Footnotes

¹The Latin word is ‘poenitentia’, which can be translated as penitence or penance, or even as repentance. The word is equivocal, as Scotus himself states in nn.59-60: it signifies the willing or accepting of punishment for sin committed and connotes the punishment. In English the word ‘penitence’ more properly signifies the willingness or readiness to accept punishment, ‘penance’ the punishment so accepted, and ‘repentance’ the sorrow for and repudiation of the sin deserving punishment. As for the sacrament of confession, as it is now typically called, this signifies rather the admission itself before a priest of sins deserving punishment. In the translation here ‘poenitentia’ has been translated as ‘penitence’, since it says in English what Scotus says ‘poenitentia’ directly signifies in Latin. If ‘penance’ were used as the translation instead (which might indeed be closer to the older English use of the word), it would signify what Scotus says ‘poenitentia’ indirectly connotes.

²The Latin word ‘culpa’ means both ‘fault’ and ‘guilt’, and is translated in both ways in what follows according to suitability to the context.

³That is, even if we suppose the listed foundations of the real relation to remain the same (the penalty as always due for such sin, God as always decreeing such penalty for such sin, and the soul as always capable of such sin), yet no relation of obligation in the soul to the penalty follows therefrom, unless an actual sin is supposed as well.

⁴That is, if punishment itself is supposed to be what deletes sin, a greater punishment should delete a greater sin, but it does not, as is clear of the damned whose punishment is greater and yet does not delete their sin.

⁵That is, what makes a penalty placate the person offended is not the mere fact that it is a punishment, but that it is undertaken voluntarily.

⁶Sc. the apprehension of it as not being there, or not being there as one wills it to be there.

⁷In Latin ‘to repent’ is ‘poenitere’, which here is made to derive from ‘poenam tenere’, or ‘to hold a penalty’.

⁸Sc. not just suffering the pain of punishment, which the impenitent can do, but suffering the fact that it is a ‘penalty’, something one deserves for a sin one now detests, which only the penitent can do.

⁹‘Sustinere’, a word derived from ‘tenere’ (like ‘poenitere’) and from ‘sub’ or ‘under’; hence to sustain is to hold oneself under something.

¹⁰For instance, to say ‘I hold it’ referring to some object one possesses, means in effect ‘I hold it for myself’. If, however, one is holding it for someone, as in safekeeping, one would say ‘I hold it for you’.

¹¹The arguments that follow, which reject this Aristotelian-derived idea of punishment as an act of friendship, seem more clever than decisive, and seem also to give to observance of the law qua observance a status more tidy than compelling. For the law would seem, like the Sabbath (Mark 2.27), to be for man and not man for the law, and fulfillment of the law is not observance but love (Romans 13.10). Let the arguments, however, be the judge.

¹²Merit by congruity is not a merit that deserves deletion of sin (the only such merit is Christ’s, not the sinner’s). It is the congruity that if the sinner does what he can (namely to be sad with natural sadness for sin committed), then God does what he can (namely forgive sin and infuse supernatural grace).

¹³If there is no disposition at all on the part of a sinner for which God, by congruity, gives charity and deletes sin, then that this sinner receives charity and that other does not bears no relation to any difference in the sinner but is arbitrary on God’s part, so that God engages in acceptance of persons, choosing this one and not that one regardless of presence or absence of disposition.

¹⁴Strictly ‘signs’, but these signs are as it were distinct moments of understanding, succeeding each other progressively not in time but in completeness of analysis.

¹⁵No response is given by Scotus to the fourth argument [n.80], but a response can be constructed from what he says in answer to the question of what remains after an act of sin to stain the sinner. For he says there that such a stain can be the object of a choice, because it can be removed by an act of penitence that is chosen [nn.34-43].

¹⁶Augustine’s text reads ‘patience’ for ‘penitence’, but ‘penitence’ is given in the citation of it by Gratian, Decretum p.2 cause 33 q.3, and Lombard, Sent. d.15 ch.7 n.1.

¹⁷Ps.-Augustine ibid. “For true penitence makes an effort to lead the penitent to the purity of baptism... Let him know that he remains hard in guilt who laments the ravages of time or the death of a friend, and does not with tears show grief for sin.”

¹⁸Sc. some sin, say, against the Evangelical virtues [n.178]. For how can such a sin be known to be a sin in human acts (as opposed to acts transcending human acts) if it is not known to be so by natural reason?

¹⁹Sc. the extremes are sinners on the one side, alienated from God, the extreme on the other side, to whom the sinners, through the middle of the priest, are brought back.

²⁰‘Creature of salt’ in the intransitive sense is, ‘creature that is salt’, and in the transitive sense, ‘creature that comes from salt’. In several rites, including that of baptism, the words ‘I exorcize you, creature of salt’ are used for blessing salt. One could speak instead here of objective and subjective genitive, as in the case of ‘love of God’, which in the objective sense means the love we have for God, and in the subjective sense the love God has for us. So ‘sacrament of penitence’ in the transitive or objective sense is the sacrament that has penitence for object (namely the penitent sinner receiving forgiveness), and in the intransitive or subjective sense it means the sacrament that penitence is (namely the sacrament in which the penitent, by confessing, receives the sacramental grace).

²¹The Latin is literally ‘lordship’ or ‘dominion’, that is, what belongs to the ‘dominus’, the lord. Since in context the discussion is about a lord in the sense of an owner of property, and not in the sense of someone with a special status of political or ecclesiastical dignity (or even less in the sense of God as Lord), the word has been translated accordingly.

²²“Others say, which seems truer, that he who possesses another’s fixed property by prescription is no longer bound to give it back, because it would not now be another’s but his own, and he possesses it justly.”

²³A term that in the legal context means ‘bailment’, which is a relationship where the owner transfers to another the physical possession of personal property for a time, but retains ownership.

²⁴‘Contract’ comes from the Latin contraho which literally means to draw (‘traho’) together (‘con’).

²⁵Richard: “Now the reason why nothing beyond the principal can be demanded for a loan but can be for something rented, is that a loan is of things whose principal use cannot be handed over without the thing itself, because the use of them is the using up of them...as is plain of money, which was principally invented for this purpose, that it be expended in the buying of other things; for this reason, when such sorts of thing are handed over to others, ownership of them is transferred to the latter.”

²⁶The argument of Richard, and Aquinas, is that lending money is different from renting a house, say, because a house can be used without being used up, so that the owner of the house can retain ownership of it while selling the use of it (as by renting it). Consequently, after the rental period is over, the owner gets the house back and keeps the rent in addition. The same cannot be said of money because to use money is to use it up and so to possess it at the same time. There is no difference between use and possession that would allow charging ‘rent’ for the ‘use’ of the money. One gets back everything one lent when one gets the same amount of money back, and to get back extra for ‘use’ is ‘usury’ and wrong, because it amounts to selling the same thing twice. Scotus’ response is to deny, relying on Boniface VIII, that the use and ownership of money necessarily go together, or to deny the validity of the inference: money is used up in being used, therefore possession cannot be separated from use. However, as he explains in nn.136-137, usury is still wrong. For either (n.136) to loan money is to give possession, so that to get the loan back is to get possession back, and to get something extra back for ‘use’ as well would be to suppose one still somehow owned the money while it was being used when precisely one did not.

Usury is wrong, therefore, because one sells what one no longer owns. Or (n.137) one can suppose that the lender still owns the money but that the gain that comes from the use of it comes from the borrower’s industry and not from the lender’s, so that the lender has no claim to the fruits of that use, or to extra payment because of it.

²⁷“By reason of this doubt [sc. about greater and lesser valuation] is he also excused who sells bread, grain, wine oil, or other merchandise so as to receive for the same, within a certain time limit, more than they then are worth -provided, however, that at the time of the contract he had not been about to sell them.”

²⁸“Clerics are prohibited here not only from playing but even from being present at games, so much so that he who is publicly a player of dice is rejected for promotion; and they should not be inspectors of such sort of games.”

²⁹The order of topics in this fourth article by Scotus follows the order of circumstances given in Aristotle’s Ethics 3.2.1111a3-6.

³⁰These verses were offered by jurists to aid memory about who is under obligation to make restitution. They are cited by many scholastics, as Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Richard of Middleton, among others.

³¹Here one must understand the usurer to be the one who borrowed the money at usury, not the one who lent it. A borrower is, of course, bound to return the borrowed money to the lender, but not to return the gain he makes from it. If he were bound in justice to return the gain as well, the lender would justly get that gain and so justly get the profit of the other’s labor, which is usury. The problem now, as Scotus immediately remarks, is that if borrowers are only bound to restore the amount borrowed and not any gain they make from using it, then men will be more induced to borrow money, because they will never have to pay back any gain they make from it.

³²Literally the ‘right of the pole [of the heavens]’, or ‘ius poli’, which was natural or divine right, and was distinguished from the ‘right of the forum’, or ‘ius fori’, which was civil or human right. The two together form a sort of jingle in Latin and are found as such in Augustine, Sermon 335, On the Life and Morals of his Clerics, “The bishop has it in his power not to make return, but iure fori not iure poli.” The phrase appears in Gratian, Decretum, e.g. p.2 cause 17 q.4 ch.42, and several other sources.

³³From the anonymous ‘Sayings of Cato’ I n.13 (Baehrens ed., Poetae Latini Minores III, Leipzig 1881)

³⁴Nicolas of Lyra: “For the fruit of the good work of him who has done no or less sin and of him who has fallen more gravely is not equal.”

³⁵Scotus 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.”

³⁶Cf. 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.”

³⁷Or “any other justice.” My reason for translating it as I do (making iustitia ablative and not nominative as in the printed text) is because justice is not a simple but a multiple virtue, and because to say charity is another kind of justice seems odd.

³⁸No 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.

³⁹A 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’.

⁴⁰Scotus’ Latin is unhelpfully ambiguous, since ‘real’ could go with ‘two’ or with ‘changes’. But it cannot go with ‘changes’ because remission of sin or guilt is said not to be a real change [nn.45, 49]. Therefore, it must go with ‘two’ and the sense is there is not just one change here [nn.39-43], but two, because, as n.45 says, one is a real change and the other is not.

⁴¹Sin is a contingent effect of nature, for no one sins by nature or necessarily, and is not repugnant to nature, for then sin would be impossible; and a fortiori sin is not repugnant to acts of virtue, which are also contingent effects, and opposite effects, of nature.

⁴²Scotus seems to be referring back to the argument at B above, nn.53-55 (and not n.62 as suggested by the Vatican editors). The major: no passage from contradictory to contradictory is without some change. The minor: but when to this person fault is remitted, it is such a passage. Conclusion: therefore, when to this person fault is remitted, it is not without some change. The conclusion does not hold because the passage from contradictory to contradictory when fault is remitted is not a change properly speaking, or not a real change. It is only a difference in relations of reason, namely from obligation to non-obligation [n.50]. This difference in relations of reason is explained in terms of God’s eternal but conditioned willing: he wills obligation to penalty for this person on the condition of no repentance, and remission of obligation to penalty for this person on the condition of repentance. There is no change in God, then, but there is change in the person [as said here, nn.62-63].

⁴³The ‘aevum’ or ‘aeviternity’ is the scholastic term for the duration of angels who, unlike God, are not eternal and, unlike men, are not measured by time.

⁴⁴That is: the will is free and not determined by its (secondary) objects, so that its acts relative to them are contingent. Consequently, if the same contingent act were always being done it could always be done differently. Scotus is not of the view that if we were in the same conditions again we would choose and do the same act again. On the contrary, our will could always have chosen differently; and if ours then a fortiori God’s.

⁴⁵In the consequence ‘if.. .then...’, the antecedent entails the consequent but not vice versa, as that ‘if it is a man, it is an animal’ but not ‘if it is an animal, it is a man’. So ‘animal’ is prior to ‘man’ in the sense that in order to be a man it is necessary to be an animal, but it is not necessary to be a man in order to be an animal. The consequent (animal) is thus not only prior to but also more imperfect than the antecedent (man), because it does not include the antecedent but the antecedent does include it.

⁴⁶The correct consequence is, ‘if there is infusion, there is expulsion’ but not ‘if there is expulsion, there is infusion’. The reason is that expulsion and infusion are not immediate opposites simply by the nature of their extremes but by divine institution. For instance, non-x and x are immediate opposites by the nature of the extremes, so that if one then not the other (if non-x then not x, and if x then not non-x). But expulsion of guilt and infusion of grace are not immediate opposites by reason of the extremes ‘guilt’ and ‘grace’, but by divine institution. For while by that institution expulsion of guilt and infusion of grace go together, there is no necessity in the nature of ‘grace’ and ‘guilt’ that they should, or that the removal of the one extreme, guilt, should necessitate the presence of the other, grace.

⁴⁷Sc. therefore grace and guilt are opposed as contradictories, and so as immediate extremes.

⁴⁸The consequence that ‘if grace is present, then guilt is not present’ holds; but the converse (the ‘second case’) that ‘if guilt is not present, then grace is present’ does not hold.

⁴⁹So there are three members in all, dealt with in turn: natural right [n.19], divine positive right [n.20], and ecclesiastical positive right [n.21].

⁵⁰“Natural right is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel”

⁵¹The laws and traditions of the Church are sanctioned ultimately by the Popes, so that if the rule about making confession holds because sanctioned by a Pope, and a Pope is not under command of a Pope (for a Pope is equal to a Pope), then Popes are not bound to the rule about making confession (whereas the value and importance of confession holds for all Christians, including Popes).

⁵²If the precept about confession comes from Church tradition, then infidels, who are not bound by the law or tradition of the Church, would not be bound to confess, but they are so bound by the law of nature [nn.22-33]. So obligation to confess cannot be Church tradition alone.

⁵³That is, if the glossator tries to prove his antecedent (‘the Greeks are not bound to confess’ [n.39]) by saying that the Greeks do not have the custom of confessing, then their not having that custom would be more known (to them and to others) than the antecedent. But it is not. For, as Scotus’ argument in the next lines continues, if it were thus more known, it would have been more a point of dispute between the Greeks and the Latins than disputes about the Eucharist and baptism, and it was not.

⁵⁴The affirmatives are ‘whose sins you remit, are remitted’ and ‘whose sins you retain, are retained’, and the corresponding negatives are ‘whose sins you do not remit, are not remitted’ and ‘whose sins you do not retain, are not retained’. But neither of these negatives is simply true, because sins that the confessing penitent does not reveal to the priest are neither remitted nor retained by the priest, and from this follows nothing about their remission or retention before God.

⁵⁵That is, from the mere fact that priests do in fact know or determine the right, and do also bind and loose penitents who submit to them, it does not follow that the faithful are obliged to confess to them. For unless priests have judiciary power in addition, no one is bound to submit to them or to follow their determinations.

⁵⁶Sc. the accusation any penitent makes against himself in confession which, in this case, is communicated though a third party, the interpreter, who can now function as joint witness with the priest against the accused.

⁵⁷That is, and not to the eternal penalty as well [nn.86-95].

⁵⁸Punctuating the Latin as in the translation and not as in the printed text.

⁵⁹That is, the priest, by virtue of the keys, remits to the penitent in confession three days of the ten that are due. Then, by virtue of being dispenser of the Church’s treasury (and not by the power of the keys), he remits another one or two days, leaving the penitent with five or six days still to pay. If the priest remits more, imposing a lesser penalty still on the penitent in confession (as Richard [n.92] at least allows he may do), the penitent’s obligation to this lesser penalty is not ratified by God, but the penitent must pay the full five or six days remaining, at least in purgatory.

⁶⁰More accurately: “for God, so as to be able to delete sins committed, seeks liberty not necessity of choice... Not therefore in fear alone does man live. He then who repents late should not only fear God the Judge, but love also God the Just; let God not be feared for penalty, but loved for glory.”

⁶¹Sc. the pains due as penalty to sin are not infinite in intensity (any actual pain will be determinate in how intense it is), so if the pains due to mortal sin exceed infinitely those due to venial sin, the infinity cannot be in intensity; so it must be in extension, that is, in the former lasting forever and the latter not.

⁶²Richard claims [n.66] that a confessor who says outside confession what he knows in confession would be lying, since he does not know it outside confession. Scotus counters that this claim entails confessors would be lying if outside confession they speak, as they do [n.71], of such and such sin and sinner without mentioning singular instances. For confessors only know such cases because they know the singular instances; so if they do not know the singular instances outside confession, neither do they know the cases outside confession and would be lying if they said they did.

⁶³The Latin text misprints ‘mentiarur’ for ‘mentiatur’.

⁶⁴That is, someone who hears a priest reveal to him a secret of another’s confession will now himself avoid confession for fear that his own secrets will be revealed by any priest he confesses to.

⁶⁵Negative precepts are binding always and at all times because there is never a time when one should not be obeying a negative precept (such as the precept not to tell lies). Positive precepts are always binding but not at all times because a given time need not be a time when a positive precept applies. So the positive precept to follow the rules of driving is always binding but not at all times, as specifically when one is not driving.

⁶⁶The Latin text here misprints ‘confiteatur’ as ‘confineatur’.

⁶⁷Natural law precedes divine law and ecclesiastical law, since divine is revealed on the basis of nature and ecclesiastical is ordained by the Church with authority from divine law. In case of conflict, then, there is no perplexity which to obey, because natural law takes precedence over divine law and divine law takes precedence over ecclesiastical law.

⁶⁸Successive things are things that follow each other, so if the same successive thing returns it will precede and follow itself, which is contradictory.

⁶⁹It was argued in n,29 that someone who rises from sin can rise with greater merits and for a greater glory than when he fell, even though the grace he receives in rising is less than the grace he first had when he fell. The objection is that if he had great grace before, the merit he gains in rising will not add as much glory as was taken away by the loss of the first grace. So if he rises to greater glory, the difference cannot be in the merits he gains but in the grace he is given, and that grace cannot be little but must be more than he had before, if he rises now to a greater glory than before.

⁷⁰That is (as n.36 makes immediately clear) the works, though weak, are accepted by God for glory if not immediately for increase of grace.

⁷¹A sin from a state of penitence could be as evil as a sin from a state of innocence as regard the intensity of the malice it involves. Therefore again (contrary to n.43) a sin from a state of penance need not be worse than a sin from a state of innocence.

⁷²Bonaventure held, along with others, that the episcopacy was not an order but an ‘eminence or dignity of order’, ibid. p.2 a.2 q.3 [n.12].

⁷³A possible reference to a dispensation given by Benedict XI in 1303, but the identification of the relevant Bull is not certain.

⁷⁴“A certain priest was ruling the church committed to him with great fear of the Lord and, from the time of having accepted orders, was loving his priestess as a sister...”

⁷⁵Deleting the parentheses round ‘or the rank’ in the edited Latin text.

⁷⁶“Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says...”

⁷⁷Transitive in the sense that the contract and sacrament of matrimony are not what matrimony is but what ‘pass over’ [transit] to what matrimony is, by making it (the contract) or gracing it (the sacrament). Matrimony proper is the bond [nn.65, 71] so made and graced.

⁷⁸Vatican editors: The doubt is briefly introduced by Scotus in Rep. IV/A d.29 q.1 n.9, “Now about venial sin.. .whether it should, according to right reason, be committed by anyone rather than that any pain be allowed, is doubtful.” However, he gives no solution to it.

⁷⁹‘Generously free’ because the Latin word ‘liberalis’ is used here to qualify the giving; in the next line the word ‘libera’ is used to qualify the giving. So, to bring out the difference, ‘generously free’ is translated here and merely ‘free’ there.

⁸⁰The form of a thing is also its definition, and a definition cannot be proved; rather is it the first principle of proof (as the definition of triangle is the principle to prove it has internal angles equal to two right angles). A definition is reached rather by process of description and division.

⁸¹The Vatican Editors note the following addition from some of the mss.: “But then it seems that the argument against the first opinion fails [n.43], because one would thus say that, having been coerced into the words by pure choice, one does consent to the words, because one has the consent by title of justice, lest one sin.”

⁸²The ‘not’ is printed in the Vatican edition, but it seems to be a mistake.

⁸³Latin words, while rife with grammatical gender, can often be left ambiguous as to biological gender, and Scotus’ Latin here is ambiguous as to whether the lustful person in this doubt, or the deceiving person in the next doubt [n.15], is the male or female partner. It could in principle be either, of course, but the Latin becomes clear enough later, especially in nn.19ff., to show that Scotus is thinking primarily of the male party as the deceiving party, and therefore also, one presumes, as the lustful party. The English translation accordingly follows this presumption from the beginning, even where the Latin remains ambiguous.

⁸⁴The Latin is ambiguous and allows the pronoun, ‘he’ or ‘she’ (or ‘it’), to go unexpressed. Scotus presumably means ‘he’ or ‘she’ indifferently, and so the neutral word ‘one’ is here used instead. In what follows Scotus does sometimes make the genders of his pronouns explicit.

⁸⁵Latin word for ‘spouse’ here is coniunx, which can refer to wife or husband, but is more often used to refer to the wife, and Scotus so takes it in what follows.

⁸⁶Scotus here, and following, uses a word in the male gender.

⁸⁷Here Scotus does make the gender of the parties clear with words explicitly for man (or husband) and wife.

⁸⁸Here Scotus’ pronouns become ambiguous, and they are made explicit in the English according to the way Scotus was using unambiguous pronouns in the immediately preceding paragraphs.

⁸⁹Scotus here, interestingly, puts both Latin adjectives for ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ into the same masculine gender.

⁹⁰Possibly a misprint for ‘will be’ (‘erant’ for ‘erunt’)

⁹¹A word modeled on ‘bigamy’ using the Latin word ‘vir’, man or husband, and the Latin prefix ‘bi’, two. The word ‘bigamy’ is actually a hybrid of the Latin ‘bi’ and the Greek ‘gamy’, marriage (‘digamy’ is the more proper Greek derivation). ‘Biviry’ is not such a hybrid.

⁹²Scotus apparently gave no separate response to the third argument [n.68]. Perhaps the reply could be that the matrimony in this case is not so much dissolved as its effect permanently suspended, because the wife’s offense compromises the proper exercise of clerical office in the husband. She must live in secluded penance, and he in celibate ministry. In other words, the ‘repudiation’ and ‘dismiss’ talked of in the Decretum are not the sort talked of in the Mosaic Law, but mean repudiating and dismissing, not the matrimony, but, by way of due penalty, the exercising of it. Christ seems indeed to have such cases in mind in Matthew 5.32 when he speaks of putting away a wife “except for the cause of fornication.”

⁹³Scotus’ pronouns are, again, ambiguous (implicit in the verb or noun and not separately expressed), but where they are made express they are mainly in the masculine gender. In English one just has to translate making adjustments case by case.

⁹⁴The Latin word is ‘acus’, which means ‘needle’ or ‘pin’. Compare our, more vulgar, word ‘prick’.

⁹⁵The Latin for sorcery is ‘maleficium’, which literally means wickedness or crime, and shares the same root with the (English and Latin) word ‘malicious’, namely ‘mal-‘ or ‘evil’.

⁹⁶No express male or female pronoun is given here, and the ‘many women’ in the next line could also be the neutral ‘many persons’, but the word translated ‘to him’ is definitely masculine.

⁹⁷A mnemonic cited by several authors, as: vow, condition, violence, spiritual proximity, error, dissimilar faith, age, crime, blood, union, time.

⁹⁸An odd remark because penal servitude, which the second case is about [n.22], hardly seems unjust. Perhaps the idea is (as Scotus’ remarks agreeing with the objection, and in n.26, suggest) that since most slaves now, in Scotus’ day, were slaves by being born slaves, then while their criminal forebears may have been justly slaves, the innocent descendants are not. So these descendants at least are unjustly slaves; for time does not pass the crime from parent to child, but rather shows that crime to be a crime.

⁹⁹Scotus gives no response to the third argument [n.5], perhaps because it is in effect answered by the answer to the second argument [n.23], that the friendship of those of the same blood is not the friendship required for the good of matrimony that is faith or fidelity. Or, it could be said that another good of matrimony, the good of offspring, is harmed if the parents are close relatives, because of inbreeding, whose effects must have been known in Scotus’ day (they can be very obvious, in other animals as well as humans), though not the biological causes in the genes. In the case of Adam and Eve, however, on the supposition (which Scotus of course makes) that they were the first humans and were made perfect, because made directly by God, there would be no defects in the gene pool, which would have taken time to emerge. So Cain and others of Adam’s and Eve’s children could have children together without fear of such defects.

¹⁰⁰Digest of Justinian I ch.7, “The name of adoption indeed is general, and it is divided into two kinds, one of which is likewise called adoption, the other arrogation [full adoption]. Sons of families are adopted, those who are possessed of their own right [legally adult] are arrogated... For general adoption happens in two ways: either by the authority of the prince or by command of the magistrate. By authority of the prince we adopt those who are possessed of their own right, which species of adoption is called arrogation.by command of the magistrate we adopt those who are in the power of a parent.”