At this point of his intellectual career, in 1876, he did not yet find an answer on this seemingly paradoxical question. Love is, as he posited in general terms, a sense of ascendance, viz. participation in the Absolute. The absolute Divine is, as already the idea of bogochelovestvo implies, as much inherent in man and in nature as it is transcendentally located outside of him in immeasurable height. To encounter the Divine by loving ascendance effectuates love that descends, for the beloved Absolute lovingly gives away spiritual abundance to the lower being.

Eighteen years after he had written La Sophia, Solov’ëv took up the Meaning of Love again and discussed it more comprehensively on about eighty pages. "In the main, the arguments in this writing balance on the borders between philosophy, science, and poetry, promising fresh interaction between these three discourses."[131] As is commonly known, this writing is a sort of polemic paper against Lev Tolstoj′s and Arthur Schopenhauer′s views on (physical) love as to merely guarantee reproduction and continuation of species[132]. The matured philosopher finally completed his early self-given task and was successful in systematically reconciling amor dei intellectuals with the eros that he radicalised significantly. In Plato, the eros prescinds from all physicalness whereas Solov’ëv, as we have seen already, targets at the physis′ deification by transfiguration and hence redemption. As he now argued, eros′ true task consists in personality′s "redemption[133]." The Solovё′vian eros does not designate either a purely natural or purely spiritual event, but, again, rather signifies a spiritual challenge to transfigure human nature. Solov’ëv suggests a paradoxical situation: spiritually, the corporeal unification of the masculine and the feminine should bring forth a metamorphosis, namely create androgynous spirituality.[134] Spiritually, also erotic love must above everything else ascend to the Divine and hence receive descendent love that never regards either race or sex.[135] Solov’ëv denies the Platonian variant of the eros,[136] for he – a consequent thinker – admits the possibility of nature′s spiritualisation. If nature′s dematerialisation is a principle call spiritualisation must be ubiquitously valid. True erotic love hence strengthens personality, for deification implies the loss of sex and acquisition of androgyny instead. Until his lifetime, as he regretted, love had unfortunately not yet flowered out. Love′s development was at the same low stage as the development of reason within the animals′ kingdom. Love still is the greatest cosmic enigma there is[137].

Basically, love is based on tripartite "faith," namely faith in God′s existence, in my own exquisite being in God, and last but not least faith in the ′you′s′ uniqueness in God. Egoism′s abandonment necessitates unique recognition of everybody′s individual and exquisite being in God. Consequently, love needs ascendance to God by definition. Simultaneously, God′s gracious love descends to "the other," to the "passive," the "feminine," to Created nature[138]. Human (carnal) love receives outmost "beauty" (italics, KB) when experienced as the gracious descending of the Divine upon nature that in turn ascends out of love. This is said to be true with regard to personal and to social aspects[139].

All social spheres work by the same principles as individual love: two wholly different yet equally dignified beings positively complement and by no means negatively delimit each other. In erotic love the ′other,′ the non-I, qualifies as everything. In social life, the collective corpus, the singular elements of which are reigned by solidarity, analogously denotes the ′other,′ and this non-I should become a complementing animated being. Active compositions between the personal I and the social corpus signify an "enlivened