Justified True Belief

(●) The Franciscan they called the Subtle Doctor, who argued that our words reach God without changing their meaning on the way. + A visitor to the Franciscan church in Cologne can still stand in front of a stone tomb with four short Latin sentences cut into it. They read, one after another: Scotland bore me. England received me. France taught me. Cologne holds me. Four countries in twelve words, and the man inside was dead at about forty-two. He worked in the narrow gap between two better-known names. Thomas Aquinas had died in 1274, when Scotus was a boy; William of Ockham was still a student when Scotus was buried. In those thirty-odd years a Scottish friar reopened the question that everything else in natural theology rests on. Natural theology is the attempt to reason toward God from what anyone can see, the world and the mind at work in it, without leaning on Scripture or on the authority of the church, and the question underneath the whole attempt is whether human language can say anything about God at all. If "good" means something wholly different when we apply it to God than when we apply it to a good neighbor, then every argument that climbs from the world up to its maker breaks somewhere in the middle, because the word we started with is not the word we finished with. Scotus said there is at least one concept that does not shift: being. That single move is why he is on a Christian apologetics site, and it is still argued over. The signature fact about him is what he left behind. He kept rewriting his masterwork, the Ordinatio, to the end of his life, and his students copied drafts on top of drafts, so that for six hundred years nobody could say with confidence which sentences were his. A commission of scholars in Rome began sorting it out in 1950 and finished the Ordinatio in 2013, fourteen volumes and sixty-three years later.

(●) c. 1266 AD: Born at Duns, a market town on the Scottish border, into a family already tied to the friars. + Almost nothing about his childhood is documented, which is normal for a thirteenth-century boy who was not born to land or a title. The name is the record: he came from Duns, in Berwickshire, close enough to England that the border wars of his lifetime would have been local news, and "Scotus" is simply the Latin for "the Scot," the tag his colleagues in Oxford and Paris used to tell him from every other John. A Franciscan tradition, written down long after the fact, says that an uncle named Elias Duns was a friar of the Scottish province and brought the boy into the order at Dumfries. It may well be true and there is no early evidence for it. What is certain is that he became a Franciscan, a member of the Order of Friars Minor founded by Francis of Assisi two generations earlier: men under vows of poverty who lived by begging and preaching rather than behind monastery walls, and who by Scotus’ day had become one of the two great teaching orders of Europe, alongside the Dominicans of Thomas Aquinas.

(●) 1291 AD: He was ordained priest at Northampton on 17 March, and that date is how anyone knows roughly when he was born. + This is the first hard date in his life, and it comes from a bishop’s administrative register rather than from anything he wrote. Oliver Sutton, bishop of Lincoln, ordained a group of men to the priesthood at St Andrew’s, Northampton, on 17 March 1291, and John Duns was among them. Now do the arithmetic the historians do. Church law required a man to be twenty-five before he could be ordained priest. So Scotus was born no later than March 1266. Bishop Sutton had held his previous ordination at Wycombe on 23 December 1290, and if Scotus was ordained at the first opportunity after his birthday, as an eager young friar probably would be, then he was still short of twenty-five that December and past it by the following March. His birthday falls in the gap between those two ceremonies: between 23 December 1265 and 17 March 1266. That is where the conventional date comes from, and it is a reconstruction rather than a record. The assumption that he was ordained as early as he possibly could be is reasonable and not certain, and some scholars now argue for 1263 or 1264 instead. By 1291 he had already been in the order’s schools for years. The Franciscans ran their own network of houses of study, and a promising student moved up it: grammar and logic, then philosophy, then theology at a university. The rules had him teach philosophy for a couple of years before he could read theology, and Cambridge seems to be where he did it. He was at Oxford reading theology by about 1290, though the order of those early years is reconstructed rather than recorded.

(●) 1298 AD: At Oxford he lectured through the standard theology textbook, and never stopped revising the notes. + Every medieval theologian earned his degree the same way: by lecturing his way through the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a Paris textbook of the 1150s that gathered the questions of the faith into four books, on God, on creation, on Christ, and on the sacraments and last things. Think of it as the syllabus that every candidate had to teach before he was allowed to teach anything else. Almost every great scholastic, meaning a teacher of the medieval schools who worked by putting a question, lining up the objections to it, and answering them in order, wrote his first major work as a commentary on it, and the shape of the Sentences is the reason so many medieval books have the same table of contents. Scotus gave his Oxford lectures in the academic year 1298 to 1299. The record of them survives as the Lectura, and by the summer of 1300 he had begun expanding and rewriting that material into a version meant for publication, the Ordinatio, which is the book his reputation rests on. He was still working on it eight years later. A second documentary sighting comes from 26 July 1300, when Hugh of Hartlepool, the provincial, meaning the friar who governed the order’s whole English province, presented twenty-two Oxford friars to John Dalderby, bishop of Lincoln, for licences to hear confessions. John Duns was one of the names on the list. The bishop thought twenty-two a great many licences for a single church, granted eight of them, and Duns was not among the eight.

(●) 1303 AD: He refused to sign the French king’s appeal against the pope, and was given days to leave France. + In the autumn of 1302 the Franciscan minister general, the head of the whole order, sent him to Paris, the most important theology faculty in Europe, to lecture on the Sentences again to a harder audience. Within a year he was walking out of the city. King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII had been at war with each other, on paper, for years, over taxes on church property and over who could judge a bishop. In June 1303 Philip escalated: he demanded a general council, a full assembly of the church’s bishops, to sit in judgment on the pope and depose him, and he sent royal agents around Paris collecting signatures for the appeal. On 25 June they came to the Franciscan convent and put the question to the friars one by one. Eighty-four signed for the king, most of them Frenchmen. Eighty-seven refused, most of them foreigners, and the surviving list has John Duns Scotus among them. Those who refused were ordered out of the kingdom within three days. He was a foreigner with no patron, choosing exile over a signature, and he was in his late thirties with his career half built. Where he spent the next months is simply not known; Oxford and Cambridge are the usual guesses. Boniface died that October, the quarrel cooled with a new pope, and by the spring of 1304 the exiles were allowed back.

(●) 1305 AD: Back in Paris he took the Franciscan chair of theology, the highest teaching post his order had to give. + On 18 November 1304 the minister general of the Franciscans, Gonsalvus of Spain, wrote to the Paris house naming the man he wanted in the order’s next chair of theology. The letter praises his candidate for a praiseworthy life, outstanding learning, and a most subtle mind, and says that his reputation had already spread everywhere. The candidate was Scotus, and the word Gonsalvus used of his mind, subtilissimum, is the same word that became his title: Doctor Subtilis, the Subtle Doctor. He became master of theology in 1305 and regent master, the working head of the Franciscan school at Paris, in the following academic year. In that role he held a quodlibet, a public disputation held once or twice a year in which anyone present could raise any question at all, on any subject, and the master had to answer on the spot and then write up his replies. It was the medieval equivalent of an open floor with no prepared script, and it was where a teacher’s reputation was made or lost. Scotus held one, probably in Advent 1306 or Lent 1307, and the twenty-one questions that came out of it are among the most polished things he wrote.

(●) 1307 AD: At the height of his powers his order moved him from Paris to its house of studies at Cologne. + At the height of his powers, holding the best chair his order could offer, he was transferred. The Franciscans had a studium generale at Cologne, a house of studies open to friars from every province, and Scotus was sent there as its lector, its teaching master. Moving a master on after his year in the Paris chair was ordinary Franciscan practice, and the teaching at Cologne stood to gain by it, which is as much as the records will bear. Why a man is moved at forty is rarely recorded in full, and the guesses that have been offered about court politics are guesses. What the order did was ordinary for the order: a Franciscan went where he was sent, and the school at Cologne was a serious place, the same city where Albert the Great had taught Thomas Aquinas half a century before. He kept working on the Ordinatio the whole time.

(●) 1308 AD: He died on 8 November at about forty-two, with his masterwork still unfinished. + He had been in Cologne about a year. He was buried in the Franciscan church there, the Minoritenkirche, where his tomb still is, under the four-part epitaph: Scotia me genuit. Anglia me suscepit. Gallia me docuit. Colonia me tenet. A later legend says he was buried alive and found afterwards to have turned in his coffin. It is a story with no early evidence behind it, of a kind that attached itself to more than one famous corpse, and it belongs in the file of things people said rather than things that happened. What he actually left was a mess and a monument. The Ordinatio broke off unrevised in places, and his students had to patch the gaps from other sets of his lectures, which is exactly how the confusion about his text began. Devotion to him at Cologne never lapsed, and centuries later it was formally recognised. Pope John Paul II beatified him on 20 March 1993, beatification being the step short of canonisation, an official declaration that a man may be publicly honoured as blessed. The pope called him the minstrel of the Incarnate Word and the defender of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. His feast is kept on 8 November, the day he died.

What He Taught

(T1) The word "being" means the same thing when we say it of God and when we say it of a stone. + A doctor tells you the medicine is strong. Your friend says the coffee at the new place is strong. Nobody is confused, and nobody thinks the two sentences are saying quite the same thing either. The word has slid a little between the two mouths, and everyday speech runs on that kind of sliding all day long. Medieval theologians thought God-talk worked the same way, and they had a good reason. If you say a man is wise and then say God is wise, you cannot mean it identically, because a man has wisdom the way a jar has water, as a quality poured into something that could have been without it, and God does not have wisdom, he is it. So the tradition said that our words apply to God analogically: in a related sense, stretched but not snapped. Aquinas taught this, and Henry of Ghent, the leading Paris theologian of Scotus’ youth, taught a version of it too. Scotus saw a problem that will not go away. Any proof of God works by taking a word from the world we know and carrying it upward. Things around here are caused, therefore there is a first cause. But if "cause" changes its sense somewhere between the premise and the conclusion, the proof commits the oldest mistake in logic, the fallacy of equivocation: using one word in two senses inside a single argument, the way a bad joke argues that a feather is light, and what is light cannot be dark, so a feather cannot be dark. Slide the meaning and the conclusion is about nothing. His answer was to find the thinnest possible foothold. There is at least one concept, he said, that does not slide: being, bare existence, taken with no size attached. It is said of God and of a stone in exactly the same sense, which is what univocal means, one voice. Everything else that separates them piles on top of that concept afterwards: infinite being against finite being, necessary against contingent. And he was careful about what he was not saying. God and creatures, he wrote in the Ordinatio, are in reality wholly diverse and agree in no reality whatever; they agree in one concept, and a concept is something our minds form, not a thing God and the stone both carry around. Christians have argued about this ever since, and the argument is a real one on both sides. Thomists, meaning the school that follows Aquinas, say the move flattens the distance between the creator and the creature, and puts God on the same shelf as everything else, one more item in a category called "things that exist." Scotists answer, for their part, that no distance is flattened, because the concept is thin to the point of emptiness until you add infinity to it, and that without some such foothold natural theology cannot even begin: an argument whose words mean something different at the end than at the start has not arrived anywhere.

(Q) "And so that there may be no quarrel about the word univocation, I call a concept univocal when its unity is such that to affirm and to deny it of the same thing is enough to make a contradiction, and enough also to serve as the middle term of a syllogism." + Source: John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio I, distinction 3, part 1, questions 1 to 2, n. 26 (Vatican critical edition, volume III; translated from the Latin). He is defining his terms before the fight starts, and the definition is doing real work. A concept counts as univocal, he says, if it is stable enough to break under contradiction and to hold up in a syllogism. That is not a claim about how words feel. It is a claim about whether an argument can be run through them (T2).

(T2) God’s existence can be proved from what is merely possible, without appealing to anything that happens to exist. + Suppose you set out to prove there is a first cause, and you begin by pointing at the mug on the table. The mug is caused, you say, and so on back, and eventually you reach something uncaused. A determined objector has an easy first move: is the mug really there? Are you sure the causal story runs the way you think? Every proof that starts from a particular fact about the world can be attacked at the fact. Scotus went underneath that. He built his proof out of possibility instead, which is a claim nobody can knock over by doubting the mug. It is possible for something to be produced. That is true whether or not anything ever actually is. From there he works in three orders of dependence at once, and the vocabulary is worth having. There is efficient causality, what makes a thing; final causality, what it is for; and eminence, how much perfection a thing has compared to another. In each order he argues that the chain cannot run backwards forever. The key move here is a distinction between two kinds of causal series. In an accidentally ordered series, each cause acts and then can drop out: a grandfather begets a father who begets a son, and the grandfather can be long dead. In an essentially ordered series, every cause has to be acting right now for the effect to happen, the way your hand moves a stick that moves a stone. Take the hand away and the stone stops immediately. Scotus argues that a series of that second sort cannot be infinite, because the whole series depends on something outside it for the causing to be going on at all. Notice what has been claimed so far and what has not. None of it needed the mug, or any other thing that happens to be lying about: if it is possible for something to be produced, and a chain of that second sort cannot run backwards forever, then it is possible that there is a first producer. So a first producer is at least possible. And here is the step the whole proof turns on. A first producer, by definition, does not depend on anything else for its existence, so nothing could bring it about. If it is merely possible and never actual, then its possibility can never be cashed, because there is nothing that could cash it. Therefore, if a first producer is possible at all, it is actual. Then he shows the three primacies land on one and the same nature, that this nature is infinite, and that there can be only one of it. It is long, and the length is deliberate: De Primo Principio is a chain of numbered propositions, each leaning on the last, more like a geometry book than a sermon. Two things are worth noticing about it. It is as rigorous a piece of natural theology as the Middle Ages produced, and its final step, that a necessary being which is possible must be real, is the same step that Anselm had reached for two centuries earlier and that twentieth-century philosophers rebuilt with the formal tools of modal logic, the logic of what is possible and what is necessary. Scotus is a hinge in that story rather than a footnote to it.

(Q) "May the First Principle of things grant me to believe, to understand, and to bring forth what may please his majesty and may raise our minds to contemplate him." + Source: John Duns Scotus, De Primo Principio, chapter 1, opening line (translated from the Latin; the sentence is short and literal enough that this rendering runs close to Allan Wolter’s in A Treatise on God as First Principle, 1966, which is the standard English version). The most technical proof of God in the Middle Ages opens with a prayer, and the prayer is addressed to the conclusion. He is asking the First Principle for help in demonstrating the First Principle, which tells you what he thought he was doing: not building God out of premises, but tracing with argument a road he was already walking (T2).

(T3) What makes you this person rather than another is something positive in you, not the matter you happen to be made of. + Take two brand-new coins off the same press: same metal, same design, same weight to the milligram. They are not one coin. So what makes this one this one? The question sounds like a schoolroom puzzle and it is not. It is the question of what an individual is, and every answer to it carries a view of what a person is worth. The medievals called it the problem of individuation, and the standard answers were all subtractive. Aquinas said that matter, marked out by having this much bulk in this place, is what divides one member of a species from another. Others said an individual is a bundle of accidents, the particular height and colour and history that happen to have collected in one spot. Others said individuality is just a negation: being this thing is being not-any-of-the-others. Scotus rejected all three, and his reason is the interesting part. Being an individual, he said, is a perfection, something more rather than something less; and negations do not make anything, and a heap of accidents is not what you love when you love a person. There has to be something positive in the thing itself that makes it just this one, a final reality added to the common nature the way a specific difference is added to a genus. He calls it in the Ordinatio the ultimate reality of the being. The name it is known by, haecceity, from the Latin haecceitas, "thisness," is his own coinage, though he uses it sparingly and never once in the work he prepared for publication. The payoff is not a technicality. If individuality is positive, then the individual is not a smudged copy of a type, and a person is not a specimen of humanity that God happens to be keeping track of. God makes and knows and loves this one. "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb" (Psalm 139:13). It is the same instinct that makes the resurrection of the body a promise about you rather than about human nature in general, and it is why a poet six centuries later, looking for words for why a bluebell or a face is unrepeatable, went to Scotus and found them.

(Q) "This entity, therefore, is not matter or form or the composite, insofar as each of these is a nature, but it is the ultimate reality of the being which is matter or which is form or which is the composite." + Source: John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, distinction 3, part 1, question 6, n. 188 (Vatican critical edition, volume VII; translated from the Latin). He is refusing every ready-made answer in one sentence. Whatever makes this thing this thing is not the stuff, not the shape, not the two together considered as a kind. It is the last thing true of it, the point past which no further division is possible (T3).

(T4) The will is free because it can love a thing for its own sake instead of for what the thing does for us. + A man visits his wife in a nursing home every afternoon for three years, and for the last two of them she has not known who he is. Ask him why and he will not have a good answer ready. He is not getting anything out of it in any sense he could put on a form. He goes because she is his wife. Most of the philosophical tradition Scotus inherited had trouble with that man. For Aristotle, and broadly for Aquinas, the will is a rational appetite: show the mind a greater good and the will follows, the way water finds the lower ground. On that picture, freedom is real, but it lives mostly in the intellect’s ability to consider things from more than one angle. Scotus thought this made the will a machine with a good sensor. A nature, he says, acts one way and cannot do otherwise: fire heats, and that is all fire does. The will is the one thing in creation that is not a nature in that sense. Hold everything fixed, the same knowledge, the same circumstances, the same instant, and it could still have gone the other way. To explain how, he took a distinction from Anselm of Canterbury and made it central. The will has two affections, two built-in inclinations. The affection for the advantageous (affectio commodi) wants what is good for me: food, safety, happiness, being loved. The affection for justice (affectio iustitiae) wants a thing because the thing is worth wanting, whether or not it does me any good. Neither is sin. The first one is how creatures are made, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. The trouble starts when the first has nothing above it, because a will with only the appetite for its own advantage is not choosing, it is being pulled. The affection for justice is what lets a creature stop, and that capacity to stop, Scotus says, is the freedom born into the will. Two consequences follow, and they mark the place where he and Aquinas divide most clearly. Theology, for Scotus, is a practical science and not mainly a contemplative one: its end is not knowing God but loving him. And the happiness of heaven is essentially an act of love rather than essentially an act of sight. Aquinas put beatitude, the finished happiness of the blessed, in the intellect’s vision of God, with love following; Scotus put it in the will’s embrace, with vision as its condition. Both are describing the same heaven from different sides, and Christians have taken both roads without leaving the faith. It is worth adding, because his name is often attached to the charge, that Scotus does not make the will a blind chooser: for him a free act comes from the intellect and the will working together, and nothing is chosen that is not first understood. "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13). Scotus read that as a statement about the structure of things, and built accordingly.

(Q) "That affection for justice, then, which is the first moderator of the affection for the advantageous ... that affection for justice, I say, is the freedom born in the will." + Source: John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio II, distinction 6, question 2 (Vatican critical edition, volume VIII; translated from the Latin). The clauses the ellipsis covers spell out in what two respects the one affection moderates the other. The setting is the fall of Lucifer, which the schoolmen used as the test case for what went wrong in a will that had everything. Scotus’ answer is that nothing was added; something was left unmoderated. An appetite for one’s own advantage with nothing above it is exactly what a fallen angel is (T4).

(T5) Christ was God’s first intention, not a repair ordered after the fall. + There is a difference between a couple who have a child because they wanted a child and a couple who have one hoping it will hold a marriage together. The child is loved either way. But the two families are not built the same, because in one of them the child is the point and in the other the child is the fix. Ask the question of the Incarnation and you have the debate Scotus walked into. The standard answer, given its classic form by Anselm of Canterbury in Why God Became Man, is that the Son took flesh in order to pay a debt no one else could pay. Aquinas handled it carefully: reason cannot settle what God would have done in a world without sin, but Scripture presents the Incarnation as the remedy for sin, so it is fitting to say that if man had not sinned, God would not have become man. Scotus said no, and his reason is a rule about how anyone wills anything. When you will in an orderly way, you will the end first and the means afterwards. A man who wants to be a doctor buys the textbook because he wants to be a doctor; nobody wants the textbook first. Now, the greatest thing God does in creation is to unite a created nature to himself in the person of the Son. That is the summit. And a summit is not something you reach by accident on the way to cleaning up a mess. So in the order of God’s intention, Christ comes first, before any thought of sin at all, and the world is made for him rather than him for the world’s repair. The cross is then God’s answer to a wound that did in fact happen, and the saving work is exactly as real and as costly as the tradition has always said. What moves is the order of intention, not the content of the gospel. He is reading Paul closely here. "For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him" (Colossians 1:16), and the church is chosen in him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). Christians have divided on this since, and it stays inside the family: nobody on either side doubts that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). The question is only whether salvation was the reason for the coming or the first work of a coming already willed. Scotus did not invent the answer he gives; Rupert of Deutz and Robert Grosseteste had reached for something like it before him. He is the one who turned it into an argument, and it has carried his name ever since.

(Q) "I say that the fall was not the cause of Christ’s predestination; indeed, even if no angel had fallen and no man, Christ would still have been predestined in this way." + Source: John Duns Scotus, Reportata Parisiensia III, distinction 7, question 4 (translated from the Latin). The Reportata are the students’ record of his Paris lectures. The Ordinatio argues the same case at book III, distinction 7, question 3, but the sentence itself belongs to the Paris report. Predestination, in that sentence, means God’s prior decision about what he would do, settled before anything was made. And the "even if" is a counterfactual, a claim about how matters would have stood had the world run some other way. This one is deliberately extreme, and that is the point. Take away the fall of the angels and the fall of man, every occasion for mercy the story has, and the one thing God had in mind is still there. Whatever else Christ is for, Scotus is saying, he is not a contingency plan (T5).

(Q) "Mary had the greatest need of Christ as Redeemer, for she would have contracted original sin by reason of her descent unless this had been prevented by the grace of a Mediator." + Source: John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III, distinction 3, question 1, n. 14, in the rendering given by Berard Vogt, Duns Scotus, Defender of the Immaculate Conception (Paterson: St Anthony Guild Press, 1955), page 16. Everything he argued about Mary sits on the sentence’s hinge: she needed a redeemer more than anyone, not less. The claim was never that she stood outside the rescue. It was that the rescue reached her first, and that being caught before the fall is a deeper debt than being lifted after it. What the church did with that argument took another five and a half centuries.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Franciscans made him their master, and for four centuries a theologian was either a Thomist or a Scotist. + Within a generation of his death his pupils and followers were teaching him: Antonius Andreas in Spain, Francis of Meyronnes in Provence, William of Alnwick in England. Within two centuries the split had hardened into institutions. Universities appointed separate chairs, one for the way of Thomas and one for the way of Scotus; when Cardinal Cisneros opened Alcalá in 1508 he endowed a Scotist chair and a Nominalist chair, that last one for the school which treated the natures things have in common as names our minds supply rather than as anything real in the things, alongside the Thomist one, and a student picked a side the way a student today picks a supervisor. William of Ockham, the next great Franciscan, argues against him constantly and does it with tools Scotus had made, which is the surest sign of a teacher who has set the terms. The other half of the reception is less flattering and belongs in the record. When the humanists of the early sixteenth century, the scholars of the new learning who wanted the ancient authors read whole and in good Latin, went to war on scholastic method, they picked Scotus as the type of everything they hated: endless distinctions, technical Latin, arguments that split hairs and never landed. By the 1520s his followers were being jeered at as Dunses, after his birthplace, and the word meant an obstinate hair-splitter who would not hear of the new learning. Two generations later it had slid into the word English still has for a man who cannot learn at all. The word is dunce. It is the strangest afterlife any philosopher has had, and it says a good deal more about the temper of the sixteenth century than about the quality of his mind. The twentieth century put him back. The Scotistic Commission’s critical edition, begun in 1950, finally made it possible to read what he actually wrote rather than what six centuries of copyists had assembled, and philosophers working in logic and metaphysics found in him a technical precision they recognised. Pope Benedict XVI devoted a general audience to him in July 2010, calling him a theologian whose Christ is the centre of history and of the cosmos.

(†) The Catholic Church came round to his argument about Mary, and defined it as doctrine five and a half centuries later. + The Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary was preserved from original sin from the first instant of her existence. Original sin is the fallen condition a person is born into rather than one he chooses, the inheritance every child of Adam arrives with. In Scotus’ day it was a minority opinion under heavy fire, and the fire came from the best people. Bernard of Clairvaux had written against the feast. Aquinas held that Mary was sanctified in the womb, after her conception, and his reason was one nobody could wave away: if she never contracted original sin, then she was never redeemed, and Scripture leaves no one outside the need for a redeemer. All have sinned (Romans 3:23), and Mary herself sings that her spirit rejoices in God her Savior (Luke 1:47). Scotus answered on exactly that ground. The most perfect mediator, he argued, performs the most perfect act of mediating for at least one person; and the most perfect act is not to lift someone out of the pit but to catch them before they fall. Anyone would rather be kept from an injury than treated for one, and the person kept from it owes more to their rescuer, not less. So Mary is redeemed in the highest way redemption can work, by prevention rather than by cure, and every word of Luke 1:47 stands: God is her Savior, and saving her cost him the same cross. The argument won slowly. The Franciscan pope Sixtus IV approved the feast and its office in 1477, and in 1483 he forbade either party to the quarrel to charge the other with heresy, which was as far as a pope was then willing to go. From 1497 the University of Paris required an oath to defend the doctrine from every candidate for a degree. The Council of Trent, in its decree on original sin in 1546, went out of its way to say it did not intend to include Mary in that decree. Pope Pius IX defined the doctrine for Catholics in 1854, and when John Paul II beatified Scotus in 1993 he named the defence of the Immaculate Conception as one of the two things he was known for. Most Protestant Christians do not hold the doctrine, on the ground that Scripture neither teaches it nor needs it, and the disagreement is old and honest. What is worth carrying away from Scotus even by those who reject the conclusion is the principle underneath it, which no Christian disputes: that prevention is a greater mercy than cure, and that the grace which keeps a person from falling is the same grace that picks one up.

(†) A Victorian Jesuit poet found in him the word he had been hunting for. + In 1872 a young Jesuit named Gerard Manley Hopkins, in the middle of his philosophy course at Stonyhurst, got hold of a copy of Scotus on the Sentences in the Baddely library there and, as he wrote in his journal that August, was flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm. He had been trying for years to name something he kept noticing: that a bluebell, a windhover, a face in a crowd each has a particular pattern of being itself, unrepeatable, and that catching it feels like being handed something. He called it inscape. In Scotus’ account of individuality he found a philosopher who had already argued for it, and that summer, he wrote, when he took in any inscape of the sky or sea he thought of Scotus. Hopkins wrote him a sonnet, "Duns Scotus’s Oxford," which calls him the rarest-veined unraveller of reality and remembers that he fired France for Mary without spot. It is a small thing and a telling one: a doctrine that had been buried in technical Latin for five hundred years turned out to be about why a kingfisher catching fire is worth looking at. He surfaces in odd places after that. Charles Sanders Peirce, the American logician, borrowed "haecceity" as a term of art and kept it. Martin Heidegger’s habilitation thesis of 1915 was built in part on a treatise of speculative grammar then attributed to Scotus, though the treatise turned out to belong to Thomas of Erfurt instead, which is a fair sample of how tangled the corpus was before the critical edition sorted it. The influence is genuine even where the attribution was not.

(†) Where his own record will not bear defending: a God who could suspend the second tablet, and baptism forced on Jewish children. + Two things in his own writing deserve to be stated plainly rather than left to a footnote. - The second tablet. Scotus distinguished the two halves of the Ten Commandments (Ordinatio III, distinction 37). Two words have to be pinned down first. The natural law, in the sense the schoolmen used, is the part of morality built into what things are, so that a person can reason his way to it instead of having to be told it; and to dispense from a command is to release someone from having to keep it in a particular case, the way a rule can be lifted for one man on one day without being repealed. The first tablet, the commands about God himself, belongs to the natural law in the strictest sense, because its propositions are true from their terms alone, and not even God could dispense from it. The third commandment he was less sure of, since fixing a particular day for worship is not a truth of that kind. The second tablet, the commands about our neighbour, he held to be exceedingly in harmony with the natural law but not strictly deducible from it, and God can dispense from those. His reason was not invented: Scripture itself records the hard cases, Abraham told to offer Isaac (Genesis 22:2), Hosea told to take an unfaithful wife (Hosea 1:2), Israel told to plunder the Egyptians on the way out (Exodus 12:35–36), and any theologian has to say something about them. The objection is that his answer proves too much. If "you shall not murder" holds because God has decided it holds for now, the command has been made a standing order rather than a truth about what human beings are, and the Thomist reading, that the second tablet follows from human nature itself and is written on the conscience (Romans 2:14–15), keeps more of what Scripture says about the law. He is not, for all that, the moral arbitrarian he is sometimes made out to be, the sort of thinker who makes right and wrong nothing but God’s bare say-so, since for him God cannot will against himself and the second tablet is far from random. He still leaves the floor less solid than it needs to be. - Forced baptism. In the fourth book of the Ordinatio (distinction 4, question 9) he asks whether the children of Jews and unbelievers may be baptised against their parents’ will, and answers that a private person may not, but a ruler not only may but ought to, taking the children out of the hands of parents who would raise them against the worship of God. The parents’ authority over their children, he argues, gives way to God’s higher claim, as a local magistrate’s authority gives way to a king’s. Aquinas had faced the same question twice and answered the other way both times (Summa Theologiae III, question 68, article 10, and II-II, question 10, article 12), on the ground that it violates natural justice to take a child from the custody of its parents before it can choose for itself. Aquinas was right and Scotus was wrong, and the wrongness is not a matter of hindsight: the better answer was on the table in his own century, in a book he had read. It is also of a piece with the failure above, since a command that binds only while God does not dispense is easier to set aside than a command written into what a person is. He was a working friar who died young in a hard century, and the same instinct runs through both his best work and his worst: a conviction that God’s will is free and unforced. Applied to the Incarnation it produced something the church has treasured. Applied to a Jewish family in a German town it produced a page his admirers have to own.