If the chief planks of Irenaeus' theology are the doctrine of creation as an expression of the divine will and the concept of humanity as the image and likeness of God, what is the hinge? The answer that anthropology and cosmogony meet in the incarnation of Christ the Word did not, of course, elude Maximus the Confessor or Gustav Aulen, but Christ and his cross were neglected in John Hick's republication of the ‘Irenaean theodicy’, and recent English publications have failed to repair the loss because they dwell exclusively either on the creation or on the renewal of the image. It is not the least of the merits of Steenberg's book that it introduces English speakers to the compendious studies of Irenaeus by Orbe, Fantino and Aftermath; he deserves praise on his own account for his skilful interweaving of the familiar and the recondite, his parsimonious accuracy in the handling of the evidence and his tenacity in the pursuit of clear solutions to perennial difficulties. In chapter i he shows that the creation of humanity was the predestined consummation of God's handiwork from the first day, and in chapter ii that the doctrine of creation through two ‘hands’ leads Irenaeus to a doctrine of the coeternal Trinity, since he cannot countenance Jewish or Gnostic theories of creation through lower intermediaries. The subject of chapter iii is the constitution of the being whom God's hands fashioned on the sixth day: the flesh is assumed to be perishable by nature, and the effect of the fall is not to make it mortal but to estrange it from the immortal soul which would otherwise have forestalled its dissolution. Chapter iv explains that, while it was never God's intention to withhold knowledge from humanity for ever, the sin of Adam and Eve originates in a premature grasping at this knowledge at the instigation of Satan; the sin of their descendants, on the other hand, is prompted not by any external blandishments but by the fermentation of the diabolic leaven in their own souls. Chapter v is a short peroration, which does not in fact bring us ‘stumbling to perfection’, but only to the condign exposure of human sinfulness in the fall of Babel. Steenberg notes that Irenaeus seems to fall at times into a theory of hereditary sin which he spurns elsewhere as a Gnostic aberration (pp. 207–10); he also seems to be only half convinced by his own attempt to acquit Irenaeus of vacillation between contradictory views of death (pp. 191–2). The relation between the image and the likeness is rather summarily examined (p. 136), and it is not clear whether Steenberg believes the spirit that God breathes into Adam's nostrils to be identical with the one that he vouchsafes to the elect after their conversion. These questions, however, have been addressed at length by scholars whom Steenberg cites, and, while his book is not an encyclopaedic study, it is an indispensable complement to other English monographs on this architect of Christian orthodoxy.