Review: The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology, by Mark McIntosh

a book review & a canon

This is a brief overview and review of Mark McIntosh’s The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology (2021). For those of you wanting to build a library of divine ideas, I compiled a short canon of the mystics and theologians mentioned by McIntosh. See the very end.

Between Plato & St. John . . .

. . . That’s where we are in The Poetics of Enchantment. By placing Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” as our first reading in the course, I wanted to center his Theory of Forms within the Western visionary tradition. The allegory posits the existence of immutable, perfect, and eternal archetypes, or "forms," the true realities underlying the imperfect, transient objects we perceive in the physical world. According to Plato, forms exist in an ideal realm accessible only through reason and intellectual inquiry.

Plato’s theory inspired several intellectual traditions, all of which often arrive at either one of two points: (1) the denial of the sacredness of the material world at the expense of the spiritual; or (2) the sanctity of the material world because of the sanctity of the spiritual. The first involves a deprecation of matter, the physical world, and the body; the second affirms their worth and holiness.

Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and hyper-Calvinist cosmologies are examples of traditions that arrive at the former; much of Christian mysticism (and orthodox Christianity, more broadly) arrives at the latter.

The Divine Ideas Tradition | Overview

Mark McIntosh’s The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology (2021) traces the Platonic inheritance of Plato’s divine archetypes through Christian mysticism. Many authors on our reading list (John Scottus Eriugena, Julian of Norwich, Edmund Spenser, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, among them) are within this larger intellectual current.

McIntosh begins by describing divine ideas as eternal and imperishable truths within the Trinitarian relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These ideas are the very forms by which God knows and loves all actual and possible beings as they share in God’s own existence. They function as metaphysical blueprints for creation, as well as epistemological realities that reveal the intelligible form of every creature. The divine ideas, therefore, embody God’s eternal act of knowing and loving; they anchor the goodness, beauty, and truth of all creatures in their divine source​, thereby sanctifying the material world as something infused by divine energies. As McIntosh writes,

The Platonic forms had not simply been converted into ideas within the divine mind or Word, they had been carried and embodied in the historical self-giving of the divine Word made flesh. Thus the meaning and significance of the divine ideas tradition in Christianity cannot adequately be realized by attention to the usual philosophical questions derived from reflections on the Platonic forms (McIntosh, 10).

The book traces the development of the Christian understanding of nature across medieval and early modern thinkers, many of whom arrive at different conclusions and rely on Plato with various degrees of inflection (Ch. 2). Here is McIntosh’s account of how Aquinas engages with Plato:

But for Thomas, and as he assumes also for Augustine, understanding the forms or ideas as existing autonomously—apart from both matter and from God—“seems contrary to faith,” because it not only seems to suggest that the material embodiment of forms is a negative thing (and this would be strongly contradicted by the Incarnation) but it also seems to imply that God is not the immediate cause of every being’s existence as precisely what it is (and this would be strongly contradicted by the Christian belief that God directly and without any intermediaries created all things in and through the eternal Word, who is himself God). (see McIntosh Ch. 5, p. 174)

A unique strength of this book is that it brackets a range of disparate writers who usually are studied separately. Through the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius), Eriugena, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart, Chapter 3 highlights the outworking of this tradition. It brings into colloquy experiential, mystical, scholastic, and apophatic writers—writers who are often discussed separately within their own distinct traditions: “Here is a matrix within which the being of the creatures in time, their being in the noetic journey of human knowers, and their imperishable being in the eternal Word all come to a re-creative and salvific communion in the Incarnation” (113).

Chapter Four centers the resurrection of Christ as the re-harmonization of perfect archetypal forms in God with nature. The divine forms become accessible through contemplation, which is where McIntosh lays the emphasis, upon “the contemplative calling that the divine self-communication within all creation evokes” (142).

The final chapter advances the importance of contemplation with the help of Aquinas.

Review

The style is accessible to the non-academic reader but occasionally cluttered. The mid-paragraph sentences are sometimes encumbered with many parentheticals. (Coleridge himself was a confessed Philo-parenthesist). My other quibble is that book doesn’t engage much with Plotinus. I know Christian writers are often wary of making much of his influence upon Christian thought (one reason is because because it is difficult to trace); but it seemed a relevant link between Plato and Augustine.

But the book’s presentation of ideas are compelling and lucid, and its writing is clearly strengthened by the author’s firm grasp of these authors’ thoughts. After all, McIntosh (1960-2021) was an Episcopal priest and Professor of Christian Spirituality at Loyola University Chicago.

Most importantly, the book addresses the contemporary need for a more robust and enchanted theology of nature. In the face of gross exploitation of the planet and the mere utilitarian and economic appreciation of the earth, McIntosh offers Trinitarian mystical theology as the antidote:

The goodness and beauty of our planet have been exploited so grievously as to lay bare, with raw and urgent relevance, our apparent obliviousness of older views—theological visions that would have regarded the goodness and beauty of each creature, not as merely a construction of human value, appreciated or dismissed according to economic reasons, but as the radiant epiphany of the divine goodness and beauty from which all creatures flow. . . .

For most of the history of Christian thought, especially amongst the teachers of Christian mystical theology, truth, goodness, and beauty appear in our world with a sovereign majesty that calls forth human reverence, and a profound human desire to understand the sacramental depth of meaning inherent in all creation. In order to think and teach more profoundly about this divine resonance within all beings, and about the human calling to contemplate and revere this fullness of meaning, Christian mystical theologians often drew upon their belief in God as Trinity. God’s life, they taught, is a life of infinite knowing and loving, a relational life in which the divine Persons are as they enact the inexhaustible self-giving that is existence itself.

Ours is an age in need of both ecological wisdom and spiritual depth. This book makes a compelling case that the two are inseparable, and that ancient Christian insights about God’s Trinitarian life might hold the key to healing our relationship with the natural world. By recovering the mystical tradition’s understanding of creation as a manifestation of Trinitarian love, The Divine Ideas Tradition points the way toward a renewed relationship with nature, grounded in reverence, wonder, and recognition of beauty as signifying divine energies present in, and sustaining, all beings.

The Divine Ideas Canon

Here is a list of authors mentioned with significance in the book.

Origen of Alexandria (c.185–c.253)

Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394)

Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 5th or 6th century)

Maximus the Confessor (c.580-662)

The Venerable Bede (d. 735)

John Scotus Eriugena (c.800-877)

William of Saint-Thierry (b. 1085)

Hugh of Saint Victor (c.1096-1141)

Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109)

Bonaventure (1221-1274)

Hadewijch (fl. 13th century)

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c.1328)

William of Ockham (1287-1347)

Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274)

John Duns Scotus (d. 1308)

Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)

Thomas Traherne (b. 1637)

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Simone Weil (1909-1943)

Many thanks to Brother Keith, SSJE, who recommended to me this book!