By Christopher M. Cullen
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"A realized and really apt creation to the philosophical and theological considered Bonaventure." --Times Literary Supplement
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The nice Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure (c.1217-74) engaged in philosophy in addition to theology, and the relation among the 2 in Bonaventure's paintings has lengthy been debated. but, few stories were dedicated to Bonaventure's idea as a complete. during this survey, Christopher M. Cullen finds Bonaventure as a good synthesizer, whose approach of idea bridged the distance among theology and philosophy.
The publication is equipped in response to the kinds of Bonaventure's personal vintage textual content, De reductione artium advert theologiam. Cullen follows Bonaventure's personal department of the branches of philosophy and theology, interpreting them as separate yet comparable entities. He indicates that Bonaventure was once a scholastic, whose mysticism used to be grounded in systematic theological and philosophical reasoning. He provides a clean and nuanced standpoint on Bonaventure's debt to Augustine, whereas clarifying Aristotle's impression. Cullen additionally places Bonaventure's principles in context of his time and position, contributing considerably to our realizing of the medieval world.
This obtainable advent offers a much-needed assessment of Bonaventure's inspiration. Cullen bargains a transparent and infrequent analyzing of "Bonaventurianism" in and for itself, with out the problems of critique and comparability. This publication delivers to develop into a regular textual content on Bonaventure, helpful for college students and students of philosophy, theology, medieval stories, and the historical past of Christianity.
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Additional info for Bonaventure (Great Medieval Thinkers)
Example text
31 In this way, he cannot be said to have developed a truly philo sophical synthesis. Gilson was wrong to present "a mutilated exposition of his theology" as his "philosophy" (mutilated because it ignores the exclusively theological elements) . 34 Van Steenberghen makes a distinction between philosophy as Welt anschauung ( worldview) and scientific philosophy. In the former sense, philosophy refers to the general worldview of any society or culture. "For the Christian, philosophy, understood as Weltanschauung, is necessarily subject to the authority of faith, or, to be more exact, to the authority of divine revelation .
Philosophy involves an ascent from being, and its principles, to God; but it leads up to a further ascent made possible by God's own revelation. Philosophy is thus an ancillary discipline to theology. All knowledge, the arts, reflect the font of intelligibility, and therefore the reduction of which Bonaventure speaks is ultimately an ascent of the mind to God in the order of knowledge. De reductione is thus a companion piece to the lti nerarium, which is the ascent of the mind to God in the order of being.
71 Bonaventure quotes De anima the most often ( I 38 times), followed closely by the Physics (I36 times ) . The Topics ( 134 times), Nicomachean Ethics ( 13 1 ) , and Metaphysics ( 125 ) are next in order of frequency. He quotes from a work that was attributed to Aristotle, the Liber de Causis, forty-seven times. ) Bonaventure incorporated certain key Aristotelian doctrines into his own thought. For example, he combines a considerable amount of Aristotle's cognitional theory with his own, such as a doctrine of the agent intellect and of abstraction.