Medieval Theology Research Articles

Original Sin according to John Duns Scotus

Original Sin according to John Duns Scotus Ernesto Dezza OFM (bio) This article is intended to offer a textual and evaluative presentation of the theory of original sin as elaborated by the Franciscan master John Duns Scotus († 1308), the “Subtle Doctor.” While there are many studies and articles about Scotus’ ethics, few are devoted to what is considered the root of evil human behavior, and hardly any analyze the text of the Subtle Doctor in any sufficient depth.1 Perhaps because this topic belongs more strictly to theology, it is seldom considered in depth by philosophers. On the other hand, since Catholic theology after Vatican II has virtually narrowed its treatment of medieval topics and figures to all but Thomas Aquinas, it is rare to find any theologians interested in other medieval theories of original sin. Yet, the way Duns Scotus presents the doctrine of original sin, namely, by showing the limitations of the Augustinian tradition, offers interesting contributions to the debate on this topic which is far from resolved in contemporary theology.2 Furthermore, philosophers interested in Scotus’ [End Page 111] thought would do well to analyze his theory on original sin, since the way he considers the human being is always predominantly theological. Studying anthropology or ethics in the Middle Ages without examining its theological scope is limited and one-sided. Before all considerations are examined, it is important to clarify the terms used in this topic. According to the Bible, our first parents participated in a sin of disobedience to God (see Gen. 3), which is called “the Fall” (casus) or “Adam’s sin” (peccatum Adae) by medieval theologians. When using the expression ‘original sin’ (peccatum originale), medieval theologians signified the consequences of Adam’s sin, that is, Adam’s sin in us.3 Catholic theology after the Council of Trent uses the expression peccatum originale originans to denote the sin of Adam, because it is the cause of the origin of our own sinful condition, and the expression peccatum originale originatum to denote the effect of that sin in us, thus showing a strong correlation between cause and effect. Nevertheless, I will follow the usage of medieval theologians and avoid the last two expressions. So, in the following paragraphs we will see, in a step-by-step manner, Scotus’ exposition on original sin as read in his first classroom teaching on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the Lectura.4 1. Presentation of the Problem The topic is presented by Scotus in four questions throughout distinctions 30–32 of the second book of his commentary on the Sentences, which constitute a unique little treatise about original sin.5 In the first question, Scotus asks whether everyone who is naturally descended from Adam contracts original sin. There are five arguments [End Page 112] against this: two from Augustine, one from Julian of Eclanum, one from Aristotle, and the last one derived from reason.6 The core of these arguments is that sin presupposes a personal responsibility and that human nature cannot be considered guilty in itself because of an action performed by Adam. On the other hand, we know from Scripture that “through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned” (Romans 5:12). The second question is whether original sin is formally a lack of original justice.7 Four arguments8 arise against this explanation, because it does not seem that original sin and original justice must be considered as simply contrary to each other: e.g. an evil angel did not have original justice, yet he has not contracted original sin.9 Furthermore, while original sin seems related to some corporeal transmission in generation, justice belongs to the will, and the will is completely separable from the body (voluntas non est organica).10 In the argument to the contrary, however, it seems that original sin is nothing but a lack of original justice, because that sin is not an act of concupiscence (which belongs naturally to the sensitive power),11 yet is a mortal sin because it keeps us out of communion with God. It is not a type of ignorance, because babies are just...

Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy by Tobias Hoffmann

Reviewed by: Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy by Tobias Hoffmann Julie Fox-Horton Middle Ages, angels, free will, intellectualism, voluntarism, fallibility, agency, psychology, theology tobias hoffmann. Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 292. In Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy, Tobias Hoffmann thoroughly examines the height of the free will debate and the influence of Aristotle's action theory on theologians central to the dispute in the Latin West between the 1220s and the 1320s. The reception of Aristotle at this time caused a shift in the debate from a theologically centered reflection on the relationship between free will and sin, to a philosophical query exploring "how free agency is rooted in the powers of the soul" (1). Organized into three sections, Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy serves as an encyclopedia of medieval theologians and philosophical thinkers in the Latin West entrenched in the debate of free will as the theoretical evolution unfolds. Hoffmann's methodology for evaluating each thinker's position on the topic consists in looking at three fundamental components: their presuppositions of free will and the question of controlling one's actions, the agency of choice, and the discourse of outright evil. In Part I, "Free Will," Hoffmann begins with a brief introduction to the essential theories of free will before Aristotelian action theory entered the debate. Discussing Augustine's struggle over the issue of free will and then moving on to Peter Lombard's treatment of the issue in his Sentences, or [End Page 438] Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, which had a profound influence on theology for some time as "a principal reference text in the formation of Catholic theologians from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries," Hoffmann moves quickly on to the ideological shift (20). Beginning in the 1220s, two influential texts circulated among theologians, John of Damascus's De fide orthodoxa and portions of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, at which point Aristotle became the "principal authority in philosophy," and influential in the free will debate (22). Once medieval theologians began to reflect on Aristotle's ideas on the mechanics of decision-making, traditional notions that once focused on "the relation between free decision, sin, and grace" shifted, in what Hoffmann refers to as a psychological turn, to a "psychological foundation of free decision in reason and will" (31). During the early phases of the psychological turn in the free will debate, scholars like Thomas Aquinas—particularly through his ideas of "the will as a rational appetite" and his discourse on the relation of the intellect and will—created a divide among thinkers, characterized as either intellectualism or voluntarism (42). For voluntarism, Hoffmann points to several medieval thinkers but focuses on Henry of Ghent and his voluntarist conceptions of free will that both align with and deviate from Aquinas. Hoffmann then turns to thinkers whose theories lean toward intellectualism, focusing on Godfrey of Fontaines and his use of principles of metaphysics to address the cause of free will. During the first two decades of the fourteenth century, the free will debate evolved even further with theologians like John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who either refined or radicalized free will theories (119). In Part II, "Whence Evil?", a theme central to medieval theologians and the debate of free will is evaluated—the origin of evil. As a premise on the origin of evil, Hoffmann turns to Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius. For Augustine, the question of the origin of evil developed from "a thorough reflection about the fall of angels" (163). In comparison, Augustine argued, according to Hoffman, "an evil will ultimately lacks an explanation," (169) while Pseudo-Dionysius argued, "evil cannot be a final cause" (173). The unifying principle for both thinkers is the belief that "evil does not have an efficient cause" (173). From Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius Hoffmann explores deeper the cause of evil according to other thinkers, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Lombard, William of Auxerre, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and John Duns Scotus. After a lengthy analysis of the influence on and the contributions of these...

Who Do You Think You Are?: DNA and Jewish American Ipseity

Who Do You Think You Are?:DNA and Jewish American Ipseity Laurie Zoloth (bio) REVIEW ESSAY DNA Test Results Videos 23andMe, https://www.youtube.com/user/23andMe There is a small town in Tennessee where the people think that they are Turkish, or rather that they are a tribe of people, called Melungeons, that is descended from Turkish sailors, who sailed with a Portuguese crew, or perhaps with Francis Drake, in the 1700s, and ended up in coastal Virginia, and from there walked into the woods of the Appalachian ridge, where their descendants live today. In fact, they are sure of it. They look, it is true, unlike many of their neighbors—darker skin, curly hair. For many years, they said they were Portuguese, then settled on Turkish. There is a book about this story, The Resurrection of a Proud People: The Melungeons written in 1994 and reprinted in 1997, and another, From Anatolia to Appalachia: A Turkish American Dialogue, written in 2003; their author, local historian Brent Kennedy, also claims Melungeon ancestry. Although Kennedy "cannot prove his theories and ideas to a 100 percent, in his heart, he feels himself to be of Turkish descent."1 Of course, when the Turks heard of this, they were delighted, and the Turkish ambassador, it is said, awarded the community a special plaque. Visits were arranged. I first heard about Melungeons when bioethicist Carl Elliott and I were co-PIs on an NIH grant, one intended to research the ethical implications that would occur when the human genome project was unrolled, and we would enter a "new era of genetic medicine." We were curious to understand if genome mapping would change earlier ideas about family, [End Page 455] origin narratives, history and identity. It was in the early 2000s, and we invited Bennett Greenspan, then just proposing the idea of commercial ancestry testing, to talk to us, along with Melungeon informants and an assortment of scientists. There were a lot of claims about Jewish ancestry then—an African tribe, the Lemba, claimed Jewish heritage, and then there were all those people in New Mexico, who were coming up with narratives about elderly relatives lighting candles in the basement and that meant they were really secret Jews. Our Melungeon informants too told me: "You know the real secret, don't you, the Melungeons are Jews!" The anthropologist I interviewed for the project was a skeptic. "People will go a long way to prove they are not Black," she sighed. (It turned out that the claim about being a Lost Tribe was especially common in communities where a Protestant missionary had at some point taught Hebrew Scripture—who wouldn't want to be the Israelites?) We were curious to understand how elaborate genealogical narratives, ones that told of endurance, true love across time, and exotic encounters that played out in the ordinary worlds of Tennessee mountain towns and New Mexican desert landscapes, would survive. Twenty and so years later, of course, all the beautiful stories, all the Lost Tribes and the lost Jews have been refracted and reframed just as we suspected they might, by the language and calculus of genetics. So now, instead of faint memories of lost candle lighters or the search for Mogen Davids on tombstones, we have YouTube videos of people who have sent their saliva away and gotten an answer that seems far more sciencey: a little chart with numbers and percentages. One YouTube video shows the actor Mayim Bialik revealing her 23andMe results, in which she makes jokes about her body and her character, both of which are "in her DNA," with the certainty that a medieval theologian would locate them in the soul. Indeed, the DNA code and the percentages have become the stand-in for the idea that deep within each of us, unseen, yet powerfully determinative, is a secret, inner self, an authentic self, our "really real," untouched by history, or context, or our actual choices. "It can tell you why you cry at commercials with puppies," says Bialik, "but what if I am really a boy?" She finds out that her "genetic muscle composition is common in elite power athletes!" and after reading off...

Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates by Richard Cross

Reviewed by: Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates by Richard Cross Aaron Moldenhauer Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates. By Richard Cross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 312 pp. Richard Cross takes a unique approach to the Christological debates among sixteenth-century Reformers. He does not survey the course of the debates, nor does he consider the many scriptural or patristic arguments raised. Instead, he limits his inquiry to a rigorous analysis of the metaphysical and semantic arguments made by Lutheran and Reformed theologians as they debated the communication of attributes. Cross’s goal is neither to judge which position is correct nor to provide a complete picture of the debates. Instead, he offers deep analysis of key snapshots in the course of the discussion that illuminate the metaphysical and semantic arguments. The result is a book that applies a typical methodology used to analyze scholastic philosophical theology to key moments of Reformation debates about the person of Christ. This approach situates Cross’s work among other works exploring the relation of the Reformers’ Christology to philosophy. Older analyses of Luther’s Christology, influenced by Reinhard Schwarz, argued that Luther broke cleanly with scholastic approaches to the person of Christ since Luther found late medieval metaphysics and semantics unsuited for Christology. Graham White’s Luther as Nominalist (1984) counters Schwarz’s approach by identifying continuities between the scholastics and Luther. In recent years works such as Joar Haga’s Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics? (2012) and David Luy’s Dominus Mortis (2014) have continued this conversation. Cross assumes two points debated in these and other works. First, Cross assumes that the Reformers made metaphysical and semantic arguments in their Christology. Second, Cross assumes that the Reformers knew and used scholastic Christology. The validity of these assumptions can be judged by assessing Cross’s work. An expert in medieval theology, Cross proceeds by [End Page 484] identifying and labeling arguments. While medieval theologians explicitly identified these arguments, the Reformers did not. Despite this difference in style, Cross argues that the Reformers raised metaphysical and semantic arguments and intended them to be taken seriously. Cross reduces key arguments to symbolic representation, using logical shorthand and identifying various positions by initials for ease of future reference. For instance, Cross isolates one of Luther’s arguments raised in his Christological debate with Ulrich Zwingli. Luther held that the two natures of Christ cannot be spatially separated without dividing the person of Christ. Accordingly, wherever Christ’s divine nature is, there Christ’s human nature must also be present. Otherwise the person of Christ is divided. Cross labels this argument as “impossibility of bodily separability” and abbreviates it as “the IBS principle.” He defines IBS as the argument: “If the natures lack two-way spatial inseparability, the person is not indivisible” (59–65). Cross’s list of such frequently cited principles runs close to two pages, showing the extent of his research into primary sources and the precision of his analysis. This type of analysis applied to the conceptually dense material of Reformation Christology demands careful attention from the reader. Cross succeeds in identifying metaphysical and semantic arguments raised by Reformers and in showing that the Reformers knew scholastic Christology, raising questions about how cleanly the Reformers broke with late medieval scholasticism. However, those interested in the debate will need to look beyond this book for a complete picture of Reformation Christology. Cross does not ask how important the arguments he analyzes were in relation to the scriptural, patristic, or other arguments raised. Nor does he ask how significant it is that the Reformers broke with medieval theologians as they pushed philosophical arguments to the background of their work. That is, the reader must recognize the limits of the study that Cross assigns himself. When the limited scope of the book is kept in mind, Cross’s work provides a window into an important facet of Reformation Christology and raises broader questions about the role of philosophy in Reformation theology. [End Page 485] Aaron Moldenhauer Concordia University Wisconsin Mequon, Wisconsin Copyright © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc

Whose Social Contract?

Many scholars view political contractarianism as a distinctly modern account of the foundations of political order. Ideas such as popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, the necessity of the consent of the governed for rightful political authority, natural equality, and a pre-civil state of nature embody the modern rupture with classical political philosophy and traditional Christian theology. At the headwaters of this modern revolution stands Thomas Hobbes. Since the American founders subscribed to the social contract theory, they are often said to reject classical political philosophy and traditional Christian political theology as well. In America on Trial, Robert Reilly rejects the usual argument. He maintains that the building blocks of the American founding originate in medieval Christian political theology. In this essay, I argue that a morally and metaphysically realist contractarian tradition—one that affirms natural equality, the authority of the society over government, the necessity of consent for legitimate government, the right to resist tyrannical rulers, and the idea of a pre-civil state of nature—predates Hobbes and also that the voluntarist contractarian tradition inaugurated by Hobbes is self-referentially incoherent. A coherent political contractarianism logicially depends on the sort of metaphysics and moral ontology Hobbes rejects.

Перелом или тупик? Дебаты в рамках теологической рецепции кантовской философии

Kant’s turn to the subject has changed the epistemological conditions for theology. Four intellectual backgrounds of objections are examined: an Aristotelian and Thomistic teleological order of nature (1); Augustinianism based on original sin in which human agency is completely attributed to God’s grace (2); a Hegelian critique of the deontological conception of an “unconditional ought” which also puts Kant’s postulate of the existence of God into question (3); the combination in Radical Orthodoxy of a postmodern critique of the subject, an Augustinian view of human nature, and a monistic understanding of the Trinity (4). Their different diagnoses why Kant’s work constitutes a cul-de-sac are contrasted with theological positions that welcome it as a watershed: its move from ontology to human subjectivity; from a biologically transmitted inescapable sin to a freedom for good and evil; from a strict reciprocity to an unlimited scope of ethics that is faced with the question of meaning; and from condemning the secular as “heretical” to defining it as the genuine space of the free human counterparts created by God, according to Duns Scotus’s late medieval theology which anticipates Kant’s concept of autonomy. The standard by which theologies are judged is how they do justice to the New Testament’s message of salvation by Jesus Christ. The Conclusion argues that Kant’s turn to freedom in its unconditionality and finitude has opened up a thought form in which the truth of the Gospel finds more adequate categories of understanding than in those of earlier eras.

Символика еды в мире «Видения о Петре Пахаре»

W. Langland’s allegorical poem Vision of Piers Plowman is one of the key works of the medieval religious literature. Scenes of eating or drinking are among its most important episodes. The sacral meaning of food in the poem originates in the context of medieval theology appearing around certain evangelic images (“I am the bread of life,” etc.) Each time when the characters eat or drink the realization of Christian dogmas is having place, or, on the contrary, they are refused, because the abundance of “daily bread” leads to spiritual deafness. Gluttony goes hand in hand with hypocrisy, and in the world of the poem it appears not only as over-eating but also as rejecting any real Christian practice. A glutton wastes goods he could give out to the needy, as well as the treasures of his soul; and if he is of the learned, he deprives the “little ones” of their spiritual repast, too. W. Langland includes everyday events and doings into the supertemporal Bible narrative, thus actualizing them for all his Christian readers. As the result of such text organization, food-related episodes appear to be linking spots for the main themes of the poem (Christian life, charity, love, knowledge).

Символика еды в мире «Видения о Петре Пахаре»

W. Langland’s allegorical poem Vision of Piers Plowman is one of the key works of the medieval religious literature. Scenes of eating or drinking are among its most important episodes. The sacral meaning of food in the poem originates in the context of medieval theology appearing around certain evangelic images (“I am the bread of life,” etc.) Each time when the characters eat or drink the realization of Christian dogmas is having place, or, on the contrary, they are refused, because the abundance of “daily bread” leads to spiritual deafness. Gluttony goes hand in hand with hypocrisy, and in the world of the poem it appears not only as over-eating but also as rejecting any real Christian practice. A glutton wastes goods he could give out to the needy, as well as the treasures of his soul; and if he is of the learned, he deprives the “little ones” of their spiritual repast, too. W. Langland includes everyday events and doings into the supertemporal Bible narrative, thus actualizing them for all his Christian readers. As the result of such text organization, food-related episodes appear to be linking spots for the main themes of the poem (Christian life, charity, love, knowledge).

Medieval university as a space for dialogue of cultures

The history of scholasticism provides the modern researcher with a wealth of material for studying the question of the state of theology at the university. Scholasticism can be viewed as an experience of solving the problem of the relationship between theological and scientific-rational knowledge. This experience can be considered negative in the sense that the formula defining the place of philosophy as the servant of theology reflected, rather, some desirable situation, rather than the actual state of affairs. The potential of the natural sciences and philosophy was so high that ultimately the synthesis of philosophy and theology came to be understood as a process of mutual enrichment. However, the idea of mutual enrichment of the arsenals of philosophy and theology, to which, for example, the pedagogy of the Society of Jesus approached quite closely, as a whole remained alien to Western European thought. This idea turned out to be very attractive for the religious philosophy of modern times, where it manifested itself, in particular, in a critical attitude towards the excessive enthusiasm of Western European philosophy with the problems of method, towards its “epistemology”. The religious and philosophical thought of the New Age, which had a significant influence on theology, was based on the recognition of the methodological limitations of natural reason, which is unable to independently cognize the truths of Divine Revelation, the “truth of faith”. This limitation is removed in the experience of existential philosophizing, in many respects opposite to the essentialism (doctrine of essences) of medieval theology. On the other hand, the mutual enrichment of philosophy and theology presupposed an appeal to the traditions of mystical intuitionism, neo-Platonism, and apophatic theology that were not in demand in Western European theology. In the history of Christianity, these traditions have played the same role in knowledge as asceticism in practice. They provided the Christian with a set of intellectual techniques aimed at cleansing the rational soul, necessary for the perception of the truths of Divine Revelation.

Система методологічних координат для історіографа середньовічної філософії: пропозиція щодо тлумачного інструменту

The last thirty years of scholarship in western medieval philosophical historiography have seen a number of reflections on the methodological paradigms, schools, trends, and dominant approaches in the field. As a contribution to this ongoing assessment of the existing methods of studies in medieval philosophy and theology and a supplement to classifications offered by M. Colish, J. Inglis, C. König-Pralong, J. Marenbon, A. de Libera, and others, the article offers another explanatory tool. Here is a description of an imaginary system of methodological coordinates that systematizes the current tendencies by placing them in a three-dimensional system of axes. Every axis corresponds to a certain aspect of the historical and systematic research in medieval thought and symbolizes a possible movement between two extremes representing opposite methodological values and directions. The methods and approaches practiced in recent studies in medieval philosophy and theology might be schematically located inside this general system of argumentational, focal (or objectival), and (con)textual axes with their intersection identified with what some scholars call the “integral” model of study. This explanatory tool allows one to see how current approaches and methods form a panoply of axes that belong together in one complex grid and helps to visualize the tapestry of existing approaches in medieval philosophical historiography.

The birds and the Bedes: Race, gender, and sexuality in Bede\u2019s In Cantica Canticorum

This article argues that Bede – like modern intersectional analysis – believed that identity categories cannot be disentangled or understood in isolation. In Bede’s commentary on the Song of Songs, skin color, gender, and religious identity intermix with metaphors of sexuality. These categories coalesce in a monumental lesson on how to read. Bede claims that reading the Song literally – perceiving Black skin, eroticism, gender confusion – means reading like a Jew and prevents readers from seeing the feminine, metaphorical level below the masculine, carnal level. This article suggests that intersectional analysis is akin to much medieval thought rather than being an anachronistic imposition on a historical text. Intersectional analysis can lay bare how medieval theologians saw identity categories as interwoven and interdependent, even while the theologians themselves entrenched hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and religious difference. For Bede, Christian interpretation is a continual process of moving from a literal outside (Black, masculine, carnal, sexual) to a metaphorical inside (beautiful, feminine, allegorical, chaste, reproductive). Once inside, however, we – like the bird passing through the hall – must return once again to the outside in an endless movement between layers that echoes theological processes of rumination and blurs the divide between the contemplative and the active life.

Secularización: ¿Una categoría válida? Una reevaluación del debate Löwith-Blumenberg en torno al surgimiento de la modernidad

Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History presents the emergence of modern philosophy of history as a secularization of medieval theology of history. His thesis holds that modern historical consciousness transposes into the immanent frame a constitutively transcendent element: the Christian history of salvation. In The Legitimacy of the Modern Age Hans Blumenberg impugns Löwith’s theory, by arguing that it works on the erroneous assumption that there would be a substantial content originally possessed by medieval Christianity and only later illegitimately appropriated by modernity. Blumenberg proposes that Löwith’s “transposition” hypothesis must be replaced by his own “reoccupation”: the modern vision of history would have thus taken up the place of Christian eschatology. This paper contends that Blumenberg fails to see that he and his opponent are arguing at different epistemological levels: while Blumenberg’s discussion operates at the level of the efficient causation of history, Löwith’s is focused on the philosophical root of the teleology of the modern idea of progress, which explains this notion as a transposition of the eschaton into a purely immanent telos .

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

Jane Hawkes and Meg Boulton , eds. All Roads Lead to Rome: The Creation, Context and Transmission of the Codex Amiatinus. Studia Traditionis Theologiae: Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology 31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. Pp. 220. $98.00 (cloth).

Jane Hawkes and Meg Boulton , eds. All Roads Lead to Rome: The Creation, Context and Transmission of the Codex Amiatinus. Studia Traditionis Theologiae: Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology 31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. Pp. 220. $98.00 (cloth). - Volume 59 Issue 4

The Cardinal Importance of Names

Abstract Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth makes four substantive changes to the traditional titles of the tarot trumps. Three of these relate to the cardinal virtues which had remained in the deck despite the almost complete esoteric revisioning of the tarot that had taken place over the preceding two centuries; the fourth is an integral part of the same topic. This article focuses on why Crowley felt impelled to make these changes as well as the significance of the new names (and associated iconography). The discussion centres around Crowley’s rejection of the cardinal virtues that underly Christian ethics in favour of the new system of morality laid out in The Book of the Law and subsequently encapsulated in Thelema. Consequently, the article first examines the development of the cardinal virtues in patristic and medieval theology and then shows how Crowley sought to overturn these values in his agenda of cultural reprogramming of which The Book of Thoth arguably constitutes the high-water mark.

From Topography to Text: The Image of Jerusalem in the Writings of Eucherius, Adomnán and Bede. By Rodney Aist. Studia Traditionis Theologiae Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology 30. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. xxiv + 262 pp. €65.00 paper.

From Topography to Text: The Image of Jerusalem in the Writings of Eucherius, Adomnán and Bede. By Rodney Aist. Studia Traditionis Theologiae Explorations in Early and Medieval Theology 30. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. xxiv + 262 pp. €65.00 paper.

The Father’s Kenosis: A Defense of Bonaventure on Intra-trinitarian Acts

Russell Friedman identifies two “rival accounts” in medieval trinitarian theology. The “emanation account,” which Bonaventure represents, prefers to emphasize the constitutive role of “act” or “operation” among the intra-trinitarian persons. The “relation account,” that of Thomas Aquinas, prefers rather to say that relations alone constitute divine persons. A specific question illustrates their difference: Does the Father generate the Son because the Father is Father, or is He Father because He generates the Son? Aquinas thinks the former, Bonaventure the latter. Bonaventure’s position attracts criticism from contemporary Thomists. And even Franciscan sympathizers have conceded ambiguity around this point of his trinitarian theology. To wit: If the Father’s act of begetting the Son makes him Father, doesn’t this presume a “Proto-Father,” as Friedman has it, who begets? I argue that this criticism ignores the uniquely Christian-Neoplatonic premises Bonaventure’s view presumes. Perceiving them manifests Bonaventure’s deep coherence on this point and beyond.

The Role of Philosophy in Dante’s Divine Comedy

The paper considers the role of antique philosophy in medieval theology. Dante’s «Divine Comedy» was chosen as an object for a comparative study of philosophy and theology. A «сomplicated» relationship between theology and philosophy is due to the question of the creation of the world. According to Aristotle and his medieval successors Averroes and Siger of Brabant, the world was not created by God but, he is needed as the source of its movement. Despite Aristotle’s overwhelming authority as a Philosopher and a Teacher, Dante placed antique thinkers led by Aristotle, in Limbo, Hell canopy. So they were unable to pass through Hell and Purgatory and face God one day. Ancient thinkers were to blame for living before Christ and therefore not knowing him. It is underlined, that all real-life hostilities become meaningless in Heaven, where everyone is equal before God. That’s why Thomas Aquinas and Siger de Brabantt are side by side in Heaven. The article states that the theme of wisdom is a keynote of Dante’s «Divine Comedy». It is noted, that Dante’s journey through the circles of Hell, ascension into Purgatory and «getting» to Heaven is because of Beatrice – allegory of philosophy. It was philosophy (in the form of beautiful Beatrice) «coming» to help when Dante found himself in an «impassable forest» of his soul. Philosophy in the form of Beatrice presents wisdom. Theology, in turn, is intended to purify the minds, which is possible just in Purgatory. Heaven is the embodiment of justice and perception of truth, the place of some conciliation between theology and philosophy.

Grotius’s Doctrine of Alliances with Infidels and the Idea of Respublica Christiana

In the framework of the issue of the observance of promises and agreements (De iure belli ac pacis, bk. ii), Grotius discusses the question of whether Christians should be allowed to conclude treaties or alliances (federa) with those who were named infideles in the canonical and theological terminology. The question was ancient: since the early Middle Ages, alliances of Christians with infidels had been labeled as ‘impious’ (impium fedus). Grotius’s solutions are based on the converging traditions of medieval canon law and theology: treaties and alliances with infidels are intrinsically lawful according to natural and positive divine law, although they should be avoided in certain circumstances. Grotius’s concern, however, was not so much to affirm the theoretical lawfulness of the fedus cum infidelibus. The outcome of his argument consists in promoting the cohesion of Christians: he thinks that a joint action of the Christian nations is a moral and juridical obligation in the face of the aggressions caused by the enemies of Christendom.

Mereology in Kalām

Abstract The objective of this article is twofold. First, it investigates mereology in medieval Islamic theology, particularly the theologians’ claim that the whole is identical to its parts and accordingly that at least some attributes common to the parts must by extension be attributed of the whole. This claim was refuted by philosophers and, from the eleventh century onwards, an increasing number of theologians. Second, it offers a new interpretation of the standard theological proof from accidents for creation ex nihilo, to which this problem was central. A wide range of early, classical and later theological and philosophical sources are consulted.