The Life of the Mind (53 page)

What in Aristotle was the "most continuous of all pleasures" is now hoped for as eternal bliss, not the pleasure that may attend volitions but a delight that puts the will to rest, so that the ultimate end of the Will, seen in reference to itself, is to cease willing—in short, to attain its own non-being. And in the context of Thomas' thought, this implies that every activity, since its end is never reached while it is still active, ultimately aims at its own self-destruction; the means disappear when the end is reached. (It is as though, while writing a book, one were constantly driven by the desire to have it finished and be rid of writing.) To what extremes Thomas, in his single-minded predilection for contemplation as sheer seeing and not-doing, was prepared to go becomes manifest in a rather casual side remark he lets drop when interpreting a Pauline text dealing with human love between two persons. Could the "enjoyment" of loving somebody, he asks, signify that the Will's ultimate "end" has been placed in man? The answer is "No," for, according to Thomas, what Paul said in effect was that "he enjoyed his brother as a
means
toward the enjoyment of God"
³²
—and God, as we have seen, cannot be reached by Man's Will or Love but only by his Intellect.

This is of course a far cry from Augustine's Love, which loves the love of the beloved, and it is also rather offensive to the ears of those who, schooled by Kant, are pretty well convinced that we ought to "treat humanity, whether in [our] own person or in that of any other ... as an end withal, never as means only."
³³

When we now come to Duns Scotus, no leap over the centuries, with the inevitable discontinuities and discords that make the historian suspicious, will be involved. He was not more than a generation younger than Thomas Aquinas, almost his contemporary. We are still in the midst of Scholasticism. In the texts you will find the same curious mixture of ancient quotations—treated as authorities—and argumentative reason. Although Scotus did not write a
Summa,
he proceeds in the same way as Aquinas: first, the Question states what is being inquired about (for instance, monotheism: "I ask whether there is but one God"); then the Pros and Contras, based on authoritative quotations, are discussed; next the arguments of other thinkers are given; finally, under
Respondeo,
Scotus states his own opinions, the
viae,
"Ways," as he calls them, for thought-trains, along with correct arguments, to travel.
³⁴
No doubt at first glance it looks as though the only point of difference with Thomistic scholasticism were the question of the primacy of the Will, which is "proved" by Scotus with no less argumentative plausibility than Thomas had deployed in proving the primacy of the Intellect, and with scarcely fewer quotations from Aristotle. To put the opposing arguments in a nutshell: If Thomas had argued that the Will is an executive organ, necessary to execute the insights of the Intellect, a merely "subservient" faculty, Duns Scotus holds that "
Intellectus ... est causa subserviens voluntatis.
" The Intellect serves the Will by providing it with its objects as well as with the necessary knowledge; i.e., the Intellect in its turn becomes a merely subservient faculty. It needs the Will to direct its attention and can function properly only when its object is "confirmed" by the Will. Without this confirmation the Intellect ceases to function.
³⁵

It would be somewhat pointless here to enter the old controversy as to whether Scotus was an "Aristotelian" or an "Augustinian"—scholars have gone so far as to maintain that "Duns Scotus is as much a disciple of Aristotle as St. Thomas is"
³⁶
—because Scotus actually was neither. But to the extent that the debate makes sense, that is, so to speak, biographically, it seems that Bettoni, the Italian Scotus scholar, is right: "Duns Scotus remains an Augustinian who profited to the utmost degree from the Aristotelian method in the exposition of the thoughts and doctrines that form his metaphysical vision of reality."
³⁷

These and similar evaluations are surface reactions, but unhappily they have succeeded in obliterating to a large degree the originality of the man and the significance of his thought, as though the
Doctor subtilis'
chief claim to our attention
were
subtlety, the unique complexity and intricacy of his presentation. Scotus was a Franciscan, and Franciscan literature was always greatly affected by the fact that Thomas, a Dominican, despite early difficulties, was recognized as a saint by the Church and his
Summa Theologica,
first used, and finally prescribed, as
the
textbook for the study of philosophy and theology in all Catholic schools. In other words, Franciscan literature is apologetic, usually cautiously defensive, even though Scotus' own polemics are directed at Henry of Ghent rather than turned on Thomas.
³⁸

A closer reading of the texts will soon disabuse one of those first impressions; the difference and distinction of the man show most clearly when he seems to be in complete conformity with the rules of Scholasticism. Thus, in a lengthy interpretive rendering of Aristotle, he suddenly proposes to "reinforce the Philosopher's reasoning" and, in discussing Anselm of Canterbury's "proof' of the existence of God, he will almost casually yield to the inclination to "touch it up" a bit, indeed quite considerably. The point is that he insisted on "establishing by reason" arguments derived from authority.
³⁹

Standing at the turning-point—the early fourteenth century—when the Middle Ages were changing into the Renaissance, he could indeed have said what Pico della Mirandola said at the end of the fifteenth century, in the middle of the Renaissance: "Pledged to the doctrine of no man, I have ranged through all the masters of philosophy, investigated all books, and come to know all schools."
⁴⁰
Except that Scotus would not have shared the naive trust of later philosophers in reasons persuasive power. At the heart of his reflection, as well as at the heart of his piety, is the firm conviction that, touching the questions that "pertain to our end and to our sempiternal perpetuity, the most learned and most ingenious men could know almost nothing by natural reason."
⁴¹
For "to those who have no faith, right reason, as it seems to itself, shows that the condition of its nature is to be mortal both in body and soul."
⁴²

It is his close attention to opinions to which he remained uncommitted, but whose examination and interpretation make up the body of his work, that is likely to lead the reader astray. Scotus certainly was not a skeptic—ancient or modern—but he had a critical turn of mind, something that is, and always has been, very rare. From this perspective, large portions of his writings read like a relentless attempt to
prove
by sheer argumentation what he suspected could not be proved; how could he be sure of being right against almost everybody else unless he followed all the arguments and subjected them to what Petrus Johannis Olivi had called an "
experimentum suitatis,
" an experiment of the mind with itself? That was why he found it necessary to "reinforce" the old arguments or "touch them up" a bit. He knew very well what he was doing. As he said: "I wish to give the most reasonable interpretation to [other thinkers'] words that I possibly can."
⁴³
Only in this essentially non-polemical way could the inherent weakness of the argumentation be demonstrated.

In Scotus' own mature thought, this manifest weakness of natural reason can never be used as an argument for the superiority of irrational faculties; he was no mystic, and the notion that "man is irrational" was to him "unthinkable" ("in-
cogitabile
").
⁴⁴
What we are dealing with, according to him, is the natural limitation of an essentially
limited
creature whose finitude is absolute, "prior to any reference it may have to another essence." "For, just as a body is first limited in itself by its own proper boundaries before it is limited in respect to anything else ... so the finite form is first limited in itself before it is limited with respect to matter."
⁴⁵
This finitude of the human intellect—very much like that of Augustine's
homo temporalis
—is due to the simple fact that man qua man has not created himself, though he is able to multiply like other animal species. Hence for Scotus the question is never how to derive (draw down, deduce) finitude from divine infinity or how to ascend from human finitude to divine infinity, but how to explain that an absolutely finite being can conceive of something infinite and call it "God." "Why is it that the intellect ... does not find the notion of something infinite repugnant?"
⁴⁶

To put it differently: What is it in the human mind that makes it capable of transcending its own limitations, its absolute finitude? And the answer to this question in Scotus, as distinguished from Thomas, is the Will. To be sure, no philosophy can ever be a substitute for divine revelation, which the Christian accepts on the strength of testimony in which he has faith. Creation and resurrection are articles of faith; they cannot be proved or refuted by natural reason. As such they are
contingent,
factual truths whose opposite is not inconceivable; they relate to events that might not have happened. For those brought up in the Christian faith they have the same validity as other events of which we know only because we trust the testimony of witnesses—for instance, the fact that the world existed before we were born or that there are places on the earth where we have never been, or even that certain persons are our parents.
⁴⁷

A radical doubt that rejects the testimony of witnesses and relies on reason alone is impossible for men; it is a mere rhetorical device of solipsism, constantly refuted by the doubter's own existence. All men live together on the solid foundation of a
fides acquisita,
an acquired faith they have in common. The test for the Countless facts whose trustworthiness we constantly take for granted is that they must make sense for men as they are constituted. And in this respect, the dogma of resurrection makes much more sense than the philosophers' notion of the soul's immortality: a creature endowed with body and soul can find sense only in an after-life in which he is resurrected from death as he is and knows himself to be. The philosophers' "proofs" of the soul's immortality, even if they were logically correct, would be irrelevant. To be existentially relevant for the "
viator,
" the wayfarer or pilgrim on earth, the after-life must be a "second life," not an entirely different mode of being as a disembodied entity.

Yet while it seems obvious to Scotus that the philosophers' natural reason never attained the "truths" proclaimed by divine revelation, it remains undeniable that the notion of divinity antedated any Christian revelation, and that means that there must be a mental capacity in man by which he can transcend whatever is given to him, transcend, that is, the very factuality of Being. He seems to be able to transcend himself. For man, according to Scotus, was created together with Being, as part and parcel of it—just as man, according to Augustine, was created not in time but together with time. His intellect is attuned to this Being as his sense organs are fitted for the perception of appearances; his intellect is "natural," "
cadit sub natura
";
⁴⁸
whatever the intellect proposes to him, man is
forced
to accept, compelled by the evidence of the object: "
Non habet in potestate sua intelligere et non intelligere.
"
⁴⁹

It is different with the Will. The Will may find it difficult not to accept what reason dictates,
but the thing is not impossible,
just as it is not impossible for the Will to resist strong natural appetites: "
Difficile est, voluntatem non inclinari ad id, quod est dictatum a ratione practica ultimatim, non tamen est impossibile, sicut voluntas naturaliter inclinatur, sibi dismissa, ad condelectandum appetitui sensitivo, non tamen impossibile, ut frequenter resistat, ut patet in virtuosis et sanctis.
"
⁵⁰
It is the possibility of resistance to the needs of desire, on the one hand, and the dictates of intellect and reason, on the other, that constitutes human freedom.

The Will's autonomy, its complete independence of things as they are, which the schoolmen call "indifference"—by which they mean that the will is "undetermined" (
indeterminata
) by any object presented to it—has only one limitation: it cannot deny Being altogether. Man's limitation is nowhere more manifest than in the fact that his mind, the willing faculty included, can hold as an article of faith that God created Being
ex nihilo,
out of nothingness, and yet be unable to conceive "nothingness." Hence the Will's indifference relates to contradictories—
voluntas autem sola habet indifferentiam ad contradictoria;
only the willing ego knows that "a decision actually taken need not have been taken and a choice other than the one actually made might have been made."
⁵¹

This is the test by which freedom is demonstrated, and neither desire nor the intellect can measure up to it: an object presented to desire can only attract or repel, and an issue presented to the intellect can only be affirmed or negated. But it is the basic quality of our will that we may will or nill the object presented by reason or desire: "
in potestate voluntatis nostrae est habere nolle et velle, quae sunt contraria, respectu unius obiecti
" ("It is in the power of our will to will and to nill, which are contraries, with respect to the same object").
⁵²
In saying this, Scotus, of course, does not deny that two successive volitions are necessary to will and nill the same object; but he does maintain that the willing ego in performing one of them is aware of being free to perform its contrary also: "The essential characteristic of our volitional acts is ... the power to choose between opposite things
and to revoke the choice once it has been made
" (italics added).
⁵³
Precisely this freedom, which is manifest only as a mental activity—the power to revoke disappears once the volition has been executed—is what we spoke of earlier in terms of a brokenness of the will.