Medieval France
(ca. 1266–1308). Born in Scotland, Duns Scotus probably obtained his early education at the Franciscan convent in Dumfries, where he entered the order by 1280. He was sent to Oxford no later than 1290 to begin his studies and may have received his baccalaureate there. He lectured on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard at both Cambridge and Oxford. Ordained at Northampton in 1291, he went to the University of Paris in 1293 to study for the master’s degree in theology, but before completing the degree he returned in 1296 to Oxford, where he commented again on the Sententiae. Duns Scotus went once more to Paris in 1302 and continued to lecture on the Sententiae. He was exiled in 1303, when he opposed Philip IV the Fair’s appeal to a general council against Pope Boniface VIII. He returned in 1304, received the master’s degree in 1305, and became regent master in the Franciscan chair for the next two years. In 1307, he was sent to teach at the Franciscan house in Cologne, where he died on November 8, 1308.
Possibly nicknamed “the Scot” early on at Oxford, he engaged in theological disputes with such skill and subtlety that he posthumously received the scholastic titles Doctor subtilis and Doctor maximus. Duns Scotus extended the moderate realism of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas but was intent less on constructing a system than on pursuing, often relentlessly, solutions to philosophical and theological problems that he considered to blemish the systems of his predecessors, such as the issues of contingency, individuation, distinctions and univocity of being, the primary object of the intellect, and the relation of love and will to intellect. He took immense pains to distinguish and then properly to reconnect the tasks and provinces of “philosophy” and “theology.” He reacted to the efforts of Henry of Ghent and others to reestablish Augustinianism at the University of Paris. Although influenced by Avicenna, he rejected both Augustinian and Aristotelian epistemologies and argued that being, not God or material things or their essences, is the primary object of knowledge. He saw theology as a science whose knowledge provides the “practical” means to reach the soul’s supernatural end. He emphasized the special uniqueness, or haecceitas, of the individual, because each is the product of God’s thoroughly free creative and loving election. He distinguished between nature and will and argued that the will alone possesses fundamental freedom and is the primary rational power. He analyzed the human capacity to love and to experience God. He distinguished the will’s inclination to choose what is advantageous from its “affection” toward justice for its own sake, which enables the will to love God for God’s sake and not for the soul’s advantage alone. Scotus’s concept of intellectual intuition explained the capacity of beatific and unique temporal visions of God in contrast with the ordinary process of knowledge through sensory experience. He promoted the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and maintained that the Incarnation would have occurred regardless of the Fall.
Duns Scotus’s principal composition was his commentary on the Sententiae. The two chief extant versions are included in the collections Opus Oxoniense, especially the Ordinatio, and in the Opus Parisiense, also known as the Reporta Parisiensia, containing notes from students and scribes. The Tractatus de Primo Principio and the quodlibetal questions represent his mature theological constructions. He also composed a series of logical commentaries, in the genre of “questions,” on Porphyry’s Isogoge and Aristotle’s Categories. Especially interesting are his Collationes, composed of disputations held at Oxford and Paris.
His writings not only influenced later Franciscan theologians, known as the Scotists, but also such diverse figures as Galileo, C.S.Peirce, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
H.Lawrence Bond
[See also: ALBERT THE GREAT; AQUINAS, THOMAS; PETER LOMBARD; PHILOSOPHY; SCHOLASTICISM; THEOLOGY; UNIVERSITIES]
Duns Scotus, John. Opera omnia, ed. Luke Wadding. Lyon: Sumptibus Laurentii Durand, 1639.
——. Opera omnia. Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1950–.
——. Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan B.Wolter. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
——. A Treatise on God as First Principle: A Latin Text and English Translation of the De Primo Principio, ed. and trans. Allan B.Wolter. 2nd ed. Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1983.
——. Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, ed. and trans. Allan B.Wolter. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
——. God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions, ed. and trans. Allan B.Wolter and Felix Alluntis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Schäfer, Odulfus. Bibliographia de vita, operibus et doctrina I. D.Scoti saecula XIX–XX. Rome: Orbis Catholicus, 1955.
Wolter, Allan B. The Transcendentals and Their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus. St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1946.
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