The papers in this interesting volume are united, as Markéta Dudziková says in her introduction, by their attention to the complementarity of pattern and image in cosmological and theological writing of late antiquity. Lenka Karfikova’s paper, ‘The iconic structure of reality in the Platonic tradition and its Christian reinterpretation’, introduces the principal themes of the volume through a careful analysis of the relation between the phenomenal realm and the paradigm contemplated by the Demiurge. She goes on to show that, in Plotinus, the forms reside in nous, which is an image of the One, and are impressed on matter by soul, the image of nous; in Christian thought, on the other hand, the sole image of God – a living one, as time is the living image of eternity – is the Son of God or Monogenes (cf. Timaeus 92a), who serves as an archetype for the human created ‘according to the image of God’ at Genesis i. 26. Plotinus’ own description of the sensible cosmos as the best possible image of the intelligible (Enneads 2.9.4) is noted by Ota Gál, ‘The pattern and the image in Plotinus: rethinking Plato’s conflict with the poets’ (p. 53), although the main goal of this paper is to show that Plotinus and Plato did not differ so much as is commonly supposed in their evaluation of plastic arts.

Philo of Alexandria is the subject of three studies in the second section. In ‘Day one and the intelligible world: an Alexandrian exegetical tradition?’, Gregory Sterling argues that Philo adopts the Platonic distinction between the intelligible and the sensible worlds to explain the two successive accounts of the creation of humanity. It may be because the argumentative structure of Philo’s tract On the making of man is obscure that Clement, Origen and Eusebius all neglect his distinction between the two worlds, although they discriminate sharply between the outward man of flesh at Genesis ii. 1–7 and the incorporeal soul which is the image of God, or more properly Christ, at Genesis i. 26–28. In Markéta Dudziková’s ‘An image ascending to its archetype according to Philo of Alexandria’, the analogy between God as charioteer of the cosmos and intellect as charioteer of the soul is found to account both for our ability to know God and for our inability to know him as he knows himself. In ‘Platonic patternism and the ideal creation’, Justin Rogers finds evidence of the adoption by Clement, Origen and Didymus of Philo’s equation of the Platonic ideas with thoughts of God. All three scholars seem to have been intimidated by classicists into postulating a ‘middle Platonic’ source both for this opinion and for the term ‘noetic cosmos’ which Philo applies to this template; yet the antecedents are (to say the least) very poorly attested, and no Platonist, whether early, middle or late, had such a strong incentive to innovate on the Timaeus as the Jewish philosopher with his unwavering faith in the self-sufficiency of God.

The third section is assigned to Christian authors in pre-Nicene Alexandria. Pierluigi Banna, in ‘The copy and the revelation: action and content of the logos in Clement of Alexandria’, explains that Clement’s appropriation of pagan tools and concepts is underwritten by his belief that all humans have some inkling of the divine by virtue of their creation in God’s image. He seems none the less to exaggerate the ‘audacity’ of Clement (p. 133), who never admits that a philosopher could anticipate a Christian doctrine without some plagiarism from the Old Testament (p. 132 n. 42).

Sincero Mantelli’s ‘Servant mysterium trinitatis: the role of the seraphim in concealing and revealing the nature of God in Origen’s work and its sources’ presents us with a model of close scrutiny, as it first contrasts Origen’s reading of Isaiah vi. 2 with that of the Jewish commentators for whom the wings of the seraphim cover their own faces, not that of God, and proceeds to compare his exegesis in First principles, where the seraphim represent Christ and the Holy Spirit, with that of his Homilies on Isaiah, where they are merely seraphim. In the course of his examination, Mantelli plausibly conjectures that Rufinus has emended the Trinitarian exegesis to fit later canons of orthodoxy. First principles is contrasted with the Commentary on John in Pavel Dudik’s ‘Wisdom as structure: Origen of Alexandria and his exegesis of Proverbs 8.22’, in which Wisdom is found in both cases to be a passive principle, as the Greek verb ektisen (created) implies, containing either prefigurements of the temporal world or underlying structures of thoughts and logoi, which are made active by the second person of the Trinity in his creative role as Word.

It is not always easy to find novel elements in the exegetic practice of authors after Origen. Vito Limone is, as always, the perfect scholar, and whether or not his article ‘Image of Christ in Eusebius’ letter to Constantia’ has demonstrated the influence of Origen on this document, he certainly shows that it mirrors Eusebius’ teaching in his undisputed works on the impossibility of picturing God and the asymmetry in Christ between the morphê or form of God and that of man. In ‘The world as an idea and reality: Ambrose’s concept of creation’, David Vopřada finds the saint’s strongest claim to originality in his ascending triad ‘umbra–imago–veritas’, where the umbra is the foreshadowing of truth in a past event and the imago the present celebration of this with an eye to the future consummation. Viacheslav Lytvynenko, in ‘Exegesis of Scripture in the pseudo-Athanasian Disputatio contra Arium’, seems to hint that the author’s use of allegorical proofs savours more of Origen than of Athanasius; this comparison, however, ignores not only the difference between analogy and allegory but also the pedantic literalism with which Origen goes about establishing doctrines from his prooftexts. Allegory is the early Christian device (by no means peculiar to Origen) whereby texts which appear to have no doctrinal import are turned into subtle reverberations of truths that are taught elsewhere in the plain and literal sense.