Saturday, April 16, 2011

Walter Chatton on Divine Ideas and Representation

These are just notes for myself for an article I'm working on. Enjoy. I think this is inconsistent with holding, as Chatton does, Scotus' Propositio famosa.
Walter Chatton, Reportatio I d. 35 q. 2 (ed. Wey-Etzkorn, vol. 2, 318)

Tertium dubium: quae sit necessitas ponendi, an ad cognoscendum, vel ad producendum, vel ad exemplificandum, vel ad mensurandum? – Dico quod quolibet istorum modorum, modo supra exposito. Nam essentia est ad cuius similitudinem et imitationem res producitur, cognitio autem divina sic est idea quod repraesentat creaturam etc.

Sed nonne essentia divina absolute accepta repraesentat creaturas? – Dico quod sic, quia essentia divina est cognitio divina. Sed si per contradictionem cognitio divina distingueretur ab essentia, cognitio tunc divina repraesentaret omnes res cognoscibiles, et non sic essentia, nisi virtualiter, sicut tunc contineret cognitionem; nam adhuc tunc eo ipso quod esset cognitio perfecta et comprehensiva essentiae, esset infinita, et ita omnis cognoscibilis.

The third doubt: what is the necessity of positing, whether for knowing or producing or for exemplifying or for measuring? I say that in whatever of those ways, in the way explained above. For the essence is to the likeness and imitation of which a thing is produced, divine cognition however is an idea quod represents a creature, etc.

But does not the divine essence understood absolutely represent creatures? I say that it does, because the divine essene is divine cognition. But if by a contradiction [ie. impossibile hypothesis] the divine cognition would be distinguished from the essence, then divine cognition would represent all knowable things, and not so the essence, unless virtually, just as then it would contain cognition; for still by the fact that it would be a perfect and comprehensive cognition of the essence it would be infinite, and so of every knowable thing.

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