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«SED HOC NON CAPIO»: LO QUE DUNS ESCOTO NO ENTENDÍA 605 SUMMARY: The philosophy of Aristotle got eclipsed with the arrival of Christian– ity, which, in its need to rationalise faith, adapted itself better to the Platonic orienta– tion, decisively reinforced by St Augustine. In the 13 th century it encountered a new incursion of Aristotelianism in the university lecture halls. Such an entry was not entirely peaceful. Its theories difficult to be reconciled with the Christian doctrine were accepted in their rigid heterodoxy by sorne masters of the faculty of Arts, faithful to the interpretation of Averroes. Albert the Great and above all Thomas of Aquinas sought to adapt critically the philosophical values of Aristotelianism not contrary to the tenets of Christian faith. The conservative reaction of the Augustinian school placed on alert the ecclesiastical authority itself, which directly condemning Latín Averroism, inter– dicted sorne of the affirmations of Thomas. In this confused situation of the scholastic masters of the close of the 1Jtl 1 century appears Duns Scotus, who with bis extraord– inary intellectual capacity, looked for a synthesis which puts in the right place the exigencies of reason and the data of faith. The Aristotelian God, absolute and necessary, alíen to every relation to the changing world, is contradicted by the Christian thought which sees him going out of himself by the act of creation of the contingent world. But, according to Thomas and bis followers, the action of Goc!, eternal as bis essence, was continuing to be necessary in the immutable God. Contingency ancl freec!om of choice remainecl for tl1e createc! beings. Scoh1s did not think this discon– formity between the necessary cause and the contingent effect, between the necessary knowledge of the contingent realties. Showing how contingency ancl freedom of man is explicable only from the contingency and freedom in the same divine act is Scotus' decisive and original contribution to the history of Christian thought. Arútotelianism complicates the Augustinian vision. Contingenry as da!t1m anterior to experience. Whether God maintains science sure and infállible and _faresees fitture contingents. Divine 1JJill as ftrst cause of contingenry. Intrinsic or !Jnchronic contingenry of free act in the Divine 1vill and in that of man. On the necessity of Divine kno1vledge. Immutability and contingenry... are the points stuc!iec! here in order to reach the conclusion that contingency, like freedom, is a perfection of the Divine act which creates the world contingent and man free.