– Duns
Scotus and the meaning of Love
By Seamus
Mulholland OFM
The Incarnation is the
model for creation: there is a creation only because of the Incarnation. In this schema, the universe is for Christ
and not Christ for the universe. Scotus
finds it inconceivable that the ‘greatest good in the universe’ i.e. the
Incarnation, can be determined by some lesser good i.e. Man’s redemption. This is because such a sin-centered view of
the Incarnation suggests that the primary role of Christ is as an assuager of
the universe’s guilt. In the Absolute
Primacy, Christ is the beginning, middle and end of creation. He stands at the center of the universe as
the reason for its existence. In this
sense the universe has realized its creational potential more than Man, since
it is created with the potential to bear the God-Man and the Incarnation has
taken place historically and existentially.
Man, as yet, has failed to reach his potential to ‘love one another as I
have loved you’.
Scotus argues that the
reason for the Incarnation is Love. The
Love of God in himself and the free desire that God has to share that love with
another who can love him as perfectly as he loves himself, i.e. the Christ. Scotus says that all the souls that were
ever created and about to be created could not, cannot and never will measure
up to the supreme love that Christ has for the Trinity. The very fact of the preconception of the
Incarnation in Scotus’s thought means that we are co-heirs to this Trinitarian
love that Christ has. The Incarnation,
then in Duns Scotus, becomes the unrepeatable, unique, and single defining act
of God’s love. God, says Scotus, is
what he is: we know that God exists and we know what that existence is:
Love. Thus, if Man had not sinned
Christ would still have come, since this was predetermined from all eternity in
the mind of God as the supreme manifestation of his love for the creation he
brings about in his free act. The
Incarnation is the effect of God freely choosing to end his self-isolation and
show who and what He is to that creation.
The Incarnation, therefore, in Franciscan spirituality is centered on
Love and not sin. Sin has been given
too much prominence in contemporary soteriology: God redeems from sin because
he loves us?: no, says the Scotist, God loves us and then redeems us. Redemption is an act of love first and
foremost, not an act of saving us from sin, and the first act of redemption is
the Incarnation. God foresees us in union
with him before he sees how sin disrupts that relational dynamic between He and
us. Scotus makes it clear that the
first movement is from God, a revelatory movement wherein God freely chooses to
move beyond his own self-loving and share that loving with something other than
himself – namely creation, and this process is epitomized in the Incarnation.
What the Incarnation shows us is not primarily the need for redemption,
but the need that is in each one of us for love. That love which is so utterly free and unmerited that it embraces
our own limitations, our own failures, our own hopes and longings and in
uniting itself to us in the Incarnate Word in the person of Jesus of Nazareth
elevates the human project to that which it always was in the mind of God. Scotus begins with Love, that love which is
the very being of God himself, he travels the road of Love, which is made
manifest in the Incarnation, and he ends with love, that love so hard to see in
the misery of the abandoned Jesus on the cross, that Love which glorifies the
whole creational project in the Resurrection.
Franciscan Spirituality sees the Incarnation as the guarantee of union
with God. It is not something to be
hoped for or to be looked forward to – it is something, which is happening
NOW. God is Love and that Love is our
redemption and redemption is not primarily being saved from sin, but is rather
the gift of the possibility of openness to the experience of the divine Other
in our life. How can it be otherwise
when we posit the notion of the divine and human in Jesus? Scotus’s doctrine of
the absolute centrality of Love is both timely and profoundly needed by our
world. Men and women cry out for an
experience of hope in a world which has lost direction – in the teaching of
Duns Scotus, Franciscan Spirituality has within its hand that hope-filled
experience and the end of that longing.
For if God willed the Incarnation from all eternity, then it was always
his intention to become part of sinful creation – sin determines the manner of
that becoming, but it does not determine the fact that it was going to be.
The incarnational thought of Duns Scotus needs a broader hearing, for
it is pertinent to all Christians and the world, not just the Catholic
tradition. The Incarnation is of God,
not Man. Scotus is indeed in the
tradition of Francis and his incarnational theology is not complex – it is
utterly simple: God is love and all that has been, is and ever will be is
because God is love and is among us in Jesus among us in Jesus who is ever
present.