Who Was Duns Scotus?
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This controversy that Blessed Duns participated in is only the tip of the iceberg. The Dominicans and Franciscans are contemporaries, both founded in the early 13th Century, and the Jesuits, though they came around 300 years later, joined in a very vigorous, sometimes brotherly, rivalry among the three.
The three orders often had debates regarding the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was not defined as dogma until the 19th Century, and which is basically rejected by the Eastern Churches, unless you can reformulate it carefully in Greek.
They also had debates about missionary activity and the "Chinese Rites Controversy" was a huge factor in how East Asia would be evangelized, and how they would worship, and whether indigeneous peoples worldwide are able to contribute their faith practices to Roman Catholic liturgies at this late stage of development.
There's an old joke they have, which goes: "The Dominicans were founded to combat the Gnostic heresy of the Albigensians. The Jesuits were founded to combat the heresy of Protestantism. Who was more successful? Have you met any Albigensians lately?"
Congratulations! (Probably).
I recently published a scientific exposé on Eucharistic Miracles: http://eucharist.info
Interestingly, I normally see references in Duns Scotus in works by Nouvelle Theologie Christian Platonists, where Duns Scotus is quite strongly condemned for his univocity eventually precipitating nominalism in medieval consciousness. Prominent theologians from that movement, like de Lubac and Balthasar would influence Wojtyła and Ratzinger, influencing at least interpretation of Vatican II.
Edit: better terminology
But I can’t recall the exact dispute but I believe it’s one of the Thomists vs Scotists ones, perhaps around grace.
A system of thought that made it easy dismiss people who disagree with you as going straight to hell and unworthy of consideration, and turned rather nasty in South Africa.
Maybe the pope could call a competition, "OK, fifty years from now we're going to see which of you has brought most good into the world, and settle this pointless dispute once and for all!"
Furthermore, knowing someone by their fruits is not necessarily straightforward. There are good fruits (and bad) that can be hidden, unseen, or slow to manifest. We won't rightly know who has "done the most good" until the world ends.
At any rate, I believe that 1 Cor 1:10-17 is most applicable here. Can you see those religious orders saying "I follow Dominic!" and "I follow Francis!"
I think that modern social communications has magnified and exacerbated the issues of esoteric theological dispute. These things are easily placed in the public square, where they do not belong. These disputes are mostly good for giving topics for Master's Theses when these proto-priests finish their seminary education. Rank-and-file Christians do not need to concern ourselves with thinking about Molinism, or whether the Orthodox accept the Immaculate Conception, or how many angels can dance upon the head of a pin.
According to the Good (Omens) book, one, because he's the only angel who knows how to dance, but he only knows the Gavotte.
wiki> The [Albigensians] taught that to regain angelic status one had to renounce the material self completely.
they were a suicide cult in the making.
The Dominicans needed to very much address this by teaching that the flesh is good, that humans are meant to enjoy our lives and all that entails: marital sex, good food and wine, recreation time, sensual pleasures in moderation.
In fact, the American Shakers took a page from this book and, like the Albigensians, they renounced marriage, and renounced sexual congress altogether, and vowed never to touch one another. My pastor was known to remark that this is why they were known as "Shakers", because they were so repressed that they vibrated. Anyway, "Simple Gifts" is a lovely legacy that the Shakers left; while there is still one village extant today, the Shakers only reproduced when dissenters rejected celibacy and left the community.
An allied heresy is Jansenism: it teaches that there's nothing humans can do to cooperate in our salvation, and in fact salvation is really, really difficult; so difficult that only a few may be saved, and that even though there's nothing you can do about it, you should try really hard and purify yourself excessively. Jansenism was ravaging the French landscape when Saint Thérèse of Lisieux came on the scene, and so her "Little Way" of love was, in part, an answer to this nasty heresy, and she is regarded as a Doctor of the Church.
Blessed Duns is similarly regarded as a Doctor of the Church, unofficially for now, but he is known as Doctor Subtilis already, and so many pious people like me think it would be awesome if the Church acknowledges that title for his canonization.
Funny this thing, the language.
The victorious chief military commander, Simon de Montfort, was rewarded with fame and (increased) fortune, mostly because of this Crusade.
If following the Word is heresy, then light this Baptist up.
"He was confident that we can know God’s existence by the unaided work of natural reason"
"One dogma that he thought philosophy could demonstrate was the existence of God. ... but he also thought that philosophy, or natural reason, could demonstrate that there is a supreme nature"
If you start off with the presumption of something existing, there is a very high probability that you will prove its existence, to your satisfaction.
If you believe in a particular God there is no need to subvert other doctrines or philosophies. You already have your proof, in your beliefs and faith. That is literally the definition of faith. You don't even need dogma (unless you do because you believe you do).
Faith is faith. If you start messing deity existence around with philosophy and science then things may get a bit sticky.
Scotus seems like a really clever lad in the 1300s who had some superb philosophical ideas. If only he hadn't wasted his intellect on theology! However, we would probably not know of him outside of theology if he hadn't been a priest. Thank the Lord for small mercies.
Perhaps you don't understand what faith is, or its relation to reason, or how "science" was understood by scientists of the 13th century.
Faith is empty and useless without reason. Likewise, reason is useless and empty without faith. They are intertwined and interdependent. See what Pope St. John Paul the Great wrote in Fides et ratio about wings.
There have been some amazing applications of formal logic and other scientific methods in service to the Christian faith. It seems like rubbish to someone who rejects their purpose or foundation, but nevertheless, priest-scientists laid all the foundations for modern engineering, discovery, genetics, astronomy: you name it, and that tradition of inquiry is still honored today, mostly by Catholic laypersons.
Well, that is pretty damning! How on earth can you pontificate on the nature of my understanding of faith?
I may take a peek at ... (I studied Latin 40 odd years ago) ... Faith and rationality (Reason is probably a better translation) about wings. However, I'm pretty sure it isn't going to involve solving special cases of Bernoulli equations or Finite Element Analysis.
You have your notion of faith and I have mine. I would never dream of describing your notions of faith as false or misled or misguided or anything else. I respect your faith and your right to have as such. I'd be grateful if you would extend the same courtesy to me and anyone else who has a difference of opinion to yourself.
Your elements of engineering, science etc list seems to have missed out rather a lot of the world. For starters: algorithms are named after an Arab bloke. Our "alphabet" is named after the first two letters of Hebrew, our numbers are famously Arabic. Nought/nowt/null/zero/nothing as a mathematics concept largely comes from Islamic scholars. What we now call India and China also have a massive input to the basics - too much for this comment 8)
can you elaborate on this? I have never heard someone say this before.
If there were otherwise a will for unity between East and West (and there definitely is not), I don’t think the Immaculate Conception would be the thing to stand in the way. The bigger problems are ecclesiastical and cultural.
The name of Dominicans comes from Latin Domini canes, which means God's hounds.
Just as you can say "Hey Einstein" to sarcastically mock someone not so smart, or how Bugs Bunny can sarcastically use "Nimrod" as an insult to call Elmer Fudd a bad hunter when Nimrod was a mighty hunter described in the Bible, so someone might use a name derived from Duns Scotus to sarcastically call someone dumb when Duns Scotus was an intelligent scholar.
The term came out of the Protestant Reformation. Within some schools of Protestantism, followers of Scotism were viewed as being slavish to Fund Scotis's teachings and thus too stupid to think for themselves. It was originally an anti-Catholic insult.
The Orthodox church has the same doctrine as the primary church. It's the same as 2000 years ago.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/teachings/pius-ixs-ineffabi...
Yet all the Eastern Catholic Churches have accepted the underlying dogma; they've even named parish churches after it!
But if you ask an Eastern Christian to describe what they believe, they probably won't use those terms (yeah, some will.)
Fun fact: the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, when recited in Greek in a Roman Rite Catholic Mass, omits the "filioque" because you can't correctly translate the Filioque to Greek. It would sound like a heresy. It's not a heresy, however, to omit it!
https://branemrys.blogspot.com/2005/04/filioque-but-never.ht...
Ah, when you said Eastern Churches you did not mean Eastern Orthodox Churches then.
So we include the Church of the East (and the Assyrian/Ancient/Chaldean communions), we include the Oriental Orthodox (e.g., Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac, et. al,) we include the Eastern Orthodox Churches (autocephalous, in communion, celebrate the Byzantine Rite), and we include the Eastern Catholic Churches (which have counterparts in every other communion I already mentioned.)
That is Eastern Christianity, and in their traditional patrimony and theologies, which are diverse and formulated in different languages, they do not subscribe to "Original Sin" or the "stain on the soul" model. So, if you present them with the formulation as written by Blessed Pope Pius IX, they'll say no thanks.
Yet all the Eastern Churches agree that Mary is sinless. They agree that Mary is all-holy (panagia). They agree that Mary never sinned, before, during, after birth, during her life, and that she entered Heaven with body and soul intact.
So IMHO, the East agrees with the West in substance, but not in form.
The Eastern Orthodox Churches, typically, will deny that they accept any such thing that comes from Rome (the Immaculate Conception is a novelty, they say) and they will deny that their doctrines agree with Catholic doctrines.
Roman Catholic reputation among the Eastern Orthodox was repeatedly damaged as Catholics invited the corporate conversion of whole parishes and eparchies to become Uniate. In the United States, Roman Catholic bishops gained a poor reputation as well: read about Alexis Toth, Cum data fuerit, and the founding of the OCA, which was, basically, composed of Catholics.
Not a dogma in Orthodox Christianity.
>So IMHO, the East agrees with the West in substance, but not in form.
You don't seem to care to make distinctions between Eastern Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox, so maybe that's why it seems so to you.
>The Eastern Orthodox Churches, typically, will deny that they accept any such thing that comes from Rome (the Immaculate Conception is a novelty, they say) and they will deny that their doctrines agree with Catholic doctrines.
Correct, Eastern Orthodox dogma does not give Mary's birth special theological status. So if you want to refer to Eastern Catholics rather than Eastern Orthodox, you should do that rather than arbitrarily ascribing your beliefs to other denominations.
I'll take him over Aquinas.
Note this well.