Lloyd Patterson, whose scholarship is celebrated in this collection ten years after his death in Oxford, was best known for a study on Methodius. Homage is paid to this in Katherina Bracht's ingenious conjecture that the derivative perfection which Methodius accords to Christ represents a fusion of two hitherto conflicting notions of self-sufficiency. Thematic affinities in other essays are disguised by the chronological arrangement according to subject. In two outstanding contributions, Richard Norris (writing on Irenaeus) and James Ernest (on Athanasius) expose the difficulties that result, in any ‘orthodox’ theology, from the necessity of reconciling the worship of Christ with the proclamation of a single God. Christopher Beeley's essay on pneumatology in Nazianzen's Oration 31 could have served as a preliminary study for Joseph Trigg's comparison of Nazianzen with Origen, though Beeley (rightly in my view) is more circumspect in crediting Nazianzen with a theory of development in doctrine after the closure of the canon. A similar belief might almost be credited to Tertullian, if Andrew McGowan is right (as he must be) to argue that the Spirit in Tertullian is revealed to us through his own work in the fructification of knowledge already given. Khaled Anatolios, strangely employing the plural of signum as the singular, maintains that knowledge of God in Augustine supervenes on the recognition of both one's inner self and the outward form of Christ as ciphers of the invisible. Annewies van den Hoek derives from Clement a similar thesis that knowledge of the archetypal Godhead is achieved by assimilation to Christ the image. Ute Possekel finds that Ephrem uses symbolism to communicate what others defend by ratiocination; his peculiarity lies, however, not (as she opines) in his hospitality to cataphatic discourse but in his fecund amplification of biblical symbols. Brian Daley proves in detail that Chalcedonian Christology presupposes the Nicene Trinity, since the unity of Christ could not be preserved unless the Church posited a Word distinct from the Father to take on flesh. The argument and the data are not wholly unfamiliar; neither are those which supply the preamble to Robin Jensen's ‘Theophany and the invisible God’, though her iconographic readings in the second half will be new to many historians of dogma. Susan Holman's ‘God and the poor’ does not quite match the title of the volume, although it shows that Christians, unlike Jews, were able to embody the eleemosynary virtues in the magnified image of Christ. Equally extraneous (though hardly unwelcome) is Robert Daly's salutary demonstration that liturgical change in antiquity was often the consequence rather than the cause of evolution in Christian doctrine – a principle confirmed by all modern liturgies whose origins lie open to inspection. Robert Grant's ‘God on storms’, which completes the book, is more a tantalising menu than a meal. There is much that is very good in this volume, and nothing simply bad; the scope is comprehensive, so long as we assume that there is no place for Gnostics, Arians, Eunomians or Nestorians in the catholic tradition.