Before forgiveness : the origins of a moral idea
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Before forgiveness : the origins of a moral idea
Cambridge University Press, 2010
Available at / 5 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-184) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures. It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology, remorse, and a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law, politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it to earth and make it a human trait.
Table of Contents
- 1. What is forgiveness?
- 2. Before forgiveness: Greeks and Romans on guilt and innocence
- 3. Did they forgive? Greek and Roman narratives of reconciliation
- 4. Divine absolution: the Hebrew and Christian bibles
- 5. Humility and repentance: the church fathers
- 6. Enter forgiveness: the self transformed.
by "Nielsen BookData"
