This book is a christological grenade which should be pondered and savoured: it constitutes a deceptively instructive theological workout. Deceptively instructive because its vast learning is worn lightly in lucid and accessible prose, and because it addresses a theologoumenon long since thought defunct, showing it to be of considerable merit. Gaine has begun to deliver handsomely on the christological lacuna carved out by his last exceptional book, Will There Be Free Will in Heaven? (2003) and made the best case possible for a renewed consideration of Christ's beatific vision. Both books show Gaine to be a theologian – historical, philosophical, systematic and pastoral – of the highest order.

The book's structure is as clear as its prose: two parts, each containing four chapters. The first part addresses general theological objections to the idea of Christ's beatific vision on earth. To the charge that ‘no one thinks that anymore’, Gaine points out that while indeed the beatific vision has fallen into theological desuetude since the 1950s, the idea was in fact key in the condemnation of Jon Sobrino's christological texts in 2006 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: contra Sobrino, Jesus was not (just) a man of faith, but had vision of God in his earthly life. To those who say that ‘it's not in the Bible’, Gaine does not disagree, but makes the important points that the same could be said of many other key doctrines (e.g. the Trinity), and that scripture does indeed contain a question about Christ's extraordinary knowledge, which might plausibly be explained by the beatific vision. The key is Christ's eschatological outlook and his salvific purpose: as revealer of the Father's kerygma and pioneer of creation's salvation, Christ must know, in some way, whence he comes and whither he is leading creation.

To yet others who object that ‘it's not in the Fathers’, Gaine again gives a finely nuanced response: its absence is not universal (e.g. Augustine's Contra Maximium), but significantly, it doesn't appear where it might have easily helped advance non-orthodox theologies (e.g. the Nestorians), and it is not displaced by other rival accounts of Christ's knowledge. Finally, to those theologians who say ‘it's not good theology’, Gaine expands on the soteriological and eschatological benefits of Christ's beatific vision in contrast to more recent attempts to account for his knowledge via hemisphere lateralisation, multiple personality and other theories. He gives an excellent account of Aquinas’ understanding of Christ's multiple kinds of knowledge, pointing out how revolutionary Thomas was in his enlisting of Aristotle's psychology in ascribing human acquired knowledge to Christ. Key here is the non-competitive nature of finite and infinite knowledges: they are not, and cannot be, mutually exclusive as many in this debate assume.

That insight is key to Gaine's more explicitly christological reflections in the second part, where he deals fairly and insightfully, first, with the objections that ‘Jesus had faith’, showing the preponderance of the objective genitive interpretation of pistis christou in the tradition and the insufficiency of alternative accounts. Against the claim that ‘Jesus didn't know’ (perennial fodder for kenotic christologies), he avers that the Bible never ascribes error to Christ but shows Christ's increasing manifestation of divine knowledge in human, communicable terms. Again, human and divine knowledge are radically different and not mutually exclusive, and a further Thomistic pedal-note is developed here: grace and glory perfect rather than destroy nature. Thus Gaine argues, against those who insist that ‘Jesus was free’ and thus did not have the beatific vision, that divine vision cannot displace human knowledge or freedom, but rather enhances it: Christ was both comprehensor and viator. And finally, against the many recent theologians who insist that ‘Jesus suffered’ and thus could not have had the beatific vision because of its ‘anaesthetic effect’ (von Balthasar), Gaine argues that joy and sorrow cannot be mutually exclusive, drawing on our experience of mixed emotions in our lives, and pointing to mystics’ experience of delight and desolation. Thomas’ account of the redundantia, or overflow, of higher to lower psychosomatic effects is key here in maintaining the differentiated unity of Christ's hypostatic union: Christ can suffer in the sensory appetites of body and soul as viator while maintaining the beatific vision in his higher rational will as comprehensor, the benefits of the latter accruing to the former.

This volume is impressive: knowledgeable, incisive, nuanced, balanced and perhaps prophetic. It might be read as reactionary because of its occasional framing as a revindication of neo-Thomist scholasticism, but this would be to fail to calibrate its scope and interest adequately. Gaine writes explicitly as a Catholic theologian – in a particular ecclesial sense – and this too should not distract (the capitalisation of ‘Tradition’ notwithstanding). Questions remain, naturally: while the soteriological focus is very welcome, there is a sense that Thomas’ soteriology is narrowed to the model of sacrifice, underplaying his polyphonic approach; a more catholic approach might have aided the Gaine's frequent emphasis on the pedagogy of the incarnation. Above all, the book calls for Gaine to provide his own account of the hypostatic union, which his exploration of Christ's beatific vision relies on but doesn't really develop. Gaine shows himself a penetrating thinker, exploring the paradoxical identity of a saviour who is both unlike and like us. Focusing more explicitly on the incarnation as such and the communication of idioms might allay concerns that the reduplicative strategy used quite often in this book needn't go in a Nestorianising direction. Such a work might well engage with the recent fulsome christological works of Nicholas Lombardo and Thomas Joseph White, but also by non-Catholic theologians such as Kathryn Tanner and Oliver Crisp. Gaine is clearly more than up to the task: I look forward to his future work.