Remainders and reminders of the divine. Duns Scotus’s critique of images of God

Abstract

In his Quodlibetal Questions and other texts, John Duns Scotus makes the seemingly-startling claim that angels or wayfarers achieve self-knowledge without recognizing God as their exemplar. I will show how this critique of images follows from Scotus’s deeper, more general, rejection of theories of analogy. Despite curtailing the image as a means of understanding God, angels, as well as certain wayfarers, are capable of distinct natural abstractive cognition of God according to Scotus.

In his Quodlibetal Questions and other texts, John Duns Scotus makes the seemingly-startling claim that angels or wayfarers achieve self-knowledge without recognizing God as their exemplar. I will show how this critique of images follows from Scotus’s deeper, more general, rejection of theories of analogy. Despite curtailing the image as a means of understanding God, angels, as well as certain wayfarers, are capable of distinct natural abstractive cognition of God according to Scotus.