1. Allan B. Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 1986; hereafter referred to as WM.
2. Anthony Quinton, "British Philosophy." The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.
by Paul Edwards (New York: Free Press/London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), vol. I, p. 373.
3. Scotus' oft-quoted statement that "everything other than God is good because God
willed it and not vice versa" occurs in reference to the goodness that stems from the merits of
Christ, something that transcends natural or any moral goodness as Aristotle understood the term
(WM, p. 16). Natural goodness is something things possess in virtue of having all that is proper
and becoming to their nature, and natural goodness is a presupposition for moral goodness, and
this depends upon actions having in addition to their natural goodness, all that is becoming to
them according to right reason (WM, pp. 17-25). If all actual goodness can be said in any sense to
be will dependent, it is only because it is part and parcel of the grand plan of a benevolent creator
who creates not only freely but wisely, so that whatever he makes will be worthy of himself and
do justice to his goodness. Hence, Scotus says, paraphrasing St. Augustine: "Whatever God
made, you know that he made it with right reason," (WM, p. 19), or as Scripture puts it: "God
saw that everything he made was very good." (Gen. 1:31).
4. See especially C. R. S. Harris, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927),
vol. 2, pp. 331-35.
5. WM, p. ix.
6. Henry of Ghent had noted that Aristotle's criterion of rational and nonrational
potencies indicated that the will was a rational potency. Scotus expanded this notion at length in
connection with his analysis of act and potency in his Questions on the Metaphysics of
Aristotle. See WM, pp. 144-72.
7. This is but another instance of how Scotus developed his own version of
"Aristotelianism." After the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 a number of Franciscan theologians,
inspired by Bonaventure, tried to develop what they considered a more "Augustinian" system of
philosophy; Scotus' merit was to show how the values they were concerned to protect could be
defended by an ingenious interpretation of Aristotelian axioms and thus brought the Franciscans'
"school," if one can speak of their pluralism as a school, into the mainstream of Christian
Aristotelianism. Scotus, however, was well aware that the Franciscan interpretation of
"Augustine" was colored largely by insights of St. Anselm and the School of St. Victor, and he
used both of these in his development of his own "Aristotelian" version of the will and its
function.
8. Part I is entitled 'The will and intellect"; Part II, "The will and its inclinations."
9. WM, pp. 144-145.
10. See Anselm, De causa diaboli, c. 4 (ed. Schmitt, I, 241).
11. Scotus refers to this in WM, pp. 468-69. "If one were to think, according to that
fictitious situation Anselm postulates in The Fall of the Devil, that there was an angel with
an affection for the beneficial, but without an affection for justice
page
30
(i.e., one that had a purely intellectual appetite and not one that was flee), such an
angel would be unable not to will what is beneficial, and unable not to covet such above all. But
this would not be imputed to it as sin, because this appetite would be related to the intellect as the
visual appetite is now related to sight, necessarily following what is shown to it by that cognitive
power, for it would be inclined to seek the very best revealed by such a power, for it would have
nothing to restrain it."
12. Ibid., pp. 469-70: "This affection for justice, which is the first checkrein on the
affection for the beneficial, inasmuch as we need not seek that towards which the latter affection
inclines us, nor must we seek it above all else (namely, to the extent which we are inclined by this
affection for the advantageous)-this affection for what is just, I say, is the liberty innate to the will,
since it represents the first checkrein on this affection for the advantageous."
13. Anselm had argued that as a perfection "to be able to sin is not liberty or any part of
liberty" (De libero arbitrio, c. 1); Scotus analyzes how far this can be applied to a created
will by reason of its innate affection for justice (WM, pp. 458-77) as well as to the divine will
(ibid., pp. 238-55).
14. WM, p. 241.
15. WM, pp. 12, 20.
16. WM, p. 5.
17. WM, pp. 5-9.
18. WM, pp. 425-27.
19. WM, pp. 9-10.
20. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, liber I, dist. 3, c. 1, ed. I.
Brady (Grottaferrata/Romae: Collegii 5. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, (tom. i) 1971), p. 69.
21. PL 176, 268.
22. WM. pp. 26, 263-65, 271, 287.
23. WM, pp. 26-29.
24. L. J. Thro, S. J., Manuscripta, vol. 31, n. 1 (1987), pp. 46-47.
25. A translation of this early version is contained in Wippel and Wolter, Medieval
Philosophy: From St. Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa (New York: Free Press, 1969).
26. See the item on Henry, ibid.
27. See my analysis of this treatment in the second part of "An Oxford Dialogue on
Language and Metaphysics," Review of Metaphysics 32 (1978), 323-48.
28. See for example what I have written in "A Scotistic Approach to the Ultimate Why-Question," in Philosophies of Existence Ancient and Medieval, ed. Parviz Morewedge
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1982, pp. 109-30); and the commentary in the second
edition of John Duns Scotus. A Treatise on God as First Principle (Chicago: Forum
Books, Franciscan Herald Press, 1983).
29. Thro, art. cit. p. 46.
page 31
30. He introduces his lengthy discussion (cf. WM, pp. 154-167) with the question: "How
reconcile the aforesaid interpretation with the mind of Aristotle, who distinguished not between
nature and will, but between irrational and rational potencies?"
31. See my article, "Duns Scotus on the Natural Desire for the Supernatural," New
Scholasticism 23 (1949), 281-317.
32. See my article, "Duns Scotus on the Necessity of Revealed Knowledge,"
Franciscan Studies 11 (Sept.-Dec. 1951), [231]-[272].
33. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio IV, dist. 1, q. 3, n. 8, quoted in WM, p. 29.
