John Scottus Eriugena (d. 877) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the leading humanist philosopher-theologians of their respective periods, espouse anthropocentric cosmologies drawing on an early medieval tradition of Christian Neoplatonism. The similarity of their anthropologies is a testament to the continuity of the Neoplatonic tradition before and after the rediscovery of the Platonic corpus and its Neoplatonic commentators in the Latin West. On close inspection of the metaphysical frameworks which support their systems, it is clear that Ficino and Eriugena are ultimately depending on distinct philosophical spirits, which can be traced back to an early division within pagan Neoplatonism between Plotinian and Iamblichean-Procline lines. The contrast between Ficino’s and Eriugena’s metaphysics is a testament to how the fracture within the Neoplatonic tradition works itself out in its appropriation by Christian thinkers. This article shows how Eriugena’s sympathy for the later pagan developments, mediated to him by the Pseudo-Dionysius, results in a more optimistic anthropology, than Ficino’s use of Plotinus and Augustine. The wider implications of this comparison for study of the Latin West are plain.
Summary
This article is the first systematic philosophical analysis of Henry More’s ethics as set out in his Enchiridion Ethicum (1668). It builds on the insights of scholars who have identified love as a key concept in the thought of the Cambridge Platonists. It contends that More’s ethics ought to be read as a philosophy of love, integrating the rational and spiritual, intellect and will, and the divine and human through an appeal to a prayerful logic of love. Special attention is paid to More’s so-called moral axioms – what he calls Moral Noemata – which develop a logic that aims at the purification of the soul; they do not, pace modern scholars, equate moral and mathematical certainty, nor do they pave the way for the emergence of a secular morality. This article addresses the implications of More’s claim that the passions are good and how they are made virtuous. It shows how his idea of free will depends on the virtue of humility and the soul’s participation in divine wisdom. This article also includes important analysis of “Right Reason” and the “Boniform Faculty”, doctrines central to More’s ethics, and how they meet when the soul falls in love with God.
is able to identify Jesus with God … through scriptural exegesis, yet he is able to keep him distinct and subordinate to the Father.' The final substantive chapter of the book explores some of the implications of what it meant for Paul to call Jesus 'Lord' and thereby to associate him with the name YHWH. Capes addresses those who think too much is made of Paul's application of the divine name to Jesus, since there are some Jewish texts where OT texts associated with the divine name are applied to another figure. He also criticises the scholarly construct that views Christianity as moving from a 'low' christology, such as some see in Paul's letters, to the 'high' christology of John's Gospel.
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