Henry of Ghent, outside Franciscan ranks, already took that tack. Duns Scotus
instead now attacks both sides. He seeks for doctrines giving maximal points
of distinctness, and overturns not only old Neoplatonism and Augustinianism,
but new Aristoteleanism as well. When Duns Scotus is through, the terrain of
the intellectual field has been revolutionized as never before.
In epistemology, Aquinas and the Aristoteleans gave primacy to sensory
knowledge of particulars: the human intellect most easily knows the essences
of material things. For Henry of Ghent, following the Augustinian tradition,
the prime object of the intellect is God, who gives knowledge by illumination
of the divine Forms. Duns attacks both doctrines. What the human intellect
knows most immediately and certainly is being, the absolutely unqualified,
fundamental concept without which one could not think at all. Furthermore,
being is univocal; it is behind all distinctions among modes of being. Duns
cleverly establishes this with an argument about doubt: we can conceive of
being even if we are doubtful whether it is being in itself or being in another
thing (i.e., whether it is existential assertion or predication, the logical copula).
Duns undercuts here the Avicennean distinction between existence and essence,
which had become conventional among Christian scholastics.
Since being is the most primitive concept, he maintains, it is from being
that we must start if we wish to prove the existence of God, or even to speak
about him. Moreover, a science cannot prove its basic principles but rather
begins with them; hence it is because the highest object of metaphysics is not
God but being that we can prove the existence of God through metaphysics.
Being is an absolutely transcendent concept, common to both the infinite and
the finite, to God and to creatures, to substance and accidents, matter and
form. Duns reorganizes the entire scholastic tradition, which had awarded
primacy to one or the other wing of these dichotomies.
Starting from being, Duns is able to state a proof of God which avoids
depending on the empirical existence of contingent facts, that is, the kind of
proof that Aquinas had used in starting from causality, movement, or order in
the sensory world. Duns instead adopts a version of Anselm’s strategy. Let us
suppose that an ultimate or highest cause of the world does not exist; what
could cause it not to exist? This would be self-contradictory, since the ultimate
cause by definition has no cause; hence it is impossible that the uncaused cause
should not exist. It is also impossible to infer the existence of contingent
beings—of the ordinary world—from the existence of God. There is, in other
words, no necessity why God should have created the world. The route of
Neoplatonic emanation is thus cut off, and so is any route which posits eternal
Forms in God. Although God is necessary, the world is logically unfounded.
The world must be a miracle, to be seen with much the same awe as in naive
holy scripture.
482 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths