Michaud, Derek A

English

University of Maine

The University of MaineDigitalCommons@UMainePhilosophy Faculty Scholarship Philosophy7-2017Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for ourTimes, Paul TysonDerek A. MichaudUniversity of Maine, derek.a.michaud@maine.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/phi_facpubPart of the Ancient Philosophy Commons, Epistemology Commons, History of PhilosophyCommons, Metaphysics Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy ofReligion CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy FacultyScholarship by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contactum.library.technical.services@maine.edu.Repository CitationMichaud, Derek A., "Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for our Times, Paul Tyson" (2017). Philosophy Faculty Scholarship. 4.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/phi_facpub/4Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for our Times, Paul Tyson,Lutterworth, 2015 (ISBN 978-0-7188-9385-9), x + 218 pp., pb £17.50Tyson’s impassioned call for a reinvigoration of Christian Platonism isthought provoking and a joy to read. Above all Returning to Realitysucceeds as a masterful statement of the problem, as Tyson sees it, of ahollowed out Christianity divorced from its metaphysical roots in latemodernity. In three concise parts, Tyson offers (1) an outline of a Christianunderstanding of reality, (2) a sketch of the historical process that led tothe near universally assumed implausibility of Platonism, and (3) an all-too-brief recommendation for the future.Tyson opens with an admirably accessible exposition of the basiccontours of Christian Platonism ‘without any reference to the likes ofAugustine or Aquinas’ (p. 8). Here, Western metaphysics is divided intotwo broad schools. One takes the world and everything in it to beessentially as it appears to be (a ‘one-dimensional metaphysic’) while theother sees the realm of the apparent as derivative of a more fundamentaltranscendent reality (a ‘three-dimensional metaphysic’). Drawing on theexample of his daughter Emma, Tyson argues that despite our modernpreoccupation with the one-dimensional outlook, it is the three-dimensional Platonic approach that remains more intuitively obvious(pp. 15–22). The second chapter elaborates on what he means by ChristianPlatonism via the example of the ﬁction of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.Tyson’s argument here is that both Lewis and Tolkien embrace themetaphysical vision he has in view, and therefore we in the twenty-ﬁrstcentury are already basically familiar with, even open to, ChristianPlatonism. The appeal to imaginative literature is telling as the positive casefor Christian Platonism offered later rests on an aesthetic choice for a moreholistic and beautiful worldview than that on offer in secular modernity.Part Two opens with an extended look at the competing andincompatible mythoi of Modernity and Christian Platonism. In anamusing re-imagining of the Genesis Creation narrative, Tyson lays barethe story of the rise of modern rationality out of the primordial ooze ofmyth and superstition. This is the familiar story one encounters in muchpopular history, especially the history of science, which is uncriticallyaccepted byNewAtheists and (ironically) many theists too. There followsa much more historically accurate and intellectually honest re-telling ofthe story of the rise of modernity. In particular, Tyson takes aim at twin‘false aspects of the myth of modernity […] (1) philosophy is all aboutthe triumph of logos (reason) over mythos (understood as imagined andfalse stories), and […] (2) modern philosophy has no debt to medievaltheology’ (p. 51). Drawing especially on the legacy of Thomas Aquinas,Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, Tyson argues that ‘the true storyof the birth of modernity is a medieval story’. Indeed, contra the myth ofmodernity ‘medieval theology is the real womb of modernity’ (p. 60).Reviews586© 2017 John Wiley & Sons LtdChapters 4 and 5 take up the question of ﬁt between Platonism andChristianity. Biblical scholars will ﬁnd plenty to dispute in the argumentthat there are many signiﬁcant ‘underlying metaphysical commonalities’connecting ‘Plato and the New Testament worldview’ (p. 78). Not theleast here among the issues left underdeveloped is the idea that there isa uniﬁed New Testament worldview. In fact, Tyson tends throughout toassume a single Christian understanding when it comes to metaphysicsin particular but also many of the classic loci of doctrinal theology(Christology, soteriology, etc.). The overall argument would be muchstrengthened by taking up the actual pluralism of belief among self-described Christians. Much more convincing than the biblical case is thatmade on behalf of the Christian nature of Christian Platonism in the ﬁfthchapter. However, here too there is an unsatisfying dearth of argument insupport of just what constitutes ‘Christianity’.Tyson returns to the history of philosophy in the sixth chapter to explorehow the normative Christian Platonism of the Patristic period came to fallfrom favor by the seventeenth century. Five major moments are identiﬁedas the collective culprits: ‘Abelard’s attack on naïve realism’, ‘the trendtowards the parting of faith and reason after 1277’, ‘Scotus and Ockham’s[…] undercutting ontological participation, replacing divine reason andlove with sovereign will, and demarcating religion from nature andpower’, ‘the sixteenth-century development of the idea of “pure nature”and the disenchantment of the cosmos’, and the ‘ﬁnal fall […] via thescientiﬁc revolution of the seventeenth centurywhere knowledge [scientia]comes to interpret wisdom [sapientia]’ (p. 150). There is, perhaps, moredefense than is warranted of the role played by Aquinas in the divorcebetween reason and faith at work here. After all, while the truths ofphilosophy cannot conﬂict with the truths of revelation for the AngelicDoctor, the latter is vouched safe byarguments rooted inauthority (SummaTheologiae Ia.1.8). Oddlymissing in this re-telling of the history ofWesternintellectual development are the ‘Dark Age’ ﬁgures of Boethius and JohnScotus Eriugena, the Renaissance Neoplatonists (Cusanus, Ficino, etc.)and the early modern Cambridge Platonists (Cudworth, More, Smith,etc.). Attention to these countervailing voices would have added breadthand depth to the argument that the dominant trajectory was anunfortunate, and more importantly, unnecessary turn of events.Tyson next turns to a critique of modern scientiﬁc rationality drawingusefully from the work of Thomas Kuhn, Michel Henry, and LloydGerson (pp. 158–181). It is here that the book is at its most sophisticatedand original yet the conclusion amounts to little more than theobservation that ‘it is precisely because we are culturally committed to amodern vision of truth itself that Plato’s approach to truth seemsimpossible for us’ (p. 181). The chief virtue of the argument is in the clarityof the presentation of the challenge to the modern recovery of ChristianPlatonism.Reviews 587© 2017 John Wiley & Sons LtdThe volume closes with a call to ‘return to reality’ by embracing‘Analogy, narrative, poetry, art, music, prayer, religion, conversation,and life lived in the contemplation and enactment of the Good, theBeautiful, and the True’ for this is both the heart of authentic Christianityand ‘what philosophy as the love of wisdom is really all about’ (p. 192).There is much to appreciate in Tyson’s book. He is I think correct tochallenge the easy assumption of we late moderns that faith and reasonare like oil andwater. He is correct too in his call for a renewed explorationof the Christian Platonist tradition as a living theological resource. Theproject however remains far from ﬁnished. This is partly because ofTyson’s effort to keep his argument accessible and the attendant lack ofphilosophical and theological detail on offer. Partly this is because animportant strand of modern criticism of the Platonic tradition is missinghere. The association of Plato and Platonism with totalitarianism, made(in)famous by Karl Popper, is ignored by Tyson. Regardless of what onemay make of Popper’s arguments, surely one of the reasons forprogressive democrats continued rejection of Christian Platonism, evenas the ﬂaws of secular reason become increasingly apparent, is thecommon assessment that Platonic ideals lead to authoritarian regimes.Derek MichaudUniversity of Maine★ ★ ★Revelation as Testimony: A Philosophical-Theological Study, MatsWahlberg, Eerdmans, 2014 (ISBN 978-0-8028-6988-3), 256 pp., pb $20This book offers a cogent defense of non-reductionist accounts ofrevelation as involving propositional testimony. This thesis runs againstthe grain of theologies of revelation most prevalent since theEnlightenment, which seems to erect a false binary between ‘static’ andcold propositionalist construals of revelation and purportedly personal,dynamic, and non-propositional ones. The aim, then, is to argue thatpropositions form an ‘essential’ ingredient to a proper account ofrevelation (p. 16), not least because Wahlberg is convinced that genuineknowledge of God can only be attained or rationally justiﬁed if a ‘potentnatural theology or propositional revelation’ is available (p. 12). Chapters2 and 3 argue for precisely this thesis, as Wahlberg also counters non-propositionalist accounts of revelation as putatively raised, in differentshades, by ﬁgures like Pannenberg, Schleiermacher, Rahner, Barth, andThiemann, and Millbank. Wahlberg’s claim is that propositions remainReviews588© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for our Times, Paul Tyson

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Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for our Times, Paul Tyson

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