Why did Dominican and secular scholars challenge John Duns Scotus’s teaching about the Immaculate Conception?

Dominican and secular scholars challenged John Duns Scotus’s teaching on the Immaculate Conception primarily because they believed it conflicted with the doctrine of Christ’s universal redemption.1

Critics, such as the secular master Jean de Pouilly, argued that if Mary were preserved from original sin at the moment of her conception, it would undermine the necessity of Christ’s redemptive grace for all humanity. Because these scholars viewed redemption as a curative process for sin already contracted, they found the Scotist position—which proposed a preventative application of grace—to be not only improbable but heretical.12

Duns Scotus countered this by arguing that such a preventative intervention represented a more perfect form of mediation, emphasizing that Mary’s preservation was a result of God’s grace rather than any intrinsic merit of her own. Despite his defense, the controversy was intense, with some opponents suggesting that those who asserted the thesis should be met with measures beyond mere academic argument.12