The Anglican theologian, Mark McIntosh, continues his creative and stimulating work at the crossroad of systematic and mystical theology with a monograph focused on classical doctrines of the divine ideas. Intent on bringing various, all-too-divided theological sub-disciplines together, McIntosh weaves together Greek and Latin theological traditions as he ponders the divine ideas from the perspective of creation theology, Trinitarian doctrine, Christology, and contemplative practice, tackling contemporary concerns such as ecology along the way. The author takes a deliberately broad approach to the tradition, moving briskly from discussions of Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure to Eastern voices such as Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, to their Latin transmitter, John Scotus Eriugena. We are also introduced to early Renaissance recoveries of the divine ideas, the crisis of Nominalist creation theology and epistemology, the contribution of early modern Anglican theologians such as Thomas Traherne, and an expansion of a Charles Taylor-esque narrative about the many causes of secularization, or the factors that enabled the emergence of the ‘buffered self’.

The work is divided into five main chapters: (1) an introduction to the Christian divine ideas tradition; (2) beauty and God's ideas; (3) the Incarnation and the divine ideas; (4) the divine ideas in relation to Christ's Resurrection as well as soteriology; and (5) the role of the ideas in beatitude and return to God. Each chapter offers a platform for a variety of voices from East and West, but the first chapter grants Augustine and Aquinas pride of place. Maximus the Confessor and Marsilio Ficino receive more space in the second chapter. Here, McIntosh also recounts the decline of divine ideas theology in early modernity, guided by the historical work of Louis Dupré. The third chapter takes us in a Christological direction sometimes ignored by contemporary studies of God's ideas, with a focus on Eriugena and Bonaventure. The fourth chapter links the divine ideas with the paschal mystery and brings C.S. Lewis into the conversation, along with the classical thinkers already mentioned. The fifth chapter seeks an eschatological synthesis on the foundation of the previous pages.

McIntosh seems to be at his best when he can offer a creative development and application of classical theological notions, as he translates those doctrines into a more accessible language. He homes in on the common elements of the diverse classical voices on the divine ideas, demonstrates the theological and cultural price we pay when we let go of them in philosophy and theology, and ably shows how the tradition's insights can still help us to recover a holistic theological vision of God and creation, where metaphysics and the Paschal Mystery, Trinitarian doctrine and contemplative practice strongly cohere with each other. His rhetoric remains free of political or ideological categories, and his historical summaries avoid facile generalizations or misleading stereotypes about Christian Platonism or medieval scholasticism. McIntosh writes as a lover of the saintly theologians, a man passionate about raising our awareness of their wisdom as a treasure for our time.

I have found McIntosh's previous work on mystical theology highly stimulating, a helpful source of hermeneutical tools for historical study of great voices in the long tradition of mystical theology. The present work may, however, have a somewhat misleading title, for much of the book does not bear a direct connection to theologies of contemplation and union with God. That is, at least for the first three chapters, much of the material that McIntosh covers primarily pertains to Trinitarian doctrine, creation theology or general theological epistemology, and only secondarily to mystical theology. While one can certainly connect all parts of theology to mystical theology, large parts of the book seem to lack the specificity one would expect from the title.

McIntosh deliberately paints a historical picture of the divine ideas that uses broad brushstrokes. He clearly does not intend to undertake original historical analysis of key texts, but rather, on the basis of solid existing studies by patrologists and medievalists, seeks to draw out positive systematic lessons from the various theologies of God's ideas (I do wish he would engage some of the specialized literature a bit more, for example, Vivian Boland's work on the sources of Aquinas's doctrine of the divine ideas). This worthy enterprise does risk moving forward somewhat too quickly. Thus, we learn what Thomas and Bonaventure hold in common on the divine ideas in the Christian life but are barely given a hint of their fierce disagreement on the question of divine illumination, a disputed issue closely intertwined with the doctrine of the divine ideas (e.g., pp. 52–54). Similarly, medieval disputations on the way to relate grace and nature directly play into the stance taken on the function of Christ as interior teacher (e.g., at pp. 58, 135), but grace/nature is barely touched on in this book. One also wonders whether McIntosh sometimes tries to integrate too many voices, with the effect that the uniqueness of the key thinkers becomes somewhat flattened.

The author chooses to make the human consciousness of the divine ideas a major category for his work, so that spiritual progress involves a greater awareness of those ideas (pp. 6, 147). I am skeptical about the effectiveness of this move, and I also cannot find in the book an adequate explanation of how the theme of consciousness fits with the classical theologians’ preference to speak of knowledge (especially of habitual and actual knowledge, at least among the scholastics). One wonders whether an all-too-modern category in philosophy and Christian spirituality (such as inner awareness) becomes the lens for reading pre-modern texts. At the very least, more close textual work on some of the major interlocutors chosen would have been necessary to support this move.

I should mention two final critiques. Some discussions could have benefited from clearer working definitions, or perhaps definitions of key terms operative in the likes of Dionysius or Aquinas, such as ‘beauty’ and ‘form’, as this would help to avoid problematic conclusions, such as the following claim concerning forms and the divine ideas, which I consider untenable: ‘… what if the apparent difference between earthly things and their heavenly ideas were in fact not so much a fundamental divide in being as a symptom of a divided consciousness?’ (p. 153, emphasis in the original). It seems that McIntosh has not sufficiently distinguished between noetic forms present in the minds of creatures, the forms of created substances and God's ideas. The divine ideas tradition evidently takes for granted a metaphysics and epistemology of form, which shift with each interlocutor. Here, more philosophical background work and textual analysis seems crucial to avoid ambiguities, or the drawing of consequences that do not perhaps follow from the traditional doctrines under consideration.

I close not with another critique but with a question. McIntosh's theological style throughout the book could be described as analogous to the art of impressionist painting, partly in the way the author sometimes draws theological conclusions from the sources employed (e.g., pp. 90 109, 137, 152–153, 155). The work presents a synthesis of a multi-faceted tradition, a synthesis that perhaps seeks to convince more by its overall beauty than by individual arguments. One wonders whether a recovery of classical theological doctrines, such as the divine ideas, also requires a deliberately metaphysical theological style whose methods are somewhat close to those of the great voices invoked, with rigorous philosophical-theological argumentation, a clear stance on the nature of essences and ideas, and a very direct engagement with philosophical and theological objections to one's position. In other words, we might ask whether we can recover the riches of a Maximian or Bonaventurian theology of God's ideas without also imitating much of their mode of theological argumentation.