Generally, if the topic of Scotistic Mariology comes up, the Immaculate Conception is the first thing to come to mind. The Subtle Doctor’s defense of the position in Paris back in the twelfth century continues to be remembered to this day, as he fended off detailed and nuanced critiques on the subject by Dominican teachers. Not to say that the Dominicans should be blamed then for being wrong; after all, it wouldn’t be for another five and a half centuries until the Church definitively and dogmatically weighed in on the issue—siding with Scotus.

In the wake of Vatican I, however, debates over Mariology understandably ceased to include the Immaculate Conception. The Church’s dogmatic ruling put it beyond the survey of theological inquiry; if you believed that Our Lady had received original sin from her parents, then you were, by definition, a heretic who had positioned himself outside of the Church. There are those who try to defame her by suggesting exactly this, but all of them, without exception, are operating outside of the Church’s institutions. It takes a more sinister sort of guile to live inside the walls and erect a fifth column. What exactly it entails, however, such as not suffering labor pains, apparently eludes some more modern scholarship.

During the middle of the last century, such a fifth column was in full force. It survives—having metastasized like a cancer—to this day, and it pervades most of the Church’s hierarchy and its institutions. Where attacks on the Church can be found, attacks on who the Church is and What it serves are always found alongside them. For our purposes here, we’re looking more at the former than at the latter. Who is the highest ranking member of the Church Triumphant if not Our Lady, Queen of Heaven?

This attack must be more insidious than upon a matter of hard dogma, but it must also be clever enough to not sound openly crass. For it to be appropriately novel to the age, it has to buy into modern notions of scientific theory—and, in a pattern that has seen troubling results for the Church, it should elevate those naturalistic presumptions above whatever traditionally-accepted precepts already exist within the Magisterium. And it has to attack Our Lady in such a way as to cast suspicion over her status as the mother of God—either by attacking motherhood, or by attacking God.

So, with all this in mind, the target has become the virgin birth, and more specifically, what constitutes birth, true motherhood, and how it could have occurred in the first place. It is against those who attack this doctrine that Fr. John Lawrence Polis, FI wrote his book on the subject, The Virgin Shall Give Birth, expanding on a doctoral thesis of the same topic. In it, he begins with the Church’s views on the subject from the Church Fathers, addresses the attacks of the twentieth century, and then expounds in some detail on the related doctrines of Blessed John Duns Scotus and the prominent members of the Scotistic school. The book is as much a handbook on the doctrine of the virgin birth’s tradition as it is a foray into Scotist Mariology in detail.

Virginity and the Birth In General

There are several important points to consider about the virgin birth, as Fr. Polis elucidates throughout the first section. Chief among these is the nature of virginity; all Church Fathers, and indeed, any reasonable Christian, held to the notion of spiritual virginity as something distinct from, albeit related to, the physical state of a young woman. There are instances of physical harm or accident that can render the latter broken but without doing injury to the spiritual purity of the person in question. Likewise, it’s unjust to consider the victims of force to have lost a spiritual virginity in any such manner as those who have willfully abandoned it. This does not mean, however, that they prioritized spiritual virginity such that they abandoned any notion of its physical counterpart; on the contrary, both were important.

If we are to hold to this as it applies to the virgin birth, that Our Lady’s physical purity remained intact before, during, and after the birth of the Savior, then we stumble exactly the reason why we must presume the presence of a miracle. Indeed, this is and has been the position of the Church for two thousand years. However, those who rely on the latter interpretation, that the virginity in question is purely spiritual, seem able to resolve the basic aspects of what the doctrine entails: that “Mary’s motherhood” was “true, active, and natural.”¹

Fr. Polis begins his work with an introduction that positions it against the contemporary crisis in Mariology that affects the whole of the Church. The disagreement of some modern theologians with the traditional understanding of the virgin birth is not of a magnitude that warrants charges of heresy per se, but, as with many of the theological and liturgical revolutions of the twentieth century, the implications of their thought certainly don’t shy away from them. The denial of physical virginity, and the belief that only Our Lady’s spiritual sense of it was preserved, indicates a worldview that strays dangerously close to blasphemy or the world-denying errors of Gnosticism, to say nothing of how uninformed it is by the tradition of the Church.

But the attacks don’t stop there. Likewise is the topic presented “as if [Christ’s birth] were exactly like any other.”² Some, when responding to criticism over these attacks on tradition, such as Anthony Zimmerman, SVD, “wondered whether the Fathers, the Magisterium, and Calkins himself had adequately considered how detrimental this doctrine is to the divine maternity,” as, according to him, “‘unless Mary participated in active birthing, she could not give Jesus to us and the world.’”³ For Our Lady’s maternity to be true, and active, and natural, and also virginal presents a complicated balancing act of theology, natural sciences, miracles, and metaphysics that is not easily demonstrated. Some charity could be spared for those in error on this issue, were it not that the doctrine was already developed by the end of the middle ages and then, as with much of tradition, argued throughout the following centuries—perhaps not in the best faith—before getting buried beneath the empty weight of modernist preoccupations.

But this introduction brings us to the heart of what Fr. Polis seeks to argue. The traditional doctrine of the virgin birth asserts that Our Lady’s virginity was not just spiritual, but physical as well. It asserts that her virginity never ceased to be before, during, or after the birth. It asserts that the birth itself was miraculous, and due to her nature as having been preserved from the Fall, painless. It also asserts, contra some of the more famous medieval commentators, that it was active, beyond the sense with which we recognize Our Lady’s ability to participate in cooperation with Divine grace. Likewise was it natural, so long as we understand how that applies to a woman preserved from the damage to human nature incurred by the Fall. And, of course, it was a true birth and therefore fulfilled true maternity.

The Church Fathers

The early Church, it should be remembered, was in a near-constant state of doctrinal crisis for the first five or six centuries of its existence. A disproportionate number of the great writings of the earliest fathers take the form of either letters or polemics, with manuals beginning to proliferate in the third or fourth century. The reason for this is simple: even at the time of the Apostles, within living memory of the events at Calvary, there were those who sought to sow disorder and disunity among the Christians, as well as those who simply sought to use the religion for their own ends. This was the age of the great heresies. The polemics of the Church Fathers served a dialectical means of resolving the doctrinal confusion, providing at once both an historical record with which to back conciliar authority, as well as helpful theological insights for the average laity today.

This is why, when studying issues of doctrine, it’s important to begin first with Scripture, and then with their writings. Catholic dogmas are declared by the magisterium only when the doctrine in question has been sufficiently understood. Doctrines are not made up out of whole cloth; they are painstakingly discovered as they are gradually revealed. Sometimes this process takes a very long time, as was the case with the Immaculate Conception. There were both theological and metaphysical implications to the discovery that needed greater exploration, even if, to a great degree, it seems as though inter-order politics prevented the Holy See from reaching a declaration for half a millennium.

Fr. Polis begins his book with a short examination of the virgin birth as Scripture tells it. For this, there are only four passages of note: Isaiah 7:14, John 1:13, Luke 1:35, and Luke 2:7. Each of these passages are referenced with varying degrees of importance throughout the rest of the book.

Isaiah’s passage is quoted by both Matthew and Luke, and remains one of the famous passages in all of the Old Testament: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel”. This is a relatively self-explanatory passage that even basic Christian exegesis elucidates for the purposes of this volume, but Fr. Polis nonetheless gives it the look it deserves. He goes to particular lengths to explain the importance of the translation of almāh as ‘virgin’, noting especially how “the Septuagint had already translated ‘almāh with parthenos (unambiguously “virgin”) some two hundred years before Christ”, emphasizing that “it was not Christians who decided that Isaiah is talking about a virgin.”⁴ This is relevant due to controversies at the time that held the prophecy of Isaiah to be speaking only of a woman of marriageable age—which would of course make it difficult “to see how there could be any sign at all, much less an extraordinary sign of the kind Isaiah offers.”⁵

This is something of a brief example as to how Fr. Polis continues his exegesis throughout the first chapter. The attention committed to translations and historical usage, especially by the authorities and scriptural exegetes at the time, is used to clarify the doctrine as it developed throughout the early Church. Although there were disagreements with one another—and, in some cases, even with what would eventually be developed as Church doctrine—the Fathers were always in agreement with the general thrust of the doctrine in question.

An example of this Fr. Polis uses is St. Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the painlessness of the virgin birth. Although he asserted that it was indeed painless, the reasons for this were not so clear. He attributed it not to Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception specifically, but rather to a lack of concupiscence in the Savior’s conception:

St. Gregory of Nyssa sees a virginal birth as the necessary consequence of a virginal conception, as Mitterer did, but not for the simple reason that a birth is called virginal by reason of the conception, without regard to the circumstances of the birth. Rather he sees the pain of childbirth as necessarily connected with the pleasure of conception.⁶

Here, he connects the lack of pain and the lack of concupiscence to “apatheia in Greek: freedom from pathos, in Latin, passio, words that can refer to suffering to the passions.” St. Gregory, he writes, emphasizes the lack of pain in the virgin birth specifically for the “antithesis” required to resolve Eve’s transgression. In similar fashion, he draws on a homily of St. Gregory’s from Christmas, which emphasized Our Lady’s perpetual virginity:

Virginity clearly has a physical aspect if it is necessary to assert that it did not prevent the birth and was not destroyed by it. St. Gregory goes on to compare Mary to the burning bush, summing up his thought in the phrase: “Just as there we have a bush, and it is set aflame and not burned, so here we have a virgin, who gives birth to Light and is not corrupted.”⁷

Fr. Polis brings St. Gregory into this specifically to show the general agreement among the Fathers about the birth’s circumstances, despite discrepancies or disagreements about causes. This is indicative of the greater trends in the development of Church doctrine. Specific analysis and exploration of causes would have to wait until the common mode of writing and instruction passed from polemics, apologia, and catechetical manuals into the scholastic frames of commentaries, dissertations, and doctrinal debates. The Fathers were rarely equipped, either socially or logistically, to hammer out these specifics on their own.

Contemporary Controversy

In the sixteenth century, Pope Clement VIII had published the Doctrina Christiana, for which St. Robert Bellarmine wrote a catechism. In it, as Fr. Polis quotes, Bellarmine affirms that the Savior “exited the mother’s womb at the end of the ninth month without pain or harm to the mother, not leaving any sign of His exit.”⁸ Although the question of ‘whether’ had been settled by this, the questions of ‘how’ and ‘in what manner’ remained—in fact, were encouraged—to be kicked around by the scholastic institutions. And this they did.

Fr. Polis breaks somewhat from his chronological approach to the subject to jump from a short look at the scholastics to a lengthier chapter on the contemporary controversies of the last two centuries. He returns to the topics that he only briefly touched on in his introduction, further developing what had previously only been orienting guideposts in why he’d written the book in the first place. So it is here that Albert Mitterer’s and Karl Rahner’s positions are given their full due.

Mitterer was an Austrian priest who “sought to update theology in light of advances in biological understanding.”⁹ His life evenly straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, having published all of his material in the latter and died in 1966. Efforts to ‘update’ theology to the novelties of contemporary scientific consensus were and remain a staple of the Church’s progressive wing.

To be fair to such efforts, the natural science of the medieval period did have regions in which it was woefully lacking compared to even just a few centuries later. St. Thomas’ understanding of childbirth, although uncontroversially in line with his contemporaries, is a perfect example:

[Mitterer] describes this system accepted by Aquinas and his contemporaries as (re-)productive biology (Erzeugungsbiologie), and says that it conceives of human and animal generation as a sort of fabrication or production (Erzeugung) of a new living creature from inert material provided by the mother. Specifically, the man’s seed (considered non-living), once deposited in the womb, is supplied with blood from the mother. This enables it to grow and mature until, after a certain number of days, it has finally been disposed to receive a rational soul. In the virginal conception of Christ, this process was replaced by the immediate and miraculous formation of Jesus’s body from his Mothers’ most pure blood, without seed.¹⁰

St. Thomas, and most of the medieval period, considered the mother’s role in childbearing and birth to be passive—not in the sense that they did nothing, but in the scholastic sense that their bodies did not engage in an active principle of creation the way men’s apparently did. It seems like this would have stemmed from simple ignorance over the presence of ovum, but as Fr. Polis shows with Scotus’ interpretation, this is not necessarily the case.

This touches on what Mitterer seems to believe is a greater point. True motherhood, he considered, included “a whole series of processes which necessarily take place,” among which “are the widening of and injury to the birth passage, breaking of the claustra pudoris (if still intact), and birth pains.”¹¹ It’s important to note here that Mitterer considered the physical component to virginity to be merely a sign of it, and therefore not intrinsic to virginity itself; rather, as it is possible for conception to occur without breaking the claustra pudoris, he believed that it’s reasonable also to treat the topic more as a spiritual consideration than necessarily also a physical one—contra, of course, just about every authority in the Church.

According to Fr. Polis, Mitterer then finds himself painted into the same corner as many theologians of the last two centuries have when attempting to reconcile natural science with revealed miracles. The virgin birth had to be a true birth; of this there is no doubt. But his error lays in the problems associated with defining what a true birth actually is. Seeking not to do injury to the person of the Savior, he believed there to be a contradiction in which his Blessed Mother and the miraculous birth had to be relegated to some lesser status.

In sum, for Mitterer a birth is virginal if it is the consequence of a virginal conception. Injuries sustained by the mother do not make it any less virginal, but do make it a true birth. The birth of Christ was not—and indeed, could not have been—miraculous, because it would not then be a true birth.¹²

St. Thomas himself, of course, affirms that the claustra pudoris must remain intact for the virgin birth to indeed remain virginal. The key difference between Mitterer’s and the Angelic Doctor’s positions is best summed up by the former holding to a general lack of respect for the tradition; had he been “more attentive to the Tradition,” Fr. Polis explains, “he would have noted that the mother’s virginity is often presented as a sign of the Son’s divinity.”¹³ As an interesting side note, Fr. Polis mentions that esteemed twentieth century manualist Ludwig Ott also “accepted Mitterer’s position.”¹⁴

Finishing with Mitterer, Fr. Polis spends a few pages each analyzing the critical reception to his beliefs, first by René Laurentin and then by Jean Galot. It is his analysis of Rahner’s position, however, that fills most of the chapter. We will not dwell on it for the purposes of this review, but it is worth touching on.

Predictably, Rahner’s approach is somewhat hard to pin down. His response to Mitterer’s case was contained in an essay submitted to a 1960 Festschrift for Josef Rupert Geiselmann, in which Rahner would “not argue that there were or were not loss of physical integrity, birth pains, or sordes,” though he does “argue consistently against the evidence for their absence.” Additionally, Fr. Polis remarks that “his imprecise and misleading statements about evidence” can be attributed to “never [having] studied it in depth.”¹⁵ Those familiar with Rahner’s work will find both this, and his interest in obscuring traditional Catholic teaching, completely unsurprising.

Blessed Scotus

The second half of his book concerns the teachings of Blessed Scotus and subsequent Scotists. Fr. Polis first spends time explaining the Subtle Doctor’s position on the Blessed Mother’s virginity before addressing a greater issue that differentiates him from St. Thomas and resolves much of the errors present in the current controversies: Our Lady’s activity in cooperating with the birth itself.

Much of the general definition around the virgin birth was well-agreed upon and settled by the start of the middle ages. What was left to the scholastics, however, was to track out, in painstaking exactness, where the miracle occurred and what it consisted of. The specific nature of virginity, of the Blessed Mother’s un-Fallen nature, and how the birth could have occurred were the focuses here, at least for those few scholars who wrote on the subject. Most of the medieval Mariological controversies surrounded the Immaculate Conception, so as a result, the virgin birth was only referred to in passing or only briefly by scholars already devoted to the study of Our Lady.

This is true particularly for Blessed John Duns Scotus, whose corpus is already a somewhat notorious for its lack of organizational systematization and its incompleteness. Nonetheless, the thoroughness and subtlety of his thought invited the Franciscan order to expand and develop the framework he laid out. Unlike St. Thomas, however, Bl. Scotus’ writings were not as well preserved—nor were many of them necessarily written by him specifically. The Reportatio of Paris, especially, is compiled from several different found sets of notes transcribed by students present at his lectures. As a result, the Paris Reportatio, as Fr. Polis explains, survives in several different versions that includes slightly differing—but not contradictory—content. Chapter twelve of his book includes a series of excerpts from the Reportatio that discuss the virgin birth itself, going to what lengths are possible to examine what Bl. Scotus had to say on the subject.

The chapter on Mary’s activity in motherhood resolves Mitterer’s problems by providing metaphysical solutions to St. Thomas’ apparent errors in natural sciences. Because the general medieval consensus regarding childbirth presumed the mother’s passivity in childbearing, there remained the problem of reconciling the miraculous virgin birth with establishing Our Lady as truly a mother. As Mitterer demonstrated, either you could believe there was a miracle, which seemed to prohibit Our Lady from experiencing and participating in motherhood in its entirety, or you could believe the latter at the expense of a miracle. The issue at stake is how natural the birth was itself.

For Our Lady’s titles and status to make any sense, we have to believe that she was not the Blessed Mother by accident or coincidence, nor that she was merely a passive vessel for the Savior. She embodied motherhood in its maximal, purest sense. This is Bl. Scotus’ starting point.

His resolution is, predictably, subtle and difficult to summarize any more than Fr. Polis already has. In short, there’s an activity from the mother involving the movement of material to the location that the fetus develops in after this material has been combined with the seed supplied by the man. Although working under the same natural science presumptions of biology as St. Thomas, Bl. Scotus introduces a general principle that reflects current biological understanding of motherhood—namely, that the mother not only supplies material, but that her body plays a subtle but nonetheless active role in getting that material to a gestational area, and, furthermore, playing a role in the earliest phases of that gestation.¹⁶ That the medievals presumed this material to be mere blood rather than ovum, and that they drew no distinction (because they had no way of knowing) between the material supplied by the ovum and the nutrients supplied by the mother, isn’t important here. Scotus resolves a Thomistic error in a way that should appease modern critics.

Later Scotists

Fr. Polis devotes roughly the last quarter of the book to the study of later Scotists, which includes a brief but helpful overview of the Scotist school through the ages. Theologically, the school was chiefly defined in popular consciousness by its radical Marian devotion, attributing to the Holy Queen the most highest reasonable goods that can be attributed to the greatest creature. He notes, however, that as a result of the controversy over her Immaculate Conception, attention to the virgin birth was frequently overshadowed by greater and more important theological and dogmatic discourse.

Two Scotists he spends the most time with are Angelo Volpe and Tomás Francés de Urrutigoyti, both of whom were Franciscans of the early-Modern period. Volpe is recognized today—and at his height—as having been an adamant critic of the Thomistic theological tradition, sometimes unreasonably so. Trained more in a background of rhetoric and oration than specifically in discourse and debate, Volpe nonetheless mostly completed a systematized compendium of the Subtle Doctor’s thought. This Sacrae Theolgiae Summa Ioannis Duns Scoti was naturally modeled after the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas, but good luck finding a copy—much less one in English.

Fr. Polis draws from this in his exploration of Volpe’s treatment on the virgin birth, providing some background and context to Volpe’s life and impact as a mid-millennium Scotist. Volpe elucidated several points that the Subtle Doctor had been silent on in his full treatment in the Summa, but, as Fr. Polis is somewhat gentle to point out, not without being overly harsh with criticisms of the Thomistic alternatives.

It is this treatment of St. Thomas’ positions that likely landed Volpe’s Summa on the Index of Forbidden Books. According to Fr. Polis, having ticked off the head of the local college of St. Dominic, Giacinto De Ruggieri, the latter completed a “work” against Volpe that was published after Volpe’s death. This was due, apparently, because De Ruggieri “had been irritated by the disrespect he felt Volpe had showed to St. Thomas in his Summa”:

De Ruggieri’s campaign was a success in that 1659, tome 3 of part IV of Angelo Volpe’s Summa was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. The reasons for the condemnation remain somewhat unclear. The usual explanation given is his immoderate criticism of Thomas, but Scaramuzzi and Di Fonzo consider this explanation inadequate. Indeed, if this was the problem, why was only one volume condemned, and why absolute? Would it not be sufficient to correct the volume by removing or moderating the offending statements? Something must have been considered to be contrary to faith or morals. One possible doctrinal motive for placing the volume on the Index is Volpe’s defense of the thesis that Mary did not have a debitum peccati. Although this is not a just motive for condemnation, it did motivate the 1636 condemnation of the Mariological work of Giovanni Maria Zamoro of Undine, which was not reversed until the time of Leo XIII.¹⁷

Although Fr. Polis does not state as such, it’s hard to shake a sense of inter-order politicking occurring behind the scenes—something unfortunately to be expected in historical dealings between Franciscans and Dominicans, much less those that take place between Italians. Nonetheless, the traditions have had their mutual give and take throughout the centuries, and Fr. Polis, despite having to touch on it by the sheer nature of the study, manages to steer clear of that history.

As with his treatment of the Spaniard Urrutigoyti, his treatment of Volpe on the question of the virgin birth deserves to be read in full, and our review here is insufficient to properly summarize it. Needless to say, it is a worthwhile addition and elaboration upon the groundwork laid down by the originator of their school of theology.

Conclusion

This is, to some extent, two books made better by being fused into one. The first half gives a detailed but appropriate rundown on Mariology as it applies to the virgin birth, while the second half gives, again, a detailed but appropriate rundown on the subject from within the Scotist camp in particular. Fr. Polis demonstrates a familiarity with the Fathers that expounds on the average reader’s study of Scripture. Where he shines, however, is in the second half of the book; his awareness of Scotistic literature and research skills bring to the forefront sources and information that would otherwise be extremely difficult for the normal laity to even become aware of.

That said, while this text is certainly readable, it is most worthwhile in the hands of those explicitly interested in the relative minutiae concerning the doctrine of the virgin birth. In a more general sense, Fr. Polis’ explications on Scotism are enough to justify obtaining a copy, but again, only for those audiences interested in the Subtle Doctor’s thought and the history of his school. What Fr. Polis does well here, and what is difficult to find in other places, is drawing out with exacting precision the details of not just Blessed Scotus’ views on the topic, but those of his followers that are presently locked behind language or publication barriers.

His depictions and explications of Franciscan history do well to orient the general audience without getting too mired in some of the biases associated with the Dominicans. Although still not exactly on the ascendancy, Scotistic and Franciscan theological literature offers a good counterpoint to the decades-long resurgence of Thomism in the popular sphere, and books such as Fr. Polis’ do well to continue this trend. Whether a new future for scholastic study is on the way or not, there is little doubt that greater attention needs be paid to the scholastic tradition—and not just limited to the scope of Thomism. This book fits into that stream.

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1xvii.

2xvi.

3Ibid.

44.

55.

652.

752-53.

889.

991.

1092.

1194.

1295.

1396.

14102.

15101.

16157.

17204.

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