Jansenist Augustinianism and the Springs of Pastoral Rigorism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Human Liberty

The central controversy surrounding Jansenism concerned its alleged heterodoxy in respect to divine grace and human liberty. Five propositions regarding fallen human nature, the operation of grace, and the ability of man to cooperate with it were extracted from Jansen’s Augustinus, and condemned by Innocent X in 1653. The Jansenists denied that they maintained the propositions in the condemned sense. Their position was framed against a teaching developed by Molina and other Jesuits (analysed in section II), which, they claimed, attributed so much power to fallen nature as to fall into Pelagianism. The chapter balances accounts which relate the Jansenists’ moral rigorism wholly to their pessimistic assessment of human nature and their predestinarianism. They aimed to establish human freedom and the responsibility of each individual for his own conversion, and the counterpoint to their view of the fall was a mystical optimism regarding the destiny of nature under grace.

Conclusions

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-196
Author(s):  
Richard A. Muller
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Free Choice ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Church

Perkins’s work has been shown to stand at the intersection of the strongly traditionary and catholic defense of the Church of England against Roman polemics with the early Reformed orthodox appropriations of scholastic argumentation. Early orthodox Reformed theology, in the works of William Perkins and his contemporaries, developed a highly nuanced understanding of human free choice and divine grace, distinguished according to the four states of human nature. His resolution of the issue of divine grace and human freedom drew eclectically on arguments from the Thomist tradition and from patterns in late medieval voluntarism. At the same time, it reinforced and refined the heritage of the Reformation on the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. The Reformed orthodoxy represented by Perkins and his contemporaries insists that God guarantees the free choice of free creatures, who always must act according to their natures.

scholarly journals Finite in Infinity

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-109
Author(s):  
Hannah Laurens
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Metaphysical Theory

One of the main themes in Spinoza’s Ethics is the issue of human freedom: What does it consist in and how may it be attained? Spinoza’s ethical views crucially depend on his metaphysical theory, and this close connection provides the answer to several central questions concerning Spinoza’s conception of human freedom. Firstly, how can we accommodate human freedom within Spinoza’s necessitarianism—in the context of which Spinoza rejects the notion of a free will? Secondly, how can humans, as merely finite beings, genuinely attain freedom? Can Spinoza defend his claim that we may even attain blessedness? I will argue that these questions are answered by appeal to a twofold in human nature. According to Spinoza, we are finite in infinity.

Bernard Lonergan e a Probabilidade Emergente

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1727-1742
Author(s):  
Mendo Castro Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Bernard Lonergan ◽  
Heuristic Model ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Generalized Probability ◽  
The Way

In Insight, an essay on human understanding, (1957, 1st edition) Lonergan presents a heuristic model of emerging probability in order to define, explain and extract norms from the dynamism common to all nature, including human nature, a dynamism that mirrors the reality of intellection. Continuity between different levels of nature discloses a directed, upward, but indeterminate dynamism of the emerging generalized probability. In addition to the ethical consequences that he elaborates, Lonergan remains in an open hermeneutic framework, beyond being proportionate to discursive reason; he opens the way for a surprising final manifestation of this universal dynamism through what he calls transcendent conjugated forms of generalized probability emerging – faith, hope and charity – that are proposed to human freedom.

The Design of Montesquieu'sThe Spirit of the Laws:The Triumph of Freedom over Determinism

2009 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANA J. SAMUEL
Keyword(s):  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Liberty ◽  
Ultimate Purpose ◽  
Standing Question

One of the perennial puzzles of Montesquieu'sThe Spirit of the Lawsis whether it has a coherent design. Although the dominant line of thinking is that this work has no unified structure, another believes it to have some organizing principle, even though proposals as to what it may be have failed to convince for lack of ability to account for various features of the work. I propose thatThe Spirit of the Lawsis organized in a dialectical way, juxtaposing the antitheses of human freedom and determination. The tension between these is manifest in the first half of the work and resolved in the middle, and human freedom worked out and advanced in the second half. This article solves the long-standing question of the design ofThe Spirit of the Lawsand reveals that the work's ultimate purpose is to champion human liberty over determination, contrary to the views of those who read the work as deterministic.

scholarly journals Beyond Personalist Virtue Ethics: Transcendental Anthropology and its Implications for Interpersonal Communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kleio Akrivou ◽  
Manuel Joaquín Fernández González
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Communication Ethics ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Nature And Society

There is a need of deeper understanding of what human beings are for facing adequately global challenges. The aim of this article is to point to the possible contributions that transcendental anthropology would represent for complementing and expanding the valuable, but still incomplete solutions put forward by personalist virtue ethics to face these challenges. In particular, the question of the moral motivation and the complex relations between virtue and freedom are addressed, taking as a starting point the understanding of the uniqueness of the personal act-of-being and the transcendentality of human freedom, which is in dialogue with human nature and society, but ultimately not subdued to none of them. Some implications of the transcendental anthropology in the field of interpersonal communication ethics are put forward.

Divine and Human Action in Salvation in Augustine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Pelagian Controversy

This chapter engages the work of Augustine on divine grace and human freedom in salvation. It works through the types of divine action seen in Augustine’s writings on grace in the Pelagian controversy as well as his work on baptism with respect to the Donatists. The author also examines a precursor to Augustine, Cyril of Jerusalem, and his work on catechesis and divine action. He considers what these theologians had to say about divine action in grace, baptism, forgiveness, and in the experience of salvation. Considering Augustine’s theology of grace, the author notes the perennial problems in reconciling divine causation of grace with human freedom in salvation.

Reading Rahner’s Evolutionary Christology with Bonaventure

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 507-529
Author(s):  
Michael Rubbelke ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Karl Rahner ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Character ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Trinity

In his evolutionary Christology, Karl Rahner shares some surprising affinities with Bonaventure. Both envision human beings as microcosmic, that is, as uniquely representative of the whole of creation. Both describe creation Christocentrically, oriented in its design and goal toward the Incarnate Word. Both understand humans as radically responsible for the non-human world. These similarities point to a more foundational congruence in their Trinitarian theologies. Rahner and Bonaventure connect the Father’s personal character as fontal source of Son and Spirit to God’s unoriginated and free relation to creation. If the Word expresses the Father fully, creation expresses God in a real but incomplete way. This grounds a series of analogous relationships between created spirit and matter, human freedom and nature, as well as grace and human nature. From this perspective, Rahner’s evolutionary Christology can be seen as ecologically significant, appreciatively critical of evolution, and ultimately rooted in the Trinity.

scholarly journals Eriugeny koncepcja powrotu: dzieło natury czy łaski?

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 31-58
Author(s):  
AGNIESZKA KIJEWSKA
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
First Cause ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius

This paper tackles upon John Scottus Eriugena’s concept of the return while presenting it against the background of the Neoplatonic teaching about return (epistrophe). The return belongs to the conceptual triad: mone-proodos-epistrophe which used to serve Neoplatonic thinkers to describe the structure of reality and its dependence on the First Cause. In the system of Eriugena who bequeathed that very teaching from the Christian Neoplatonists (Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa), we talk about the return on metaphysical and mystical level in addition to the general return (reditus generalis) and the return of the elects (reditus specialis). Eriugena indicates the cyclical processes in the whole nature but at the same time he stresses that the return is caused by divine grace and the very condition of its possibility is the fact of taking fl esh (incarnatio) and taking human nature (inhumanatio) by Jesus Christ.

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