The early Roman Empire provides little evidence for the personal religious feelings of its inhabitants; only a few texts reflect what we would call individual testimony of personal religious experience. The works of second-century authors which in fact display such religious feelings often offend modern sensibilities. Commentators have described Aelius Aristides' Orationes sacrae, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as neurotic or pathological. In a recent book, for example, Charles A. Behr introduced a discussion of Aristides with the deprecatory comment: “peculiar and unpleasant though his personality may seem to us today.” The same offense, moreover, is ascribed to all three men, namely, an inordinate fixation on bodily pain and suffering. Interpreting these authors' textual emphasis on pain as merely a reflection of the pathology of aberrant individuals of the early empire is an unfair simplification of the texts. Such a reading prevents the recognition that their emphasis on pain and suffering reflects a widespread cultural concern of the period that used representations of bodily pain and suffering to construct a new subjectivity of the human person.

In a final section of his Alēthēs Logos Celsus singles out his opponents' vaunted monotheism for special attack. The Christians' refusal to worship the traditional δαίμονες (“divinities”) and ἥρωες (“heroes”) is irrational. God alone is the source of direction in the universe, and if God has delegated his authority to subordinates who perfectly reflect his will, they are deserving of veneration. When the Christians respond with Jesus' dictum about the impossibility of serving more than one lord (Matt 6:24 // Luke 16:13), to Celsus's mind this is merely the projection of their own rebellious and antisocial spirit onto the person of God (Origen Cels. 7.68; 8.2). Celsus continues (8.11), taking up a charge that he has leveled against the Christians before (5.61; 6.42, 52): the assertion that only one being is named κύριος (“lord”) introduces faction into the divine economy; God as “master” forms one party, and another, whether Satan or an inferior god, revolts against him and opposes his will. Celsus concludes with the assertion (8.12, 14) that if the Christians really did worship no other god but one, they would perhaps have a tenable argument against the others. But in fact they lavish an excessive cult on Jesus; they do not consider it discordant with their monotheism or a violation of Jesus' dictum if they serve God's servant as well. If Christians were taught that Jesus is not God's special son and that God is the only one deserving of true worship, they would not listen because Jesus is the actual focus of their cult. When they call Jesus Son of God, they are not paying supreme reverence to God but conferring a supreme exaltation upon Jesus.

The influence of Agostino Valier on the theoretical formulations behind the Catholic Reformation and on its practical reforms is little known. There are reasons for this lack of recognition. Unlike Robert Bellarmine and Caesar Baronius, his illustrious contemporaries, he did not leave behind one or two great works on which the eyes of the Catholic and non-Catholic worlds were fixed. Unlike them, he was not in the center of major theological or historical controversies. From behind the scenes, he exerted a quiet, consistent influence on Catholic intellectual life and reforms over half a century. Much of his impact was the result of his personal contacts with his wide circle of friends, church leaders, and secular rulers of Europe, for whom individually he prepared short treatises concerning major issues confronting them. There were many such treatises. In 1719 Josephus Caminus listed one hundred twenty-eight such titles in his edition of Valier's book De cautione adhibenda in edendis libris which he published in Venice.

With the growth of Arminianism in the post-Awakening period, a decisive move away from Puritan orthodoxy occurred in New England. In this article I shall map the contours of this movement, using as my guide a recent work of the political theorist, Judith Shklar. In her book Ordinary Vices, Shklar describes the rise of Enlightenment thought in the West as primarily a shift in value structures. As a result of this shift from the moral universe defined by the seven deadly sins to one defined by the “ordinary vices,” traditional political, moral, and religious systems were viewed from a new perspective. From this perspective it was possible to perceive in these systems a deeply entrenched cruelty. I shall argue that Shklar's analysis can be fruitfully applied to changing trends in religious thought that were wrought by the Enlightenment in America. Specifically, I shall argue that the rise of Arminianism and the general liberalization of Christianity in eighteenth-century New England were informed by a perception, created by the influx of Enlightenment values into the colonies, of the systemic cruelty of the body of doctrine traditionally maintained by orthodox Puritan divines.

Sometime in the early summer of 1782, Moses Mendelssohn received word that a pamphlet, entitled Das Forschen nach Licht und Recht (The Searching for Light and Right) and signed only as “S***,” was being prepared for publication. Enunciating the concerns of an Enlightenment-minded Christian writer, this pamphlet explicitly challenged Mendelssohn to clarify two issues of public interest: his increasingly outspoken advocacy for the civil admission of Jews into Prussian society, and the future shape of Judaism within a modern tolerant state. For Mendelssohn, the impending publication of the pamphlet was disconcerting because it insisted on linking his personal religious integrity to the broader political debate over civil integration. Given that his political campaign on behalf of his coreligionists was predicated upon the removal of confessional considerations from the public realm, this particular linkage became a source of no small irritation. Mendelssohn, however, quickly determined that the challenge could not be left unanswered. Indeed, it was in response to this tract and its appended postscript that Mendelssohn penned Jerusalem, his most articulate and enduring statement on religious tolerance and political equality.