Sarah Mortimer examines the impact of the Reformation on thinking about the human commonwealth within the Christian temporal and historical scheme of the Fall. From the outset Protestants sought to integrate the civil and the divine, pursuing the ideal of the godly commonwealth, while Catholics would align the commonwealth with natural law, distinct from the divine law which gave the Church its authority. With the hardening of confessional divisions, these differences were accentuated: Protestants appealed directly to Scripture for political guidance, while leading Catholics emphasised that priests and worship were essential to all forms of society. But there were also those such as Jean Bodin who sought to understand politics independently of the Christian story; others, including Francisco Suárez, began to analyse human relationships using the hypothesis of a state of nature with neither sin nor grace. These attempts to stretch and even hypothetically step outside the scheme of the Fall in turn informed the thinking of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the chapter ends with an extended assessment of his reflections on the relation between commonwealth and churches, and his increasing acceptance of diversity in the civil sphere.

Greggs examines how creaturely gratitude has been disrupted by the Fall, but is restored by grace. Rather than accepting the Thomist or Calvinist account of gratitude as an obligation, stemming from the Fall, Greggs sees true creaturely gratitude as movement within grace, in anticipation of redemption; an outpouring of thankfulness into all areas of life.

Ulysses’ mad pursuit of virtue and knowledge presumed that an exploration of physical facts can yield an understanding of value. In the examination on love in the heaven of the fixed stars, St. John first asks not what love is, but where Dante’s soul is pointed. To love is to have an aim, a point, a target. It is to value something more than other things and, in the hierarchy of all good things, there must be one that is the best of all. It is from the sphere of the constellations, of which Ulysses necessarily lost sight when he ventured beyond the known world into the southern hemisphere, that Adam reveals that the cause of his long exile was a trespassing beyond the sign. Since language, the logos, is what humans use to discern what is good and what is harmful, it enacts the role of the God of Bible who promised to reveal to Moses “every value.

Chapter 2 introduces Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and offers an analysis of his account of the story of the Fall from Genesis. Here Hegel develops his discussion of alienation, since the Fall is a story about how humans are alienated from themselves. It shows that alienation is a fundamental fact of human existence and not just something contingent. The chapter also introduces Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History and presents his analysis of the alienation that was characteristic of the Roman Empire. Hegel points out that the schools of Roman philosophy—Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism—can all be seen as reactions to this. An account is given of Hegel’s analysis of Christianity, which he sees as overcoming this alienation. At the end of his lectures, Hegel claims that his own time in the 1820s has certain elements in common with the Roman Empire, when the world of culture had lost its meaning and people fell into a state of alienation and despair. Later thinkers were generally dissatisfied with Hegel’s view that it was sufficient simply to understand the nature of the contemporary crisis. They demanded a more active approach to the world.

Chapter 9 is concerned with the thought of the Russian anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin. In 1840 Bakunin traveled to Prussia and attended the University of Berlin. There he came into contact with some of Hegel’s leading students. The chapter begins with an analysis of his work God and the State. Like Hegel, he has recourse to the myth of the Fall in order to understand the fundamental shift from nature to spirit. But in contrast to Hegel, the important thing about the biblical account for Bakunin is the element of rebellion, which is essential for human freedom. A comparison is given of the criticism of religion found in Bauer and Bakunin, according to which humans must emancipate themselves from the belief in God in order to realize their own freedom. Bakunin also draws on Hegel’s theory of recognition and freedom. To be who we are, we need the recognition of others in society. An overview is provided of Bakunin’s criticism of Hegel and his followers in Statism and Anarchy. Finally, Bakunin’s bitter polemic against his one-time friend Karl Marx is examined.

This chapter explores how taste’s epistemological utility in the early modern period was compromised by its disreputable moral status: taste was often identified as the cause of Adam and Eve’s fall. Nonetheless, sacramental tasting held out the promise of redemption. Eucharistic practices, I propose, provide a crucial context for the Protestant poetics of authors including George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Amelia Lanyer. Frequently, for instance, the language of taste is used – with varying levels of commitment – to affirm the superiority of experiential faith over clerical and scriptural authority. Simultaneously, religious writing, from poetry to polemic, offers a neglected source to uncover popular understandings and experiences of everyday, physical tasting. In particular, even banal, quotidian experiences of eating were conceived of as opportunities for spiritual illumination, precisely – and paradoxically – because of the fallenness of taste.