John Duns Scotus

Life

Duns Scotus was born in Scotland around 1265 or 1266. His name means "Duns the Scot." As a young man he entered the Franciscan order and was ordained a priest, and he studied and taught at Oxford and Paris. Because few records of his life survive, many of its dates remain uncertain. In his final years he taught at Cologne, Germany, where he died on November 8, 1308. In 1993 Pope John Paul II declared him Blessed, the title the Catholic Church gives to a person venerated at the stage immediately preceding sainthood.

Work and Contributions

The precision and incisiveness of Scotus's thought earned him the epithet "the Subtle Doctor" (Doctor Subtilis). His principal work is his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the standard textbook of medieval theology. This commentary contains nearly all of his major ideas and survives in several versions.

• Univocity of being: He held that the concept of "being" applies to God and to creatures in the same sense. He explained the difference between God and creatures as the difference between the infinite and the finite.
• Thisness (haecceitas): He posited a distinctive principle that makes each individual thing precisely "this" thing.
• Primacy of the will: He emphasized that the universe depends on God's creative will, and in human beings, too, he gave the will priority over the intellect.
• Proof of God's existence: He developed an intricate metaphysical argument to show that God is the first, unique, and infinite being.
• Immaculate Conception: He offered a theological defense of the claim that Mary was conceived without original sin from the very first moment of her existence. His defense is regarded as having strongly influenced the later establishment of this teaching as a doctrine of the Catholic Church.

Influence on the Korean Church

There is little clear evidence that Scotus directly influenced Korean Protestantism. He is introduced mainly in medieval philosophy and church history courses at seminaries and theological colleges as a representative figure of scholasticism. Acceptance of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception varies by denomination. The Catholic Church confesses it as official doctrine, whereas many Protestant denominations reject it as lacking sufficient scriptural basis. His emphasis on God's sovereignty and will, meanwhile, is sometimes studied in connection with theological currents before and after the Reformation.

Assessment

Scotus is counted, along with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, among the leading philosophers and theologians of the late Middle Ages. He has also drawn criticism. Sixteenth-century humanists and Protestant reformers ridiculed the convoluted arguments of the Scotist school, and the English word "dunce," meaning a fool, is said to derive from his name. In modern times, some theologians have argued that the univocity of being places God and the world on the same level and thereby opened the way to modern secularization. Scotus scholars counter that this criticism misunderstands his original intent.