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Abstract
Vladimir Solov'ëv, informal "founder" of the current of Russian religious philosophy which gained some prominence in the early 20th C with thinkers like N. Berdyaev, S. Frank and S. Bulgakov, based his social and political philosophy as well as his program of "Christian politics" (an attempt to bring the world as close to the Kingdom of God as possible, while steering clear from any idea of "building" God's Kingdom on Earth) on a series of personal mystical encounters with Sophia, understood by him as, simultaneously, Eternal Femininity, Divine Wisdom and World Soul. The paper argues that this vision remained the foundation of his entire world-view, despite the fact that he initially articulated a more "utopian" vision of a world-encompassing "free theocracy," while later in his career he elaborated, in Opravdanie dobra [The Justification of the (Moral) Good], a more realistic, but still "ideal-theoretical" vision of a just Christian state. Highlighting the tension between Solov'ëv's advocacy of a free and plural sphere of public debate and his own "prophetic" position based on privileged access to divine wisdom, the paper ends with a discussion of the intrinsic and unsolvable tension between religion and politics, and with the claim that there is a fundamental opposition between holistic mystical visions and a recognition of the political, understood as the ubiquitous possibility of both conflict and concord among humans.