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!

Bishop Barron Again

As the Scotus Police, I bring to your attention the latest from Robert Barron, Auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles. Some comments, follow, though I have discussed Barron's views elsewhere (see the tags). It is more of the same. It is not really about Scotus at all, but about evangelization. I add it here simply as documentation of the contemporary attitude towards Scotus. His lecture is here on the First Things website.

There is nothing new in the arguments of the New Atheists. They are borrowed from Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Sartre. And what all the atheists, new and old, have in common is a mistaken notion of God, for to a person they construe God as one being among many, an item within the nexus of conditioned things. The roots of this misconception are deep and tangled, stretching back to antiquity, but I would put a good deal of the blame for the present form of the problem on the transition from an analogical to a univocal conception of being, on display in Duns Scotus and especially William of Occam. On Aquinas’s analogical interpretation, God is not one item, however impressive, in the genus of existing things. Indeed, Thomas insists that God is not an individual and is not to be categorized in any genus, even that most generic of genera, the genus of being. God is not so much ens summum (highest being) as ipsum esse subsistens. But if, as Scotus and Occam would have it, being is a univocal term, then God and creatures can be considered under the same ontological rubric, and they do indeed belong to an identical genus. This means, in consequence, that God, though he might be described as infinite, is one being among many, an individual alongside other individuals. Occam would state the principle with admirable economy of expression: Praeter illas partes absolutas nulla res est (“Outside of these absolute parts, there is nothing real”).

I realize that this might seem the very definition of medieval hairsplitting, but a great deal hinges on this point. On the analogical reading, all of finite reality participates in the fullness of the actus essendi of God, and hence God and creation cannot be construed as rivals, since they don’t compete for space, as it were, on the same ontological grid. But on the univocal reading, God and creation are competitive, and a zero-sum game does obtain. The Reformers were massively shaped by the nominalist view that came up from Occam, and they therefore inherited this competitive understanding of God’s relationship to the world, which is evident in so much of their speculation concerning justification, grace, and providence. If God is to get all of the glory, the world has to be emptied of glory; if grace is to be fully honored, nature has to be denigrated; if salvation is all God’s work, cooperation with grace has to be denied. When this notion of God became widespread in Europe after the Reformation, it provoked a powerful counter-reaction, which one can see in almost all of the major philosophical figures of early modernity. The threatening God must be explained away (as in Spinoza), fundamentally identified with human consciousness (as in Hegel), internalized as the ground of the will (as in Kant), or shunted off to the sidelines (as in most forms of Deism). In time, the God of late medieval nominalism is ushered off the stage by an impatient atheism that sees him (quite correctly) as a menace to human flourishing. Thus, Feuerbach can say, “Das Nein zu Gott ist das Ja zum Menschen,” and every atheist since has followed him. Jean-Paul Sartre, in the twentieth century, captured the exasperation with the competitive God in a syllogism: “If God exists, I cannot be free; but I am free; therefore, God does not exist.” And Christopher Hitchens has restated the Feuerbach view, observing that believing in God is like accepting permanent citizenship in a cosmic version of North Korea.

On further reflection, I was rather struck by the Latin quote from Ockham that Barron references: "praeter illas partes absolutas nulla res est". He says by it Ockham is stating a principle, but Barron does not tell us what the principle is. That God is in a genus? That being is univocal? That being is a genus? That God is one individual alongside other individuals? Does Barron think that, according to Ockham, God and creatures are parts of some whole?


The quote comes from Ockham's Ordinatio I d. 30 (OTh IV, 317). This question is a debate about relations. Scotus had held that relations were really distinct from their terms, and this question of Ockham's consists of quoting Scotus' arguments verbatim and refuting them. So it is odd, to say the least, for Barron to group Scotus with Ockham here. The quote is from some exegesis of Aristotle's Metaphysics XII. Ockham, annoyingly, in this question only talks about what can be known by pure reason, and so he does not talk about God at all, save in this reply to Scotus. So it clear why Barron would want to cite this passage, since even though there are many mentions of Ockham's view int he question, that relations are not really distinct or absolute beings, only substances are, none of them directly concern God. But Barron does misrepresent the context of the quote, I would say.


But this is not a question about univocity. And even the conclusion is not terribly controversial, i.e. that relations are not absolute things or really distinct. It was quite common in medieval thought to argue about this, long before Ockham and Scotus, and I see no connection to the univocity debate. There was some debate about whether quality and quantity were absolute categories like substance, Ockham here is denying that relations are real or absolute.


Barron's comments are then turning a rather mundane medieval position into a consequence of univocity, even though people who deny univocity could hold it and those who hold univocity could deny it. Indeed, Scotus holds univocity but is the target of Ockham's attack in the very passage Barron quotes. But there are no rules in the narrative game.


The ultimate root of Barron's comments here is the neoplatonist strand in academic thomist theologians, combined with continental speculation. The dependence of creation on God entails, for modern thomist theologians, the idea that humans cannot be granted any ontological standing in their own right, even though even on thomist natural philosophy human beings et al. are all substances, are individuals, have causal powers, support accidents, etc. And oddly, God is somehow not an individual, but way way beyond such mundane notions, though they never bother to explain that God isn't just a universal or an abstract object, what one normally would contrast an individual with.


So in the end, Barron is sort of right, at least that Thomism and Scotism are incompatible on many points. For Thomism, God is subsistent being itself, for Scotism God is an infinite This. The Scotist view for Barron entails competition between God and creatures; Barron thinks that this competition is bad and leads to protestantism. But competition would seem to be a datum of the human experience, at least if Barron's other views, are correct, that is, given that he is a Catholic Bishop he believes in human sin, and what is sin other than the assertion of one's own will and choice over the divine law/wish/choice? But there was sin prior to Scotus' theory of the univocity of the concept of being, so I think we can absolve univocity of the competition charge, at least.

Robert Barron on Univocity and Voluntarism

Fr. Robert Barron recently made the following comment on this blog post, in the comments of which there was some discussion of the link between univocity and voluntarism in Scotus.

I would like to respond to the charge that I “erred” in linking Scotus’s voluntarism to his univocal conception of being. There is indeed a strong connection between the two. Once God is construed as one being, however supreme, among many, then the metaphysical links that tie creatures to God are severed and therefore the relation between us and God is established primarily through will. To see the details of the argument, I’d recommend my book The Priority of Christ, but that’s the very real connection between voluntarism and a univocal conception of being.

Now, I have written on fr. Barron before, but since he is so influential in popular catholicsm I think his views need to be addressed again since it is clear he will continue to misrepresent Scotus' views by relying on postmodernist jargon that avoids dealing with Scotus' arguments. To see the effects of this view in action, simply read "Nick's" review of Fr. Barron's book mentioned in his quotation at google books.  Nick gives an extremely bad "narrative" (I put this in quotation marks because it is the sort of word these people like, even though it is inherently relativistic and only shows them to be compromised by the very "secular values" they so decry in Scotus), despite his having studied the book directly with the author.

So lets review Fr. Barron's The Priority of Christ, with special attention to the relation between univocity and voluntarism. First, some quotations.

(p.  12-13):

There have in recent years been numerous accounts of the etiology of modernity. Jurgen Habermas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, Colin Gunton, and Louis Dupre, among many others, have offered explanations of the transition from the premodern to the modern. I subscribe to the proposal that liberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problemaitc version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity, it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated. As a result the two systems settled into a centuries-long and terribly unproductive warfare. Even when the two attempted a reconciliation (as in all forms of liberal Christianity in the past two centuries), the results were less than satisfactory, precisely because each party was itself a sort of caricature.

The trouble began with Duns Scotus's option for a univocal conception of being in contradistinction to Thomas Aquinas's analogical understanding. For Thomas, God, as the sheer act of to-be itself (ipsum esse subsistens), is that through which all creatures exist. What follows epistemologically from this metaphysical claim is that the meaning of "to-be," in reference to God and creatures, must be analogical, with God as primary analogue and created things as secondary. In accord with this intuitition, Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we're not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the "cash value" of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.

In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligibile, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, bewteen the supreme being, God, and finite beings. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God is categorizable in no genus whatsover, Scotus held that God and creatures do belong together to a logical category, that in a real sense, transcends and includes them. The implications of this shift are enormous and, to my mind, almost entirely negative. If the analogical conception of being is rejected, creatures are no longer seen as participating in the divine to-be; instead, God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and them any creatures) are now what is most basically real

.

Scotus's intuition was confirmed a generation later by his Franciscan successor William of Occam. Congruent with his nominalism, which denied ontological density to the unifying features of being, Occam held that there is nothing real outside of disconnected individual things (praeter illas partes absolutas nulla res est). As for Scotus so for Occam, God and creatures are set side by side, joined only through a convention of logic that assigns them to the category of "beings". A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. Just as a chair is itself precisely in the measure that it is no other creaturely thing, so God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas's participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam's reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. A further concomitant of this indivdualistic ontology is voluntarism. Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection betwen the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God's relation with his rational creatures is therefore legalistic and arbitrary. This understanding of divine power influenced Occam's conception of the human will as well. Finite freedom is, for him, absolute spontaneity, an action prorpted by nothing either interior or exterior to the subject. Accordingly, human power is a distant mirror of divine power: both are self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational. The most obvious practical consquence of this nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics is that divine and human freedom find themselves pitted against one another, God imposing himself arbitrarily on a necessarily reluctant and resentful humanity.

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principales of late-medieval nominalism ...

[p. 193 repeats basically the same regarding univocity. Note that here the category that God and creatures allegedly share is a metaphysical one]

[p. 194]

"God" becomes but the collectivity of creatures considered as a totality. In this sense, modern pantheism is the logical fulfillment of Scotus' adoption of a univocal conception of being: God and the world can be spoken of univocally because there is finally no difference between them

.

[p. 202, following a quote from William James]

How like Scotus's claim that God and creatures are both beings, though the former is infinite and the latter finite, one the biggest part, the other smaller parts. God, in sum, is a being among others, capable of influencing lower relaitites without comporomising them, exisiting in the same universe as they and subject to the same metaphysical constraints.

Summary of Barron's position:
1. There are bad things that happened in the past that influence the present.
2. There is a popular narrative held by popular theologians that lays the blame for the clash of Christianity and modernity at Scotus' door.

Barron's statement of Scotus' position:

1. Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence.
2. He did this to make God more intelligible.
3. On Scotus' view, God and creatures share the same metaphysical category, the genus of being.
4. God is infinite and quantitatively superior to creatures, but there is no qualitative difference between God and creatures "in the metaphysical sense".
5. Scotus held that God and creatures are contained in a logical category that transcends them.

Barrons's view of the consequences of Scotus' position:

1. If the analogical world-view is rejected, creatures no longer are seen as participating in the divine "to-be".
2. God and creatures are "appreciated" side by side, as beings among beings, differing only by degrees and intensity.
3. Once participation is gone, creatures are no longer connected to each other.
4. The "most basically real" becomes isolated and self-contained individuals.
5. As a result of their being individuals, God and creatures somehow become rivals.
6. Voluntarism: "Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection betwen the divine and the nondivine has to be through will".  I'm not sure, but this "link" must be participation.
7. A laundry list of the usual alleged bad effects of voluntarism: capriciousness, problems with freedom, law, etc.

Contra Robert Barron:

Some general observations:

*Fr. Barron cites only pomo theologians, no primary sources; so in the end it is an argument from authority.
*Scotus, Aquinas, and Ockham aren't interested in "intuitions" but arguments.
*I'm not sure, but fr. Barron might be assuming that all the scholastics had a common, shared view on existence. But this is not the case, for Aquinas' views were quite idiosyncratic and controversial at the time.  Remember Scotus' comment from Ord. IV: "I know not that fiction that states that essence and existence are really distinct" or somesuch.
*For much of what I will say I rely on my previous posts in the fundamenta series wherein I quote and explain Scotus' views on univocity.

Against Barron's statement of Scotus' position:

(1). False. Scotus proposed a univocal concept of being, a concept which does not correspond to any external, extramental reality. As Richard Cross likes to say, it is a "vicious abstraction". See the fundamenta posts for the arguments that Scotus uses to establish this. He didn't just propose it, he thought he had arguments to support it.

(2). False.  Scotus did it to ensure that the arguments that theologians make about God don't commit the fallacy of equivocation. Scotus is quite up front about this in Ord. I d. 3.

(3.) False. Scotus says directly the opposite in Ord. I d. 8 q. 3 (ed. Vat. IV, ca. p. 200). A metaphysical category would be a real extramental category (Barron can't make up his mind whether God and creatures share a metaphysical or logical category).  But everyone since Aristotle agreed that being can't be a genus. Scotus also agreed with this.  Scotus thinks that if being were a genus that contained God and creatures divine simplicity would be compromised because God there would be a reality for the genus (being) and another reality for the specific difference (divine).

(4.) This one I don't understand. I suppose infinity was often thought of in quantitative terms, but in Scotus it is an intrinsic mode of the divine essence and he conceives of it (ie. infinity qua intrinsic mode) on the model of quality, which admits of degrees. But to say that in the metaphysical sense there is no qualitative difference between God and creatures is simply false.

(5). False. Scotus denies that God and creatures are both contained in a category. See above (1) and (3).

So there you have it. All of Fr. Barron's statements about Scotus' actual position are false.  Consequences are a nasty business, as they basically amount to character assassination by blaming Scotus for Ockham.  But we could just as easily blame Aquinas for Scotus, and therefore also for Ockham.  I will comment on some of the consequences.

Against Barron's "Consequences"

(1). Scotus never rejected analogy. As one can read in the fundamenta post on univocity, Scotus argues for a concept that is "not only analogical but univocal". So he accepts analogical concepts as well as univocal concepts. Also, Scotus never rejects participation.  And in any case, analogy is a doctrine about terms, while participation is a metaphysical doctrine. So while they may be connected, I don't think they are necessarily so.

(2). I don't know what "appreciated" means here. But yes, Scotus thinks God and creatures differ by degrees: infinite ones.

(3.) Scotus doesn't deny participation. Also, participation is in God, not in other creatures. Creatures are connected only insofar as they share the same form. I suppose one could say humans participate in the species-form of humanity.

(4). Um, but that's true. I don't know about the "isolated" part, but everything enjoying actual, extramental existence presumably is an individual (I'm not a platonist, I confess).

(5) Nonsense.

(6) This is what Fr. Barron's blog post that I quoted above was about. But since Barron already thinks that univocity makes God just a being among beings, it seems more plausible that we would have much greater access to and knowledge of God, and so we wouldn't have to rely purely on his will to know what to do.  But if this won't do, note that the claim seems to be about the loss of participation.  But I already pointed out, Scotus doesn't deny participation, nor does he deny analogy.
Conclusion:

Lee Faber's prescription for dealing with modern chaos in theology: develop a post-theological Christian theology. We can do this by
(1)  getting rid of inherently relativized terms such as "culture","value", "narrative", "genealogy", and so on, and talk about arguments.
(2) Reading primary sources.

Theology of Robert Barron

It's been a while since I examined contemporary representations of Scotus, so today lets look at Fr. Robert Barron's book:

bridging the Great Divide: Musings of a Post-Liberal, Post-Conservative Evangelical Catholic. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

Fr. Robert Barron is a professor of systematic theology at Mundelein seminary. He is a widely read author and commentator on catholic issues, reaching the educated and not so educated. That is why I feel he requires a response. When it comes to Scotus, he is just following in the steps of Milbank ("Milbank the mountebank" a professor of mine calls him) and his phantastical cohorts, and he really only has about 2 facts on Scotus and a few alleged consequences. It is really rather dull. Anyways, the book, which we shall examine below, embodies all that really irritates me about modern theology. In a word, lack of focus. The book is barely 272 pages, yet we meet Goethe, Dante, lots of Aquinas, Paul Tillich, Luther, Calvin, the Nouvelle theologie theologians, Rahner, von Balthasar, Plato, Aristotle, Schleiermacher, Jean-Luc Marion, the Communio crowd, basically everyone in the history of theology and philosophy. And yet who from among this august company is the only one to be excluded from the post-modern table of dialogue? John Duns Scotus.

Now for some quotes:

p. 62: "..creaturely being, though really distinct from God, is in an analogical relationship to the divine reality. But this means, in turn, that creaturely being is, by nature, ecstatic and not autonomous. It furthermore implies that every creature is connected through the center of its being to every other creature, so that Francis's statement about brother sun and sister moon could be not only a charming bit of poetry but a rather exact metaphysical remark. Now when this conception began to unravel, first through Duns Scotus's introduction of a univocal sense of being and then through the Reformer's distantiation of God, a properly secular realm emerged, that is to say, an arena of finite being that could ground itself. The breakdown of an analogical conception of being led also to a fundamentally antagonistic social ontology, the link between creatures having been eliminated... What makes the modern successors of Descartes and Hobbes incapable of the liturgical act? The disciple of Aquinas might respond: the loss of participation/creation metaphysics and hence the attenuation of any sense of an ecstatic and communitarian self."

fr. Barron claims:

1. Duns Scotus introduced a univocal sense of being.

2. A properly secular realm emerged = finite being could ground itself.

3. Rise of antagonistic social ontology because link between creatures eliminated

Lee Faber rebuts:

(1.) is true, if by 'sense' he means 'sense of the term' being.

(2.) Scotus never says finite being could ground itself or anything similar. In Scotus' view this would have to amount to creatures being self-caused. Other than that, it's not clear how univocity leads to the reformation or even how the reformation leads to secularism.

(3.) I don't see how analogy connects us all to each other. Analogy is a theory of how terms used by creatures are predicated of God. Nor do we participate in each other, we participate in God. Also, participation does not enjoy magisterial authority. Also, what was the world like before Aquinas expounded his theory of analogy? If fr. Barron is correct, wouldn't the analogical/participatory world view only have come into being with Aquinas? Then society should have been in terrible shambles before Aquinas came along, and the years between Aquinas' death and Scotus' birth must have been a veritable golden age of human flourishing. Also, what is the connection between univocity and an 'anagonistic social ontology'?

p.111: "Correllative to the doctrine of creation from nothing is the doctrine of the analogia entis. For Thomas, God cannot be construed, as we have seen, as one being among many; rather, he must be conceived as the act of being that is otherly other than the realm of beings. God and creatures are not--as in Duns Scotus--beings categorized as varying types in the genus 'existence'. Rather created things are participants in the primordial act of existence..."

Fr. Barron:

1. according to Scotus, Existence is a genus.

2. according to scotus, God and creatures are both in this genus.

Lee Faber rebuts:

First of all, there is a fundamental misunderstanding here; analogy of being is not the correllate of creation ex nihilo. Analogy pertains to natural knowledge of God, while creation to divine revelation.

contra (1.) Nobody in the middle ages thought this, certainly not about existence. All the scholastics agree that Aristotle proved that being is not a genus.

(2.) Cf. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I d.8 pt. q.3 (ed. Vat. IV p. 169ff.): whether it stands with divine simplicity that God or something formally said of God is in a genus?

"There is another affirmative opinion, in the other extreme, which posits that God is in a genus...[the Vatican editors can identify no one who held this position] Against this [position] the first argument is posited [from earlier in the question]... I hold the middle opinion, that with divine simplicity it stands that some concept is common to himself and a creature, nevertheless not some concept common as a genus, because neither a concept said 'in quid' of God, nor one said of him by whatever kind of formal predication, is per se in some genus." [arguments follow]

So not only is there no agreement between God and creatures in reality, but not even generic agreement in concept!

p.113: "God is placed by Luther in a transcendent realm almost as a gesture of protection, as though any closer contact with the world would compromise him. This distantiation was made possible, furthermore, through the univocal conception of being introduced by Scotus and given fuller expression by Occam and his nominalist successors who in turn helped to shape Luther's philosophical vision."

RB's claims:

(1.) Scotus introduced a univocal conception of being

(2.) Occam gave fuller expression to this univocal conception of being.

(3.) Occam's successors influenced Luther.

(4.) Luther tries to save God from univocity.

LF refutes:

(1.) True, as long as we are clear we are talking about a concept, not a reality.

(2.) True, though Ockham generally rejects as much as he accepts from scotus, and reformulates it beyond all recognition.

(3.) True.

(4.) If this is true, so what. All it does is smear Ockham by association with late medieval nominalists, and Scotus by association with Ockham. To construct a geneology is not to construct an argument; it's a fallacy.

Omitted: p. 127, which contains a discussion of James Joyce 'A portrait of a young man' and how although the quote he offers is closer to Scotist haeceity than thomistic quidditas, it preserves intellectualism, esthetics, and the splendor formae.

p.133: "Umberto Eco carefully traced the evolution of the medieval understanding of the beautiful and noticed that a major shift occurred in the writings of Duns Scotus and William of Occam. Scotus's metaphysics of haecceitas and Occam's explicit nominalism both led to an attenuation of the ontology of beauty that we have been describing. When the individual thing has primacy, the interconnectedness of all creatures, the consonantia of the finite realm, is severely understessed... [quote from Ockham follows] And this cosmic disconnectedness is even more fully established when, as in Scotus, a univocal conception of being holds sway... But when being is taken univocally, God and creatures are instances of a general, overarching principle and hence exist, as it were, side by side, without an essential connection."

RB:

(1.) metaphysics of haecceity + nominalism ruined aesthetics.

(2.) emphasis on individual = interconnectedness of all creatures being understressed

(3.) univocity = cosmic disconnectedness

(4.) univocity entails God and creatures being instances of a general principle

(5.) univocity entails God and creatures exist side by side w/o essential connection

LF rebuts:

Almost too much here. But it amounts to the claim that "Scotus said something different than Aquinas" so I wont' delay much here.

(1.) Boo hoo. In the one passage on beauty I've seen in Scotus, he relates it to a proportion between parts. One suspects the analogical worldview is pretty weak to be unable to withstand that observation.

(2.) none of the scholastics talk about the interconnectedness of creatures. We are all related by species and genera, I suppose. But that's not very aesthetic.

(3.) That's why my zen garden looks so bad!

(4.) So there is a principle superior to God? I suppose that would have to be causal principle. This claim is on the level of Brad Gregory's claim that "God is univocal" or Matthew Levering's that the great whore of revelation is cast into the lake of fire for abandoning participation metaphysics. It's just the contemporary form the rivalry between scotism and thomism is taking.

(5.) But I thought univocity also entails God is made too transcendent and distantiated?

Dont' ask me what the essential connection is; I suppose it's because creatures aren't participating in each other or God (allegedly).

p.202-203:

"the tired modernity of Merton's youth...was the consequence of the collapse of a participation metaphysics. One of the first causes this collapse was, oddly enough, a Franciscan friar, John Duns Scotus. When Scotus insisted that there is a univocal concept of being, he situated God and creation under the same great ontological canopy, effectively setting God alongside the world, one being (however great) among many. But the juxtaposing of God and creatures amounts to a negation of the participation metaphysics that Aquinas advocated. On the Scotist reading, the world is comparable to God, but it doesn't share in the to-be of God. And when this participation is denied, the essential connectedness of all creatures to one another is also undone. Scotus' univocal conception of being was carried further and deepened by William of Occam and the nominalists inspired by him, and they in turn had a decisive influence on Martin Luther. The Scotist-Occamist strain can be discerned in Luther's embrace of a radical theologia crucis and his effective distantiation of God from the world."

RB:

(1.) Scotus had a univocal concept being

(2.) Scotus placed God and creatures in the same genus

(3.) this denies participation metaphysics, which destroys essential connectedness of creatures to each other.

(4.) Scotus' doctrine of univocity was 'deepened' by Ockham and the nominalists

(5.) the nominalists influenced Luther

(6.) Luther distantiated God from the world.

LF rebuts:

The usual. (1.), (4.) and (5.) are true, although fr. Barron cites no literature, and it's not clear how this works as there is no scholarship that i know of on the topic of univocity in late medieval nominalism. (2.) as we saw above is false, therefore (3.) is not a result of Scotus' conception of univocity. Again, aside from sharing in genus and species, no scholastic talks about essential connectedness of creatures; participation is in God, not other creatures. As for (6.), again, this is just guilt by association.

p.261:

"So many of the great Reformers were trained in the philosophical school of nominalism, with its roots in the speculations of the late medieval Franciscan William of Occam. Like his Franciscan predecessor Duns Scotus, Occam held to a univocal conception of being, according to which both the infinite existence of God and the finite existence of creatures are instances of a general, overarching category of being that contains them both... This denial of participation metaphysics conduced, as in Scotus and Occam, to a stress on the isolated individual--which can be seen in the theologies of both luther and John Calvin."

RB:

(1.) the reformation has roots in late medieval nominalism

(2.) Scotus and Ockham held to a univocal concept of being

(3.) Both God and creatures are in the genus 'being'.

(4.) this constitutes a denial of participation metaphysics, and leads to stress on isolated individuals.

LF:

(1.) and (2.) we've seen to be true, (3.) false from scotus' own writings, (4.) is another alleged consequence of (3.). But is true, Scotus does lay a lot of emphasis on the individual. And he doesn't mention in these contexts how the individual participates in God, or other creatures. Stupid Scotus, wasting all that time trying to figure out individuation!