2. Scotus’ own Opinion

a. About Order Taken Generally

16. One needs to understand, then, that order is in one way taken as Augustine describes it in City of God 19.13 n.1, that “order is the fitting disposition of equal and unequal things bestowing on each of them their place.” We commonly take order in this way when we say that there is an order of beings in the universe; and thus does Aristotle speak, Metaphysics 12.10.1075a16, “all things are in some ordered,” and he explains how. Also in this way is order in well-disposed polities taken, where the fitting disposition of equal and unequal persons in the polity is called the order of that polity, by which it is said to be ordered.

17. But in another way is the preeminent rank in such polity called order. And thus is a person in an eminent rank said to have order, in the way that ‘having a rank’ is said quasi-antonomastically, because those who are in a lower rank are not said to have a rank thus.

18. In this way there is fittingly in the Church, which is an ordered polity, an order according to this double acceptation. For according to the first acceptation is the whole Church ordered with the fitting disposition of equal and unequal persons each in their place. In the second way is a person who has an eminent rank in the Church said to have order. And although these two significations posit each other mutually (because when there is order in the first way in a polity there is eminent rank there and so order in the second way), yet this signification and that are not the same, as is plain enough. The way, then, that we are speaking here of order, order is taken here for the second signification, not for the first.

19. Further, an eminent rank in the Church is said to be in order to an eminent ecclesiastical act; not, to be sure, in this way, that rank is a power for carrying out the act (as the earlier rejected opinion said [n.12]), but that it be a rank disposing one fittingly or simply to carrying out that act in due way, so that order thus could, as we are here speaking of order, be called a preeminent rank in the Church disposing one to some preeminent act. And because the acts especially preeminent in the Church are acts respecting the sacraments, therefore can it more especially be said that order is a rank disposing one to some sacramental act.

b. About Order Taken Specifically

20. From this, as it were, general idea could inquiry be made into the more special idea of order, as we are here speaking of order; but on this point there is a certain controversy.

21. For those [Bonaventure, Ps-Isidorian Decretals, Ps.-Alcuin, Lombard, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Richard of Middleton] who posit that the priesthood is the simply first order, denying that episcopacy is an order, would, from the fact that the priesthood is a rank disposing one to the consecrating of the Eucharist as to the more excellent act agreeing to that rank (and the idea of all the inferior ranks ought to be in their order to the first rank) - these say that the fitting description of order would be that it is ‘a preeminent rank in the Church, disposing one by congruity to some act pertaining to the consecration or dispensation of the Eucharist’.

22. Others [Godfrey of Vendome, William of Auxerre], who say that episcopacy is an order, because some rank belongs to it in the Church that does not belong to the priest, do not restrict the idea of order to the fact that it disposes one to an eminent act pertaining to the Eucharist, but in general that it is an eminent rank in the Church disposing one to carrying out some sacramental act. And in this way the power that episcopacy adds over priesthood has regard to some sacramental act, namely to confirm and to confer orders, which acts are proper to bishops.