Focusing on the Christian concept of sin, this chapter explores the way in which Anti-Climacus in Part Two of The Sickness unto Death analyzes the concepts of despair, selfhood, spirit, sin, offense, faith, paradox, and God from the standpoint of a Christian understanding of these concepts in contrast to that of classical paganism and Christendom, especially the way in which these concepts are rooted scripturally in Christianity in not willing or doing what is right rather than not knowing or understanding what one should do, as in paganism. It focuses in particular on the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin and the paradox that sin is not a negation but a position before God that cannot be comprehended but must be believed through a revelation from and relation to God, thereby creating the possibility of offense.

The chapter outlines the biographical context of 1848, when Denmark underwent a revolution and its Church was reconstituted. In 1848 Kierkegaard felt himself at a turning point in his own life: He was looking back at his difficult childhood and Christian upbringing and considering his professional future. The same year was also a turning point in his relationship to the Danish State Church and its head, Bishop Mynster. Having declared an end to his authorship, Kierkegaard was trying to decide how to express his developing views and how far he should go in his critique of the Church. From a literary point of view, The Sickness unto Death signaled the increasing prominence of the genre of the religious discourse, while from a theological point of view it shows Kierkegaard drawing closer to the ideal of imitating Christ. At the same time, The Sickness unto Death presents his mature philosophical position, in continuity with his earlier works, consolidated in his analysis of the human being’s spiritual condition and the ideal of faith as “resting transparently in God.” The personal, philosophical, and professional questions underlying The Sickness unto Death caused a long delay in its publication; these questions were eventually resolved by the invention of a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.

General readers still lack awareness of the prevalence of slavery between the classical period and the post-1420 wider Atlantic World. This phenomenon is not just temporal but geographic, in that Asia, the Indian Ocean World, Amerindian societies and Oceania still receive far less scholarly attention than their populations warrant. This situation exists despite the rapid growth of interest in the general subject of slavery in recent decades. The Islamic conquests and the Mongol expansions generated large numbers of captives, but in fact no society in the Medieval millennium was without enslaved people. While no consensus on the definition of slavery is possible – in this era it assumed a wide spectrum of dependencies - the existence of slave markets across the known world indicates that buyers and sellers shared enough of a common understanding of the practice to sustain a vibrant slave trade. Despite this traffic and major military disruptions, many enslaved people derived their status via birth even though the sources suggest that probably most slaves were female. They also exercised some agency. Prejudice against black people is apparent but the ebb and flow of empires ensured that any group could be a slave, just as any could be a slave owner.

The idea of Europe first emerged in ancient Greece, featuring in the work of Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Aristotle, among others. The classical myth of Europa describes the abduction of an Asian princess by the king of the Greek gods, and the classical idea of Europe served to distinguish Hellenic culture from an Asian world viewed highly negatively as an enslaved collective ruled by autocrats. In imperial Rome, the idea of Europe served an important geopolitical purpose, underwriting Roman civilization as European. While the rise of Christianity led to the idea of Europe being elided in favor of that of Christendom as opposed to Islam, following the discovery of the New World the idea of Europe became ever more central to reflections on civilization and what was seen as Europe’s civilizing mission beyond its geographical borders. Chapter 1 focuses on the emergence of the idea of Europe in classical antiquity, before considering its role in late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period, following the discovery of the Americas and the new sense of the European that arose at that time, as the idea of Europe and European civilization slowly came to displace that of Christendom.