This book attempts to determine the degree to which the modern fate of the Western legal tradition depends on one of the most long-standing debates of the Middle Ages, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata (God’s absolute and ordered power). The mediaeval investigation into God’s attributes was originally concerned with the problem of divine almightiness. It underwent a slow but steady displacement from the territory of theology to the freshly emerging proceedings of legal analysis. Here, based on the distinction, late-mediaeval lawyers worked out a new terminology to define the extent of the power-holder’s authority. This effort would give rise, during the early modern era, to the gradual establishment of the legal-political framework represented by the concepts of the prince and sovereignty.
Author(s): Massimiliano Traversino Di Cristo
Series: Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 34
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 256
City: Leiden
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Foreword • Diego Quaglioni
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 A Normative History of Power: The Distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata
2 The Theology of God’s Power as an Archaeology of the Modern Notion of Power
3 The Classic Age of the Distinction: The Pontificate of John XXII (1316–34)
4 The Distinction in the Early-Modern EraBruno, Gentili, and the Sixteenth-Century Debate on Native Americans
5 Gentili’s Religion and the Secularization of the Theology of God’s Power
Conclusion
Appendix
List of Works Cited
Index of Names
