No True Scotsman (Part Seven): The Origin of the Use of Duns Scotus in Theological Historiography
IV.
Scotus: The Origin Story
As we have seen, therefore, variations of the “Scotus Story”
are not particular to Radical Orthodoxy, but span disciplines in theology, sociology,
history of science, and philosophy.
Judgments regarding the “Scotus Story” not only cut across disciplines,
but in many instances seem to index an entire range of sensibilities from
aesthetic, philosophical, and theological, to particular political analyses and
the very determination of the character of epochs.
But, as with most things, the Scotus Story did not spring
newborn into history. Where then did it
come from, and how did it achieve the character it did? While we can hardly provide an exhaustive or
exclusive analysis, a bit of historical sleuthing does seem to reveal the
origins. To tell this story we will
start moving backwards in time. Lets
start at an obvious place: Milbank and Pickstock’s stress that the “Scotus
Story” (not the title they use, of course) is not original to Radical Orthodoxy
“but has been elaborated on by L. Honnesfelder, J.-F. Courtine, O. Boulnois,
J.-L. Marion and J. Schmutz, amongst many others, ultimately in the wake of
Etienne Gilson, whose views they have nonetheless heavily qualified.”[1] The key phrase for our purposes here is
that all of these come “in the wake of Etienne Gilson,” to whom we now turn
first for a clue to the origins of the Scotus Story.
Gilson has undoubtedly been one of the most influential
Medievalists of the 20th century.
Indeed in the introduction to his book The Age of Reform: 1250-1550 Steven Ozment acknowledges the reign
of what he calls the “Gilsonian paradigm”:
The scholar who has contributed most to
the view of late medieval intellectual history as a decline from greatness is
the late Etienne Gilson. … The historical achievement considered to be
justification for such praise was Aquinas’ peculiar synthesis of reason and
revelation, his union of philosophy and theology, Aristotle and Augustine—what
the thirteenth century considered the highest human knowledge and divine truth.[2]
One does not have to look far in Gilson’s works to find
versions of the Scotus Story. In his The History of Christian Philosophy in the
Middle Ages, Gilson calls Ockham “an apprentice sorcerer” who has
unwittingly unleashed the later chaos of Western thought. “In this sense it can be said that the
doctrine of Ockham marked a turning point in the history of philosophy as well
as theology,” says Gilson. “In theology,
his doctrine was paving the way to the ‘positive theology’ of the moderns. In philosophy, it was paving the way to
modern empiricism.”[3] Ockham in fact substitutes for the
collaboration of faith and reason that “obtained in the golden age of scholasticism”
a new and “much looser regime in which the absolute and self-sufficient
certitude of faith was only backed by mere philosophical probabilities.”[4]
In his earlier work, The
Unity of Philosophical Experience, Gilson outlines the “Scotus Story” as we
have seen it in this essay:
St. Thomas Aquinas restores
philosophical knowledge, but Ockham cuts its very root, and ushers in the late
mediaeval and Renaissance skepticism, itself redeemed by the moralism of the
Humanists or by the pseudo-mysticism of Nicolaus Cusanus and of his
successors. Then come Descartes and
Locke, but their philosophies disintegrate into Berkeley and Hume, with the
moralism of Rousseau and the visions of Swedenborg as natural reactions. Kant had read Swedenborg, Rousseau and Hume,
but his own philosophical restoration ultimately degenerated into the various
forms of contemporary agnosticism, with all sorts of moralisms and would-be
mysticisms as ready shelters against spiritual despair. The so-called death of philosophy being regularly
attended by its revival, some new dogmatism should now be at hand. In short, the first law to be inferred from
philosophical experience is: Philosophy always buries its undertakers.[5]
Given not only the place of the nouvelle theologie in Radical Orthodoxy, but also the close
association of Etienne Gilson with Henri de Lubac, one would expect to find
sources for the Scotus Story looking that at scholarship in those quarters as
well (we have already seen it in part in von Balthasar and his interpretation
of Barth above). Indeed de Lubac’s work Corpus Mysticum directly inspired
Kantorowicz’ study The King’s Two Bodies which
we also looked at briefly above. Henri
de Lubac, however, very rarely mentions Scotus directly.
Scotus nonetheless still plays a part of the story (albeit
indirectly) insofar as de Lubac is narrating how later Thomistic commentators
like Cardinal Cajetan and Francisco Suarez misinterpreted Aquinas as teaching
what he calls “pure nature”—that is, the idea that God made agents with natural
but no supernatural ends. In other words
no “natural desire for God” which is only “added” extrinsically by the movement
of grace. De Lubac notes “the fact that
‘pure nature’ in the modern sense of the word is something not considered at
all in eastern [Christian] theology is explained by the fact that the early
Greek tradition contained no such idea … nor, I believe, was it contained in
the Latin tradition until a very late date.”[6]
Yet he also notes that Cajetan (and Suarez) “were not properly speaking the
inventor [of the concept of pure nature],” but rather “the first to claim the
patronage of St. Thomas for it.”[7] Earlier, for example, Denys the Carthusian
had proffered a view of pure nature, but this was in order to explicitly countermand
Aquinas, whom Denys thought had compromised the integrity of creation and the
gratuity of grace.[8] Yet Cajetan, “instead of openly refuting St.
Thomas like Denys—who is thus a trustworthy witness to the way St. Thomas was
understood in the generation immediately preceding Cajetan—Cajetan now claimed
to be commenting upon [Thomas].”[9] Suarez on the other hand attempted to bring
Thomas in line with other Scholastics like Bonaventure and Scotus himself, thus
introducing this line of interpretation into Thomism.
Agree or disagree with them, the point here is that both
Gilson and de Lubac perpetuate a “Scotus Story” in one manner or another. Despite the influence of Gilson and de Lubac,
however, they were themselves not the origin of the “Scotus Story” of decline
but in some sense (with all due respect to their originality and brilliance)
perpetuated a more established idea.
Luckily for us the legwork on this fascinating
historiography has already been accomplished by John Inglis’ incredibly
insightful work, Spheres of Philosophical
Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. The story really begins when historical works
by the likes of Jacob Brucker (originally printed 1742-1767)[10]
and Hegel[11]
argued that there was no philosophy
done in the Middle Ages. They argued
this because in their minds theology dominated all other discourse to such an
extent as to render it useless as philosophy (understood as a necessarily
autonomous discipline). As such both
Brucker and Hegel praise Scotus, and
ultimately Ockham, for beginning to separate theology from philosophy (and in
this sense represent a peculiarly inverse form of Milbank, for example).
With the increasing secularization of Germany, however, an
impulse counter to the French Revolution began, the primary vehicle of which
was a return to Medieval sources. In
order to give this movement proper heft, however, it now had to be argued that
there was philosophy in the Middle Ages—in fact in this anti-revolutionary,
anti-German Idealist historiography, the scholastics are now interpreted as
dealing primarily with the problem of reconciling reason and revelation without
compromising one or the other, most comprehensively (as Ingis tells the story)
by the Thomists Joseph Kleutgen[12]
and Albert Stöckl.[13] Far from some obscurantist endeavor, this is
driven by political reasons: such historiography was done in order to
demonstrate that the proper balance of reason and revelation, secular and
sacred, Pope and Kingdom, took place in Medieval thought—not modern thinking
that led to the chaos of the French Revolution.
In this endeavor above all Kleutgen provided the theoretical model of
understanding the primary scholastic enterprise as solving the “problem” of
reason and revelation—and hence interpreting scholastic thought along the lines
of the by-then institutionalizing and codified standard “spheres of
philosophical inquiry” (epistemology, metaphysics, consciousness,
intentionality, etc. …) and then demonstrating not only that the medievals had
novel contributions to these items of philosophical inquiry, but that they
provided such within a context of integrating revelation without compromising
disciplinary boundaries.
Stöckl on the other hand wrote a massive history of medieval
philosophy utilizing Kleutgen’s prescribed interpretive strategy, writing this
paradigm into the history itself. As
such Inglis will refer to the prevailing method as the Kleutgen-Stöckl model
(hereafter K-S). For both Aquinas became
the high-point of the medieval understood in terms of the attempts at
reconciling reason and revelation, while Scotus and Ockham—because they
destroyed this Thomist ‘High Point’—represent a decline into the eventual
subjectivism of modernity represented by Descartes and Kant,[14]
the latter being a stalking horse for Kleutgen’s dislike of British empiricism.[15] The K-S model tends to prioritize
“epistemology” in these thinkers, says Inglis, as such extracting a “realist”
(as opposed to subjectivist) approach.[16]
On this approach nominalism for K-S in particular is the
boogeyman, as they claim it destroys the grounds for realist epistemology. Many more of the details regarding Scotus and
Ockham need not detain us here; the point is that the K-S model introduced them
as a decline. Whereas Brucker and Hegel
said there was no philosophy in the Middle Ages, the K-S argued there was
philosophy (as it was understood in the 19th century professional
environment), but that the balance of reason and revelation was undone by
Scotus and Ockham. Again this was no
mere intellectual exercise but began to determine very real party lines between
conservative “Roman” German Christians, and the liberal German Christians. The K-S model (and Kleutgen and Stöckl
themselves) were utilized and essentially ratified by Pius IX (who at that time
also declared himself infallible).[17] Indeed, even outside of Catholic circles the
K-S model would come to saturate academia more generally.[18]
Inglis’ general point is to argue that according to how
philosophy and theology came to be defined, the Medievals in fact do neither so understood. But the K-S model dominated in this
fashion—even among those who wanted to vindicate Scotus and Ockham—for the
“vindication” of these thinkers came only by showing that both Scotus and
Ockham contributed to the synthesis of philosophy and theology at the same
level Aquinas did:
Kleutgen, Stockl, de Wulf, Geyer, and
Gilson present Aquinas as a great philosopher on account of his contributions
to the relations between faith and reason and to the spheres of philosophical
inquiry. They view other medieval
figures according to whether they lead towards or away from Aquinas. Minges, Boehner, Knowles, and Weinberg use
the same criteria to raise Scotus and Ockham to the philosophical level of
Aquinas. They argue that Scotus and
Ockham wrote philosophically important accounts on the standard areas of
philosophy. Kretzmann, Athony Kenny, and
Pinborg follow suit with the addition of logic, adding significant medieval
logicians to the pantheon of great medieval philosophers.[19]
Conclusion
Inglis’s main thesis[20]—that
to understand the medievals as doing philosophy in its standard areas as later
defined is to distort Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham et al. with poor
historiography—can for our purposes be put to one side. What is important is
that Inglis has identified the beginning of the “Scotus Story” (or a version of
it) as historiography meant to counter both revolutionary politics and German
Idealist (but also Protestant) historiography, and claim we should return to
the proper balance and synthesis of reason and revelation in the Middle Ages.
Ultimately the point of this paper is to survey the
wide-ranging and multifarious uses of the “Scotus Story.” In one sense the cartoonish exaggerations of
the story present in Radical Orthodoxy have ironically caused people to merely
role their eyes—and not without good reason.
To speak of something as “Scotist politics” like Pickstock and Milbank
do seems to be unhelpful nonsense, and worse it impugns a faithful Christian
(can one really be blamed for permutations of their thought that happen
generations later, if such a link can indeed be established? That is the question).
Such antics aside, when one rolls their eyes at the
variations of the “Scotus Story” one also misses that an entire array of judgments—theological,
philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, etc. …--are being marshaled by
how one orients this story or others like it.
It provides a fascinating case study not just for Radical Orthodoxy’s
sensibilities, but as we have seen a diverse array of others as well, and
allows us a very clear picture (sometimes absurdly so) of how contemporary
judgments affect our interaction with the past.
In another way, to simply dismiss the “Scotus Story” as so
much nonsense is also to miss the larger picture of all of these inquiries:
just how influential Christian theology, and Christian thinkers have been, even
in areas where theology now is seemingly absent. The truly fascinating tale, one thinks, is how
even in our most secular moments we are, in the west, still children of a more
distant age.
[1] Milbank, Theology and
Social Theory, xxv note 41.
[2] Steven Ozment, The
Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late
Medieval and Reformation Europe (Yale: Yale University Press, 1981), 9.
[3] Etienne Gilson, The
History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House,
1955), 498-499.
[4] Ibid., 489.
[5] Etienne Gilson, The
Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1937),
305-306.
[6] Henri De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural trans.
Rosemary Sheed (New York: Cross Road Publishing, 1998), 5.
[7] Ibid., 69-70.
[8] Ibid., 143-145.
[9] Ibid., 145.
[10] John Inglis, Spheres
of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy (Leiden:
Brill, 1998), 30-40.
[11] Ibid., 49-53.
[12] Ibid., 62-105.
[13] Ibid., 105-168.
[14] Ibid., 83f.
[15] Ibid., 85.
[16] Ibid., 95.
[17] Ibid., 145-149.
[18] Ibid., 188f.
[19] Ibid., 233.
[20] Ibid., 237-283.
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