Nikolaos Loudovikos is a prolific and insightful Greek theologian, and this present work brings together a number of themes of his career to this point. This synthetic quality is due in part to details of the book's composition. The first two parts of the present work were published originally as a monograph in Greek in 1999, and are here translated for the first time into English. They are completed now by a new third part which brings the argument up to date. This whole present volume serves as the start of a larger trilogy supplying a ‘systematic theological interpretation of the self’ (p. x), whose second volume is to be published soon.

In the first part of this book, Loudovikos offers the thesis that Christian theology has been beholden to what he calls ‘the Greek-Western Christian anthropology’, a concept produced in large part by Origen and Augustine, and then passed on to Christian tradition via these thinkers’ ongoing influence. According to Loudovikos, the pernicious feature of this concept of the self is the controlling domination of the body by the soul, such that the soul is identified with the self, and the body's integration with and relevance to the self's final destiny is insufficiently justified. He finds in Origen and Augustine an ‘ecstatic metaphysics of the will’ that sees the soul's desire for God in direct conflict with the body's desires (p. 28). This is a ‘fundamental nihilism’ described as ‘the renunciation of the perceptible world on the part of the ideal’. This Greek-Western self is ‘constituting now the certain foundation of an ontology of power’ (p. 52) that leads ultimately to Nietzsche's will to power.

In part two Loudovikos turns to Maximus the Confessor, who is presented as promoting a concept of the Christian self that overcomes the Origenian-Augustinian one. The human will is not above or opposed to the human's enfleshed nature, but the will is fulfilled in a non-oppositional integration, analogous to trinitarian consubstantiality (p. 184). Will is oriented toward nature understood as logos – and thus is to be understood as dia-logos, insofar as the various natures of created things are themselves logoi that call persons into conversation and elicit the response of the self (p. 185). This concept of the self is developed further by Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas. Symeon shows that the fulfilment of human nature is communal and eschatological, because it is eucharistic and based in ongoing repentance (pp. 100–1). Palamas corrects the Origenian self by repudiating a false apophaticism that rejects nature, in favour of hesychastic practices that integrate rather than destroy the body. Such practices lead the self away from angst-riddled division into an experience of communion (pp. 138–41).

Part three serves as a renewal of Loudovikos's proposal of a true concept of the Christian self. He restates his arguments about Augustine and Origen, and then gives a more complete tracing of the journey of their ancient concept of the self up to modernity: ‘the Augustinian inwardness is added to the Augustino-Cartesian independence of the will, in its Kantian, and then Fichtean and Hegelian more secular transformations, and the result is Nietzsche’ (p. 231, emphasis original). Loudovikos also supplies a two-column table of contrasting features of two ‘types’ of the self, which he calls ‘the type of Analogy of energy/synergy/dialogue’ and ‘the type of Inwardness’, and then spends a number of pages describing which features from which columns he sees represented in different thinkers throughout Christian history (pp. 259–63). He concludes the main text of the work with a twelve-point summary of the ‘analogical identity’. Three appendices, reprints of earlier writings, complete the book. Two of them present an admiring but vigorous critique of John Zizioulas’ concepts of person and nature, and the remaining one is dedicated to bringing Loudovikos’ theology of the self into dialogue with Aquinas.

The book is admirable for its scope, as Loudovikos deals with an impressive list of theological, philosophical and psychological authors. He also does well in noting the inconsistencies and ruptures in concepts of the self that pervade modern Christianity. The question is whether Loudovikos has made a coherent and convincing case for his origin story of the Greek-Western self and for his proposed Maximian solution. He chides John Behr and Rowan Williams for their readings of Origen and Augustine, respectively, because he believes Behr and Williams do not examine closely the details of the positions of the patristic thinkers but merely lionise their intentions (pp. 234–5, 262). Loudovikos’ own reading of Origen and Augustine could be subject to a similar critique: he more often takes for granted that aspects of their thought are harmful than demonstrates this from their texts. Loudovikos neglects Origen particularly in this regard, but Augustine too is selectively quoted, mostly from the early works and choice passages from the De trinitate.

Though his criticism of Origen and Augustine is unsatisfying, Loudovikos’ admiration for Maximus is more appealing, particularly as a corrective to Zizioulas, in whom the opposition of ‘person’ and ‘nature’ is so persistent. Maximus offers a vision of trinitarianism and of the human self that sees nature not as bound by necessity but as open to freedom and grace.

A final practical note is that Loudovikos’ style is dense and difficult, and readability is not helped by the fact that the text of the present book has consistent and distracting errors of grammar, spelling and typography. One hopes his editors will serve him better in the trilogy's later volumes, so that his synoptic theological work might more readily take its place in the English-speaking theological conversation.