As the traditionalist movement in the Church has grown and attracted new, younger members and converts across the English speaking West, so has it encouraged popular inquiry into the sources of its traditions. These sources include the scholastic achievements of its Medieval doctors every bit as much as the foundational polemics of the Early Fathers, to say nothing of the study of the Bible itself.

As such, secondary sources and introductory texts on the subject are welcome additions to any modest personal library, and Thomas Ward supplies one here on a subject of recently growing interest: the thought of Blessed John Duns Scotus, one of the theological pillars of the Franciscan theological tradition alongside St. Bonaventure and, of course, St. Francis himself. Ward’s brief approach is as illuminating as it is accessible and, fortunately, short. As such, Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus is somewhat unlike much other scholarship available at the level of entry. His approach is simple and he speaks, for the most part, in very plain English. And, interspersed with his descriptions of the Scot’s thought are relatable analogies written in a conversational tone.

The Subtle Doctor and His Thought

Blessed John Duns Scotus wrote no Summa Theologiae, and although a couple of attempts were made over the centuries to summarize his thought into such a format, none of them caught on. Instead, the philosophical theology of Blessed John has to be assembled from his writings across several main works: his commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences and compiled notes from lectures he gave at the University of Paris. Fortunately, such work has already been done many times by qualified scholars—mostly Franciscans.

Ward begins with outlining an appropriate context for Scotus, summarizing what little we know about his life and placing his thought into context amid the chaotic inter-mendicant squabbles over the centuries, before moving on to explain Scotus’ system itself. With this, he proceeds, much like Scotus himself did, with the first thing: God. Each chapter works its way a bit further ‘backwards’, as it were, until by the end, we eventually reach Christ and Our Lady, having passed through the creation, man, and by implication, history itself.

In modern thought, one is impelled to begin with what can be known and then reason ‘outwards’, as it were, from himself. Scholasticism, although common approaches ranging from St. Albert Magnus and Peter Lombard to St. Thomas Aquinas to the Subtle Doctor here all begin with the First Principle, do so in similar fashion. Contrary to modern thought, God’s reality is easier to argue and be sure of than one’s own, and for good reason: God is, in fact, more real than we are, though this is not intended to introduce a dichotomy in which we are somehow ‘unreal’ the way dreams are.

As such, Ward, following Scotus and the Scholastic tradition, begins with God. Like all medieval scholars, knowledge of God’s existence could be satisfied purely by reason alone, but “knowledge of God most worth having, Scotus affirmed, is knowledge only God can give us.”¹ God’s existence can be known by man alone, fallen as he is, but man can only have expressed to him God’s intentions by God Himself. This can be understood as recognizing the necessity of revealed truths—Sacred Scripture—in any efforts intended to reveal something of theological value. That God can be known to exist without Scripture is true, but that He can be known, either empirically or personally, without the use of Scripture is not.

This leads Ward to show how such knowledge of God can be expressed between men and discussed: Scotus’ often misunderstood (and therefore controversial) idea of the univocity of being. “Scotus’s actual view is that the concept or term ‘being’ is used the same way for both God and creatures,” he writes, rather than, as others have misconstrued, “that God and creatures are beings in the same way.”² The notion that univocity numbers God as another among all beings is, of course, ludicrous, which is why univocity has been such a contentious point among critics of the Scot for centuries. Although Ward does not go into great depth explaining the differences, he points readers to modern scholarship by Richard Cross and Thomas Williams for more.

Being, Scotus argues, can be “isolated in our thinking,” as a concept, “with no determining features added to it,” and as such, this becomes “the fundamental intelligible link between God and creatures.”³ In this way, Ward describes how Scotus orients his definition of being’s univocity. By careful recognition of our relations with other creatures, particularly in the sense of how we can love others as we may love ourselves, we form a ‘horizontal’ relation that informs our definition of love. This definition is exactly how we can recognize that a ‘vertical’ relation of all creatures to God also exists, and these various ‘horizontal’ relations then inform our understanding of the ‘vertical’ one. “God’s love is the archetype of all creaturely perfections,” Ward writes; “[His] Love is the exemplar of all other loves, and their causal origin, and that to which all other loves are ultimately ordered.”⁴

Scotus’ elucidation of haecceity, too, deserves a mention. ‘This-ness’, a term that refers to an individual created object’s uniqueness, is sometimes misconstrued into a nominalist force that breaks down universals. In fact, the opposite is the case; for Scotus, ‘haecceity’ is only considered because of universals, not as a matter against them. The problem haecceity addresses emerges from distinguishing exactly what makes one particular thing distinct from another particular thing of the same kind; what makes this tree not that tree, this chair not that chair, and of course, this person not that person. Ward takes us through in reasoning that uniqueness cannot be a matter of qualities, such as height, width or weight, nor the composition of materials or matter; two identical rocks could exist, after all, and yet they would be distinct from one another and therefore not the same rock. Likewise, as thought experiments with clones have played out, can this apply to complex living organisms—conceivably (though unlikely) to people, as well. Nor, Ward points out, could we use the soul as the distinguishing factor, as “humans all share the same kind of soul,”⁵ an observation that only restates the problem of determining the uniqueness due to individuals.

Instead, Ward explains how Scotus uses haecceity to position souls within God’s witness and divine plan. Souls are intimately understood and known by God with a closeness that men are ultimately blind to, though they can know it briefly, at times, by intuition. But God knows this sort of identity because he is that very identity’s creator:

When He thinks of you, He knows that thing that makes you unique, and He knows it intimately. According to Scotus, this is yet another way in which God’s thoughts are not like our own. We can only think about haecceity in a general way, as a theoretical entity posited to explain the phenomenon of individuality. Your uniqueness, at least in this life, is hidden from us, behind all those general characteristics that might help us to pick you out in a lineup of suspects but do not explain your individuality. God, on the other hand, knows your haecceity exactly as it is. His decision to create you, then, is not a decision to create a human being at such and such a time, in such and such a place, with such and such genetic information, having a proclivity for reading books on Duns Scotus, and so on, but a decision to create you, this thing he has been thinking for all eternity.⁶

Not unlike his explanation of univocity, Ward explains haecceity with implicit reference to Scotus’ providential conception of all creation. God’s plan is at work in every made fiber, every observable measurement, and every created soul, all for the express purpose of bringing about His divine vision. The relation of creatures to each other, the organization and content of matter, and the uniqueness of all things within their categories all serve to illustrate this idea, which Ward explains in the following chapter.

Providence is knowable by man by his natural inclination that everything happens for rational reasons, and that these reasons aren’t always reducible to material causes. To get at these reasons, final causation—teleology—leads man into thoughts of God and presumptions of his plan for the world. However, just as the cosmos, though fallen, remains ordered and comprehensible, it is clear too that things aren’t always what we think they are, and in fact, are ordered such that their ends do not obviously follow from their means. “According to Scotus,” Ward writes, “in general the true purposes of things are just what humans can discover;” however, “God retains the prerogative to intend for things purposes other than what their natures best suit them for.”⁷

This is the sort of divine radical voluntarism that Scotus is sometimes accused of fostering. In context, however, again, nuance prevails for those willing to attend to it; Scotus does not suggest that, because some exceptions to the self-evident order exist, the universe and God’s will are totally arbitrary and unknowable. Rather, he recognizes that God holds domain over all created things, and is both perfectly able and within His rights to use things in ways that are not obviously connected to their apparent natures.

When considered by itself, removed from Scotus’ beliefs about what and more importantly Who God is, this belief could seem like a black hole that threatens to undermine the realism that he’s painstakingly assembled. But this voluntarism isn’t considered in a vacuum; God is not arbitrary and His designs for the world are all shaped toward knowable ends that He has revealed to us.

It is in the final chapter that Ward arrives at these ends, and in fact, on what is perhaps the most intriguing element of the Subtle Doctor’s theological vision: the doctrine of Christ’s Absolute Primacy, or, in other words, that “God’s main reason for the Incarnation was to be united with the human nature of Jesus Christ.”⁸ This goes against what is more or less the conventional view of the Incarnation, that somehow the Incarnation was predicated on the Fall of man, which introduces a difficult and seemingly unresolvable paradox at the very heart of Christian belief. Theologians who subscribe to such a view often seem to throw their hands up at the paradox and resign themselves to the assumption that God brings good things out of bad, a true statement that is difficult to stretch out to even the Incarnation. Such a belief struggles under the weight of suggesting that the greatest miracle of all creation had been brought about by the worst thing man could ever have done. Even in a poetic or ironic sense, this seems like a misplaced belief. It is as if to say, had man not sinned, God would never have become man, and when phrased in such a way, it almost comes across as a non-sequitur.

For Scotus, however, Absolute Primacy sidesteps the paradox altogether. By placing the Incarnation at the center of God’s intentions for creation, he illuminates God’s designs as they relate to man, matter, history, and all things. It is because of the Fall that the Incarnation took on the qualities of atonement as well, but it is not because of atonement, first and foremost, that the Incarnation took place. It seems far more reasonable that even had Adam never sinned, and no progeny of his ever sinned, God’s designs for the world included something as grand as the Incarnation at its root. And if this is the case, then all of creation was made with the Incarnation as its express purpose. Again, one can see that by starting with God, Scotus, in a sense, works backwards in order to find the proper placement of man within the scope of all things. Not unlike the Mass, in which the celebrant (hopefully) performs the ritual with a selfless adoration and love for God, for the greater glorification of Him as He transubstantiates for our sake, all of creation, too, was made with the intention of a greater glorification of God by the means of the Incarnation. Man was made so God could be clothed in his nature. “God loves himself most of all, and even loves all other things for his own sake,” as Ward points out.⁹

Ward ends his book understandably tying Scotus’ doctrine of Christ’s Absolute Primacy to the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Where the book begins with an entertainment of the First Principle, it ends, after explorations of matter, form, personhood, souls, history and intention, with the Mother of God and the elite place she held in the plan of the Creator.

Brief Aside

As the traditionalist movement within the Church has gained more popular notoriety in the last decade, so too has the intellectual traditions that have come to be associated, by modern parlance, with the Tridentine form of the Mass. Theologically, one can point to the reason for the conferring of the Council of Trent in the first place: the chaos of the Protestant revolutions occurring throughout Europe at the time. The chief results of this within the Church were two: the eventual standardization of the Roman Rite, and specifically its Mass around the Tridentine form, as well as the promulgation of the first Church-spanning Catechism of the Faith.

Trent’s trajectory guaranteed the position that St. Thomas’ works would hold within the Church’s teaching magisterium. Inter-mendicant feuds lasted throughout the medieval and renaissance periods, all the way up until the realities of secular modernism made it impractical to keep them up outside of extremely niche publications. Thomism, however, somewhat at the expense of Franciscan scholarship, seemed to win out when, at the behest of Pope Leo XIII, St. Thomas and his Summa were reaffirmed as the gold standard of Catholic philosophical tradition. This was not done as a slight against the Franciscan theological tradition, however, but as a bulwark against secular modernist thought.

To Pope Leo XIII’s credit, his emphasis on St. Thomas was intended as an exhortation to Catholic educators; the Summa should be a starting point in inculcating a Catholic, scholastic, and faithful mindset as a framework for critical thinking. It was intended, after all, to be something of an introductory manual to philosophical scholastic theology; rather than a final word on the subject, the Summa is somewhat better understood a beginner’s handbook. Indeed, the medieval scholar Catejan believed as such when he substituted the commentary requirements for his theology students from Peter Lombard’s Sentences to St. Thomas’ Summa; this sparked a change across the universities of Europe to do the same.

There is much that can and has been said about the neo-Thomists of a century ago, as well as the rise of ‘nouvelle theologie’. More relevantly, however, the reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass in 2006 coincided with the approximate high-water mark of New Atheism, the ostensibly counter-cultural reaction to Bush-era Evangelical zeal. The spread of the internet facilitated the development of a tiresome clique of atheists, and this had prompted an acceleration of both apologetics and polemical works against them. For Catholics, this meant turning, understandably, to St. Thomas.

As a result, the Summa Theologiae has come to be something of a one stop shop for those engaged in informal discourse and casual apologetics. Some will have read it themselves, and some will have read instead a few of the more popular scholars on the subject. Few, however, will have ventured into the territory of the Scholastics beyond the Angelic Doctor. While on the one hand this is something of a net positive, as it is ill-fitting to criticize St. Thomas’ works or those looking to expand their knowledge of the Faith through them, it would similarly be remiss to assume that St. Thomas is the only of the Scholastic Doctors who has anything worth reading to modern eyes, or even that he’s the only one worth reading at all. It is likewise ill-fitting to assume, as Ward points out early in his introduction, that St. Thomas offers somehow the “final word on philosophy.”¹⁰ St. Thomas would certainly have disagreed at the charge.

Ward’s book then is in-line with a steadily growing trend of Scholastic reintroduction, as it were. It contributes to a growing body of literature accessible to a popular audience that elucidates the Franciscan theological tradition, and one hopes that this body continues to grow.

One hopes, too, that the Scot’s canonization takes place sooner, at this rate, rather than later, now that the somewhat petty inter-mendicant squabbling of the past centuries has died down. The more one studies what Scotus left behind, as his life is somewhat mysterious and largely undocumented, one sees little reason not to place him alongside the other great doctors of the period. But, time will tell.

Conclusion

In terms of a broad primer on the Subtle Doctor’s thought, Ward’s book couldn’t be more appropriate. It’s short, coming in at just under one hundred sixty pages, and it lends a chapter a piece to each of the main points of importance in the Scot’s oeuvre. His appendix features further reading recommended by relevant chapter.

As secondary works of the Subtle Doctor go, there are many resources available. Few, however, do as succinct and accessible a job of introducing Blessed John to an audience wholly unfamiliar with his work. Many, too, are out of print, difficult to find in stock, lengthy, written at the academic level of a master’s program or higher, or, worse, factually inaccurate with regard to their interpretations. Most of these resources may go into greater depth than Ward does, and Ward’s book will be no means make one an expert in the thought of Blessed John Duns Scotus. Nor, perhaps, will it even make one feel secure that they know that much about him, given its brevity. But no reader would pick the book up with such assumptions in the first place; what Ward offers his audience is a jumping off point, a broad look at where and how to begin looking into the Doctor’s thought that, unlike, say, St. Thomas, has no readily apparent points of entry.

Ward peppers his book with anecdotes and references taken from his personal life and literary culture, with a particular nod to Lord of the Rings, making the eminently readable book all the more digestible. His grasp on Scotus’ thought is thorough while his explanations are clear, mostly concise, and woven together across chapters that flow logically from one subject to the next. And, as mentioned above, the book is short, which—unlike other ‘overviews’ of the Scot’s philosophical and theological system, means that one can usually finish it in only a handful of sittings. It’s tailor made both for audiences unused to academic or philosophical literature, as well as those who are but have not made any forays yet into the thought of John Duns Scotus.

The study of the Subtle Doctor should not be undertaken merely as the exploration of an alternative to St. Thomas. The two share more in common than they diverge on, for one thing, as both owe a great deal of their philosophical systems to the thought of Aristotle. That said, for those familiar with the thought of the Angelic Doctor, much of Bl. Scotus’ thought should sound quite opposed not just in detail, but in broader worldview to that of St. Thomas. The Franciscan theological tradition carries with it a rich and nuanced presentation of the creation and salvation history that Ward’s book offers a brief glimpse into. It’s well worth the look.

One last brief aside: I had intended to write and post this review two years ago, when this book was first published. Instead, it’s up now in 2024, coincidentally at about the same time that Thomas Ward’s next project is due to be released: Duns Scotus’ Treatise on the First Principle. This is a new translation by Ward and will definitely be worth looking into once it’s out. Ward does not know who I am and has no idea that this review was written; I have not been contacted by anyone to write reviews. I’m shilling this for free because it’s going to be worth it.

1Ward, 12.

230.

3Ibid.

438.

573.

675-76.

789.

8136.

9139.

106.

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