John Duns Scotus · Theology
Scotus’s voluntarism - the will, not the intellect, is the highest and freest power; it is self-determining, able to choose otherwise even given the intellect’s judgment; the created moral order is contingent on God’s will; and the love of God for his own sake is the noblest of all acts.
Medieval thinkers agreed that the human soul has two great rational powers: the intellect, which knows, and the will, which loves and chooses. But which is higher, and which is the seat of our freedom? Thomas Aquinas and the intellectualist tradition gave the primacy to the intellect: the will is a ‘rational appetite’ that naturally follows the intellect’s judgment about what is good; we choose what reason presents as best, and freedom lies chiefly in the mind’s power to weigh alternatives. Scotus disagreed, and made the will primary. For him the will is not a follower but a self-mover: it is the one power in us that is not determined by anything outside itself - not by objects, not by the passions, and crucially not even by the intellect’s verdict. The intellect advises; the will decides. This is Scotus’s voluntarism, and it reorders the whole soul - putting the free, loving will, not the calculating intellect, at the summit of the human person.
Scotus locates freedom not in deliberation but in the will’s own structure. Every other power in nature, he observes, is determined to a single outcome: fire heats, an eye given light sees, the intellect given a proof assents. These are ‘natures’ - they act to the limit of their power in one fixed way. The will is unique in being a free power, one that even when all the conditions for acting are in place is not thereby necessitated to act, nor to act this way rather than that. Present the will with a good, and it can accept or refuse; present it with two goods, and it can take either. This is not caprice: the will acts for reasons, in the light of the intellect’s judgment. But the judgment does not settle the act; the will settles it, and could have settled it otherwise. Freedom, for Scotus, just is this rooted power for opposites - the capacity, right up to the moment of choice and even in it, to have done the other thing. Take that away, make the will follow the strongest reason automatically, and you have not explained freedom but abolished it.
Scotus deepens his account by taking up a distinction from Anselm: the will has two basic inclinations or ‘affections.’ One is the affectio commodi, the affection for the advantageous - the drive toward what benefits me, my own happiness and fulfilment. This we share with every appetite; by itself it is a kind of natural gravity toward one’s own good, and a will governed only by it would be, in effect, determined, always grasping at its own advantage. The other is the affectio iustitiae, the affection for justice - the capacity to love a thing for its own worth, to will what is good in itself even when it brings me no advantage, even against my own interest. This second affection, Scotus says, is the very root of freedom, the ‘innate liberty’ of the will, because it frees the will from the tyranny of self-seeking and lets it love things according to their real value. Its supreme exercise is to love God for God’s own sake - not for the reward or beatitude God brings me, but because God is worthy of love in himself. That disinterested love, for Scotus, is the highest and freest act a creature can perform.
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 the intellectualism of Aquinas, held the will to be the superior and genuinely self-determining power - a rational appetite with a two-way freedom - and that he distinguished the affection for advantage from the affection for justice, making free, disinterested love of God the highest…
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
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