This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Truthfulness is, so to speak, Kant’s go-to duty. He invokes it in a wide range of philosophical settings, such as his discussion of free will in the Critique of Pure Reason, in his argument for a pure moral theory in the Groundwork, in the detailed moral philosophy of the Metaphysics of Morals and in his late lectures on education. Even though its scope and its theoretical foundation vary, the duty not to lie remains Kant’s prime example of a strict and unequivocal obligation. By way of introduction, this chapter first provides a survey of some important passages in which Kant invokes or argues for the duty of truthfulness before turning to the textbook example that is the bone of contention between him and Benjamin Constant and presenting some reactions provoked by the main thesis of Kant’s essay “On a Supposed Right to Lie”: that there is an unconditional, absolute duty to be truthful even in emergencies.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.

Part of the fascination of Being and Time is that it seeks to weave together so many different strands of thought. But unsurprisingly, its readers also worry that such a work must subject itself to such strain that ultimately it itself must unravel. Key tensions are between the outlooks of three figures: Heidegger the pragmatist, Heidegger the existentialist, and Heidegger the philosopher of being. Seeing how openness to our concerns as a whole is both necessary for authenticity and reveals a unified horizon against which entities with different ways of being show themselves, dissipates these apparent tensions. Recognition of the mediating role played by a conception of the good – that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and Augustine inspired – helps make clear that authenticity is both compatible with the practical embeddedness of our concerns and reveals a form of understanding necessary for ontology to be possible.

The medieval transmission of Augustine’s preaching, in particular that of the Sermones ad populum, has had a significant impact on which parts of his vast homiletic corpus have survived and what state the texts find themselves in after a millennium of being copied by medieval scribes. This chapter will sketch a broad overview of the way Augustine’s sermons were transmitted, focusing in particular on their dynamic organization in sermon collections throughout the Middle Ages. It will discuss the implications of the modes of transmission and the medieval afterlife of Augustine’s preaching for the usability of these sermons as primary sources.

This introduction extols reasons to study Augustine’s sermons for the academy and Church today. It introduces the sixteen chapters written by an international team of experts. It then lays the foundation of humility for the rest of the volume by considering this theme in the volume’s three parts: Augustine’s pastoral task of preaching sermons; sermons on the Scriptures and liturgical feasts; and preaching themes.

While studies frequently concern preachers and their audiences, this chapter avoids the word “audience” and relies more upon the phrase that Augustine uses for the people who stand before him when he preaches: fratres mei (my brethren). The chapter first considers Augustine as preacher with a critical use of Possidius’s Life of Augustine. One of Augustine’s most devoted episcopal friends, Possidius knew him for nearly 40 years and heard him preach many times. The chapter then considers how Augustine understood the people before him. It treats how he spoke to them and how he allows us to glimpse something of who they are and how they think, with a focus on the descriptions of his people in ep. 29. Attending to this biography and letter can help us have a greater appreciation for the study of Augustine as a preacher and those with him when we focus on the extant sermon collection.

The introduction describes the scholastic Latin debate over the relation between the soul and its powers in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. It shows that this debate concerned the question of how a living being’s natural kind, which is determined by its soul, and its kind-specific powers are related. Is a living being’s soul the very same thing as its kind-specific powers, or is its soul perhaps something more basic upon which its kind-specific powers depend? The introduction shows that there were two overarching answers to this question in the thirteenth and fourteenth century: the identity theory, according to which the soul and its powers are identical, and the distinction theory, according to which the soul is distinct from its powers. The introduction first highlights that the debate between identity and distinction theorists already arose in the twelfth century in response to Augustine’s doctrine of the image of the Trinity. It then traces, in broad strokes, the development of the debate from the twelfth century until 1250. Finally, it discusses the phase between 1250 and 1320 focusing on the reception of Aristotle’s theory of the soul in the Latin West.

This text of Bonaventure’s gives a nice indication of how Aristotle begins to influence the debate about the relation between the soul and its powers in the Latin West around the 1250s. In this text, Bonaventure is still very much in dialogue with the earlier debate. He recounts the early twelfth-century identity theory and earlier versions of the distinction theory, and he argues in favor of the version of the distinction theory defended by early Franciscans like Alexander of Hales. As Bonaventure states this latter theory, the soul and its powers are one “in substance” but differ “in essence”, the essential difference having to do with the fact that the powers of the soul, unlike the soul itself, are relations. But Bonaventure also introduces a philosophical innovation into this theory—one that draws on Aristotle. He argues that the powers of the soul, despite being relations, are special types of substances, namely, substances “by a tracing back” (per reductionem). He understands by “substances by a tracing back” imperfect occupants of the category of substance.

This chapter offers a critical appraisal of two dominant approaches to pluralism, conflict, and difference in contemporary political theology, both of which draw on the thought of Augustine. Postliberal Augustinianism, represented by the “Radical Orthodoxy” of John Milbank, develops a highly sophisticated account of the metaphysics of human sociality, grounded in a creative reading of Trinitarian theology which construes political community in terms of harmonious difference. Augustinian civic liberalism, represented by Charles Mathewes and Eric Gregory, draws on Augustine’s understanding of love and difference in order to propose an ethics and ascetics of liberal citizenship. Both, however, thematize political community and difference in essentially oppositional terms, privileging one or the other, and reading conflict in decidedly negative terms. The limits of these political theological strategies reveal a need to reconceptualize the nature of political community and the place of conflict therein.

This introduction assesses a range of popular and scholarly attitudes toward the current state of American democracy, identifying in them a dominant theme of modern democratic theory, namely, an aversion to conflict. Just as John Rawls believed democratic societies to be perennially threatened by a “mortal conflict” between comprehensive doctrines and their “transcendent elements not admitting of compromise,” and so proposed a theory of liberal order aimed at preempting, containing, and resolving these conflicts, so contemporary critics perceive the intractable disagreements and polarizations of American political culture to be only corrosive and destabilizing. They propose strategies for achieving social cohesion grounded in a sense of national unity, shared history, or common identity more fundamental to difference. Many religious persons and traditions exhibit a similar aversion to conflict, believing it to indicate some form of sin, injustice, or moral error. I question this presumption that conflict is inherently vicious, ruinous, or violent, and begin to sketch an alternative view of conflict as basic to human creaturehood and potentially generative for social life.

In this final chapter, I explore how the experience of democratic conflict might be conceptualized by religious traditions in theologically and ethically meaningful ways. I return to the Augustinian tradition and its understanding of love as a resource for thematizing agonism theologically. First, I consider the role of love in Augustine’s moral psychology and political theory, showing how pluralist politics can be understood as a practice of discovering and pursuing “common objects of love” amidst difference. Next, I analyze the notion of political friendship in Augustine and Aristotle in order to show how social relations around these common objects of love might incorporate forms of conflict, disagreement, and parrhesia that are ordered to tending these common goods. I conclude by looking at two figures who extend Augustine’s political theology of love in distinctly liberative directions under the notion of enemy-love. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr., I argue, develop accounts of the imperative to love the enemy in ways that encompass forms of confrontation, opposition, and conflict in seeking to convert enemies to friends.

The relations between medieval and early modern Jews and the popes rested on consistently applied canonical and Roman law principles, alongside Pauline theology, which was itself bifurcated. These principles were fundamentally restrictive, and the restrictions became tighter over time. To speak of a mild early Middle Ages, driven by Augustinian principles, which turned radically hostile after the First Crusade, is a distortion. Nobody mentioned Augustine until Innocent III. There were forced conversions even in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was not a turning point, but a culmination. Subsequent attacks on literature were new, but not papally initiated. Beginning with Benedict XIII in 1415, a move to press conversion – without ignoring old limits, theoretically – began to grow, which culminated in Paul IV’s foundation of the Roman ghetto in 1555, intended be a cauldron of conversion achieved through repression. The policy failed.

It is often suggested that new thinking brought by Christianity spelled the end of ancient ideas of the city. Three Christian authors of the fifth century -- Orosius, Augustine, and Salvian -- have much to say on cities and citizenship. Despite the shock of the sack of Rome, all three are convinced of the value of Roman citizenship, and respond resiliently to the troubles of Rome and other cities of the empire. Augustine’s treatise, the City of God, while offering the Heavenly City and a citizenship in faith as the ultimate aspiration, see it as entangled in the terrestrial world of cities. Salvian is scathing about the moral failings of the city elites, to which he attributes the divine wrath of barbarian devastations, and vividly portrays urban corruption, but in a plea for better cities rather than abandonment of cities.