Creatura intellecta: Die Ideen und Possibilienlehre bei Duns Scotus mit Ausblick auf Franz von Mayronnes, Poncius und Mastrius by Tobias Hoffmann (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 643 to be who I am. What Scotus and Cross forget is that there existentially or ontologically exists no such thing as a "non-assumed" human nature or a human nature that can or cannot be assumed. Only human beings/persons, who are who they are, exist, and therefore they could not possibly be assumed and so become somebody else. The Son could not assume me because before I came to be there was no "me" to assume. Once I came to be, I am me, and once I am me I cannot be assumed. The Son of God assumed a humanity that was uniquely his own (conceived in the womb of Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit), making him Jesus, and it only came to be at the moment of its assumption. While I have been critical of Cross's book, I would nonetheless stress that it should not be ignored. The issues that Cross raises are at the heart of the Incarnation and the answers that he proposes must be taken seriously and given their proper due. THOMAS G. WEINANDY, 0.F.M.CAP. Greyfriars Oxford, England Creatura intellecta: Die Ideen und Possibilienlehre bei Duns Scotus mit Ausblick aufFranz von Mayronnes, Poncius und Mastrius. By TOBIAS HOFFMANN. Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge 60. Munster: AschendorffVerlag, 2002. 46.00 EUR. Pp. 356 (paper). ISBN 3-402-04011-5. Tobias Hoffmann's Creatura intellecta is at present the definitive exposition and interpretation ofDuns Scotus's metaphysics of divine ideas and the possibles in their relation to God. While the author frames his own questions to Scotus in terms of recent discussion of the Franciscan doctor's place in the history of metaphysics, his interpretations are well supported by the texts he cites not only from the Ordinatio Sentence commentary but also from the earlier Lectura and the laterReportatio IA. (Specialists have not been in full agreement regarding the complete authenticity of this latter, a student report, but Hoffmann fully accepts its authenticity and relies on it extensively.) In accord with his subtitle, Hoffmann also traces the fundamental divergence within the Scotist school on divine knowledge and the possibles in the centuries after the Subtle Doctor's death. After an introduction that situates Scotus historically and summarizes his originality, the first part of the work devotes five chapters to the issues of divine knowledge in general, practical and theoretical knowledge in God and the contingency of creation, the debate between Scotus and Henry of Ghent on divine ideas, the distant but vital role played by the divine ideas in human knowing (Scotus's minimalist appropriation of Augustine), and the divine 644 BOOK REVIEWS intellect's production of the ideas as possible quiddities or "understood creatures." For Scotus, there is a sense in which one can say that a divine idea is an eternally understood creature, possible only, or possible and to-be-freely-created (hence the tide of the book). For Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, the problematic ofthe divine ideas, inherited from St. Augustine, served to explain how the one and simple God in knowing himselfcould know a plurality ofpotential creatures other than himself. Saint Thomas in the Summa first deduced that God knows things other than himself before going on to treat of the divine ideas as that whereby he knows the things he can create. The divine ideas are so many relations of imitability of the divine essence by things other than God and which he can create. God's knowing himselfas imitable in different ways is God's knowing what can imitate him. For Duns Scotus, God's knowing that his essence is imitable in different ways, that is, his knowing of a relation, presupposes knowledge of both terms, the divine essence and the possible essences of creatures. Thus for Scows, the starting point for the discussion should be the gaze of the divine intellect on finite essences in their intrinsic non-repugnance to being (their possibility). This does not imply for Scotus that existence-less but somehow independently subsisting essences or Platonic ideas actualize the divine intellect as objects of its act. Rather, the divine...