The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology, by Mark McIntosh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MarkMcIntosh was an Anglican priest, scholar, and author of multiple books on the history, study, and practice of Christian mysticism.His latest book, published just before his death in October of 2021 due to complications resulting from ALS, is titled The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology.In this work he addresses what he argues is a key component of mysticism in general and Christian theology in particular: the divine ideas tradition (abbreviated throughout as DIT).This tradition, more broadly identifiable as the Augustinian illuminationist tradition, holds that in God's "eternal knowing and loving of Godself, that is, in the eternal begetting of the Word and breathing forth of the Spirit, God also knows and loves all the ways in which creatures might participate in God's life through God's gift to each creature of existence" ( 12).McIntosh's text, following the work of scholars like Bernard McGinn and Douglas Hedley, is aimed at exploring this relational dynamic.By way of a robust appeal to analogical thought, McIntosh deploys an exemplarist theology that builds upon the writing of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Scotus Erigena, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Traherne among others.Rejecting commonplace critiques that see in the DIT a Platonic intrusion to the Gospel message, McIntosh argues that the epistemological, ontological, and spiritual elements of this tradition are ingredients to the Christian religion.McIntosh, however, goes further and asserts
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".