 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Stairway to Heaven – Bonaventure It would be so convenient if figures in the history of philosophy actually fell neatly into the boxes we use to keep them straight in our heads. You have your liberals and your conservatives, your idealists and your materialists, your empiricists and your rationalists. But often as not, philosophers defy such easy categorization. No contrast is older or more familiar to the historian of philosophy than the one between Platonism and Aristotelianism, yet Aristotle borrowed more than a few ideas from Plato, and I'm on record as saying that Plato was not a Platonist. So you should already have been suspicious when I said that in covering 13th century scholasticism I'd be looking in turn at the Franciscans and then the Dominicans. Were these two orders really associated with opposing philosophical approaches or doctrines? The traditional answer would be yes, and the traditional basis for that answer would be the contrast between two of the era's greatest thinkers, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, stands for a mystically tinged theology and skepticism concerning the secular offerings of philosophy. He steers by the star of Augustine, about whom he wrote, Aquinas, a Dominican, represents the Aristotelian side of the debate, aware that theology is needed to complete the teachings found in the philosophers, but eager to make full use of those teachings nonetheless. The contrast is epitomized by their rival conceptions of human knowledge. Bonaventure takes on Augustine's idea, already revived by Robert Grossetest, that human knowledge is possible only thanks to an illumination, granted by God. Aquinas instead places his trust in our senses, following the Aristotelian line that we can abstract general knowledge of the world from our perceptual experiences. The contrast seems to be confirmed by other members of the two orders. Bonaventure had Franciscan followers like his student John Peckham, who became Archbishop of Canterbury and, in turn, taught Matthew of Aquasparta. Both of them followed Bonaventure on many points, not least the requirement for divine illumination in human knowledge. In recognition of this group, one book devoted to the illumination theory has gone so far as to say, one and the same. Among the Dominicans, meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas's own teacher, Albert the Great, was among the most outstanding exponents of Aristotle in the 13th century, and Thomas's contemporary, Robert Kilwardby, did pioneering work commenting on Aristotle's logic. But, and I know you'll be shocked to hear me say this, simple contrasts rarely tell the whole story. Augustinian scholasticism cannot just be equated with Aristotelianism. Albert the Great's thought was shot through with Platonist themes. Citations of Augustine are far from difficult to find in the pages of Aquinas's works, and Kilwardby is notorious for his involvement in condemnations aimed against the excesses of Aristotelian philosophy. What about the Augustinian side of the contrast? Well, when we talked about Grosotest and his embrace of Augustine's illumination theory, we already saw that he presented that theory in the context of commenting on Aristotle. And among the Franciscans, we need only cast our mind back to Roger Bacon to see a very different approach to philosophy than the one pursued by Bonaventure. As for Bonaventure himself, though his admiration for Augustine is unmistakable, his ideas incorporate Aristotelian philosophy within a larger vision. This strategy is encapsulated in a short treatise of his entitled Retracing the Arts to Theology. It surveys the arts and philosophical sciences, and shows that the image of the divine is present in even the meanest of them. The project is in the spirit of Hugh of St. Victor, who, as you may remember, earned special praise from Bonaventure as excelling in reasoning, preaching, and contemplation. Hugh of St. Victor did not consider the so-called mechanical arts beneath his notice, and neither does Bonaventure, who sketches the purpose of such activities as farming, hunting, and weaving. Even these arts are a light given to us by God. But Bonaventure calls them an external light because they involve us with things outside ourselves. Every human enjoys the gift of two further lights within his or her own nature—the lower light of sensation and the inner light of philosophy. Crowning them all is the light of grace, which offers salvation. But all four of these lights, and not just the last one, are given by God. Bonaventure also detects images of the divine within all these arts. When a blacksmith makes a horseshoe, he tries to fashion something that represents, as well as possible, the idea of a horseshoe in his mind. This is an unwitting imitation of God's creation of things through the divine word. And when we see something, the visual image we get is a so-called similitude begotten by whatever it is we're seeing, just as God the Son is begotten by God the Father. Parallels of the same sort are discovered in the various philosophical sciences. When he comes to logic, Bonaventure takes his cue from the Aristotelian account of words as representing mental concepts. He points out that linguistic signs make our ideas known in physical form, that is, in the sounds we make when we talk. Just so was the divine made known in the Incarnation. What does all this show, other than that Bonaventure has mastered the Augustinian art of finding Christian motifs in even the unlikeliest places? At least two things. One is that the other arts can be considered to be handmaids of theology, a famous phrase with roots in antiquity. Anyone thinking that philosophy, or the other lights given to humankind, may be incompatible with theology had better turn up the dimmer switch and think again. Far from being in tension with theology, the other arts are to be used by theology. This is another idea we can trace back to Hugh of St. Victor, who admonished his youthful students to learn everything because all knowledge may help in understanding Scripture. Bonaventure is saying something further though. For him, the lights of the arts, sensation, and philosophy show that we have been created in God's image. Every use of these lights is an imitation of divinity, whether it's a smith making horseshoes, someone using his hearing to listen to the smiths, or a philosopher studying horseshoe crabs. The parallels Bonaventure draws may seem far-fetched, but they are backed up by his explanation of how created things come to have the limited degree of reality they possess. In this short work, that explanation is only sketched. The causes or reasons for things that we find in matter are mere images of what Bonaventure calls ideal reasons, which are found in God himself. We might go so far as to say that created things are nothing more than signs of divine reality, much as a linguistic sign represents the meaning intended by the person who used the sign. You listen to someone's words to know what they have in mind. Likewise, we can seek to understand the divine mind by investigating the created signs in the world around us. Thus do the building blocks of terminus logic become symbolic elements supporting the serene edifice of Bonaventure's theology. He would never consider philosophy to be an error or sin, provided that the philosopher does not lose sight of the overall goal. This very work, retracing the art to theology, practices what it preaches and shows the philosopher how to proceed. Bonaventure postulates divine exemplars of things, another idea with late antique roots, but in his hands the theory itself shows that pagan philosophy was bound to remain incomplete, and that Christians who pursue philosophy purely for its own sake are engaging in a futile exercise, the misguided sort of activity that some medieval's condemned as mere curiosity. To study the world for its own sake is to concentrate on the created image at the expense of the divine reality. All of this might lead us to expect that in Bonaventure's hands the illumination theory would above all concern knowledge of God. True understanding would consist in simply beholding His light in the form of the divine exemplars. But for Bonaventure this is a prospect we may anticipate only in the afterlife. Our knowledge in this life always falls short of a direct grasp of God. This point emerges in one of Bonaventure's most direct treatments of the issue, the fourth of a set of disputed questions on the subject of the knowledge of Christ. He chose this as the first topic he would take up after becoming ordinary master at Paris in 1253-4. His selection of theme may indicate the influence of Alexander of Hales, the first Franciscan to be a master at the University of Paris. Alexander was the contemporary whose ideas had the greatest impact on Bonaventure, who studied with Alexander after his arrival in Paris from his native Italy in the 1230s. Bonaventure admired his master greatly and spoke of his own ideas as little more than dutiful exposition of those that Alexander had put forward. The admiration was mutual, with Alexander saying of his famous student that, in him, Adam seemed not to have sinned. Now, a scholastic discussion of Christ's knowledge may sound like a pretty unpromising place to look for philosophical arguments. But Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure had sound philosophical, as well as theological, reasons for being interested in the problem. Christ is believed to be fully human and fully divine, and in his former aspect he fulfills human nature perfectly. Thus, Christ gives us an example, or rather the one and only example, at least in this earthly life, of a person who enjoys the full remit of possible human knowledge. To focus on his manner of knowing is thus to explore the ideal human cognitive state, something we might, with numerous caveats to avoid anachronism, to say nothing of heresy, compare to the Stoics' idea of a perfect sage who would never make a mistake. This explains why the fourth question in Bonaventure's series actually has nothing directly to do with Christ's knowledge. Instead, it asks whether it is generally the case that humans attain certainty through illumination from the divine exemplars. Where Grossetest explored the illumination theory while commenting on Aristotle, Bonaventure reveals the true intellectual lineage of the idea by kicking off his disputed question with no fewer than nine quotations from Augustine. The format gives him ample opportunity to do this, because it is standard to quote authoritative sources and produce arguments on both sides of a question before resolving it. In this case, we get 34 points in favor of the illumination theory and 26 against. After then offering a response that sets out his own positive answer, Bonaventure concludes by answering the negative considerations one by one. Again, this is totally standard for the format, as is the fact that Bonaventure does not just say, yes, we do know in the light of the divine exemplars, but uses the opportunity to refine the proposal and indeed to unfold a whole theory of human knowledge. Though this theory requires that the divine exemplars are somehow involved in each case of our knowing, Bonaventure stridently denies that the exemplars are the only factor involved by being the direct objects of our thought. If they were, then we would enjoy a vision of God already in this life every time we attained knowledge. That would leave no room for improvement, which is unacceptable since our state in paradise, or when granted a special revelation, surely has to be better than the state of everyday knowing. And yet, the exemplars must be involved somehow every time anyone knows anything. This case has already been made in the initial series of arguments in favor of the proposal, which were taken from Augustine and others. You'll be relieved to hear that I am not going to tell you about all 34 of them. Instead, I'll reduce them to two groups of considerations, having to do on the one hand with the things that we know, and on the other hand with our situation as knowers. Concerning the objects that we know, Bonaventure sounds like many a Platonist when he demands that nothing can really be known unless it is unchanging. There is a hint of Aristotle here too. He stipulated that only necessary and eternal things are truly knowable. For the Platonists, for Aristotle, and now for Bonaventure, I cannot take myself to know that something is true, if it may stop being true at some point. But in that case, created things in the sensible world cannot, strictly speaking, be the true objects of our knowledge, because none of them endure forever. And what about us as knowers? Here Bonaventure and the sources he has quoted argue that by themselves, our minds are simply too limited to achieve genuine knowledge. How can a limited mind come to grasp the unlimited as when we come to understand number, which is potentially infinite? How can creatures who are fallible by nature enjoy knowledge, which is infallible? This mismatch between imperfect knowers and the perfection of knowledge can be overcome only if some other perfect principle is involved, and that principle is provided by divine illumination. We can bring the whole line of argument together by referring to the key word in the title of Bonaventure's disputed question, how is it that humans achieve certainty? Only if there is no hint of unreliability on either side, in the subject or in the object. The things we know must be guaranteed to be permanently knowable, and our act of knowing must be guaranteed to grasp the truth about those things. And speaking of truth, Bonaventure repeats an argument from Augustine to the effect that God must be involved in our knowledge, since knowledge is always true, and God is nothing other than the truth itself. We can see here that the theory of illumination connects to another central theme of medieval thought, the doctrine of the transcendentals. God is the source of being and truth for all things, and all that he has created has being and truth. So, when we know about them, we are indirectly knowing him. It's another way of making the point we found in The Retracing of the Arts to Theology, that all created things are mere signs of divine reality. But we need to be careful here. All that talk about unchanging objects may lead us to think that the divine exemplars are, in fact, the things we know, if that is, we get to know anything. As I've already said though, Bonaventure insists otherwise. In the response at the center of the disputed question, he explains that we never know the divine exemplars, at least not in this life. Rather, we do know created things as images of the exemplars. The talk of illumination is not meant to suggest that we are beholding God's ideas, like lights flashing in our mind's eye. Rather, we are knowing about created things in the light of the exemplars. The metaphor does not have God playing the role of a brilliant lamp into which we are staring, but of a lamp that is making other things visible so that we can see them. Bonaventure describes it with somewhat less metaphorical, but not entirely literal, language by saying that the exemplars serve as rules or standards for the things we know. When we know that giraffes are ruminants, it's as if we are implicitly comparing created giraffes to the divine idea of a giraffe, with the comparison allowing for certain knowledge rather than a mere belief. The exemplars provide a perfect standard in the light of which we can judge. But something else is needed too, an encounter with some actual created giraffes. Otherwise, there will be nothing for the divine light to illuminate. To this extent, like Grossetest before him, Bonaventure could retain something of Aristotle's point that human knowledge draws on sense perception. Like someone interrupted halfway through the process of extracting milk fat from butter, Bonaventure has left much unclarified. The broad lines of his teaching are explicit and emphatic enough that his followers, notably John Peckham and Matthew of Aqua Sparta, will also embrace the theory, but they add various refinements of their own, for which I'll give just one example. John Peckham notes that some of our concepts seem to be so immediate that we grasp them with no prompting from sense perception. The transcendentals would be such primary concepts. So Peckham made them an exception to the general rule that sensation is needed as a second source for knowledge alongside the divine exemplars. He and Matthew are also somewhat more careful in distinguishing between the grasp of simple concepts and whole propositions, the difference between understanding plain old giraffe and understanding a complex truth like giraffes are ruminants. It seems that Grossetest mostly had propositions in mind when he first started to develop the illumination theory, but by the time we get to Bonaventure, and especially his followers, we are seeing the theory applied to both kinds of knowledge. I don't want you to come away from this look at Bonaventure's epistemology with the impression that the understanding and acquisition of knowledge was, for him, the final goal of his writings. To see that it was not, we can do no better than to turn to his most celebrated treatise, The Journey of the Mind to God. In this work, Bonaventure makes many of the same points we've already discussed, for instance that created things are mere signs or traces of God. The illumination theory also emerges at several points, as when Bonaventure says that God provides the rule by which we understand things as if we make our judgments in accordance with immutable laws, or that since the human mind is changeable, it cannot know unchanging things without help. But like his retracing the arts to theology, Bonaventure's Journey of the Mind to God places the illumination theory and philosophy itself within a more general and ambitious context. It is a contemplative work, full of numerical correspondences and other symbolic images, yet another reminder of the 12th century Victorines. Where they had analyzed the various features of Noah's Ark, Bonaventure stays closer to home, in more sense than one, by dwelling on a vision enjoyed by his fellow Italian, and the founder of his movement, Francis of Assisi. Francis beheld an angel with six wings, which for Bonaventure symbolized six steps in our journey towards God, from created things seen as the traces of God, all the way up to the Trinity itself, by way of an analysis of the human soul. As in his other works, Bonaventure does give normal, non-theological knowledge its due. Philosophy allows us to understand the workings of our own souls, which as we know from Augustine, has a three-fold structure that mirrors the divine Trinity. But we should leave this mode of thinking behind when we come to contemplate the Trinity itself. At this stage, scripture must play the role that philosophy played before. Ultimately, Bonaventure is true to his Franciscan roots. For all his deft scholastic distinctions, and his care to retain at least some of Aristotle's teachings, philosophical knowledge is not his objective. Or rather, even if philosophical knowledge is his objective, it is not his only objective. Just as bodies and the mind are a kind of ladder to God, a stairway to heaven if you will, the real meaning of philosophy is found when we discover that it too is a trace of the divine. As Bonaventure says, there should be no speculation without devotion, no observation without exaltation, and no knowledge without love. For his vast body of writings, his combination of spirituality with intellectual dexterity, and his devotion not just to the divine exemplars, but to the example of Francis himself, for many Bonaventure stands unchallenged as the greatest of the medieval Franciscans. But as historians of philosophy, we may want to reserve judgment, because there are some awfully impressive Franciscans to come, not least Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Next time, we'll be looking at a less well-known Franciscan thinker, whose ideas about cognition and the soul can also fairly be placed among his order's greatest achievements. Frankly, I'd advise you not to miss the next episode, when we'll be turning our attention to Peter Olivi, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.