The Reception of Aquinas’ Ethics

2021 ◽  
pp. 553-564
Author(s):  
Angela Knobel
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Definitive Solution

In this chapter I argue that the most productive way to approach long-standing, apparently ‘insoluble’ interpretive questions about Aquinas is to focus not on finding a definitive solution, but on the question of how Aquinas’ fundamental commitments ‘constrain’ the various solutions that can be offered. As an example of how this might be helpful, I apply this method to the long-standing debate over whether or not Aquinas recognized the possibility of so-called ‘pagan’ virtue. I argue that while Aquinas’ text can sustain multiple answers to this question, his most fundamental commitments regarding the good commensurate to human nature, man’s inherent capacity to pursue that good, and the effects of original sin create important limits on the different solutions that can be offered.

‘I wish you joy of the worm’: Evolutionary ecology in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Martin
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Ecology ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Human Uniqueness ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
Industrial State

Disaffected from the court and shaken out of conventional assumptions about human nature by the Ghost’s revelations, Hamlet begins to think of comparisons with non-human life, beginning with his father as ‘old mole’ (1.5.170). Later he turns to worms, and his attention suggests a willed strategy of existential and ecological discovery, since worms occupied a place diametrically opposite to humans in the traditional hierarchy of life. Renaissance Humanists often used the perceived inferiority of worms and other animals to define human uniqueness. Their gradations of being, by extension, justified human mastery of the earth represented in Hamlet by Claudius’s modernizing transformation of Denmark into a military-industrial state. Adopting a worm-oriented perspective (wryly imagined by conservation ecologist André Voisin in my epigraph), Hamlet begins to question his own conventional Humanist reflexes, such as those on display in his opening soliloquy (e.g. ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason /Would have mourned longer’ [1.2.150–51]). Recent critics have shown how analogies between social behaviour and animals in Hamlet and other Shakespeare plays reflect the rediscovery of classical scepticism towards human superiority by Humanists such as Michel de Montaigne, before René Descartes and other Enlightenment philosophers elevated mind and soul into essential qualities of human nature. As in other areas of ecology and environmentalism discussed in this book, early modern reflections such as Hamlet’s look forward to today’s post-Cartesian and post-human enquiries into human, animal, and cyborgian crossovers. In this chapter I want to align these pre-modern and present-day horizons with the scientific revolution that links them: evolutionary biology’s tracing of human origins to the shared creaturely and genetic life of the planet. Worms will be my trope for Hamlet’s attention to what Giorgio Agamben calls a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ between human and animal life, and what Andreas Höfele identifies as the complex doubleness of similarity and difference that runs through all of Shakespeare’s animal–human relations, beginning with the comic dialogues of Crab and Lance in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The Rudeness and Reverence of Geoffrey Hill’s Mariology

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-165
Author(s):  
Jesse Russell
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
British History ◽  
Blessed Virgin Mary ◽  
The World ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Geoffrey Hill

Abstract Due to his seemingly reactionary politics and theology, the recently deceased English lyricist Geoffrey Hill has courted controversy throughout his life. However, while Hill’s work is replete with qualified nostalgia for premodern British history, and he does treat a number of Christian themes in his work, the great British poet defies easy categorisation. Moreover, drawing from the theology of Simone Weil, Rowan Williams, and others, Hill’s work is saturated with a profound awareness of the fallen state of human nature. One of the most profound tropes Hill uses as a representative of what could be called Original Sin is the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As a tormented believer and a poet very aware of the fallenness of the world, Hill’s depiction of Mary reveals that Hill is a Christian poet who does not fall into ready categories.

Sceptical Reflections on Human Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Sterelny
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
David Hull ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Over Time

David Hull famously argued that the very idea of human nature was pre-Darwinian; once we genuinely embrace Darwin’s insights into unbounded variation and plasticity over time, no robust account of human nature can survive. There have been a variety of responses to Hull’s critique, variously showing that some concept of human nature can be rebuilt in ways consistent with contemporary evolutionary biology. In this chapter, I argue that, in one sense, some of these reconstructive attempts succeed. One can develop a concept of human nature consistent with evolutionary insights into variation and potentially unbounded change. But in a deeper sense these reconstructive projects are in trouble: the cost of making a concept of human nature evolutionarily credible is, arguably, to rob that concept of explanatory salience.

The Fall

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-188
Author(s):  
Michael Moriarty
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
The Relationship

Pascal argues that the doctrine of the Fall explains the contradictions he has studied. Human nature has been transformed by original sin. Our ‘greatness’ is the residue of our former nature, the vestigial memory of which takes the form of our frustration at the ‘wretchedness’ into which we have fallen. Pascal’s particular conception of the Fall is essentially inspired by St Augustine, from whom he derives the key notion of concupiscence (earthly desire), and certain problems in the Augustinian theory are discussed. The chapter concludes by mentioning more recent presentations of the doctrine in the work of Kierkegaard and Rahner, and of contemporary theologians discussing the relationship between the doctrine and findings in biology.

Symbolism of the Double as the Source F.M. Dostoevsky Dostoevsky's Artistic Anthropology

2021 ◽  
pp. 245-256
Author(s):  
Vitaliy Yu. Darenskiy
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Special Mode ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
First Time

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Double symbolism as the source of personality metaphysics in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky. “The Double” novel is considered by the author as the paradigmatic text in which the principles of key images construction in the late novels of F.M. Dostoevsky were formed. The paper uses the ideas of A.A. Ukhtomsky and E.Ya. Golosovker, who proposed philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon of “duality”. “The Double” is viewed as the source of theology of personality in F.M. Dostoevsky’s works, since it was the first time that the figurative model of the struggle of personality and personality in a man, which most directly revealed the duality of his nature as the created image of God, was developed. The hero’s search for his inner “place” (topos of authenticity) and inner support in the confrontation between the “mask” and then the Double as its ultimate expression, is the main theme of the story. The duality of the “nature” of man, who is both the image and likeness of God, and carries the Original sin, is the traditional theological theme and the theme of Christian anthropology. However, no one developed this theme in fiction with such depth and completeness before F.M. Dostoevsky. “Duality” acts as a special mode of negative self-disclosure of personality by means of elimination of his external false identities. The struggle against the Double is the struggle of the true human nature against its damages by the Original sin. The corrupted nature stands out in the form of the masks of the Doubles, and the genuine nature is fighting them, searching in the soul the highest prototype. The masks are defeated only by positively overcoming them in the inner experience of man. The text of “The Double” is for the first time interpreted as “genre of dreams” and as special “initiation” text aimed at the internal transformation of the reader’s personality.

Original Sin as the Evil Inclination–A Polemicist's Appreciation of Human Nature

1980 ◽  
Vol 73 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 495-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Shortcoming

Studies on the essence and development of the concept of original sin abound. Not only has this fundamental tenet of Christian theology played an important role in the history of Western religious thought, but it continues to command the attention of scholars and theologians even today. Given this great interest, one is occasionally surprised at the narrowness of the historical and religious framework to which many have confined their discussions of original sin. All too often, scholars have overlooked the significance which events within the community they are examining or parallel developments in other religious communities might have for explicating a new direction in the history of this doctrine. While the present study can hope neither to reformulate the findings of the voluminous literature on original sin nor to compensate in large measure for this methodological shortcoming at times inherent in it, it will attempt to demonstrate by example how the notion of original sin did not evolve in a historical vacuum. It both drew from and contributed to prevalent philosophical and political theory, and it even interacted significantly with non-Christian religious concepts.

“Non potest non peccare”: Karl Barth on original sin and the bondage of the will

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-207
Author(s):  
Shao Kai Tseng
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
Historical Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will

Summary This article offers an exposition of Karl Barth’s actualistic reorientation of the Augustinian notions of original sin and the bondage of the will in § 60 and § 65 of Church Dogmatics IV/1–2. Barth redefines human nature as a total determination of the human being (Sein/Dasein) “from above” by the covenantal history of reconciliation. Human nature as such remains totally intact in the historical state of sin. The human being, however, is also determined “from below” by the Adamic world-history of total corruption. With this dialectical construal of sin and human nature, Barth redefines original sin as the radically sinful activities and decisions that determine the confinement of human beings to the historical condition of fallenness. Barth also challenges the famous Augustinian account of the bondage of the will to which original sin gives rise, and uses the present active indicative to express his actualistic reorientation of the Augustinian notion of the bondage: “non potest non peccare”.

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