8 November—The Monitor’s election geniuses haven’t had a chance to digest yesterday’s still unofficial returns or recover from the shock of the amuse-gueule, so today’s subject will be dunces. Of course.

Dunces, as everybody knows, are dull-witted, stupid people, blockheads who show no capacity for or are simply slow at learning. But why are they called dunces? For that we must look back to Johannes Duns Scotus, commonly known these days as Duns the Scot. We’ll go with JDS.

John Duns was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar (OFM), likely born in Duns, Berwickshire, in 1265 or 1266. (It was the practice in the day to call a person by his Christian name followed by his place of origin. Scotus merely means he was a Scotsman.)

JDS was beatified by Pope John Paul II (a.k.a. J2P2, a serial beatifier) only in 1993 and his feast day is 8 November, because he’s known to have died on that (this) day in 1308. Old calendar, of course, but it’s a pilpul not worth quibbling about.

Don’t ask why JDS hasn’t been sanctified or canonized, just accept that the Roman Catholic Church has its reasons that ultimately boil down to politics—because that’s what religion is really all about. One of the blessed Scotsman’s claims to fame is his spirited defense of Mary’s Immaculate Conception—that she had been conceived and lived her life without sin, not that she was a virgin. So you’d have figured that when Pope Pius IX made the Immaculate Conception church dogma in 1854, he’d have done something to grease the skids for JDS’s theological advancement. But figure again.

It’s ironic that dummies are called after JDS, because he was a brilliant university professor, philosopher, and theologian—a renaissance man before the Renaissance. Along with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure (baptized as John), and William of Ockham (of razor fame), JDS is considered one of the most important Christian thinkers of the High Middle Ages. Unlike JDS, Aquinas and Bonaventure are full-fledged saints; like JDS, Bonaventure and Ockham were Franciscans (Aquinas was a Dominican); like JDS, Ockham was an Oxford man.

The evolution of Duns to dunce may very well be due to JDS’s brilliance, which could have encouraged his rather less brilliant students and followers to resort to embarrassing pedantry just to show off or try to cover up their own stupidity. That’s especially easy when you’re blethering about philosophy and theology, but it never stops any of us; and it often makes people think the pedant is a horse’s ass—or a dunce.

Oops . . .