Introduction
Scholars writing on John Duns Scotus' doctrine of the atonement repeatedly point out his bold departure from the mainstream medieval theologians in ascribing a merely finite worth to the merit of Christ's atoning sacrifice. Frequently taken out of context, the Subtle Doctor's idea of the finite merit of Christ has spawned a number of misconceptions regarding his doctrine of the atonement. For example, certain studies allege that Scotus denied the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit and denigrated the very concept of atonement. Focusing narrowly on certain statements made by Scotus, based on his view of how differently God could have ordered the world according to his absolute power, they depict the Franciscan as an extreme voluntarist who argued that God could have, simply by sheer power of his will, accepted in place of the passion of Christ a purely creaturely sacrifice of an angel or a saint as adequate satisfaction for human sins. They further claim that Scotus rejected St Anselm of Canterbury's principle of satisfaction along with his argument for the necessity of the God-man who alone could atone for the infinite sin of humanity.
In what follows, I seek to overturn these disparaging views of Scotus' doctrine and mitigate the supposed extremity of the nature of his voluntarism by setting his idea of the finite merit of Christ in proper context and by balancing out his oft-quoted remarks based on God's absolute power with his rarely cited statements concerning what God actually can and cannot do in the present order according to his ordained power. I argue that Scotus situates his argument for a finite worth of Christ's merit within the framework of a larger and seemingly opposite argument – namely, argument for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit. An examination of the ways in which Scotus posits a merit of finite worth and arrives at its infinite sufficiency – when combined with a balanced presentation of Scotus' voluntarism – will disclose a perfectly orthodox doctrine of the atonement that emphasises the personal dimension of God's atoning grace without diminishing the value of Christ's merit, portrays the divine acceptation as an orderly power that observes limits and fittingness, and upholds the necessity for a God-man and satisfaction in the present order.
Scotus' argument for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit
Scotus begins his comments on the nineteenth distinction of the third book of Lombard's Sentences by expressing his displeasure with the distinction that his predecessors – most notably, St Thomas Aquinas – and contemporaries drew between sufficiency and efficacy of the atonement. These theologians wanted to affirm that the passion of Christ was a meritorious work of infinite value, sufficient to redeem the whole world, even if there were an infinite number of sinners. In affirming the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit, they needed to deal with the reality that not all sinners are redeemed. Therefore, they distinguished sufficiency from efficacy in order to explain that, while Christ's merit was sufficient to atone for an infinite amount of sin as well as an infinite number of sinners, it is made efficacious only for a finite number of people. Thus far Scotus has no disagreement with the distinction. Just like St Thomas and others, Scotus wants to uphold the infinite sufficiency and affirm only a finite efficacy.
However, Scotus sharply disagrees with them over what determines the sufficiency and the efficacy of Christ's merit. His criticism of the distinction handed down to him is directed at the fact that the infinite sufficiency of the atonement is grounded solely in its ontological worth, leaving no room for the personal dimension of grace.Footnote 1 Furthermore, Scotus is dissatisfied with the notion that the efficacy of the atonement is determined entirely by the creaturely will of human beings. According to this notion, the efficacy requires that Christ's merit be extended to human beings through their union with Christ, which in turn requires that the human beings dispose themselves to grace by knowing and loving God. Since not all human beings dispose themselves to grace and stay disposed, the infinitely sufficient atonement extends only to a finite number efficaciously.Footnote 2 In the end, the sufficiency of Christ's merit is determined entirely by the divine essence and its efficacy entirely by the creaturely will, and the divine will is not free to control either. This Scotus would not have. Therefore, Scotus wants to arrive at the infinite sufficiency and finite efficacy via a different route, one in which the divine will plays the determining role for both the sufficiency and the efficacy of the atonement.
Yet a number of scholars allege that Scotus denies the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit, and they base this allegation on the fact that Scotus regards the intrinsic worth of Christ's merit as finite rather than infinite. It is well known that Scotus identifies the human nature of Christ as the principle of his atoning work. While Scotus does not reject any of the patristic and medieval theories or imageries of the atonement that Lombard the Master of Sentences presents, Scotus chooses to focus on the atonement viewed as Christ's merit. Ever a voluntarist, Scotus emphasises the volitional aspect of merit and describes the passion of Christ primarily as an act of willing (velle). Since it is through his human nature that Christ is able both to suffer and to merit, the act of willing by which Christ merits grace and glory for the elect is not based on an infinite principle (i.e. the divine nature) but a finite principle. As Douglas Langston points out, Scotus states: ‘Insofar as sufficiency is concerned, I say that the merit of Christ was finite, because it essentially depended upon a finite principle.’Footnote 3 This direct citation, when isolated from the rest of Scotus' text, indeed appears to support the claim that Scotus denies the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit. However, this statement merely constitutes a starting point of Scotus' argument and in no way warrants Langston's hasty assessment: ‘Consequently, if an infinite sacrifice were required to redeem mankind, Christ's finite sacrifice would not have redeemed mankind.’Footnote 4 In fact, Scotus acknowledges that humanity's sin against God is in some sense infinite and that a similarly infinite sacrifice is indeed required to make satisfaction. But the Subtle Doctor is not willing for that reason to join the followers of St Anselm and St Thomas in concluding that Christ's atoning sacrifice must therefore be intrinsically infinite. In fact, one of Scotus' main objectives in this distinction is to demonstrate the ways in which the intrinsically finite merit of Christ can overcome the infinite obstacles that the sins of humanity present and achieve infinite sufficiency.
Scotus' criticism of those who attribute intrinsically infinite worth to Christ's merit
According to Scotus, those theologians who follow St Anselm of Canterbury hold that Christ's merit has a certain infinite value on account of his person. Since the life of the divine person who performed the functions of his assumed nature was an infinite good, Christ's work on the cross had an infinite value, sufficient both to remit the infinite sins of humanity and to confer an infinite amount of grace and glory.Footnote 5 Scotus identifies several problems with this position.
The first is a christological problem. These theologians do not distinguish between the willing (velle) that is proper to the Divine Word himself and that which is proper to his assumed (i.e. human) nature. By arguing that the ‘simply infinite’ (simpliciter infinita) life of the Divine Word directly translates into the infinite acceptability of Christ's bonum velle, these theologians attribute the bonum velle directly to the Divine Word, completely bypassing the human soul of Christ. This is tantamount to arguing that the Divine Word himself merited salvation for humanity, a notion Scotus strongly rejects.Footnote 6 As we shall discuss later in depth, Scotus regards ‘merit’ as an activity God has reserved only for select rational creatures; therefore, the Creator is simply ineligible for merit.Footnote 7 What we can infer from Scotus' critique is that these theologians’ arguments are grounded on a simplistic use of communicatio idiomatum and are at odds with the concept of merit, as well as with the role that Christ's human nature plays in the volitional activities of the God-man.Footnote 8
Another problem that Scotus points out is the hyperbolic and uncritical use of the term ‘infinite’ on the part of these theologians.Footnote 9 For example, St Anselm and his followers argue that since sin is infinite, the atoning sacrifice, i.e. Christ's merit, must also be infinite in a symmetrical manner. But if the meritorious velle of Christ is, as they argue, simply infinite as is the life of the Divine Word, then this velle would be ‘formally infinite’ (formaliter infinitum). That is, what makes this velle infinite lies in the velle itself; in other words, it is intrinsically infinite.Footnote 10 However, to argue that such velle is required to make satisfaction for the infinite sins of humanity would entail that the sins of humanity also be formally infinite. Scotus, however, maintains that no human sin can be formally infinite, because it is essentially caused by a creaturely faculty of will, a finite principle. These theologians err because they use the term ‘infinite’ in an imprecise way. To remedy this problem, Scotus draws a distinction of two ways in which a thing is said to be infinite: intensive and extensive.
Considered ‘intensively’ (i.e. inwardly or in relation to itself or per se), no sin, says Scotus, can be formally infinite. For to posit a formally infinite sin is nothing else than to posit a summum malum, something akin to the evil God of the Manichaean dualism, which is heresy.Footnote 11 Therefore, to maintain simultaneously (A) that the merit of Christ must be infinite in the same manner in which humanity's sin against God is infinite, and (B) that the merit of Christ is intensively infinite, is far more serious than a mere error in exercise of thought. Scotus then introduces a way in which one can maintain the symmetry between the infinity of Christ's merit and that of humanity's sin without falling into heresy, namely, to regard the term ‘infinite’ extensively.
When considered ‘extensively’ (i.e. outwardly or in relation to an external object), sin can be considered infinite in several ways. It is noteworthy that Scotus fully anticipates the aforementioned assessment of Langston (that if an infinite sacrifice were required to redeem humanity, the finite sacrifice of Christ would not have been sufficient) and begins the nineteenth distinction of Ordinatio III by listing it as a set of objections that he intends to overcome. The way in which the Subtle Doctor sets up these objections makes it clear that his goal is not to reduce Christ's accomplishment to a merely finite merit; rather, it is to demonstrate the way in which Christ's merit can achieve infinite sufficiency without having to be formally infinite.
How the formally finite merit of Christ can overcome the infinite nature of sin
The list of objections that Scotus supplies includes most notably the following three reasons for the infinite nature of sin: (1) the infinite nature of the offended party, namely God, (2) the infinite duration of penalty and (3) the infinite amount of guilt.Footnote 12
First, against the notion that sin is infinite on account of the infinite nature of the offended party, Scotus maintains that sin is still a finite act. As most medieval theologians would agree, Scotus states that the proper end (terminus) of a rational creature is God, who is the infinite good. Whereas humanity is to move towards this terminus and be joined to it, a mortal sin turns it away from it, and it is in this sense that sin is considered infinite on account of the nature of God. Here Scotus is careful not to posit two infinite ends as did the Manichaeans. Rather, the infinity of the human act is based on its directional relation to a single infinite terminus. In this sense, if an act directs and unites the human being to the infinite good, then it is an infinitely good act; if it separates and turns away the human being from the infinite good, then it is an infinitely sinful act. The sin of humanity, then, is not intrinsically infinite, but only in relation to its end (terminus ad quem or a quo), or put in another way, according to ‘a certain extrinsic denomination’.Footnote 13 Therefore, it is false to reason that the merit of Christ must be of infinite intrinsic worth in order to compensate for the ‘infinite’ sin of humanity. The merit of Christ only needs be as infinite as the sin of humanity – that is, according to an extrinsic denomination.Footnote 14
The second objection considers sin infinite because sin incurs an infinite penalty (poena). Again, Scotus' argument focuses on drawing a distinction between an intrinsic infinity and an extrinsic infinity. He argues that there is no absolute necessity that imposes an infinite penalty – i.e. everlasting punishment – on sinners who die in the state of mortal sin. Rather, God freely ordained that such penalty be imposed on the impenitent, and God could have just as freely ordained a different type of penalty. In fact, God could have ordained a finite penalty – for example, a finite duration of punishment, followed by an annihilation of the soul – without violating any rule of justice. Therefore, the penalty of sin is not infinite intensively. Only extensively is it infinite and that from divine ordination.Footnote 15
The third objection is based on a hypothetical situation in which God allows the world to continue endlessly and to produce an infinite number of sinners, hence an infinite amount of combined guilt (culpa). This objection is significant for two reasons. First, even if Scotus succeeds in establishing that the sin of a single individual (for example, Adam) is formally finite, he would still need to explain how Christ's finite merit could atone for the infinite amount of collective guilt produced by an infinitely growing number of sinners.Footnote 16 Second, this objection poses perhaps the most difficult challenge to Scotus' argument, because it presents a case in which sin can be considered infinite in a quasi-intrinsic way. Unlike the case of summum malum, Scotus sees nothing objectionable about an infinite series of finite guilt.
The infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit and the nature of Scotus' voluntarism
Scotus' response to the third objection sheds much needed light on the nature of his voluntarism. First, he points out the liberality and primacy of divine acceptance. When God accepts a human act as meritorious of a reward, he rewards liberally, beyond the condignity of the act. Therefore, reward always exceeds merit.Footnote 17 Moreover, in Scotus' thought, divine acceptation exercises causal primacy over the things that are accepted. That is, when God accepts X as good, X's goodness does not constitute the basis for God's acceptance of X; rather, it is God's acceptance that causes X to be good. With regard to merit, Scotus maintains that X is merit because it is accepted, not the converse.Footnote 18 Therefore, God is able to grant a reward of exceedingly great worth for a good work of disproportionately small worth.
However, the primacy and the generosity of divine acceptation do not constitute the whole of Scotus' solution, because he thinks that there is a limitation to the power of divine acceptance. It is important to point out that when Scotus' notions of the primacy and the generosity of divine acceptance are isolated from his insistence on its limitation, an extreme-voluntarist portrait of Scotus emerges. Langston, for example, fails to deal with the fact that Scotus not only affirms a certain infinity on the part of human sin, but also acknowledges the need for Christ's merit to match and overcome this infinity. As a result, Langston depicts Scotus as stripping the merit of Christ of all saving power and attributing it entirely to divine acceptation: ‘the finite sacrifice of Christ was not redemptive for all mankind because of any intrinsic merit of the finite sacrifice; it was redemptive simply because God chose to accept the finite sacrifice of Christ as sufficient recompense for mankind's fall’.Footnote 19 Based on this reasoning, Langston declares that in Scotus' thought the sacrifice of Christ is no more sufficient or effectual than a purely creaturely sacrifice:
If mankind's redemption did not result from the intrinsic nature of the sacrificial act offered in compensation and derived instead from God's acceptance of the sacrifice as a sufficient recompense, God could accept any sacrifice as sufficient for mankind's salvation.Footnote 20
L. W. Grensted is of the same persuasion: ‘If everything is referred to the acceptatio of God, there is clearly no limit to that which God may choose to accept.’Footnote 21 Adolf von Harnack even suggests that Scotus' God could accept any finite good as an infinite merit.Footnote 22 According to these scholars, the power of divine acceptance is so boundless that it can grant any creaturely sacrifice the same sufficiency that it accords Christ's sacrifice, and the fact that the Second Person of the Trinity sacrificed his life makes no difference whatsoever to divine acceptance. Therefore, the passion of Christ is both comparable to and exchangeable with any creaturely sacrifice in the eye of Scotus' God.
Contrary to these scholars’ assessment, Scotus does not conceptualise divine acceptance as an absolutely unrestricted power with no regard for order and fittingness. While the immensity of power that Scotus ascribes to acceptatio divina is indisputable, Scotus clearly articulates its limitation – namely, that God cannot accept a finite good in an infinite manner, or ‘infinitely’, because God cannot love a finite creature the way God loves himself.Footnote 23 Consequently, God could have ordained any creaturely sacrifice as satisfaction sufficient for all the sinners ever born into the world as long as the number of sinners was to remain finite. But Scotus is now faced with a challenge: the infinite series of finite guilt proposed in the objection demands an atoning sacrifice that God can receive as an infinite one, but God cannot accept the formally finite sacrifice of Christ as an infinite one.Footnote 24 Scotus' solution: there is a special circumstantia surrounding the passion of Christ that sets it apart from all other formally finite sacrifices, and on account of this circumstance it becomes fitting that God should accept the passion as though it were formally infinite.Footnote 25
Circumstantia is a technical term that Scotus distinguishes from substantia in his discussion of the role that the habit of charity plays in the production and acceptance of a meritorious act.Footnote 26 To illustrate this distinction, suppose Person A and Person B produce acts of loving God above all else with the same degree of intensity. The substance of the act (substantia actus) refers to the content of the act, or that which makes the act what it is in itself. In this case, loving God above all else to the said degree constitutes the substance of the act. Therefore, we can conceptualise an ideal situation in which the act of Person A is identical to the act of Person B in substance.
The circumstance of the act (circumstantia actus), on the other hand, refers to some quality or situation pertaining to the act that makes a difference in the way in which the act is perceived or accepted by another party but is nonetheless not necessary for producing the act or for making the act what it is in itself. Since two acts of same substance can differ in circumstances, suppose that Person A produced the act of loving God above all else with the aid of the infused habit of charity (habitus caritatis) while Person B produced the same act without the habit. Although many medieval theologians consider the supernatural habit necessary for accomplishing the daunting task of loving God above all else, Scotus thinks that the faculty of will is primarily responsible for producing the substance of the act. Since human will is not a supernatural power, most human beings are capable of eliciting this act from purely natural powers (ex puris naturalibus) without the aid of the supernatural habit, albeit for brief moments even with enormous efforts. The habit of charity can aid the will by increasing the substantial intensity of the act but is nonetheless unnecessary for the production of the substance of the act. However, it is precisely the circumstance of the act – i.e. the fact that the act was produced in accordance with the supernatural habit – that makes the difference in the way God perceives the act. Because God has ordained by eternal acceptation that he will accept such acts of love as meritorious of eternal life only if they are elicited in accordance with the infused habit of charity, God accepts the act of Person A and rejects that of Person B, in spite of the fact that the two acts are identical in substance. Therefore, the acceptability of the act hinges on its circumstance, rather than its substance.
This relationship between the substance and the circumstance of the act seems to be what Scotus has in mind when he deploys the term circumstantia in his argument for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit. Christ's act of loving God above all else through his passion, for all its greatness, is still creaturely, therefore finite in substance. And as such, it cannot – if judged solely on the substance of the act – be accepted as an infinitely sufficient sacrifice. Consequently, what truly distinguishes the sacrifice of Christ from all other creaturely sacrifices does not lie in the substance of the act but in the circumstance of the act. By ‘circumstance’ in this case, Scotus refers to the fact that the person performing the act is an infinite being, namely the Divine Word who elicited the bonum velle through his assumed nature. Again, it is clear that the acceptability of the act hinges on its circumstance, rather than its substance: Scotus declares that it was ex circumstantia suppositi that God was able to make an exception in this case and to accept Christ's formally finite merit as a ‘quasi-infinite’ merit, sufficient to atone for both the infinite amount of sin and the infinite number of sinners. And Scotus makes a clear distinction between the merit of Christ and merits of mere creatures by stating that if Christ had not possessed divine personhood, i.e. had he been a mere human being, his passion would have lacked the special circumstance, and consequently it would have been neither possible nor fitting for God to accept it in an infinite manner.Footnote 27
Hypostatic union, then, plays an important role in Scotus' account of the sufficiency of the atonement in spite of his strong opposition to those who attribute Christ's merit to the person (i.e. the Divine Word) of Christ. On the surface, there may seem little difference between Scotus' own position and that which he opposes. Nevertheless, there exists a difference – subtle, yet profound. Scotus' opponents teach that the infinite personhood of Christ makes the velle of Christ infinite – that is, the velle of Christ has an infinite intrinsic worth. This is precisely the position that Scotus rejects. For Scotus, nothing created can impose necessity on divine acceptance, but an intrinsically infinite sacrifice of the divine person certainly would, and this infringement on divine freedom poses a problem for Scotus, because he thinks that the passion of Christ maximally displayed God's love for humanity and the personal dimension of God's saving grace, precisely because it was freely offered and freely accepted. Therefore, Scotus conceptualises the bonum velle of Christ as having a finite intrinsic worth but carrying with it a special circumstantia of infinite acceptability. Since the circumstance alone does not constitute an act, it is not the object of God's acceptance. Thus, the infinite circumstance does not impose on God any necessity to accept the act, but it provides God with a loophole to overcome the limitation on what he can accept and also with freedom to accept the merit of Christ infinitely if he so desires. With Scotus' setup of finite substance and infinite circumstance of the velle Christi, God is completely free to accept it for as many sinners and as much sin as God wants without limit, and this constitutes the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit. For if the substance of the act were infinite, then God would not be free to reject the sacrifice or to determine the extent of its efficacy; and if both the substance and the circumstance were finite, then God would not be free to accept the sacrifice infinitely. But Scotus' metaphysic of Christ's merit provides God with the freedom to accept it as infinitely sufficient and finitely efficacious simultaneously.
In light of what we have seen in Scotus' argument for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit, we must conclude that the extreme-voluntarist portrait of Scotus' doctrine of acceptatio divina needs to be moderated. Scotus does not think that acceptatio divina is boundless and unorderly. Nor does he think that it makes the merit of Christ exchangeable with other creaturely merits. In fact, Scotus argues that it is the ontological constitution of Christ's merit that enables the divine will to bridge the gulf between the infinite and the finite and to accept the merit as infinitely sufficient. Moreover, when Scotus says that X is meritorious because it is accepted and not vice versa, we must be mindful of the Subtle Doctor's intentionally ambiguous use of the term acceptatio and the multiple layers of meaning that the term carries in his thought. At the basic level, acceptatio can refer to a passive acceptance by which God accepts something from a creature in the temporal realm; for example, God passively accepts, or receives, a good act elicited in accordance with the infused habit of charity as meritorious of eternal life. But at another level, acceptatio refers to the eternal and active acceptance by which God ordains the ‘good act elicited in accordance with the infused habit of charity’ as merit, and it is by virtue of this eternal acceptance that the act is passively accepted in the present order for the reward of eternal life. Hence, acceptatio in Scotus' thought is a broad theological term that encompasses ordinatio by which God provides the ontological basis for his passive acceptance.Footnote 28 Therefore, the famous Scotist dictum is not meant to reject the objective, ontological basis of merit. Instead, it is intended to underscore the derivative nature of the ontological basis and to attribute credit for human merit to its highest cause, namely the divine will, rather than to secondary causes, such as human endeavours, the supernatural yet created grace of charity, or anything other than God. For the dictum means that there is a higher cause of God's passive acceptance of X than the fact that X is of such meritorious worth, and that this cause is none other than acceptatio by which God has preordained X as an act meritorious of a certain reward and has promised to passively accept it in the future as such.Footnote 29 Therefore, Scotus' voluntarism is not as extreme as some scholars allege.
Scotus on the possibility of atonement by means of a purely creaturely sacrifice
It is tragic that Scotus' doctrine of the atonement seems best known for his claim that, had it pleased God, even angels or saints could have atoned for the sin of humanity. Citing the finite intrinsic worth of Christ's merit and the immense power of divine acceptation in Scotus' thought, too many scholars have turned this claim into the hallmark of his doctrine of the atonement. Many of these scholars neglect to mention the distinction between the ordained power (potentia ordinata) and the absolute power (potentia absoluta) of God that is so prevalent in Scotus' thought. Yet they present the reader with remarks that Scotus makes on the basis of God's absolute power without even mentioning, much less explaining, such a basis. Nor do they attempt to balance out the one-sidedness of these remarks with counterpoints from his remarks concerning God's ordained power.Footnote 30
Scotus' statements based on God's ordained power
When Scotus speaks of God's ordained power, he is speaking about what God is able to do in the present order of things, having already set up the laws and regulations that govern this world. By conceptualising logical moments or instants of the eternal act of divine will, Scotus is able to distinguish the logically prior acts from the logically subsequent acts of the divine will. Scotus thinks that prior decrees of the divine will cannot be contradicted by subsequent decrees within a single order.Footnote 31 Therefore, each instant of divine decree imposes a conditional necessity on the subsequent acts of the divine will.Footnote 32 In the present order, Scotus thinks that God has already ordained the salvific scheme of this world in such a way that it is no longer possible for God to accept anything besides the work of Christ as meritorious of redeeming the world. Such decrees of ordinatio revolve around the qualifications of the person who can perform the work of atonement by merit. Scotus mentions two qualifications: the person must be (1) eligible for merit and (2) sinless.
First, Scotus argues that God cannot accept the good works of an angel or a saint, because neither is eligible for merit in the present order. In Scotus' thought, merit is an activity that God reserves for pilgrims prior to reaching their destination. But holy angels and saints are not pilgrims in via, but comprehensors in patria.Footnote 33 Furthermore, God has ordained that merit be based on the rational creatures’ volitional activity that makes good use of their innate affection for justice (affectio iustitiae). But volitional affections of the saints and holy angels are so perfectly united to God that they cannot exercise their affection for justice to choose contrary to their affection for what is advantageous to them (affectio commodi).Footnote 34 Moreover, many good works that holy angels do for the benefit of pilgrims are not meritorious, because these angels are obligated by God to perform these works simply as part of their ministry.Footnote 35 Therefore, holy angels and saints cannot merit salvation for humanity, and for the same reason, neither can God. Had he not assumed the nature of a rational creature – more precisely that of a pilgrim – even the Almighty himself would not have been able to merit and could not have atoned for the sin of the world, at least not meritoriously.Footnote 36
This position of Scotus certainly leaves room for saints to have performed works of atonement prior to attaining their sainthood while they were still pilgrims. However, this possibility is denied by the second qualification – namely, that the person meriting the redemption of the world be sinless. Scotus explicitly states that God does not, de potentia ordinata, save anyone except by the merit of the one who was sinless, namely Christ.Footnote 37 And this requirement of sinlessness extends not only to actual sins but also to the original sin.Footnote 38 Therefore, God cannot de potentia ordinata accept the works of future saints in lieu of Christ's merit.
Unlike the angels and saints, Jesus Christ was uniquely qualified to merit the redemption of the world. Not only was he sinless, but he was viator and comprehensor simultaneously. Although he was perfectly united to God through the higher portion of his human soul, through the lower portion of his human soul he functioned as a viator, a pilgrim fully eligible for merit.Footnote 39 This is why Scotus places such emphasis on his argument that Christ's bonum velle must be considered a product of his human nature.
Yet Scotus does not make the mistake of attributing all of Christ's salvific functions to his human nature to the exclusion of his divine nature. Recall that for Scotus the merit of Christ is infinitely sufficient and that such sufficiency stems from the circumstantia of the bonum velle, which is grounded in hypostatic union between the human nature and the divine nature. And Scotus explicitly states that if Christ were purely human, God could not have accepted his passion as infinitely sufficient. Furthermore, Scotus states that the divinity of Christ effects the restoration and glorification of humanity even from the moment of predestination so that Christ is said to have redeemed humanity ‘meritoriously insofar as he was man but effectively insofar as he was God’.Footnote 40 Moreover, the entire Trinity was involved in ‘actively accepting’ (i.e. ordaining from eternity) the passion of Christ as infinitely sufficient, as well as ‘passively accepting’ (i.e. accepting in the temporal realm) it as such.Footnote 41 Therefore, Scotus envisions both the humanity and the divinity of Christ as actively involved in the salvific scheme of the present order.
Scotus' statements based on God's absolute power
While Scotus is adamant that God cannot, according to his ordained power, accept the good works of angels or saints as a substitute for the merit of Christ, he certainly entertains those possibilities when speaking of the absolute power of God. However, we must preface this discussion by asking how other theologians have responded to the question, ‘Could God have redeemed the world by means other than the passion of Christ?’ Not wishing to deny the omnipotence of God, the vast majority of theologians, including St Augustine, St Thomas and even St Anselm of Canterbury, devised some ways to answer the question affirmatively, even if they wanted to emphasise some sort of necessity or fittingness of the passion of Christ. Therefore, Scotus' affirmation of other possible means of redemption should not surprise us at all. Further, given the scholastic penchant for pursuing speculative exercises in thought, we can hardly fault Scotus for speaking concretely about these other possible means.
When Scotus speaks of God's absolute power he is usually speaking of a hypothetical situation in which God has not yet firmly set in place the boundaries of the present order. For example, in the present order, God has decreed that the Eternal Word would become incarnate and save the world by means of his passion. Having decreed this, God cannot save the world apart from the incarnation and the passion in the present order, and this inability falls squarely within the realm of God's ordained power. However, what if God had not decreed the passion? Could Christ have redeemed the world without his suffering and death? Further, what if God had not decreed the incarnation in the first place? Removing layer by layer these prior restrictions that God had imposed on himself opens up significantly more possibilities to the divine will and, as a result, God can choose any means of redemption that does not contradict his own nature or violate the law of non-contradiction. This is the realm of the divine absolute power.Footnote 42
By invoking God's absolute power, Scotus can remove the prior divine decrees concerning the passion, the incarnation and the stipulations concerning merit, and conceptualise a situation in which God ordains another means of saving the world. Scotus subordinates Christ's merit to the divine will in the chain of salvific causality and argues that whatever God can do through a secondary cause, he can also do without it.Footnote 43 In this case, Scotus sees no reason that the finite world cannot be redeemed through the finite merits of angels, saints and pilgrims, especially since there is nothing about sin that is formally infinite.
But what is Scotus' motive for entertaining the possibility of these other means of atonement and constantly bringing up God's absolute power? It is because Scotus wants to preserve the freedom of God in choosing the passion of Christ as the means of human redemption. Unlike those who consider the formal infinity of sin and the necessity of the passion of a God-man as proof of God's great compassion for humanity, Scotus thinks that the divine compassion is far better demonstrated and that we as a result become far more attracted to God's love if Christ suffered and died for us out of free choice rather than out of necessity. Given the finite number of sinners, it was perfectly within God's power to have ordained a sacrifice finite in sufficiency, but he freely chose to redeem humanity by means of an infinitely sufficient sacrifice in which he gave both himself and the rational creature he loved the most.Footnote 44 Here we detect an unmistakably Abelardian theory of the atonement. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that Scotus rejected St Anselm in favour of Abelard.Footnote 45
Scotus on the Anselmian theory of satisfaction
Scotus' critique of St Anselm of Canterbury focuses on the latter's pronounced emphasis on the necessity of the passion of Christ and the danger that it may be interpreted as absolute necessity. As pointed out by Karl Werner, Reinhold Seeberg and recently by Richard Cross,Footnote 46 Scotus basically agrees with St Anselm's argument for why God became human, provided that Anselm's idea of necessity be interpreted as a conditional necessity arising from the fact that God's prior decrees impose necessitas consequentiae not only upon their execution in time but also upon God's subsequent decrees, even though all divine acts ad extra are contingent and free.Footnote 47
Furthermore, contrary to the claims of Ritschl, Hodge, Langston and Burns, Scotus does not reject St Anselm's principle of satisfaction.Footnote 48 In his discussion of satisfaction in Ordinatio IV, distinction 15, question 1, Scotus states that it would be unjust for sinners to be beatified without satisfaction, since God has ordained that guilt incurs penalty according to justice. Then he discusses the ways in which God could have, de potentia absoluta, redeemed the world by means of satisfaction yet not by means of Christ's passion. For example, God could have allowed the elect to make satisfaction for their own sins by doing penance.Footnote 49 Through penance, the bad or evil of having turned away from God can be satisfied by the good of turning back to God through charity, which would render to God what is justly owed, ‘equivalent for equivalent’.Footnote 50 Scotus also thinks that the act of turning back to God through charity would require the first grace, which in the present order cannot be obtained except by the merit of Christ. But Scotus argues that God could, again de potentia absoluta, grant this grace without the merit of Christ's passion. Scotus supports this argument by deploying a famous anti-Pelagian argument of St Augustine: the highest of all graces was bestowed upon the human soul of Christ when it was chosen for hypostatic union with the Second Person of the Trinity, and this grace was given freely without any merit on the part of the soul of Christ. Therefore, it is certainly possible for God to grant a lesser grace, namely the first grace, freely to all.Footnote 51
The concept of satisfaction also appears in Ordinatio IV, dist. 2, q. 1: by sinning, human beings have become enemies of God, and God does not forgive his enemies, unless something be offered to him which pleases him more than the sins of the enemies displease him. Since the human soul of Christ is more beloved of God than entire humanity would have been even prior to the fall, Christ's self-sacrifice, which displayed maximal charity and was offered for the sake of justice, was accepted as the meritorious cause of the atonement.Footnote 52
Far from rejecting St Anselm's theory of satisfaction, Scotus accepts it as a plausible explanation of the unfolding of the redemptive drama, as long as no absolute necessity is attributed to God's decisions ad extra.
Evaluation of Scotus' doctrine of Christ's merit
In light of the strong argument that Scotus advances for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit and his view of the uniqueness and necessity of the merit of the God-man in the present order, the kind of criticisms that depict his doctrine as a ‘degradation of the idea of the atonement’ are no longer tenable.Footnote 53 Those who are convinced that Scotus denigrated the value of Christ's merit simply fail to recognise the Subtle Doctor's theological genius in his attempt to approach the infinite sufficiency and finite efficacy of Christ's merit from a different angle. What we observe in Scotus' theology is a simultaneously bold and delicate move to stress the personal and volitional dimension of the atonement over the ontological, while giving credits where they are due in the right order. We can identify in Scotus' doctrine three denominations of the atoning grace of God: intrinsic, middle and extrinsic.
First, the passion of Christ – more precisely, the substance of this act – constitutes for Scotus the intrinsic denomination of the atoning grace. Scotus guards against allowing this ontological dimension of the atonement to overshadow the personal dimension, and he accomplishes this by attributing the passion to the human nature of Christ and by assigning to it a finite intrinsic worth. However, ‘finite’ does not entail ‘insignificant’. In fact, Scotus' doctrine gives the human nature of Christ, both body and soul, a far more substantial role in the atoning work than a purely instrumental role that makes the passion attributable to the Second Person of the Trinity. For Scotus, the concept of passion encompasses more than the physical suffering and the ontological worth of a life sacrificed. It was first and foremost a volitional act of the human soul of Christ by which he chose to do God's work and speak God's truths against our injustices and our improperly ordered affections even at the expense of his life. He ‘suffered for justice’ and ‘chose rather to die than to be silent’.Footnote 54 In other words, the human will of Christ chose the passion out of a rightly ordered love by placing his affection for justice far above his affection for what was useful and advantageous to him. And by this volitional act Christ truly merited our redemption.
Second, the middle denomination: whereas Scotus' theological opponents locate the infinite acceptability of Christ's merit in the intrinsic denomination of the atoning grace (namely, the ontological worth of the sacrifice), Scotus creates a middle denomination in between the intrinsic and the extrinsic and locates the infinite acceptability in the circumstantia of Christ's passion. On the one hand, this infinite acceptability remains outside the substance of the velle Christi and does not increase the ontological value of the finite act. On the other hand, it does maintain a close ontological proximity to the substance of the velle Christi and constitutes an objective, ontological ground for the divine will to overcome its limitation and to accept the finite passion of Christ as a quasi-infinite merit. But, even when providing this ontological ground, Scotus emphasises the personal dimension of God's atoning grace by bringing to the fore the person behind the atoning work. For there is a difference between (A) a formally finite work being accepted as though it were infinite on account of the formally infinite person performing the work and (B) the formal infinity of the person somehow resulting in the formal infinity of his work even when the work is performed through his assumed and formally finite nature. Scotus uses his doctrine of double acceptance – i.e. God's acceptance of a creaturely act or work is contingent on God's prior acceptance of its agent or person – to declare that the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit cannot be achieved by considering the work in and of itself, but only ‘on account of the infinite love and acceptation of the person meriting’.Footnote 55
Finally, the extrinsic denomination of the atoning grace is none other than divine acceptance. Both the concept of merit and the concept of sacrifice demand the presence of an acceptor. But, for Scotus' theological opponents, the acceptor plays no significant role in their doctrine of Christ's merit. For the sufficiency of Christ's merit is made infinite by the infinite ontological worth of Christ's work rather than by the will of the acceptor. Likewise, its efficacy is limited to a finite number by the creaturely will of human beings, rather than by the will of the divine acceptor. Scotus, on the other hand, greatly expands the role of the extrinsic denomination. For him it is the divine acceptor who decides both initially and ultimately whether to accept the merit of Christ, and to what extent of sufficiency and efficacy to accept it.
Nonetheless, it is not as though Scotus imagines Christ as a beggar at the mercy of a generous yet whimsical decision-maker. Insofar as concerns God's passive acceptance, Scotus' God cannot bridge the gulf between the infinite and the finite and consequently would not have been able to accept Christ's merit as an infinitely sufficient atonement even if he so desired had the passion lacked the middle denomination, namely, the special circumstance based on hypostatic union. But insofar as concerns God's active and eternal acceptance, the entire Trinity preordained the incarnation, and having foreseen the Fall, preordained the passion of the incarnate God as the means of atonement rather than choosing some other means. Then it follows that it was none other than acceptatio divina that provided the special circumstantia. Therefore, God is not only the final acceptor but also the provider of the atoning sacrifice.
The examination of Scotus' argument for the infinite sufficiency of Christ's merit and his understanding of God's redemptive strategy for the present order shows that his doctrine of the atonement is perfectly consistent with the teaching of the church on issues such as the infinite sufficiency and finite efficacy of the atonement, the uniqueness and necessity of the God-man, and the concept of satisfaction. Far from a degradation of the concept of the atonement, Scotus' doctrine brings a much needed emphasis on the personal and volitional dimension of the atonement by casting the spotlight simultaneously on the most free, generous and orderly will of the provider and acceptor of the atoning sacrifice and on the freely willed self-sacrifice of the most beloved of God and apex of God's creation.
