Wearing a Dunce Cap

I have been wandering of late in the company of a distinct minority within the Age of Christendom. By and large it is the company I’ve kept throughout my life even if, quite often, sometimes for years on end, I’ve been socializing with the same minorities in other cultures—Persian (Mazdaism), Arab (Sufism), but also touching the Chinese (in Taoism). This walk, of late, began with Duns Scotus whom I met, in my childhood, by way of the dunce cap and, growing up, I never questioned the prevalent but mildly expressed view among my teachers in Catholic schools from lowest to highest that Scotus was a rather dim light, if not a small shadow-thrower, in the vast brilliance of St. Thomas Aquinas. Dunce cap? Worn by those who do not get it. You can make one out of some sheets of newspaper, making them into a cone. For the origin of that shape I show a fifteenth century painting of Scotus (who himself lived mostly in the blessed thirteenth century, 1266-1308); the Flemish painter was Justus van Gent (link).

Scotus belongs to the Platonic line traceable backwards by way of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine himself was part of this minority, close to Manichaeism in youth, a gnostic view which itself has links back to Mazdaism. He lived in a time when the New Dark Age of the Roman Realm was up and running in a serious way. The Visigoths sacked Rome when he was 56 in 410 AD. Therefore his view was darker and more pessimistic than that of Aquinas (1225-1274) who lived as the light of the Renaissance began to signal its own coming with a faint rosy color beneath the horizon. And Aquinas’ great influence was Aristotle who lived just as the Old Modernism, Hellenism, was about to be launched by his pupil, Alexander the Great.  

Let me capture these distinctions in cartoon-like fashion, as it were. Plato stood in relation to Aristotle as Scotus stood to Aquinas. In Plato we see the mature philosophy of a passing religious age, in Aristotle the foreshadowing of a modern time. The same may be said of Scotus and Aquinas, with the small but not very important difference that Aquinas was 41 years older than Scotus whereas Plato was 43 years older than Aristotle. In inwardly-directed religious ages, awareness of the fallen nature of humanity is to the fore. In outwardly-directed secular ages, self-assertion rises. The feeling tone derives from the focus of attention.

So I was reading Berdyaev. He proclaims himself a Platonist, Christian existentialist, and he viewed Duns Scotus as the greatest of the Scholastics. It was the kind of statement that caught my eye, surprised me. I underlined it heavily, adding exclamation marks in the margin—the last time I had read the Russian sage some decades ago with great approval.

So here we have a minority strain of pessimism and a majority dominance of optimism—both within an almost invisibly small cluster of communities that even think about permanent transcendence. I’m still of the pessimistic camp but getting there, in age, I mean. And the odd thing is that, well past the three-score-and-ten, I am feeling optimistic now. If one goes deep enough in any direction with a kind of junk-yard-dog persistence, amazingly the light begins to dawn. I wonder. Does the light eventually dim for the really persistent optimists? If so, my intuition guided me correctly in my gloomy youth.