What I've Been Working On
Renaissance Scotists?
One of the perks of being a paid subscriber to Window Light is that every once in a while, I offer a sneak peek into my own work as a theologian. For example, last spring I highlighted three essays that had recently been published or that were soon to be published. Today I want to share an article that was recently published in the journal Franciscan Studies: “Renaissance Scotist Commentators on Predestination: Francesco Licheto and Giacomino Malafossa da Barge.” Readers at all familiar with my prior scholarly work—which has mostly focused on Catholic social teaching and issues of social ethics—may be scratching their heads. If you’ve been following Window Light for a while, though, you may not be completely surprised by the topic; I’ve written about predestination a few times, and I’ve hinted that I’ve been exploring the Scotist tradition, that is, the theological tradition based around the work of the medieval theologian John Duns Scotus. I’ll get to how I ended up writing on this topic in a bit, but first I want to introduce the topic of the article.
Note: The article isn’t available yet for those of you who have access to academic journals online through a university library, and I haven’t received permission yet from the editors to publicly share the pre-publication proof of the article. However, if you are interested, I’m willing to personally send you the proof if you send me an email.
One of the challenges of studying John Duns Scotus is that he never wrote a Summa or similar systematic presentation of his thought. Instead, we have three versions of his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the standard “textbook” of medieval theology. These three versions (the Lectura, the Reportatio, and the Ordinatio) represent three occasions on which he lectured on the Sentences and then wrote down his lectures.
Medieval commentaries on the Sentences are organized around the topics, or “distinctions,” that Lombard thought were worthy of debate in the twelfth century, and while a commentator might write at length on the particular topics suggested by Lombard, for other topics, a modern reader needs to look in multiple places to fully understand the theologian’s point of view.
In the distinction devoted specifically to the topic of predestination, Scotus presents an argument that on the surface fits into the Augustinian tradition, which was dominant in Western theology during the Middle Ages: God elects some for predestination, independent of any merit on their part, while allowing others to fall into sin and merit damnation. What distinguishes Scotus’s perspective on the issue from that of earlier theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome is his theory of how God knows future contingent events: God knows future events because He wills them. In a way, this reinforces the Augustinian aspect of Scotus’s thought: some are predestined to salvation because God wills it, not because God foresees that they will live good lives and then wills to save them.
And yet, other aspects of Scotus’s theology don’t seem to mesh with this account of predestination. For one, as the contemporary Scotus scholar William A. Frank notes, Scotus’s insistence on “the radically indeterminist freedom of the created will” is “a hallmark of Scotistic thought.” In particular, Scotus consistently argues that human beings can freely choose to accept or refuse grace (in a way that Aquinas, for example, does not). How could such an “indeterminist” view of human freedom be consistent with an Augustinian account of predestination? Second, elsewhere Scotus argues that God provides each of us with the grace necessary for salvation (appealing to 1 Tim. 2:4, God “wills everyone to be saved”), which likewise is hard to reconcile with the view that God only elects some to salvation. Given the structure of his theological works (and perhaps also his untimely death), Scotus never resolves these apparent contradictions.
