Bonaventure and Creation
We willl examine aspects of Bonaventure’s work pertaining to creation extending from the broad milieu encountered in his thirteenth-century context to specific, key, areas of his speculative thought.
Course code: TH308
Professor: Dr. Jesmond MicallefDescription
Globalization has also demonstrated the grave problems arising from human individualism, such as destruction of the rainforests and the concentration of wealth, food consumption and energy use in a few countries to the detriment of the rest. Francis and Bonaventure were interested in creation not as a matter of curiosity but as the basis of spirituality, as a ladder to God. Can we today find a ladder to God through the Franciscan approach to matter?
In this course we will examine their contribution (together with a reference to Maximus the Theologian) of how today’s challenge for Christians today is to look for the traces of God in the world revealed by modern science, and to see in this world a reflection of the dynamic Trinity held in unity by love instead of putting Christianity faith and science in an adversarial relationship.
Table of contents
- Bonaventure's creation Theology
- The 12th and 13th century context of, and influence on, Bonaventure's theology of creation
- Christological foundations of Bonaventure's theology of creation
- Bonaventure's methaphysics
- The meaning of Convenientia in the Methaphysics of Bonaventure
- Bonaventure's aesthetics
- Bonaventure's methaphysics of the good