Journey Toward Justice 11

This chapter is titled 'Natural Rights in Three Church Fathers'. In this chapter Nick traces the prevalence of the idea of natural rights to the Church Fathers. Church Fathers are those leaders of the Christian Church in the first five hundred years of church history. The point is that Nick is trying to argue for the point that the idea that natural rights emerged from the Enlightenment Period with the likes of Hobbes and Locke is mistaken. He is rather trying to show that Hobbes and Locke were working with the idea bequeathed to them by earlier thinkers specially by those Medieval writers on Jurisprudence. But again these writers on jurisprudence were working with the idea that was there in the writing on earlier thinkers. Nick quotes from the writing of Ambrose of Milan (340-397), who is known as the spiritual guru of St. Augustine, and also from Basil the Great (330-379)and finally from John Chrysostom ( 347-407) . Moreover, these writers were not functioning within the atmosphere that expresses possessive individualism.