RichardCross, <i>Christology and Metaphysics in the Seventeenth Century</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, xxii + 333pp. $130.00

Richard Cross has, again, done us a great service with this volume on seventeenth-century Christologies.It crowns a five-volume series, which actually begins with the last volume to be published, Early Scholastic Christology: 1050-1250.The entire series painstakingly documents the vagaries of Western christological thought through its major exponents, as well as a host of obscure and by all accounts largely forgotten voices, eventually bifurcating -in the last two volumes -into varieties of Protestant and Roman Catholic accounts of the person of Christ.If there is a single-word descriptor that characterizes the present volume, then it too, like its companions, is encyclopaedic in the best sense of the word.But surely more than that!Cross does not merely meticulously catalog a wide range of voices, subdivided in the Roman Catholic case into schools such as the Jesuits and Scotists, in addition to a variety of Thomists; and in the Protestant case refracted into the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, the latter subdivided further into the emerging schools of Tbingen and Giessen.To leave things at that would silo, fragment, and needlessly obscure what on Cross's account adds up to a narrative of creative engagements with the earlier tradition.Thus, while the work is certainly encyclopaedic and may be consulted accordingly, it makes no pretense to completeness; and its center of gravity lies, instead, in parsing the unruly, multifaceted, and crisscrossing landscape of early modern christological polemics in terms of a Wirkungsgeschichte of the reception of Aquinas and Scotus.Even here, Cross's focus rests on just one specific debatebetween communion and union theorists of the incarnation (to the exclusion, e.g., of the nature of divine activity in relation to the assumed human nature, or the question of mutuality between the divine and human natures).This sustained focus enables Cross to discern, amidst the intransigence of 17th-century christological polemics, not so much an entrenchment -taking place along various school and confessional lines, or within a constellation of doctrinal loci -as a series of creative encounters that repeatedly send their participants back to re-examine and fine-tune their metaphysical toolkit.In brief, on the one side of the debate stand thinkers influenced by John Duns Scotus's union-centered account of Christ's divinity and humanity, 'the single most important theological and philosophical school in the seventeenth century',