Page:Duns Scotus, defender of the Immaculate Conception (1955).djvu/41



HEOLOGIANS generally hold that though Mary was actually exempt from original sin, she incurred the need or debt of contracting it, because otherwise her Immaculate Conception would not be the effect of atonement. We may distinguish a twofold debt, proximate and remote. The remote debt merely signifies membership in the human race, based on the ordinary mode of human propagation. The proximate debt involves inclusion in the willful act by which Adam, as representative of the human race, rejected the grace of God and implicated human nature in sin. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is sufficiently safeguarded by admitting that Mary was subject to the remote debt. Some Scotist Friars, e. g., John of Bassolis (d. 1347), and Angelus Volpi (d. 1646), hold that Mary did not even incur this remote debt, since they believe her to be included in the primacy of Christ’s predestination.

Duns Scotus, as is well known, defends the primacy of the predestination of Christ; in other words, the view that our Lord would have become man even if Adam had not sinned. According to the Subtle Doctor, Christ, the God-Man, was predestined first and absolutely in the divine plan of creation. To say that he had no other purpose in becoming man than the redemption of the human race would be equivalent to making the divine predestination of Christ the Son of God to glory, dependent upon Adam and his foreseen fall into sin. Such an assumption 25