The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s critical engagement with thinkers from his own era. It notes that Schopenhauer often focused his scrutiny of Kant and Hegel on their political arguments. In the former case, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant’s moral theory was in fact a concealed political theory. In the latter case, he claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of the state conflated politics, religion, and morality for the purpose of serving the Prussian state. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s reputation as an apolitical thinker is misleading since his elaborate criticisms of Kant and Hegel are partly generated by his conception of politics. It also argues that Schopenhauer’s demystifying critique of statehood in German Idealism places him in a position similar to the radical Young Hegelians, including the early Marx. Yet while the young Marx attacked the bourgeois vision of state rule over a market society composed of atomized, competitive individuals, Schopenhauer affirmed it.

The aims and scope of ’Salvation in the Block Universe’ are set out.

While Hopkins’s poetry has long ignited the imaginations of religious readers, surprisingly few theologians have engaged deeply with his work. This chapter considers the limited body of theological discourse that engages directly and substantively with Hopkins’s work, focusing on the way that his poetry has been taken up in the field of Christian systematic theology (narrowly conceived). Much of the chapter is dedicated to unpacking a highly influential essay by Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. As I demonstrate, while Balthasar’s essay offers numerous valuable insights, it also exhibits several of the most ubiquitous limitations in theological receptions of Hopkins. Thus, at the conclusion of the chapter I propose a way forward for renewed engagement with Hopkins’s theological vision, building on the innovative approach of contemporary Anglican theologian Ben Quash.

The resurrection of Jesus, pivotal to Christian history and praxis, is universally attested in early Christian sources, even if often critiqued or sidelined as myth or apologetics in modern scholarship. Paul’s letters and of the Gospels in their narrative diversity document the resurrection’s transformative and abiding impact on Jesus’s followers. In bringing the aspirations of myth and metaphor to fruition in time, the resurrection of Jesus is both an event in history and yet constitutes a new reality that transcends the register of available language and analogy.

Jesus’s Jewish identity offers fresh insights into Christian–Jewish relations and historical Jesus research. Although often obscured in Christian tradition, this recognition has been emphasized by Jewish scholars to counter anti-Semitism and challenge Christian theological narratives. Memory of the Jewish Jesus serves as a critical tool in rewriting the history of Jewish–Christian relations and understanding the evolution of both Judaism and Christianity. It can energize a reevaluation of exegetical methodologies and dogmatic discourses, thus reshaping Christian theology and fostering mutual understanding.

This chapter looks at the rivalry between religion and philosophy in German culture after 1800, starting with the Reformation anniversary of 1817 and concluding with Schleiermacher’s and Hegel’s competing tercentennial celebrations of the Augsburg Confession in 1830. It starts with a discussion of the Wartburg Festival in 1817, in which students and veterans of the Battle of Leipzig (1813) met at Wartburg Castle, where Luther translated the gospels while in hiding after being declared an outlaw and heretic at the Diet of Worms (1521). It then looks at the ways in which new philosophical and historical ideas about the legacy and impact of the Reformation were reflected in popular and accessible writings, specifically Friedrich Keyser’s Reformations-Almanach (1817, 1819). Finally, through an analysis of late-career works by the most famous theologian and the most famous philosopher of the day – the Berlin University rivals Hegel and Schleiermacher – the chapter’s last section shows how the Reformation was constituted in public discourse as a legitimation strategy for intellectuals courting public opinion and official favor.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

The fin-de-siècle aesthetes, of course, react against the moral project expressed in realist novels like Eliot’s and Ward’s. Indeed, Oscar Wilde uses liturgy to attack what he sees as realism’s stunted imagination. But, as this chapter and the next show, aestheticism too is deeply suspicious of how excarnation separates the material and the spiritual. Again, if modernity typically sunders these realms, liturgy joins them. It therefore offers the perfect channel for aestheticism’s veneration of material reality – of beautiful bodies, lovely objects, and stimulating experiences. Such devotion pervades Walter Pater’s novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) – itself a kind of liturgical and aesthetic bildungsroman. Set in second-century Italy, the novel follows the pious Marius, who cherishes the pagan rituals of his boyhood and finds their fulfillment in the early Christian Mass. For Marius, the Eucharist not only sacralizes material objects but also defends matter – specifically the body – against the ritual violence of imperial Rome. Just as Wordsworth depicts industrialism as a liturgy of desecration, Pater sees Roman imperial power in similar terms.