3. How the will controls thought
The WiU and Intellect
determination, but he insists this is precisely why it is called an active "potency," "because there is something it can do, for it can determine itself." I have referred to this "superabundant sufficiency" of the will to act in this way as being a state more suitably called "positive indeterminacy" rather than "negative indeterminacy." Other Franciscan thinkers before Scotus, such as Olivi, had defended this same theory of the will but considered it to be anti-Aristotelian. Scotus' merit was to show one could reconcile the Franciscan thesis with what is essential to Aristotle's metaphysics if this be properly understood. And so, with Godfrey of Fontaines apparently in mind, he writes: "What is added about metaphysical principles being most universal is true enough, but none of them suffers exception in a particular instance.
For the mark of true statements is the fact that they are illustrated in what is manifest. But how can that be called a principle from which so many absurdities follow? I don't believe Aristotle could have assumed any proposition to be-not a first, no! not even a tenth principle, which has, in so many particular instances, such obviously absurd consequences." And with the will in mind, he goes on to add: "If the following be a metaphysical principle: 'Nothing identical can be both in virtual act and still in potency to the formal perfection of which this virtual act is the effective principle'-if, I say, this be a first metaphysical principle, I know it is not inscribed in Aristotle's Metaphysics.
If those who hold it have another metaphysics, how is it that they alone have the sort of intellect that can grasp the terms of this 'principle', which everyone else is unable to comprehend?" (q. 14, n. 23;
Wolter, 1981, p. 60); see also Roy Effler's excellent study, John Duns Scotus and the Principle 'Omne quod movetur ab alia movetur' (Effler,
1962).
With this in mind consider the text as such. It is presented in the customary tripartite format of a scholastic question, beginning with the case for the opposition, and after a long and detailed discussion of the problem, closing with an answer to these initial objections. Those who find Scotus' involved argumentation difficult to follow may be helped by reading a detailed analysis I have given of this question elsewhere in an article entitled "Duns Scotus on the Will as a Rational
Potency" (Wolter, 1990).
3. How the will controls thought If sin or moral malice is primarily an act of the will, how can one sin in thought, word, and deed, as Augustine, Jerome, and other Fathers of the Church have traditionally maintained? In dist. 42 of the second book of his commentary on the Sentences, Scotus discusses this prob-
Introduction lem, setting up the following as a general principle: "Malice is primarily and formally only in some act of the will ... Although sin can not be formally in anything other than the will or its act, materially it can be in the aforesaid acts, namely, thought, word, and deed, because according to Anselm [On Original Sin], the will is the motor or moving cause throughout the whole realm of the soul, and all else obeys it.
Just as the will is bound to have rectitude in its own act, therefore, so it is required to have it in all the exterior acts in which it cooperates as moving cause. Thus by moving the inferior potencies rightly, their acts become right by a participated rectitude, and so also in the opposite way, by not moving them rightly, the rectitude the will ought to give them is lacking and they are not right. And thus by moving them in an unrighteous way, the will deprives them of that rectitude" (Opus oxoniense II, qq. 1-4, nn. 1-2; Wadding reprint ed. XIII, pp. 44849). With this in mind Scotus takes up the present interesting question that throws considerable light on his theory of how will is related to intellect. How is it that the will, despite the fact that it must work with reason and requires enlightenment before it can freely choose at all, is able nevertheless to command the intellect and tum it from one consideration to another?
The question is found in the Wadding edition of the Opus oxoniense, but according to Balie it does not belong to the Ordinario and is missing from Codex A and other manuscripts of Bk. II. However, a variation of the edited text is found in William of Alnwick's Additiones to Bk. II, which the explicit of Codex V (Vat. 876) says he "extracted from the Paris and Oxford lectures of the aforesaid Master John [of Duns]" (f. 3Iova). I have suggested elsewhere that perhaps the reason why it is not found in the Ordinatio is that Scotus had completed in great part his revision of the first two books of his Oxford lectures before leaving for Paris, and that Alnwick thought there was sufficient reason in the later material Scotus presented at Paris to warrant an update of what Scotus had done earlier on Bks. I and II. Be that as it may, from what we have seen of the Reportatio examinata on Bk. I and the text of the Addiriones magnae published in the Wadding edition as the first book of the Reportata parisiensia, it would seem that Alnwick was trying to reproduce the substance of Scotus' Paris lectures with some clarifications from what he had said earlier at Oxford. Perhaps the same can be said of Alnwick's additions to the second book. At any rate, the material of the present selection seems to represent the mind of Scotus, if not his actual words. We have translated the Latin text as found in the Wadding reprint edition, dist. 42, qq. 1-4, nn.
10-11 (XIII, pp. 460-61); for the text of the Addiriones, see Codex V, f·30 9rab.