A generous grant to Holy Cross Seminary by the Pappas family, has allowed the school to set up a Patristics Institute which, over several years past, has done sterling work in gathering young and more senior scholars to the Brookline campus to engage in Early Christian work with a strong theological and ecclesial focus. Three excellent volumes of collected studies have appeared so far in this series, each of which emanated from previous symposia hosted at the seminary, focused on the themes of wealth and poverty, apocalyptic thought, and the divine trinity, respectively. This present volume continues in the same strong vein with a very fine set of papers discussing the concept of theodicy in the ancient Church.

There are outstanding essays in the present collection, almost all of which have been authored by active professors, and a few of which would more than justify the book's presence on any scholar's bookshelves. Paul Gavrilyuk opens the volume with a masterly survey of what the fathers had to say on theodicy in general. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and J. Warren Smith offer very fine studies of Cyril of Alexandria, both in relation to the latter's notion of “impassible suffering.” This has often been caricatured in dogmatic handbooks in times past as an example of how the fathers were hopelessly out of touch with the real world, like a Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide. Both scholars show how, if one bothers to read the original texts, Cyril sums up in his soteriological Christology a profound sense of how the Incarnate Lord epitomizes a saving and transfigurative solidarity with the human race in the midst of its pain. These illuminating studies take up themes announced earlier in Gavrilyuk's seminal study of Cyrilline soteriology (The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought [Oxford University Press, 2004]). David Hunter and Brian E. Daley both develop the relation of Christology to soteriological thought in relation to the problem of evil in their essays, respectively entitled “Evil, Suffering, and Embodiment in Augustine,” and “The Word and His Flesh: Human Weakness and the Identity of Jesus in Greek Patristic Christology.” These two articles would form a superb pair of reading resources for any advanced seminar on the themes of theodicy and soteriology in a religion department, as would the essay by John Behr excavating the “Pedagogy of Suffering and Death in Irenaeus” Other papers in the volume consider the use of the apocalyptic genre in antiquity for negotiating issues of theodicy (John W. Martens), the significance of the cult of martyrs (James Skedros and Dennis Quinn). Nonna Harrison offers a gracious essay related to Chrysostom's treatment of the “man born blind.” Regina Walton offers a paper on the use of early Christian funeral sermons as a pastoral way of negotiating a theology of suffering and grief; an approach echoed in Douglas Finn's essay on Chrysostom's Commentary on Job. Gary Anderson's paper on the theme of Christus Victor takes us into a fresh domain by locating the theology in the works of the neglected theologians of Syria: Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serug.

All in all, a very successful and quality volume that holds together very strongly as a coherent treatment of a central classical theme. It is a resource that would be of great use and interest to a wide range of readers in both the church and the academy. Highly recommended.