DUNS SCOTUS AND OCCAM
The thirteenth century was a time of potent Church unity, when the papacy, triumphant over emperors and kings, was drawing further strength from the devotion of the two Orders, who were renewing the spiritual energies of Western Christendom. Scholasticism was still whole and unbroken, in spite of Roger Bacon, who attacked its methods with weapons of his own forging, yet asserting loudly the single-eyed subservience of all the sciences to theology. This assertion from a man of Bacon’s views, was as vain as the Unam sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII., fulminated in 1302, arrogating for the papacy every power on earth. In earlier decades such pretensions had been almost acquiesced in; but the Unam sanctam was a senile outcry from a papacy vanquished by the new-grown power of the French king, sustained by the awakening of a French nation.
The opening years of the fourteenth century, so fatal for the papacy, were also portentous for scholasticism. The Summa of Thomas was impugned by Joannes Duns Scotus, whose entire work, constructive as well as critical, was impressed with qualities of finality, signifying that in the forms of reasoning represented by him as well as Thomas, thought should advance no farther. Bacon’s attack upon scholastic methods had proved abortive from its tactlessness and confusion, and because men did not care for, and perhaps did not understand, his arguments. It was not so with the arguments of Duns Scotus. Throughout the academic world, thought still was set to chords of metaphysics; and although men had never listened to quite such dialectic orchestration as Duns provided, they liked it, perceived its motives, and comprehended the meaning of its themes. So his generation understood and appreciated him. That he was the beginning of the end of the scholastic system, could not be known until the manner of that ending had disclosed itself more fully. We, however, discern the symptoms of scholastic dissolution in his work. His criticism of his predecessors was disintegrating, even when not destructive. His own dialectic was so surpassingly intricate and dizzy that, like the choir of Beauvais, it might some day collapse. With Duns Scotus, scholasticism reasoned itself out of human reach. And with him also, the wholeness of the scholastic purpose finally broke. For he no longer maintained the union of metaphysics and theology. The latter, to be sure, was valid absolutely; but, from a speculative, it has become a practical science. It neither draws its principles from metaphysics, nor subordinates the other sciences—all human knowledge—to its service. Although rational in content, it possesses proofs stronger than dialectic, and stands on revelation.
There had always been men who maintained similar propositions. But it was quite another matter that the severance between metaphysics and theology should be demonstrated by a prodigious metaphysical theologian after a different view had been carried to its farthest reaches by the great Aquinas. Henceforth philosophy and theology were set on opposite pinnacles, only with theology’s pinnacle the higher. In spite of the last circumstance, the coming time showed that men cannot for long possess in peace two standards of truth—philosophy and revelation; but will be driven to hold to the one and ignore the other. By breaking the rational union of philosophy and theology, Duns Scotus prepared the way for Occam. The latter also asserts vociferously the superiority of the divine truth over human knowledge and its reasonings. But the popes are at Avignon, and the Christian world no longer bows down before those willing Babylonian captives. Under such a blasted condition of the Church, how should any inclusive Christian synthesis of thought and faith be maintained?
Duns Scotus[657] could not have been what he was, had he not lived after Thomas. He was indeed the pinnacle of scholasticism; set upon all the rest. Yet this pinnacle had its more particular supports—or antecedents. And their special line may be noted without intending thereby to suggest that the influences affecting the thought of Duns Scotus did not include all the men he heard or read, and criticised.
That Duns Scotus was educated at Oxford, and became a Franciscan, and not a Dominican, had done much to set the lines of thought reflected in his doctrines. Anselm of Aosta, of Bec, of Canterbury, had been an intellectual force in England. Duns was strongly influenced by his bold realism, by his emphasis upon the power and freedom of the will, and by his doctrine of the atonement.[658] But Anselm also affected Scotus indirectly through the English worthy who stands between them.
This, of course, was Robert Grosseteste, to whom we have had occasion to refer, yet, despite of his intrinsic worth, always in relation to his effect on others. He was a great man; in his day a many-sided force, strong in the business of Church and State, strong in censuring and bridling the wicked, strong in the guidance of the young university of Oxford, and a mighty friend of the Franciscan Order, then establishing itself there. To his pupils, and their pupils apparently, he was a fruitful inspiration; yet the historian of thought may be less interested in the master than in certain of these pupils who brought to explicit form divers matters which in Grosseteste seem to have been but inchoate.[659] One thinks immediately of Roger Bacon, who was his pupil; and then of Duns, the metaphysician, who possibly may have listened to some aged pupil of Grosseteste. In different ways, Duns as well as Bacon took much from the master. And it is possible to see how the great teacher and bishop may have incited the genius of Scotus as well as that of Bacon to perform its task. For Grosseteste was a rarely capable and clear-eyed man, honest and resolute, who with the entire strength of a powerful personality insisted upon going to the heart of every proposition, and testing its validity by the surest means obtainable. By virtue of his training and intellectual inheritance, he was an Augustinian and a Platonist; a successor of Anselm, rather than a predecessor of the great Dominican Aristotelians. He was accordingly an emphatic realist, yet one who would co-ordinate the reality of his “universals” with the reality of experience. Even had he not been an Augustinian, such a masterful character would have realised the power of the human will, and felt the practical insistencies of the art of human salvation, which was the science of theology.
Views like these prevailed at Oxford. They may be found clearly stated by Richard of Middleton, an Oxford Franciscan somewhat older than Duns Scotus. He declares that theology is a practical science, and emphasises the primacy and freedom of the will. Voluntas est nobilissima potentia in anima. Again: Voluntas simpliciter nobilior est quam intellectus: the intellect indeed goes before the Will, as the servant who carries the candle before his lord. So the idea of the Good, toward which the Will directs itself, is higher than that of the True, which is the object of the mind; and loving is greater than knowing.[660] Roger Bacon had also held that Will (Voluntas) was higher than the knowing faculty (intellectus); and so did Henry of Ghent,[661] a man of the Low Countries, doctor solemnis hight, and a ruling spirit at the Paris University in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Many of his doctrines substantially resembled those of Scotus, although attacked by him.
So we seem to see the pit in which Duns may have digged. This man, who was no mere fossor, but a builder, and might have deserved the name of Poliorcetes, as the overthrower of many bulwarks, has left few traces of himself, beyond his twenty tomes of metaphysics, which contain no personal references to their author. The birthplace of Johannes Duns Scotus, whether in Scotland, England or Ireland, is unknown. The commonly accepted date, 1274, probably should be abandoned for an earlier year. It is known that he was a Franciscan, and that the greater part of his life as student and teacher was passed at Oxford. In a letter of commendation, written by the General of his Order in 1304, he is already termed subtilissimus. He was then leaving for Paris, where, two or three years later, in 1307, he was made a Doctor. The following year he was sent to Cologne, and there he died an enigmatical death on November 8, 1308. Report has it that he was buried alive while in a trance.[662] Probably there was little to tell of the life of Duns Scotus. His personality, as well as his career, seems completely included and exhausted in his works. Yet back of them, besides a most acutely reasoning mind, lay an indomitable will. The man never faltered in his labour any more than his reasoning wavered in its labyrinthic course to its conclusions. His learning was complete: he knew the Bible and the Fathers; he was a master of theology, of philosophy, of astronomy, and mathematics.
The constructive processes of his genius appear to issue out of the action of its critical energies. Duns was the most penetrating critic produced by scholasticism. Whatever he considered from the systems of other men he subjected to tests that were apt to leave the argument in tatters. No logical inconsequence escaped him. And when every point had been examined with respect to its rational consistency, this dialectic genius was inclined to bring the matter to the bar of psychological experience. On the other hand he was a churchman, holding that even as Scripture and dogma were above question, so were the decrees of the Church, God’s sanctioned earthly Civitas.