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Not Scotist: Understandings of Being, Univocity, and Analogy in Early-Modern Reformed Thought

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No. 2, 2012, 127-150 ه1 . ٧٠١ ,RENAI$SANCE REVIEW ه REFORMATION Not Scotist: understandings of being, univocity, and analogy in early-modern Reformed thought Richard a . M uller Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids Several lines of recent scholarship have identified developing Protestant thought as Scotist and, specifically, have contended a dominance of the Scotist concept of the univocity of being in early modern Protestantism. The present essay examines early-modern Reformed metaphysics and theology and demonstrates that the contention is unfounded. Rather, the more typical approach to the language of being and related issues of predication concerning God and creatures in Reformed circles was advocacy of the analogía entis , often understood in a classical Thomist manner as an analogy proportionality. KEVWORDS Reformed scholasticism, $cotism, univocity of being, analogy, Thomism, Radical Orthodoxy the issue of □uns Scotus and early-modern Reformed ؛Introduction thought In the now outdated scholarship of the latter part of the twentieth century, was typically identified as the hero or villain of (م-16ول 5ل Theodore Beza ( 5 developing ‘Calvinism.’ Perhaps because that debate has outworn its usefulness or perhaps because the perennial (and one might add, perennially misguided) quest for heroes and villains in the history of thought has been driven to find the sources of its issues deeper in the past, the figure of Duns Scotus (£.1266-1308) has emerged as the new source of all that is bad and of most of what is good in the older Reformed tradition and, in some accounts, in the entire heritage of the Reformation. ilosophical^؛ One school of thought has argued that the various theological and distinctions employed by Reformed or Calvinist orthodoxy ought to be read in a Scotist manner, on the ground of a pervasive Scotism in late-medieval and early- DOl 10.1179/14622459132.00000000011 و1 هw. s. Maney 8c Son Ltd 2 © RICHARD A. MULLER ו28 modern thought.1 Several studies belonging to this line of research argue that the older Reformed theology either held to the Scotist concept of the univocity of being or, at the very least, assumed a ‘univocal core’ in its language of God, even to the point of identifying univocity of being as the dominant view of seventeenth- century theologians.* There are two primary grounds for their claim: on the one hand, Martijn Bac assumes that the identification of all individual beings as having the transcendental properties of being itself (unity, goodness, and truth) will yield a conception of univocity; on the other hand Bac and Andreas Beck look to other instances of univocal predication, as evidence of a concept of the univocity of This approach leads Bac to find an implication of univocity of being in the ؟.being writings of one of the very authors who argued against it and supplies Beck with a basis for declaring that he can find among the Reformed ‘a nuanced univocity in foe Scotistic sense’ (although he does note some exceptions, notably Maresius and Turretin.)4 Yet another approach to the issue of Scotism and the Reformation, related to the so-called ‘Lortz Thesis’ concerning foe origins of the German Reformation, appears in the works of writers associated wifo Radical Grthodoxy and in foe recent historical diatribe of Brad s. Gregory. The Lortz thesis (now largely discredited) had claimed that Luther’s theological revolt was precipitated by foe decadent theology and philosophy of the later Middle Ages, specifically foe ؟.developments that took place after Duns Scotus largely among the nominalists Wifo the Radical Orthodox writers and Gregory, the thesis has become more focused on Scotus and his understanding of the univocity of being. According to their theses, Scotus’ understanding of univocity created a profound problem, identifying foe being of God wifo the being of creatures but nonetheless placed at an infinite distance from them, undermining traditional teaching concerning divine 1 Antonie Vos, ‘De kern van de klassicke gereformeerde theologie’, in Kerk en Theologie 47 (1996): 106-12.5; Vos, ‘Ab W illem ], van Asselt and ؛٨ ,’Vos, ‘Scholasticism and R eform ation ; وول9ر: uno disce omnes’, in Bijdragen 60 (04-2-173 Eef Dekker, eds. Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 99-119; Vos, ‘The Systematic ?lace of Reformed ^holasticism: Reflections Concerning the Reception of Calvin’s Thought’, in Church History and Religious Culture 91, no. 1-2, 2011: 29-41; Andreas J- Beck, ‘Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676): Basic Features of his Doctrine of God’, in Willem 1. van Asselt and Fef Dekker, eds. Reformation and Scholasticism: An Ecumenical Enterprise , (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 205-226; Roelf T. te Velde, Paths Beyond Tracing Out: the connection of method and content in the Doctrine of God, examined in Reformed orthodoxy, Karl Barth, and the Utrecht School (Delft: Eburon, 2010); and Martijn Bac and Theo ?leizier, ‘Reentering Sites of Truth. Teaching Reformed Scholasticism in the Contemporary Classroom’, in Willemien Otten, Marcel Sarot and Maarten Wisse, eds, Scholasticism Reformed: Festschrift Willem van Asselt, Studies in Theology and Religion, 14 (Eeiden: E.J. Brill, 2010), ^Martijn Bac, ‘?erfect Will Theology: Divine Agency in Reformed Scholasticism as against Suárez, Episcopius, Descartes, and Spinoza’ (doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University, 2009), 140-141, 208; cf. Andreas Beck,G isbertus Voetius (1j89~16y6): Sein Theologieversta«ndnis und seme Gotteslehre (Go«tflngen: Vandenhoeck &c Ruprecht, 2007), 218-222; and Te Velde, Paths Beyond Tracing Out, 115, 125-126. 3 Bac, ‘?erfect Will Theology’, 140. ydekker, Fax veritatis seu exercitationes ad nonullas؛citing Melchior D ,ؤn. 11 ,ا Bac, ‘?erfect Will Theology’, 40 4 controversias quae hodie in Belgio potissimum moventur: ... Praefixa est praefatio de statu Belgicae Ecclesiae, & suffixa dissertatio de Providentia Dei (Leiden: Daniel à Gaesbeec'k et Eeh^ Lopez, 1677), 126 (e^^hcit denial of univocity), and 252-253 (purported implication of univocity); cf. Beck, Gisbertus Voetius, 2 2 0 -2 2 1 . ,Josef Lortz, The Reformation in Germany, 2 vols., trans. Ronald Walls (London and New York: Herder & Herder؟ 1968), 1, 67-77, 193-2.10. Against the Lortz thesis, specifically on the backgrounds to Luther’s theology, see Dennis Janz, Luther and Late Medieval Thomism: A Study in Theological Anthropology (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University ?ress, 1983); and John Farthing,Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Biel· Interpretations of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Eve o f the R eform ation (Durham and London: Duke University ?ress, 1988). و NOT SCOTIST 12 transcendence. Scotus becomes the ‘crucial’ figure ‘in a general shift away from a focus upon the metaphysics of participation.’^ This problematic theological and p^losophical understanding then carried over wholesale into the Reformation, rendering ?rotestant theology highly flawed from the outset and, in the version of the thesis espoused by Gregory, yielding a defective understanding of the relationship of God and world, reason and theology, ultimately bringing about a new and highly secularized worldview as an unintended result of the Reformation/ Despite the several voices that have identified Reformed theology as philosophically eclectic,® as also despite the scholarship indicating significant misreading of Scotus and the implications of his conception of the univocity of being on the part of Radical Orthodoxy,9 little has been done to address either form of the claim that Protestant and specifically Reformed or Calvinistic Protestant thought became foundationally Scotist. In what follows, I examine a series of philosophers and theologians who contributed to the Reformed to the end of the ﻫﻮ5ل .intellectual milieu during the era of orthodoxy, from ca seventeenth century, and representing views found across the geographical spectrum of Reformed academies and universities, in Heidelberg (Zanchi), Geneva (Daneau, Beza), Danzig (Keckermann), Leiden (Junius, Burgersdijk, Jacchaeus, Heereboord), Franecker (Maccovius), Bremen (Crocius), Utrecht (Revius, Gisbertus and Paulus Voetius, Mastricht, Leydekker), Steinfurt (Timpler), Sedan and Groningen (Maresius), Cambridge (Crakanthorpe), Oxford (Twisse, Barlow, Gale), Aberdeen (Baron), Nimes (Derodon), Frankfurt-on-Oder (Grebenitz-Strimesius), Montauban (Charnier), Lausanne (Mu«ller), Herborn (Alsted), Duisberg (Clauberg), and Marburg (Goclenius, Combachius)ro — arguably, a representative sampling. The essay will demonstrate that, contrary to the assumptions of both the positive and the negative readings of a purported Recent Invocations of Univocity’, A ntonianum 78 ﺀه 6Catherine Pickst©ck, ‘Modernity and Sholasticism: A Critique .n. 2 , ﻫﺖ0و): 5) 7John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Craham Ward, eds. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: cf. Milbank, ‘Alternative Protestantism: Radical Orthodoxy and the ; وهz , 5, 2.3-24, 48, 50-51, 1 ,رووول ,Routledge Reformed Tradition’, in James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthius, eds, Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition: Creation, Covenant, and Participation (Grand Rapids: I^erdmans, 2005), 30, 35; Milbank, Theology and Catherine Pickstock, A fter ; و9ه), Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1303-302 ar،d ; ووآWriting: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 23- 122 ,(8 Brad s. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University
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