FOUR QUESTIONS ON MARY - Franciscan Institute Publications

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inTroducTion Scotus’s principal writings on the Blessed Virgin are found in his various commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Since they spanned the entire field of theology, Lombard’s four books constituted the official textbook a bachelor of theology preparing for regency as a Master used to order his lectures on theology. Before becoming Master, Scotus commented on Lombard, first at Oxford and later at Paris 1 and, on the basis of these two sets of lectures, almost completed a third and official version for distribution to the booksellers before his premature death in 1308. Known as his Ordinatio, this is Scotus’s most comprehensive theological work, and is the source of these four questions on Mary. 2 They are all of some historical and theological interest. The first on the predestination of Christ marks a turning point in the theological literature on the motive of the Incarnation. Unlike many of his predecessors, Scotus was not primarily concerned with what God might have done in another order, for instance, if Adam had not sinned. He began with the actual order, with the fact of the Incarnation. What 1 There is also evidence Scotus lectured at Cambridge on part of Lombard’s work. 2 Since these questions are all from the last two books of Ordinatio, as yet unavailable in the Vatican edition, for the Latin texts in the present volume we used two earlier critical editions made by Carl Balic, O.F.M., founder of the Bibliotheca Mariana Medii Aevi and later head of the Scotistic Commission editing the new Vatican Opera omnia. The first is a relatively complete edition of all of Scotus’s extant writings on Mary, entitled Scoti Doctor Mariani Theologiae Elementa quae ad fidem codicum manuscriptorum edidit Carolus Balić, O.F.M. (Sibenik in Jugoslavia: Ex typographia Kacic, 1933). We have used it for the first and last two questions. The second is entitled Ioannes Duns Scotus Doctor Immaculatae Conceptionis [Bibliotheca Immaculatae Conceptionis n. 5] (Romae: Academia Mariana Internationalis, 1954), and contains a new edition of those pertaining to the Immaculate Conception, done for the Marian Year of 1954, commemorating the centenary of the Bull Ineffabilis Deus of Pius IX, declaring this prerogative of Mary a dogma of Catholic faith. We have used this for all references to Scotus’s questions on the Immaculate Conception.
John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary was its primary purpose? Put negatively, Scotus rejects the redemption as the fundamental reason for Christ’s coming. The glory of the souls he redeemed cannot compare with the glory of Christ’s own human nature. Hence their restoration to grace and glory cannot have been the primary reason why Christ’s soul was created, assumed by the Word, supernaturalized by grace. Positively stated, Scotus held that humanly speaking God first intended Christ as king and center of the universe. Only secondarily, so to speak, did God conceive Christ as redeemer of fallen man. But if the incarnation was designed as a means of ennobling human nature, it must involve somehow both sexes and that meant the God-man must have a human mother. Hence it is not surprising that in its full development, Scotus’s doctrine was extended further by the Scotist school to include Mary as the next most perfect of God’s works, and is cited by its proponents as the fundamental reason for Mary’s Immaculate Conception. 3 The second and most important of these four questions shows how Scotus solved the radical theological objections of his day to this prerogative of Mary. 4 The way in which the Immaculate Conception came to be explicitly recognized and eventually defined by Pius IX in the Ineffabilis Deus as a dogma of faith has long interested theologians. It figures largely in their theories of the role played by the sensus fidelium or the living faith of the common Christian in the development of doctrine. In this case that faith centered on a feast to honor St. Ann’s conception of Mary. If John the Baptist was cleansed of sin in Elizabeth’s womb, what of Mary who would be even more intimately connected with the redeemer? The apocryphal gospels 5 already drew parallels between 3 A. B. Wolter, “Duns Scotus on the Primacy and Personality of Christ,” in Franciscan Theology, ed. Damian McElrath, Franciscan Sources, No. 1 (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1980), 140-41. 4 See New Catholic Encyclopedia article on the “Immaculate Conception” by E. D. O’Conner (vol. 7, 378-82). 5 See especially “The Gospel of the Birth of Mary” and the “Protoevangelion,” in The Apocryphal Books of the New Testament (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1901). The angelic apparitions to St. Ann and Joachim recorded there parallel those described in the Gospel of St. Luke of Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, and these miraculous circumstances like those surrounding the birth of the Baptist, whose conception was also called holy 2
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FOUR QUESTIONS ON MARY - Franciscan Institute Publications

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