In this episode, I share with you one of Bonaventure’s sermons, which, I think, gives us a good idea of how Bonaventure thought about the roles of philosophy and theology. It will also show us how he thought about the problem of certainty.
Link to the sermon is here.
I meant to post all the passages I quote here, but I'm limited in how much I can add. So I've eliminated the longest passages (the first and the last) and provided instead the timestamp and the place in the text where they show up. Enjoy.
2:15 - Section 1, p. 1.
7:40 - “There would be no authority, unless revelation had preceded it.”
9:13 - “Every (something), which is known, is in itself necessary and to the very knower certain.”
9:57 - “Since, therefore, things have ‘being’ in their own genus, they also have ‘being’ in the Eternal Reason; nor is their ‘being’ entirely immutable in the first and second manner, but only in the third, that is, insofar as they are in the eternal Word: it remains, that nothing can make things perfectly knowable, unless Christ, the Son of God and Master, be there.”
12:39 - “There is also required, second, for cognition of this kind, certitude on the part of the knower. But this (certitude) cannot be on the part of that, which can fail, and/or from that light, which can be obscured. Moreover, the light of such (a cognition) is not the light of the created intelligence, but of the uncreated Wisdom, which is Christ.”
15:01 - “God gave me true knowledge of those things, which are, that I may know the disposition of the world and the virtues of the elements, the start and the consummation and middle of the seasons.”
15:54 - “Just as the Earth could not be seen except it be brightened by light, so those things which are handed down in the (academic) disciplines, though everyone without doubt concedes that they are to be most true, it must be believed, that they could not be understood, unless they were brightened by Him as if by their sun.”
19:09 - “Therefore invoking Jesus, the Light of the Father, which is indeed the True (Light), which illumines every man coming into this world, through which to the principle Light, the Father, we have access, we look back, as much as is possible, into the illuminations of the most sacred utterances, handed down from the Father, and we will consider, as such as we are able, the hierarchies of the celestial souls, manifested symbolically and anagogically to us by these (illuminations), (as we) look back to the principle and super principle Divine Clarity of the Father with the immaterial and untrembling eyes of our mind.”
21:53 - “From the aforesaid, therefore, there appears, the order by which and the author by whom one arrives at wisdom. For the order is, to begin from the stability of the Faith and proceeds through the serenity of reason, to arrive at the savoriness of contemplation.”
23:51 - “Moreover that He be called the reason of understanding, must be sanely understood, not that He be the sole, nor the bare, nor the whole reason of understanding. For if He were the sole reason, cognition of science would not differ from the cognition of Wisdom, nor cognition in the Word from cognition in the proper genus.”
26:10 - Section 18, p. 9.
References used in this episode:
-Cullen, Christopher M., Bonaventure, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
-St. Bonaventure, “Christ, The One Master Of All", Translated from the Quaracchi Edition of the Opera Omnia S. Bonaventurae Vol. V, 1891, pp. 567-574, with original notes.
Thanks for listening to the Poiein podcast. This was episode eight of a series on reason and desire. If you enjoyed what you heard, be sure to subscribe and rate us on iTunes.
