Duns Scotus, John

(b. Roxburghshire, Scotland, ca. 1266; d. Cologne, Germany, November 1308)

philosophy.

Little is known of the life of John Duns Scotus, who was among the outstanding thinkers of the later Middle Ages. He entered the Franciscan order probably in 1279 or 1280 and was ordained in 1291. He studied first at Oxford University and then at Paris University, returning to Oxford in 1300 to complete the requirement for his doctorate. Before he could take his degree, however, he was once again sent by his superiors to Paris, where he finally became a doctor of theology in 1305, having been temporarily banished from France in 1303, together with about seventy other friars, for supporting Pope Boniface VIII in his quarrel with the French king, Philip the Fair. We last hear of him at Cologne in 1308, teaching in the Franciscan house there.

Duns Scotus’ premature death together with the vicissitudes of his career have combined to make his writings more than usually problematical. Only gradually is the correct relation between his lectures at Paris and those at Oxford being established, while the authority of other works ascribed to him has still to be definitively established. His major writings are his two commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a compendium of theology, which constituted one of the main exercises for a degree in that subject. Because of his studies in the theological faculties of both Oxford and Paris, Duns Scotus wrote two such commentaries, Opus Oxoniense and Reportata Parisiensis. Each was left in an unfinished state, as were all his other main works; the unraveling of the correct relation of the two commentaries to each other has been one of the preoccupations of the Scotist editorial commission over the past thirty years and is still not complete. Even when it is, Duns Scotus’ thought will always be incompletely understood. Within a few years of his death his teaching had been developed by his followers into a definite set of tenets, from which it is sometimes difficult to disentangle his own positions. Scotism became one of the dominant schools of later medieval thought, and much in Duns Scotus’ teaching formed the point of departure for William of Ockham’s own, more far-reaching radicalism.

Like the majority of medieval thinkers, Duns Scotus was primarily a theologian. He sought to provide a new, metaphysical basis for a natural theology, which would thereby free such discourse from dependence upon natural phenomena. Duns Scotus was writing in the aftermath of the great 1277 condemnations at Paris and at Oxford of over 200 theses that had applied criteria drawn from the sensory world to the articles of Christian faith. The condemnations had crystallized the danger inherent in employing the categories of nature in seeking knowledge of the divine. As a consequence, many theologians in the years immediately before Duns Scotus had sought a return to the older, traditional stress upon inner, nonsensory awareness as the source of higher knowledge. Duns Scotus, however, denied the human mind any but a sensory source for its knowledge. Accordingly, the problem was how to arrive at concepts that could be held independently of sensory experience. Scotus found the answer in metaphysics—the study of being in itself—and more specifically in the notion of being. As a concept, being was the most universal of all categories, under which every other concept fell. In this most generalized form, being was univocal: it applied indifferently to all that is, regardless of different kinds of being. It therefore transcended the physical properties of specific beings known through the senses; thus, if it could be applied to God, it would free any discussion of him from reliance upon physical categories. In that way, God could be the object of metaphysical, as opposed to physical, discourse. Duns Scotus held that the way to this lay in considering being in its two main modes, infinite and finite. Infinite being was by definition necessary and uncaused, while finite being was dependent upon another for its existence and, so, contingent. Accordingly, metaphysics could adduce God’s existence as necessary being and that of his creatures as finite. But that was as far as it could go. Beyond saying God was first being, one could know his nature only when one turned from metaphysics to theology; in like manner, what he had ordained for creation belonged to the articles of faith, not to natural reason.

The effects of Duns Scotus’ reorientation of metaphysics were to put a new stress upon infinity and contingency. On the one hand, only God was infinite and, so, beyond the compass of human discourse; once having established God as the first infinite being, metaphysics could offer no analogies between the divine and the created. There was no place for Aquinas’ five proofs of God’s existence drawn from knowledge of this world, just as Duns Scotus allowed none to the older Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination of the soul, by which the soul was enabled to know eternal truths. On the other hand, creatures, since they were merely contingent, had no other raison d’être than God’s having willed them. God’s will was the only reason for the existence of that which was finite and need not have been. Moreover, God was absolutely free to do anything save contradict himself, which would limit him. Duns Scotus gave a renewed emphasis to God’s omnipotence by reviving the distinction between God’s ordained power as applied to this world and his absolute power by which he could do anything. Whereas by his ordained power he had decreed the unchanging laws that govern creation, by his absolute power God could supersede those laws and thus, for example, reward a man without first having infused him with grace. Duns Scotus does not appear to have pressed very far the contrast between these two aspects of God’s power, but in this, as in stressing God’s infinity, he opened the way to a much more radical application by William of Ockham and his followers.

The significance of Duns Scotus in the history of thought is that he broke away from the previous ways of establishing a natural theology. In doing so, he limited the area of meaningful natural discourse about the divine and gave new force to the contingent nature of creation. He thereby took an important step in separating natural experience and reason from revealed theological truth and from the preordained determinism against which the condemnations of 1277 had been especially directed. Those of the next generation, above all William of Ockham, were to make unbridgeable the gulf thus opened between knowledge and faith and to arrive at new and fruitful ways of interpreting natural phenomena.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duns Scotus’ works were collected as Opera omnia, 12 vols. (Lyons, 1639; repr., Paris, 1891–1895). A new critical edition by the Scotist Commission, under C. Balic, at Rome is in progress.

Modern editions of individual works include Tractatus de primo principio, ed. and with English trans. by E. Roche (New York, 1949). Selections from Duns Scotus in English translation are contained in John Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, A. Wolter, ed. and trans., which also provides a selected bibliography. A fuller bibliography is to be found in E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy (London, 1955), pp. 763–764.

Gordon Leff