The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins crystallized so beautifully the effect that John Duns Scotus’ teaching has on mystical minds:
Yet ah! this air I gather and release
He lived on;
These weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted
Who of all men most sways my spirits to peace.
The worldview of Scotus can sway our spirits to this: God is good and so we his children must be good too; God is free and so we do not need to be afraid of true freedom; God is nonviolent love, and this is the only hope for a world in which even Christians think violence is a way to “redeem” the world. Wrong ideas about God create wrong ideas about everything else too.
—from Franciscan Media’s “Friar to Friar: Richard Rohr on John Duns Scotus“
by Richard Rohr, OFM
