When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

This chapter demonstrates that the doctrines contained in the Consolatio philosophiae unite and reconcile, in an elegant and balanced way, pagan Platonist philosophy and Christian faith. The most fertile ground for verifying this thesis is the third book of the Consolatio, with its Timaeus-inspired O qui perpetua hymn (III.m9), its talk of deification (III.10.24–5), its biblical paraphrase of Wisdom 8:1 (III.12.22), and its account of God understood in terms of happiness, goodness, and unity. As Boethius tells us in his second commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation (80.1–6), he thought that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were, if properly interpreted, complementary expressions of one truth. I argue that Boethius took a similar view regarding pagan Platonist philosophy and Christianity: although on the surface there might be some disagreement, both can be harmonized in such a way as to offer complementary expressions of the one truth. The pagan and Christian references in Book III support the conclusion that the Consolation enacts a harmonization of pagan Platonist philosophy and Christianity without distorting either.

A central tenet of Reformed theology was the doctrine of justification by imputed righteousness: the faithful are not saved on account of their own righteousness, but purely by the gracious decision of God to ‘impute’ or ‘account’ the perfect righteousness of his Son unto them. While this doctrine was a popular target for broader anti-Calvinist criticism, this chapter demonstrates that Whichcote, Cudworth, More and Smith challenged the Reformed doctrine by producing an explicitly Platonic account of justification on which believers are rendered acceptable to God by deification (i.e. by direct, internal conformity to and participation in the nature of God). This model of justification is distinctive, even against the wider background of English anti-Calvinism, and provides one of the strongest indications of the close philosophical alignment of Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith. As the present chapter will demonstrate, to their Calvinist critics such as Anthony Tuckney, it was the Cambridge Platonists’ views about justification that constituted their most egregious departure from Reformed doctrine and that most clearly unmasked the ‘Platonic’ character of their thought.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

This chapter further explores the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by examining their theory of spiritual sensation, a striking fusion of early modern sense theory, early Christian notions of deification, Puritan spirituality, and Platonic metaphysics. The Cambridge Platonists hold that when a soul becomes deified through the practice of virtue, God comes to dwell in it, and that as a result, the soul becomes able to know God directly by looking inward. This knowledge is the fruit of direct, perceptual contact with God, granting it a phenomenal quality that cannot be attained by mere descriptions of God. Conversely though, when a soul marred with vices looks inward in the attempt to know God, it inevitably forms a distorted picture of God that reflects its own moral flaws. Thus, the Cambridge Platonists’ theory of spiritual sensation undergirds their rejection of Calvinist doctrine, providing them with a sort of ‘error theory’ to explain how their theological opponents arrived at the views they did.

The Cambridge Platonists’ anti-Calvinism was undergirded by a Platonic epistemology of participation – an epistemology on which the faculty of reason allowed the soul to participate in, and thereby come to know, the nature of God. This epistemology, drawn largely from Plotinus, enabled them to defend and articulate their reasons for rejecting the arbitrary, voluntarist picture of God propagated by their Calvinist contemporaries, and defend their own, rival conception of God as unswervingly committed to communicating his overflowing goodness to all his creatures. The central component of this Platonic epistemology is a high view of human reason as a direct participation in the divine nature, where beauty, goodness and truth are inseparably united. This chapter introduces the Cambridge Platonists’ religious epistemology by highlighting the ways in which they make conformity to God, both through purity of mind and virtuous action, a precondition for knowledge of God, resulting in a distinctive combination of Plotinian epistemology and Puritan spirituality.

Alongside Ambrose, several prominent figures exemplify other forms of knowledge-shaping practices in catechesis. Zeno of Verona and Gaudentius of Brescia taught new Christians to re-imagine time and the natural world guided by Christian principles. Rufinus of Aquileia and Peter Chrysologus stressed the apophatic reserve necessary for initial inquiries into the nature of God.

This introduction distinguishes angelification (becoming an angel) from angelomorphism (becoming like an angel), although it acknowledges ambiguity. After briefly discussing angelification in modern literature and film, it defines both angels and daimones in the ancient sense, discusses the analogous concept of a hero, and distinguishes angelification and daimonification from the broader concept of deification in the ancient world.

Clement’s motif of concealment has often led scholars to describe him as an ‘esoteric author,’ who chose the miscellany genre in order to hide some things from some people, in imitation of scriptural concealment by aenigma. This chapter begins to respond by arguing that Clement’s esoteric tropes draw attention to the theme of hiddenness, which is a widespread imagistic discourse in his work. Five major modes of hiddenness are discerned in Clement’s theology: theological, anthropological, exegetical, social and cosmic; in practice, all of these are grounded in the hiddenness of God. God is transcendent, but is revealed in hidden ways in persons, texts, and in the world, for those who seclude themselves from the social gaze and direct their contemplation to God through Christ. Clement invites all people to participate in the divine economy of revelation with the selective discernment that is made possible by a gnostic relationship to the hidden God. Miscellanism emerges as the necessary and normative mode of gnostic life.

This chapter selects some of the plentiful epigraphic evidence for women of the imperial family, ranging from the relatives of the emperor Augustus to the empresses of the Severan dynasty in the early third century AD. Starting with two prominent women of leading Republican families, who may be considered as forerunners of the women of the imperial family, the inscriptions are grouped together under three headings: life, death and deeds; titles and cult; wealth and staff. By throwing light on their public image, their public titles, such as mother of the army camps, their personal staff and their economic undertakings, inscriptions allow a more dispassionate view of imperial women vilified by the ancient literary authors, such as Livia, Messalina and Agrippina Minor, and shed some light on empresses neglected by the literary sources, such as the Matidias and Sabina. Inscriptions also attest to the friendship and benefactions of indivual empresses and the way they were presented as models for (female) citizens. In contrast to the deification and cult of some empresses, inscriptions also testify to the posthumous damnatio memoriae of other imperial women or their relatives.

Chapter two explores Egyptian conceptions of human nature. I argue that Egyptians viewed the human as embodied space that shared in the divine state even in its natural condition. In Egypt, the cosmos was thought to have emerged out of the deities responsible for creating it. Egyptians embraced a form of panentheism, as deities inhabited every aspect of the cosmos. Having been created from the divine clay of the earth, the human body enjoyed a trace or latent share in the divine. The physical space of the self thus existed in kinship with the material cosmos from which the deities created it. Inside the body, the soul-aspects likewise shared in this state, as these were the same as those of the deities. Just as the deities embodied the elements of the cosmos, sacred temples and ritual images, the divine presence embodied the human self. The self’s divine-human nature took on a new meaning in the context of the pharaoh. While regular humans shared in trace amounts of the divine, the pharaoh enjoyed a far more substantial stake in the divine nature.

Chapter six considers Greek and Roman conceptions of human nature. Greeks and Romans had wide-ranging views on humanity’s relation with the divine. However, in philosophical and scientific circles, it was common to find talk of humanity’s intrinsic share in the divine nature even in its natural condition. Certain groups thought of the self as a space comprising different material bodies, some nondivine and some divine. Others imagined it as a space comprising material and immaterial parts, the former being mortal and the latter having a latent share in the divine state. There was thus general agreement that, regardless of the nature of the different parts or aspects of the self, the human enjoyed some share in the divine nature. Many seem to have imagined some rulers to have had an exalted ontology. Unfortunately, the evidence is simply not conclusive. In any case, Greeks and Romans quite widely thought that the regular human self participated in the divine state.

Chapter seven concludes this study. I begin the conclusion with a chapter-by-chapter summary of what we have found in the foregoing chapters. After this, I offer a more synthetic analysis of near eastern and Mediterranean ideas about the human self and its relationship to the divine. I also offer some thoughts on the implications of my study on near eastern and biblical studies, as well as on the study of early Judaism and Christianity.

In this chapter I offer some thoughts about the models for Ennius’ divine apparatus and about the balance struck in the Annals among the Varronian theologies. Specifically, I suggest (1) that Ennius’ treatment of the gods owes as much to Hesiod as it does to Homer; (2) that this debt involves structural as well as thematic resemblances between the Annals and Hesiod’s genealogical poetry; (3) that Ennius represents the Olympians as a group very differently from Hesiod or Homer; and (4) that the rationalizing theology of Euhemerus’ Sacred History, which Ennius translated into Latin, is present in the Annals to a larger extent than is commonly assumed. On this basis I suggest (5) that the poem’s representation of the gods evolves in a way that represents the increasing eclecticism of philosophical ideas about divinity over time. The result is that the poem ends with a perspective that is overtly different from, but not fundamentally incompatible with the one with which it began.

Chapter 2 argues that Thomas’s mature view of the formal cause of original justice created an unresolved problem for his doctrine of original sin. Though his early writings sharply distinguished the rectitude of the human will in the state of original justice from supernatural sanctifying grace, by the mid-1260s (e.g., STh I, q. 95, a. 1) he implied that the formal cause of original justice is sanctifying grace. The problem is that Thomas also held (1) that Adam should have been the principal cause of original justice in his posterity and (2) that no creature can be the principal cause of sanctifying grace. Thomas’s mature view implies that the disposition to original justice never could have been sexually transmitted. This implies that his account of original sin as a whole needed to be modified. Adam’s failure to transmit the disposition to original justice rendered the lack of original justice sinful in his posterity: if Adam couldn’t have done this in the first place, how could his descendants have original sin?