The object of this book is to show how Clement, watering what the philosophers planted, became the founder of the apophatic method in Christian talk of God, which characterises him only by negating all that is predicable of his creatures. Hägg writes as a Christian rather than a Platonist when he urges that an apophatic theology implies a cataphatic one, since ‘otherwise there would be nothing to negate’. His sense that a Christian cannot serve two masters keeps him safe from the common error of making Clement merely a satellite to pagan luminaries, and he is careful not to treat likeness in vocabulary as proof of unanimity in doctrine. He is at his best when, following Eric Osborn against the Byzantine patriarch Photius and a number of modern scholars, he maintains that no distinction between the word in potency and the Word in act is discernible in Clement's writings (pp. 185–94); in the same chapter on Christology, he offers a lucid, cogent and (so far as I know) original exegesis of some dark passages in the Excerpts from Theodotus which have been construed by others to mean that the Word in heaven is not the incarnate Saviour (pp. 197–206). On the other hand, in his chapter on God, he mixes what the early Church considered to be immiscible, yoking Clement with his forebears and contemporaries in the worship of a being styled indifferently ho ôn and to ôn, ‘the one who is’ and ‘that which is’ (p. 172); in fact he discovers only the first in Clement, though he shows that he also spoke of God as hen or ‘one’ (though not as to hen, ‘the One’, as in the manner of Plato and Plotinus). What he quotes from Numenius is not the appellative to ôn but the participle ôn, ‘existent’, together with an ambiguous locution which John Whittaker (in contrast, for example to E. H. Gifford) has construed as an application of the biblical term ho ôn to the Creator. Elsewhere one meets the occasional obiter dictum which betrays the limitations of Hägg's project. Only in a footnote does he acknowledge the suspicions that have gathered round the Secret Gospel of Mark since the death of its publicist, Morton Smith (pp. 137–8). He asserts, without offering evidence or argument to convince those who demur, that the Christian Origen was taught by ‘the same Ammonius’ as Plotinus (p. 29). He decides that Atticus, Plutarch and Numenius were untypical of the Platonists in affirming the creation of the world in time (p. 119), but does not say why these three – the most distinguished Platonists of the second century – should have been less representative than Alcinous, who (if his name has been correctly preserved) is wholly ignored in the subsequent tradition. This will be a useful book for the student who has yet to gain detailed knowledge of the sources, but it is not quite comprehensive, and not so enterprising or original as the preface and conclusion invite the reader to suppose.