28. Is the power to sin from God?
Introduction The text translated here is from the supplement to Ordinatio Ill, dist. 29, and is a revision of the Wadding reprint ed. (XV, pp. 389-90) based on Codices A (f. I72vb) and S (ff. 212vb-I3ra).
PART VIII: SIN
28. Is the power to sin from God?
At the end of Bk. II of the Sentences, Peter Lombard raises the question: Is the power to sin in man and the devil from God? This occasioned a discussion of the present question among the scholastics, beginning with the Summafratris Alexandri IIaIIae, n. 8, and continued in the Sentence commentaries of Bonaventure (art. I, q. I), St. Thomas
(q. I, art. I), and a great many others. It was a favorite question because it allowed the young bachelor of theology to introduce a number of distinctions based on the positive and negative aspects of what was meant by the "power to sin." Scotus opens his discussion with an argument for the opposition based on a principle he himself accepts as a valid insight of St. Anselm of Canterbury (as we noted earlier in the introduction to selection IS), namely, that freedom consists essentially in the power to preserve justice for its own sake, rather than in the power to sin. From this it would seem to follow that "to be able to sin is not liberty or any part of liberty." In replying to the argument
Scotus has the opportunity to explain in general how Anselm understood the notion of pure perfection (perfectio simpliciter) and what is implied by the admission that pure perfections are characteristic of creatures, but as found there, they are associated with imperfection as well, for though their formal notion does not imply imperfection, this is only because the notion prescinds from any question as to the degree or intensity of the perfection in question.
As for the body of the question, Scotus' discussion, like that of most of his colleagues, is based on the Augustinian idea that evil is not something positive, as the Manichaeans, and Augustine himself as a member of that sect, had once held. After his conversion, the saint fought for some fifteen years to save the Bible from a Manichaean interpretation, and his analysis of evil as a privation and sin as a deformity, rather than the effect of some evil god of darkness, had a strong influence on all the great scholastics.
Scotus' specific approach and solution are not greatly different from that of his colleagues, but they do bring into playa number of his particular conceptions of the created will as a pure perfection, as well as some of its actual limitations. He begins by distinguishing between
Sin
"the act that is the basis for sin" and the lack of goodness or "deformity that is present in the sinful act."
The "power to sin either [I] expresses the immediate order of potentiality to the act of sinning or else [2] refers to the foundation of such a potentiality, by virtue of which the one having such is said to be able to sin." The first of these, says Scotus, can be interpreted in two ways: (a) the act that is the basis for sin or (b) the deformity present in that act.
If the first is meant, then this order is from God, . . . [for] God has power also over that act which underlies or is the basis for sin, and not just the created will, according to one opinion. If the second is meant, then there is no such ordering to sin, even as the term [L e., the deformity or lack of goodness] is nothing, and hence is not from God.
What Scotus is arguing for here is the position that God not only creates and conserves the human will as an active potency, but also cooperates with it in eliciting its act, whatever that act may be. The rationale for this is his conviction that inasmuch as the act, as a volition or nolition, is a positive quality in the will, it has a measure of entity or being at the moment it comes into existence. God as the primary cause of all being, therefore, has a creative finger, so to speak, in its coming into existence. The contrary opinion he is opposing is the doctrine that God's cooperation with the actions of his creatures consists essentially in his creating and conserving the creatural essence or nature with its active potencies as such, and that this suffices for them to act on their own, given the proper external conditions. In this sense, God would not function formally as a primary "moving" cause and the creature, with respect to him, as secondary cause.
On the other hand, if (b) is meant, then since there is no positive entity involved, no causality on God's part is required either. But what of case [2]?
If one is speaking of the basis or foundation of this order, however, I say that something positive lies at the root of this order in both senses [Le., something positive underlies both the act that is the basis of sin and the deformity itself].
For as is the case of passive or receptive potencies, where the same subject can either have something or be deprived of it, so too where the subject is a power that is free to act deficiently. Such a power is the immediate basis or source of its opposite states by either acting or being deficient. By acting it is a power for righteousness, by being deficient it is a power to sin. And this absolute entity [Le., the will] is the proper power for both in the respective way that there can be a power for both [righteousness and sin], namely, by the power being either effective or defective. And in this sense the power to sin is