The object of this book is to show that Augustine's eschatology combines two streams of thought, one flowing from Origen, the other from Jerome, his pertinacious censor and occasional disciple. The wellspring of Origen's Christian philosophy is the classical learning which he imbibed from Ammonius Saccas; Jerome is above all a translator and exegete whose proficiency as a stylist is in inverse ratio to his profundity as a theologian. Augustine charges Origen with an exaggerated notion of human freedom which implies a dualistic account of the body-soul relation and cannot be reconciled with the scriptural teaching that our destinies are fixed irrevocably at the point of death. Jerome and Augustine made common cause against Pelagius, and hence against Origen insofar as he was the putative ancestor of the doctrine that we can save ourselves without divine assistance; Jerome, however, remained incapable of the stringent logic which convinced the mature Augustine that our merits have no share in determining the will of God. Instead he drew up a catalogue of Origen's errors regarding the Trinity and the resurrection, the gravest of which (exposed by his own translation of a treatise On the seraphim, and meriting a whole chapter in this volume) was the interpretation of the angels in Isaiah's vision of God as the Son and the Holy Spirit (pp. 239–75). At the same time, Jerome and many of his contemporaries are indebted to Origen's teaching that the incarnation was God's subterfuge against the vigilance of the devil (p. 281). Fürst, like a number of Origen's ancient critics, construes him in a more Platonic manner than would seem to me to be warranted by his cautious phrasing of his own doctrines in First principles, or by the letter to Gregory Thaumaturgus, cited here on the opening page, in which he explains the purpose of his studies in Greek philosophy. Excellent – in my view, decisive – arguments are advanced on p. 59 against the fashionable identification of the Christian Origen with his homonym, the colleague of Plotinus; on the other hand, the assertion that there is ‘no ground’ for the conjecture that his teacher was Ammonius the Peripatetic rather than Ammonius Saccas appears to be simply an act of vociferation. A long book could have been profitably abridged if the excursus on Origen's parentage had been omitted. When Epiphanius states that he was an Egyptian ‘by race’ (genos), we are free to believe or to doubt, but not to commandeer this testimony as evidence that Origen's mother may have been Greek by race but an Egyptian by civic status (p. 49). Nevertheless this study is, for the most part, a learned and judicious survey of the relations between three luminaries of ancient Christendom, each of whom, though in ways diverse and sometimes unperceived, continues to play a salient role in the shaping of ecclesiastical dogma.