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Greene and Stanlis on Dr. Johnson and the Natural Law: a Medieval Postscript
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
Extract
“And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Matthew Arnold
Perhaps it is somewhat less than fair that to one whose interests lie in earlier centuries than theirs, the recent exchanges between Donald J. Greene and Peter J. Stanlis should have called irresistibly to mind the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Unfair, indeed, admittedly unfair, but not wholly without its moral. The strife has been ferocious and the crash of opposed artillery truly deafening. But the smoke remains dense, the objectives obscured, and so many of the projectiles hurled have spent their force on phantom targets. And why is this so? In part, no doubt, because of disagreements about the very nature of Dr. Johnson's views — but a medievalist would be presumptuous indeed to contemplate even the most tentative of interventions on this score. More germane to his interests, however, and surely no less fundamental to the impasse, is the dangerously impoverished historical landscape against which these views have been measured.
This comes out very clearly in Stanlis's abuse of the label “Calvinist” — for which Greene correctly upbraids him. It comes out, too, in Greene's reliance on that shopworn tag “Augustinian,” with which Stanlis is rightfully uneasy — though, conceivably, for the wrong reasons. But it comes out most clearly of all in the assumption, common, it seems, to both parties, that it is safe and meaningful to speak of the Scholastic conception of natural law.
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- Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1964
References
1. Greene, Donald J., “Samuel Johnson and ‘Natural Law’,” J.B.S., II (1963), 59–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “Response to Mr. Stanlis's Comment,” ibid., II (1963), 84-87; Peter J. Stanlis, “Comment on Samuel Johnson and ‘Natural Law’,” ibid., II (1963), 76-83. All my references will be to this exchange, but see also the further correspondence in ibid., III (1963), 158-67.
2. Stanlis, “Comment on Samuel Johnson and ‘Natural Law’,” ibid., II (1963), 80; Greene, “Response to Mr. Stanlis's Comment,” ibid., II (1963), 86.
3. Greene, “Samuel Johnson and ‘Natural Law’,” ibid., II (1963), 72-75; Stanlis, “Comment on Samuel Johnson and ‘Natural Law’,” ibid., II (1963), 80-81.
4. D'Entrèves, A. P., Natural Law: an Introduction to Legal Philosophy (London, 1951), p. 11Google Scholar.
5. For Ockham, the voluntarist tradition, and the material upon which my argument is based, see Oakley, Francis, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Position,” Natural Law Forum, VI (1961), 65–83Google Scholar, and Oakley, Francis, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science: the Rise of the Concept of the Laws of Nature,” Church History, XXX (1961), 433–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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