Omnipotence, Covenant & Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz

169 Pages·1985·6.382 MB·English

by  Francis Oakley

Omnipotence, Covenant, &) Order
OTHER BOOKS BY FRANCIS OAKLEY
The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly
Council over Pope!
The Medieval Experience
The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages
Natural Law, Conciliarism, and Consent
in the Late Middle Ages
Editor, with Daniel O'Connor
Creation: The Impact of an Idea
Omnipotence,
Covenant, &) Order
AN EXCURSION IN THE HISTORY OF
IDEAS FROM ABELARD TO LEIBNIZ
BY FRANCIS OAKLEY
Cornell University Press
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 1984 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book,
or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address
Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1984 by Cornell University Press.
Published in the United Kingdom by Cornell University Press Ftd.,
Fondon
International Standard Book Number 0-8014-1631-0
Fibrary of Congress Catalog Card Number 83-45945
Printed in the United States of America
Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information
appears on the last page of the book.
The paper in this book is acid-free and meets the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
To
D eh die
Chiistopher
Timothy
Brian

Contents
PREFACE 9
1
AGAINST THE STREAM! IN PRAISE OF LOVEJOY I 5
2
ST. JEROME AND THE SAD CASE OF THE
FALLEN VIRGIN 4 I
3
Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace 67
4
DIVINE SOVEREIGNTY, PAPAL MIRACLE,
ROYAL GRACE 93
7
8 Contents
epilogue 119
NOTES 123
INDEX I 6 I
Preface
Over the course of the past decade and a half, as meta-
historical and methodological debates have come to disturb
the commonsensical dogmatic slumbers of historians in gen¬
eral and intellectual historians in particular, I have been re¬
peatedly struck by two things. First, the unfortunate and
widening gulf between the work of those on the one hand
whose creative energies are fully engaged in the actual doing
of history and the arguments of those on the other whose
concerns focus almost exclusively on the methodological is¬
sue—now almost a subspecialty in its own right. Second, the
casual way in which those interested in exploring or promot¬
ing the newer approaches to intellectual history so often
brush to one side the claims Arthur O. Lovejoy made, now
almost half a century ago, for his own approach to the history
of ideas. Those claims were neither overweening nor monop¬
olistic, and in his Great Chain of Being Lovejoy succeeded in
9
Preface
IO
demonstrating the efficacy and power of his chosen approach
in coming to terms at least with certain types of intellectual
phenomena. And while I have long been persuaded that the
overall picture of European intellectual history outlined in
his classic work calls in some measure for qualification and
revision, I have been equally convinced that that process of
qualification can best be promoted not by the abandonment
but by the continued exploitation of the methodological ap¬
proach he himself pioneered.
For some years, then, it was my intention, should an ap¬
propriate occasion present itself, to produce a short study
combining methodological prescription with concrete histor¬
ical exemplification in such a way as to engineer a significant
qualification of Lovejoy's vision of European intellectual his¬
tory while at the same time (indeed, by the act of so doing)
vindicating the validity, efficacy, and fruitfulness of his im¬
properly maligned approach to intellectual history. A happy
invitation from Oberlin College to deliver the Mead-Swmg
lectures there afforded me, in the autumn of 1981, the appro¬
priate occasion. And the following pages derive from those
lectures.
After an opening chapter devoted to methodological is¬
sues in general and a defense of Lovejoy's approach in partic¬
ular, I proceed to use that approach in the three chapters
remaining to trace from the twelfth to the seventeenth cen¬
tury the history of a theme on which pivoted, during those
centuries, a coherent scheme of things contrasting sharply
with the picture evoked by the notion of the great chain of
being but rivaling it by its own imaginative force. The theme
in question, familiar enough nowadays to historians of late-
medieval philosophy and theology but to few others besides,
is the distinction between the absolute and ordained or ordi¬
nary powers of God—and, by frequently invoked analogy, of
popes, emperors, and kings. The scheme: the vision of an