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Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times
Could it be that we have lost touch with some basic human realities in our day of high-tech efficiency, frenetic competition, and ceaseless consumption? Have we turned from the moral, the spiritual, and even the physical realities that make our lives meaningful? These are metaphysical questions--questions about the nature of reality--but they are not abstract questions. These are very down to earth questions that concern power and the collective frameworks of belief and action governing our daily lives.
This book is an introduction to the history, theory, and application of Christian metaphysics. Yet this book is not just an introduction, it is also a passionately argued call for a profound change in the contemporary Christian mind. Paul Tyson argues that as Western culture's Christian Platonist understanding of reality was replaced by modern pragmatic realism, we turned not just from one outlook on reality to another, but away from reality itself. This book seeks to show that if we can recover this ancient Christian outlook on reality, reframed for our day, then we will be able to recover a way of life that is in harmony with human and divine truth.
"Paul Tyson is an academic with a passion. He wants us to think hard and long about overcoming dualistic thinking and not to buy into the sacred-secular divide. He thus advocates a personal faith with public implications and longs to see us enter ways of knowing that combine transcendentalism and a passion for justice."
--Charles Ringma, Professor emeritus, Regent College, Vancouver, BC, Canada
"Paul Tyson has written an impressive essay on Christian metaphysics. He is aware of the widespread charges against Platonism, metaphysics, and Christianity but he addresses them with a balanced combination of sound common sense, theological acumen, and philosophical finesse. He shows how Christian Platonism is richly concerned with the things of reality we know, while yet seeing them in the light of a wisdom that is more than human. His thoughtful voice is both accessible and penetrating and the human wisdom of the author shines through. Warmly recommended."
--William Desmond, Professor of Philosophy, Katholieke Universteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium and David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University, Villanova, PA
"Paul Tyson's Returning to Reality is an excellent introduction to the fundamental existential and intellectual crisis facing Christianity and the West: whether meaning and intelligibility are intrinsic to reality and thus whether truth is anything but pragmatic success. Simultaneously beautiful, whimsical, and profound, Returning to Reality provides an important witness to the unity of life in Christ and the life of the mind and compelling evidence that only Christian faith in its fullness can now save reason."
--Michael Hanby, Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science, Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
"Everyone does metaphysics. For Paul Tyson, therefore, the crucial question becomes whether we fall in line with the one-dimensional (1DM) physicalist outlook of modernity or open our horizons to the three dimensions of morality, physicality, and spirituality that make up the 3DM outlook of Christian Platonism. This is a passionately written book, calling for nothing less than a 'life-world rebellion.' Those gripped by Tyson's uncovering of the mythos of modernity find here a convincing alternative to the amoral instrumentalism that characterizes much of contemporary society."
--Hans Boersma, J. I.
This book is an introduction to the history, theory, and application of Christian metaphysics. Yet this book is not just an introduction, it is also a passionately argued call for a profound change in the contemporary Christian mind. Paul Tyson argues that as Western culture's Christian Platonist understanding of reality was replaced by modern pragmatic realism, we turned not just from one outlook on reality to another, but away from reality itself. This book seeks to show that if we can recover this ancient Christian outlook on reality, reframed for our day, then we will be able to recover a way of life that is in harmony with human and divine truth.
"Paul Tyson is an academic with a passion. He wants us to think hard and long about overcoming dualistic thinking and not to buy into the sacred-secular divide. He thus advocates a personal faith with public implications and longs to see us enter ways of knowing that combine transcendentalism and a passion for justice."
--Charles Ringma, Professor emeritus, Regent College, Vancouver, BC, Canada
"Paul Tyson has written an impressive essay on Christian metaphysics. He is aware of the widespread charges against Platonism, metaphysics, and Christianity but he addresses them with a balanced combination of sound common sense, theological acumen, and philosophical finesse. He shows how Christian Platonism is richly concerned with the things of reality we know, while yet seeing them in the light of a wisdom that is more than human. His thoughtful voice is both accessible and penetrating and the human wisdom of the author shines through. Warmly recommended."
--William Desmond, Professor of Philosophy, Katholieke Universteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium and David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University, Villanova, PA
"Paul Tyson's Returning to Reality is an excellent introduction to the fundamental existential and intellectual crisis facing Christianity and the West: whether meaning and intelligibility are intrinsic to reality and thus whether truth is anything but pragmatic success. Simultaneously beautiful, whimsical, and profound, Returning to Reality provides an important witness to the unity of life in Christ and the life of the mind and compelling evidence that only Christian faith in its fullness can now save reason."
--Michael Hanby, Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science, Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
"Everyone does metaphysics. For Paul Tyson, therefore, the crucial question becomes whether we fall in line with the one-dimensional (1DM) physicalist outlook of modernity or open our horizons to the three dimensions of morality, physicality, and spirituality that make up the 3DM outlook of Christian Platonism. This is a passionately written book, calling for nothing less than a 'life-world rebellion.' Those gripped by Tyson's uncovering of the mythos of modernity find here a convincing alternative to the amoral instrumentalism that characterizes much of contemporary society."
--Hans Boersma, J. I.
230 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 18, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 16, 2016
This book is an argument for Platonism, for Christian Platonism, for a return to the medieval consensus which was destroyed by Nominalism and Voluntarism. It argues that wisdom ought to be considered anterior to information and knowledge, and that philosophy and theology ought to provide the context in which science is meaningful. It argues that the world is being destroyed in a mindless pursuit of power and prosperity without any moral values to guide that pursuit, so that means have eclipsed ends. Ironically, what mars this book is that it has a transformational thrust. Granted, it is probably the best argument that can be made for transformationalism: lets be metaphysical realists. But it is a bit more than that, it is: Lets be metaphysical realists to save the world. Or in the author's own words, “Metaphysical truth is the only way to morally effective politics” (211). One feels that means are eclipsing ends. Still, who else is making the argument that the problem has been modernity and that we need to turn back from that mistake? The modern world is a product of the two medieval heresies mentioned above, and the way forward is to return to the place where we went wrong.
2 He begins arguing that philosophy ought to be conceived of as a love of wisdom, which means understanding a divine order, moral goodness, and innate purpose in the cosmos.
3 The Platonist is the essential Christian outlook, he will argue. Christian Platonism recognizes that the good, the true and the beautiful all mediate transcendence, all have real and absolute meaning.
6 “I seek to rehabilitate a way of thinking about reality that was powerfully advocated in classical, patristic, and medieval times.”
29 Because “metaphysics is never simply metaphysics” because it has all kinds of implications in practical life, it “is a matter of the utmost practical and political significance.”
60 “Modern logos is a product of late medieval thinking, and this thinking re-invents the idea of what reason is, of what knowledge is, of what the relationship between philosophy and theology is, and of what philosophy itself is, in ways that are genuinely new.” That last is the most dismaying. The whole is nevertheless a very concise insight into a whole epoch.
82 Biblical support: “The relationship between the visible transient world and invisible eternal truth that Paul maintains here is common to all the New Testament and is not just a distinctive feature of Pauline literature.”
83 “The New Testament outlook on reality, the realm of immediate tangibility is never just nature in the modern sense, it is always nature as reflective of a larger, more solid, more real spiritual realm.”
88 “It is worth considering how easy it is for modern readers of the New Testament to misread or simply miss the assumed metaphysics of the New Testament.” And that is not the only place we ignore the assumed metaphysics, but starting there would be a good point to begin a recovery.
99 Christian Platonism is not Platonism with a dusting of Christianity. It is Christianity that “always interprets Platonic philosophy through the lens of Christian doctrine.” Christian is the modifier because it is doing the modifying, not the other way around.
126 If Christian Platonists was what previous ages were, why didn’t they explicitly say so? “They did not think of philosophy and religion as separate things. Religion and philosophy are two words for the same thing—the way of life rightly ordered by a divinely enabled pursuit of the highest truth to which humans can aspire.” This is a good point badly put. They are, rather, distinguishable but inseparable activities. It thins religion out too much to say it is the same as the philosophy by which humans pursue the highest truth they aspire to. It aggrandizes philosophy too much to claim it is a divinely enabled pursuit. It is better to say that a life directed to a divinely enabled pursuit of the highest truth to which humans aspire requires the orientation of religion, and to be rightly ordered, beside the orientation and guidance of religion, the care of philosophy.
131 Here he concludes a rather wonderful section on the impossibility of reducing Plato to a few salient points, how the dialogues work to suggest and to woo the reader, and skillfully hints at the glory of Plato.
131-2 Four general points of Christian Platonism
1 “Christian Platonism is an entirely integrative outlook, yet it is not a reductive or closed (conceptually complete) outlook.” This is Plato’s own method and disposition. Integrative but not closed: always open, not without certainties of the widest consideration.
2 No such thing as pure nature. God upholds even the intelligibility of the world. (This had better not be occasionalism.)
3 Qualities (moral, aesthetic, spiritual) are real, and more primary than material facts.
4 Ontological participation. Everything that is in some way participates in absolute being.
142 The problem with modernity is that faith and reason have “become functionally autonomous from each other.” This is the great divide that casts each adrift, so that reason has no reason, no purpose, no context, and runs along madly going nowhere, and faith becomes devoid of structure and suffers a loss of content.
161 It was Kant who isolated “knowledge from metaphysics and religion.” Kant was attempting to prop up knowledge without speculation, without vision of what is invisible and without that which is given which every person who has had a religious experience possesses.
162 The result is that knowledge, not being metaphysically or theologically framed, is a methodological atheism. It is the scientific method, and unguided quest for the knowledge of everything that can be done to the exclusion of every other consideration.
171 “Christian Platonism is a way of seeing truth and reality that is grounded in the full bandwidth of human existence. Genuinely qualitative and transcendently derived realities are taken as primary truths in Christian Platonism, but such a conception of truth is outside of the bandwidth of modern quantitative and materially manipulative scientific truth.”
177 “The ancients distinguished between wisdom and what we call science along these lines. Wisdom concerns fundamental truths that are ontologically prior to sensory knowledge. Wisdom is essentially a contemplative (spiritual/prayerful) insight that cannot be a matter of opinion and approximation, but is true knowledge if one has it at all.” Would the parenthesis were not added. It seems too much to project that onto Plato. Contemplative = reason in its fullest, noblest sense, but mental is better than spiritual.
181 Modern knowledge, with its aversion to metaphysics, is barbaric. It is not the kind of learning that comes to us without a proliferation of barbarism. It would be blind to deny that we can see it in our world plainly.
202 More must be accomplished than that which can be done in the sphere of personal morality. He wants social transformation. Society could use some transformation; that is true. I wonder if these need to be aimed at quite as pointedly as he does. What about the contemplation of reality as an end in itself?
207 “Imagine if Australian Christians came to see land-care as a significant issue of faithfulness to the Scriptures.” Indeed, this is what troubles me. What if Christian Platonism were undertaken with the purpose of achieving land-care? If it is a side effect, I can accept it. But when it comes into focus, I wonder how much Platonism this Christianity really contains. My advice: skip the last chapter. The rest is good.
2 He begins arguing that philosophy ought to be conceived of as a love of wisdom, which means understanding a divine order, moral goodness, and innate purpose in the cosmos.
3 The Platonist is the essential Christian outlook, he will argue. Christian Platonism recognizes that the good, the true and the beautiful all mediate transcendence, all have real and absolute meaning.
6 “I seek to rehabilitate a way of thinking about reality that was powerfully advocated in classical, patristic, and medieval times.”
29 Because “metaphysics is never simply metaphysics” because it has all kinds of implications in practical life, it “is a matter of the utmost practical and political significance.”
60 “Modern logos is a product of late medieval thinking, and this thinking re-invents the idea of what reason is, of what knowledge is, of what the relationship between philosophy and theology is, and of what philosophy itself is, in ways that are genuinely new.” That last is the most dismaying. The whole is nevertheless a very concise insight into a whole epoch.
82 Biblical support: “The relationship between the visible transient world and invisible eternal truth that Paul maintains here is common to all the New Testament and is not just a distinctive feature of Pauline literature.”
83 “The New Testament outlook on reality, the realm of immediate tangibility is never just nature in the modern sense, it is always nature as reflective of a larger, more solid, more real spiritual realm.”
88 “It is worth considering how easy it is for modern readers of the New Testament to misread or simply miss the assumed metaphysics of the New Testament.” And that is not the only place we ignore the assumed metaphysics, but starting there would be a good point to begin a recovery.
99 Christian Platonism is not Platonism with a dusting of Christianity. It is Christianity that “always interprets Platonic philosophy through the lens of Christian doctrine.” Christian is the modifier because it is doing the modifying, not the other way around.
126 If Christian Platonists was what previous ages were, why didn’t they explicitly say so? “They did not think of philosophy and religion as separate things. Religion and philosophy are two words for the same thing—the way of life rightly ordered by a divinely enabled pursuit of the highest truth to which humans can aspire.” This is a good point badly put. They are, rather, distinguishable but inseparable activities. It thins religion out too much to say it is the same as the philosophy by which humans pursue the highest truth they aspire to. It aggrandizes philosophy too much to claim it is a divinely enabled pursuit. It is better to say that a life directed to a divinely enabled pursuit of the highest truth to which humans aspire requires the orientation of religion, and to be rightly ordered, beside the orientation and guidance of religion, the care of philosophy.
131 Here he concludes a rather wonderful section on the impossibility of reducing Plato to a few salient points, how the dialogues work to suggest and to woo the reader, and skillfully hints at the glory of Plato.
131-2 Four general points of Christian Platonism
1 “Christian Platonism is an entirely integrative outlook, yet it is not a reductive or closed (conceptually complete) outlook.” This is Plato’s own method and disposition. Integrative but not closed: always open, not without certainties of the widest consideration.
2 No such thing as pure nature. God upholds even the intelligibility of the world. (This had better not be occasionalism.)
3 Qualities (moral, aesthetic, spiritual) are real, and more primary than material facts.
4 Ontological participation. Everything that is in some way participates in absolute being.
142 The problem with modernity is that faith and reason have “become functionally autonomous from each other.” This is the great divide that casts each adrift, so that reason has no reason, no purpose, no context, and runs along madly going nowhere, and faith becomes devoid of structure and suffers a loss of content.
161 It was Kant who isolated “knowledge from metaphysics and religion.” Kant was attempting to prop up knowledge without speculation, without vision of what is invisible and without that which is given which every person who has had a religious experience possesses.
162 The result is that knowledge, not being metaphysically or theologically framed, is a methodological atheism. It is the scientific method, and unguided quest for the knowledge of everything that can be done to the exclusion of every other consideration.
171 “Christian Platonism is a way of seeing truth and reality that is grounded in the full bandwidth of human existence. Genuinely qualitative and transcendently derived realities are taken as primary truths in Christian Platonism, but such a conception of truth is outside of the bandwidth of modern quantitative and materially manipulative scientific truth.”
177 “The ancients distinguished between wisdom and what we call science along these lines. Wisdom concerns fundamental truths that are ontologically prior to sensory knowledge. Wisdom is essentially a contemplative (spiritual/prayerful) insight that cannot be a matter of opinion and approximation, but is true knowledge if one has it at all.” Would the parenthesis were not added. It seems too much to project that onto Plato. Contemplative = reason in its fullest, noblest sense, but mental is better than spiritual.
181 Modern knowledge, with its aversion to metaphysics, is barbaric. It is not the kind of learning that comes to us without a proliferation of barbarism. It would be blind to deny that we can see it in our world plainly.
202 More must be accomplished than that which can be done in the sphere of personal morality. He wants social transformation. Society could use some transformation; that is true. I wonder if these need to be aimed at quite as pointedly as he does. What about the contemplation of reality as an end in itself?
207 “Imagine if Australian Christians came to see land-care as a significant issue of faithfulness to the Scriptures.” Indeed, this is what troubles me. What if Christian Platonism were undertaken with the purpose of achieving land-care? If it is a side effect, I can accept it. But when it comes into focus, I wonder how much Platonism this Christianity really contains. My advice: skip the last chapter. The rest is good.
January 18, 2022
I had a few quibbles here and there whenever Tyson takes potshots at Protestantism in general, and the Reformed tradition in particular. I also am not convinced that the hypothetical picture he paints at the end of the book (i.e., of what Christian Platonism's transformation of the public square might look like) is THE Christian Platonic ideal. But all in all, this book is *excellent.* It lays out the importance of metaphysics quite nicely. Tyson does a great job at not only describing the beauty of Christian Platonism and the metaphysical poverty of modernism, he also ably describes HOW we got here (where a beautiful vision of metaphysics was replaced for a suffocatingly boring one), and he lays out some reasonable proposals for how we might retrieve a better way.
June 24, 2019
After re -reading Boersma this is quite helpful. His social , left-leaning views aside- the philosophical and theological argument was clear and useful.
October 30, 2020
Buy it now!
May 19, 2022
Very interesting and timeless, yet current. For me, the book’s strongest merits are definitely the sections in which Tyler discusses Duns Scotus’s and William of Ockham’s crucial contributions to modern thought. Towards the end, Tyler’s style evolves into something a tad too gloomy, doomsdayish and good-old-days-longing for my taste. Also, the concrete suggestions and action plans on how Christians practicing Christian Platonism could or should of act in, for instance, the political realm, were a little confusing. However, he does make clear the general point according to which one’s faith and fundamental believes should actually affect one’s actions.
February 5, 2021
Very rich-good assortment of historiographical references (Henry, Berger, Milbank, Bauman, Dupre) and a wide collation of historical juggernauts tackled, from Classical thinkers to Medieval and Modern (fun to see Hamann get such a prize place as an alternative to Kant; actual references to Plato are fairly scant but sufficient for the goals of this book). Accessible read but will make you work! I'm very glad to have read through this and likely will be back to work through the various archs of history that he unpacks.
January 30, 2023
Paul Tyson writes with careful scholarship, conviction, and commitment. Where other writers tackling the topic of Christian Platonism may excel in one or two of these areas, he excels in all three. Indeed, Tyson has one of those minds that is simply amazing; his ability to recount and then synthesize ten to twenty centuries of metaphysical arguments in ten pages is impressive, but equally impressive is his ability to apply all of this to the life of the Church today.
December 26, 2021
An essential and timely read concerning where the church and world is, how it got there, and how the Triune God through the church could restore it as salt and light for the world.
February 21, 2023
astounding. Clear, concise, much more accessible way of understanding ideas Milbank is getting at.
July 9, 2024
Excellent, just such an excellent essay on Christian Platonism. As an introduction to the topic, Tyson does an excellent job. I only wish he gave more in his conclusion.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews