4 - Divine Absolution
The Hebrew and Christian Bibles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
Summary
If one were to consult Philo, or Origen, or any other Jewish or Christian writer of Greco-Roman antiquity about the proper function of mental distress, an answer would be ready to hand: remorse and repentance bring about a change in one's relationship to god, marked by a fuller awareness of one's responsibilities as a moral agent. This explicitly religious conception of remorse … is not to be found in the secular philosophical tradition.
In this chapter, I consider the nature of guilt, confession, repentance, and absolution in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, in which one encounters a moral structure that, if not yet conforming to the complete modern paradigm of interpersonal forgiveness, nevertheless represents a very different pattern from the one that informs the classical Greek and Roman texts examined so far. But before turning to the biblical literature, I should like to consider a text in the Judeo-Christian tradition that exhibits with particular clarity the role of sin, remorse, and redemption. What is more, this work invites comparison with a set of romantic Greek narratives, in which the relationship of suffering mortals to the divine is markedly different. The contrast thus serves to highlight what is distinctive about the attitude toward forgiveness in the Jewish and Christian scriptures and to confirm the absence of such a conception in pagan Greek and Roman culture.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Before ForgivenessThe Origins of a Moral Idea, pp. 91 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010