The Ransom of the Soul

Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity

Bibliographic Data

ID8207659
AuthorsMeghan Henning (University of Dayton, corresponding author)
Year2016
Pageslfv101
Publication date2016-01-06
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfv101
OpenAlexW2398152269
LanguageEN
Citations received7

The Ransom of the Soul is based upon three lectures that Peter Brown delivered at the Institute für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, in 2012. In his preface, Brown situates this project with respect to other scholarly depictions of the afterlife, as well as his own oeuvre. Brown is working against the tendency to depict “the development of a Christian doctrine of the afterlife as if it were the unfolding of a single master narrative.” He offers a counter to these “traditional histories” by looking at Christian views of the afterlife as part of a “perpetual argument” (x–xi). He stresses that this is a methodological continuation of his longer work in Through the Eye of a Needle , in the sense that he is also here concerned with the relationship between Christian history and the social and economic history of the period, but is here turning toward “the relation between society and the religious imagination” (xii). In setting out to trace the discordant views on the afterlife and their contextual roots, Brown learns that the “pace” of ideological shifts on the afterlife do not always match the great epistemological shifts that are typically charted in histories of early Christianity. He reflects upon the potential impact of this work on the whole of his understanding of Christian history: “What I myself have learned, when writing this book, is that some of the most decisive changes in the Christian imagination cannot be linked in any direct way to the brisk pace of history as it is conventionally related in textbooks of the history of the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages” (xiv).

Afterlife · Art · Christianity · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Soul · Theology · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub