Bonaventure Quotes on Knowledge
Bonaventure's epistemology, developed across the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, and the Soul's Journey to God, integrates the Aristotelian apparatus of Bonaventure's scholastic context with the Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination he held more centrally than his Dominican contemporary Aquinas. Genuine human knowledge of the eternal truths requires the supernatural illumination of the divine Light operating internally on the cognizing intellect; the natural light of reason can produce only the partial and unstable knowledge that the wider salvation-historical context Bonaventure articulated in the Soul's Journey is designed to complete. The framework supplies the principal Franciscan-Augustinian alternative to the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis that defined the high scholastic period, and shaped subsequent Franciscan philosophical theology through Scotus and beyond.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bonaventure:
“He who is not enlightened by such great splendours of created things is blind; he who is not awakened by such great cries is deaf.”
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Attributed to Bonaventure:
“All knowledge serves theology.”
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Attributed to Bonaventure:
“The light of natural knowledge is in vain if our affections are not rightly ordered.”
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“Let us not believe that it is enough to read without unction, to speculate without devotion, to investigate without wonder, to observe without joy, to act without godly zeal, to know without love, to understand without humility, to strive without divine grace, or to reflect as a mirror without divinely inspired wisdom.”
Wikiquote -
“The virtue of gratitude is extremely commendable and pleasing in the sight of God, as its opposite is a detestable vice before him. Of which subject, thus speaks St. Bernard: Learn to be thankful for every grace received. Consider diligently the favors heaped upon you, that no gift of God be defrauded of the due return of gratitude and thanksgiving you ought to make, whether the gift be great, middling, or little.”
Wikiquote -
“...Though His Passion sufficed for all, yet all would not profit from it, for some would be reprobate, hard-hearted, and impenitent.”
Life of Christ, Chapter LXXI -
“Contemplation deepens the more we feel the working of God’s grace within our hearts, and the better we learn to encounter God in creatures outside ourselves.”
Bonaventure, On the Sentences , Book 2, 23, 2, 3 | Quoted by Pope Francis in Laudato si' (2015), paragraph 233