This is a book which will be useful to students and scholars alike. In a scholarly yet readable style Beeley aims to ‘clarify the patristic materials themselves’ and to shed light on ‘unrecognized conflicts within the orthodox fold’. He remarks of Origen's quality as a scholar that he often looked at both sides of a question and was prepared to change his mind; in the steps of the master, Beeley too resists the pull of narrative history in the patristic period towards seeing the flux in intellectual approaches to theology in terms of right and wrong. This entails a reassessment of the historical and theological role of Athanasius; and a revision of the influence of Origen on theologians who did not always realise the provenance of what they were arguing. Beeley plays up the importance of Eusebius of Caesarea in the development of fourth-century Christology; his understanding of Christ as having both a human soul capable of suffering, and a human mind (in contrast to the inadequacy of Athanasius on this subject). In passing he notes Eusebius' angle on historical causation in the Diocletianic persecution: the theme of moral decline leading to competitive strife among church leaders and then institutional decay is reflected in Socrates of Constantinople's meta-narrative for Church-Empire relations in the later fourth century and beyond. (Beeley does not acknowledge Socrates as a principal source for Nicaea and after.) It is as if ambitio mala, which had once led to competitive strife over dignitas, provinces and territories among the imperial elite were mapped on to church rivalries over intellectual ideas. Contextualising the ideological strife in this way is one strategy for resisting the otherwise impossibility of writing fourth-century history without Athanasius at the centre. Beeley casts light on several theologians characterised by the dominant tradition as heretics: among them Arius (sketching his distinctive apophaticism) and Apollinarius. He is blunt about the limitations of Athanasius' Christology, as well as his manipulation of theology for political ends: but also acknowledges innovative elements in his thinking. Setting it against the theology embedded in Alexandrian liturgies is one way of highlighting the divide between theological theory and everyday praxis. More than once in the history surveyed here, it is the historical ‘losers’ whose arguments and ideas come to stick – men like Origen and (to some extent) Nestorius. The political theologians, men like Athanasius and Cyril, seem to win the fight but lose the argument. One of the enduring problems in this field is the extent to which ideas about God which language proves inadequate to express can be enjoined as theologically authoritative: even Leo had to admit to struggling with the subtleties of Greek phraseology as well as the issues that it sought to express. To paraphrase Gregory of Nazianzus (who is treated at some length and with acuity, and emphasised as influential in shaping Cyril's Christology), ‘what is not translateable is not enforceable’, perhaps.