Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Note on Charity

As is well known, for Scotus acts of intellection are caused by to essentially-ordered co-causes. Initially, I had thought that these co-causes are the object and the activity of the agent intellect on the species. In today's reading of Ordinatio IV, he left out the object and was discussing the intelligible species' relation to the intellect as a partial cause of intellection. I don't have my books at hand (as I am on vacation), so I can't follow this up. In any case, amid a series of interesting remarks he said that the two partial causes can co-inhere, but that this is entirely accidental. As an example, he made the following remark about charity (Ord. IV d. 12 q. 3):

Et ita breviter dico, quod charitas in patria immediate causabit intellectionem intuitivam sui in intellectu, et tamen non erit praesens intellectui inhaerendo, sed voluntati, et tamen ista praesentia sufficit ad hoc quod ipsa, ut causa partialis, concurrat cum alia causa.

Bad translation: "And so I say briefly, that charity in heaven will cause immediately the intuitive intellection of itself in the intellect, and nevertheless will not be present to the intellect by inhering, but to the will, and that presence will suffice for this that this charity, as it is a partial cause, concurs with another cause."

Perhaps it is not all that surprising; it just makes a little more explicit some of his claims elsewhere that we have intuitive cognition of our own (interior, mental) acts.

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