Surprised by Scotus

Have you ever had an opinion of someone or something, perhaps informed by little, if any real substantive evidence, only, upon actually learning about that person or thing, that you were terribly, and perhaps even culpably misinformed?

If we’re honest about being on an intellectual journey, rather than having already definitely arrived at a destination, I think we should all have those moments now and again. Otherwise, we’ll suffer from an arrogance and rigidity that’s liable to impede, if not erode the well-being of our minds and hearts, stifling our growth in virtue.

That’s certainly what happened to the Jewish religious leadership upon encountering Jesus of Nazareth. The chief priests and the Pharisees scoffed at Him and His humble background, declaring in John 7:52: “Search and you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee.” (They were actually even wrong about that, Jonah was from Galilee). Indeed, they thought so little of Him that they preferred His death over the murdering insurrectionist Barabbas (Lk 23-18-19).

It’s an extreme example, I’ll submit — not all intellectual laziness is akin to betraying Our Lord. We need not look far to find examples closer to home. I’ll offer one example for myself, occasioned by Thomas M. Ward’s book Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus.

I’ll confess that prior to reading Ward’s book, I’m not sure I had ever read anything by the Franciscan monk Scotus, who died in 1308. If I did, perhaps in some undergraduate religious studies course, the memory of Scotus’s brilliance has long since vanished. Though Scotus was beatified by St. John Paul II in 1993, I’m guessing most Catholics share my ignorance — I couldn’t find a single example in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that cites his work. The “subtle doctor,” as he’s called, is a moniker true in more ways than one!

If anything, I’m more familiar with the work of one of Scotus’s pupils: the notoriously hubristic William of Occam (d. 1347). Occam is known, not only for his “razor,” but for his teachings on nominalism and univocity, both of which in turn influenced Occam’s most famous intellectual descendant. His name was Martin Luther, and he claimed that he “absorbed completely” the Occamist school.

Nominalism is the idea that universals are not objective; univocity is the idea that God and creation both in some sense share the idea of “being.” Both of these, as I argue in my book The Obscurity of Scripture, have tended to cause all manner of philosophical and theological problems within Protestantism. Nominalism undermines Catholic teaching regarding the unity of God and creation, as well as natural theology; univocity tends to lead its adherents to view God and man as existing on the same metaphysical plane, and thus in competition with one another. This is why, for example, Luther believed salvation must be wholly God’s work.

Because of this, it’s easy (if a bit intellectually lazy) to blame Scotus for Luther’s philosophical errors. If we can trace a line from Luther to Occam, and then from Occam to Scotus, I (and many other Catholic writers and thinkers) have surmised, then surely the Franciscan Scotsman must also be philosophically compromised. Ward’s treatment of Scotus helps us see why that view is at least simplistic, and perhaps even erroneous.

Scotus, writes Ward, “was ambitious in his efforts, but always deferential to the Church’s teaching.” He cites Franciscan Allan B. Wolter’s description of the seventeenth century as the “golden age of Scotism” in Catholic universities, and seventeenth-century Cistercian John Caramuel’s observation that at the time the Scotist school was more popular than all others, including the Thomists, combined. Nevertheless, since Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Aeternei Patris, the influence of Scotus has been eclipsed by that of Aquinas.

Yet there is much overlap between Scotus and Aquinas. Consider Scotus’s argument that unaided human reason can perceive what he calls a “Triple Primacy,” the idea that there is a First Cause of everything besides itself; that there is an Ultimate End of everything in the universe; and there is a Most Perfect nature possible. Anyone familiar with Aquinas’s “Five Ways” will recognize those three proofs for God’s existence, which Scotus argues leads to a “most fertile” conclusion.

Scotus also offered early support for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was a somewhat controversial thing to do in thirteenth century Europe. A few years after Scotus publicly defended the doctrine, Paris theologian John of Pouilly darkly suggested that those who endorsed the Immaculate Conception should be answered “not with argument but in some other way.” Yet Scotus’s argument in favor of the Immaculate Conception appears in Pope Pius IX’s 1854 declaration of the dogma Ineffabilis Deus.

Ward also argues that Scotus’s doctrine of univocity has been misunderstood. He explains: “Whereas Scotus’s actual view is that the concept or term ‘being’ is used the same way for both God and creatures, others have claimed that his view instead is that God and creatures are beings in the same way.” Scotus would insist that God is infinite being, whereas any creature is finite being; nor does God and His creation in any way share being, though creatures participate in God’s being as effects participate in their causes (that, too, sounds like Aquinas).

Though Aquinas rejects univocity in favor of the analogy of being (i.e. creation has being in a sense that is analogical, and not identical to God, since God is being itself), Ward argues that Scotus did not define univocity in the way that his errant interpreters did. In effect, and as Catholic philosopher Edward Feser explains in his review of Ordered by Love, Ward believes critics of Scotus are wrongly reading a metaphysical implication out of a semantic ­thesis, “a claim about the meanings of our words rather than about the nature of the reality to which those words refer.” Ward also argues that Scotus believed in realism (as did Aquinas), and not the nominalism of Occam and later Protestants who are understood as following in the Occamist school.

As Feser acknowledges, Ward’s admittedly abbreviated treatment of these debates (it is an introduction after all), is unlikely to resolve the now centuries-long debates between Thomists and Scotists. Nevertheless, the success of Ordered by Love is to understand why we should understand Scotus not simply as a foil to Aquinas, but as an important, influential thinker in his own right.

“Purity of heart is the will’s freedom from all disordered delight,” the Scottish Blessed wrote in his Ordinatio. That’s about a good summation of virtue as anything one will find in the Summa Theologiae. And one that should influence our treatment not only of Scotus, but anyone whom we are inclined to think we know better than we actually do.

Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus
By Thomas M. Ward
Angelico Press, 2022
Paperback/Hardcover, 174 pages

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