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129 CHAPTER SEVEN SCOTUS ON THE ORIGIN OF POSSIBILITY1 The Questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in the opinion of the Scotistic Commission , is a work Duns Scotus composed early in his academic career. Portions of what he wrote there are more fully developed in his Oxford Lectura.2 According to the editors working on a critical edition at work in the Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University, however, the original work has been revised , and this may explain the references the Sentence commentaries.3 Book IX seems to be one of the more mature portions of the work, however , with its masterful analysis of the various meanings of potency and act, but like other portions of this early work it presents certain questions with only probable answers and needs to be complemented with what Scotus says elsewhere in his later commentaries on the Sentences. I Santogrossi’s essay4 undertakes to examine one aspect of “potency,” namely that opposed to actuality, and unpacks what Scotus has to say about the possible as a non-existent object.5 He indicates at the outset, however, that he intends to deal with “potency” exclusively from the standpoint of what Scotus says about it in the Questions on the Metaphysics and that this needs to be supplemented with his treatment of potency in the Ordinatio. And he concludes his essay with the suggestion that “Scotus’s aporematic treatment of potency opposed to act needs to be integrated by an explicit treatment of divine knowledge of the potential and the actual.” It is to this task that I devote the present essay. For that treatment, though begun in the Lectura, is given its most mature and complete expression in his Ordinatio. Incidentally, I think this topic of potentiality is a good illustration of the wisdom of Baliç’s methodology I spoke of earlier.6 He was firmly convinced that whatever Scotus said about any particular subject elsewhere in his writings , it should be interpreted in the light of this late and most important work. Scotus himself implies as much when he declares that the question of the sort “entity” the creature has before it is created is a difficult one to answer, particularly if one is not content to reduce its possibility exclusively to a conceptual relationship. For a relationship requires a foundation, and though relations of a lower order can be the basis for those of a higher order, ultimately one must root a first level relationship in something that is absolute or non-relational. SCOTUS & OCKHAM 130 II In these Questions on the Metaphysics Scotus is determined as far as possible to limit his discussion to metaphysical questions about Aristotle’s conception of potency. But, as Santogrossi sagely remarks at the outset of his essay, this is difficult for a Christian theologian. For the concept of creation enters in, something wholly foreign to Aristotle’s philosophy. For his conception of deity was an intelligent spirit, a transcendent Mind, hermetically sealed off from the perpetually changing world, as it were. A mind whose thinking is a thinking on thinking.7 Though God, for Aristotle, was the prime mover, the divine being was unmoved, and hence only a final cause, not the efficient cause of movement in the world.8 The universe fundamentally was uncaused and eternal. Only its movement, its endless generation and corruption of forms, required an explanation. Potency and act, in a universe of this sort would be quite different and much simpler than it could possibly be for a Christian metaphysican, or even an Islamic one, like Avicenna who first endeavored to expand these basic notions that Scotus explores in his Metaphysics. For Islamic philosophers were the first to try to integrate Aristotle’s philosophy with their biblical belief in the Pentateuch. Avicenna did so by reinterpreting the notion of creation so as to be compatible with the Philosopher’s conception that the world is eternal. Where Aristotle spoke of production as a reforming of pre-existent materials, Christian theologians spoke of creation as the complete and total production of a being where before there had been nothing. Philosophically, theologians came to define creation or the creative process as a case where, as regards some finite nature, its existence, pure and simple, follows its non-existence. As they phrased it in Latin, “esse post nonesse .” On the basis of this definition alone creation seemed to be contradicted by Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of the world, and this created one of...

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