Aristotle’s theology is best understood in relation to Plato’s. Like Plato, Aristotle offers no science of god, but he does offer philosophers a way to immortalize themselves through the study and contemplation of the cosmos. First, Aristotle arrays all classes of substances, from the elements to the gods, in a single progressive hierarchy. Every substance in the cosmos, he says, strives to become as much like god as its own nature permits: each class of substance perfects itself by imitating the class above it. A person’s life, says Aristotle, develops through the classes of plants, animals, and humans—before striving to imitate the divine by contemplating the stars. We become like the god by climbing the ladder of classes of substances. Second, Aristotle’s god governs the cosmos not by managing it but purely by being an example of perfection—an example that magnetically draws all things toward him. The perfect happiness enjoyed by god inspires all other classes of substances to love and to imitate him. Similarly, a philosopher governs his household and his city not by managing them, but merely by the attractive power of the example he sets of godlike happiness.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.

This chapter traces the fortunes of our modern understanding of ‘belief’ which is deeply informed by its original uses in a religious context. It begins with an account of faith/belief (Greek: pistis) in early Christianity, showing how the primary meanings of the term related to trust rather than intellectual assent. In the medieval period, this social component of faith/belief was formalised in the conception of ‘implicit faith’, which enabled lay believers to affirm abstruse theological doctrines without the requirement of a full intellectual comprehension of what was being affirmed. While it is possible to speak of the propositional content of belief during this period, the identity of the faithful was established more by liturgical practice than assent to doctrinal propositions.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the philosophical treatise Peri kosmou (often known by the Latin title De mundo), written in approximately the 1st century AD (a much-disputed date) and preserved among the works of Aristotle. The chapter introduction emphasizes the literary polish of the work, and the remarkable way in which it draws accurately upon a late hellenistic understanding of geography, the earth sciences, and cosmology in order to sustain its open-minded, but fundamentally Aristotelian and anti-Stoic, theological position and stimulate readers to immerse themselves more deeply in its philosophy.

Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

Themanuscripts discussed above are analysed as examples of the diverse practices of using and reading liturgical texts in the Early Middle Ages. Accompanying text and apparatus are noted and studied, showing that none of the manuscripts fully agree with the conception of ‘purely’ liturgical or non-liturgical texts erected by scholarly analysis and cataloguing. Education co-existed with narrative and prescription of ritual. All the texts led towards deeper understanding, the precondition for correct performance. Manuscripts in which the ordines appear alongside canon law, papal history, and within liturgical books of other genres, are all discussed.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically and harmonically complex. It reflects, as he affirmed, the miraculous beauty of God’s Creation. By the early 1940s, he had developed a musical language of religious symbolism comprising a variety of components. The building blocks on which this language is based and the contents their inventor intended them to represent were clearly defined, and hardly changed in the course of the composer’s long life. This article gives an overview of this symbolism and discusses the prevalent devices Messiaen used, along with the religious concepts informing each of them.

Messiaen was inspired by a pantheon of saints and theologians that were important to him: Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and then Ernest Hello, Dom. Columba Marmion, Romano Guardini, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This chapter focusses in particular on St Thomas Aquinas, whose work exerted the greatest influence on Messiaen’s understanding of Christian doctrine. It examines the way this shaped his language, and assesses the range of the symbolic manifestations of Aquinas’s thought in his art.

Although it is a truism of understanding Messiaen to assert that Roman Catholicism was profoundly important to him and his music, it can be difficult to understand what this actually means in the face of two millennia of the church’s unfolding history with its countless controversies between theological schools, monastic orders, and religious politics. This chapter explores how Messiaen’s musical theology was colored by the remarkable legacy of St. Francis of Assisi. While attending to ways that Messiaen’s towering achievement, the opera Saint François d’Assise, expresses the Franciscan spirit, it also asserts that the Franciscan influence can also be discerned in Messiaen’s representational subject matter (particularly his bird style and his several works on the Nativity of Jesus), as well as in his focus on color, joy, and an unsettling inclusivity.