My understanding of Scotus and his historical significance might be headed for a major shift.
This kind of change of mind is not unprecedented. I used to read Kant and Hegel’s valorizations of freedom as sophisticated apologetics for some kind of voluntarism. But across many posts, we have seen that better readings of Kant and Hegel can eliminate such worries (see especially Hegel on Willing.) Very recently, I’ve been starting to wonder if what by general consensus is called the “voluntarism” of Scotus might also be read in some other way.
What is called “voluntarism” in the Latin theological tradition has to do with a relatively narrow debate about the priority of “will” and intellect. The will involved in this case is not any definite will, but rather an alleged power of free decision, where “free” is supposed to mean completely unconstrained. Theologians have often wanted to deny that God was subject to any constraint. But is it “constraint” to recognize the better reason? I think not, and many theologians seem also to agree.
Then too, in a scholastic context, those who like Aquinas are called “intellectualist” rather than voluntarist also defended the existence of liberum arbitrium, which technically includes a so-called “freedom” to cleave to the worse reason, or to any arbitrary fancy. But a common argument, also repeated in many variations, is that God’s “absolute” freedom — in effect a freedom to choose the worse — is never really exercised. There is still intense disagreement on this non-exercise means, as also occurs in the debate on absolute versus ordained power.
The pragmatist might advise us that a power that is never exercised does not in any meaningful sense exist. But as we have seen recently, Charles Pierce, the originator of pragmatism, vigorously rejected the reduction of reality to facts. Reality for Pierce is characterized by true — and in principle testable — conditional statements about what “would be” the case if this or that.
Aristotelian potentiality and actuality are often misread as power and fact, which completely loses the valuational significance that they acquire over the course of the argument of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Pierce too seems to follow this diminished reading. But this does not prevent him from making the valid point that scholastic talk about “powers” already goes beyond talk about present fact. In this way it is a good thing, even if (as I would add) it is also deeply tied to non-Aristotelian assumptions about the predominance of “efficient” causality.
Scotus does seem to argue that God in a supernatural way really exercises both absolute power and absolute freedom, and that humans making practical decisions do also in fact exercise absolute freedom. But in recognizing that he makes these claims, we still have to consider what these assertions mean in the total context of his thought, and what other countervailing tendencies there may be that need to be taken into account.
In the case of Aquinas, in spite of many divergences from Aristotle on important points, there is still a substantial extent to which he also defends many good Aristotelian positions that have been sharply contested by some conservative theologians. Overall I think Aquinas played a progressive historical role, by inventing and promoting an Aristotle whose texts mainstream opinion in the Church could allow to be read sympathetically, and thus no longer felt the need to ban. This is in spite of my disagreement on numerous matters of interpretation. Augustine has of course never been mistaken for an Aristotelian, but he too played a historically progressive role by taking philosophical thought seriously and making it theologically respectable.
These achievements of broad respectability — for Aristotle, and/or for philosophy in general — had the immense value of leaving open the possibility that others could read the philosophical texts in an even more sympathetic way. I therefore tend to read Aquinas (and scholasticism in general) in a sympathetic way, even though I harp on various matters of interpretation.
I have been feeling the deep irony that some of what I write nowadays, if taken out of context, could be misunderstood as professing a kind of dogmatic Aristotelianism. While I have always regarded Aristotle’s works with interest and sympathy, the degree of that sympathy and the strength of that interest have increased greatly over the years, as I have gradually overcome prejudicial judgments that I had too uncritically accepted, from the contemporary world’s widely diffused bias against Aristotle.
In any case, from my recent investigations it is beginning to appear that Scotus’s actual writings touching on ethics and natural-philosophical topics do not really at all sound like the working out of the consequences of a radical voluntarism. I do still think that Scotus’s theory of synchronic contingency — as it has been called in recent years — goes way too far in opposing the determinist bias attributed to the Arabic Aristotelians. But the most substantial account yet available of Scotus’s general attitude toward Aristotelian natural philosophy — Richard Cross’s The Physics of Duns Scotus (1999) — says in the front matter that when addressing natural-philosophical questions, Scotus never primarily relies on theological arguments, but only uses them in a secondary and corroborating way. This is actually true of many of the scholastics.
There is a new collection of Scotus’s ethical writings (Williams 2017), which seems to have largely superseded the Wolter 1996 collection mentioned recently. The most substantial secondary work on Scotus’s ethics seems to be Mary Beth Ingham, The Harmony of Goodness: Mutuality and Moral Living According to John Duns Scotus (1996; 2nd ed. 2012). She speaks of Scotus’s “moral vision of relational love and generous living” (p. 7) as rooted in a broader Franciscan emphasis on the beauty of Creation. In her view, Scotist ethics develops and builds on a Franciscan theological aesthetics. Ingham’s account opens up perspectives on Scotus’s ethics that seem far closer to the ethical themes in Aristotle and Hegel than I ever expected,
The case for the existence and importance of such a Franciscan theological aesthetics gains additional support from The Beauty of the Trinity: A reading of the Summa Halensis (2022) by Justin Coyle. He argues that the main document of early Franciscan theology gives beauty a central place in its account of the Trinity that has been little recognized. Schumacher and Bychkow’s A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis (also 2022) translates selections from this same work, which had multiple authors, the most prominent of whom were Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) and John of La Rochelle (also d. 1245). Along with Roger Bacon, Alexander and John are the most prominent of the Franciscan predecessors of Scotus, whom Boulnois partially credits for some of the innovations that have been attributed solely to Scotus.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 