Reading room

Russia and the Universal Church

Vladimir Solovyov

His great ecumenical book, written in French and published in Paris in 1889 because Russian censorship would have banned it. In three parts — the Russian ecclesiastical question, the ecclesiastical monarchy founded by Christ, and the Trinity and its manifestation in the world — it defends the primacy of the Bishop of Rome as centre of unity of a universal Church, recognises the full orthodoxy of the Russian people's faith and culminates in a sophiology. It was his most contested work in Russia.