Through attention to Augustine’s teaching on the Resurrection and Ascension, this chapter draws to the fore the ecclesiological consequences of the book’s christological proposal, emphasizing both the nature of the Church as the mutual recognition of Christ in one another, and the Church’s intrinsic dependence on and receptivity to the world beyond it.

Cyprian of Carthage is the most fulsome and direct user of sacrificial language in relation to Christian worship and organisation up to his own time, even though his community experienced persecution under the emperor Decius via a decree of universal sacrifice. Cyprian’s De lapsis and his Letter 63 both use common knowledge about sacrificial ritual shared between Jews, Christians, and other Romans to make more specific points in controversies over reconciliation of apostates and use of wine in the Eucharist. Cyprian’s use of shared assumptions about ritual helps reveal shared ancient understandings about sacrifice, centred not on altruism or violence but on gift. His formulations also reflect how he, like Decius, was seeking to use older ideas of tradition and communal solidarity in the service of new challenges.

The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

The book’s final chapter draws on recent scholarship on cultic imagery in the New Testament to demonstrate that Jesus likely used temple and priestly imagery in his teaching, yet without the intention of repudiating the validity of the temple. Among other narratives, the Last Supper traditioins are given special attention.

Chapter 8 analyzes Augustine’s narration, in Confessiones, of his experience of the spiritual resurrection of his dead soul. As Augustine confesses, God graciously and gradually lifts him up from his descent into the triple sin of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and worldly ambition (1 Jn 2:16) along an ascent into the baptismal and ecclesial life of put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom 13:14). Augustine’s various presentations of the degree of his spiritual death, however, do not map neatly onto his threefold schematization of the soul’s paschal mystery. By these complications, Augustine suggests that he cannot coherently grasp the unfathomable depths of his spiritual death, which eludes his comprehension, but not the reach of God’s resurrecting power. As baptized Catholics, Augustine and Monica ascend together in hope for the beatific resurrection of the Church, entrusting themselves completely to the Eucharistic mercy of the Lord.

Chapter 8 is an account of music-making at Christian social meals over the course of the first four centuries of the Common Era. Topics include musical activities at community suppers, private Christian dinner parties, and martyr festivals, as well as ways in which certain Christian writers saw a parallel between singing by turns at Christian social meals and the customs of classical Greeks. The earliest form of Christian music was the self-composed song or hymn, whose setting was the community supper and private Christian dinner party. In time, biblical psalms were taken up as part of the individual Christian’s song repertoire for social meals and prayer gatherings. During the third and fourth centuries, personal hymnody was largely displaced by psalmody. Meanwhile, differing preferences and moral sensibilities among Christians, typically with overtones of class, troubled inner church relations over musical recreations in both church and nonchurch social settings.

Drawing on biblical texts and theological reflections from early Christianity to the present, three prominent ways in which the sacramentality of creation has been nuanced over the centuries are explored: (1) Experiencing the presence of God in the world with focus on Ignatius of Loyola’s final contemplation in his Spiritual Exercises; (2) reflecting on manifestations of God’s goodness, power and wisdom that eminent patristic and medieval theologians discerned when studying the world and novel attributes that are discernible today when informed by current scientific findings; and (3) receiving the Eucharist as a heightened encounter with God that can strengthen individuals and communities to act cooperatively. These three ways of perceiving the world within which we encounter God constitute a formula for venerating Earth that should stimulate Christian attitudes and actions aimed at mitigating impediments to the flourishing of our common home.

This chapter expands the conclusions of II.2 to explore how Bayle thought it was still rational to be a Protestant, even if the mysteries of faith were beyond the grasp of reason. Bayle had been deeply influenced by certain Catholic theologians, above all Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld, who had argued for the incomprehensibility of dogma, and the need to adopt a positive rather than a philosophical method in theology. But while for them this led to an emphasis on the authority of the Catholic Church, Bayle deployed the argument to defend (Reformed) Protestantism. For him, even if one acknowledged the incomprehensibility of the mysteries, there were still rational grounds to choose to believe some mysteries (e.g. predestination) over others (e.g. the Real Presence in the Eucharist). These reasons were grounded in historical testimony, approached probabilistically. In turn, we can completely revise of our understanding of Bayle’s debate with the so-called ‘rationaux’ (above all Jean Le Clerc and Isaac Jacquelot). Bayle was no more or less fideist than his opponents, who were no more ‘rationalist’ than him; indeed, Bayle’s position was directly influenced by Le Clerc. The debate between them was in reality a confessional one, with both sides accusing the other of rationalism. Le Clerc was arguing that Bayle was a rationalist beholden to philosophical determinism, and that a non-philosophical biblicism revealed the truths of Christianity – which happened to be Arminian. Bayle was arguing that Le Clerc was a philosophical rationalist beholden to the idol free will, and that a non-philosophical biblicism revealed the truths of Christianity – which happened to be Reformed.

When Gratian’s Decretum took its final shape in the mid-twelfth century, one of its three major parts, the Tractatus de consecratione ecclesiae, focused on sacramental law. De consecratione, added in the second recension, reflects the theological climate of the time, when theologians defined seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, holy orders, matrimony, and extreme unction. Previously, the sacraments had occupied only a modest place in the canon law, with exceptions like the Decretum of Burchard of Worms and the collections ascribed to Ivo of Chartres. De consecratione was divided into five distinctions, focused on churches, the Eucharist, and baptism. The text exposed students to the concept of the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine, reflecting the theologies of the previous century and the Gregorian Reform’s critique of simony, buying and selling spiritual gifts.

Natural philosophy was often seen as a means of reading the “Book of Nature” written by God’s creative act, and therefore must be seen against the background of religion. Older commentary has examined how post-Reformation confessional divides affected the moral and spiritual project of “Physico-Theology.” Some intellectual historians have suggested that there was something that could be described as the confessionalization of early modern physics. Other intellectual historians have argued that the homogenizing pressure of confessionalization was much less successful, both in popular culture and in natural philosophy. This chapter aims to advance these controversies by contrasting general confessionalization claims with case studies that examine whether and how particular contents of natural philosophy were shaped by theological concerns specific to different Christian denominations. These case studies analyze the influence theories of special providence had on cosmology, the problems that doctrines of the Eucharist raised for matter theories, the persistence of moral interpretations of natural particulars in natural histories, and the methodological foundations of eclectic natural philosophies. The upshot of these considerations is that confessionalization led to a much lower degree of homogeneity in natural philosophy than has been supposed.

While Henry V is alive with religious echoes, its moral direction seems incoherent or unstable. Accordingly, the focus of this account is the way the play’s use of religion paradoxically intensifies and legitimates the pleasures of war. The chapter aims to explain not only how the sacral monarchy of England’s Plantagenet kings lives on in Shakespeare’s play but more importantly how in instrumentalizing it and its complex political theology, the prince outdoes his royal predecessors and the play aestheticizes war. It does this by enabling Henry to appropriate the dynamism and sheer agency imagined in Scripture’s representation of God’s freedom. The king comes out of a whirlwind and his army appears as Leviathan – all apparently in the service of the new national community. While Henry V is insistently skeptical about the value of war, its delight in the king’s virtù or violent agency complicates the irony and so denies the play any clear-cut moral critique.

This chapter discusses a series of high-profile cases in which significant disputes arose involving the application of ecclesiastical law. It begins with Parliament’s debates on its role and authority in this area as it attempted more than once to frame legislation for clergy discipline and the discussions in Convocation. It considers the Gompertz case, raising questions about the role of the bishop; the contrasting churchmanships of Evangelicals and Tractarians; and the controversy about biblical interpretation prompted by the publication of Essays and Reviews. The case of James Shore tested the law on the effect of a clergyman’s finding his opinions had changed to such an extent that he was no longer a member of the Church of England, while still effectively retaining his Anglican priesthood. The chapter also covers the cases of William Bennett and the ‘real presence’, and George Denison’s lengthy dispute with the Bishop of Exeter on the effect of baptism. It ends with the case of Alexander Mackonochie and controversy over the regulation of public worship.

This chapter addresses the advent of Nothing within the history of religions as an advent necessarily within literature, and within the ritual enactments of literature as sacred. If the Commedia of Dante is our most profoundly heterodox work while at the same time our most purely orthodox, then Joyce is the late modern counterpart of Dante, and Finnegans Wake is not only the final epic of late modernity, but also at once deeply primordial and apocalyptic, so that its pure heterodoxy is nonetheless a profoundly liturgical work. Only the advent of a uniquely modern Nothing makes possible this universal liturgical celebration. This Nothing is more primal in the Wake than the liturgical movement of anamnesis, but this is an anamnesis of the fall, condemnation, and crucifixion of H.C.E. or Here Comes Everybody, repeated again and again, even as the host is ever broken in the mass. Thus the epic becomes our only purely liturgical epic, embodying a pure action that is a purely ritual action, one truly irresistible to all who actually encounter it as a liturgical mode of being, which is our most sacred mode.