Book Reviews

Brian E. Daley, God Visible: Patristic Christology Recon-

sidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xvi + 294
pages.

As a young Jesuit scholastic, Brian Daley was the research

assistant of Aloys Grillmeier, S.J., whom he helped on his
voluminous study, Christ and the Christian Tradition. Sen-
sitive to the erudition of his former teacher, Daley nevertheless
recognizes the shortcomings of Grillmeier’s approach and his
resulting blind spots, offering an alternative vision of patristic
Christology in his latest work, God Visible. In Daley’s view,
Grillmeier’s scholastic training often imposed the scheme of
Roman Catholic dogmatic textbooks on historical sources; in
this way, for Grillmeier as for many other scholars of patris-
tics, the doctrine of Chalcedon became an assumed postulate
that dominated the interpretation of texts. Daley identifies se-
veral problems with this view. First, it fails to consider
thinkers who fall outside of the purview of the Chalcedonian
trajectory. Second, and more importantly, this narrow view of
the history of Chalcedon risks distorting “reflection on the
mystery of Christ into an exercise in paradoxical metaphysics”
(23). Instead, Daley affirms that Christology “must concern
itself in even broader terms with the one whom faith recog-
nizes as Savior and Lord, who reveals to us in fully human
terms the way the creating, saving God lives and acts to heal
us and draw us to himself” (23).
In the remainder of the book, Daley chronologically
profiles various patristic authors. He begins in the second cen-
tury with anonymous texts such as the Odes of Solomon and
The Ascension of Isaiah, before moving to Ignatius of Antioch,
Melito of Sardis, and Justin Martyr. Daley sees these texts as a
consistent witness to an understanding of Jesus as in relation-
ship with the God of Israel revealed in the Old Testament. This
is especially clear in the Odes and The Ascension of Isaiah,
which are conscious mixtures of Old Testament imagery and
form, and, in the case of The Ascension, likely a Christian
redaction of a Jewish text. Daley also draws parallels between
the Odes and Ignatius of Antioch, seeing in the latter the same
interpretation of Jesus as fulfillment of the Jewish Scripture.
256 Andrew J. Summerson

This is somewhat surprising since a number of scholars,

including David C. Sim, A.M. Bibliowicz, Manlio Simonetti,
and Emanuela Prinzivalli, have recently draw attention to an
anti-judaizing tendency in Ignatius’s work, which appears to
focus on the novelty of Christ. Old Testament citations and
allusions are rare in Ignatius, and one finds a firm distinction
between Judaism and Christianity in his epistolary: “For
Christianity did not believe in Judaism, but Judaism in
Christianity” (Letter to Magnesians, 10:3). Some engagement
with this view on Ignatius would have been a welcome addi-
tion to Daley’s otherwise fine observations on the Christology
of such early Christian literature.
The next chapter deals with Irenaeus and Origen, who,
despite their different approaches, develop a Christology of
epiphany, not necessarily subject to philosophical analysis but
“embedded in their interpretation of the whole biblical narra-
tive” (66). Both theologians thus build on earlier second-
century authors, highlighting the continuity of the New Testa-
ment with the Old, and the priority of Christ as manifest in
scripture.
Daley then outlines the contours of the early Arian crisis.
He starts with an examination of Arius on his own terms, then
attends to lesser known figures of opposition in the debate at
Nicaea: Marcellus of Ancyra, who emphasized the unity of
God, and Eusebius of Caesarea, who argued for the unique
identity of both Father and Son. Daley then treats the contribu-
tion of Athanasius of Alexandria, drawing attention to the ico-
nic Christology found in the Life of Anthony that envisions
Anthony as a revelation of the Word in the desert. Later, Daley
argues against the view, held by Grillmeier and Hanson, that
Athanasius’s Christology lacks a full humanity (121); he
rightly points out that the rhetorical aims of Athanasius’ Chris-
tology emphasize the dialectic of word and flesh, creator and
creature, not at the expense of Christ’s humanity but rather to
point out the depth of the paradox at the heart of the mystery
of Christ.
Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 257

Moving beyond Nicea, Daley examines the Christological

conflict between Apollinarius of Laodicea and the Cappado-
cians, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. Daley
emphasizes the language of mixture used by Nazianzus to
speak of Christ’s human and divine nature; this rhetorical
theme looms large in this father’s work, yet was ignored by
earlier treatments of his Christology because it lacked the pre-
cision of Chalcedon. Daley’s review of this neglected Christo-
logy along with that of Gregory of Nyssa (so frequently neg-
lected in favor of the latter’s trinitarian theology, evocative
exploration of the nature of God, and Christian anthropology)
is one of the signature contributions of this volume. In the end,
Daley highlights how the debate between Apollinarius and the
Cappadocians draws out the distinctive anthropological, sote-
riological, and eschatological aims of Cappadocian thought, so
influential on subsequent theology.
Moving to the West, Daley next offers a profile of Augus-
tine. According to Daley, Augustine’s Christology has been
largely understudied due to his distance from conciliar Christo-
logical debates and his later role in the Pelagian controversy.
Daley offers a corrective to this approach, pointing to the ex-
plicit references to Christ made by Augustine in almost every
theological subject he tackled. Daley points out the rhetorical
character of Augustine’s explication of theology, which is “not
simply a matter of decoration. It conveys what is, for [Augus-
tine], at the heart of the Gospel: the presence of God in the
contrasting, contingent dependent reality of our created nature
in order to communicate powerfully with us” (172).
Daley then offers a re-evaluation of the distinction bet-
ween Antiochene and Alexandrian schools of exegesis and
how they come to bear on Christology, arguing for a shift
away from metaphysical terminology, in order to consider
these approaches to scripture more generally. In the next
chapter, he considers, among others, two figures of importance
to his own scholarly output: Leontius of Byzantium (Daley
published a critical edition of Leontius’s collected works in
2017) and Maximus the Confessor (who was the subject of
Daley’s 2003 translation of Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy).
Leontius appears as offering a précis on the Chaledonian defi-
258 Andrew J. Summerson

nition, which, in Daley’s view, is important for an adequate

understanding of the orthodox tradition of faith, and also
“theologically necessary to understand a Christian under-
standing of the world, as the place where the transcendent God
is at work” (208). Daley then shows how Maximus properly
emphasized the Chalcedonian definition to preserve the role of
the human and divine wills in Christ, matters vital not only for
correct linguistic predication as provided by the language of
Leontius, but also having real consequences for salvation
(223). Daley emphasizes how these post-Chaledonian thinkers,
and others such as John of Damascus, are not concerned as
much with articulating the language of the formula of union
correctly, as with articulating a vision of the uniqueness of
Christ, of what precisely is revealed in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth.
Last, Daley turns to the iconoclast controversy. He begins
with an extended survey of the theological problems involved,
starting with early Christian practice and the relationship of
icon veneration to the Decalogue’s prohibition of idolatry. He
highlights early fourth-century positions opposed to Christian
images, found in a letter attributed to Eusebius of Caesarea and
in passages from Epiphanius of Cyprus. Daley then covers the
years leading up to the early period of iconoclasm, beginning
formally with Leo III and continuing under Constantine V, be-
fore treating the Council of Nicaea and the second period of
iconoclasm in the ninth century and the corresponding defense
of icons articulated by Theodore the Studite and Patriarch
Photius.
Daley’s close reading of primary sources, rooted in solid
historical analysis, brings to light several marginal figures in
theology, including Marcellus of Ancyra and Eusebius of
Caesarea, while also shedding light on figures whose Christo-
logy has been neglected in current scholarship, including Gre-
gory of Nyssa and Augustine. In several places, he identifies
the important role rhetoric played in the development of early
Christian theology, an area that requires further study. In this
and in other respects, in controverting the synthetic approach
that exalts Chalcedon, Daley’s God Visible is not so much an
end as a beginning; this volume is an implicit exhortation to
Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 259

further detailed study of the various early Christian writers it

treats, in order to redirect approaches to patristic Christology
in line with Daley’s overarching thesis. While more engage-
ment with post-Chalcedonian fathers would have helped fill in
the blanks in an understudied area, God Visible remains an
essential work for students and scholars, one that offers a fresh
look and a clear grasp of early Christology by one of the mas-
ters in the field.

Andrew J. Summerson
Calumet College of St. Joseph
Hammond, Indiana



Carrie Frederick Frost, Maternal Body: A Theology of Incar-

nation from the Christian East (New York: Paulist Press,
2019), 144 pp.

“About a decade ago, I found myself pregnant with triplets

halfway through work on a PhD in theology at the University
of Virginia” (xiii). With this startling disclosure, Carrie Frede-
rick Frost, professor of theology at St. Sophia Ukrainian Or-
thodox Seminary, invites readers into her remarkable reflection
on incarnation and the maternal body in the Christian East.
Although Frederick Frost had already mothered two children,
the intensity of a triplet pregnancy gave her renewed fervor to
seek any theological and spiritual affirmations of motherhood
to be found in the teaching of the Church. Though Frederick
Frost writes from an Orthodox vantage point, her work is in-
tended for all readers who value the historical Christian tradi-
tion. What she encountered was more complex than antici-
pated: alongside “an understanding of motherhood in which
spirituality and physicality are deeply intertwined,” Frederick
Frost discovered “depictions of motherhood in Orthodoxy that
did not affirm motherhood as a vocation,” and indeed even in-
stances when this tradition “denigrates the maternal body, con-