God, Man and the Church: The Spiritual Foundations of Life

A classic work of ecclesiological theology by one of the leading Russian theologians of the late 19th-century.


God, Man and the Church is a penetrating examination of man’s relationship – both as an individual and in society – with God. For Solovyev, personal religion can only be satisfied in social religion. Private prayer finds its fulfilment in the Church’s liturgy, and the Church is the highest expression of man’s religious aspirations. Solovyev’s mystical understanding of the Church provides the basis for a fundamental analysis of the idea of the state from a Christian viewpoint.

During the years after its first publication in Russian in 1885, God, Man and the Church rapidly established a reputation as a seminal work of Russian theology. Donald Attwater’s translation, first published in 1937, made the work available in the English language for the first time, and has become a classic in its own right.

Vladimir Solovyev was born in 1853, the son of the historian Sergius Mikhailovich Solovyev. He became a junior professor at the University of Moscow at the age of twenty-one, where he remained until his lectures gave the authorities the excuse they needed to dismiss a man whose Western sympathies had made him unpopular. He spent the rest of his life writing and travelling. He died on 31 July 1900.