Reflections on Pope Benedict XVI’s Talk at Regensburg
While Pope Benedict’s talk aroused a great deal of controversy partly, perhaps, due to misunderstanding, there were a lot of insights directed to a sound partnership between faith and reason. In a negative way, he pointed out that faith cannot be forced and is incompatible with violence, although it is curious that he did not repudiate the Inquisition or the trials of Joan of Arc and Gallileo. In the best Christian tradition, faith is a free assent to what is not sensibly or rationally obvious. Benedict’s appeal to a companionship between faith and reason is firmly rooted in the Anselmian tradition of faith seeking understanding. This stands as a repudiation of blind and non-thinking fundamentalism whether it be Christian, Islamic, or Jewish. The ability to think and reflect is not adversative to faith; if faith is a God-given gift, then so is the human mind.
It is his appraisal of the thought of Duns Scotus with which I would like to deal here.
The following is a paragraph (in English translation) from the Pope’s address:
“In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.”
The above passage is not an accurate appraisal of the thought of Duns Scotus. In all probability, it stems from the philosophical and theological manuals of the late 19th and early 20th century whose authors had no access to the critical editions of Scotus’s writings. All too often their agenda included a defense of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas by constructing ‘straw men’ as his opponents. During his tenure as professor of theology at the University of Bonn, Dr. Ratzinger could have had access to the basic texts of Scotus, thanks in large part to the editions of the Scotist Commission in Rome and the contributions of Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. who spent his life retrieving the writings of Duns Scotus and translating them into English.
Scotus, with Bonaventure and Ockham, knew that Hellenism needed correction by those who hold the tenets of the Christian faith. According to Socrates, if we know clearly what is right, we will do what is right. For Aristotle, the world was necessary and eternal, always was and always will be. His God was aloof from the contingencies of human behavior with which he could not be ‘contaminated’. For Aristotle, divine providence and miraculous intervention were apriori impossible.
The Fathers of the Church and the great medieval theologians repudiated this necessitarianism. God’s creation, incarnation, and redemption were gifts of goodness freely bestowed; God cannot be constrained by creatures. God made whatever may be construed as rational in the universe; the basis for rationality is God-made. It is not as if ‘this is reasonable, therefore God must make it’. It should be noted that the Franciscan predecessors and followers of Scotus asserted that God could do nothing disorderly and therein lies the foundation for rationality. Likewise, the universe is good because God has created it and not the contrary: ‘the universe is good; therefore God must create it’. There were theologians, of course, who indulged in ‘counter-factual and hypothetical theology’, by indicating, for example, that this is not the only possible world, pace Aristotle, nor the best of all worlds, pace Leibniz. Yes, God could have done and could do ‘otherwise’ except create a contradiction. However, that God could do otherwise does not lead to divine capriciousness as Benedict claims. In fact I know of no ‘orthodox’ theologian who would claim that God could, can or might still do otherwise, e. g. miraculous intervention. However, the foundation for our reason is what God did do, not what He could have done.
In the human realm, Scotus’s so-called voluntarism is not anti-intellectual but co-intellectual. One of God’s greatest gifts is man’s free will, and it must be a very precious gift or it would have been taken away long ago, given all the abusive misuse of this gift. In Scotus’s view, the human will is superior to the human intellect, which operates necessarily, not being able to dissent from the true or assent to the false. However, the will can direct or divert the intellect. It is the will that determines what is to be examined or reflected upon. The will is the ultimate basis of morality: we are not morally good because we know what is right, but because we act rightly and do what is right. Even Aristotle knew that we are not praised or blamed for what is ‘necessary’ in us but for the choices we freely make. The gauge of moral goodness, according to Scotus (and Ockham), is right reason, and right reason must go by what God has done, that is, creation as we seek to understand it, and not what God might have done. “Moral goodness is formally something inherent in a human act, namely, its suitability or conformity to what right reason dictates.” (Allan B. Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality; Catholic Univ. Press 1986, p. 20) There is no capricious God in either Scotus or Ockham, as is clear to an unbiased reading of their writings. In his efforts to clarify the role of the intellect and will in making moral decisions, Scotus makes careful distinctions through lengthy analyses which require equally careful reading and are not subject to facile summarization; he has been called the ‘Subtle Doctor’ with good reason.
It is unfortunate that Pope Benedict, it would seem, has simply reiterated a distorted view of Scotus’s thought perpetuated by certain manuels of philosophy and theology and certain historians who, too often motivated by the desire to defend Thomas Aquinas, have made a caricature of Scotus’s thought without troubling themselves with going back to the texts.