Hello. I would need help in answering the following question:

 

Based on the theology of Saint Bonaventure, what role should reason and philosophy play in theology, and why should the average Christian care about them?

 

Here's a link to get info: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bonaventure/

 

The attached document contains some information about St Bonaventure.

 

Here is the assignment:

Disputation was an important practice in the Medieval theology classroom. Careful debate was how theologians and their students moved a conversation forward (by pushing back gently on each other).

But the debate in this discussion will be a rare public one. Regular Christians -- "persons in the pew"-- and not just university students, will get to join in this fray. Why should intellectuals have all the fun?!!

In each conversation, there will be 3 roles: Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the 13^th century person in the pew. First come, first serve, but no more than 2 people per role.

For those who take the role of medieval church goers, you will get to challenge both theologians from the perspective of the 13th century person in the pew. You can decide whether you are a peasant, a member of the growing bourgeoisie class, or a noble.

The two theologians get to push back on each other, but also get to challenge or respond to the person in the pew. 

 

I would like to answer as St Bonaventure.

 

Is this something you could help me with? I would need an answer to this assignment in 1 hour if possible.

 

What are the possibilities in getting helped?

09/06/2017 History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) ­ History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) Lecture 2: Challenges to Aquinas' Synthesis Week Six, Part 2
Before proceeding with this segment of Week 6, you will need to read one entry on
each of the following three figures: Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and William
of Ockham. Our course textbooks need supplementing on these figures, which is
why I am asking you to read the entries. Your posts in the discussion will need to
reference the site you’ve used. You may select the entries from the following sites:
Sites on Bonaventure
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ­ Saint Bonaventure
Catholic Information Network (CIN) ­ St. Bonaventure
Encyclopedia Britannica ­ Saint Bonaventure
Sites on John Duns Scotus
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ­ John Duns Scotus
John Duns Scotus
Sites on William of Ockham
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ­ William of Ockham
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ­ William of Ockham
6.2 The Franciscan Reaction to Aquinas
Great minds and great ideas induce other great minds to respond, often, in critique.
Already in Thomas Aquinas’ own time equally brilliant rejoinders were offered to
the ‘new philosophy’ (the 13th century name for Thomas’ Christian reception and
interpretation of Aristotle). Unsurprisingly, the major respondents to the
Dominican Thomists were Franciscans, the mendicant order begun by St. Francis
of Assisi. It is a permanently fascinating feature of medieval theology and church
history that two orders with so parallel a vision of the Christian life could have so
quickly entered into a significant theological and philosophical dispute that would
eventually and permanently alter the theological landscape of the West. The fact
that both orders were officially sanctioned by the Church, and that both were
committed fully to the Catholic faith ought to correct some of the misinformed
views one often hears about the rigid uniformity of the Medieval Church. The
Church could indeed tolerate diversity of thought, as long as the diversity was
centered on shared core beliefs, sacramental practices, and wider ecclesial
loyalties. What the church could not tolerate was doctrinal pluralism, which is
substantively a quite different phenomenon from philosophical and hermeneutical
diversity. Diversity refers to different interpretations of a shared center; 'pluralism'
refers to different 'centers.'
The source of the immediate reaction to Thomas originated in the different
philosophical canopy of the Franciscan way of life. Franciscan theology and piety
https://graceland.brightspace.com/d2l/le/content/13984/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 1/5 09/06/2017 History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) ­ History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) was grounded in the Augustinian­Neoplatonic tradition, which held that real
knowledge comes not from sense perception but from the inner illumination of the
intellect by faith, and that the focus of the Christian life is ascent of the mind and
soul to God, through the agency of Jesus’ crucified humanity. The use of analytical
Aristotelian philosophy seemed to Franciscan thinkers to lead in exactly the wrong
direction: not towards the reunion of the soul with God, but towards a academic
sterility that trusted more in human wisdom than in Divine Wisdom, which was to
be found only in Christ Incarnate and Crucified. All of this is classically expressed
in the thirteenth century theologian, philosopher, and mystic who was every bit
Thomas Aquinas’ intellectual and spiritual equal, Saint Bonaventure (1217­1274).
6.2.1 Bonaventure: Faith 'over' Reason
Along with the short selection from Bonaventure in Anderson and the website
you chose, you will read more about Bonaventure’s theology in the PowerPoint
that follows this lecture. Here I will say that Bonaventure’s theology is
simultaneously rational, biblical, and mystical. Its superstructure and flow are
dictated by the classic threefold movement of Neoplatonic Christianity. The words
Bonaventure uses for this movements are: “emanation, exemplarity, and
consummation.” Ilia Delio reinterprets these three movements for modern readers
of Bonaventure as three questions: 1) Where have we come from? 2) What are we
doing here? and 3) Where are we going?” (Simply Bonaventure, p. 12). Human
beings are on a journey back to God, and to know this truth is to know the single
most important thing that we need to know as human beings created in the Image
of God. In the spirit of the Augustinian tradition, our single most important task as
human beings created in the Image of God is to open our 'restless heart'
(Augustine's cor inquietum) to the healing journey which results ultimately,
eschatologically in the soul's contemplative rest in God. Bonaventure’s threefold movement is mirrored in the mystics’ s journey of
purgation, illumination, and perfection, which you learned about in the section on
Mysticism. Bonaventure’s theology is Trinitarian and Christocentric, Christ being
the One whom the soul follows in its return to God (s.v., “Bonaventure,”
Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality). Bonaventure is deeply stamped
by the Augustinian/Franciscan tradition, and offers a theological vision of life in
the world that is a grand, comprehensive, systematic counterpoint to the Thomistic
vision of a synthesis of faith and reason. For Bonaventure the point and goal of
theology is finally only one thing: union with God. If the use of ‘secular’
philosophy to clarify the Christian message in any way endangers theology’s true
goal, then it is a problematic method, and must therefore be used with extreme
caution, and perhaps to maybe even avoided. Bonaventure is not anti­rational, or
even anti­philosophical. Rather, he holds that all that humans do and seek must be
directed toward the single end for which human beings exist: to know God.
So is the most important task of the human person to find the soul's home in God,
or is it both the find that home and to understand the world of which we are a part?
These are ­­somewhat simplified­­ two different visions of the Christian life: the
first, the Bonaventurian­Franciscan vision, the second the Thomistic­Dominican
https://graceland.brightspace.com/d2l/le/content/13984/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 2/5 09/06/2017 History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) ­ History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) vision. Interestingly one sees vestiges of these two visions yet today in different
views of the Christian life.
6.2.3 Duns Scotus (1265? – 1308) & William of Ockham (ca. 1280­1349):
Nominalism vs. Realism
John Duns Scotus was possessed of an incredible intellect, so much that he has
since the High Middle Ages been titled ‘Doctor Subtilis’ –the Subtle Doctor. His
written works fill 26 volumes, most of which has never been translated from Latin.
He stood in the shadow of the towering figures of Thomas and Bonaventure,
though he was their intellectual equal. Like Aquinas, he wrote a commentary on
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, though Scotus took a quite different approach. His belief
that reason alone can know only God as first cause, but that all other doctrines and
claims of the church must be taken strictly on faith was in many ways at odds with
Thomas's understanding of the mutual though differing roles of reason and faith.
Scotus' view that God must be understood primarily in terms of the Will, not of
Intellect, turns into an idea that, like an acid begins to eat away at the high
estimation of rationality that Scholastic theology held. None of this means that
Duns Scotus was ‘irrational’; he was capable of precise and exacting lines of
argument. But the project of Scholastic Theology believed that reason could be
used to verify all the church’s faith claims, and Scotus cast deep doubt on this
assumption.
In his objection to this scholastic assumption, Duns Scotus shows himself to be
thoroughly rooted in the Franciscan tradition. The problem that Scotus’ thought
creates (and the thought of Ockham and other nominalists afterwards) is that the
picture of the world and God’s relation to it they paint appears increasingly
arbitrary. Theirs is not a harmonious world in which God as the rational ground of
all being, so to speak, plays by the rules. Rather, in Duns Scotus’ theology God
relates to the world strictly by God’s own unfathomable will; what God does is
right because God does it (rather than as a Thomist would say, the world and
God’s relation to it run fittingly by God’s justice, God acting in accord with God’s
own rules of ‘rightness’). Scotus and the Nominalist philosophers and theologians
essential unravel the Scholastic synthesis in order to preserve God’s omnipotence
and freedom, but in so doing they succeeded in creating a vision of the world in
which the average Christian could no longer be sure of how God will relate to him
or her; even if Christians follow the rules –living within the sacramental of the
church, for example. Scotus’ God would do what Scotus' God would do, and
whatever that was, was right, even if it seemed unjust by the best human standards.
It took a while for all this to unfold (or unravel!), and it was probably not Scotus’
plan; he was arguing against the threat of Aristotelian rationalism and empiricism
which might obscure his deep Franciscan faith in following Jesus. But sometimes
in the history of theology, one generation's remedy to a theological problem,
becomes a subsequent generation’s stumbling block.
William of Ockham took themes that Duns Scotus developed and pushed them
even further. Ockham was, like Scotus, a brilliant intellect and logician. He
received the title Doctor Invincibilis: the Unconquerable Doctor. In his work we
see expressed with great clarity the principles of a movement philosophers call
https://graceland.brightspace.com/d2l/le/content/13984/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 3/5 09/06/2017 History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) ­ History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) Nominalism. Ockham rejected belief in the existence of universals or eternal ideas
in the mind of God, by which God governs the world, because this belief, in his
estimation, limited God’s freedom; he further rejected the claim that God’s
existence and attributes could be proved apart from revelation. “In short, he
destroyed the conception of the relationship between theology and philosophy
elaborated in the 13th century” (ODCC, 2d ed., p. 1484).
Ockham articulated ideas that become the building blocks of the modern Western
world. He defended the idea of the independence of the state from the church,
rejected the idea that there was a universal and immutable order, viewed God in
terms of absolute power and will (not in terms of being), and saw Scripture alone
as ultimately authoritative. He critiqued the pope and the church, which led to his
spending the latter part of his life in exile in Germany. Interestingly, 150 years
after Ockham’s death, his philosophical stance, called ‘Nominalism,’ was taught in
the universities of Germany, e.g., by Gabriel Biel (1420­1495), and these ideas
helped form an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther.
The legacy of Ockham is remarkable, in the sense that much that moderns and
postmoderns take for granted about life, politics, and the nature of the world was
first articulated by him. Positively speaking, modern democratic states and
autonomous individuals who seek their own well being and create their own
futures are not imaginable apart from Ockham and Nominalism. Our early
medieval ancestors saw the world and their place in it as permanently reflecting
the divine mind and order. They would not recognize our social and political world
at all because Nominalism began to deconstruct all this. But even if Nominalism
sparked a new revolution in the West, one that will have far ranging consequences
centuries after Scotus and Ockham, it is unlikely that these thinkers could see the
far­reaching consequences of their own thought. I might add here that Nominalist thought, in my view, helped contribute to the
increasing inability of Western people to imagine God as Trinity. Nominalists
turned from analogical language to more univocal linguistic ideas, and once one
has a hard time conceptualizing 'essences' as having an independent reality from
the things which embody these universals, it becomes harder to imagine 'one
substance in three hypostaseis.' It also become harder to imagine the church as a
universal body that is the prior ground of the less than perfect historical
expressions of the Church. I also hear even in modern fundamentalism echoes of
the late medieval belief that God should be understood as absolute power, scripture
as absolute authority, and the Christian life as being about unbending obedience to
'absolute truth.' All of this looked quite different in Ockham's late Medieval
Catholic context, but once there was a fracturing of Christendom in the
Reformation, and then subsequent atomization of Christianity into highly
individualized denominations, the type of absolutism Ockham discussed took on a
more complex and difficult character. I should also add that in the post­Modern
world I would not trade Ockham's political vision for anything, only that some of
his ideas had far­ranging consequences of a less positive sort that he could not
foresee. And this, I hasten to add, is true of all of us. 6.2.4 The Breakdown of the Medieval/Scholastic Synthesis of Faith and Reason
https://graceland.brightspace.com/d2l/le/content/13984/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 4/5 09/06/2017 History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) ­ History of Christian Thought I (SU2017 ­ Tony Chvala­Smith) The scholastic synthesis of faith and reason was an unparalleled event in the
history of the West. The Western world has never seen another attempt that so
comprehensively sought to address all the questions of human existence within the
framework of the Christian Faith and the Church’s life. But from Scholasticism's
own flowering were born the seeds of its transformation. The later Middle Ages,
that period from roughly 1300­1500, will be a time in which academic theology
becomes more removed from the lives and struggles of the average Christian, a
time when church and society will face one upheaval after another, and when
corruption within the church will spark various renewal movements, some of
which portend a coming great disruption begun when an Augustinian monk
(named Martin Luther) struggled to find a reliably merciful God in an spiritual
universe that had become unpredictable and hostile.
Yet neither the theologies of Thomas nor Bonaventure will ever be abandoned, but
will continue to be studied and lived in successive generations. In a sense they
represent two types of Christian theology, analogous to the two types of theology
we examined in the 2nd­3rd centuries: theologies which creatively engage
contemporary culture and philosophy, and theologies which faithfully re­engage
the Jesus Story and search for all their signposts there. Both types have biblical
warrants, so one cannot claim that one type is the 'one, true, Christian theology.'
Both come with benefits and perils: a Bonaventurian theology stays rooted in the
Jesus story and reads reality from that lens, but can tend towards absolutism and
obscurantism. A Thomistic theology makes ample space for both rational,
scientific thought and for faith in revelation, but can tend towards intellectualism,
rationalism, and hair­splitting analysis remote from the struggles of people's lives.
In theology, there is no storm­free zone. We follow a path and stay generous
towards others on different paths. If all the paths lead us to the love of God,
neighbor, and enemy, then we can't go too far wrong. https://graceland.brightspace.com/d2l/le/content/13984/printsyllabus/PrintSyllabus 5/5

 

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