John Duns Scotus

Introduction to His Fundamental Positions

Etienne Gilson, James Colbert

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780567678706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Étienne Gilson's Jean Duns Scot: Introduction À Ses Positions Fondamentales is widely understood to be one of the most important works on John Duns Scotus' texts, famous for their complexity. James Colbert's translation is the first time that Gilson's work on Scotus has been put into English, with an introduction by Trent Pomplun and an afterword by John Millbank. Scotus contributed to the development of a metaphysical system that was compatible with Christian doctrine, an epistemology that altered the 13th century understanding of human knowledge, and a theology that stressed both divine and human will. Gilson, in turn, offers a thoroughly comprehensive introduction to the fundamental positions that Scotus stood for. Explaining Scotus's views on metaphysics, the existence of infinite being and divine nature, the matter of the physical spiritual and angelic, intellectual knowledge and will and Scotus' relationship with other scholars, Gilson and Colbert show how deeply Scotus left a mark on discussions of such disparate topics as the semantics of religious language, the problem of universals, divine illumination, and the nature of human freedom. This work has been translated from the original work in French Jean Duns Scot. Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (© 1952 by Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin).

1

The Object of Metaphysics

In the prologue of the Opus Oxoniense Duns Scotus already encounters a theological problem whose importance is decisive in the establishment of boundaries between philosophers and theologians. Consequently, we must begin with this question ourselves.

A The limits of metaphysics

For a theologian metaphysics is not paradigmatic wisdom. Theology is above the highest natural knowledge, and any precise definition of either theology or metaphysics implies the definition of their relations.¹ The most complete discussion of the problem by Duns Scotus is found in the prologue of the Opus Oxoniense. This work is a commentary on Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences.² Peter Lombard did not use the word theology in the introduction that precedes the first book of his Sentences, except in the derived form “to open the concealed things of theological investigations,” theologicarum inquisitionum abdita aperire. Likewise, even in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas does not normally use the word theologia to designate the sacra doctrina that the theologian professes.³ By contrast, in Duns Scotus, theologia is the usual term in similar cases. It has become the proper noun that designates the knowledge human beings need to let them achieve their end.

Moreover, the Scotist formulation of the problem deserves to hold our attention: “In the state in which human beings are, is it necessary that a special doctrine be supernaturally produced of a kind that they could not attain by the natural light of the intellect?”⁴ The question is posed pro statu isto, which is to say, in the present state of human beings as it results from original sin. The mere fact that the problem is explicitly posed seems significant. St. Bonaventure, who commented on Peter Lombard toward 1250, did not deem it necessary to devote a special article to the question.⁵ By contrast, in 1254–55, if the text we possess goes back to that date,⁶ in his commentary on the Sentences, St. Thomas Aquinas deemed it appropriate to establish the necessity of a kind of knowledge higher than philosophy. In one of the objections that Thomas raises against his position, the sufficiency of philosophy is maintained hypothetically but clearly: for human perfection the knowledge suffices that can be had from our natural intellect; therefore, no other doctrine beyond philosophy is necessary.⁷ In Duns Scotus’s commentary, that is to say, around 1300, the conflict is no longer between theses, but between persons. In this question, there seems to be a controversy between philosophers and theologians.⁸ This change of perspective is surely significant.

Whatever the date of the text now known as the Opus Oxoniense, its theses are posterior to the 1277 condemnation,⁹ which implies the existence of a conflict between philosophers and theologians as well as the existence of purely philosophical wisdom. By condemning the scandalously bold proposition that the wise men of the world are philosophers alone,¹⁰ or the proposition that the intellectual and moral virtues of which Aristotle speaks suffice for human beings to be assured of eternal happiness,¹¹ Étienne Tempier certainly intended to denounce contemporary errors, actually maintained by persons who lived in his time. It is not necessary to admit that Duns Scotus primarily has particular contemporaries in mind. To be sure, he speaks of philosophers, not of philosophy. By the way he speaks, we see that his thinking moves rather on the quite classical level of the distinction between sancti and philosophi. The philosophers of whom he is thinking seem to be chiefly ancients, particularly Aristotle. Such persons never had the occasion to maintain the sufficiency of philosophy against a Jewish religion unknown to them nor against an unforeseen Christian revelation. Duns Scotus’s position indicates the moment when, under the pressure of contemporary Averroism and its claims, Christian wisdom asks whether philosophy is really capable of justifying in principle the sufficiency of which it is proud. So, for Duns Scotus the issue is to find out whether philosophical knowledge alone, without the contribution of a supernaturally revealed knowledge, suffices for human beings to attain their end.

If anything can make supernatural revelation necessary, it is the insufficiency of nature. Duns Scotus reduces the debate primarily to a fundamental divergence regarding the perfection or imperfection of human nature: “The philosophers maintain the perfection of nature and deny supernatural perfection. By contrast, the theologians recognize the deficiency of nature, the necessity of grace, and supernatural perfection.”¹² The very terms Duns Scotus uses, defect of nature, (defectum naturae) suggest that he is thinking here not about nature taken in the state in which human beings were created, in statu hominis instituti, but about human nature in our present state, pro isto statu, that is to say the state in which it is found as a consequence of original sin. Scotus wonders what a philosopher would say if he heard it maintained that supernatural revelation is necessary for human beings to attain their end: “A philosopher would say that no supernatural knowledge is necessary to human beings in the state in which they are (pro statu isto), but that by the simple play of natural causes, they can acquire all the knowledge they need.”¹³ Therefore, Duns Scotus asks himself about the necessity of revelation primarily in function of original sin.

It is immediately evident that his way of presenting the problem is not only theological, as it must be, but supposes that another theological problem had been resolved, one Aristotle could not conceive, namely the problem of the present condition of human beings in the state of fallen nature, in statu naturae lapsae. This fact is remarkable, because at first sight nothing imposes this approach to the problem on theologians as such. It is not a priori evident or necessary that the state of fallen nature must be involved in the discussion. The necessity only occurs in a theology according to which we can at least ask whether human beings could have known their end distinctly without it having been revealed to them in the case in which original sin had not been committed. Allowing for possible later confirmations, the Scotist way of posing the question invites us to anticipate that the first state of the human intellect is no longer its present state and that the intellect’s field of vision may be reduced as a result of Adam’s fall. If this hypothesis were confirmed, the theory of knowledge and epistemology of philosophers would be criticized here from the standpoint of prior conclusions concerning the scope of the human intellect pro statu isto. However, let us add that Duns Scotus himself does not begin by defining the state of fallen nature. He does not immediately tell us how precisely the state can affect the solution of his first problem. No doubt, the clarification is not immediately necessary, and, with Scotus, we can await the moment to formulate it.

Therefore, let us say that a philosopher, that is to say a person disposing of natural reason alone, wonders whether revelation is necessary to human beings. What would he respond? First, that it is useless for them. Next, that the notion itself is contradictory and impossible.

In a text that first St. Thomas Aquinas and then Duns Scotus continually quote, Avicenna says that the concepts of being and thing are the first ones that fall within the grasp of the human understanding.¹⁴ Therefore, being is the first object of our intellect. Every faculty of knowledge whose first object is a common object, namely, one that includes other objects in itself, naturally grasps all that enters within that object and attains it as included ipso facto in its natural object. For example, sight not only attains it first object, which is color, but all that falls within its grasp by being colored. The same goes for the other faculties and certainly for reason. Normally, the first object of a faculty is also its adequate object. An object of a faculty is called adequate when it includes all that the faculty can know and that it can know completely. In other words, the adequate object of a faculty is exactly coextensive with it; their respective areas are not distinguished in any way, either by something left over or something left out. If the first and adequate object of the human intellect is being, human beings naturally know everything that in any sense whatsoever deserves the label being. Now, everything knowable is being. Consequently, no supernatural revelation could be necessary to human beings, since what is revealed would still be being, which is the first, natural, and adequate object of our intellect.¹⁵

As is evident, the argument is based on the necessity of exact proportion between the faculty of knowing and its object. That is why the concept of a supernatural knowledge received by a natural faculty can be rejected not only as superfluous but also as contradictory. For the revelation of a supernatural knowledge to be possible, the human intellect would have to be disproportionate to the object of the knowledge in what is purely natural, in puris naturalibus, and in one way or another the proportion would have to be restored. But it cannot be, because if what is added to it is natural like itself, the sum will remain disproportionate to the supernatural object. Accordingly, something will still have to be added to it, in which connection the same problem arises and so on indefinitely. To avoid going to the infinite in this way, it is necessary to stop at the start. Let us say that the human intellect of itself is proportionate to every object knowable according to any mode of knowledge. It follows that it is neither necessary nor possible that the intellect should possess inspired supernatural knowledge.¹⁶

It is always risky to make a philosopher say what he would have said if he posed a problem he did not pose. At first sight it seems completely legitimate to make a philosopher deny the necessity of revelation in the name of Aristotle. Duns Scotus himself might easily have gathered the wherewithal in De Anima and the Metaphysics to prove the intellect’s sufficiency to know its object naturally.¹⁷ Yet, upon reflection, the thesis is not at all certain, and perhaps it is not by chance that here our theologian starts from Avicenna rather than Aristotle. In fact, what Scotus criticizes is a thesis that invokes Avicenna and tries to justify itself with the help of arguments taken from Aristotle’s writings. The Philosopher certainly never taught that supernatural revelation was necessary for human beings to attain their good, but he also did not claim that the human intellect was adequate to being as being and naturally capable of grasping it. He even maintained quite the opposite since, according to him, being is only accessible to us through sensible expression, and the only being that fully deserves that name, the intelligible, escapes us by its very purity. Therefore, in Aristotle’s world, there would be material for revelation, and this is why, in carrying out the necessary Platonic adjustments in order to relieve the soul of its body, Alfarabi and Avicenna made a great current of intelligible illuminations circulate in the soul. They are not supernatural revelations, but they can be regarded as superhuman and, in any case, they certainly intervene in order to expand the human intellect to the measure of what is its adequate object in principle in these doctrines, namely being. Aristotle never seemed to have hoped for this complete human salvation through philosophy. By contrast, it seems that Avicenna’s neo-Platonism grants it to us. We would have to ask ourselves whether Duns Scotus was not clearly aware of this difference and even whether one of his concerns was not to reduce Avicenna to Aristotle by denying pure philosophy certain knowledge to which it wrongly laid claim.

Though expressed in Aristotelian terms, the first argument that Duns Scotus opposes to the thesis he is criticizing is still not totally Aristotelian: in order to act in view of an end, it is necessary to desire the end; to desire it, it is necessary to know it; now, human beings can have no distinct knowledge of their end by their natural abilities; it is therefore necessary that they be given supernatural knowledge.¹⁸ The whole weight of the argument obviously lies in the major premise: human beings are naturally incapable of distinctly knowing their proper end, a proposition that is only meaningful if the person who formulates it already possesses that distinct knowledge and judges that it is due to Christian revelation.

This is precisely the case of Duns Scotus. He does not dispute that Aristotle, Averroes, or Avicenna had some knowledge of the authentic last end of humankind, but he denies that this knowledge was sufficient to ensure salvation. In other words, he reproaches philosophy in general for is radical incapacity to discover by itself what we only know by the Gospel message. He does not reproach it qua philosophy. As such, philosophy has done what it could, and it could not be expected that philosophy would do what is not able by nature to do. The God of the Gospels is not its object. Here Duns Scotus argues as a Christian who knows that the last end of human beings is not simple speculative, abstract knowledge of the divine nature but a direct, beatifying vision of God. Accordingly, he reasons as a theologian who is grounded upon his faith, and his intention is not to reproach philosophers for not having known what philosophy cannot know, but rather to establish that philosophy was and remains incapable of knowing by itself that about which revelation alone can inform us.

Even reading only Wadd...