Christology and the ‘Scotist Rupture’

Abstract

This essay engages the debate concerning the so-called ‘Scotist rupture’ from the point of view of Christology. The essay investigates John Duns Scotus’s development of Christological doctrine against the strong Cyrilline tendencies of Thomas Aquinas. In particular the essay explores how Scotus’s innovative doctrine of the ‘haecceity’ of Christ’s human nature entailed a self-sufficing conception of the ‘person’, having to do less with the mystery of rationality and ‘communion’, and more to do with a quasi-voluntaristic ‘power’ over oneself. In this light, Scotus’s Christological development is read as suggestively contributing to make possible a proto-liberal condition in which ‘agency’ (agere) and ‘right’ (ius) are construed as determinative of what it means to be and act as a person.