A. About the Many Ways of Taking the Term ‘To Be Penitent’

9. Here one needs to understand that, besides the way according to which ‘penitence’ is taken for the sacrament of penitence [infra n.25], ‘penitence’, or rather ‘to be penitent’, can be taken in many other ways:

For as is had from what was said in distinction 14 questions 2 and 3 [nn.86-92, 168, 187], penitence happens to have a sort of justice avenging its own proper sin; and next to that there is an elicited act proper to it, which is a certain imperative willing of a penalty, as of what avenges the fault; in third rank is an effect next to the elicited act, which effect is an act, or acts, on which follows a penalty of avenging (for the will cannot, by an act of will, command a penalty save by first commanding the cause of the penalty, because passions are not in the power of the will save by the mediation of acts); fourth and last there follows the penalty consequent to the act commanded by the elicited act of penitence itself as virtue; and the penalty is the remote effect of the elicited act.Scotus seems to be following specifically here the analysis of the idea of penitence given in d.14 n.90 (save for the omission of the fifth part): “.. .one needs to know that ‘to be penitent’ requires...a distinct prior knowledge of that about which one is penitent. Here I say that the following things are disposed in order: (1) to command the coming together of the partial proximate causes of sadness; (2) and the conjunction of these partial causes that are the proximate effect of the command; (3) and there follows further the remote effect of this command, namely the sadness itself; (4) next contentment in the sadness can follow, which is an act of will having sadness for object; (5) and finally joy in the sadness, according to the saying of Augustine, “Let the sinner grieve over his sin and rejoice in his grief.” ³⁵

10. The distinction between all these is plain from the fact that they can be separated from each other:Cf. d.14 n.91: “The distinction between these is plain: the distinction, indeed, of the first one, namely the command, from the proximate cause of sadness, as of the principal and remote cause from the proximate and second cause; the distinction of the second one from the third, as of the cause from the effect and of the action from the passion; and the third one from the fourth, as of the object from the action; the fourth one from the fifth, as of the object from the passion that is desirous of this object.” ³⁶

For the virtue can exist without the elicited act (as is plain of itself) and conversely, because (as was said) the first act conformed to right reason (of a nature to generate virtue) can be had before anything of virtue is had, because it is the cause of generation of the first degree of virtue.

11. Similarly, the elicited act, which is second, can be without the third, namely without the commanded act, because an act that is commanded does not at once follow the act of command in the will (because the will in commanding is not omnipotent), and conversely.

12. The third can be without the second, namely some act causative of a penalty can be without the act of the will commanding this act, just as someone can at once have detestation of a sin, committed by himself, from contemplation of God, though he not command such an act to be elicited as avenging the fault.

13. The third can also be without the fourth, because those acts that would be of a nature to generate the penalty are not always followed by the penalty, because of indisposition perhaps in the power itself that is receptive of the penalty, just as on the willing-against, or hatred, of sin committed sadness does not always follow, as was said before.

14. And the fourth can also be without the third, because this penalty can be without this ordered act that would be of a nature to cause the penalty, because that act, as ordered, is not the precise cause of the generation of the penalty.

Each one of these, then, can be without any other, and any two or three can be together without any other or any others.

15. To the matter at hand, about the term ‘to be penitent’, properly it is (as was said before d.14 n.61) ‘to hold a penalty’; but ‘to hold’ includes the act of the holder, namely that he hold it voluntarily, and the application of the penalty to himself, that he hold it in himself. This habit, therefore, can be called ‘penitence’, which is a certain habitual holding of the penalty, as a principle habitually inclining to inflicting a penalty on oneself voluntarily; and the elicited act of it can be called ‘actual penitence’ or ‘the to be penitent that is a certain willing inflictive of a penalty on oneself’; and the next act, commanded by the elicited act of justice, can be called ‘to be penitent’, because it is to have a penalty in oneself, at least in its cause; nor can something that is equally principally an object of will be otherwise had as in its cause; the fourth, namely, ‘to be punished with a penalty following that act’, is not properly to be penitent but rather (so to say) to be made penitent, that is, to be held by the penalty or, in more common usage, to be punished.