8 - Duns Scotus

Summary

WE NOW TRAVEL FORWARD eight centuries after Augustine. In Europe it is the late Middle Ages and Greek philosophy, despite re-emerging in Europe around this time, is also about to be eclipsed. Duns Scotus (1266–1308), the subject of this chapter, was part of a great shift in the Western tradition away from the confidence of Greek philosophy that our questions push on an open door, that we can know the world by way of our reason because the world wants to be known in the beauty of its order. This is the cosmos of the ancient Stoics, a world soul with ‘man’ at its centre sharing in the divine reason that guides the world providentially and therefore predictably.

But the Christian world, unlike the world of the Greeks, is created. And as we saw in the last chapter, what is to stop a God who can make something out of nothing doing what he wants? This wilful God haunts the Christian theology of the Middle Ages. To be sure, such a God is anticipated already in Augustine, for whom God is a ‘controller of the universe’ rather than its prime mover (Confessions 7.6). But while Augustine believed that God was identical with his will, this God had nonetheless ‘made all things by a choice which in no sense manifests change’ (Confessions 12.28). In Augustine’s God there is both will and law. As God’s will became ascendent in medieval Christian theology, however, questioning became ever more problematic. Our questions can only provide us with dependable answers if the world is as law-like as it seemed to the Greeks. And while Augustine still believed in a legible cosmos, hadn’t he already lamented the lack of humility found ‘in the Platonist books’: ‘Let not man say ‘“What is this? Why is that?”’ (Confessions 7.21, 7.6). Why should God be limited by natural law? Where would this leave miracles, including the miracle of creation, of the virgin birth, and of the resurrection from the dead?

This is not to say that Greek thought was no longer decisive for medieval theology. Far from it. Duns Scotus, like his contemporaries in the Western Church, was profoundly shaped by the recovery (via Muslim scholars who had not lost sight of him in the first place) of Aristotle, a process which began in the mid-twelfth century.