George Pattison, University of Glasgow, UK
This video was prepared in cooperation with Trubetskoy's Foundation in Russia.
The paper approaches Soloviev’s metaphysics of love in the light of the question concerning the relationship between biological evolution and love. Dante’s Divine Comedy ends by speaking of the poet’s vision of “the love that moved the sun and other stars”. This expressive line captures the poet’s belief that the power that moved or caused the powers of the material cosmos to come into being and to be sustained in being was the same power that manifested in love. In Dante’s case, the primary instance of such love at a human level was his love for Beatrice, which becomes the means of bringing him to the ultimate realization of the love of God. Although Dante’s vision remains paradigmatic for Christian thought, the poet’s conception of the material cosmos was very different from that of Soloviev since ideas of cosmic and human evolution lay many centuries in the future. Those ideas brought about significant disruption in Christian thought and continue to
do so, not only because they provide a fuller account of the material causality involved in human origins but also because they depict natural selection as random and non-teleological. We must therefore ask whether Dante’s optimism regarding the continuity between cosmic life and human
love remains credible in an evolutionary age.
