Thesis advisor: Eileen C. Sweeney / Francis Mayronis was a Franciscan friar and one of John Duns Scotus’s primary students; he became a master of theology in 1323. His Commentary on the Sentences is preserved in more than 100 medieval manuscripts. In recent literature, Mayronis’s work has received considerable attention, especially in his cognitive theory and metaphysics. However, his ethical work has generally received very little attention. Mayronis occupies an important place in the early fourteenth century’s Franciscan intellectual tradition, particularly in the onset of the Scotist tradition. Mayronis not only creatively explicated and developed Scotus’s thoughts in his writings but also actively engaged in conversation with Peter Auriol and William Ockham as the “first” Scotist.My dissertation is organized to present Mayronis’s relational teleology in his notion of beatitude as the enjoyment of God. While generally maintaining a volitional agent-centered perspective that an agent or efficient cause is not determined to seek the good, Mayronis argues for the certitude of the ultimate end of the blessed and sees God, i.e., the final cause, as the total cause of the end. Mayronis harmonizes these seemingly contradictory causal powers of the final and efficient causes with the notion of habitus. First, Mayronis affirms the traditional view of habitus as an active power. In the present life, the free will gradually acquires a habitus toward the good through its own actions, and in heaven, grace or charity, i.e., supernatural habitus, is infused in the will of the blessed so that the will is eventually necessitated by the good. However, he could not maintain this position, i.e., the will’s habitus determines the will’s character, without abandoning Scotus’s emphasis on the will’s free aspect over its natural aspect since habitus is natural, though it is second nature. Hence, he develops a novel story of relation that completely replaces the role of habitus: God freely accepts someone due to a relational change to the person, rather than because the person has a supernatural habitus that is ‘acceptable’ to God.
I begin by presenting Mayronis’s metaphysics of final causality in its historical context. For Plato and Aristotle, the end is formal. Plato considers the end as the form externally given by the divine craftsman, and Aristotle depicts nature’s motion toward the end as matter’s internal desire for its form. Then, Avicenna, while defining the final cause as the cause of causes, develops two ways the efficient cause can be central: the intellect can see something other than the good as its end, and the will can seek something not as determined by its goodness. I treat Averroes, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Mayronis in developing Avicenna’s notion of the final cause and the relationship between the final and efficient causes. In medieval teleology, we see fully developed agent-centered perspectives. In his unique rendering of Avicennian final causality, Mayronis shows that, although the final cause is the primary and necessary cause, it potentially causes our relations with God; then, we, as the efficient cause, contingently actualize the relations. Then, to situate Mayronis’s ethical teleology as a continuation of Scotus’s voluntarism, I argue for Duns Scotus’s ethical teleology against Thomas Williams’s view that sees Scotus’s ethics as proto-Kantian.
I then present Mayronis’s notion of our intellect’s vision of God and our will’s enjoyment of God according to his metaphysics of final causality. First, I examine Mayronis’s cognitive theory that holds the vision of God, i.e., intuitive cognition, as a relation. I then argue for his relational teleology based on the premise that Mayronis views our enjoyment of God as a relation. For Mayronis, our ultimate end is our beatific enjoyment of God; it is neither our beatific act nor the object of the act, i.e., God, but the relation between the act and the object. Happiness is the relation to the Supreme Good, and misery is the lack of the relation. The purpose or goal of our life is neither merely internal nor external but relational. Finally, I present how Mayronis translates the role of habitus that grants the certitude of the enjoyment of the blessed into divine acceptance. For Mayronis, our moral life is not a long journey of accumulating habitus or virtues until we finally reach our destination; it is an everyday journey of love where we actualize the final cause, which potentially orders us to the Supreme Good. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_109522 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Park, Damian Sungho |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). |
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