Chapter 8 considers a radically different version of the dynamic explored in chs 6-7: the relationships between provincial governors and Christian communities across the Mediterranean world. For much of this period, these governors were outsiders with short terms of office, who relied heavily on resident office staffs and local grandees. Recent revisionist work on the Christianization of the Roman world has thus stressed the tendency of provincial appointees to prioritise those local elite interests over the demands of bishops and ascetics in the context of religious conflict. As Brent Shaw has put it, the governor could ‘give rather short shrift to a person whom they thought had no standing to intervene in the running of the state affairs over which they had authority’ (Shaw 2015, 58). In this chapter, I seek to modify this picture by suggesting that membership of the church and relationships with provincial Christian communities, institutions, and authority figures played a more significant role for governors than has been appreciated. In this sense, bishops and ascetics were, in fact, amongst the local interest groups whose collaboration these Christian appointees had to pursue.

This chapter explores the challenge of teaching Homer and Vergil in the Roman Empire, focusing on the pleasures of fiction in epic poetry. Using the Phaeacian books of the Odyssey (6–13) and Carthaginian books of the Aeneid (1–4) as case studies, it shows how educators reckoned with the poetic seduction that threatened to derail heroic virtue and integrity. Drawing on philosophical critiques of these canonical poets, the chapter traces evolving responses to the nexus of “Phaeacian pleasures” in their episodes. In the second half, it analyzes how four educators – Plutarch, the anonymous author of the Essay on Homer, Tiberius Claudius Donatus, and Augustine – developed distinctive approaches to epic pleasure. While Plutarch disciplines poetic deception into a propaedeutic for philosophy, the Essay embraces Homeric fiction as a new pedagogy of pleasure. Donatus treats the Aeneid as rhetorical panegyric, while Augustine transforms the affective power of Aeneas and Dido into a new Christian grammar. Together, these authors reveal the centrality of epic pleasure to Imperial education and the divergent strategies by which students learned to navigate literary enchantment

In this chapter I trace the problem of killing in Christian thought. I then raise the question of whether any intentional killing can be justified; in the remainder of the book I argue that the answer to this question is “no”.

This chapter explores ideas about the origins of the self. It focuses specifically on the various accounts of the origins of the self to be found in the works of Augustine, who is Charles Taylor’s second historical reference point (after Plato) as he builds his account of the sources of the modern self. However, the chapter diverges markedly from Taylor’s emphasis on radical reflexivity, the self discovered through introspection. It studies two aspects of the self for Augustine: first, the self’s formation in what Taylor himself calls “webs of interlocution”; second, and more innovatively, the chapter explores the scattered traces of Augustine’s thoughts on the pre-natal self, and on the mystery of the moment at which soul combines with body to become a human person. Augustine ponders this mystery but never makes a declarative statement on the topic, and the chapter suggests that we should listen to the Augustinian nescio (“I don’t know”) and its resultant embrace of indeterminacy, instead of the Cartesian cogito, as we think about the nature of the self.

This chapter revisits the question of Renaissance individualism by focusing on the writings of two early propagators of the Italian Renaissance: Petrarch and Boccaccio. Through an analysis of their literary dialogues with central medieval authorities and institutions, it argues that both authors develop a highly personal, earthbound conception of a relational self. In their engagements with figures such as Augustine (for Petrarch) and Dante (for Boccaccio), they challenge traditional structures of order and meaning, questioning their relevance to contemporary experience and thereby opening a space for an individualism that may be described as “modern.” The chapter also demonstrates that these dialogues are not purely agonistic or triumphant, but reveal the costs and contradictions of this emerging individualism – whether in its lack of metaphysical grounding or its destabilizing effects on the social fabric. Rather than simply discarding old authorities, Petrarch and Boccaccio’s representations of the self often seek to reconcile the old with the new, individualism with tradition, and self with others, anticipating Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the relational nature of the self.

Heresy was a concept by which Joyce understood his role as evangelist of a new literature. The theology of the heretic Giordano Bruno informs mystical religiosity in a range of Joyce’s fiction; it also influenced Joyce’s overall view of his own mission to challenge Catholicism, which finds its ultimate expression in Finnegans Wake. The place that Bruno affords sensuality within pantheism appealed to Joyce. From Bruno’s thought the corporeal – and sexuality in particular – is significant to reflections on the soul in Joyce’s early fiction, such as Stephen Hero. A heretical reading of St Augustine’s felix culpa, the ‘happy sin’, is central to Joyce’s later novels, underpinning both Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and the vision of God as masturbator in Finnegans Wake. As Joyce’s last novel devotes considerable attention to the work of St Augustine and Newman, and stylistic dialogue with the Bible, the overall task of the Wake can be considered heretical.

For Pascal, our knowledge of everything from geometry and the external world to God comes not from reason or experience alone, but rather it requires a feeling of “the heart.” This central notion in Pascal, which is underexplored in the literature, is the key to understanding his philosophy. This chapter develops a “cordate” (or heart-shaped) epistemology to show how the heart replaces reason and experience as the foundation in Pascal. Once we piece together an account of the heart – no easy task, since Pascal’s notes do not explicitly define it – we can trace its role in generating belief. The heart is, roughly, an affective orientation that is the seat of the will, which in turn affects experience, feelings, and perception. It even generates its own reasons. This affective orientation includes, for example, what one fundamentally loves, hates, fears, and so on. We can then see how a feeling of the heart can generate knowledge of first principles, that we are not dreaming, and, once we consider the role of the heart in Pascal’s Augustinian theology, a kind of religious engagement with the world and ultimately a love (and consequently knowledge) of God. Applications to life today are also explored.

Philosophy is not only about beliefs but also decisions and desires. This chapter explores Pascal’s ideas about the human condition, how our desires can make us miserable even when they are satisfied, and how this condition leads us to seek distractions that only make us more miserable. Again we find Pascal’s views and prescriptions stem from the heart, as our fallen state is the source of this sad situation. At the same time, by thinking well about it we can arrive at the conclusion that life could be great, and that the fact that it is not so great confirms the theology of the Fall (and doesn’t confirm other religions, which do not predict our actual predicament). The heart, then, is the key to all of our engagement with the world: not only our beliefs about it but also our desires and happiness. Remarkably, some of the problems Pascal wrote so eloquently about seem especially applicable today, as his descriptions of the need to display a fake identity predict and diagnose TikTok culture, and his rejection of the project to “find your true self,” “love yourself,” and “go with your heart” challenges the typical self-help advice one finds today.

Any proper investigation of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state has to commence where his own investigation begins: with his definition of what states are. Accordingly, this chapter elucidates the particular theory of definition which informs Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato. Machiavelli is continually preoccupied with what we ‘call’ things – or how we ‘nominate’ them, as he sometimes puts it. These are matters of definition in a technical sense, pursued according to a set of argumentative procedures derived from the pages of the ancient Roman rhetorical theorists Cicero and Quintilian. This chapter reconstructs their theory of definition, showing how they classify things in rhetorical argument, before turning to illustrate the theory in action in Roman antiquity by examining how the concept of the civitas – the crucially important political noun used in classical Latin to denote ‘the city’, ‘city-state’, or ‘citizenry’ – is handled in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, and Augustine. The second section of the chapter analyses the reception of this theory and its application to the idea of the civitas in medieval and Renaissance political culture in order to explain how and why Machiavelli comes to rely upon it.

This chapter discusses the social and professional contexts for the emergence of the Italian humanists as a new cultural “class,” and traces the classical and Christian antecedents of their formation of a substantive discourse on secular vocation.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Truthfulness is, so to speak, Kant’s go-to duty. He invokes it in a wide range of philosophical settings, such as his discussion of free will in the Critique of Pure Reason, in his argument for a pure moral theory in the Groundwork, in the detailed moral philosophy of the Metaphysics of Morals and in his late lectures on education. Even though its scope and its theoretical foundation vary, the duty not to lie remains Kant’s prime example of a strict and unequivocal obligation. By way of introduction, this chapter first provides a survey of some important passages in which Kant invokes or argues for the duty of truthfulness before turning to the textbook example that is the bone of contention between him and Benjamin Constant and presenting some reactions provoked by the main thesis of Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie”: that there is an unconditional, absolute duty to be truthful even in emergencies.