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Nominalism and Modernist Literature | Prof. Erik Tonning

The Thomistic Institute

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The Nominalist God

The poet as ultimate namer and un-namer of things comes in some ways to stand uneasily in the vacated place of the nominalist god. The god who can make and unmake arbitrarily capriciously and it will. So for example, Canto 8 in the third section of notes. What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud serenely gazing at the violent abyss plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory leaps downward through evening's revelations. Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied? Are the wings his, the lapis haunted air? Is it he or is it I that experience this?"

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