ABSTRACT
In the fourth chapter of An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, published in 1652, 1 Nathaniel Culverwell set himself the task to define “the just notion of a Law in general
The Apostle Paul, to staine the pride of them that gloried in the Law, calls such things by the name of Law as were most odious and anomalous. Thus he tells us of nomos thanatou, & nomos hamartias [the law of death and the law of sin], though sin be properly anomia [lawlessness] … And yet this is sure, that a rational creature is only capable of a Law, which is a moral restraint, and so cannot reach to those things that are necessitated to act ad extremum virium [to the limit of their passion]. 2
A secondary figure in the neo-Platonist school of Cambridge, Culverwell is only one of many English Renaissance writers who defined anomy 3 as they discussed law, morality, and human reason; in his Discourse Culverwell argued that the existence of laws presupposed human reason and the freedom of the will, and that, consequently, anomia was also a specifically human phenomenon.