This chapter traces basic contours of early scholastic Atonement theories from 1150 to 1250, which integrated insights from Augustine and Anselm on the objective work of Atonement with Abelard's attention to the subjective dimensions of Atonement.

Incarnation and Atonement are two aspects of the work of Christ addressed in Christology. In the IIncarnation, God the Son assumes a human nature in order to bring about human salvation; and in Atonement he achieves this. Various accounts of atonement have developed over the centuries. This chapter considers the major historic views in the context of a broadly Chalcedonian understanding of the Incarnation.

Atonement is a critical component of the cultic system described in Leviticus 1–7 and 16. Purification of sin and thanksgiving offerings shape the worship of Israel. This chapter describes the theology of sacrifice and atonement in Leviticus, the specific offerings, and how atonement has been interpreted by later commentators.

This chapter pursues the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris in their opposition to orthodox political and normative views. It follows Williams’s view that modern liberal society involves a ‘peculiar’ political morality of voluntary responsibility and his underdeveloped line that a naturalistic understanding of ‘psychological materials’ like anger, fear and love is needed. It notes his recognition of the psychological role of the internalised other in human guilt. It pursues Morris’s philosophical account of guilt as involving psychological feeling: ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). It notes the importance of ‘atonement’ and identification with another in his account, the former involving being ‘at one with’ oneself. It identifies the reaction he notes to deep-seated psychological problems and cycles of violence as ‘quantum guilt’. Williams and Morris push philosophy beyond itself to the brink of a new psychological understanding. Following Jonathan Lear, the moral psychology they initiate renders psychoanalysis part of a broader conception of philosophy in line with its original Greek self-understanding. It gives the ancient Socratic principle that we should know ourselves a modern post-Freudian twist.

Taking Herbert Morris’s ethical concepts of guilt, identification, responsibility and atonement as ‘at-one-ment’, this chapter explores their metapsychological basis and somatic link to feeling ‘rotten, depleted of energy, and tense’ (Morris 1976: 99). Exploring Freud’s metapsychology in Civilization and Its Discontents (1985), two conflicting routes to guilt are noted. The more prominent involves internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts. The better but less developed emphasises loving identification with others in the process of ego and superego formation of the self. This second route is in line with Freud’s later structural theory as developed by Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of self-formation makes loving identification the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement as at-one-ment. The superego is an ‘atonement structure’ that is reconciliative, and this links psychoanalysis to Morris’s metaphysics of atonement. The analysis is developed to include ‘prospective identification’, moral and psychological guilt for the violation of a stranger. Emotional disturbance at killing another with whom one could identify is explored and a comparison made with Raskolnikov’s guilt in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A closing section links this chapter to the previous, cementing the metaphysical and metapsychological dimensions of guilt in an expanded understanding of philosophy as both Greek and modern.

This chapter draws together the whole argument of the book to face the defining question that it must answer, and through that answer to unfurl the full significance of incarnational theology. The question is, what happens when God’s purpose to be with us now and forever meets with a refusal? Addressing the question of humankind’s alienation from God, itself and the wider creation is not, from the point of view of incarnational theology, the central dynamic of Christianity, as it is in conventional accounts. But the utter with-ness of Jesus inevitably encounters the profound, widespread and powerful resistance to God’s embrace: and the truth of God is thereby revealed like never before. Jesus does not ‘come to die’: yet in his death and resurrection he exposes the forces that oppose him and displays the dynamic that sent him and settles the only questions about existence and essence that ultimately matter.

Chapter 6 sets out in detail Paul Tillich’s formulation of the doctrine of salvation. Particular focus is placed upon Tillich’s existentialist framing of fallenness and his understanding of personal salvation as a transformation from Old Being to New Being.

This Introduction offers a survey of how criticism to date has conceived of the relationship between mass violence and the creative imagination, arguing that little has been done to destabilise the view that when literary works take the destruction of bodies, minds, and ideals in times of war seriously, they find their structures and surfaces warped. Identifying Jay Winter’s pioneering work in the field of cultural history as running counter to this trend, it positions this study as likewise animated by a belief that the wars of the last century not only sparked aesthetic experiments and the abandonment of traditional imaginative structures; they also impelled forms of creative counterfactual thinking whose aims were reparative, preservatory, and consolatory. The concepts of ‘unlived lives’ and ‘lives unlived’ (which will be used to explore various imaginative modes of resistance to violence, loss, and change) are defined. The book’s aims are situated relative to the ethos of the ‘new modernist studies’ and its place periodisation debate explained. The combination of historical, biographical, and close readings deployed in the six chapters to come are given careful justification – as is the selection of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as the book’s central writers.

Many readers have seen Piers Plowman as a poem of crisis, a poem that fractures under the weight of its own ambivalence. I argue here that the demonic ambiguity of debt offers a plausible explanation of the conflicting impulses at work in this text. For Langland, monetary exchange, along with the careful accounting practices it demands, as long as it is conducted honestly and fairly, serves as a metaphor of penitential exchange, not paradoxically, not in spite of its corrupting power, but because it is conducive to balance and order, to the practice of virtue and the ethical habits of self-regulation required for true and effective penance. On the other hand, for Langland, the unpayable and infinitely reproducible nature of debt, manifest precisely in the ascesis instituted by grace, produces a troubling limitlessness. The ascesis of debt is, in this way, self-undermining. The debt that cannot be repaid correlates to needs that cannot be measured, and thus to desires that cannot be checked and boundaries that cannot be known.

This chapter explores how the idea of sacrifice was used to render death in war acceptable – the death of enemies as well as of compatriots and allies – and how this public ideal was reconciled with the private sorrow of bereavement and mourning. Drawing on a distinction between sacrificing to (atonement) and sacrificing for (on behalf of the nation), it compares the response to death encouraged by the Church with the more classical ideal of heroic sacrifice promoted by Shaftesbury, by Addison, by the Patriot Bolingbroke and by Richard Glover in his epic poem Leonidas. And it considers how the sacrifice of the hero was brought into relation with the mourning of the bereaved, looking at examples in Glover, in funeral monuments, and in poems by Mark Akenside and William Collins.

This chapter offers a theology of the Atonement, building on Augustine’s account of the Cross. It argues that, on the Cross, Jesus opens and joins himself fully to the death-dealing that is the inner logic of all sinful human community, and overcomes it in the Resurrection.