The notion of noetic perception may be expanded in relation to the role of the imagination in revelatory experience. Here, the expansion of neo-Platonic perspectives in the understanding of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is significant, as are the notion of the imaginal developed by Henry Corbin and the understanding of the role of the human imaginative faculty in religious visionary experience, as explored by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This kind of analysis has implications for solving certain puzzles inherent in the New Testament accounts of visions of the risen Christ. However, questions arise in relation to this understanding, and these may be tackled in part through recent Christian thinking about the notion of revelation, in which the focus is no longer on ‘information about God’ but on what Yves Congar has called an orientation towards salvation. This suggests an understanding akin to the perennialist separation of exoteric and esoteric aspects of religious traditions in the sense of suggesting a two-component, psychological-referential model of revelatory experience.

As a way of encouraging learning from others, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the various ways in which the development of Judaism and Christianity alike displayed profound debts to the wider culture of pagan belief and practice. The story is first told in respect of the way in which archaeological research has transformed our understanding of Judaism. It also argues that it would be quite wrong to have a low view of the religious practice and belief of the ancient Middle East and Egypt. The second half of the chapter turns to consider two significant influences from classical culture on Christianity, the mystery cults and pagan philosophy. In the latter case attention is drawn to more recent evaluations of later Neo-Platonism and theurgy. The chapter ends with a discussion of polytheism.

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.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

This chapter focuses on Neoplatonist engagements with the issue of life worth living as represented in the philosophy of Plotinus. The Platonic metaphysics and ethics regards the highest form of life as the life of pure intellection, and the materiality of the body in strongly negative terms as the limiting and potentially corrupting influence on the soul. Therefore, the question about the conditions of a life worth living emerges specifically as a question about the worth of embodied life. Is it worthwhile for the immortal soul to descend into bodies, and to remain there until the bond between body and soul dissolves naturally? Plotinus’s attempts to answer this questions are best viewed in terms of a negotiation between the anti-corporealist stance, according to which disembodied existence is always better for the soul, and an acknowledgment that the embodied condition is good for the soul, insofar as it enables the realisation of some of its capacities.

The historiography of mathematics in the Renaissance involves two kinds of anachronism. First, the tendency to anachronism in the authors themselves, whose understanding of broad historical structures and of the development of mathematics may be colored by concerns of their own time. And second, our anachronism in reading these histories of mathematics as if they were attempting precisely the same thing as modern historians of mathematics. This article focuses on the author of the first modern work dedicated to the history of mathematics, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), singling out three occasions in which his historical account seems to diverge widely from that of modern historians, and examining them in the light of both types of anachronism. First, in his account of the development of mathematics in the early Platonic Academy; second, his assessment of Eudoxus of Cnidus; and finally in his dating of the Neoplatonic philosopher and commentator on Euclid, Proclus.

Sometimes called the ‘last of the Romans, first of the Scholastics’, Boethius (c.475–c.525) was among the most influential writers in medieval Europe. He devised a grand scheme to harmonize Aristotelian and Platonic thought, but he was best known for his prosimetric De consolatione philosophiae, which describes a dialogue between an imprisoned Boethius, falsely accused and awaiting execution, and the figure of Lady Philosophy. In alternating sections of prose and verse, she explains the transitory nature of earthly goods like wealth and fame and assures Boethius of the universe’s just, hierarchical order. Translated as the Boece by Chaucer, who drew on a French translation and Latin commentary sources as well as the Latin original, the Consolation and its ideas pervade his poetry, especially the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.