"[the angels and "court of heaven"] viderunt et vident divinam essentiam visione intuitiva et etiam faciali, nulla mediante creatura in ratine obiecti visi se habente, sed divina essenta immediate se nude, clare et aperte eis ostendente, quodque sic videntes eadem divina essentia perfruuntur, nec non quod ex tali visione et fruitione eroum animae, qui iam decessertun, sunt vere beatae et habent vitam et requiem aeternam, et etiam illorum, qui postea decedent, eamdem divinam videbunt essentiam, ipsaque perfruentur ante iudicium generale; ac quod visio huiusmodi divinae essentiae eiusque fruitio actus fidei et spei in eis evacuant, prout fides et spes propriae theologicae sunt virtutes; quodque postquam inchoata fuerit vel erit talis intuitiva ac facialis visio et fruitio in eisdem, eadem visio et fruitio sine aliqua intercisione seu evacuatione pradicateae visionis et fruitionis continuata extitit et continuabitur usque ad finale iudicium et ex tunc usque in sempiternum"
Now the point of all this was to resolve whether the dead see God after death or not, and the document does define that the blessed dead enjoy intuitive cognition of the divine essence (sorry, seventh-day adventists, you lose). By saying this may be a "Scotist" dogma I am not saying that it is necessarily opposed to Thomism. Thomas if I recall my recent exam question correctly, thinks that the divine essence becomes a form for the intellect; so it is also direct. But Thomas does not use the term "intuitive" which, while not coined by Scotus, did historically seem to explode in the extent of its usage due to his employment of it. By this I mean that after Scotus, discussions of intuitive and abstractive cognition became standard fare in the prologues to Sentence commenaries, though he does not talk about intuitive cognition at all in the prologue to his Parisian Reportatio, instead develops a complicated and controversial usage of abstractive cognition. Essentially, Scotus thinks intuitive cognition is the direct cognition of something qua existing in the here and now. Abstractive cognition "abstracts" from the here and now, and is mediated by an intelligible species. Returning to Benedictus Deus, then, Benedict XII is using a technical term known have been developed in its "modern", 14th century sense by Scotus.
Of course, this does not exactly constitute a dogma...the dogma is that there is a vision of God after death that is intuitively immediate. The Scotistic part is the manner of the vision. The tricky part of all this is that intuitive cognition is a mode of cognition naturally had by the intellect (its manner of functioning in this life is unclear in Scotus and highly disputed by scholars). While this may be logically distinct from his notion of being as the object of the intellect, in that context he denies the existence of the lumen gloriae, which if you, gentle readers, recall from an earlier post, apparently is dogma [though as the affirmation of it was directed against the Beghards and not a scholastic, and as I read an article the other day saying certain other parts of the council of Vienne weren't considered dogma, I am entirely unsure of the status of that bit on the lumen gloriae]; but, all is not lost, for he says that God is maximally intelligible, and maximally light, and so therefore does seem to shine on the intellect (this bit is from Ord. III where he talks about the knowledge of Christ). But the whole point of the lumen gloriae is that the intellect of itself can't see God and needs to be elevated by the divine light [I am reminded of a recent entry on energetic processions in which Perry I think lamented some intellectual propterty issues he was having...in the area of Scotistic studies and 14th century philosophy, the field is so wide open that I gladly here give the status questionis of an article someone could write]. Such are my rambling thoughts of the day. Now its time for bed so I'll sign off now. enjoy
