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In the literature of the Enlightenment, landscapes played a crucial role. These did not present an end in themselves but served an imaginative clarification of the idea of man. Among the anthropological landscapes in eighteenth-century literature, the Polynesian island Tahiti stood out in particular, since it was imagined as an earthly paradise: Tahitians were said to be in a permanent state of perfect bliss guaranteed above all by free sexuality. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville declared the Tahitians to be the embodiment of the homme naturel in his travelogue entitled Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L’Étoile en 1766, 1767, 1768, et 1769 (1771) as a means of social criticism. Tahiti thus moved to the center of the contemporary debate about the relationship between the state of nature and the civil society. The islanders’ natural way of life was imagined as a positive counter-image to depraved European civilizations. The article highlights which anthropological goals the literary imaginations of Tahiti served.

Augustine of Hippo’s early works distinguish between the earthly human person, driven by worldly desires, and the reborn person, oriented towards heaven. Later, in his monumental De ciuitate Dei (On the City of God), Augustine expands on this distinction, proposing the existence of two cities: the earthly city, characterized by the love of self; and the city of God, characterized by the love of God. This tension between the two loves shapes human understanding of and place in the world. This article explores how the said tension reflects a duality in human nature, tracing the development of the relationship between Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities and his reflections on the dual human nature from his early works to De ciuitate Dei. The article studies whether the duality of human nature mirrors the dichotomy between the ciuitas Dei (city of God) and the ciuitas terrena (earthly city), examining how the conflict between good and evil within individuals and society serves as a model for the conflict between the two cities in Augustine’s doctrine, with a focus on how these concepts are expounded in his earlier writings and articulated in his De ciuitate Dei. It examines how the interaction between these loves manifests in human actions and desires, and shapes our understanding of the good and desirable. Ultimately, this article seeks to address the question of whether the tension between the love of God and the love of self, both in society and in human nature, is capable of harmonious resolution in Augustine’s mindset.

Interest has been in human beings' daily economic life since ancient times. Receiving interest was mostly considered evil and the source of many social and economic problems. Therefore, interest was either entirely prohibited or allowed at rates under defined limits in many societies. The interest-based transactions were attempted to regulate by using financial, moral, religious, and legal instruments. Besides others, the spiritual means were considerably harsh. Receiving interest was considered a sin in most of the prevalent religions. Among these, the afterlife sanctions defined for the offenders against the prohibition of interest are the most severe in Islam. This article aims to evaluate the legal sanctions for not respecting the prohibition of interest-based transactions. Since Islam takes an explicit stance against interest, the earthly punishment practices in Muslim societies for violating the prohibition of interest were studied. It is observed that the implemented weak earthly sanctions are inconsistent with the severe afterlife punishments in Islam.

This article explores how sin and trust as fundamental notions of Luther’s relational anthropology determine his understanding of social relations unfolding in the hierarchies of the earthly realm. Against scholastic works righteousness, Luther maintains that humans are absolute sinners incapable of justifying themselves through good works and receive faith as a gift of unconditional trust in God. This reformulation of the human relation to God has profound consequences for Luther’s understanding of interpersonal relations. Luther understands the justifying relation to God as a precondition for fruitful and trusting social relations in a world infused by sin. Moreover, Luther patterns his understanding of the hierarchic relations between subjects and their earthly authorities on the trusting relation between God and human beings. However, because of sin individuals need to subject themselves to superiors. In this way, Luther’s understanding of the human being as both righteous and sinful seems to be the reason behind the apparent paradox of hierarchy and equality permeating his conception of society.

A short essay of world history of subjugation and study by humanity of earthly continental dry land and enormous marine spaces of Earth is presented.

La interpretación de la moral cartesiana ha tendido a centrarse en la noción de beatitud, consecuencia del correcto ejercicio de la virtud. En este sentido, los bienes espirituales han suprimido la función que los bienes terrenales poseen en la propuesta de Descartes. El presente artículo cuestiona esa lectura, destacando el importante papel que los bienes terrenales juegan en la consecución de una buena vida, mostrando la dimensión activa del sujeto cartesiano.

Book I of Augustine’s work On Free Choice (De Libero Arbitrio) offers a helpful introduction to some of the most important themes of political philosophy. The paper makes a case for teaching this text in introductory courses on political thought, theology of social life, and similar topics, alongside or even in place of the more usually assigned excerpts from City of God. The text is written as a dialogue in which Augustine seeks to introduce a student of his to reflection on the ways in which our moral outlook is profoundly shaped by our political citizenship. It invites all of us, whether Christian or non-Christian citizens, to enter into the dialogue ourselves as Augustine’s students and so to reflect on the moral significance of our own citizenship.

This new critical volume, the second to appear in the three-volume Lectura Dantis, contains expert, focused commentary on the Purgatorio by thirty-three international scholars, each of whom presents to the nonspecialist reader one of the cantos of the transitional middle cantica of Dante's unique Christian epic. The cast of characters is as colorful as before, although this time most of them are headed for salvation. The canto-by-canto commentary allows each contributor his or her individual voice and results in a deeper, richer awareness of Dante's timeless aspirations and achievements.

Due to yadam’s characteristic narrative principles that foreground actions and plots, space has played a minimal role. However, particular attention has been paid to the description of space and landscape in the so-called ‘utopia-seeking’ yadam stories. This article analyzes the motives for creating a utopia and its manner of functioning as a landscape in these utopian yadam stories. Utopia creators construct a very exclusive utopia into which they invite visitors to enter. The utopia creators want to show their visitors not just the landscape itself but traces of communal life. The third landscape is either discovered or presumed by these utopia creators, and then introduced to their visitors. This place of absolute spectacle transcends the utopia creators’ lives. Once they become accustomed to the utopia as a place for living in, it loses its freshness and charm as a spectacle itself. Therefore, the utopia creators covertly seek another space that can be appreciated strictly as a spectacle. This experience of the third landscape provides visitors with a decisive chance to cleanse themselves from the dregs of worldly desire and be reborn as new human beings. The more strongly they experience the spectacle, however, the harder it is for them to return to their former lives when they return home. As a result, worldly men try to revisit the utopia; their attempts are unsuccessful, however, because a utopia will not accept anyone who tries to return from the earthly world. The utopian landscape stories of yadam hint at the paradoxical fate of people who simultaneously recall both a utopia and the earthly world.