TRANSFORMATIONS OF EROS: An Odyssey From Platonic to Christian Eros
by Vladimir Solovyev

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Vladimir Solovyev was one of the great Russian philosophers and mystics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work, as Janko Lavrin put it, “centered on the human religious longing as understood in its most profound and vital sense. Culture itself, that is, true culture as distinguished from a mechanical civilization, was in his opinion inseparable from religion. Regarding an organic relationship between God, Man, Society (collective humanity), and the World (nature) as essential for a complete life, Solovyev could not imagine any of these four elements being omitted without distorting the whole of existence. And the main cause of religious principle (God) has been, or is being, eliminated out of the consciousness of modern humanity. His own philosophic work thus became an endeavour to ‘bring all elements of human existence – individual and social – into the right relation with the ultimate principle of all life, and through and in it also to a harmonious relation with each other’. In such a harmony alone he saw a promise and a prospect of the highest realization of existence on earth, of the ‘integral fullness of life’.”

In this book, originally entitled Plato, Solovyev details how Plato's concept of eros is transcended and transformed by the Christian concept of spiritual eros. This is an important work for understanding both Solovyev's mysticism and the development of his mature philosophy and thought, since this work was written late in his life.

This book is now available, and includes a new essay by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, an internationally known specialist in Russian religious philosophy.