This chapter examines the ways in which Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elites recast local earthquakes as divine blessing upon the city rather than manifestations of divine wrath as evinced in the liturgical commemoration rite. First, it examines a legend that arose in connection with the earthquake of 438 that framed it as a divine theophany. Following the divisive Council of Chalcedon in 451, ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople’s imperial church used the legend against their miaphysite opponents to cast the quake as divine approval of Constantinople’s political and theological claims. Next, it turns to the earthquake of 557, which partially destroyed the famous church of Hagia Sophia built by the emperor Justinian in 537. Justinian rebuilt the church in 562 and held an elaborate ceremony complete with a liturgy of rededication for the church. This ceremony and its liturgy eschewed the theology of divine chastisement and framed the quake as a temporary setback, an opportunity for Justinian to display his prowess over the destructive effects of nature by rebuilding the church to be more magnificent than before.

This book has demonstrated how Christian liturgy and theology were entangled within a complex religious, political, and environmental ecology in Byzantine Constantinople. It has also shown how responses to earthquakes in Constantinople provide an exceptional window into the ways in which early Byzantines conceived of the natural world. Here I summarize the book’s conclusions.

Constantinople was a society marked by grand ritual systems that shaped its residents’ view of the kosmos and history. In ecclesiastical and civic rites, Constantinople projected an image of an ordered kosmos and a similarly ordered state that reflected it. Earthquakes, to the extent that they threatened these images of cosmic and political order, did not fit comfortably in the city’s political and ecclesiastical ritual systems but for different reasons: they threatened both the patristic notion of a harmonious kosmos and the Roman ideology of eternal victory.

This chapter describes how medieval Constantinople ceased to commemorate new local earthquakes on its liturgical calendar and instead crafted new ways of responding liturgically to seismicity. First it discusses new liturgical hymnography added to the commemoration rite for the quake of October 26, 740, and the establishment of that day as an annual “earthquake day” on which worshippers could reflect on natural disaster in the abstract, even as the hymns presented an incoherent set of conflicting theologies of earthquakes. It then examines how earthquakes from the distant past became potent ideological symbols in this period. It concludes with an examination of a prayer from the late eighth century created for use whenever earthquakes struck, a form of liturgical response that came to replace the practice of commemorating new quakes.

It is hard to see the early Emerson as anything other than a racist. There are just far too many ugly comments in his journals; even in his earlier antislavery speeches he seems, at best, tone-deaf. But gradually Emerson began to have a broader view of race that resulted in his actually being a leader in speaking for racial equality and integration. How did this happen? The chapter evaluates how Emerson embraced and then renounced scientific racism. It also analyzes his compositional strategies within his journals. Often, Emerson posed unthinkable ideas there to provoke himself to move beyond a position. That is demonstrably the case with certain racist statements. It is not a straight line from racist to defender of a common humanity, but it is a discernible one. Emerson’s growth here parallels both his move toward abolitionism and his recalibration of self-reliance.

The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

Abolitionists adopted higher law to oppose the settled law which explicitly recognized chattel slavery in America. Emerson sometimes spoke on higher law but it was not his most comfortable position. Emerson was a Neoplatonist, and it is the gradualism of Neoplatonism that he embraced against the immediatism implied in higher law. But even before Emerson’s 1856 conversion to abolition, starting in 1854 Emerson began moving his self-reliance into Northern-reliance. He was working his way philosophically toward a political activism that he would, finally, enthusiastically embrace. Emerson borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus the word and idea of living “amphibiously,” and that is what he learned to do.