In this course, we will survey the late antique and early medieval writers and their texts that shaped western European ideas about politics and power, agency and institutions, nature and the supernatural, man and the devil. We will see how both holy scripture and the works of the church authorities who laid down its “correct” interpretation were received and put into practice. Along the way, we will test the validity of the famous dictum by the notorious twentieth-century political philosopher Carl Schmitt that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.