Recently, as the dust cover of this book reminds us, Oxford University Press has published a handful of remarkable books about Kierkegaard: by M. Jamie Ferreira, David R. Law, Stephen Mulhall, Murray Rae and Anthony Rudd, to which this makes a fine addition. Professor of philosophy at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, a Baptist foundation dating back to 1845, the author has published about fifteen books, including The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History(Oxford University Press, 1996) and Faith Beyond Reason(Edinburgh University Press, 1998). As regards Kierkegaard, besides his book Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments(Indiana University Press, 1992), Professor Evans served as Curator of the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library, while at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.
Obviously, the primary readership for this book is scholars who are interested in Kierkegaard. The thesis for them is that they have not paid enough heed to the place the related role of divine command and divine authority play in Kierkegaard's work. God's commands should be obeyed, on this account, not because of fear of divine punishment, but out of love and gratitude for the good that God has bestowed on human beings by creating them and giving them eternal life with God as their destiny. The relation human beings have with God makes possible this ultimate human good, thus creating those unique obligations we call moral.
The other audience, as Evans hopes, is philosophers and theologians interested in divine command theories of ethics. Classically, the discussion is traced back to Plato's dialogue Euthyphro: ‘Do the gods love holiness because it is holy, or is it holy because they love it?’ Does God will the good because it is good, or is it good because God wills it? The fear that the latter alternative arouses is that morality becomes quite arbitrary: God could change the rules overnight. This is particularly objectionable for followers of Thomas Aquinas, who keeps insisting that God acts towards creatures in accordance with a wisdom that is not totally beyond their capacity to understand. The objection leveled against them, on the other hand, is that they derive a naturalistic humanism from Aquinas, which owes almost everything to Aristotle and leaves little space for God, let alone for the Gospel.
Naturalistic versions of Aristotelian ethics, as Evans notes at the outset, are well represented in current Anglo‐American debates. He instances the work of Martha Craven Nussbaum; he might have mentioned Philippa Foot.
He cites Philip Quinn's objection, from a Christian perspective, that Aristotle's optimistic humanism seems worlds apart from ‘the grim realities of the Christian drama of sin and salvation’. Nevertheless, Evans contends, it is not so difficult to appreciate the affinity, in Aquinas, between Aristotelian and Christian positions. For Aquinas, God created human beings with a particular nature, with a distinctive set of capacities, with a specific idea of what they should be. What he calls Aquinas's theory of human nature does not ignore the role of divine commands: on the contrary, human nature is grounded in God's creative intentions for our moral development.
Far from being on opposite sides of the debate, as would commonly be assumed, Kierkegaard and Thomas Aquinas turn out, if Evans is right, to maintain ‘deeply humanistic’ divine command theories: God's commands are directed to human flourishing, leading to happiness, by way of an obedience which involves self denial – and which is anything but the egotistically motivated hedonism that previous generations of philosophers feared in Aristotle.
Finally, in three very fine chapters, Evans shows the advantages of this version of Kierkegaardian ethics over the current rivals: evolutionary naturalism, social contract theories, and moral relativism.
