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limitation, and a substantial theological addition is required to address this
that will involve a different understanding of the creation of humans.
Teilhard’s influence on Men is on his understanding of creation rather
than his approach to the problem of evil.
B. Russian approaches to Creation and the Problem of Evil

I. VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV (1853-1900)
Men’s In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life is dedicated to memory of
Vladimir Solovyov , and sets out to realise one of Solovyov’s unrealised
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projects. However, obvious references to Solovyov in Men’s writings on evil are
limited to short passages on the ‘World Soul’ and a lecture that includes a short
discussion of Solovyov and freedom.
Commenting on Solovyov’s conception of The World Soul in ch. 4 of his
Origins of Religion, he tells us that ‘certainly the Bible teaches that nature is not
a dead principle, but has a certain spiritual dimension… Very probably at a deep
and immaterial level nature is somehow contiguous with the transphysical
world and constitutes a kind of whole with it… Precisely because of this nature
has been infected with corruption at its very source. We might regard chaos
and death as the results of a distortion of the spiritual parameters of the
universe, a distortion which brought into cosmogenesis the blind destructive
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forces, which impede its movement forward’. The ‘World Soul’ as conceived
by Men parallels the ‘living’ conception of the world put forward by Teilhard,
but it may be distorted and corrupted. Men tells us this possibility for
corruption is made possible by kenosis – a self-emptying of the Godhead that
allows for the existence of feedom. We shall consider Solovyov’s ‘World Soul’
and ‘freedom’, and then how they are understood and adapted by Men.
The qualities of the ‘World Soul’ vary quite considerably in Solovyov’s
writing. In his Lectures on Godmanhood, the World Soul is identified with
Wisdom (Sofia), whereas in Russia and the Universal Church, the two are
distinguished quite clearly. We shall limit our brief discussion to the views
expounded in Lectures on Godmanhood as this appears to have been the starting
point for Men’s In Search of the Way, the Truth and the Life.

28 All of the above arguments are taken from Men, Origins of Religion, Appendix 10
29 Shukman/Roberts, p23
30 Translation in Shukman/Roberts, p52

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