The Infinite Dignity

of the Immaculate Conception, according to Scotus, comes into being as a consequence of the nature of Christ's work of redemption. A snippet:

...The place to begin for understanding Scotus' account of our Lady is with his account of our Lord. There is, indeed, an intimate connection between Scotus' views on the Incarnation and his theory of the Immaculate Conception since he maintains that our Lady needs to be immaculate in order to [enable Christ to] fulfill Christ's own role as perfect Mediator. But Christ's role as Mediator and Savior is one that is itself contingent, since Scotus claims, contrary to most of his contemporaries, that Christ would have come even if Adam had not sinned and, thus, the glory of Christ's human nature is the essential and unconditional goal of the Incarnation, not simply the reparation for sin.

In the different versions of Scotus' commentary on Sent. III d. 7, the Ordinatio and the Parisian lectures, the same question is raised, "Whether Christ was predestined to be the Son of God." (Utrum Christus praedestinatus sit esse Filius Dei). Predestination is understood by Scotus as the foreordaining of someone or something to glory. Glory is, then, the primary end of any predestination, whether Christ's predestination, or that of any other person.

Yet, the glory of Christ is wholly, indeed infinitely, unique; the glory of Christ's soul far transcends the glory of any other human or angel. This alone hints, to Scotus' mind, that his contemporaries are incorrect to assign human redemption as the chief and main motivation behind the Incarnation. Christ's coming as Redeemer is, the Subtle Doctor admits, rooted in the fact of Adam's sin and its consequences; nor would Christ have had a body subject to death and suffering if Adam had persisted in the way of righteousness.³ But Christ's coming as such, is ordered to the glory of human nature in Christ's person; and Scotus thinks implausible, any view making such a great good depend upon the lesser good of the Redemption and glory of the elect:

Nor is it probable that the highest good in things only finds its occasion solely on account of the lesser good.⁴

The systematic context for all of Scotus' marian teaching is found in two key ideas: Christ's Incarnation expresses a beauty and metaphysical perfection that could have occurred (and perhaps would have occurred) even apart from human sinfulness; and the mode and specificity of the Incarnation springs from the fact of human sinfulness and the human need for salvation. What these two points combine to mean is that God becomes incarnated so as to save us in a way that expresses the depth of the divine love for us; the order displayed in salvation history, moreover, reflects that love and its beauty. God could have, after all, simply willed to save us without any suffering by his divine Son. The very contingency of the divine will ad extra means that the historical unfolding of the story of our salvation expresses both a narrative and a metaphysically significant sequence...

What confronts Scotus, then, are the following challenges: 1) how to explain Mary's need for the redemptive act of Christ in spite of Her lacking all sin in the order of time, both original and actual; 2) how to account for Her not contracting original sin despite the fact that Her body was brought into being in the ordinary manner; and 3) how to deal with the technical issue of how the Immaculate Conception is even possible in light of what I shall call St. Bernard's problem...

Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception!