The scope of the book – with a theological focus, Luther’s central teachings of a viable Christian religion engaged in light of his spiritual motivations, biblical interpretation, personal experience of freedom, and critical theological arguments that fueled his reform agendas.

This chapter introduces the main argument and themes of the book, and positions it within earlier and existing scholarship on archaic and classical Greek literature, religion and philosophy. Particular points of focus include the relationship between Greek tragedy, ritual and theology, and influential mid-twentieth-century research on Sophocles (the ’classics’ of Sophoclean scholarship). The chapter also discusses ancient biographical traditions surrounding Sophocles’ religiosity and piety.

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.

Broader debates about possible ways of addressing the tensions between science and theology/religion have not often been applied to psychiatry, and yet it is to a large extent scientific research on spirituality and mental health over recent decades that has generated current interest in the importance of spirituality to psychiatry. The four models of relationship between science and religion, developed by Ian Barbour – conflict, independence, dialogue and integration – each have their correlates in the literature on spirituality and psychiatry. However, in clinical practice it is the ‘ordinary’ theology of patients that assumes greater importance than the formal, or academic, theology of philosophical debate. As an example of the importance of a kind of ordinary theology which has been subjected to scientific research, the concept of God images is explored. It is proposed that, in the course of assessment and treatment, a kind of ‘clinical theology’ is needed, in which psychiatrists take into account inner representations of God and other ordinary theological beliefs which inform understanding of a patient’s illness and spirituality.

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.

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.

Chapter 3 looks at the various ways Muslims in the early Islamic centuries constructed a variety of idealised communities engaging with dialogues between universal ideas and more particularist ones, an endeavour that can be seen in a number of different scholarly fields. The first half of the chapter looks at debates in the fields of theology (specifically prophetology), law and politics (and political theology); the second half considers ideas about attachment to territory and the existence of a united Muslim world, before ending with a brief consideration of the social significance of gradual processes of conversion to Islam. One of the key arguments of this book is that local history-writing was one way for certain elites to deal with the dialogue between universal and more particular concerns as they envisioned and created their communities. Chapter 3 lays the groundwork for this by exploring that dialogue in fields ranging beyond history alone.

In PA I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed – protreptic speech – is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of philosophical discourse. In his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus, Aristotle had defended and promoted the Academic conception of philosophy and its preoccupation with theoretical and mathematical sciences such as astronomy by discussing the clarity of such sciences and the excellence of their objects. In the later protreptic to biology, he adapted these earlier arguments, arguing that biology also has excellent objects and offers a kind of clarity that may even surpass astronomy. These arguments turn out to be part of a general rhetorical strategy for comparing and rank-ordering sciences that was theorized in the Topics and Rhetoric.

This chapter will examine the notion of theology as a science in some summae from the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century, exploring the works written both by secular masters and members of the religious orders.