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Chapter 11 - On Naming God

from Part IV - From David Tracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

By
David Tracy
Edited by
Barnabas Palfrey  and
Andreas Telser
Barnabas Palfrey
Affiliation:
Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge
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Summary

A succinct account of the author’s mature constructive theological investment in a metaphysics of the Infinite. The opening section of this essay indicates a determination to weave metaphysical and soteriological concerns together without any implied separation of these from each other, or, alternatively, any premature collapse of one into the other. Latter parts of the essay then focus on how ‘Infinite Perfection’ came to prominence in Duns Scotus as the principal Christian thought-name for God, to ‘help theologians understand the positive (cataphatic) possibilities for naming God in the Bible and in philosophy as well as the negative (apophatic) limits of our knowledge’. Scotus’s confidence in abstract conceptual analysis and in ‘the power and ability of our finite minds’ helped to lead the Franciscan to crown ‘Infinity’ (above ‘Being’) as the highest name of the divine perfection. In this Scotus is also an ancestor of Descartes’s later modern discovery of the excessive idea of the Infinite within the human mind.

Keywords

theologyinfinity, perfectiondivine perfectionmetaphysicsDuns ScotusRené Descartesexcess
Type
Chapter
Information
Beyond the Analogical Imagination
The Theological and Cultural Vision of David Tracy
 , pp. 214 - 220
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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