Thomas M. Ward > Quotes

“According to Scotus, this is yet another way in which God’s thoughts are not like our own. We can only think about haecceity in a general way, as a theoretical entity posited to explain the phenomenon of individuality. Your uniqueness, at least in this life, is hidden from us, behind all those general characteristics that might help us to pick you out in a lineup of suspects but do not explain your individuality. God, on the other hand, knows your haecceity exactly as it is. His decision to create you, then, is not a decision to create a human being at such and such a time, in such and such a place, with such and such genetic information, having a proclivity for reading books on Duns Scotus, and so on, but a decision to create you, this thing he has been thinking for all eternity.”
― Thomas M. Ward, Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus