My MicroNarrative

The common Thomist narrative of the rise of theology and philosophy to its zenith in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, the common doctor of all and the angelic doctor, a rise which soon turned into a flaming nosedive needs no introduction here. It is so widespread that Milbank can refer to it as "scarcely then controversial". The text-base defense of Scotus seem to have all failed, at least rhetorically. The "semantic" defense of Scotus has been effectively undermined by Milbank (in the linked piece) on the grounds of a-historicity (think about that for a minute, then try not to spill your beer). The narrative normally focuses on the "twin scissors" (to use Hans Boersma's turn of phrase) of univocity and voluntarism that snipped the "sacramental tapestry" that Scotus had inherited from Christ and the Apostles via Thomas Aquinas.

Here I want to propose a counter-narrative, though it is more fact-based than interpretative, so it probably does not count as a narrative. And it does not explain the present, but is the sequence of what went on in the 12th-14th centuries. The narrative is ultimately more driven by the waves of Aristotelian translations than anything else.

Step 1: In the twelfth century, the common opinion among the theologians was that perfections or attributes are said univocally of God and creatures. The basic sense of univocity was that of Aristotle's Categories.

Step 2: Aristotle's Metaphysics and Posterior analytics were translated. Aristotle's view in the former is that being is said in many ways. This sense is what became the "analogy of being". Following the Arab commentators one could posit it as "midway" between equivocity and univocity, or following Boethius, one could take the division of the Categories as immediate; there is no medium between univocity and equivocity, analogy becomes  equivocity, in particular, 'equivocal by design', as opposed to pure equivocity. Aquinas himself seems a bit ambiguous here. He often says analogy is a middle way between the extremes, but he clearly knew the Boethian definition, for in Summa contra gentiles when he rejects equivocity he rejects "pure" equivocity. But he does not identify analogy as an equivocal by design. At this step, there is no attempt to unite the metaphysics with the notion of a science in the Posterior analytics

Step 3: The posterior analytics' criteria for science are applied to the science of being, requiring univocity. An early defense of univocity was launched in the 1280's, though I have not found who it was. Their attempt posited a real agreement between God and creatures. Scotus himself attacks this person, as did William of Ware and Peter Sutton. Scotus also posits univocity, at some stage, the univocal concept of being may well be common to God of creatures, the object of the intellect, and the subject of metaphysics. Scotus retains the analogy of being.

Step 4: Criticism of Scotus. Scotus is the locus of the discussion. Early critics reject his position and return to equivocity of being, linked to some 12th c. discussions as well as Porphyry and Boethius. Ockham jettisons analogy.

With the emerge of Ockham, the basic positions of the scholastic discussion are set until the dissolution of scholasaticism itself: equivocity of being, univocity of being with analogy, univocity alone, analogy of being alone. There was much discussion of the issue during the 14th century. I have found little discussion in Franciscans of the fifteenth century on the topic. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough. Most mention it, but say nothing interesting and don't devote questions to it. Thus there is some justice in Mastri's comment that there was little discussion of analogy before Cajetan. Cajetan revived the debate (note I deny the existence of a distinction between first or second scholasticism and the fanciful claims made today about Cajetan restarting scholasticism). By Mastri's day (17th c.) there were extensive debates among the schools about analogy and univocity, long after the RO narrative has jumped to Luther and Kant. In truth, analogy was never abandoned by anyone save Ockham and the nominalists, certainly not by Scotus and the Scotists.

Get to work in the comments and tear this apart!

Another Review of Brad Gregory

Rather late in the game, a new review of Brad Gregory's Unintended Reformation has appeared, here, by Michael Horton.

He is quite dismissive of the Scotus Myth, even mentioning the names of scholars that actually know things about Scotus (!!!).

Cross on Scotus on Faith and Reason

From Richard Cross, "Fides et Ratio: The Harmony of Philosophy and Theology in Duns Scotus," Antonianum 83 (2008), 589-602.

This article was a response to Benedict XVI's Regensburg address. Benedect has said something to the effect of voluntarism and maybe nominalism arose with Scotus and led to bad modern things and was similar to Islamic voluntarism. My interest in posting the following excerpt is in Cross pointing out that Scotus treats arguments.

"...as I have suggested in a different context, scholastic writers are not doxographers; they offer arguments for the theories they adopt. so here, even if the proposed account of Scotus were accurate, it is not sufficient simply to disagree with the position ascribed to Scotus. Scotus presents arguments - he does not adopt positions just to be perverse - and any intellectually principled engagement with his views would need to consider as well the arguments he proposes in favor of his conclusions."

O'Regan: Scotus the Nefarious

The following is a quotation from an article in the Newman-Scotus Reader:

Cyril O'Regan, "Scotus the Nefarious: Uncovering Genealogical Sophistications," p. 637-38.

This Essay has provided a sketch of what amounts to a montage of negative constructions of Scotus which do not evince serious engagement with his thought and in fact discourage it (a) by suggesting that it is fatally flawed from the ground up and (b) implicating it in lines of modern discourse which are either demonstrated or assumed to be pernicious. My aim has not been so much to defend Scotus' actual positions as to protest against the apriorism of each of these individual schemes and their cumulative ideological effect which is to make impossible a hearing of what Scotus has to say.  We are talking here about procedural fairness denied a thinker, but we are also talking about the way in which superficial engagements with a thinker's thought and superficial readings of the history of effects compromises the claims of the discourses being supported and in the process also serve to undermine the very enterprise of genealogy.

[...]

Although indirectly, the essay is a form of plea for the unaligned for opening up the plurality of the tradition This was the instinct of Gilson when he wrote his book on Scotus over sixty years ago. The fact that the instinct gets compromised in the performance is hardly unimportant, but it is not constitutive. What is needed is another Gilson in the very new situation, a new century with more derogatory discourses, a new century in which scholarship has considerably changed the textual landscape what belongs to the historical Scotus and what does not, a new century in which while there is much highly technical work done on Scotus, there is no book that takes a comprehensive look at the work of Scotus and shows its comprehensiveness, its seriousness, and its beauty.

Review of Postmodernity and Univocity

Here are my thoughts on a recent book.

Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus

For sale here.

The author is Daniel Horan, OFM. His website is here. He is a graduate student in systematic theology at Boston College. The author is not a specialist in Scotus, but a member of the same order trying to exonerate Scotus' name.

Previously reviewed by Peter J. Leihart here.

The book is not a general discussion of Radical Orthdoxy, but, as is obvious from the title, focuses on RO's appropriation of Scotus, or what Horan calls the "Scotus story". The book is roughly divided in three parts. 1. Summarizing what RO claims about Scotus, 2. summarizing the critique of Radical orthodoxy by Richard Cross and Thomas Williams, 3. and a historical-critical discussion of univocity.

It was somewhat of a drag to read the first part, though not owing to the fault of the author, since I have read the originals, and the RO claims are so outrageous. But the author, whose own blood seemed to be up at times, did not fall into polemic. He noted RO's reliance on non-existence passages, strange methods of citation, and so on. Although the main storytellers for RO's Scotus are Milbank and Pickstock, Horan covered all the minor characters in the tapestry as well, even though they are largely derivative. The end of this section of Horan's book was quite valuable. For not only did he treat RO proper, but he also went through some of the more recent popularizers of the Scotus story, some of whom we have encountered on this blog: Brad Gregory and Robert Baron, and a bishop or two, for example. Horan shows that these derivative writers add nothing at all to the conversation, but simply cite RO as their source.

One defect of the first section is that Horan did not wish to delve into narrative. Now to some extent this is perfectly reasonable. It is a work on RO's appropriation of Scotus, not one on the use of narrative in theology. But by making this move, Horan misses, I think the ultimately twofold origin of the Scotus story. The first is that RO subscribes to the rise-fall thesis deriving from early 19th century Jesuits involved in the German kulturkampf, according to which all human thought prior to Thomas Aquinas is but a preparation for Aquinas, and everything that follows is a symptom of decline and departure from the truth. This thesis underlies RO, though even Thomists have criticized it as distorting Aquinas. I am thinking of John Inglis' work in particular. Horan thinks that the RO narrative goes back only as far as Gilson. But in fact it is part of a much older Thomist historiographical claim, which may explain why Thomists have been generally sympathetic to RO, save for reservations about their use of Aquinas. A second point about narrative that I think Horan misses is the importance of Deleuze. RO despises Deleuze, but their Scotus story is best explained as a response to Deleuze's scattered remarks on Scotus, who D. makes central to his own genealogy of modernity; univocity is great and leads straight to Spinoza. RO basically takes everything Deleuze says about Scotus at face value; their attack on Scotus is really an attack on Deleuze's Scotus with a few back-filled references to the Wolter translations to give the appearance of having read Scotus (though it should noted that, as an Australian Thomist did in his dissertation that was making the rounds a year so ago, RO views itself as prophetic and creative and so not bound by the canons of academic scholarship. To this I say, shouldn't they then be employed by think-tanks instead of a university?).

In the second section of the book, Horan discusses Cross and William's, the only two authors who have written against RO's interpretation of Scotus. William's piece is something of a rant, and so perhaps easily ignored, while Cross's main piece of criticism was published in Antonianum, which elsewhere Horan says no one in the states apparently reads. So their criticism has been generally ignored, and the "Scotus story" has been adopted all across the humanities. Indeed, one of the more depressing parts of the book is the few times Horan mentions how remarkable it is that even though academics generally pride themselves on being critical and distrustful of narrative and testing of truth claims, there has been no criticism of RO's appropriation of Scotus save for the two specialists mentioned above. Also in this section Horan tries to locate RO within 20th c. Thomism, and opts for a new label: "Cambridge Thomist".

In the third section the author gives a historical-critical analysis of univocity. Here we find that Thomas was not Scotus' target when developing univocity, but rather Henry of Ghent. We also find that univocity is not a metaphysical claim, but a semantic/conceptual one. Horan basically just reads the text of Scotus and explains what univocity is about, with reference to the relevant secondary literature (a feature lacking in the RO story). There are some strange errors, here, such as attributing Marrone's article on univocity in Scotus' early works to Dumont, a few latin typos, but nothing serious. Pini's work is strangely absent, which made sense of Scotus' commentary on met. IV, and also explained the notion of different sciences viewing being in different ways (analogical for metaphysics, univocal for logic), and which was not fully articulated by the older studies of Cyrcil and Wolter that Horan cites. But that is a minor criticism. The only substantial criticism I had of this section was a desire to make Scotus one harmonious whole in which everything is connected. The author segued rather unclearly from the application of the formal distinction in the treatment in univocity to its use in individuation (without much explanation of the formal distinction, which is probably as complicated as univocity), and he also seemed to think that haecceity was a direct consequence of univocity, which I found strange. I think univocity (that is, as applied to the problem of natural knowledge of God) and individuation are simply separate issues. But all in all, Horan gave an accurate presentation of what Scotus actually thought.

The question that remains is whether pointing out the historical-critical truth affect the dominant view of Scotus in the humanities today that is based on narrative? Perhaps publishing a book from an ecumenical press rather than an academic press will make more of a difference than the previous publications in specialist journals. It is also not written by a specialist, but by a concerned theologian, which may also make it more palatable.

Recommendation: specialists will not get much out of this book, I am afraid, especially if they have already read this material. But happily it is not directed at them. So I heartily recommend it to theologians, Thomists, philosophers with an interest in medieval thought, and also to the interested lay reader. The book manages to be both brief and to get the required work done, and it is written by and large quite clearly.

The Destroyers of Philosophy

Are those who deny the univocity of being. So says the Doctor.

Lectura I d. 3 p. 1 q. 1-2 (Vat XVI) ...

n. 105:

But to the contrary it seems that to posit the univocity of being to all destroys philosophy, although it is not predicated essentially of all, as of differences.

n. 110:

I say that I do not destroy philosophy, but the ones positing the contrary necessarily destroy philosophy, because if there is not a common concept of being, then it would be impossible that we would have a concept of substance, because substance does not have its own species in the possible intellect, but only the concept of being abstracted from the species of accidents. If therefore being did not have one concept, we would have no concept of substance, neither in common nor in particular.

n. 112:

Whence I say that our intellect first has a cognition of accidents, from which it abstracts the intention of being, which predicates the essence of substance just as accidents; and we only intuitively know substance, and not in any other way. This, as I said, each one experiences for himself, that he does not know more of the nature of substance save that it is being. The total other which we know about substance are properties and accidents proper to substance, through which we intuit those aspects which are essential to substance.

n. 113:

Again, unless being had one univocal intention, theology would be completely destroyed. For theologians prove that the Word in the divine proceeds and is generated by the intellect, and the Holy Spirit proceeds through the mode of the will. But if 'intellect' and 'will' would be only equivocally found in us and in God, there would be no evidence that just because the word is generated in us, so also it is in God, and likewise concerning love in us, because then 'intellect and 'will' would be of another kind here and there. Now it does not follow 'just as it is in our intellect and will, therefore it also is in an intellect of another kind and a will of another kind'. Therefore there would not be any evidence.

So. If you deny the univocity of being, you have no way to know substance. Now, this has some consequences. For much of the pre-modern tradition, metaphysics consisted in reasoning into the knowledge of God and the separated substances. For Scotus, then, in order keep doing metaphysics as traditionally conceived we need univocal concepts. So to conclude:

If no univocity of being,

1. No metaphysics

2. No theology

Voluntarism Again

There was a comment over at the Register (the same site on which I couldn't post a comment) that voices a common misunderstanding of voluntarism. This particular formulation is garbled, but I thought it best to use an example from the wilds of the internet:

If Mary’s rational soul and so her capacity for sin was only infused into her body post conception on what grounds could such an immaculate conception take place? Duns Scotus used Franciscan voluntarism to ‘solve’ his problem where the will rather than the intellect takes precedence. Which taken to its logical conclusion causes all kinds of problems for the principle of non-contradiction [God could create a square circle if He wanted to, perfection could be less than perfect if He wanted to be. Etc.] If St. Thomas (and Dun Scotus) et al had modern biology to base their philosophy and theology upon then there would have been no debate at all. But then if we diden’t have franciscian voluntarism its unlikely we would have had nominalism, conceptualism and the general nuttiness of modern philosophy and theology. 

So the complaint is that if the will has "precedence" or "precedes" the intellect, lots of bad thing follow. Philosophically you get God able to create a square-circle, or be less perfect, or whatever. Historically, Scotist voluntarism "causes" (read Brad Gregory for an explanation of this causality) nominalism, conceptualism, and everything the one making the claim doesn't like about the modern world.

The philosophical claim underlying all this seems to be that according to Scotus, possibility and impossibility are dependent on the divine will.

The passage in Scotus to examine is I d. 43 of his commentaries on the Sentences, the Lectura, Ordinatio, or Reportatio.

One thing we find is that the will plays no role in whether something is possible or impossible. For Scotus, possibility and impossibility is a feature of terms (or  natures, essences) which are generated by the divine intellect. The divine intellect generates say, 'rational' and 'animal'; there is no repugnance between these terms, so the species human being is possible.  The terms 'square' and 'circle' are repugnant, so a square-circle is impossible. This is even true if per impossible, God did not exist. If God did not exist, and neither did anything else, a square-circle would be impossible because the terms are repugnant, and human being would still be possible because the terms are compatible. This is what Scotus calls logical potency, and the result of it seems to be that modality is grounded in things themselves or their essences, rather than on God or some feature of God. Now on this tricky point Scotus actually says that possibility is "principiative" from the divine intellect. The idea is that while the terms are repugnant or non-repugnant based on their natures, for there to be any terms or essences at all there must be the divine intellect to generate them.

So whatever other philosophical problems voluntarism might have, at least for Scotus we are not in danger of a world of square-circles or impossible objects walking the streets, or God making himself not-God. Possibility and impossibility arise from the relation of the divine intellect and its thinking about essences.

A Counter-Narrative for Brad Gregory

See this post for photos of Duns Scotus in colonial Mexican art. Note especially the winged Scotus and Scotus treading upon the Lutherans.

Yet Another Review of Brad Gregory

Here. This one is devestating.  Some snippets.

BUT IF YOU DON'T buy that story, Gregory has another. This one, which has little to do with the Reformation, focuses on transformations in medieval theology and early modern philosophy. This is not his specialty (nor mine), which is perhaps why the writing here is clotted and the thoughts seem second-hand; positions are stated rather than argued, and without regard to well-known objections and rebuttals. Essentially the issues come down to the old quarrel between affirmative theology and negative theology—very roughly, over whether we can speak meaningfully of the attributes of God, or whether He is the He of whom nothing can be said. As Gregory rightly insists, how one thinks about this question affects how one thinks about nearly everything else. That is what makes the history of medieval Christian theology and philosophy so fascinating to study: every possible permutation of every possible argument about every possible subject is to be found there. The more one encounters it in all its variety, the more derivative subsequent philosophy seems.

Medieval Christian thought was hyper-plural—which is why Thomas Aquinas hoped that his Summa Theologiae would resolve its fundamental antinomies and make order out of chaos. Brad Gregory, though, is committed to the view that before the Reformation the harmony of the heavens was mirrored in Christian life and thought. And so he makes the bald assertion (argument would be too strong a word) that before the late-medieval writings of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, something called “traditional Christian metaphysics” held sway, and leaned in a somewhat negative theological direction. According to “traditional Christian teaching,” he writes, “God is literally unimaginable and incomprehensible.” It is hard to know what he means by “traditional” here, given the centuries of disagreement about just what it means to say that God is, or acts providentially, or performs miracles, or was incarnated, or can be understood, or is present in the Holy Eucharist. Or how such a metaphysics manifested itself at the popular level, where ordinary clergy and common believers thought of God as the Big Bearded Being, took miracles to be the direct work of His hands, venerated the saints and their sacred relics, practiced magic, and swallowed the host whole, lest their teeth add wounds to the flesh of Christ.

Modern Thomists have long asserted that the departures from the Summa by Scotus and then Ockham unintentionally paved the way for modern philosophy and science. The (simplified) argument goes like this: Scotus compromised God’s transcendence by claiming that a single concept of being applies both to Him and to His creation, whereas Thomas had said that only an analogy could be established between them. Once God and creation were thought to inhabit the same mountain, so to speak, the question arose how far up the slope one needed to go to explain things farther down. The answer of modern science would be: not very far. God is a hypothesis that we can, for practical purposes, do without. For Thomists such as Étienne Gilson, the decoupling of modern science from theology, and subsequently from morality, was foreordained by these two subtle theological departures from the grand Summa.

Gregory, though, is not interested in defending Thomism—or even theology, which he appears to distrust, believing perhaps that it is incapable of proving what he wants it to prove. So like many American theoconservatives, he makes a populist turn. He is annoyed not only that “religion is not and cannot be considered a potential source of knowledge,” just “a matter of subjective opinion and personal preference,” but also by the contemporary secular assumption that “knowledge must be based on evidence, it must make sense” and that it “must be universal and objective: if something is known or knowable, its content is not contingent on who discovers it.” He wants to defend other “ways” of knowing, which he calls “salvific participatory” and “experiential,” along with “a sacramental view of reality.”

At this point a narcotic haze descends on the book. Gregory wants us to believe that medieval Christendom before the theological fall seamlessly harmonized distinct “kinds” of knowledge, blending theology, natural science, and “individually differentiated participatory knowledge of the faith and its shared way of life, based ultimately and above all on God’s actions in Jesus.” And what was the nature and content of that knowledge, exactly? Gregory never explains. Perhaps by its very nature it cannot be communicated verbally. The most we are told about Christian life in the old days is that “the better that one lived it—the holier one was—the clearer did [God’s] truth become, a sapientia beyond mere scientia. The lived holy wisdom of the saints, quite apart from whether they were erudite or brilliant, embodied most conspicuously this sort of knowledge.” I leave the reader to make sense of those words. The meaning of the following sentence, though, is perfectly clear: in medieval Christianity, “the pursuit of knowledge for some other end, or as an end in itself, was literally vain in the sense of purposeless.”

Faith seeking understanding, with a curfew at eleven—that’s Gregory’s historical, and apparently future, ideal. So what happened? Well, late scholasticism, which pursued its dialectical games late into the night, mindless of the lived faith of others, shares part of the blame. Then, of course, the Bible was “let loose among the ‘common man’” by the Reformation. After that, states and universities became divided by confession, knowledge became a tool of state power, scripture was subjected to the higher criticism, and disciplines became separated from each other. In Europe, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s modern research university distanced itself from religious questions and affiliations, and in the United States religious colleges governed by milquetoast liberal Protestants eventually succumbed to this German virus, giving birth to our centerless multiversity, which spawned today’s anti-rational, anything-goes postmodernism.

And that’s how we got from scholasticism to structuralism.

Another Review of Brad Gregory's New Book

Here.  Thanks to Marty Foord.

Review of Brad Gregory's New Book

Here.  The beginning of it is like a bad game of telephone.  The reviewer seems to misunderstand Gregory's explanation of univocity, and Gregory himself misunderstood Scotus.

Some snippets:

The book's first chapter, "Excluding God," begins with what I regard as an accurate portrayal of the modern intellectual's arbitrary and illogical refusal to countenance any explanation of the world's origins, no matter how cogent that explanation may be, if it happens to include God. The roots of this mindset reach back centuries, Mr. Gregory says, to the late-medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, who argued that God and man both exist in the same essence of things and that therefore man may speak of God with "univocal" as opposed to "analogical" language. In Scotus's thinking, the word "wise," for example, might apply to God in the same sense in which it applies to man. This had the effect, says Mr. Gregory, of defining God as if He were bound by the material world rather than transcendent over it. And when this view combined with William of Occam's "razor"—the principle that the best argument is the one with the fewest unnecessary parts—philosophers eventually felt emboldened to exclude God from any explanation of natural phenomena: and, in time, from any argument at all.

Very interesting, one might think—except that the book presents no evidence that any Protestant reformer actually espoused "univocal metaphysics," in the author's phrase. Nothing from Luther or Calvin on the subject, nothing from William Farel or Martin Bucer. Mr. Gregory does mention the Swiss Reformation leader Ulrich Zwingli and his disavowal of Christ's real presence in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper, but that position is hardly the "logical corollary" to univocal metaphysics that the author claims. Transubstantiation is a far more "univocal" reading of the words "This is my body" than Zwingli's interpretation. But never mind. When Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche and, more recently, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris formulated their skeptical views of religion, Mr. Gregory says, they thought of God in reductive, univocal terms, and this was somehow a long-term consequence of the Protestant Reformation.

[...]

Leaving aside Mr. Gregory's preposterously overwrought characterization of modern Western societies, especially America—he sees little beyond depredation, exploitation, consumerism and global warming—his complaint that modern Western morality elevates acquisitiveness to the status of a virtue is justified. But blaming this state of affairs on events that occurred and people who lived five centuries ago is a sort of rearview-mirror utopianism: If only the right social order had been left in place—if only the Protestant reformers hadn't shattered medieval Catholicism's "institutionalized worldview"—life today would be so much better.

Brad Gregory's New Book

You remember Brad Gregory, Notre Dame's golden boy.  Well he has a new book out.  Generating lots of buzz, probably awards in the offiing.  But it doesn't look like he learned his lession.  Here's a quote from the introduction, p.5, of The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

Finally, until Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (1986), no one would have suspected any connection between late medieval metaphysics and contemporary neo-Darwinian atheism. But the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of modern science and of antireligious, scientistic ideologies are clearly indebted to the emergence of metaphysical univocity that Funkenstein identified in medieval scholasticism beginning with John Duns Scotus.

Some more from his 2009 Logos article:

Funkenstein showed both that there was a deep affinity between theology and science among major intellectual figures in the seventeenth century and why this symbiosis proved fleeting: the underlying ontology— God “is” just like creation “is”—meant that God had to beat a progressive retreat as science explained more and more about the natural world. Scotus’s initial move is anything but an arcane curiosity from the distant past because it led through an unanticipated series of intellectual developments that include the scientific revolution, Isaac Newton’s physics and post-Newtonian deism, Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and his sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena, the philosophical framework of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, and eventually the neo-Darwinian, scientistic atheism of the New Atheists.

And it turns out that Scotus believed in a different God than did the Biblical authors, Church Fathers, Aquinas, and millions of Christian lay people.

Well, of course, it will be argued—what “other” ontological framework could there be? One in which God is not conceptually domesticated, but is rather regarded as radically distinct from and noncompetitive with his creation, as the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo implies.

[...]

God conceptualized in this manner is not an “entity or being” at all; he cannot be conceived or visualized; he cannot be represented directly in any human categories whatsoever, whether visual, verbal, or conceptual. This is the same God written about with acuity by contemporary Catholic philosophers such as Robert Sokolowski and theologians such as Robert Barron. This is the same God in whom faithful Catholics believe today, whatever their level of explicit philosophical or theological awareness (my ninety-five-year-old grandmother, with her eighth-grade education, believes in, worships, and prays to this God).

We really ought to take away all that NEH money for the edition, burn all works of Scotus, and excommunicate  anyone who says his name aloud.  Because in the end, we all know that  Aquinas was right about everything (except the immaculate conception...).


Update:


In leafing through Funkenstein's book, I came across a discussion of univocity on p. 26 that claims that existence is a divine attribute for Scotus (assuming, like the Thomists, that Scotus holds the same view on essence and existence as Aquinas). He cites as his proof for this and univocity generally the spurious Expositio in Metaphysicam, known since at least the 1920's to be spurious. But Funkenstein, like Brad Gregory, is an historian, which means they don't need to worry about such matters.


So it looks like the intellectual giants of our time are agreed and we have a common opinion: Scotistic univocity is bad and is the root of all evil in the world, and we know this because of all its bad effects on society. It is in fact so obviously bad and stoopid we do not need to make a single argument against it.  Thus say the philosophers, theologians, and historians of our time.

Brad Gregory on Scotus

That's Brad Gregory, one of ND's historians, in an article: "Forum: God, Science, and Historical Explanation", in History and Theory 47 (2008), 495-519.

This article, not really about Scotus but rather about the origins of contemporary attitudes holding that scientific findings disprove religion, endorses what historians playing at being philosophers call "narratives" and runs parallel to the Cambridge Phantasists, to wit, that all those Bad Things about the modern world have their origin in Scotus. In this case, its modern atheism. Now, as is common among historians, there is no discussion of Scotus' ideas beyond which what I will quote below; so, like the Cambridge Phantasists I am not terribly concerned as this just another example of the genetic fallacy. Scotus isn't proven to be wrong because of what other people did with his arguments, but rather when his arguments themselves are proven to be wrong. Naturally, neither Gregory nor the phantasists bother to do this as they are too busy writing stories.

p.501: "The supernatural is both defined over against the natural and understood to belong to the same conceptual and metaphysical framework. So if God existed, God plus the natural world would be components within a more comprehensive reality. This conceptualization of the relationship between God and the natural world in the modern "scientific worldview" is not itself the result of empirical inquiry. No one found or discovered it. Rather, it is contingent on certain theological presuppositions linked to particular metaphysical views: it makes assumptions about what God would be like if God were real. As it happens, the metaphysics of modern science relies on a univocal conception of being first articulated by John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) in response to Henry of Ghent's analogical concept of being, which was then further transformed in the fourteenth century by William of Occam (c. 1285-1347). According to them and to Occam's late-medieval scholastic followers, because being is common to all that exists, including God, it must be conceived as pertaining to God in the same manner as it pertains to all creatures in the natural world, however God is otherwise understood to differ from everything else that exists." [completly false with respect to Scotus. Being isn't common, but a concept of being can be formed that is common. There is no corresponding reality. Scotus is the subtle doctor, after all]

[there follows some talk of someones' brilliant book,] "The particular confluence of theology and and natural science in seventeenth-century thinkers as different as Descartes, Hobbes, Henry More, and Newton combined a nominalist insistence on univocity of expression with neo-Stoic Renassance [sic] conceptions of the homogeneity of nature governed by forces. This combination, plus the de facto methodological assumption of Occams razor, established the framework for the eventual retreat of God in modern science and philosophy." [of course 'ockhams razor' is used of Scotus who ascribes it to Aristotle. maybe we need to roll the clock back to Plato]

[...]

"...perhaps God is real and is radically distinct from the universe; perhaps God is metaphysically transcendent. [...] If God is real and is radically, otherly[sic] transcendent, then every quality univocally predicated of God would be a category mistake, including even his existence--which was the point of Aquinas' insistence that there is no genus, not even the genus of being, to which God belongs along with creatures. It was such a view that Henry of Ghent modified and Scotus rejected, leading to the unanticipated and enormously influential trajectory traced by Funkenstein." [contrary to Gregorys assertion, Scotus is explicit that being is not a genus and God is not in a genus. see Ord. I d. 8 q.3]

[...]

"The metaphysical assertions of modern science can only be agnostic precisely because of its methodological presuppositions. Atheists' heartfelt, personal, subjective beliefs notwithstanding, the findings of science tend toward atheism only if one's theological conception of God presupposes a univocal metaphysics."

[...]

"Scotus insisted on a univocal notion of God [So now God is univocal!!! what can that even mean? that God is univocal to God and creatures? this must have been written late at night] because he recognized that without it, nothing could be said about God directly on the basis of reason or philosophy. By contrast, the traditional Christian conception of a radically transcendent God, which flouts ordinary ways of using language and insists on the reality of what is unimaginable, is neither the outcome of philosophical speculation nor the product of empirical investigation. It is the result of theological reflection on the writings of the Old and New testaments, themselves rooted in the experiences of ancient Israelites, some of whom became first-century Christians."

This is pretty bad. Clearly, the author has never bothered to read Scotus or Ockham on the subject of univocity, to say nothing of the followers of either (they're in manuscript, let me tell you, because I read them), as none of them have a monolithic view of univocity. Scotus' followers alone disagree about every point of its interpretation in Scotus, and Ockham just jumps into the middle of this fracas. The view given here is simply wrong as applied to Scotus. Being is univocal conceptually alone. No corresponding reality outside the mind. I sound like a broken record. Being is not a genus. Of course, one has to be sort of obliquely impressed. After all, Gregory's response continued after the last quote follows in the David Burrell line of "theology is a dance". Scotus' (unread) arguments must be so good that the only alternative is to deny the scientific character of theology, as conceived during the thirteenth century and championed by just about all medieval theologians, Aquinas included.

I'm also suspicious about the link between the nominalists and modern science. Gregory cites literature from the 80's on this, but they look like surveys taking the long view of history, not detailed analyses of individual figures. Anneliese Maier, who held doctorates in physics and philosophy denied any link between fourteenth century science and the renaissance scientists, as the former still maintained most of Aristotle's physical principles that impeded the development of modern science. On her view, even impetus theory was incorrect and still as wrong the rest because it still retained Aristotelian principles. Fr. Wallace in his modelling of nature makes a good case for the "regressus" being common to medieval and modern science, which is basically Aristotle's quia and propter quid demonstrations taken in chains of reasoning. Copleston denies the link as well, for what its worth, though he's no specialist.

It's really too bad; Gregory is a devout son of the Church, who has chosen to follow liberal anglicans in their blackening of the reputation of a man declared blessed by Pope John Paul II.