He urged Alexander III to become "the new Charlemagne," who would unite Christendom politically; and he was blessed by the Pope and leading Western Catholic officials, many of whom were deeply impressed by his project for reunification. Solov'ev was perhaps the most profound and searching apostle of Christian unity in the nineteenth-century world. For, although he was in his later years more sympathetic with Catholicism than with Orthodoxy or Protestantism, he had (almost alone in nineteenth-century Russia) a sympathetic understanding of all three branches of Christendom. Moreover, he conceived of the problem of unification not in terms of conversion but in terms of leading all the churches to a higher form of unity that none of them had yet found. The Catholic Church was admired as the germ of a social order that transcended nationalism. The isolation and persecution of the Jews in Russia was condemned not only for humane reasons but also because the coming theocracy needed the prophetic spirit and interest in social justice that the Jews had kept alive:
Their only fault perhaps is that they remain Jews and preserve their isolationism. Then show them visible and tangible Christianity so that they should have something to adhere to. They are practical people-show them Christianity in practice. . . . The Jews are certainly not going to accept Christianity so long as it is rejected by Christians themselves. . . .61
Solov'ev seems to have regarded himself as the prophet of this new theocracy; and the poems, fables, and essays on art that he wrote in his last years are in many ways an effort to give concrete form to this prophetic spirit. But pessimism began to replace his earlier hopeful expectation of a "free theocracy." A new and violent paganism was rising to challenge the Judaeo-Christian world; and the symbol of this new force was Asia, which was just being discovered by the Russian popular mind, thanks to the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad and the beginnings of Russian imperialistic adventures in the Far East.62 Solov'ev was both repulsed and fascinated by the rising East. Even before the first Sino-Japanese War in the mid-nineties, Solov'ev wrote a poem, "Pan-Mongolism," which depicted the conquest of Russia by a horde of Mongolians. In his Three Conversations with a Short Story of the Antichrist, written in 1900, the year of his death, Solov'ev portrays Japan as having unified the Orient and overrun the world. This anticipation of the surprising triumph that Japan was shortly to register over Russia is only one of the many prophetic elements in the work. The Antichrist has come to rule over this new world empire -claiming like Dostoevsky's Inquisitor to be carrying on and perfecting Christ's work. The Antichrist is rather uncharitably given many of the opinions and attributes of Solov'ev's ideological opponent, Tolstoy. All three Christian churches have declined in strength with the growth of material prosperity and new forms of entertainment. They are easily subordinated to his rule. But a few from each communion have the strength to resist and retire to the desert, including an Orthodox community under the leadership of an elder.
Russian Orthodoxy had lost millions of its nominal members when political events changed the official position of the Church, but it had the joy of being united to the best elements among the Old Believers and even among many sectarians. . . . The regenerated Church, while not increasing in numbers, grew in spiritual power.63
These Orthodox are reunited with all other Christians when the Jews, who had helped build the rule of Antichrist, suddenly realize that he is not the Messiah and begin a rebellion against him. Thus, the Jews are reunited in solidarity with Christians, the pagan cities are swallowed up by rivers of fire, the dead are resurrected, and Christ comes again to launch his millennial rule on earth together with his saints and "the Jews and Christians executed by Antichrist."64
Solov'ev's prophetic writings and magnetic personality helped inspire a variety of new developments of the silver age. First of all, he played a leading role in the revival of idealism as an intellectually respectable philos-
ophy. He attempted to show that philosophic idealism was logically implied by the moral idealism of the populist tradition. Whereas Plekhanov cited this same fact to criticize the populists, Solov'ev cited it in order to beckon the moral idealists on to idealism and his own brand of dynamic mysticism. Many who started out as Marxists in the nineties soon went over to the new idealism under Solov'ev's influence: Berdiaev, Starve, and others. His Justification of the Good, which began to appear serially in 1894 (and was republished as a book in 1897 and 1899), vigorously contended that idealism was the only possible basis on which moral imperatives could be elevated above material self-interest and defended from philosophic scepticism.
Related to his rehabilitation of idealism is Solov'ev's more general role in helping launch a tradition of serious critical philosophy in Russia. Only with the lifting of curricular restrictions on the teaching of philosophy in 1889 did such a tradition become possible in Russia. With the founding of the journal Questions of Philosophy and Psychology in the same year, Russia at last acquired its first professional journal of technical philosophy. At last there was a medium for critical absorption of Western ideas rather than voracious consumption in the manner of earlier thick journals. The bracketing together of philosophy and psychology in the new journal indicates an immediate willingness for fresh approaches. Solov'ev contributed not only to this journal but also to an even more widely read medium for philosophic education in the 1890's, the Brockhaus-Efron encyclopedia. This eighty-six-volume collection remains even to this day the greatest single treasure chest of published information in the Russian language; and Solov'ev, as the director of its philosophy section and author of many individual articles, contributed richly both to its literacy and to its sophistication.
Solov'ev also had an influence on the small but significant return to the Russian Orthodox Church that began to take place after his death in the early twentieth century. Dostoevsky's late works and Solov'ev's writings combined to enable a number of former radicals suddenly to discover in the Orthodox Church something more than the organ of state discipline that it appeared to be for Pobedonostsev. Men like Bulgakov, Frank, and Berdiaev were willing to brave ridicule by their intellectual associates in order to reaffirm allegiance to the Church in Landmarks of 1909 and several other collections. These intellectuals professed to believe in the new rather than the old Christianity, insisting that true Christianity taught freedom rather than coercion and was not in conflict with social change but was rather necessary to fulfill and sanctify it. The movement for renewal in the Russian Orthodox Church was part of the general movement
toward religious modernism that was noticeable in most Christian communities in the early twentieth century. Although the Russian Orthodox Church was remarkably slow in acknowledging the need for new approaches, it did demonstrate an element of independent vitality amidst the disintegration of authority in 1917, convening a church council in August of 1917, which re-established the long-abolished Patriarchate and launched a belated but nonetheless important claim to be an institution with a destiny and mission that should continue even though the old dream of an Eastern Christian empire should be shattered.