The Work
The Ordinatio is John Duns Scotus's revised and authoritative version of his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, prepared from his own copy of his Paris and Oxford lecture notes for definitive circulation. It was never completed - Scotus died in 1308 at approximately forty-two - but what exists constitutes one of the most important works of late medieval scholasticism. Together with his Lectura (an earlier version of the Sentences commentary) and the Quaestiones Quodlibetales (questions debated in formal academic disputation), the Ordinatio forms the basis for Scotus's extraordinary influence on Catholic theology, canon law, and philosophy.
Scotus occupies the position in the Franciscan scholastic tradition that Thomas Aquinas occupies in the Dominican tradition: the greatest systematic theologian of the order, whose thought shaped all subsequent Franciscan theology. The rivalry between Thomism and Scotism - between the Dominican and Franciscan approaches to the relationship between intellect and will, between being and God - defined the major fault line in late medieval Catholic intellectual life and influenced both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Biblical Engagement
Psalm 115:3 - 'But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased' - is the Old Testament text that most directly expresses the primacy of the divine will that Scotus uses as the foundation of his theology. Against Aquinas's intellectualism - the view that God's will necessarily follows his intellect, acting in accordance with the rational order of being - Scotus argues for the primacy of the divine will: God's will is not constrained by any external standard, not even by God's own intellect. God does what he wills, and his willing is the standard of goodness, not the reverse. This 'voluntarism' has enormous implications: moral law is grounded not in the nature of things but in the divine command; the Atonement was not necessary but freely chosen; the Incarnation itself was, for Scotus, not primarily a response to sin (the dominant Thomistic view) but the crowning expression of God's free love for creation that would have occurred even without the Fall.
Luke 1:28 - 'And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women' - is the Annunciation to Mary that grounds Scotus's most celebrated contribution to Catholic theology: the argument for the Immaculate Conception. The question - whether Mary was conceived without original sin - had been disputed in the schools. Aquinas had concluded that Mary was not immaculately conceived (since Christ's redemption would then not apply to her). Scotus argued that the most perfect form of redemption is the redemption that prevents sin from occurring, not the redemption that removes it after the fact; and that it is appropriate to attribute to Mary the most perfect form of redemption. His argument - 'God could do it; it was fitting; therefore he did it' (potuit, decuit, ergo fecit) - was logically elegant and rhetorically powerful, and it eventually prevailed: the Immaculate Conception was defined as Catholic dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854.
Romans 9:18 - 'Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth' - supports Scotus's voluntarist reading of divine sovereignty. The Pauline insistence on the radical freedom of divine election - that God's choice is not based on anything in the recipient - confirms for Scotus that the divine will is genuinely free, not constrained by antecedent conditions in the creature.
John 1:14 - 'And the Word was made flesh' - is read by Scotus in the context of his argument that the Incarnation was not necessitated by the Fall. If the Word became flesh in response to sin, then the Incarnation is a remedial measure - beautiful but not the eternal intention of God. Scotus argued instead that the Incarnation was God's primary intention for creation, the reason creation was made: the Word becoming flesh is the summit of the divine self-communication to the creature, and would have occurred whether or not Adam sinned. This 'absolute primacy of Christ' has become a characteristic Franciscan theological theme, developed in the twentieth century by Karl Rahner and others.
Philosophical Contributions
Scotus's philosophical contributions are as important as his theological ones. His doctrine of the 'univocity of being' - the claim that 'being' is predicated in the same sense of both God and creatures (against Aquinas's analogical doctrine) - provided a philosophical foundation for the possibility of rational knowledge of God. His concept of haecceitas ('thisness') - the individual differentiating principle that makes this thing to be this thing rather than any other - is a significant contribution to the metaphysics of individuation. His formal distinction (a middle position between real distinction and mere conceptual distinction) provided tools for addressing puzzles in Trinitarian theology and Christology.
Author and Context
John Duns Scotus (c.1266-1308) was born in Duns, Roxburghshire, Scotland, entered the Franciscan Order as a young man, was ordained priest in 1291, and studied and taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. His academic career was brief - he died at approximately forty-two - but extraordinarily productive. His formal title 'Doctor Subtilis' (the Subtle Doctor) acknowledges the precision and complexity of his philosophical and theological analysis.
Scotus's thought represented a significant departure from the Thomistic synthesis that had dominated Catholic theology since Aquinas. Where Aquinas sought to integrate reason and revelation in a harmonious synthesis grounded in the rational order of being, Scotus insisted more sharply on the freedom and sovereignty of the divine will and the radical contingency of created existence.
Legacy
Scotism - the school of thought derived from Scotus - dominated the Franciscan order and had substantial influence in the other orders and in secular philosophy. The nominalist tradition of William of Ockham developed Scotus's voluntarism in directions that eventually contributed to the Protestant Reformation's critique of scholastic theology. Gerard Manley Hopkins studied Scotus deeply and credited the doctrine of haecceitas (the individual 'thisness' of each creature) with helping him to the poetic vision of 'inscape' that characterizes his poetry. The definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 was the most dramatic institutional vindication of Scotus's influence on Catholic doctrine.