Duns Scotus

Introduction

John Duns Scotus is the Scottish Franciscan theologian and philosopher of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries whose technical revisions to the dominant Thomist scholastic framework produced the major Franciscan alternative to Thomism in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. He is conventionally known by the honorific Doctor Subtilis (the Subtle Doctor), a designation that captures both the technical sophistication of his work and the demands he made on his readers; the prose is dense, the distinctions are fine-grained, and the systematic structure of the corpus is unusually complex.

The most influential single Scotist doctrine is the univocity of being — the claim that being (ens) is predicated of God and creatures in the same sense, against the Thomist doctrine of analogy (that being is predicated of God and creatures in related but not identical senses). The doctrine has been continuously consequential: it provides the framework within which modern conceptions of being and reality have developed; the contemporary critique of Scotus through the Radical Orthodoxy movement (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward) treats the univocity doctrine as the major early-modern theological development that produced the conditions for secular modernity.

The other major Scotist doctrines — the formal distinction (a distinction less than real but greater than merely conceptual), the primacy of the will (a voluntarism in both theology and ethics), the doctrine of haecceity (the principle of individuation by which a thing is this particular thing) — each shaped subsequent scholastic development substantially. Scotism became one of the major scholastic schools alongside Thomism and Nominalism through the late-medieval and early-modern periods.

Life

The biographical record on Duns Scotus is unusually thin for a figure of his importance. He was born probably in 1266 in the village of Duns, in the Scottish Borders; the family name (later sometimes given as Scotus, the Latin form for the Scot) is the source of his standard appellation. He entered the Franciscan order in his teens and was ordained priest in 1291.

The education was at the Franciscan houses at Oxford and probably Paris. He lectured on Peter Lombard's Sentences at Oxford from approximately 1300 to 1302, then at Paris from 1302 onward. The Paris period was interrupted by his temporary exile in 1303, when he was banished for siding with Pope Boniface VIII in the king's dispute with the papacy; he returned to Paris in 1304 and continued the Sentences lectures.

He became Master of Theology at Paris in 1305 and continued teaching there until 1307, when he was transferred to the Franciscan house at Cologne. The reason for the transfer is contested; the conventional report is that he was sent to defend the Franciscan position on the Immaculate Conception against the dominant Dominican position. He died in Cologne on November 8, 1308 at approximately age 42; the cause is not recorded.

The surviving corpus is but its precise authenticity and chronology have been continuously contested. The Ordinatio (or Opus Oxoniense) is the revised version of his Oxford Sentences lectures, which Scotus was revising for publication at the time of his death and which therefore exists in multiple incomplete forms. The Reportatio Parisiensis is the Paris Sentences lectures as recorded by students. The Quaestiones Quodlibetales are formal disputations from his Paris regency. Various other works (the De Primo Principio, the various Aristotelian commentaries) are but raise textual and authorship questions.

The problem he worked on

Scotus's intellectual project was the systematic reconstruction of Christian theology on a more rigorous philosophical foundation than the dominant Thomist synthesis had provided. The Thomist framework had achieved a powerful integration of philosophy and theology, but Scotus took it to be philosophically and theologically inadequate at several specific points: the analogical account of being introduced unwarranted skepticism about whether human language can apply to God; the intellectualist account of God's nature subordinated divine freedom to divine reason in ways Scotus took to be theologically problematic; the doctrine of the soul's individuation through matter could not adequately account for the individuality of angels and the resurrected.

The constructive project was the development of more rigorous alternatives at each point: the univocity of being to replace analogy; the primacy of the will (in both God and humans) to qualify intellectualism; the doctrine of haecceity to account for individuation independently of matter; the formal distinction to provide a category of distinction between merely conceptual difference and real separation. The result is a major scholastic system that operates with more technical apparatus than the Thomist alternative and that produced a distinctive tradition (the Scotists) lasting into the early modern period.

Contributions

The univocity of being

Scotus's most famous and most contested doctrine. Being (ens) is predicated of God and creatures in the same sense — the concept of being that applies to creatures and the concept that applies to God are univocal, not analogical. The motivation: if being is predicated only analogically of God and creatures (as Thomism holds), then human language and human concepts cannot in principle reach God; we can speak of God only by stretching concepts originally developed for creatures, and the stretching introduces an irremovable indeterminacy. Univocity allows for genuine knowledge of God: the concept of being that grounds the inference God exists is the same concept that grounds the inference this stone exists.

The doctrine has been continuously contested. The Thomist tradition has consistently rejected it as collapsing God into creaturely categories and producing an inadequate theology of divine transcendence. The Radical Orthodoxy critique of Scotus, beginning with John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990) and continued through the work of Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and others, treats the univocity doctrine as the major late-medieval theological development that produced the conditions for early-modern secularization — the doctrine made being a more general framework than God, displacing the divine from the position of metaphysical priority it had held in the Thomist framework.

The formal distinction

The formal distinction (distinctio formalis a parte rei) is a Scotist category of distinction between merely conceptual distinction (where the distinction is only in our way of thinking about the thing) and real distinction (where the two distinguishable items are in fact separable). The formal distinction holds when two aspects of a thing are inseparable but are nonetheless really distinct in the thing itself — the divine attributes (justice, mercy, wisdom) in God; the various powers of the soul; the common nature and haecceity in an individual creature.

The doctrine has been continuously controversial. Critics (Ockham especially) have argued that the formal distinction is incoherent: a real distinction in a thing must be a real distinction (which would make God's attributes really separable, a position Christian theology cannot accept) or it must be only conceptual (which would deflate the doctrine into a merely epistemic claim). Defenders have argued that the doctrine captures real metaphysical structure in the world that the binary of real/conceptual misses.

Haecceity

Scotus's account of the principle of individuation: what makes this horse the particular horse it is, and not some other horse with the same essential properties? The Thomist answer is matter — the same essential form is individuated by being instantiated in distinct material substrates. Scotus rejected this answer for several reasons (it cannot account for the individuation of angels, who lack matter; it cannot account for the individuation of the resurrected human soul before the resurrection of the body; it threatens the individuality of the rational soul more generally).

His alternative is the doctrine of haecceity (haecceitas) — thisness. Each individual has, in addition to its common nature (the species and genus features it shares with others of its kind), an irreducible individuating principle by which it is this particular instance. The haecceity is not a property but the irreducible individuality of the thing itself.

The doctrine has been continuously engaged in metaphysics and in the philosophy of religion. Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic concept of inscape is recognizably Scotist; the contemporary work on individuation, on personal identity, and on the metaphysics of unique particulars continues to engage the doctrine.

The primacy of the will

Scotus's voluntarism in both ethics and theology. In God, the will is in a sense prior to the intellect — God's commands and acts are not merely expressions of an antecedent rational understanding but expressions of the divine freedom. In human beings, the will is similarly prior to the intellect in moral action; moral worth is a matter of how the will acts, not merely of what the intellect understands.

The position has had historical consequences. The voluntarist trajectory in late scholasticism, continued through Ockham and through into the early-modern theology of the divine command theory, was shaped by Scotist articulations. The doctrine of the absolute freedom of God (especially as articulated in the de potentia absoluta / de potentia ordinata distinction) became one of the central organizing features of late-medieval theology and early-modern political and theological thought.

Key works

• Ordinatio (also known as Opus Oxoniense). The major theological work, the revised version of his Oxford Sentences lectures.
• Reportatio Parisiensis. The Paris Sentences lectures as recorded by students.
• Quaestiones Quodlibetales. The formal Paris disputations.
• De Primo Principio (Treatise on the First Principle). The compressed systematic statement of the proof for God's existence and the divine attributes.
• Various Aristotelian commentaries (on the Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Metaphysics).

The standard scholarly edition is the Opera Omnia edited by the Scotistic Commission at the Vatican (begun 1950 and still in progress). The English translations include the Wolter translation of De Primo Principio and selected texts (multiple volumes since 1962), the Wolter-Bychkov translation of The Examined Report of the Paris Lecture (Franciscan Institute, 2004–08), and the Frank-Wolter translation of selected passages from the Ordinatio.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Augustine (the broad theological framework); Bonaventure (the immediate Franciscan predecessor); Aquinas (the dominant Thomist framework whose technical alternatives Scotus developed); Henry of Ghent (the major immediate Augustinian counterpart, with whom Scotus engaged extensively); Avicenna (the Islamic philosopher whose metaphysics of being shaped Scotus's account); the broader Franciscan tradition of the Doctores Solemnes.

Influenced: The Scotist tradition through the late-medieval and early-modern periods (Francis of Mayronnes, William of Alnwick, Antonius Andreas, Petrus Thomae); William of Ockham (whose nominalism developed in critical engagement with Scotist positions); the late-medieval voluntarist tradition through Pierre d'Ailly and Jean Gerson; the Counter-Reformation Spanish scholastics (especially Suárez, whose Disputationes Metaphysicae operates with Scotist apparatus); Gerard Manley Hopkins (whose poetic concept of inscape is recognizably Scotist); the modern Catholic theological recovery through Etienne Gilson, Charles Balic, and the Scotistic Commission; the contemporary engagement through Richard Cross, Peter King, Antonie Vos, Allan Wolter, and the recent monograph literature.

Reception

The medieval reception was substantial. The Scotist tradition became one of the three major scholastic schools alongside Thomism and Nominalism; Franciscan houses of study adopted Scotist positions; the major Scotist theologians of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Francis of Meyronnes, John of Bassolis, Petrus Thomae) developed and defended the framework substantially.

The early modern reception was mixed. The Counter-Reformation Spanish scholastics (Suárez especially) operated extensively with Scotist categories; the broader Catholic theological education through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries treated Scotus as one of the three principal scholastic authorities. The Enlightenment treatment was often dismissive (the Subtle Doctor became Dunce, the English noun for a stupid person, by way of the Reformation polemic against scholasticism).

The modern recovery has been substantial. Charles Balic's foundation of the Scotistic Commission in 1938 began the production of a modern critical edition that continues today. Etienne Gilson's Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (1952) was the major modern monograph. The Anglo-Saxon analytic recovery through Allan Wolter (whose translations and studies from the 1960s onward were foundational) and the contemporary work of Richard Cross, Peter King, Calvin Normore, Stephen Dumont, Giorgio Pini, and Antonie Vos has produced a body of contemporary Scotus scholarship.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Richard Cross's Duns Scotus (1999) and Duns Scotus on God (2005), Antonie Vos's The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus (2006), Peter King's chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Williams, ed., 2003), the work of Giorgio Pini on the metaphysics, Calvin Normore on the philosophy of mind, and Mary Beth Ingham on the ethics. Active scholarly debates concern the precise interpretation and historical significance of the univocity doctrine (especially in light of the Radical Orthodoxy critique), the technical interpretation of the formal distinction, the relation between Scotus and Ockham (especially over the nature of universals), and the question of how to integrate the various incomplete works into a unified picture of Scotus's mature position.

Further reading

• Scholasticism — the tradition Scotus shaped
• Aquinas — the dominant Thomist framework whose technical alternatives Scotus developed
• Bonaventure — the immediate Franciscan predecessor in the Augustinian tradition
• Avicenna — the Islamic philosopher whose metaphysics of being shaped Scotus's univocity doctrine
• Essence and Existence — the metaphysical distinction Scotus engaged in developing the univocity doctrine
• Free Will — the doctrine Scotus's voluntarism developed

The Scottish Franciscan Subtle Doctor whose technical revisions to the Thomist synthesis — univocity of being, formal distinction, primacy of the will, haecceity — produced the major late-medieval Franciscan alternative to Thomism.