The problem of the will arose first with reference to the human will. Thomas contended against Duns Scotus that man is free so far as he follows his knowledge of the good. The intellect is therefore primal, for it determines the will by showing the will what the good is.
The question next arose as to the priority of the faculties in God. Does God’s will dominate His intellect or His intellect dominate His will? This was a vital point in the Augustinian theodicy. Does God will the good to be good, or does His will act according to what He knows to be good? Here lies the point at issue between the Dominican Thomas and the Franciscan Scotus. Thomas maintained that the intellect of God determines His will. The intellect is determined by the truth so long as the intellect is true to itself. Why should not the will be determined by the truth in the same way? With God this freedom for the truth is God himself. The world is the best possible world, for God has willed it out of himself.
The world is determined by goodness and man’s will is determined by the same goodness. When the sense conquers the morally determined will, there is sin. The senses, and not the will, are the cause of sin.
Duns Scotus (1270–1308), the Founder of the Franciscan Tradition—Life and Philosophical Position. Thus the Middle Ages did not come to a standstill with Thomas. A greater movement existed after him than is often thought. The leading minds who succeeded Thomas refused to follow the middle course which he had mapped out. New attempts were made to relate the world of grace and the world of nature. One was mysticism, represented by Eckhart (d. 1372). The other was the reaction of the Augustinians against the intellectualismof the new Aristotelianism as represented by Thomas. The leader in this was Duns Scotus.The seat of this movement was Oxford.[66]
Duns Scotus was born in Ireland and at an early age he joined the Franciscan order. He graduated from Oxford, which at that time was anti-Thomistic. He then taught theology and philosophy at Oxford for ten years. His lectures were largely attended and his fame spread over Europe. He went to Paris in 1304, where he taught for four years. He was then transferred to Cologne, where he died.
Scotus was the Kant of scholasticism. The time of construction of scholasticism had passed, and the time of criticism and analysis had come. Scotus was the intellectual knight-errant who refused to accept any theory without subjecting it to criticism. He was the acutest mind of the Middle Ages and was called the doctor subtilis.
Duns Scotus’s Conception of the Twofold Truth.—The Separation of Science and Religion. The distinction between revelation, theology, and philosophy, that appears in this period of Classic Scholasticism, was sharply drawn by Scotus. In Thomas’s conception of a graded world of development the distinction between theology and philosophy was not emphasized. Philosophy now in the hands of Scotus becomes science, having the marks of exactness that compel belief, but is, however, restricted to its own realm. By philosophy Scotus meanslogic. In matters of faith logic has nothing whatever to say, for at that extreme stands revelation possessing the absolute truth that compels faith. Between revelation and philosophy Scotus squeezes theology—the science that his predecessors had used to clarify revelation. With Scotus it becomes a domain that is poor indeed. Its objects are the highest, but it can never reach them. It has not the divine assurance of revelation nor the exactness of logical science. Its highest conclusions are only probable, and it can help revelation only in a negative way. It cannot prove the doctrine of the Trinity, incarnation, creation, immortality, and even its proofs for the existence of God have no cogency. Philosophy and revelation both profit at the expense of scholastic theology. After Scotus scientific heresy frequently shielded itself on the ground that its conclusions apply only to the realm of science, while the opposite may be true in revelation.
The Inscrutable Will of God. Revelation is thus placed beyond the reach of the human reason because it rests on the inscrutable will of God. Revelation is God’s free act. God must be free. If Thomas’s conception of God’s will as determined by his intellect were true, God would not be free. The intellect in man or God must be the servant of the will, if the will be free. In man consciousness produces at first a number of indistinct and imperfect ideas. Those ideas become distinct upon which the will fixes its attention, while the others cease to exist because they are unsupported by the will.
God’s will is more fundamental than the good. God makes the good to be good. Both Thomas and Scotus say that the moral law is the command of God. Thomas conceives it to be God’s command because it is in accordwith the good; Scotus, for no other reason than that it is God’s command. The good might be different if God so created it. In opposition to Thomas, Scotus maintained that God does not have to create what He does create, and that this is not the best possible world. God creates what He wills; He can, therefore, grant dispensation, and so can the church. If God’s will were determined by His intellect, He would have no independence, He would not even exist, He would be only nature or one of its causes, there could be no evil nor accident. He can supersede the moral law by a new law, just as He superseded the Mosaic law by the Gospel. Individuality, revelation, salvation, and all objects of faith have their existence only in the groundless and inscrutable will of God. For this reason there can be no rational theology.
This founder of the “Franciscan tradition” of practical piety and meritorious action could not have other than the freedom of the will as his central principle. An Augustinian he refused, however, to follow Augustine in centralizing freedom in God. The object of faith is the will of God, the subject of faith is the will of man. Human freedom consists in coöperation with divine grace. Man can help in the work of God. His freedom is partly formal: he can will or not will. It is partly material: he can will A or B. There is no ulterior ground to determine the human will, and this undetermined freedom is the ground for merit, provided the human will coincides with the divine.