Vl. Solov’ev believed in mankind as of real being. With this is connected a very intimate side of his religious philosophy, his teaching about Sophia. Sophia first of all for him is the ideal, perfected mankind. Mankind is the centre of the being of the world. And Sophia is the soul of the world. Sophia, the soul of the world, and mankind, is twofold in its nature: aspective of both the Divine and of the creaturely. There is no sharp delineation between the natural and the supernatural, as in Catholic theology, in Thomism. Mankind is rooted in God’s world. And each individual man is rooted in the universal, the heavenly man, in Adam Kadman of the Kabbala. The Sophia world soul is free. Prior to the world and prior to time, it fell away from God and freely it ought to return to God. God is absolute being. Mankind, which in Christ and through Christ becomes Divine-human, is an absolute becoming. The appearance of Christ is the appearance of the New Adam, the new spiritual man, it is a new day of creation, an anthropologic and cosmologic process.

This second [or] produced unity, as opposed to the original oneness of the divine Logos, is, as we know, the soul of the world or the ideal mankind (Sophia), which contains in itself and binds with itself all the particular living beings or souls. Representing the realization of the divine beginning, being its image and likeness, the protoform humanity or the soul of the world is, simultaneously, one and all; she occupies the mediating position between the multiplicity of living beings, which comprise the real content of her life, and the unconditional unity of Divinity, which is the ideal beginning and the norm of that life. As the living focus or the soul of all creatures, and at the same time the real form of Divinity — the extant [living] subject of the created being and the extant [living] object of the divine action — participant of the oneness of God, and at the same time embracing the whole multiplicity of the living souls, the all-one humanity, or the soul of the world, is a dual being: containing in herself both the divine beginning and the created being, she is not defined exclusively by either one or the other and, consequently, remains free, the divine beginning, inherent in her, liberates her from her created nature, while the latter makes her free in regard to Divinity. In embracing all living beings (souls) and in them also all ideas, she is not exclusively bound to any one among them, is free from all of them but, being the immediate centre and the real unity of all these beings, she receives in them, in their particularity, independence from the divine beginning [and] the possibility of acting upon it in the capacity of a free subject. In so far as she receives unto herself the divine Logos and is determined by Him, the soul of the world is humanity — the divine manhood of Christ — the body of Christ, or Sophia. Conceiving the unitary divine beginning and binding by this unity the entire multiplicity of beings, the soul of the world thereby gives the divine beginning [its] complete actual realization in every thing; by means of her [through her as the medium] God is manifested in all creation as the living, active force, or as the Holy Spirit. In other words: in being determined or formed by the divine Logos, the soul of the world enables the Holy Spirit to actualize Himself in all; for that which in the light of Logos is revealed in ideal images, is realized by the Holy Spirit in real action.