ABSTRACT
Clearly, Scotus emphasizes – perhaps to a greater extent than his immediate predecessors – the genuinely causal nature of the origination relations between the divine persons. This seems to me quite right. Origination relations seem, by their very nature, to be causal in some way or another. Nevertheless, some theologians have objected to this sort of account on the grounds that it appears to be subordinationist. For example, when the doctrine of the divine processions was first being properly developed, Gregory of Nazianzus replied to such worries by noting that, even though the persons are not equal in terms of causal relationships (since two are dependent on the third), the divinity of each person is equal, and that this is sufficient to rebut any serious subordinationism charge. 1 The subordinationism objection seems to me particularly weak: Gregory’s reply is surely, and obviously right, and sufficient to deal with the difficulty; though if it is felt that more should be said, then surely Gregory’s reply coupled with the necessity of the production – its being internal to the divine essence, as outlined in chapter 10, and in chapter 14 §2 – should be sufficient to dispose of the objection. In the course of his discussion, Scotus proposes various arguments against subordinationism, and I discuss these in case the reader thinks that Scotus’s robustly causal account of the origination relations makes him particularly susceptible to the objection.
