A Cord of Three Strands Is Not Easily Broken: The Transcendental Brocade of Unity, Truth, and Goodness in the Early Franciscan Intellectual Tradition

Abstract

A Cord of Three Strands Is Not Easily Broken:The Transcendental Brocade of Unity, Truth, and Goodness in the Early Franciscan Intellectual Tradition Boyd Taylor Coolman Introduction In his unjustly infamous "Regensburg Address," Pope Benedict XVI made this now famous observation: One must observe that in the late Middle Ages … there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata [ordained will]. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to … the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.1 [End Page 561] Three features of this passage merit mention: (1) a concern about a conception of a deity whose nature is constituted by a will (voluntas) so radically free that it is constrained or determined by absolutely nothing; (2) a genealogy that locates the origins of this view in certain late medieval Franciscan thinkers, often dubbed "voluntarists"; and (3) an implied preference for a different God, whose will is in some sense "bound" by characteristics that human reason would recognize as truth and goodness. In short, the Pope explicitly worries about the pernicious legacy of a medieval Franciscan theology of "a capricious God" and implicitly invites speculation about what it might mean, alternatively, for God to be "bound to truth and goodness." The problem that worried the Pope is fairly well known. It begins with the concept, late medieval in origin, of a "voluntarist deity" whose nature it is to be absolutely free of everything, including any putative "divine nature," fettered by absolutely nothing, constituted as and by its sheer freedom to will.2 Entailed in this is the notion that a particular divine attribute, such as divine will (or power), could be conceived as in some sense primary, such that all other attributes could be relegated to a derivative status in relation to it. That is, one might conceive of truth and goodness as reducible to will, such that the true and the good could be "collapsed," as it were, or subsumed into it. In this case, "true" and "good" would be defined on no other basis than what in fact God wills or does, and in principle, God could at any time will true and good to be other than "our [current] sense of the true and good." This is a "capricious" deity, "unbound" by truth and goodness. This account of the divine that Pope Benedict summarizes is part of an oft-repeated genealogy of modernity that locates its deep source in a late medieval intellectual tradition often associated with certain Franciscan thinkers, especially John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, and recently dubbed "nominalism-voluntarism."3 As of late, though, this "sinister genealogy" has come under critical scrutiny.4 Adjudicating this debate, however, is not the concern of this [End Page 562] essay. What follows, rather, is an act of ressourcement that hopes to uncover in a high medieval theological tradition a distinctive model for conceiving of a deity "bound by truth and goodness." The Pope's comments above provide a fitting point of departure for this task. For, truth and goodness are not random divine attributes, but rather members of a triad of philosophical notions, along with "one," or "unity," that are known today as the "transcendentals": universal properties of all of reality.5 A popular variation, "the good, the true, and the beautiful"—often mentioned in the promotional materials of liberal arts universities—is perhaps more familiar today. But "unity, truth, and goodness" is the original formula.6 And, as it turns out, these transcendentals figure centrally at a particularly important juncture in the development of medieval theology, a development that may provide inspiration, if not an actual framework, for conceiving of just such a God. Although philosophers have been thinking for millennia...