De Officio Regis reveals what Wyclif believed to be the place and duty of the king in the postlapsarian world, and explains some aspects of his thought that were under-developed in De Civili Dominio. The title De Officio Regis may lead one to expect Wyclif to give a more recognizably practical description of kingship in the treatise than he does, but it is no “mirror of princes.” Wyclif was firmly committed to uncovering the connection between the a priori truth of divine justice and its created instantiations, and has scant interest in the daily mechanics of royal administration. The work follows De Ecclesia in Thomson's chronological ordering of the tractates of the Summa Theologie, and was written in mid-1379.

The treatise is divided into twelve chapters, of which the first five explain Wyclif's belief that secular monarchs are ordained by God to reform and hold temporal iurisdictio over the church. In the first chapter, Wyclif begins with God's having ordained two vicars in His church: a king acting as vicar of God the Father with final authority in all temporal matters, and a priest acting as Christ's vicar with final authority in spiritual affairs. That the king's authority is over temporalia, while the priest's is over spiritual matters means that the sacerdotal dignity is of a higher nature and superior to royal dignity. But this elevated authority does not translate into a temporal authority beyond the king's; in every temporal affair, the king's authority is complete.

If Wyclif believes proprietas to be antithetical to the evangelical dominium of the priests as well as ultimately threatening to the restored Natural dominium of the Elect, how can he argue that a civil lord, the chief owner in society, is an instrument of God's justice? Wyclif's answer to this will show how he believes the king, the primary civil lord of the kingdom, can bring about a just society for the church and for his kingdom as a whole.

IURISDICTIO IN DE CIVILI DOMINIO AND DE OFFICIO REGIS

Wyclif's views on secular earthly power, to which he refers as either kingship or civil dominium, appear mainly in De Civili Dominio (1375–76) and in De Officio Regis (1379), two non-consecutive treatises of his Summa Theologie (1375–81). His account of the more practical concerns of rule is brief; Wyclif offers no programmatic advice to rulers, no well-developed plans for class-harmony in the realm, no schemes for the increase of monarchic power in the world. If his discussion of monarchy is comprehensible only by conceiving it as an outgrowth of his theological and metaphysical assumptions, why did he treat it as a separate concern? Why not view it as an outgrowth of Wyclif's more theoretical concerns? One might also ask why Wyclif devotes two separate treatises to the subject in his Summa. Why has he paid such close attention to secular power, and why has he lavished so much attention to showing its superiority to ecclesiastical authority?

Wyclif's most definitive treatment of dominium is in the second treatise of the Summa Theologie, De Dominio Divino, with a general definition of the term in the first book, and a list of the actions associated with dominium-relations in the third. Wyclif describes relation as a foundation for many of his theological and philosophical innovations. This is because Wyclif believes that God's absolute transcendence entails no real relation is possible between God and Creation. Only a relation following from some act of God in Creation can make the connection. And since God's dominium follows necessarily and immediately from the act of creating, dominium best defines God's continued participation in Creation. Wyclif defines divine dominium as “the standard prior to and the presupposition of all other dominium; if a creature has dominium over anything God already has dominium over it, so any created dominium follows upon divine dominium.”

Wyclif was a metaphysical realist about universals, and to those sensitive to late fourteenth-century Oxford philosophical dialogue, this description suggests a universal–particular relation holding between divine and human dominium-relations. If we are to understand Wyclif's thought on dominium as a theme uniting his earlier and his later writings and as a concept central to his philosophy, we will need to explore his thought on universals to see if divine dominium functions as one. Accordingly, we should survey Wyclif's realism, particularly as it appears in the Tractatus de Universalibus, to show how divine dominium is a universal by causality for all human dominium-relations.

De Civili Dominio is the largest of the treatises of the Summa Theologie, as well the most significant, for it introduces most of Wyclif's later theological recommendations for ecclesiastical reform. Wyclif wrote De Civili Dominio in late 1375 through 1376, directly upon completing De Divino Dominio, and even the most fleeting acquaintance with the earlier works shows the thematic ties between first works of the Summa and De Civili Dominio. Having explained the nature of God's perfect dominium, a continuing, unmediated relation between Creator and Creation, Wyclif was ready to address the earthly species of lordship and its two chief characteristics, proprietas and iurisdictio. Not surprisingly, given the significance of giving, receiving, and lending to dominium in De Dominio Divino, private property-ownership lies at the center of the arguments in De Civili Dominio and De Officio Regis. So before approaching the recognizably jurisdictive, governance-related aspects of his thought, we should address Wyclif's discussion of postlapsarian ownership.

We cannot begin as Wyclif begins, for he plunges us into matters with minimal introduction. Dominium's necessary ties to God's Grace are the subject of much of the first book, while the second and third are devoted to dominium's political and ecclesiastical ramifications. A better introductory approach is to see why Grace-founded dominium seemed so radical an idea to Wyclif's contemporaries.

By the mid-twelfth century the revival of Roman law and canon law allowed philosophers to define rulership in terms of “power,” “authority,” “imperium,” and “jurisdiction” without addressing problems about use and possession of private property. Similarly, Roman law had long provided civil and canon lawyers with careful distinctions about ownership issues, to which the term dominium had usually applied. Why unite ownership and jurisdiction, making dominium into a portmanteau concept? Janet Coleman argues that the term's use in reference to proprietas and iurisdictio was attributable to two factors. First, economic conditions were moving from traditional feudal modes in which credit and other techniques of payment were of less import to conditions which favored an increasing reliance on hard currency. As the accumulation of large amounts of money became possible, so did a revulsion to avarice, she argues, and so the thirteenth century saw the growth not only of the merchant class, but of the theological glorification of the life of poverty. Secondly, this emergence of a currency-based economy complicated the issue of church holdings. The canon-law tradition had long held that natural law permitted communal ownership of property, and it developed the view that while a priest can own property, he is not an owner of the church property which he administered. Innocent IV asserted that the mystical body of Christ owned church property with coercive authority.

So far we have explained Wyclif's thought on divine and human dominium to show both how the two are connected with one another and how they are founded in his realism. The metaphysics of the Tractatus de Universalibus form the basis for the cosmological, social, and ecclesiastical arguments of the first books of the Summa Theologie. Earlier interpretations of Wyclif's thought have either denied connections between Wyclif's realism and his political thought or suggested that the tenor of the political thought indicates a likely abandonment of his realism. It will help, however, if we explore several possible alternative readings aside from the earlier interpretations, to be more certain that our reading is a viable alternative to the earlier approaches.

In place of interpretations of the universal–particular account of civil dominium, Wyclif might have had the theocratic model of kingship in mind, in which the secular lord is the sole rightful holder of all temporal authority, acting as God's intermediary on earth. But on most versions of this model, the king's sovereignty is absolute; in Wyclif's thought, the depiction of dominium as a reciprocal relation with the lord's subjects forestalls such relatively complete authority. Such a theme is not as immediately evident in the theocratic model. We might also think that Wyclif's theory was patterned on a secular hierocratic scheme, in which the king replaces the pope at the summit of an earthly hierarchy of power imitative of the celestial hierarchy.

In 1377, John Wyclif had need of powerful political support. He had been summoned to Saint Paul's by Archbishop Sudbury to account for heretical arguments threatening to the foundations of the church in England. So on February 19, Wyclif appeared at the arraignment with John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and arguably the most powerful man in the kingdom. Wyclif, once an Oxford metaphysician, had become an associate of John of Gaunt two years earlier, and had begun arguing for the reduction of the church's political influence and her material wealth shortly thereafter. Gaunt was, and still is, widely believed to be eager to supplement his political power at the expense of the church, and Thomas Walsingham encourages us to believe that Gaunt's support of Wyclif that February afternoon was that of a patron for his valued servant.

Had Gaunt been self-interestedly using Wyclif as his polemicist, he had made an odd choice. Wyclif's arguments for the absolute power of the king were framed neither in the theocratic kingship language of the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman tradition, nor were they couched in the more contemporary Aristotelian terms favored by other champions of secular authority. On the contrary, Wyclif used language that had, until then, usually been employed by papally sponsored churchmen. His arguments were framed in terms of Grace-founded dominium, redolent of Archbishop Richard Fitzralph's defense of ecclesiastical property-ownership.

As many commentators have noticed, medieval views on the relation of mind and body occupy a strange territory somewhere between substance dualism, on the one hand, and some form of materialism, on the other. On the one hand, the medievals were convinced that the soul is an immaterial agent, causally responsible for our intellectual activities - causally responsible independently of the body - on the other hand, they were all convinced that body and soul are united in such a way as to form one (composite) substance. While there was widespread agreement about the correct understanding of the first of these two claims - that the soul is an individual immaterial object - there was considerable disagreement about the correct understanding of the second. The consensus was that the soul is in some sense an (Aristotelian) form of the body. But there was no corresponding consensus about what it is to be a form.

THE IMMATERIALITY OF THE SOUL

Scotus’s account of the immateriality of the soul springs from a discussion of the immateriality of human cognition and will. The argument from cognition focuses on an argument proposed by Aquinas in defence of the immateriality of the soul. According to Aquinas, we can infer the immateriality of the soul from the immateriality of mental acts.

The traditional philosophical category of epistemology serves medieval philosophy poorly. The medievals were concerned with most of what now falls within the theory of knowledge, but they never thought of knowledge as the sort of integrated topic around which one might construct a philosophical theory. Much the same might be said about philosophy today. In place of knowledge, philosophers now focus their energies on cognition; in place of the theory of knowledge, we now have cognitive theory. This way of dividing up the philosophical terrain turns out to be well suited to the study of medieval philosophy. The medievals, rather than focusing on how knowledge differs from mere true belief, focus on how we manage to form true beliefs: How does the process work? To answer this question is to develop a theory of cognition.

As in most matters, John Duns Scotus does not distinguish himself in cognitive theory by adopting a radically new perspective. Scotus accepts the general cognitive framework set out by his most distinguished recent predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent; where he disagrees, he does so in ways that reinforce the broader contours of the theory. Scotus is interesting, then, not because he offers any startlingly new ideas about cognition, but because he gives a careful and penetrating analysis of the field as it stood at the end of the thirteenth century. In many ways, he sees the issues in more depth than had anyone before him.

Recent interest in John Duns Scotus’s modal theory derives largely from the suggestion that Scotus was the first in the Middle Ages, and perhaps the first ever, to employ a synchronic conception of modality, one that allowed for alternative possibilities at a given time, and from the debate about whether Scotus introduced a notion of logical possibility divorced from any question of what powers there are. These issues interact in the question of whether Scotus had any analogue of the notion of possible world in either the Leibnizian or the late twentieth-century sense. Late medieval interest in Scotus’s modal theory derived largely from its role in his account of divine and human freedom and from the debate about whether possibility itself depended in any way upon God. This discussion attempts to shed some light on these issues and to locate them in the context of the issues in the theory of modality with which Scotus and his contemporaries were themselves concerned.

It would be desirable in an essay of this kind to present a picture of the development of Scotus’s thought about modality, but in the current state of scholarship that is not possible. Despite nearly a century of work by the Scotus Commission and by a number of very able scholars outside it, our understanding of the textual tradition of Scotus’s works remains radically incomplete. In such a situation any hypothesis about the development of Scotus’s modal theory must be highly speculative. In what follows I will not attempt to trace such a development but will attempt to limn the modal theory with which Scotus seems to have been working at the end of his (unfortunately short) life.

Scotus’s natural theology has the following distinctive claims:

1. That we can reason demonstratively to the necessary existence and nature of God from what is actually so but not from imagined situations or from conceivability-to-us; rather, only from the possibility logically required for what we know actually to be so.

2. That there is a univocal transcendental notion of being.

3. That there are disjunctive transcendental notions that apply exclusively to everything, like 'contingent/necessary', and such that the inferior cannot have a case unless the superior does.

4. That an a priori demonstration of the existence of God is impossible because there is nothing explanatorily prior to the divine being; thus, reasoning must be a posteriori from the real dependences among things we perceive to the possibility of an absolutely First Being (The First Principle).

5. That such a being cannot be possible without existing necessarily.

6. That the First Being (God) is simple, omni-intelligent, free (spontaneous), omnipotent, and positively infinite.

7. That there is a formal distinction, which is more than a distinction within our concepts or definitions, among the divine attributes.