Chapter 6 studies the work of the Polish dramatist Jerzy Grotowski, whose theater profoundly shaped the American stage. Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1968) probes the boundary between theater and ritual practice. While most critics have attended to its embodied elements, I find it is entangled with the histories of literary drama, especially the writings of T. S. Eliot. Across Apocalypsis, a shift from representing to enacting religious ritual mirrors Grotowski’s own intensifying pursuit of ritual efficacy in his art and actor training. This pivot seems to be a reaction against language but actually develops through it. My analysis shows how Apocalypsis realizes a process of demystification through which ritual performance was reconstituted as a European export. This work seems to secularize ritual acts and to destabilize the hierarchical models that distinguish white Christian traditions from other forms of world performance. In fact, it extends Christianity’s universalizing model of the world.

Chapter 8 explores Homeric religion as lived practice rather than abstract theology. It examines fate and choice, divine agents and human responsibility, and the rituals that connected communities to the sacred. The chapter discusses sacred places, prayer and sacrifice, and the afterlife, showing how epic memory uses the gods to think through uncertainty, mortality, and the limits of control.

This chapter examines the sacraments, with special attention to baptism, penance and the Eucharist. Thomas serenely adopts both ontological and symbolical approaches in his sacramentology. The sacraments commemorate Christ, are truly transformative by making grace present, and have an eschatological dimension by assisting us in attaining beatitude. Baptism addresses the imperfection of original sin and incorporates us into Christ. Penance restores our relationship with God. A key element of penance is satisfaction. This allows us to deepen our discussion of ‘making satisfaction’ considered in Chapter 5. The chapter concludes with an overview of central aspects of the Eucharist as sacrifice (again enriching our discussion from Chapter 5) and as a communal meal. The Eucharist is the goal of the other sacraments and the fulfilment of the Christian life.

This chapter covers the objective dimension of salvation: the redeeming work of Christ. Several models of salvation are being discussed in detail: the sacramental model, merit, making satisfaction and sacrifice. In each case the pivotal role of charity is being highlighted. I also argue that Thomas’s account of Christ’s salvific work is not penal and vindictive but penitential and medicinal. His soteriology is both ontological and symbolical; subjective and objective; interpersonal and participatory.

This chapter examines one of Hipponax’s best known (and least understood) fragments, fr. 3a West. With its reference to Kandaules as a supposed ‘Maeonian’ (i.e. Lydian) equivalent of a ‘dog-throttling’ Hermes, the fragment has variously been examined as purported evidence for the Lydian pantheon, kingship, and sacrificial practices. After correcting these less-than-adequate explanations of the supposed theonym on the basis of recent advances in our knowledge of Lydian, this chapter investigates a more pressing and hitherto neglected question: how this glossing of ‘Hermes the dog-throttler’ as Kandaules functions within the poetic objectives of Hipponax and of the iambic genre. In so doing, it becomes clear that Hipponax’s Kandaules is no god and that the passage is purely comical, achieving its effect through a complex juxtaposition of differing elements from the cultural assemblage of sixth-century Ionia. Unpacking the humour of the lines brings into relief the compositional technique of Hipponactean poetry, in particular how Hipponax creates an associative nexus in which interpretation and humour operate at multiple levels. This chapter argues that an understanding of the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic context of Hipponax’ poetry is critical for appreciating the complexity, linguistic polysemy, and poetic artistry of Hipponax as a poet.

How did the songs of Pindar solicit the language of Greek polytheism? How could their words generate ritual knowledge and provoke experience? Pindar was long recognised as a master of piety and an authority on divine matters, and his poems remained privileged points of reference for thinking ritual occasions like festivals, the sanctuaries where they were held, and ritual types like sacrifice. Focusing on sacrifice, this chapter looks at the ritual language produced by Pindaric poetry, rather than the one it reflects, and its inscription in the ritual archive of Greek culture. It is concerned with the poet’s enduring role as an agent in the dynamic system of Greek polytheism. After a brief survey of the prominence of sacrifice in the Pindaric biographical tradition, different aspects of the sacrifices found in the poems of Pindar are reviewed and illustrated through case studies, most notably passages from Pythian 5, Isthmian 4, and Olympian 10.

The controversial nature of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s polemical writing has had theeffect of sidelining his earlier literary criticism, in particular his engagement withseveral French Catholic writers. A more nuanced exploration of his work as a wholedisplays a complex intersection of secularism and religious feeling. O’Brien, thepublic intellectual determined to fly by the nets of political and religious doctrine,nevertheless produces work saturated with religious language, forms, and structuresof feeling. His writing demonstrates a tension between his secularism and hisrepeated return to the language of suffering, sacrifice, heresy, and schism. O’Brien’sfamily history, with its traumatic relationship to events during the violent formation ofthe Irish state, is a helpful lens through which to view this emotional substratumwithin his writings.  His later writings emphasise the forces in his life that resistedcategorization, and thus offer a kind of apophatic vision, a dark enlightenment.

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.

Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

This chapter develops a view that casts moral heroism as a specific kind of moral achievement and argues it is superior to the virtue approach to moral heroism. I begin the discussion with J. O. Urmson’s account of moral heroism as overcoming fear, registering the limitations of that account before moving on to Gwen Bradford’s account of achievement as such, which centers on overcoming difficulty. She defends a view of difficulty that consists in the expending of effort, rather than in the surmounting of complexity. Her highly developed account is a good model for analyzing moral achievement, yet it is in need of significant modification in order to function in a specifically moral context. In order to give an account of moral achievement, I argue that Bradford’s key notion of difficulty should be replaced by sacrifice. Moral heroism consists in making high-stakes sacrifices. I develop an account of what sacrificing consists in, identifying features of actions that constitute sacrifices. I show how this concept offers us an account of moral heroism as a kind of moral achievement. I then argue that it significantly outperforms the virtue approach according to the desiderata from Chapter 2: accuracy, related phenomenon, and fitting responses.

This chapter completes the picture of moral heroism the book offers. I address the tension in the account that arises from the combination of my practical necessity explanation of the Non-Optionality Claim and the feature of sacrifices that they are chosen over an available alternative. I do so by distinguishing between ways in which an agent’s choice becomes constrained. Another tension is between the practical necessity explanation of the Non-Optionality Claim and the deontic status of being supererogatory. I show how an action can be practically necessary and supererogatory.

These arguments lead to a more general consideration of the supererogatory status of moral heroism, which unfolds in three phases: first in terms of the reasons and duties we might have to aspire to moral heroism, second in terms of programs designed to socially engineer moral heroism, and finally in terms of parents or caretakers raising children to become moral heroes. In all three phases, I argue that the goals of becoming morally heroic or helping others to do so are not simply universally laudable and fitting. This is an important quality of my view that is again an improvement over virtue thinking, which positions moral heroes more straightforwardly as models for emulation.