Fired France for Mary Without Spot’: John Duns Scotus and the Immaculate Conception

Chapter 7 ‘Fired France for Mary without Spot’: John Duns Scotus and the Immaculate Conception

Mary Beth Ingham

In his poem Duns Scotus’ Oxford, Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins captures the tensions of the dynamic scholarly climate in the Paris debates of the early fourteenth century, wherein John Duns Scotus defended for the third time his position on the Immaculate Conception. His defense ‘fired up’ opposi- tion against the bold Franciscan assertion of human innocence. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that Scotus’s radical defense of Mary’s purity resulted in the Franciscan Order’s decision to send him to Cologne to open the Lec- torate School there.1 The year following Scotus’s death, in a 1309 Quodlibetal disputation in Paris, secular Master John of Pouilly attacked the argument and deemed it heretical. Despite the reactions of his contemporaries and subsequent Masters,

Scotus initiated a trend that would never die out but would continue to grow until the ‘new theologians,’ as they were first called, would even- tually outnumber the old, and the Feast of December 8 would become simply that of the Immaculate Conception and the Marian prerogative it honored would some four centuries later be defined as a dogma of faith.2

While the Church of 1308 may not have been prepared to acknowledge the Marian prerogative, declared as dogma in 1854,3 the Church in 1988 was happily

1 André Callebaut, ‘Le maîtrise du Bx. Jean Duns Scot en 1305; son depart de Paris en 1307 du- rant la preparation du procès des Templiers,’ in Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 21, 214– 239. See also Thomas Williams, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge, 2003), 6. 2 Allan B. Wolter, ofm, John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary (St. Bonaventure, NY, 2000), Introduction, 8. 3 The bull Ineffabilis Deus, issued by Pius ix on December 8, 1854, declared that ‘the Most Blessed Virgin Mary at the first instant of her conception was by a singular grace and privi- lege of Almighty God, in consideration of the merits of Christ Jesus, the Savior of the human race, preserved immune from every stain of original guilt; that this was revealed by God and therefore is firmly and constantly to be believed by all of the faithful.’ Heinrich Denzinger,

Fired France for Mary without Spot 175 ready to take this position even further, suggesting that Mary offers the model for human dignity, indeed the ‘most complete expression of this dignity and vocation.’4 In what follows, we consider Scotus’s proposed solution to the question of Mary’s innocence insofar as it draws upon the broader Franciscan intuitions surrounding human dignity and salvation history. His solution emerges not simply from the perspective of Marian devotion, so common to Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures, which informed the practice of the medieval Church in England. Rather, in Scotist thought, Mary epitomizes the very essence of what it means to be a human person in light of the Incarnation. This means that his opponents were not simply objecting to the cultural invasion of English piety. They understood only too well what it would mean to affirm that there was (at least) one human being who was not subject to Original Sin.

1 Honoring Mary

The celebration of the ‘sanctity of Mary’ knows a long history within Christian- ity. Early apocryphal texts, such as ‘The Gospel of the Birth of Mary’ and ‘The Protoevangelion of James,’5 fueled popular piety and practice. In these texts, the annunciation to Sts. Anne and Joachim was identified as the moment of Mary’s sanctification in the womb. Her in utero sanctification was likened to that of John the Baptist and the prophet Jeremiah, both held to be sanctified before their birth. Originally the feast that celebrated this focused on St. Anne; as it entered the West, the focus soon turned to a celebration of Mary herself in England and parts of France. Prior to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Saxon Christians celebrated the Feast of Mary’s Conception, yet there is no evidence that this was a celebration of an Immaculate Conception. With the Norman invasion, many episcopal sees and abbacies were transferred by William the Conqueror to his own ecclesiasti- cal representatives. The celebration of the feast was subsequently suppressed in many dioceses. While suppressed, it would not be eliminated, and Saxons continued to celebrate this extremely popular feast, supported by miracles and

Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum (Freiburg in Breisgau, 1911) #1641 (1502), 440. 4 John Paul ii, Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year), 1988, n. 5 (Boston, 1988), 21. 5 The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. James K. Elliott (Oxford, 1993) and The Other Gospels, ed. Ron Cameron (Philadelphia, 1982), 109–121.