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CHAPTER TEN SCOTUS'S ESCHATOLOGY: SOME REFLECTIONS! Pope Paul VI points out in his apostolic letter Alma parens that Duns Scotus built his systematic philosophical and theological conception of God upon two passages of Scripture, one from Exodus, namely "I am who am" and the other from the firstJohannine epistle, namely: "God is love."2 As a philosopher Scotus interpreted the first of these to be God's description of himself as 'being' - the core notion he chose to develop as a philosopher in his De primo principio. He gives this prayerful summary ofwhat he believed a skillful metaphysician could prove by natural reason:) You alone are simply perfect, not just a perfect angel, or a perfect body, but a perfect being, lacking no entity it is possible for anything to have. Nothing can formally possess every perfection, but everyentity can exist in something either formally or eminentiy,4 as it does in you, o God, who are supreme among beings, the only one of them that is infinite. Communicating the rays ofyour goodness most liberally, you are boundless good, to whom as the most lovable thing of all every single being in its own way comes back to you as its ultimate end. Even on purely philosophical grounds, it was clear to Scotus that God himself must somehow be the ultimate end of whatever he creates. What our intellect, unaided by revelation, leaves unexplained is how 'in its own way' (suo modo) is to be understood. What divine revelation adds to this picture is what Scotus examined as a theologian. And it was in this role that he explored the implications of the other Scriptural passage, "God is love." In the monumental Ordinatio, Scotus's 'theological legacy to posterity,' as the late Carl BaHt; liked to call it,s Scotus did spell out the various implications of his belief that our triune God is "essentially love."6 Unfortunately this major work suffers from the fact that, according to university custom of the times it is cast in the form of a so-called 'commentary on the Sentences.' As a result John Duns could give us only piecemeal glimpses of the grand theological vision he had ofGod's supernatural destiny for humankind as he followed the topical divisions of Peter Lombard's four books of Sentences. Had he lived as long as Thomas Aquinas, his illustrious Dominican predecessor, he might have extracted in a more systematic way in a work the size of his De primo principio or St. Bonaventure's Breviloquium, a more concise account of his eschatology.7 It seems clear he did plan to compile something ofthis sort from the words he adds to the quotation from the De p1'imo principio above.8 185 186 EARLY FRANCISCAN SCHOOLMEN Besides the aforesaid points which philosophers have affirmed ofyou, Catholics often praise you as omnipotent, immense, omnipresent, just yet merciful, provident of all creatures but looking after intellectual ones in a special way, but these matters are deferred to the next tract. In this first treatise I have tried to show how the metaphysical attributes affirmed of you can be inferred in some way by natural reason . In the tract which follows, those shall be set forth that are the subject ofbelief, wherein reason is held captive - yet to Catholics, the latter are the more certain since they rest firmly upon your own most solid truth and not upon our intellect which is blind and weak in many things. Note that the first three attributes of omnipotence, immensity and omnipresence stress the sharp difference between the philosophical and theological conceptions ofGod in Scotus's day. Unlike the remote transcendent God of the philosophers, dwelling in the third heaven, causally related to the earth and humankind only through a lengthy series of intermediary intelligent beings, for the Catholic he is immanent and active throughout the universe, continually conserving what he created, and indwelling in a personal way in the souls of the just. Omnipotence, also, had a special meaning for the believer.9 It meant that God could do immediately whatever could be performed through the secondary causes. Hence God is the one "in whom we live, move and have our being" -as Paul explained to the Athenian philosophers (Acts. 17, 28). 'Just yet merciful' stresses the eschatological dimension of these two attributes ofGod, for they are treated as inseparably connected.Justice and mercy are divine attributes, and as such we might expect them to be presented systematically in...

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