The Existence of a First Being

Scotus’s proof for the existence of a first being builds on the distinction in types of essential order outlined in chapter 1 above. For he holds that it is possible to show that there is a first efficient cause, an ultimate goal of activity, and a maximally eminent being. And his view of the interrelations of these three kinds of primacy allows him to infer that anything that has one sort of primacy has the other two sorts too. The background to the argument is Henry of Ghent. Henry analysed all proofs for the existence of God into two basic types: arguments from causation, and arguments from eminence. ¹ Scotus more or less follows this basic insight, though he subdivides the causal argument into efficient and final causation. But Scotus adds various further features of his own. Perhaps the most striking is that Scotus’s argument is in effect a modal argument, based on premisses that Scotus believes to be necessarily true. As is well known, Scotus was an important innovator in modal theory, effectively introducing the notion of logical modalities, definable in terms of consistency relations. But he does not make consistent use of his new theory in the context of his cosmological argument. As Calvin Normore has rightly noted,

That Duns Scotus is a pivotal figure in the history of modal theory seems beyond doubt. Although apparently not the first to claim that the present is as contingent as the future, he argued for and employed the thesis with such verve that the doctrine became associated with him. … A pivot can face in more than one direction, and so it is with Scotus. While his picture led easily to the divorce of time and modality, he himself never completely divorced the two. ²