Crime and Punishment, Sin and Retribution: From the History of Religious and Legal Traditions of East and Wes

Abstract

The concepts of “sin” and “crime”, “reward” and “punishment” are found in the ancient Indian religious and ethical treatises - dharmasastra Manu, Yajnavalkya and Vishnu, and canon law manuscripts of Western Europe of early and High Middle Ages. The issue of the relationship between Eastern and Western religious and legal views is examined in the paper. The authors defend the idea that religion is a key component having influenced the basic principles of morality and law, the construction of crime and punishment concepts. It is proved that officially already in the early Middle Ages, both in the East and in the West the sources of law differentiate between the sinful and criminal acts, which, however, at that time still was not clear and unambiguous. Based on the application of comparative analysis, hermeneutics, contextual analysis, historical, legal and other methods while studying the dharmasastra texts, the authors propose several classifications of sins against various reasons: according to the form of guilt, the degree of public danger, according to the order imposition and execution of the expiation. In turn, the methods mentioned above contributed to the detailed study of the medieval sources of canon law, which allowed us to formulate the thesis on the official differentiation between the concepts of “sin” and “crime” only after the adoption of the Decretum Gratiani to have been the main source of Western canon law in the Middle Ages.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p662