John Duns Scotus
Reportatio 1A, d. 44, q. 2

Translated by Thomas Williams from his working edition

1 Can God make things better than he in fact made them?

[Preliminary Arguments]

It appears that he cannot:

In Eighty-Three Diverse Questions, q. 50, Augustine proves that the Father generated a Son equal to himself on the grounds that if he had not, it would have been either because he could not, and so he was powerless and weak, or else because he did not will to do so, and so he was grudging. I argue in the same way regarding the question at issue here, and it is evident.

2 Moreover, according to Augustine in On Free Choice of the Will 3, “Whatever better thing might occur to you according to right reason, know that God has made it,” etc.

3 On the contrary:

Augustine writes in On Genesis 11 (and this is included in the text of the Sentences), “God could have made an impeccable human being who would never have sinned, and this would have been better than what is in fact in the human being.”

[Scotus’s view]

[IA: On accidental goodness taken intensively]

4 I reply to the question that God could have made better things than he made, and he can make them now, in terms of every goodness in a thing, whether essential or accidental, whether extensive or intensive.

And I prove first that he could have made them better according to accidental perfection taken intensively. For since all souls are of the same species, either they are equal in perfection or they are not. If they are equal, then they have the capacity for equal perfection. But not all souls of equal capacity equally have equal accidental perfection, since not all souls have equal essential beatitude, since they also do not have equal merits, to which beatitude corresponds, even if they are equal in natural capacity. Therefore, it is not the case the whole natural capacity of any given soul is perfected by as much accidental perfection as it could receive.

5 Similarly, the soul of Christ has greater beatitude than any angel, and yet the natural capacity of any given angel is greater than the natural capacity of any given soul. Therefore, no angel has as great a perfection as it is capable of. You will object that they are not equal, since an angel and a soul are not of the same species. But the soul of Christ is more perfect with respect to shared features than any given angel. I say that from this, my answer to the question at issue follows. An angel is more noble according to its species than a soul. But in ordered species, if one is essentially nobler than another, any given individual of the one species is more perfect and nobler than any given individual of the other, less noble, species. Otherwise, the species would have only an accidental order. Therefore, any given angel is more perfect and nobler in nature than any given soul, even the soul of Christ. And consequently any given angel has a great natural capacity for having greater perfection than any given soul. But the soul of Christ, according to you, is more perfected by glory than any given angel. Therefore, no angel has as much accidental perfection as it is capable of.

6 On the basis of these spiritual creatures, we can derive my answer to the question at issue as it concerns corporeal creatures as well. For if those creatures that are immediately ordered to God as to their end can naturally be more perfected by the perfection of the end than they are in fact perfected, this is much more true for corporeal creatures, which are of less concern to God, that they capable of greater accidental perfection than they in fact have.

[IB: On accidental goodness taken extensively]

7 Second, I say that God can also make some things accidentally better intensively than he in fact makes them, by giving them more perfections than he actually gave them. This is evident first in spiritual creatures. For the blessed can know more than they in fact know. For they do not know infinitely many things in the Word, and the Word can know all things simultaneously and, if he wills, reveal them all to the blessed, although not simultaneously. And if the blessed can [know more than they in fact do], much more is this true of wayfarers.

8 This is also evident in the case of the celestial bodies. For although they do not receive extrinsic impressions — I mean ones that would corrupt them — they do receive many extrinsic passions that are accidental to them, such as light, resplendence, and so forth. Hence, if the medium were so great that [an intervening body] could cast its shadow all the way to the stars, the whole sphere of the fixed stars could be eclipsed and darkened. Therefore, light is an accidental perfection of the fixed stars. But to be a pellucid luminous body is more perfect than the same body not luminous. Therefore, God can give additional perfections that he did not give, and more than he in fact gave.

9 And that is why Averroes was not able to avoid this absurdity concerning light. He held that only motion is perpetuated from another and is not necessary from itself. For light is perpetuated from another and comes to be from another, and thus necessarily and perpetually, just like motion. For air was not made illuminated, but becomes illuminated, according to Augustine in On Genesis 8.

[II On essential goodness]

10 But as for the second main point, which concerns essential goodness and perfection, I say, along the same lines, that God can make things better than he in fact made them intensively and substantially — if substance is susceptible of more and less, which I’m not going to talk about here, since that is a more difficult question than the one currently at issue.

[Replies to the preliminary arguments]

11 To the first argument for the opposing view I say that God is not grudging if he did not make all things as good as he could. For grudging involves taking away from something a good that is due to it. But nothing is due from God to any creature as far as any perfection in that creature is concerned, since God makes all things out of sheer generosity. Still, if God the Father had not produced a Son equal to himself, he would have been grudging, because the [divine] nature is due in the Son as it is due in the Father, and consequently so too is every perfection consequent on that nature, such as equality and the like.

12 To the other argument I say that “Whatever better thing might occur to you according to right reason, know that God has made it” is true because nothing is better unqualifiedly according to right reason except insofar as it is willed by God; and therefore the other things that, if they had been made, would be better, are not in fact better than existing things. Hence, the authoritative passage means to claim nothing more than that “whatever God has made, know that he has made it with right reason.” “For everything that he willed, he made,” as it says in the Psalm: blessed be his will.