Certain beliefs are seen as serious threats to societies and individuals, especially when technology disproportionately amplifies their range and impact. Yet these dangerous beliefs can offer psychological benefits, such as epistemic clarity and stress reduction. They also fulfill potent social needs for cohesion, purpose, excitement, and power, acting as a social currency by providing justifications for preexisting antisociality, targets for hate, reasons to take violent action, access to groups of like-minded believers, and status within such groups. Given the multiple needs involved, devaluing these beliefs requires multiple strategies both for increasing their social costs and for meeting believers’ needs in other ways.

This chapter asserts that J. M. Coetzee’s ostensibly surprising turn to questions of religion in “The Jesus Novels” should have been anticipated from his trajectory of concerns since the novels of the late 1990s. Through a genetic reading of Disgrace that extensively uses Coetzee’s notebooks and drafts for the novel, I show how this work posits the reality of souls, human and nonhuman, and imagines how that reality can reorient the self away from abusive uses of others and toward practices of care. This reading of Disgrace traces how Coetzee dismantles previous forms of Western perception through an anti-epiphany, opening the way for belief in souls to produce a better form of life and seeing others. The chapter closes by considering how the Jesus novels further develop the life of spiritual contemplation that Coetzee’s late style explores.

This introduction to The New Believers begins by identifying a broader problem with the contemporary novel: that it often ends with bleak defeat or uncertain irresolution. Instead, I identify a new grouping of contemporary writers – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders – who turn to spiritual beliefs, powers, and presences to offer new hope and possibilities for the contemporary novel, ones that might empower specific progressive causes. I show how this grouping is distinct from other forms of the contemporary, including writers who are hostile to religion, indifferent to it, or committed to it, and I show how the New Believers avoid the problem of oppressive totality by assessing the value of spiritual ideas by their impact on the immanent and the worldly, specifically how spiritual ideas alleviate and prevent material, bodily, and ecological suffering. This new grouping shows that the contemporary novel takes spirituality much more seriously than our critical categories have allowed.

The conclusion to The New Believers identifies how the varieties of spiritual realism newly imagined by each writer reshape our critical understanding of ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, and teleology. Because they commit to spiritual beliefs, in their public comments and in their fiction, the New Believers change the basic understanding of reality (ontology) from a materialist absence of intrinsic meaning to a world filled with spiritual meaning. Our sense of self (subjectivity) changes from completely self-created to one that is still free but responsive to forces of care and compassion, which in turn make better communities (collectivity) possible. The spiritual realism of these writers ultimately reshapes our understanding of death and the purpose of the universe (teleology) by pointing to spiritual persistence and the hope for something beyond our own material demise and the deaths of those we love, which empowers the contemporary novel in more hopeful and affirmative directions.

This chapter departs from many typical readings of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which treat that novel’s spiritual and numinous presences, practices, and powers as fantastical or magical rather than real and efficacious. Drawing on Díaz’s own statements, I show how the novel insists on the reality of supernatural forces and on how practices of prayer and the intervention of powerful spiritual forces, such as the Mongoose, can lead to resilience and survival amid the uncertainties and traumas of Caribbean dictatorship and migration to America. Díaz’s sense of cosmic vision in the novel, an insistence that there is spiritual purpose and power at work in the cosmos, shows how syncretic religious formations in the Caribbean can empower a radical hope in the face of the seemingly traumatic and impossible.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s interviews and archives to show how she is concerned to explore in her late fiction and poetry the idea of the soul as “the better story” about human and nonhuman animal life. I show how Atwood critiques not only Christian Nationalism but also, in Oryx and Crake, a materialist understanding of life. As a response to each of these extremes, Atwood turns to the soul, particularly in The Testaments and in Dearly, showing how that idea and the experienced presence of the souls of the dead can motivate endurance and hope in the face of oppressive formations of Christianity and a materialist sense of nothingness after death. Drawing on Atwood’s drafts of The Testaments, I trace how the novel became more spiritually serious as it developed and how the spiritual poetry of Dearly works together with scenes of spiritual support in Atwood’s novel.

The Coda takes stock of the book’s argument for the distinctiveness of persuasion among its lexical and cognitive others in Romantic writing. It responds to some common misconceptions about the malleability of persuasion and considers its implications for our lives among others today, in political and professional community. The chapter suggests that one response to our civic polarizations, as well as to professional anxieties about the methods and future of literary studies, might well be the self-conscious and flexible mode of persuasion countenanced by Romantic writers at a moment of comparable entrenchments and attacks on the value of a creative and critical imagination. Rather than assume synonymy between persuasion and conviction, in other words, and dismiss them both as either so much domineering or else so much boundless subjectivism, we might consider the continuing value of the kind of judgment under uncertainty characteristic of persuasion as it was reimagined in Romantic writing.

The chapter-length Introduction establishes the historical and philosophical contexts for the Romantic reimagining of persuasion. A section on David Hume’s skeptical views on “perswasion” and the influential response to them by the Scottish rhetorician and minister George Campbell draws important terminological distinctions and delineates key features of the inquiries and reimaginings addressed in the chapters that follow. The main features of the concept of malleable persuasion are described and differentiated from adjacent concepts in works by Lord Byron, Edmund Burke, and Mary Shelley, among others. The book is situated in relation to major lines of scholarship on Romantic cultures of controversy, secular casuistry, and the histories of belief and skepticism. The chapter ends by addressing the distinctly literary dimensions of persuasion, including the role of reading in its representation and elicitation, and the formal resources involved across genres.

This chapter introduces the main argument and themes of the book, and positions it within earlier and existing scholarship on archaic and classical Greek literature, religion and philosophy. Particular points of focus include the relationship between Greek tragedy, ritual and theology, and influential mid-twentieth-century research on Sophocles (the ’classics’ of Sophoclean scholarship). The chapter also discusses ancient biographical traditions surrounding Sophocles’ religiosity and piety.

This chapter argues for the role of collective cognition in creating Roman religious reality. Inauguratio, through which priests were created, was no empty orthopraxic ritual but a means of generating collective belief in order to create socio-religious status and power. Ideally, when Romans judged the ritual of inauguratio efficacious, they collectively believed that Jupiter had sent auspicial signs approving a candidate and that the candidate was therefore a priest. Collective belief was what made the priest a priest, with all the powers and duties concomitant with that status. But the Romans were typically blind to the collective-intentional nature of their social reality. Thus the standard Roman explanation of inauguratio mystifies sacerdotal ontology, holding that priests were priests as a result of Jupiter’s nod. Constitutive beliefs are distinguished from non-constitutive, merely religious beliefs. The Romans’ collectively held constitutive beliefs about sacerdotal status and power actually constituted priests as priests. Although Jupiter’s agency could not be constituted by Roman collective belief, it was a genuine religious belief and part of Roman conceptions of the basis of sacerdotal authority.

Contemporary analytic philosophers of religion have tended to focus attention on epistemological questions about the grounds for religious belief, or on analysing the precise cognitive content of claims about God. But there is reason to suppose that the actual practice of religion depends less on intellectual inquiries of this sort and more on a lived tradition of observance, including participation in various kinds of ritual, and public and private acts of worship. This chapter, drawing on some attitudes manifest in the poetry of Horace, examines what may have been a prevalent approach to religion in the educated Roman world, involving conformity to religious praxis, combined with an ironic or sceptical attitude to the existence of supernatural forces, or the power or influence of the gods, in human affairs. Such an attitude certainly has its counterpart in our own contemporary culture, but it is argued that such a stance inevitably creates a certain psychological dissonance in the religious practitioner. Detached orthopraxy alone cannot satisfy our deepest human needs. The chapter concludes with reflections on the intimate relation between praxis and belief in matters of religion.

Vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the term ‘belief’ regarding ancient states of mind and cognition has had a profound effect on the field of ancient history (and others, such as anthropology) in recent decades. This chapter considers which of these are still relevant and which are mutual misunderstandings, and which issues have, in effect, been resolved indirectly (such as injunctions to use different words for greater clarity). The opportunities offered by cognitive science of religion (and some limits) are set in a broader context of the study of religion. Behind many of these debates (and misunderstandings), it is argued, secular hegemony intrinsically seeks to ‘contain’ religion (taken pragmatically to be the assertion of the actual existence of divinities). This insoluble tension exerts an unceasing influence on our formulation of questions and answers in history. Recently, we have seen a fruitful greater sympathy for religion and ‘believers’ develop, while an appropriate secular distance from empathy is still maintained, notwithstanding the fact that empathy may contribute to an openness to greater sympathy and understanding: the tension does, and will, persist.

This chapter surveys the wide range of definitions of belief in recent scholarship and explores the potential of the cognitive science of religion for generating new approaches. It rejects the assumption that it is possible to talk about the presence or absence of ‘belief’ in Greek religion in a monolithic way, such that the Greeks either believed wholly in their gods or they did not, and challenges the related assumption that beliefs combine to form stable, internally consistent systems. It draws on a range of concepts from cognitive science to explore how contradictions between beliefs and between beliefs and experience might be managed and argues for a dynamic, contextual and plural understanding of Greek religious belief.

This chapter considers how Plutarch, a Platonic philosopher and priest of Apollo, used the language of pistis (‘faith’) and pisteuein (‘to believe’). It rejects the view that Plutarch was the first to introduce a ‘fideistic’, proto-Christian concept of religious faith as opposed to reason, or that his faith was only a way to inscribe himself into ‘tradition’. Crucial for our understanding of Plutarch’s pistis is his initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries, which prevented him from ‘believing’ the Epicureans’ denial of immortality, as he deemed that the Platonists’ view of the immortality of the soul ‘is harder to disbelieve than to believe’. The chapter emphasises the convergence between Plutarch’s experience of the mysteries and his Platonic philosophy. Plutarch’s notion of faith is not fideistic and anti-philosophical but belongs to the domain of philosophy: unfounded faith must be criticised when it misrepresents the gods and strengthened when it aligns with sound philosophical doctrines. Not only can philosophical doctrines confirm expressions of pistis, but particular philosophical views are also the object of faith and are, conversely, reinforced by initiation into the mysteries. Throughout the chapter, it is intimated that Plutarch’s concept of pistis is not fundamentally different from that of Paul.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.