This chapter provides an overview of Buddhist sexualities ranging from monastic celibacy in India, China and Japan, to Buddhist lay sexualities, to altruistic sexuality in Indian Mahayana Buddhism. It then examines religious sexuality in tantra in India and Tibet, including transgressive discourses in Indian Buddhist liturgies and sexual yoga techniques in Tibetan Buddhist literature. The chapter argues that these diverse and contradictory discourses all represent a shared concern with regulating sexuality and harnessing it for soteriological purposes. Both the renunciation of sensual experience in Indian monastic literature and the embrace of sensual experience in Tibetan sexual yoga have been framed as means for relieving suffering and attaining soteriological success. With examples from Vinaya literature, yogini tantras, premodern and contemporary literature, this chapter highlights the rich diversity of Buddhist sexualities and gender constructs.

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.

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’.

In his discourse On Gluttony, the Syrian metropolitan Philoxenos of Mabbug shows that a glutton’s behaviour and attitude towards food and drink are rooted in false epistemologies of the self and God. This chapter shows that within this discourse Philoxenos tells the story of a gluttonous monk. By studying this embedded narrative of an imagined gluttonous monk, this chapter uncovers how Philoxenos uses rhetorical strategies to advance his thesis about the danger of gluttony: it perverts the monk and prevents the knowledge of God. Gluttony leads to heresy and death.

The Tridentine Decree on the religious life reflected long-standing ecclesial disaffection and aspirations for reform. The product of a lively conciliar debate, it was neither innovative nor theologically sophisticated but narrowly disciplinary. In the aftermath of the Council, several of its prescriptions concerning male religious went unheeded.

The Epilogue identifies classical masculinity as reflected in depictions of late antique clothing,liturgy in Carolingian monasteries, and miniature illustrations in middle-Byzantine manuscripts. Fifth-century clergy wore specific apparel to signify manhood. Benedictine lectors (readers) were selected according to their virility of voice. And Byzantine artists set clergy face to face in manuscripts, in part a legacy of the agōn trope of reciprocal strength. These examples show that elements of classical masculinity continued to inform the Christian church in western Europe and Byzantium into the eleventh century. Such representations continued to evoke power and authority within the hierarchy of the church.Like fourth-century agōn rhetoric, these trappings of classical manhood provided a language of hierarchy for church leaders to integrate into a faith that lacked comparable platforms for displays of social and spiritual distinction.

This chapter focuses on the period between roughly 1050 and 1150, when calls to reform the Church and religious life swept across Europe. The new religious orders that emerged in this period, including the Cistercians, Premonstratensians and Augustinian canons, all sought to limit the influence of secular authorities over their communities. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that – especially in the German-speaking lands – church advocacy was already too entrenched a feature of society for these new orders to ignore it or effectively control it. Someone needed to provide protection and exercise justice over the numerous estates these new foundations were receiving, and nobles had already come to rely on the position of advocate as an effective means of asserting their influence over monasteries and churches. As a result, while Church reformers increasingly sought in this period to regulate and place limits on advocates’ responsibilities, they were unable to prevent high-ranking nobles from accumulating large numbers of church advocacies in their own hands.

The Romans adaptation of Greek philosophy was illustrated by the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics held that humanity is determined by the fates of nature, while the Epicureans believed that happiness came from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Plato was revived by Plotinus and dominated Roman philosophy during the early years of Christianity. Both the missionary zeal of early Christians and the tranquility of Roman administration rapidly spread Christianity. The teachings of Jesus were bolstered by defenders, who gave Christianity form and content. St. Augustine successfully reinterpreted Platonic thought within Christian theology, and the consequent influence on psychology continued well beyond. With the fall of the Western empire, intellectual life came to a virtual halt, and only the monastic movement preserved remnants of Greek and Roman civilization. The papacy assumed a leading role in spiritual direction and civil administration. The power shift to the East saw the Byzantine Empire assume a distinctive Greek character. The rise of Islam threatened the survival of Christianity in the Middle East and in North Africa. But, at the same time, much of the Greek heritage of scholarship was preserved and extended in the great academic centers of medieval Islam.

In the short story Father Sergius, Tolstoi tells about the guards officer Kasatskii who renounces his military career, enters a monastery, then leaves it again in order to become hermit. Finally, he ends up as a simple vagabond. The drama unfolds on the inner plane, but is reflected in three incidents when Kasatskii alias Father Sergius suddenly breaks away from his former life and finds new meaning in an existence that coincides with four traditional forms of Orthodox piety; monasticism, eldership, holy wandering. He ends up in holy foolishness, which combines elements of them all, as a life in the world, but not of the world. The life of Kasatskii alias Father Sergius is a circular motion. He starts in the world, withdraws from it, and finally returns to it. However, he has not come back to the starting point, for he is now equipped with new insights about God and life. These varieties of piety prove to be, with the words of Søren Kierkegaard, "stages on the path of life," hierarchically arranged. Despite the abrupt breaks between them, they must be understood as parts of a developmental process, all contributing to a cumulative maturation.

Chapter 12, “Sacred Dimensions: Constantinopolitan Monasticism,” describes the introduction of monastic communities to the city and ensuing developments in these urban monastic institutions. It considers, in particular, the distinctive nature of Constantinopolitan monasticism, debates about the idea of what monastic living should be, and the ever-evolving relationship between the patriarchate and monastic communities in the period between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries.

Thus begins one of the most unusual and intriguing documents of late antiquity, the Confession of St Patrick, describing the circumstances in which a Romano-British teenager was taken from his home and sold into slavery in barbarian Ireland. The Confessio is Patrick’s defence against criticisms by certain members of the British church hierarchy who were attacking his past and his missionary efforts in Ireland. It was written sometime in the second half of the fifth century, but is plagued by chronological vagueness, references to unknown places, and a Latin that has suggested to some it was not his native tongue. Nevertheless, the Confessio is still the closest thing we have to a slave narrative from antiquity. It is one of only two authentic writings of St Patrick, the other being the earlier Epistola ad milites Corotici (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus), addressed to the soldiers of a British warlord who had attacked and enslaved newly baptized Irish converts.