John Duns Scotus · Theology
Scotus’s foundational claim that <em>being</em> (ens) is said in one and the same sense of God and creatures - not merely by analogy - because otherwise no concept we form could ever reach across to God at all. It is the ground of his natural theology.
John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan master the medievals called the Doctor Subtilis (the Subtle Doctor), began his natural theology from a worry about words. Every concept we possess is drawn from creatures - from the finite things our senses meet. So when we say ‘God exists’ or ‘God is wise,’ what do those words mean? Thomas Aquinas had answered: they are used analogically, neither in the very same sense they bear for creatures nor in a wholly unrelated sense, but by a proportion between Creator and creature. Scotus pressed on this answer with a hard question. If the concept being shifts even slightly in meaning as it passes from creatures to God, then the concept we started with is not the concept we end with, and our thought never actually arrives at God - it reaches only a creaturely shadow. To secure any natural knowledge of God at all, Scotus argued, there must be at least one concept, being itself, that is univocal: one and the same in meaning for God and creatures alike.
Scotus gave a precise argument that we do possess such a univocal concept. Imagine a thinker who is certain that God is a being, yet doubtful whether God is a finite or an infinite being. The certainty and the doubt cannot have the very same object, or they would cancel out. So the concept the thinker is certain of - being - must be one concept, distinct from and common to both ‘finite being’ and ‘infinite being.’ That common concept is univocal. Scotus fixed the notion with a razor-sharp definition: a concept is univocal when it is so one that to affirm and deny it of the same thing would be a flat contradiction, and when it can serve as the middle term of a valid syllogism without the fallacy of equivocation. If ‘being’ failed this test, then every argument that moves from creatures to God would secretly equivocate, and natural theology would be a chain of puns.
How does Scotus keep God transcendent if ‘being’ means the same for God and a gnat? Through the idea of an intrinsic mode. The concept being is univocal and common; but it is contracted to God by the mode infinite and to creatures by the mode finite, the way one concept ‘white’ is intensified into ‘brilliant white’ or dimmed into ‘pale white’ without ceasing to be whiteness. ‘Infinite being’ is thus Scotus’s most proper concept of God: not being of a different kind, but being at its unqualified maximum. This is why univocity does not flatten God into one more item in the world. God and the creature share the concept being, but they are separated by the infinite distance between the two modes - a distance as great as any analogy could want, yet spanned by a concept the mind can actually hold. The word reaches God; the mode marks how far above us he remains.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Scotus, against Aquinas’s analogy of being, held that being is predicated univocally (in one sense) of God and creatures, and that his test for a univocal concept is that its unity suffices for a contradiction. Explain why he thought only univocity secures our ability to think and speak about God.
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
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