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Updated: May 14, 2025
The apostles also confuted the heathen philosophers and Jews, a people than whom none more obstinate, but rather by their good lives and miracles than syllogisms: and yet there was scarce one among them that was capable of understanding the least "quodlibet" of the Scotists.
What may Epimenides have dreamt? What but subtleties of the Scotists: quiddities, formalities, etc.! Epimenides himself was reborn in Scotus, or rather, Epimenides was Scotus's prototype. For did not he, too, write theological books, in which he tied such syllogistic knots as he would never have been able to loosen?
The Scotists, on the other hand, taught that what is called the will is merely a name for the possibility of determining without motive in either of two opposite directions.
And these subtleties are alchymized to a more refined sublimate by the abstracting brains of their several schoolmen; the Realists, the Nominalists, the Thomists, the Albertists, the Occamists, the Scotists; these are not all, but the rehearsal of a few only, as a specimen of their divided sects; in each of which there is so much of deep learning, so much of unfathomable difficulty, that I believe the apostles themselves would stand in need of a new illuminating spirit, if they were to engage in any controversy with these new divines.
'Remember ye not, says Tyndal, 'how within this thirty years and far less, the old barking curs, Dunce's disciples, and like draff called Scotists, the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin, and Hebrew? And thus from that conflict long ago extinct between the old and the new learning, that strife between the medieval and the modern theology, we inherit 'dunce' and 'duncery. The lot of Duns, it must be confessed, has been a hard one, who, whatever his merits as a teacher of Christian truth, was assuredly one of the keenest and most subtle-witted of men.
If my judgment might be taken, I would advise Christians, in their next expedition to a holy war, instead of those many unsuccessful legions, which they have hitherto sent to encounter the Turks and Saracens, that they would furnish out their clamorous Scotists, their obstinate Occamists, their invincible Albertists, and all their forces of tough, crabbed and profound disputants: the engagement, I fancy, would be mighty pleasant, and the victory we may imagine on our side not to be questioned.
But, in the present state of historical science, the arguing against miracles is, as Colet remarked of his friend Erasmus's warfare against the Thomists and Scotists of Cambridge, "a contest more necessary than glorious or difficult."
They detest and abominate sin, but let me not live if they could define according to art what that is which we call sin, unless perhaps they were inspired by the spirit of the Scotists.
The thirteenth century was the golden age of scholasticism. Then flourished Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventura, and others very influential in their day. There were two schools of opinion, that of the Thomists, the adherents of Aquinas, the great theologian of the Dominican order; and that of the Scotists, the adherents of Duns Scotus, a great light of the Franciscans.
The method of instruction had not advanced far beyond the dictation of text and gloss and commentary, which had been current before the days of printing. Erasmus yawned and dozed, or wrote letters to his friends making fun of these 'barbarous Scotists'. 'You wouldn't know me, he says, 'if you could see me sitting under old Dunderhead, my brows knit and looking thoroughly puzzled.
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