In this rich selection of his published papers, Brian Daley shows, as ever, that one can embrace the ecclesiastical tradition while being a learned and candid scholar of this and its historic rivals. The first item, ‘Christ and Christologies’, gives a compendious but concise account of the development of ecclesiastical teaching on the person of Christ up to the age of Justinian, concluding that it was never discussed as an isolated tenet, but was always understood to involve fundamental beliefs on the nature of God, his creation of the world and the economy of salvation. In the second, ‘Seeing God in flesh: the range and implications of patristic Christology’, Daley explains how close academic study, informed by this complex understanding, led the theologian Rahner and the historian Grillmeier to view the Council of Chalcedon as a clearing of the path but not as a terminus after which there was nothing new but heresy. Daley does not think the condemnation of heresy an arbitrary or a trivial matter, but he argues in ‘The Word and his flesh: human weakness and the identity of Jesus in patristic Christology’ that the seemingly recondite questions of Trinitarian theology were debated with zeal because there was nothing recondite in the devotion of the Church to the God whom against all reason, made himself weak for our sakes in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The rejected traditions often share this conviction with those that triumph, and in his fourth paper, ‘Antioch and Alexandria: Christology as reflection in history’, Daley shows that if Cyril of Alexandria stresses the majesty of God and the omnipotence of grace, his Antiochene critics restrained the Church from metaphysical error and reminded it that regeneration is the fruit of grace.

Daley is not afraid to admit that figures whom we call orthodox have sometimes shrunk from formulae that were subsequently promulgated by oecumenical councils because these formulae, as construed by some contemporaries, seemed to profane the mystery of salvation. In two pieces on the Apollinarian controversy, ‘Divine transcendence and human transformation: Gregory of Nyssa’s Apollinarian Christology’ and ‘Heavenly man and eternal Christ: Apollinarius and Gregory of Nyssa on the personal identity of the Saviour’, he argues that the union of two natures in one hypostasis was less palatable to Gregory than to the Fathers at Chalcedon because they feared that it might imply a confusion of the divine and the human, whereas in his view (and that of the Chalcedonian Fathers) the transformation of humanity by Christ would have no purpose if God himself were subject to change. In ‘Word, soul and flesh: Origen and Augustine on the person of Christ’, he shows that, for all their differences, these pillars of heterodoxy and orthodoxy agree that Christ is the ubiquitous subject of Scripture, that his nature as God was revealed in the incarnation, that he possessed a human soul, that he mediates between us and God both by revelation and by incarnation and that the goal of this mediation is to lead us by faith to deeper knowledge of truth. Noting that the Christology of Augustine is often neglected, he surmises in ‘The giant’s twin substances: Ambrose and the Christology of Augustine’s Contra sermonem Arianorum’ that the tendency of the young Augustine to dwell more on the duality of natures than on the centrality of the Word in the incarnation reflects the influence of Ambrose and his hymns. In ‘A humble mediator: the distinctive elements in Augustine’s Christology’, he finds this distinctiveness to consist in the reciprocity between the gratuitous self-abasement of God and the unmerited elevation of the sinner.

Four contributions follow which develop the themes and arguments of Daley’s doctoral thesis on Leontius of Byzantium. In ‘Unpacking the Chalcedonian formula: from studies in ambiguity to saving mystery’, he points out that the Council of Chalcedon did not set out to speak the last word on Christology, and that subsequent debate aimed not to refine its technicalities but to reconcile its formularies with the teaching of great theologians on the saving and transformative person of Christ. The subject of ‘Apollo as a Chalcedonian: a new fragment of a controversial work from early sixth-century Constantinople’ is a fabricated oracle of Apollo which asserts the possibility of God’s suffering while the Godhead remains impassible; in his case for dating it between 511 and 518, Daley provides a lucid and detailed account of the frustrated efforts of emperors and prelates after Chalcedon to find another ground of consensus. The historical narrative is expanded in ‘Leontius of Byzantium and the reception of the Christological definition’, which concludes that for Leontius Christological reflection commences with ‘the divine fait accompli of Jesus Christ’ (p. 302). In ‘Nature and the “Mode of Union”: late patristic models for the unity of Christ’, the assertion of Leontius that it is the mode of union rather than the anatomy of nature which constitutes the mystery is the basis of Daley’s attempts to explain to modern theologians that the debates surrounding Chalcedon never lost sight of the fundamental importance of the person of Christ, transcending all formulae, as the God-sent bearer of salvation and ground of communion between creator and creature. The entry of God the Word into our own history, both collective and personal, is thus the foundation of all the metaphysical reasoning which has assisted the Church in its understanding of that critical event, as Daley contends in ‘Logos as reason and logos incarnate: philosophy, theology and the voices of tradition’. The final essay, ‘“Faithful and True”: early Christian apocalyptic and the person of Christ’ enters less familiar territory in its study of the Trinitarian basis of the ascension of Isaiah, but concludes in keeping with the general tenor of the volume that the apocalyptic themes which prove most enduring in Christin thought – in Oecumenius and Andrew of Caesarea, no less than in Maximus the Confessor – are the irruption of God into history and the consequent transformation of humankind in body and soul.