Is a “Communion of Subjects” Plausible? Positioning Berry’s Conception Within a Scotist Order of Freedom

Although Thomas Berry proclaimed the universe to be “a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects,” a robust case for pan-animal communion has yet to be made. While we can recognize a natural basis for communion in animals’ subjective interactivity, a merely transactional logic governs the temporal milieu. We can incorporate the existential freedom which underlies communion, however, by reference to the medieval theological voluntarism of John Duns Scotus. Scotus’s Triune God is a self-organizing—and so free—circulation of love. Correspondingly, God founds each creature on its own existential freedom. In this way, God accords it the possibility of gifting its own self in a friendship relation which cultivates some other’s own agency. In light of Scotus, then, a pan-animal subjective interactivity does indeed hold the potential to progress toward communion: A community of unique individuals pursuing, in freedom, an emancipatory love for self and other.