Franciscan Studies

THE TEACHING OF JOHN DUNS SCOTUS ON THE NATURE OF THE DIVINE MATERNITY Jesus Christ, true God, true man, was born from the Virgin Mary, deriving "from her his sacred body born according to the flesh and perfected by an intelligent soul to which the Word of God was hypostatically united,"1 and therefore, "if the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary is God, certainly she who bore Him should rightly and deservingly be called Mother of God. If the person of Jesus Christ is one and divine, surely Mary is not only Mother of Christ but she should bs called Dsipara, Theotocos. She who was acclaimed ty Elizabsth, her relative, 'mother of my Lord,' who is acknowledged by the martyr Ignatius to have brought forth God; She from whom Tertullian says God was born, we can all venerate as the beloved Mother of God, her whom the eternal Godhead favored with the fullness of grace and honored with so much dignity."2 Mary, then, is the Mother of God. But how is she the Mother of God ? More specifically : what is the nature of Mary's causality in the process of Christ's physical generation? This basic question in Mariology, some of whose phases continue to divide modern theologians, was expounded at length by not a few of the Scholastics. Perhaps none of them was more aware of its importance and ramifications than John Duns Scotus, whose original and penetrating treatment of the problem seems to us to deserve a fair hearing. Scotus, for example, held this position: Mary's role was an active one in the generation of the God-Man, a position, so it would seem, modern science upholds. At once we are in the midst of a fascinating controversy since St. Thomas and the great majority of the scholastics maintained that Mary's role was a passive one. Scotus, of course, did not write a treatise on Mary as such. His mariological teachings must be gleaned from his other theological works, for example, the Opus Oxoniense and the Opus Parisiense. Fr. Charles Balk, O. F. M., has done just this, gathering the relevant materials 1 Pius XI, Encyclical Lux veritatis, Dec. 25, 1931; in W. Doheny, J. Kelly (Editors), Papal Documents on Mary, Milwaukee, 1954, P- x742 Loc cit. 396 Duns Scotus: Divine Maternity397 together in an excellent critical edition, which is a basic source for the Mariology of John Duns Scotus.3 What, then, has Scotus to say with regard to the maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary ? Turning to his Opus Oxoniense, which treats of the Blessed Virgin at greater length than do the other works and which includes, substantially, all that is contained in those other works. Scotus asks: Was the Blessed Virgin truly the mother of God and man, the mother of Christ ? He treats the question in his customaiy manner, setting down various objections to the doctrines proposed in the question. These having been answered and, a path having been cleared, as it were, the positive teaching on the matter is presented. On the question "whether the Blessed Virgin was truly the mother of God and man," Scotus proposes the following objections against the divine maternity. i. Virginity and maternity are contraries. They cannot exist et one and the same time in one and the same subject. Aristotle proves this in his Metaphysics. It would seem, then, that the Blessed Virgin cannot be the mother of God. 2.Scotus quotes St. John Damascene as follows: By no means do we say that the Blessed Virgin is the "Genitrix Christi." The Subtle Doctor lists this specific quotation as an objection. 3.Mothers have an active part to play in the generation of children. If they have only a passive role, Adam was the mother of Eve and the dust of the earth was the mother of Adam. 4.The notions of activity and passivity are mutually correlative. If one is present so is the other. Now, the relationship between mother and father is the same as that between activity and passivity. They are mutually correlative. Christ, as a man, had no father and, therefore, he had no mother. 5.In all generation...