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308 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Mootus Briaens

involved meaning of Scripture was infinite, so that the exegesis of different commentators might all contain truth (iii. 24). With respect to the Fathers, he claimed the right in cases where they differed to follow the one who to him seemed to be right, though he disclaimed the purpose of deciding between them.

The philosophic-theological system of Scotus is set forth in his great work De divisione naturce [ed. T. Gale, Oxford, 1681 (16857) and C. B. Schliiter, Miin ater, 1838; Germ. transl., 2 vols., Berlin, 1870-76], which must be taken as the basis in an exposition of his ideas, though other works furnish confirmation and illustration. It is in dialogue 6. His form, between a master and a pupil; System. and it has been well said in praise of the composition that both contribute to the development of the line of thought. By nature Scotus means everything with which thought has to do, existence and non-existence-the last, to be sure, in the special sense in which the author regards God as non-existent. Nature includes God and the world, even though neither has a predicate in common with the other. The word "nature" is not quite a fitting expression of what Scotus had in mind; it might be rendered by "the All." This he divided into four categories: that which creates but is not created; that which creates and is created; that which is created and does not create; and that which is not created and does not create. Un created creating nature is God, as is also uncreated and non-creating; the last is the world in its return to God [i.e., God as the end of all things]. The second and third categories are those of the ideal and the real world; the system thus leads from God through the ideal and the real back to God.

Book i. discusses the being of God in his selfexistence, book ii. the first revelation of God in the world of ideas or original causes, books iii. and iv. discuss the real world, and book, v. deals with the return of the world to God. Scotus'

7. Doctrine doctrine of God goes back to the kata-

of God. phatic and apophatic ("affirming and denying") theology of Dionysius (i. 13). All positive predicates attributed to the mundane can be superlatively attributed to God as the transcendental or "super-being," but these predicates are positive in form only, in fact negative (by virtue of the "super"; iii. 20). Hence positive leads to negative, and in this way all predicates may be denied to deity, since deity is incomprehensible. His being is a "super-being," hence not in the category of being as applied to the mundane, and so can be called a "not-being." But this "not-being" is not to be understood as pure negation. Considering the self-existence of God, Scotus affirms that God can not grasp the entire fulness of his being; God knows that he is nothing of all that is in the world, but does not know what he is (by which Scotus means that even God can not comprehend and define himself · as a certain definite something). The whole mundane existence is by God created and formed after his plan, and the realization of the world involves the self-consciousness of God, but this self-consciousness is not to be thought of as like that of man, since God is absolute and most comX. 20

plete unity (i. 12, 73). This conception of unity is for Scotus the highest, most comprehensive, and transcendental, its fulness unattainable by man; it means the absolute oneness of willing and knowing. It was Scotus' doctrine on this point which led him so bitterly to assail Gottschalk's doctrine of predestination. While on the one side Scotus regards God as altogether severed from the world, there is another side of the consideration according to which God and the world are identical (iii. 17) ; the reconciliation of these two sides is 'in the conception that the world is the revelation of God (i. 13). God creates himself in the world and is All in all; he is the substance of all things, the last unknowable basis of its existence as of its accidents hence God is all and all is God, yet meanwhile he remains over all within himself, does not go forth into what he creates. The analogy employed is the relationship between human thought and speech; thought clothes itself in speech but does not go forth in the speech. While God's inner being remains unknown, yet there is knowledge of him according to the measure by which he reveals himself. Scotus borrows from Dionysius and Maximus the expression "theophany," which he uses in various senses. It may mean special divine appearances or visions to a creature, or the virtues which God works in a creature which then become the basis of a knowledge of God; or, finally, each creature is itself a theophany in so far as God is revealed in it. Consequently the knowledge a creature has of its own being is a knowledge of God proportionally as God is revealed in the creature.

The next category, which leads from the absolutely unknowable divine unity to the manifoldneas of the world, is the creation of the ideal world or the totality, of potencies which in turn & The Ideal emits from itself the world of sense.

World. Scotus knows as ideas divine pre destinations, acts of will, original causes (ii. 2), which are the names he gives to goodness, essence, life, reason, intelligence, wisdom, virtue, blessedness, truth, eternity, greatness, love, peace, unity, perfection (ii. 36, iii. 1). But this is not a complete enumeration or arrangement of these ideas, which, in view of the divine unity in which they issue, is impossible. They are the radii of which the unity is the center, which can be indefinitely multiplied without changing the being of the cir cumference. The first step of the self-revealing God is taken in making himself accessible to the creature; the means of doing this is unknown; but it is af firmed that God is eternal, according to his eternal (not temporal) being. The unlimited fulness of the ideas is summed up in the divine Logos or Son of God; in him in whom they are created do they exist without change. To be known in a certain sense coincides with being; so one may say that one is in another when he is known by that other (ii. 8, iii. 4, iv. 9), and of God it is true that he becomes so far as he becomes known (i. 12). Hence the"invariable movement" taking place in the Trinity by which God is made accessible to knowledge is a real crea tion, and ideas become so far as they are made as cessible to knowledge. Scotus conceived the primal causes as wholly enclosed in the divine being, yet