This chapter sets out a taxonomy of late ancient approaches to Christian political service. Historians of the Christianization of the Roman world have tended to take at face value the (oft-repeated) contemporary assertion that a traditional public career was irreconcilable with Christian piety and the true form of service: militia Christi. Yet as ch. 4 shows, this was just one of many ways in which late ancient observers thought through the compatibility (or otherwise) of officeholding and Christian commitment. Drawing inspiration from recent work which has read between the lines of ascetic texts to reconstruct the character of a more moderate ‘respectable’ Christianity, this chapter delineates the ways in which Christian officials could reconcile their careers and religious identities. Through this holistic account, I argue that there were numerous ways for individual officeholders to be presented, perceived—and indeed, to understand themselves—as virtuous political actors, according both to traditional Roman political assumptions, and to the more distinctly Christian norms which appropriated, problematised, and reframed them in late antiquity.

This chapter treats a selection of divine responses to impiety recorded in historiography, oratory, and letters from the late Republic. Considering influential claims for the stability of certain theological tenets regarding divine justice, the chapter examines the question of how and when gods punish individuals rather than communities. In this period, formulaic calls for the gods to punish the guilty individual rather than the state became weaponized. Although such utterances conformed superficially to normative theology, they undermined the traditional perception of the gods as concerned primarily with the welfare of the community as a whole, and as reacting to impiety in a consistent manner. The period of the late Republic thus sees the emergence of perceptions of the gods as being less predictable, stable, or moral than in the traditional scholarly view.

Chapter 3 is the first of three chapters to consider an aspect of the material production of Dominican liturgical books. This chapter focuses on textual palaeography and the work of text scribes, as exemplified in the three extant exemplars: Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1; London, British Library, Add. 23935; and Salamanca, San Esteban, SAL.–CL.01. The chapter opens with a review of thirteenth-century Dominican documentation concerning the copying of books more generally, such as Humbert of Romans’ description of the ‘overseer of scribes’, as well as the more limited evidence for liturgical book production. It then treats each of the three extant liturgical exemplars individually, identifying text scribes and their working patterns. Numerous scribes copied the exemplars, with only one working on more than one manuscript. Given the high production quality, it is argued that the exemplars were largely the work of professional scribes, who would have been working under the supervision of a Dominican friar.

The introductory chapter explains the importance of worldview studies and their emergence in contemporary society. It outlines the book’s aim to explore some basic religious and secular outlooks on life, presenting them as distinct yet coherent rival worldviews.

This chapter explores the influence of Confucian culture on the political culture of the CCP, with a particular focus on the latter’s attempt to establish a revolutionary morality. Having analysed different views of Confucius within the Party leadership, it reviews the debate among intellectuals about Confucianism, which reached its peak in the early 1960s. By the Cultural Revolution, Confucian values had come under fierce attack. It explores the CCP’s relation to specific Confucian values, such as loyalty, family relations, filial piety, benevolence, ‘conscience’, hard work, and the pursuit of wealth. It rejects the idea of the CCP as a ‘Confucian Leninist party’, concluding that its appropriation of elements in the Confucian tradition was often unconscious and always fraught with tension.

This chapter examines the regulation of Protestantism through the Three-Self Movement. Liberal Protestants, like progressive Buddhists, tended to view the Communist accession to power fairly positively, even though it meant that foreign missionaries were expelled. Indigenous denominations were more hostile to the CCP. Things were considerably worse for Roman Catholics, at least for those who were unwilling to break their tie with the Vatican. The Patriotic Catholic Church proved difficult to establish, and no sooner had it been set up in 1957 than its priests and bishops found themselves caught up in the surge of anti-religious leftism. The chapter shows how the Socialist Education Movement tried to use techniques honed during land reform, such as ‘speaking bitterness’, to split insular Catholic villages along class lines. The chapter shows how at the grassroots both Protestant and Catholics fell back on informal networks as churches were closed and clerics arrested. In the case of the Protestant houses, the grassroots movement actually grew during Cultural Revolution.

The notion of belief is often seen as central to Christianity, whilst ancient religions have been seen as ritualistic in nature. This chapter casts doubt on that dichotomy, by analysing how Roman writing on religion, as well as early Christian texts (exemplified in Augustine) rely on a shared set of assumptions about what religion was. This went back to philosophical expectations about the coherence between religious practice and theology, which Christianity, at least as argued by Augustine, achieved better than Greco-Roman religions. In their own perception, Christians and pagans parted ways not on matters of the conceptualisation of the divine but on that of which deity one had to worship.

This conclusion brings together the main arguments of the book regarding Christian expectations of officials in the fifth and sixth centuries. It draws these together to suggest a holistic picture of late and post-Roman service aristocracies whose practices and self-representation were shaped, in part, by the demands of Christian commitment. It recapitulates the two central strands of argument in the book. Some officials sought to present—and likely understood—their role in governance as linked to their exceptional fulfilment of such requirements on members of the church: church attendance and patronage, adherence to orthodoxy, morality, and even asceticism. At the same time, the changing culture of late ancient political institutions meant that (almost) all those who served imperial and post-imperial regimes were subject to distinctly Christian expectations: from rulers, superiors, colleagues, churchmen, holy people, and—last but not least—their subjects. It concludes by suggesting that the survey conducted here should not be the end of this line of inquiry. The implication of this book is that the peculiar character of the Christianity envisaged and practiced within late ancient states should be the subject of further study.

Chapter 1 sets out the historical context for the revision of the Dominican liturgy in the mid-thirteenth century. It opens with a discussion of the scope and challenges of the corpus of ‘pre-Humbertian’ Dominican books dating from before and during the revision period; the surviving books can be used to complement our understanding of the development of the Dominican liturgy, particularly with regard to the mass. Then, drawing on early legislative documents and other Dominican writings, the chapter charts what is known about the protracted revision period and the reception of the revised liturgy. A narrative emerges of a search for liturgical uniformity that took several years to achieve, beginning in 1244, first assigned to a commission of four (unnamed) friars, and finally completed by Humbert of Romans in 1256.

This chapter focuses on the perhaps most recently developed worldview examined in the book, transhumanism. The transhumanist core conviction is that, by utilizing biotechnology and AI, we should radically change, improve, or refine humanity, even to the extent of creating a new species, the posthuman.

Chapter 6 explores supernatural rumours as a form of supernatural politics, a means whereby the uneducated put their fears and concerns about the accession of the CCP to power into the public domain. The chapter focuses on two particular ‘epidemics’ of rumour, the first of which told how the Soviet government had asked Mao Zedong for the hearts, livers, eyes, testicles, and breasts of 20,000 Chinese people in order to make an atom bomb; the second of which occurred in the wake of the famine and told of a conversation that had been heard between two toads which predicted that the elderly would not survive unless the young baked them buns in the shape of toads. The chapter explores the meanings of both rumours, analyses their disseminators, evaluates the effectiveness of the CCP’s response, and asks how far they were acts of resistance.

Chapter 4 is the second of three chapters to consider an aspect of the material production of Dominican liturgical books. Music scribes, termed ‘notators’, are the focus of this chapter. Their work is first contextualised through a discussion of the Dominican regulations concerning notation, and the antecedents which may have influenced these Dominican rules. The chapter then turns to the three Dominican liturgical exemplars: Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1; London, British Library, Add. 23935; and Salamanca, San Esteban, SAL.–CL.01, which were copied in Paris in the mid thirteenth century. The musical palaeography of each exemplar is examined in turn. Numerous notators are identified across the three exemplars, only one of which, potentially a Dominican cantor, copied notation in more than one exemplar. The majority of the notators appear to have been professionals. Beyond the Dominican sphere, this has implications for understanding professional medieval music book production in the milieu in which books of Notre Dame polyphony were made, as well as numerous other chant books.

This chapter approaches the archaic philosopher-poet Xenophanes of Colophon both as a distinctive religious agent and as an instructive interpreter of traditional religious attitudes and practices. Xenophanes develops a category of belief (dokos) and employs it not only to express the status of his own theological and cosmological views but also to conceptualise traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as a cohesive system of beliefs. This system of beliefs comprises the interrelated and mutually reinforcing views that the gods are fundamentally human-like in biological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, moral, and political respects. The chapter explores Xenophanes’ critique of the different aspects of this system of beliefs, as well as the sources and grounds that underpin it. Finally, the chapter considers how Xenophanes closely relates expectations for veracity, propriety, and socio-political benefit in a way that suggests a requirement for harmony between religious belief and practice and, therefore, a conception of religious practice as theologically loaded. In the final analysis, Xenophanes teaches the modern student of Greek religion that a Greek thinker of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE had the conceptual and expressive resources to articulate a conception of traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as, at bottom, a system of beliefs.