Be sure to watch Mark Noll’s critique of Brad Gregory’s, The Unintended Reformation. (H/T to Millinerd and his review in FT.)
As Noll makes clear, the appropriate critique to Gregory’s book has not to do with Protestantism’s embrace of univocal metaphysics or about the unintended consequences of the Reformation era. Rather, Gregory misses the fact that the medieval ideal, running from the Cappodocians through Aquinas, was itself already comprised (anachronistically speaking) by the Roman Catholic Church. That is, it was Roman Catholicism’s embrace of univocal metaphysics and nominalist theology that bequeathed Luther. According to Noll, this form of late medieval theology, fully ensconced in the papacy, “cut the channels in which Protestantism would run.” All of this leads Noll to say that the book should have been titled, The Inconsistent Middle Ages, and The Unintended Reformation. Gregory noted that he agrees with this, though with some qualification.
What I found particularly interesting about Noll’s response, however, was the first part of his paper, where he offers a summary of Eucharistic theology in the High Middle Ages. Noll notes, in so many words, that the doctrine of Real Presence depends upon, or only makes sense within, a sacramental or non-univocal understanding of existence.
The tradition running from the Apostolic Fathers through Aquinas understood that Christ’s presence is instantiated in the mysterious efficacy of the Eucharist. Noll argues that in this sense, Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is the mysterious event of the transcendent and the immanent, the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human. Yet this only coheres in a non-univocal metaphysical cosmos, whereby sacraments are not magic acts, but a natural consequence of the Incarnation and an “apocalypsed” universe.
And so I wonder: before speaking about the doctrine of Real Presence, doesn’t one first have to be convinced of the reality of a sacramental universe, and the attendant questions of the episcopacy?
Thankfully, Gregory’s book calls us back to these larger questions.
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June 5, 2012 at 12:31 am
lee faber
Um, but Aquinas argues unequivocally for transubstantiation. There’s no mystery there. In any case, there is something of a category mistake going on here: univocity is a property of terms. ‘a is univocally predicated of b’. There is and cannot be any such thing as an “univocal metaphysics”.
June 6, 2012 at 12:18 am
Robbie
Hey Lee,
Thanks so much for taking the time to comment. I have to admit I love how fired up you get about Scotus!
I’m not sure where you were going with “transubstantiation”; I certainly didn’t bring that up in my post. Did I miss something?
Also, I read your comments at FT and I really liked this bit: “Maybe univocity is false, but then why not meet Scotus on his own terms rather than employ the genetic fallacy?” That seems entirely fair.
Still, I’m not quite ready as you are to diminish a whole host of reputable thinkers, ranging from Gilson, von Balthasar, Boulnois, Charles Taylor, all the way to Brad Gregory, to name just a few. And I’m definitely not comfortable saying that “the one thing all these people have in common is that they have never read a word of Duns Scotus” (I’m assuming you were referring to Gregory and Fulton).
With that said, I find myself deferring more and more to the position Milliner brought up in one of his comments, that maybe there is way “to tell the same compelling (and I think, in many ways true) narrative without necessarily pinning it all on Duns Scotus and Ockham.”
If you have any particular posts you’ve written or articles along these lines, please do send them my way.
Pax,
Robb
June 10, 2012 at 5:10 pm
lee faber
Hi Robb, my point was probably that Noll is using pie in the sky mystery talk here to gloss over the fact that Aquinas gives a very literalist account of the Eucharist, literalist as far as Christ’s words are involved. This involves transubstantiation. In fact, univocity and the sacraments have nothing to do with each other as the former pertains to natural knowledge of God. I suspect what the historians actually mean here is to complain about Franciscan sacramental pact causality, but that didn’t originate with Scotus and he barely talks about it.
I am quite happy to dismiss most of these folks as they have never read Scotus. Sure, Boulnois has, and Gilson obviously did as well. But the rest, no. One can tell simply by reading them. Gilson had a saying: “of all the people who have attacked Duns Scotus, only 10 have every bothered to read him, and of those, only two have understood him”. I have the highest respect for Gilson, by the way, but note: he didn’t write narratives.
I don’t disagree with your last comment. No doubt the fact that there were three medieval schools who didn’t get along and used university legislation to get their own way when argument failed contributed to the reformation, but so did lots of other things. Univocity wasn’t one of the them, however. Voluntarism is a much better suspect, but it isn’t very convenient because Scotus is a very moderate voluntarist and voluntarism is again older than Scotus. So univocity becomes a much easier target since it clearly originates with Scotus (albeit with hints in 13th cen. Oxford logicians and in the 12th c. with Richard of St. Victor saying that ‘persona’ is univocal to God and creatures).
The main reason for the contemporary interest in univocity is Giles Deleuze, who made a bunch of fanciful claims about Scotus as the originator of modernity (Deleuze liked scotus, or at least his own presentation of Scotus). Radical Orthodoxy just took his claims at face value, as it gave them a nice foil. People like Gregory, Robert Barron, et al. are mostly just riding the RO coattails in one way or another.