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Against the background of the Persian and then Muslim invasions of the Roman Near East in the first half of the seventh century, this book explores the careers and output of three prominent and closely associated Palestinian contemporaries: Sophronius of Jerusalem, John Moschus, and Maximus Confessor. By analyzing Sophronius’s Miracles of Cyrus and John, Moschus’s Spiritual Meadow, and Maximus’s Mystagogy, it first examines how, in the context of imperial crisis, all three authors attempted to negotiate long-standing ambiguities surrounding the relationship between asceticism and the Eucharist, therein asserting visions of a unified church immune to the caprice of temporal politics. It then explores how—as the emperor and the patriarch at Constantinople threw their weight behind a doctrinal compromise that aimed to reunite the fractious Christian churches of the East, and as claims to Roman renewal were proved vapid in the spectacular rise of Islam—the same circle emerged as the capital’s most vociferous religious critics, developing an explicit doctrinal opposition to imperial initiatives. Here the earlier reconciliation of competing ascetical and clerical narratives was put to more subversive ends: as the basis both for a dramatic recognition of Roman preeminence within the church and for a radical rejection of imperial interference in matters of the faith.

During the fourth century AD, theological controversy divided Christian communities throughout the eastern half of the Roman Empire. At stake in these disputes was not only the truth about God but also the authority of church leaders whose legitimacy rested on their willingness to validate that truth. Because that truth could not be fixed, however, nor that willingness secured, the dispute constantly threatened prelates' claims to authority. In this book, Galvão-Sobrinho argues that churchmen's response to that challenge gave birth to a new style of church leadership that contributed to the affirmation of episcopal power. The author shows how prelates engaged in the dispute embarked on quests to assert their orthodoxy and legitimacy—tasks that called for organized, sustained, and effective action, and that demanded prelates and their congregations to be constantly mobilized. Galvão-Sobrinho argues that the dispute produced new modes of behavior—dispositions and tendencies to act in particular ways—that continuously channeled powers. While these novelties were largely the work of prelates in the first half of the fourth century, the style of command they inaugurated was incorporated into a dynamic model of ecclesiastical leadership that came to define the episcopal office in late antiquity.

Drawing on the connections between the history of Western subjectivity and early modern European colonialism, this book explores how the idea of “self” emerged in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico as a consequence of the Jesuit encounter. Specifically, I focus on the core of Jesuit spirituality, their Spiritual Exercises—an adaptable, step-by-step program for renewal and salvation, adapted from the monastic practices of St. Ignatius to serve a new, worldly Catholicism. The Exercises advocated a rigorous method for self-examination and reflection that would ultimately contribute to a new understanding of “religion” as something private and personal, overturning long-held concepts of personhood, time, space, and social reality. Like their European contemporaries, colonial inhabitants of the New World did not think their way into modern selves; rather, that shift was the by-product of embodied intersubjective relationships, involving not only talking and writing but mimicking, crying, praying, and self-flagellating. What’s more, Jesuit self-reform became linked to a colonialist vision of a triumphant, worldwide Christianity. This book brings to light a trans-Atlantic network of shared devotional practices, thereby collapsing a long-standing, over-inflated sense of cultural distance between Europe and New Spain. My aim is an intellectual history grounded in the study of person-to-person interactions to answer the question: How did the so-called Western self become a disembodied self? Short answer: it was through embodied processes that humans came to experience themselves as split into mind and body. Despite the self-congratulatory role assigned to “consciousness” in the Western intellectual tradition, early moderns did not think themselves into thinking selves. Rather, “the self” was forged from embodied efforts to transcend self. To complicate matters, this was not a solo enterprise: Catholic spiritual-healing practices in the early modern era relied upon intersubjective relationships between spiritual director and subject. Furthermore, despite a discourse that situates self as interior, the actual fuel for continued self-transformation required an object-cum-subject: someone else to transform. Constant questions throughout the book: Why does the effort to know and transcend self require so many others? What can we learn about the inherent intersubjectivity of techniques of the self in the process?