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This chapter presents an essay on the works of Vagn Holmboe, a Danish composer who despite being regarded as the greatest living traditional symphonist, never had much presence in the international concert stage. He had enormous contrapuntal energy and produced tight, tense musical arguments, based on the manipulation of terse melodic cells composers call motives that demanded and rewarded close attention over lengthy spans. His works demanded active intellectual engagement from his listeners that resulted in their emotional exhilaration. His choral Fourth Symphony, subtitled “Sinfonia Sacra,” and written in 1941 and revised four years later, embodies a staunch response to the German wartime occupation of Denmark in the form of a hymn-like Latin text by the composer. His Sixth and Seventh Symphonies exhibit a virtuosic “metamorphosis technique,” whereas in his Seventh Symphony, written in 1950, the motivic argument takes place in smallish, climax-driven bites at fast tempos, with a refrainlike “intermedio” that periodically and helpfully reorients the listener.

As the political centre of a vast Mediterranean-wide empire, Rome was home to a significant concentration of elite consumers, all of whom possessed incredible wealth. Since much of this wealth was expended in Rome, the city found itself at the centre of a thriving trade in luxury goods. This chapter takes account of sumptuary legislation, changing ideas of luxury in Rome, and the ideology of self-sufficiency. It then explores the various ways in which the elite acquired the necessary trappings of their wealth and status, considering the private circulation of goods as gifts and legacies, the visits of retailers and manufacturers to private homes, and the sale of expensive goods at auctions and in locations such as the Via Sacra and the Saepta, as well as in the bookshops of Rome.

Chapter forty-two examines one of the most titanic theological battles of Hodge’s career. It recounts the many articles published in the Repertory and Bibliotheca Sacra as Hodge and Edwards Amasa Park at Andover Seminary sparred over the exact nature and reliability of biblical language. Park argued that for a different between figurative and descriptive language in the Bible. Hodge held that no such distinction existed. Reason alone could understand the Bible; an intuitive faculty was not needed, nor was it reliable.

As the final redaction of the New Testament was never introduced, an impression exists that the New Testament never underwent such editing. The author first clarifies the term canonical edition to pertain to how this edition is identified by the history of its reception or how a certain community has construed the book for better understanding, and the term final redaction to refer to the anthologies involved in its modifications. Textual and nontextual elements that imply the occurrence of a final redaction can be identified by their dates, unifying functions, and consistent editorial structures. Such evidence can be seen through nomina sacra or sacred names, the use of codices, and the arrangement and number of writings, and the titles seen in the five documents illustrated in this chapter.

Two characteristics of early gospel manuscripts – the use of standard‐sized codices and wholesale or systematic contraction of nomina sacra – show that Christians arrived at a ‘consensus’ about standardizing some aspects of gospel manuscript production in the second century. Since the Egyptian evidence is probably representative, the ‘consensus’ appears to have been ‘catholic’. But the terms ‘catholic’ and ‘catholicity’ as used here have no reference to later periods. The same manuscripts indicate that standardization developed via informal collaboration and not hierarchical imposition. In terms of history, these indications of ‘catholicity’, which continue throughout the third century, pose a very significant problem for the ‘heterodox’‐dominant view of early Christianity.

While most Roman animal sacrifice consisted of common meat sources (sheep/goat, cattle, and pig), evidence from the early sixth century BCE Archaic temple from the Area Sacra di Sant’Omobono in Rome demonstrates that dogs were sacrificed at the site along with other domesticates. Domestic dog remains recovered from this site consist of primarily juvenile cranial elements, suggesting that there was a deliberate selection of young animals and cranial skeletal elements interred at the sanctuary. These findings from the zooarchaeological analysis provide evidence for early Romans sacrificing subadult dogs for rites of purification during the Archaic period and these practices may have been the precursors for rituals that continued into later periods.

In its original form, Mosè in Egitto is an Azione Tragico-Sacra, a biblical drama suitable for staging during Lent. As was the custom, Gioachino Rossini and his librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, made the restriction palatable by grafting a secular narrative onto a sacred one. In this instance the story of the Israelites’ flight from Egypt is joined with Francesco Ringhieri’s 1760 romance L’Osiride. Thus a young Jewish girl, Elcia, falls in love with the Pharaoh’s son, Osiride. Like Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, it is a tale of the tension between love and duty, of disputed homelands, and of the counterpointing of the bonds of family and the bonds of country. For much of its length Mosè in Egitto has a guileless beauty about it, appropriate to the theme of young love and young nationhood, qualities which are not so much sacrificed as choked and smothered in the grandiose revision Rossini prepared for the Paris Opera in 1827.

Beginning with the Aristotelian dictum that “the good is what all desire,” this chapter argues that for Thomas the good is Jesus Christ and the Triune God. So understood, this principle founds his recognition of any creaturely virtue wherever it may be found. For Thomas, all things – including humans who do not believe in God – are ceaselessly related to and desire God, for God in Christ is drawing all things to himself. Elucidating Thomas’s theology of esse, goodness, and participation, this chapter explains how he believes this is so and how this commitment sets the low threshold for pagan virtue. The chapter’s second half explicates Thomas’s way of uniting Augustinian Trinitarianism with Aristotelian philosophy to establish sacra doctrina as properly Aristotelian scientia. It shows how Thomas’s vision of good- and God-seeking is rooted in an irreducibly Christological and Trinitarian moral vision.

This chapter reconstructs Thomas’s account of habit demonstrating its philosophical plausibility, tracing its textual origins, and displaying its capacity to bring distinctively human agency into view. Habit is marked by at least four features – its enabling action at will, its stability, its inherently good or bad character, and its determination of an under-determined capacity. Rightly grasping habit rules out a common interpretation of Thomas on pagan virtue. Thomas’s conception of humans as creatures in need of habits drives him to anticipate virtues among outsiders and enables readers better to grasp the overlay of commonality and difference in human excellence among diverse communities. The chapter concludes by showing how, drawing on Aristotle himself, Thomas renders an essentially Aristotelian notion of habit friendly to Augustinian conceptions of supernaturally-given virtues. Chapter keywords: perfection, subject, difficile mobile, easily lost, operative habit, bodily habit, a natura, virtus inchoata, at will, disposition

The entrepreneurial experience in Rome is an insightful illustration of enterprise as practiced under unfavorable and, at times, even hostile, conditions. While Roman nobility and slaveowners steered clear of the "dirty work" of entrepreneurship, slaves and former slaves, many of whom were foreigners, eagerly climbed the entrepreneurial ladder. The chapter describes how, in some instances, the ladder led not only out of bondage but to great wealth and even a measure of respectability.

This book concludes by focusing on the careers of various actors who played important roles in the creation of Fascist romanità after World War II, as well as the fate of institutions like the Istituto di Studi Romani (ISR) and the Mostra Augustea della Romanità. It also considers the postwar significance of Rome and romanità for the culture of Italy and of Europe more generally. It shows that the demise of Fascism and the restored primacy of Roma sacra forced a reconsideration of romanità and that the discrediting of romanità prompted deeper introspection and a return to the anti-Romanism of the pre-Fascist period in Italy.

This chapter explains in detail how petitions brought before the Holy Congregation of the Council (Sacra Congregazione del Concilio, SCC), were handled. During their meetings, held once or twice a month on Saturday afternoons in the Quirinal Palace, cardinal-members of the SCC discussed cases and made interim and final rulings. At first, unlike sentences pronounced by inquisitors and decisions of the Rota, their rulings were not “motivated,” that is, they did not present the reasoning behind the conclusions judges reached. Only from the 1740s on, did secretaries’ summaries included in the Libri Decretorum (LD) begin to provide such explanation.

This chapter considers short- and long-term trends in forced monachization. During the period 1668–1793, little changed with regards to pervasive coerced monachization—the reasons behind the practice, the means by which it was accomplished, the attitudes and behaviors of its victims, the way cases were adjudicated, its geographical distribution, and the extent of public knowledge about it. But the same cannot be said about the frequency of legal proceedings for release from monastic vows. The total number of decisions reached by the Holy Congregation of the Council (Sacra Congregazione del Concilio, SCC) rose from the low sixties in 1668–77 to a high of eighty in 1698–1707. From 1708 until 1757 it shrank rather steadily to just under forty. From 1758 on, the numbers became exiguous. Only from 1728 on—with a temporary reversal in the decade 1748–57—did favorable decisions begin to outnumber unfavorable ones.

This chapter examines the nature of Thomas Aquinas’ intellectual project. It begins by considering a view of Aquinas that is believed to be wrong — the view of Aquinas as one who is engaged in a philosophical project that can at least in principle be detached from any theological project that he might also have been pursuing. It then looks at how he understood the role of the catholicae veritatis doctor by considering the inaugural lecture that formed part of the ceremonies surrounding his inception as a master in the faculty of theology at Paris in 1256. The discussion then turns to the position Aquinas maps out in the ten articles of the opening question in the Summa theologiae concerning the nature of sacra doctrina as scientia. This is followed by discussions of the influence of Aristotle in Aquinas’ thought and the question of philosophy and its relationship to sacra doctrina.

This chapter summarizes St. Cyril and St. Methodius’s mission to Moravia (during the ninth century CE) and the subsequent episode known as the Venetian Disputation in order to describe the emergence of a new written language: Old Church Slavonic. Legend holds that Cyril devised an alphabet and translated a number of sacred texts into Moravian in order to preach to the Moravians. On his return from Moravia, according to some sources, he and his brother Methodius were met in Venice and challenged by representatives of the Latin Church, who accused him of translating sacred texts into a vernacular unauthorized for scriptural translation. The episode demonstrates the complexity and the depth of emotion invested in the category of lingua sacra in both the Latin West and the Byzantine East – ironically, on the cusp of the vernacular revolutions, which would see the translation of sacred and devotional works into a large number of European vernaculars. It also characterizes the translation movements that are used to import knowledge into a language, and allow it to adjust to emergent scientific and intellectual movements.

Rome's religion is not so much about the objects of worship but the institutions that made possible Rome's greatness, among them the two key sacerdotal colleges, the pontifices, who supervised the sacra, the ensemble of rules and rituals which loosely group under the word ‘religion’, and the augures, who had responsibility for the auspicia, a major axis of communication between men and gods. This emphasis upon the importance of the priestly colleges to the maintenance of Roman religion and so of the Roman state reappears elsewhere in the late Republic and early Empire. In keeping with his basic assumption that, though a God of some sort truly pre-exists, civic religion is a thoroughly human creation, Marcus Terentius Varro devotes the three books after the general introduction to an account of the three major sacerdotal colleges. There follow three books on shrines and sacred places, three on festivals and three on rituals public and private.

Arias Montano’s magnum opus drew from two genres that were vehicles for discussions about the relationship between the revealed Word, the study of nature and the purpose of natural philosophy: hexameral commentaries and Mosaic philosophies. Using several examples of exegesis about the biblical passage on the celestial waters (Gen 1, 7), this chapter illustrates how controversial aspects of natural phenomena were dealt with in the hexameral commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco, Antonio de Honcala, and Luis de León. It shows that the scholastic style employed by most commentators was an effective way to propose some radical cosmological re-conceptualizations which were presented as valid alternatives to prevailing natural philosophical explanations. The chapter then compares this genre to early examples of Mosaic philosophies, in particular an early Spanish exemplar of the genre Francisco Valles de Covarrubias’s Sacra philosophia. Although Arias Montano’s work was ultimately very different from these two genres—he despised scholastic language, for one—he shared with their authors some very influential historical ‘truths’ that undergirded both genres: the concept of Hebrew as the Adamic language, the veracity of the Genesis account and the Mosaic authorship of Genesis.

How does Aquinas conceive of the connections between faith and theological contemplation? How does he defend the scientific nature of theology? What is the role of the assent of faith, and is Aquinas guilty of voluntarism? Aquinas’s espousal of the notion of theology as a science sub-alternated to divine scientia allowed him to defend a non-charismatic notion of theology (i.e. one that does not depend on the cognitive gifts of the Holy Spirit to assist us in grasping the articles of faith). The chapter further argues that all rational disciplines (with the exception of those that operate with principles that are known per se) rely on first principles that cannot be argued for within the relevant discipline itself. Finally, the chapter argues that Aquinas’s view that we cannot both know and believe something at the same time actually softens the boundary between theology and philosophy, which is of considerable importance when we address the perennial question as to how Aquinas conceives of the relation between theology and other disciplines.

This chapter describes qualities of amulets used throughout the book when examining individual artefacts: the materials on which amulets were written (mainly papyrus and parchment); the format of the written text; the various types of handwriting; lectional signs, spelling, and syntax; acoustic and visual devices used in incantations (vowels, nomina barbara, voces mysticae, charaktêres, word-shapes, figures); and abbreviations or signs used by Christian scribes (nomina sacra, crosses, staurograms, christograms, and other markers). The way in which an amulet is written, the extent to which it draws on customary phrasing and devices, and the manner in which it incorporates Christian elements are all relevant when one is assessing the culture of an amulet’s scribe and the nature of an amulet’s ‘christianization’.