This is the first of two volumes of Brian Daley’s collected essays. The other volume gathers together essays on patristic Christology. This first volume is devoted to questions of biblical interpretation, and in particular to patristic interpretation of the Scriptures. It was widely held by the liberal theology that prevailed in the middle of the last century that, although patristic doctrine appealed to the Scriptures, the patristic method of interpreting the Scriptures was, not only no longer tenable, but had never been a way of engaging with the Scriptures and their meaning. This entailed that the whole fabric of traditional Christian doctrine was groundless, for the arguments from Scripture adduced to support the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, the Church, the Sacraments and our final hope were simply invalid. This was a much more fundamental challenge to traditional Christian teaching than the challenges to the authority of the Bible posed by what has come to known as the ‘historical-critical method’ which, in a rather different way, had fragmented the notion of biblical revelation. It is this fundamental challenge to the authority of the Fathers that Brian Daley takes issue with in this volume, beginning with the very first essay. As an example of this liberal attack on patristic doctrine, Daley takes an ‘Evangelical Anglican with a deep knowledge of patristic theology, Bishop R. P. C. Hanson’, for whom Origen’s – and more widely, the Fathers’ – recourse to allegorical interpretation is ‘at best … quaint and sometimes poetical; at worst it is a device for obscuring the meaning of the Bible from its readers’ (quoted on p. 12). Daley’s response is fundamental: Scripture is to be seen as finding its meaning in the light of death and resurrection of Christ, so that the whole of Scripture is seen as a cohesive whole, capable of manifold interpretations, which embrace – not as an addition, but as of the essence – what they mean for us: all of which entails that the whole is to be seen as ‘wrapped by God in a veil of mystery’ which is only to be entered ‘in a spirit of reverence, a sense that one [is] walking on holy ground’ (p. 14). The first essay goes on to illustrate what this means from some of the Fathers – Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, Augustine. As in all the essays in this book, Daley makes his case with eloquence, based on a thorough knowledge of the texts discussed, and familiarity with all the secondary literature. The second essay is concerned with interpretation of the Psalms; the third with the way Scriptural revelation has to be seen as multiple and manifold, to be discerned through a variety of interlocking symbols and figures. This first part closes with a meditation on the ‘Woman of many names: Mary in Orthodox and Catholic theology’, which traces the way in which devotion to Mary expresses itself by adorning her with many names – the most obvious example of this being the Greek Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God, which spills over into homilies on Mary, of which Daley has given us a translation in his On the dormition of Mary: early patristic homilies (1998). This essay continues with a comparison of Orthodox and Catholic Mariology, focusing on a comparison between the Orthodox Bulgakov and the Catholic Rahner.

Part ii is more technical, concerned with Origen’s On first principles, which culminates in discussion of Scriptural exegesis. Part iii concerns the Cappadocian Gregories. First, Gregory of Nazianzus (‘the Theologian’), who in a wealth of theological reflections seems never directly to engage in verse-by-verse exegesis, but rather engages in exegesis more indirectly. The title of the essay, ‘Walking through the Word of God’, takes up a metaphor he uses several times, seeing in consideration of the events of Christ’s life, or in his various names, a journey in which we participate as we reflect on them. Rather different are Gregory’s Poemata arcana, in which the fundamental Christian doctrines are presented in ‘Homeric Dress’ – a tour de force in itself. On the other hand, the other Gregory (of Nyssa) engages in a good deal of exegesis. One article translates Psalm vi and provides a commentary; the other is concerned with Gregory’s treatises on death (including his famous ‘Platonic’ dialogue) and funerary homilies (of which Daley has now provided a translation: Gregory of Nyssa, On death and eternal life [2022]).

Part iv contains two fundamental articles on theological method in the sixth century: one on Boethius, the other on Leontius of Byzantium (the question of what is meant by his ‘Origenism’).

Part v looks at scriptural interpretation in matters concerning redemption and eschatology. An essay on early Christian views of Redemption in Christ at first seems to be a survey of the variety of metaphors used by Scripture and the Fathers to capture something of what is involved in Redemption or Salvation (both of which are themselves metaphors). Towards the end, Daley pushes his thought further, arguing that ‘God must work our salvation by becoming one of us’, for salvation cannot be conceived simply as ‘a “work”, however dramatic and providential’, for ‘salvation simply is God’s personal presence among us, as “Emmanuel”’ (pp. 343–4). An article on the hope for resurrection again sets the variety of ways in which resurrection of the body is seen as concerned with what it is to be human in the context of the Lord’s resurrection, for it ‘is that Easter Gospel that is the heart of all Christian eschatology’ (p. 364). The final article in this section is a classic article of Daley’s – ‘Apokatastasis and “honorable silence” in the eschatology of Maximus the Confessor’ – a paper given at a historic conference on Maximus in 1980, in which Daley took issue with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s suggestion that Maximus, although committed to the doctrine of the final restoration of all, draws over it a veil of honourable silence. Nearly fifty years on, with renewed interest in apokatastasis, Daley’s arguments seem to me unanswerable.

Part vi moves beyond patristics as such with an article on Henri de Lubac’s role in what was first dismissed as ‘la nouvelle théologie’, for which Daley claims Newman as a precursor and demonstrates its embrace in the decree Dei verbum of Vatican II.