Book contents
- The Self in Premodern Thought
- The Self in Premodern Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Framing (Some) Self in the Platonic Dialogues
- Chapter 3 Aristotle’s Multiple Selves
- Chapter 4 Self-Harm and the Death Drive
- Chapter 5 Augustine and the Origins of the Self
- Chapter 6 The Sinful Self: Formation and Transformation
- Chapter 7 Turning Inward and Outward: Two Medieval Approaches to the Self
- Chapter 8 The Hesychast Self: Interiority and Embodied Perfection in the Anthropology of Gregory Palamas
- Chapter 9 Renaissance Individualism Revisited: Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Emergence of the Humanist Relational Self
- Chapter 10 Free Will a Fortress: The Self in Spanish Renaissance Drama
- Chapter 11 Beyond Consciousness: Locke’s Sources for the Self
- Chapter 12 A Decaying Carcass? Mary Astell on the Body
- Index
- References
Chapter 6 - The Sinful Self: Formation and Transformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2026
Book contents
- The Self in Premodern Thought
- The Self in Premodern Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Framing (Some) Self in the Platonic Dialogues
- Chapter 3 Aristotle’s Multiple Selves
- Chapter 4 Self-Harm and the Death Drive
- Chapter 5 Augustine and the Origins of the Self
- Chapter 6 The Sinful Self: Formation and Transformation
- Chapter 7 Turning Inward and Outward: Two Medieval Approaches to the Self
- Chapter 8 The Hesychast Self: Interiority and Embodied Perfection in the Anthropology of Gregory Palamas
- Chapter 9 Renaissance Individualism Revisited: Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Emergence of the Humanist Relational Self
- Chapter 10 Free Will a Fortress: The Self in Spanish Renaissance Drama
- Chapter 11 Beyond Consciousness: Locke’s Sources for the Self
- Chapter 12 A Decaying Carcass? Mary Astell on the Body
- Index
- References
Summary
Taking the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) and the “penitential Psalms” as sites for late antique and early medieval investigations of the effect of sin on the self, this chapter proposes that exegetes saw the self as malleable and permeable. Commentaries and sermons framed the self as sinful but salvageable. Changing views of agency, responsibility, and remedies produced shifts in representations of communal interests and penitential interpretations of well-known scriptural texts. Protections against the penetrations and deformations of sin were erected in liturgical rituals and communal prayer. The universal stain of sin fostered a porous relation between the individual and the community, each bound to the other in a metaphysical, corporate entity encasing all selves. Christian views of individual autonomy created as well a spatial expanse of the individual interior in which the soul could wander, even become lost. Emerging from that grim void to salvation was to grasp a lifeline of the penitential words of others, sung in concert, in an activation of universal memory, to transform the self into a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.
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- The Self in Premodern ThoughtFrom Antiquity to the Renaissance in Europe, pp. 104 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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