Duns Scotus (Great Medieval Thinkers Series)
Richard Cross
New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999
250 pages

Richard Cross is Official Fellow and Tutor in Theology, Oriel College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in Theology at the University of Oxford. In this volume, Cross provides a comprehensive introduction to Duns

Scotus, one of the greatest and most influential philosopher-theologians of the thirteenth century. Cross's book is a contribution to the Oxford series on "Great Medieval Thinkers." Scotus is an important thinker for several reasons. For Protestant theology, Scotus is important because Luther stood in the Scotist tradition of theology. Heiko Obermann's great study of the background of Luther's theology, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, makes this very clear. One particular feature of Scotus's theology, a feature accented even more by William of Occam, is the distinction between God's two powers, God's potentia absoluta and God's potentia ordinate. In his absolute power, God can present to his choice an infinite number of logically coherent worlds. In his ordained power, God chooses one of these possibilities to actualize. This distinction has remarkable implications for the meaning of human freedom, for the authority of the Bible and the Church's magisterium and for the meaning of faith. We cannot fully understand Luther's notion of forensic justification or Luther's treatment of the authority of the Bible apart from this distinction which Scotus and Occam did not originate but which they made very prominent.

Scotus is very important also for emphasizing a feature of Franciscan theology, i.e., the stress that this medieval theological tradition gave to God's will. It may not be overstretching the imagination to look for the earliest forerunners in modern voluntaristic philosophy, in Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Rorty and Foucault, in the Franciscan theology and philosophy of Scotus and Occam.

Scotus is especially important for his view of divine and human freedom. For Scotus, in contrast to Thomas Aquinas, with whom Scotus disagreed on my points, freedom means the capacity to choose opposites in any given situation. This radical notion of freedom--which Scotus ascribed to God and to human beings--comes closer to the modern notion of freedom as autonomy than, say, Augustine's or Thomas's notion of freedom as capacity to choose the end or goal which truly befits human beings as rational beings.

Cross' purpose is to provide the reader with an introduction to Scotus, which includes both Scotus' philosophical and his theological ideas. Thereby, Cross avoids the mistake of separating Scotus, the philosopher, from Scotus, the theologian. This separation is made, for example, by Frederick Coplestone, in his History of Philosophy and by Etienne Gilson in his La Philosophie du Moyen Age in their treatments of Scotus, and other scholastic theologians. Cross' commitment to treat Scotus as philosopher and as theologian is valid, because Scotus, like Thomas Aquinas or William of Occam or Bonaventura, did their philosophy in the framework of their theological vocation. Granted, Thomas, Scotus and the others asked what could human reason, apart from revelation, know about God? But even this question was motivated by theological commitments. So the attempt to treat Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Scotus as philosophers, in distinction from being theologians, is artificial and misleading. A merit of Cross's book is that he avoids this false separation.

Cross carries out his goal of a comprehensive overview of Scotus in eleven chapters, which range over a wide array of philosophical and theological topics. These topics include God's existence, God's unicity and simplicity; God's perfection and infinity; God's knowledge and agency; God the Trinity; Humanity: Body and Soul; Human Freedom, Ethics and Sin; Predestination, Merit and Grace; Jesus as God and Man; and the Sacraments. In each of these chapters Cross seeks to combine accuracy and substance with accessibility for the non-professional philosopher and theologian. On the whole, I think he succeeds, although the subtle, complex nature of Scotus' theology has always challenged the best minds. Scotus was not given the title, Doctor Subtilis, for nothing. This volume can be commended for its comprehensiveness, its clarity and its mastery of Scotus' thought to serious students of the history of theology and philosophy--especially those interested in Scotus himself as a theologian and for his contribution to later theology and philosophy.