Ways of Living Religion provides a philosophical analysis of different types of religious experience – ascetic, liturgical, monastic, mystical, devotional, compassionate, fundamentalist – that focuses on the lived experience of religion rather than reducing it to mere statements of belief or doctrine. Using phenomenology, Christina M. Gschwandtner distinguishes between different kinds of religious experiences by examining their central characteristics and defining features, as well as showing their continuity with human experience more broadly. The book is the first philosophical examination of several of these types, thus breaking new ground in philosophical thinking about religion. It is neither a confessional treatment nor a reduction of the lived experience to psychological or sociological phenomena. While Gschwandtner’s treatment focuses on Christian forms of expression of these different types, it opens the path to broader examinations of ways of living religion that might enable scholars to give a more nuanced account of their similarities and differences.

Chapter 5 describes how the story of the life of the Buddha travelled from India via the Manichees and the Islamic Middle East to the West to become the life of Saint Josaphat. As Saint Josaphat, the Buddha had become a saint in the Eastern Church by the tenth century and in the Catholic Church by the thirteenth. As a result of the many translations of the story in Western vernaculars, the story of the Buddha was one of the most popular Western legends. The story of Saint Josaphat demonstrates how, unbeknownst to the West, the life of the Buddha and the ascetic ideal that it symbolised were incorporated into the ‘spiritual’ life of Christianity. That Saint Josaphat was none other than the Buddha was not recognised in the West until the ‘historical’ Buddha emerged in the nineteenth century.

Three Indian religions are considered, in the likely order of their origin. In each case a history and analysis are first offered before a specific issue is addressed in more detail. For Jainism it is the question of reincarnation. Here it is suggested that similar concerns for justice underly both Jainism’s almost physical embedding of karma in the universe and western theism’s postulation of a doctrine of resurrection. If so, it is what is scientifically and metaphysically possible which is in dispute (the status of soul and body) rather than different moral values. With Buddhism its moral approach is considered, partly through using Gavin Flood’s comparative study on asceticism and partly through drawing parallels with the influence of Stoicism on early Christian ethics. Finally, the impersonal character of the divine advocated in Sikhism is given sympathetic treatment through considering some issues raised by Neo-Platonism. Each of these questions will be considered further in subsequent chapters.

The Venerable Bede’s epistemology was scholarly and experiential. His work drew on the combined riches of classical and patristic knowledge, as he encountered them at the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Supported by lavish patronage, he turned these resources to the teaching, preaching, and exegesis of the scriptures. His writing on pain, pleasure, poverty, and preaching suggests that every faithful Christian has experiential access to unique knowledge. They may taste future joys, enter Christ’s mind, and glimpse the divine nature through embodied practices infused by grace. Yet access to such knowledge is unequal. ‘The perfect’, with their greater understanding and virtue, are best suited for shaping societal and ecclesial life. They meditate unceasingly on holy things, without care or need and with resources beyond the reach of most. Bede’s epistemological emphases were integrated in his self-image, as teacher and monk, and his teaching elaborated an influential ‘inequality regime’.

This chapter explores Evagrius of Pontus’ contribution to a uniquely Christian construction of the human being as knowing subject and known object. Evagrius includes distress (λύπη) among the ‘Eight Evil Thoughts’. Evagrius, following Paul, distinguishes between ‘worldly’ or ‘demonic’ λύπη and godly λύπη. This chapter probes this distinction in context of ancient passion-lists, which create affective lexica and cultural scripts for the articulation and management of emotions. In them λύπη is a deleterious emotion and an impediment to proper cognition. Evagrius emulates these lists but modifies their logic: he replaces classical with biblical exemplars, and he inserts the Pauline distinction between godly and worldly λύπη. Evagrius thus differentiates between positive and negative emotion on the basis of cause or intentional object. This results in λύπη becoming a valid dimension of human knowing, while creating a new need for a hermeneutic of λύπη and organisation of human emotion and knowledge.

Irenaeus made a significant contribution to epistemology, psychology, and asceticism in late antiquity by establishing the first fully developed Christian framework for ascetic training that has come down to us. Irenaeus innovated in epistemology and psychology to direct the daily, embodied ascetic practices that enabled human beings to make progress towards union with God. Irenaeus developed an empirical epistemology from his physics of creation ex nihilo that focused ascetic training on structuring embodied perceptions in order to develop the ability to accurately discern the truth and to reliably choose the good. He produced a holistic psychology from his physics of embodiment that focused on training the soul to grasp the truth, have virtuous emotions, choose righteous actions, and follow the desires of the Spirit. Irenaeus taught that practising the ascetic disciplines of vigilant attention, meletē, and egkrateia every day was essential for structuring perception to grasp the essence of phenomena ‘as they are’, unveiling the true value of faith, righteousness, and union with God as the highest human good, and living an embodied life capable of enjoying the good without end.

This chapter explores the role of early modern non-state actors in organized martial conflicts to understand how diverse social formations define “war” prior to the institution of the nation-state system. Exploration of how such actors interacted with states, and often operated independently of them, enhances our understanding of the multiple locations of organized violence without the assumption of state formation as a goal and allows greater appreciation of the sometimes dispersed nature of martial coercion.

Egypt has an abundance of well-preserved monastic settlements. The mudbrick structures provide ample evidence for examining domestic spaces associated with the daily household activities of food preparation through the acts of cooking, frying, and baking. While monastic literature presents a portrait of food scarcity in monastic communities, the archaeological evidence of kitchens and cooking spaces creates a more dynamic story of how monks interacted with ingredients, prepared meals, and considered the economy of space in designing areas for food preparation. The monastic movement required new habitations and ones in new locations to be set apart from the traditional and biological households. The importance of consumption habits within the family setting played a role in reinforcing one’s identity in a monastery or in a non-monastic family. The numerous examples of preserved monastic kitchens offer substantial evidence for a robust analysis that combines the theoretical models of household archaeology and spatial configuration to consider how monastic builders addressed the specific needs for food production within a homosocial community. The advent of new monastic settlements in late antique Egypt provides a unique opportunity to observe the evolution of cooking within an archaeological context.

This chapter examines the nihilistic dimension in the first volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. It begins with an account of the philosopher’s theory of the will as the fundamental metaphysical principle of the universe. Schopenhauer describes the will as a never-ending inward discord in every living thing that is the result of the constant drive to satiate one’s needs for food, drink, sex, sleep, and so on. This striving is what Schopenhauer calls “suffering,” and he claims that all life is suffering. He emphasizes the nature of human beings as finite and always on the way to death. He argues that time and space are infinite, in comparison to which the human being is a tiny, insignificant thing that occupies only a small space and a short period of time. Schopenhauer recommends the disposition of asceticism as the solution of the constant suffering and striving of the human condition. With asceticism one tries to break the never-ending circle of the will by renunciation, resignation, and denial of the will-to-live. Schopenhauer seems to concede that it is impossible to escape nihilism (even with the strictest ascetic discipline), and in the end everything dies and disappears into nothingness.

This chapter traces the dual legacy of Christian asceticism as an art of living with distinct but related rules for virtue in monastic and married life. The forms of ascetic virtue cultivated in the early Church have a significant afterlife in sixteenth century fiction and drama, exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610). In Utopia, married couples are essential citizens of an ascetic commonwealth, but also potentially at odds with its communal quasi-monastic virtues. The Winter’s Tale reveals a fault line in marriage as an ascetic mode of life: the tension between marriage as a legal code and marriage as a sacrament and relationship of fidelity can only be resolved by turning to the more radical asceticism of penance. These works demonstrate how ascetic practices mediate between self and society; they reflect on ways to cultivate a virtuous life that extend beyond the household or the cloister to the wider world of public and political action.

The three subchapters demonstrate the early attempts at Christianizing historiography. The start of history is made by the historically perceived Resurrection of Christ, as outlined by Iulius Africanus. Christians are not simply part of a long history of human development, but they mark a new beginning of human history. What existed before, Paganism and Judaism, were only ephemeral preparations for Christianity. Like Eusebius later, he draws on pseudonymous writings, particularly documents that he refers back to the archive of Edessa. Origen, before him, had already approached history from a spiritual angle, largely disregarding the historical and chronological side of it, and making use of the canonical writings of the New Testament in an allegorical way by which he dissociates Christian history from that of Jews and Pagans, and sees it guided and foreseen by God. Very similar to Origen, Tertullian in the Latin speaking world portraits Christians in fighting of Pagans and Jews, but also deviant Christians, heretics and less commited brothers and sisters which he contrasts with those prophetic Christians who are fully engaged, are prepared for asceticism, rejection of pagan pasts and are willing martyrs. Instead of canonical scriptures it is the prophetic reading of the church traditions that inform about the origins of Christianity.

Bernard Reginster provides a different perspective on some of these themes, deepening our understanding of Schopenhauer's pessimism. This is rooted in the idea that there is something systematically delusive about desire, since fulfilling our desires does not give the lasting satisfaction we would want. But Schopenhauer holds out the possibility that we can detach from our desires through resignation. How is such detachment possible?Reginster confronts the same problem we saw in Chapter 1, that the act of denial of the will cannot itself be an act of will; but he looks to a solution Janaway rejected, namely, Schopenhauer’s appeal to a secularized version of the Christian concept of grace. In probing the structure of resignation, Reginster argues that it must involve some “incentive” in the form of cognitive insight into “the will's inner conflict and its essential nothingness,” (WWR 1, 68, 424–470) which leads one to voluntary asceticism, that is, mortification of the will, which in turn leads to resignation. He shows that Schopenhauer provides two mechanisms for this, plausible by the standards of contemporary psychology: hedonic adaptation (i.e. “getting used to” deprivation) and physical weakening of the body, which, as objectified will, weakens the will.

Chris Janaway argues that Schopenhauer's theory of negation of the will is problematic: How can you will not to will?If will is the basis of all reality, who would remain to experience the satisfaction that negation of the will supposedly generates? Janaway argues that negation of the will is best thought of as negation specifically of the will to life, and that this is compatible with the existence of other kinds of willing. Will to life is egoistic willing; and the negation of this kind of willing is consistent with nonegoistic willing and, in particular, moral action. This more constrained interpretation of the doctrine of negation of the will not only makes more sense of the text when Schopenhauer distinguishes between self- and other-directed willing; it helps clarify Schopenhauer’s account of the relation between virtue and holiness. The morally righteous person has other-directed desires at least some of the time, but not necessarily all of the time, while the saint no longer has any self-directed desires at all. Finally, Janaway shows that this interpretation of negation of the will has the virtue of bringing Schopenhauer closer to the Buddhist models he cites in support of his theory.

Judith Norman takes up the complicated question of feminism in WWR.Political critiques of the history of philosophy frequently accuse philosophers of illegitimately universalizing a particular view of subjectivity – unwittingly normalizing a parochial conception of human nature, for instance.Although this is a critique that can undoubtedly be extended to Schopenhauer, it is striking that Nietzsche, drawing largely on metaphysical resources derived from Schopenhauer, was one of the first to really recognize and contest this illegitimate philosophical strategy. Norman looks at the extent to which Schopenhauer anticipated Nietzsche in this project of tracing a genealogy of the subject within a metaphysics of will, closely examining Schopenhauer’s fraught discussion of sexual difference in “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” This leads her to the question of the ontological status of sexual difference, and whether this cleft in nature registers at the level of transcendental subjectivity, and the consequences for Schopenhauer’s view of the subject, the question of women readers of the text, and women subjects of philosophy in general.

The Introduction discusses paideia (culture of Greek intellectuals) and its relevance for fourth-century clergy by providing a background to the Cappadocian Fathers. The chapter defines the meaning of "classical masculinity" for this study and places its treatment of gender into the broader scholarship on late antiquity and Christianity. The chapter outlines key concepts such as aretē (manly virtue), agathos (superior person), and asceticism (self-denial), and introduces agōn (contest or struggle) as the concept around which the book is organized. It also directs the reader to consider the Second Sophistic as the antecedent to the fourth-century culture of epistolary exhibitions. The chapter explains the differences in the Cappadocians’ use of genre and the distinguishing features of epistolography and hagiographic biography. And the Introduction explores identity theory and its usefulness for investigating gender and Christianity.

Chapter 4 treats the Cappadocians’ hagiographic biographies in conjunction with their polemic against non-Trinitarian theologians.The chapter begins by outlining the background and teachings of Eunomius of Cyzicus (c. 335–c. 395), a longtime heterousian rival to the Cappadocians. The chapter analyzes the narratives about fourth-century Nicene bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 298–372), Basil, and Macrina as hagiographies designed in part to contrast true (pro-Nicene) doctrine against the false philosophy of non-Trinitarians.These saints’ ascetic feats are recounted as spiritual ordeals fashioned as classical contests: in Athanasius, suffering multiple exiles because of standing up to false (heterousian) teachers; in Basil, countering threats to the Nicene faith by imperial officials; and in Macrina, enduring disease and death with unwavering resolve.In each case,Nyssen or Nazianzen emphasize that character is formed out of struggle; and that voice and speech (as a metaphor for doctrine) have been purified and validated in pro-Nicene theologians, but are corrupted and disingenuous in the untested charlatans they oppose.