Nature, Sin and the Origins of Society: The Ciceronian Tradition in Medieval Political Thought

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The idea that man is by nature a social and political creature enjoyed a long and rich career during the Latin Middle Ages.1 Indeed, it is perh not too implausible to say that the naturalness of human association wa one of the few doctrines to which virtually all medieval political think would subscribe, in one or another version. A primary reason for widespread agreement was an analogous near-unanimity on the par the philosophical and theological sources available to the Middle A At one time it was supposed that social and political naturalism w strictly an inheritance from the transmission of Aristotle to the West the thirteenth century.2 Despite occasional relapses,3 however, this vie has been discredited on the grounds that most of the influential classic and Christian authorities accessible throughout the whole of the Mi Ages articulated essentially the same concept.4 Cicero, Seneca, the L poets, St. Augustine, Lactantius-these figures (and others besides) reinforced the notion that man was meant by nature to live in communi with his fellows. Thus the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics by the We merely confirmed the naturalism that had almost universally permeate