John Duns Scotus

“ Further, while the genius of Aquinas was constructive, that of Duns Scotus was destructive; Aquinas was a philosopher, Duns a critic. The latter has been said to stand to the former in the relation of Kant to Leibnitz. In the matter of Universals, Duns was more of a realist and less of an eclectic than Aquinas. Theologically, the Thomistic system approximates to pantheism, while that of Scotus inclines distinctly to Pelagianism. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was the great subject in dispute between the two parties ”

“ Scotland had had no Grosteste, no Anselm or Bradwardine among its prelates in the middle ages, no Wycliffe among its priests. Duns Scotus, the one theologian before the sixteenth century who claimed Scottish birth and European fame, never seems to have taught in his native land. John Major.Chief among its doctors in the beginning of the sixteenth century stood John Major, a native of East Lothian, who taught with distinguished success, first in Paris, then in Glasgow, after that in St Andrews, then once more in Paris, and finally in St Andrews again. ”

“ These were sharp measures; we lose our breath at their rapidity and violence. The saddest vicissitude was that which befell the famous Memorable fate of Duns Scotus. Duns—Duns Scotus, the greatest of the Schoolmen, the constructor of the memoria technica of ignorance, the ancient text-book of à priori knowledge, established for centuries the supreme despot in the Oxford lecture-rooms. "We have set Duns in Bocardo," says Leyton. He was thrown down from his high estate, and from being lord of the Oxford intellect, was "made the common servant of all men;" ”

“ For his writings, most of which have been printed, see Tanner, Bibl. p. 605, Wood, Athenae I, 16-18. They relate for the most part to works of Duns Scotus, ‘whom (Wood remarks) he had in so great veneration that he was in a manner besotted with his subtilties.’ The Distinctiones ordine alphabetico by ‘Frater Mauricius Anglus’ cannot be by Mauritius de Portu; they exist e.g. in a fourteenth-century MS. in the British Museum (Royal 10 B. xvi) , and in a thirteenth-century MS. at Paris [1706] .
Petrus Pauli de Nycopia, friar, who transcribed a work of Duns Scotus at Oxford, c. ”

“ In 1304 he went to Paris, and was appointed professor and regent in the theological schools, in which situation he acquired the title of Doctor Subtilis, 'the subtle doctor'. He opposed Thomas Aquinas on the subject of grace and free-will; and hence the Scotists are opposed to the Thomists. Duns Scotus was the apostle of realism, which was opposed to the systems of nominalism and conceptualism promulgated by the other sections into which the schoolmen were divided. He died, it is said, at Cologne in 1308, leaving behind him numerous works. ”

“ Then the marvellous Duns Scotus a scholar [pg 157] of Merton and afterwards a Franciscan monk, an Abelard in brilliancy, versatility, and keenness of argument, who, disputing one day before the doctors of the Sorbonne (to whom he was personally unknown) , was interrupted by one of them with this exclamation, “This must be either an angel from heaven, a demon from hell, or Duns Scotus from Oxford!” A similar legend is told of Alanus de Insulis, a Paris doctor, who, having left the schools and become a lay-brother at Citeaux, accompanied the abbot to Rome to take charge of his horses. ”

“ Having thus tested whatever was presented by human reason, and accepting what was declared by Scripture or the Church, Duns proceeds to build out his doctrine as the case may call for. No man ever drove either constructive logic or the subtilties of critical distinctions closer to the limits of human comprehension or human patience than Duns Scotus. And here lies the trouble with him. The endless [Pg 514] ramification and refinement of his dialectic, his devious processes of conclusion, make his work a reductio ad absurdum of scholastic ways of reasoning. ”

“ In respect of the formal development of philosophic theology a third individual is famous, namely, Duns Scotus, Doctor subtilis, a Franciscan, who was born at Dunston in the county of Northumberland, and who little by little obtained thirty thousand disciples. ”

“ The Irish, like the Greek mind, has a natural love for speculation, is quick, subtle, and far-seeing, has greater power of abstraction and generalisation—that is to say, greater metaphysical power than the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon. Scotus was a typical Celt, strongly developing all the intellectual peculiarities of the race. Moreover, he was familiar with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greek Fathers, far more than with the Latin Fathers. ”

“ Like many other good things which Ireland has produced, both England and Scotland have striven to make Scotus their own. Thomas Dempster, the saint-stealer, in his Menologium Scotorum, published in A.D. 1621, and dedicated to Cardinal Barberini, has endeavoured to prove that Scotus Erigena was a native of North Britain; as, however, his arguments are founded on the similarity in sound between Ayr and Erigena and between Scotus and Scot, we need not now refute them at length. ”

“ If the attempt of John Scotus to change Christianity into a philosophy failed to make an impression upon the succeeding age, it is the less surprising when we consider that he failed in company with all the wise men of the ninth century. ”

“ The world of letters was divided for generations into the rival camps of Scotists and Thomists. But the two doctors have fared very differently at the hands of posterity. Thomas was made a Saint, judged to be a “candlestick,” and awarded by Dante a place high in the realms of Paradise. Duns Scotus, on the other hand, whose learning and industry were as great and his merit probably not much inferior, survives chiefly in the English language as a “dunce.” The name of the great Oxford scholar stands to the world chiefly as a synonym for a fool and a blockhead. ”

“ And since there was no good scholar in his own kingdom, he sent for Werefrith119 bishop of Worcester out of Mercia, who by command of the king rendered into the English tongue the books of Gregory’s Dialogues. At this time Johannes Scotus is supposed to have lived; a man of clear understanding and amazing eloquence. He had long since, from the continued tumult of war around him, retired into France to Charles the Bald, at whose request he had translated the Hierarchia of Dionysius the Areopagite, word for word, out of the Greek into Latin. ”

“ Dandy.—Bishop Fleetwood says that “dandy” is derived from a silver coin of small value, circulated in the reign of Henry VIII., and called a “dandy-prat.”
Dunce.—This word comes to us from the celebrated Duns Scotus, chief of the Schoolmen of his time. He was “the subtle doctor by preëminence;” and it certainly is a strange perversion that a scholar of his great ability should give name to a class who hate all scholarship. ”

“ John Scot, or Johannes Scotus Erigena, as he was called because an Irishman, lived long at the court of Charles the Bald, and afterward returned to England at the invitation of Alfred the Great, to teach at Oxford, where he died in 886, expressed the great text of his cotemporaries which they all labored to expound and exemplify: "There are not two studies, one of philosophy, and the other of religion; true philosophy is true religion, and true religion is true philosophy." ”

“ De Wulf in §335 accuses Duns Scotus of: "creating fictitious, misleading, and superfluous beaconlights, - in defiance of a precept which he himself pretended to approve of: entia non sunt multiplicanda præter necessitatem". But he gives no reference, and I cannot find the formula anywhere in the text of the Subtle Doctor's writings. It appears substantially indeed in Wadding's edition (1639) , tom. ”

“ Lord Crawford continued listening with his eyes fixed on the ground, and from time to time he sighed and shook his head. At length he said, looking up, “Thou knowest, Dunois, that, for thy father's sake, as well as thine own, I would full fain do thee a service.”
“It is not for myself I demand anything,” answered Dunois. “Thou hast my sword, and I am your prisoner—what needs more? But it is for this noble Prince, the only hope of France, if God should call the Dauphin. He only came hither to do me a favour—in an effort to make my fortune—in a matter which the King had partly encouraged.” ”

“ Johannes Dunscotus was a very learned man, who lived about the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century. The English and Scotch strive which of them shall have the honour of his birth. The English say, he was born in Northumberland: the Scots alledge he was born at Duns, in the Mers, the neighbouring county to Northumberland, and hence was called Dunscotus. ”

“ Setting aside the fact that Asser’s notice, if indeed it refers to John Scotus, is not placed under any particular date, it is evident that one cannot assert the impossibility of a man s working power lasting until or beyond his seventieth year. At the same time there is no positive ground for excluding the alternative date for John Scotus s birth, which would make him fifty-three in 878 or fifty-nine in 884.
8. Another question arises about John s ecclesiastical position. Here we must note that William of Malmesbury makes no mention of him as anything but a plain teacher. ”

“ But when used alone in those early centuries the terms “Scoti” and “Scotia” were applied exclusively to the primitive race and their dwelling-place—the Milesian Scots of Ireland, of whom the Albanian Scots were a colony. In A.D. 812, before the birth of Scotus, Eginhard, the secretary of Charlemagne, says that a fleet of Normans invaded Ireland, “the island of the Scots;” and, after the death of Scotus, Alfred the Great, in his translation of Orosius, speaks of Ireland as “Hibernia, which we call Scotland.” ”

“ He arranges his recollections ill, ignoring essential facts, and, later, dragging them in very awkwardly. His Memoirs [178] are such as an elderly warrior of his period would naturally pen; they illustrate the chaotic condition of Highland morals and manners in 1745-54, and introduce us to figures familiar in the Prince’s campaign of Scotland. [106]
Scotus, Scottos, or Scothouse, the estate of the Colonel’s family, lies in the south of Knoydart, and on the north side of the entrance to Loch Nevis, just opposite to the Aird of Sleat in Skye. ”

“ Like another and far greater man, whose sepulchre also was not known among his people, Scot died in the fulness of his powers and fame, while yet his sight was not dim, nor his natural force abated. He was denied indeed the entry to those broad kingdoms of knowledge which later times enjoy, but we may truly think of him as one who stood in his own day upon a height from which something of that fair land of promise could at least be divined, and manfully did his part in leading the progress of the human mind onward to those more perfect attainments now within the reach of every patient scholar. ”

“ This letter was written in the third year of Nicholas’s pontificate, either A.D. 861 or 862. We do not know what effect the letter produced, whether the king dismissed Scotus from his high position or not. It is very improbable that he did dismiss him, seeing the way in which Anastasius, himself a Roman, spoke of Scotus twelve years later as a holy, learned, and humble man. ”

“ Scotus cannot be considered as the continuer of the old Franciscan school, but rather as the founder of a new school which rightly bears his name. His excessive realism has a tendency quite opposed to the Platonism of the early members of his Order, and, indeed, agrees with Nominalism on many points. His stiff and dry style is very different from the ease and grace which charm us in St. Bonaventure. However, Scotus is the direct antagonist of St. Thomas, and it is in relation to him that the character of his mind stands out most clearly. St. Thomas is strictly organic; Scotus is less so. ”

“ See Mayhew-Skeat, Dict. of Middle English (s. v. ‘Trivials’) .
Others avouch, and that more truly, that he [Duns Scotus] was born in Downe, and thereof they guess him to be named Dunensis, and by contraction Duns, which term is so trivial and common in schools, that whoso surpasseth others either in cavilling sophistry or subtle philosophy is forthwith nicknamed a Duns.—Stanyhurst, Description of Ireland, p. 2.
Æquitas optimo cuique notissima, is a trivial saying, A very good man cannot be ignorant of equity.—Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, part i. p. 57. ”

“ He exhibits no tendency towards mysticism. Among his contemporaries Siger of Brabant, who taught in Paris in the last decade of the thirteenth century, and there, according to Dante (Par. x. 138) , ‘sillogizzò invidiosi veri,’ Peter of Auvergne and Alexander of Alexandria were more or less influenced by Duns, but the first decided Scotist was Antonius Andreæ, a Spaniard (fl. 1310) , as to whose writings see remarks on Wadding's edition of Duns, infra. ”

“ I had chanced to mention the serfs who worked in the coal-mines and salt-pans in Scotland; he at once struck into the conversation. "Sir Walter Scott," he said, "makes one of his characters say, 'he would not take him back like a collier on a salter.' This made me look the matter up for I did not understand what he meant." He praised the old Scotch common schools. "We Scotchmen," he proudly said, "have had education for three hundred years. A Scotch working-man would starve to death to give his son a good education." ”

“ Station, power, wealth, beauty, and genius, strove with each other in every demonstration of respect and worship, and—a few political fanatics and envious poetasters apart—wherever he appeared in town or country, whoever had Scotch blood in him, "gentle or simple," felt it move more rapidly through his veins when he was in the presence of Scott.' But in the midst of this blaze of glory, and while he was dreaming dreams of fortune and family pride, what was it that struck the most keen-eyed of critics when he first saw his hero? ”