Duns Scotus - Life

Life

Little is known of Scotus apart from his work. His date of birth is thought to have been between 23 December 1265 and 17 March 1266, based on his ordination to the priesthood in the Order of Friars Minor (the Franciscans) at Saint Andrew's Priory in Northampton, England, on 17 March 1291. The minimum age for ordination at the time was 25 and it is generally assumed that he would have been ordained as soon as it was permitted. That his contemporaries called him Johannes Duns, after the medieval practice of calling people by their Christian name followed by their place of origin, suggests that he came from Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland.

According to tradition, Scotus was educated at the Franciscan studium at Oxford, a house behind St Ebbe's Church, in a triangular area enclosed by Pennyfarthing Street and running from St Aldate's to the Castle, the Baley and the old wall, where the Franciscans had moved when the University of Paris was dispersed in 1229–30. At that time there would have been about 270 persons living there, of whom about 80 would have been Franciscans.

Scotus appears to have been in Oxford in 1300–01, taking part in a disputation under the regent master, Philip of Bridlington. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris towards the end of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with Philip the Fair of France, over the taxation of church property.

Scotus was back in Paris before the end of 1304, probably returning in May. He continued lecturing there until, for reasons that are still mysterious, he was dispatched to the Franciscan studium at Cologne, probably in October 1307. According to the 15th-century writer William Vorilong, his departure was sudden and unexpected. He was relaxing or talking with students in the Prato clericorum or Pre-aux-Clercs – an open area of the Left Bank used by scholars for recreation – when orders arrived from the Franciscan Minister General; Scotus left immediately, taking few or no personal belongings.

He died in Cologne in November 1308; the date of his death is traditionally given as 8 November. He is buried in the Church of the Franciscans in Cologne. His sarcophagus bears the Latin inscription:

Scotia me genuit. Anglia me suscepit. Gallia me docuit. Colonia me tenet. (trans. "Scotland brought me forth. England sustained me. France taught me. Cologne holds me.")

He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on March 20, 1993. The story about Scotus being buried alive, in the absence of his servant who alone knew of his susceptibility to coma, is probably a myth. It was reported by Sir Francis Bacon in his Historia vitae et mortis.

The colophon of Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford says that Scotus was also at Cambridge, but we do not know for certain if this is true, or if it was, when he was there.