This stimulating volume, emerging from a conference in Leuven in 2017, has a wide range of material covering alpha and omega from Plato to John Philoponus and beyond. The essays are therefore intended to explore contours of the theme, rather than to be exhaustive: the aim is to give illustrative examples of how both pagans and Christians thought that a view of the origins of the cosmos might shape views of its end or its telos more broadly construed. For some of course, the cosmos has no beginning or end, and hence the first essay (by Andrea Falcon) covers the complexities of Aristotle’s own eternalism, but also some surprising inheritors of this view beyond the peripatos, including Panaetius of Rhodes and probably Lucianus Ocellus. Among those holding an eternalist position, there are those for whom the cosmos is intrinsically indestructible, such as the author speaking for Ocellus who took the view that the supra-lunary realm always acts upon the sub-lunary realm and thereby preserves the whole; others propounding a contingent eternalism see the world’s perdurance as guaranteed by a god, the view taken by Aristotle, which also goes back to Plato. Two essays on Proclus (by Alain Lernould and Marije Martijn) focus more on creation and individual immortality, since Proclus has no cosmic eschatology. Marc-Antoine Gavray’s chapter on the controversy between Simplicius and John Philoponus on the origin of the world explores Simplicius’ criticisms of the latter’s views of the perishability of the world and the status of the heavenly realm. Jörg Frey offers a New Testament contribution, examining the temporal logic of John’s Gospel, arguing that Johannine theological reasoning proceeds from eschatology (here, the death, resurrection and exaltation of Christ) to protology, rather than the other way round. Frey argues that since the Gospel is narrated from a post-Easter perspective, this is the framework for reading the high Christology of not only the Gospel narrative, but also the Prologue with its statements about the eternity of the Logos and the Christological Schöpfungsmittlerschaft. In the nature of the case, there is a degree of speculation here, and it might be more difficult than Frey allows to come to a clear conclusion on this point, given that – by the time that John is writing – the pre-existence of Christ is already a widely distributed Christian theologoumenon. Van Kooten’s very substantial essay, with a similarly epic title too big to be included here, is more than twice as long as any of the other chapters, and covers both New Testament and patristic ground on the extent to which there is an ontological gap between God and the eschatological cosmos. Van Kooten seeks to argue that ‘Paul’s own cosmology is deeply Stoic’, and therefore the cosmos emerges from God and in the end is identical with God, seeing in Paul an egressus-regressus scheme. How far Paul makes use of specifically ‘Stoic prepositions’, and uses them to construe an ontological identification between God and the cosmos is unclear, however. These ideas are more clearly akin to Valentinian theology, the theme of Einar Thomassen’s essay, which builds on his monograph The spiritual seed. Similarly, John Turner’s essay on (Sethian) Gnostic works shows the variation in those treatises on the extent to which the mystic is or is not assimilated to the supreme principle. Finally, one should note the essay by Benjamin Gleede, which resists the temptation to think in exclusively temporal terms when discussing eschatology, and explores patristic views of whether location is needed to accommodate resurrection bodies. Gregory of Nyssa’s view of resurrection, for example, removes the need for any place for a risen body.

Overall, this volume is a smorgasbord of material covering over a millennium of authors. The volume retains, by the skin of its teeth, a degree of coherence, although the themes covered in the essays can be quite tangentially related to the central issues of the volume. But, then, what could be excluded from a scope extending From protology to eschatology?