Forgivingness is virtue, a specification of generosity, a disposition to give offenders, especially against oneself, more of good and less of evil than they deserve. It is an interconnected set of sensitivities to features of situations marked by wrongdoing. The forgiving person is responsive to these features in ways that tend to mitigate, eliminate, or forestall anger in the interest of wishing the wrongdoer well and/or of enjoying a positive and harmonious relationship with him or her. The chief considerations favoring forgiveness are (1) the offender’s repentance, (2) excuses for the offender, (3) the offender’s suffering, (4) moral commonality with the offender, and (5) relationship to the offender.

Practical wisdom is caring understanding of the good in the situations of a human life. Our emotions are rational to the extent that we care about the real good and are truthful about the facts. The two main kinds of virtues – the virtues of caring and the enkratic virtues – embody different aspects of practical wisdom. On the one side, in compassion, generosity, justice, and sense of duty, we care about and understand our good in its varieties and aspects. On the other side, we know about and know our practical way around ourselves, our shortcomings and the ways they may be mitigated and repaired by use of courage, patience, perseverance, and self-control. The virtues of caring form a coherent ensemble and overall picture of the good, a practical wisdom by which we see our situations in the perspective of a whole life.

The so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus highlights the importance of ethical living if Israel is to be holy as God is holy. This chapter discusses the historical-critical arguments around the composition of the Holiness Code but focuses mainly on bridge Leviticus creates between the holiness of Israel’s tent and God’s tent. Ethical purity is as important as ritual purity in Leviticus and requires holiness in every aspect of Israel’s life.

Marcus Aurelius addresses himself as sociable by nature, as someone made to belong to a political community, and as a citizen of the cosmos. The good life for him consists in obeying the gods and cooperating with his fellow citizens in service of the common interest. His fellow citizens are all beings endowed with reason, and as a human he cares for all other people, whoever they may be. The Meditations demonstrate detailed knowledge and agreement with the conceptual foundations of Stoic cosmopolitanism, but specific approaches can be identified. Marcus underscores the organismic and egalitarian nature of the cosmic community and often gives a functional account of his status as a part of the cosmos, while at the same time also suggesting a hierarchical account of degrees of sociability. His rule as emperor he conceives as a personal challenge to live up to the model of his predecessor, Antoninus Pius, also sharing the latter’s conservativism and traditionalism. Marcus’ Stoicism is more apparent in his quest for sincere and truly loving sociability, a striving that finds its limits in the aversion and disappointment Marcus often seems to experience with regard to those around him.

Explores the interaction between love poetry and philosophy in Ovid and Plato. The philosophical uncertainty that results from Ovid’s visions of fluid ontologies is not restricted to the Metamorphoses but can also be identified in his earlier elegiac work, as love too is subject to constant change. Love and desire are also frequently theorized in ancient philosophy, with Ovid’s didactic Ars Amatoria integrating and distorting elements of this tradition. Its combination of a speculative approach to love with manipulative rhetoric, all with the goal of fostering and pursuing the object of desire, has clear precedents in the philosophical tradition, most notably Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. The nature of love, however, remains fundamentally elusive, and its definition something of a paradox. The dangers of abduction and sexual assault, however, remain a dark undercurrent in both Ovid’s and Plato’s works. This danger is closely associated with poetry in the Phaedrus, which includes myths of abduction and metamorphosis that internally disrupt the philosophical dimensions of the dialogue. Comparisons are also drawn between passages from the Symposium and Phaedrus and Ovid’s narratives of Narcissus and Hermaphroditus from the Metamorphoses.

Before considering the goal of Augustine’s preaching, this chapter first of all considers Augustine’s understanding of the nature of reality and of human beings as wholly dependent upon God’s grace. In this context, it argues that the question of the goal of preaching is effectively turned on its head: that it is not so much a question of what the human preacher should say or do – of what they should give in order to achieve a particular goal – but rather a question of how they are to receive what is given to them so that their goal can be achieved. It suggests that the answer is found in Augustine’s identification of grace as the love of God, which is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and demonstrates that love is the source, means, message and end, or goal, of preaching.

While the double love command permeates Augustine’s oeuvre, he develops it into a consistent pedagogy in his preaching. Augustine’s preaching locates the concomitant growth of love of God and love of neighbor within the whole Christ (totus Christus). He indicates to his hearers that the double love command actually involves three objects: God, neighbor, and the self. Augustine leads his hearers through a pattern of reflection concerning these loves: an articulation of the double love command, problematizing the love of self, relocating the self within the body of Christ, and the practical demands incurred by such a location for “neighbors” in Augustine’s and his hearers’ midst. The chapter pays particular attention to the way in which the parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan form conceptual markers for Augustine’s pedagogy. The result is a love of neighbor that includes family, friends, rivals, enemies, and the poor within the whole Christ.

This study considers ethical questions of freedom and reconciliation in Jimmy Boyle’s autobiographical A Sense of Freedom (2016). A Scottish life prisoner, Boyle describes a moral phenomenology of freedom and reconciliation through his life and his time in prisons, including Glasgow’s Barlinnie Special Unit. Promoting mature democratic relations between prisoners and staff, the Unit enabled development and change in participants’ moral psychology. Boyle’s ‘sense of freedom’ moves from negative forms of refusal, resistance and withdrawal to ever more positive forms: abstract ideal freedom, emancipatory agency, trust, collective empowerment, taking responsibility, coming alive and loving creativity. Reconciliation recognised the human in the enemy, mature engagement, democratic involvement and thinking socially and politically beyond the prison. This metaphysics transcending violence was grounded in Boyle’s metapsychology as one capable of love. The chapter draws on earlier discussions of freedom and reconciliation in the young Hegel, recognition and complex victimhood, atonement and mature retributivism. The penal system is seen as combining a persecutory impulse in the major key and humanistic traces in the minor, a ‘structure in dominance’ of the former over the latter. Barlinnie Special Unit inverted this structure briefly, pointing to a deep abolitionist tendency inside what became ‘the loving prison’.

Taking Herbert Morris’s ethical concepts of guilt, identification, responsibility and atonement as ‘at-one-ment’, this chapter explores their metapsychological basis and somatic link to feeling ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). Exploring Freud’s metapsychology in Civilization and Its Discontents (1985), two conflicting routes to guilt are noted. The more prominent involves internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts. The better but less developed emphasises loving identification with others in the process of ego and superego formation of the self. This second route is in line with Freud’s later structural theory as developed by Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of self-formation makes loving identification the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement as at-one-ment. The superego is an ‘atonement structure’ that is reconciliative, and this links psychoanalysis to Morris’s metaphysics of atonement. The analysis is developed to include ‘prospective identification’, moral and psychological guilt for the violation of a stranger. Emotional disturbance at killing another with whom one could identify is explored and a comparison made with Raskolnikov’s guilt in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A closing section links this chapter to the previous, cementing the metaphysical and metapsychological dimensions of guilt in an expanded understanding of philosophy as both Greek and modern.

The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.

Shelley has traditionally been associated with radical atheism and freethought. This chapter places those movements in a wider context by tracing historical definitions of religion and atheism. It suggests that Shelley’s doctrine of Love moves beyond atheism and the radical enlightenment that influenced Shelley’s early verse. The entry concludes with a discussion of the Victorian Shelley, capable of being understood as a non-doctrinal spiritual guide whatever his private opinions were. This leads to some reflections about how scholars define and analyse religion in literary texts.

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.

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.