Review

Reviewed Work(s): On the Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy by

Vladimir Solovyov, Nathalie A. Duddington and Boris Jakim
Review by: Anthony D. Baker
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 808-
810
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4094026
Accessed: 18-07-2017 08:41 UTC

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808 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

380-360 BC" (Snowden 34, figure 2); "Black steatite statuette of a crouched boy,
perhaps a captive, Alexandrian--hair in rows of tight curls radiating from center
of head, broad nose, high cheekbones, subnasal prognathism, thick lips"
(Snowden 72, figure 42). Unless I have completely misread Isaac's intent, we
would be required to label the ancient Greeks (and Frank Snowden) as racists
simply because both noticed, and indeed called attention to, certain anatomical
peculiarities of black Africans! But that would be absurd. So the opinion that
race does not exist but racism does seems grounded more on several modernist
conceits Isaac harbors (cf. esp. 51) than the evidence itself which continues to
show, I think, that the ancient Greeks and Romans did not invent racism.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfjl 10 John G. Nordling

Advance Access publication July 14, 2006 Baylor University

On the Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy. By

Vladimir Solovyov. Translated by Nathalie A. Duddington; annotated
and edited by Boris Jakim; foreword by David Bentley Hart. Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2005. 410 pages. $40.00.

Three years before his death in 1900, the Russian theologian, philosopher,
and mystical poet Vladimir Solovyov wrote a book that, a decade earlier, he had
feared would be impossible for him to write: a philosophical ethics that "justified"
the orientation of all of life toward a transcendent good without beginning from
faith in this transcendence as supernaturally revealed. The latter perspective car-
ries the melody in nearly all of his work: the speculative accounts of the triune
God as the origin of the fullness of beings, the mystical accounts of Lady Sophia
appearing in a museum or in the sky at the end of history, and the critical philo-
sophical accounts of "principles" always generated from and tending toward the
divine. Here, however, Solovyov begins from an almost Heideggerian analysis of
subjective feeling. We feel shame, pity, and awe or reverence; what do these three
fundamental "moods" tell us about our essential orientation as existing beings?
Shame whispers to us that giving ourselves over entirely to bodily drives and
desires like hunger or libido is "below" us; a sense of pity suggests that we belong
with others who are both different and akin to us; and reverence is the suspicion
that we are dependent on something "above"-a feeling which emerges first not
in fear, he says, but in revering the ancestors who gave us life. Unlike Heidegger,
however, who is ultimately unable to sustain a phenomenology of dasein as so
characterized and who thus abstracts from the particularity of moody beings to
the unnamable and uncharacterizable being of beings, Solovyov insists--or at
least hypothesizes-that these feelings reveal something true and good to us. We
truly are better than unreflective animality and pitiless egoism, because we belong
to a being who is better than us, and in whom it is actually pleasant to trust. We
feel because the world is full of feeling, and we are aware of our sins because the
world is composed of goodness: our most basic moods justify the good.

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 Book Reviews 809

Our existence justifies the goo

tion, therefore, is the ultimate
a book about unity: the unity
about "how unity becomes holi
to say, is to illuminate the or
tions of goodness in the temp
dent and simple good. Ultim
unbounded, extending to all cr
all as a faithful response to div
we to navigate the complexities
allow the light of "reverence"
their true natures as relative a
the world.
So, for instance, nations are
product of human power lust b
ancient bounds of kinship and
unification of peoples; they
ordered to a transnational com
Prisons are essential for th
malevolence, and allow for a "p
re-orientation. Solovyov offers
take retribution or protection
toward the highest good must
churches.
Economic structures especial
material "below" us is taken up
ing the market to direct its ow
tence for both the material wo
proclaim laissez faire, laissez p
(284). With penetrating insight
socialism as relying on the sam
the denial of a participation of
Finally, treating "the meanin
on pacifism in words that are r
today. Granted that under a re
this justify the dissolution of k
refusal, for instance, to aid
warring states are answerable
"histories" of origins, and ethni
intervention. A state that takes
from a higher morality remove
any of its actions-especially v
In the end, the rejection of m
prison, and warfare errs by con
ation with the labor of perfect
true end. In doing so, it evacua

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810 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

reverence of their educative potential which alone offers the possibility of a cre-
ation transformed into the image of God. The church is the community which,
above all others, lives an orientation toward the divine good and so challenges
and invokes all cultural institutions which otherwise tend to ignore or miscon-
strue their own true ends. Prisons limit freedom, wars bring death, legal systems
depend on the threat and deployment of compulsory force: these modes of
human order can be contingent way-stations for pure moral goodness only if
they are answerable to the church which only makes people free and never
enslaves, which only invites and never compels, which only grants life and never
accepts death. The Kingdom of God, finally, is the unity of all things under the
direct rule of the Bridegroom in which these contingent institutions will melt
away.
Contemporary readers will be rightly suspicious of Solovyov's confidence in
the progress of human history-Is the church really holier now than in the Mid-
dle Ages? Will "the forthcoming armed struggle between Europe and Mongolian
Asia" really "be the last war" (343)? Here, as elsewhere, an evolutionary Hege-
lianism is one of the more oxidized elements of his work. There is, however, an
agnostic distancing of the Kingdom of God from the progress of the ages that
both takes from Hegel his keenest Christian insight-that culture and growth
reach beyond themselves into the eschaton-and retracts the most reductively
atheistic element-God's coming is, for Solovyov, still a moment of grace in
which progress only participates, and humanity in no sense "builds" the divine,
as the Russian socialists of his time were already beginning to suggest.
As an ethicist, Solovyov is oddly reflective of Enlightenment theory and yet
more insightful and persuasive than the bulk of postmodern Continental ethics
and virtue theory. As a theologian, he strikes us as bearing an astonishing faith in
the traditions and practices of the church and yet also as relentlessly freethink-
ing. All this, however, is no doubt fitting for an enigmatic figure such as this,
who was both a product of his own time and remains, in so many ways, far
beyond our own. Jakim has here revised and annotated the nearly century-old
translation, which was, stylistically, already lucid and uncompromised. Hart's
brief foreword is perhaps the best theological introduction to Solovyov in
English. Their efforts are the perfect complement to a work that is all at once
strange, prophetic, and filled with so many brilliant analyses that it is impossible
to skim. At a time in which the various disciplines of ethics have all but lost their
ontological moorings, in which theology has all but lost its ability to inquire into
universals that would grant it critical access to political and social theories, this
book reads like a philosophical catechism, both radically new and radically old,
that invites us to relearn what it means to live as families, as citizens, and espe-
cially as the baptized in the post-Enlightened world. This is one of those rare
books that, if taken seriously, would shake up our disciplinary structures as well
as our lives.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj 111 Anthony D. Baker

Advance Access publication July 6, 2006 Episcopal Theological
Seminary of the Southwest

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