ABSTRACT
Dante’s imaginings of the other world become fully real as “repetitions” in a human sphere in some way answering to what contact with the higher reality has inspired in him. In a parallel development, Scotus originated the theory of the will as self-determination that eventually, in the Enlightenment, would be developed in terms of subjective autonomy by Kant. For Duns, such autonomous willing or freedom is “transcategorical” and thus applies to humans and God alike. Rather than being determined by natural striving for good, the will is radically free and yet not merely arbitrary. This transcendence belonging to an underived freedom beyond cosmological determination belongs, in the first instance, to God: it opens the world to contingency and to determination by a historical goal. Absolute freedom introduces contingency into the world and chooses its own end as an historical event.
