This chapter explores the concept of a worldview and provides a helpful definition. Additionally, the differences between religious and secular worldviews are examined and explained.

The concept of the Dominican liturgical ‘exemplar’ is the subject of Chapter 2. The Dominican exemplar was undoubtedly modelled on an earlier exemplar from the Cistercian order (now Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, 114). Comparing the Dominican exemplar to its Cistercian predecessor, it is evident that the two are similar in both content and presentation. Nevertheless, the Dominicans took the concept further: they made several copies of their exemplar rather than just one, and, instead of merely documenting the liturgy, the Dominican exemplars supplied the models for fourteen types of books required for performing the liturgy. Three exemplars survive: the oldest, Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1; a copy used by the master of the order, London, British Library, Add. 23935; and a copy made for the Dominican province of Spain, Salamanca, San Esteban, SAL.–CL.01. Each manuscript is described individually, outlining the dating, known provenance, and current physical state.

This chapter considers how Plutarch, a Platonic philosopher and priest of Apollo, used the language of pistis (‘faith’) and pisteuein (‘to believe’). It rejects the view that Plutarch was the first to introduce a ‘fideistic’, proto-Christian concept of religious faith as opposed to reason, or that his faith was only a way to inscribe himself into ‘tradition’. Crucial for our understanding of Plutarch’s pistis is his initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries, which prevented him from ‘believing’ the Epicureans’ denial of immortality, as he deemed that the Platonists’ view of the immortality of the soul ‘is harder to disbelieve than to believe’. The chapter emphasises the convergence between Plutarch’s experience of the mysteries and his Platonic philosophy. Plutarch’s notion of faith is not fideistic and anti-philosophical but belongs to the domain of philosophy: unfounded faith must be criticised when it misrepresents the gods and strengthened when it aligns with sound philosophical doctrines. Not only can philosophical doctrines confirm expressions of pistis, but particular philosophical views are also the object of faith and are, conversely, reinforced by initiation into the mysteries. Throughout the chapter, it is intimated that Plutarch’s concept of pistis is not fundamentally different from that of Paul.

This chapter examines ‘supernatural politics ’as practised most consciously by the Cultural Revolution Group during the Cultural Revolution, which used supernatural imagery to communicate the demonic dangers of ‘revisionism’, to exploit popular belief that surface appearances are innately deceptive (compare Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao), and to deploy modes of magical thinking (e.g. that like begets like; that things that have been in contact with one another continue to act on one another). Notwithstanding its highly ideologized content – capitalist roaders, line struggles, revisionism – Cultural Revolution discourse ‘worked’ by playing on the turbid world of yin forces.

This chapter explores those who reject theism and all forms of supernaturalism, yet also reject secular worldviews. What characterizes religious naturalists is that they find religious meaning, values, and importance solely in nature, believing that nature is sacred.

Chapter 9 is the last of four chapters to consider one element of the Dominican liturgy, focussing here on the melodic and modal qualities of Dominican chant before and after the mid-thirteenth-century liturgical revision. The chapter opens with a consideration of the melodic characteristics of Dominican chant; Cistercian melodies were clearly an initial source of inspiration for the Dominican mass chants. A comparison of the melodies of a twelfth-century Cistercian gradual (Paris, BnF, lat. 17328) with key thirteenth-century Dominican mass books reveals that the Dominican revision maintained many Cistercian characteristics (such as abbreviated melismas and a preference for minor thirds over major seconds), while reducing the incidence of repetition and reversing the Cistercian transposition of the modes of alleluias. To close, the chapter investigates cases of palaeographical anomalies at points of melodic revision in the first authoritative ‘exemplar’ of the revised liturgy (Rome, Santa Sabina XIV L 1), and considers what these reveal about both the production and revision process.

Chapter 7 looks at the role of officials in carrying out religious policy. It begins with an analysis of their social profile from the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution and shows that despite officials’ rising literacy and improved political education, they found it hard to carry out a policy that demanded respect for religious freedom, on the one hand, and the elimination of folk religion, coded as ‘feudal superstition’. The chapter looks at four dimensions of officials’ involvement in implementing religious policy: their response to the destruction of lineages and to the persistence of lineage sentiment; their involvement in the levelling of gravesites during collectivization; their relationship to the popular upsurge to restore the ‘sacred village’ in the aftermath of the famine; and the support of a significant minority in sustaining folk religion. It shows grassroots officials displayed a variety of responses to folk religion, which affected the experiences of believers.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.