4. Right reason governs God's relationship to creatures
Introduction The point of all this is to show why Scotus believed that in God, at least, the perfection of his love for his own nature is not only free but necessary. It is free, in the sense that it is a will-act and will, as opposed to nature, never tends to anything except in the spontaneous, self-determining, and liberated way that is peculiar to it as will. But it is also in some sense necessary. For "necessary"-he points out-is a multifaceted word with a multiplicity of meanings. And in addition to the ones that are cited explicitly in God and Creatures (AlluntisWolter, 1975), p. 379, we need to add the necessity entailed by "firmness of purpose" or a "steadfast will."
Finally, we should stress that this too is a consequence of God's "affection for justice," which, as Scotus will point out in selection 15, obliges him to do justice to his own goodness. And this brings us to our next point, how this dual aspect not only affects the relationship of God's will to his own goodness, but also modifies his creative act.
4. Right reason governs God's relationship to creatures The two selections in Part IV deal with the dual aspect of God's relationship to creatures in general and to the moral law binding on man in particular. If God's will is infinitely perfect and all creatures have only a finite degree of being and goodness, then it is clear that from an Aristotelian point of view, the finite goodness of a creature cannot be the final cause that moves God to give it existence, even if "moves" be taken in the metaphorical sense of a motive (Finis movet metaphorice). As we shall see in explaining the background of item 16, the scholastics to a man rejected the theory of Abelard that anticipated in some sense Leibniz's belief that one could find a sufficient reason for God's creating the world he actually did in the degree of goodness characteristic of this "best of all possible worlds." It is this conviction-rooted let us note in the fact that God's creative will is governed by right reason-that caused the Parisian theologians to reject the Averroistic necessitarianism that had invaded the arts faculty and prompted Bishop Stephen T empier to issue the condemnations of "errors" in 1270 and 1277. Here is where we find the rationale of the controversial statement that "things are good because God wills them, and not vice versa."
As I noted in an earlier publication (Wolter, 1972, pp. 366-68), the context in which this oft-quoted expression occurs is in reference to the merits of Christ and reads in full:
I say that just as everything other than God is good because it is willed by God and not vice versa, so this merit was good to the extent that it was accepted. It was not the other way around, namely, because it was merit and good, therefore it was accepted. (Ord. III, suppl. dist. 37, n. 6)
General Remarks Scotus is concerned here specifically with meritorious goodness, rather than natural or moral goodness as such. Since merit is dependent on grace or charity (selection I I), it has to do, not with the naturalorder, but with the supernatural state to which man has been gratuitously elevated by God. If any human act is to be rewarded with an increase of grace in this life and a face-to-face vision and love of God in the next, this is obviously a pure gift on God's part and transcends anything our human nature needs or requires. Hence, the particular application of this principle should not create any problem or appear as a violation of anything demanded by right reason. However, the principle itself is unquestionably broader in scope, and may even have a transcendental or metaphysical interpretation, as well as application to "moral goodness" in the broad sense in which this term is taken in selection I I. In either case, however, right reason and the affection of the will for justice seem to playa significant role. This will become clear if we consider how Scotus regarded natural goodness, and secondly, what moral goodness adds to the natural goodness of a voluntary act. a. Natural goodness. Scotus is not denying that possibles by reason of their nature can have an essential or natural goodness; the same is true not only of substantive natures but also of actions, including voluntary acts that are elicited freely. In selection I I, for instance, he refers to "volition's natural goodness, which pertains to it as something positive and which is characteristic of any positive thing according to the grade of entity it has (the more the entity, the more the goodness; the less the entity, the less the goodness)." Obviously, such natural goodness, or the "primary or essential goodness" Scotus speaks of in selection Io-if these be the same-is not arbitrarily will-dependent.
Otherwise, there would be no point in what he says about God as "ordinatissime volens," something we shall take up shortly. What he is trying to rule out is the suggestion that this natural goodness somehow moves God's creative will in the way his own infinite goodness does, for no creature has a claim to actual existence simply in virtue of the sort of thing it happens to be.
In the case of God's intellect, Scotus had argued that it would be derogatory to the perfection of God's mind if it depended for its knowledge on the intelligibility of a created object. For any such object is finite, limited in perfection, and to that extent, it represents a mixture of perfection and imperfection, and as such it does not move God's intellect to know it. God is rather like the poet or sculptor, who first models his masterpiece in his mind before putting it on paper or embodying it in marble or bronze, for his infinitely fertile intellect men-
Introduction tally creates each possible creature as an object of thought, thus giving that created nature or essence its first intelligibility or esse intelligibile.
Hence, for Scotus it is true to say: "God does not know creatures because they are intelligible; but vice versa, creatures are intelligible because God knows them" (Ord. I, dist. 35, nn. 31-32; Vatican ed. VI, p. 258). If creatures have an ideal being or essence, they also have an ideal or essential goodness. But being finite in degree, it cannot force or compel the divine will first to give it being as a willed object (esse volitum) from all eternity, and then actual existence at some moment in time. Hence, when Scotus says that "everything other than God is good because it is willed by God and not vice versa," if natural goodness is meant, the statement can only refer to real or actual existing goodness. And it would mean nothing more than that the divine creative will is contingently related to whatever created good exists.
So understood, the controversial maxim would be a logical consequence of the fact that God's will is governed by an affection for justice. For this would mean it tends to something good in terms of its intrinsic or true value. Only where the good is infinite can it bind or necessitate God's infinitely perfect will. In all other cases, God is free to love or not to love creatively.
Does this mean God is free to deal with his creatures in a purely arbitrary and whimsical fashion? Or to put the question another way, in what sense is God constrained to create a cosmos rather than something bizarre or chaotic? Does the affection for justice characteristic of his will impose any obligation on him as to what or how he will create?
Scotus addresses himself to this problem in selection 15, where he asks: Is there justice in God? and in selection 16: Could God have created things otherwise than he did?
In answer to the first question he points out in what sense God is just and upright both in respect to what he owes himself and in his dealings with others. To begin with, the law or practical truth "God must be loved" is prior to any decision on the part of the divine will.
Furthermore, he is bound by his affection for justice to be true to his own goodness. This obligation, if we can call it that, is also something anterior to any act on the part of his will. While he is obliged, so to speak, to love his infinitely lovable divine nature as an infinite good, he is not so necessitated towards any finite entity. Creative love is always a free gift on his part, something contingently given. But granted he does create, does God owe creatures anything in justice? Not in a strict sense, says Scotus, since these are finite and cannot compel or force an infinite will to do anything it does not freely choose to do.
Nevertheless, the justice which obliges God to be true to his own goodness does modify his creative act in regard to whatever he chooses
General Remarks to create. Scotus expresses this most succinctly when he writes in selection 15:
I say that God is no debtor in any unqualified sense save with respect to his own goodness, namely, that he love it. But where creatures are concerned he is debtor rather to his generosity, in the sense that he gives creatures what their nature demands, which exigency in them is set down as something just, a kind of secondary object of this justice, as it were. But in truth nothing outside of God can be said to be definitely just without this added qualification. In an unqualified sense where a creature is concerned, God is just only in relation to his first justice, namely, because such a creature has been actually willed by the divine will.
In a word, if he actually creates something, God must be true to himself and to his infinitely good and perfect nature. As I noted elsewhere (Wolter, 1972, p. 367), it has often been said of fine artists or master craftsmen that they cannot turn out a product badly done. I think this might serve as a model for what Scotus is saying equivalently. For God is obviously the most perfect of artists, a craftsman like no other. He owes it to himself that whatever he chooses to create will have a beauty and natural goodness about it. Yet no particular creation is so perfect, beautiful, or good that it exhausts his infinite powers of creativity. While the goodness of creation is thus, in some sense, a consequence of the affection for justice inherent in his will, no creation or creature is such that its goodness can be regarded in an Abelardian or Leibnizian sense as a sufficient reason for its existence.
This latter point is stressed in selection 16, which points out that God could always create otherwise than he actually has, since to do so is not self-contradictory. For though he has ordered things wisely, his absolute power extends beyond what he has actually ordained. And while absolute power is defined in terms of what is not self-contradictory, this does not mean-as an initial objection suggests-that "he could have made things inordinately." If what Scotus has just said of God's justice be true, then it would be simply self-contradictory if he did not do justice to his own goodness and in his generosity make creatures in a fitting way. And in the examined report of his late Paris lectures he says expressly, paraphrasing St. Augustine: "Whatever God made, you know that God has made it with right reason" ("Quidquid Deus fecit, hoc scias, Deum cum recta ratione fecisse"j Reportatio I A, dist. 44, q. 2j Vienna, cod. palatinus 1453, f. 122va).
Put in another way, God is always "ordinatissime volens." In the section entitled "How God's Love Extends to All Things" (Wolter,
1980, pp. 155ff), Scotus describes the actual order of creation as the theologian conceives of it.
Introduction Everyone who wills in a reasonable way, first wills the end and secondly that which immediately attains the end, and thirdly other things that are more remotely ordered to the attainment of his end. And so it is [with] God, who is most reasonable, not of course by different acts, but in one single act which is said to tend in different ways to the different objects ordered in some way to one another-first wills the end, and in this his act is perfect, and his intellect is perfect, and his will is happy. Secondly, he wills those things which are immediately ordered to him ... Hence, he first loves himself ordinately and consequently not inordinately in an envious or jealous manner. Secondly, he wills to have co-lovers, and this is nothing else than willing that others have his love in themselves ... Thirdly, however, he wills those things which are necessary to attain his end, namely, the gift of grace. Fourthly, he wills for their sakes other things that are more remote, for instance this sensible world in order that it may serve them, so that what is stated in the second book of Aristotle's Physics is true: 'Man is in some way the end of all sensible things', for these are willed in the fourth place because of man's being willed in the second place. Also that which is closer to the ultimate end is customarily said to be the end of the sensible world, whether it be because God wills the sensible world to be ordered to predestined man or whether it be because his more immediate concern is not that the sensible world exist, but rather that man love him.
Even though he is speaking of a supernatural order, something beyond anything Aristotle dreamed of, there is no suggestion the principle does not apply to the natural order as well. God is always "ordinatissime volens" -a most methodical lover. Grace builds on nature, after all, and the supernatural on the natural.
So much for natural goodness and meritorious goodness. But what of moral goodness? Can the controversial maxim be applied to this, as Quinton suggests, and if so, how is it to be understood? b. Moral goodness. Moral goodness is formally something inherent in a human act, namely, its suitability or conformity to what right reason dictates (selections 9, 10, and 12). Hence its existence as well as its possibility in some degree depends on the fact that God has freely created man not merely with an intellectual but with a free appetite. One could interpret this reductively of course as meaning merely that a morally good act has a special form of natural goodness. But Scotus apparently had something more in mind. As he points out in selections 10 and I I, moral goodness is something over and above the natural or essential goodness characteristic of a voluntary act, though it presupposes such antecedent goodness as a relational entity presupposes its relata and foundation for the relationship. The will's affection for justice or its native freedom liberates it in some degree from the servitude of human nature that always seeks its own individual per-
General Remarks
fection or that of the species. Consequently, one would suspect that the will too is not bound morally merely by some principle of selfactualization, or obligation that arises automatically and exclusively from the fact that creatures are perfectible in certain ways. It can be bound only by an infinite or absolute good, or by a higher will that has authority because it authored man as free, i.e., with an inclination or affection for justice as dictated by right reason.
To explain. As ethicians have often argued, one cannot logically go from what is the case to what ought to be. Because justice determines what ought to be, Scotus sees the will as somehow morally bound by reason of what is essential to it as will, its affection for justice (selection 5) and the fact it is a "rational potency" or guided by right reason
(selection 2). As such, it tends to things in terms of their intrinsic values, or what it owes to such. Where the value is absolute, such as in the case of the infinitely good God, "God should be loved" is an obligation according to right reason simply in virtue of the object to be loved. Scotus, in selection I I, distinguishes two grades of moral goodness antecedent to meritorious goodness. One is generic, the other specific; the former regards the object willed; the latter regards the attendant circumstances and particularly the end for which the object in question is loved or hated. Generic goodness is concerned with the question: "According to right reason is it suitable, appropriate, or just to love or hate such an object?" Specific goodness asks: "Is the purpose or other attendant circumstances such that according to right reason such and such an object should be loved or hated, sought or avoided?"
There is only one case where a voluntary act is completely good simply in virtue of its object or generic goodness, that is, where God is the object of friendship love (arnOT arnicitiae). For by such a voluntary act,
God is loved for his own sake, and thus, we could say, the appropriate end is built into the initial act itself. Furthermore, as an infinite good,
God cannot be loved too much, or too often, or under any other inappropriate conceivable circumstance.
As for generic goodness, this fitting relationship between the willact and its object, like natural goodness, is not something that depends solely upon God's will. God wills such because it is good, and it is not good just because God wills it. Take the case where an act is generically good or bad by reason of the object alone, e.g., love of God as an intrinsically good act, or hatred or disrespect of God as an intrinsically bad act. In selection 15, referred to above, Scotus makes it clear that the "law" or "practical truth" "God should be loved" or "God must not be shown irreverence" holds good antecedent to any will or decision on God's part. It is on this score that Scotus concedes that "legal justice, could be postulated of God if there were some other
Introduction law antecedent to any decision of his will, with which 'law and its legislator' as other his own will could rightly agree." There is such a law, he goes on to say, namely, '''God should be loved'-if one ought to call it a 'law' rather than a practical principle of law." In any case, he insists, "it is a practical truth that is prior to any decision on the part of the divine will." If God's will itself is "bound by such a law," so too, a fortiori, is the free will of any creature he has authored.
But what is to be said of the other specific obligations that ethical philosophers agree are morally binding on man? All of these, unless they can be shown to follow logically from a law such as "God should be loved" or "God should not be hated," are indifferent per se generically, and become morally good or bad dependent on the circumstances, as the selections in Part III make clear. In regard to such actions, natural goodness becomes a necessary condition for generic moral goodness; generic moral goodness, for specific moral goodness; specific moral goodness, for meritorious goodness. Conversely, the absence of anything demanded by right reason suffices to induce some measure of moral badness or lack of moral goodness, according to the principle taken over from pseudo-Dionysius, namely, "Good requires that everything about the act be right" (selection II).
Like the generality of his contemporaries and medieval colleagues, Scotus equates the complete requirements of the moral law with what is enjoined on man by either natural law, divine positive law, or legitimate positive legislation imposed by proper ecclesiastical, civil, or parental authority (see Part V, "The Moral Law in General"). Obligations of divine positive law obviously depend upon the will of God; ecclesiastical or civil authority is legitimate if it is directly or indirectly sanctioned by God. The question of the will-dependence of the remaining obligations then comes down to how far the precepts of natural law can be said to be dependent on God's will.
In selection 18, Scotus explains at great length the twofold meaning of "law of nature," reflected in its division into two tables. The initial three commandments that make up the first table concern our relationship and obligations towards God. The second table, comprising the last seven commandments, concerns our social and political relationship and obligations towards our neighbor. Now, the intrinsic and objective values safeguarded by the precepts of these two tables are vastly different. Inasmuch as the first table can be equated with this law, "God should be loved," God himself could not dispense man from its obligations. And hence in this sense, the actions commanded or prohibited by the first table are morally good or bad independently of the fact that God commands or prohibits such (see Ord. II, dist. 21,
General Remarks
q. 2, n. 3; Wadding reprint ed. XIII, p. 141; Reportatio II A, dist. 22, n. 3; ibid., XXIII, p. 104}. Specifically the third commandment (regarding the obligation "to keep holy the Sabbath") represents positive divine law, explicating affirmatively how "God should be loved" is to be fulfilled, and to that extent this action is good because God wills it. But the first two precepts, insofar as they prohibit the worship of "strange gods" or any irreverence towards the true God, are precepts that "belong strictly to the natural law, taking law of nature as that which follows necessarily if God exists and he alone must be loved as God." Since God himself could never dispense from these two, the meaning of the controversial maxim cannot be that these commandments bind only because God wills such.
But what of the obligations imposed by the second table? Here, there were diverse opinions among the scholastics as to how such commandments were expressions of the law of nature, and on what, if any, grounds God could dispense with them. One thing all seemed to agree upon, however, was that only in its broad outlines was the natural law
"written into the heart of man" and to that extent evident to all who had not sinfully blinded their intellect to the truth in the way Paul speaks of in the opening chapter of his Epistle to the Romans. We shall have occasion to refer to this again in the following section.
We might note here parenthetically, however, that many of Scotus' colleagues, following Augustine, made use of an idea borrowed from the Stoics. They considered the entire decalogue as a reflection of some impersonal "eternal law" that was written into nature, and saw it as binding on God by reason of what he is and the sort of created nature he decided to make. As we said above, Scotus-instead of making use of this Stoic conception-develops an insight of St. Anselm; he sees the moral law as grounded rather in the will's affection for justice; this native liberty frees it, to some extent, from what "nature" demands, and allows it to "moderate its affection for the advantageous" (selection 29).
One could put this another way, by stressing that the values protected by the second table of the natural law cannot have the same absolute value as those preserved by the first table. Neither are they as independent of, or antecedent to, what God wills, in the way the values safeguarded by the precepts of the first table are. For the natural good each precept is intended to save or secure concerns some aspect of what is of individual, social, and political value to mankind. As such it represents only what pertains to man's natural perfection. Like human nature itself, this is only a finite good; furthermore, it represents an ideal for which one should strive, rather than the actual con-
Introduction dition in which man exists. As a Christiaa theologian like his contemporaries, Scotus views man's actual condition as tainted by original sin. As selections 25 and 26 indicate, man was destined for a supernatural end, from which he fell, and to which he was restored through the merits of Christ. Now, none of the intrinsic or ideal natural perfections protected by the second table of the law are absolutely or necessarily connected with the attainment of man's actual supernatural end, which is union with God in the afterlife. Hence, Scotus maintains (selection 18) that while the second table represents what is
"valde consonans" with natural law, certain aspects of the second table of the decalogue can be dispensed with according to right reason, when their observation would entail more harm than good. But God could obviously not dispense from all its precepts at once, for this would be equivalent to creating man in one way and obligating him in an entirely different fashion, something contrary to what he "owes to human nature in virtue of his generosity."
All of these aspects would have to be considered, Scotus would say, in answering whether some specific voluntary act was morally good or bad only because God willed such. The important qualification here is
"only," for what is naturally good or evil, as we said, is a precondition for moral goodness or moral badness. And the natural goodness or badness of an act; as the subsequent section will make clear, is something we can reason to philosophically or logically. Natural goodness, as we said, does not automatically guarantee moral goodness, though the rational analysis of what constitutes such natural goodness can tell us much about the actual content of the law of nature. Copleston
(1950, p. 547) explains this point rather well when he writes:
Inasmuch as the divine intellect, considered as preceding an act of the divine will, perceives the acts which are in conformity with human nature, the eternal and immutable moral law is constituted in regard to its content; but it acquires obligatory force only through the free choice of the divine will. One can say then, that it is not the content of the moral law which is due to the divine will, but the obligation of the moral law, its morally binding force. 'To command pertains only to the appetite or will' [Ord. IV, dist. 14, q. 2, n. 5].
The intellect says that this is true or untrue, in the practical as in the speculative sphere, and though it inclines to action of a certain type, it does not dictate that one ought to act in that way. Scotus is not simply saying that obligation actually bears on human beings only because God has willed to create them, which would be obvious enough, since they could not be obliged if they did not exist; he is saying that the divine will is the font of obligation. It seems to follow that if God had not chosen to impose obligation, morality would be a matter of self-perfection, in the sense that the intellect would perceive that a certain course of action is what befits human