When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

War is often seen as both morally repugnant and as a heroic activity conducted in the national interest. This introduction outlines some conditions in which this moral dualism appears and is managed in eighteenth-century Britain. It surveys the financial, social, and cultural pressures that could influence public attitudes to war. Focusing on selected examples, it explores the role of humanitarian feeling in justifying particular acts of violence, in enabling a general, compassionate acquiescence in war, and in encouraging the emergence of anti-war attitudes that eventually led to organised opposition to war.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.

Chapter 2 considers the problem of ‘atheism’ in the period before the Civil War, emphasising the extent to which the concept represented an amalgam of the imaginary and the real, to which justice needs to be done. In many ways the discourse of ‘atheism’ was exaggerated, even fantastic. Yet it overlapped with actual instances of irreligion in ways that are teased out in the course of the chapter. The concept of ‘atheism’ made was possible to express disquiet about tendencies in contemporary thought and mores, such as secularism, naturalism and an undue reliance on ‘wit’ and sarcasm. The supposed overlap between atheism and immorality also provided an opportunity for preachers to draw attention to the spiritual shortcomings of the godly to whom they preached.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

Chapter 4 concludes the analysis of Julian’s reckoning with Constantine’s propaganda. It focuses on Julian’s strategy to disavow the public persona of the first emperor who had promoted the association between Christian sovereignty and ideals of philosophical leadership. The first section considers the efforts of Constantine’s propaganda to use the events of his (Constantine’s) life to prove that Roman history was guided by Christian providence. The engagement with autobiography in Julian’s final writings appears in this light as the culmination of his response to Christianity’s claims of intellectual dominance over Greco-Roman culture. The second section reconstructs Julian’s joint attempts to project his life as the token of his superior understanding of providential history (Against Heraclius) and to mobilise past Roman history as a source of counter-exempla disproving Constantine’s claims (The Caesars). In the process, Julian repurposed a fundamental element of Constantine’s propaganda – imperial iconography – to his advantage (Caesars; Misopogon).

The Aeneid is qualifiedly Augustan. It does not suppress the problems of Augustus’ rise. It foregrounds human tragedy within the range of events in suspension, fortunae, though these cannot impede providential World Fate. Dido and Turnus make choices against fate that are up to them; the fact of fate’s providence makes these and other tragedies even more cruel. Virgil combines the Stoic concept of cosmic fate with the contemporary view that the Roman empire was coterminous with the inhabited world, and he innovatively adds that Rome’s universal fate is Stoically providential. He complicates that model with his emphasis on the human tragedy involved in Rome’s establishment. Rather than being Augustan or anti-Augustan, the Aeneid is realistic in its acceptance of the problems of Augustus’ rise and guardedly optimistic chiefly because of Virgil’s independent didacticism for Augustus. He presents as exempla for Augustus Hercules and Aeneas, though the latter’s defective inclemency to Turnus is meant to encourage Augustus’ well-advertised exercise of clemency. Anchises’ words at Aeneid 6.851–3 have a special didactic application to Augustus: ‘tu regere imperio .... memento’.

Stoicism before Chrysippus believed in radical determism, but Chrysippus reintroduced the notion of human responsibility. He argued that it is in our power to assent to an impression or otherwise and work with it, and it is likewise in our power to assent to or to reject World Fate, working with or against it. He illustrated this with his analogy with the top that needs a spin: its spinnability is its inherent cause, but needs an external cause to activate it. In this way, he further posited, we can assign good or bad morality to humans, judging by their will to live Stoically, that is, ‘in accordance with nature’, the Stoics’ highest virtue. Virgil adopts this model in the Aeneid, so that Aeneas can be seen as learning to assent to World Fate, while Juno, Dido and Turnus can ignore or reject it. Virgil in fact incorporates Chrysippus’ analogy in a simile depicting Amata driven by her inherent desire and by the daemonic goddess Allecto to deny her assent to World Fate. However, he locates deviations from World Fate within the Stoic category of ‘events in suspension’, ‘indifferents’ or individual fortunes, which might temporarily challenge World Fate but never negate it.

From the founding on, a dominant stream of American political thought and statesmanship has understood the polity in providentialist terms. Revolutionary leaders espoused belief in a particularly providential God, which is what we would expect if they also held to a classical Christian conception of natural law rather than the pantheistic naturalism alleged by modern scholars.We take our investigative cues from the providentialist proclamation by the Continental Congress that bookended the Revolutionary War, and we then engage in historical case studies of key players and events in American counterintelligence and French diplomacy. These case studies show that prominent actors in the war affirmed core tenets of classical theism: the existence of a creator God who providentially governs the cosmos and the destiny of men.According to these key participants engaged in espionage and diplomacy, the providential creator was also a moralistic God of justice who favored the side of liberty such that the revolutionary actors saw themselves carrying out the divine will on the world historic stage in obedience to the dictates of right reason.

This chapter explores the link between international law’s long-standing doctrinal commitment to commerce and its inability to act decisively on behalf of the environment. One of the fundamental rights the early authors of jus gentium discovered was the right to engage in commerce. Vitoria, Gentili, and Grotius each drew on a providentialist theory of commerce. The doctrine held that Providence distributed scarcity and plenty across the Earth so that people could not be self-sufficient but would need to go in search of one another in order to acquire what they lacked. Commerce imagined in its pure form of reciprocal, mutually beneficial exchange would be the means to bring separated mankind to friendship. The embrace of such doctrine by early exponents of the law of nations, carried forward by Vattel, set the stage for international law’s longstanding commitment to international commerce, viewed as a virtuous activity that tends to the common good. An additional legacy was the view of nature as commodity. The providentialist doctrine of commerce remains embedded in international law and hobbles its ability to protect the natural environment.

Chapters 3 through 6 examine what selected early modern providential naturalisms looked like on the ground. Each of those chapters concludes with some observations about the providential naturalism framework analysed in that chapter, and some questions about implementing those frameworks in general, that arise from these scenarios. Those observations and questions are ones that emerge either directly (through an author’s explicit discussion of them), or indirectly (because an author’s treatment of an issue prompts them). This concluding chapter of the book draws these together to better understand what might be involved in being a providential naturalist today. It identifies some of the key theological ideas, assumptions, and judgements involved in providential naturalisms, as well as some significant challenges and complexities that providential naturalists in any time and place will likely need to navigate. In terms of the latter, it draws attention specifically to three areas of concern: the boundary between the natural and the miraculous; the communicative qualities of nature; and the implications of naturalistic explanation for how to live one’s life.

This chapter delves into early modern theories about a key scriptural story, that of Noah’s flood, and the theological implications of explaining the flood in a largely naturalistic manner through appeal to laws of nature. Seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes used laws of nature as the basis for a naturalistic account of the creation of the world, and others followed suit. This chapter analyses two accounts of the world’s creation and subsequent dissolution in the flood written in England in the closing decades of the seventeenth century that drew on laws of nature: Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, and William Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth. Burnet and Whiston each explore how those early events in the earth’s history might be accounted for through natural processes, making their treatises among the earliest explicit attempts in England to explain key scriptural events chiefly in terms of natural causality.