John Duns Scotus and the Western Crisis, Part 1

To many it might seem hard to believe that a reflection on the thought of John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) could possibly be timely. And yet Benedict XVI, for one, seems to think it is—and with good reason. Benedict mentioned Scotus prominently in one of the earliest public statements of his papacy, an address that sought to set a theme (the recovery of reason) for his entire papacy. And Benedict has returned to the subject more recently. In fact, as Benedict realizes, a consideration of Scotus' thought is important for any understanding of the rejection of reason and of anti-intellectual currents of thought (especially in the field of morality) both in the modern world as well as in the modern Church, since Scotus was a significant figure in the trend toward rationalistic skepticism that has characterized Western thought since the High Middle Ages. As Alasdair MacIntyre has expressed it:

Scotus thus not only made possible but provoked a good deal of later moral philosophy, directly and indirectly, from Occam all the way to Kant. (Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 155)

The Historical Setting

Josef Pieper, in Scholasticism, offers us the context in which Scotus' thought must be placed for a proper evaluation: the aftermath of the Condemnation of 1277. This condemnation of a number of philosophical positions was issued by the Bishop of Paris--home of the foremost Medieval university--and was aimed at halting the spread of Aristotelian inspired thought, which many traditional (i.e., Augustinian) theologians believed involved a surrender to ancient Greek views that could generally be termed “necessitarian.” Typically, such views included the idea of an eternal universe, a universe that is a self contained process and which included "God" as an integral part of that whole or process. Thus, God would not be understood in the Christian sense as the transcendent creator. Another common position in this worldview was the denial that each individual human is an independent intellectual substance. In other words, in Aristotelian terms, all men share a common, separate “agent intellect” or “world soul.” This, of course, also meant that the individual would not endure beyond death--there was no immortal individual soul, only the common "world soul" or "agent intellect."

Obviously, the Condemnation was issued from a generally traditional Augustinian perspective that was somewhat less than discriminating, as witness the fact that among the condemned propositions were a number that clearly had Thomas Aquinas in mind. Of course, the Christian West had long been exposed to Greek thought, including the thought of Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, through the mediation of Augustine, but the West had previously been unaware of the full implications of the ancient Greek worldview. It was only natural, therefore, that Christians would react. That reaction, however, in the form that the Condemnation took--a somewhat uncritical reassertion of traditional Augustinian thought--had unfortunate consequences. In effect, it stifled intellectual inquiry by identifying orthodoxy with a reactionary defensive shell against the free use of reason, while doing little to expose the dangerous tendencies that had, in fact, long been latent in Platonized versions of Christian thought that had the sanction of tradition.

Two of the foremost historians of medieval thought are in agreement on the importance of the Condemnation of 1277 as setting a new intellectual tone for the West. Fernand Van Steenberghen (in Le XIIIe siècle) calls the Condemnation of 1277 the “true pivot of the intellectual history of this epoch,” and Etienne Gilson (in his History ...) states that it changed the “atmosphere of intellectual life … fundamentally” (quoted in its French edition in Pieper's Scholasticism, 127). Gilson further maintained that “the Christian worldview, which of course has always been simultaneously theological and philosophical, went over to the defensive against 'worldly' knowledge ...” (Scholasticism, 135). The Condemnation represented a circling of the wagons rather than a healthy intellectual confrontation; it was a reaction that failed to address all that was not well with the tradition that it sought to preserve.

In opposition to the “necessitarianism” of Greco-Muslim thought Christian thinkers—and particularly Franciscans of the Augustinian school of thought—focused on safeguarding the freedom of God. While this reaction was understandable, inasmuch as those types of thought were in fact opposed to the Christian conception of God, too often Augustinian thinkers failed to observe that their positions--especially those, like Divine Illumination, which attacked the independence of man's reasoning faculties--posed obvious threats to the Christian conception of human nature and, crucially, of human freedom itself. Pieper admirably summarizes the predominant trend of this type of thought, citing Scotus as one of its leading exponents:

“The watchword 'freedom,' which I said characterized Duns Scotus, refers above all to the freedom of God. This may seem to us a purely theological thesis, but we will think otherwise as soon as we see the conclusion which Duns Scotus quickly draws from this: Because God is absolutely free, everything that He does and effects has the character of nonnecessity, of being in a particular sense 'accidental' (contingent). This applies both to God's creative work, and therefore to Creation itself, and to the events included within the history of Salvation.

The direction in which this argument aims is quite plain. In a word: there are no 'necessary reasons' for the work of God. And certainly human reason is incapable of arriving by deductions and arguments at that which has emerged as the result of a free divine act; human reason cannot claim that such results are meaningful 'in themselves,' let alone necessarily intelligible. As far as the absolute freedom of God reaches, no room is left for philosophical speculation. But all of Creation is a work of divine freedom, just as are the redemption and the conferral of grace upon man. Of all this, therefore, we cannot in the least say that it 'must' be 'so' or 'otherwise'--or that it must be 'at all.'” (Scholasticism, 140)

It should be apparent that the Christian Augustinian reaction to necessitarianism (whether Greek or Greek derived through Muslim thought), whatever effect it may have had on the Greek or Muslim worldview, was unquestionably destructive of an authentic Christian worldview. As Benedict has seen, and understood in part, the thought of Christian champions of divine freedom ended up bearing a striking and unsettling resemblance to the type of Muslim thought they had set out to oppose. This is particularly true of their portrait of God, who emerges as an inscrutable, arbitrary figure beyond reason, driven by the will to power. Nor was this accidental, for the tactic increasingly adopted by Augustinian thinkers was to defend God's freedom by attacking human reason, severely restricting the scope of reason and thus rendering God unknowable except by revelation. They had gotten themselves into the no-win position of exalting the sovereignty of God by denigrating the value of God's creation, especially the crown of that creation: man. Ironically (or not?), the tools that Christian thinkers used in this endeavor were borrowed from precisely those Greek thinkers whose views they sought to oppose—a fool's errand if ever there was one. But many Christian thinkers had long since confused Platonism for Christianity.

Scotus and the Problem of Knowledge

Benedict and other critics of Scotus focus on his moral thought, which amounts to a rejection of Catholic natural law teaching. But in order to gain an understanding of how Scotus came to hold these views it is best to begin by outlining the influence on Scotus of Platonic-Augustinian theories of human knowledge. Recall that, according to Plato's "philosophical myth" of anamnesis, our knowledge of abstract ideas comes about, on the occasion of sensations, by recollection of corresponding Ideas known before the soul was imprisoned in a body, or known in a previous life. Augustine Christianized this “philosophical myth” by eliminating the idea of a previous existence of the soul and simply asserting that God “illuminates” the human mind with abstract ideas upon the occasion of sense knowledge. Augustine's reasoning in this regard is Platonic to the core. This Augustinian doctrine of Divine Illumination was championed by Bonaventure, who can be regarded as the founder of a sort of Augustinian orthodoxy. However, the Augustinian theologians and philosophers who followed Bonaventure (many of them Franciscans, like Bonaventuire) were not slow to perceive the difficulties that Augustine's "solution" to the problem of knowledge entailed. David Knowles sums up the dilemma facing the neo-Augustinian theologians in the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries, following the Condemnation:

The epistemology, in particular, of the neo-Augustinians was a focus of difficulty. On the one hand, the classical dictum of Augustine, deriving ultimately from Plato, that 'no pure truth can be expected from sensation,' made them distrust the empiricism of Aristotle, with its Thomist corollary, that 'nothing is in the intellect that has not first come through the sense.' On the other hand, the doctrine of the divine illumination of the intellect, which alone guarded an Augustinian from a general scepticism when the pure Platonic doctrine of ideas had gone, was a tenet extremely hard to defend philosophically … (The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 274-276)

Scotus, of course, was the most important of the neo-Augustinian theologians, and Etienne Gilson, in The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, devotes two chapters to various aspects of Scotus' account of human knowledge. In Chapter XII, “Knowledge of Things,” Gilson begins by discussing the state of Augustinian thought following Bonaventure. Gilson first focuses on the well known Franciscan, Matthew of Aquasparta, who sought to be loyal to the spirit of Bonaventure, and whose thought illustrates the difficulties involved in the Augustinian doctrine of Divine Illumination. Gilson writes:

“To reach conclusions of this kind [that things are not the cause of our knowledge; instead, the Ideas imprinted on our minds by God are] is to admit that pure philosophy is unable by its own resources to secure the foundations of science, and since Matthew of Aquasparta regards the doctrine of illumination as essentially theological, we may say that his epistemology is a philosophical scepticism saved by fideism. That amounts to saying that there is no guarantee of certitude save in faith …” (SMP, 234-235)

Gilson points out that the neo-Augustinians who followed Matthew were not slow to recognize the philosophical weaknesses of Divine Illumination as a doctrine, and he notes that, in fact, Peter Olivi (1248-1298) explicitly makes the connection between the Augustinian doctrine and the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis (recollection)--which rested on the non-Christian notion of the soul's pre-existence. The neo-Augustinians also recognized that Divine Illumination had serious consequences both for man's freedom and for moral thought. Clearly, the Condemnation was the easy part; the project of preserving the substance of Augustinian thought would be the tricky part, requiring all the talents of the Doctor Subtilis (the title bestowed on Scotus).

The Augustinian reaction therefore sought some way to either rehabilitate Augustine's doctrine or to replace it. This was the context in which Scotus began his academic career. Note that the problem that faced Scotus was complicated by the fact that, while the issues themselves were essentially philosophical, the neo-Augustinians were committed from the outset to come up with a solution that conformed to an Augustinian theological pattern. Thus, while Scotus recognized the problems facing traditional Augustinian thought, he by no means wished to simply start afresh. Scotus' approach could best be characterized as one of damage control, in which he sought to preserve as much as possible of Augustinian thought--as it had come to be understood since the time of Bonaventure--by repackaging it in a form designed to be more resistant to the newer trends of thought--including Thomism. Indeed, Alasdair MacIntyre has described Scotus as one

whose philosophical enquiries were at every point controlled by his theological conclusions and whose primary interest was in protecting the autonomy of Augustinian theology from the inroads of either Averroist [i.e., Muslim] or Thomistic Aristotelianism.  (TRVME, 155-156)

Above all Scotus, like all Augustinians, was determined to resist any trend of thought that appeared to place constraints on God's freedom. This, of course, included Greco-Muslim philosophy but, as demonstrated by the Condemnation of 1277, it also brought under suspicion any tendency (in the Augustinian view) to unduly exalt man's natural powers, especially those of the intellect. Contrary to what Gilson suggests (SMP, 235), therefore, Scotus' aim was not to "rehabilitate the sensible order" per se; rather, he was willing to make some concessions in that direction in order to preserve the substance of the Augustinian position.

In presenting Scotus' thought, Gilson attempts an irenic approach, stressing that Scotus largely came to the same conclusions as Aquinas. Nevertheless, while contending that Scotus “judged [divine illumination] to be philosophically untenable" Gilson also admits that Scotus "reserv[ed] the right to find some other means of saving whatever truth there is in Augustine's doctrine.” (SMP, 240)

But that is a very significant reservation! It means that Scotus did not, as Gilson would have it, “follow[] St Thomas Aquinas” (SMP, 235). And we will see that Scotus' treatment of human knowledge differs significantly from the ideas and spirit of Aquinas. Thus, Gilson himself later adds:

“… Duns Scotus' whole noetic tends to strengthen as much as possible the independence of the intellect in respect of the sensible order. It is just this that distinguishes it from the noetic of St. Thomas. Throughout all its emendations of Augustine's doctrine a vein of Augustinianism persists; sense knowledge is never anything more for him than the 'occasion' of intellectual knowledge.” (SMP, 241)

This “vein of Augustinianism” is, in fact, the Platonic spirit that Pieper (Scholasticism, 76) noted, stretching from Augustine to Anselm, through Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus to Descartes and Leibniz. And Kant and his progeny as well, we should add.

Gilson next turns (in Chapter XIII "The Intellect and its Object") to a consideration of a question that was a touchstone for all Christian thought during the Middle Ages: is God the natural object of our cognitive powers? All Christian thinkers deny that this is the case although, as Gilson notes, it was “an accusation freely leveled by the medievals against one another” in order to impugn the orthodoxy of their opponents (SMP, 248). A hot button issue such as this will provide important insights into the nature of Scotus' thought.

Gilson proceeds by contrasting the views of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Aquinas' position is easily summarized. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that “in this life, we can form no concept unless first we have received a sense impression, nor even return later on to this concept without turning to the images that sense has left behind in the imagination.” Therefore, since “there is a natural relation, an essential proportion, between the human intellect and the nature of material things,” it follows that “even granting the existence of purely intelligible Ideas, such as those of Plato, the very fact that their nature puts them out of the reach of our senses makes it impossible to regard them as the natural object of the intellect” (SMP, 249). And since God, too, is inaccessible to our senses, it follows that God cannot be the natural object of our cognitive powers: “an intellect which bears naturally on sensible things cannot naturally have God for object” (SMP, 250). Our knowledge of God must therefore be derived by inference from our knowledge of created, material things. The whole matter is easily summarized in about two pages.

The case is entirely different when Gilson comes to consider Scotus, for it will require six very dense pages to give some idea of Scotus' extraordinarily complex position. Gilson emphasizes that, “as far as conclusions go,” Scotus' conclusions are “in entire accord with those of Thomism” (SMP, 250), which is to say that Scotus, too, concludes that God is not the natural object of the human intellect. But Scotus' approach could not be more different than Aquinas', and Scotus' approach sheds considerable light on what Pieper recognizes as the essentially Platonic nature of Scotus' thought.

Thus, Scotus begins by rejecting outright Aquinas' starting point: that the cognitive powers of humans are naturally proportioned toward the knowledge of sensible beings. True, says Scotus, man in his current state is unable to form any concept without first turning to the senses. But why is this the case?

“Perhaps--and this is an hypothesis to which Duns Scotus returns with a certain complacency--as a divine punishment for original sin; perhaps again, simply because God desires this strict collaboration between our various cognitive faculties. Whatever the reason may be supposed to be, this at least is certain; that nothing in the nature of the intellect as such, nor even in the nature of the intellect as united to the body, makes it a matter of necessity for it to turn to sense in order to exert its activities. … thus, we can no longer say that the proper object of our intellect is the essence of the sensible thing; still less can we maintain that the pure intelligible is out of its reach on account of its very intelligibility ...” (SMP, 252)

I have already noted that, in his view, it is not on account of its essence that the intellect is obliged to turn to sense ... By birthright, in virtue of its proper nature, its proper object can only be a pure intelligible, exactly as in the case of the angelic intellect to which it is so closely allied. (SMP, 263-264)

Two things are clearly at work here. First, Scotus' vision of human nature is fundamentally the purest Platonism, as mediated by the Augustinian tradition. In other words, man is essentially a soul attached to or even imprisoned in a body. Thus, while Scotus may have contested the doctrine of Divine Illumination in the traditional form in which Henry of Ghent presented it, we can see that Scotus remains true to his commitment to find some way to preserve the substance of the Augustinian view of man. Indeed, the history of philosophy is conclusive that such a view of man is ultimately incompatible with a theory of knowledge that integrates man as a unity of body and soul. As MacIntyre puts it:

The relationship of soul to body, indeed the existence of body, had been something of an embarrassment to later Augustinians, even if not to Augustine. (TRVME, 153)

Second, Scotus maintains--again in opposition to Aquinas--that the immortality of the soul cannot be proven by human reason. Here, Scotus, as so often, is restricting the scope of human reason in order to shield Augustinian theological positions from challenge. But this approach has an important consequence, because it implicitly means that human nature is essentially unknown to us from the standpoint of reason. By withdrawing this issue from the province of philosophy Scotus has not only significantly narrowed the scope of reason itself; he has also relegated the most distinctive element of human nature to the realm of faith, at least in an Augustinian version of faith. As a direct result, this strategy makes a true natural law morality essentially impossible, since human nature as we experience it has been fundamentally altered by God for reasons unknown and is, in any event, unknowable to us. No wonder, then, that Scotus was forced to adopt a form of voluntarism in ethics.

It's important to keep these considerations firmly in mind when discussing Scotus' theory of knowledge, for while it's easy to find Scotus discussing the intellect abstracting ideas from sense experience in a seemingly Aristotelian vein, this is not the true spirit of his thought. Harold Weatherby, in his fascinating study, The Keen Delight (Chapter 4, “Hopkins, Newman, and Scotus”), goes into Scotus' epistemology in a more critical spirit than Gilson, with an eye to Scotist influence on modern skeptical fideism in the thought of Newman and Hopkins. Weatherby, like Knowles and Pieper, begins by recognizing that Scotus is at heart a Platonist, by way of Augustine. And to emphasize the point Weatherby points out, following Bettoni, that even when Scotus appears to be criticizing another Augustinian (like Henry of Ghent) he does so only to purify their ideas, not to contradict them: “he himself [Scotus] moves within the … Platonic-Augustinian line of thought, from which he does not depart unless forced to do so” (Bettoni, Duns Scotus: The Basic Principles of His Philosophy, pp. 20,21). Thus, Weatherby notes, whereas a Thomist thinker relies for knowledge upon intelligible species abstracted from existing substances, we can expect an Augustinian to appeal in one way or another to the intellect's supposed direct participation of the forms [i.e. Ideas] (KD, 77-78). And since Scotus is an Augustinian we should expect that, no matter what Aristotelian terminology he may use (“abstraction”), he will end up doing the same thing.

Now, Scotus does adopt a form of what he calls “abstraction” to explain human knowledge, but since Scotus' aim is to preserve as much of Augustinianism as possible,

“abstraction as Scotus understands it is radically different from what Aquinas conceives the process to be; for in Scotus's thought the role of the intellect is much more nearly Augustinian than Thomist. For instance, he rejects the fundamental Thomist doctrine that … the mind is moved to know by what the senses perceive. Such a doctrine, in his estimation, infringes upon the prerogatives of the intellect, reducing its role to that of a mere mirror of external things. Therefore he places his emphasis, in typically Augustinian fashion, not on the thing as it impregnates the intellect … but upon a mode of union between intellect and thing in which the soul gives as much as it receives.” (KD, 78)

We need only recall what Gilson wrote:

“… Duns Scotus' whole noetic tends to strengthen as much as possible the independence of the intellect in respect of the sensible order. It is just this that distinguishes it from the noetic of St. Thomas. Throughout all its emendations of Augustine's doctrine a vein of Augustinianism persists; sense knowledge is never anything more for him than the 'occasion' of intellectual knowledge.” (SMP, 241)

to see that Gilson, for all his irenic intent, is in basic agreement with Weatherby.

Indeed, without delving too far into the technical details, Scotus' view is that the “intelligible species, rather than being abstracted from the phantasm by the agent intellect, is engendered by the agent in the possible intellect in response to the presence of the phantasm” (KD, 78). Weatherby quite correctly characterizes this as “the intellect's utterance of itself in response to the stimulation of the thing.” And, he adds, “… the phantasm [may be] necessary for cognition as a catalyst to knowledge, [but] knowledge itself springs from the intellect and from the intellect alone” (KD,79). We may add in support of Weatherby's position--for Scotus is very hard to pin down--cf. Gilson, History, p. 461 note 65, p. 765-766:

"Scotus ... strongly maintains, against Henry of Ghent, the reliability of sense cognition; consequently he denies the necessity of any Augustinian illumination to insure the possibility of absolutely certain natural knowledge, but he adds that the general motion of our intellect by the divine light is its motion by these "intelligible quiddities." The divine intellect has pure and simple being; these quiddities only have in it a "relative being," or being of known object; the same quiddities "move our intellect to the knowing of sincere truths," Opus Oxoniense, I, d. 36, q. unica, n. 10." To which Gilson adds: "There is therefore a trace of the Augustinian cognition 'in rationibus aeternis' left in the noetic of Duns Scotus."

Clearly, we are not to regard this as an experientially based philosophical explanation of human knowledge. This is a theologically motivated construct, the aim of which is to preserve a Platonic-Augustinian vision of human nature and of Divine freedom while using Aristotelian terminology. Thus, Weatherby concludes that

“though Scotus holds to a doctrine of abstraction a sensu … his interpretation of that doctrine is such as to distinguish him radically from St. Thomas. Scotus does not deny the objectivity, the reality, of conceptual knowledge; he does not go so far as Newman does, to say that notions, or the sciences built on notions, are no more than subjective reflections of objective truth or that notions starve and dilute reality. However, one can see how such sceptical views might be said to be latent in his theory of abstraction ...” (KD, 79)

Before turning to a consideration of how Scotus' account of knowledge plays into his views on morality, we will simply add that skeptical views are latent in any type of thought that views true reality, the “really real,” as pure intelligibility—in other words, all those types of thought which, like Platonism, have (in an historical sense) sought to transform the archaic ontology of heavenly archetypes (Eliade) into a scientific (as opposed to a philosophical) explanation of reality. As Gilson maintains, in Being and Some Philosophers (74).

Platonism … like all pure philosophical positions, … has always exhibited a tendency to disengage itself from contaminating elements foreign to its own essence, and thus to recover its original purity.

Which is to say that Platonized versions of Christianity always exhibit a tendency for the Platonic element to become more dominant. 

In the West that Platonic element was, as we have continually repeated, largely mediated through Augustine, supplemented by the thought of Avicenna (the Iranian Muslim who was well known to the Medieval West). As Gilson demonstrates (BSP, 74-132), Scotus' approach--which identifies being and essence—explicitly mirrors that of Avicenna, whose “essences” (Gilson writes) are “so many ghosts of Plato's Ideas.” (BSP, 76). The influence of the Augustinian Scotus' view of being (and so, indirectly, also of Avicenna's Platonism) extends through the Spanish Jesuit Suarez to Descartes, “the estimable Wolff,” and finally to Kant. As Descartes and Kant wrestle with the epistemological consequences of this view of being, we will see them adopting secularized or, at most, vestigially religious theories of knowledge that are clearly derived from Augustine's doctrine of divine illumination (and thus, ultimately, from Plato's “philosophical myth” of anamnesis). For Descartes, God is a deus ex machina guarantor of the objectivity of our knowledge, while Kant secularizes the whole thing and internalizes it, making man's mind—through its “categories”—the source of meaning. As Gilson observes, with an oblique reference to the doctrine of Divine Illumination, “It may in a sense be said that Kantism consists in attributing to human thought that function of creating intelligibility reserved by the Middle Ages for God” (SMP, 468, note 14). The heavenly archetypes have, in Kant, become artifacts of the human mind.

Scotus' Moral Doctrine

We have considered Scotus' account of human knowledge at considerable length, stressing the limits that he places on man's ability to develop a knowledge even of worldly natures--especially human nature--and his strong tendency toward skepticism. This matter is of more than historical or theoretical interest. When coupled with Scotus' views on Divine freedom, his account of knowledge will feed into a voluntarist view of morality. Indeed, as we have already stressed, Scotus has striven in his account of human knowledge to preserve as much of traditional Augustinianism as possible precisely in order to enhance Divine freedom. What effects this will have on moral philosophy we must now consider.

Scotus' name has come to be closely associated with voluntarism, the doctrine that acts are good or bad only because God so designates them—a matter of God's will alone (voluntas). His partisans, of course, do their best to defend him from this charge, claiming that he was not a voluntarist. Benedict defends Scotus only within limits, seeking to insulate Scotus from the most extreme forms of voluntarism. For example, in his address at the University of Regensburg (2006) Benedict acknowledges that voluntarism “in its later developments” can, indeed, be traced to Scotus, although presumably Scotus himself would, in Benedict's view, not have endorsed those later developments that Benedict compares to the Islamic view of God:

there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.

In a later general audience (2010) Benedict follows the same tack:

Duns Scotus has developed a point to which modernity is very sensitive. It is the topic of freedom and its relationship with the will and with the intellect. Our author underlines freedom as a fundamental quality of the will, introducing an approach that lays greater emphasis on the will. Unfortunately, in later authors, this line of thinking turned into a voluntarism, ... Indeed, an idea of innate and absolute freedom - as it evolved, precisely, after Duns Scotus - placed in the will that precedes the intellect, both in God and in man, risks leading to the idea of a God who would not even be bound to truth and good. The wish to save God's absolute transcendence and diversity with such a radical and impenetrable accentuation of his will does not take into account that the God who revealed himself in Christ is the God "Logos" …

While Benedict's words are carefully chosen, we believe that Pieper's view gets closer to the heart of the matter:

“... it seems to me not at all a matter of chance that this appellation [voluntarism] has repeatedly been attached to [Scotus].”

Duns Scotus in fact … says that the will is determined by nothing else than the will itself.” (Scholasticism, 141-142)

And, in fact, it should come as no surprise that Christian thought that has strayed into the latent form of skepticism we have been describing should be tempted to also embrace one form or another of voluntarism—a counterpart in moral thought to fideism in metaphysics. To understand why this is so we need only review what Pieper said about Scotus' watchword: “freedom.”

“The watchword 'freedom,' which I said characterized Duns Scotus, refers above all to the freedom of God. This may seem to us a purely theological thesis, but we will think otherwise as soon as we see the conclusion which Duns Scotus quickly draws from this: Because God is absolutely free, everything that He does and effects has the character of nonnecessity, of being in a particular sense 'accidental' (contingent). This applies both to God's creative work, and therefore to Creation itself, and to the events included within the history of Salvation.

The direction in which this argument aims is quite plain. In a word: there are no 'necessary reasons' for the work of God. And certainly human reason is incapable of arriving by deductions and arguments at that which has emerged as the result of a free divine act; human reason cannot claim that such results are meaningful 'in themselves,' let alone necessarily intelligible. As far as the absolute freedom of God reaches, no room is left for philosophical speculation. But all of Creation is a work of divine freedom, just as are the redemption and the conferral of grace upon man. Of all this, therefore, we cannot in the least say that it 'must' be 'so' or 'otherwise'--or that it must be 'at all.'” (Scholasticism, 140)

It follows from these principles that there can be in Scotus' thought no question of a natural law, in the sense that orthodox Christianity understands it. How could there be, if we cannot know or say that human nature 'must' be 'so'? If this is clear in principle, we may ask with Benedict: did Scotus draw back from the consequences of his principles? The answer that modern scholarship gives is that Scotus, in point of fact, was well aware of those consequences and embraced them. Thomas Williams has usefully summarized the shape of Scotus' thought in Reason, Morality, and Voluntarism in Duns Scotus.

Williams turns to Scotus' commentary on the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments (Ordinatio 3, d. 37), and quotes Patrick Lee's summary of Scotus' position, in opposition to those who claim that Scotus, in fact, “recognizes a close connection between human nature and the moral law.” Writes Lee:

[F]or both Aquinas and Scotus God's absolute power extends to everything that does not involve a contradiction. Where they differ is precisely here: does a dispensation from a precept of the second table of the Decalogue involve a contradiction? Aquinas says yes, and Scotus says no. For Aquinas the obligations expressed in the Decalogue's second table somehow necessarily belong to man's nature, so that just as God could not create a man without a rational soul so He could not create a man not obliged by those precepts. For Scotus this is not the case.

The practical effect of what Lee is saying is simply this: Scotus maintains that the first table of the Decalogue—commands that pertain to God himself, such as worshiping God, not taking God's name in vain, etc.--cannot be revoked, even by God, since that would involve a contradiction. However, commands that do not pertain to God—those that forbid murder, theft, lying adultery, and so forth-- are contingent because they deal with contingent beings. These commands God can dispense or even revoke without contradiction. In fact, says Williams, “Scotus argues quite explicitly that God can, without contradiction, create human beings and yet not establish the commandments of the second table,” and he provides Scotus' own words:

For in the things that they prescribe there is no goodness necessary for the goodness of the ultimate end that turns one towards the ultimate end, and in the things they prohibit there is no badness that necessarily turns one away from the ultimate end. So even if that good were not commanded, the ultimate end could be loved and attained; and if that evil were not prohibited, the attainment of the ultimate end would be consistent with that evil. With the commandments of the first table, however, it is otherwise, since they have to do immediately with God as their object.

As if that were not enough, Scotus goes on to argue his case using the example of murder, maintaining that God can, if He wills so, revoke such commandments. As Williams comments:

This argument illustrates just how uncompromising Scotus's voluntarism really is. For it shows not merely that the prohibition against killing this man does not follow from any facts about human nature, but that this prohibition does not follow from any facts whatsoever, other than God's will.

As I have argued, this uncompromising voluntarism commits Scotus to the view that there is no valid argument for any contingent moral truth. Scotus is quite aware of this implication, as we can see by examining his treatment of particular moral questions.

Williams then illustrates Scotus' mindset by providing Scotus' argumentation against the proposition that lying is always wrong. To make a long story short, Scotus maintains that lying is wrong only because God designates it as wrong. Thus, if God were to revoke the command against lying or even against murder, those deeds would no longer be wrong and might even be meritorious. All of this flows quite logically from Scotus' views on divine freedom. Since freedom is, for Scotus, rooted in the will alone, no reasons can be given for God's freely willed decisions. There are precisely no reasons on which a natural law theory could be based.

And yet Scotus also maintains that no act can be fully morally good unless it is consciously chosen as morally right by the agent of the action. How does Scotus square this with his position that man is unable to determine by discursive reasoning what God has willed? Scotus quite simply invokes God, as a deus ex machina guarantor of man's ability to act morally. And here we can do no better than to quote Williams' summary from The Unmitigated Scotus:

Since Scotus holds that the moral law does not follow from anything other than the divine will, and since he does not think we can know the divine will apart from supernatural revelation, he cannot hold that our natural knowledge of the moral law is discursive. In other words, since the moral law does not follow from any naturally knowable truths, any inference from such truths to a moral proposition will be invalid. The texts show that Scotus was aware of this implication of his voluntarism, and indeed embraced it.

But the fact that we cannot know the moral law discursively does not mean that we cannot know it at all. We know it non‐discursively; in Scotus’s terminology, we know it immediately. That is, God has given us moral intuitions to suit the moral order that he freely and contingently established. In the words of St Paul that Scotus was fond of quoting in this context, the moral law is “written on our hearts.”

We may profitably recall Gilson's comment regarding the thought of Scotus' fellow Augustinian theologian, Matthew of Aquasparta. Like Matthew, Scotus' thought amounts to “a philosophical skepticism saved by a fideism. That amounts to saying that there is no guarantee of certitude save in faith …” But let us be clear. The reasons that Scotus, philosophically, runs into a brick wall of skepticism are twofold. The first is that his conclusions are dictated by his theological concern to preserve God's utter and absolute freedom—regardless of any consequences that might appear to contradict human experience. This is strictly a theological concern, not truly a philosophical conclusion--even though the issue in question is a philosophical issue. The second reason is that Scotus' acceptance of the Platonic-Augustinian position that true being is to be identified with essence, pure intelligibility (derived, as we have seen, from the archaic ontology of heavenly archetypes), ineluctably leads every thinker who accepts this as a principle to insoluble epistemological problems. The only solution to these problems, as we have also seen, is in the philosophy that Aquinas derived from his Christian faith (faith, understood as reasonable belief, not as mere subjective certitude). That faith rests on rational insight into the created status of all limited being, and into the identification of being as act—not as concept. This was a key part of the early Christian faith, as we have demonstrated, and the recovery of that faith is key to rectifying the wasteland that the Augustinian tradition has helped to create in the West.