These texts, which have a spiritual rather than dogmatic focus, provide in many ways the best hermeneutical key to the rest of Patristic theology, certainly in its Greek form; they complement and complete and explain the better-known treatises of the great Fathers; and many of them are brief and uncomplicated. The whole collection provides also an encyclopaedia of the development of the spirituality in the Eastern Church of the Jesus Prayer over the whole millennium from the period of the Desert Fathers to the late middle-ages, culminating in the teachings of Gregory Palamas: this context shows his works, in particular, to be entirely consonant with the main-stream of Orthodox tradition. In these texts characters like Maximus the Confessor and Simeon the New Theologian come alive, too, with a spiritual vibrancy which still speaks today. The translations are elegant, unfussy, and accessible - and the whole collection is an example of the very greatest spiritual maturity. ( )