TheRelational Teleology of Francis Mayronis

Thesis advisor: Eileen C. Sweeney ; Francis Mayronis was a Franciscan friar and one of John Duns Scotus’s primary students; he became a master of theology in 1323. His Commentary on the Sentences is preserved in more than 100 medieval manuscripts. In recent literature, Mayronis’s work has received considerable attention, especially in his cognitive theory and metaphysics. However, his ethical work has generally received very little attention. Mayronis occupies an important place in the early fourteenth century’s Franciscan intellectual tradition, particularly in the onset of the Scotist tradition. Mayronis not only creatively explicated and developed Scotus’s thoughts in his writings but also actively engaged in conversation with Peter Auriol and William Ockham as the “first” Scotist.My dissertation is organized to present Mayronis’s relational teleology in his notion of beatitude as the enjoyment of God. While generally maintaining a volitional agent-centered perspective that an agent or efficient cause is not determined to seek the good, Mayronis argues for the certitude of the ultimate end of the blessed and sees God, i.e., the final cause, as the total cause of the end. Mayronis harmonizes these seemingly contradictory causal powers of the final and efficient causes with the notion of habitus. First, Mayronis affirms the traditional view of habitus as an active power. In the present life, the free will gradually acquires a habitus toward the good through its own actions, and in heaven, grace or charity, i.e., supernatural habitus, is infused in the will of the blessed so that the will is eventually necessitated by the good. However, he could not maintain this position, i.e., the will’s habitus determines the will’s character, without abandoning Scotus’s emphasis on the will’s free aspect over its natural aspect since habitus is natural, though it is second nature. Hence, he develops a novel story of relation that completely replaces the role of habitus: God freely accepts someone due to a relational change ...