John Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus was a Scottish Franciscan and the most distinguished scholar of his day at Oxford. His teaching survives in his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, glosses on Aristotle, and disputations. He opposed Thomas Aquinas on almost every point and was called “the subtle doctor.” His detractors coined the word “dunce” from his name.1
Timothy George explains that Aquinas came close to limiting God’s freedom by “entrapping him in his own system,” and that Scotus reacted “by positing the primacy of God’s will.” An act is virtuous because God commands it. With William of Ockham he made great use of the distinction between God’s absolute power and his ordained power.2
Before Scotus, most theologians, including Anselm, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, held that Mary was free from sin after her conception. Scotus was the first major advocate of her Immaculate Conception:
I say that God was able to effect it that Mary was never in original sin.3 John Duns Scotuson the Immaculate Conception
His Legacy
Scotus argued only that his view was probable, but in 1854 Pope Pius IX defined it as dogma: that Mary, “in the first instant of her conception … was preserved free from all stain of original sin.” His emphasis on the will of God also helped prepare the late medieval theology of covenant and merit against which the young Luther struggled. The Reformers had little patience with the subtle doctor; in 1521 Zürich ordered that preaching be “from Holy Scripture, to the exclusion of Scotus and Thomas and suchlike.”4
