The gospel of the book to which an afterword is now in process of being appended here has been that the good spell may be but does not have to be a God's spell. The religious in defence of which this news of necessary contingency speaks may be illuminated by this or that religion, so it does not preach the necessity of atheism or secularism. Nor however is it a derivative of a religion or a deduction from a Book. It is an exercise in Seinlassen, in letting being be in such a manner that justice is done at the same time to beings by following a path opened up by the author of a Treatise on Duns Scotus’ Theory of Categories and Signification. More specifically, it is an exercise aimed at removing what to some potential readers of Scotus and Hopkins might present itself as a stumbling block to their becoming actual readers of the singular philosophical and poetical entities created by these two writers, to wit the theological presuppositions of their writings.

These theological presuppositions and how they draw the Scottish Franciscan and the English Jesuit together are studied meticulously by Christopher Devlin SJ in his edition of Hopkins’ Sermons and Devotional Writings. However, he scrupulously and explicitly eschews what he deems to be more purely or technically philosophical discussion. What I eschew is the more purely or technically theological discussion. I do this out of an acute awareness of my incompetence in that domain. Yet I do not do it without acknowledgement of an obligation to attempt to render that incompetence less crass. My discourse has been for the most part philosophical. But in adopting that discourse and in imitation of the carefulness with which Scotus considers the relation of the metaphysical to the theological in the prologue to the Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle and in Reportatio I A210 I have tried to avoid complacency over the question how the languages of philosophy, theology and poetry adapt to or unravel one another when one of them becomes a source of metaphors for one or more of the others.