Books 8–10 of The City of God complete the polemical interrogation of pagan culture. As Augustine says, the last five of these ten are addressed to the philosophers whose connivance with the blasphemies of the civic cult exposes the insufficiency of reason as a means to the knowledge of God and the perfection of moral character. In the three books discussed here, his interlocutors are the Platonists Apuleius and Porphyry, one the foremost African man of letters before Augustine himself, the other a trenchant critic of the scriptures who had derided Christianity as the superstitious worship of a dead man. Augustine’s case against both is that, notwithstanding their adherence to a school which had come close to Christianity in its consciousness of the unity and sovereignty of God, they had returned to the most demotic form of polytheism, making human access to the gods depend on a race of aerial spirits who are inferior in piety and benevolence to the best denizens of earth. Augustine’s aim is to show that their speculations are inconsistent not only with scriptural teaching on the origin of demons, but with the genuine traditions of Platonism, the confession of the ancient prophet Hermes Trismegistus and Porphyry’s own intimations of the true nature of God.

This chapter explores a range of possible intersections between music, politics, and Romanticism in France and German lands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of early German Romantic theories of political organisation and how they influenced Romantic conceptions of art, I subsequently unpick the complicated relationship between the French Revolution and Romanticism in music, and between the politically revolutionary and the artistically revolutionary. I show the extreme adaptability of the Romantic aesthetic when it came to its political interpretation, not only through the contrast between German and French Romanticism, but also through the surprising twists and turns in the political associations of Romanticism in France over three decades. In the second section, I look at the political mobilisation of Romantic symbols in Prussian musical life to nationalist and dynastic ends, before ending with a brief consideration of politicised anti-Romanticism amongst music critics in 1848.

In conf., Augustine recounts how he was led to Manicheanism, in part, by his repugnance to Old Testament passages in which a human-like body is attributed to God (conf. 3.7). Ambrose helps to release the grip that Manicheanism had on Augustine by showing him that it is not always necessary to read the Old Testament literally (conf. 6.4 and 7.1). In Books 17 and 18 of the ciu. Dei, Augustine both rejects the notion that all of the Old Testament is allegorical (the allegorical cannot negate the literal meaning, and sometimes the text is purely historical) and affirms that the most important meaning of the Old Testament is prophetic (ciu. Dei 17.3). The earthly kingdom in the Old Testament is inherently allegorical and prophetic. It is not a kingdom that is about or for itself; it is about and for the future heavenly kingdom. The work of the prophets is to prevent the earthly kingdom from being taken too literally – as a kingdom whose meaning is wholly in the present and in itself.

This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.

The listening posture that accompanied the rise of Romantic musical aesthetics in the late 1790s was decidedly inward-facing. Valorising interior response over external circumstance, Romantic listeners sought to be catapulted into a world of feeling and imagination, a world that stretched inward to the affects and outward to the realm of nature. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana as a point of departure, this essay identifies three guiding principles of musical Romanticism: that music is inscrutably deep or profound, that musical sounds penetrate into and change the listener’s inner world, and that music is capable of transporting listeners to a more ideal, and markedly spiritual, state of being. The essay shows how these principles undergird broader Romantic convictions about the relationship between music and interiority, as evidenced by authors ranging from Hoffmann, W. H. Wackenroder, and Bettina von Arnim to G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Malwida von Meysenbug.

In the first three books of City of God, Augustine begins to defend Christianity against those who blame it for the sack of Rome. More specifically, Augustine is responding to both the written theological questions of the pagan Volusian, the proconsul of Africa (ep. 135), and Volusian’s spoken concerns relayed by his Christian friend, Marcellinus (ep. 136), that Christianity and Roman citizenship were incompatible. In his aim of exonerating the Christians from blame for Rome’s fall, Augustine, as Markus suggests, speaks of Rome “as an outsider.” But Rome plays a more complicated role in Augustine’s argument. For Augustine, we are a complex amalgam of experiences, memories, habits, affections, dispositions, and reason, all of which shape, both consciously and subconsciously, what we love. “To have a past,” as Wetzel observes, is “to admit grief into wisdom.” Augustine shares with his audience many of the same affective memories derived from his Roman upbringing and education. One need only recall Augustine’s recollection of how Virgil moved him to tears as a youth (conf. 1.13.20–21). Books 4 and 5 read not as a break from this Roman past, but as a recasting of memory. Citing Roman sources along the way, Augustine detaches paganism from romanticized images of Rome’s past, showing that traditional Roman religious practices not only fail to account for Roman successes, but also are the contrivance of elites used to conceal their criminality and justify domination.

Noted Augustine scholar J. H. S. Burleigh (d. 1985) once opined that Books 15–18 were “the least satisfactory section” of the entire ciu. Dei. While acknowledging that these words are comparative not superlative, this chapter suggests that there are good reasons for disagreeing with Burleigh’s assessment. Indeed, it contends that there is much to appreciate within this overtly “historical section” if one develops a sense for what Augustine is attempting within them.

Books 13 and 14, written around AD 418, are part of a broader set of Books 11–14 which deal with the origin of the earthly and heavenly cities. Books 13 and 14 were written in the midst of the Pelagian controversy but also sought to tackle an issue Augustine invested much time and energy in, from the very beginning of his ecclesiastical career. Furthermore, these two books can be read as commentaries on Genesis on the one hand, and as philosophical tractates critiquing Platonic and Stoic tenets on the other. And while Books 13 and 14 focus on the fall of Adam and its consequences, Augustine does use this opportunity to attack Pelagian positions explicitly in this context.

The predominant theme of ciu. Dei 2, which sets the course for Augustine’s critique of ancient Rome, is the disastrous influence of a religion without public moral teaching to offer. In exploring his treatment of that theme, we must first pause over the word ‘religion’, which is ours and not Augustine’s. ‘Religion and morality’ is the way we would naturally pose the question, and more commonly talk about morality without religion than about religion without morality. Augustine could also have expressed his question in our way. He uses the word ritus (plural), sometimes in phrases, as ritus sacri, ritus religionis, in ways that correspond sufficiently to our use of the term ‘religion’, and on one occasion he even refers to ‘religion and morality’ (ritibus moribusque; ciu. Dei 14.1). But he states the question in terms of the conduct of demons, really existing powers that are worshipped as gods in Roman religion, who have failed to provide the city with laws and its worshippers with moral instruction, and who have peremptorily demanded the homage of corrupting theatrical productions.

Using as a point of departure the paradigmatic example of musical landscape – Felix Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Op. 26 – this chapter considers how the idea of landscape came to shape the composition and subsequent reception of numerous Romantic works. In addition to addressing the question of why so much of this music has been heard to evoke a sense of place, attention is given to the very act of contemplating landscape, both by composers and by the protagonists that often occupy their works. Particular attention is given to Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, and Mahler, but the expansive view of musical Romanticism offered here encompasses the proto-programmatic genre of the characteristic symphony, as well as the music of a diverse array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers from Charles Ives to Jonathan Harvey, composers whose engagement with Romantic landscape tropes reveal the continued relevance of this rich tradition.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, changes in philosophy and aesthetics as well as the increasing prominence of ‘pure’ instrumental music brought to a head questions over the meaning and value of music. While the merit of most of the fine arts (literature, painting, sculpture) was beyond serious doubt, instrumental music’s supposed lack of content posed a peculiar problem to writers. This chapter presents four main Romantic strategies used to argue for music’s meaning, including the use of programmes as well as the rethinking of the relations between music and feeling, music and words, and between content and form. Covering the first half of the nineteenth century, it encompasses the view of philosophers and composers as well as writers and critics, from Schopenhauer, Hoffmann, and Tieck to Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brendel, and Hanslick.

An introduction to the volume with rationale for the second edition and chapter summaries.

In a detailed study of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Stephen Barton examines the character of God in each narrative. He shows that controversial claims about God are implied at every point in the gospel stories of Jesus, shaped as they are by an apocalyptic worldview and by the parting of the ways between the synagogue and the church.

Provides an analysis of historical Jesus studies and the key interpretative issues scholars seek to address. Surveying scholarship from the eighteenth century on, Fowl disentangles the guiding assumptions of historical Jesus research in its quest for a dispassionate assessment of historical ‘facts’ and interpretative frameworks. As case studies, Fowl compares the major accounts of Jesus offered by John Dominic Crossan, N. T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson.

Narrates a shift in reading methods from notions of objectivity and authorial intent to a reader-oriented approach which emphasizes the reader as the subject who interprets the text. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Schneiders argues that reading scripture is an event with the potential to transform the reader through the transcendent reality mediated by the text.