Page:EB1911 - Volume 24.djvu/372

Rh an article of faith, the philosophical arguments for and against being inconclusive.

Thomism, which was destined to become the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, became in the first instance the accepted doctrine of the Dominican order, who were presently joined in this allegiance by the Augustinians. The Franciscan order, on the other hand, early showed their rivalry in attacks upon the doctrines of Albert and Aquinas. One of the first of these was the Reprehensorium seu correctorium fratris Thomae, published in 1285 by William Lamarre, in which the Averroistic consequences of the Thomist doctrine of individuation are already pressed home. More important was Richard of Middletown (d. c. 1300), who anticipated many of the objections urged soon after him by (q.v.). His system is conditioned throughout by its relation to that of Aquinas, of which it is in effect an elaborate criticism. The chief characteristic of this criticism is well expressed in the name bestowed on Duns by his contemporaries - Doctor subtilis. It will be sufficient therefore to note the chief points in which the two antagonists differ. In general it may be said that Duns shows less confidence in the power of reason than Aquinas, and to that extent Erdmann and others are right in looking upon his system as the beginning of the decline of Scholasticism. For Scholasticism, as perfected by Aquinas, implies the harmony of reason and faith, in the sense that they both teach the same truths. To this general position Aquinas, it has been seen, makes several important exceptions; but the exceptions are few in number and precisely defined. Scotus extends the number of theological doctrines which are not, according to him, susceptible of philosophical proof, including in this class the creation of the world out of nothing, the immortality of the human soul, and even the existence of an almighty divine cause of the universe (though he admits the possibility of proving an ultimate cause superior to all else). His destructive criticism thus tended to reintroduce the dualism between faith and reason which Scholasticism had laboured through centuries to overcome, though Scotus himself, of course, had no such sceptical intention. But the way in which he founded the leading Christian doctrines (after confessing his inability to rationalize them) on the arbitrary will of God was undoubtedly calculated to help in the work of disintegration. And it is significant that this primacy of the undetermined will (voluntas superior intellectu) was the central contention of the Scotists against the Thomist doctrine. Voluntary action, Aquinas had said, is action originating in self or in an internal principle. The freedom here spoken of is a freedom from the immediacy of impulse - a freedom based upon our possession of reason as a power of comparison, memory and forethought. Nothing is said of an absolute freedom of the will; the will is, on the contrary, subordinated to the reason in so far as it is supposed to choose what reason pronounces good. Accordingly, the Thomist doctrine may be described as a moderate determinism. To this Scotus opposed an indeterminism of the extremest type, describing the will as the possibility of determining itself motivelessly in either of two opposite senses. Transferred to the divine activity, Aquinas's doctrine led him to insist upon the perseitas boni. The divine will is, equally with the human, subject to a rational determination; God commands what is good because it is good. Scotus, on the other hand, following out his doctrine of the will, declared the good to be so only by arbitrary imposition. It is good because God willed it, and for no other reason; had He commanded precisely the opposite course of conduct, that course would have been right by the mere fact of His commanding it. Far removed from actuality as such speculations regarding the priority of intellect or will in the Divine Being may seem to be, the side taken is yet a sure index of the general tendency of a philosophy. Aquinas is on the side of rationalism, Scotus on the side of scepticism.