Causality
Modern philosophical accounts of causality deviate dramatically from medieval accounts, yet many of the views held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent the end of an evolutionary process that began in the thirteenth century with the reint
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Calvin, John, Political Thought ▶ John Calvin, Political Thought
Campanus of Novara ▶ Adelard of Bath ▶ Mathematics and Philosophy in the Arab World
Canon Law JAMES A. BRUNDAGE Department of History University of Kansas Lawrence, KS USA
Abstract The history of canon law, the western church’s legal system, reaches back almost to the origins of Christianity itself. Despite the aversion of Jesus and his earliest followers to legalism, their successors quickly discovered that good will and brotherly love were not by themselves sufficient to form a viable community. Rules concerning worship, property, and relationships within the community started to appear around CE 100 and multiplied rapidly thereafter. Canonical rules varied considerably from one region to another; however, until around 1140, when Gratian’s Decretum finally provided a body of texts
that all could accept as binding. Popes and councils during the following centuries promulgated a substantial volume of new canon law and by 1250, the church had a working system of courts, complete with professional canon lawyers. These courts and lawyers sought with mixed success to regulate the personal lives and religious practices of medieval Christians in great detail. While the sixteenthcentury Reformation rejected much (but not all) of medieval canon law, the Catholic Counter-Reformation sought to reshape the medieval law and to centralize authority firmly in the papacy, through the Roman Congregations that the Council of Trent established. In 1917, the Catholic church again reorganized its legal system, which had grown unwieldy over the centuries, in the form of a Code, which was further revised in 1983, which remains in force among Roman Catholics. The earliest surviving set of canons (so called from the Greek kanon, meaning ‘‘a rule’’) is a brief collection known as the Didache, or Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles, written around CE 100. Further collections – the Pastor of Hermas, the Traditio apostolica of Hippolytus, and the Didascalia apostolorum – followed during the second and third centuries. These early collections, produced while Christians were a persecuted minority within the Roman Empire, dealt almost exclusively with internal concerns of the community of believers, such as the conduct of worship, fasting and penance, the authority and duties of bishops, priests, and deacons, and the conduct of Christians toward one another. A revolution in Roman religious policy occurred when the emperor Constantine I proclaimed toleration for Christianity in 313 and then proceeded to embrace the religion himself. Imperial patronage made Christianity the most favored religion in the Roman world and under Constantine’s successors, it was established by the end of the fourth century as the Empire’s official religion. Canon law quickly expanded in scope and force. Imperial authorities enforced decisions by popes, bishops, and church councils. Pronouncements by church fathers, such as Saints Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, were accorded the force of legal enactments. Ch
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