Radical Scotism: The Error Wiclefi in the Long Scotist Tradition
(2024) Radical Thinking in the Middle Ages. Acts of the XV International Congress of the SIEPM, Paris, 22–26 August 2022 — ISBN: [978-2-503-61354-3], p. 1003–1014, published
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- In a seventeenth-century Scotist debate over the ontological status of possible beings, we find one Scotist charging another Scotist with a special kind of heresy, labelled ‘Error Wiclefi’, named after one of the favorite metaphysical doctrines of the posthumously condemned heretic John Wyclif († 1384). While Wyclif authored a variety of provocative doctrines, his view of the creaturely eternal intelligible being, co-eternal with God’s knowledge of creatures, is the one that keeps recurring in Early Modern Scotist metaphysical discussions. Wyclif’s view challenges the fundamental theological notion of divine creation from nothingness and the corresponding notion of annihilation; according to Wyclif, creation is from and annihilation is into pure intelligible being. In this present contribution, I shall argue that the Early Modern Scotist discussion in fact mirrors Duns Scotus’s († 1308) own reaction to Henry of Ghent’s († 1293) doctrine of being of essence (esse essentiae) and its peculiar aftermath in the early Scotist tradition that likely, through one radical string of Scotism, inspired Wyclif himself. The charge of Wyclifism then travelled into Early Modernity via Thomist Anti-Scotist polemics.
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Andersen, C. (2024). Radical Scotism: The Error Wiclefi in the Long Scotist Tradition. In Monica Brinzei, Irene Caiazzo, Christophe Grellard, Aurélien Robert (ed.), Radical Thinking in the Middle Ages. Acts of the XV International Congress of the SIEPM, Paris, 22–26 August 2022 (Published 2024, p. p. 1003–1014). Brepols. https://doi.org/10.1484/M.RPM-EB.5.143052