Knowledge is the product of both the knower and the thing known.
—Bl. John Duns Scotus
The unkind word “dunce” is a pejorative of the little town of Duns in southern Scotland where John the Scot was born and raised. His thinking was so subtle, brilliant, and hard to understand that his opponents later mocked him by calling his professor’s hat at Oxford the “dunce’s” cap, meaning the cap of someone who is incapable of learning. Just a little trivia to get you intrigued with one who is indeed very intriguing.
Scotus was a philosopher theologian who joined the early group of Franciscans who had first came ashore at Canterbury in 1224 while Francis was still alive. We know little about his biography, but the fact that he would join this new ragtag group with no academic credentials tells you a lot about his priorities. His tomb in Cologne, Germany, in the Minoritenkirche where he died in 1308 at the age of forty-two, says in Latin, “Scotland bore me, England taught me, and Germany holds me.”
Although for many he is an unknown figure, we Franciscans tended to study his philosophy over that of Thomas Aquinas, and I was blessed to have four years to distill his rarefied wisdom at Duns Scotus College in Michigan in the early 1960s. Some of Scotus’s seminal ideas have come to their fullness and deep appreciation in our own time, but these three especially stand out:
- The “univocity of being” which gives a philosophical foundation to what we now call the circle of life or ecosystems, holons and fractals (parts that replicate the whole), unitive thinking—and mysticism itself.
- His assertion that inside of such wholeness God only creates particular individuals, a quality he named “thisness” (haecceity), which has endeared him to poets and mystics alike, and utterly exemplifies and grounds the principle of incarnation in the concrete and the specific. To Scotus, even Mary was believed to be a particular and unique choice of God, and he is credited with laying the philosophical-theological foundation for what became the official doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which had not been the mainline position up to that time. For Scotus, Mary personified and accentuated “thisness,” or “the scandal” of God’s particularity. Even fervent Catholics often hesitated to think that God would make just one exception to the universal pattern of brokenness (“original sin”).
- His assertion that Divine Incarnation itself was “the first idea in the mind of God” and not an after-the-fact attempt to solve the problem of sin. Scotus, in effect, taught that grace is inherent to the universe from the moment of the “Big Bang” (implied in Genesis 1:2, which has the Spirit hovering over chaos). His cosmic Christology implies that grace is not a later add-on-now-and- then-for-a-few phenomenon, but the very shape of the universe from the start. The Christ Mystery (Inspirited Matter) is Plan A for God—and not a Plan B mop-up exercise after “Adam and Eve ate the apple.”
These are three world-changing ideas. One changes your philosophy, the second your cosmology, and the last your foundational Christian theology. First, let me offer a short thought on the univocity of being, because it is a foundational concept, especially for mysticism: Our being is not just analogous to God’s being, but we may speak of our two supposedly different beings “with one voice.” From this alone we know that Scotus was a non-dual thinker, and thus a contemplative.
The Univocity of Being
I am convinced that Scotus was laying the philosophical foundation for what Michael Talbot and Ken Wilber in our time are speaking of as a hologra universe, where “everything is a holon,” and also Mandelbrot’s discovery of fractals, the repetitive and imitative patterns found in nature, mathematics, and art. In these discoveries, we know that the part contains the whole or replicates the whole, and yet each part still has a wholeness within itself—this “appreciative accumulation” is what makes the whole Whole! We now believe such wholeness is true physically, biologically, and spiritually, and can even be seen as a basis for any understanding of mystical union.
It implies that there is an “inherent sympathy” between God and all created things, and between the other “ten thousand things,” too. Each of us replicates the Whole and yet has a certain wholeness within ourselves—but we are never entirely whole apart from connection with the larger Whole. Holons create a very fine language for what I call the mystery of participation, for understanding how holiness transmits and how God’s life is an utterly shared phenomenon. If you are “holy” alone, you are not holy.
Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more it is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for, the very One who created you. Each is both a part that is like the Whole and also contributes to the Whole, just as Paul teaches in his analogy of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12–30).The world we live in today no longer enjoys any natural sense of this wholeness, and therefore of holiness. In our secular mind, we do not inherently and naturally “participate” in this creation, but we think we have to “buy” our way in somehow. This tragic spiritual loss takes many forms today. It is a sad and lonely world as a result, and we live outside the gates of paradise—excluded by angels of our own making (Genesis 3:24).
In this chapter, however, we will primarily be discussing the other two great themes of Scotus since the univocity of being has been implied in the whole book thus far. I surely cannot teach these other two ideas in the fully academic and footnoted way they deserve; that is the work of much more qualified scholars. But I can follow the Franciscan call and strategy to bring great truths and scholarship to the common person and the ordinary Christian, so everyone can profit and grow from them. Just as bad theology has been used for purposes of slavery and oppression, good theology—made available in simple form to the masses—offers much needed liberation to both individuals and society. That is my hope and vocation.
‘Thisness’
So why is “thisness” (Scotus’s doctrine of haecceity) so good and important? To begin with, such thinking was a breakthrough in the hierarchical Middle Ages, when the top and the center were alone considered important. If the top held, people assumed they could hold on too! Any writing about a common person or an ordinary person’s life was very, very rare at that time. The concept of the individual apart from the group had not yet been born, despite Jesus’s talk of leaving the ninety-nine to search for the one. Kings and queens, the papacy, the office of the bishop, and nationhood were far more important than anything local, immediate, concrete, or any specific “this.”
“My king is better than your king” and “my religion is the only true one” substituted for most personal trans- formation or any sense that God was engaged with the individual and ordinary soul (which is precisely mysticism). The corporate, the ninety-nine, the ethnic identity were preferred to the individual soul, which is exactly why most wars could be waged at all. This is “first-tier” or tribal consciousness.
For John Duns Scotus to move beyond tribal consciousness to honor the specificity of the individual—while still fully balancing this with the social Body of Christ—is really quite amazing. Such a leap is only possible if there has been a death to the ego, and the beginnings of communal wisdom. We are, in fact, still moving toward this synthesis that Scotus exemplified: the common good and the individual good are equally important—and must be held in a hard-won but creative tension. Few achieve it, in my opinion.
Scotus mirrors Jesus leaving the ninety-nine sheep and going after the one. But, just like Jesus, he holds that “one” fully inside a “commonwealth” (the word works here!), so he is no Western individualist. That would be to cheapen his insight. He is fully an incarnationalist, which is our great Christian trump card. The universal incarnation always shows itself in the specific, the concrete, the particular, and it refuses to be a mere abstraction. No one says this better than Christian Wiman: “If nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time ravaged self.”
The doctrine of haecceity is saying that we come to universal meaning deeply and rightly through the concrete, the specific, and the ordinary, and not the other way around, which is the great danger of all the ideologies (overarching and universal explanations) that have plagued our world in the last century. Everything in the universe is a holon and a fractal—and thus important! The principle here is “go deep in any one place and you will meet all places.”
When we start with big universal ideas, at the level of concepts and -isms, we too often stay there—and argue about theory, forever making more distinctions. At that level, the mind is totally in charge. It is then easy to “love humanity, but not any individual people.” We defend principles of justice but would not put ourselves out to live fully just lives ourselves. Only those who live like Francis and Clare do that. This takes different forms on the Left and on the Right, to put it in political terms. Liberals love political correctness itself and get authoritarian about process and language as recently defined. Conservatives love their validating group for its own sake and become authoritarian about its symbols, forever defining and defending the rules and rights of membership in that group. Both sides risk becoming “word police” and “symbol protectors” instead of actually changing the world—or themselves—by offering the healing energy of love.
Sometimes neither group ever gets to concrete acts of charity, mercy, liberation, or service. We just argue about its theory and proper definition. I have done it myself. Making our thinking first of all particular, now, concrete, and individual is a major gift from Scotus, and his entire philosophy makes love, and the will to love in a particular way, more important than intellect or understanding, or any theories about love itself.
In fact, this is often quoted as the essential difference between Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. For the Franciscan School, before God is the divine Logos (“rational pattern”), God is Eternal Outpouring (“Love”). The divine pattern is first and itself Love, as opposed to thinking that God can be rationally understood, and that this God then orders us to love. Love is then a mandate instead of the nature of being itself. For Scotus, as for Bonaventure, the Trinity is the absolute beginning point—and ending point too. Outpouring Love is the inherent shape of the universe, and when we love, only then do we fully exist in this universe. We do not need to “understand” what is happening, or who God is, before we can live in love. The will to love precedes any need to fully understand what we are doing, the Franciscan School would say.
This is a major difference in schools of spirituality, and I must say that the post-Reformation Church lived almost entirely inside of the Thomistic school instead of the Franciscan: understanding was a higher goal than “the will to love.” Almost all seminaries taught Thomas Aquinas first, and even exclusively, except for some Franciscan seminaries. Many papal decrees over the centuries made Thomism almost tantamount to the Gospel itself. I am sure you can see how it kept us a few shades away from a more mystical and unitive reading of the Gospels. In short, truth was equated with knowing instead of loving. Josef Pieper, a Thomist scholar himself, rightly said that “The proper habitat for truth is human relationships.” Ideas by themselves are never fully “true,” which is Platonism and not incarnate Christianity. At that level, we just keep arguing about words, and this keeps us from love.
Atonement Theory
For the sake of simplicity and brevity here, let me say that the common Christian reading of the Bible is that Jesus “died for our sins”—either to pay a debt to the devil (common in the first millennium) or to pay a debt to God the Father (proposed by Anselm of Canterbury [1033–1109] and has often been called “the most unfortunately successful piece of theology ever written”). Scotus agreed with neither of these readings. He was not guided by the Temple language of debt, atonement, blood sacrifice, or necessary satisfaction, but by the cosmic hymns of Colossians and Ephesians.
If Scotus’s understanding of the “how” and meaning of redemption (his “atonement theory”) had been taught, we would have had a much more positive understanding of Jesus, and even more of God the Father. Christian people have paid a huge price for what theologians after Anselm called “substitutionary atonement theory”: the idea that, before God could love his creation, God needed and demanded Jesus to be a blood sacrifice to atone for a sin-drenched humanity.
Please think about the impossible, shackled, and even petty God that such a theory implies and presents. Christ is not the first idea in the mind of God, as Scotus taught, but a mere problem solver after the sad fact of our radical unworthiness. And where did that come from? When you start with a negative, it is almost impossible to ever get back to anything positive and wonderful. When you start with a positive, things tend to take care of themselves from within.
We have had enough trouble helping people to love, trust, and like God to begin with, without creating even further obstacles. Except for striking fear in the hearts of those we sought to convert, substitutionary atonement theories did not help our evangelization
God never merely reacts but always supremely and freely acts, and acts totally out of love.
It is no wonder that Christianity did not produce more mystics and saints over the centuries. Unconsciously, and often consciously, many people did not trust or even like this Father God, much less want to be in union with him. He had to be paid in blood to love us and to care for his own creation, which seems rather petty and punitive, and we ended up with both an incoherent message and universe. Paul told us that “love takes no offense” (1 Corinthians 13:5), but apparently God was the big exception to this rule. Jesus tells us to love unconditionally, but God apparently does not. This just will not work for the soul or mature spirituality.
Basically when you lose the understanding of God’s perfect and absolute freedom and eagerness to love, which Scotus insisted on, humanity is relegated to the world of counting! Everything has to be measured, accounted for, doled out, earned, and paid back. That is the effect on the psyche of any notion of heroic sacrifice or necessary atonement. It is also why Jesus said Temple religion had to go, including all of its attempts at the “buying and selling” of divine favor (John 2:13–22). In that scenario, God has to be placated and defused; and reparation has to be paid to a moody, angry, and very distant deity. This is no longer the message Jesus came to bring.
This wrongheaded worldview has tragically influenced much of our entire spirituality for the last millennium, and is still implied in most of the Catholic Eucharistic prayers. It gave lay Catholics and most clergy an impossible and utterly false notion of grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness—which are, in fact, at the heart of our message. The best short summary I can give of how Scotus tried to change the equation is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. Christ was Plan A for Scotus, the hologram of the whole, the Alpha—and therefore also the Omega—Point of cosmic history. Understand the beginning and you know where it is all heading. This was, of course, very similar to Bonaventure’s notion of emanation and consummation.
God in Jesus was trying to move people beyond the counting and measuring that the ego prefers to the utterly new world that Jesus offered, where God’s abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary. Jesus undid “once and for all” (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10) all notions of human and animal sacrifice, and replaced them with his new economy of grace, which is at the heart of the gospel revolution. Jesus was meant to be a game changer for the human psyche and for religion itself.
In other words, we are all saved by grace and the utter freedom of God to love who and what God wills, without our tit-for-tat thinking getting in the way of God’s absolute freedom, and absolute freedom to love. As Peter already says to the first apostles when the Holy Spirit descends on the unbaptized and they want to deny this very possibility: “God has no favorites” (Acts 10:34– 35). Ironically, when we experience God’s love we feel very much like a favorite!
We all need to know that God does not love us because we are that good; God loves us because God is good. Nothing humans can do will inhibit, direct, decrease, or increase God’s eagerness to love. That is the one Absolute of biblical faith, as Pope Francis says, and all else is relative to it. All other claims to some theoretical “absolute truth,” even by the Church, are all in the head, and that is not where we need truth. For us, the word has become flesh. So we need to first find truth in relationships and in ourselves, and not in theories. Only great love can handle great truth.
Such good teaching on so many foundational issues should make us very happy indeed. For me, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins crystallized so beautifully the effect that Scotus’s teaching has on mystical minds:
Yet ah! this air I gather and release
He lived on;
These weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted
Who of all men most sways my spirits to peace.
The worldview of John Duns Scotus can and still will sway our spirits to this same cosmic peace: God is good and so we his children must be good too; God is free and so we do not need to be afraid of true freedom; God is nonviolent love, and this is the only hope for a world in which even Christians think violence is a way to “redeem” the world. Wrong ideas about God create wrong ideas about everything else too.
