It seems best to begin with the concluding chapter. Three things are required if there is to be truth, Pickstock says there. One is an inherent connection between objects and subjects, between things and spirits, between things known and knowing minds. A second is that this connection cannot be exhausted as contingent but must somehow reflect the eternal, participate in it, because if there is no ultimate stability there is no truth. And the third is that the eternal cannot be a matter of ineffable being but must itself be dynamic or self-expressing: the eternal or the infinite must itself be an eternal correlation between being and its expression or manifestation. Only if there is eternal truth in this sense can there be truth in any sense.
So Pickstock's ‘religious metaphysics’ involves a return to Plato and to Aristotle and to what those philosophers had to say about ‘form’, form in things and form in minds. Students of philosophy are immediately told that Plato and Aristotle thought differently about form but that difference should not blind them to the fundamental agreement between the two great Greeks, namely that, as Plato says in Parmenides, and in spite of the difficulties the various theories raise, it is impossible to see how, without forms, there can be not just truth, but thinking or discourse at all.
The previous nine chapters, then, are given to defending the ground necessary to sustain Pickstock's three requisites for truth. So much has happened in philosophy between the ancient Greeks and today, including many thinkers, schools and orientations that would disallow one or more of those requisites. For some people, Descartes is immediately identified as the great ‘baddie’ with his separation of consciousness and matter, but Pickstock does not take that road, for the cogito might be understood creatively, which would open the way to the kind of approach she advocates. The great ‘baddie’ is rather Kant, not so much for anything he consciously intended as for the consequences of his thought in imprisoning so many later thinkers in epistemology. How can there be truth if things cannot be known for what they are? How can we emerge from that prison if epistemology insists on its own ultimacy and refuses space to ontology and to metaphysics? One of the ‘goodies’ in the story is Merleau-Ponty, who keeps turning up at crucial moments, and whose defence of a continuity between things and the flesh of the human body secures the first requisite for truth, in something like the way Aquinas also does with his empiricism, his understanding of the essential union of body and soul, and his view that for rational beings ‘reason is nature’.
In the opening chapter, entitled ‘Receiving’, Pickstock shows how the point reached in both analytical and continental philosophy in relation to ‘truth’ opens the door to ‘innovative intellectual assumptions’ informed by pre-modern understandings of truth but illuminated by what is to be learned from the modern engagements with the question. The chapter called ‘Exchanging’ considers contemporary philosophies of the gift and of the given, and presents some difficulties inherent in those philosophies which render them unable to account for truth unless supplemented with a philosophy of participation. Bolzano's scholasticism enters as another ‘baddie’, in the chapter entitled ‘Mattering’, a Catholic scholastic approach which, Pickstock says, preferred at serious cost an ‘etiolated realism’ (p.92) to Kantian subjectivism. It became a form of the rationalism from which it sought to distance itself, losing sight of Aquinas on God and on our knowledge of God, as well as of the unavoidable situatedness of any knowledge. Instead, she considers Rowan Williams's Gifford Lectures, The Edge of Words, as a better path to take, testifying to the movement towards realism in 21st century thought.
The chapter on ‘Sensing’ will feel like home ground to students of Aquinas, though Pickstock relies more on Chrétien, Guardini, and Casel to speak of how it is not only spirit that leads body but body that leads spirit, if only because all sensation already has a ‘spiritual resonance’. The Dionysian corpus comes to mind here, with its ‘liturgical consummation of theology’, in the Hierarchies that follow on, rather than anticipate, the Mystical Theology. The chapter on ‘Minding’ struggles with Descartes and Kant, with the rupture of human nature and ‘raw’ nature, and the possible ways forward from there. One strategy is non-naturalism but better perhaps is a renewal of naturalism? Contemporary debates involving McDowell, Dreyfus, Strawson, and Nagel are summarized. This is one point where Merleau-Ponty saves the day, since for him the mental experience of truth must be rooted in sensory experience of truth.
We are at the centre of the argument with a chapter called ‘Realising’, where she considers various proposals for a post-modern realism. One crucial need is to get beyond epistemology to ontology and to metaphysics. Another is to consider how the body is understood in post-modern thought. Realism presents itself in various forms today, but once again Merleau-Ponty seems like the secure point of reference, with his presentation of the ‘double-facedness’ of the body. There is no need for a ‘third thing’ to make knowledge possible for there is already a continuity, a connection, between things known and knowing minds.
The term ‘infinite’ appears in the chapter called ‘Thinging’ and perhaps this is a concept that needed a bit more attention, at least to explain where it comes from and what it is doing here. She explains well how an immanentist realism will be necessarily dualist – something will inevitably be absolutized. Transcendence on the other hand overcomes dualism, replacing it with ‘hierarchy’, but within an equality of all before the transcendent. Once again Pseudo-Dionysius comes to mind, for he presents just such a vision of the immediate relationship of all things, no matter where they belong on any hierarchy, with the one source of all things. Having considered many contemporary proposals, Pickstock sees the way forward as espousing a mode of real ontological continuity between things as existing and things as known, this to be done either by returning to pre-modern morphe, to Merleau-Ponty's shared surface of ‘flesh’ linking the interiorities of knower and known, or a postmodern synthesis of the two (p.198). There follow critiques of various ‘-isms’ and their proponents – monisms, pluralisms, materialisms, realisms whether plain or fancy – but she keeps her eye on the goal, a realism that will be metaphysically secured. Many of the contemporary philosophers she considers, especially the French ones, testify either positively or negatively, to the need to speak again of formal and final causality, to return with our contemporary preoccupations, to Plato and Aristotle.
The chapter called ‘Emptying’ shows how some postmodern philosophies align with Buddhist philosophies of nothingness which, in turn, can find themselves at home with Plato's Parmenides. But Plato worked on from there, Pickstock says, in Sophist and later dialogues, pursuing the quest to locate truth in being. This is the second requisite for truth, that the connection between things and minds participates somehow in the eternal. There is no truth even in realist philosophies if they lack transcendence. Realism means ontological continuity between material and spiritual things making possible the transmission and abstraction of forms. That sounds like a classical summary of what Greek philosophy teaches us, but it is proposed here as re-conceived – here he is again! – by Merleau-Ponty ‘in terms of the belonging of the knowing soul-inhabited body to a continuous material surface of flesh’ (p.237). The conclusion comes into view: for truth to gain sway one depends on a vertical correlation: upon God, upon spirit, and that there be a continuity between things and spirit in terms of both form and embodiment (p.240).
The penultimate chapter is entitled ‘Spiriting’ and it supports her developing strategy by appealing to the work of French philosophers of ‘spiritual realism’, notably Ravaisson, but now also Bellantone. Human thought is not co-relationally confined, they help us to see, but is rather a kind of initiation and sacrifice that attains to or aligns with truth. This is where Descartes’ cogito is understood as creative (like the Aristotelian agent intellect?), like the Socratic subject who in encountering things is awakened to excellence, to goodness, and to beauty. It means reading Descartes in terms of Augustine rather than vice versa and so seeing that both the material world and spirit are real, and not just one or other of these as materialism and idealism would propose.
So, we return to the final chapter in which Pickstock turns to some earlier English thinkers (Edward Herbert, Robert Greville, and Anne Conway) whose writings, she believes, could support alternative modern approaches that are similar to what she finds in the French philosophers of spirit. Things seem a bit unsteady, however, as we come towards the end of Aspects of Truth, with a move beyond philosophy towards theurgy / liturgy, and truth understood as an event enacted rather than something accessible to ‘pure reason’. Rather than skepticism, she speaks of an apophatic theory of truth, retracing philosophically therefore the Dionysian dialectic through cataphatic and apophatic to the mystical and on to worship and prayer. Is it a collapsus ad esoterica at the end, or simply seeing anew what Plato speaks of in Laches (the subject matter of the Postscript), that truth must be both eternal and unknown, that there is no final truth even of finite things, and that the quest ends in silence and interiority?
It seems that the great teacher of truth is, therefore, Socrates. Unless, of course, one brings in the One who, when presented with the question ‘what is truth?’, simply remained silent (John 18.38). There are some intriguing references to the Neoplatonist ‘trinity’ informing the Christian Trinity but this point, her third requisite if there is to be truth – that the eternal must itself be dynamic or self-expressing – seems to require another book, showing how, as Aquinas says, human beings cannot think rightly about the world's creation or about human salvation without knowing about the divine Persons.
