My current direction of research is focussed upon Latin canon law, turning between its origins in the fifth century and its manuscripts around 1100 in Durham. One of the trains of thought I find myself moving down every once in a while is the integration of canon law with wider knowledge, specifically as an element of theology.
To that end, the following passage from St Anselm of Canterbury is worth pondering:
S. So what is the evil that makes them bad and the good that makes them good?
T. We should hold that justice is the good whereby they are good or just, both angels and men, and that whereby the will itself is called his and just; and injustice is the evil that is only a privation is the good, and makes angels and men bad and makes their will bad. So we should say that injustice is nothing but the privation of justice. As long as the will originally given to a rational nature is simultaneously oriented to its rectitude by the same act with which God gives it, thus not only inclined to rectitude, but created right, that is, oriented to what it ought to do, as long as, I say, the will remains in that rectitude that we call truth or justice, it was just. But when it distanced itself from what it ought and turned itself against it, it did not remain in the original rectitude in which it was created. And when it abandoned it, it list something great, and acquired in exchange only the privation of justice we call injustice and that has no positive being. –On the Fall of the Devil, ch. 9 (trans. in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. B. Davies and G. Evans, p. 206).
The word justice here is, of course, iustitia. In other contexts, we would translate iustitia as righteousness and iustus as righteous rather than just. We see here also rectitude, which is a matter of order. In Law and Theology in the Middle Ages, G. R. Evans discusses the fact that rectitudo is about the right ordering of human relationships in light of the wider cosmos.
Canon law is the law of the church, and it is about the ordering of our human relationships rightly in line with divine principles as derived from Scripture and tradition (the Fathers, the councils, the popes). At a theoretical level, then, the canons of the church are not mere ‘dead’ regulations as perhaps people view them today. Rather, they are seen as manifestations of how we can live in accordance with divine rectitude.
In the Anselmian passage above, the more we live in line with rectitude, the more we live according to justice/righteousness, and the more we are just/righteous. In a way, this is the whole of practical theology, isn’t it? The whole of ethics? If we live justly, then we become just. Righteousness. The ius, the law, helps us do so.
But we have not remained in our ‘original rectitude’, and so we often fall into unjust living contrary to rectitude and justice and are thus bad. How we get out of this so that we can live according to justice is the subject of Cur Deus Homo.
My final thoughts are that this is a reminder of the integrated mindset of the patristic and medieval thinker. We are just because we live justly. While they would probably agree with the phrase simul iustus et peccator, they would be confused by the absolute division between us becoming just by grace and us demonstrating that we are just by our actions, a division often asserted by Protestants.
God makes us just. We thus live justly. By living in accord with justice, we become just. It is an integrated matrix of the whole. God works in us as we work ourselves. In the Greek tradition, it is called synergeia. And I, for one, am not sure that it is any worse than sixteenth-century theological maxims. It may even be better…
Classically Christian 