This chapter offers a theology of the Atonement, building on Augustine’s account of the Cross. It argues that, on the Cross, Jesus opens and joins himself fully to the death-dealing that is the inner logic of all sinful human community, and overcomes it in the Resurrection.

Chapter 5 explores Faulkner’s lifelong interest in the physicality of writing and the relationship of this interest to questions about religion and literature. With his 1954 novel A Fable, he foregrounds a play of text and materiality that had been present in his work since his early handmade books. Faulkner persuaded Random House to issue A Fable with no title on the hardbound cover beneath the dust jacket but rather iterations of the cross, a motif they used throughout the book, but which has disappeared from current editions of the novel. Faulkner dedicated the book to his daughter Jill on her twenty-first birthday, which he later maintained was a way of saying that she was now on her own. The book itself, though, which interweaves aspects of the Gospels with a First World War narrative, becomes its own quasi-sacred physical support for readers, a new kind of Bible as material text. Multiple characters in the novel try to find versions of sustenance in physical texts, but many come away disappointed. Finally, the chapter examines Faulkner’s ambiguous use of the term literature, which generally took on a more positive sense for him when connected with the materials of writing.

I return to hymnography in this chapter, looking at the development of a full calendar of Marian praise between about 600 and 1000 CE. The main source of Marian hymnography is the major feasts, which include the Virgin’s Nativity, Entrance into the Temple, Annunciation, Dormition and others. The festal hymns, which include kontakia, stichera, kanons and various other forms, provide Christological teaching, although intercessory supplication to the Virgin may also play a role in short hymns known as theotokia. It is especially in the weekday services that we find intense supplication to the Theotokos, particularly on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her human lament at the foot of the cross, which was remembered on those days throughout the liturgical year, may symbolise the contrition that was expected of monks and nuns at all times; it also highlights Mary’s human qualities, which came to be understood as models for ascetics to imitate.

I return to hymnography in this chapter, looking at the development of a full calendar of Marian praise between about 600 and 1000 CE. The main source of Marian hymnography is the major feasts, which include the Virgin’s Nativity, Entrance into the Temple, Annunciation, Dormition and others. The festal hymns, which include kontakia, stichera, kanons and various other forms, provide Christological teaching, although intercessory supplication to the Virgin may also play a role in short hymns known as theotokia. It is especially in the weekday services that we find intense supplication to the Theotokos, particularly on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her human lament at the foot of the cross, which was remembered on those days throughout the liturgical year, may symbolise the contrition that was expected of monks and nuns at all times; it also highlights Mary’s human qualities, which came to be understood as models for ascetics to imitate.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

As a self-reflexive conceptual category that works by inverting and unsettling commonly held assumptions, decadence has much in common with the device of parody. In England in the early 1890s the self-conscious self-mockery of decadents, dandies, and New Women writers gestured to a robustness and broadening of the decadent tradition. Those New Women writers who used the unorthodoxies of decadence to align themselves against a conservative press did so chiefly via the early volumes of the decadent periodical The Yellow Book between 1894 and 1895. Paradoxically, through the exaggerated appropriation of features of male decadent writing ? egoism, sexual expressiveness, homosexuality ? New Women writers declared their independence from patriarchal literary convention. This chapter discusses the contributions to the Yellow Book of Ella D’Arcy, Ada Leverson, and Victoria Cross, who wrote with a heightened sexual consciousness and a profound sense of disenchantment with contemporary culture in order to raise feminist concerns about sexuality, class, and race.

At Apollonia (Uluborlu) after Augustus died the Res gestae was inscribed below statues of the imperial family. Apollonios, son of Olympichos, went on a mission to Germanicus Caesar in 18<AU: Pl. confirm date is correct>. Apollonios’ grandfather had been a priest of Zeus, but Apollonios was a priest of the goddess Rome. In the third century, a cross was carved on the pediment of the gravestone of Alexandros (also known as Artemon), a member of this same family. Still prominent in civic life, the third-century descendants looked to Christianity. In churches, feelings about holding public office were mixed. Origen advised against, and the Council of Elvira ruled that duoviri should not step inside a church during their term of office. But Christian city councillors are attested, and more in Phrygia than anywhere. At Synnada, Dorymedon, a councillor, was martyred during the reign of Probus (276–282), along with Trophimos, whose ossuary is now in the Bursa Museum. Another gravestone, from outside Apollonia, commemorates Zoulakios, whose father-in-law was ‘Diogenes the Christian’. Probably this Diogenes was born before the middle of the second century, so one can argue for a connection with the Montanist missionary endeavour.

In the upper Tembris valley, some 175 kilometres north of Eumeneia, there is another group of Christian gravestones, many of which use the phrase ‘Christians for Christians’. Only two extant ‘Christians for Christians’ epitaphs are dated, one to 249 and one to 305. There is a case for believing that many of these gravestones were made in the same workshop. This workshop expected to have more Christian than non-Christian customers. Gravestones were prefabricated in a range of decorative schemes and sold when only lettering remained to be done. Modern scholars have wondered if the ‘Christians for Christians’ gravestones commemorated people from a Montanist community, but the idea remains unproven. Stephen Mitchell has argued that the ‘Christians for Christians’ formula continued to be used until late in the fourth century, but Elsa Gibson’s view that the latest inscriptions in this category are from early in the fourth century is preferable. The first-century Colossian church, a place with distinctive characteristics perhaps not widely shared in the Christian churches of its time, may be a relevant comparison with the Christian community of the upper Tembris valley.

The central symbolic event of the Christian religion appears everywhere in Hughes’s poetry and prose, explicitly and implicitly, as a fundamental metaphysical statement about the human condition. This chapter begins with a discussion of “Hawk in the Rain,” the opening and title poem of Hughes’s first collection, as an update of Hopkin’s explicitly Christological poem “The Windhover,” which leads to a consideration of how the crucifixion has been made less horrific over the years through the use of comforting cultural “roses.” Making much use of the theologian Paul Tillich, this chapter introduces the concept of teleological freedom, of which the crucifixion is a powerful representation, not least in Hughes’s poetry. Key crufixional Crow poems, especially “Crow Blacker Than Ever,” are discussed, and the prevailing critical reading overturned. The chapter concludes with a theological and literary look at Jesus’ death-cry, an act which echoes repeatedly in Hughes’s work.