Logica lui Guilielmus Amesius în interpretare academizantă
The Logic of Guilielmus Amesius in Academic Interpretation

Summary/Abstract: In the Amesian conception conscientia means the awareness of the sinful state of the Puritan individual. The Amesian logic, based on the dialectic of Ramus, offers us, on the one hand, cases, methods of becoming aware of sin in one's own life, of confronting and opposing it, of recognizing the hellish state and radically improving one's spiritual life ("Conscientia humana est judicium hominis de semetipso, prout subjicitur judicio Dei.") The Lord has given us messages, precepts (institutiones) that must be appropriated for the reconciliation with our own spiritual life, before the Day of Judgment. These precepts must be learned by individuals, because on their basis all the species (specie) of human things can be known and appropriated. The judgment of one's own spiritual state is called iudicium by Ames, a judgment which requires the input of both the intellect (intellectus) and the individual will (voluntas). Secondly, the methods prescribed by Ames provide answers for those destined (destinati) to shepherd among the parishioners, to preach by their deeds and sermons, the destined life of Jesus Christ. The four versified or responsorially redacted inscriptions reflect the direction of the Puritan school of teaching in the 17th century: everything must be read and tried and what is good must be preserved, based on the passage from Paul's letter to the Thessalonians (5:21). Thus, in the above-mentioned inscriptions, the formulae of Aristotelian syllogisms, packaged in Melanchthonian terms, as well as the formulae of maxims (in our case about Pelagianism), but also the Amesian literary expressions of Ramian origin reflect the plurality of educational ideas, which the academics encountered at the above-mentioned universities. This plurality reflects the organizational syncretism of logic at this time. The Puritan academics taught on the basis of a single system of logic, the Amesian system of Ramian origin, but the preceding, high school teachings represent the elements and nuances of Keckermann's logic. For the Calvinist Christian believer, there is the eternal and agonizing dilemma of being "elect or excluded" for eternal life, for eternity. The Puritan individual, turning to the teaching of the Bible, strives throughout his or her life to live and act in a way pleasing to God, trusting in the efficacy of faith (fides efficax) to enhance the glory of God in this world. By his actions, he wants to prove his own supposed election or, in the absence of the knowledge of election, the hope of it. That is why he "scours", searches, copies or compiles in manuscript, in possessorial or rhetorico-grammatical inscriptions, the sources read and studied in their original language, Hebrew, Koine Greek or Latin, or redacts the passage read by translating them into his mother tongue, sources which offer him the way to his eternal life. The manuscript production of the Puritan individual reflects the syncretism of the religious texts he produces or reproduces from sources found in school or private libraries, often without mentioning the origin of the texts produced or reproduced.

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