Professor Sell seeks to fill a definite ‘gap in the market’ with his book on some important thinkers in the Idealist tradition who flourished in the early years of this century in Britain. His aim is to give an account of their life and thought and to explore their connection with Christianity. While it is clearly true that the philosophical movement of absolute Idealism, like the seeds that fell on rocky ground, where they had not much soil, sprang up but withered quickly in the sun, displaying too little rootage to do more than impress briefly, nevertheless it did give rise to interesting thinkers who deserve to be retrieved and heard.

The figures chosen are those who straddled philosophy and theology, all seeking to baptize insights gained from Hegelian metaphysics. The motif running through the narrative of these thinkers is whether such metaphysics really is an ally of the Christian gospel, or whether, like the instruments of darkness in Macbeth, all it does is to ‘tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence’.

Sell comes across as a sympathetic expositor of all seven British Idealists: T.H. Green, Edward Caird, J.R. Illingworth, Henry Jones, A.S. Pringle Pattison, C.C.J. Webb and A.E. Taylor, a nice mixture of Scots, Welsh and English, with a particular focus on Oxford. We hear of the characters and careers of the cast, and in an interesting fashion which seeks to draw the reader into their thought by the historical route and generally succeeds well. Occasionally one feels that details are included unnecessarily: for example, one wonders whether we need to know that Clement Webb was a member of Marston Parish Council). Generally we have a judicious and carefully researched presentation of life and thought, which makes the work interesting to both historians and to students of theological philosophy.

The first two chapters set out the intellectual background of the seven and sketch their lives. These chapters are packed with names and incident, much of it enlightening and providing a helpful context. As regards Sell’s treatment of the intellectual provenance of British Idealism, I wondered whether the English Platonist strand was given sufficient place as a contributory factor. The third and fourth chapters take a more thematic approach and examine the Idealists’ treatment of God and the absolute, and ethics and society, perhaps the two most significant themes we would wish to be selected.

At the heart of the idealists’ discussion of God and the absolute, is the difficulty of defending the notion of a personal or relational Judaeo-Christian God with the absolute, which, as the purer Idealist philosophers of the day, Bradley and Bosanquet, pointed out, must be beyond our knowledge and fellowship. Sell quotes Bradley: ‘The absolute cannot be God because in the end the absolute is related to nothing’ (p. 120), and Bosanquet rejecting Webb’s doctrine: ‘Surely, personal intercourse must be with what is one among others and ultimate reality must be what is all-inclusive’ (p. 145). (As little as Sell resists mentioning Webb and Marston Parish Council can I resist reminding cricket lovers that Bosanquet invented and named the googly or, as the Australians call it, the ‘bosie’.) John Macquarrie’s modern doctrine, in rejecting the I-Thou model of revelation, uses similar Hegelian reasoning today. The theme dealt with in this chapter through the seven, as they interact with their critics, is well worth while and loaded with quotation, perhaps too much so at times.

The problem of evil and sin as mediated by the Hegelian tradition is perhaps the other great tension with Christian theology. The issue here is that of the smoothly ascending gradation of matter to mind and spirit, as found for instance in Edward Caird’s work, over against the rugged biblicist and evangelical insistence on the terrible division introduced by sin, the wound that cannot be covered—save by the blood of the cross. Hegel nauseated Kierkegaard for this reason, and likewise James Denney and P.T. Forsyth interpreted reconciliation as a result of the great moral act of the individual Christ on the cross, and not as a process at work generally in the universe. Few issues can be of such importance to Christian theology, and again the book is worth reading for raising and pondering this through these Idealists. At the end of the day the synthesis does not really hold because of just this fault-line at the scandal of particularity and ‘the old rugged cross’, notwithstanding the very Anglican effort to deploy the doctrine of the incarnation to unite God with man metaphysically.

We are more used, these days, to perusing such issues through Kierkegaard and Barth, Schleiermacher and Coleridge, Bultmann and Pannenberg. It is good to be taken through these permanently important themes in the thought of these neglected seven British Idealists, who regarded themselves as thoroughly Christian first and foremost rather than merely speculative metaphysicians, and whose lives revealed this.

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