Eschatology is the study of the Last Days, including the idea that at the Last Judgement, God will judge each human being who has ever lived. Starting with the biblical origins of eschatological thought, I explore several new developments in discourses from the Byzantine Christian tradition, focusing on theological and liturgical responses to concerns about the end of time and the salvation of believers. The doctrines of divinisation, universal salvation, millennialism and purgatory were developed in different ways in East and West. I contrast these theological responses with the popular eschatological visions found in apocalypses and saints’ Lives.

The Virgin Mary was a multifaceted figure in Byzantine theology. She played a central role in the incarnation of Christ since she provided him with his human nature. Her virginity, before, during, and after the birth bore witness to his ongoing divinity. Although Mariological doctrine did not receive systematic treatment in the Byzantine theological tradition, it was elaborated in liturgical texts. The Theotokos was described with the help of metaphorical and typological language, which associated her symbolically with creation, humanity, and a transfigured paradise, that is, spaces that were potentially receptive to God’s presence. As recent scholarship has shown, however, Byzantine Christians also encountered Mary as a female human person. Her maternal qualities, which came to be celebrated especially during and after the period of Iconoclasm (ca. 730–843), included tenderness, mercy, and sorrow – as displayed at the foot of the cross during Christ’s crucifixion. Historical accounts and miracle stories provide evidence of individual Christians’ visions of the Virgin Mary at shrines and churches in Constantinople. At both symbolic and personal levels, Mary, the Theotokos, remained accessible to Christians while representing the ideal model of the deified human person.

After Constantine was buried in Constantinople in 337, the senate at Rome voted to deify him. In inscriptions his sons, the new senior emperors Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans, advertised their descent from deified Constantine and deified Constantius I. Legends claimed that Constantine had once seen a cross in the sky, accompanied by a caption, “conquer in this.” This exhortation became common in inscriptions.

Focusing on the often too easily neglected concept of piety, Job Getcha sheds light on the natural bond between liturgy and spirituality. It would be erroneous to see them simply as the objective or communal and subjective or individual sides of the same reality, since an argument can be set up that spirituality itself is as liturgical as the liturgy is spiritual.

This chapter poses the most difficult objection for the instrument doctrine, in particular as Aquinas conceives of it. For Aquinas, a created cause, Christ’s humanity, produces divine effects as an instrumental cause. But the tradition has affirmed that God alone is the cause of grace in the soul, and no created cause can produce grace. John Duns Scotus puts this objection to Aquinas’s account of instrumental causality, and this chapter argues that the criticism appears to succeed. If a created cause participates in the production of grace, as Aquinas argues, then Scotus argues that Aquinas fails to maintain the distinction of natures and powers in Christ basic to Chalcedonian Christology. For Christ’s humanity is taken up into God’s power and brings about the deification of the human person immediately, something only divine power can do. The ground is prepared for a response to this objection in the following chapter.

Bishop Augustine probably preached countless sermons on the New Testament, but less than three hundred remain extant. Most of his New Testament preaching is found in his 124 Homilies on the Gospel of John, his ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John, and his Sermons 51–183. The richness of these sermons is astounding. This chapter samples them, offering a starting point for further analysis. The first section focuses on the pastoral goals that stand behind Augustine’s preaching on the Gospel of Matthew. Second, the chapter turns to his anti-Donatist Homilies on the First Epistle of John, where he intersperses his commentary on 1 John with extensive citations of the Psalms and the Gospels. Third, with respect to his Homilies on the Gospel of John, the chapter shows that Augustine preaches on John with a strong eye to his central theological interests, including his well-known arguments regarding grace and predestination.

Physicalist soteriology is a scholarly category created by the nineteenth-century German liberal Protestants. Because they immediately connected physicalism with heterodoxy, subsequent scholars have – through methodologically untenable approaches – frequently rejected physicalism as a logic that has no historical existence. A review of scholarship on physicalist soteriology – within development of doctrine studies, studies of individual early Christian authors, and deification studies – reveals that physicalist soteriology has been subsumed into other scholarly projects and has rarely been the direct subject of scholarly study. The six major early Christian proponents of physicalist soteriology, namely Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, are introduced.

The recent denial of the presence of physicalist soteriology in Athanasius’ thought in favor of the “representative humanity” model is partially, but not entirely, correct. The passages and themes – particularly the incarnation as effecting a universal solution to the problem of death – that have historically been used as the “proofs” of Athanasius’ physicalism do not in fact reveal physicalist logic and are better explained through the “representative humanity” model. However, what neither the proponents of the “representative humanity” model nor those who have historically classified Athanasius as a physicalist recognize is that Athanasius’ physicalism is embedded in his pneumatology. Athanasius argues that deification is accomplished by the Holy Spirit; however, the Holy Spirit would not be able to deify individuals if the incarnation had not already transformed the human nature of all humanity in a way that makes humans newly capable of interiorly receiving and maintaining the presence of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, recognizing Athanasius’ physicalist logic is the prerequisite for understanding his presentation of deification by the Holy Spirit.

I address three questions. First, how do Eastern theologians configure the way the incarnation is rendered as God’s original intention, and how significant is that insight? The answer is that this is central to their portrayal of God’s purpose. Second, what precisely is God’s purpose in the incarnation? The answer lies in the notion of deification, our being made divine, a concept pivotal to Eastern theology – and yet one that seems in significant respects problematic. Third, are there ways in which Eastern theologians portray God’s purpose that are less problematic, yet equally integral to their notion of God’s original and constant purpose? The answer is, yes there are. I conclude with three key motifs that I find more transferable yet nonetheless wholly authentic to the Orthodox theological imagination: communion, participation and transfiguration.

Scholars on Hilary have been uniquely open to and accepting of the presence of physicalist soteriology in Hilary’s thought. Hilary presents a corporate physicalism in which all humans exist in Christ’s incarnate body apart from, and prior to, any individual willing or choice, and this existence in Christ’s body gives eternal incorruptibility to all humans. However, Hilary presents salvation not merely as incorruptibility but as a complete and never-ending mutual indwelling of individuals and Christ. The physicalist existence of humans in Christ’s body is the necessary foundation of this permanent mutual indwelling, but the choices of each individual either enable or reject it.

Physicalism was a logical development of fourth-century theology, but the fifth-century triumph of the creationist ensoulment model had the effect of making physicalist soteriology a much less useful theological tool by narrowing the possible physicalist effects of the incarnation to the body only (and not the soul). The disappearance of physicalism is one manifestation of the detrimental effect the creationist ensoulment model had on theological conceptions of human solidarity through its sharp division between body and soul that rendered “human nature” a category that no longer had logical relevance as regards articulations of fall or redemption. The renewed interest in both human solidarity and “human nature” as a meaningful soteriological category – manifest most clearly in the current explosion of interest in deification studies – emphasizes the need for a new curation of the Christian tradition that would both restore the category of human nature to soteriological usefulness and would recognize physicalist soteriology as a historical reality that should be evaluated for its possible utility to contemporary needs.

When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

This chapter demonstrates that the doctrines contained in the Consolatio philosophiae unite and reconcile, in an elegant and balanced way, pagan Platonist philosophy and Christian faith. The most fertile ground for verifying this thesis is the third book of the Consolatio, with its Timaeus-inspired O qui perpetua hymn (III.m9), its talk of deification (III.10.24–5), its biblical paraphrase of Wisdom 8:1 (III.12.22), and its account of God understood in terms of happiness, goodness, and unity. As Boethius tells us in his second commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation (80.1–6), he thought that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were, if properly interpreted, complementary expressions of one truth. I argue that Boethius took a similar view regarding pagan Platonist philosophy and Christianity: although on the surface there might be some disagreement, both can be harmonized in such a way as to offer complementary expressions of the one truth. The pagan and Christian references in Book III support the conclusion that the Consolation enacts a harmonization of pagan Platonist philosophy and Christianity without distorting either.

A central tenet of Reformed theology was the doctrine of justification by imputed righteousness: the faithful are not saved on account of their own righteousness, but purely by the gracious decision of God to ‘impute’ or ‘account’ the perfect righteousness of his Son unto them. While this doctrine was a popular target for broader anti-Calvinist criticism, this chapter demonstrates that Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith challenged the Reformed doctrine by producing an explicitly Platonic account of justification on which believers are rendered acceptable to God by deification (i.e. by direct, internal conformity to and participation in the nature of God). This model of justification is distinctive, even against the wider background of English anti-Calvinism, and provides one of the strongest indications of the close philosophical alignment of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith. As the present chapter will demonstrate, to their Calvinist critics such as Anthony Tuckney, it was the Cambridge Platonists’ views about justification that constituted their most egregious departure from Reformed doctrine and that most clearly unmasked the ‘Platonic’ character of their thought.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

This chapter further explores the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by examining their theory of spiritual sensation, a striking fusion of early modern sense theory, early Christian notions of deification, Puritan spirituality, and Platonic metaphysics. The Cambridge Platonists hold that when a soul becomes deified through the practice of virtue, God comes to dwell in it, and that as a result, the soul becomes able to know God directly by looking inward. This knowledge is the fruit of direct, perceptual contact with God, granting it a phenomenal quality that cannot be attained by mere descriptions of God. Conversely though, when a soul marred with vices looks inward in the attempt to know God, it inevitably forms a distorted picture of God that reflects its own moral flaws. Thus, the Cambridge Platonists’ theory of spiritual sensation undergirds their rejection of Calvinist doctrine, providing them with a sort of ‘error theory’ to explain how their theological opponents arrived at the views they did.

The Cambridge Platonists’ anti-Calvinism was undergirded by a Platonic epistemology of participation – an epistemology on which the faculty of reason allowed the soul to participate in, and thereby come to know, the nature of God. This epistemology, drawn largely from Plotinus, enabled them to defend and articulate their reasons for rejecting the arbitrary, voluntarist picture of God propagated by their Calvinist contemporaries, and defend their own, rival conception of God as unswervingly committed to communicating his overflowing goodness to all his creatures. The central component of this Platonic epistemology is a high view of human reason as a direct participation in the divine nature, where beauty, goodness and truth are inseparably united. This chapter introduces the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by highlighting the ways in which they make conformity to God, both through purity of mind and virtuous action, a precondition for knowledge of God, resulting in a distinctive combination of Plotinian epistemology and Puritan spirituality.