Chapter 2 considers how requirements for Christian officials intersected with ongoing debates and disputes over the definition of orthodoxy in East and West. Eastern emperors and post-imperial kings felt the need to establish forms of consensus which might unite potentially opposing churches and church factions amidst new Christological disputes (in the East) and renewed Trinitarian controversies (in the West). This chapter considers how that pursuit of accommodation affected the practical implementation of ideals of a religiously uniform state. What Eastern emperors seem to have sought (and officials provided) was not personal commitment to a particular Christological orthodoxy, but rather, public support of and administrative co-operation with the current imperial line on its definition. Post-imperial kings adopted similar strategies. While the Hasding dynasty eagerly (and self-consciously) deployed the precedents of Theodosian legislation on religious uniformity within the state, these provisions were quietly shelved elsewhere in the West. This tacit acceptance of Christian diversity within the state maps onto the wider attempts of Burgundian and Ostrogothic regimes and their elite subjects to skirt the implications of doctrinal difference as part of wider strategies of accommodation.

The redemptive religious societies represented a form of religiosity that spread rapidly in the disturbed conditions of the 1920s and 1930s. Most societies had a semi-Buddhist, millennial character, offering members the prospect of surviving the third kalpa, or cosmic cycle, which they associated with the arrival of the Maitreya Buddha. Most were non-political, but certain leaders of the largest of the societies, the Yiguandao, collaborated with the Japanese during the war and later with the Guomindang. The chapter looks at the beliefs and forms of these societies and the reasons for the CCP’s animus against them. It recounts the suppression of the societies from 1950 but shows that they were never completely eliminated. Subsequent sections examine the social profile of the societies and the nature of their appeal, including to some CCP members, and asks how and why the societies survived repression.

Over the past two decades, historians of ideas have posed searching questions about the relevance of some of the standard categories used in the investigation of past systems of thought and practice. The categories ‘science’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘religion’, in particular, have been subjected to intense scrutiny, and it is now often claimed that in antiquity and the Middle Ages there were no enterprises that can easily be mapped onto these modern categories. This chapter traces the origins of the modern conception of religion – understood as a generic entity characterised by sets of beliefs and practices – with some reference to the parallel emergence of modern notions of philosophy and science. It also offers some preliminary suggestions about how this might be relevant to the study of religion in antiquity.

This chapter examines the fate of Buddhism and Daoism, mainly in relation to folk religion, looking at Buddhist monks and nuns, lay Buddhists, and Buddhists who ran local temples. It discusses the two main forms of Daoist monasticism – Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) and Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi dao) – and household Daoists, who were married and had jobs but who provided ritual services to their communities. It shows that the majority of monks and nuns were forced out of religious life following land reform but also that monastic life persisted fitfully until the Cultural Revolution. It looks at the responses of Buddhists to the new regime and at the efforts of Chinese Buddhist Association and the Chinese Daoist Association to carry out reform of their structures and theologies. It shows that a small number of former monks and nuns continued to sell ritual services to individuals and local communities, especially for funerals, while household Daoists and musical associations sometimes continued to operate into the Cultural Revolution.

This chapter examines the discourse of religious belief in Latin epic of the first century CE. The first section advances a methodological case for the value of high-register poetry as evidence for Roman thinking about religious belief. Building on the model of Charles King, the argument highlights the implications of the literary evidence for key theoretical debates about belief. The second section consists of a series of case studies demonstrating Roman imperial epic’s interest in the role of empiricism in shaping beliefs about the divine. Human testing of the gods features especially prominently in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Statius’ Thebaid: how to recognise a deity, whether a mortal can perform the same acts as a god, what qualities distinguish the human from the divine. Using Ovid’s Lycaon and Niobe and Statius’ Capaneus as paradigms of a broader phenomenon, the chapter shows how Latin epic develops both a vocabulary and behavioural code of theological scrutiny, which subjects divinity to rigorous examination by mortals as a method of grounding belief. The motivations for this poetic line of inquiry can be traced not only to philosophical discourse but also to contemporary practices of emperor cult and deification.

Chapter 1 explores the discourse of ‘superstition’ (mixin) from the New Culture Movement (1915–20s) to the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), focusing on the intersection of the categories of ‘superstition’, ‘religion’, and ‘science’. Nationalist intellectuals and Guomindang leaders counterposed superstition to modern religion, seeing the former as an impediment to China’s becoming a modern nation-state. A strong theme in the discourse of the CCP was to counterpose superstition to science, and the chapter discusses briefly efforts to propagate scientific knowledge of the natural world. It examines the efforts of the CCP to rethink what religious policy might mean in a country where ‘religion’ did not conform to the implicitly European conception of religion that underpinned the Marxist–Leninist tradition.

The CCP rejected an ‘anti-religious’ policy such as the Soviet Union had developed in favour of one that reflected its commitment to a ‘united front’ with loyal and progressive religious leaders. It involved the setting up of five state-regulated national associations for each of the five religions the regime recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. With the move to the phase of ’socialist construction’, the united front policy came under attack from leftists. Despite efforts by the United Front Work Department to maintain the policy from the Socialist Education Movement (1963–6), the policy mutated into an anti-religious policy that reached its apogee with the Cultural Revolution. The chapter explores how the Chinese Buddhist Association and the Chinese Daoist Association, set up in 1953 and 1957, were affected by the changing policy.

This chapter argues that ‘belief’ is neither the only, nor the most appropriate, concept for understanding the mental and experiential dimensions of Greek religion. It argues that the dichotomy between ritualistic and belief-centred conceptions of religion that has long shaped the debate over Greek religion reflects an underlying dualism of mind and body. Under the influence of this dualism, the domain of religion has been divided into categories of ritual, which belongs to the body, and belief, which belongs to the mind. This chapter draws on recent work in anthropology that seeks to collapse this mind–body dualism to propose a concept of skilled perception as the basis of an alternative approach to religion in the lived experience of the Greeks. This approach is developed through a series of studies of normative and divergent acts of religious perceiving, via a close reading of Theophrastus’ ‘Superstitious Man’ (Characters 16) and a selection of episodes of divination and omen-perception in Herodotus and Xenophon. These studies suggest that we might view Greek religion less as a body of beliefs and rituals and more as a skill for living in a dynamic world.

Supernatural politics is a theme that runs through the preceding chapters. It is intended to show how efforts to indigenize Communism by the CCP drew consciously and unconsciously on traditional religious culture, even though this was only ever one mode of political legitimation. It is hard to measure its effectiveness in promoting the legitimacy of the regime, although it certainly served to mystify the workings of power. Through an assessment of the CCP’s reliance on repression, its failure to forge a new-style religious policy based on the united front, its organizational incoherence, divisions among its grassroots cadres, popular resistance in defence of folk religion, its policies to improve health and popularize science, it concludes that the project to roll back the influence of the recognized religions and eliminate ‘feudal superstition’ had only limited success. Judged from the perspective of religion, the party-state is shown to be much weaker than is often assumed.

The introduction examines the CCP’s hope to break with a Soviet-style anti-religious policy. It examines policies towards the five religions that it recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism (Islam is not discussed), as well as towards the folk religion of the vast majority of Chinese which the Party did not recognize as a religion and dismissed as feudal superstition. The CCP’s initial aim was to create a united front with patriotic religion leaders. However, this came under attack from those who increasingly saw religion as an obstacle to socialist advance. Through propaganda, campaigns and scientific education, the regime aimed to eradicate popular belief in supernatural agency. At the same time, it sought to bolster its legitimacy through what is called ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. the use of supernatural imagery and Confucian values to communicate its messages. This led to tensions within the ruling ideology. The introduction uses the steady move towards repression of religion to reflect on the unhappy relationship of Marxism to religion in general.

Chapter 4 surveys the ways in which imperial officials were represented in various forms of late ancient Christian literature. In so doing, it acts as an introduction to Part II, which explores how contemporaries conceived of distinctly Christian forms of political service in this period. There is not a straightforward ‘archive’ of sources for this problem. Texts on government by current or former administrators do not tend to discuss the implications of their religious identities. As a result, it is rare that we can reconstruct an officeholder’s own perspective. At the same time—and in sharp contrast to other Christian authority figures (emperors, bishops, ascetics)—there is no single genre of Christian literature which focuses consistently on the careers of imperial or royal officials. This chapter thus considers how the purposes, audiences and generic expectations of letters, sermons, church histories, and saints’ lives shaped (and sometimes demanded) positive portrayals of officials, their religious identities, and their interactions with Christian communities and authority figures.

Chapter 7 is the second of four chapters to consider one element of the Dominican liturgy, focussing here on the sources and development of the Dominican mass over the thirteenth century. The analysis confirms that the Dominican order’s mass chants, particularly its alleluias, were mainly drawn from the Cistercian gradual, and demonstrates that this can be traced back to the earliest identifiable Dominican liturgy. Using surviving manuscripts, this chapter traces various patterns of revision made to the Dominican liturgy in the mid thirteenth century, undertaken by a commission of four friars and completed by Humbert of Romans. The final portion of the chapter examines instances where these changes result in palaeographical anomalies in the first ‘exemplar’ manuscript of Humbert’s revised liturgy (Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1), and considers what these reveal about the process of copying the exemplar.