The Seba library treats Expiation in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Edinger, Edward F., Rohde, Erwin, Benveniste, Émile).
This act of expiation is performed by the Paraclete; for, just as man must suffer from God, so God must suffer from man. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation between the two.
Edinger, reading Jung’s Answer to Job, argues that expiation is a mutual, theogonic necessity: the Incarnation enacts God’s reparation for the injustice done to Job, making divine suffering the counterpart to human suffering.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis
The usages of expiation… were intended to propitiate the indignant soul of the dead and the gods who protected it, by means of solemn sacrifice; but in the Homeric picture of the world they never appear.
Rohde establishes the archaic Greek function of expiation as propitiatory sacrifice directed at the dead and their divine protectors, noting that Homer suppressed these rites along with the pollution-beliefs that necessitated them.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894thesis
The price which was paid for the expiation of a crime, the ransom… Once the crime is over and paid for, an alliance becomes established and we return to the notion of the guild.
Benveniste traces expiation to the Indo-European wergeld, situating it at the convergence of religious sacrifice, legal compensation, and social reconciliation — a payment that transforms guilt into renewed solidarity.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973thesis
Life is the expiation of sin by suffering. Freedom has opened the path of evil to man, it is a proof of freedom, and man must pay the price.
Berdyaev’s reading of Dostoevsky, as mediated by Louth, identifies life itself as an expiatory process wherein the misuse of freedom is redeemed through voluntary suffering.
, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentthesis
However much the details and variations of the ceremonies of expiation and purification after the slaying of enemies might be of interest for deeper research into the subject…
Freud reads warrior expiation rites as manifestations of psychic ambivalence toward the slain enemy, treating the ceremonial discharge of guilt as a universal psychological and anthropological mechanism.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
Delphic Oracle, regulates expiatory rites, v, 167; 180 f.; authority of, in the cult of Heroes, 128 f.
Rohde’s index records the Delphic Oracle’s institutional role in regulating expiatory rites, underscoring expiation’s embeddedness in organized Greek religious authority.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894supporting
The greatest fire can only be put out with tears. The pouring of tears is a shower which extinguishes it, that terrible fire which menaces criminals.
Hausherr’s account of compunction presents tears as a functionally expiatory medium in Eastern Christian asceticism, substituting for formal sacramental penance and extinguishing the ‘fire’ of accumulated sin.
, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, 1944supporting
Repentance is the daughter of hope and the refusal to despair. (The penitent stands guilty—but undisgraced.) Repentance is reconciliation with the Lord.
Climacus frames repentance — the inner corollary to expiatory practice — as a movement of hope rather than punitive self-destruction, reconciling the guilty soul with the divine without the vocabulary of external expiation.
, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 600supporting
Atonement in Plato (Purgation), xiii, 36.
A brief index reference in Rohde links Platonic purgation to the broader thematic field of expiation and atonement in Greek religious thought.
, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and the Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, 1894aside