Eclipsed Autonomy: Celestial Images and the Free Will Debate in Antonio Mira de Amescua’s Álvaro de Luna Plays
Antonio Mira de Amescua’s two-part Próspera fortuna and Adversa fortuna de don Álvaro de Luna chronicles the rise and fall of Spain’s most iconic privado, Álvaro de Luna. Suspected by medieval chroniclers of controlling Juan II with magic, Luna’s appearance on stage speaks to growing concerns in seventeenth-century Spain over the king’s ability to resist manipulation by powerful courtiers. Rather than using the plays as political commentary, however, Mira frames the institution of privanza within contemporary debates regarding free will, and, in doing so, offers a dramatic rendering of the nature of human autonomy and spiritual bondage.
Pulling Strings: Puppets and Free Will on the Spanish Stage
Abstract:In the later seventeenth century, máquina real companies performed full-length religious plays in the corrales de comedia using puppets instead of human actors. Much of their repertoire consisted of comedias de santos affirming the sovereignty of free will. This essay explores the possible dissonance produced among early modern audiences who watched a puppet—seemingly a metonym for manipulation—insist on his free will. Through close reading of a diverse assortment of theatrical, theological, and political texts, I reconstruct the metaphorical meaning of puppet, which turns out to have curiously distinct resonances in the Catholic and Protestant traditions.
Rectitude: The Moral Foundation of Anselm of Canterbury's Soteriology
ANSELM OF CANTERBURY has attracted increasing scholarly attention during the past century as a major thinker standing at the dawn of the Middle Ages. His greatest intellectual achievement is generally considered to be the monograph Cur Deus Homo, which is of decisive importance in the history of doctrine. Its unrivalled combination of sustained argument, moral force and originality make it a landmark in the history of literature as well as of doctrine. The Reformers, as well as several of the earlier scholastics, were to take up and develop aspects of his theology, and the doctrines of justification associated with the Reformers, particularly those of Melanchthon and Calvin, are set within a theological framework which is recognizably Anselmian.' Anselm's interpreters, however, transferred his soteriological concepts from their original context to one considerably more juridical in outlook, with the result that his theology has generally been approached with certain preconceptions quite alien to Anselm's own time. Thus Anselm has frequently been accused of legalizing the gospel, being typical of the Latin 'impulse to carry religion into the legal sphere' .2 His most outspoken English critic, Hastings Rashdall, dismissed his soteriology as feudal: 'Anselm appeals to justice: ... but his notions of justice are the barbaric ideas of an ancient Lombard king, or the technicalities of a Lombard lawyer'. 3 It is a sad reflection upon the current state of English theological awareness that this misrepresentation of Anselm's soteriology is still generally accepted. Rashdall's offended liberalism, however, prevents him from grasping the theological framework of the Cur Deus Homo. Whilst Rashdall appreciated that Anselm 'made a serious attempt to vindicate the whole scheme (of salvation) from the point of view of justice', he failed to answer the central question posed by the Anselmian soteriology: What concept of justice is appropriate to God's dealings with men? Anselm does not employ 'ordinary ideas of justice', and his soteriology can only be understood when the concept of iustitia which underlies God's dealings with man is