All legal judgments, including the death penalty, were not to be made arbitrarily, but after sound consideration. Where Antigone only checked the king’s decisions, Ambrose could go a step further and transfer the divine law onto law codes. Human laws were, too, to reflect the immutable divine decrees. In this sense, Christianity went further than the ancient concept. Modern notions of democracy and human rights are the direct (but in several ways ungrateful) bearers of this active tradition. Here, too, we see why and how the modern and post-modern wish (like Nazism before) for a world without limits, of an all-powerful scientism and unlimited economic power can only lead us into the opposite of the idea of civilization and humanity: namely tyranny and despotism. Unless we prefer to be ruled by arbitrary conditions, be they economic or other, it is necessary for us to return to this concept that nothing in human affairs can possibly be unlimited.
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