Doubtless law does have distinctive resources to offer the tempering of power, and Chapter 8 considers some of them. It discusses the significance of the letter of the law but notes that it can conceal arbitrary abuse by acting as camouflage for what is really happening. It is also susceptible to the phenomenon of dual statehood, where the law follows the letter in some domains and for some people and is ignored in others and for others. It can also be manipulated by contemporary populists who often ‘rule by cheating’. Philosophers have commended law of a certain character, so that it be predictable, but that too is subject to manipulation. A lot depends on the kind of legal traditions that the legal order embodies. Law is a crucial frame for interactions, solving a lot of problems ahead of time and engendering possibilities of deliberative adjudication. However, it needs a lot of support from sources outside the law itself.

This introduces the key themes of Spirituality in Mind, including the concept of entanglement and the importance of attentiveness as both a spiritual practice and a clinical skill. Whereas many books on psychiatry by psychiatrists emphasise controversies and fears, the intention here is to focus on spirituality as casting light on what patients most desire. This book is different from other books on spirituality and psychiatry by virtue of engagement with the humanities (especially theology and religious studies), its concern with the ‘ordinary theology’ of patients and its attention to the invisible assumptions of pragmatic atheism. This does not mean that atheists or agnostics are less likely to be spiritually attentive than those who are spiritual/religious (not infrequently the reverse may be true) and the situated perspective of the author, and of all psychiatrists, is highlighted. An outline of the book as a whole is provided, some clarifications are given in regard to vocabulary (notably in respect of ‘patients’ and ‘theology’) and general remarks are made concerning the clinical case studies.

A case study of a patient diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder demonstrates the entanglements of phenomenology of spirituality and psychopathology, and the implications of failing to properly understand the importance of these entanglements when planning treatment. The concepts of entanglement, pragmatic atheism, spirituality and religion are introduced. Spirituality and religion are both complex and contested concepts which elude simple definition, but a person-centred holistic model of psychiatry requires giving attention to the whole person, ‘body, mind and spirit’. The biopsychosocial model does not explicitly address spirituality, but spirituality is entangled with the biological, psychological and social aspects of the matrix. The chapter discusses the secular context within which psychiatry is generally seen to be practised (at least in the Western world), the perceived tension between science and religion that it often evokes, the nature of psychiatry as concerned with the study and treatment of mental illnesses, and the way in which these illnesses affect our self-understanding and identity as human beings.

Referring to the medical model of frenzy sketched out in the first two chapters, Chapter 3 explores the metaphysical problems which it caused. The model’s insistence on the total dependence of the mind on the brain, it argues, placed pressure on a Christian cosmology in which ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ were supposed to be fully separable. Frenzy forced contemporaries to ask how it was possible for the human mind – made in the ‘image of God’ – to be impaired by organic disease. For most early modern Christians, the mind was a part of the soul, and this soul was immaterial, incorruptible, and immortal. Frenzy gave the impression that it invaded every part of the person, but this impression was false. The soul had to be immune to brain disease. This chapter examines the ancient roots of this problem, and examines how early modern England’s preachers, physicians, and philosophers attempted to solve it.

The human body is tied to a distinctive form of natural beauty, for Hegel proposes that there is something about the human body in its given, natural form that makes it uniquely capable of manifesting self-conscious spirit or mind. Since, ontologically speaking, the being of spirit is of a higher order than anything in nonhuman nature, the capacity to give off the distinctive look and sound of a spiritual way of being amounts to the human body’s capacity for a higher, fuller beauty as well. This chapter focuses primarily on the naturally given, predominantly involuntary ways in which the human body allows spirituality to appear. Because Hegel characterizes artworks generally as involving a “spiritualizing” of otherwise natural forms, we are encouraged to think of the human body’s distinctive, spirit-manifesting demeanor as a kind of root aesthetic vocabulary with which all of the more developed “languages” of art are familiar and from which they grow. But it also seems that for Hegel it ultimately takes art, and in particular classical sculpture, to reveal the purportedly natural beauty of the body, and this complicates the sense in which bodily beauty is natural after all.

Chapter 3 begins with how the Donatist controversy shaped Augustine’s theology of justification by faith because the Donatists represented the real possibility of having faith without charity. The chapter then turns to the key features of Augustine’s theology of justification formed by the Pelagian controversy, especially participation in Christ’s righteousness. Both controversies pressed Augustine to consider how justification is by faith if faith sometimes fails to justify, as in Donatists, lax catechumens, and impenitent Christians. In both de spiritu et littera (The Spirit and the Letter) and his sermons, Augustine addresses this through a deeper psychology of faith: faith only obtains the grace of justification when it is motivated by hope and fails if it is motivated primarily by fear. The chapter concludes with de fide et operibus (Faith and Works), exploring Augustine’s understanding of faith, works, and charity, his criticism of sola fide (faith alone), and his development of a new terminology for justifying faith: fides Christi (faith in Christ).

On the Parts of Animals (PA) is our main source for Aristotle’s explanations of animal character. This he locates in the qualities of an animal’s blood (or it’s analogue), whether it is hot, cold, thick, then, turbid, or pure (PA II.2, 651a16). This chapter sets out the main debate about character in Aristotle’s biological writings, whether it is formal or material, and argues that it is part of an animals’ material nature. While the materials existing in the blood vessels are not put there for the purpose of underlying character, they are often utilised for this end, displaying a complex coordination of material and formal natures. The chapter ends with a detailed analysis of which fluid elements in the body are responsible for underlying character and at which point they emerge in the digestive process. This further clarifies the relationship between animal bodies, nutritive processes, and the character potentials animals possess.

Commentators on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love have typically taken spiritual love to mean the same as neighborly love, an unconditional moral duty owed by all humans to all humans. Ostensibly, this contrasts with the preferential love typical of a friend or spouse. We, however, take spiritual love to refer to the Trinitarian love that, when emulated by human beings, is called Christian love. This type of love either transcends or engenders both neighborly and preferential love. First, we show how the economy of salvation expresses the Father’s love in both neighborly and preferential ways, corresponding to the Son’s mediation of the Father’s love through the Incarnation and the Spirit’s mediation of the Father’s love through Pentecost. Second, we use the Trinitarian approach to elucidate Kierkegaard’s claim that God is love’s “middle term.” Third, we use this approach to resolve the apparent conflict between self-interest and self-denial in Works of Love.

American Patriots argued the case for Independence in a distinctive emotional idiom that blended classical theories about the links between feeling and freedom, Enlightenment-era philosophies on the moral force of sentiment, and popular understandings of passion as the source of action. Together, they composed a Revolutionary spirit of liberty. Investigating the history of emotion in the Revolution allows historians to connect intellectual history (the study of political ideology) to social and cultural history (the stories of the revolutionary experiences and contributions of ordinary Americans). At the same time, it provides new insights into the vexed interrelationship of liberty and slavery in American history. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans and their descendants. Attention to the issue of Revolutionary “spirit” thus requires acknowledging the deep roots and enduring power of American racism, rather than simply accommodating the comfortable confirmation of the inevitability of slavery’s demise. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from the supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans. Yet a focus on Revolutionary emotion also reveals that even when members of the colonial upper orders tried to restrain the spread of liberty, they could not fully contain or control the spirit of freedom. Subordinated people, including white women, free and enslaved Blacks, and members of Native American nations worked actively to expand universal views of emotion, understanding intimately the links between feeling and freedom. Many Patriots took a more radical stance and argued that all Americans could lay claim to roughly the same set of universal emotions. In this view, natural feelings could bind all Americans together far more closely than cultivated sensibility had ever linked provincial elites with metropolitan aristocrats. Ultimately, novel theories of universal human emotions became both the foundation of Revolutionary organizing efforts and the basis for new theories of natural rights.

This chapter turns from the question of the Gospels’ literary form to that of their literary formation. According to David Strauss, no preceding understanding of the Gospels shared closer proximity to the emerging “mythical point of view” than “ancient allegorical interpretation” – an astonishing claim left unexamined since his Life of Jesus was first published. Strauss’s comparison of the mythical and allegorical views cuts closer to the heart of Origen’s sense of the figurative nature of the Gospels than any other account of early criticism of the Gospels. Nevertheless, I challenge Strauss’s final charge of unrestrained interpretive “arbitrariness” resulting from Origen’s view. I show instead that Origen locates the formation of the Gospel narratives in the Evangelists freely “making use” of the traditions they had received for their own purposes, freedom reflected in the distinctive (even discordant) characteristics of their narratives, which differ according to how the authors sought, “each in his own way,” to “teach what they had perceived in their own mind by way of figures.” Thus, for Origen, the Evangelists themselves were “figurative readers” of the life of Jesus.

The Tempest throws us into the midst of a world of tragic repetition, in which usurpation, oppression, and the drive for mastery repeat themselves again and again. The chapter argues that it also offers a precious, if tenuous, escape from tragic history, by calling for a politics of humble disappointment. This tentative path runs through abjuration or negation. The play consistently stages violent and intrusive spectacles that break the characters (and the audience) out of their initial subject positions and into a more outward-looking mode. Such interruptions connect to the tradition of negative theology, in which poorness or nothingness “is the ultimate state of receptivity” (Meister Eckhart). They offer a breath of air from outside the masterful self, a sliver of distance from the tragic past. In particular, the play institutes a theatrical form of collectivity through the isle’s inclusive dramatic “air”. It draws us, as well as the sovereign figure of Prospero, into a broader dramatic life-force or “intersubjective phenomenology” (Schalkwyk). Indeed, in the Epilogue, the sovereign power is subject to the many; subject to audience’s judgment, pleasure, and approval. It is this recognition of mutual need (Plato) that opens the vision of a renewed political community.

This chapter examines the issue of the “logic” underlying Hegel’s exposition of the “concept of nature.” Given the systematic structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, which is positioned between the Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, the problem of the logic guiding the immanent development of nature’s forms as well as the development of the philosophical cognition of them is, in Hegel’s view, a particularly relevant one. At the center of this chapter is the question of whether the “logic of nature” is the same logic presented in the first systematic division of Hegel’s philosophy or rather a modified variant of such a logic. The logic of nature, it argues, combines the determinations of pure speculative thinking (or the determinations of the “absolute idea”) with the specific conditions offered by the concept and by the reality of nature. Crucial to this logic is, first, Hegel’s famous definition of nature as the “idea in the form of otherness.” Such a definition obtains from the end of the Logic, which is be examined in detail, and followed through some crucial passages from the Philosophy of Nature. This chapter follows the development of the logic of nature between two extremes – the “absolute idea” and “spirit” – and concludes with a brief examination of the three syllogisms with which Hegel crowns his encyclopedic system.

The main question this chapter asks and attempts to answer is: What is the principal difference between animal life and human spirit, as Hegel construes it at the end of his Philosophy of Nature? More specifically, in what way are non-human animal organisms “inadequate” or “imperfect” and in what way, correspondingly, are human beings the “perfect” animal? Answering this question requires getting clear on the different ways in which non-human and human animals bear their respective natures, the connection between reproduction and the manner in which non-human animals relate to their genus, and the role of biological death within that process of reproduction. To the extent that Hegel commentators have dealt with the relation between animal life and human spirit, they have been predominantly concerned in recent years with Hegel’s Anthropology. The end of the Philosophy of Nature has, by contrast, been relatively neglected. On the occasions when it has been discussed, the latter text has tended to be the object of passing paraphrase rather than the focus of an attempt at philosophical comprehension. This chapter contributes to remedying this scholarly situation.

This chapter works through Romans 10 and Galatians 3:10–14 in conversation with other early Jewish evidence, arguing that Paul is participating in a long-standing Jewish debate about the relationship between repentance and Israel’s redemption. Specifically, will Israel’s repentance initiate the restoration or will God’s redemptive intervention produce Israel’s repentance? Paul comes down squarely on the latter side, arguing for a divinely-initiated redemption through the obedient fidelity of Jesus, whose status and authority as “the just one”—the figure divinely appointed to bring about redemption—was validated by the resurrection. In the process, this chapter provides an elegant solution for the longstanding problem of how to understand Paul’s citations of Lev 18:5 and Deut 30:12–14 in these passages.