The Five Kingdoms

The sheer cosmic scope of this vision of ethics finds its loveliest expression in Solovyov's...doctrine of the five Kingdoms; each of these Kingdoms — the mineral, vegetal, animal, human, and divine — says Solovyov, is "translated" and exalted in the next. Each, in order, comprises one moment in the development of creation toward its union with the divine: to be, to live, to be conscious, to be rational, to be perfect. Plants absorb the nutrients of the earth and transform them into vitality; animals absorb the world not only as food but in varying degrees of consciousness; humanity raises the world up into rational reflection; and finally the God-man (as reason, Logos, incarnate) actively realizes the perfect moral order of all things in himself. The great chain of being has, in a sense, been given eschatological depth; the world-process gathers the universe into a living and diverse unity, and humanity gathers it again into rational and ordering thought, and the God-man gathers it together into its ultimate reality — the infinite moral order: universal resurrection. Thus, when the Kingdom comes, it does not abolish any of the lower orders of existence, but rather puts them in their proper places within the unity of the Logos.

—David Bentley Hart, Preface to Vladimir Solovyov's The Justification of the Good (2005)