The Western meeting, conflict, confluence and mutual transformation of these opposed fundamental principles imposed terrible problems on thinkers. Nonetheless, such a doctrine was not only central in the Latin West, but there it also encountered the opposed principle for relating the divine and the human. Those retrieving, and in many ways creating, mediaeval theological literature as philosophy to be used in this war against modern subjectivity, will not emphasize the importance of a doctrine which shows not only that the subject conforms the object of knowledge to its own substantial mode but also that it may thereby bring into being new objects. This influence has not been widely recognised since it is at odds with one of the central purposes for which the history of mediaeval philosophy has mostly been constructed among us: namely, opposition to a modern philosophy represented as destructively subjective. ![]() It had a long, important, and varied, influence in Latin mediaeval philosophical theology and beyond. Knower and known in Boethius, Anselm and Bonaventure The doctrine that a thing is known according to the mode of the knower was found in the most authoritative Latin, Arabic and Greek sources of mediaeval thought - even if the authority of the source was mostly owed to mistakes. Dionysius has become an Augustinian, and Augustine lives within a Proclean systematic cosmos which was not his creation. It is significant that in both authors Augustine is surpassed. Moving from both Cherubic visions to the Incarnation, Bonaventure then leads the itinerant mind to the Dionysian darkness which is brilliant light and emptiness entirely full. Crucially the vision of the first Cherub is not lost or erased because the Trinity of persons only appears when the summum bonum is also simple being. Anselm’s new beginning Bonaventure, with speculative insight, assimilates to Dionysius’ primary name for God, so as to bring forth Anselm’s deduction of the Trinity. In that distress Anselm was graciously granted a way to God in which the form of thought was appropriate to the simplicity of its content. Anselm’s Proslogion emerged from his dissatisfaction with the inadequacy in the Monologion between the simple notion of the God he was demonstrating and the complexity of his argument, an argument he thought could be judged by those who would read Augustine’s De Trinitate. 4:7, "The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is stamped upon us.”») Bonaventure uses Augustine to arrive at this result. This is a participation in uncreated light (God’s knowing) which is, for Aquinas, «stamped» on each mind by God (see Summa theologiae I.79.4: «the human soul derives its intellectual light from God, according to Ps. Aquinas makes the human possession of intellect a borrowing from God or a participation in God. In Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, Book 3 of the De Anima, and Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, the human becomes what Aristotle exhorts it to be by passing to intellectual contemplation which is proper to God and to the happiness of the immortals. Hellenic philosophy and theology inherits this paradox from Aristotle. ![]() He invokes the First, invisible Father of lights, through a train of connected mediators, so that he begins, as if from sensible veils (for Dionysius we come to the invisible through these), at hand in the sensed world “Francis, our father and guide” in of whose Order Bonaventure is the head, who spoke always of the end: peace.Īfter rehearsing the steps through which the mind has passed in its ascent into God he passes to the last where, paradoxically, by looking above itself to intellect and what intellect contemplates, it is properly called «mind» «supra se, secundum quem dicitur mens» (Chapter 1, § 4). This appears at the beginning with the mediation in the opening lines. In contrast, Bonaventure places his explicitly Augustinian philosophical theology within an explicitly Dionysian framework. Dionysius, whether known or not (I think he was), Anselm did not EXPLICITLY use. ![]() Aristotle’s great scientific works were unknown to Anselm. They come, in great part, from the roles played by Aristotle (who largely appears in the first chapters) and Dionysius. ![]() Bonaventure used Anselm’s works and followed him considerably, but there are profound differences. This commentary compares the Itinerarium with the Proslogion in order to continue treating the questions we developed while reading the latter.
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