ABSTRACT
For Duns, the active pursuit of negative theology and its unknowing knowing no longer has any motivation nor even makes sense. In the older tradition of negative theology, knowing in the sense of wisdom sought to take up and absorb the limits of knowing into knowing itself. Turning away from productive unknowing that orients the reader to an ungraspable whole, a Whole which is a member of no set, Duns, initiates the modern, self-reflexive form of self-knowing that was to acquire such confidence that it would eventually recognize no higher authority beyond itself. It is indeed true that self-negation makes sense not in itself but only in relation to a movement of thought that takes its own negation up into what it knows. Dante’s theological poetics explores this dimension of being beyond realized form via the vivid analogical modes of the Paradiso. Through using form to imitate formless by displaying particular forms under erasure, the poem “effects what it figures”.
