A Russian Spirit
Soloviev: “The importance of a truth lies, of course, not in the truth itself, but within us, in our inconsistency. By not carrying out a truth to the end, we limit it—and any limitation of a truth provides an expanse for falsehood.” “It is madness not to believe in God; it is the greater madness to believe in Him only in part.”
He says, in effect, that consistency in truth means striving with pure and perfect hope to realize our “positive unconditionality,” that is, that we can possess in god the “whole content, the fullness of being, not as a mere fantasy, but as a real actuality.” Also, it is on this “inconsistency” that he bases his accusation of the inadequacy of Catholicism—“it does not carry its faith to its logical end.” He adds that modern materialism, struggling to overcome a Catholic tradition (and in this struggle, according to Soloviev, it will be successful), is a transition period between the inadequate spirituality of the past and the new, more perfect, spirituality of the future—“Godmanhood.”
In this is a tremendous challenge really to live my monastic life.
August 7, 1956, III.63
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