Benedict XVI on Duns Scotus

Blessed John Duns Scotus: A model for maintaining faith & reason

Paul at the blog named Communio posts the text of a recent address by Pope Benedict on Duns Scotus. 

Paul significantly emphasizes a key point in the Holy Father's discussion of Scotus, the priority of practice and love over speculation in Scotus's thought:

"Thus we desire to remind scholars and everyone, believers and non-believers alike, of the path and method that Scotus followed in order to establish harmony between faith and reason, defining in this manner the nature of theology in order constantly to exalt action, influence, practice and love rather than pure speculation"

This preference for what is over what might have been is deftly summarized by Walter Ong SJ in his foundational study, Hopkins, the Self, and God. Not surprisingly, I discover that I have posted the relevant bit elsewhere ("Hopkins and Scotus"):

«Scotus' approach here was characteristically positive, not hypothetical. At least in the Ordinatio, his own composition, if not in the Reportationes drafted by his students, Scotus did not cast the issue in the hypothetical form in which it is often cast, 'If Adam had not sinned, would there have been an incarnation?' He remained within the actual economy of existence and of revelation (Carol 27-31; Bonnefoy, 3). The actual world which we know and inhabit, in which divine revelation is given and to which divine revelation refers, was created by God because God wanted to Son to become man and shares himself and his Father with the Holy Spirit with finite creatures, which are all spin-offs from the [I]ncarnation. Scotus here stays with what is real, attending to the origins of the existing world, not to possibilities.» (Hopkins, the Self, and God, p 108-109)