A Babel of Pure Speech: When Nominalism Changed Theology (The Heart of My Thesis, Part One)

Duns Scotus, reacting to the formulation of analogy proffered by Henry of Ghent, perceived that analogy actually turned into equivocation unless there was a univocal point of reference shared by both sides of an analogy.  So to speak, if Socrates:wise::God:wise as an analogy is to work (for example), we must know how wise is used on both sides of the ratio if we are to avoid falling into agnosticism; “on such an account,” writes David Burrell describing Scotus’ view, “we dare not vacillate about our ability to be clear … for everything else hangs on it.”[1]  In his Opus Oxoniense, Scotus identifies the univocal element as esse (being) which is said to be the same in both God and creatures: “for it is impossible that the same thing be and not be at the same time.”[2] Thus, following the Muslim philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Scotus notes that the first object of the mind is “being qua being.”[3]  While being is not in and of itself susceptible of a definition, since it is basic, it must, for Scotus “possess sufficient unity in itself so that to affirm and deny of it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction,” and so “being” becomes stable enough “to serve as the middle term of a syllogism.”[4]  “Being,” as such grounds the science of analogical inquiry for Scotus, because if to be is not univocal, then no concept will be, and we fall into agnosticism about God.[5] 

In other words, Scotus secures a common term in esse by noting that all things “are” in the same way; this fundamentally “exteriorizes” the act of existence from the essence of the existent thing.  As such “to exist as x” does not modify the notion of existence per the identity of the “x” (as it does in Aquinas and Augustine, where “to be God” and “to be creature” modifies the sense of “to be”); rather essences (goodness, truth, beauty, strength, etc. …) constitute a realm of a priori logical order not modified by actuality, and which can now serve as stable terms across acts of existence—even if that existence is in the mode of infinity, as Scotus claims of God.  When God is good, and man is good, good stands firm across the gulf of the modalities of infinite and finite being, as its essence is not modified. 

By this account, however, Scotus does not critique Aquinas’ concept of analogy, so much as dissolves its logic.[6]  In the attempt to secure analogy through a univocal common term in the ratio of any analogy attempting to speak of God, Scotus circumvents the fact that for Aquinas—much as for Augustine despite his own differences from the Angelic Doctor—analogy works because God as Creator bestows upon us a participation in His own act of existence, and more specifically, God the Son has become incarnate in Christ.  To be sure, the terms of reference Scotus speaks of as univocal are precisely those given in revelation; what is different is that the process of understanding is no longer seen as functioning because it is incorporated into Christ’s incarnated grace, where God has both given us a reference point precisely by joining us in Him through the Spirit[7]—where, as such, we do not have any systematic theory of “how” analogy works apart from our continuing incorporation into Christ through the Spirit’s sanctification. 

Scotus’ attempt to save analogy from what he feared ended up as equivocation, through the univocity of a common term, is an admirable attempt at clarity that no one should begrudge—yet in his attempt at systematization Scotus loosens, or perhaps entirely dissolves, the connection of analogy with spiritual discipleship “in Christ,” and displaces it into a specifically logical and so epistemological realm of discourse—albeit one that is not yet independent of faith but a clarifying response to scripture and revelation.  As David Burrell writes: “This tendency [to conceptual abstraction] manifests itself most clearly in Scotus’ treatment of the problem of ‘naming God’ in theological discourse … [His] interpretation squares with the textbook caricature of Augustine.  It concentrates on the logical presuppositions (here in Scotus’ own conceptualist terms) and fails to explain the ‘leading-up-to’ aspect of the account [of Divine names] clearly at the heart of Augustine’s analysis.”[8]

The “leading-up-to” aspect in Augustine that Scotus circumvents is precisely what we saw at length in the last chapter as Augustine’s theological commentary on scripture, along with its concomitant spiritual contemplation of God.  Just so, Catherine Pickstock, commentating on the same transition of “divine names” to “divine attributes” MacIntyre, Soskice, Babcock and now Burrell mentioned above, notes:

Already before Duns Scotus (even in Bonaventure, perhaps), the business of naming God was beginning to change [emphasis added]; it was gradually losing the accompanying element of existential transformation of the one naming. This tends to be a consequence of an aprioristic reading of Anselm by the Franciscans, for which perfection terms 
already start to denote abstraction rather than elevation. But with Scotus, the mystical dimension is lost, and Augustinian divine illumination of the intellect (in all human knowing) is reduced to the divine causal instigation of the natural light of the agent intellect.[9]   

Or, as Matthew Lamb puts it, Scotus, and later William of Ockham and other nominalist theologians, catalyzed changes in which “a perceptualistic and logistic matrix replaced … the theory of divine eternity in Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas.”  In other words the concept of concepts or eternal ideas changed and migrated outside of the divine essence; all ideas were less and less the result of God knowing what is possible through himself and more by understanding what is possible “in itself.”  This resulted, says Lamb, in the eventual triumph of “logical analysis over genuine ontological or metaphysical analysis.”[10] Thus “theologically speaking,” writes John Milbank, “univocity breaks with the entire legacy of negative theology and eminent attribution, which also grounds the doctrine of deification.”[11] Knowledge of God for Scotus is no longer modified in acts of discipleship, service, or contemplation—so that one’s knowledge of calling God “good” is enriched by Christ feeding the poor, say—but becomes a purely conceptual token insofar as “good” is essentially stable across referents; no “ascent” will modify the meaning or lead to a greater vision of God’s truth:

Finite being is now regarded as possessing in essence “being” in its own right (even though it still requires an infinite cause), when the mind abstracts being from finitude, it undergoes no elevation, but only isolates something formally empty, something that is already a transcendentally a priori category and no longer transcendental in the usual medieval sense of a metaphysically universal category which applies to all beings as such…For this reason,  [being] now represents something that is simply “there” without overtones of valuation, although it also represents something that must be invoked in any act of representation and so is in this new sense “transcendental” … once the perceived relationship between the transcendentals has undergone [this shift], to abstract to the Good tells us nothing concerning the divine nature … Scotus opens up the possibility of considering being without God.[12]

Much of the historical specifics will have to elude us here.  The main point in this transition is that now, despite whatever claims are still made to God’s transcendence, this shift in epistemology is also a shift in ontology, a fundamental “immanentizing” of transcendence (even where the name “transcendence” is still spoken, and seemingly affirmed in its “Classical” dimensions): “One unintended result of this pious if misguided modernist project was a diminution of the radical transcendence brought into Western thought” Soskice writes, “with this came a loss of the radical distinction between creator and creature, and accordingly a collapse of religious language into effective ‘univocity.’”[13]

Though Soskice is talking about Descartes and Locke, much of what she just said can be applied to post-Scotist trends (indeed in many ways Descartes and Locke are relatively direct inheritors of nominalist presuppositions).[14]  To be sure, Scotus still advocates creatio ex nihilo and in many ways is a traditional theologian of Divine transcendence.  Yet his concept of univocal predication subtly implies not just an epistemology, but also an ontology that begins to break with Aquinas, Anselm, and ultimately Augustine. “An uncharitable account,” says Richard Cross, “would be that Scotus’ God is just a human being writ large.”[15]  Yet ironically Cross then seems to concede exactly that: “[The difference between God and man] is ultimately one of degree [for Scotus]”—even if, to be sure, for Scotus an infinite degree is not comparable with any finite degree.[16]  Cross continues, and argues that because univocal predication occurs between differing modes (finite creatures and infinite God) Scotus’ God, far from being a “rather large person,” is actually spoken of only equivocally because of the unbridgeable difference—in other words univocal predication only references the bare “facts” of God and creatures’ predicates, but does not mitigate the modes (that is, finite or infinite) in which those predicates are affirmed.[17] If a concept like “good” does not seem inextricably bound to finite conditions, it can be predicated indifferently between finite and infinite subjects, with the difference coming in the mode it is affirmed, not by the predication itself. But the difference between infinite and finite is of course—infinite.  Thus paradoxically within univocity lay a core of the very equivocity Scotus feared.

This equivocity results in—rather than tempers—the problem of Scotus’ God being like a human “writ large.”  This equivocal God is still “finitized” even when spoken of as infinite: as we saw, univocity implies that creaturely acts of existence are no longer, as in Augustine and Aquinas, viewed as participations in God’s own act of existence and hence non-competitive with God’s repletive presence—things now just independently “are,” even if ultimately they refer back to God as their cause (increasingly understood in extrinsic terms of pure power and ordering).  Yet, the “just there-ness,” of the world, its “thisness” (haeccity) means God-talk as pure equivocation marks transcendence with a fairly literal “not here,”—i.e. amongst created things, which for Scotus no longer express God as signs participating and articulating His presence through themselves, but simply are.[18]  Davenport comments regarding this that although the finite cannot reach the infinite by “steps” in Scotus’ view, nonetheless “[the infinite in Scotus] belongs conceptually to the same univocal ‘measure’ of excellence to which the finite belongs.”[19] 

This can manifest in simple univocal predication between God and creation (in naïve anthropomorphic, anthropopathic, or theriomorphic language, e.g., or in more sophisticated ways that speak of God as “Love” but merely apply ready made human forms).[20]  Or, it can manifest, paradoxically, in the simple denial that God is in any sense like finite things.[21]  Equivocity is as such not an apophatic cure to univocity, but a manifestation of the same instability of non-analogous talk.  For now when reason attempts to maintain a vestige of its earlier humility, God is noted to be transcendent over reason’s taxonomies—yet this means He is simply placed in the unknowable regions outside experience as a sort of empty sublime, as in Kant.[22] One shifts from “near” to “far” language, so to speak, but these are still manifestly within the same spectrum. 

This in a certain respect is seen within a shift between Scotus and Ockham themselves, as recorded in Russell Friedman’s excellent work Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham.  Friedman notes that in the Franciscan tradition up through Scotus there had been a tendency toward what he calls the “strong form” of the psychological analogy (as opposed to the Dominican “weak form”).  The Dominicans—including Aquinas—though undoubtedly systematizing the psychological analogy for the Trinity in ways that appear quite robust, were relatively austere in their expectations of the “work” such analogies could do: “When Dominicans discuss the productions or emanations of the persons in God, they insist, following up on hints found in Thomas Aquinas, that the power productive of the persons in God is the divine essence or nature, and not the intellect and will as such.” It followed for these Dominicans, therefore, that “the Son’s generation cannot be ‘intellectual’ if that is understood to mean that generation truly comes from the divine intellect.”[23]  There is nothing truly “psychological” about the psychological analogy here. 

The Franciscans on the other hand were quite insistent on the capacity of psychological language to not only reference, but also explain God’s inner life: “For Henry of Ghent and the Franciscans,” writes Friedman, “there is some kind of tight link between the divine attributes and divine emanations; e.g. the Son is distinct from the other two persons because he [literally] emanates by way of intellect.”[24]  This univocal literalism of the “strong use” was in turn characterized “by the attempt to consistently make ... concepts and concept formation answer Trinitarian questions—the Son is a Word or a Concept, therefore concept theory should in some way be directly applicable [emphasis added] in the study of the Son as Trinity; likewise a theory of willing and volitions should be directly applicable in the study of the Holy Spirit.”[25]  As Friedman puts it “What is extremely impressive about Scotus’ theory is that it is an attempt to explain just about everything [according to the psychological analogy].  Scotus’ theory is what I would call ‘explanatorily dense.’”[26]  Yet this comes at a cost for Scotus, precisely in terms of divine simplicity: “he has to postulate a great deal of distinction in God.”[27] This need for distinction is buttressed in Scotus’ theory by the general drift toward univocity, which allows a more precise grasp on the nature and boundaries of predicates in their distinctive qualities. 

The somewhat paradoxical historical conclusion to be drawn from this is that, quite contrary to those like Gunton who decry Augustine’s psychological analogy as conspiring with Simplicity to reinforce a picture of a monistic God envisioned along the lines of a single subject—Scotus’ truly “psychologized” psychological analogy only works by fracturing simplicity. Richard Cross has elsewhere pointed out that (quite ironically!) “the truth of Scotus’ view [of psychological explanatory density] which entails weakening some of the classical restraints on divine simplicity, is a necessary condition for Social Trinitarianism—even though this is not a theory that Scotus himself would have been happy with.”[28]  This is important to keep in mind for our final chapters. 

What is more important for our immediate purposes is that when other Franciscans like Ockham felt this weakening of simplicity was too costly, they did not fall back into a view of analogy akin to their Dominican opponents, but—per our hypothesis of oscillation—shifted from “near” to “far” language, and by an absolutized insistence on divine simplicity, demanded all Trinitarian speculation be accepted by faith rather than upon inferences and deductions drawn from psychological proofs.[29]  This “search for simplicity”[30] as a transition, consists of the fact that “what happens in the fourteenth century [is that] a group of theologians to all intents and purposes claim that divine simplicity is more important than Trinitarian explanation.”[31]  As such this shift occurs against the univocal “strong-form” of the psychological analogy and is negatively defined by it; “Simplicity” is now no longer a technique used in theological exegesis, but is explicitly used as a countervalence against a univocal understanding of distinct attributes within God, and as such serves as a fairly literal “erasure” of the logic of all distinctives within the Godhead.

Curiously, in insisting such, Ockham did not thereby abandon the content of the “strong form” of the psychological analogy (because scripture does indeed call Christ “word”), merely the logical structure used to justify the more elaborate form of “psychological” presentation.  Yet by denying its logical basis in Scotus and Henry of Ghent (who themselves had already tended to obscure its biblical origins in Augustine via logical analysis, as we have noted) by emphasizing God’s utter transcendence and simplicity, Ockham’s Trinitarianism is “an application of the psychological model by fiat.”[32]

It is here then, between two strands of Franciscan tradition, that many of the characteristics of the psychological analogy for which Augustine often takes heat, emerge—namely a rigidly systematized theory based in a straightforward way on the faculties of a single subject (Scotus) on the one hand, and an abstruse set of psychologistic assertions taken on faith, which seemingly have little to do with concrete salvation history (Ockham) on the other.  Moreover, with Ockham, simplicity takes on a new function: it is no longer a spiritual exercise in which the grammar of scriptural and theological language is examined when it refers to God, in a sense now it is just the opposite, where the manifold of the Names of God are retained but in a newly fragilized position threatened to be swallowed by God’s blankness.

---

[1] David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 100.

[2] Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, I. d.III, q.iii in Philosophical Writings ed. and trans. Allan Wolter, O.F.M. (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1962).

[3] Ibid.,I. d. III. Q.iii n.6.

[4] Ibid., I. d. III. Q.ii, n.5.

[5] Ibid., I. d. III. Q.iii. n.6.

[6] Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 106: “Scotus invokes [his distinctions] in such a way as to dissolve the problems, rather than meet the issues.”

[7] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 58: “Those who, since Duns Scotus, rejected the analogical status of being could not admit an analogical ‘being in’ [God] either.”

[8] Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 115.

[9] Pickstock, “Duns Scotus,”, 548.

[10] Quoted in Matthew Levering, “Participation and Exegesis: A Reply to Catherine Pickstock,” Modern Theology 21:4 (October 2005): 588.

[11] Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 50.  Cf. Thomas Williams, “From Meta-Ethics to Action Theory,” in Thomas Williams, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 334-335: “In Scotus we see a strange fragmentation—not so much an unraveling of the Thomist synthesis as a deliberate dismantling. The creation approach remains, but the sort of goodness associated with it, which Scotus calls 'essential goodness,' has clearly lost its Platonic aura and is rigorously deemphasized."

[12] Catherine Pickstock “Postmodernism,” in Peter Scott and William Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 474.  Readers may be surprised that a rather technical passage on a medieval theologian appears in a volume of essays on political theology, but even further, in an essay on postmodernism. It has been a central tenet of Radical Orthodoxy (Pickstock being one of its chief members) to “out-narrate” secular politics and philosophy by displaying how their thought actually presupposes certain historically contingent theological moments, thus exposing their supposedly “scientific” or “non-religious” views of the world as saturated with opinions only supportable by the history of a theology they unsuccessfully renounce or obfuscate. Cf.: James K. A. Smith Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), 1-23; D. Stephen Long, “Radical Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 126-145.  On John Milbank’s work in relation to nihilism in particular a very helpful summary and critique comes from David Toole Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse (CO: Westview Press, 1998), 53-88; cf., 38-42. It is at this juncture that we would like to distance ourselves from some of the political interpretations of Radical Orthodoxy—especially John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock—regarding their condemnation of certain forms of politics as “Scotist.”  While much of the historical interpretation here presented has considerable sympathy with Radical Orthodox’s presention of how historical shifts are to be interpreted, there seems just as little point to impugn the character of Scotus with later changes resulting from his thought, as there is to condemn Augustine for later changes within “Augustinianism.”

[13] Soskice, “Naming God.”, 243. 

[14] Cf. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 170-207.  Cf. Dupré Passage to Modernity, 88: “Descartes has redefined the ultimate ontological principles in function of the epistemic order,” and this is precisely because “to render the idea of God serviceable [to his project] Descartes had to overcome the problem created by late nominalist theology—namely, that of a totally unpredictable God…for a moment the French philosopher reminds us of Augustine’s self-examination before God.  But only for a moment, because Descartes’ introspection reverses [emphasis added] the traditional order from God to the soul…God has to be proven, and to be proven on the basis of the prior certainty of the self.” (116-118).

[15] Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45.

[16] Ibid., 39.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 61: “Locality is but a metaphor, and yet to be ‘simply everywhere’ is the property of God alone.  God was driven out of all places in the same way that Gassendi and Descartes were to adopt later.  Out of a concern with univocation, [the nominalists] turned God’s omnipresence into an altogether equivocal attribute.”

[19] Quoted in Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism, 30.

[20] For example, in Open Theism’s attempt to “take seriously” the images used of God in scripture (Pinnock, Most-Moved Mover, 34 et al).

[21] Here the metaphorical theology of Elizabeth Johnson and in particular Sallie McFague comes to mind.

[22] This is argued at length by David Bentley Hart, “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy,” in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, 255-295.;  The historical rise of the polarity rationalism/fideism is the topic of investigation of a recent book, D. Stephen Long, Speaking of God: Theology, Language, and Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2009) to which we are greatly indebted.  cf. Hart Beauty of the Infinite, 44-45, 81:  “Being itself [post-nominalism] could now be conceived of only in absolutely opposite terms: as a veil, or an absence [of meaning]…The entire pathology of the modern and postmodern [of Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, Nancy, Lyotard, Deleuze] can be diagnosed as a multifarious narrative of the unrepresentable sublime, according to the paradigm of Kant’s critical project: what pure reason extracts from experience and represents to itself is neutral appearance, separated by an untraversable abyss from everything ‘meaningful.’”

[23] Russell L. Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought From Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65.  On Aquinas’ use of the psychology analogy in terms of its hermeneutical value for anti-Arian and anti-Sabellian scriptural exegesis, cf. Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics, 149-165.

[24] Ibid., 63.

[25] Ibid., 60.

[26] Ibid., 112.

[27] Ibid.,

[28] Richard Cross, “Medieval Trinitarianism and Modern Theology,” in Giulio Maspero and Robert Wozniak, eds., Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2012), 37.

[29] Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Theology, 128.

[30] Ibid., 94-133.

[31] Ibid., 100.  “Trinitarian explanation,” does not necessarily mean what we would initially think it means.  It was not, we should say, that suddenly theologians became “merely” monotheistic at the expense of Trinitarian theology.  Rather the phrase “Trinitarian explanation,” is rather technical and involves—not that God is Trinity—but how we can make sense of this.  “Explanation,” therefore names the complex strategies undertaken to elaborate on this end, leading up to the fourteenth century shift.

[32] Ibid., 130.