasized in Rozanov in seminal essays such a “The Family as Religion.” For Rozanov the Church’s cruelty in this area was a major cause of the moral crisis in Russia.355 The branding of the bodily, natural element in man as “evil,” while “evil” is totally absent from the Godhead, is a third problem Rozanov identified that Jung was later to expatiate upon a great deal. As the summum bonum God has no evil in him, nor does he create evil. The doctrine of privatio boni, according to which evil is the deprivation of or absence of the Good, leaves evil with no independent ontological status. This can lead to all the rampant evil in the world being blamed on man, which elevates man’s position vis-à-vis the deity immensely. A doctrinally enforced denial of evil in the world from any source other than man and his Fall can, on the other hand, lead to man’s overdeveloped depreciation of his own nature (a species of self-hatred) to a devaluation of his own freedom and creativity (his quest for knowledge, for instance), a debilitating guilt and self-contempt or, because man knows much of the evil in the world is not of his making (socalled: “acts of God” or force majeure), it can lead to a fear, anxiety or hostility towards God which inhibits or renders impossible love of God. An evil-free Deity is for Jung an ineffective symbol for man. Jung’s suggested emendation for this final problem is, as Murray Stein has pointed out, on the surface very radical and in fact more radical than anything Rozanov ever suggested for God the Father and the Godman, Christ: Jung injects the scandalous suggestion of including evil within the doctrine of God: Satan as the fourth figure in a quaternity. ‘The Devil,’ Jung argues, ‘represents God’s eternal adversary and should thus be placed back into the symbolic realm where he originated. [p. 124] […] Evil and its symbolic agent belongs to the very core of Christian theology as […] evidenced in the doctrine of the Creation where [man’s] disobedience and resistance are intrinsic to the unfolding of autonomous spiritual beings and through the Fall to the very appearance of the natural world […]. At a more metaphysical level, the Devil is conceived as the soul of

355

See Rozanov, The Family Question in Russia.

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chapter eight matter because they [the soul and matter]both constitute the point of resistance without which the relative autonomy of individual existence would be unthinkable.’ As Lord of the lower, natural world and author of the Fall and original sin the Devil’s work leads to the necessity of God’s further manifestations.356

These manifestations include the very Incarnation of the Son and sending the Son to redeem the world. None of the Russian thinkers suggests that Satan be promoted to the status of a fourth in a quaternitarian Godhead. Dostoevsky, almost like a Manichaean, indicates the great strength of Satan, the reality and power of evil in the world. Rozanov is the Russian thinker who comes closest to saying that there is “evil” in Christ, as we shall see. Certainly he accuses Christ of evil or very deleterious effects upon the world and man. Of course, the total absence of evil in God the Father that Jung identifies as problematic applies equally to the Son: “There is no darkness in Him.”357 The total absence of sin in the incarnate Godman compounds the difficulties of his functioning as a practicable model for emulation and as a feasible self-concept for a human being. This leads to Rozanov’s critique of the Christ of Church doctrine, even the questioning of the fullness of his Incarnation. Is the Church’s over-spiritualized deity a figure of fear and anxiety or one of love for the modern Christian? And further: If we are to believe that he was sent by the Father out of the Father’s love, to redeem the world, does Christ’s action in the world, as recounted in the Gospels and the entire New Testament, amount to the kind of love and grace that can truly elevate man spiritually? Or, does the doctrinal Christ’s purity and perfection, his non-sexual nature, rather lead man to self-division and self contempt and drag him down as a spiritual and psychic being? Does it make him hate his own human nature and enslave him as Nietzsche said it did? Though he advances nothing as radical Jung’s call for the reinstatement of the Devil in a quaternitarian.358 Godhead, Rozanov sees much that is highly frightening and negative in the figure of Jesus Christ, as Jung came to much later. In his important article “Answer to Job.”359 Jung treats the 356

Stein, pp.124ff. See John’s First Epistle. Jesus’ hatred is much emphasized by Jung. 358 Jung discusses quaternitarian imagery in several places, see Jung-Stein, “From ‘Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy’, ” p. 274; “The Psychological Concept of Self,” p. 80; in references to the Son of Man, p. 236; see also discussion on quaternitarian imagery as an improvement to the image of God over the trinitarian view (ibid., pp. 10 and 21). 359 Jung, “Answer to Job,” in Jung-Stein, pp. 235–272, especially pp. 242–272. 357

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unconscious dark side–the shadow—of the Christian godhead of which the believer is usually not conscious. Rozanov, too, sees the Christian believer as mesmerized by the unearthly beauty of the Gospel texts, as so stunned by the beauty and incapacitating “love” and “tenderness” of the Gospel words that he forgets or fails to understand the harm the bright face of Christ is actually causing him. While both see the average believer as largely unconscious of or afraid to admit his ambivalence about “the dark face” of Christ, Rozanov is maximally cognizant of it, as this book so amply attests. The painful ambivalence arises in Rozanov because the author is still a very mystical religious spirit, still experiences the attraction even of the Russian Church’s Christ, and exhibits a highly conflicted ambivalent love for Him.360 Having written mainly of the bright aspects of Christianity in two volumes entitled Around the Church Walls in 1906,361 in this later study of Christian metaphysics, The Dark Face, Rozanov is maximally and consciously aware of what one would have to call “evil” in Christ and the religion and he spends more than a decade exposing it. Rozanov of all Russian thinkers makes the strongest case that the Church’s Christ or the Christ of historical Christianity does not love man enough to redeem him effectively. A heretical figure within Christianity, Rozanov appears not to believe the Church’s Christ is the true Christ God sent. To wit, in his earlier essay “Nominalism in Christianity” he states: “Christianity has never yet been[in history] yet we worship it like a dead legend […]. No one has yet comprehended/sounded the true depths of Christianity.”362 That is to say, that the human Church has not yet revealed the true Christ. As a Russian God-seeker or Christ-seeker for much of his life, such a reading of Rozanov treats him as a dissonant voice, a Christian reformer, a rebel from within. It is true that, in some of his statements, he appears to stricter Christians as a defector to Judaism (his repeated praise of the Old Testament over the New and of Jehovah over Christ). The full extent and character of Rozanov’s “heresy” is, in my view, still not understood. C.G. Jung, for his part, defines heretics as positive religious forces, as “those who are catalysts to the positive evolution of religion.”363 Solovyov and Rozanov, as well as Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev,

360

See Anna Lisa Crone, “The Disintegration of the Mystical Body,” in Die Welt der Slaven, 1979, I, 257–270. 361 Rozanov, Okolo tserkovnykh sten. 362 Rozanov, “Nominalizm v Khristianstve” (Nominalism in Christianity), in V mire neiasnogo i nereshennogo, pp. 61–81. 363 Jung-Stein, discussion of this in “Introduction,” pp. 3–23.

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clearly share with Jung the notion that the Godman, and even the concept of Jehovah, have been developing over history and will still evolve as man’s religious consciousness deepens. The Russians and Jung share the positive “Christian” hope that man and the Christian religion can still change and improve over time. Convergences of Rozanov and Jung in Specific Texts We preface this presentation of truly remarkable anticipations of Jungian views on Christianity by Vasily Rozanov by reminding the reader of the time and place in which they wrote, as well as the religious affiliation of Rozanov, his claim to believe many tenets of Church dogma, and his certain desire to believe in them, and the total silence about metaphysics or faith/belief of Jung. Rozanov in 1911, after the public reading in 1907 of his most famous “attack on the person of Christ,” “On Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the World,”364 had been assailed as an anti-Christian and even a heretic, although the case for his excommunication, which was brought later, languished before the Holy Synod and was finally dropped.365 The Orthodox clergy never had the strong desire to excommunicate this maverick and rebel, who could be called the “Peck’s bad boy” of Russian religious thought. But Rozanov, raised in the provinces in an atmosphere of Orthodox piety, had unusual knowledge of and aesthetic delight in things “Russian and Orthodox,” and was married to a very pious priest’s widow. Rozanov’s social life was largely with members of the priestly estate and they felt and perceived him as a maverick, but one of their own. Lev Shestov wrote in 1907 that Rozanov was the only religious intellectual who sounded like an insider (svoi chelovek) in the Orthodox fold. In Shestov’s words, when Berdyaev and even Sergei Bulgakov spoke of Christianity they sounded like people who “had learned a foreign language well into adulthood and had the wrong inflections, couldn’t speak the language of the Church without an accent.”366 Rozanov, who had always been in it and close to it, in his own words, multiply repeated by the priest Vasily

364

Rozanov, “Ob Iisuse Sladchaishem,” passim. See Fateev. Rozanov’s excommunication case is discussed in many sources. 366 Lev Shestov, “Pokhvala gluposti (Po povodu knigi Nikolaia Berdyaeva sub specie aeternitatis),” in Shestov, Nachala i kontsy, in Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (St Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1911), V, 95–96. 365

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Zen’kovsky, “around the Church walls,”367 was ultimately tolerated as a Christian renegade. Rozanov early on, simply as an Old Testament and New Testament “scholar,” could run rings around the converts from Marxism, such as Berdyaev and Bulgakov, who were much younger and became erudite in Scripture and theology well after Rozanov. Zen’kovsky, a priest from 1943, and a major scholar of the history of Russian philosophy, consistently viewed Rozanov as “always taking Orthodox Christianity as his point of departure,” and wrote in 1948 of Rozanov’s great contribution to the evolution of Orthodox thought, and specifically of the great value of the negative things Rozanov had said about Christianity and Orthodox Christianity in particular.368 The texts of Rozanov that most closely anticipate Jung’s views, even to the point of referring to the same passages in the Gospel, are from the collection The Dark Face, “On Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the Earth” (pp. 252–268), “In the Dark Religious Rays” (pp. vii–xv), the brilliant and still unappreciated article “Christ-the Judge of the World” (pp. 227–251), and the short story/parable “An Alarming Night” (pp. 269–285), as well as many passages in the book Rozanov wrote as he was dying in the monastery at Sergiev Posad, The Apocalypse of Our Time.369 The articles of C.G. Jung that we find most resonant with Rozanov’s views are: “Christ, a Symbol of the Self,” “The Christ Archetype,” “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy” and the brilliant very late piece “Answer to Job,”370 although there are other passages throughout Jung’s voluminous writings on Christianity that sound like echoes of Rozanov, to which we shall refer when they are especially relevant. The official Western Church, Catholic and Protestant, was less welcoming of Jung’s psychological analyses of Christianity, with the exception of the English Catholic scholar of Thomas Aquinas, Victor White. Judaic theology in the person of Martin Buber was very hostile to Jung’s incursions into religion.

367

Zen’kovsky, I, 457. Ibid., pp. 464–465. 369 Apokalipsis nashego vremeni, in Rozanov, Ausgewählte Schriften. All references to Rozanov’s trilogy—Solitaria, Fallen Leaves, I and II, and The Apocalypse of Our Time— are to this recent one-volume edition. See footnote 110 above. 370 Jung-Stein, “Christ, a Symbol of the Self,” pp. 75–106; “Christ as Archetype,” pp. 107–118. 368

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It must be stressed that both Rozanov and Jung were addressing a crisis of Christianity in the present of the writing. Rozanov wrote before and then in the very midst of the Russian Revolution (1918– 1919) when he felt he was witnessing “the closing down of Holy Russia in a single day […] (even the fall of Babylon had taken three days) […] as if Russia had never been a Christian nation at all.”371 Jung was writing in the years before and in the immediate wake of the horrors of the Holocaust and Second World War when in his view Christian Europe had to wonder whether Christianity had made any headway at all against its pagan cruelty and barbarism. Jung’s post-holocaust warning in his study of Christian alchemy to the Christian Church of modern Europe is in a spirit identical to Rozanov’s post-revolutionary one: The Church assumes […] that the fact of having once believed (semel credidisse) leaves certain traces behind it. But of these traces nothing is to be seen in the march of events. Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged…Inside [Christian man] reign the archaic gods […] that is to say, […] the inner correspondence with the outer God-image (Christ) is undeveloped and therefore got stuck in heathenism […] that is why dark paganism reigns there, […] a paganism which now in a form so blatant that it cannot be denied [Nazism—ALC] is swamping the world of so-called Christian civilization.372

Rozanov prefaces his Apocalypse with similar words: “My title needs no explanation in view of current events which have a true apocalyptic import. There can be no doubt that the deep foundation of all these events is the fact that in European (and therefore in Russian) mankind huge voids have formed from the [loss of] the Christianity of the past. And everything falls into these voids: crowns, thrones, classes, estates, labor, wealth. Everything is shaken utterly and is perishing, perishing. It is all falling into the emptiness of a soul that has lost its former content” (italics mine—ALC).373 Thus, a sense of contemporary Nihilism and pessimism concerning mankind and human civilization haunts the writings of both: a powerful sense of the debacle of Christian culture and civilization.

371

Rozanov, Apokalipsis… Jung-Stein, “From ‘Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy’, ” p. 189. 373 Rozanov, Apokalipsis…, p. 444. 372

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The final three essays in Temnyi lik and Rozanov’s Apocalypse and Jung’s important article “Answer to Job,” which repeats and summarizes many of the psychologist’s views on Christianity from earlier studies, almost beg comparison as they are both commentaries on the apostle John and his Book of Revelation and both relate it to the historical experience of Christianity over almost 2,000 years and to Christian man’s difficulties in the present. Jung comments at length on the psychology of John, whom he considers to be the same apostle who wrote the three letters to the churches towards the very end of the New Testament, which present a Christ of love “with no darkness in him” (First Epistle of John 1:5); “there is no sin in Him” (First Epistle of John 3:4). There love is Christ’s defining trait: “there is no fear in Love, but perfect love casketh out fear […] for Fear has to do with punishment and he who fears is not perfected in love.” Rozanov likewise assumes, as did Biblical scholarship at that time, that the Gospel according to John, the three epistles and Revelation were written by the same person. The originality of Rozanov consists not only in his commentaries on Revelation and the Gospels, but in his taking upon himself the position of the Christian John and writing his own Apocalypse for the present day, breaking the explicit prohibition in the Apocalypse against “adding new words.”374 For Jung the Gospels and words of the epistles are the conscious beliefs of St. John and Revelation is an irruption of his unconscious in the form of a nightmarish dream or vision. Jung feels that many Christians have these darker visions repressed in their unconscious, but that John’s is truly exceptional in the darkness of its Christ: “In this I see the outburst of pent-up negative feelings such as can frequently be observed in people who strive for perfection […] John made every attempt to practice what he preached to his fellow Christians. For this reason he shut out (read: repressed) his negative feelings. But as they disappeared from the conscious level they continued to rankle beneath and in time spun an elaborate web of resentment and vengeful thought which burst upon consciousness in the form of Revelation.”375

374 The last words before the closing benediction in the Book of Revelation are: “If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book” (Rev.: 22: 18–19). 375 Jung, “Answer to Job,” in Jung-Stein, p. 243.

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Certainly, if we take Rozanov’s religious development over his lifetime, its pattern is similar to Jung’s diagnosis of St. John’s and of zealous Christians in general. The period of repression of the “dark side” would correspond to Rozanov’s early very and “bright” Orthodox period. The period of the early 1890s when he writes his book on the Grand Inquisitor and speaks of the present as a “post-Christian period” reflects not only Dostoevsky’s religious anxieties, but Rozanov’s own.376 In his overtly anti-Christian writings as represented by The Dark Face and his Apocalypse his premonitions and previously repressed feelings come to the conscious surface in his passionate ambivalent love-hate for Christ and his revelations of so much dark, shadow material in the religion and its central Godhead. Jung had wanted to put evil/Satan back into a quaternity, complaining of a too bright, too perfect God/Christ. The nightmarish revelation from John’s wild dream is the unconscious asserting its repressed contents which, festering there, unbalanced his psyche and, no longer repressible, burst into consciousness and overwhelmed it. Rozanov is consciously perturbed and even infuriated at the darkness, sadistic evil and lack of love and compassion for man’s suffering that he sees everywhere in Christianity. He claims that most believers are as if struck dumb, so enthralled by the beauty of the Gospel words that they fail to see Gospel deeds, that the promise of the bright, light, loving Christ is betrayed by the reality, already in the Gospel according to Luke. In Luke, Chapter 12, Rozanov lists the series of Christ’s threats, especially: “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled […] Do you think I have come to give peace to earth? No, I tell you, but rather division for henceforth in one house there will be five divided […] father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother […]” (Luke 12: 49–53). Rozanov calls the Apocalypse a book which burns the tongue and roars. He calls it an “anti-Christian book.”377 in which the dark shadow-Christ stands in a negative relation to the one depicted

376 [34]Rozanov, “Ob Iisuse sladchaishem…”: “Yes, the Church permits priests to marry, but to anyone at all and right now without selecting the person and falling in love, as if it the Church’s marriage the man should not be any more in love with his wife than and officer is in love with his soldier” (Temnyi lik, p. 247), and “A monk can sin with a girl and sire a baby but the baby should be drowned. The minute the monk clings to the baby and says ‘I won’t give him up,’ the minute he embraces the girl and says “I love her and I won’t stop loving her and Christianity has gone out the window, as soon as the family becomes serious, Christianity becomes a joke” (Temnyi lik, pp. 258–259). 377 Rozanov, Apokalipsis…, p. 453.

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in the main in the Gospels. Jung is likewise struck with the Christ “with a sword in his teeth,” the vengeful Lamb, whom he describes more as a vicious ram, who comes with threats and to mete out frightening punishments to the seven young Churches who are addressed. The Christ who was all Love in the Epistles of John here is hate-filled: “He hates the Nicolatians” (Revelations 2:6) (italics mine—ALC).378 Jung emphasizes that the contrast between the light and dark Christs could not be starker in the psyche of the same believer. Jung assumes that John is not conscious of their co-existence and cannot explain how both these Christs live his psyche: “John’s conscious attitude is Orthodox, but he has evil forebodings.”379 Rozanov sees these forebodings as John’s prediction that Christianity would not last: But he [John] looked upon the tree planted by Christ and saw with inexplicable for himself and his time depth that it was not [emphasis mine— ALC] the Tree of Life and predicted its fate at the very moment when the churches were just being formed […] For someone 2,000 years ago to predict to the letter some events that are now coming to pass, jumping through all of Christian history, through such a thickness of time and such unencompassable events—is so strange and improbable that no human words can be compared to it. The Apocalypse is an event. The Apocalypse is not words. It is as if the Universe belched it forth immediately after another Teacher (Christ) spoke to the Universe his threatening and prophetic words as his ‘judgment on this world.’ Two Judgments— from Jerusalem upon Jerusalem [Christ’s] and from the Isle of Patmos a judgment against the universe that Christ had preached.380

John’s dream is the undoing of his own faith, the split in his psyche that Jung says Christianity produces, the vision that Christianity is doomed to end. Rozanov is consciously collecting the more cruel and vengeful words of Christ that contradict his loving image, and openly expressing his anger. In “Christ-the Judge of the World” he shows Christ as coming to destroy the whole world just as he came to destroy Jerusalem, as bringing a “tenderness” and “love” that kills or makes everything kill and destroy itself. In this article and his Apocalypse Rozanov decries this situation and rails against it without indicating why it is the case. Jung’s psychological explanation is clear: “the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything turns dark beside it.”381 378 379 380 381

This word is much emphasized by Jung. Jung, “Answer to Job,” in Jung-Stein, p. 242. Jung, “Christ, a Symbol of the Self,” in Jung-Stein, p. 81. Ibid., and Rozanov, Apokalipsis…, pp. 453–455.

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This is almost word for word Rozanov’s conclusion “in Christ the world turned bitter,” his evaluation of the effect of Christ’s unearthly beauty on God’ s first child, the world, in “On Sweetest Jesus…”382 Jung continues, saying that John “wrote as if he were aware […] that every differentiation of the [positive] Christ-image brings about a corresponding accentuation of its [negative]unconscious complement, thereby increasing the tension between above (conscious) and below (unconscious) […]. A factor that no one has reckoned with, however, […] is the fatality in the Christian disposition itself, which leads inevitably to a reversal of its spirit—not through the obscure workings of chance, but in accordance with the workings of psychological law.”383 Yet here Jung is patently mistaken, for in 1911 Rozanov had indeed reckoned with that very same “fatality” in the Christian disposition, not as a psychological law, but an item of Christian metaphysics: what appears to have no darkness it in at all (Christ), is, in fact, full of darkness. In the powerful introductory essay to The Dark Face, “In the Dark Religious Rays,” Rozanov takes the bright sun and shows how modern science, here parallel to modern psychology, has revealed that it in fact is full of darkness: “The light of the bright sun was long thought to be all bright and white in nature, but it contains many spectra of light. When they placed various filters beyond the ultra-violet rays, they discovered rays that were neither white, nor colored, seven spectra of light. These were the ‘dark rays of the sun.’ ”384 The parallel is obvious: that a deeper gaze at the Godman has discovered his dark sides. In place of psychological science, Rozanov refers this to the Newtonian-Leibnitzian physical law of fluxia, the infinitesimally small units which account for the linkage of phenomena which appear on the surface totally opposite, light and darkness in this case: “that which appears light and white is linked by fluxia to darkness.”385 Rozanov moves immediately to the darkness and cruelty in Christianity: “How can Christianity, so seemingly well-intentioned towards man, still lead to the Spanish Inquisition? Clearly we have a hidden chain of fluxia here, of endlessly changeable and tiny units […].The Catholics patted people on the head for a thousand years and then began burning them at the stake! There was not any discontinuity here.” Jung’s conclusion is very close, i.e., that this comes with the psychology of Christianity: “It is as if with the coming 382 383 384 385

Rozanov, “Ob Iisuse Sladchaishem…,” p. 265. Jung, “Christ, a Symbol of the Self,” in Jung-Stein, p. 81. Rozanov, “V temnykh religioznykh luchakh,” VII–VIII. Ibid.

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of Christ opposites that were latent until then become manifest [… given] that tremendous tension in the world psyche that Christ’s advent signified. He is the “Mysterium iniquitas” (mysterious iniquity) that accompanies the Sol iustitiae (Sun of justice) as inseparably as the shadow belongs to the light…”386 For Jung, as for Rozanov, the shadow, the dark side properly belongs to Christ, and his too bright image as in the doctrinal religion calls the dark image forth, destroying man’s life, enslaving him, and terrifying man so that he cannot carry on his earthly life as before and cannot freely love this God. Jung, having criticized the psychological problems of the religion, having exposed the conscious-unconscious ambivalence in John as causing fear and evil premonitions in many contemporary Christians, feels some satisfaction that a correction, a light-dark Christ—a Christ and a shadow-Christ—can be suggested as a more balanced self image for man. Then all dark and evil in the world would not be laid at man’s feet as the official Church had always done. Rozanov has become maximally conscious of the same thing, of the evil and gratuitous suffering (of the innocent—a Dostoevskian theme) inherent in and caused by Christ and Christianity. He sees much less of it in Judaism and finds Jehovah, God the Father, much kinder and more loving in clear disagreement with Pauline and Johannine Christianity. He questions the Trinity, proclaiming Christ as not only “not one with the Father,” but as directly “against His Father.”387 In this he overlooks that Jehovah sacrifices his son Jesus and almost allows Abraham to kill his. Having achieved very close psychological insights to those of Jung, however, Rozanov is in a constant state of turbulence and misery, even despair. Hence, one must ask 1) why does Rozanov not revert to Judaism, to the One God, and avoid the Trinity and the Christ figure altogether, and 2) why do Rozanov’s surmises, so close to Jung’s later discoveries, which provide a rational explanation of the built-in woes of the Christian mentality, and which might lead to a path of religious renewal, fail to satisfy Rozanov? Why does he seem to keep proving and reproving the same case against Christ and Christianity ad nauseum with such unabating anger? He suggests that Moses was a better, more loving leader of his people than Christ for his. He praises virile gods, such as Osiris, and generally finds the sanctity of the family much more valued and supported in fertility cults and 386

Jung, “Christ as Symbol of the Self,” in Jung-Stein, p. 82. The idea that Christ came against God the Father is in “Khristos—Sudiia mira” and elsewhere in Temnyi lik. It is quite clear in Rozanov, Apokalipsis… likewise. 387

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Judaism. Why must Rozanov’s Christomachy go on unendingly in his work almost to the moment of his death? There is no simple answer to this question and every reply proffered will be interpretative of Rozanov’s religious consciousness. Unlike Jung, who aims for maximal scientific objectivity and relegates his period of unquestioning belief in Christian doctrine to his early childhood, Rozanov is a critic and a believer, speaking of Christian humanity as a “we,” a large part of which is troubled like himself. Differences arise from Rozanov’s being both the critic and, in the most personal, intimate of ways, the patient/victim of what he is critiquing. Hence, he cannot long remain dispassionate, scholarly and unrestrained in his treatment of Christianity. Even Jung, being from a predominantly priestly family, grows emotional sometimes in his censure of his native Swiss Protestantism. Therefore, while the intellectual content of what Jung and Rozanov say has many striking convergences, the tone and manner in which these ideas are expounded differ markedly. The rational analysis of the contradictions in doctrinal Christianity and its negative effects on the human psyche satisfies Jung the psychiatrist and scientist far more than it does Rozanov. The latter can take the tone of the diagnosing doctor, but it breaks down as he manifests all the symptoms and pain of modern Christian man. The diagnosing analyst immediately exhibits the emotional pain, anger, sense of betrayal and personal involvement as he still counts himself a Christian, a very anguished and suffering one. Phase Two: The Importance of an Idealizing Love Relationship for the Creative Christian In the two chapters of Part Two the underlying assumption is that the celibate model of Christ cannot be the only ideal model for the Christian creative man and there is a strong implication in Solovyov and Rozanov that it may not be the best model. In this conviction they accomplish the definitive removal of the taint of sin from the sexual act as such and from Christian marriage. They do not agree with the Freudians that man has a limited amount of sexual energy and must choose between a sexual life/marriage and children, on the one hand and an ascetic, celibate creative life on the other. Of course, the ascetic life of the sublimating genius/creator is a highly active and productive life in the world, as seen in Freud’s prime example, Leonardo da Vinci. In its frenetic activity it differs markedly from the quiet, contemplative life of the Russian

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hermit, monk or religious Saint, who is involved in passive imitation of Christ. Sublimation, even in the atheist Freud, means a qualitative change in the sexual energy expended/released into creative products. Though Otto Rank presents two models of the creative genius, the one a secular ascetic and the other a transgressive sexual superman, his models parallel closely Berdyaev’s opposed models of the Christian Saint, the passive recluse Seraphim of Sarov (a non-sexual Christian), questionably “creative” and the Genius, represented by the clearly “sexual,” and highly creative sinner, Alexander Pushkin. We recall that Berdyaev is the religious thinker who is most critical of and doubtful about Christianity as a catalyst to human creativity. He points out that nothing is said about creativity in the Gospels and speaks of overcoming the Redemptive Period of Human Culture and History with a new age called the post-Redemptive Epoch of Religious Creativeness. There can appear to be a contradiction in Berdyaev’s pessimistic attitude towards the fallenness of sex and the tragic failure of human sexual love and his enthusiastic support for sublimation of the sexual instinct in creative acts, on the one hand, and his choice of a man with a long Don Juan list, the poet Pushkin, as the example of the successful creative genius, on the other. While Berdyaev does have qualms about man’s sexual nature, he clearly believes his vaunted creativity is sexually-based and gets out of the contradiction, as we shall see directly, 1) by declaring sex a yet unfathomed “mystery,” and 2) allowing that married men like himself can be great creators, i.e., thereby accepting, as Rank had, both the ascetic and the sexually active model of the creator genius. Be that as it may, it is striking that the great genius who appears to be the best example of the modern creator for both Berdyaev and Otto Rank is the paradoxically semi-ascetic, Friedrich Nietzsche, who died of syphilis. Berdyaev and Rank on the Creative Man The new man is born in torments, he passes through abysses unknown to the old form of saintliness.We stand before a new understanding of therelations between saintliness and genius, redemption and creativity… —N. Berdyaev (1916)388

388

Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 170. Pages are given in the text.

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The similarities of Berdyaev’s thought on the creative genius in the late teens and Rank’s ideas in the thirties are very marked despite the fact that Berdyaev considered himself a “Christian” as early as 1905. For Rank, Christianity was not a religious faith but a cultural ideology, supporting the belief in the immortality of the soul which he considered the major unconscious motivation of creative man. Berdyaev, in my view, like Rank, takes Friedrich Nietzsche as his model of the modern creative genius and of all thinkers treated in this book it is Rank and Berdyaev who have the greatest focus on the individual genius-creator. The substance of what Rank and Berdyaev say on the subject is remarkably similar; the fact that one sees himself as Christian and the other agnostic accounts for the slight differences in how they evaluate the creative genius, Nietzsche. For Rank, as we saw, Nietzsche is both a Hellene (Greek hero)— virtually the god of his own religion who takes on a tragic fate he forges for himself willfully and with complete consciousness of what he is doing—and a Christian self-sacrifice like Christ who dies kenotically into his great oeuvre which he bequeaths to humanity. The Hellene and Christian are not contradictory in Nietzsche, for Rank, but so finely blended as to be inextricable. He is the perfect “heretic individual” (Rank’s image of the artist after the Renaissance), a re-secularized Christ-sacrifice, the Godman or Godman surrogate of the modern age. Even were he only a nominal believer, and Berdyaev does not see himself as such, being a “Christian” means he cannot call Nietzsche a “Christian” sacrifice with the ease that Rank does. Still, as we have observed heretofore, Berdyaev is so fulsome in his praise of Nietzsche that it rivals his encomium of Dostoevsky, whose tortured path back to Christianity Berdyaev, as a professed Christian, feels ultimately bound to validate above Nietzsche’s path. With all that, reading Berdyaev one often feels that Dostoevsky himself might have found him to be more of a Nietzschean than a Dostoevskian. Dostoevsky, after all, embraced Gospel Christianity and Berdyaev has great reservations about it and the whole “Redemptive Epoch of human creativity,” which he says must be “overcome.” This is exactly what Nietzsche exhorted modern man to do and attempted to achieve himself. Gospel Christianity for Berdyaev, as for Nietzsche, places strong fetters on man’s free creativity and in Berdyaev’s description often degenerates into obedience, i.e., slavery, especially in the historical

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church. Berdyaev’s view of Nietzsche as a religious phenomenon is much more passionate than Solovyov’s in his above-mentioned article “The Idea of the Superman” (1899) and the hero of Berdyaev’s postRedemptive epoch of creativity, called “the sinner” seems a variant on the Nietzschean superman, not on the Christian saint. According to Berdyaev “Nietzsche [not Christ!—ALC] is the redemptive sacrifice for the sins of the modern age, the sacrifice for the humanistic consciousness. After Nietzsche’s deeds and fate humanism is impossible; it has been overcome once and for all. Zarathustra is the greatest human book that is outside of Christ’s/God’s Grace. Those books that stand above it do so because Christ’s Grace is upon them. And never did a man, left to his own devices, rise higher than Nietzsche. The crisis of humanism had to lead to the idea of the Superman, the idea of transcendence of everything human. In Nietzsche humanism is overcome not from above, but from below, in man’s own efforts and this is Nietzsche’s great achievement”. (pp. 90–91)

Indeed, Berdyaev stands with Nietzsche and Rank, siding with the exceptional man: “Nietzsche cursed the so-called ‘good’ and ‘just’ because they hated the creative ones. We must share Nietzsche’s torments, they are religious torments through and through” (p. 90). “After Nietzsche and Dostoevsky there is no return to the past, neither to the old Christian anthropology, nor the old humanist one. A new era [of human creativity] is dawning and new goals and horizons have opened up” (p. 91). Berdyaev’s post-Redemptive creative man is very close to Rank’s Christian-Hellenic Godman model. In stressing that creativity is something religious, Berdyaev agrees with Rank entirely: “Creativity is no less spiritual than asceticism. Such a posing of the problem of creativity (as mine) could arise only in our present epoch, as the world moves into a religious period of creativity” (p. 162). This clearly implied a debunking of all previous Christian creativity, one that we saw in Chapter VI, infuriated Zen’kovsky and Rozanov. Here Rank, so enamoured of the masterpieces of the Christian period of church art, would oppose Berdyaev’s view. Berdyaev continues: “In the epochs of Obedience and Redemption (which encompass Judaism and all Christian history up to the 1910 circa), the religious problem of creativity was not even broached; creativity was posed as a secular problem, a problem of culture only.” (p. 109) Rank’s view of Christianity as retaining in tact man’s soulbeliefs and as a cultural ideology that had fostered marvelous creativity

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for centuries would vitiate Berdyaev’s distinction of a Redemptive and post-Redemptive epoch of creativity as meaningless. Not a religious Jew, Rank did not profess any religion in the sense that Berdyaev came to and for him the strong creative man would be neither helped nor hindered by a strong faith in Christ. For Rank’s creative (and very Nietzschean) man, all given, traditional ideologies, societal constraints and mores, other people’s views, the materials of his art,—all can be freely chosen or rejected by the creative genius. Whatever faith or worldview the free strong-willed creator might choose, he would change it radically anyway, bending it to his own powerful will. It will be the ideology/object which his will resists, reshapes or re- molds, something in the external world that will be subdued by his powerful and unique inner world. This is Rank’s version of Berdyaev’s struggle of the free personality against objectivation. Rank, who wrote poetry and plays and declared very early “I am an artist,”389 views himself, as does Berdyaev, as the very type of the creative individual he praises and describes. Berdyaev is a similar rabid non-conformist, trying to free himself from all manner of traditional societal and religious constraints, just as Rank’s genius does and as Nietzsche most emphatically did. Yet Berdyaev feels Nietzsche misunderstood Christianity and went too far in his anti-Christian sallies. At the same time, one feels that what Nietzsche rebelled against in the religion is very similar to what Berdyaev dislikes in the historical church. Berdyaev’s rejection of things Christian, however, proceeds by fits and starts,—his attacks on the Redemptive era as enslaving and crippling of creativity alternate with attacks on those who appear too vehemently anti-Christian (Nietzsche, Rozanov, etc). His is not the direct robust approach of Nietzsche or Rank. As a result of this vacillation Berdyaev remains in between Nietzsche’s post-Christian position, which Ranked termed “Christian and pagan” and Dostoevsky’s full-hearted re-embrace of Christ “right or wrong.” Berdyaev’s many confluences with Rank indicate how much Berdyaev’s creative man of the future will be free of traditional Christian or other restraint and the degree to which he will forge his own values and his own “world.” It is because of Berdyaev’s intermittent knee-jerk appeals to more traditional positions that he splits his creative man into two parts. He separates the old “saintliness” from the

389

Lieberman, p. 118.

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more desirable new form of creativity, setting up the modern and, for him, much preferred type of the genius-sinner. “Creativity is an overcoming of the world (in the Gospel sense), but a different overcoming than the ascetic one […] to be bound to ‘the world’ means to be the slave of necessity.”390 Here he means the material world and society, as does Rank. Rank’s average man who adapts is Berdyaev’s “slave” and both thinkers show little interest in and considerable contempt for this type of individual. Berdyaev goes on speaking of the free spiritual acts of creative individuals in terms very close to Rank’s, as both give them a spiritual, if not religious, coloring: “The creative act is always a departure from the world. Creativity in its essence is always an unchaining, a breaking of chains.”391 In his book The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Rank expatiates at length on the creative act as a breaking of the chains of cause and effect, which starts a new chain of cause and effect: Only in the individual act of will do we have the unique phenomenon of spontaneity, the establishing of a new primary cause. In this sense, both the will and the individual bearing it represent a psychologically new fact, which does not arbitrarily interrupt the causal chain with any final assumption of free will, but actually sets in motion a new causal chain. This is the meaning of the myth of the birth of the first man, that is of man as the beginning of a new series of causes, not only as in the myth of the biblical Adam, but in all heroes who have willed to be free of the past […] like Prometheus or […] Christ.392

Here the possibility of man overcoming his subjection to natural cause and effect is delineated as a spiritual freedom: within the bonds of nature, the highest and only self-reflective being, man, can exceed those natural laws by spiritual acts. For both thinkers creative acts are profoundly spiritual and positively proactive upon the world. Berdyaev writes: “The experience of creative overcoming of the world is profoundly different from the ascetic rejection of the world; it is not an experience of obedience, but one of daring […] the creative act is transcendental with reference to the given world of objectivity, it is a stepping out of the world…”393

390

Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 163. Ibid. 392 Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, trs. F. Robbins and J. Smith (New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 19l4), pp. xvliii–xvliv. 393 Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 163 391

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If Rank had said this, he, like Berdyaev, would mean stepping into a spiritual realm, for both a realm that is within the human soul and, in Berdyaev’s case, outside it also. This is done by exteriorizing one’s own inner world in the form of a creative work, supplanting part of the given world with it. Rank stresses that the early primitive artists began by creating out of and using their own bodies as material. As we saw in the case of Rozanov (see Chapter III), this is repeated metaphorically in his attitude towards his literary creation as sexual-physiological. In his final words on the Saint and the Sinner, Berdyaev implies something very similar: “Creativity and genius-quality have a profound and mysterious link with sex which must be taken into consciousness and grasped religiously.”394 Rank as a scientific observer finds some creativity to be markedly anti-sexual. And he accepts the ascetic as a common model for the creative genius just as much as the so-called sexual superman. Berdyaev advocates a very Freudian sublimation which cleanses the sexual element away: “the creative upsurge rejects the heaviness of the world and turns (sexual) passion into different being […].” The same may be said of the sinner: he is one, but his product is not.395 Here Rank’s view of what was happening in Christian art, the humanization of the abstractly spiritual, appears to be the inverse of what Berdyaev depicts in his “ascent to spirit.” In his juxtaposition of the Saint (the Elder St Seraphim of Sarov) to the Genius-sinner (A.S. Pushkin), Berdyaev consigns the former to the lesser Redemptive (Gospel-Christian)period: “When genius-like creativity was not considered religious activity.” Pushkin is said to be a genius-creator precisely because he was not a Christian saint!: “If Pushkin had been a saint like Seraphim, he would not have been a genius, a poet, or a creator of any kind.”396 It is clear that, in the Epoch of Post-Redemptive Creativity, real creativity, in Berdyaev’s view, will be evaluated “religiously,” and being a saint on the old model will clearly prevent one from being a true, daring creator. One sacrifices one’s soul (one’s ascetic Christ-like perfection) and instead pours one’s being in to a perfect work. All the high Romantic pathos here in Berdyaev is on the side of the sinners—Pushkin, Nietzsche, and presumably Berdyaev himself. Clearly, what Rank has seen as a Christian-Hellene heroic 394 395 396

Berdyaev, Meaning of the Creative Act, p. 179. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 172.

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self-sacrifice in the modern Christian apostate—Nietzsche—is split in Berdyaev into two conflicting types, of which future of creative greatness lies with the Sinner, not the Saint. *** The aspect of creativity most emphasized in the religious thinkers is not only the sublimation of specific sexual energy into an idea or a painting, but the creative perfecting, the sublimation of the selfpersonality, which traditionally was associated with “living the Christian life,” some version of Imitatio Christi. And here sublimated sexual, i.e., Romantic love, an idealizing individualized relation to one other person of the opposite sex, is advocated by Solovyov, Rozanov and Vysheslavtsev, as a loyal Solovyovian, as necessary to overcoming one’s isolation and egoism and becoming one’s fullest and best self. As concerns the creative products this self may produce, the loving sexual relationship is viewed by them as a catalyst to self-improvement and self-integration and to the enhanced quality of the products created. The relation to the beloved other emphasizes the dependence of the individual on the totality of God’s Creation and is even an emblem for the relation of God to His beloved Creation. This, in its way, is an even stronger indictment of the celibate model of Christ as the image a Christian creator should emulate, stronger than anything Berdyaev advances. Phase Three: Unconscious Man versus the Super-Rational and Omniscient Christ The underlying assumption that informs Part Three of this study with its treatment of Berdyaev’s and Vysheslavtsev’s engagement with psychoanalysis is not primarily occupied with the Church’s demonization of the sexual in man, but rather with its definition of him as largely a rational creature. Jesus Christ with his divine status is by definition omniscient, possessor of a super-rationality, superior to man’s reason in every way. Freud and the psychoanalysts defined man as largely, even primarily an unconscious being, and one determined to a greater or lesser degree by his unconscious drives, needs, inclinations. This culminates in Jung’s view that the transcendent self—the totality of the individual psyche-true selfhood, lies in the unconscious and that man can reveal it to himself only through a long and steadfast effort of selfpenetration and self-discovery.

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When we say the religion was based on a faulty anthropology, what is wrong with it in phase three is that it does not know or take into account the irrational in man, the unconscious man, his powerful will and freedom. We observed in Chapter VI that Berdyaev believes this and attempts to use psychoanalysis in the revamping of his anthropology in The Destiny of Man, and in Chapter VII we demonstrated exhaustively that Vysheslavtsev was wholeheartedly convinced of it and used Jung’s very firm contention that the human unconscious was religious in character to re-claim and Christianize Freudian sublimation both in the area of creativity as character-formation and the creation of new ideas, art, music that contributed to the spiritualization of the world. The other Russians here, like Vysheslavtsev, had been critiquing traditional Orthodox Christianity very strongly from within. As we have seen, this was the main thrust of the Russian Religious Renaissance of the early twentieth century. Vysheslavtsev had inherited that critique and he at times explicitly, at others tacitly, assumed many of the ideas of Solovyov and Rozanov. He likewise took the philosophical positions of his immediate colleague, Berdyaev, very firmly into account. His major point was that Christian anthropology erred radically in that it took into account only the conscious will of man, not his all-important unconscious being and his unconscious will and freedom. Hence, Christianity needed the help of the Freudian School and especially of Jung. We have contended here above that, prior to the philosophical activity of Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev, the Russian thinkers had mostly critiqued the excessive emphasis on Christ’s spiritual nature (the excessive spiritualization of the religion) to the detriment of Christ’s fleshly nature. When the discoveries of modern psychology become known, the theory of the unconscious pointed up another major reason for Christianity’s failure to appeal to and hold modern man. The Church’s and even analytical psychology’s disregard of and failure to deal with man’s freedom, an element mainly residing in his unconscious, also came to the fore.397 Indeed all four Russians assailed Christianity for becoming a dead (empty) Formalism that excluded freedom, demanded obedience, insulting man’s sense of his freedom 397 Vysheslavtsev (in Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa, p. 106) comments that not only Freud but even Jung’s analytical psychology does not deal sufficiently with man’s freedom.

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and autonomy and even his intelligence. This is what Solovyov alluded to when he said the “Faith of the fathers” had become “unbelievable” for the modern educated person. It is likewise what Berdyaev and Vysheslavtsev mean when they imply that Christianity has become more of a religion of Law and Obedience, than of Freedom and Grace. Vysheslavtsev repeatedly emphasizes modern man’s awareness of his freedom and autonomy. Another major psychoanalytic correction along these lines is found in Vysheslavtsev’s strong admonition to the contemporary Church that it must respect man’s freedom, that the Church “could not be of the inquisitorial kind in the present age if it was to succeed/be religiously effective,”398 that Christianity must be a religion of Grace. For him Baudouin’s “la suggestion” was the psychoanalytic equivalent of Grace, which influences free creatures and gently acts upon their consciousness and unconscious. As a believer and active exponent of the Christian life, Vysheslavtsev effects a strong rehabilitation of the unconscious with its sexual/erotic and other contents as the source of all good and virtue, as well as evil tendencies. He views it as the seat of radical individuality (lichnost’) and treats selfhood, like Jung, as a constant, developing dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. Jung sounds a warning that Christianity might become extinct that reads like an echo of Rozanov’s earlier one. It is striking that there is so much agreement between the Russian thinkers and Jung as to what is wrong with the Christian religion. Jung and Vysheslavtsev felt that Christianity without the discoveries of psychoanalysis, would neither inspire nor foster modern man’s spiritual striving for balance and harmony. His striving towards his best self. towards the Godman, or spiritual selfhood, the “I myself ” would go awry. While the Christ archetype lies for Vysheslavtsev in the substance of every individual, the realization of the Christ-ideal in each Christian or creative life, will not be a superficial repetition of events or circumstances (for example, celibacy) in the life of Christ as narrated in the Gospels or interpreted by St. Paul or John. If the Godman is to be a truly living “uniting symbol” in the Christian psyche and selfhood, He will be realized differently in each unique human personality.399 Christian 398

Vysheslavtsev, The Eternal in Russian Philosophy, pp. 263–264. He writes: “Contemporary Christianity must take the freedom of personality in all its fullness under its protection…. If the religious opponents of freedom try to interpret the word ‘Let Thy will be done’ to defend a humble ‘obedience’ as a rejection 399

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spirituality and Christianity itself for these thinkers is perennially being created and re-recreated the hearts of Christian individuals. If this is not the case, the religion is in serious danger of degenerating into an empty formalism and becoming a relic of the past. The archetype of the Godman and Christ-ideal will cease to be the creative catalyst to a living faith, remain buried in the collective unconscious, irrelevant to human creativity and modern life.

of freedom, as a Higher power taking away freedom…,” and in the footnote: “Every infringement on our lower freedom, makes the attainment of the higher freedom impossible […] Instead of sublimation, it leads to a fall into slavery, a great Inquisition, against which any rebellion is justified” (ibid., pp. 199–200).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, E.L. Freedom in God: A Guide to the Thought of Nicholas Berdyaev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950). Arjakovsky, A. La génération des penseurs religieux de l’émigration russe. La Revue la Voie (Put’, 1925–1940) (Paris-Kiev: L’Espirit et la Lettre, 2002). Bakhtin, M. The Poetics of Dostoevsky, trs. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). Baudouin, C. Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics, trs. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1924). Baudouin, C. Psychanalyse de l’Art (Paris: Alcan, 1929). Baudouin, C. Suggestion and Autosuggestion, A Psychological and Pedagogical Study, trs. Eden and Cedar Paul (Allen and Unwin, London, 1920). Baudouin, C. Suggestion et autosuggestion (Neuchâtel-Paris: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1920). Berdyaev, N.A. “Concerning Earthly and Heavenly Utopianism (As Regards the Book of Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy ‘The World-Concept of Vl. Solov’ev’),” http://www .berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1913_170.html Berdyaev, N. Dostoevsky, tr. Donald Attwater (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). Berdyaev, N. Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography, tr. Katharine Lampert (New York: MacMillan, 1951). Berdyaev, N.A. Dukhovnyi krizis intelligentsii (Moscow: Reabilitatsiia, 1988). Berdyaev, N.A. Eros i lichnost’. Filosofiia pola i liubvi (Moscow: “Prometei,” 1989), pp. 52–59. Berdyaev, N. Freedom and the Spirit, tr. O.F. Clarke (London: G. Bles, 1935). Berdyaev, N.A. pro et contra, in two books, Book 1 (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo Gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1994). Berdyaev, N. Slavery and Freedom, tr. R.M. French (New York: Scribner’s, 1944). Berdyaev, N. The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). Berdyaev, N. The Meaning of the Creative Act, tr. Donald A. Lowrie (London: Gollancz, 1955). Berdyaev, N.A. Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii. 3 vols. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1989). Bershtein, E. “Tragediia pola: dve zametki o russkom veiningerianstve,” NLO, 65, 2004. Bird, R. Prospero (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Bloom, H. The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Blok, A.A. Sochineniia v odnom tome (Moscow: G.KH.G.L., 1946). Charcot, J.-M. Clinique des maladies du système nerveux (Paris: Publications du Progrès médical, 1892–1893). Charcot, J.-M. Leçons du Mardi à la salpêtrière (Paris: Publications du Progrès médical, 1889–1892). Charcot, J.-M. Leçons sur les localisations dans les maladies du cerveau (Paris: Adrien Delahaye and Émile Lecroisnier, 1876–1880). Cherny, Iu. Filosifiia pola i liubvi N.A. Berdyaeva (Moscow: Nauka, 2004). Chodorow, J. Introduction// Jung on Active Imagination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Crone, A.L. Rozanov and the End of Literature (Würzburg, JAL Verlag, 1978).

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INDEX OF NAMES Adam 142, 249 Adler, Alfred 84, 163, 170–173, 182, 190, 208, 212, 221 Alexander the Second (Aleksandr II) 56 Allen, Edgar 159 Anaxagoras 17 Andrei Bely 55 Andrews-Rusiecka, Hilda 4 Aphrodite 11, 25, 29, 46, 49, 53, 121 Apuleius 115 Arjakovsky, Antoine (Anton) 163, 188, 204 Attwater, Donald 137, 148 St. Augustine 205 Bakhtin, Mikhail vii, 70, 147–149 Bakhmet’eva, Sofia, 47, nee Khitrovo 36–37, 47–52, 60–62, 68 Barthes, Roland 83 Baratynsky, Evgeny 83 Baudouin, Charles 7, 163, 171, 173, 189–191, 193, 196, 202, 296, 208, 211–212, 218, 227, 253 Berdyaev, Nikolai (Berdiaeff ) viii, ix, x, 118–120, 136–147, 159–187, 245–251 Bergson, Henri 171, 173 Bershtein, Evgenii 86 Bezobrazova, Maria 51 Bird, Robert 55 Bliumenkrants, Mikhail 197–198 Borisova, Irina 35 Bloom, Harold 2, 55 Blok, Alexander 55, 65 Boehme, Jakob 165–167, 186 Brentano, Franz 98 Buber, Martin 198, 237 Bulgakov, Sergei 16, 18, 137, 236–237 Burt, Patricia 110, 191 Burns, Robert 44 Charcot, Jean-Martin 5–6, 65, 83, 99 Chicherin, Boris 58, 72 Cherny, Iury 161 Chernyshevsky Nikolai 16, 153 Chodorow, Joan 14 Christ (Jesus, Iisus, Isus, Khristos) x, 1–29, 31, 33, 37–38, 49, 53, 58, 62–63,

67, 69–71, 64, 77–82, 85–86, 92–93, 98, 100–101, 107–111, 113–117, 123, 125, 128, 133, 136–141, 143–144, 146–147, 151, 153–160, 162–167, 170, 175, 180–186, 188–197, 199, 201–211, 213–215, 217–254 Clarke, Oliver 165 Copernicus, Nicolaus 119 Coué, Émile 181, 189–190, 193, 206, 208, 217–218 Crone, Anna 79 Dante Alighieri 185 Davie, Donald 85 Darwin, Charles 29, 36–37, 75 Damascene, John 86, 185 Dionysius the Areopagite 205 Donchik, Liliana 5 Dostoevsky, Fedor viii, 4–5, 11, 22, 70, 75, 79–80, 84–85, 89–91, 98, 102, 121, 127, 134, 137, 139, 147–149, 163–167, 170, 173, 179, 182–184, 186, 192, 198, 204–205, 210, 224, 234, 240, 243, 246–248 Duddington, Natalie 164 Duns Scotus 205 Emerson, Caryl 149 Erskine, Albert 44, 121 Ern, Vladimir 84 Etkind, Alexander (Aleksandr) 1, 68, 86, 192 Fateev, Valery 57–58, 68, 75, 122, 136, 236 Fedotov, Georgy 11 Fet, Afanasy vii, xi, 20, 28, 41, 44–47, 53–54, 61, 73, 90, 139, 178, 240, 246 Feuerbach, Ludwig 4, 186, 224 Fichte, Johann 188, 239 Filosofov, Dmitry 154 Florensky, Pavel 71 Fra Angelico 86, 119, 185 St. Francis of Assisi 86 Frank, Semen 18, 80, 208–209 Franz, Marie-Louise von 213 French, Reginald 144

262

index of names

Freud, Sigmund vii, viii, ix, xiii, 1–10, 13, 15–16, 45, 55, 60, 62, 67, 72, 75, 79–82, 84, 89–91, 93, 95–107, 109–115, 117–120, 125–135, 137, 138, 140–146, 150, 158–159, 161–163, 165, 167–176, 178–183, 185, 187–194, 196–201, 203–229, 244–245, 250–252 Fedorov, Nikolai 72 Gagnebin, Laurent 159 Gaidenko, Piama 159 Gay, Volney 96, 101, 103 Gardner, Howard 72, 99, 119 Gibson, Aleksei 21 Ginzburg, Elizabeth ix, xii Gippius, Zinaida 154 Goethe, Wolfgang von 129 Gogol, Nikolai 82 Gollerbakh, Eric 60, 62, 66 Gren, Aleksei 2 Griftsov, Boris 84 Grot, Iakov 36 Hafiz 52 Hayman, Ronald 105 Hegel, Georg 4–5, 16, 53, 139, 150, 194, 199, 209 Horace 45 Holquist, Michael 149 Hutchins, William 97 Isaac the Syrian 205 Ivanov, Viacheslav 55, 84, 144 Ivask, George 63, 76 Janet, Pierre 63, 171, 173, 190 Jehovah 206, 235–236, 243 John the Baptist 177 St. John 28, 234, 239–243, 253 Jones, Ernest 3, 6, 95, 172 Jung, Carl viii, ix, x, 5–10, 15, 80–81, 91, 93, 95, 104–120, 125, 127, 129, 146, 150, 163, 170–173, 180–182, 188–191, 193–197, 199–205, 207–217, 219–229, 231, 244, 251–253 Kant, Immanuel 4–5, 205 Kaufmann, Walter 4, 230 Khitrovo, Sophia (Bakhmet’eva, Sofia) 36–37, 47–52, 60–62, 68 Khomiakov, Aleksei 4–5, 17, 216 Kierkegaard, Soren 166 Kireevsky, Ivan 4, 17, 194–195, 216 Kireevsky, Petr 4 Kline, George 16

Kolerov, Modest 35 Kon, Igor 86 Kotel’nikov, Vladimir 195 Krafft-Ebing, Richard, von 5–6, 83, 99 Lampert, Katharine 161 Lawrence, David 85 Lazich, Maria 45–46, 85 Leibnitz, Gottfried 242 Lenk, Oswald 133 Leonardo da Vinci 40, 89–91, 119, 126–127, 133, 144, 176–179, 200, 244 Leont’ev, Konstantin 76–77 Lermontov, Mikhail 83 Levitsky, Sergei 188 Lieberman, James 111, 171, 248 Likhtenshtadt, Vladimir 2 Lipps, Theodor 95 Lombroso, Cesare 5–6, 99 Lopatin, Lev 24 Loria, Sofia 211 Losev, Aleksei 23–24, 33, 47–48, 51, 56, 57–58, 60–62, 66, 124 Lossky, Nikolai 21–22, 33, 188, 225 Lowrie, Donald 138, 159 Lubac, Henri 4, 183 Luk’ianov, Sergei 47 Luther, Martin 11, 86, 119 Mary 115 Maritain, Jacques 189 Malraux, André 189 Martynova, Sofia 36–37, 42, 45, 47–51 Marx, Karl 99, 138, 164, 188, 197, 203, 237 Matich, Olga 33, 36 Maxim the Confessor 203, 205 Medtner, Emily (Metner) 188–189, 211, 216, 223 Meerson, Ol’ga 151 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry 55, 74, 84, 90, 108, 127, 153–157 Meyendorff, Elizabeth 16 Michelangelo 40, 89, 116 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai 16 Miller, Martin 1 Mints, Zara 48–53, 74 Mirsky, Dmitrii 78 Mochul’sky, Konstantin 63–64 Moses 40, 203, 205, 208, 212, 243 Mullahy, Patrick 200, 212 Nabokov, Vladimir 6 Namiot, G. 2 Nekrasov, Nikolai 57

index of names Neumann, Erich 195, 200–201 Newton, Isaac 242 Nicholas the First (Nikolai I) 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich ix, 4–5, 7, 11, 81, 116, 146, 153, 159, 160, 162, 173, 182–187, 230, 234, 245–241, 251 Nosov, Aleksandr 35 Novgorodtsev, Pavel I88 Otto, Rudolph 189 Oedipus 200 Paul, Eden 218 Paul, Cedar 218 St. Paul ix, 100, 203, 205–207, 210–212, 253 Palamas, Gregory 304, 190–191, 253 Pertsov, Petr 57 Pisarev, Dmitry 16, Pishun, Victor 57 Pishun, Sergei 57 Plato (Platon) vii, 2–3, 6, 11, 19–20, 24–30, 38, 40, 53, 62–63, 73, 76, 92, 113, 120, 135, 141, 142, 177, 198–199, 204, 210, 212 Polonsky, Iakov 41, 45, 73 Pope Pius XII 232 Prometheus 249 Propp, Vladimir 111 Radlov, Ernest 30 Rank, Otto (Rosenfeld, Otto) vii, viii, x, 6–11, 18, 36, 60, 63, 80, 85, 91–92, 95, 102–105, 110–118, 120, 125, 129–135, 137, 146–147, 149–150, 163–169, 171, 173, 180.182, 184, 189–190, 204, 208–209, 212–213, 220–22, 229, 239, 245–250 Rice, James 90 Riceour, Paul 103 Richter, Gregory 110 Ritschl, Albrecht 205 Robbins, Frederick 249 Rozanov, Vasily vii, viii, x, xiii, 1–11, 15, 21, 23–24, 30, 42–43, 53–90, 92–93, 108–109, 114, 118–125, 132–146, 148–150, 153–158, 160, 162, 169, 179, 182, 185–186, 190–192, 202, 204, 208, 227, 229–244, 247–248, 250–253 Rubins, Maria 1 Rubins, Noah 1 Rublev, Andrei 119 Rudneva-Rozanova, Varvara 68, 122–124

263

Sapov, Vladimir 188 Sartre, Jean-Paul 76, 160 Savodnik, Vladimir 48 Scanlan, James xii, 153–156, 159 Skovoroda, Grigory 199 Scheler, Max 163, 173, 189, 209 Schelling, Friedrich 4, 16, 19, 161 Schiller, Friedrich 141, 129, 161 Schopenhauer, Arthur 29, 38, 161 Scotus, Duns 205 Shakespeare, William 49, 91 Shestov, Lev 84, 163, 182–183, 186–187, 236 Siniavsky, Andrei 79–80 Sinkewicz, Robert 191 Sirotkina, Irina 1, 191 Jelliffe, Smith 249 Socrates 20, 22, 25–27, 249 Solovyov, Sergei 30 Solovyov, Vladimir (Soloviev) vii, vii, x, xi, xiii, 1–11, 15–69, 71–86, 90, 93, 109, 113–114, 118–125, 132–150, 153, 160, 162, 166, 168, 178–179, 184, 190–193, 198–199, 204, 210. 229–234, 244, 247, 251–253 Sophocles 1 Stasiulevich, Mikhail 36 Stein, Murray 107–108, 225, 227, 231–235, 237–239, 241–243 Steckel, Wilhelm 171 Stremooukhoff, Dmitry 16 Suslova, Apollinaria 68, 122, 136 Swoboda, Henryk 6 Taft, Jessie 112 Thomas Aquinas 237 Tiutchev, Fedor 31 Tolstoy, Aleksei 47 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev) 35, 48, 50–51, 63, 68, 82, 90, 184, 230 Trubetskoi Evgeny 16, 21–22, 33–37, 137, 155–156 Trubetskoi, Sergei 21, 35–36 Trzeciak, Joanna 6 Tsvetaeva, Marina 162 Vallon, Michel 159 Vitz, Paul 98 Vogüé, Eugéne 4–5 Vysheslavtsev, Boris viii, ix, 1–3, 6–11, 15, 21, 42–43, 55, 93–94, 108–110, 114, 118–120, 128, 133–138, 143, 146, 149–150, 153, 158–160, 162–163, 170–171, 180–181, 188–228, 235, 251–253

264

index of names

Walicki, Andrzej 4–5 Warren, Robert Penn 44, 121 Weininger, Otto 2, 6, 26, 71, 83–86 White, Victor 237 Wilkes, Samuel 95 Wordsworth, William 121

Zakrzhevsky, Aleksandr 84 Zen’kovsky, Vasily 16–27, 30–33, 64–67, 73–79, 137, 143–145, 155, 160–162, 182, 184–188, 193, 201–202, 237, 247 Zernov, Nikolai 11 Zosima (Father) 53, 57, 205.