Continuing to follow the threads established by the previous chapter, this chapter highlights four passages (6:22–71; 7:11–8:30; 12:20–36; and 13:31–38) typically excluded from studies on John’s temple motif to demonstrate that John’s Gospel evinces a pervasive concern for divine presence and absence. I propose that John describes two objections to the Gospel’s claim that Jesus is the enfleshed divine presence, which dominate the narrative’s major conflicts: (1) Jesus’s humanity and (2) Jesus’s impending absence. Scholars rarely focus on the second of these objections, which I argue features prominently in the narrative. I contend that John depicts Jesus’s absence as a problem both for those still considering the Gospel’s claims as well as those struggling with faithfulness amid Jesus’s absence. Consequently, the authorial audience could perceive a developing tension between the Gospel’s emphasis on the significance of Jesus’s presence and their own lived reality amid Jesus’s physical absence, a tension which John amplifies by stressing that Jesus’s absence was an obstacle to belief even for the narrative’s characters.

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.

A brief review of Luther’s confessional summation of the central indisputable articles of faith for the reformed Christian religion; Luther’s practical reformation agendas are interpreted, noting the tensions regarding sacramental theology and teachings on marriage and sexuality.

This chapter sets out the book’s central claim, namely that deafness offers a new perspective on early modern England. It does this by revealing both the diversity of deaf experiences and the cultural weight attached to speech and hearing. Drawing on extensive archival research, it recovers the lives of deaf and deafened people across the social spectrum, showing how prelingually deaf individuals using sign language to work, marry and participate in religious life. Their stories challenge long-standing assumptions that a primarily oral society excluded them. Instead, deaf people were more integrated than printed sources or legal guides suggest, even as prejudice about speech and rationality persisted. The chapter also introduces the methodological challenges of writing deaf history, foregrounding the rarity of first-person accounts and the importance of interpreters, family networks and teachers. By combining insights from medical, theological, legal and cultural models of disability, the chapter reframes deafness as a historically situated experience that illuminates broader questions of knowledge, communication and what it meant to be human in early modern England.

The Byzantine Rite today transcends confessional, geographical, linguistic and cultural barriers. It is the ritual expression of millions of believers, both Orthodox and Catholic, throughout the world. This essay looks at the Byzantine Rite as it is practised in the Greek and Slavonic traditions, notes some observable differences between the two, then continues with a discussion of the Greek Catholic tradition, and ends with a discussion about movements of renewal and reform.

This chapter examines the Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy at Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of Constantinople, roughly in the period after the end of Iconoclasm after 843 until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The beginning of this period coincides with the liturgical texts of the Divine Liturgy in the oldest extant Byzantine euchologion that serve as the basis for the synchronic and thematic analysis of the preparatory rites, the reading of Scripture, the moments of consecration and the reception of communion. Along with the texts of the prayers of the Divine Liturgy from the euchologion, the diataxis (book of rubrics) of Philotheos Kokkinos and Demetrios Gemistos and liturgical commentaries by St Germanos of Constantinople, Nicholas of Andida, Nicholas Kabasilas and St Symeon of Thessalonike are brought together to present a more complete picture of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. Nevertheless, this is the perspective of the clergy—and not the faithful—since by this time the prayers were recited inaudibly. For a better understanding of what the faithful experienced during the Divine Liturgy, questions of hymnography, mystagogy, movement and participation are briefly examined. Overall, the Divine Liturgy expressed the theology of the Church as a vision of the glory of God and the celebration of the passion, death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Thus, the church became the dwelling place of God—whether in the Great Church of Constantinople or anywhere the Byzantine Rite was celebrated.

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.

This chapter gives fruitful attention to the role of the sacraments in the Confessions. It delineates the ways in which the sacrament of baptism structures the autobiographical books, with baptism foregrounded in the first book (Augustine’s baptism postponed), the central or hinge book (Book 5, in which Augustine’s baptism is again deferred), and the climactic book (Book 9, in which Augustine’s baptism is recounted, along with many other baptisms, quite a few of which did not take place within the chronological scope of Book 9). The Eucharist, which was for Augustine the other sacrament of initiation and for which baptism itself was a prerequisite, comes into clear view at the end of Book 9 and in Book 10. The exegetical books then treat Genesis as “a model for all of Christian life, and especially that of the church,” a life inaugurated in baptism and sustained by the Eucharist. Contrary to the view of some scholars, who see very few Eucharistic allusions in the Confessions, the chapter shows that many of Augustine’s images – especially of food and of milk – have Eucharistic overtones.

The chapter discusses the development of sacramental doctrine during a period of lively debate on the subject around the year 1200, with a focus on the relevance of the Fourth Lateran Council as a continuation of the eleventh-century ecclesiastical reform movement, and with stress on the unique relevance of Paris as the key centre of intellectual production.

Chapter 4, on David Jones’ The Anathemata (1952), considers the poem in terms of the author’s own aspiration to preserve the past. Jones considers art to be a way of making its object present and active, as the Roman Catholic Mass is believed to make Christ’s body and blood present. This form of “re-presentation” (anamnēsis) makes the past actively present without literally reconstructing it, offering a middle way between Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia. In Jones’ view, poets in the twentieth century must assemble the fragments of the cultural past as a means of resisting the increasingly utilitarian nature of modern culture. Ultimately, Jones’ densely allusive poetry forces us to consider the limits of nostalgia. If art inevitably makes past present, is it always in some sense nostalgic?

The Spanish Inquisition developed the heresy known as alumbradismo out of disparate evidence: the heresy existed only in documents by, for, or about the Inquisition. Defendants charged as alumbrados were often acted in ways incommensurate with orthodox Spanish Catholicism; their defining characteristic across time was an emphasis on interior religious experience, especially mental prayer, which would lead toward the abandonment of one’s soul in God. However, the idea that they were members of an organized group—despite lacking any self-formulated doctrine or teachings, much less a means for global communication or dissemination of their ideas—was a stretch of logic that validated inquisitorial persecution but fails to adhere to modern historians’ concepts of proof. It was the Inquisition’s persecutorial discourse and bureaucracy that provided the connective threads for this “sect” when the alumbrados themselves failed to do so.

Part I, ‘The Dispensary’, focuses on the consumables on Sturmy’s ship – sweet wines and spices – reflecting on their medicinal, spiritual and commercial value. Chapter 1 analyses Eucharistic images which presented sweet wine as the Christian blood of the Holy Land, providing an ethnonationalist rationale for the essentialised Christianity of the lost crusader territories. Sweet wine was revered and regulated as a category distinct from ‘ordinary’ wines. Archaeological evidence of excavated Frankish winepresses shows that winemaking in the crusader kingdom was a major, organised industry. Sweet wines were first imported to England from these settlements, and subsequently were traded by Italian merchants.

Harald Buchinger sketches the origins and complex evolutions of liturgies in Christian Antiquity. He focuses on patterns of worship and celebration developed in those times, underscoring how difficult it is to draw straightforward conclusions, mainly because of a paucity of sources.

This chapter explores christological underpinnings to eucharistic theology. It delineates transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and three versions of impanation in the effort to offer an incarnational model of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

This chapter focuses on the companion volumes Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration to explore the ways Michael Field’s poetry changed following Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s 1907 conversion to Roman Catholicism. This chapter reviews prior scholarship on Field’s devotional poetry, which has often emphasised the continuity between Field’s pre- and post- conversion work. The chapter builds on this scholarship by arguing that Field’s devotional poetry, informed by their newfound faith, explores new ways of thinking about time, suffering, and the purpose of art. Furthermore, this chapter explores the significance of studying Victorian devotional and religious verse, and the ways women and queer people were able to use the genre to engage with and build upon theological concepts, outside the bounds of ecclesiastical authority.

The argument of this chapter is that the instrument doctrine, if held, sharpens our understanding of other mysteries of the Christian faith, including the hypostatic union, the Church, and the sacrament of the Eucharist. One reason that Aquinas held to the doctrine was the clarity it brought to these other mysteries. With Christology, the benefits are grammatical and speculative. Calling Christ’s humanity an instrument leads us to think of the one who possesses it, namely, the Logos, and so it can render single-subject Christology clearer to the intellect. If Christ’s humanity is held to be an instrument, it also implicates in our understanding the divine power through which the Logos works. With the theology of the Church, the instrument doctrine supports the biblical idea that Christ sends the Holy Spirit on the Church as a human being, and not only as God. And with the theology of the Eucharist, the instrument doctrine assists Catholic faith in perceiving how Jesus gives us a share of the divine life through sacramental communion.

Leviticus has shaped both Jewish and Christian theology and practice over the centuries. The final chapter examines its influence in the rest of the Old Testament and into the Second Temple period and the New Testament. Levitical theology also influenced a Christian understanding of sacred space in church architecture as well as helping shape the Christian liturgical year.