The title of this book is a little misleading, in that it is a good deal more than a history of Christian Platonism, for, although it includes a section called ‘History’, that section is not only less than half the book, but is even shorter (though not by much) than the final section, called ‘Engagements’. This is inevitable, as the subject – Christian Platonism – is not something easily identifiable. The very first sentence of the first chapter by Lloyd Gerson makes clear one reason why there is Christian Platonism (or maybe, Platonic Christianity) at all: ‘By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 ce, self-declared Christians who wanted to reflect philosophically on their religion did so almost exclusively within a Platonic context’ (p. 13) – because, as Gerson goes on to say, all the other philosophical schools of the Hellenistic period had either vanished, or become assimilated into the victorious school of Platonism. In contrast, a Christian reflecting philosophically in the twentieth century who confesses to being ‘unabashedly Platonic’ (as Catherine Pickstock does in her latest book) is taking a defiant stance against the more influential trends of twentieth-century thought, whether inspired by Nietzsche, Harnack, Wittgenstein (though the case here is complicated) or, more recently, Derrida. Nevertheless, as this book demonstrates by its very existence, Platonic inspiration is by no means dead, and may well be making a come-back in the twenty-first century.

There is first a question of definition – what is Christian Platonism? This, I take it, is the main thrust of the first section of the book, ‘Concepts’. The first chapter, by Gerson, presents an account of how Platonism can be seen to be ‘perennial’, and it is a Platonism that is, as he puts it, a ‘collaborative project, with Plato himself as the guiding light’ (p. 22). For Gerson, at the centre of Platonism is its conviction that its subject matter is the intelligible world, at the apex of which is the idea of the Good, soon – and easily – identified with the One, as the ultimate explanatory principle of all that is, with a programme of moral improvement (readily seen as ascetical) freeing the embodied rational soul to ascend to contemplation of the One: an understanding of Platonism gratefully adopted by Christianity, which brings its own contribution, namely the ‘utterly unique manifestation of the intelligible in the sensible in the Incarnation’ (p. 31), which by no means neutralises the Platonic approach, but introduces a tension, potentially fruitful. The following chapters in the first section explore the notion of the Ideas as God's thoughts, a development taken further by Christians (Dillon and Tolan), the Platonic background to Christian notions of God as One and Trinity (Radde-Gallwitz), which is particularly valuable for its criticisms of the popular notion that creation ex nihilo is distinctive of Christian thought in contrast with Platonism, showing how the uncreated/created divide by no means replaces the Platonic divide between the intelligible and the sensible. This is taken further by Kevin Corrigan in a carefully argued and deeply illuminating chapter that explores ‘Creation, begetting, desire, and re-creation’. Then a chapter on the ‘concept of theology’, by Olivier Boulnois, who derives the medieval Latin use of the term from the Neoplatonists via Dionysios, completely overlooking the fact that, while Dionysios is indebted to Procline Neoplatonism in his notion of theologia, he is using theologia as a term for the doctrine of the Trinity and the divine attributes, a usage already well established in his Christian sources, to whom he is also indebted. The final chapter in this section, on participation and Aquinas's Neoplatonic sources (Rudi A. te Velde), enrols Aquinas as an undoubted Christian Platonist.

Section ii explores the history of Christian Platonism; the chapters are ordered historically, but take very different forms. Mark Edwards kicks off with an elegantly presented discussion of the engagement between the Bible and Christian Platonism, which takes a fresh and compelling look at long-considered issues. J. P. Kenney then covers late antiquity, first discussing pagan Platonism's theological turn in the period, and then the pre-Nicene Justin Martyr and Origen (with a passing glance at Clement), and the post-Nicene reception of Platonism especially in Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, both of whom develop the significance of creation ex nihilo. Lydia Schumacher discusses the medieval West, focusing on Franciscan theology and seeing there not simply a revived Augustinianism, but the beginnings of engagement with Arab-mediated Neoplatonism, usually ascribed to the Dominicans. Torstein Theodore Tollefsen takes on Byzantium – a huge subject, scholarship on which is growing rapidly – and wisely concentrates on Dionysios the Areopagite, Maximos the Confessor and Gregory Palamas. He makes striking use of a phrase of Dillon's (in his pioneering and still indispensable book, The middle Platonists, London 1977) – ‘metaphysics of prepositions’ – to bring out the influence of the Apostle Paul on Dionysios, but mostly focuses on the notion of participation. Stephen Gersh then has a chapter on Ficino, which is followed by the ‘Northern Renaissance’, taking the story, at a somewhat breathless pace, from Nicholas of Cusa to Jakob Böhme (Muratori and Meliadò). The final three chapters in this section maintain the heady pace, partly because there are so many thinkers to discuss (and so much secondary scholarship to do obeisance to): early modernity is covered by Derek A. Michaud (who restores Berkeley to his proper place in the Platonist tradition, rather than reducing him to the truncated figure of an empiricist between Locke and Hume); the Romantic period by Douglas Hedley, an immensely rich chapter, culminating in Coleridge; and modernity by Joshua Levi Ian Gentzke, a dense chapter envisaging modernity as book-ended by two poets, W. B. Yeats and Allen Ginsburg, and showing how Plato haunts modernity as a not-altogether welcome ghost.

The final section – ‘Engagements’ – explores Christian Platonist engagement with natural science (Davison and Sherman); nature and the environmental crisis (Hampton), ignoring (I suppose inevitably) Philip Sherrard and his Platonically-inspired deep and early concern for the environment; art and meaning (Viladesu); attacks on value, dualism, in the interests of materialism – all understood as anti-Platonic (Taliaferro); Christian love and Platonic friendship (Pickstock) – dense and fitfully illuminating; and, finally, Stephen Clark with a scintillating discussion of multiplicity in earth and heaven. This forms a fitting conclusion to a book that, in its introduction, proclaims ‘the central message of Christian Platonism’ as ‘not an intellectualizing and abstract tendency, but rather a focus on the incarnational, participatory, and sacramental character of being, which calls us back to its motive force in love’. The book is dedicated to Mark A. McIntosh, whose inspiration the volume was, and whose tragic and untimely death has robbed us of a supreme advocate of Christian Platonism, a friend and encourager of many scholars.