468 Reviews briefly gestures at responses to these questions, he does not, in this book, pursue these topics in depth, perhaps saving them for another project. One important factor that might be adduced relates to the “tricky” nature of the concepts in question. Levinas’ resistance to “personal” descriptions of God could be illuminated by Kierkegaard’s assertion that attempts at direct communication of religious concepts will lead to distortion. While this may not fully account for Levinas’ stringency, it can, at the least, give us a sense of why we, as readers, are better served not by focusing on determinate “results” but rather by focusing on the two thinkers’ underlying dynamic of thought. In seeking to ward off denominational explanations for the topics wherein Levinas differs from Kierkegaard, Westphal repeatedly points out that each of the Kierkegaardian elements can also be found within classical Jewish sources, notably the Hebrew Bible. Here, Westphal’s case could be made even stronger through reference to rabbinic literature, in which God is likewise described as personal, as one who speaks, as an agent, and as a You to be addressed. Unfortunately, Westphal does not address the presence of such themes in rabbinic material, an omission which could potentially have the unintended effect of reinforcing Levinas’ own misleading dichotomy between “the Jew of the Talmud” and “the Jew of the Psalms” (see Westphal, pp. 38, 47). In general, however, Westphal’s rejection of a Jewish/Christian dividing line on these issues is sound, and his study opens the door not only to the application of Levinas to Christian religious thought—a trend which has already begun—but also to the compatibility of Kierkegaard with Jewish religious thought, a possibility which some (including Levinas himself) may previously have considered less plausible, but which demands further exploration. More broadly, Westphal’s approach calls into question the tendency to pigeonhole any given thinker’s ideas as inherently “Jewish” or “Christian,” based simply on outward forms of expression. In all, Westphal has provided us with an important study, not only in terms of the ways it illuminates these two particular thinkers, but also in its careful comparative methodology that provides a useful model for further philosophical dialogue between past and present representatives of Jewish and Christian religious thought. Daniel H. Weiss Faculty of Divinity University of Cambridge West Road Cambridge, CB3 9BS UK dhw2s@virginia.edu Freedom, Faith, and Dogma: Essays by V.S. Soloviev on Christianity and Judaism by Vladimir Wozniuk (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008) vii + 250 pp. Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900), philosopher, theologian, poet, critic and mystic, was a massively influential figure in late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century Russian thought and culture. A close friend of Dostoyevsky, and reputedly the model for both Ivan and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, he inspired figures in the arts (the Symbolist poets: Vyacheslav Ivanov, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Bely), philosophy and theology (Nikolai Lossky, Sergii Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Pavel Florensky, Lev Karsavin) and even, with his late works, in liberal social philosophy (Pavel Novgorodtsev, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Petr Struve, Bulgakov). However, due to his focus in some of his © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Reviews 469 most famous books (e.g. Lectures on Godmanhood), essays and poems on the quasidivine mythical figure of “Sophia”, his philosophy/theology (“sophiology”), and its continuation in figures like Florensky and Bulgakov, was rejected as heterodox by a younger generation of Russian émigré theologians (especially George Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky), whose Patristic-exegetical vision of theology has since become all but unquestionable in contemporary Eastern Orthodox theology. Although Solov’ev was admired by some figures in the West (notably, Balthasar, Louis Bouyer and Thomas Merton), this was mostly relegated to the few in the German and Frenchspeaking worlds who were sympathetic to his hybrid idiom of German Romanticism, the Greek Fathers, Aquinas and esoterica (e.g. Kabbalah). Yet, as can be seen by this book, large tracts of Solov’ev, not unlike Bulgakov, make no explicit reference to his sophiology (even while presuming it). This is the fourth collection of Solov’ev’s writings translated by Vladimir Wozniuk, which have ranged from his extensive writings on ethics and politics to his major contributions to aesthetics and, most recently, his writings on paganism, Islam and Asia. Thus, a new volume of translations of Solov’ev from Wozniuk is most timely, especially, given the recent interest in sophiology seen, for example, in some in the Radical Orthodoxy movement (John Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Christoph Schneider). Solov’ev’s massive output was both the product of a sweeping vision of reality which saw truth as actively at work in transforming all life in the “quickening spirit of Christ” (p. 148) and the child of necessity, for he had to write for a living. Shortly after the assassination of Alexander I by socialist revolutionaries in March 1881, Solov’ev, in a public lecture, condemned the revolutionaries but then appealed to the new emperor to commute their death sentences to Siberian exile. As a result of his appeal, he was forbidden to lecture in public and forced to resign from the University of St Petersburg where he was a privatdozent. He then dedicated himself until his death less than 20 years later to the promotion—publishing increasingly in the liberal, Westernizing press as well as abroad to avoid censorship—of what he called “Christian politics” (p. 156). The eleven texts collected in this volume, dating from 1881 to a few years before his death in 1897, all return to his concern for a Christian politics, the transformation or “humanization” of the society, material life, nature and the individual in the spirit of Christ (p. 88). Solov’ev has a wholistic approach to politics, seeing it as the living out of the Kingdom of God in the world through striving for unification (pp. 150, 155–156) with God in Christ “by means of an internal divinization [obozhenie not obozhanie/worship] through an experience of the cross, through moral exploit [podvig], through self-abnegation both personal and national” (p. 64). Wozniuk’s translation is fine on the whole with only the occasional mistake. The only difficulty is that he is not always consistent with his rendering of Solovievan terminology, given the variability of context, which tends to obscure Solov’ev’s argument if the reader has no access to the Russian. This problem could have been solved by providing the original in parenthesis. Discussion of a few of the articles will give a sense of the broad range of what would now be called his “political theology.” The first article dates from 1881 when he was still a member of conservative Slavophile circles, but already critical of what he regarded as the intellectual and spiritual sterility of the Russian Orthodox Church as a government department whose Synod of Bishops was headed by a lay appointee of the czar—the Ober-procurator. He attacks the Church’s hierarchy for its failure to “act upon human society in the spirit of Christ, permeating and regenerating all societal forms and relations with this life-creating spirit” (“On Spiritual Authority in Russia”, p. 26). His break with Slavophilism in 1883 with his first articles in the liberal press and the beginning of his so-called “utopian period” are also treated. In particular, in “The Jews and the Christian Question”, we are given the first full English translation of one of Solov’ev’s earliest and most powerful statements of his utopian vision of the © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 470 Reviews reunification of the Churches (p. 86) and the realization of “divine law in the human world, the embodiment of the heavenly in the earthly” (p. 63)—the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. This free, true and universal “theocracy” was Christoform as a symphonia of independent but mutually dependent centres of power, the Church, State, and Society, each headed (and here he was thinking of the munus triplex Christi) by its respective organs of king/emperor, priest/pope and prophet/independent preacher and teacher, as Christ Himself is a priest, a king and a prophet (pp. 67ff.). Solov’ev, in true Russian messianic fervour, saw the Russian empire as a providential reality that embraced the three peoples best able to exemplify what he would later call “the social Trinity” (“L’Idée Russe” (1888))—the Poles as Roman Catholics under the pope, the Russians with their czar and the Jews with the law and the prophets (pp. 65ff.). Although this theocratic vision is in some ways profoundly illiberal, its contemporary relevance can be found in the debate surrounding social doctrines of the Trinity propounded by figures like Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf and opposed by Karen Kilby and Brian Leftow. Like his friend Nikolai Fedorov (“The Trinity is my social programme”), Solov’ev argued for the restoration on the earth of a faithful image of the Trinity. He saw this Trinitarian political project as bound up with the fate of the Jewish people who symbolized for him both the principle of prophecy—insofar as prophecy, as he puts it in “When did the Hebrew Prophets Live?”, anticipates the future and by this anticipation “gives a moral power to people to bring closer this ideal future and realize it” (p. 188)—and a vision of what he called “religious materialism” which was the “impatient striving to embody the Divine on earth” or the incarnational principle (pp. 54–55). Many of the articles explore this unique vocation of the Jews, in particular “The Talmud and Recent Polemical Literature,” where he attacks anti-semitism and defends the Talmud as a “law of life” that can serve as a model for Christians as a practical life system (pp. 142ff.). Other articles come from the period in the early 1890s when he came to be disillusioned with his theocratic project, and began attacking the passivity of O/orthodox Christianity and arguing in favour of a more liberal social order. In a notorious 1891 speech, “On the Decline of the Medieval Worldview”, he attacks the medieval worldview and life, what he would later call “Byzantinism” (pp. 192ff.), as a compromise of Christianity with paganism, creating the “monstrous teaching” that one is saved only through abstract faith in dogmas (p. 166). Rather, Christianity is a divine-human religion which presupposes both divine and human action, so that the spiritual regeneration of humanity will not take place by divine fiat but requires our own cooperation with Him in a divinehuman deed (delo: occupation, undertaking) laid upon humanity and a morallyhistorical task (zadacha: problem) to be accomplished of realizing on earth the Kingdom of God (pp. 160, 163–164). Indeed, one sees more of the “Spirit of Christ” in the “social progress” (e.g. the ending of slavery and the persecution of heretics) accomplished by unbelievers than in the medieval Christian defence of dogmatism, individualism and spiritualism (p. 69). Likewise, in “On Counterfeits” (1891), Solov’ev defends divine-human cooperation in the deed of living out in the world the idea of the Kingdom of God. Thus, in contrast to the counterfeit Christianity of quietism, the ideas of “development and progress” are the hallmarks of Christianity introduced to it through the Jewish prophets who taught us the essence of “Christian politics,” which is “the idea of the Kingdom of God [. . .] [which] gives meaning to history and defines a true concept of progress” (pp. 154–155). Wozniuk’s latest volume is welcome, for it reminds us once again that Solov’ev is a major thinker who should be better known, not least because of his formative influence on Bulgakov, whose theology is now being widely discussed. Yet, more importantly, he offers the theologian who is searching for a form of worldly activity, a truly Christian politics that is both fully Trinitarian and Christocentric, a cohesive, if continually developing, vision not only of the event of God’s embrace of the world in © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Reviews 471 Christ (Godmanhood), but the living out of this event both personally and socially in the promise of a life wholly patterned after Him in the Church, the Kingdom of God, and the task of fulfilling this promise through elevating, transubstantiating all social and political forms into that Kingdom (p. 156). Brandon Gallaher Regents Park College University of Oxford Pusey Street, Oxford UK OX1 2LB UK brandon.gallaher@regents.ox.ac.uk Reading Anselm’s “Proslogion”: The History of Anselm’s Argument and Its Significance Today by Ian Logan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) + 220 pp. For centuries, philosophers have disagreed considerably when it comes to determining the purpose of the argument for God’s existence that Anselm presents in his Proslogion and whether it is plausible. According to this argument, a being “than which no greater can be conceived” (X) necessarily exists in reality if He exists in thought, else He would not be X. Since God is X, the logical inference is that God exists and indeed cannot be thought not to exist. In the introduction to his book, Ian Logan of Blackfriars, Oxford readily acknowledges the controversies this argument has caused and delineates a three-fold plan for making his own contribution to efforts to interpret it. In this plan, the first priority is to conduct a careful translation and analysis of the primary text; the second is to trace its late Medieval and modern reception; the last is to determine what the significance of the argument actually is. On Logan’s account, much of the confusion over the argument results from a scholarly failure to attend to the actual message Anselm’s text communicates. As a result of this tendency, Anselm’s argument has been misunderstood and criticized on the basis of misapprehensions. One of the basic assumptions Logan admits to making in his book is that a proper rendering and analysis of the Latin and English text is the key to deciphering its meaning. Operating on that assumption, Logan bypasses the existing critical edition of Anselm’s Opera omnia and turns straight to the text on which the edition itself is based, that is, to a manuscript titled MS Bodly 271. By transcribing and translating the Latin text of the Proslogion this manuscript contains, Logan presents the primary source in unadulterated form and thereby takes the first step towards understanding it. His translation is followed by a line-by-line commentary on the text, which elaborates the meaning of key Latin phrases. The commentary is succeeded in turn by an investigation of the added support for his argument Anselm gives in his reply to the objections of Gaunilo. After devoting more than the first half of the book to these textual considerations, Logan turns to evaluate the reception of the Proslogion. In discussing the relevant thirteenth-century developments, Logan makes the important but rare observation that Anselm’s argument came to be understood during this time, for the first time, in the way it is commonly construed today, namely, as an argument according to which God’s existence is per se notum (self-evident), such that knowledge of Him is a priori or innate. Logan rightly emphasizes that Anselm never affirmed this. For him, after all, the thought of God is the thought of a Being so great that it cannot be conceived. Inasmuch as Anslem acknowledges this, Logan notes, he is in agreement with © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd