The theological stems of modern economic ideas: John Duns Scotus

Abstract

Voluntarism is a medieval theological doctrine that argues that God’s will takes precedence over God’s intellect and explores the consequences on the relation between Creation and the Creator. We show that Duns Scotus’s theological voluntarism had an important impact on his economic teachings. Moreover, we suggest that it opened an ontological path that fostered the theorisation of modern economic ideas. Voluntarism undermined the Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue ethics framework and the medieval mistrust of self-interest and commerce typical of voluntarism contrary, i.e., intellectualism. For voluntarist Duns Scotus, human being can promote unintentionally the common good, whereas intellectualism holds intentionality as its pillar.

Keywords:

• Voluntarism
• intellectualism
• Duns Scotus
• Aquinas
• invisible hand

JEL CODES:

• B11
• B31
• Z12

1. Introduction

The deep coil between philosophy, theology and economics becomes noticeable in the history of ideas. Granted that, sometimes we are faced with surprising and quite unbelievable connections, as the one between economy and theodicy, whereas the question on how a Good and Almighty God can allow natural and moral evil becomes a possible source for economic ideas like the invisible hand mechanism (Bruni and Santori 2021, 2022; Santori 2022), or when the word “economy” is employed to signify both God’s “administration” of the world and the work of the Holy Trinity (Agamben 2011). Our paper follows the footsteps of these analyses. We will suggest that Medieval theological voluntarism¹ (Ekenberg 2016; Quinn 1992, 2007; Hoffmann 2009; Murphy 2019) created the ontological space that helped the spread of some of the cornerstones of the modern economic ideas.²

How are medieval debates on the relation between God’s will and intellect (the main concern of theological voluntarism) connected to economic ideas? The answer that we will develop through our analysis focuses on the ontological side, namely, the view of the essence of reality advanced by voluntarist theologians. In this respect, the key author is the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar John Duns Scotus (Gilson 2018), who laid the foundation for voluntarist ideas (Prentice 1968; Broadie 1995, 1999, 2008; Parisoli 1999; McGrath 2005; Hoffmann 2013; Ward 2017). The broader context of our research is the relation between Christianity and the rise of market economy and capitalism in Europe (Weber 2005 [1905]; Fanfani 1935; Gregory 2012; Milbank and Pabst 2016; Bruni and Milbank 2019; Schwarzkopf 2020; Todeschini 2021). We focus here on the intellectual side of the story, starting from the following research question: how was it possible that modern economic science was born from the medieval Christian world, where the attitude of the church and Christian theologians towards merchants, profit, and commerce, was mostly that of condemnation and reprobation? The most obvious answer is the advent of the Lutheran-Calvinist Reformation between medieval Christianity and eighteenth-century economic thought. In this respect, protestant ethics, as described by Weber (2005 [1905]) supplied, unintentionally, the social fabric of religious and cultural values on which capitalist practices –but also capitalistic ideas –arose. This part of the story has been the subject of many commentaries (Tawney 1926; Robertson 1933; Fanfani 1935; Samuelsson 1961; Delacroix and Samuelsson 1995).

We want to add to this analysis, expanding the period of inquiry to theological debates of the late medieval era. Our main thesis is that voluntarism allowed Christian theologians who embraced it to create a new ontological space, within which commerce and self-interest could be praised unreservedly.³ Voluntarism undermined the Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue-ethics framework that dominated late medieval Christianity, especially the idea that contributing to the common good required intentional virtuous actions directed to it. In a voluntarist ontology, mankind can be led by Divine Providence to contribute unintentionally to the common good. This, we argue, might be interpreted as a theological antecedent of the unintended consequences mechanism. To our knowledge, Duns Scotus did not theorised explicitly and intentionally something as complete theory of the unintended consequences mechanism. This does not mean that in his economic teachings that theological doctrine had no impact. We would rather show how some roots of the unintended consequences idea is also present in Scotus’ economic teachings, alongside more traditional views in line with the established understanding of economic activity of his own times.

Our interpretation starts with Scotus but goes far beyond his theory. We cannot provide hard and conclusive evidence on how 13th–14th centuries ideas impacted 18th century one. If that is even possible, that would go beyond the scope of our paper. Differently, we want to suggest one possible intellectual path that connected Scotus to modernity. Among the many paths, we chose the one uniting the two Scots, Duns Scotus and Adam Smith, mediated by John Calvin. The echo of the voluntarist ontological schism, in fact, arrived to the Reformation. It was John Calvin who inserted Duns Scotus’s theological categories in his own view and, in parallel, made explicit the concept of unintended consequences as a theological mean employed by God’s Providence to harassing individual sinful behaviours towards the common good. Through a long and intricate journey into the history of ideas, Calvin’s teachings arrived to Adam Smith who could have heard about an “invisible hand” during presbyterian sermons or read it in the Glasgow edition of Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion (Harrison 2011). Therefore, our analysis intersects some in literature who have already explored the Calvinists sources of the invisible hand (Force 2003; Evensky 1993; Blosser 2011; Harrison 2011; Pabst 2011; Blaney 2018; Hengstmengel 2019; Bruni and Santori 2021) and, more in general, the ones on the theological sources of Smith’s thought (Hill 2001, 2004; Waterman 2002, 2004; Kennedy 2011, 2013; Oslington 2011, 2018).

The paper is structured as follows. In next section, we briefly describe the late medieval diatribe between intellectualism and voluntarism. Subsection 2.1 will place Duns Scotus’s position within this debate, whereas Subsection 2.2 will describe the implications of Scotus’s voluntarism for his doctrine of free will (Boler 1994) and human merits (Broadie 1995; McGrath 2005). The reader already familiar with theological disputes on voluntarism and intellectualism might go quickly over this section and its two parts. These are meant to be a primer for the audience without background in theological matters, but also essential elements for what will be argued in the other sections. The fourth section will be devoted to an analysis of Scotus’s social and economic teachings (Mochrie 2006). We focus on the issue of private property and natural law, contrasting Scotus’s voluntarist view with Aquinas’s intellectualist one. Last, we show how Duns Scotus’s voluntarism impacted Reformation via John Calvin’s thought, and how these ideas arrived to Adam Smith.

Overall, our inquiry can be understood as a theological genealogy of modernity. Our argument is similar in spirit, but different in content, to studies connecting theological voluntarism to the emergence of early modern science (Foster 1934; Oakley 1961; Harrison 2002), with the sole exception (and innovation) that we focus on the economic side. We do not claim to advance unconfutable (the smoking gun) proof; conversely, we suggest a hermeneutic pattern for reading the theological frame of modern economic ideas.

2. Theological voluntarism

2.1. Voluntarism and the powers of God

A good way for a non-specialist in theology to approach the medieval debate between intellectualism and voluntarism it is to start with another philosophical concept, finalism. Imagine being part of a world that has been created for a determined purpose. You do not know precisely what this purpose is, but you know that the Creator arranged each part of the world to reach the final goal. Christianity identified the Creator with God and endorsed such a finalistic view of society: union with God the Creator is the final end of the Creation. For human beings, the loving contemplation of God, obtainable only in the eternal life, is the ultimate goal: this is happiness (beatitudo).

Late medieval voluntarist and intellectualist theologians agreed that finalism is inherent in the world and that human beings are part of God’s plan. Their disagreement begins when we move from the end to the means for reaching that end. To recall Leibniz’s famous motto of the eighteenth century, we might ask: is this the best of all possible worlds, is the structure of reality so configured that the relation between means and ends is optimal? In a creationist framework, to judge the structure of creation, we have to move to the Creator (God).

Voluntarists and intellectualists diverged regarding the essence and operation of God’s Will and Intellect. The voluntarists disputed the belief that God’s intellect has pre-eminence over His will (voluntas intellectum sequitur) and that, consequently, knowledge and wisdom (sapientia) has precedence over God’s will in the structure of reality according to the divine plan. If God’s intellect created reality, then the ontological structure of Creation, grounded on God’s wisdom, binds it—it would be better to say that God’s wisdom binds itself—to generally follow its order. Somehow, theological intellectualism gives ontological relevance to the world because, being the result of divine wisdom, the structure of reality is perfectly harmonised and realised. The relation means-ends is shaped in the best way being the direct product of God’s intellect. Aquinas is traditionally listed as a supporter of this position. In his De Veritate, he clearly states:

the first thing upon which the essential character of all justice depends is the wisdom of the divine intellect, which constitutes things in their due proportion both to one another and to their cause. In this proportion the essential character of created justice consists. But to say that justice depends simply upon the will is to say that the divine will does not proceed according to the order of wisdom, and that is blasphemous. (De Ver., q. 3, a. 6, corp. 1954)

To know the essence of the world as created by God, one has to start inquiring the nature of things (ex natura rei). It is not by chance that Aquinas’s proof for God’s existence starts always from men’s experience.

Conversely, voluntarism argued that Creation is grounded in God’s free act of will. Voluntarist theologians held that this is manifested in the line of the Creed in which God is defined as omnipotent: God is not subject to any external constraints, including the order His free act impressed upon Creation. Voluntarists ontologically thus separated the essence of Creation from the essence of the Creator. If reality is the fruit of God’s will and only secondarily that of his intellect, this weakens the ontological structure of reality.

The voluntarist ontology can be understood by the distinction between ordained power (ex potential dei ordinata) and absolute power (ex potential dei absoluta). When God created reality, his absolute power was in front of a set of possible configurations of the world: of them, he chose to actualise some, and not others. The order of reality chosen by God it is the realm of God’s ordained power. The order has its rules, including moral rules, which God chose freely to follow by his ordained power. However, and here lies Duns Scotus’s voluntarism (McGrath 2005), not only is God able to do things that go beyond the laws he established, but with His absolute power, He is also able to establish a new set of laws, or change some of those that already exist,⁴ so that they become the new order of the world:

God, therefore, insofar as He is able to act in accord with those right laws he set up previously, is said to act according to his ordained power; but insofar as he is able to do many things that are not in accord with, but go beyond, these preestablished laws, God is said to act according to his absolute power. For God can do anything that is not self-contradictory or act in any way that does not include a contradiction (and there are many such ways he could act); and then he is said to be acting according to his absolute power (Duns Scotus Ordinatio I, dist. 44. 1977, 192).

The actual order of the creation, with its law and rules, is not the best of all possible worlds. Neither does the fact that God’s free will chose this world among the many different options give it more inherent value, as in Amartya Sen’s idea of freedom as opportunity (Sen 2001). For morality this is of the utmost importance, because it tells that the source of morality does not lie in the essence of things or acts or moral codes, but in God’s will and decision: “And therefore such an agent can act otherwise, so that he establishes another upright law, which, if it were set up by God, would be right, because no law is right except insofar as the divine will accepts it as established” (Duns Scotus 1977, 192).

As such, the relationship means-end has to be reconsidered as an expression of God’s ordained power.⁵ The kind of finalism endorsed by Scotus is a weak finalism, because it is undermined by the ontological predominance of God’s absolute power. Scotus’s theological voluntarism has a huge impact on his view of mankind, specifically on what he believed was the more essential part of human nature: the will.

2.2. Free will and the distinction between moral and meritorious

Traditionally, the will was treated as a kind of “appetite”, to indicate the sort of “goal-orientedness” of things within a teleological system (Boler 1994). It means that all things “seek” to realise the potential of their natures, to complete or perfect themselves. As an intellectual appetite, a person’s will is inclined to the perfection of their own nature, which is happiness. This tendency is labelled by Scotus as affectio commodi. For Scotus, however, this picture applies to the will of rational agents in only one of its aspects. The will has another inclination, as basic as affectio commodi, which Scotus named the affectio iustitiae⁶:

Two affections may be assigned to the will, namely, the affection for justice and the affection for the advantageous. The affection for justice is nobler than the affection for the advantageous, understanding by "justice" not only acquired or infused justice, but also innate justice, which is the will’s congenital liberty by reason of which it is able to will some good not oriented to self. (Duns Scotus Ordinatio III, suppl., dist. 46, q.1. 1997, 153)

For Scotus, the affectio iustitiae is our capacity to love and seek the good of existing things, including the good of other people, in themselves, because they are of inherent value, not because they tend to complete us. When human beings think and act based on their affectio iustitiae, their actions are morally worthy:

According to the affection for what is advantageous, however, nothing can be willed save with reference to self. And this we would possess if only an intellectual appetite with no liberty followed upon intellectual knowledge, as sense appetite follows sense cognition. The only point I wish to make from this is the following. To love something in itself [or for its own sake] is more an act of giving or sharing and is a freer act than is desiring that object for oneself. As such it is an act more appropriate to the will, as the seat of this innate justice at least (Duns Scotus Ordinatio III, suppl., dist. 46, q.1 1997, 153)

This consideration raises an interesting question: what if happiness and moral good diverged, that is, if the object of affectio iustitiae is different from that of affectio commodi? What if the relation means-ends were broken? This question made little sense within an Aristotelian virtue ethics framework, where the search for a good life is the same as the search for what is just or unjust. For example, in the intellectualist framework of Aquinas, free will is exercised in choosing the means and the ends to reach happiness (McCluskey 2017, 34). But you cannot say that there is something equally worthy, or even worthier, than your own happiness (Krause 2015, 29–41). Even the capacity to love something in itself is indirectly connected to human flourishing (Hirschfeld 2018, chap. 3, 4, 5; Santori 2021, chap. 2). The relation of means-ends is ontologically strong and guaranteed by God’s intellect. This is well explained by Hause in what follows: “One cannot, then, will evil for evil’s sake. Furthermore, Aquinas contends that, in every human action, the human being intends what it takes to be its ultimate end. Hence, every action must be at least apparently conducive to that ultimate end: it must be not only good but suitable” (Hause 1997, 176).

Things were different for Duns Scotus.⁷ He declared that the will enjoys absolute freedom, saying that it can “will” opposite things: “the will is a potency with power over the opposite… in the sense that it has the power to will contrary at that very instant, by no willing the other at that instant …” (Duns Scotus Questions on the Metaphysics IX, q. 15, repl. 1997, 148). In other words, the will can properly “will” something as morally good, such as helping the poor, and later “will” something else, even something opposite, as equally good. The means that things we consider as morally good are established by God’s ordained power, but they can be reversed or changed by God’s absolute power at any time. If God’s absolute power establishes other means to reach the very same ends, then people can will them as morally good.

The emphasis on God’s will and intentions over the course and structure of reality not only undermines the intelligibility of the latter but, again, creates an ontological gap between Creation and its Creator.

The same can be found in the distinction between the moral and meritorious value of an act. The meritorious value of an act is connected to its significance for salvation, whereas its moral value relates to its intrinsic worth. In the intellectualistic framework, these two realms coincided ontologically. Within voluntarism, this association is not ontological and should not be taken for granted. In freely creating the world, God entered into a covenant (pactum) with humanity. Therefore, according to voluntarists, the meritorious value of an act coincides with its moral value only when it falls within the terms of the covenant between God and humanity. Instead of ontological causality, they speak of covenantal causality. The meritorious value of an act lies in divine acceptance (divina acceptatio), that is, the value that God freely chooses to impose on it, not in the intrinsic worth of the act performed. As to the terms of the covenant, the link between the moral and the meritorious is contingent, as the only connection between the two is given by God’s decision, an expression of His absolute power, to enter into a pact with humanity.⁸

According to Scotus and his followers, this tenuous link between morals and merits is thus ontologically liable to be reversed by God’s absolute power. That is what happened with natural law and private property, which allowed Scotus to create an ontological space for the theological legitimisation of the idea that the pursuit of wealth, merchants, and commerce are contributors to the common good.

4. Natural law, private property and commerce

Every Christian theologian of 13th century know that, according to Christian teachings, private property emerged after the Original Sin. Scotus made no exception.⁹ In a prelapsarian world, natural law provided that property was held in common so that mankind could live in peace and be prosperous:

According to right reason men should have the use of things in such a way as, first, to contribute to a peaceful and decent life, and [second] to provide needed sustenance. But in the state of innocence common use with no distinct ownership would have been more conducive to this than individual ownership, for no one would have taken what another needed, nor would the latter have had to wrest it by force from others. (Duns Scotus Ordinatio IV, dist. 15, q. 2. 1997, 220)

For Scotus, in primordial innocence,¹⁰ the rule was the communion of goods, such that “mine” and “yours” did not exist. In this state, the only “ours” coincided with that of all humanity, which nonetheless did not claim to own goods, but only to use them. Here Scotus is in line with that stream of Franciscan tradition that theorised and practiced “use without ownership” (Agamben 2011).

According to Scotus, this part of natural law was revoked by God’s absolute power after the fall (Soto 1951; Mochrie 2006, 39), and private property was established as proper means to reach the very same end of peace and prosperity:

after the Fall of man, this law of nature of holding all things in common was revoked. This also was reasonable, for two reasons. First of all, communality of property would have militated against the peaceful life; the evil or covetous man would take more than he needed. And to do so, he would also use violence against others who wished to use these common goods for their own needs […] The original law would also have failed to ensure the necessary sustenance of mankind, for the stronger warriors would have deprived the others of necessities. (Duns Scotus Ordinatio IV, dist. 15, q. 2. 1997, 220–221).

Likewise, Aquinas also theorised a passage from communion of goods to private property:

In this sense, "the possession of all things in common and universal freedom" are said to be of the natural law, because, to wit, the distinction of possessions and slavery were not brought in by nature, but devised by human reason for the benefit of human life. Accordingly the law of nature was not changed in this respect, except by addition. (S. Th., I^a-II^ae, q. 94, a. 5, ad. 3. 1947)

There is a similarity between Aquinas’s and Scotus’s doctrines, but the theological and ontological framework is radically different. In Aquinas’s intellectualism, natural law cannot be revoked, as it is the essence of reality inscribed in God’s wisdom: perhaps it can be changed or amended, but never revoked. Instead, according to Scotus, such modification is within God’s absolute power that revoked natural law, given the different circumstances after the Original Sin:

The third conclusion is this: "Once this natural law precept of having all in common was revoked, and thus permission was given to appropriate and divide up what had been common, there was still no actual division imposed by either divine or natural law." Not by divine law, certainly, as the aforesaid citation from Augustine proves-"By what law?" and so on. Not by a law of nature, in all probability, for nothing indicates that the original law was reversed rather than revoked (and the original determination of the law was that all things be common). (Duns Scotus Ordinatio IV, dist. 15, q. 2. 1997, 221)

Aquinas adopted an Aristotelian solution, offering a theory on the private property of goods allowing for their usage in common. Giving the essential relation between the means and ends in the intellectualist framework (see Sub-section 2.1), the intentional use of property for the common good remains constant in human history: private property, by itself, cannot be accounted for the common good. Conversely, in Scotus’ voluntarism, not only this is possible, but it is what actually happened. By God’s absolute power, after the Original Sin private property can, by itself, contribute to the common good, meaning that human beings can unintentionally contribute to the common good through ownership alone. This is what Scotus meant when he wrote about the “peaceful life” and the “necessary sustenance of mankind” that private property does guarantee in the post-lapsarian word. Minding my own business and property, I implicitly refuse to take advantage of others’ properties, and, at the same time, I am protected by the very same peril. In this respect, it is important to stress that the unintentional character of social and economic activity will be a pillar of the modern economic science.

While on property the theological and ontological division between voluntarism and intellectualism brought Scotus and Aquinas to diverge, the same cannot be argued regarding the pursuit of profit as a driver of human actions in commerce (Koehler 2020, 362). The Gospels and the message of Christ were unambiguous about money and wealth, and the economic ethics of the first millennium, shaped first and foremost by the early Church Fathers, set out a strong critique of money and the pursuit of wealth, in which true wealth could only be attained in the heaven. The development of early trade practices and the foundation of the mendicant orders favoured a shift to a more open view on money-lending and other economic activities. Nonetheless, Christian ethics did not evolve into capitalistic ethics, nor did it encourage the accumulation of wealth. The pursuit of profit, even when permitted, was always looked upon with suspicion or with the need to be “moderated” by other ends.¹¹ In Aquinas’s words,

gain which is the end of trading, though not implying, by its nature, anything virtuous or necessary, does not, in itself, connote anything sinful or contrary to virtue: wherefore nothing prevents gain from being directed to some necessary or even virtuous end, and thus trading becomes lawful. Thus, for instance, a man may intend the moderate gain which he seeks to acquire by trading for the upkeep of his household, or for the assistance of the needy: or again, a man may take to trade for some public advantage, for instance, lest his country lack the necessaries of life, and seek gain, not as an end, but as payment for his labor. (S. Th., II^a-II^ae, q. 77, a. 4, corp. 1947)

Something similar was envisaged by Duns Scotus.¹² As Mochrie wrote, “Use of goods both for charitable purposes and in just exchange is licit, and while the terms of any exchange should generally be determined by the value placed on the goods by both parties, it would be wrong for one party either to take account of the indigence of the other party or to fail to recognise costs incurred in production” (2006, 44). Reciprocity in commercial exchange is seen as an expression of evangelical reciprocity. To Duns Scotus and the Franciscan Order,¹³ the marketplace did not only appear to be a new form of civic relations, but also a new manifestation of the law of mutual love. Both Aquinas and Duns Scotus believed that, to a certain extent, trade and pursuit of gain can be intentionally directed towards the good of society. Hence, why do we argue that Duns Scotus is behind the rise of modern economic ideas?

The answer can be derived from what we have just argued about private property. According to Scotus’ voluntarism, if the circumstances change, then the pursuit of self-interest can become morally good and even meritorious. The ends here have precedence over the means. While this happened for private property, the same, for Scotus, cannot be argued for commerce, although the possibility of a different view is not absurd as would be in Aquinas’ intellectualism. Therefore, we do not claim that Duns Scotus anticipated, in the thirteenth century, modern economic ideas about the market functioning. The Scottish theologian did not make that step, and his view of commerce as established by God’s ordained power was in line with his times. However, he was among the first who left open the ontological door to the unintended consequence mechanism that later characterised modern views of the market. The presence of God’s absolute power, His ability to revoke the means–laws, morals, habits–to reach the ends, the power of His will to “will” something as morally good and even the opposite: all of this accounted for a new ontological space in which the unintended consequences mechanism was seen as a better means to reach the common good. The Reformers, Calvin in particular, took the step through the door that Duns Scotus and the voluntarist tradition had opened.

5. Impacts of voluntarism on modern economic ideas

Voluntarism is at the basis of Reformation in at least two senses. First, voluntarism was at the basis of the late medieval theological systems to which Luther strongly reacted. The young Luther studied and was strongly influenced by the teachings of voluntarist authors of the via moderna, such as Gabriel Biel.¹⁴ When he was a student at the University of Erfurt (1501–1505), he was taught by many moderni doctors, and he seemed to embrace some of their doctrines concerning justification. To put it simply, following Biel, Luther wrote that when the believer does their best (quod in se est), God is bound to give them grace. Dwelling in the distinction between the two powers of God theorised by Duns Scotus and developed by Ockham, the authors of the via moderna could “bind” God’s will to what His ordained power established, while maintaining His absolute freedom ex potential dei absoluta.¹⁵ Luther reacted to what he came to understand as a Pelagian heresy, i.e. the idea that human free will can merit something from God. His Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam (1517) was especially dedicated to confuting these voluntarist ideas. The Lutheran emphasis on sola fide as the path of salvation arose mostly as a reaction to the Pelagianism hidden in the voluntarist ideas.

Second, which pertains more closely to our analysis, voluntarism, in particular that of Duns Scotus, paved the way for the Reformation by opening an ontological space in which the ideas of the Reformers flourished. The delegitimization and weakening of the ontological structure of reality proposed by Aristotelian-Thomistic finalism allowed the reformers to propose an alternative to the medieval view and a new understanding of society. The eclipse of the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition viewing man as a social animal, of ethics based on moral and theological virtues, of that finalism typical of medieval Christian society (Pabst 2010), was favoured by the voluntarist account of the two powers of God. When Reformers advanced an alternative view of mankind as irremediably corrupted by Sin and incapable of virtue outside of God’s grace, they were facilitated by an ontological process started by voluntarists. Reformers’ anthropology broke the relation between means-ends that dominated the late medieval world and called for a new configuration of reality. The attention of medieval theologians to natural law and moral virtues, rooted in man’s nature as a social animal, was substituted by the predominant focus on revealed Law and God’s grace. The unintended consequences mechanism, which is the operation of God’s providence to produce social good out of man’s moral evils, found its space in this process, as shown by Calvin’s texts.

Calvin was highly influenced by voluntarism (McGrath 1986) and, in particular, by Duns Scotus’ thought (Gordon 1879; Reuter 1963, 1981). Reuter, noting that the young Calvin was taught in Paris by the Scot John Major (John Mair), argues that there he found a “new conception of anti-pelagian and Scotist theology” (Reuter 1963, 21).¹⁶ Even if this argument has been criticised (Ganoczy 1966; McGrath 1986), there is a consensus that voluntarist ideas, either those of Scotus or Ockham or the via moderna, had a huge impact on Calvin’s intellectual development.¹⁷ We follow McGrath’s advice (2004, 96) to seek similarities in Calvin’s works with the voluntarist authors who preceded him. Therefore, we should try to answer the question: was Calvin concerned with the dialectic between the two powers of God? He responded in a passage of his treatise The Secret Operation of God’s Providence ([1558]1840) where he meant to clarify his doctrine previously set out in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536, 1541):

Besides, though the will of God is to me the highest of all reasons, yet I everywhere teach, that where the reason of his counsel and works does not appear, the reason is hid with him; so that he always decreed justly and wisely. Therefore I not only reject, I detest the trifling of the Schoolmen about absolute power, because they separate his justice from his authority. (Calvin 1840, 17)

From this passage, scholars (Steinmetz 2010; Anna Case-Winters) have deduced that Calvin was rejecting the distinction between the two powers of God. Other scholars, such as Helm (2010) and Balserak (2006), have reacted by arguing that here Calvin is indeed confirming that there is a distinction between the two powers of God, but not that made by the Ockhamist and via moderna schools, which lead to Pelagianism and heresy. We side with this latter interpretation, and we argue that Calvin, in line with Duns Scotus, sees a connection between the two powers of God: “I grant that Augustine mentions different wills; but these so harmonious with each other, that the last day will demonstrate how consistent he was in all his complicated modes of action” (Calvin 1840, 66).¹⁸ What changed between Duns Scotus and Calvin were the contents and circumstances on which the relation between the two powers was built. Calvin’s anthropology was different from that of late medieval theology, the one that Scotus’s voluntarism ontologically undermined but which, nonetheless, Scotus adopted as an expression of God’s ordained power. Given Calvin’s pessimistic anthropology, he needed to deal with the “secret” way in which God’s Providence operates, ex potential dei ordinata, to let the vicious and corrupt human being contribute to the common good. The virtue ethics solution theorised by the Scholastics, even in its refined forms of cooperation with God’s grace as in Aquinas, was no longer enough.

In Calvin, we clearly find an archetypical unintended consequences mechanism in his theory of how Providence has made bad people (wicked) unintentionally promote the common good. This passage of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is revelatory:

approbation or condemnation depend on what it is befitting in man, and what in God to will, and to what end the will of each has respect. For the things which God rightly wills, he accomplishes by the evil wills of bad men" (August. _Enchirid. ad Laurent. cap. 101). He had said a little before (cap. 100), that the apostate angels, by their revolt, and all the reprobate, as far as they themselves were concerned, did what God willed not; but, in regard to his omnipotence, it was impossible for them to do so; for, while they act against the will of God, his will is accomplished in them. Hence he exclaims, "Great is the work of God, exquisite in all he wills! so that, in a manner wondrous and ineffable, that is not done without his will which is done contrary to it, because it could not be done if he did not permit; nor does he permit it unwillingly, but willingly; nor would He who is good permit evil to be done, were he not omnipotent to bring good out of evil" (Augustine. in Ps. cxi. 2). […] How these things, which men do perversely, are of God, and are ruled by his secret providence, is strikingly shown. (Calvin 2019, 180)¹⁹

Calvin repeated this in his Defence of the secret operation of Providence:: “as if God were impious, when he accommodates in his own wonderful way human wickedness, to a different end from that intended by the perpetrator” (Calvin 1840, 94–95). Again, such a theological possibility emerged in its full force only after the static intellectualism of medieval theologians, together with its anthropological account rooted on virtues and intentional actions towards common good, were undermined and removed. Scotus and his followers paved the way for Calvin and his followers.

If there is a thread connecting Duns Scotus and Calvin, why should this pertain to Smith and his account of the invisible hand? Smith was exposed to Calvinism in the Scottish context form his youth to his death. The Presbyterian Kirk (i.e., the Church of Scotland) was profoundly influenced by Calvinist theology (Blosser 2011). The young Smith breathed this religious atmosphere in his native town of Kirkaldy, and “he signed the Calvinist Confession of Faith before the Presbytery of Glasgow” (Ross 2010, 109). Later, he was influenced by reactions to this “old light” Calvinism, especially through his master, Francis Hutcheson (Ross 2010, 32). In this respect, it is interesting to stress Smith’s life-long friendship with the Reverend John Drysdale (1718–1788), who attended lessons in Kirkaldy with Smith. In his sermons, Drysdale adopted a “modified” Calvinism, stressing the role of morality with some Stoic influence (Ross 2010, 25).

In his article on the theological history of the invisible hand Harrison (2011) showed that in the 1762 Glasgow editions of the Institutes Calvin’s passage “the reason is not always equally apparent, but we ought undoubtedly to hold that all the changes which take place in the world are produced by the secret agency of the hand of God” was rendered as follows:

Though many things seem to come to pass by meer chance, it doth but seem so, for there is no such thing. There is a secret unseen hand of providence, that ordereth every motion and event… . For still in the most casual events, and greatest contingencies, there is an invisible hand of the infinitely-wise God, that linketh one thing to another, though in such a way, that we know not, nor that is fit we should know how” (Calvin in Harrison 2011, 36. Our emphasis).

As Harrison rightly notices, the usage of “invisible hand” to determine the operation of God’s providence that accomplishes His aim in spite of human intentions “had acquired a stable technical meaning that was consistent with the tenor of Calvin’s discussion of providence […] it was the contemporary expression which best captured his meaning, and which would convey it most straight forwardly to eighteenth-century readers” (Harrison 2011, 38). Even if Smith had a troubled relation with Calvinism throughout his life, we cannot exclude he might have been influenced by this notion circulating in Presbyterian Scotland of 18th century. However, our aim here is to understand if the invisible hand theorised by Smith is compatible with voluntarism rather than proving that the Calvinist sources of Smith’s economic ideas.

We are far from Scotus and medieval theological debates, but not that far. It would be a mistake to think that modern economists did not take the common good into account, even in the reductive form of public good. As Smith explained, he was mistrustful of people who directly traded in order to promote the public good: “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need to be employed in dissuading them from it” (Smith 1976, 477–478). What changed between Scotus and Smith, i.e. the medieval and modern world, were the means, the way to best contribute to the common good, not the ends.

The invisible hand expresses the basic economic idea that pursuing self-interest does not deprive, but rather enriches, the common good. Smith’s passage above is the conclusion of this reasoning:

by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention […] By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. (Smith 1976, 477–478).

Even if it is often scaled down by Smith’s own heirs and interpreters (e.g. Sen 2010; Rothschild 2013), the invisible hand expresses a fundamental idea: the common good does not require that actions be intentionally aimed towards it, because the only good way and effective means to achieve the common good is to create incentives for each individual to seek his own private interest. Order and wealth do not need to be either intentionality oriented towards the common good, or intentionality oriented towards the good of the counterparty of an economic relationship: everyone should think about their own personal interest (self-interest), because a sort of secular providence (the invisible hand) transforms the sum of private interests into collective well-being. This theoretical expedient disconnects social results from individual intentions.

We claim that Aquinas’s intellectualism cannot fully embrace this view: self-interest can be admitted, as Aquinas did, but moderatum, moderated by a direct and intentional concern for the common good. In Smith, the nexus of self-interest/common good is a sum: the search of self-interest contributes directly to common good, without the need for renouncing any dimension of the private good for the sake of the common. In Aquinas, instead, this nexus can be expressed as a sort of subtraction: in order to contribute to common good, one has to temper some parts of his interest. The transformation of private into common requires intentional sacrifice by the individual. While modern economic understanding of the market could have not flourished within the static intellectualism, Duns Scotus voluntarism created this possibility.

5. Conclusion

It might appear that the existence of an ideal thread connecting two Scots, Duns Scotus and Adam Smith, distant five centuries from one another, has been one of our main assumptions. However, things are more complicated. We do not conjecture that there was a direct influence of Duns Scotus on Smith given that there is no direct reference to Scotus, as far as we know, in Smith’s works, and none of Scotus’s books in his private library (Mizuta 2000). Moreover, we are not arguing that Smith adhered personally to Calvinism or that the only theological source of the invisible hand is Calvinism. We can only stress is that there is a tie–tiny and quasi-invisible, but still a tie –between Smith’s view of the invisible hand and Calvin’s treatment of the unintended consequences,²⁰ which was in turn allowed by the ontological space created by Duns Scotus’s theological voluntarism. We believe this is what the literature available and the very intricate subject allow us to suggest: overcoming this limit, we would end up in just conjectural and fantastic hypotheses without any foothold in reality. At the same time, eliminating this possible tie, because of lack of irrefutable proofs, would reduce the wealth and complexity of the continuously growing corpus of Smithian interpretations.

Hence, our paper leaves open the issue of the economic consequences of theological intellectualism. We showed that in the intellectualist view of Aquinas, the intentional concern for the common good is an essential part of good economic activity. In the voluntarist framework of Duns Scotus, instead, the intentional pursuit of the common good is just the means that God’s ordained power has established, but which can be changed when the circumstances change. Ontologically speaking, the invisible hand found space within the voluntarist worldview of the Reformation; theologically speaking, it can be seen as the operation of God’s Providence permitting Creation to fulfil its proper end.

However, if Smith received voluntarism via Calvin, what path was taken by Aquinas’s ideas over time? Can we speak of a Thomistic tradition as the base of another modern school of economic thought, perhaps civil economy, as suggested by Bruni and Zamagni (2016) and Santori (2021)? Answering these questions might lead us to see that the history of invisible hand is plural also in another sense, i.e., the history of invisible hands (Bruni and Santori 2022).

Acknowledgements

the authors wish to express their gratitude to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their relevant comments on the manuscript. Moreover, this paper benefitted from the questions of the participants to the EoF Academy course “Franciscan tradition and Economic Thought”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 If we were asked to place the notion of voluntarism within contemporary debates, we would think immediately of the area of philanthropy or the non-profit sector. We are keen to imagine that the sincere concern of volunteers for the good of other people, especially the least advantaged, inspires their efforts to improve human rights, social and economic justice and impels them to freely choose to spend part of their time to make the world a more just place for all. We are less inclined to associate voluntarism with the economic sphere, as the latter is ruled by self-interest, diametrically opposed to the philanthropic world. It is as if our social lives were a delicate balance between these two spheres, each ruled by different logics. For eight hours per day, we can be honest workers, legitimately pursuing our own interests; the rest of the day, or perhaps one day of the week, we can sincerely take part in activities related to the promotion of the good of our society. In this paper, we show that voluntarism, at least in one of its numerous meanings, is fundamental not just for charitable activities, but also for modern economic ideas.

2 While being aware of the immense tradition and the numerous debates surrounding this term, we employ “ontological” to denote the basic structure of reality, meaning its parts and how are they related one another.

3 The general attitude of suspicion towards economic life survived in the theological adversary of voluntarism, namely intellectualism.

4 Harrison (2002) notes the flaws with this interpretation (see pages 71–74). However, the doctrine of private property that we consider in this paper proves the contrary, i.e., God’s ability to revoke laws and intervene in history.

5 The relation means-ends is our way to translate the medieval categories necessity-contingency (Porro 2013).

6 Even if he took this distinction from Anselm of Aosta, the discussion of these concepts in Scotus’s theological voluntarism offered an original and valuable contribution to the history of ideas.

7 Scholars see in Scotus a forerunner of Kantian morality. We will more prudently say that in his thought we can see the beginning of the eclipse of the Aristotelian virtue ethics.

8 McGrath showed how Scotus, Ockham and other voluntarist authors of the Middle Ages employed an economic metaphor to express this concept: “in the Middle Ages the king appears to have been regarded as entitled to issue “token” coinage, often made of lead, which had a negligible inherent value, but which would be redeemed at its full ascribed value at a later date. In the meantime, the ascribed value of the coins was vastly greater than their inherent value, on account of the promise of the king expressed in the covenant regulating the relationship between the valor impositus and valor intrinsecus. Just as a major discrepancy could arise within an economic system between bonitas intrinseca and valor impositus, given a firm and binding contract on the part of the king, so a similar discrepancy could arise between the moral value of an act (i.e., its bonitas intrinseca) and its meritorious value (i.e., valor impositus), given a comparable covenant on the part of God. Although human acts have negligible inherent value in themselves by God’s absolute standards, God has nevertheless entered into a pactum with humanity, by virtue of which such human acts have a much greater contracted value” (2005, 113–114).

9 Wolter inquired the genesis of Duns Scotus’s view on private property in his Introduction to Scotus’s economic writings. See Wolter (2001).

10 We clearly must not understand the primordial condition in a historical sense. When Scotus says that private property arises after sin, he is telling us something important, namely that the private appropriation of goods was not in God's original plan for humanity. It was a deviation, a corruption, a decay.

11 To go more in depth on the evolution of Aquinas’s thought and the meaning of “moderate gain”, please refer to Januard (2022a, 2022b) recent works.

12 There is a similarity also between Scotus’s concept of latitude (latitudo) and Aquinas’s idea of a range of value (Santori 2021).

13 Among the Franciscan theologians, the Frenchman Pietro di Giovanni Olivi (1248–1298) had a decisive role. Olivi was among the first to understand that not all trading was uncivilized, and that not all interest-bearing loans were usury. The same goes for Bernardino da Siena, but also for the Dominican Antonino da Firenze.

14 As shown in the literature, even his reading of Aquinas’s ideas was mediated by Biel and the voluntarists (Murphy 1969).

15 For the sake of length, we will not enter into the details of the distinction between merit de congruo and de condigno, even if that would show how close the later Luther was to the Schola augustiniana moderna (Gregory of Rimini).

16 Interestingly enough, Smith owned a copy of John Mair’s Historia Maioris Britanniae in his library (Klein and Humpries 2019, 437)

17 Things become clearer if one considers Scotus’ doctrine on predestination. How do God’s will and intellect interact in choosing who is ordained for grace and glory? According to intellectualist authors, God’s intellect informs His will about the people who will be granted grace and therefore obtain eternal glory. Scotus rejected this view because, to him, it bound God’s gratuitous act of predestination either to a particular means, that is grace, or to an intellectual foresight of merits that should be the ratio of their election. Conversely, God’s will freely predestines people to glory, and only after this decision does the intellect play a role, predisposing the means for the end established by God’s will. Grace is just a means; it cannot contain in itself the reason for predestination. In McGrath’s words, this is the “difference between Aquinas and Scotus: for the former, God predestines first to grace and subsequently to glory; for the latter, God predestines first to glory and then to grace” (2005, 167). Calvin shared a similar understanding, and this is relevant insofar as the Calvinist doctrine of predestination had a critical impact on the development of the spirit of capitalism.

18 Augustine is a steady reference for Calvin and Calvinism. Not only Calvin’s anthropological pessimism rooted on Augustinian texts (human beings as massa damnata); as the passage in the main text demonstrates, Calvin quoted Augustine to describe the true dialectic between the two powers of God (as theorized by Duns Scotus).

19 In line with note 13, compare Calvin’s passage with Augustine’s text: “The natural activity of providence is carried out by the occult action of God who also makes trees and herbs grow, while voluntary activity is carried out through the work of angels and men […] By means of the second activity of providence, signs are given, teaching is imparted, learning is acquired, fields are cultivated, communities are governed, various professions are exercised and every other activity that is carried out both in the consortium of the celestial city as well as in the terrestrial and mortal one: in this way even the wicked, without intending it, contribute to the good of the good people” (Augustine De Genesi ad Litteram, IX, 17. Our translation).

20 One cannot argue that Calvin’s invisible hand is the direct antecedent of Smith’s for many reasons, the clearest of which is Smith’s usage of the term in his other works dated ante 1762, such as The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1984 [1759]).