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This chapter presents illustrations of ecological thinking that follow the pattern of food webs in nature itself—interrelating everything, feeding waste and excess back into the health of the larger system. They model the dance, the perichoresis, of the Holy Trinity. If we survive as a family of species in this biosphere, the patterns of ecological behavior—the house rules by which we live together in the oikos (the home) of this world—will have to imitate the exchange of love and reciprocity that characterizes God's own innermost being. This is what the Holy Trinity can teach us best.

The bulk of this chapter deals with the issue of divine relationality in the two treatises mentioned in the chapter title. As corollaries to this, I also study what I call Gregory’s theology of humanity’s exile and homecoming, with special attention to Gregory’s view of divine freedom and the issue of gender language in reference to the Holy Trinity. In his concept of divine relations, Gregory of Nyssa does not differ significantly from such patristic predecessors as the Alexandrian theologians (Origen, Dionysius, Alexander, Athanasius) or his brother, Basil of Caesarea. Moreover, all of them seem to be influenced by Aristotle’s category of relation that they apply to God. Thus, a father is both the name of a person and also points to a son—a reality that is different from the father but has the same nature.

The third chapter is the first of two interrelated analyses of language. The first part considers the central role of paradox in the articulation of Christian doctrine, in the light of its stylistic manifestations across a range of genres and through a variety of metaphors. It examines the role of the Bible in the provision of material that is ripe for imaginative exploitation; and illustrates contrastively the use of natural imagery in St François de Sales. It then looks at the attempt within a poetic idiom (the works of Claude Hopil) to express the inexpressible dogma of the Holy Trinity; and concludes on an examination of how Bossuet both underlines and transcends the limitations of language in his Funeral Orations.

This chapter presents an English translation of the ascetic corpus writing of Evagrius of Pontus about his advice to monks. Though this treatise, much like the other works of Evagrius, has no defined systematic plan, one can discern within it several loose groupings of sentences around individual themes. The first Exhortation covers the subject of vices and the process of purification. The second Exhortation focuses on trials and temptations, faithfulness to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and warnings to the sinners.

This chapter examines four works in which Gregory defends himself against charges of heterodoxy in his Trinitarian teaching: the confessions of faith known as Epistles 5 and 24, as well as the treatises To Eustathius—On the Holy Trinity and Against the Macedonians—On the Holy Spirit. The chapter first sets the works into the context of Gregory’s activities as an ambassador for the Council of Antioch in 379. Concerned Nicene allies prompted Gregory to write Epistles 5 and 24, and questions about those documents in turn prompted the two treatises examined in this chapter, as well as To Ablabius. Gregory’s reasoning in these works is centered on the interpretation of Matthew 28:19, which Gregory reads as Christ’s creed. In particular, Gregory grounds the unity of the Trinity on the activity of life-giving that comes in baptism from the Father, through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.

This chapter details the Christian account of the Barcelona Disposition. After a discussion with King James I of Aragon and certain friars who were present, Pablo Christiani proposed to Naḥmanides that he would prove, through writings accepted and authoritative among the Jews, the following: that the Messiah whom the Jews expect, has undoubtedly come; that the Messiah himself, as had been prophesied, must be both God and man; that he truly suffered and died for the salvation of the human race; and that legal or ceremonial matters ceased and had to cease after the coming of the said Messiah. Pablo Christiani also addresses the belief in the Holy Trinity held by Christians. Among the proofs put forward for the advent of the Messiah was one adduced from Genesis: ‘The sceptre shall not pass away from Judah’ (Genesis, 49:10). Since, therefore, it is certain that in Judah there is neither sceptre nor leader, it is certain that the Messiah who was to be sent has come.

William Frend (1757–1841) was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, notable for intellectual brilliance and Christian good works. An early participant in the Sunday School movement, he prepared reading texts for illiterate children in parishes he served. Like some other Cambridge faculty, Frend opposed the limits placed on Dissenting students by the 17th-century Test and Corporation Acts. He wrote a series of pamphlets challenging the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican creed. For these he successively lost his college privileges and university employment, eventually becoming a Unitarian. His Peace and Union Recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans (1793), ostensibly an attempt to calm the rising tensions of political controversy, is rather a subtly provocative criticism of Pitt’s declaration of war on France. Exiled from the university, Frend pursued a lower-profile career as an insurance actuary.

This chapter traces the cumulative influence of Wordsworth’s reading of a series of topographical and antiquarian studies on the poetry and prose he produced between 1807 and 1810. These sources contain extensive details about medieval monastic life in the north of England and describe how powerful coenobitic communities shaped the cultural and geographical landscapes they inhabited. The chapter shows how knowledge of the civic operation of the monastic world influenced Wordsworth’s thinking about primogeniture, living legacy, memorialization, and familial and democratic representation. It explains why Wordsworth was particularly drawn to St Basil, suggesting that aspects of Basil’s monastic system infiltrated The Tuft of Primroses (1808) and the Convention of Cintra (1809), and that the saint’s formulation of the Holy Trinity inflected Wordsworth’s Essays uponEpitaphs (1810). The chapter offers a new context in which to interpret Wordsworth’s metaphor of language as the ‘incarnation’ of thought.

This chapter focuses on John Milton’s Paradise Regain’d (1671), arguing that a mortalist temporality keeps its hero’s education unfinished. To explain why Milton’s brief epic is such a strangely presentist work, with both the past and the deep future of the Son of God inaccessible, the chapter places the poem in a fresh theological context and establishes points of continuity with John Biddle, the Socinian firebrand who wrote the Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity (1648) and probably translated the Racovian Catechism (1652). But Milton goes further than Biddle and the Socinians do, the chapter proposes, in constraining the Son’s knowledge about himself and his purpose. Trying to extend the poetic now, spliced between the old and the new, the poem invites readers to join the Son in resisting the temptation to reach too far ahead, to the expected consolations of resurrection and then heaven.

Chapter 1 explores the smallest-scale expression of the writer’s house museum, the reliquary, through investigating the history of affective investment in the remains of the authorial body. The discussion is framed and exemplified by the biographies of Robert Burns’ skull and John Keats’ hair, but also touches upon ways in which the mortal remains of Ariosto, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Schiller have been imagined and preserved. The chapter discusses the ways in which the mortal likeness of authors was preserved and transmitted by admirers through acquiring authors’ bones, making casts of their skulls, taking life and death masks, and taking, gifting, and displaying authors’ hair.