The Comedy’s recantation of an error determines Paradiso’s role. The poem recants Convivio’s rationalism, not for the sake of faith but for philosophy properly understood. Dante initiates that change when, in Convivio IV, he pivots from a metaphysical impasse to investigating the meaning of nobility, a focus on human affairs that persists in the Comedy. Because wisdom must be sought, understanding the ground from which the search begins is crucial to its justification and, once it’s undertaken, to forestall passion-induced distortions. As a guide, Dante looks to Aristotle, the genuine Aristotle, not the derivative versions of his contemporaries.

But Dante’s path to the question of happiness, which animates philosophy, differs from Aristotle’s. To defend the philosophic life, Dante must liberate philosophy from subordination to faith. I here sketch the way in which the Comedy’s form aids him in this effort. In thus prosecuting political philosophy’s central task, the defense of the philosophic life, Paradiso fulfills its role not as the poem’s telos but as the portal to that life “figured” in Purgatorio’s Earthly Paradise.

Dante’s two reports of his looks back to earth frame this section. After the first, Dante has a vision of Christ himself.Despite this theophany, Dante must undergo an examination of his Christianity, testing him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.The eager “bachelor” answers the masters’ queries with definitions memorized from authoritative texts.The test, however, exceeds rote memorization.The question of the texts’ truth, which concern the most significant matter of our happiness, moves the participants to inquire more deeply.

Dante rethinks the Christian virtues as he rethought the sins in Purgatorio.His reassessment reconsiders Adam, the figure most intimately connected with the meaning of Scripture’s supremacy, namely, its discouragement of philosophic inquiry. Through this conversation, Dante reinterprets the text that originates the faith in which he’s tested. He recurs to that origin to direct it onto an alternative path, one that encourages rather than prohibits the philosophic life.

This alternative way of life requires an alternative divinity. In this realm of the fixed stars, to which he traces his origins as man and poet, Dante undertakes the ultimate poetic act, that of theopoiesis. Dante’s vision of Christ, he writes, prepared him to see Beatrice.

Despite the colossal importance of Augustine in the history of justification, no comprehensive study on this topic has yet been written. Moreover, the prevailing view is that Augustine understood justification to be caused by charity, not faith. This book aims to re-center Augustine’s theology of justification onto faith, and its thesis is that Augustine developed multiple accounts of how faith justifies based on whether faith is motivated by fear (which fails to justify), hope (which will justify), or love (which already justifies). The introduction then establishes the fundamentals of justification for Augustine: Augustine understands justification to consist in forgiveness and interior renewal, interprets iustificare (to justify) as making righteous by grace alone, and understands human iustitia (righteousness) as a created gift distinct from God’s righteousness. Lastly, the introduction shows how justification was central to Augustine, both to counter Pelagianism and to explain the work of God operative in the actions of the Church.

Chapter 4 examines how Augustine’s theology of the righteousness of faith also becomes more Christological, that is, uniquely shaped by having Christ as its object. This chapter begins with the fundamental contrast between pride and humility. Augustine sees pride as the love of the delusional thought that one is the center of reality, and faith in Christ as the healing remedy which restores the soul’s relationship to God, the true center. Returning to confessiones (Confessions), Augustine understands faith in Christ as more than just an ascent to God. Instead, it initiates a double movement in which the soul is first humbled by its recognition in faith of Christ’s humble humanity and then exalted by its reception of his divinity. Finally, the chapter turns to de trinitate (The Trinity), in which Augustine explains how, because sacraments present eternal realities through temporal signs, Christ as sacrament makes the humility of God accessible to faith.

Early in the text of Works of Love (1847) Kierkegaard makes the claim that “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.” The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate how this claim might relate to his later claim in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that it is faith that is the opposite of despair. The first section introduces the intertwined dynamics of love and despair as they are traced out by Kierkegaard in both Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The second section of this chapter argues that there is a genuine therapy that the loving person undergoes and is able through love of others to heal the sickness unto death that is nothing other than despair. The third and final section of this chapter considers the basis on which we might attribute to Kierkegaard a view of the theological virtues at least as being closely related by dint of a common structure and a common aspiration to consolation and integration of the self with itself in peace and reconciliation despite the unavoidable sorrows of our lives.

This chapter reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.

This chapter lays out two key tasks in reading Scripture that Augustine identifies in the Confessions, and especially in his exegesis of Genesis: “the task of grasping meaning” and “the task of grasping truth.” The first task is that of discerning authorial intention; the second is that of “seeing for oneself that what the author is saying is in fact the case.” The task of grasping meaning is difficult in part because of the peculiar character of the Scriptures; they are both accessible to all, using ordinary language (which is open to misinterpretation), and yet full of profundities that only the wisest readers can come to appreciate. It is also difficult because we cannot really know what is in another person’s mind; any judgments about authorial intention are provisional at best, and only pride would claim to have identified the uniquely correct interpretation. The task of grasping truth is likewise difficult. When it comes to intelligible realities, Truth speaks inwardly, not through any text, even that of Scripture. When it comes to historical realities, including the central truths about the life of the Incarnate Word, we cannot have knowledge in the fullest sense.

Action at scale on climate change is urgent. It is unavoidable that such action must for a period of some decades include restraint, because we do not have time to construct enough emissions-free substitutes for all today’s emitting activities. Leaders in politics and businesses cannot promote restraint without losing their jobs, so leadership must come from us, individually and collectively, making decisions to live differently. We can all act, at home and at work or in other teams. We can prioritise our most emitting activities, make changes where possible and, where it is for now beyond our reach, we can promote change through raising awareness of what matters and what help we need. These choices and actions are virtuous. Not ‘virtuous’ in the sense we parodied in the opening, of something admirable but prim and outdated, but a joyful, life-enhancing virtue that expresses the best of what we hope to be. The virtue of restraint in climate action is an act of leadership, an expression of faith and charity, and above all, an act of love.

With this chapter we move from the ‘cardinal’ virtues of courage, prudence, temperance and justice to the ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope and love. In particular, we ask what faith – belief in God, and in the wider Christian creed – means for what we have already considered. We see that, far from encouraging us to disregard justice and responsibility in this life for the sake of the next, it teaches us to see the world as God’s creation and other human beings as bearing God’s image, spurring us to action with all the more energy.

Chapter 3 explores the role of small group dynamics and collective emotions in facilitating group theorizing, provoking unconventional scientific thought, and facilitating the rise of new scientific movements. It describes RA’s idioculture, their context of theoretical discovery, and the socio-emotional practices Holling used to spark transformative scientific creativity – a process that he called “island time.” I show how holding short, energetic meetings on remote islands with group rituals, personality selectivity, social bonding, charismatic leadership, and inductions to a secret scientific society created what I call “hot spots and hot moments.” These are brief but intense bursts of collective emotion, intersubjectivity, group creativity, and exceptional scientific performance where transformative science is conducted and faith in the group and its ideas were generated. This highlights new aspects of theory group dynamics, including the bursty nature of creative production within them, and the role of collective emotional states, relationships, and evocative locations for producing innovative scientific knowledge that can support new scientific movements.

Chapter 5 examines how intergenerational dynamics affected sociality and group theorizing in RA. The Resilience Alliance Young Scholars (RAYS) were recruited to help test and refine resilience theory after the founding generation had established its core tenets. Additionally, RA and resilience theory began facing external criticisms as their ideas gained traction. The RAYS’s distance from the high-intensity ritual interactions of early days, combined with growing doubt from outside RA, led them to approach the theory with more skepticism. I use data from interviews, articles, books, and observations of a two-day mock court in which the RAYS literally put first-generation ideas on trial to illustrate their crucial role in testing resilience theory, determining key theoretical scoping conditions, and developing initial metrics and measurements of core RA concepts. In all of this, the RAYS made contributions that went far beyond the “normal science” anticipated from second-generation theory group members.

Chapter 1 reviews previous research on theory groups and argues that the social network methods that have been the dominant means of investigating them cannot adequately capture the significance of small-group interactions or the emergent generation of novel ideas from within theory groups. Understanding theory groups instead requires conceptualizing them from a microsociological, localistic perspective that considers the importance of group dynamics, group cultures, collective emotions, collective identity, and collective ideation. This allows for drawing direct connections between specific social interactions and the social construction and transformation of scientific theories, fields, and movements. I reconceptualize theory groups as small groups, as engines of collective action, and as faith-based collectives. The chapter closes by relating my analytic approach, research questions, and outlining the plan of the book.

This chapter examines early scholastic discussions of the ontology of grace and how grace is related to the theological virtues and other spiritual gifts conferred on the soul.

Religious beliefs are a profound source of motivation and purpose for many people. This is especially true of fundamentalists of different faiths, who strive to strictly adhere to what they believe to be scriptural guidance for how to live their lives. However, given the high rates of religious illiteracy across American citizens, belief in a religion does not necessarily indicate knowledge of the contents of one’s religious teachings. Perhaps as a consequence, people belonging to the same religion, and the clergy who guide them, have used different aspects of the scriptures to express divergent viewpoints (for and against slavery, homophobia, violence, etc.). The complexity of religious scriptures and interpretations across history has meant that members of religions who have sought to follow the righteous path have, at times, been taught that expressing bias against certain groups is the virtuous thing to do. As such, religion has been used to justify strategic beliefs (based on power and political motives) which then become fused with religious identity in private beliefs and public discourse. This chapter addresses how the noble purpose associated with being a virtuous person can be reclaimed from the forces that exploit the power of religion to create division and discord. We call on people to educate themselves about the content and context of various religious scriptures, to value diversity and avoid bias, and to cultivate spiritual and intellectual humility.

In Kierkegaard, a three-part dialectical structure is set, first, by the two elements that comprise parts I and II of Either/Or, the “esthetic” and then the “ethical life.” A subsequent, third stage comes with a “teleological suspension of the ethical” (by which Kierkegaard means “suspension of the moral” in the modern sense) and a committing “leap” of faith. Unlike Marx’s version, Kierkegaard’s dialectic takes place not at the social level, but within an individual’s life in a way that can bring about an essentially individual authenticity and what Kierkegaard called “existential inwardness.” But if Kierkegaard’s dialectic, unlike Hegel’s and Marx’s, is decidedly not world historical, thus different from Hegel’s and Marx’s, the notions of individuality and authenticity that Kierkegaard develops are nonetheless themselves distinctively modern ethical ideas, more modern, indeed, than any idea of individuality that is in place in early modern moral philosophy. Kierkegaard’s concept of the “single individual” is more closely related to Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual,” to “individuality” in John Stuart Mill, and to the radically free subject of the twentieth-century existentialists, than it is to the “forensic” notion of the individual person or moral agent as, for example, in Locke or Kant.

In two of Kierkegaard’s earliest works, The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, imaginary construction (i.e., thought experiment, or Experiment) is often characterized negatively. However, the three core features of thought experiment shared by Ørsted and Mach also begin to emerge, laying foundations for a more positive view in other works. Kierkegaard’s characterizations of thought experiment indicate that imaginary construction guides mental action. This focus contrasts with the standard emphasis in Kierkegaard scholarship on thought experiment as supplying the concreteness of (empirical) actuality. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard critiques irony as a retreat from reality but also shows it can be used to achieve new kinds of wholeheartedness and unity. In this chapter, I will argue that thought experiments can similarly lead the experimenter away from reality but, like irony, may also be a useful tool for self-development.

Chapter 7 offers a culminating test for competing rationalities, given how thoroughly Julian’s and Cyril’s texts are focused on re-narrating episodes from their rival. It returns to three specific arguments to consider if MacIntyre’s further claim about incommensurable forms of reasoning obtains in Julian’s and Cyril’s engagement. Three case studies in rationality, focusing on words (genētos, pronoia, and pistis) used by Julian and Cyril at crucial points in their reasoning, provide occasion to query whether non-intersecting forms of reasoning are at play in these specific arguments. Intellectual impasses on particular topics can suggest, after all, that the traditions inhabited by individuals engaged in intellectual conflict are more broadly incommensurable.

This chapter proposes new readings of the poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love based on ideas of unconventional domesticity, alternative divinity, and queer, chosen families. The chapter explores the ways in which animal characteristics disrupt and subvert conventional poetic form and religious teachings in the volume, specifically elegy and Catholicism. It also focuses on connections between Michael Field’s writing and animal poetry found in the work of other fin-de-siècle and modernist writers. The chapter proposes that these poems can and should be celebrated for their eccentricity, oddity, and queerness rather than overlooked and marginalised within Michael Field’s oeuvre.