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

"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 general and intellectual historians in particular, I have been repeatedly 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 issue—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 monopolistic, and in his Great Chain of Being Lovejoy succeeded in 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 approach 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 history while at the same time (indeed, by the act of so doing) vindicating the validity, efficacy, and fruitfulness of his improperly 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 appropriate 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 order—natural, moral, salvational, political—grounded not in the very nature of things but rather in will, promise, and covenant. Only if historians recognize, I argue, that radically different conceptions of order jostle side by side in the texts confronting them will the perplexities generated by some segments of early modern legal, theological, and scientific thinking be successfully dissipated."


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
epilogue 119
NOTES 123
INDEX 161