Over forty years ago, a group of advanced scholars who were fascinated with the life and work of Origen of Alexandria gathered together at the Oxford patristics conferences, which are held every four years, and decided to initiate a separate set of meetings, again to be held every four years, but with a two-year hiatus from the Oxford meeting so as to avoid conflict. These congresses were designed to follow up systematically the indications given by the French Jesuits of the turn of the century who had first signalled the need for a radical rethinking and new appreciation of the work of Origen of Alexandria. The papers from those gatherings have now accumulated to the eleventh volume which here presents the studies (the main keynote lectures and the shorter position papers) from the last gathering, at the University of Aarhus in 2013. It may seem unbelievable now, so much has been achieved by the Origeniana series, and the impetus thus provided to an ever increasing body of scholars dedicated to aspects of the work of the great Alexandrian, but in the early decades of the twentieth century the achievements of this greatest thinker of the Early Church lay in the deepest obscurity, other than when they were not being dragged out into the light to be caricatured and pilloried.

The Origeniana series, devotedly supported for many years by Peeters Press, is a virtual library of the most advanced work on Origenian thought available today. It is an essential resource for any serious theological library. It gathers together definitive studies of themes as well as pointing towards lacunae in the research that still need to be filled. The organising topic of each congress is now decided at the preceding one, and this with a view to the themes that have already been chosen as the foci of preceding gatherings. The present volume (though with half a dozen papers that stubbornly refused to conform and are thus classed as ‘miscellaneous’) focuses on the issue of how Origen's thought, accurately received or not, went on to influence the later Western Christian tradition. Influence it, it certainly did, and this despite the Western Church being adamantly opposed to Origen and all his errors – at least in theory. Never has anyone so extensively used been so badly served by his inheritors, it has to be said. Jerome, who was once ready to praise Origen to the skies, went on in later life to denounce him most bitterly: though this never stopped him recycling volumes of the early master's works, generally without acknowledgement.

The present volume organises fifty-seven scholarly papers into seven categories. The first is how Origen's work has been received in modern theology and philosophy. The general theme of this section is the hermeneutical revolution that has occurred in living memory, leading to a new appreciation of the semantic sophistication of this ancient Christian commentator – who previously had so often been dismissed as a foolish allegoriser of plain biblical truths. Here an essay by P. Martens of St Louis gives an overview of how Origen's hermeneutic theory has been received by modern biblicists. Alfons Furst of Munster offers an interesting consideration of how the ancient philosopher offers a legacy to contemporary thinking on freedom and autonomy. Vit Husek of Olomouc compares Origen and Paul Ricoeur.

The second category considers how Origen has been received in modern philology. It begins with a keynote address by C. Markschies of Berlin, which looks closely at the demanding editorial work that has gone on through the various new editions of the master's works. The Origen text tradition, given that he had been posthumously condemned by Justinian, was in a very poor condition, and the achievements of Origen scholars, beginning in the eighteenth century with the DelaRue brothers, who have laboured hard especially throughout the past century to provide superb critical editions is a history of philological work at its most refined. The third category of studies is led by essays from B. Pouderon (Tours) and Jon Dechow (Salem) who head up a section of six papers dedicated to how Origen was received in the western Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The fourth category is misleadingly titled ‘Origen's thought in the West until John Scotus Eriugena’, which seems, at first, to run backwards chronologically. This section, however, specifically discusses the reception of his ‘theological ideas’, especially by Ambrose, Augustine, Julian of Eclanum and eventually the Irish scholastics. The whole section is admirably led off by a magisterial keynote on that theme by Hilaria Ramelli of Milan. The fifth section groups together papers devoted to how Origen's ideas on mystical prayer affected the Western Church. This was headed up by a fine keynote overview by Andrew Louth (Durham), but had very few supporting papers, surprisingly for such a seminal theme.

After that point the editor's best efforts to keep the book to the conference theme start to fall apart. Origen's influence on Western thought is abandoned in the sixth section, which is dedicated to his impact on Greek and Byzantine theologians, though these nine scholarly papers were a delight anyway, showing his heavy fingerprints throughout the work of Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Methodius of Olympus, Didymus the Blind, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas via Byzantine spiritual teachers. The miscellaneous seventh section is just that.

Origen scholars will want to purchase this book. All serious libraries of Christian antiquity should keep the entire series, and this present volume earns its place among its predecessors as replete with first-class theological, literary and philosophical insights. As conferences go, the Origenians unfailingly produce a fine product. Eighteen hundred years after his death Origen here still proves himself to be the ‘whetstone that sharpens us all’.