ABSTRACT
The key interlocutor for Scotus, and the most authoritative Parisian theologian of his time, is Henry of Ghent. The articulable unity of being between God and creatures for Henry, then, is purely nominal. There is no stateable common being between them, and yet their relation enables all manner of analogous representations. The subjective sensibility of an individual poet, such as one finds in Milton or Blake, or even in Leopardi, Baudelaire, and Rilke, is now the key to connecting things together analogically-or metaphorically, to be more exact-in the total order of the cosmos. The metaphorical image for Dante, like the metaphysical or ethical concept for Duns, is a way of secularizing our contemplation of the divine-of rendering it in terms reflecting the world focused through the knowing subject. On the contrary, Dante becomes harsher than ever against arbitrary appropriations of Scripture.
