This chapter explores Augustine’s monumental City of God, written in the wake of the 410 sack of Rome, as a response to critics who blamed Christianity for the empire’s decline. Augustine constructs a dual vision of history structured around two metaphorical cities: the City of Man, grounded in pride and temporal ambition, and the City of God, formed by love of God and oriented toward eternal peace. The chapter examines Augustine’s theological reframing of history as linear, purposeful, and governed by divine providence, in contrast to the cyclical models of ancient historians. It analyzes his critique of pagan religion, his nuanced appropriation of Platonism, and his demonology, all of which served to delegitimize traditional Roman cults while affirming Christianity’s supremacy. At the heart of the chapter is Augustine’s doctrine of predestination and his unsettling insistence on humanity’s dependence on divine grace. The City of God emerges as both a critique of Roman imperial pretensions and a charter for a Christian understanding of time, politics, and salvation, whose legacy would profoundly shape medieval and modern thought.

Grace and providence, much like the sacraments (which are instruments of grace), are pervasive in the Confessions. Yet we learn about them, not from any explicit theorizing or argumentation on Augustine’s part, but by examining their role in the dual narrative: the personal narrative of Augustine’s life and the cosmic narrative of creation and redemption. This chapter considers how grace (God’s unmerited favor) and providence (God’s directing of the course of events in the service of his own ends) shape, but do not determine, Augustine’s life. Although there is no explicit consideration in the Confessions of the relationship between grace and free choice, the overwhelming message of the work seems to be that grace is indispensable but not irresistible: God makes Augustine into the kind of person who can accept grace, but not someone who cannot help but accept it.

Origen’s examination of Jesus’s baptism in Against Celsus offers readers a particularly secure first footing for apprehending his sense of the Gospel narratives’ “mixed” character. That Jesus was baptized by John is hardly problematic, historically speaking. But the events narrated to have taken place directly after the baptism presented no less difficulty for readers in antiquity than they do for readers today. Origen preserves Celsus’s dismissal of the descent of the dove and voice from heaven as an obvious fiction. Origen, however, resists the judgment. Why? His reply to Celsus puts the whole complex of first principles detailed in Part I to work. According to Origen’s view, one can receive the narrative to be “true” inasmuch as it depicts, in figurative language drawn from prophetic literary tropes, Jesus’s own interior inspiration at the commencement of his public ministry. In short, the story narrates something real, something “historical” even, precisely insofar as it is entirely spiritual. The Evangelists then came to share in the same kind of vision Jesus is said to have had at his baptism and narrated “in figures” what they, too, had “perceived in their own understanding.”

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.

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.

This chapter uses Diogenes Laertius’ doxographical overview of Stoic natural philosophy as a starting point to examine the role of physics in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Contrary to a common misconception, all the central aspects of Stoic physics, except for some more technical issues, are well represented. The chapter discusses Marcus Aurelius’ treatment of the telos-formula of ‘living according to nature’; the two fundamental Stoic principles of reality, god and matter; the scale of nature; and the relation between Providence, fate, necessity, change, human action, and freedom. Marcus Aurelius’ distinctive touch comes through in certain areas of emphasis, such as the centrality of sociability, human and divine, or the many implications of the view that the processes of change that also entail human mortality actually constitute the order of the universe.

Chapter III focuses on another key feature of Tolkien’s literary technique, namely the lavish use of omissions, allusive language, and, more specifically, the deletion of (almost) all the explicit references to the hidden ‘divine narrative’ underlying the story; these are scattered throughout the book, but always in a ‘hidden’ or ‘glimpsed’ form. The second part explores the theoretical implications of this poetics of ‘cloaking’ or ‘glimpsing’. This technique evokes in the reader a “heart-racking” longing for something unattainable. This is not just a (well-paralleled) strategy: rather, literature for Tolkien does not just come from the human mind, since human beings are only sub-creators, and the light that their works refract comes from a higher Light: incompleteness and cloaking are thus means by which Tolkien acknowledges the mysterious origin of his sub-creations, and at the same time expresses God’s high concern for freedom, His own and that of the human sub-creators and their readers.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.

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 considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

War is often seen as both morally repugnant and as a heroic activity conducted in the national interest. This introduction outlines some conditions in which this moral dualism appears and is managed in eighteenth-century Britain. It surveys the financial, social, and cultural pressures that could influence public attitudes to war. Focusing on selected examples, it explores the role of humanitarian feeling in justifying particular acts of violence, in enabling a general, compassionate acquiescence in war, and in encouraging the emergence of anti-war attitudes that eventually led to organised opposition to war.

This chapter explores the Laudian critique of the (allegedly) puritan doctrine of absolute predestination, and particularly absolute reprobation. This critique imputed an absolute, fatal or stoic necessity to questions of salvation and damnation, which, the Laudians claimed, reduced the role of human free will and moral effort to nothing. In so doing it created desperately difficult pastoral dilemmas for ministers trying to rescue members of their flocks from the desperation such doctrines all too often induced. This was particularly the case for absolute reprobation. It was in the course of dealing with puritan error on this subject that the Laudians came to deal with the topic of predestination, and faute de mieux, to adumbrate their own position, asserting that saving grace was offered to all, that Christ died for the sins of the whole world, that God willed the salvation of every sinner, that human effort was required for salvation, that true faith could be totally and finally lost and that no one was simply doomed to damnation; contentions which they defended not as resolutions of the paradoxes at the heart of the debate about predestination, but rather as saving truths central to the nature of Christianity.