zak
The Living Force
I didn't know the existence of this film that I'm going to share, I knew that "The Justification of the Good" by Vladimir Soloviev was a book read by Putin, so while researching a bit more about this author, I came across this film inspired by another of his books.
I let you discover it by yourself, I'm sorry for the non French speakers, you have to find the right version by yourselves, nevertheless the film has subtitles in Spanish.
More than 122 years ago, a man wrote the story that our humanity has been living and reliving since our Fall.
Oh how fascinatingly real and true it is to our own present realm.
Also fascinating, the question of whether or not to read the book before viewing, is answered in the film itself, if one had neither asked the question nor read the book before!
The film is 3 hours 16 minutes and 30 seconds long.
Get out the popcorn!
The trailer with English subtitles
Vladimir Soloviev and the mystery of the Antichrist
Source in French HERE
I let you discover it by yourself, I'm sorry for the non French speakers, you have to find the right version by yourselves, nevertheless the film has subtitles in Spanish.
More than 122 years ago, a man wrote the story that our humanity has been living and reliving since our Fall.
Oh how fascinatingly real and true it is to our own present realm.
Also fascinating, the question of whether or not to read the book before viewing, is answered in the film itself, if one had neither asked the question nor read the book before!
The film is 3 hours 16 minutes and 30 seconds long.
Get out the popcorn!
The trailer with English subtitles
Vladimir Soloviev and the mystery of the Antichrist
DeepL.In the summer of 2020, there was not only Christopher Nolan's Tenet to see in the cinema. There was also Malmkrog, by Romanian director Cristi Puiu. With this demanding film, Puiu offered a successful adaptation of the book Three Conversations on War, Morality and Religion by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. In this book, recently republished by B2M, the philosopher asks himself a question that has haunted him all his life: who is the Antichrist?
The reign of Tsar Nicholas II in Russia (1894-1917) was a time of intense political and cultural upheaval. Many contradictory movements animated the empire. One of these movements has been called the Russian Religious Renaissance. By this term, historians designate a movement of return (often filled with ambiguities, however) to Orthodoxy by certain members of the revolutionary intelligentsia. This movement concerned both philosophers (e.g. Sergei Bulgakov or Nicholas Berdiaev) and artists (e.g. Dmitri Merejkovsky or Alexander Blok). The philosopher and poet Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) can, in many ways, be considered as the inspirer of this Russian Religious Renaissance (those interested in the subject can read The Russian Religious Renaissance in the twentieth century by the Russian-American historian Nicolas Zernov).
Although Soloviev's work inspired a whole generation of thinkers and artists, it was too deeply personal for him to be a real school. It was a sometimes strange and evolving synthesis of Orthodox Slavophilism, Catholic Westernism, socialism, theosophy, Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalah and German idealism, unified by the immense genius of its author, often guided by his own mystical visions. Nevertheless, at the foundation of Soloviev's thought, one guiding intuition can be discerned: the divine transfiguration of the world will be accomplished through the cosmic incarnation of a being of beauty, the Eternal Feminine, whom he calls the Sophia and of whom he had a vision one night in 1875 at the foot of the pyramids in Egypt. For Soloviev, as for Dostoyevsky, of whom he was a close friend (the character of Alyosha Karamazov is said to have been inspired by the young Soloviev), it is therefore beauty that must save the world. In his book Vladimir Soloviev et son œuvre messianique (Vladimir Soloviev and his Messianic Work), Dimitri Strémoukoff analyses how Soloviev explored this intuition through the three successive periods of his work: in thought (theosophical period), in politics (theocratic period), and in art (theurgic period).
Alain Besançon, in his book La falsification du bien (in which he offers an interesting cross-reading of Soloviev and George Orwell), points out that despite the eclecticism of his sources, Soloviev always remained rooted in the traditional Christology of the East, in particular that of Saint Maximus the Confessor, for whom the deification of man and the world is always accomplished through the cooperation of divine grace and human freedom. In his view, man's activity thus has a nodal role to play in the salvation of the world. However, in the course of his life, he became increasingly pessimistic. He gradually realised that the divine-human work of incarnating Sophia was coming up against oppositions that were difficult to overcome. The reality of evil thus became more and more important in his vision of the world. In 1898, a vision he had of the devil convinced him of the power of the demonic forces at work in history. His last book, published in 1899, thus aimed to unmask the nature of the ultimate agent of the forces of evil: the Antichrist. Influenced by his reading of Plato, he decided to give this book the form of a dialogue, which he entitled Three Conversations on War, Morality and Religion.
Salon discussion
In a villa on the Côte d'Azur, a lady from Russian high society is holding a salon. She welcomes four guests: the general, the politician, the prince, and Monsieur Z, who is none other than Soloviev himself. The dialogue begins when the general remarks that in the past war was considered a good and sacred thing. He notes that among the male saints in the Russian calendar, there are almost only monks or princes, i.e. warlords (e.g. St. Vladimir of Kiev, St. Alexander Nevsky, St. Dimitri Donskoy). He concludes that, of all the professions offered to the men of the century, that of arms was traditionally considered the one most likely to lead to sanctity. But he also notes that war is now considered barbaric, evil, the worst thing that human folly can produce, and that the profession of arms is said to be vile, morally ignoble, unworthy of a civilised man. The general adds that only the certainty of doing good and sacred work can sustain the soldier who accepts to kill and be killed. He fears that without this conviction, the profession of arms can only attract men motivated exclusively by their greed or their taste for violence, in short the dregs of humanity in his eyes.
But the politician laughs somewhat at this denunciation of antimilitarism. The important thing is not to ask whether war is good or bad, but to place it in the perspective of historical progress. War is probably an evil, but also a necessary evil, and sometimes even a lesser evil. It is not surprising that in earlier times war had to be sanctified. But in the present age, marked by the progress of nations, war is destined to be gradually replaced by new means of peaceful conflict resolution, as the sphere of influence of European civilisation expands. The politician claimed to be a member of the liberal and enlightened (and firmly colonialist) European bourgeoisie. He believed that it was impossible for Europe to experience another major war, and that it would soon become a completely peaceful area, regulated by international law.
Soloviev is not a reactionary, he does not believe that Western progress is intrinsically and totally bad (he will debate this point with Constantine Leontiev). But he cannot join the somewhat blissful optimism of the politician. Evil is not just an archaism, the residue of a primitive age destined to be eliminated by the social engineering projects of the progressive bourgeoisie. It is a cosmic force. And the 'enlightened' West seems to him to be ill-equipped to resist it. Indeed, in Soloviev's eyes, Western progress is above all a progress of the material order, and in this it is worthy of esteem. But it is accompanied by a decline in the spiritual order. The combination of these two phenomena, the increase in material power and the decrease in spiritual power, will certainly end up causing great catastrophes. In Soloviev's view, the twentieth century will be a century of iron and fire, contrary to the optimism of the politician.
The prince defended a radical pacifism. For him, war is an absolute evil, always and everywhere. The wars of the past are just as immoral and reprehensible as those of the present and future. Christ totally proscribed violence and taught us that responding to evil with evil only maintained and reinforced it. Thus, only the respect of the principle of non-resistance to evil will make it possible to break the circle of violence in which humanity is locked. It is clear that the Prince is a disciple of Leo Tolstoy's thought. Like the great Russian writer, he does not believe that Christ is the incarnate Word, nor does he believe in the Easter resurrection or any other miracle. He professes a spiritualist deism, for whom Jesus is a moral teacher whose core teaching is the principle of non-resistance to evil.
To the prince, Soloviev simply replies that it is false that all war is evil. History teaches us that there are good wars and bad peace. The prince's fundamental error is to consider the problem only through a binary relationship: between the warmonger who turns the right cheek and the pacifist who turns the left. However, as Soloviev points out, war sometimes involves a ternary relationship: between the aggressor who attacks the weak, the weak who is the victim of the aggressor, and the protector who comes to the defence of the weak with arms in hand. In this situation (perhaps rare in reality, but which nevertheless occurs), the war waged by the protector against the aggressor is obviously good and just. For Soloviev, the achievement of good is always a divine-human work that requires man's active participation, including through arms. To refuse to resist evil in the name of a principled pacifism, as the prince advocates, is ultimately to allow the devil the freedom to unleash himself.
The nature of the Antichrist
As we can see, Soloviev rejects both the materialism of the politician, the cult of man without God, and the spiritualism of the prince, the cult of God without man. To both, he finally reproaches the failure to recognise the truth of the God-Man, Christ. Indeed, the politician and the prince have in common that they see evil only as a lack, a lack of progress for the former and a lack of morality for the latter, and thus fail to recognise it in all its terrifying power. For Soloviev, evil "is not expressed by the mere absence of good, but by an opposition, a positive predominance of inferior forces over superior ones in all domains: individual, public, physical evil, and finally the supreme evil that envelops them all, death. Death, an inherited consequence of ancestral sin according to Eastern Tradition (and not inherited guilt as for part of Western Tradition), is thus the supreme manifestation of evil. But the truth of Christ is indeed that of an eschatological victory of life over death, and thus of good over evil, through the final resurrection, guaranteed by a historical event (for Soloviev): the paschal resurrection of the God-Man. By refusing the miracle of Christ's resurrection as they do, the politician and the prince finally accept the definitive and irremediable triumph of evil.
However, Soloviev does not send the politician and the prince back to back. The politician's ultimately rather pragmatic progressivism is not totally worthless in his eyes. The politician accepts the triumph of evil primarily out of passivity, because of the crudity of his secularism. The prince, by preaching non-resistance to evil, is in truth actively preaching submission to the devil. Soloviev does not forget that for the biblical and patristic tradition (for example, in Saint Cyril of Jerusalem), the Antichrist is a figure of religious, not secular, imposture. The Antichrist is a pseudo-Christ, an impostor who claims to fulfil the Gospel, while he distorts and corrupts it. This is what the prince is doing in substance, by affirming that the heart of the Gospel is the non-resistance to evil, and not the Easter resurrection in which he does not believe. In Soloviev's view, Tolstoyism (and all corresponding thought) thus paves the way for the eschatological coming of the Antichrist.
The Three Conversations on War, Morality, and Religion ends with a short story about the coming and final defeat of the Antichrist. This apocalyptic tale thus expresses the philosopher's final warning. Contrary to what American horror films try to convince us (which, even in Hollywood, is still puritanical in spirit), radical evil is not monstrous, obvoyantly evil. It is the falsification of good. Like the Antichrist, radical evil accomplishes its work by making us believe that it accomplishes good. Soloviev's astonishing prescience seems to discern in advance what will be the heart of the Soviet lie. If the extent of the satanic falsifications of the 20th century, and of the 21st as well, perhaps makes Soloviev seem somewhat severe with Tolstoy, it also proves the truth of this last warning: evil is all the more profound when it is the illusion of good. "Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light," St. Paul warned us (2 Cor. 11:14).
Source in French HERE
