Holiness and humanism: a comparative-religions commentary on book 2 of Cicero’s laws, with special reference to Confucianism and Chinese thought
After a brief introduction, a new translation of De Legibus II, and prolegomenal remarks, the commentary discusses in Cicero's sequence: how place connects to ancient times and traditions (4), God's Law and his judgment on human laws (5-6), tension between Roman religion and Greek philosophy (7), and the setting forth of Cicero's code of religious law (8), the code covers whom to worship (9), the power of Cicero's own priesthood (10), religion and political unity (11), social justice and religious rites (12), Cicero's digression on a turf-war between augurs and pontifices and priestly responsibility for religious law alone (13), the rites of death (14), and the prospect of immortality (15). Excursuses within the commentary include: holy reason as imago Dei in humans; dialogists' family and friendship; legitimacy of law in Confucianism; the supreme God and His/Its relation to lesser deities, especially Minerva; hyperphilologism and ancient holist theology (hence reference to current African philosophy and theology and to modern religious traditions). Cicero's anti-Platonism/anti-utopianism. parallel Confucian-Mohist enmity, and the common substrate of family and family rite; mistaking propriety for agnosticism and tacit knowing for unbelief; reliability of the canonical texts; the sages' descendants and classical explicators; tyranny as the sin of parricide: Roman priesthoods with reference to the religious power of women; family religious rites; the augural priesthood and its liberationist implications. Selected interpretive issues meriting further enquiry follows: the integrity of theology in DL2 and aspects of classical Confucianism; Cicero's theological language and the use of translations; theological anti-totalitarianism in Cicero and his contemporary Han Dynasty Confucians; scholarly contempt for Cicero and its civic-theological implications: late-dating of DL as buttress of its civic-theological character; lsocrates as anti-Platonic paradigm of theological political praxis; the distinctiveness of our sages over against mediaeval philosophical theology in the West and China; and anti-imperialist theology in Viet Nam and Cicero's Philippics. The conclusion offers encouragement in civic-theological resistance to tyranny, the role of humane reason in theology and the present applicability of aspects of the theology of Cicero and that of Confucius.
Holiness and humanism, Cicero’s laws, Confucianism
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