Chapter 4 argues that Augustine reaches a theologically coherent articulation of the resurrection in Contra Faustum Manicheum. At this culminating moment, Augustine defends human flesh and its resurrection against the Manichaean repudiations of both. Despite the Manichaean claim to promote the spiritual resurrection, Augustine diagnoses their mental captivity within their ideological constructs of an alternative reality and of a phantom and deceptive Christ as deriving from their disbelief in Christ’s true flesh and fleshly resurrection. Augustine shows how the risen Jesus and Scripture testify to the enduring substance of the flesh in its resurrection, whereby God vindicates his creation and accomplishes our salvation. Augustine progresses to a more sophisticated reading of key scriptural verses by distinguishing between the flesh’s substantial constitution and its qualitative conditions of corruption and incorruption. Moreover, in elevating believers’ hope and by transfiguring their sacraments, Christ’s fleshly resurrection has advanced them towards the kingdom of God.

The complexity of its themes and concerns suggests that Augustine anticipated multiple audiences for the “Confessions,” including his critics within the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa and his former compatriots among the Manichaean community. For the former, it served as an apology, demonstrating the authenticity of his spiritual development away from his Manichaean past. For the latter, it served both as a polemic, cleverly criticizing Manichaeism in the guise of self-condemnation, and as a protreptic, offering himself as an exemplar of a path to conversion commensurable with those spiritual values he could appreciate in the Manichaeans, despite their heresy.

In no other period in the German-speaking lands was so much written about, and in the service of, religion as from 1450 to 1700. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first discusses the literature of exhortation and polemic. Before the Reformation this included The Ship of Fools (1494) by Sebastian Brant and the writings of Erasmus. From 1517 on it meant the religious debate spearheaded by Martin Luther. The second section demonstrates how drama was used for polemical and edificatory purposes in Reformation satire, Protestant Biblical drama, and both Catholic and Protestant historical drama. The third section analyses a cautionary tale from each side of the confessional divide: the Lutheran History of Dr John Faustus (1587) and the Catholic Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (1669). The fourth section discusses the religious poetry of the seventeenth century, including that of Andreas Gryphius, the hymns of Paul Gerhardt and mystical poetry from Jakob Böhme to Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg.