| Popis: |
This chapter shows how Stair’s conception of liberty and freedom used in the Institutions of the Law of Scotland can be informed by his theological treatise, Divine Perfections. What emerges is that Stair held a theologically rich conception of liberty, which meant that when prescribed obligations of divine law were exhausted, man had a discretion to decide how he would bring glory to God. But this was not freedom in a negative Hobbesian or a secular Pufendorfian sense: it was uttered within the context of seventeenth-century Scotland, where the notion of bringing glory to God was central to the social, institutional, and personal organization of an individual’s life. Indeed, when Stair is read within the appropriate context, it appears that for him there was a range of permissible actions which man could do with his liberty, and which could bring glory to God; but this was not licence or immunity to do whatever you wanted to do. That is, once Stair’s approach to liberty is understood within the context of the seventeenth century and his own theological writing, for Stair, man is only truly free when he acts in accordance with what God has willed, which was known to man through the Moral Law, which was written on his heart, and through his dialogue with his conscience, reason, and Scripture. |
