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    Spain Avalon Member Javblanc's Avatar
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    Default THE INTERNAL MEANING OF LOVE according to Sophiology

    Sophiology is a modern school of thought based on an ancient notion, that of Sophia, understood as the feminine aspect of God. Its theological framework is Russian Orthodox Christianity and Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) is its most representative thinker.
    Soloviev had a great love in his life: Sophia Chitrovo. The impossibility of marrying Sophia motivated him to renounce marriage, and encouraged the obsessive dedication to theology that would undermine his health and eventually lead him to an early grave. This great love impregnates the Sophiological doctrine in a fascinating way.
    Solovyov thought that, in its current fallen state, man was one–half of a true Man: an imperfect and incomplete being. He was also convinced that man was destined to overcome that state; destined to restore his original state of Perfection and Integrity. And to achieve this, a long prior process of evolution is required.
    Solovyov draws a rough sketch of Evolution, and he does so in the following terms: Evolution, he says, is the “contradiction and antagonism between the species and the individual.” The battle is long and arduous, but it’s destined to lean in favour of the individual. Throughout Evolution, the individual will cut a path through the indifferentiation of the species. He will crystallise and stand out from the dark background of Nature, where he had hitherto been, let’s say, diluted…
    Since the individual belongs to the spiritual category and the species to the material category, we could also put it this way: In the course of Evolution, the Spirit will make its way through Matter. Slowly, the individual –each half of a fallen spark, buried underneath a pile of debris– will crawl of out that tomb.
    Matter belongs to the species: therefore, it strips itself of what does not belong to it as an individual. Since that, as Solovyov points out: “The fullness of life’s powers bubbling over in the individual being is not its own life, but an alien life, the life of a species…”
    In animals, the life of the species is absolute, all–embracing. Animals are not free; they have no initiative of their own: everything they do is dictated by their species’ instinct. Human beings are freer, although, to a lesser extent, we also obey the instincts of our species. Many of the things we do, we do them because we are compelled to them by those material life powers. It’s what Solovyov calls the “tyranny of the species over the individual” .
    Evolution’s task consists precisely of our gradual liberation from those material determinations. Through Evolution, we will become –in Solovyov’s words– “capable of internal freedom from the demands of the species” . And as this happens, we will liberate our own life, the life of the individual, the life of the Spirit.
    In the course of Evolution, the proper life –the life of the soul, the individual’s life– will then become independent from that other alien life, the life of the body, the “life of the species”... And love follows a parallel evolution. Just as there is a “life of the species”, there is also a “love of the species”. This love revolves around sex. This is the love that determines that man and woman should come together in carnal union for the reproduction of the species, for that is the purpose of this love that happened to us because of the Fall, a love which is, then, alien to the individual. There exists, buried under the alien love, a self–love, a “love of the individual”. This is genuine love, love as it was before falling: a love that does not pull towards carnal intimacy but towards the spiritual one, not towards the union of the bodies, but to that of the souls. This type of love will cut its way open through Matter in the course of Evolution. Matter will give birth to it as in a long labour. The love of the species’ slow drift over to the “love of the individual” is a transition towards the interiority of love, towards what Solovyov called the “internal meaning of love”.
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