John Duns Scotus

Scottish philosopher and theologian

• Born: c. March, 1266
• Birthplace: Duns, Berwick, Scotland
• Died: November 8, 1308
• Place of death: Cologne (now in Germany)

Duns Scotus, with his closely woven synthesis of Scholastic philosophical and theological thought, created the school of Scotism. His rigorous and subtle critical method and fresh theoretical formulations have influenced important thinkers.

Early Life

Little is known for certain about the life, early or late, of John Duns Scotus (duhnz SKOHT-uhs), both because of the period in which he was born and because his life was not one of action but of thought; he was a thinker rather than a doer. He was nicknamed by his contemporaries Doctor Subtilis (the Subtle Doctor), a tribute to the keenness of his reasoning as well as to his ability to make fine distinctions of meaning.

Duns Scotus evidently was the son of a well-to-do landowner known as Ninian Duns of Littledean. The Duns family was noted as a longtime benefactor of the Friars Minor, or Franciscans , the religious order founded in 1210 by Saint Francis of Assisi. Since the young Duns Scotus displayed a brilliant intellect as well as pious religious devotion, his uncle, a Franciscan vicar general who was stationed at the friary of Dumfries, arranged for the twelve-year-old student to come to the friary to prepare himself for a religious vocation.

Because Duns Scotus was not yet fifteen, however, he had to wait until 1280 before he could be accepted as a novice friar. In 1282, he became a candidate for the bachelor’s degree, which required four years of philosophical training, and had entered Oxford for this purpose, although no extant documentation sustains this assumption. Before his studies were completed, he was ordained into the priesthood at St. Andrew’s Church in Northampton on March 17, 1291. Duns Scotus apparently received his bachelor’s degree from Oxford in the following year.

In 1293, Duns Scotus was sent to the University of Paris to obtain his master’s degree. For some reason, however, he returned in 1296 to Oxford without having completed his master’s requirements. At Oxford, he lectured from 1297 to 1301. In 1302, he returned to Paris and resumed his studies. In 1303, however, he was forced to leave the university and return to England because he supported Pope Boniface VIII in the pope’s controversy with the French king, Philip IV the Fair. Duns Scotus’s presence at Oxford from 1300 to 1301 is documented: His name is listed among the twenty-two Oxford Franciscans who were presented to Bishop Dalderby on July 26, 1300, and a disputation of a master of theology, Philip of Bridington, names Duns Scotus as the bachelor respondent. Following a brief exile, Duns Scotus returned to the University of Paris, where he received his master’s degree in 1305.

Duns Scotus was evidently a devout monk, a zealous teacher, and an ambitious writer, but the essence of his personality must be extrapolated from his writing style, which, in general, is impersonal in line with his intention to attain absolute objectivity. Utilizing the dialectical approach to the discussion of a topic, Duns Scotus deliberately suppresses the identities of those with whom he enters into dialogue. Yet despite his meticulous analysis and his effort to be precise, his style is difficult and often obscure. Nevertheless, despite his efforts to be impersonal, his style is not fully dehumanized, however lacking it is in emotion and a sense of humor. Never seeking to portray himself in any favorable light, he sometimes falls from grace and displays pettiness, narrow-mindedness, prejudice, and even fanaticism. In his love of God he was undoubtedly sincere, but a love without a tangible object, whether it be God, the Virgin Mary, or simply everybody, can sometimes, as it appears with Duns Scotus, efface the love of the individual.

His reception of the master’s degree from the University of Paris in 1305 stimulated Duns Scotus to ambitious literary activity. Having started on his Commentaria Oxoniensia ad IV libros magistri Sententiarum (after 1300; Proof for the Unicity of God, 1950; better known as Ordinatio: Philosophical Writings, 1962) at Oxford in 1300, he set about to complete this notable work by drawing not only on his original Oxford lecture notes but also on those made at Cambridge (exactly when he taught at Cambridge is not known, but possibly this occurred during his exile) and at Paris. This remarkable commentary, which is also known by the title Opus Oxoniense, on Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri IV (c. 1160; The Books of Opinions of Peter Lombard, 1970; better known as Sentences), has proven to be the most important of his works, although it remained unfinished at his death.

Life’s Work

In 1305, Duns Scotus was appointed regent master in the Franciscan chair at the University of Paris, and he lectured and disputed there in this capacity until 1307. During this period, Duns Scotus conducted several disputations worthy of note. In one, he locked horns with the Dominican master Guillaume Pierre Godin, regarding the principle of individuation , or what makes one thing different from another of the same species. Godin held that matter was the principle of individuation. Duns Scotus denied that that was so, believing instead that it was neither matter nor form nor quantity. Rather, he contended, the principle of individuation was a property in itself that was added to the others. Scotists later referred to this property as the haecceitas, that is, the “thisness” of a thing, which individualized it. At the same time, Duns Scotus recognized that individualized created natures must have some common denominator if scientific knowledge were to be gained of them.

Duns Scotus also conducted an important quodlibetal disputation. This was a disputation in which the master accepted questions of any kind on any topic (de quodlibet) and from any bachelor or master present (a quodlibet). Duns Scotus accepted twenty-one such questions to be disputed that concerned God and creatures. Later, he revised, enlarged, and organized them into a work called Quaestiones Quodlibetales (1306; The Quodlibetal Questions, 1975). As with his Ordinatio, however, he left this work unfinished at his death. Nevertheless, the The Quodlibetal Questions proved scarcely less important than the Ordinatio. Indeed, the former represented his most advanced thinking. Altogether, his fame depends chiefly on these two works.

Another important disputation in which Duns Scotus engaged at this time was his defense of his theory of the Immaculate Conception . During the Middle Ages, many doctors of the Church were disturbed by the very idea of the Immaculate Conception. Was not Mary a product of human propagation? Was she therefore not a child of Adam and Eve, one who had inherited the original sin of her primordial parents? If so, did she not need Christ as her Redeemer? Therefore, how could Mary, virgin birth notwithstanding, have been free of original sin at her conception of Christ? Although Duns Scotus agreed with the skeptics that Mary would necessarily have needed Christ as her Redeemer, he proposed that mother and Son had been united in the Incarnation and Redemption by virtue of divine predestination and hence were joined together in their life, mission, and privileges. Therefore, he concluded, Mary had been preserved from both original and actual sin by Christ’s Redemption. This theory, however, was not received well by Duns Scotus’s secular and Dominican colleagues and was heatedly debated. Indeed, the idea of the Immaculate Conception continued to be controversial for five centuries before it became approved Catholic dogma.

Although Duns Scotus worked out of the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition, he was influenced by a variety of predecessors. He belongs to no particular school except the one he founded. Among the ancient Greeks, he drew mostly on Aristotle; among the Apostles, he favored Saint Paul; among the Evangelists, he preferred Saint John the Divine; among the later Peripatetics, he was stimulated by Porphyry (a disciple of Plotinus); among the Latin fathers, he drew heavily on Saint Augustine of Hippo, Africa; among the Arabians of the East, he was mostly indebted to Avicenna; among the Franciscan school, he was attracted to Saint Bonaventura; among the Dominican school, he paid particular attention to Saint Thomas Aquinas; and among the Neo-Augustinians, he followed closely the doctrine of the secular Henry of Ghent.

Near the end of 1307, Duns Scotus was suddenly called away from Paris, having been unexpectedly appointed to a professorship at Cologne, Germany. According to some scholars, the reason for this abrupt departure is that his teacher and loyal friend, Master Gonsalvus of Balboa, had transferred him to Germany because he feared for his protégé’s life, given the heated resistance to his defense of the Immaculate Conception. Duns Scotus’s theory at this time seemed to many to conflict with the Church’s doctrine of Christ’s universal redemption, and he had been hotly challenged by his secular and Dominican colleagues. Indeed, at one quodlibetal disputation the secular master Jean de Pouilly had denounced the thesis as heretical and hinted that Duns Scotus deserved severe punishment. Under these circumstances, Duns Scotus’s life was surely in danger if a charge of heresy could have been proved against him.

In any case, Duns Scotus had not long to live. He lectured at Cologne until near the end of 1308, when he died November 8 at the age of forty-two. His body was buried in the Franciscan church at Cologne, where it still lies. Although canonical proceedings for his beatification have been initiated twice since his death, he has never been canonized by the Church. In the Franciscan order he is known as “Blessed” Duns Scotus, and his name is included in the Franciscan martyrology. He is also thus venerated in the German dioceses of Cologne and Nola.

The basis of Duns Scotus’s metaphysics is “being” (ens). For him, being is the primary object of human intellect. He distinguishes, however, between spiritual and material being. God, the Divine Spirit, is the Supreme Being, that is, God is “pure” being, self-generated and uncreated. Although angels are in like manner immaterial, their spirit is less pure than that of the Divine Spirit; having been created, they are distanced from God. The human soul is also immaterial; breathed into the body by God to give it life, it lodges temporarily in its prison house, further distanced from “pure” being until it is released by death.

For Duns Scotus, all created substances are composed of matter (materia) and form (forma). He calls the common substrate of all created beings materia prima. Passive and receptive to corporeal forms, it is the subject of substantial and accidental change without the mediation of any substantial form. In other words, it is a terminus creationis. Duns Scotus insists on the unity and homogeneity of matter in all created beings. Everything that is created partakes univocally of this materia prima, which is indeterminate, matter without form, and only just removed from “nothing.”

Duns Scotus distinguishes between “essence” (what makes a thing what it is) and “existence” (actual being). Between the two, he holds, is a distinctio formalis a parte rei, a formal property that is partly logical and partly real. Because an imaginary being has essence without having existence, however, substance (substancia) is an essence that has existence. In attempting to solve the questions of what gives existence to an essence and what constitutes the individual thing, Duns Scotus proposes that every created thing is composed of two realities: the “universal” and the “particular.” The universal essence is the natura (what is common to all concrete realities of the same species). It is “form” that confers natura on matter. Form and matter constitute concrete substance in the “real” world, or what is taken to be reality. Matter in itself is indeterminate, but form is determining. It is form that communicates being to matter by determining “genus” and “species.” Compounded, form and matter make a “unity.” It is haecceitas, however the principle of individuation that confers singularity and uniqueness on a thing. Thus haecceity, like matter and form, has its own unity. According to Duns Scotus, between the natura and the haecceitas is a difference that is partly conceptional but is also partly an objective ground in reality itself and independent of the mind. The unity of this composite is less than the numerical unity of the individual as such. What actually constitutes the individual as a concrete object is neither matter nor form nor compositum as such, for all three of these factors can be conceived of logically as universals. Hence the singular and unique thing is a composite of this matter, this form, and this compositum. Duns Scotus’s view that the universal has an objective ground in reality is termed in philosophy “moderate realism.”

The concepts described above are among the most important speculations in Duns Scotus’s philosophy. Others of similar importance include his theory of the “plurality of forms,” which he applies only to organic creation. His conception is that the essence of the whole contains the essences of all the parts and includes a plurality of partial forms. All beings that possess life share in this plurality. Another significant theory is Duns Scotus’s idea of the “hierarchy of forms.” He arranges the forms in their order of perfection. The perfection of a form depends on its distance or separation from matter, that is, the range from corporeal matter to the matter or stuff of which spirits are composed. The further a form is separated from corporeal matter, the more potent is its activity. Duns Scotus’s theory of the plurality of forms must be distinguished from his theory of formalities and his concept of distinctio formalis. In this theory, he distinguishes the forms of the intellect (distinctio rationis tantum) from those that are “real” (distinctio realis) and their merely physical counterparts, or res. Although the idea of the plurality of forms is a metaphysical concept, that of the formalities and of distinctio formalis is a logical one.

Although in modern times, Duns Scotus has been admired principally for his philosophy, by profession he was a theologian. Although he considered philosophy to be the foundation of theology, at the same time he viewed the former as inferior to the latter. Only theology, he held, can solve the mysteries of religion, but it must be aided by divine revelation if certainty is to be attained, for human reason alone cannot prove the omnipotence of God or the immortality of the human soul. In philosophy, he is an empiricist in affirming that all knowledge comes through the senses and that knowledge of the particulars of sense is the foundation of higher cognition, and hence of the natural sciences and scientific knowing. In his division of the speculative sciences, his placing of logic midway between grammar and metaphysics shows his awareness of their close connection. In this way he acknowledges the importance of language in philosophical discussion.

Significance

Duns Scotus, an heir to the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition, founded the Scholastic school of Scotism. Franciscan teachers tended to follow his lead. In the fourteenth century, the principle Scotists were Francis of Mayron and Antonio Andrea. During the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries appeared the following Scotists: John of Basoles, John Dumbleton, Walter Burleigh, Alexander of Alessandria, Lychetus of Brescia, and Nicholas De Orbellis. Among the Scotists of the period that marks the transition from Scholasticism to modern philosophy were John the Englishman, Johannes Magistri, Antonius Trombetta, and Maurice the Irishman. Because Duns Scotus rejected the principle that all bodies are moved by other bodies as a physical proof of God’s existence and viewed corporeal substance more dynamically, some scholars have declared that the tendency of his physics prefigured that of the German philosopher and mathematicianGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Duns Scotus has also been called the Immanuel Kant of Scholastic philosophy because he resembles Kant in his refusal to accept without criticism any theory, regardless of its popularity or how strongly it was supported by the authority of great names. Here the resemblance stops, perhaps, because for Kant the supreme tribunal was moral consciousness, whereas for Duns Scotus it was divine revelation.

The high quality of Duns Scotus’s thought is further attested by his influence on modern philosophers and literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His voluntarism (which he owes to Henry of Ghent) prefigured that of Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, and Friedrich Nietzsche, although whether they were familiar with his work is uncertain. He has, however, exerted a direct influence on such thinkers as Charles Sanders Peirce, Martin Heidegger, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Thomas Merton.

Duns Scotus is not, therefore, simply another medieval Scholastic. His philosophy contains much that is original, even unique. Emphasizing criticism, his thinking displayed rigor as well as subtlety and depth as well as brilliance. It is true that he composed no single work in which the whole of his philosophy is clearly set forth as a system; nevertheless, a fairly well-rounded system can be extracted from his two major works, Ordinatio and The Quodlibetal Questions. Duns Scotus had the courage of his convictions and mercilessly attacked those masters whom he considered either inconclusive or erroneous in their thinking. He cared not that their schools might be distinguished or that their names were authoritative and prestigious.

Bibliography

Bettoni, Efrem. Duns Scotus: The Basic Principles of His Philosophy. Edited by Bernardine Bonansea. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1961. Simple, relatively nontechnical, and clear exposition of Duns Scotus’s ontology, epistemology, theology, and ethics.

Campbell, Bertrand James. The Problem of One or Plural Substantial Forms in Man as Found in the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1940. Compares and contrasts the Thomistic theory of the unity of form with the Scotist theory of the plurality of forms and their bearing on their respective cosmologies, especially in the concepts of space and time.

Frank, William A., and Allan B. Wolter. Duns Scotus, Metaphysician. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995. Part of the History of Philosophy series, includes chapters on Duns Scotus’s metaphysics, his ideas on the existence of God, and his epistemology.

Ryan, J. K., and B. W. Bonansea, eds. John Scotus, 1265-1965. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1965. Fifteen essays by distinguished Scotist scholars covering a wide range of philosophical and theological topics.

Williams, Thomas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Essays cover Duns Scotus’s ideas about space and time, universals and individuation, philosophy of language and mind, cognition, natural law, and more.