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particularly valuable. For example, we move from the doctrine of Crea-
tion to the distinctive Eastern concepts of Logoi and Sophiology.

I was taken with Louth’s turns of phrase. There is a beauty in
such phrases as ‘what we should hear from the chorus of the Fathers is a
rich harmony not a thin unison.’ There is the memorable and helpful
statement that ‘The creed is part of our initiation into a life, not a
summary of things to be believed.’ And I enjoyed his point when he says
that ‘although the mysteries of the faith are beyond understanding, they
are not beyond misunderstanding’. These are useful phrases that many
would ?nd useful to remember and repeat.

There is a fascinating chapter on Creation, and particularly the
place of The Fall in Orthodox theology, which Louth characterises are
being more broadly focused on the dei?cation of the whole cosmos
from creation to the end of time, and contrasts this with a western per-
spective that often takes the narrower perspective of the Fall to re-
demption in Christ. This idea is then important in the ?nal chapter on
eschatology, providing ?rmer ground for at least the possibility of uni-
versal salvation.

Familiar yet also di?erent is how we might describe much of the
theology outlined in this book. A distinctive Orthodox view permeates
throughout. That is particularly true of the chapter on the Sacraments
which moves seamlessly from Christian materialism to the language and
symbolism of the Sacraments and ?nally to the signi?cance of icons. It
all ?ts together in elegantly written and well-argued chapters. I love the
idea that the word ‘mysterion’ is onomatopoeic, that is, the pursing of
one’s lips to pronounce ‘m’ represents those things about the Sacra-
ments which cannot be fully known or which are kept hidden.

Just very occasionally, one feels that Louth is a little unfair to the
Western tradition. The idea that liturgy does more than re-enact past
events but makes them present to us in the here and now, is not
uniquely con?ned to Orthodoxy, although it is perhaps emphasised in
the East. It is, for example, a key idea in any Catholic (whether Roman
or Anglican) understanding of what is going on in the Eucharist. Having

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