After a general survey of the situation in China, attention turns to Daoism and Confucianism and the conflicting interpretations of their key concepts of ‘the Way’ and ‘Heaven.’ A number of reasons are given for considering their approach religious. With Daoism the specific case considered is how Christianity might learn from its approach to the beginning and end of life, in critique of the traditional doctrine of the Fall at the beginning and too tenacious a desire for permanence at its end. With Confucianism the social value of ritual is considered. The work of Daniel Bell and Stephen Angle are used to argue the need for the sacred underpinning of contemporary democracy. Finally, the extent of the change in Buddhism as it adopted the Mahayana position is considered. Here most attention is devoted to the type of arguments deployed for the necessity of change from Shakyamuni’s original message, particularly as presented in the Lotus Sutra.

This chapter considers John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that Lydgate composed for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, during the 1430s. I suggest that, in Lydgate’s historical poetry, and particularly in the Fall, the poet fixates upon the “surplus” of literary matter that the forms of his poetry leave out or exclude. In its most immediate sense, this “surplus” consists of those aspects of the historical record that Lydgate cannot, or will not, repeat within his poetry. But in a broader way, it also figures Lydgate’s view of history itself, which he feels is too vast, and too self-conflicted, to represent in full. I begin by examining Lydgate’s debts to the artes poetriae manuals, the formes fixes tradition, and practices of monastic historiography, all of which lie behind his belief in the surplus and shape his use of the idea. I then consider how the surplus, both as a term and as a concept, motivates the poetics of the Fall, and in particular, the pointed but ambiguous way that it speaks to matters of contemporary political concern to Humphrey of Gloucester.

Chapter 2 analyzes the rises and falls of China’s government revenue in the last four decades. It estimates the size of China’s government revenue which includes general fiscal revenue, government fund, social security fund, and operating income from state-owned capital, as well as extra-budgetary revenue. It discusses China’s tax reforms and analyzes the reasons for the ups and downs of the general fiscal revenue and other government revenues. It compares the size of China’s government revenue with other countries, showing that the ratio of total government revenue in GDP in China is quite large now. It also discusses the characteristics of China's government revenue system. This chapter finally examines the problems in the current revenue system, and discusses factors affecting future government revenue.

Maimonides never wrote a commentary on the Hebrew Bible or on any part thereof. That literary choice is belied by the influential legacy of Maimonides’ biblical hermeneutics as developed in the Guide. For the Guide is a work that is declaredly about Scripture. This claim merits emphasis: The Guide is first and foremost an exegetical work. In the general introduction, Maimonides writes that the two primary purposes of the Guide are: first, to explain the meaning of certain terms that appear in the Bible; second, to explain the meaning of meshalim, or parables that appear in the Bible. However, in terms of form, the expected approach for an exegetical work, in light of Maimonides’ intellectual background, would have been to compose a commentary on all or part of the Bible. Jewish biblical commentary was a sophisticated art by Maimonides’ time, originating as far back as Saadia Gaon’s (882–942) commentary on the book of Job, which adapted the genre of formal commentary for Hebrew biblical texts. In such formal commentaries, which harken back to models of ancient Greek and medieval Arabic philosophical commentary, three features stand out. One, there is a clear division between text and commentary, between chunks of text (lemmata) and their interpretation, between author and commentator. Two, the commentator follows the order of the text as a structural principle for the commentary. Three, the commentary is the product of one interpreter and reflects an individual reading. Often the commentator adds a preface of some sort, whose structure and themes were guided by a number of conventions. Saadia’s commentary features all of these elements, including an extensive introduction. As far as Greek commentaries on the philosophical-scientific canon, it is a matter of some contention whether Maimonides was familiar with commentaries on Aristotle by Alexander of Aphrodisias. We do know that he was familiar with Galen’s commentary on Hippocrates’ aphorisms, in Arabic translation, since he himself authored a commentary on Galen’s commentary.

Empedocles (about 492–430 BCE) promoted himself as a daimon in flesh. He told a cosmic story about how daimones fell from their blessed state and the mode of their return. The pure daimon is a spherical being made up of the energy of Love. Owing to a moral fault, the individual daimon falls into flesh and enters a drawn-out cycle of moral and physical purification. The fallen daimon purifies itself by living the lives of different animals and plants and by not eating substances that contain the daimonic essence. Empedocles is historically significant for his focus on individual and present daimonification, and for his cosmic story of daimonic fall and redemption, a story moralized by Plato and his intellectual heirs.

In this chapter, the author considers Lapsarian Theodicy, according to which the originating cause of natural evil, including the suffering of animals in nature, was a cosmic Fall set in motion when the first human disobeyed God. He argues that, besides being antiquated by Darwinian science, this traditional explanation of animal suffering fails on four analytical-theologicalgrounds. For it entails (1) an implausible original fragility of the created world, (2) extreme moral impropriety on God’s part, (3) an implausible account of motivation to do evil in paradisiacal circumstances,and (4) an overvaluing of human freedom. Furthermore, the author argues that Lapsarian Theodicy is not supported unambiguously by the story of Adam and Eve in Eden, as commonly assumed. He concludes that theists are best advised to search for non-lapsarian alternatives, as the majority of participants in the controversy are doing.

It was, above all, the romantic melodies and rich harmonic textures of operetta that attracted British and American audiences. The music of operetta occupied a number of positions between popular musical theatre and opera. Dance rhythms formed an important part of the style of every operetta composer. American influence on German operetta had its source in the music-making of African Americans in the period just before the jazz craze of the 1920s. There was delight in mixing musical styles, and it is common to find Austro-German, Hungarian, and American styles in the same piece. While operettas with modern themes were increasingly characterized by syncopated rhythms in the 1920s, those with exotic themes were spiced up with augmented intervals, modal harmony, and ostinato rhythms. Most operetta composers in Vienna and Berlin were happy to have the help of orchestrators. Orchestrators were also on hand for New York productions.

It was, above all, the romantic melodies and rich harmonic textures of operetta that attracted British and American audiences. The music of operetta occupied a number of positions between popular musical theatre and opera. Dance rhythms formed an important part of the style of every operetta composer. American influence on German operetta had its source in the music-making of African Americans in the period just before the jazz craze of the 1920s. There was delight in mixing musical styles, and it is common to find Austro-German, Hungarian, and American styles in the same piece. While operettas with modern themes were increasingly characterized by syncopated rhythms in the 1920s, those with exotic themes were spiced up with augmented intervals, modal harmony, and ostinato rhythms. Most operetta composers in Vienna and Berlin were happy to have the help of orchestrators. Orchestrators were also on hand for New York productions.

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.

The book begins its soteriological arc with a discussion of the fall as it operates in Hughes’s work: not merely as a playful trope, but as an ontological truth of the human condition. Presenting self-regard as the primary Hughesian symptom of fallenness, this chapter discusses key early poems before arguing that the poem “Wodwo,” with its depiction of a creature crouched in negotiations with a lost divine life, holds a place of greater significance in Hughes’s canon than critical attention has so far granted. Discussion turns to Hughes’s essay “Baboons and Neanderthals: a Rereading of The Inheritors,” in which Hughes attempts to marry scripture to science by suggesting that human fallenness is the result of a mutation in our evolutionary history. The chapter engages heavily with the work of paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould (who Hughes himself read) to demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of Hughes’s theorising. Hughes discusses the biological fall in relation to William Golding’s novel, but here we are able to see Hughes’s own deployments of the idea.

Chapter 4 explores Gregory’s re-telling of the fall against the backdrop of the ‘garments of glory’ tradition. After being persuaded by the devil to eat the fruit in paradise, the image of God is banished and clothed in garments of ‘thick, dull flesh’, which equates to being shrouded in sin. This renders the human person at greater risk from the devil. Here, we examine the way in which Gregory discusses the devil, arguing that Gregory attributes to the devil a diminishing existence. The battles with the spiritual powers of darkness form a primary strand in Gregory’s narrative of the image of God’s existence, in which the devil hovers behind conversations of sin, the flesh, the world and the passions.