Having thus tested whatever was presented by human reason, and accepting what was declared by Scripture or the Church, Duns proceeds to build out his doctrine as the case may call for. No man ever drove either constructive logic or the subtilties of critical distinctions closer to the limits of human comprehension or human patience than Duns Scotus. And here lies the trouble with him. The endless ramification and refinement of his dialectic, his devious processes of conclusion, make his work a reductio ad absurdum of scholastic ways of reasoning. Logically, eristically, the argumentation is inerrant. It never wanders aimlessly, but winding and circling, at last it reaches a conclusion from some point unforeseen. Would you run a course with this master of the syllogism? If you enter his lists, you are lost. The right way to attack him, is to stand without, and laugh. That is what was done afterwards, when whoever cared for such reasonings was called a Dunce, after the name of this most subtle of mediaeval metaphysicians.
Thus a man is judged by his form and method, and by the bulk of his accomplishment. Form, method, bulk of accomplishment, with Scotus were preposterous. When the taste or mania for such dialectics passed away, this kind of form, this maze of method, this hopelessness of bulk, made an unfit vehicle for a philosophy of life. Men would not search it through to find the living principles. Yet living principles were there; or, at least, tenable and consistent views. The main positions of Duns Scotus, some of which he held in opposition to Thomas, may strike us as quite reasonable: we may be inclined to agree with him. Perhaps it will surprise us to find sane doctrine so well hidden in such dialectic.
He held, for example, that there is no real difference between the soul and its faculties. Thomas never demonstrated the contrary quite satisfactorily. Again, Duns Scotus was a realist: the Idea exists, since it is conceived. For the intellect is passive, and is moved by the intelligible. Therefore the Universal must be a something, in order to occasion the conception of it. Thus the reality of the concept proves the actuality of the Idea.[663] Duns adds further explanations and distinctions regarding the actuality of universals, which are somewhat beyond the comprehension of the modern mind. But one may remark that he reaches his views of the actuality of universals through analysis of the processes of thought. Sense-perception occasions the Idea in us; there must exist some objective correspondence to our general concepts, as there must also be in things some objective correspondence to our perception of them as individuals, whereby they become to us this or that individual thing. Such individual objectivity is constituted by the thisness of the thing, its haecceitas which is to be contra-distinguished from its general essence, to wit, its whatness, or quidditas. Duns holds that we think individual things directly as we think abstract Ideas; and so their haecceitas is as true an object of our thought as their quidditas. This seems a reasonable conclusion, seeing that the individual and not the type is the final end of creation. So our conceptions prove for us the actuality both of the universal and the concrete; and the proof of one and the other is rooted in sense-perception.
Nothing was of greater import with Duns than the doctrine of the primacy of the Will over the intellect. Duns supports it with intricate argument. The soul in substance is identical with its faculties; but the latter are formally distinguishable from it and from each other. Knowing and willing are faculties or properties of the soul. The will is purely spiritual, and to be distinguished from sense-appetite: the will, and the will alone, is free; absolutely undetermined by any cause beyond itself. Even the intellect, that is the knowing faculty, is determined from without. Although some cognition precedes the act of willing, the will is not determined by cognition, but uses it. So the will, being free, is higher than the intellect. It is the will that constitutes man’s greatness; it raises him above nature, and liberates him from her coercions. Not the intellect, but the will directs itself toward the goal of blessedness, and is the subject of the moral virtues. Such seems to be Duns’s main position; but he distinguishes and refines the matter beyond the limits of our comprehension.[664]
Another fundamental doctrine with Duns Scotus is that theology is not a speculative, but a practical, science—a position which Duns unfortunately disproved with his tomes of metaphysics! But in spite of the personal reductio ad absurdum of his argument, the position taken by him betokens the breaking up of the scholastic system. The subject of theology, at least for men, is the revelation of God contained in Scripture. “Holy Scripture is a kind of knowledge (quaedam notitia) divinely given in order to direct men to a supernatural end—in finem supernaturalem.”[665] The knowledge revealed in Scripture relates to God’s free will and ordainment for man; which is, that man should attain blessedness. Therefore the truths of Scripture are practical, having an end in view; they are such as are necessary for Salvation. The Church has authority to declare the meaning of Scripture, and supplement it through its Catholic tradition.
Is theology, then, properly a science? Duns will not deny it; but thinks it may more properly be called a sapientia, since according to its nature, it is rather a knowledge of principles than a method of conclusions. It consists in knowledge of God directly revealed. Therefore its principles are not those of the human sciences: for example, it does not accept its principles from metaphysics, although that science treats of much that is contained in theology. Nor are the sciences—we can hardly say the other sciences—subordinated to it; since their province is natural knowledge obtained through natural means. Theology, if it be a science, is one apart from the rest. The knowledge which makes its substance is never its end, but always means to its end; which is to say, that it is practical and not speculative. By virtue of its primacy as well as character, theology pertains to the Will, and works itself out in practice: practical alike are its principles and conclusions. Apparently, with Duns, theology is a science only in this respect, that its substance, which is most rational, may be logically treated with a view to a complete and consistent understanding of it.[666]
In entire consistency with these fundamental views, Duns held that man’s supreme beatitude lay in the complete and perfect functioning of his will in accordance with the will of God. This was a strong and noble view of man, free to think and act and will and love, according to the will, and aided by the Grace, of the Creator of his will and mind. The trouble lay, as said before, in the method by which all was set forth and proved. The truly consequent person who made theology a practical matter, was such a one as Francis of Assisi, with his ceaselessly-burning Christlike love actualizing itself in living act and word—or possibly such a one as Bonaventura with his piety. But can it ever seem other than fantastic, to state this principle, and then bulwark it with volumes of dialectic and a metaphysics beyond the grasp of human understanding? Not from such does one learn to do the will of God. This was scarcely the way to make good the ultimate practical character of religion, as against Thomas’s frankly intellectual view. Duns is as intellectual as Thomas; but Thomas is the more consistent. And shall we say, that with Duns all makes toward God, as the final end, through the strong action of the human will and love? So be it—Thomas said, through intellection and through love. Again one queries, did the Scotian reasoning ever foster love?
And then Duns set theology apart,—and supreme. Again, so be it. Let the impulsive religion of the soul assert its primacy. But this was not the way of Duns. Theology and philosophy do not rest on the same principles, says he; but how does he demonstrate it? By substantiating this severance by means of metaphysical dialectic, and using the same dialectic and the same metaphysics to prove that theology can do without either. Not by dialectic and metaphysics can theology free itself from them, and set itself on other foundations.
Duns Scotus exerted great influence, both directly and through the reaction occasioned by certain of his teachings. The next generations were full of Scotists, who were proud if only they might be reputed more subtle than their master. They succeeded in becoming more inane. There were other men, whom the critical processes of Duns led to deny the validity of his constructive metaphysics. Of those who profited by his teaching, yet represented this reaction against parts of it, the ablest was the Franciscan, William of Occam, a man but few years younger than Duns. He was born in England, in the county of Surrey; and studied under Duns at Paris. It is known that in 1320 he was lecturing with distinction at this centre of intellectual life. Three years afterward, he quitted his chair, and in the controversies then rending his Order, hotly espoused the cause of the Spirituales—the Franciscans who would carry out the precepts of Francis to the letter. Next, he threw himself with all the ardour of his temper into the conflict with the papacy, and became the literary champion of the rights of the State. He was cited before the pope, and imprisoned at Avignon, but escaped, in 1328, and fled to the Court of the emperor, Louis of Bavaria, to whom, as the accounts declare, he addressed the proud word: Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo. He died about 1347.
The succession, as it were, of Occam to Duns Scotus, is of great interest. It was portentous for scholasticism. The pupil, for pupil in large measure he was, profited by the critical methods and negations of the master. But he denied the validity of the metaphysical constructions whereby Duns sought to rebuild what his criticism had cast down or shaken. Especially, Occam would not accept the subtle Doctor’s fabrication of an external world in accord with the apparent necessities of thought. For with all Duns’s critical insistency, never did a man more unhesitatingly make a universe to fit the syllogistic processes of his reason, projected into the external world. Here Occam would not follow him, as Aristotle would not follow Plato.