II. To the Initial Arguments

27. To the first main argument [n.3]: it does not follow that, if a sin be simple, the avenging remedy is simple; for a legislator can justly establish that many partial penalties correspond to one sin as one integral revenge.

28. To the second [n.4] I say that when penitence, taken in the third or fourth mode [n.9], is correspondent to some sin, it can be taken in two ways:

In one way for what is of a sort to be adequately correspondent to it, and in this way a single penitence and a single penalty correspond to a single fault and, if the fault has them as parts, it is disposed to them as to integral parts.

In another way, penitence can be taken (when stated in the third or fourth way) for the general idea of what it is ‘to hold a penalty’, or to be punished for a fault, even if not adequately; and thus is it a whole universal to things that are integral parts of it in the first way. This is plain in an example. For suppose someone has killed another: there can be a just law that he be punished with a bodily punishment, and that a monetary penalty be handed over to the friends of the person killed; each of these is a penalty, and a penalty for homicide. In this way can it be called a penalty universal with respect to the monetary and bodily penalty, because each of these is the penalty, and for this sin. In another way, taking the penalty for homicide to be the total and adequate penalty for the fault, neither the bodily nor the monetary punishment is that penalty but an integral part of that penalty.

29. And it is plain how, according to this, penitence is predicated of any of these three separately [contrition, confession, satisfaction], taking them for what holds of any penalty corresponding to the fault but not totally and adequately; and it is plain how, on the other side, none of them without the other makes the penitence complete - and understand this as what is adequate to the fault.

30. To the third argument [n.5], it is plain that they [the three of contrition, confession, satisfaction] are not parts of penitence as sacrament nor of penitence as virtue, nor even parts of the act of the virtue, but they are acts commanded by the virtue, which is the proximate punitive act; and it is plain that the penalties accompanying those acts are parts of the remote effect of the act of penitence. But the elicited act of penitence could in some way be said to have those parts not formally but quasi causally, to the extent the act is in some way distinct as it commands this part and that; and in this way could they be called parts of virtue as penitence, as this inclines to inflicting all of them.

31. To the fifth argumentNo response is given by Scotus to the fourth argument in n.6. The Vatican editors write: “The reason is that Scotus, in putting the Ordinatio together, follows the lectures he gave before at Paris and Oxford, the student reports of which (Reportationes) have come down to us. And already in Rep. IV A d.16 q.1 n.1 the fourth argument is lacking. In place of ‘To the fifth argument’ the codices and editions hand on ‘to the fourth’. So rightly is there placed here in edition ‘u’ a marginal note: ‘To the fifth. The solution to the fourth is clear from what has been said’. Similar lapses for similar reasons occur elsewhere too.” The answer to the fourth argument would presumably come from the answer to the third, that penitence has satisfaction as a part quasi causally or as a remote effect, for satisfaction can be a part of penitence in this way and yet be posterior to it in order of nature. This answer is in effect, anyway, what the response to the fifth argument says, that something can be both part of something, and so not posterior to it, and also a result of it, and so posterior to it. ³⁸ [n.7] I say that of penitence as virtue and of its elicited act and of its commanded act the laborious exterior act is the fruit; and in this way must the exterior work worked be understood. And I concede that that work is not part of penitence in any of the three ways stated. It is yet part of what ‘to be punished’ is, which is the fourth among the parts enumerated before [n.9]; and it is not unacceptable that the same thing is part of something prior and fruit of something posterior.A bit obscure. Perhaps the sense is that it is part of ‘to be punished’, which is prior in universal predication; and fruit of the commanded act of the will, to which it is a posterior in the analysis of ‘to be punished’. ³⁹