Chapter 1 examines faith in Lancelot Andrewes’s preaching. It shows that his discussions of religious belief frequently draw on the methods used in early modern England of evaluating forensic testimony. After a survey of Andrewes’s interest in religious belief and witness evidence, it turns its attention to discussions of faith and epistemology in his lectures from the 1580s. The chapter then shows how Andrewes’s interest in religious belief is reframed in explicitly legal terms in his seventeenth-century Easter sermons at court. Andrewes valued legal evidence for its ability to establish the Resurrection as an attested matter of fact. Yet these sermons also trace the limitations of legal methods of proof. For Andrewes, a true faith in the Resurrection involves a more diverse set of epistemic resources – bodily participation in the Eucharist, for instance. These mysterious aspects of faith are nevertheless articulated through the framework of legal proof and evidence.

Chapter 2 focuses on discussions of faith in John Donne’s religious prose. Donne often addresses such questions by turning to legal discourses. Processes of evaluating forensic testimony provide useful structures for measuring probability or certainty in evidence and the assent that it generates. This is exemplified in Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, which relies on widely recognised rules about forensic testimony to discuss pressing questions regarding belief and its legitimacy in post-Reformation England. The chapter then shows how Donne adapts this legal handling of belief to address questions about salvation and certainty for a variety of audiences. To lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn, Donne uses the technicalities of civilian law to support and critique post-Reformation understandings of soteriology. To a broader congregation at St Paul’s, he deploys common law evidentiary procedures to show that, to a limited but helpful extent, the evidence of salvation can be apprehended through legal methods.

This book’s Introduction sets out the key intellectual and historical contexts for its argument. It shows that religious belief gained an important cultural emphasis after the Reformation and that it was considered to be distinct from other kinds of belief or assent. Engaging with scholarly discussions of belief, this introduction suggests that the period from around 1580 to the 1650s witnessed an attempt to investigate what was particular about a specifically religious kind of belief. Its certainty and spiritual origin were compared to, and contrasted with, other kinds of assent that were generated by probable forms of argument. An important and widespread way of effecting this comparison involved considering religious belief alongside the kinds of assent generated in legal settings – when witness evidence is evaluated for its credibility. The introduction roots this discursive method in contemporary legal culture, before surveying recent scholarship on literary culture, law and religion.

Chapter 3 considers Francis Bacon’s use of legal evidentiary procedures and the important role they play in his discussions of religious belief. Its first half is given over to a wide-ranging account of Bacon’s philosophical prose. It sets out to establish that Bacon uses his knowledge of Romano-canon law and its evidentiary practices to shape his methodological reforms for natural philosophy. This chapter applies the findings of this survey to Bacon’s prose fiction narrative, New Atlantis. Requirements for credible legal testimony are, on the one hand, shown to shape the style of Bacon’s narration. On the other, though, Bacon’s discussion of evangelical conversion shows that, as a spiritually derived form of assent, religious belief transcends such legally derived criteria for credibility. New Atlantis thus develops Bacon’s philosophical distinctions between faith and knowledge. It also asks probing questions about religious belief and intercultural encounters in early modernity.

The book’s Conclusion develops the argument made by earlier chapters. It considers the variety of ways in which probable arguments, structured through imaginative engagements with legal forms of testimony, interacted with convictions and beliefs that were borne out of supernatural, spiritual influence. One key outcome of this discussion is the recognition that literature provided an important venue for comparing different kinds of belief and assent. Literary texts staged highly plausible legal cases, rooted in persuasively credible evidence; they could also qualify the force of these forensic arguments, especially when accounting for the ways in which religious belief was understood to work. This literary evaluation of modes of assent sheds new light on what it means to write a history of belief. The book ends by outlining a methodology that attends to texts and contexts where persuasive and probable modes of argument were afforded only provisional force.

Much has been written about the historical sources – Aristotelian and neo-Platonic – used by Thomas Aquinas in his theological works. Without neglecting such research, this chapter examines the broader speculative framework of themes at the intersection of faith and reason in Thomistic thought. The goal is to provide philosophers and theologians with a clearer view of Thomism’s key speculative concerns regarding human reason and revealed truth. These include the degree of theology’s influence on faith (Christian philosophy), the preambles of faith, rational credibility, the relationship between common sense, philosophy, and faith, analogy in relation to revealed truths, the scientific structure of theology, and the potential for a Thomist account of knowledge’s historicity.

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.