B. Scotus’ own Opinion

14. I speak in a way different from the first opinion (as to what the two arguments prove [nn.6, 9]), that although the power of God to himself - that is any absolute perfection by which God is formally powerful - is in God in the first instant of nature, as is also any perfection simply (just as being a power for heating is consequent to heat, which heat however is an absolute form), yet by the power itself ‘under the idea in which it is omnipotence’ it does not have an object that is first possible save through the divine intellect producing it first in intelligible being, and the intellect is not formally the active power by which God is called omnipotent; and then the thing produced in such being by the divine intellect in the first moment of nature - namely intelligible being - has itself to be possible in the second instant of nature, because being is not formally repugnant to it, and having necessary being of itself is formally repugnant to it (on which two points stands the whole idea of omnipotence, corresponding to these ideas of active power). Therefore possibility is not in the object in any way before omnipotence is in God, taking omnipotence for an absolute perfection in God, just as the creature is not prior to anything absolute in God. If however a thing is understood to be possible before God by his omnipotence produces it, this understanding is in this way true, but the thing is not simply prior in that possibility but is produced by the divine intellect.

15. But as to impossibility, I say that it cannot be first on the part of God but on the part of the thing (as the first opinion says), and this for the reason given against the second opinion, because the thing is impossible for the reason that coming to be is repugnant to it.

16. Which point I understand thus: ‘impossible simply’ includes incompossibles that, by their formal ideas, are incompossible, and they are incompossible from that thing as principle from which as principle they have their formal ideas. So there is here this process, that as God by his intellect produces a possible in possible being, so he also produces two entities formally (each in possible being), and these ‘produced’ things are of themselves formally incompossible, so that they cannot be together one thing nor can any third thing come from them; but the impossibility that they have, they have formally from themselves, and from him as from a principle - in some way - who produced them. And on this incompossibility of theirs there follows the incompossibilty of the whole imagined construct that includes them, and from the impossibility of the imagined construct in itself and from the incompossibility of their parts there comes its incompossibility with respect to any agent; and from this must the whole process of the impossibility of the thing be completed, as if the ultimate degree of incompossibility or impossibility is the negation of a respect to any agent. Nor does it need to have any negative respect on the part of God, nor on the part of anything else (nor is there, perhaps, any negative respect in the nature of the thing), although the intellect can compare God -or any agent - to it under the negation of respect.

17. So in this way the first impossibility is on the part of the impossible thing and in God as in the principle; and if it is reduced to anything as a principle, yet it is not reduced to a negation of possibility in God; rather it is reduced to the divine intellect as principle, which is the principle of it in that being in which the parts are formally repugnant, because of which formal repugnance the whole composed of those parts is simply impossible.

18. And from this is clear that the imagination of those is false who look for the impossibility of anything in some one thing, as if some one thing - whether an intelligible or any sort of being - is of itself formally impossible as God is of himself formally necessary being. For nothing is such first in the being of non-entity, nor even is the divine intellect the reason for the opposite possibility of the entity that is opposed to such a nonentity; nor even is the divine intellect the precise reason for the opposite possibility about nothing, because then the argument ‘about precise causes in affirmation and negation’ [n.10] would hold. But everything ‘simply nothing’ includes in itself the idea of many things, such that it is not first nothing by its own idea but by the ideas of the things that it is understood to include, because of the formal repugnance of those several included things; and this reason for repugnance comes from the formal reasons, which repugnance they have first from the divine intellect.