Bl. John Duns Scotus
Posted on November 18, 2018 by admin No comments
Born: c. 1266 Duns, County of Berwick, Kingdom of Scotland
Died: 8 November 1308 Cologne, Electorate of Cologne, Holy Roman Empire
John Duns, commonly called Duns Scotus (c. 1266 – 8 November 1308), is generally considered to be one of the three most important philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages (together with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham). Scotus has had considerable influence on both Catholic and secular thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the “univocity of being”, that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
Duns Scotus was given the scholastic accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993.
Life
Little is known of Duns Scotus apart from his work. His date of birth is thought to have been between 23 December 1265 and 17 March 1266, born into a leading family of the region. The site of his birth, in front of the Pavilion Lodge, near the North Lodge of Duns Castle, is now marked by a cairn which was erected in 1966 by the Franciscan friars of the United Kingdom to mark the 700th anniversary of his birth. Duns Scotus received the religious habit of the Friars Minor at Dumfries, where his uncle, Elias Duns, was guardian.
Duns Scotus’s age is based on the first certain date for his life, that of his ordination to the priesthood at St Andrew’s, Northampton, England on 17 March 1291. The minimum canonical age for receiving holy orders is 25 and it is generally assumed that he would have been ordained as soon as it was permitted. That his contemporaries called him Johannes Duns, after the medieval practice of calling people by their Christian name followed by their place of origin, suggests that he came from Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland.
According to tradition, Duns Scotus was educated at a Franciscan studium generale (a medieval university), a house behind St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford, in a triangular area enclosed by Pennyfarthing Street and running from St Aldate’s to the Castle, the Baley and the old wall, where the Friars Minor had moved when the University of Paris was dispersed in 1229–30. At that time there would have been about 270 persons living there, of whom about 80 would have been friars.
Duns Scotus appears to have been in Oxford by 1300, as he is listed among a group of friars for whom the provincial superior of the English ecclesiastical province (which included Scotland) requested faculties from the Bishop of Lincoln for the hearing of confessions.[13] He took part in a disputation under the regent master, Philip of Bridlington in 1300–01.[14] He began lecturing on Peter Lombard’s Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris towards the end of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with King Philip IV of France over the taxation of church property.
Duns Scotus was back in Paris before the end of 1304, probably returning in May. He continued lecturing there until, for reasons that are still mysterious, he was dispatched to the Franciscan studium at Cologne, probably in October 1307. According to the 15th-century writer William Vorilong, his departure was sudden and unexpected. He was relaxing or talking with students in the Prato clericorum or Pre-aux-Clercs – an open area of the Rive Gauche used by scholars for recreation – when orders arrived from the Franciscan Minister General; Scotus left immediately, taking few or no personal belongings.
Duns Scotus died unexpectedly in Cologne in November 1308; the date of his death is traditionally given as 8 November. He is buried in the Church of the Friars Minor there. His sarcophagus bears the Latin inscription:
Scotia me genuit. Anglia me suscepit. Gallia me docuit. Colonia me tenet. (Scotland brought me forth. England sustained me. France taught me. Cologne holds me.)
The story about Duns Scotus being buried alive, in the absence of his servant who alone knew of his susceptibility to coma, is probably a myth. It was reported by Francis Bacon in his Historia vitae et mortis.
The colophon of Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford says that Scotus was also at Cambridge, but we do not know for certain if this is true, or, if it was, when he was there.
Prayer to Blessed John Duns Scotus
Blessed John Duns Scotus,
you strove to understand, explain, and defend
the truths of the holy Christian Faith in the light
of human reason. For all truths, natural and supernatural,
are from one and the same Source:
the eternal God who is truth and light and love.
And so you proposed and expounded the perfect
purity and holiness of the Blessed Virgin Mary
in the first moment of her Immaculate Conception. By her intercession and yours,
may the Most Holy Trinity
grant the conversion of sinners
and the favor of:
Amen.
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