Blessed John Duns Scotus is celebrated by the Church on Nov. 8 as a great exemplar of a maxim that he himself popularized: “If God wills an end, he must will the means.”
He was a great theologian who left an enormous theological legacy that drew Catholics from the 1300s to St. Elizabeth Ann Seton to today into his intellectual orbit.
Duns Scotus is very well known, but the details of his life are scarce.
He was born in Duns, near Edinburgh, Scotland, in the winter of 1265-1266. He became a Franciscan and was ordained a priest in 1291, in his 20s.
His great works bear the names of the places he taught: The Works of Oxford (Opus Oxoniense) the Cambridge lectures (Reporatio Cambrigensis) and the Paris lectures (Reportata Parisiens).
He left Paris for a life of exile when he was faced with a king who demanded that he sign a document opposing the Pope. Centuries later, Pope Benedict XVI praised him for leaving Paris instead of signing, saying:
“Many times in the history of the Church believers have encountered hostility and even persecution as a result of their faithfulness to Christ, to the Church and to the Pope. We admire these Christians because they teach us to safeguard our faith in Christ and our communion with the Successor of Peter — and thus with the universal Church — as a precious gift.”
It’s a lesson we would see repeated centuries later by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who left the Protestant spiritual home of her childhood in New York to associate herself with the Church she discovered in Italy, telling her congregation days before her death in Emmitsburg: “Be children of the Church, be children of the Church.”
Duns Scotus was known as the “Cantor of the Incarnate Word” because of his dedication to the central mystery of the faith.
Scotus spent a lifetime meditating on the ramifications of the Second Person of the Trinity, God himself, becoming truly human in Christ Jesus. In fact, Scotus was convinced that even if Adam and Eve had never sinned, God would have become man. Wrote Scotus:
“To think that God would have renounced this work if Adam had not sinned would be completely irrational! I maintain, therefore that the Fall was not the cause of Christ’s predestination and that — even if no one had fallen, neither angel nor man — Christ in this hypothetical situation would have been predestined for the same fate nonetheless.”
For Scotus, God planned to become man all along: What changed with original sin was the need to redeem us by his death and resurrection. Like St. Francis, whom he followed as a Franciscan, Scotus saw the manger, and not just the cross, as a key sign of Christ’s love. But he also reflected at length on the power of the suffering and death of Christ.
All of this led to Scotus’s intense devotion to the Eucharist, the continuation of the incarnation of Christ in space and time that he instituted the night before he died.
Because of his dedication to the incarnation, Scotus is also known as the “Defender of the Immaculate Conception.”
When Scotus entered religious life, popular piety long wanted to say that Mary was free of sin from the very moment of her conception; that she had no part in the original sin passed on by Adam and Eve. Christians came to that conclusion because of the praise given to the Blessed Mother by the early Fathers of the Church and by the New Testament itself in Revelation 12.
Theologians such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure had been working to express Mary’s situation in theological terms. The insurmountable obstacle to proclaiming Mary immaculately conceived, though, was the indispensable saving act of Christ: How could she be preserved from sin if her son had not yet redeemed mankind?
In Scotus’s view, God — who exists outside of time and space — could preserve Mary from original sin by applying the merits of Jesus Christ during her conception. His argument of “preventive redemption” solved the problem, and was later used by Pope Pius IX to declare the Immaculate Conception with these words:
“The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”
Ultimately, that is the message of Scotus’s life: It is a testament to the power of grace.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s life shows how later generations imbibed as first principles a basic understanding of the faith that Scotus helped develop.
Scotus said “If God wills an end, he must will the means,” and Mother Seton echoed those words, saying: “We know certainly that our God calls us to a holy life. We know that he gives us every grace, every abundant grace; and though we are so weak of ourselves, this grace is able to carry us through every obstacle and difficulty.”
Her path to holiness led through her devotion to the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was extremely significant to her that all three of these realities converged on the day of her First Holy Communion on the Feast of the Annunciation.
St. Elizabeth Ann was also certain that God, outside of time, is not bound by our categories. “We must often draw the comparison between time and eternity,” she wrote. “This is the remedy of all our troubles. How small will the present moment appear when we enter that great ocean.”
St. John Paul II said that Blessed Duns Scotus was not just a towering of intellect, he was something more.
He “presents himself not only with the acuteness of his ingenuity and the extraordinary ability to penetrate into the mystery of God,” wrote the Polish pope, “but also with the persuasive force of his holiness of life which makes him, for the Church and for all humanity, a Master of thought and life.”
Scotus died on Nov. 8, 1308, and his German gravesite is adorned with a poem, in Latin, that says:
Scotland brought me forth.
England sustained me.
France taught me.
Cologne holds me.
It’s a hymn to the “small-c” catholicity of the Church, which exists as one institution all over the world, and thanks in part to Scotus, you could write a similar epitaph for St. Elizabeth Ann Seton:
New York brought me forth.
America sustained me.
Italy taught me.
Emmitsburg holds me.
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
Image Credit: Wikicommons
Click here to view all the Seton Reflections.