Mundane Humility

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-70
Author(s):  
Kent Dunnington
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Development

Christian humility was repurposed in the early modern period to suit the goals of the emerging liberal state. After sketching how Thomas Hobbes achieved this repurposing, this chapter shows how David Hume’s critique of Christian humility and Immanuel Kant’s attempt to rescue Christian humility from Hume’s critique created a new kind of “mundane” humility newly committed to the need for a counterbalancing proper pride alongside anything that could be called virtuous humility. After showing how this concern for proper pride was a modern development, the chapter then shows how it drives most contemporary theorizing about humility, including the dominant low concern account of humility. Given that early Christian sayings about humility show no regard for the proper prides, an account of Christian humility will need to confront the claim that the virtue of humility requires counterbalancing by pride.

Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
European Universities ◽  
Modern Period

Nemesius of Emesa’s On Human Nature (De Natura Hominis) is the first Christian anthropology. Written in Greek, circa 390 CE, it was read in half a dozen languages—from Baghdad to Oxford—well into the early modern period. Nemesius’ text circulated in two Latin versions in the centuries that saw the rise of European universities, shaping scholastic theories of human nature. During the Renaissance, it saw a flurry of print editions, helping to inspire a new discourse of human dignity. This is the first monograph in English on Nemesius’ treatise. On the interpretation offered here, the Syrian bishop seeks to define the human qua human. His early Christian anthropology is cosmopolitan. ‘Things that are natural’, he writes, ‘are the same for all’. In his pages, a host of texts and discourses—biblical and medical, legal and philosophical—are made to converge upon a decisive tenet of Christian late antiquity: humans’ natural freedom. For Nemesius, reason and choice are a divine double-strand of powers. Since he believes that both are a natural human inheritance, he concludes that much is ‘in our power’. Nemesius defines humans as the only living beings who are at once ruler (intellect) and ruled (body). Because of this, the human is a ‘little world’, binding the rationality of angels to the flux of elements, the tranquillity of plants, and the impulsiveness of animals. This book traces Nemesius’ reasoning through the whole of On Human Nature, as he seeks to give a long-influential image of humankind both philosophical and anatomical proof.

China Normal: Patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and trade on a Eurasian discursive base

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1278-1314
Author(s):  
PAMELA KYLE CROSSLEY
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
Integrated Environment

AbstractComparative historians have illuminated the weaknesses in the Europe-derived and Europe-centred historical paradigms of the preceding century-and-a-half, while questioning the factual foundations and depth of Europe's development towards capitalism, imperialism, and industrialism. But a continental perspective on China's early modern development suggests the possibilities of a vicinage—or integrated environment—approach to China's development and its relevance to more widespread changes of the early modern period.

Reformed Theology and the Church Fathers

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Aza Goudriaan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Church

The purpose of this chapter is to describe and explain the inherent ambivalence of the reception of patristic writers in (early modern) Reformed theology by concentrating on the early modern period, when patristic authority was discussed intensely, and on those aspects of the reception history that are, more or less strictly, concerned with theology. The theological continuity between Reformed theology and the church fathers is visible most obviously in the adoption of early Christian creeds and in the fact that Reformed theologians commented upon and explained their own confessions by means of compilations of patristic testimonies. The pursuit of catholicity evidenced by numerous other publications and by the corresponding acceptance of patristic heresiology, however, had evident limitations, and was accompanied by caveats and criticisms that have been articulated from the sixteenth century onwards.

Jonathan Edwards’ French Connection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Traditional Belief ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jewish Scholar

Robert E. Brown focuses on Jonthan Edwards’ engagement with the emerging criticism of the early modern period, when the question of who authored the Pentateuch occupied many a biblical interpreter. Influenced by the more rationalistic approach of the Jewish scholar Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), several writers—including Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère, Benedict Spinoza, Richard Simon, and Jean Le Clerc—argued against the traditional belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. One leading responder to this view was Louis Ellie Du Pin, a French Catholic ecumenist, and Edwards, interestingly enough, drew substantially on Du Pin in his own discussion of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Brown uses this episode to show that Edwards was a creative consumer of European ideas, which illustrates that early modern biblical interpretation was more complex and layered than often recognized.

Lost in Translation? Constructing Ancient Roman Martyrs in Baroque Bavaria

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 801-828
Author(s):  
Noria Litaker
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Lost In Translation

Over the course of the early modern period, parish, monastic, and pilgrimage churches across Catholic Europe and beyond eagerly sought to acquire the relics of ancient Roman martyrs excavated from the Eternal City's catacombs. Between 1648 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria welcomed nearly 350 of these “holy bodies” to its soil. Rather than presenting the remains as fragments, as was common during the medieval period, local communities forged catacomb saint relics into gleaming skeletons and then worked to write hagiographical narratives that made martyrs’ lives vivid and memorable to a population unfamiliar with their deeds. Closely examining the construction and material presentation of Bavarian catacomb saints as well as the vitae written for them offers a new vantage point from which to consider how the intellectual movement known as the paleo-Christian revival and the scholarship it produced were received, understood, and then used by Catholic Europeans in an everyday religious context. This article demonstrates that local Bavarian craftsmen, artists, relic decorators, priests, and nuns—along with erudite scholars in Rome—were active in bringing the early Christian church to life and participated in the revival as practitioners and creative scholars in their own right.

Thomas Hobbes

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Peter Machamer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
And Function

In this essay, I present an overview of Hobbes as a consistent philosopher, perhaps the most consistent in the Early Modern period. First, I sketch how his endeavors have a cogency that is unrivalled, in many ways even to this day. Section 2 outlines Hobbes’s conception of philosophy and his causal materialism. Section 3 deals briefly with Hobbes’s discussion of sensation and then presents his views on the nature and function of language and how reason depends upon language. Section 4 treats human nature, and section 5 discusses the artificial body of the Commonwealth. All of this will move rather quickly, so that hopefully the sketch of the overall structure of Hobbes’s thought will be clear. At the end, I will try to correct a few misconceptions, and briefly to say why it was that Hobbes’ natural philosophy has been so unduly neglected.

MIGRATION FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF EASTERN CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
John-Paul A. Ghobrial
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Development ◽  
The Everyday

ABSTRACTFrom Lebanese politicians in Argentina to Iraqi immigrants in Sweden, Middle Eastern Christians can be found today scattered across the entire world. Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political and religious tensions in the Middle East. In fact, this type of mobility had earlier manifestations in the early modern period. From the sixteenth century onwards, Christians from the Ottoman Empire set out for distant worlds and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia and even the Americas and leaving traces of themselves in countless European and Middle Eastern archives, chanceries and libraries. This paper lays out a framework for understanding movement in the early modern world in a way that pays as much attention to how migrants understood their own travels as to contemporary European ideas about Eastern Christian mobility. Focusing on the intersection of two traditions of sources, I explore here how European and Eastern Christian perspectives about migration drew from one another, reinforcing and feeding on each other in powerful, mutually constitutive ways. In doing so, this paper seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the everyday experience of circulation and mobility in the early modern world.

From Craft to Institution: Accounting in Italy from the Middle ages to the Early Modern Period

2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Technical Standards ◽  
Medieval Italy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Professional Field

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.

Becoming “Indians”: The Jesuit Missionary Path from Italy to Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-50
Author(s):  
Camilla Russell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jesuit Missions ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Italian Provinces ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Jesuit Missionary

The Jesuit missions in Asia were among the most audacious undertakings by Europeans in the early modern period. This article focuses on a still relatively little understood aspect of the enterprise: its appointment process. It draws together disparate archival documents to recreate the steps to becoming a Jesuit missionary, specifically the Litterae indipetae (petitions for the “Indies”), provincial reports about missionary candidates, and replies to applicants from the Jesuit superior general. Focusing on candidates from the Italian provinces of the Society of Jesus, the article outlines not just how Jesuit missionaries were appointed but also the priorities, motivations, and attitudes that informed their assessment and selection. Missionaries were made, the study shows, through a specific “way of proceeding” that was negotiated between all parties and seen in both organizational and spiritual terms, beginning with the vocation itself, which, whether the applicant departed or not, earned him the name indiano.

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