This paper examines the uses and abuses of Augustine in the Commentary on the Book
of Wisdom, by Robert Holcot, O.P. (1349). In the paper I examine
Holcot’s employment of Augustine's definition of justice as he
interprets Wisdom's introductory, prophetic call to "love
justice, O rulers of the earth." Rather than being primarily a function
of what human beings owe to one another (e.g. Aquinas), justice is
cultivated when a person has rendered to God what he owes to Him. Holcot
identifies this debt with the three theological virtues. Thus, only
when a person has disposed himself to God in faith, hope, and love can
he be rightly ordered to himself and to his neighbours. This ordering
of self to God is the paradigm of justice between persons. Unlike
Augustine, though, Holcot’s understanding of justice is covenantal. The
metaphor that Holcot consistently uses to describe the intertwining of
divine and human loves is the pact, a concept that is meant to
guarantee the freedom of the human will in its relationship with God.
The final section of the paper explores the consequences of this concept
for Holcot's political theology. Ultimately, I argue that Holcot's
exegesis of Wisdom’s first verses offers us a glimpse of a late
medieval thinker drawing on Augustine's conception of justice to account
for relations between God and creatures on the one hand, and the role
of moral virtue in the formation of a political body on the other.
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