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Part Four: John Duns Scotus's Theology of Creation
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33 A Franciscan View of Creation PART FOUR JOHN DUNS SCOTUS’S THEOLOGY OF CREATION W hile Bonaventure described an intimate link between the Trinity and creation, a link that affirms the goodness of creation, the fourteenth-century theologian, John Duns Scotus, viewed the goodness of creation through the lens of the primacy of Christ, the freedom of God, and the contingency of the world. Scotus’s doctrine of creation is insightful and original. It imparts to creation a profound dignity that reflects Francis’s fidelity to the world as the cloister in which we seek God. Creation: Gift of God’s Infinite Love Scotus looked at our world and realized that God is absolutely free; nothing created is necessary. Since God did not have to create anything , all is gift and grace.94 God creates in order to reveal and communicate God’s self to others as the fullness of divine love. God reveals this love by choosing to create this world precisely as it is. The present moment, therefore, expresses the perfection of the eternal . For Scotus, why creation comes about is more important than how creation comes about. Scotus claims that God creates for God’s own purpose, namely, the glory and love of God. Creation is simply the work of an infinitely loving Creator. Scotus, like Francis and Bonaventure, saw an intimate connection between creation and Incarnation, a connection that he grounded in the infinite love of God. The reason for all divine activity, he said, is found in the very nature of God as love. God is Trinity and Trinity, for Scotus, is the three divine persons in a communion of love. As the eternal movement of lover (Father), beloved (Son) and the sharing of love (Spirit), the Trinity is the model of reality, especially for human relationships. According to Scotus, God’s love is ordered, free and holy. Every single aspect of the created universe exists because of God’s absolute freedom and because of God’s unlimited love. All of creation is a gift. Nothing in creation is necessary.95 God 34 Ilia Delio, O.S.F. loves God’s very self in the other, and this love is unselfish since God is the cause of all creatures. Divine love tends to “spill over” or diffuse itself, and God wills to be loved by another who can love God as perfectly as God does. This “other” of God’s infinite love is Jesus Christ. Scotus maintains that God became human in Jesus out of love (rather than because of human sin) because God wanted to express God’s self in a creature who would be a masterpiece and who would love God perfectly in return. This is Scotus’s doctrine of the primacy of Christ. Christ is the first in God’s intention to love. Creation is not an independent act of divine love that was, incidentally, followed up by divine self-revelation in the covenant. Rather, the divine desire to become incarnate was part of the overall plan or order of intention. Scotus places the Incarnation within the context of creation and not within the context of human sin. Christ, therefore, is the masterpiece of love, the “summum opus Dei.” The idea that all of creation is made for Christ means that for Christ to come about there had to be a creation, and, in this creation, there had to be beings capable of understanding and freely responding to divine initiative. Creation was only a prelude to a much fuller manifestation of divine goodness, namely, the Incarnation.96 Christ: The Blueprint of Creation Whereas Thomas Aquinas emphasized the material and formal causes in creation, Scotus emphasized the final cause as determining the work of the Artist. Everything in creation is related to finality expressed in Christ, and this final goal is impressed on everything in between. Christ is the meaning and model of creation and every creature is made in the image of Christ. Because creation is centered on Incarnation, every leaf, cloud, fruit, animal and person is an outward expression of the Word of God in love. When Jesus comes as the Incarnation of God, there is a “perfect fit” because everything has been made to resemble Jesus Christ.97 This means that sun, moon, trees, animals, stories, all have life only in Christ, through Christ and with Christ, for Christ is the Word through whom all things are made (cf. John 1:1).98 The idea that all of creation...