Philosophical arguments for religious pluralism – including that of John Hick – are outlined. It is noted, however, that the question of ontology, as explored within the philosophy of science, has not been included in these arguments. The views of ontology in scientific description that are associated with the work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn are outlined, but a deeper insight, it is argued, may be developed through the work of Mary Hesse and of Rom which suggests insurmountable limitations to our grasp of the ontology of created things. This understanding may be extended, it is argued, to God (or what Hick calls Reality) so that an attitude of ‘apophatic critical realism’ may be applied both to God (as it is in Eastern Orthodoxy) and to created entities. (In relation to God, something comparable can, it is noted, be found in certain Western Christian scholars such as Yves Congar.) This understanding, in its theological component, may be applied to apparent incompatibilities between different faith traditions, such as that between ‘personal’ and ‘non-personal’ and between ‘monotheistic’ and ‘polytheistic’ understandings.

The Council of Trent addressed the topics of original sin and justification in two decrees, developed in succession. The Decree on Original Sin reaffirms a broadly Augustinian understanding of original sin, its effects, and its remedy in baptism. What remains after baptism is not sin in the strict sense. The Decree on Justification lays out the path from sin to grace to glory. Emphasis lies on both the constant and decisive role of grace and on the way grace engages rather than nullifies the agency of the justified. The Decree on Justification in particular not only rejected errors, but expounded Catholic teaching.

Alone among texts analyzed, Soumission describes no battlefields. Civil war diffuses into street violence. The electoral crisis, in which the Muslim Brotherhood prevents the National Front from coming to power, is handled behind the scenes. The Roman tradition’s tropes, however, frame France’s social dysfunction as raging civil war: a republic fails and an oriental empire modeled on ancient Rome takes its place. Allusion – streets in Paris, squares encoding Roman institutions, towns commemorating Crusade battles – retells France’s dystopian future as a rerun of history since Augustus imposed peace through empire. The novel’s protagonist faces a personal crisis as he relives the life of his research interest, Huysmans: the paradigm of decadence converted to Catholicism. His perverse conversion, however, exposes the present refoundation as a return to a decadent political theology. Soumission’s Muslims, all nativist converts who establish a Nietzschean empire of domination, aim above all to subject women. Once again, orientalism projects onto an apparently foreign other the abjection residing within the self. The novel’s poetics accuse us of hypocrisy if we think we are any better.

With a focus on Edmund Spenser, this chapter explores representations of ruined monasteries within (New) English protestant writing of c.1590-1642. Monastic ruins are visible mnemonics of British-Irish reformation, and Protestants express surprisingly broad motivations for their remembrance, from sorrow for, to celebration of, monastic dissolution – a breadth of opinion reflecting the breadth of beliefs and practices within the Elizabethan/early Stuart church. Recognition of this confessional latitude is leading to reappraisal of Spenser’s own ‘puritan’ credentials, and to realisation that Spenser was as anti-Presbyterian as he was anti-Catholic. The chapter is the first to translate Spenser’s Presbyterian anxieties to a Scottish context, arguing that Spenser’s famously fractious relationship with James VI was prompted as much by Spenser’s anxieties over James’s seeming support for Scottish Presbyterians as by Spenser’s attack on James’s Catholic mother. The chapter shows how, in Faerie Queene VI, Spenser evokes memories of monastic ruins to warn his generation against the prospect of further, Presbyterian-led ruination in England and Ireland under a future Scottish king. This perspective on monastic ruins – as memories of past, and monitories against future, reformation – serves as a salutary reminder that ‘reformation’ was a protracted and by no means universally popular process for Spenser’s generation.

Dante explicitly associates himself with the sin of pride (Purg. xiii, 133–38), and scholars have emphasised, in particular, the temptation to pride in the composition of the Commedia itself. By contrast, Dante makes no such explicit association between himself and the sin of sloth. Sloth might seem a strange sin to ascribe to the poet whose magnum opus, he informs us, had made him for many years lean (Par. xxv, 3).The terrace of sloth, nonetheless, is privileged by Dante: structurally, it is at the literal centre of Purgatorio and thus of the poem as a whole; narratively, it is midway (nel mezzo del cammin) both through Purgatory (the fourth of seven terraces) and through the afterlife (the fourth day on the pilgrim’s seven-day journey); thematically, it includes the discourses on ordered and disordered love as the Christian principles of moral good and evil respectively. Moreover, the very first group of souls whom Dante encounters on his journey through Hell (the ‘wretched souls’ of Inferno iii, 35) are partly characterised by sloth, as are the ‘sad souls’ (tristi) who emit the ‘accidioso fumo’ of Inferno viii. Sloth dominates the moral colour of Ante-Purgatory (Purgatorio i–viii), a region invented by Dante and occupied specifically by those who delayed, albeit in different ways, their conversions to the path of Christian holiness and penitence. Likewise, sloth is associated with the very first group of blessed souls whom Dante-character encounters in Paradise, the ‘slowest sphere’ of the Moon (Par. iii, 30). In each of the three canticles, therefore, the first group of souls is characterised – at least in part – by the vice of sloth. Moreover, after his Christian conversion, sloth was the dominant sin – we learn in Purgatory – of the poet Statius, one of the important autobiographical ‘cyphers’ for Dante in the Commedia. Most significantly, there is good reason to believe, as I shall argue, that sloth is Dante-character’s first sin in the dark wood of Inferno i, and a key to his dramatic confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise.

Although the Gospel of Mary is a dialogue gospel, the text’s narrative frame is just as integral to understanding the message of the gospel as the eschatological teachings in the dialogues. The narrative frame includes Jesus’ departure, Mary’s intervention, and the ensuing dispute among the disciples. This chapter explores possibilities for what was contained in the missing opening pages of the Gospel of Mary, firmly situating the text within the dialogue gospel genre. It then analyzes the Saviour’s farewell discourse, which encourages the disciples to be active participants in the Christian message of salvation. The section on Mary’s intervention focuses on her relationship with the male disciples and her relationship with Jesus, and argues that the Coptic manuscript heightens animosity between the disciples in contrast to the earlier Greek versions. Mary’s relationship to Jesus, on the other hand, is one of succession. The final part of the narrative frame sees the disciples split into two factions, with Mary and Levi on one side and Peter and Andrew on the other. It is unclear at the ending of the gospel whether the disciples are reconciled, and this is explored in light of other dialogue gospels such as the Pistis Sophia.

Although the Gospel of Mary is a dialogue gospel, the text’s narrative frame is just as integral to understanding the message of the gospel as the eschatological teachings in the dialogues. The narrative frame includes Jesus’ departure, Mary’s intervention, and the ensuing dispute among the disciples. This chapter explores possibilities for what was contained in the missing opening pages of the Gospel of Mary, firmly situating the text within the dialogue gospel genre. It then analyzes the Saviour’s farewell discourse, which encourages the disciples to be active participants in the Christian message of salvation. The section on Mary’s intervention focuses on her relationship with the male disciples and her relationship with Jesus, and argues that the Coptic manuscript heightens animosity between the disciples in contrast to the earlier Greek versions. Mary’s relationship to Jesus, on the other hand, is one of succession. The final part of the narrative frame sees the disciples split into two factions, with Mary and Levi on one side and Peter and Andrew on the other. It is unclear at the ending of the gospel whether the disciples are reconciled, and this is explored in light of other dialogue gospels such as the Pistis Sophia.

Gail Crowther examines Plath’s ambivalent response to religion by highlighting how the context of her religious upbringing lay at the root of her theological questionings. Crowther examines the impact of the Plath family’s Unitarian faith on Plath’s writing, her study of religion throughout her school and college education, and her adult position of reluctant atheism. Crowther shows how Plath’s writing disrupts Judeo–Christian ideas of patrilineage, instead putting Marian notions of love, care and redemption at the centre of her poems.

This chapter reconstructs the liturgical context of two chronicle entries about Princess Olga of Kiev: the account of her baptism in Constantinople in 955 and the panegyric following her death in 969. The chapter demonstrates that the tale of the princess’ baptism derives, in part, from the tenth-century baptismal rubrics of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. In the liturgical manuscripts, every word and action for the baptismal ritual is spelled out for the priest performing the service. In the chronicle, the prelate and princess act out these ritual behaviours between baptiser and baptised, precisely as they are prescribed in the church books. The chapter also uncovers the liturgical typologies in the text. In 955, Princess Olga is depicted as a ‘Slavic Mary’ using hymns from the major feasts of the Mother of God, and in 969 she is cast as the ‘Slavic Forerunner’ using hymns from a series of feasts surrounding the conception and birth of major sacred figures, such as Saint John the Baptist. The ‘blessed Olga’ is thus best understood not as a biblical or hagiographical creation but rather as a liturgical one. She is a textual figure fashioned from the songs, prayers, and readings of the Byzantine rite.

Departing momentarily from the soteriological arc of fall-crucifixion-redemption, this chapter tackles a range of cultural topics centred around the Protestant Reformation, a historical development about which Hughes expresses repeated regret. Much of this chapter is concerned with bridging the symbolic worlds of Robert Graves’s White Goddess, which Hughes emphatically embraces, with the Christian metaphysical world discussed in this book. With reference to Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary and Hughes’s own great work of critical prose, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, our discussion teases out the complicated relationship between Graves’s Goddess and Christian figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Hughes’s particular disdain for Puritanism, which he read as a systematic rejection of the Goddess, is explored, leading to explorations of Marian symbolism in Gaudete and the provocatively religious language of Remains of Elmet, incorporating a history of the Primitive Methodist Church, the religion of Hughes’s earliest childhood in the Calder Valley.