John duns scotus biography

DUNS SCOTUS, JOHN (c. 1266–1308), Franciscan philosopher and theologian, and founder of the school of Scotism. Born in Scotland and trained by his paternal uncle at the Franciscan friary at Dumfries, Scotland, Duns Scotus entered the Franciscan order at an early age and was ordained a priest. As a bachelor of theology he studied and taught at Oxford, completing his lectures on Peter Lombard's Sentences, which he began revising as the Ordinatio in 1300. When in 1302 the turn came for the English province to provide a talented candidate for the prestigious University of Paris, Duns Scotus was sent. During the demonstrations against Boniface VIII initiated by Philip the Fair, Duns Scotus sided with the pope and, as a consequence, was exiled from France. Just where he spent his exile is unknown, but with the death of Boniface and the accession to the papacy of Benedict XI, the church's ban against the king and the university was lifted, and Duns Scotus returned to complete his Paris lectures on the Sentences. He became regent master probably in 1305.

During his regency Duns Scotus conducted quodlibetic disputations covering a wide variety of theological and philosophical questions about God and creatures proposed by his audience. His later version of these questions (Quaestiones quodlibetales ), like his Ordinatio (begun at Oxford, and hence referred to as the Opus oxoniense ), was not finished at the time of his untimely death, yet these two works were widely copied for distribution and are largely responsible for his fame as a philosopher and theologian. In addition he left a number of important philosophical works on logic, psychology, and metaphysics, presented in the form of questions suggested by the works of Porphyry and Aristotle. Like Collationes oxoniense et parisienses (shorter questions on specific philosophical and theological topics), these were probably the result of disputations Duns Scotus conducted for the Franciscan students at Oxford and Paris. The most extensive and influential of these philosophical works are the Quaestiones subtilissime super libros Metaphysicorum Aristoteles and the important Tractatus de Primo Principio, a compendium of what reason can prove about God. Duns Scotus left Paris in the fall of 1307 to teach at the Franciscan house of studies in Cologne, where he died the following year. His remains rest in the nave of the Franciscan church near the Cologne cathedral, where he is venerated as blessed.

In his writings, Duns Scotus views theology as a practical science rather than a theoretical science, inasmuch as it gives human beings the necessary knowledge to reach their supernatural end. This end consists in sharing in the inner life of the Trinity in heaven. Developing Richard of Saint-Victor's insight that perfect love wants the beloved to be loved by others, Duns Scotus envisions the motive for creation as follows. God first loved himself, then he freely decided to create co-lovers of his infinitely lovable nature. Being orderly in his love, he next predestined Christ's human nature to share this glory and gave this nature the highest possible grace that could be bestowed upon a creature. Christ, the God-man, purchased grace for both angels and humanity. But because God foresaw Adam's sin and humanity's consequent fall from grace, Christ came as a suffering, rather than a triumphant, mediator. The most perfect form of mediation, however, would have been to preredeem, and Scotus proposes this as the rationale for Mary's immaculate conception, an argument that became basic for defenders of that doctrine until its declaration in 1854 as a dogma by Pius IX. Finally, God willed the sensible world to serve humanity.

As a philosopher, Duns Scotus modified the Aristotelian influence current in his day with insights of Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Richard of Saint-Victor, and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). Developing Ibn Sīnā's conception of metaphysics, Duns Scotus provided a powerful rational proof for an infinite being, who he believed had revealed himself to Moses as the "I am who am."

In his philosophical system, Duns Scotus stressed the metaphysical primacy of the individual, each with its own unique "haecceity," which exists only because God's creative love wanted just "this" and not "that." On the other hand, he logically analyzed what individualized created natures must have in common, if scientific knowledge of them is to become possible.

Duns Scotus adopted the peculiar "Augustinian" tradition of the earlier Franciscan school, which stressed the "supersufficient potentiality" of the will for self-determination, and showed how it could be reconciled with the Aristotelian notion of an active potency, if one rejected the controversial principle that "whatever is moved is moved by another." In this and other ways he brought the earlier anti-Aristotelianism of his Franciscan predecessors into the mainstream of what contemporaries considered essential to Aristotle's philosophical system. For instance, he indicated how Aristotle's criteria for rational and nonrational faculties could be used to prove that the will, not the intellect, is the primary rational potency. Nonrational faculties are determined to act in one way, said Aristotle, all other conditions being the same; rational faculties are free to act in more than one way and thus are the basis of all creativity in the arts. If that be so, Duns Scotus argued, the intellect is nonrational, since it has but one mode of acting determined by the objective evidence. In this it resembles all active potencies that are collectively called "nature." The will alone has the basic freedom, when it acts with reason, for alternate modes of acting. Thus for Duns Scotus the distinction between nature and will represents the primary division of active potencies, corresponding roughly to the Aristotelian division of nonrational and rational.

Original also is Duns Scotus's development of Anselm of Canterbury's distinction of the will's twofold inclination, or "affection," namely, love of the advantageous on the one hand and love of what is right and just for its own sake on the other. As the seat of the former, the will is only an intellectual appetite that seeks happiness and self above all else. Only by reason of its affection for justice is the will free to moderate this self-seeking and, according to right reason, love what is good objectively for its intrinsic worth. Unlike Anselm, however, Duns Scotus understood justice not merely as a supernatural, infused gift, called "gratuitous grace" or "charity," but as a congenital or innate freedom of the will, free precisely because it liberates the will from that necessity Aristotle claimed was characteristic of all natural agents, namely, to seek happiness and the perfection of their nature above all else.

These two affections of the will are not volitions as such; though they incline the will, they do not necessitate it or cause it to act. The will itself determines how it will act, but when it does it acts in accord with one or the other of these affections. While the affection for the advantageous corresponds with Aristotle's conception of choice, the affection or bias for justice is an essentially Christian notion. This inclination, according to Duns Scotus, has a twofold effect: (1) it enables the will to love God above all else for God's own sake, and (2) it allows the will to moderate its natural inclination for happiness and self-actualization, either as an individual or as a species, and to love according to right reason. Thus the affection for justice provides the natural basis for a rational ethical philosophy. Both affections are essential to human nature, but they can be perfected supernaturally and directed to God as their object. Charity perfects the will's affection for justice, inclining it to love God for his own sake; hope perfects the will's affection for the advantageous, inclining it to love God because he has shown his love for us in this life and because he will be our ultimate happiness in the life to come.

Another important psychological notion of Duns Scotus' that influenced subsequent scholastics is his conception of intuitive intellectual cognition, or the simple, nonjudgmental awareness of a here-and-now existential situation. First developed as a necessary theological condition for the face-to-face vision of God in the afterlife, intellectual intuition is needed to explain our certainty of primary contingent truths such as "I think," "I choose," "I live," and to account for our awareness of existence. Duns Scotus never makes intellectual intuition the basis for his epistemology. Neither does he see it as putting persons into direct contact with the external sensible world, with any substance material or spiritual, or with an individual's haecceity, for in this life, at least, human intellect works through the sensory imagination. Intellectual intuition seems rather to be identified with the indistinct peripheral aura associated with all our direct sensory-intellectual cognition. We know of it explicitly only in retrospect when we consider the necessary conditions for intellectual memory.

The notion of intellectual intuition continued to be a topic of discussion and dispute down to the time of Calvin, who, influenced by the Scotist John Major, used an auditory rather than a visual sense model of intellectual intuition to explain our experience of God. Whereas Duns Scotus restricted intuition of God to the beatific vision in the afterlife or to the special mystical visions given to the prophets or to Paul of Tarsus, John Major explained that we may also experience God intuitively whenever he "speaks to our soul" through some special inspiration.

Bibliography

The Scotistic Commission (Rome) began publishing a critical edition of the collected works of Duns Scotus in 1950. The Luke Wadding edition (Lyons, 1639), reprinted as John Duns Scotus: Opera omnia, edited by L. Vivès (Paris, 1891–1895), contains the major portion of his writings. A critical edition of the Tractatus de Primo Principio, edited by Marianus Mueller (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1941), has been reprinted with translations in several languages. I have added to my earlier edition and translation an extensive commentary on this work in A Treatise on God as First Principle (Chicago, 1983). Selections from the Ordinatio are available in my Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings (Edinburgh, 1962). The most recent edition of the Quodlibetal Questions (Latin text and Spanish translation) is by Felix Alluntis, Obras del Doctor Sutil Juan Duns Escoto (Madrid, 1968); an English translation by Felix Alluntis and myself is entitled God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions (Princeton, 1975). An extensive bibliography by Odulfus Schaefer, Bibliographia vita operibus et doctrina Iohannis Duns Scoti (Rome, 1950), covers nineteenth- and twentieth-century secondary literature. This has been updated to 1965 by Odulfus Schaefer in the Acta ordinis Fratrum Minorum (Florence) 85 (1966) and by Servus Gieben in Laurentianum 6 (1965). Contemporary interest in Duns Scotus's thought is apparent from the international Scotistic Congresses held every five years, the proceedings of which are published under special titles in the general series "Studia Scholastico-Scotistica" (Rome, 1968–) by the Societas Internationalis Scotistica. Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, D. C., 1986) contains a large selection of Latin texts that I have translated into English.

Allan B. Wolter (1987)