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This volume, a sequel to the author's earlier book The Beauty of the Cross, carries the study of Christian soteriology into the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter‐Reformation eras. Drawing on original documents and classic works of art and music, it uses the theology of the passion to exemplify the parallels and the divergences between conceptual and aesthetic theologies of this era, which represented a crucial turning point in both religion and the arts. The book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, showing how they affected each other and transformed Christian thinking and imagination. After an introductory section dealing with a “paradigmatic” artistic portrayal of the Passion, each chapter examines the “theoretical” as well as the “aesthetic” mediations of the theology of the Passion of Christ and its relationship to human salvation. The theologies of Savonarola, Vincent Ferrer, Gabriel Biel and the nominalists, Luther, Calvin, Robert Bellarmine, and the Council of Trent are examined as examples of the early Catholic Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter‐Reformation. These are placed in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Frà Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Cranach, and the Mannerists. In addition to specifically theological themes, the book explores the effects of theology and preaching on the arts, examining the iconoclasm of some of the early Reformers, the use of pictorial art in service of the word in Lutheranism, and the regulation of the arts by the Council of Trent.

This book studies Rousseau's rich and complex theory of the type of self-love (amour propre) that, for him, marks the central difference between humans and beasts. Amour-propre is the passion that drives human individuals to seek the esteem, approval, admiration, or love — the recognition — of their fellow beings. This book reconstructs Rousseau's understanding of what the drive for recognition is, why it is so problematic, and how its presence opens up far-reaching developmental possibilities for creatures that possess it. One of Rousseau's central theses is that amour-propre in its corrupted, manifestations — pride or vanity — is the principal source of an array of evils so widespread that they can easily appear to be necessary features of the human condition: enslavement, conflict, vice, misery, and self-estrangement. Yet Rousseau also argues that solving these problems depends not on suppressing or overcoming the drive for recognition but on cultivating it so that it contributes positively to the achievement of freedom, peace, virtue, happiness, and unalienated selfhood. Indeed, Rousseau goes so far as to claim that, despite its many dangers, the need for recognition is a condition of nearly everything that makes human life valuable and that elevates it above mere animal existence: rationality, morality, freedom — subjectivity itself — would be impossible for humans if it were not for amour-propre and the relations to others it impels us to establish.

This volume represents the first part of a study of the concept and the symbol of the cross in Christian theology and imagination. It examines the theology of the cross in both its conceptual and aesthetic mediations within specific historical contexts, from the early church to the eve of the renaissance. Each chapter is introduced by a discussion of an artwork — a representation of Christ’s crucifixion — that exemplifies the focus of the chapter. There follows an exposition of a theological paradigm for the interpretation of the Christ’s passion as a salvific event, i.e., a particular Christian soteriology, as seen in the works of classic theologians. These theological ideas are compared and contrasted with aesthetic works that were contemporaneous with the theological classics or that illustrate a parallel theological attitude. The general method is one of correlation between two kinds of interpretation of the Christian tradition and of human experience: between theology as explicit systematic thought and as affective and communicative images. Within the aesthetic realm, this volume emphasizes visual art (various styles of cross and crucifix) and Christian poetry, both liturgical and non-liturgical.

This book defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's enlightened vision of human excellence, including his theories of good and evil, virtue, perfection, and freedom. Spinoza holds that what is fundamental to human morality is the fact that we find things to be good or evil, not what we take those designations to mean. When we come to understand the conditions under which we act—that is, when we come to understand the sorts of beings that we are and the ways in which we interact with things in the world—then we can recast traditional moral notions in ways that help us to attain more of what we find to be valuable. For Spinoza, we find value in greater activity. Two hazards impede the search for value. First, we need to know and acquire the means to be good. In this respect, Spinoza's theory is a great deal like Hobbes's: we strive to be active, and in order to do so we need food, security, health, and other necessary components of a decent life. There is another hazard, however, that is more subtle. On Spinoza's theory of the passions, we can misjudge our own natures and fail to understand the sorts of beings that we really are. So we can misjudge what is good and might even seek ends that are evil. Spinoza's account of human nature is thus much deeper and darker than Hobbes's: we are not well known to ourselves, and the self‐knowledge that is the foundation of virtue and freedom is elusive and fragile.

Johann Sebastian Bach's two surviving passions—St. John and St. Matthew—are an essential part of the modern repertory, performed regularly both by professional ensembles and amateur groups. These large, complex pieces are well-loved; but because of our distance from the original context in which they were performed, questions and problems emerge. Bach wrote the passions for a particular liturgical event at a specific time and place; we hear them hundreds of years later, often a world away and usually in concert performances. They were performed with vocal and instrumental forces deployed according to early 18th century conceptions; we usually hear them now as the pinnacle of the choral/orchestral repertory, adapted to modern forces and conventions. In Bach's time, passion settings were revised, altered, and tampered with both by their composers and by other musicians who used them. Today, we tend to regard them as having fixed texts, to be treated with respect. Their music was sometimes recycled from other compositions, or reused itself for other purposes. We have trouble imagining the familiar material of Bach's passion settings in any other guise. We can learn about these issues by exploring the sources that transmit Bach's passion settings today, performance practice (including the question of the size of Bach's ensemble), delving into the passions as dramatic music, examining the problem of multiple versions of a work and the reconstruction of lost pieces, exploring the other passions in Bach's performing repertory, and sifting through the puzzle of authorship.

First published in 1986, this ground-breaking work addresses two complex and very human emotions—love and erotic passion—as these appear in the great love stories of the world. Starting with the story of Romeo and Juliet and its roots in European Christianity, the authors uncover hidden depths of cultural and universal significance in famous romantic tales of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent—‘Layla and Majnun’, ‘Heer and Ranjha’, ‘Sohni and Mahinwal’, ‘Vis and Ramin’, and ‘Radha and Krishna’. Moving westward again, the authors look at the Greek myth of Oedipus, the Celtic saga of Tristan and Isolde, the tragic drama of Hamlet, the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus, and a contemporary handling of the love theme in the writings of Vladimir Nabokov. With each love story including within its gambit all of love’s paradoxical associations and radii—from conquest and possession to surrender, sensuality and sensuousness, time held still in a poised nostalgia, and the loss of visual, distal perceptions in another mode of knowing—this book elaborates on the phenomenology and what it calls the ontogeny of love, sex, and danger. In this second edition, the authors revisit their earlier assertions about romantic and erotic love in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and literary theory.

“Chess gets a hold of some people, like a virus or a drug,” states this book. Drawing on a lifelong fascination with the game, the book guides readers into the world of twenty-first-century chess to help them understand its unique pleasures and challenges, and to advance a new “anthropology of passion.” Immersing us directly in chess's intricate culture, it interweaves small dramas, closely observed details, insights, anecdotes, and biographical sketches to elucidate the game and to reveal what goes on in the minds of experienced players when they face off over the board. The book offers a compelling take on the intrigues of chess and shows how the themes of play, beauty, competition, addiction, fanciful cognition, and intersubjective engagement shape the lives of those who take up this most captivating of games.

For most of my life, I have been dismissive of both spirituality and religion. I say this to make clear the perspective and the starting point of this book, this search. No doubt, many of my readers will think of me as simpleminded, trying to recover what I should have learned had I been rightly raised in the matrix of religion, ritual, and belief. Others, my friends from the field of science and most of my political friends, will think that I am benighted, or perhaps something of a sell out, for giving up my lifelong down‐to‐earth scientific, and admittedly hyperrational way of thinking about things. But if the very idea of spirituality seemed to me to be contaminated by sectarian religion and by uncritical and antiscientific thinking, my view of life, which manifested in my becoming a philosopher (it did not come from philosophy) pointed to something else. Spirituality is not just organized religion. Nor is it antiscience, unnatural or supernatural. There is a naturalized spirituality that I have always had a glimpse of, and this is what I want to pursue in this book.

Reason plays a central role in Hume's account of human understanding but just what that role is is a matter of continuing controversy. Many of the most famous problems that Hume discusses, and many of the positions he advocates, are expressed in terms of reason. It is central to his arguments about induction, belief, scepticism, the passions, and moral distinctions. Hume's Reason provides a new look at Hume's account of reason and discusses the first three of the aforementioned issues. Hume's theory is introduced by looking at the logic of ideas developed by Descartes and Locke. Hume followed them in rejecting a formal, deductive account of the workings of the inferential faculty of reason. His account of demonstration is similar to their treatment. But he went farther, in what we now call the argument concerning induction, by showing that no account of reason as a separate faculty could explain our inferences to beliefs in the unobserved. Hume offers instead an associationist account of probable reasoning and a new account of belief. In the process, the picture of reason as an independent faculty is replaced by an explanation of reasoning in terms of properties of the imagination.

The passions were a topic of widespread interest in antiquity. This is a study on their role in Roman love elegy (1st c. BCE), a genre rife with passions and jealousy in particular. Jealousy does appear in a number of earlier genres, but never with the centrality and importance it has in elegy. This book offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate the ancient representation of jealousy in its Roman context, as well as its significance for Roman love elegy itself. The narrators portray themselves as poets and as experts of love, championing a view of love that stands in marked contrast to the criticisms that Stoic and Epicurean philosophers had raised. Elegy provides rich evidence of the genesis and development of erotic jealousy: we find suspicions and rumors of infidelity, obsessive attention to visual clues, and accusations and confrontations with the beloved. The Roman elegists depict the susceptibility and reactions to jealousy along gendered lines, with an asymmetric representation of skepticism and belief, violence and restraint. But jealousy has ramifications well beyond the erotic affair. Underlying jealousy are fears about fides or trust and the vulnerability of human relations. These are prominent in love relationships, of course, but the term has broader application in the Roman world, and the poetic narrator often extends his fears about trust into many other dimensions of life, including friendship, religion, and politics. The infidelity rampant in the love affair indicates a more general breakdown of trust in other human relations. All of these features have implications for the genre itself. Many of the distinctive elements of Roman elegy—its first-person narration, obsessive recordkeeping, and role-playing—can be seen to derive from the thematic concern with jealousy. As such, jealousy provides a new way of understanding the distinctive features of Roman love elegy.

In August 1934 Adolf Hitler attended the world-famous Oberammergau Passion Play, falsely branding the villagers as Nazi ideologues. In fact, the drama reflected traditional interpretations of the biblical narrative, pitting Jewish leaders and crowds against Jesus and his loyal followers. Yet elite Europeans and Americans flocked to Oberammergau each decade after 1850 to witness the play because actors and audience shared the anti-Semitic messages they read into the Gospel story. Oberammergau’s population was split between Hitler’s supporters and opponents because some villagers were true believers and others tolerated the Nazi regime’s extreme cultural restructuring, while Catholic loyalists resisted efforts to replace their customary practices with Nazified alternatives. All sides united in defending their centuries-old tradition of dramatizing the Passion. Villagers appeared on stage as children and grew up hoping to perform major roles as adults, so their entire lives revolved around the play seasons. This commitment nurtured a powerful communal identity in Oberammergau, carving out maneuvering room for dissent at the margins of Nazi tyranny even by party members who defied superiors threatening Oberammergau’s special interests. Their actions represented an extreme example of the maxim: “All politics is local.” Drawing on a huge array of records, the book tells the up-close and personal story of a community in crisis, illuminating heart-wrenching decisions made by villagers alternatively wooed and threatened by their Nazi leaders. Biographies bring these everyday Germans to life as complex human beings struggling with the extreme challenges of the Nazi Era.