The controversial nature of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s polemical writing has had theeffect of sidelining his earlier literary criticism, in particular his engagement withseveral French Catholic writers. A more nuanced exploration of his work as a wholedisplays a complex intersection of secularism and religious feeling. O’Brien, thepublic intellectual determined to fly by the nets of political and religious doctrine,nevertheless produces work saturated with religious language, forms, and structuresof feeling. His writing demonstrates a tension between his secularism and hisrepeated return to the language of suffering, sacrifice, heresy, and schism. O’Brien’sfamily history, with its traumatic relationship to events during the violent formation ofthe Irish state, is a helpful lens through which to view this emotional substratumwithin his writings.  His later writings emphasise the forces in his life that resistedcategorization, and thus offer a kind of apophatic vision, a dark enlightenment.

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.

Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

This chapter develops a view that casts moral heroism as a specific kind of moral achievement and argues it is superior to the virtue approach to moral heroism. I begin the discussion with J. O. Urmson’s account of moral heroism as overcoming fear, registering the limitations of that account before moving on to Gwen Bradford’s account of achievement as such, which centers on overcoming difficulty. She defends a view of difficulty that consists in the expending of effort, rather than in the surmounting of complexity. Her highly developed account is a good model for analyzing moral achievement, yet it is in need of significant modification in order to function in a specifically moral context. In order to give an account of moral achievement, I argue that Bradford’s key notion of difficulty should be replaced by sacrifice. Moral heroism consists in making high-stakes sacrifices. I develop an account of what sacrificing consists in, identifying features of actions that constitute sacrifices. I show how this concept offers us an account of moral heroism as a kind of moral achievement. I then argue that it significantly outperforms the virtue approach according to the desiderata from Chapter 2: accuracy, related phenomenon, and fitting responses.

This chapter completes the picture of moral heroism the book offers. I address the tension in the account that arises from the combination of my practical necessity explanation of the Non-Optionality Claim and the feature of sacrifices that they are chosen over an available alternative. I do so by distinguishing between ways in which an agent’s choice becomes constrained. Another tension is between the practical necessity explanation of the Non-Optionality Claim and the deontic status of being supererogatory. I show how an action can be practically necessary and supererogatory.

These arguments lead to a more general consideration of the supererogatory status of moral heroism, which unfolds in three phases: first in terms of the reasons and duties we might have to aspire to moral heroism, second in terms of programs designed to socially engineer moral heroism, and finally in terms of parents or caretakers raising children to become moral heroes. In all three phases, I argue that the goals of becoming morally heroic or helping others to do so are not simply universally laudable and fitting. This is an important quality of my view that is again an improvement over virtue thinking, which positions moral heroes more straightforwardly as models for emulation.

Chapter 4 turns to Cyril’s response to Julian in Against Julian. It provides an extensive overview of the narrative structure behind Cyril’s arguments against Julian. After surveying the setting, characters, and plot that frame Cyril’s arguments, it examines two leitmotifs that are crucial to Cyril’s reasoning and then provides examples of “narrative moments” in Against Julian. In broad outlines, the chapter reviews the well-known contours of emerging orthodoxy in the early church. But as a focused analysis of Against Julian, it also provides broad coverage of a text that has been understudied to date and further illustrates how a “narrative structure” lies implicit in something like a polemical treatise. It shows, finally, that despite Cyril’s exemplary status with most Christian communities he still had unique and idiosyncratic perspectives, some of which play noteworthy roles in Against Julian.

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

Chapter 6 turns to a cluster of broadly cosmological episodes: the events and agents of creation, the texts that tell of these events and agents, and the authors who wrote these more and less authoritative texts. It focuses on two stretches of Cyril’s Against Julian, broadly concerning the modes of divine management of the cosmos but covering topics ranging from the breadth of human diversity to the Mosaic sacrificial system to the Tower of Babel and Homer’s Aloadae giant brothers. Cyril’s consistent objective is to dislodge the characters of the gods from Julian’s Hellenic story while also demonstrating how much better sense they make within the Christian story as fallen demons. That “all the gods of the nations are demons” (LXX Ps 95:5) was, of course, a common apologetic line. But this re-narrating claim is more than a polemical trope, structuring in fact a surprising range of arguments.

Atonement is a critical component of the cultic system described in Leviticus 1–7 and 16. Purification of sin and thanksgiving offerings shape the worship of Israel. This chapter describes the theology of sacrifice and atonement in Leviticus, the specific offerings, and how atonement has been interpreted by later commentators.

Chapter 4 is in part an examination of a Mycenaean divine Potnia, one affiliated with the “labyrinth,” the Potnia of the dabúrinthos (δαβύρινθος). The labyrinthine space with which she is associated is an Asian cult notion introduced from Anatolia to Balkan Hellas. This chapter also examines the Rājasūya, a Vedic rite of consecration by which a warrior is made a king and a likely cult counterpart to the Mycenaean initiation of the wanaks.

Chapter 2 examines the Vedic sacrificial post called the yūpa and its role in ritual performances. A Mycenaean Greek cognate term and comparable ritual implement lies behind the Linear B form spelled u-po – that is, hûpos (ὗπος). Among other topics treated in this chapter are the Mycenaean deity called the po-ti-ni-ja, a-si-wi-ja, the Asian Potnia, and the u-po-jo po-ti-ni-ja, the Potnia of the u-po (that is, húpoio Pótnia [ὕποιο Πότνια]), a term matched exactly by Sanskrit patnī-yūpá-.

Chapter 6 examines Iranian cult and myth as evidenced in the Nart sagas of Transcaucasia, but also among Scythians as well as in Zoroastrian tradition, including the psychotropic cult substances Haoma (Iranian) and Soma (Indic). The Greek polis of Dioscurias in the Caucasus is explored as a place where Hellenic and Indo-Iranian divine-twin myth and cult affiliation meet, as indeed they do in the Pontic polis of Sinope. Aeolian connections are conspicuous at both locales.

The purity of the Israelite tent had a direct relationship to the purity of God’s tent, or the tabernacle. Understanding purity is critical to understanding Leviticus’ theology of holiness and holy space. This chapter discusses the difference between moral and ethical purity as well as the dietary laws and other commands for Israel around maintaining their holiness.

Chapter 7 examines the sheep’s fleece filter used in the preparation of Soma. A cult ideology in which such an implement played an important role was preserved for some time in Iranian tradition in the Caucuses, ultimately giving expression to Greek ideas about the presence of fleecy filters impinged with gold in the vicinity of Dioscurias – rationalizing accounts of the Golden Fleece of Aeolian Argonautic tradition. Particular elements of the Golden Fleece myth find parallels in Indic poetic accounts of the performance of Soma cult. The common Hellenic and Indic elements constitute a shared nexus of ideas that earliest took shape in Bronze-Age communities of admixed Mycenaean and Luvian populations into which Mitanni Soma ideas had spread via Kizzuwatna. The Golden Fleece mythic tradition, with its geographic localization in Transcaucasia, is a Mycenaean Asianism that took shape in Asia Minor under Indic and Iranian influences and that continued to evolve among the Iron-Age Asian Greeks.