The Calvinist International
Words introductory, in which I do the disclaimer thing: The following quotation should not be taken as an endorsement of Lamennais in omnibus rebus as anyone who reads his Wikipedia entry will immediately understand. But the quotation itself is worthy of some reflection. And anyway, I was directed to it by the great Bavinck. So […]
Romans 2:14–15 is one of the most important of biblical texts that bear on the idea of “natural law.” I’d like over time to compile a sort of catena of Western exegesis of this passage (admittedly, the surrounding verses are important too, but I’m trying to keep it manageable). I will try to go in chronological […]
Sam Harris likes Brazilian jiu-jitsu, apparently because it lacks all those religious connotations of the other kind. But he then proceeds to turn the fighting itself into a religious experience–inflected in a very violent key–proving once again that man is indeed homo religiosus and that Sam Harris, too, has Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. The fighting may […]
In the nineteenth century, the methods of comparative philology were often transferred to interpret and explain cultural phenomena such as religion. Herman Bavinck offers a pithy caution against taking such an approach too far: The philosophical premise that all religions are essentially the same and only differ in forms is directly contradicted by unbiased historical […]
The following passage comes from Augustine’s Questions on Exodus, which forms Book 2 of his Questions on the Heptateuch. The Quaestiones in Heptateuchum was written in AD 419; Allan Fitzgerald comments that Augustine, “rather than being focused primarily on immediate pastoral questions, … seeks to provide an interpretation of those biblical texts that he did […]
An excerpt from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (On the ends of goods and evils) on how Wisdom relates to Nature: Ut Phidias potest a primo instituere signum idque perficere, potest ab alio inchoatum accipere et absolvere, huic est sapientia similis; non enim ipsa genuit hominem, sed accepit a natura inchoatum. Hanc ergo intuens debet institutum […]
The starting point of the theory of knowledge ought to be ordinary daily experience, the universal and natural certainty of human beings concerning the objectivity and truth of their knowledge. After all, it is not philosophy that creates the cognitive faculty and cognition. Philosophy only finds it and then attempts to explain it. Any solution […]
Fas, Ius, and Lex: Vergilian Prelude fas mihi Graiorum sacrata resolvere iura, fas odisse viros atque omnia ferre sub auras, si qua tegunt; teneor patriae nec legibus ullis. (Aeneid 2.157–59; emphases mine) This is justice, I am justified in dropping all allegiance to the Greeks– as I had cause to hate them; I may bring […]
In keeping with one of TCI’s goals, namely, evangelical and Reformed retrieval and renewal of the past and its literature, I thought I’d write up a brief sketch of the Reformed jurist I mentioned in my previous post, Denis Godefroy (Dionysius Gothofredus). For the curious nonspecialist, among whose number I count myself, it’s more difficult […]
I propose in coming weeks to put forward a series of historico-archaeological posts on ideas of justice and of natural law in Roman jurisprudence by making use of sections of two parts of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”): first, the Digest and, later, the Institutes. Most posts will consist of a short […]