| 110. Duns Scotus. | ||||
Literature: Works. Complete ed. by Luke Wadding, 12 vols., Lyons, 1639, with a Life by Wadding, and the glosses of Hugh Mac Caghwell (Hugo Cavellus, d. 1626), abp. of Armagh, Maurice O'Fihely, abp. of Tuam, etc. *New ed., 26 vols., Paris, 1891-1895, with some changes. The Opus Oxoniense, Vienna, 1481, ed. by Mac Caghwell together with the Reportata Parisiensia and Quaestiones Quodlibetales and a Life, Antwerp, 1620. The Quaestiones Quodlibet., Venice, 1474, 1505, Paris, 1513. The Logical Treatises were publ. at Barcelona, 1475, Venice, 1491-1493, and ed. by O'Fihely, 1504. Duns' system was expounded by Angelo Vulpi in Sacr. theol. Summa Joan. Scoti, 12 vols., Naples, 1622-1640. For biogr. and analytic works publ. before 1800, see Rigg in Dict. Of Natl. Biog. XVI. 216 sqq. Baumgarten-Crusius: De theol. Scoti, Jena, 1826. Schneid: D. Koerperlehre des J. Duns Sc. und ihr Verhaetniss zum Thomismus und Atomismus, Mainz, 1879. *C. Werner: J. Duns Sc., Vienna, 1881, also S. Thomas von Aquino, III, 3-101. Kahl: D. Primat des Willens bei Augustinus, Duns Sc. und Des Cartes, Strassb., 1886. *R. Seeberg: D. Theologie des J. Duns Sc., Leip., 1900; also his art. in Herzog, 3d ed. and his Dogmengesch., II. 129 sqq. Renan: art. Scotus, in Hist. Lit. de France, vol. XXV. *Doellinger: art. in Wetzer-Welte, X. 2123-2133. J. M. Rigg: in Dict. Natl. Biog., XVI. 216-220. *Schwane: Dogmengesch., pp. 74-76, etc. Harnack: Dogmengesch., III. 459 sqq. *A. Ritschl: Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung, I. 58-86; Gesch. des Pietismus, I. 470. P. Minges: Ist Duns Scotus Indeterminist? Muenster, 1905, p. 139. The Histt. of Philos. | ||||
The last of the scholastic thinkers of the first rank and the most daring of mediaeval logicians is John Duns Scotus. With his death the disintegration of scholastic theology begins. This remarkable man, one of the intellectual prodigies of the race, may have been under forty years of age when death overtook him. His dialectic genius and ingenuity won for him the title of the Subtle doctor, doctor subtilis. His intellectual independence is shown in the freedom with which he subjected his predecessors to his searching and often sophistical criticisms. Anselm, the St. Victors, Albert the Great, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and other Schoolmen he does not hesitate to mention by name and to assail their views. The discussions of Thomas Aquinas are frequently made the subject of his attack. Duns became the chief theological ornament of the Franciscan order and his theology was defended by a distinct school, which took his name, the Scotists. This school and the Thomists, who followed the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, are the leading schools of theology produced in the Middle Ages and came into violent controversy. | ||||
Duns' mind was critical rather than constructive. The abstruseness of his style offers difficulties almost insuperable to the comprehension of the modern student. He developed no complete system. It was his characteristic to disturb faith and to open again questions to which Thomas Aquinas and other Schoolmen were supposed to have given final statements. The sharp distinction he made between faith and knowledge, dogma and reason, and his use of the arguments from silence and probability, undermined confidence in the infallibility of the Church and opened the way for the disrepute into which scholasticism fell. Duns denied that the being of God and other dogmas can be proved by the reason, and he based their acceptance solely upon the authority of the Church. The analytic precision, as well as lucid statement of Thomas and Peter the Lombard, are wanting in the Subtle doctor, and the mystical element, so perceptible in the writings of Anselm, Thomas, and Bonaventura, gives way to a purely speculative interest. | ||||
What a contrast Duns presents to the founder of his order, Francis d'Assisi, the man of simple faith and creed, and popular speech and ministries! Of all the Schoolmen, Duns wandered most in the labyrinth of metaphysical subtleties, and none of them is so much responsible as he for the current opinion that mediaeval theology and fanciful speculation are interchangeable terms. His reputation for specious ratiocination has given to the language the term, dunce. | ||||
Of his personal history scarcely anything is known, and his extensive writings furnish not a single clew. Even the time and place of his entering the Franciscan order cannot be made out with certainty. The only fixed date in his career is the date which brought it to a close. He died at Cologne, Nov. 8, 1308. The date of his birth is placed between 1265-1274. | ||||
England, Scotland, and Ireland have contended for the honor of being the Schoolman's native land, with the probability in favor of England. Irishmen since the fifteenth century have argued for Dun, or Down, in Ulster. Scotchmen plead for Dunse in Berwickshire, while writers, unaffected by patriotic considerations, for the most part agree upon Dunstane in Northumberland. The uncertain tradition runs that he studied at Merton College, Oxford, and became teacher there on the transfer of William of Ware to Paris. In 1304, he was in the French capital, where he won the doctor's degree. In 1308, be was transferred by the general of his order to Cologne, where he died soon after. The story ran that he was buried alive. In 1707, the Franciscans tried in vain to secure his canonization. A monument, reared to Duns in the Franciscan church at Cologne, 1513, bore this inscription: - | ||||
Scotia gave me birth, England nursed me, | ||||
Gaul educated me, Cologne holds my ashes. | ||||
Among the stories told of Duns Scotus is the following, behind which more wisdom hides than is found in whole chapters of his labored discussions. On one occasion he stopped to speak to an English farmer on the subject of religion. The farmer, who was engaged in sowing, turned and said: Why do you speak to me? If God has foreknowledge that I will be saved, I will be saved whether I do good or ill. Duns replied: Then, if God has foreknowledge that grain will grow out of this soil, it will grow whether you sow or withhold your hand. You may as well save yourself the labor you are at. | ||||
The works of Duns Scotus include commentaries on Aristotle, an extended commentary on the Sentences of the Lombard, called the Opus oxoniense, his theological lectures delivered at Paris, known as the Reportata parisiensia1 and his Quaestiones quodlibetales, being sundry discussions on theological and philosophical problems. A commentary on Genesis and one on the Gospels, sermons and other writings of doubtful or denied authenticity are ascribed to Duns. | ||||
In philosophy Duns was a moderate realist. The universals are not intellectual fictions, fictiones intellectus. Our ideas presuppose their reality. The universal is gotten by abstraction and by noting points of agreement in individuals, and in a certain sense it is a creation of the mind. The individual has its individuality, or haecceitas, not by reason of its differentiation from something else but by its own real essence, or quidditas. A stone is an individual by reason of something positive, intrinsic within itself. The individual is the final form of being, ultima realitas entis. | ||||
Theology is a practical science and its chief value is in furnishing to the will the materials of faith to lighten it on the path of virtuous action. | ||||
The Scriptures contain what is to be believed, but the authority of the Church establishes what these truths are. Articles of faith are to be accepted, not because they are demonstrable by reason. Reason is unreliable or, at best, obscure and many truths it cannot prove, such as the soul's immortality, the unity of God, and transubstantiation. A doctrine such as the descent into hell, which is not found in the Scriptures is, nevertheless, to be accepted because it is found in the Apostles' Creed. Other truths the Church possesses which are not found in the Scriptures. Our belief in the Scriptures rests ultimately on the authority of the Church. The doctrines in which Duns differed most from his predecessors were the doctrines of God and transubstantiation. In his treatment of God, Duns shows himself to be the most positive of determinists. The controlling element in the divine nature is the will of God, and to submit to the will of God is the highest goal the human will can reach. Here he differs widely from Thomas Aquinas, who places God's intelligence above His will. The sufficient explanation of God's action is His absolute will. God is good because God wills to be so. The will of God might have made what is now bad good, had God so chosen. He can do all things except what is logically absurd. He could have saved Judas after he was condemned, but He cannot make a stone holy or change an event which has already happened. | ||||
The will of God determines the salvation of men. The predestination of the elect is an act purely of God's determination. The non-elect are reprobated in view of their foreseen demerit. On the other hand, Duns seems to hold fast to the doctrine that the elect merit the eternal reward by good works. Without attempting to exhaust the apparent contradiction between divine foreordination and human responsibility, he confesses the mystery attaching to the subject. | ||||
Sin is not infinite, for it is connected with finite beings. Original righteousness was a superadded gift, forfeited through the first sin. Eve's sin was greater than Adam's, for Adam shrank from offending Eve Eve sought to be equal with God. Man's freedom consists in his ability to choose the contrary. Original sin consists in the loss of original righteousness which Adam owed to God. Sin does not pass down to Adam's descendants by way of infection. Duns separated from Augustine in denying the doctrine of moral inability, the servum arbitrium. It belongs to the very nature of the will to be free. This freedom, however, the will can lose by repeated volitions. Sin is inherent in the will alone, and concupiscence is only an inclination of the will to desire objects of pleasure immoderately. | ||||
The ultimate questions why God permitted evil, and how He could foreknow evil would occur without also predetermining it, find their solution only in God's absolute will. God willed, and that must suffice for the reason. | ||||
The infinite value of the atonement likewise finds its explanation in the absolute will of God. Christ died as a man, and for that reason his merit of itself was not infinite. An angel, or a man, free from original sin, might have made efficient atonement if God had so willed. Nothing in the guilt of sin made it necessary for the Son of God to die. God determined to accept Christ's obedience and, in view of it, to impart grace to the sinner. Duns follows closely Anselm's theory, whose principles he carefully states. | ||||
In his treatment of transubstantiation, Duns vigorously attacked the view of Thomas Aquinas as a transition of the body of Christ into the bread. He argued that if there were such transition, then at celebrations of the eucharist during the three days of Christ's burial the elements would have been changed into his dead body. To avoid this difficulty he enunciated the theory that the body of Christ, as of every man, has more than one form, that is, in addition to the rational soul, a forma mixti sive corporeitatis, which is joined to matter and constitutes it a human body. Into this corporal form of Christ, corporeitas, the elements are transmuted and this form remained with Christ's corpse in the grave. Duns declared that the doctrine of transubstantiation cannot be proved with certainty from the Scriptures, nor at all by the reason. He then argued that it is more probable than any other theory because the Church has accepted it, and the dogma is most in keeping with God's omnipotence. The dogma must be accepted on the authority of the Church. | ||||
The doctrine upon whose development the Subtle doctor had altogether the most influence is the doctrine of the immaculate conception, which he taught in the form in which it was proclaimed a dogma, by Pius IX., 1854. Departing from the statements of Anselm, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura, Duns taught that Mary was conceived without sin. His theory is presented at length in the chapter on the Virgin Mary. The story ran that, in championing this theory, at a public disputation at Paris, he controverted Thomas' position with no less than two hundred arguments. Duns' frequent attacks upon Thomas' statements were the sufficient cause of controversy between the followers of the two teachers, and this controversy belongs to the number of the more bitter controversies that have been carried on within the Roman Catholic communion. It was a contest, however, not between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but between two eminent teachers equally in good standing, and between the two orders they represented. | ||||
Doellinger expressed the opinion that the controversy was turned into a blessing for theology by keeping it from stagnation and petrifaction, and into a blessing for the Church, which took under its protection both systems and kept each from arrogating to itself the right of final authority. | ||||
The common view in regard to the place of Duns Scotus in the history of doctrine is that he was a disturber of the peace. Without adding any element of permanent value to theological thought, he shook to its base the scholastic structure upon which Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and other theologians had wrought for nearly two centuries. The opinion will, no doubt, continue to prevail that Duns was a master in intellectual ingenuity, but that his judgment was unsound. It is fair to say that Seeberg of Berlin, in his recent elaborate and thorough monograph on the theology of Duns Scotus, takes an entirely different view. To him Duns was not a disturber of theological thought, but the head of a new period of development and worthy of equal honor with Thomas Aquinas. Yea, he ascribes to him a more profound and extensive influence upon theology than Thomas exerted. He broke a new path, and was a historical figure of epoch-making importance. | ||||
By his speculative piquancy, on the one hand, Duns strengthened the desire of certain groups in Europe for a saner method of theological discussion; and on the other hand stimulated pious minds along the Rhine to search along a better way after personal piety, as did Tauler and the German mystics. The succeeding generation of Schoolmen was brought by him as their leader into a disputatious attitude. What else could be expected when Duns, contrary to the fundamental principles of Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and other divines, did not shrink from declaring a thing might at the same time be true in philosophy and false in theology?1 | ||||
Ockam, who shared Duns' determinism, called him the doctor of our order. In the dispute over the immaculate conception in the fifteenth century no divine was more quoted than he. A century later Archbishop Mac Caghwell and other Irish theologians warmly expatiated upon his powers, wrote his biography, and edited his works. | ||||
One of the works of the Reformation was to dethrone Duns Scotus from his seat of authority as a teacher. Richard Layton wrote to Cromwell, 1535, We have set Dunce in Bocardo and banished him from Oxford forever, and he is now made a common servant to every man fast nailed up upon posts in all houses of common easement. Luther called him the most arrant of sophists, and he made him responsible for a revival of Pelagianism and exalting the consequent value of good works by emphasizing the freedom of the will and the natural powers. Duns had no presentiment of any other order than the papal and said nothing looking toward a reformation in doctrine. | ||||
Among the contemporaries with whom Duns had theological affinity were Henry of Ghent and the Englishman, Richard Middleton. Henry of Ghent, named doctor solemnis, a celebrated teacher in Paris, was born at Ghent and died, 1293, in Paris or Tournay. His Quodlibeta and Summa were published in Paris, 1518 and 1520. At points Henry combated Thomas Aquinas and prepared the way for Duns Scotus, who adopts some of Henry's views. Henry's discussions run far into the region of abstruse metaphysics. He leaned to Platonism and was a realist. | ||||
Richard Middleton was supposedly a predecessor of Duns at Oxford. Little is known of his life. He was a Franciscan, a scholar at Paris, and was appointed by the general of his order to examine into the doctrines of Peter Olivi, 1278-1288. He died about 1307. His commentary on the Sentences of the Lombard survived him. Middleton was known at Paris as doctor solidus. At the council of Constance he was cited as an authority against Wyclif. His name is inscribed on the tomb of Duns Scotus at Cologne, and the tradition runs that Duns was his pupil. In his teachings regarding the will, which he defined as the noblest of the soul's faculties, he may have influenced Duns, as Seeberg attempts to prove. Middleton compared the mind to a servant who carries a light in front of his master and does nothing more than to show his master the way, while his master commands and directs as he pleases. | ||||