On the co-nowness of time and eternity: a Scotistic perspective

Abstract

The paper will explore a key tension between eternity and temporality that comes to the fore in the seeming contradiction between freedom of the human will and divine foreknowledge of future contingents. It will be claimed that Duns Scotus's adaptation of Thomas Aquinas's view reduces the tension between a human being's freedom and divine foreknowledge of future contingents to the question of how to conflate the now of eternity and our experience of the instantaneous now. Scotus's account of the matter is unfortunately not satisfying and it is the purpose of this paper to develop this insight further in a speculative manner. In order to make such co-nowness possible it will be asked how the eternal and the temporal can co-cause together. This problem will be tackled through a development of Scotus's doctrine of the will taken elsewhere, in order to examine how the divine and the human wills can occur together. It will be claimed that such co-willing produces a co-nowness of the eternal and the instantaneous "nows" which generates a logical temporal movement.

‘All is Foreseen, and Freedom of Choice is Granted’: A Scotistic Examination of God's Freedom, Divine Foreknowledge and the Arbitrary Use of Power

“…14 In a previous study I discussed the relation between God's eternality and time and specifically contrasted the views of Aquinas and Duns Scotus. 15 Just as the center of a circle views its circumference simultaneously, so Aquinas sees God's eternality as viewing all events simultaneously in a one big Now of all past-present-future events. Like Aquinas, Scotus maintains that the relation between the Now of eternity and the fleeting now is analogous to the relation between the center of the circle and its circumference whereby the first is eternal insofar as it is immobile, and the latter is present for an instant.…”