Researched by the Ignaria Editorial Team · Published 2026-03-12
Aquinas and Duns Scotus represent the two poles of the medieval debate on divine intellect and will. For Aquinas, divine intellect is foundational: in God, the one who understands, the means of understanding, and the thing understood are identical — a self-sufficient intellectual act from which will flows necessarily. For Scotus, the faculty of love (will) is more noble than either the active or possible intellect, and the divine will is the immediate principle of every act directed outward. Where Aquinas saw intellect as providing the ordered form that will enacts, Scotus argued that intellect produces objects in intelligible being but will freely elicits them — making God a free rather than merely natural cause. This distinction shapes their differing accounts of divine freedom, natural law, and the basis of moral obligation.
What the primary sources show
"But the divine essence is the proper intelligible form of the divine intelligence, and is proportioned to it: for in God these three are one, that which understands, that whereby it understands, and that which is understood" — Aquinas on the intellect's self-identical act in God, the foundation of his intellectualist account of divine causation.
"We should rather be said to see in God willing or in God in so far as He is will, for the divine will is the immediate principle of every act directed towards something outside Himself" — Scotus inverting Aquinas's hierarchy: will, not intellect, is the immediate principle of divine action ad extra.