The truth of Christianity, under this positive aspect — the complete and concrete incarnation of Godhead — has particularly attracted the religious soul of the Russian people from the earliest times of their conversion to Christianity. In dedicating their most ancient churches to St. Sophia, the substantial Wisdom of God, they have given to this idea a new expression unknown to the Greeks (who identified Σοφία with the Λόγος). While closely linking the Holy Wisdom with the Mother of God and with Jesus Christ, the religious art of our ancestors distinguished it clearly from both and represented it under the form of a distinct divine being. It was for them the heavenly essence clad in the appearance of the lower world, the luminous spirit of regenerate humanity, the Guardian Angel of the Earth, the final appearance of the Godhead for which they waited.

Thus, side by side with the individual human form of the Divine — the Virgin-Mother and the Son of God — the Russian people have known and loved, under the name of St. Sophia, the social incarnation of the Godhead in the Universal Church. It is this idea, revealed to the religious consciousness of our ancestors, this truly national and yet absolutely universal notion, that we must now expound in reasoned terms. It is for us to formulate the living Word which old Russia conceived and which new Russia must declare to the world.

Our task is not the description of man, but the pointing out of his significance in the general connection of the truly-extant.

In the past lecture I spoke about the necessity of distinguishing two unities in the divine being: the acting or producing one, the unity of the divine creation of the Word (Logos); and the unity produced, realized. As in a particular organism of the natural world we distinguish the active unity, the beginning [element] which produces and supports its organic wholeness—the beginning which comprises the living and active soul of this organism—and then also the unity of that which is produced and realized by that soul, the unity of the organic body.

If in the divine being, in Christ, the first or the producing unity is properly the Divinity—God, as the acting force, or Logos—and if, thus, in this first unity we have Christ as the divine being proper; then the second unity, the produced one, to which we have given the mystical name of Sophia, is the principle of humanity, is the ideal or normal man. And Christ, as participant in this unity of the human being, is a man, or to use the expression of the Holy Scripture, the second Adam.

Thus, Sophia is the ideal or perfect humanity, eternally contained in the integral divine being Christ. Since it is indubitable that God, in order to exist actually and really must manifest Himself, His being, i.e., must act in the 'other' [in that which is not He], the existence of this `other' [this antipode] is thereby established as necessary; and, since in speaking of God we cannot have in mind any form of time, because all that is said about God presumes eternity, then the existence of this 'other', in relation to which God is manifested, must necessarily be acknowledged as eternal. This 'other' is not unconditionally alien to God (that is unthinkable), but is [rather] His own expression or manifestation; and it is in regard to this antipode of His that God is called the Word.

But this unfolding or the inner revelation of Divinity, and consequently also the distinction of God as Logos from God as the primordial substance for the Father, this revelation and this distinction necessarily presupposes that in which Divinity is revealed, or in which it acts, and which in the first (in the Father) exists substantially, or in a latent form, and is manifested through the second (i.e., through Logos).

Consequently, in order that God exist eternally as Logos, or as the active God., it is necessary to assume the eternal existence Of real elements which receive [as objects of it] the divine action; it is necessary to assume the existence of the world as subject to divine action, as giving in itself place to divine unity. The proper unity of that world, i.e., the produced unity—the world's centre and at the same time the circumference of Divinity—is humanity. Every actuality presupposes action, and every action presupposes a real object of [that] action:—a subject which receives that action; consequently, the actuality of God, based upon the action of God, presupposes a subject receiving this action, presupposes man—and presupposes him eternally, since the action of God is eternal. This [proposition] may not be countered [with a statement] that God already has such an eternal object for [His] action, in Logos; for Logos is the same God made manifest, and manifestation presupposes that 'other' for which or in relation to which God is manifested, i.e., presupposes man.

If a man as a phenomenon is a transitory fact, then as essence he is necessarily eternal and all-embracing; what is, then, the ideal man? In order to be actual he must he one and [at the same time] many; consequently, he is not only the universal general essence of all human specimens, abstracted from them; he is a universal, and at the same time, an individual being, containing in himself all these specimens actually. Every one of us, every human being, is essentially and actually rooted, and takes part, in the universal or absolute man.

As the divine forces comprise a single, whole, unconditionally universal and unconditionally individual, organism of the living Logos, so all human elements form a similarly whole simultaneously universal and individual organism—the necessary realization and receptory [receptacle] of the first—the pan-human organism, as the eternal body of God and the eternal soul of the world. As this latter organism, that is to say, Sophia, in its eternal being necessarily consists of a multiplicity of elements, of which it is the real unity: it follows that each of the elements, as a necessary new part of eternal Godmanhood, must be acknowledged eternal in the absolute, or the ideal, order.