This is a curate's egg of a book, with good and not so good parts in almost equal measures.

To start with the good parts: I. is to be thanked for choosing a subject matter that had been in need of a scholarly treatment for some time: ‘the overall aim of this volume is … to focus on the moment of transition between the third and the fourth centuries when, in philosophy as in art, old and new, classical culture and Christian civilization overlap’ (p. 14). Since the subject is vast and the volume diminutive, I. has had, inevitably, to be selective in his choice of method and themes. His method is to intersperse analysis of selected passages from the Enneads and the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers with brief descriptions of significant trends in the literature and the arts of the time. His theme is the likely influence of the pagan philosophy of Plotinus on the intellectual and artistic life in the century and a half that followed his death. As I. notes, Platonists, for whom the intelligible world is immaterial and the human soul immortal, offered the only philosophical system broadly compatible with Christian dogmas, which were then in the process of being theorised and expressed artistically. Even so, a certain amount of adjustment was necessary since Plotinus and Porphyry, who, among the Platonists, are chronologically closest to the Cappadocians, had been explicit in their rejection of Christianity. The adjustments needed, however, proved to be small since Plotinus consistently relied on aesthetic concepts and metaphors not so much to glorify the attractiveness of the world of sense but mostly to evoke the other-worldly beauties of the intelligible realm.

A careful scholar on the whole, I. is not unaware of the uncertain nature of the evidence. Although Gregory of Nyssa's upbringing in a Christian household and his early training in philosophy and rhetoric are reasonably well documented, we simply do not know how direct was his acquaintance with the writings of Plotinus, whom he never refers to by name. Did he have access to the Enneads, as edited by Porphyry some 30 years after Plotinus’ death, or did he use compendia? Had he, as I. speculates (pp. 32–3), even read Ennead I.6[1] (On Beauty), the best known and the most literary of Plotinus’ tractates? Uncertainty on that score inevitably hampers exegesis, as it does in the better documented case of Augustine. Such is presumably the reason why I. chose to rely on a study of figurative language to back his claim that both Plotinus and the Cappadocians, especially Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, relied on an overlapping stock of metaphors, which also reflected (or contributed to initiate) trends in the plastic arts of their time.

I.’s exegetical scrupulousness is in evidence in his handling of two much commented passages of Ennead I.6[1], in which Plotinus argues that symmetry cannot be a criterion of beauty and later uses the metaphor of the sculptor to urge human souls to engage in the process of catharsis that would lead them upwards to the apprehension of the higher realities. Although I. brings nothing new to the analysis of the first passage, he usefully records the divergent interpretations to which it has given rise before bringing to our attention passages in which both Gregory and Basil, in their different ways, defend the didactic and anagogic function of painting. Still on the subject of the plastic arts, I. relates Plotinus’ disapproval of naturalistic portraits with the revival of the classical style in the age of Gallienus, and he discusses a possible link between the philosopher's reliance on metaphors of light to express intelligible beauty and the contemporary taste for gold, light and colour, as evident, for instance, in the use of dichroic glass to fashion the Lycurgus Cup (now in the British Museum).

In the final chapter, I. discusses Plotinus’ choice of terminology to describe the soul's reaction to beauty, both sensible and intelligible, and he speculates on the likely influence that the resulting account had on the Cappadocians. The chapter, the most ambitious of the book, is also the weakest. Adopting a piecemeal approach, I. first makes a list of the concepts used by Plotinus to describe the pathê felt by the human soul in its encounter with beauty: thambos (‘wonder’), ekplêxis (‘astonishment’), pothos (‘longing’) and ptoêsis (‘excitement’). He studies their occurrences in various Greek poets, from Homer to Callimachus, before turning to Plato's own usage in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. He draws two conclusions: (1) for Plotinus, the object of vision makes no difference to the nature of the soul's response: ‘Whether one observes a human body, or contemplates the stars, or considers the beautiful in itself, the soul feels the same πάθη’ (p. 80); (2) having pointed out that Plotinus loads these concepts with connotations of pleasure and pain, I. concludes: ‘After considering the meaning of the individual terms of πάθη indicated by Plotinus, one may wonder if their antinomical character … can be traced before Plotinus’ (p. 83).

Both conclusions are rash. The first conclusion is to be questioned on the ground that in tractate III.6[26] (On Impassibility) Plotinus argued that the soul, being immaterial, is immune to affections (pathê). Although this point of doctrine led him into difficulties of various kinds, he did not deviate from it later, a fact that accounts for his sparing use of paschein and its cognates in later discussions of beauty. Tractate V.8[31] (On Intelligible Beauty) contains none of the above terms in the sense singled out by I. Tractate III.5[50] (On Love) opens with what is, on the face of it, a rather odd question: is love a being (god or daimôn) or an affection of the human soul (pathos ti tês psychês). To address the question, Plotinus begins by drawing a distinction between different levels of soul, each of which generates a form of erôs. While the lower soul in us, whose desires are for the beauties of this world, experiences a pathos, the higher soul generates a reality (ousia, III.5[50]3.1–2). As Plotinus explains: ‘The Love which belongs to the higher soul … would be of this kind, himself, too, looking on high, since he is that soul's follower and has come into being from her and by her, and satisfies himself with the contemplation of the gods’ (3.19–21). Given the significance that Plotinus attached to the doctrine of the impassibility of the soul, I. might have wondered whether, or in what sense, the four concepts that he had selected for examination apply to the purified soul's ascent to Intellect and beyond. As for his second conclusion, it falls victim to his narrowly piecemeal approach to the text of his authors. Had he but considered Plato's use of the words in their wider context in the Phaedrus, he would have seen that Plato had already drawn attention to the mixed nature of the emotions felt by the soul as it comes to the vision of the place beyond the heavens. In 251d7–e3, he had Socrates note that the soul then hovers: ‘between joy and anguish’ and that it is ‘distraught at being in such strange case, perplexed and frenzied’ (trans. Hackforth). Whatever Plotinus’ later thoughts on the issue, he clearly had the Platonic lines in mind when writing the passage that Porphyry included in Ennead I.6[1].

Finally, a complaint has to be registered about I.’s style of writing, if only as a warning to publishers who take on manuscripts from scholars without a solid command of English. In spite of its attractive subject matter the book is no joy to read: the text is peppered with obsolete and rare foreign idioms (such as ‘equiparate’, ‘paraenesis’ and ‘rifiniture’), the syntax is occasionally wobbly, and I.’s choice of words often betray an ignorance of English idiom (‘notorious’ is not synonymous with ‘famous’ and ‘to reprise’ is no acceptable alternative for ‘to return to’). Typos abound.

The endnotes are mostly helpful and the bibliography pleasingly international. This said, the Reverend Michel Aubineau SJ would have been amused to see himself referred to as Marguerite Abineau and his book quoted as Introduction to Grégoire de Nysse, Traité de la Verginité (as opposed to Virginité).