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@ MichaelJ
2023-11-24 21:26:58In the second part of the first chapter of St. Bonaventure's The Journey of the Mind to God, the Seraphic Doctor sets us on the first rung of the ladder to God by adjuring us to look around us at the material world. He describes the material world as a mirror which shows forth God, calling to mind St. Paul's words: "We see now through a glass in a dark manner, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12).
The Tools
By Bonaventure's account, our minds have three faculties that enable us to discern God's power, wisdom, and goodness from His traces in the material world. These faculties are intellect, faith, and reason.
Intellect
The intellect speculates on material things as they are. As we encounter things in themselves, we begin by observing them with the senses, and from these observations we distinguish, measure, and discern the causes and ends of things.
Faith
Faith is the faculty that concerns things in their habitual course, and its activity is belief. By faith, the mind grasps the pattern of the ongoing activity of things, and where such activity fits in the arc of the universe as a whole. Faith fulfilled believes that the world had its beginning in God, and will find its end in Him. It sees and follows the progression of the moral law, beginning with the law of nature, proceeding to the law of Scripture, and culminating in the law of grace. It is by faith that we can believe in the internal consistency of reality.
Reason
The faculty of the reason finds its activity in investigation. By reason, the mind extrapolates to truths beyond what is immediately accessible to the senses. For instance, the mind can recognize that some things are purely material, that some things are part material and part spiritual, and, by extension, conclude that some purely spiritual things must exist.
All things that exist have seven characteristics, and by investigation, the mind can reason from each of these characteristics to the existence of a transcendent God. The first of these characteristics is origin; all things have causes, and all that exists must have an ultimate first origin and final cause.
Next are vastness and multitude, wherein the mind can perceive that things in their size, quantity, power, and greatness are beyond human reckoning. Vastness and multitude point to a transcendent power that encompasses all things.
The fourth quality is beauty. In beauty, the reason recognizes the various perfections of material things, and discerns the necessity of a most perfect being.
The next two qualities, fullness and operation, deal with the forms of things, their potencies, and the goodness of their activities. In God, the reason identifies that something must exist which has complete fullness—that is, in which all the forms of things are found, and in which all potency is realized in pure activity. The activities, or operations, of things, insofar as they are good, all point to an ultimate goodness.
Finally, the reason can perceive order. One of the core assumptions of Bonaventure—and indeed of the whole Western tradition—is that the material world is inherently ordered, and that this order is readily accessible to the investigations of reason. If that which exists is ordered, then it follows that there must be a thing which is first, highest, mightiest, wisest, and best.
Reflections
The key axiom of this section of the book is that the material world is inherently meaningful. If it were not, then all the activity of the mind that Bonaventure outlines would be nothing more than an elaborate self-deception.
The attention Bonaventure gives to reason and its investigative power is significant. It is by reason that we first ascend from what we perceive to what must exist, but is not accessible to the senses. Our minds are always striving to make this ascent, even when we are not explicitly seeking God. For instance, when we see the sun rise each morning, the intellect probes this observation of the senses, and discerns the pattern in the sun's rising. Seeing this pattern in the past, faith extends this pattern to hold that the sun must have risen every day before we noticed it, and that it will continue to do so into the future. Investigating this pattern further, the reason can discern the order and motion of the sun and the planets that orbit around it, even though that motion is not directly accessible to the senses.
Bonaventure's understanding of these faculties of the mind indicate that the perceived opposition between faith and science is a false dichotomy. All scientific activity makes use of these three faculties of the soul that probe the material world: intellect, faith, and reason. God is certainly no less reasonable than the world itself, so if we can use these faculties to grasp the material world, we can certainly use them to come to know God.
Finally, Bonaventure's discussion on vastness and multitude is an interesting point of overlap with everyday experiences of transcendence. Many people experience a sense of awe at the vastness of the ocean, the eons of deep time, or the innumerable stars of the night sky. Such an awe is perfectly reasonable, according to Bonaventure, and it should point our understanding toward the existence of a being that encompasses all of this vastness and multitude within itself.
Conclusion
St. Bonaventure concludes this chapter by admonishing his readers to be attentive to God's traces in the material world. Blindness to these truths, and certainly willful blindness, is, in his view, the height of foolishness. Borrowing from Psalm 91, he warns us that "the universe shall war...against the foolhardy" (ellipsis in original). The wise person, he says, rejoices at the perceptible works of God in the material world, and uses these traces of the divine as a starting point on the mind's ascent towards its true source and end.