They had no conception of history as fulfilling itself. Even the greatest Greek philosophers were unaware of the ‘historical’ and the possibility of a philosophy of history. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor any of the other great philosophers has left us a conception of history. … They conceived the world aesthetically, as a finite and harmonious cosmos. The most representative Hellenic thinkers conceived creation as something static, as a sort of classical contemplation of a well-ordered cosmos. This is true of all the great Greek philosophers, who could grasp neither the historical process nor that of historical fulfilment. To them history had no issue, no goal, no beginning even; in it everything was recurrent, eternally rotating and governed by a cyclic motion. The Hellenic consciousness was, in fact, never concerned with the future in which history fulfils itself and in which lie both its centre and issue, but only with the past. …

… It was the Jews who contributed the concept of ‘historical’ to world history, thereby discharging, in my opinion, the essence of their specific mission. They were the first to conceive the world as historical fulfilment in contradistinction to the cyclic process of the Greeks. For the ancient Hebrews tlie idea of fulfilment was always closely allied to that of Messianism. The Jewish consciousness, unlike that of the Greeks, always aspired towards the future; it lived in the intense expectation of some great decisive event in the destinies of Israel and of other peoples.

History has positive significance only when it has a culmination. The entire metaphysic of history, as I have endeavoured to state it in this book, concludes in the inevitability of historical culmination. If history were an endless process it would have no significance. The tragedy of time would admit of no resolution, the historical purpose of no realization, since neither the one nor the other can consist with historical time. …

History is powerless to solve the problem of individual destiny, … The problem of individual destiny admits of no solution within the historical framework, any more than does its tragic conflict with the destiny of mankind and the world at large. The problems of individual destiny and of its conflict with world destiny will only be solved when the world has attained to a higher reality and an integral time.

The end of history and the path to the end is not exclusively divine, but divine-human, and in God-humanity lies the opportunity to comprehend the divine plan of history without extinguishing the individual freedom of man.

All history is filled with the search for the Kingdom of God. This search is the innermost soul of history, its holy of holies. All ends of history are relative in comparison with this absolute end, all ends become mere means. History itself, in its hidden meaning, is only a movement towards the Kingdom of God. But the limited human consciousness seeks the Kingdom of God in history itself. This is the main contradiction of the religious philosophy of history. The Kingdom of God is the goal of history, the end of history, the transcendence of history.

The apocalyptic plan, to which we attribute the coming of the end of the world, the resolution of world history, cannot be thought either completely immanently or completely transcendently, neither exclusively from this world, nor exclusively from beyond. This is the problem of the relationship between time and eternity that is antinomic for our rational consciousness. Thus, for example, to think of immortality as a life beyond the grave, in contrast to life on earth, this world, is a rationalistic limitation. Immortality is also revealed in the depths of every moment of earthly life. So it is within history itself, in its depths, the end is revealed, the apocalypse is given as another dimension of it. Accomplishment in time is only a projection of what is given in depth. The end of history and the overcoming of history will not be in history, the end of time and the overcoming of time will not be in time.

For a believing Social Democrat, socialist society is, as it were, the end of history, a transition to a super-historical process in which everything will be different, absolute good will come, a perfect earthly state, and a terrible judgment will be made on evil. For the socialist religion, formulated best of all by Marxism, before the social catastrophe "the world lay in evil", the whole culture rested on the fall, on the economic exploitation of the working classes of society, the whole history was reduced to an evil class struggle. After a social catastrophe, the world becomes kind, exploitation ceases, class struggle and their very existence are abolished, and the kingdom of truth sets in.

… I believed and believe in the possibility of a new era in Christianity, the era of the Spirit, which will be a creative era. For me, Christianity is the religion of the Spirit. It is more correct to call my religious philosophy eschatological. And I have been trying for a long time to refine my understanding of eschatology. My understanding of Christianity is eschatological, and I oppose it to historical Christianity. My understanding of eschatology is active and creative, not passive. The end of this world, the end of history also depends on the creative act of man. At the same time, I revealed the tragedy of human creativity, which is that there is a discrepancy between the creative idea and the creative product; man creates not a new life, not a new being, but cultural products. The main philosophical problem for me is the problem of objectification, which is based on alienation, loss of freedom and personality, subordination to the general and necessary. My philosophy is sharply personalistic, and according to the terminology that has become fashionable today, it can be called existential, …

All this is in line with the movement towards an active creative understanding of the end of the world. The teaching of Vl. Solovyov about God-manhood, carried to the end, should lead to active, not passive eschatology, to the consciousness of the creative vocation of man at the end of history, which alone will make possible the coming of the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. The end of history, the end of the world is a divine-human end, it also depends on man, on human activity. At Vl. Solovyov does not see what the positive result of the divine-human process of history is. Previously, he had mistakenly imagined it to be too evolutionary. Now he correctly imagines the end of history as catastrophic. But catastrophism does not mean that there will be no positive result of the creative work of man for the Kingdom of God.