Carter here presents his 2007 dissertation. He provoked mixed anticipations in this, its perforce candid, reader: the format is unrevised, overweight and oversize; there are no indices; and a list of acknowledgements that includes a friend's provision of an English version of Muehlenberg's important 1968 Habilitationsschrift on Apollinaris and assistance with reading literature in modern foreign languages does not inspire confidence in the basic level of scholarship from which Carter started. None the less the work that I read deserves the measured commendations on its cover: ‘very thorough and thought-provoking’ (Anthony Meredith); and ‘a valuable contribution to our understanding of Apollinaris’ (Andrew Louth). Apollinaris is of first importance as initiator of the long-standing and not yet concluded controversy on the nature or natures of Christ and serious students would profit from acquaintance with Carter's work. Its main title indicates a thesis from which a broader account and evaluation of Apollinaris's thought on the person and work of Christ is developed through welcome English translation, and where necessary through equally welcome restoration, of all the relevant texts with analysis and commentary on them. The thesis is that Apollinaris was inconsistent, especially on the logical geometry of Christ: a dichotomy of two elements (‘Word’ and ‘flesh’) or trichotomy of three (‘Divine Mind’, ‘body’ and ‘soul=human animation’). The inconsistency, according to Carter, arose because Apollinaris changed his mind: as Rufinus had said he did and Lietzmann, who rediscovered the subject in 1904 and spoke of Apollinaris's ‘two Christological theories’, affirmed. In essence Lietzmann's position is upheld, fortified and elaborated here in the light of later discussions. Apollinaris, it is argued, maintained successively two distinct Christological theories each with its logical and soteriological correlates: a ‘compositional’ dichotomistic theory, cast in terms of ‘synthesis’ and ‘mixture’; and a trichotomistic in terms of ‘assumption’. A plausible account of how and when Apollinaris's change of mind could have occurred is given, illuminated by good and often telling observations on Apollinaris and his relation to Christological controversy in the period and its aftermath. Carter understands and successfully conveys much of the depth and certainly the variety of his subject's thought. Is his thesis valid? He proves that Apollinaris's arguments changed (if that was ever open to real doubt). Apollinaris consistently taught that Christ had no sin-prone human conscious intellect and will; it was, surely, a fundamental premise of his teaching. I am not satisfied that he changed his mind about how that premise was to be fitted into an account of Christ as saving model and means of salvation. On these matters, I guess, he simply oscillated and I reckon it a moot point how far that constitutes inconsistency. He walked, as it were, with two feet but danced now on one now on the other. I give weight to Charles Raven's view in his classic monograph on Apollinaris that since Apollinaris accepted the inheritance of all human natural characteristics (i.e. was a ‘traducian’) he must always have been a ‘trichotomist’; moreover that since anti-Nicenes (I think especially of Eunomius) insisted that Christ was not a man ‘made up of body and soul’, it is unlikely that Apollinaris would have followed suit.

Apollinaris has only one passing, though illuminating, reference, on Pauline eschatology, in this distinguished volume by Paul Blowers dealing with the patristic doctrine of God and creature in their relation and rapport. He believes that after the rich harvest in recent years of studies dealing with particular aspects of early Christianity's theology of creation there is room for a consideration of what he calls ‘the big picture’. He takes a broad view of what constitutes the ‘early Christianity’ of that picture: George of Pisidia (seventh century) and Anastasius of Sinai (eighth century) figure in it; Maximus the Confessor is there too and prominently, with the occasional reference to John of Damascus. As for the studies, he is enviably au fait and up to date with them. His own book is as much a work of theology in its own right as it is of ecclesiastical history in its particular aspect as history of ideas. Von Balthasar's presentation of Christianity as aesthetic revelation has influenced his scope and method. He offers, like Von Balthasar, a general evocation of the Christian understanding of nature in relation to God, which is, as more than one patristic theologian writes, a drama in which rational and irrational creation partake as agents and spectators. The ‘divine strategy’, as he aptly glosses the Greek ‘economy’, embraces world-making and world-shaping. Sequence is not neglected, but this is not a book in which the historical succession of teachers and schools of thought is analysed or indeed much attended to. That is not a fault but a consequence of its method and style. There is plenty of detail in the ‘big picture’: well-chosen quotations are given due prominence; copious, good and, so far as I have checked them, always accurate, references supplied. The book's nine chapters give first an introduction setting out its scope, followed by a presentation and analysis of the ‘legacies of Greco-Roman cosmological wisdom’, with their insights and challenges to the new religion. Chapter iii looks in the same way at the ‘legacies of Hellenistic-Jewish cosmological wisdom’, and particularly at Wisdom of Solomon and Philo. Emphasis is placed on the incomprehensible and indeed strictly meaningless phrase,‘creation out of nothing’ as the inherited formula asserting the independence of God. Subsequent chapters discuss patristic interpretation of the creation narrative in Genesis and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. A well-judged chapter vi compares the approaches of Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and Maximus to the theology of ‘The beginning and the end’. The roles of Christ the Creator and the Holy Spirit in the cosmic drama of the Incarnation and the Remaking of Creation are the subject of chapter viii. Chapter ix looks at the divine economy as the framework of devotion and ritual and finds its contemplation to be their paramount objective. A note of polemic is sounded in a pithy repudiation of the objection that Christian theology promoted a crudely exploitative attitude towards the natural world. The repudiation is convincing so far as this period of Christian history is concerned; plenty of texts can be found which at least encourage the attitude of stewardship. It must always, though, be a reproach, uncomfortable for Christian theology and Christianity in general, that it is anthropomorphic and anthropocentric: think, for example, of the way from its biblical beginnings it made the sun and moon mere celestial timepieces and man image of God and little lower than the angels. The author has not quite got the measure of that. An eloquent epilogue, ‘Drama of the divine economy’, recapitulates the main theme rounding off a fine book. Granted its scope and method, I do not think that it could be much better composed. You might complain that it tells you several times what it is going to say and several times again also what has just been said, but the complainer will be trying to avoid a charge of sycophancy.