Reflections on John Duns Scotus

From November 4, 2005:

"God is First Truth."  The Blessed John Duns Scotus’s praise of God as First Truth was not intended by John to be a meditation on Scriptures about God as the Light of the World.  Rather, it appears near the end of a treatise in which he attempted to prove the existence and nature of God from purely philosophical reasoning.  Part of his reasoning is convincing, and part of it is less so.  As an effort to find what is knowable of God in an existentialist world, John’s thirteenth and fourteenth century writing is important to contemporary Christian philosophy.  Edith Stein, in Finite and Eternal Being, wrote that she started her philosophical analysis using the work of Thomas Aquinas, and ended up with John Duns Scotus.  His work may be more important now than it was for several centuries after it was written. Although he lived at the turn of the thirteenth to fourteenth century, he was beatified only in 1993, by Pope John Paul II.

However, John Duns Scotus was more than a philosopher because he was also a Christian.  His “treatise” includes prayers that God would guide his thinking and praises for God’s omniscience.  His writing can be extremely dry and sometimes almost impossible to follow, but at other times he follows the tradition of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Anselm of Canterbury in breaking into unrestrained praise and prayer in the middle of what purports to be intellectual analysis.

Thus, Father Charles Balic, O.F.M., perhaps the foremost 20th century authority on John, said of him, "The whole of Scotus's theology is dominated by the notion of love. The characteristic note of this love is its absolute freedom. As love becomes more perfect and intense, freedom becomes more noble and integral both in God and in man."

There is an honesty to John's writing because it openly displays his involvement with the God he is analyzing.  Perhaps it is our more contemporary theologians who have erred in attempting to write theology or apologetic philosophy in a detached, intellectual manner when they are describing the God who made them, the God they pray to daily, and the God who was made man and gave His life for their salvation. 

I am doubtful that there is such a thing as a theological treatise in the sense that a scientific treatise can exist about some aspect of science that means little personally to the author.  Although there are dry theology books, perhaps the dryness reflects that the authors and editors have deleted the best parts of their writing in an effort to be more detached and intellectual about a subject that defies such dryness.  Although I think John derived much of his praise for God as First Truth from the Bible and not from his philosophical analysis, there is an honesty to his praise that tells the reader that John really believed his own analysis written elsewhere in his “treatise.” 

Perhaps John was in awe of God and confronting his own lack of sufficient comprehension of deity.  He compared God’s comprehension of Truth with his own lack of objectivity when he wrote, “For the ground or reason for the appearance does not prevent the proper meaning of what it reveals from appearing to Your intellect as is the case with our visual deceptions, when the appearance of something else prevents us from seeing what is really there.”  In so doing, he echoed the frustrations of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, who wrote, “Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it.”  We see “through a glass darkly,” while God sees all of reality in its full truth.  He is not misled by appearances as we are so easily misled by what only appears to be the truth. 

John reasons that God is first principle, the first cause of all else that exists, and that He by necessity cannot be dependent upon anything or anyone else to exist or to be perfect.  He cannot depend on anyone else for His knowledge of all that is and for His knowledge of what has been and what will be.  Thus, He is omniscient in and of Himself and of His own nature.  He is, therefore, First Truth, by His own nature. Although this appears in John’s treatise as the product of extensive philosophical reasoning, it echoes Biblical texts that surely must have influenced the questions John asked and the aspects of God’s perfection that John chose to analyze.  John was a philosopher, concerned with knowledge and humbled by his own lack of understanding and susceptibility to philosophical error.  He felt deeply his own tendency to misunderstand God as he tried to explain God intellectually, and He stood in awe of God’s own ability to know us and to know all of creation, with true knowledge and perception of truth. 

Scripture says Jesus told his disciples that He was the way, the truth and the life, and that no one could come to the Father but by Him. John surely knew this passage as he sought to show how and why God was the First Truth.  John stood in awe of God as the way, the truth and the life, as he tried to describe why this must necessarily be the case. 

John was not ashamed to be awed or to be humble before his subject, who was God.  Sometimes our contemporary world has lost its awe of God.  We become casual: either intellectual and skeptical or else shallow and flippant.  Neither Thomas Aquinas nor John Duns Scotus nor the others from their era fell into those errors of our own day.  We seek to bring praise into our worship, and we need to regain our sense of awe in a scientific and intellectual age.  When we look back at Thomas, John, Francis of Assisi, Angela of Foligno, and others from the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, we should see their sense of God’s divinity and reality that is sometimes missing from modern Christianity. 

Perhaps we need to remember the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “Thus says the Lord: "Stand by the roads and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” (Jeremiah 6:16 RSV)  More than we look to the paths of Christians of past centuries, we need to look to the scriptures that they read and knew.  When John asked for God’s guidance, he stood in awe of God and believed Him to be the Truth.  There is rest in that kind of awe.

A short online summary on John Duns Scotus with links to other online materials is on the Patron Saints Index here .

John Duns Scotus's Treatise on God as First Principle is available from EWTN online here .