In this important book, David Albertson sets out to provide an alternative to one of the more popular contemporary accounts of the development of Christian mysticism (he prefers the term contemplatio/theôria), what might be called the triumph of Dionysian apophaticism, that is, the notion of God as utterly without Form. Rather, as he persuasively argues, there have been two major traditions regarding how God is related to form and therefore the status of images and the role of negation. The first, rooted in Plotinus, he calls Tradition A, the “aesthetic of absolute Formlessness”; the second, Tradition B, is the “aesthetic of supreme Form.” Although these are “ideal types,” they provide Albertson with a leitmotif to guide the reader through some difficult thinkers and complex issues (see, e.g., 20–25, 50–51, 87–88, 251–256). It would be wrong to identify Tradition A only with the apophatic, and Tradition B with the kataphatic. Rather, they both concern the relationship of the two modes of predication in the contemplative path. What Albertson is trying to correct is not so much the history of the interaction of the two traditions, but the modern “turn to the apophatic,” which has often occluded the role of the kataphatic. Recent suspicion of the kataphatic, however, is a block to fuller understanding of the Christian contemplative tradition. Albertson realizes that some Christians did, indeed, adapt variants of Tradition A, but they also faced severe problems. “Some Christians adopt the resulting aneidetic condition of divine formlessness without reservation (Tradition A). Others contest it and seek to surpass it with a counter-aesthetics of divine Form, in order to accommodate the total novelty of the Incarnation in the space and time of the world” (p. 253). The meaning of the Incarnation for figure, image, weight, and measurement is essential to his story.

In turning to the concrete world of visible space, that is, line, figure, measure, and magnitude – the realm of geometry – Albertson’s book breaks new ground. The concrete world, of course, has always been there; it is just that it was largely overlooked in some histories of mysticism. In his own words: “In order to recover the proper harmony of kataphasis and apophasis,… I propose that we must reexamine the role of the geometrical imagination in early Christian contemplation, namely, the practices of measuring the world” (p. 6).

The Geometry of Christian Contemplation ranges from Plato to the twelfth century and contains nine dense chapters and two short “Interludes.” Part I, “An Archeology of the Formless,” has three chapters. Chapter 1, “The Silence of the Word,” introduces key concepts and the two traditions, as well as some of Albertson’s unusual terminology, such as “outscape,” that is, “the mysticism of outside, and exteriority” Outscape does not go as far as “geo-metry,” which Albertson understands as “world-measuring,” a new kind of “typology and pre-quantitative spatiality” (pp. 20–21). Chapters 2 and 3 deal with Plotinus as the Father of Tradition A. Contrary to some recent Plotinian scholars, Albertson (correctly I think) resists the temptation to import eros and even something like Christian love into the philosopher’s view of the relation of the One and what is below it.

Part II, “A Genealogy of Form,” concentrates on Tradition B and is more extensive (chap. 4–9). First of all, Albertson provides a brilliant account of the Dionysian writings (chap. 4–5), showing that Dionysius is far from a “Plotinian.” He does call God “formless,” but by way of excess in that God is the “All-Form” and “All-Figure” (Divine Names, 5.8). Second, Dionysius breaks with Plotinus by introducing a strong erotic element into the relation of Creator and creation (Divine Names, 4). Third, the Dionysian corpus unifies the positive and negative approaches to God and concludes by emphasizing a realm that goes beyond both the kataphatic and the apophatic into what might be called the “hyperphatic” (Mystical Theology, 1 and 5). Chapters 6–9 follow the thread of Tradition B in sometimes surprising ways. Of particular importance are Chapters 6 and 7 devoted to the Byzantine iconophile authors, John of Damascus and Theodore the Studite because Albertson contends that, “The high water mark of kataphatic contemplation in the first millennium is the Eastern Christian defense of icon veneration” (p. 150). John and Theodore have been the subjects of many illuminating studies, but I know of no analysis that shows how important these two iconophiles were to broader issues in the history of Christian contemplation. Finally, and again surprisingly, Albertson turns to two lesser known Western figures of the twelfth century whom he finds important proponents of Tradition B.

After a brief treatment of the Boethian tradition (pp. 208–212), which Albertson says, “…operates like a portal in history, holding open the door for the arrival of novel theological aesthetics in the heart of western Christianity,” Chapter 8, “Trinity and Form,” turns to Thierry of Chartres and Achard of St. Victor as introducing “a new theory of linearity” and beginning “to contemplate geometrical figures as if they were icons” (p. 213). Chapter 8 concentrates on Thierry and his notion of “folding” (explicare) and of divine equality or eternal measure (aequalitas). Thierry also completes a decisive break with Plotinian aesthetics by locating the “Form of Forms” not in the Intellect, but in the divine One itself as a Trinity of persons. Finally, Chapter 9, “The Figure as Icon,” presents Achard of St. Victor as overturning the Plotinian approach by “embracing alterity, multiplicity, and plurality as unquestionably positive goods, since they express the wild diversity of forms eternally born within God himself” (p. 246). The upshot of all this, briefly set out in the “Epilogue,” is a contemplative paradigm that can be described as “measure without measure” (Augustine, Literal Commentary on Genesis 4.3–6; see Wis. 11:21), a fusion of the kataphatic and apophatic in which God remains the supreme self-figuration and measure of all things, but also surpasses any measuring known to us.

Albertson’s book provides a significant new option for overcoming the forgetfulness of the kataphatic in many recent investigations of mystical contemplation. There are, to be sure, other forms of mystical discourse that escape the erasure of the kataphatic, but Albertson’s stress on the importance of figuring and measuring God and the world emphasizes a truly Incarnational and geometrical mysticism.