Catherine Pickstock Duns Scotus
Catherine Pickstock Duns Scotus
Catherine Pickstock Duns Scotus
CATHERINE PICKSTOCK
In recent years, there has been a remarkable increase in focus upon inter-
pretations of the theology and philosophy of Duns Scotus. Much of this focus
has centred upon an attempt to place the crucial shifts in the direction of
modern philosophy not with Descartes and Kant, but in the middle ages.
Duns Scotus has been seen as central to this change, but by no means its
instigator or sole contributor. Other important figures are often cited: Avi-
cenna, Gilbert Porreta, Roger Bacon, Peter Olivi, Bonaventure, Henry of
Ghent, William of Ockham, Jean Buridan. Moreover, the shift is not pre-
sented as a crude “before” and “after”. Even if it is the case that the move-
ment away from an analogical worldview became most marked in the
fourteenth century, nevertheless it is clear that tendencies in this direction
had been put in place from at least the twelfth century. One should see the
change as part of the plurality of the middle ages themselves, and the diver-
gent intellectual visions on offer. Indeed, in some ways, Aquinas can be seen
as a conservative defender of positions which were already being
challenged.
A crucial aspect of the recent focus upon these issues concerns the rela-
tionship between philosophy and theology. The suggestion that Duns Scotus
rather than Kant is the caesura in the history of philosophy involves a revi-
sion in the understanding of the importance of theology in the history of phi-
losophy, because Duns Scotus’ philosophical and theological reflections are
connected in a complex way. As we will see, his central thesis of the uni-
vocity of being is subtly linked to his understanding of the consequences of
the Fall. Philosophers and theologians are considering the significance of this
Catherine Pickstock
Emmanuel College, Cambridge CB2 3AP, UK
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Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
544 Catherine Pickstock
the state and market have so visibly failed, then perhaps this revised geneal-
ogy which stresses the legacy of a distorted religious theory could also point
us indirectly towards a more serious alternative future polity than the liberal
and post-modern critiques.
But one can even go further than this. Against the one-dimensional
“modern” vision of progress without a genuine novum, post-modern
philosophers and cultural theorists have protested in the name of the
diverse, the more than human, the incommensurable. In doing so, some of
them (in particular Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida) have
explicitly appealed to Duns Scotus for their alternative vision. They regard
his levelling of the infinite and the finite to a univocal being, his unleashing
of the virtual and unmediably discontinuous, as permitting a radical break
with a totalizing rationalism. But it has recently been argued that these
Scotist innovations themselves lie at the inception of modernity. How then
can they provide the key to a break with modernity? Surely they betoken a
radicalisation of, and a return to, the very origins of modernity?
Duns Scotus’ flattening out of actual necessity (an “aesthetically” neces-
sary order shown only in actual existence, not proceeding from logical pos-
sibility) to pure virtuality, and of being to the bare fact of existence, which
are modern rationalist moves (and which undergird the primacy of episte-
mology over ontology), do indeed suggest a radicalisation of the modern in
a more anarchic direction which renders all possibilities in their limitless
range equally valid, and all existence merely phenomenal and ephemeral,
lacking altogether in depth, or any symbolic pointing beyond itself towards
either eternal truth or abiding human values. This suggests that one way to
understand the post-modern is as the “late” modern, or the intensification
of certain trends established within modernity. The invocation of Duns
Scotus and the later middle ages by Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Jacques
Derrida and many others is a crucial part of what is best understood as a
revised understanding of the nature of modernity itself.
In the philosophical sphere, modernity used to be characterised by the
turn to the subject, the dominance of epistemology and the guaranteeing of
secure knowledge by the following of a reliable method. Today, following
tendencies beginning early in the twentieth century with the work of Étienne
Gilson, and climaxing in the rigorous scholarship of Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-
François Courtine and Olivier Boulnois, we have become aware of the way
in which both the Cartesian and the Kantian moves depended upon shifts
within Latin scholasticism, to such an extent that one can now validly say
that both Descartes and Kant remained to a degree “scholastics”.2
In particular, it can be seen that these two thinkers did not simply trans-
fer allegiance for objectively critical reasons from an unwarranted claim to
know being as it really is, to an attempt to define true knowledge and even
being in terms of the unequivocally graspable and internally consistent.
Rather, a prior change in the understanding of being, a prior re-orientation
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546 Catherine Pickstock
of ontology, was necessary in order to make possible the move from ontol-
ogy to epistemology. As long as the Greco-Arab and then Western Catholic
synthesis of Aristotle with Neoplatonism remained in place, a turn towards
epistemology could have possessed no critical obviousness. Within this syn-
thesis, every abstraction of properties—such as “being” or “truth” or “good”
or “entity”—from the real, was still concerned with their instance as uni-
versal elements within the real (as opposed to logical abstractions), while
even the act of abstraction was regarded as an elevation towards that greater
actuality and perfection which characterised a more purely spiritual appre-
hension. The working assumption was that the finite occurrence of being (as
of truth, goodness, substance, etc.) restricts infinite being in which it partic-
ipates. When knowledge grasps finitude in its relatively universal aspects,
it does not simply mirror finitude, but rather fulfils its nature in achieving a
certain elevation of its reality.3
To conceive of knowledge, by contrast, as a mirroring, or as “representa-
tion”, requires that one think of the abstraction that is clearly involved in
all understanding in an entirely different fashion. To abstract must not
involve any elevation but rather a kind of mimetic doubling. It is now
regarded as a demand of rigour that one keep a “transcendental” univer-
sality strictly distinct from “transcendent” height and spirituality, logical
abstraction from spiritual ascesis. This is what Duns Scotus achieves by
reading pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine in his own fashion, which was
sometimes alert to ambiguities within their texts, and at other times seem-
ingly almost wilfully perverse. His new and explicit deployment of perfec-
tion terms as “common” both to God and creatures was nonetheless
anticipated by Bonaventure, and was decisively undergirded by central
elements of the metaphysical views and positions attributed at the time to
Avicenna.4 For Scotus, being and other transcendental categories now imply
no freight of perfective elevation.
Instead, finite creatures, like the infinite creator, nakedly “are”, as opposed
to “not being” in a punctiliar fashion—they are “the same” in quid as regards
existing which belongs to them as an essential property, just as substance
and accident, genus, species, and individuality all exist in the same fashion,
in quid. Only in quale—as regards specific differences of a qualitative kind,
including the difference between finite and infinite, and the differences
between the transcendentals (since Duns Scotus denies their full convert-
ibility: being is not of itself entirely true, etc.)5—is there no univocity, but
rather, it seems, something like pure equivocity. This provides a very
complex and notoriously subtle picture, but, put briefly: as regards the pure
logical essence of esse, there is univocity between all its instances, while as
regards ultimate differentiating qualitative properties there is equivocal
diversity. Thus although esse is univocal in quid, as regards its being directly
predicated of a subject in which qualities inhere, in the fully determined
quidditive instance (which is for Scotus in quid in another more fundamen-
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Duns Scotus 547
tal sense) there is always something formally present that is over and above
pure univocity, and appears indeed to be entirely “different”. Nevertheless,
because differences are only instantiated in things that are, Scotus declares
that uncreated being and the ten genera of finitude are all included “essen-
tially” within being as univocal and as a quasi-genus. (It is not a proper
genus, for Scotus, because for him genera only divide the finite, and not
because, as for Aquinas, being cannot, like a genus, be extrinsically deter-
mined). Moreover, even the specific differences of finitude, the property of
infinitude and the passiones or transcendentals are “virtually” included
within being as univocal. This makes it clear that while, indeed, univocity is
for Scotus a semantic thesis regarding the constancy of meaning through
diverse predications, all the same he tends to semanticise the field of ontol-
ogy itself, through his thesis of essential and virtual inclusion.6 In effect this
implies that being as a semantic or logical unit is also a formal element of
the make-up of any existential reality; although Scotus does not explicitly
speak of a “formal distinction” between being and essence, later Scotists
developed a clear logicist formalisation.
When Scotus speaks of analogy, as Boulnois concludes, this seems to
reduce either to the equivocal, or to degrees of “intensity” upon a quantita-
tive model.7 Although, indeed, Scotus allows that an infinite degree tran-
scends the quantitative, this excess is once again conceived in an equivocal
fashion, while the model of intensive ascent itself remains quantitative in its
paradigm, as is shown by Scotus’ insistence that the idea of “more good”
does not—contra Augustine—affect our grasp of the meaning of “good”.8
The position of the analogical, as a third medium between identity and dif-
ference, whereby something can be like something else in its very unlikeness
according to an ineffable co-belonging, is rejected by Scotus because it does
not seem to be rationally thinkable.9 What remains is a semantic world sun-
dered between the univocal and the equivocal. Scotus’ refusal, in contrast to
Aristotle and Aquinas, to conceive of a semantic analogy within grammar
and logic inevitably influences his conception of the metaphysical field also,
since the new autonomy which he grants to the semantic is itself a meta-
physical move: purely logical existence, including purely punctiliar essen-
tial univocal being in quid now belongs entirely to the real and can always
be “virtually distinguished” within its more complex concrete binding
together with other elements in quale. Far from this outlook displaying an
unquestionable rigour, it would seem that the idea that abstraction opens
upon its own neutral quasi-ontological realm of virtuality that is indepen-
dent of any ascent to the concretely spiritual, amounts simply to the fol-
lowing through of one hermeneutic option.
Since finite being is now regarded as possessing in essence “being” in its
own right (even though it still requires an infinite cause), when the mind
abstracts being from finitude, it undergoes no elevation but simply isolates
something formally empty, something that is already in effect a transcen-
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548 Catherine Pickstock
fashion. For Scotus, it is as free that human beings especially exhibit the
image of God. This is because they are granted a certain authentic self-
origination which remains at the most fundamental ontological level. By
contrast, for Aquinas, at the level of Esse, freedom is itself radically predes-
tined without remainder. Just for this reason, the Scotist God primarily char-
acterised by freedom is no despot. Indeed, one can, following Todisco and
Manzano, throw back such a charge upon Thomas. Is not the specifically
Thomist potentia absoluta left dangerously undetermined, and so only ren-
dered just and true under the auspices of potentia ordinata? For Scotus,
however, one can claim, the two potencies display one single will to
charity—both in what God actually does and in what He might do.
The same formal goodness is shown in human beings: they do not require
extrinsic teleological determination in order to be accounted good by nature,
nor do they await any mode of cultural determination. Aristotelianism, to
the contrary, requires that human beings be teleologically fulfilled in the life
of the polis. But for Scotus human beings are not political or social animals
as they are for Aristotle and Aquinas. Instead, they are able to negotiate
culture as a work of freedom, and the only “common good” one should
recognise is a contractually produced state of empirical peace. This Scotist
“proto-liberalism”, on Manzano’s account, meshes exactly with his proto-
empiricism and modest rationalism. Scotus maintains both the latter two ele-
ments because he also foreshadows (one can add to Todisco and Manzano)
a Baroque division of knowledge between “truths of fact” and “truths of
reason” confined to the little that follows from the law of identity.
According to the perspective which Todisco and Manzano present, with
great lucidity, an extremely attractive theological programme is offered. If
one takes modernity back to its Scotist roots (and even where they protest
this thesis, their own exegesis tends to confirm it), one can retain what is
valid in the modern world purged of its secularity. Thus empiricism, a strict
use of reason and political liberalism all sit nicely with an apophatic atten-
tion to revelation, and a theology focussed upon charity and the gift.
It is a very “Anglo-Saxon” programme, and why should some contempo-
rary British and American authors question it? If, for the moment, I were
permitted to be somewhat expansive, I would say that this is in part because
of doubts about the “modern” Anglo-Saxon project which have arisen from
within this project itself. Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. O. Quine, Richard Rorty and
John McDowell have all questioned the possibility of empiricism and ratio-
nalism by questioning the possibility of distinguishing the sources of our
knowledge as clearly either fact or reason, synthesis or analysis, or fact or
value.16 The epistemology of “representation” whereby the mind can image
reality (in either an empiricist or rationalist/idealist variant) has been in this
way challenged. Likewise, the liberal politics of “representation” of suppos-
edly originally isolated and fully autonomous individuals through the objec-
tive artifices of contract, money, politeness and parliamentary election has
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Duns Scotus 553
been challenged by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel and
many others (MacIntyre’s work being Thomistic in inspiration).17 So if, as
both Radical Orthodoxy and Todisco with Manzano seem to agree, episte-
mological representation and political liberalism have roots in univocity,
then an “Anglo-Saxon” questioning of univocity is not so surprising: it
would appear logically to be next on the post-empiricist agenda. And, one
might add, to conclude this digression, that it may be a welcome sign of the
recovery of a truly European culture that British defenders of a South Italian
Norman find themselves in debate with Latin defenders of a man born in a
small town in the Scottish borders. . . .
gulf)? Todisco and Manzano do not engage this issue. Todisco in particular
obfuscates the point that while, for Scotus, being and not God is the subject
of metaphysics, God is nonetheless included in the first subdivision of this
subject-matter, as infinite being, whereas, for Aquinas, God, as cause of ens
inquantum ens (and not just of being qua finite), can only be invoked as the
inaccessible principle of the subject-matter of metaphysics, unknowable by
metaphysics itself.18
If, in this fashion, God is somewhat reduced to ontic status and included
within the consideration of metaphysics, then the greater autonomy allowed
by Scotus to theology in relation to metaphysics appears ambivalent. In par-
ticular, the conceptual space for revelation is pre-determined in its nature
by philosophy—just as much (and arguably more so) as with analogy of
attribution. Since revelation is seen to be removed from every mode of
compellingly intelligible necessity, it has to fall within the scope of pure
contingency and pure factuality. It will inevitably favour the “truths of fact”
pole within a facts/reason a priori alternative supplied solely by philosophy.
The danger is clearly one of revelational positivism: that we know in advance
that all that God can show us is positive facts and unambiguous informa-
tion. For example, it does not seem good enough to say, with Manzano, that
only by divine freedom are bread and wine appointed to be sacramental
vehicles. Of course this is true, but it does not preclude a certain insight into
their “convenience” or “aesthetic necessity”—how otherwise should spiri-
tual writers be able to meditate, for example, on the significance of the
colour, liquidity and intoxicating power of the wine? It is hard to make sense
of this sort of limited but real insight into revelation without invoking certain
ideas about analogical ascent (and also extending those notions to encom-
pass theories of metaphor).19
Univocity appears to encourage dualities without mediation: God is
unknowably and equivocally remote as regards His being in quale; this gap
can only be bridged by positive revealed disclosures, yet this means that the
space of revelation is philosophically pre-determined as a space of facts or
empirical propositions. By contrast, while it seems that analogy already by
reason intrudes upon the space of revelation (since any rational advance
is ultimately lured forward by a grace-granted anticipation of the beatific
vision), nevertheless the paradoxical presence of unlikeness within likeness
in analogy, which also governs revealed discourse, ensures that the myste-
rious unlikeness of the revealed truth is sustained, not just with regard to
content, but even with respect to formality. An analogical participating
reality is neither simply a reason nor simply a fact; neither simply universal
nor simply particular. The participating analogue cannot exhibit a full ratio-
nal account of its cause (cannot furnish us with a syllogistic proof of its
cause) but only a partial one, by way of its concreteness as an effect, its very
factuality which declares its cause by exhibiting more clearly its own con-
crete character. And yet this fact, in pointing towards its more excellent
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Duns Scotus 555
grant of grace; Christ’s humanity did not possess grace intrinsically but only
by special fiat; Christ’s dead body in the tomb was divine by virtue of the
formal distinction and so separability of his body from his whole substance
(whereas for Aquinas it was divine by virtue of its substantive inclusion via
the persona of the Logos and single esse granted by the Logos instead of the
normal unity of substantive form); our natural desire for beatitude is only
for Scotus more than a vague non-cognitive probing, not by enticement by
the supernatural goal itself, but rather under the historical impact of actual
grace.21
The theological dimension of univocity tends to problematise rather than
assist an integral vision. But leaving questions of revelation aside, does logic
nevertheless ineluctably commit us to a univocal vision, whatever the con-
sequences for the theological realm? Todisco argues that this is the case. One
can concede to him that our finite minds are inclined by their very modus
cognoscendi to thinking that everything that “is”, including God, “is” in the
same fashion. The forms of language which we are obliged to use tend to
imply this, and it is impossible for our logic altogether to escape such a con-
ception. This circumstance, as both Aristotle and Aquinas recognised, is part
of the categorical boundedness (at once ontological and logical) of our finite
circumstances. However, this inescapable univocal moment concerns being
as fully transparent to our logic, or mode of thinking. But this does not mean
that logic by itself obliges ontology to follow its lead, unless one has already
assumed an ontological priority of rational possibility over actuality. Just
because, for the most transparent logic, existence is an either/or and the
notion of “degrees of being” makes no sense, it does not follow that actual
existence necessarily enshrines this logic. Moreover, disclosures of being
other than the logical—in aesthetic, ethical and contemplative experience—
may suggest to us that being can undergo a qualitative intensification. For
actual existence—the circumstance that there is anything at all—exceeds the
a priori notion of existentiality as the condition of the possibility for things
being this or that. Although everything that is given to us is a being, this still
involves a disclosure that existence itself is a given mystery. And since the a
priori grasp of ens qua ens as bare possibility cannot of itself generate a single
actuality, we cannot know what being itself is, nor that it is predatory upon
the prior repertoire of the possible; on the contrary, since the possible is
always only the possibility of the actual, it makes more sense to assume the
ontological primacy of actuality.
For these sorts of reasons, Aristotle’s metaphysics asks what is being, and
in what diverse ways can it occur? Neoplatonism dealt with the resulting
aporia—is being primarily a first causal source or primarily the most general
categorical circumstance?—with the notion of a scale of processions, con-
strued (especially by Proclus) as participations and imitations (albeit finally
of the One beyond Being).22 Without this resolution, one is left with two
options: either the notion of a highest ontic being, which does not explain
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Duns Scotus 557
in this respect, but maybe this is why Nicholas of Cusa, who sought (unlike
the Baroque “Thomists”) to salvage the Proclean heritage in the face of
Terminism, decided to question the law of identity itself? The recourse to
coincidentia oppositorum seems justified because of the ontological difference,
which is also for Aquinas the infinite/finite difference. Just as there can only
be pure identity and simplicity in the infinite—since finite things are always
composed and shifting—so, inversely, there can be no mere logical identity
in the un-limited, since this notion only makes sense by reference to limita-
tions. For Aristotle (for whom it was still a relatively ontological, and not
purely logical principle), the law of excluded middle applies because there
is such a thing as (for him always limited) “substance” (even though
inversely the law also ensures that there can be such a thing).24 If God, as
according to Aquinas, lies beyond limited substance, then the law loses its
field of application.
In a similar fashion, the law of excluded middle cannot readily apply to
participation of the bounded in the unbounded. For the finite to enter into
participation in the infinite is to enter into identity and non-identity, and this
coincidence is reflected and doubled in the circumstance that the finite here
becomes both finite and infinite at once. (And the finite can be construed
either as the complex and non-identical or as the bounded self-identical).
This provides the contradictory dynamism of analogy which exceeds that of
Hegelian dialectics (also indebted to Proclus) since the contradictory tension
is not really a conflict in search of an elusive return to formal identity, but a
higher harmony beyond logical opposition which inspires an increase and
intensification of a tension which mediates and resolves in and through its
apparent contradictoriness. One may protest that here language has taken a
very long vacation indeed. But does it make any more workaday sense that
God is omnipresent and yet the world is not God? That for Augustine we
are “of ourselves” nothing and only something from God and yet are not
God? That (as for Aquinas) our created freedom is entirely determined in
the very formality of freedom and yet is incomprehensibly determined as
free since God is the absolute author of the existential, including the exis-
tentiality of freedom? (If he is not, then, as David Burrell has argued, there
is a competition between God and creatures in a “zero sum game” which
loses divine transcendence in an ontic parity).25
The doctrine of Creation seems to impose these mysteries and the incom-
prehensible logic of analogy seems sensitive to them. According to a Scotist
perspective, however, they undergo a demystification. This perspective
appears to prioritise the mystery of freedom; yet pure freedom is so open as
to cancel mystery. It is already emptily determined as the supposed oppo-
site of rational determination, but this only allows to the divine absolute
freedom the status of a pure free “thing” alongside us in so far as our reason
can comprehend this. Every voluntarism is but the reverse face of a ratio-
nalism: what one has here is not a benign dividing and ruling, but instead
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Duns Scotus 559
refusing our analysis, still welcomes us. This remains the case even when
perfection terms are negated, as with Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena,
because this negation is always driven by a super-exceeding rather than a
sceptical suspension.39 But Scotus offers us instead the positive presence of
a kind of fetishised infinite absence. This could be seen as an anticipation of
the Kantian sublime which is alien to an infinitude of the forma of the beau-
tiful. Such a shift in the mystical component towards the absolutely empty
effectively delivers theology over to the ineffable authority of the Church
hierarchy, and, later, alternatively, to that of scripture.40
One can also read Duns Scotus as offering a theological anticipation of
post-modernity: by foreclosing the scope of theological speculation, he
demoted intellect in general and opened up theology as the pure discourse
of charity. We receive the loving will of God, and respond to this with our
answering will.41 Between the reading of Scotus as surrendering the mysti-
cal heart of Catholicism and the reading of Scotus as inaugurating a kind of
Pascalian way of charity, recent French historians of philosophy seem to hes-
itate—and with perfect legitimacy. There is certainly a sense in which the
Scotist distinguishing between the ethical goal of happiness and the goal of
pure justice, linked with an obedient and correctly intending will, rather than
a beatified intellect, leads not only towards Kant, but also (as he at least once
recognised) towards Jean-Luc Marion’s disinterested charity and unilateral
gift. In like fashion, Scotus’ separation of revelation from mystical ascent
points towards both Barth’s hermeneutics of the pure word of God, and
Marion’s phenomenology (without metaphysics) of the revealed word. Both
seem to be linked to a loss of the mediating vision of analogy, even though,
contradictorily, Marion’s defence of the Pseudo-Dionysian via antiqua against
the Scotist inauguration of onto-theology, seems to require the via antiqua
alliance of revelation with metaphysics in the broader sense, and a more
emphatic sense of analogy and participation than Marion affirms (although
establishing his position on this is very difficult indeed).42
It becomes illogical to uphold the “post-modern” Scotus, while denounc-
ing the “modern” Scotus, and this applies both in philosophy and theology.
If one cannot countenance Scotist onto-theology, one must also question a
“pure” philosophy concerned with a non-divine being, since this is ulti-
mately grounded in univocity and the refusal of analogy in any sense con-
sistent with the Pseudo-Dionysian naming of God. In this way, Heidegger
comes into question. Likewise, if one is wary of the Scotist separation of
abstraction from elevation, or, rather, his particular refusal of the mystical,
one must be wary also of his semi-voluntarism. For the very same separa-
tion, applied by Duns Scotus to Augustine’s discourse on the Trinity, ensures
that one must interpret the divine intellect and divine will as univocally
similar in character to the human intellect and will. Such a predilection is
reciprocally reinforced by Scotus’ Franciscan rejection of a distinguishing of
the persons of the Trinity by substantive relations.
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Duns Scotus 565
We have seen that the paradigm of representation had another source. This
may be equally or more fundamental. This is in relation to the divine intel-
lect. As we have seen, Scotus shifts notions of divine understanding away
from simple identity with essence, and, in consequence, away from the idea
of its being archetypal art—a supreme “maker’s knowledge”—rather than a
kind of self-mirroring. For Scotus, the divine ideas of the divine perfections
which are the first exemplars only arise as representations of perfections that
in some sense precede cognition. So, just as, for Aquinas, finite knowledge
by identity (the species of a thing being realised in our understanding) is
grounded in the supreme divine identity that is simplicity, so, for Scotus,
finite knowledge by representation is grounded in divine self-representation.
In this double fashion, realism gradually gave way within the Middle Ages
to modes of empiricism, scepticism and even idealism (though there were
many examples of hybrids of knowledge by identity and knowledge by
mirroring).47
The complex and gradual shift towards representation also tended to
render less distinct cases of mere logical predication from real invocation. As
we have already seen, the domains of logic and semantics began to domi-
nate and predetermine that of metaphysics. This process was in certain ways
begun by Avicenna himself: for the latter, logic deals with universals, and
physics with particulars, while metaphysics concerns pure forms or essences
indifferent either to universal or particular. But this tends to turn the subject
of metaphysics into certain inherently abstract entities which hover in a no-
man’s-land between the logical and the real, the mental and the actual.
Inevitably, this suggests a further logic of that which is not necessarily uni-
versal, and metaphysics is here placed on its Kantian course of concern with
a transcendental logic. (Perhaps Kant—the pre-eminent “modern”—also
remained within “a certain Middle Ages”?)48
Another way to express this would be to say that Scotus increased the ten-
dency to logicize and semanticise metaphysics. Prior to his writings, being
had usually been considered to be univocal within logic, equivocal within
physics and analogical within metaphysics. It is true that Aquinas’ theologi-
cal analogy plays subtly between metaphysical and logical analogy, where
the former (ad unum ipsorum, or proportionality) denotes a real ineffable
sharing in one principle through convenientia by two other realities (as sub-
stance and accident share in being), and the latter (ad unum alterum, or pro-
portion or attribution) denotes a mysterious link strictly in terms of semantic
priority with no necessary foundation in the real—as both medicine and the
body are healthy; the latter primarily so, yet the former in a causal manner.
Nevertheless, attribution still assumes, following the Proclean legacy, an
ontological foundation; as in this case the matter of occult sympathies etc.
Thus Aquinas also talks of proportionalitas, a parallel sharing in “health”
between medicine and the animal body.49 Without this metaphysical dimen-
sion, attribution would collapse into equivocity. In theology, for Aquinas, the
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568 Catherine Pickstock
metaphysical aspect of analogy preserves the real affinity, while the logical
aspect preserves the dimension of mystery: how is God good? And how is
medicine healthy? Yet the ontological assumption is made that God is pre-
eminently good.
In this way, Aquinas begins somewhat to qualify metaphysics with logic
in theology. His analogy, as Alain de Libera has suggested, can be seen as
analogical to a second degree, since it lies between the relative univocity
of metaphysical analogy and the relative equivocity of logical analogy.50
Nevertheless, the interweaving of a logical moment tends to favour the
metaphysical interpolation of participation within the schemes of ordered
proportionate causality.
Scotus also gives logic and grammar a newly accentuated place in
theology. But he goes further. Earlier in his career, he had presented
being as logically equivocal; and later as logically univocal, mainly under
the pressure of the need to ground the possibility of predication by finite
creatures concerning the infinite, once participated-in perfections had been
abandoned. The univocity of being within logic is here held to govern also
the character of being as a transcendental formality. Every existing thing,
whether finite or infinite, is univocal in quid, where being is taken to mean
an essential “not not-being”. Specific and virtual differences remain,
however, as we have seen, purely equivocal. Gilles Deleuze was right: uni-
vocity releases equivocal difference, but it suppresses analogy.51 Ultimately,
the warrant for this move is not objectively rational; rather, it is grounded
in the refusal of any existential and evaluative freight to the process of
abstraction.
This essay has been an attempt to explore the relation of the Scotist legacy
to modernity and postmodernity. In this light, the latter seems but an
advanced version of the former, in which the inseparability of univocity, rep-
resentation and flattened causal interaction on a single plane becomes more
fully realised. One might also contend that according to this post-Scotist per-
spective, there is no modern phase at all, and so also no pre-modern to which
one might nostalgically make appeal. Instead, there is “a certain Middle
Ages” which has never ceased to be dominant, even now in the twenty-first
century. Where, in the midst of all these epochs, which turn out not to be
straightforward epochs after all, are we to look? Perhaps, as many people—
from south European Catholics to midwestern-exiled evangelicals (such as
John Hare)—seem to suggest, we need to re-theologise modernity by return-
ing it to its roots in Avicenna, and Henry of Ghent, Bonaventure and
supremely Duns Scotus? But then, if so, how should one describe Aquinas’
challenge to Avicenna (deploying Averroës, Pseudo-Dionysius, Proclus, and
a de-Avicennised Augustine rather than Avicenna’s Plotinus)? Not, surely,
as an invocation of the pre-modern, but as something like an avant-garde
innovation against the modern already begun in the name of a deepening of
the Patristic tradition? To invoke such a project is not to return to the past.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005
Duns Scotus 569
NOTES
Y The first and second sections of this essay develop further some of the arguments sketched
in “Postmodern Scholasticism: A Critique of Recent Invocations of Univocity”, Antonianum
Annus LXXVII Fasc. 1 (January–March, 2003), pp. 3–46. My thanks to Lluis Oviedo for per-
mission to repeat here elements of that article. In addition, the first section of this essay is
a re-working of part of an earlier essay, “Postmodernism”, The Blackwell Companion to Polit-
ical Theology, edited by Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh (Oxford: Blackwell Publish-
ers, 2004), pp. 471–485. My thanks to the editors for permission to re-use elements of that
essay. For their criticisms of the present essay and helpful suggestions, I would like to
thank: David Burrell, John Milbank, Lluis Oviedo, Adrian Pabst, Denys Turner and Tony
Street.
1 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (New York and London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
2 It has become fashionable to contest any interpretation of Duns Scotus which seeks to place
him in any instrumental relationship with the kind of genealogy traced in the present essay;
see for example David Ford’s review of Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999) in
Scottish Journal of Theology Vol. 54 no. 3 (2001), pp. 385–404, 423–425. See also my response
essay to his review in the same issue of that journal (pp. 405–422). It is my contention that
the interpretation of Duns Scotus and his historical significance put forward in this essay,
especially in relation to Aquinas, is scarcely controversial: see further Étienne Gilson, Jean
Duns Scot: Introduction à ses Positions Fondamentales (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin,
1952); but, more explicitly, Olivier Boulnois, “Quand Commence L’Ontothéologie? Aristote,
Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot”, Revue Thomiste, Vol. XCV no. 1 (January–March, 1995), pp.
84–108; Etre et Representation (Paris: P.U.F., 1999) and Duns Scot: sur la connaissance de Dieu
et L’Univocité de L’Etant (Paris: P.U.F., 1990); J.-F. Courtine, Suarez et le Système de la Méta-
physique (Paris: P.U.F., 1990); Éric Alliez, Le Temps Capitaux (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1999)
II.i; Michel Corbin, Le Chemin de la Théologie chez Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972);
Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Analogie”, Dictionnaire Critique de Théologie, edited by Jean-Yves
Lacoste and Paul Bauchamp (Paris: P.U.F., 1998); Bruno Puntel, Analogie und Geschichtlichkeit
(Fribourg: Herder, 1969); G. Prouvost, Thomas d’Aquin et les Thomismes (Paris: Editions du
Cerf, 1998); C. Esposito, Introduzione a Suarez: meditazioni metafisiche (Milan: Rusioni, 1996);
David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Ludger Honnefelder, “Metaphysik zwischen
Onto-Theologik, Transszendentalwissenschaft und universaler formaler Semantik. Zur
philosophischen Aktualitat der mittelalterlichen Ansatze von Metaphysik”, Was ist Philoso-
phie im Mittelalter? (Acts of the Tenth International Congress for Mediaeval Philosophy of
the International Society for the Study of Mediaeval Philosophy), Jan A. Aertsen and
Andreas Speer, editors, (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 48–60; Mark D.
Jordan, Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), and The Alleged Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992); John Inglis, “Philosophical Auton-
omy and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy”, Journal of the Historv of Philosophy
Vol. 5 no. 1 (1997), pp. 21–53, and Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of
Mediaeval Philosophy (Leiden/Boston: E. J. Brill, 1998); H. Möhle, Ethik als Scientia Practica
nach Johannes Duns Scotus, Eine Philosophische Grundlegung (Munster, 1997). The significance
of Duns Scotus’ contribution is not that he is the sole inaugurator of transformations in the-
oretical speculation, but rather that he is one figure among many—although a crucial one—
in a general shift away from a focus upon the metaphysics of participation (which he tended
to reduce to a matter of external imitation rather than intrinsic “sharing in”), and he is note-
worthy in particular because he gave attention to these issues in a comprehensive fashion.
No scholar could deny that such a shift occurred: see for example such diverse figures as
Gilles Deleuze and Richard Cross; Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968),
and Richard Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The Scientific Context of a Theological Vision
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Richard Cross is a critic of my own interpretation of Duns Scotus, although it is not so
much that the two analyses of Duns Scotus stand in a hostile relation, but that the negoti-
ations of these analyses differ greatly; see, for example, Cross’ critique in “Where angels
fear to tread: Duns Scotus and Radical Orthodoxy”, Antonianum Annus LXXVI Fasc. 1
(January–March, 2001), pp. 7–41. See especially pp. 13–14 n. 40. Whatever one’s position
with regard to specific texts, one must perhaps take a position in relation to this generally
acknowledged shift away from participation and its relative importance or otherwise. Put
briefly, my own position is that Duns Scotus and his successors, within an approach seeking
(after the post-1270 condemnations) for complex reasons to emphasise the sovereignty of
God and the primacy of scripture, opened a space for univocal treatment of finite being
without regard to theology, rational or revealed. Although this space was not immediately
exploited in a secularising fashion, in the long run this came to be the case.
3 Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I d 8 q 3 nn. 50 and 86, and I d 3 q 3 and see Boulnois, op.cit., Duns
Scot: sur le connaissance, p. 379 nn. 192 and 193; Boulnois, op.cit., Etre et representation, pp.
308–314, 457–505.
4 Alain de Libera, La philosophie médiévale (Paris: P.U.F., 1994), pp. 404–406; Libera and
Maurice-Ruben Hayoun, Averroës et l’averroësme (Paris: P.U.F., 1991); Libera, Penser au Moyen
Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991); Boulnois, Etre et representation, pp. 293–327. Richard
Cross seems both to admit and to evade the issue concerning the shift in the meaning of
removed universality and perfection terms. He rightly says that for Aquinas the concept
of being was not an abstraction, but a matter of concrete elevation and participation (op.cit.,
“Where Angels Fear to Tread”, p. 13). However, he also says that for both Aquinas and
Scotus the concept of Being (and other transcendental terms) constitutes a concept
“common” to both God and creatures: “there is a concept under whose extension both God
and creatures fall, just as there is a concept under whose extension both cats and dogs fall”
(p. 18). Once things are set up in this fashion, Scotus is bound to seem the more lucid
thinker. Demonstrative theology requiring common concepts will clearly require univocal
ones. However, since Aquinas admits that demonstration in general requires univocity, one
can only assume (unless uncharacteristically he overlooked something rather crucial) that
for him, as for Averroës, demonstration of God is not genuinely apodeictic (related to syl-
logism) but more dialectical (allowing of probable assumptions). Likewise for Aquinas the
only “common” concept of being is that of ens commune which applies to created being
alone. (Cross neglects to note that for Aquinas, as for Scotus, “God” does not fall directly
under the subject of metaphysics, which, after Avicenna’s modification of Aristotle, they
see as concerning ens inquantum ens: for Aquinas this is ens commune, for Scotus, univocal
esse, conceptually indifferent as to created and uncreated). For Aquinas, the conceptual tran-
sition from creatures to God works (ontologically and epistemologically) through the inef-
fable convenientia of analogy of attribution, without any isolatable, univocal medium which
can be considered to be “in common”. (God himself is the ultimate ground of what is held
in common between beings, so he cannot himself be an item within this set).
This means that for Aquinas the mode of signification/thing signified contrast as regards
knowledge of God distinguishes between the divine res or reality which is also infinite
thought, on the one hand, and our modus or limited access to this reality which is at once
cognitive and existential, on the other hand. But Cross reads this distinction in post-Fregean
terms as somewhat like a distinction of focal sense and multiple existential contexts.
Without textual warrant this gives “being” and not Deus/Esse as the res, and then variable
finite or infinite modi. But this scheme already allows being to be abstracted without per-
fective elevation—and of course if one thinks in these terms, Scotus is likely to appear
superior to Aquinas. But the important point is that Scotus inaugurates the conceptual
sphere in which Fregean logical universes and Kantian transcendental categories (etc.) can
orbit.
Cross ensures that Scotus must beat Aquinas at a Scotist game. His disdain for histori-
cism in this instance of profound epistemic transformation arguably prevents him from
considering a viable philosophical alternative. Nor is Cross consistent in this disdain. He
indicates that he knows well that most thinkers up to and including Aquinas did not regard
“being” as merely a “vicious abstraction”—for reasons bound up with notions of abstrac-
tion as involving real ontological elevation. It seems rather as though Cross thinks of the
alternative view of the concept of “being” as simply not worth discussing. Fortunately, it
would seem, Scotus put a stop to all this nonsense. Yet if he did call a halt to obfuscation,
then it would seem that, indeed, “Radical Orthodoxy” is right to see him as a revolution-
ary—at least in this respect.
Cross is again inconsistent about whether or not he is prepared to acknowledge histor-
ical change in relation to the question of analogy (another aspect of the handling of per-
fection language). In places he seems clearly to allow that for Aquinas analogy is grounded
in participation (p. 14), while in other places he asserts (p. 28) that for Aquinas “the like-
ness of analogy is just the likeness of imitation”. For Cross, the reduction of participation
to imitation is in line with nominalist common sense (participation “confuses” the essence
of a property with its imitability: p. 14), but he fails to reflect that this common sense, if it
be such, is also idolatry. Creation cannot simply be “part” of God, since God is not a divis-
ible object, but nor can it simply “imitate” God, since there can be no third real medium
between God and creatures that could confirm the truth or falsity of this copying. Only
God himself provides the medium. Hence to imitate (somehow) God, is also to share
(somehow) in God, since God alone establishes and confirms the veracity of the imitation.
For this reason, traditional “participation language”, from Plato onwards, hovers between
literal mimesis and literal “being a part of”. Thus, for Aquinas, “[t]o participate is to take a
quasi-part”, In Boeth. De Hebdom. 2.24. Yet Cross insists that the tradition was always
secretly nominalist and adhered to the criteria of Anglo-Saxon common-sense—reducing
a real sharing-in to an empirically observable “likeness”.
This is no more than anachronism, whatever one’s opinion as to the coherence of “par-
ticipation language”. Moreover, Scotus’ innovation in reducing participation to imitation
is seen in his reduction of the language of imago Dei to an intensified instance of vestigium,
in the context of his discussion of trinitarian theology. By contrast, Aquinas had seen the
vestigium (always seen as more like an empirically observable causal imprint of literal but
relatively “thin” likeness: a “footprint” showing mainly God’s might) as a weak instance
of the imago (which is an ineffable showing-forth in a weak degree of the divine essence).
See Ordinatio I d 3 Pars 2 q unica; Aquinas S.T. I q 93 a 2.
5 See for example Ordinatio, I d 3 q 1 and d 8 q 3 nn. 112–115.
6 Ordinatio I d 3 q 3 nn 31–151.
7 Boulnois, op.cit., pp. 290–291.
8 Ordinatio I d 3 q 4 nn 358–60.
9 Duns Scotus, In Elench. q 15 para [8] (22a–23a); In Praed. q 4 para [5] (446b–447a) and para
[6] (447a); see also Boulnois op.cit., pp. 246–247.
10 Boulnois, ibid., pp. 327–405, 457–493.
11 Alain de Libera, op.cit.
12 Thomas Aquinas, De spiritualibus creaturis a. 10: “Now it does not matter much if we say
that intelligible things themselves are participated in from God or that the light that makes
them intelligible is participated in from God.” And see Jacob Schutz, “La Doctrine Médié-
vale des Causes et la théologie de la Nature Pure (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles)” in Revue Thomiste
Vol. C no. 1–2 (January/June 2001), special issue, Surnaturel, pp. 217–264.
13 Orlando Todisco ofm conv, “L’univocità scotista dell’ ente e la svolta moderna” in Anto-
nianum Annus LXXVI Fasc.1 (January-March, 2001), pp. 79–110; Isidoro Manzano ofm,
“Individuo y sociedad en Duns Escoto” in the same issue pp. 43–78.
14 Libera, op.cit., La philosophie médiévale, pp. 116ff.
15 On property rights, see Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 248: “Promoting a mendicant idea of absolute poverty [the Fran-
ciscans] posited a ‘right of natural necessity’ (Bonaventure) or a ‘right of use’ (Ockham).
Though dissociated from real property, the right still carried proprietary overtones. Gerson
invoked the term dominium to describe the right of self-preservation and indeed initiated
the tradition of conceiving freedom as a property in one’s own body and its powers.”
O’Donovan here radicalises the discussion of the ambiguity of Franciscan poverty in John
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 16. On the shift in meaning
of influentia, see Jacob Schutz, loc.cit. See n. 12 above.
16 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Wilfrid
Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); Willard Van
Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 20–47; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
17 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988).
18 In defense of Scotus on this matter, see Leonardo Sileo ofm “I ‘soggetti’ della teologia e il
‘soggeto’ della metafisica”, Antonianum Annus lxxvi Fasc. 2 (April–June, 2001), pp. 207–224.
See also Boulnois, op.cit., Etre et representation, pp. 457–505.
19 Narcisse, op.cit., Les Raisons de Dieu. See further section 4 below.
20 Boulnois, op.cit., Etre et representation, pp. 55–107.
21 Olivier Boulnois, “Duns Scotus, Jean”, Dictionnaire critique de Theologie edited by Jean-Yves
Lacoste and Paul Bauchamp, (Paris: P.U.F., 1998); Rowan Williams, “Jesus Christus III:
Mittalalter”, Theologische Realenzyklopadie Vol. 16 (New York, NY: Walter De Gruyter, Inc.,
1987), pp. 748–753; Cornelio Fabro, “Participation”, New Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. X (New
York: NY: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1967).
22 Proclus, Elements of Theology, E. R. Dodds, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
Propositions 13, 25, 29, 55.
23 William of Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, 1.1.
24 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005B 16–1009A 37.
25 David Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1993), p. 94.
26 Duns Scotus, Opus oxoniense, 1 d 17 pars 3 q 13. See also Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in
the Middle Ages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).
27 Nicholas of Cusa, “On Learned Ignorance”, Selected Spiritual Writings, L. H. Lawrence Bond,
trans. (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1997).
28 See II Peter 1:4 where human beings are said to be “sharers in the divine nature”.
29 Duns Scotus, Rep. Paris., 1 IV d 28 n 6.
30 Javier Andonegui ofm, “Escoto en el punto de mira”, Antonianum Annus lxxvi Fasc. 1
(January-March, 2001), pp. 145–191.
31 This might seem to be contradicted by Scotus’ assertion that there is an individuating factor
in things—haeccitas—beyond negative material determination, which the intellect can intuit.
See here Antonio Conti, “Alcune note su individuazione e struttura metafisica della sostanza
prima in Duns Scoto”, Antonianum Annus LXXVI Fasc. 1 (January–March, 2001), pp. 111–144.
However, the Scotist account of individuation involves a somewhat incoherent “formal”
element in matter (as if it could potentially exist of itself in an unformed state) and an inef-
fable principle of haecceity. One could here agree with Gilson that the Thomist account of
the concrete act of esse supervening upon essential form gives a more adequate account of
individuation (and a more relational one). However, Conti argues against Gilson that since
being is the act of essence (the entire nature of a thing) and not of form (which is an aspect
of the thing insofar as it informs matter), this leaves Aristotelian individuation which con-
cerns the activation of matter by form—matter supplying negatively the individuating
factor—unaffected. Hence Gilson’s argument that the concrete existence of the thing gives
a new primacy to the individual beyond Aristotle, will not work. However, one might argue
that the equal creative actuation by esse of matter and form, substance and accident, etc.,
ensures that material individuation only occurs “through” its share in esse. This tends to turn
the negative individuation into something positive. Moreover, Aquinas makes it clear that
the esse/essentia dimension is not just a topmost “added on” layer. Its analogical economy
extends to the inter-relations of genus, species and individual. See Fabro, op.cit. “Participa-
tion”. It is also the case that the frequent expression in Aquinas forma dat esse suggests some
equation of forma with essentia. The “negativity” of matter seems the best way to understand
it, and compared with Aristotle, Aquinas accentuates its non-positivity: matter exists
through form. This leaves external (non-angelic) limitation itself a gift or created mystery.
32 S.T., I q 25 a 5 resp.
33 S.T., I Q 45 a 2 ad 3.
34 John of St. Thomas, (John Poinsot), Artis Logicæ secundæ pars 581B 24–582A 16 and 574B
35–575A 5; John Deely, New Beginnings: Early Modern Philosophy and Postmodern Thought
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994), pp. 65–109; Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of
Knowledge, Gerald B. Phelan, trans. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1995), pp. 75–145.
35 Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, E. R. Morrow, trans. (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Jean Trouillard, La Mystagogue de Procles (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1982); Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995), “Introduction”.
36 Benedykt Huculak, “De mature Augustiniano opere Joannis Duns Scoti”, Antonianum, Vol.
LXXVI Fasc. 3 (July–September, 2001), pp. 429–479.
37 Huculak cites Fabro as saying that Thomist participation proved incompatible with Augus-
tinianism. However the passage cited concerns merely the Thomist refusal of the “Augus-
tinian” idea that finitude equates with materiality, Augustine’s view here being arguably
more complex than this characterisation. Op.cit. On Augustine’s intellectualism, see James
Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
38 Ordinatio 1 d 8 q 3 n 49.
39 On illumination, see Ordinatio I d 3 q 3 a 5. On negation, see Ordinatio, I d 8 q 3 n 49, and
nn. 70–86. On the formal distinction of divine perfections and divine intellect, see Ordina-
tio I d 3 q 4. See also Olivier Boulnois, Sur La Connaisance de Dieu et l’Univocité de l’Etant
(Paris: P.U.F., 1988), pp. 111–181 and op.cit., Etre et representation, pp. 308–314, 457–505.
40 Duns Scotus, Quodlibetal Questions 5 a 1. See George Tavard, Holy Writ and Holy Church
(New York: Harper and Row, 1959) passim.
41 Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I d 8 q 4; and see Olivier Boulnois, “Duns Scotus: Jean” in op.cit.,
Lacoste and Bauchamp, eds. Dictionnaire.
42 See Jean-Luc Marion, “Une époque de métaphysique” in Jean Duns Scot ou la révolution
subtile (Paris: Editions Radio-France, 1982), pp. 62–72.
43 Ordinatio, I d 3 q 4 n 387 and d 13 q 1 n 45; Quodlibetal Questions, q I a 3.1 57–80; q 8 a 1.27;
Boulnois, op.cit., Etre et representation, pp. 107–114.
44 Aquinas, S.T. I q 14 a 4 resp; a 5 resp; Scotus, Ordinatio, I d 30 q 1 nn 11–53; Boulnois, op.cit.,
Etre et representation, pp. 405–432.
45 See Boulnois, op.cit., pp. 107–114. Ordinatio d 3 q 3 a 4. See also Quodlibetal Questions, q 1 a
3; q 2 a 2; q 3 a 2; 5 a 3.
46 Boulnois, op.cit., pp. 55–107. Richard Cross interprets the formal distinction (op.cit., p. 28)
in terms of the idea of features distinguishable within an entity but not separable from it.
The present author wonders, however, whether this somewhat misses the point. For
Aquinas such features are either really distinct in a certain way (like one’s arm from the
rest of one’s body) or only intellectually distinct (like God’s truth from God). Scotus,
however, presents this in a different way: an intellectual distinction without total separa-
tion must have some real foundation of separability as well as holistic unity. For Scotus the
arm is no mere real part: in one (over?) holistic respect, the “arm” is pulled back into inef-
fable haeccitas, where its separability lies dormant. In another (over?) atomistic respect, the
arm is a kind of virtual prosthesis, ready to take on a life of its own. In relation to God
there is only the latter danger: divine simplicity is compromised by Scotus. His Neopla-
tonic language of “quasi-emanations” to describe the ontological succession of formal dis-
tinctions in God tells against Cross’ reading of this doctrine.
47 Boulnois, op.cit., pp. 17–107, 405–453. Cross speaks of Scotus’ epistemic theory as if it simply
followed common sense. However, once again he equivocates: at times Aquinas is also sup-
posed to have a representational theory of knowledge (op.cit., p. 53), yet finally Cross con-
cedes that Scotus innovates in shifting to esse representivum as the basis for knowledge, and
that this inaugurates a modern epoch in thought about thinking.
48 Hannes Möhle, Ethik als Scientia Practica nach Johannes Duns Scotus, Eine Philosophische
Grundlegung (Münster: Aschendorff, 1995); Étienne Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses
Positions Fondamentales (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1952).
A similar anticipation of a transcendental approach can be found in Scotus’ account of
time. He tended not to regard time as a real aspect either of moving things (“Aristotle”) or
of the distended life of the soul (“Augustine”). Rather, time for Scotus was a pure duration
in its abstract measurableness, as if an abstract virtual clock were counting units of time at
every moment. It is in this context that he redefines aevum (previously regarded as a concept
embracing both angelic and material duration) as pure finite resistance with indifference
as to motion and its various modes. Hence aevum is said to apply as much, and in the same
univocal fashion, to an angel as to a stone: Ordinatio II dist 2 p I q 4 para 182. Richard Cross
(loc. cit. pp. 39–40) has argued that the present author is mistaken in After Writing in pre-
senting Scotus as anticipating Newtonian and Kantian notions of abstract time. And yet
for Scotus, even if there were no movement of the heavens, their repose could be poten-
tially measured by that time which would measure their movement if it existed: Opus oxon.
II dist 2 q 11. Other interpreters of Scotus have come to similar conclusions. See, for
example, P. Ariotti, “Celestial Reductionism Regarding Time, from Albert the Great and
Thomas Aquinas to the end of the Sixteenth Century”, Studi Internazionali di Filosofia Vol.
4 (1972), p. 113: “Time as aevum is continuous, indivisible, independent of motion. It is
tempting to see in Scotus’ concept of aevum the roots of Newton’s concept of absolute time.”
See also Alliez, Le Temps Capitaux II.i, pp. 71–121.
49 St Thomas Aquinas, S.T. I q 13 a 5 resp.
50 De Libera, op.cit., La philosophie médiévale, pp. 408–411.
51 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968).