Duns Scotus on God (review)

In this volume, Richard Cross gives us an excellent treatment of Duns Scotus's teaching on God, admirable for both its comprehensiveness and philosophical rigor. Scotus's positions on God's existence and nature, and on the Trinity, are reconstructed and evaluated with close attention to their argumentative soundness. Cross's method is particularly well-suited to his subject. As he notices, Scotus is, among theologians, "the least likely to appeal to mystery, and most likely to try to solve a problem by intellectual gymnastics" (8). For this reason, Cross felicitously calls him "par excellence the philosopher's theologian" (ibid.). Readers should not expect to find here an easy introduction to Scotus's theological achievement. The content of this book is "theology unashamedly at its most complex and specialized, in perhaps its most technically proficient philosophical practitioner" (3). Instead of proposing just another overview of Scotus's doctrine of God, Cross follows Scotus and his contemporaries in their passion for "sorting out micro-problems with particular issues in what we would call systematic theology" (9). Not surprisingly, this choice sometimes results in passages of exacting technicality. But the philosophical reward is assured.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to Scotus's demonstration of God's existence, and a discussion of his nature and attributes. The second and larger part is a study of Scotus's Trinitarian doctrine. In the first part, Cross painstakingly reconstructs each element of Scotus's cosmological argument for the existence of God. His analysis is particularly commendable for making clear that, although Scotus's demonstration is based on necessarily true premises, the notion of modality relevant here requires reference to a causal power, not to logical possibility. This is in contrast with what Scotus does elsewhere. Concerning divine attributes, Cross duly stresses the privileged role of infinity over simplicity and unicity. The second part is perhaps even more interesting. This is largely due to Scotus's opinion—not unique, but not common among scholastic theologians—that it is possible to provide rational arguments in favor of there being a Trinity of persons. As Cross notices, Scotus admits that these arguments are not demonstrative, since they are grounded on premises that do not have the degree of evidence required for a demonstration (128). These premises (which Scotus takes from Augustine) concern some positions in the philosophy of mind about the role of memory as a principle of production of a thought-act. Cross does a wonderful job of illuminating Scotus's rigorous application of the Augustinian insight.

The book ends with an appendix devoted to religious language and divine ineffability. Here Cross straightens out a common misunderstanding of the notion of univocity, often interpreted as a doctrine concerning things instead of concepts.

Apart from Scotus's passion for arguments, Cross's analysis allows the reader to discern some general trends in his theological output. These issues, while not unique to Scotus, have nevertheless been developed by him in a typically systematic fashion. A first trend is Scotus's emphasis on the contingent character of any external divine action, i.e., any divine action distinct from the internal Trinitarian productions. Strictly speaking, "nothing about the causal constitution of the universe requires the real (i.e., extramental) existence of anything other than God" (43). A second element is Scotus's anti-apophaticism, as can be clearly seen both in his doctrine of univocity, and in his taking seriously the Augustinian analogy between the human mind and the divine Trinity. A third element is Scotus's little sympathy for any sort of social Trinitarianism, which is evident in his stress on the identity of essence and essential properties in the divine persons. This allows Scotus to reject some traditional views, including the opinion that the Holy Spirit is the mutual love between the Father and the Son, which implies, contrary to what Scotus maintains, that the Father's love for the Son and the Son's love for the...