Catherine Pickstock Duns Scotus

Modern Theology 21:4 October 2005
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
DUNS SCOTUS: HIS HISTORICAL

AND CONTEMPORARY
SIGNIFICANCE
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
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350
Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
544 Catherine Pickstock
revised history (Ludwig Honnefelder, Jean-François Courtine and Olivier

Boulnois in particular).
In response to this new development, one can isolate four main reactions.
First, there are those who say that if one understands modern thought
not just as “Kantian” but also as “Scotist”, one can show how modern
approaches to epistemology and politics are more compatible with a classi-
cal Christian vision than some have suspected. This is a very serious and
coherent position, and it will be given consideration below. The second reac-
tion, common to certain French phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion
and Olivier Boulnois, is more ambivalent. On the one hand, Scotus’ uni-
vocity is seen as a commencement of an idolatrous onto-theology, and a loss
of the mystical discourse on the names of God. On the other hand, it is seen
as making way for a post-metaphysical theology focussed upon charity
rather than knowledge. The third tendency is that of so-called post-modern
thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze who argue that the Scotist shift towards a
univocal ontology is more fundamental for modern thought than the shift
to the subject and to epistemology. The fourth reaction which has come
to be associated with Radical Orthodoxy, but has far older roots and a far
wider contemporary adherence, holds that the shift towards a univocal
ontology, knowledge as representation, and causality as primarily efficient,
is philosophically questionable and has negative implications for the
upholding of a Christian vision and for the synthesis of theology and
philosophy.
In what follows, I will try to clarify why Duns Scotus has come to have
such contemporary significance. In addition, I will attempt as far as possi-
ble within the very brief compass of this essay,Y to give consideration to the
different assessments just outlined, while explaining some of the arguments
in favour of the fourth view.
1. The Problem of Epochs

In his book We Have Never Been Modern the French philosopher of science
Bruno Latour exposes the falsity of the myth that there are absolutely irre-
versible breaks in cultures through time.1 This observation bears strongly
upon the theme of the present essay, for in tracing certain theoretical trans-
formations from the later middle ages to the early modern period, one can
see that aspects of late mediaeval theological thought underpin later char-
acteristically “modern” ideas, even though much in the Enlightenment may
also be seen as a qualified reaction against these changes. It has been
common to account for the origins of modernity in terms of the vague edifice
of “the Enlightenment”, and to see modernity as co-extensive with the rise
of the secular modern state needed to quell the Wars of Religion, together
with the rise of systematic organisation of medical, educational and penal
institutions. But given that attempts to improve society in a secular way via
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005
Duns Scotus 545
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
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-
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-
dentally a priori category and no longer transcendental in the usual mediae-

val sense of a metaphysically universal category which applies to all beings
as such, with or without material instantiation. For this reason, it now rep-
resents something that is simply there, without overtones of valuation,
although it also represents something that must be invoked in any act of rep-
resentation, and is in this new sense “transcendental”. Scotus here echoes
the supposed Avicennian view that the subject of metaphysics is being and
not the first principle (as Averroës held), for being can now be regarded as
(for our understanding) transcendentally prior to, and also as common to
both God and creatures.10 In one sense, this inaugurates onto-theology, and
so is “modern” and not “post-modern”. But in another sense, Scotus opens
up the possibility of considering being without God, and as more funda-
mental (supposedly) than the alternative of finite versus infinite, or tempo-
ral versus eternal. And this space is as much occupied by Heidegger, Derrida
and Deleuze as it was by Hegel. Here, Scotus’ proto-modernity involves also
the “post-modern”.
Something similar applies to the Scotist impact upon theology. As a
“proto-modern” thinker, Scotus’ contributions had implications for the
alliance between theology and the metaphysical (in the broad sense of pre-
Scotist Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical realism, not in the sense of onto-
theology). For within the prevailing theologico-metaphysical discourse of
participated-in perfections, there was a ready continuity between reason and
revelation: reason itself was drawn upwards by divine light, while, inversely,
revelation involved the conjunction of radiant being and further illuminated
mind. Here, as we have seen, to rise to the Good, before as well as within
faith, was to rise to God. But once the perceived relationship to the tran-
scendentals has undergone the shift described above, to abstract to the Good
tells us nothing concerning the divine nature. To know the latter, we wait far
more upon a positive revelation of something that has for us the impact of
a contingent fact rather than a metaphysical necessity.
One can interpret the latter outcome as modern misfortune: the loss of an
integrally conceptual and mystical path. Already before Duns Scotus (even
in Bonaventure, perhaps), the business of naming God was beginning to
change; it was gradually losing the accompanying element of existential
transformation of the one naming. This tends to be a consequence of an apri-
oristic reading of Anselm by the Franciscans, for which perfection terms
already start to denote abstraction rather than elevation.11 But with Scotus,
the mystical dimension is lost, and Augustinian divine illumination of the
intellect (in all human knowing) is reduced to the divine causal instigation
of the natural light of the agent intellect (more so than for Aquinas, for whom
the entirely created light of the individual human agent intellect was still
a self-exceeding light).12 In this way a path was opened for an historical
transition from Platonic recollection (in its many mutations) to modern
apriorism.
Duns Scotus 549
2. Duns Scotus and the End of Onto-theology
The above verdict on Scotus is strongly contested by Orlando Todisco and

Isiduro Manzano.13 These writers do not question the “Radical Orthodoxy”
view that Scotus stood at the centre of a paradigm shift in the thirteenth
century. The argument here concerns evaluation rather than exegesis. What
Radical Orthodoxy writers would tend to view negatively, they view
positively.
In particular, Todisco and Manzano reject my (and others’) interpretation
that Scotus’ ideas led to a diminution of the scope of theology. For Todisco,
just the opposite is the case: by reducing metaphysics to a bare ontology
which defines the ens in terms of the law of excluded middle, Scotus ends
rather than inaugurates onto-theology, and ensures that thenceforwards our
discourse concerning God and his relation to the world will be much more
radically derived from the sources of revelation. The Radical Orthodoxy
writers are, furthermore, guilty of ignoring the fact that even univocity of
being is a theological as well as a metaphysical thesis. Because of our fall-
enness, in statu ipso the first object of knowledge seems to be a material crea-
ture, mediated to us by the sensorily imagined phantasm. Only revelation
of our previous unfallen condition opens up the hidden truth that by its orig-
inal, integral nature our intellect is attuned to the meta-physical before the
physical: that it properly grasps first the ens qua ens, in abstraction from either
material or spiritual designation. In this way, and on account of this neutral
abstraction, revealed theology itself paradoxically makes available the space
for metaphysics as a science in its own right, purified of any Aristotelian co-
reference to God as subject matter along with being. Conversely, a meta-
physics re-directed towards thinking about ens as such in indifference as to
cause and relation, reciprocally opens the space of revealed theology in two
different ways. First, it helps to show the contingency of our perverse fallen
condition, where, contrary to natural governance, the senses lead the mind.
Secondly, it reveals a natural precondition for the reception of supernatural
grace—namely, the neutral possible orientation of our mind as much to infi-
nite as to finite being.
Both Todisco and Manzano rightly consider that this indeed subtle and
creatively brilliant scheme allows for a kind of benign dividing and ruling.
Strict reason is more fully acknowledged than with Aquinas, since univoc-
ity permits a proof of God’s existence without reference to a higher cause
beyond our grasp, and so within the terms of strict maintenance of a medi-
ating identity as required by syllogistic proof: one can see with certainty that
infinite being must be ontologically prior to finite being only because the
middle term “being” retains a univocal identity. By contrast, Aquinas, fol-
lowing Averroës, knows that his always somewhat “physical” (though also
metaphysical, unlike Averroës) “proof” of a first highest cause falls short of
strict demonstration.14 In the Proclean derived schema of analogy of attribu-
tion and metaphysics of participation, a mystical supplement to pure reason

would appear always to be required. However, Scotus goes further in seeing
this schema as rationally deficient: he argues that it violates the law of
excluded middle. Thus, one may contend, participated esse at once is and is
not the divine esse: if a thing is “like” what is higher than it, and this is irre-
ducible to its being like in some ways (univocally) and unlike in other ways
(equivocally), then it must be at once present as something that exists and
yet also present as not this thing—and in the same way and the same respect.
On the other hand, reason is more chastened for Scotus than for Aquinas.
Our fallen reason is properly attuned to the finite, and for this reason finite
causes form a closed system, otherwise they would disperse into uncertainty
(the foreshadowing of Kant is clear). God cannot be demonstrated from
physical causes, and the ontological proof of his existence concludes only to
a bare infinite without further determination purely qua infinite (whereas for
Aquinas the infinite in its simplicity also equals esse and all the other tran-
scendentals). Above all, for Scotus, the ontological difference between esse
and ens will not capture the difference between Creator and creature, since
this difference cannot logically and so (for Scotus) ontologically be construed
in terms of participation. Esse is nothing in itself (a “vicious abstraction” as
Richard Cross terms it) and is exhaustively instantiated in the same way
in all the punctual occurrences of entia. The latter do not share an eminent
elevation but something common and equal which they alone determine.
Nevertheless, Todisco argues, this shared ontological dimension much better
reveals the ontological distance of God than does the Thomist real distinc-
tion of esse from essentia. For as we have seen, of the infinite one cannot ratio-
nally know its eminence or causality or excellence.
In this way, univocity unlike analogy—which can only open upon distance
by also insinuating a likeness—leaves us radically open to divine grace. No
extrinsicism is involved here for Todisco, since, quite to the contrary, Scotus
saw the extrinsicist dangers of Aquinas’ view of cognition: reason that is nat-
urally (and not just pro statu ipso) confined to the conversio ad phantasmata, is
not at all prepared for the reception of grace. Nor does univocity encourage
an arbitrary voluntarism: what it favours is charitable gift, not tyranny. For
Aquinas the sharedness of esse, whereby divine omnipresence concerns a
certain emanation of his esse as such, suggests a necessitating of God in cre-
ation, and indeed the divine reason for Thomas takes precedence over his
will. In the Thomist cosmos some realities—like the orbiting stars—are “nec-
essary”, and only some others purely contingent. Likewise creatures possess
“natural ends” which it seems they arrive at ineluctably. By contrast, for
Scotus, the creation is pure willed free gift. It is incited, beyond reason, not
by a will-to-dominate but by charity, which freely gives a space of freedom
to the other. In the Scotist cosmos every creature qua creature is contingent,
and in being what it is, reveals that it might have been otherwise. Instead of
possessing “natural tendencies”, human creatures are endowed with open
Duns Scotus 551
capacities (recognised by the doctrine of univocity) to which divine grace

may condescend.
Corresponding with the new primacy of charity, however, (and here
Todisco and Manzano are in a kind of negative agreement with the Radical
Orthodoxy authors), is a certain arena of created autonomy. This shows
clearly that all parties agree that while univocity is rooted in formal logic, it
has ontological and theological consequences. Univocity of being allows for
Scotus a reading of divine/human concurrence in freedom in terms other
than those of Aquinas—whose notions of a fully determined creaturely
freedom can seem contradictory: Just what, after all, is an entirely deter-
mined freedom? Even if, for Scotus, the divine election is irresistible, our
response still has some formal space of its own, its own integrity grounded
in the logical law of identity (just as, as one might mention, for the Francis-
can tradition culminating in Ockham, property rights are a matter of
absolute formal ownership and not built upon “appropriate use” as for
Aquinas—in such a way that the life of religious poverty requires the aban-
donment of material ownership by a will which nonetheless “owns itself”).
Since God freely gives gifts of finite being to us as others, he can also enter
into covenanted bonds with us that are sensitive to our freedom.
One can note here as a supplement to the reflections of Todisco and
Manzano that this concursus account of divine-human co-operation is one
instance of Scotus’ modified view (shared with Peter Olivi and Bonaventure)
of the working of causality—and especially divine causality—in terms of the
category of influentia.15 The latter is no longer seen as equivalent to a Neo-
platonic processio, or as a higher total cause which by an “in-flowing” gives
rise to an equally total cause at a lower level (such as the human will under
grace). For the older view of “influence”, which followed the metaphorical
contour of the term itself, a lower cause could retain its full integrity and yet
be the “gift” of a higher cause with which it was in no sense properly com-
mensurate. For Scotus, however, this radical integrity no longer applies,
paradoxically because higher and lower cause now contribute respective
shares on the same ontic plane, like two men drawing a single barge, to use
a later frequently deployed analogy.
This shift in understanding of cause is another consequence of a univo-
calist ontology, for which all cases, as equally instances of bare existence as
subjects, must be at the deepest level commensurable. At the same time, the
idea that a higher cause in its descending influence abandons its higher
incommensurable dignity also helped reciprocally to reinforce the apparent
obviousness of such an ontology (as with the case of knowledge as
representation).
Nevertheless, one might want to agree with Manzano and Todisco that the
revised view of influentia as extrinsic rather than in-flowing, might be
defended as both more rationally comprehensible and more permitting of
the exercise of human freedom in a more apparently non-paradoxical
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
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. . . .
3. The Theological Dimension of Univocity

Can this defence of Scotism be adequately answered? In response, it is
important to stress that one is not simply advocating the autonomy and wide
compass of theology. Rather, the present critique of Scotus has more to do
with the separation of faith from reason, grace from nature, will from reason
and theology from metaphysics and physics.
One cannot (as most contemporary commentators agree) really exonerate
Scotus from the charge of onto-theology. The distance of the infinite is not
difference from the ontic, and univocity requires that God and creatures
“are” in the same albeit spectral ontic fashion. Scotus’ treatment of a vast
range of issues from human freedom (as we have just seen), to questions
concerning Adam, Christ, Grace and the Eucharist all tend to show that this
logical/ontological minimum still makes a considerable conceptual and
practical difference. Common to all these instances is the idea that a being
as self-identical and so recognisable must be free from all internal relations
(to adopt a later terminology). It must be thinkable in abstraction from all
that has caused it, and from its constitutive co-belonging with other reali-
ties. It is this position which tends to encourage both epistemological and
political atomism. If each finite position does not occupy the problematic
(even, one can admit) contradictory space of participation, then it is identi-
cal with its own space, and univocity involves necessarily a logic of self-
possession which may be at variance with the theological notion that being
in its very existence is donum and not the mere ground for the reception of a
gift—even for the gift of determination of this ens as finite. For even the latter
reception allows a certain formal ground to persist outside gift, as in the case
of the Scotist conception of the human will. This self-possessed space is fre-
quently considered by Scotus as if per impossibile God did not exist, and so
etsi Deus non daretur. Being can be treated purely “metaphysically” (for the
first time) in abstraction from “physical” issues of cause and moving inter-
actions. Yet does not this approach in some slight way impugn divine
omnipotence, and render God a being alongside other beings, even if this
“alongside” is a nonnegotiable gulf (and even because it is a nonnegotiable
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
Duns Scotus 555
cause, embodies a kind of reason. This analogical perspective ensures that

revelata are not reduced to objects or items of information. It allows more
scope to revelation than does univocity, since revelata now bear with them-
selves not just their own historical contingency but also their own logic
which reason without revelation cannot fully anticipate. To put this another
way, the space for the Logos to amend even our logic may be somewhat
lacking on Scotist premises.
So might it be that analogy more than univocity presents the autonomy of
the logic of revelation? One can note that it was Aquinas and not Scotus who
wrote many commentaries upon scripture imbued with the principles of
fourfold allegorical exegesis. This is not at all to deny that for Scotus uni-
vocity is a theological as well as a metaphysical category. It does indeed have
profoundly to do with Scotus’ theology of grace, as Todisco notes. Since, for
Scotus, we are fallen, we have lost the possibility of our orientation to the
infinite in the beatific vision. At the same time, redeeming grace permits us
a minimal recovery in neutral terms of the natural orientation of the intel-
lect to being—but without yet allowing us, like Adam, by grace to see angels
and God as easily as we might trees and rocks—and facilitates our re-orien-
tation via grace to the infinite. Nevertheless, this beguiling circle relies
heavily upon Scotus’ supposedly Avicennian (and somewhat Plotinian) view
that knowledge is not for us naturally mediated by the senses.20 And this
would appear to qualify the verdict that Scotus more than Aquinas allows
this world to be true to itself within its own terms, since here something that
clearly belongs to our embodiment—our conceptual grasp only of the
sensorily mediated—is re-evaluated. Everything that depends upon this
mediation—science, the arts, philosophy, even the sacramental practice of
religion—must partake of this re-evaluation. The sphere of culture, like pol-
itics, for Scotus can only figure as a kind of semi-sinful emergency measure.
By contrast, Aquinas was able to combine a certain materialism with our
natural orientation to a supernatural end. His affirmation that, even in Eden,
we first understand the materially instantiated ens, requires no extrinsic sup-
plementation in the order of grace (as Scotism suspects) because Aquinas
also thought that being as such was the first object of the human under-
standing. The co-primacy depends entirely upon Thomas’ esse/essentia meta-
physics as supervening upon his form/matter, spirit/body metaphysics.
Since every essence participates in esse and discloses it, the material thing
renders being as partially transparent to our gaze just as much as does the
spiritual thing. In this way the embodied creature can be as near and as far
from the beatific vision as the angelic one. It is for this reason that Aquinas,
elaborating upon several of the Fathers, could so vividly grasp that the
degraded following of our senses by reason after the Fall was subverted by
the Incarnation into the instrument of our redemption. Here it is Scotus who
permits a pathway to extrinsicism because of his cognitive Plotinianism:
Adam was not by nature orientated to the beatific vision but only by special
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
Duns Scotus 557
being as such and invites infinite regression, or with an Avicennian/Scotist

notion of an a-causal being in general which tends towards the mystery of
an original res indifferent as to something or nothing. In the long run this
allows the possibility of “Scotist” nihilism as evidenced by Deleuze. The
Proclean (but also Augustinian, Dionysian and Thomist) hierarchy of par-
ticipation and attribution avoids both of these problems. But is it merely
senseless? Here one can venture that no finite logic can rule out the idea that
the actuality of finite being includes always a greater and lesser intensity.
Indeed, according to a certain traditional logic, only the instance of a lack in
appropriate being at any given level makes sense of notions of falsity and
evil. Likewise, according to a certain traditional ontology, only the notion of
degrees of being makes sense of the facts of autonomous life which can
accommodate more being and exhibit a “self-advancing” being, and the
comprehensive powers of cognition which “is in a manner all things” accord-
ing to Aristotle. Most crucially, the doctrine of Creation forbids theology to
think in terms of “bare existence”. If being as such is created, then to be a
finite being is causally to receive a measure of being, and this donation of a
participation in esse by God is beyond the causal reach of any finite creature.
No creature can bring about being as such (though it can participate in the
arrival of new being through processes such as the diffusion of light or the
uttering of a thought, processes which exhibit some analogy with the imme-
diacy of creation but remain within the ontic level of the modification of
form: see note 33 below). This is because esse in its original actuality as God
is a simple plenitude, and other realities can only be as diversely refracting
this simplicity in various degrees. By contrast, to say that one can think being
univocally outside the realm of causality has implications for the doctrine of
Creation. If one thinks of finite being only as a logical possibility and without
reference to how it has causally arisen, when one does think of it in causal
terms, one will assume that the causing of esse or the act of creation resides
within the capacity of the finite creature. This is because “to be” is now just
a bare existential, indifferent as to simplicity or complexity. Hence in the
wake of Scotus a residue of Avicennian Neoplatonism resurfaces in Ockham:
for the latter, at least in principle, the angelic intelligences may fully create
beings below their own level.23 The idea that created being is only a gift
bestowed by infinite esse, not an a priori something/nothing that any crea-
ture might posit, is here dismissed, in such a fashion that the notion of the
ontological omnipotence of God (for which to cause to be lies within the
divine scope alone) as something that he himself cannot will away, is here
abandoned. God’s power comes to be regarded idolatrously as in effect but
a supreme degree of ontic power, for which the mark of power is always that
one might abandon one’s power.
Logic does not oblige us to assume a univocal ontology. However, does
analogy in logic violate the principle of non-contradiction? One must
concede to Todisco that it appears to do so. Scotus was rigorous and correct
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
Duns Scotus 559
a collusion generated by a questionable dualism. This dualism tends not to

allow God the status of a freedom that is equally (and incomprehensibly)
something rationally determined and also (again incomprehensibly) able to
allow “another” space of freedom which is still non aliud. Inversely, reason
and determination, once robbed of a freedom intrinsic to their being, are left
to their own merely formal and ultimately tautologous devices. The media-
tion of the beautiful between goodness and truth is here impeded, and
whereas an aesthetic is always fundamental for Aquinas (as also for
Bonaventure and other Franciscans), in Scotus it tends to be converted into
an empirical aggregate (a consequence of the Avicennian view that there can
be a multiplicity of forms in a single substance) and to analysable propor-
tion. (This somewhat anticipates the later eighteenth century tension
between empirical and rationalist approaches to aesthetics, neither of which
was capable of capturing the Beautiful: a circumstance which helped pre-
cipitate the romantic reaction against the Enlightenment).26
One can say in opposition to this that unless we can formally distinguish
truth and goodness in God, our use of these words no longer makes any
sense. But this confines theological discourse to the inert and non-mystical.
The Thomistic counter to this objection is that we already partially integrate
in our lives the co-belonging of truth and goodness, and by mystical advance
we are asymptotically but essentially drawn to the divine point where the
difference between the two really vanishes.
Moreover, the Scotist determination of the divine difference by infinity is
ontologically insecure once the infinitisation of the finite opens to view in
the Renaissance (though this was anticipated by another great British Fran-
ciscan, Robert Grosseteste, in De Luce). Once this has happened, Scotus’ onto-
logical primacy of the infinite over the finite (which may be a true thesis) is
perfectly compatible with a pantheistic immanentism. At this point it was
only a continued subscription to attributive ascent and to ontological differ-
ence (between simple complicatio and composed explicatio) which prevented
Cusa from becoming a Bruno or a Spinoza. (Alternatively there is a direct
passage from Scotism to a Spinozistic postmodernism).27 As Cornelio Fabro
has argued, only participation secures simultaneously transcendence and
immanence. But only the God who is simultaneously both is the transcen-
dent God, since infinity without participation and so simply “beyond” and
“outside” the finite, can be recruited to pure immanence alone. So partici-
pation is not merely a “Greek” thesis alien to the Biblical legacy; it is a frame-
work perfectly compatible with free creation ex nihilo.28
Nor does Aquinas’ idea that certain created structures are relatively “nec-
essary” and others relatively contingent negate the freedom of the divine
creative act. It rather augments our sense of divine freedom to point out that
he can build into creation such a distinction. For the free contingency of the
creation is ontological and not ontic and therefore more transcendentally
free. This means that even the most apparently necessary structures within
the cosmos are nonetheless contingent in their ontological dependency, just

as the most apparently free creatures in the cosmos are fully determined in
their existentiality. To say, by contrast, with Scotus, that all creatures are
equally contingent in their ontic instance, thereby taking contingency always
to mean that “a thing might have been otherwise” rather than to mean (onto-
logically) “a thing did not have to be” is to reduce the actual to our logical
apprehension and to claim too much insight, despite the apparent mood of
empirical piety or pious empiricism. How do we know that water, trees, fire
and so forth merely instantiate “possibilities” from an infinite repertoire?
Might they not instead disclose to a small degree the mysterious (not simply
rational) necessities of the divine mind and will—which two realities
Aquinas never separates, unlike Scotus, for whom a formally distinct will in
the human instance is open to the possibility of an incomprehensible “pure”
choice, altogether without inspiring reasons.
In the foregoing, we have explored some of the negative consequences of
univocity and its alliance with the formal distinction of will from reason. But
is there nothing in the idea that the reduction of metaphysics to a minimal
ontology actually frees theology to be a practical discourse about charity that
is truer to the priorities and exigencies of the Christian life? Certainly this
perspective allows Scotus to articulate a rich theology from which valuable
insights may sometimes be gleaned. Nevertheless, as both Todisco and
Manzano reveal (inadvertently or not), the danger here is of a drift into for-
malism. If God’s will is inherently charitable and this quality enjoys a certain
subtle priority over, and independence from, his intellect (with which indeed
it harmonises, yet does not altogether coincide) then what is the content of
charity? It will tend to become a free respecting of the freedom of the other;
the gift will be simply of freedom, and such giving will be set at variance
with the mutual agreement of covenant and contract. (Even though for
Scotus the second table of the Decalogue republishes the natural law, its extra
force as direct divine law still depends on willed institution and formal
agreement).29
This secures what one might see as a typically modern duality of private
“free” gift over against contract, and Manzano appears to endorse (though
to evaluate differently) the reading of Scotus which allies him with an emerg-
ing market society and the rise of the nation state. But why should Christ-
ian theology endorse with Todisco (and Scotus?) the assumption that people
properly pursuing their own legitimate interests will naturally be in a hostile
relation to one another? Is this compatible with Augustinian frameworks of
the natural harmony of the creation and the possibility of a substantive (not
just formally and contractually contrived) human peace? And why, for
Manzano, are notions of “the common good” any more obscure than the
shared values of the public library, or the shared pleasures of the public
piazza—and why allow Oxford Professors (in this case J. L. Austin) with their
remarks about trousers, cats and tea-cups (“the common good” is an ambigu-
Duns Scotus 561
ously forking “trouser phrase”) to deprive us of such palpable actualities?

Does not the shared piazza exhibit an irreducibly collective good in so far as
it involves a kind of state of charity, a reciprocal give-and-take within a
shared horizon, rather than the empty one-way gift of freedom and the con-
tractual achievement to enjoy such gifts in solitary self-pleasuring? Such an
exchange of freedom amounts to a reduction of gift to contract, since the gift
is given only within the mutual agreement to respect each other’s freedom;
by contrast, a contract is like the passing in the night of two “free” gifts that
never acknowledge each other or discover a mutual appropriateness.
Manzano’s abandonment of Catholic social teaching (for which the notion
of “the common good” is scarcely dispensable) in favour of the today still
emerging liberal market-state must ensure that the realm of human cultural
choices has little relevance to transcendent goodness and truth. If indeed
Scotus went this far in the direction of contractualism, then the thesis con-
cerning the secularising tendency of univocity is all the more confirmed.
I am not at all contending instead, as Manzano suggests, for “natural law
fundamentalism”. To the contrary, he takes the view that Aquinas’ natural
law, beyond the minimum that we share with animals (self-preservation,
care of the young and so forth) concerns the prudential judgement of equity
and not the reading-off of norms from a pre-given nature (a perspective
which may indeed result in prejudicial views concerning women, as
Manzano suggests). To deny, with Manzano, our natural orientation to
sociality beyond the family does nonetheless appear to ignore certain facts
(such as the fundamental role of sympathy, for example, as noted by that
other philosophical Scottish lowlander, David Hume). But the fact of our
orientation to agreeable association can nonetheless only be interpreted by
increasing theoretical and practical insight into the value of association and
just what it is that makes it agreeable. Teleology is not closure, if it equally
avoids formal openness. But then, even the eschaton can be somewhat antic-
ipated, otherwise it may as well be threat as promise.
Neither Aquinas nor Scotus possessed an adequate ontology of culture or
history.30 However, the semi-voluntarist perspective of the latter promises
less in this domain than the semi-intellectualism of the former. If culture is
merely the work of will, then it is irrelevant to reason; it is still irrelevant to
reason if it is half the work of will and half the work of a rational mathesis.
For neither is intrinsically cultural. Culture is only taken seriously where it
is seen that both reason and desire are only possible in terms of language
and other humanly constructed products which in turn construct humanity.
The Scotist denial that human knowledge naturally concerns primarily sen-
sorily intuited things cannot support this sort of insight. Much is made of
Scotus’ “historicist” attention to the status lapsus. Yet this exhibits only a
concern with salvific metahistory, whereas the denial of the materiality of
knowledge before the Fall is also by implication a denial of the natural his-
toricity of human understanding, namely, the rootedness of our thoughts in
concretely embodied occasions and circumstances.31 By contrast, the Thomist

model of both human and divine understanding seems more promising.
God’s intellect at one with his will responds to a kind of intrinsic aesthetic
necessity, since Aquinas does not yet subscribe to anything like Leibniz’s
idea of God as submitting to sufficient reason and a calculus of the best pos-
sibilities. This necessity is only present in the trinitarian emanation of the
Verbum and the procession of the Donum. (Although this embodies the poten-
tia ordinata, it properly expresses the potentia absoluta, which coincides with
divine wisdom, although this infinite potency and wisdom cannot be ade-
quately embodied in any particular finite order. Nevertheless, since the par-
ticular ordained order perfectly expresses an infinitely wise absolute power,
the latter does not virtually suspend the finitely incomparable “justice” of
the actually ordained order. In contrast to Scotus, it avoids reducing it to a
mere possible instantiation of an infinite repertoire).32
For Aquinas our utterance of the inner word and directing of desire par-
ticipates in the trinitarian processions. Likewise, in the Prima Pars, he says
that the former remotely approximates, as does the diffusion of physical
light, to the divine act of creation, since there is a simultaneity between the
“being made” of the word and the “is made” of the word (Aquinas’ own
locutions). This echoes the way in which, in the economy of creation, “being
created” is identical with “is created” and no transition or movement
appears to be involved. This suggests that there is for Aquinas an internal
construction of expressive signs which is co-original with thought and reflec-
tive of divine emanation and outward creation (since for Aquinas the divine
creative act is eminently included within the generation of the son).33 In the
seventeenth century, the Portuguese Dominican John of St. Thomas (Juan
Poinsot) expanded the theory of the concept as inner word into an account
of our necessary cognitive deployment of culturally instituted signs which
were nonetheless in continuity with natural signs. The trinitarian reference
was preserved through a recognition that a sign like the trinitarian person
falls under a “real relation” within the domain of esse intentionale and is as
objective as a real relation in the substantive universe (material or angelic).
This means that for Poinsot (making use of the category of real relation
which Scotism and Terminism had tended to reject), human knowing and
willing are only possible within the cultural and yet objective edifice of signs
which itself participates in the divine Verbum and Donum and so in divine
esse. (Poinsot’s grasp of participatory metaphysics and analogy was not
strong, but his account of signs is Thomistic and compatible with such a
metaphysics).34
One could argue that the potential of Thomism to generate an ontology
and theology of culture is linked with its Proclean dimension. Proclus, as a
“theurgic” Neoplatonist, insisted that recollection of the transcendent reali-
ties was possible only via their descent into culturally instituted ritual forms;
in his treatment of geometry he insists on the technological and pragmatic
Duns Scotus 563
mediation of geometric theorems.35 I would concur with Benedykt Huculak’s

stress upon an Aquinas-Proclus alignment versus a Scotus-Plotinus align-
ment.36 However, Proclus’ stronger interest in recollection (despite Huculak’s
denial of this and conflation of Proclus with Plotinus at this point) and insis-
tence upon the abiding of the finite soul in time seem closer to Plato than
does the Plotinian legacy. It is partly on this basis that one might see Aquinas
as “more Platonic” than Scotus. One could also add that Augustine had also
reacted to Plotinus in a manner somewhat analogous to that of Proclus: in
the Confessions, although the soul measures time since time is its own dis-
tension, it nonetheless remains dispersed within created time which is not
itself the work of the human soul; recollection plays a role in Augustine’s
articulation of divine illumination, re-invoking the Meno problematic of
seeking for what we somehow already know; God must descend in the
Incarnation and the Eucharist if we are to see the divine ideas; “interior”
vision is contained within the vision of a sacral cosmos.
Are the usual alignments and contrasts (Plato versus Aristotle; Plotinian
Augustine versus Proclean Aquinas) really reliable? Can we not sometimes
read Aquinas as more Augustinian than mediaeval “Augustinians” much
influenced by Plotinus via “Avicenna Latinus”? This is not necessarily to
deny that Franciscan mediations of Augustine can balance Aquinas’ perhaps
not always sufficient stress on intellect as intrinsically desiring. However,
Augustine was himself far more Platonically intellectualist than the standard
interpretations often suggest.37
4. Scotus and Post-modernism

It is declared by Scotus that the way of denial, or via negativa, only removes
finite imperfections from a positively-known quality which is infinity,
deemed to be properly “convenient” for God in a more absolute sense even
than intellect and goodness and so forth.38 By this concept of a positive infi-
nite, one “grasps” an absolute void of mystery. Within the framework of
Pseudo-Dionysian and Thomist negative infinitude, by contrast, one does
not grasp mystery, but one might say that one is positively initiated into it,
according to the Pseudo-Dionysian dialectic of the apophatic and cataphatic
which mystical theology embraces. The comprehended infinite void is akin
to the Plotinian-tinged Avicennian infinite One, taken by Scotus as formally
preceding the divine qualitative perfections (“good”, “true” and so forth),
which themselves formally precede the divine intellection: at Quodlibetal
Questions 5 a 3 Scotus speaks of these orderings as “quasi-emanations”. (It
is this ontological priority of a positive infinite over any substantive quali-
ties which seems more or less to legitimate the use of the term “void” here).
To say, as many do, that Scotus retains, in his own fashion, a form of
apophaticism, is somewhat misleading. For Augustine and Aquinas, nega-
tivity introduces us to a mysterious and yet palpable darkness, which in
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.
Duns Scotus 565
This rejection is allied to an Avicennian assumption that divine essence,

and then intellect, and later still divine will, are “quasi-emanations” which
precede in some fashion the entire Trinity. This tends to disallow the idea
that the Verbum simply “is” an original aspect of the divine intellect in con-
junction with the Donum, which in turn simply “is” an original aspect of the
divine will. Duns Scotus sees the Verbum as “declaring” an understanding
fully present in the Father as Father, in principle not requiring any genera-
tion in order to be understanding; likewise with the Holy Spirit in relation
to paternal and filial volition.43 This is inevitable, because if essence and intel-
lect and will are all “prior” to the Trinity, and formally separate from it, then
all three realities are essentially non-relational.
If relation has no root in the divine essence, then the persons which spring
from the divine essence, understanding and will, cannot have their most fun-
damental identity in relation. They require instead some preceding respec-
tive principles to ground their distinctive personhood. For Scotus, such
principles are found in originating essence, intellect and will. The divine
intellect for Scotus, in contrast to Aquinas, can only be intellectual if it rep-
resents something that precedes it: because what it represents are the divine
perfections (in contrast to the absolute simplicity of the divine infinite
essence), the latter being formally distinct from the divine intellect as well
as the divine essence. For Aquinas, by contrast, divine ideas do not abide
outside the divine intellect any more than outside the essence.44 Because the
intellect is ineluctably compelled by the perfections, it is a “natural” response,
and the Verbum is said to proceed per naturam. For Scotus, this compulsion
is formally independent of the will, and this inaugurates a separation of
judgement from teleology. Concomitantly, the divine will in Scotus is sepa-
rated from the inner lure of desire, and the procession of the Spirit is
grounded in a pure non-natural and, it would seem, arbitrary procession per
voluntatem.
Without recourse to substantive relation in identifying the persons of the
Trinity, the attribution of intellect to the Son, and will to the Spirit, ceases to
be remote analogical naming—since we cannot really grasp pure relational-
ity—and becomes the means of literal distinction. The Son proceeds per
naturam (in “declaring”, as words do thought, the Father’s ineluctable rep-
resentations) but the Spirit per voluntatem. In this way, God is psychologised
in an unequivocal fashion foreign to Augustine, yet scarcely because of
western “perversions”, since neither substantive relation nor the filioque is
anywhere in sight. Indeed, a reading of Scotus tends to show that none of
the typical text-book categorisations of the history of trinitarian doctrine is
valid: for example, Scotus has a strong doctrine of the paternal monarchia as
prior to generation and spiration because he also has a strong view of the
divine essentia as characterising the Godhead, rather than trinitarian rela-
tions. Such a view is found neither in Augustine nor in Aquinas who have
weak (but sufficient) accounts of the monarchia. The oft-trumpeted Francis-
can “alternatives” in trinitarian theology, it seems, result from the subordi-

nation of the Christian Trinity to a Neoplatonic trinity lurking in the onto-
logical shadows.
The Scotist mode of distinguishing the persons by the natural/voluntary
contrast, in turn ensures that will is regarded as a movement of pure spon-
taneity outside the heteronomy of the laws of motion (a movement is always
from another, according to Aristotle) and independent of the recognitions of
the intellect.45 If the latter now simply represents a neutral being, without
evaluation, then concomitantly “will” begins its career of the pure positing
of values without foundation. This is the inauguration at once of pure piety
and pure irresponsibility.
The issue does not involve a contrast between the modern and the post-
modern. It is rather that both represent “a certain Middle Ages” (with roots
which reach back before Duns Scotus in his Franciscan forebears) within
which our culture still mostly lies, and whose assumptions we might want
to re-examine.
It is not that the post-modern aspect of Scotism is now to be perceived as
the most fundamental one. So far, this essay has pursued such an argument,
but this is too one-sided. It is true that the reign of representation (or episte-
mology) assumes univocity of being, but it is also true that the latter assumes
representation. In reality, one cannot assign a priority, either in logic or in his-
torical fact; not in logic, because while representation assumes the formality
of abstraction which univocity guarantees, this univocal formality is recip-
rocally established when it is assumed that the mind’s ability to abstract
something common mirrors something in the real, rather than doing some-
thing to the real. Not in historical fact, because the moves towards univocity
were permitted by the Avicennian and later Franciscan doctrine that there
can be many substantive forms within the entity, rather than merely subor-
dinate forms integrated under one overriding form, as for Aristotle. This posi-
tion arises because a new ontological weight is accorded to the mind’s ability
to isolate and abstract different elements—the source of the Scotist “formal
distinction”. In addition, Olivier Boulnois has shown how Roger Bacon’s
reception of Arab optics (or “Perspective”) encouraged the view that physi-
cal realities are generated through an exact imaging or copying of prototypes,
in a fashion that tends to reduce the Arabic stress on convenientia—or
ineffable aesthetic rapport of all beings to each other (a theme taken up by
Aquinas)—to exactly measurable proportion and equivalence.46 This account
of optics encouraged Bacon’s account of the linguistic sign either as assisting
a mental copying of something either real or imagined, or as arbitrarily
invoking an ontic equivalent in algebraic fashion without the mediation of
reflective understanding (so resisting the Aristotelian sequence of signÆ
conceptÆexternal thing understood). Such a perspective tended to unseat
the Aristotelian view of knowledge as “realising” spiritually a materialised
form, and this shift is sustained through Scotus up to William of Ockham.
Duns Scotus 567
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
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.
Duns Scotus 569
Rather, it is the re-assuming of the newest and most innovative thing,

scarcely known of at all.
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-

Duns Scotus 571
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.

Duns Scotus 573
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).

Catherine Pickstock Duns Scotus

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Modern Theology 21:4 October 2005

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

DUNS SCOTUS: HIS HISTORICAL

revised history (Ludwig Honnefelder, Jean-François Courtine and Olivier

1. The Problem of Epochs

dentally a priori category and no longer transcendental in the usual mediae-

2. Duns Scotus and the End of Onto-theology

The above verdict on Scotus is strongly contested by Orlando Todisco and

tion and metaphysics of participation, a mystical supplement to pure reason

capacities (recognised by the doctrine of univocity) to which divine grace

3. The Theological Dimension of Univocity

cause, embodies a kind of reason. This analogical perspective ensures that

being as such and invites infinite regression, or with an Avicennian/Scotist

a collusion generated by a questionable dualism. This dualism tends not to

the cosmos are nonetheless contingent in their ontological dependency, just

ously forking “trouser phrase”) to deprive us of such palpable actualities?

concretely embodied occasions and circumstances.31 By contrast, the Thomist

mediation of geometric theorems.35 I would concur with Benedykt Huculak’s

4. Scotus and Post-modernism

This rejection is allied to an Avicennian assumption that divine essence,

can “alternatives” in trinitarian theology, it seems, result from the subordi-

Rather, it is the re-assuming of the newest and most innovative thing,

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

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