Research

Abstract: How autonomous is the human intellect for Bonaventure, and how much does it depend upon divine illumination for its ability to abstract universals from sense perception? The scholarship is divided: an Aristotelian reading holds that abstraction precedes illumination (Timothy Noone), while an Augustinian reading holds that illumination precedes and conditions abstraction (Étienne Gilson). Both readings face difficulties: if a divine exemplar illuminates the intellect prior to abstraction, then abstraction seems superfluous; if abstraction precedes illumination, then the agent intellect’s ability to abstract is left unexplained.

I defend a moderate Augustinian reading: illumination by general divine attributes (eternity, infinity, immutability) precedes and conditions abstraction, while a fuller understanding of the divine exemplar corresponding to a given abstracted universal follows abstraction. Interpretive questions still remain regarding what precisely Bonaventure thinks abstraction consists in—questions which his texts may simply underdetermine.

Abstract: Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987) was a philosophical theologian in the Neo-Calvinist tradition of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Van Til claims that God’s existence is the fundamental presupposition of all intelligible human predication—a claim whose precise meaning is often left unclear. Most interpreters focus on how Van Til holds that knowledge of God is fundamental at the hermeneutical level. I suggest that Van Til also holds that knowledge of God is fundamental at the conceptual level. For Van Til, innate knowledge of God, consisting in a contentful cognitive awareness of God’s existence, makes possible our grasp of every other concept, including acquired knowledge of God from creatures.

I contrast Van Til’s approach with the alternative “abstract” approach associated with Thomas Aquinas, who holds that theological predication is possible ultimately through concepts representing created being, which are extended upward to God through negation and analogy—without any prior knowledge of God to “anchor” negations in prior affirmations about God or the analogical extension of our concepts to God. Understanding Van Til’s own critique of Aquinas’s view, and his insistence that the only viable argument for God’s existence is a transcendental argument, requires understanding Van Til’s view that knowledge of God is fundamental not only at the hermeneutical level, but also at the conceptual level.

Abstract: Medieval Aristotelians held, following Aristotle (Metaphysics 4), that all learning presupposes an unconditioned principle (non conditionale principium) which knowledge of all other propositions presupposes but which itself presupposes no other proposition. Thomas Aquinas identities this principle with the Principle of Noncontradiction (PNC), grounded in our abstractive cognition of created being. I argue that Bonaventure holds that <God exists>, grounded in intuitive cognition of divine being, is the unconditioned principle—more fundamental even than PNC.

I defend this reading of Bonaventure and argue that Bonaventure’s position rests on Aristotle’s own criteria of scientific knowledge, applied to an Augustinian theory of exemplar causality. The upshot of Bonaventure’s transformation of Aristotle’s position is that scientific knowledge (scientia) of PNC’s truth requires knowledge of the exemplar cause of being: divine being (esse divinum). Therefore, knowledge of the proposition <God exists> is, for Bonaventure, the most basic presupposition for the possibility of knowledge of any other proposition—including fundamental truths of logic.

Abstract: What is the relation between fundamental principles of logic, like the Principle of Noncontradiction (PNC), and knowledge of God? In the first half of my paper, I reconstruct two medieval theistic responses to this question: the Logic-First Model, due to Thomas Aquinas, and the God-First Model, due to Bonaventure. Each model answers two questions:

1. Intelligibility Question: How do humans understand the concepts involved in PNC?
2. Epistemic Question: How do humans have epistemic access to PNC?

To the Intelligibility Question, Aquinas’s Logic-First Model answers that humans understand the concepts involved in PNC by understanding COMMON BEING, which is conceptually primitive (i.e., understanding this concept depends upon understanding no other concept) and whose extension includes divine and nondivine being. To the Epistemic Question, the Logic-First Model answers that humans have epistemic access to PNC through (ideal) conceivability, although humans can know PNC, with normative certainty, without knowing what guarantees that conceivability reliably tracks modal space. Knowledge that God exists, on this model, depends upon prior knowledge of PNC.
Bonaventure’s God-First Model, by contrast, takes a surprising position: knowledge that God exists is prior to, and more certain than, knowledge of PNC—although this knowledge is either merely dispositional, or occurrent but nonluminous. To the Intelligibility Question, the God-First Model responds that humans understand concepts involved in PNC by understanding COMMON BEING, but it denies that COMMON BEING is conceptually primitive. Instead, the God-First Model affirms that PERFECT BEING is conceptually primitive and conceptually prior to COMMON BEING. To the Epistemic Question, the God-First Model answers that humans have epistemic access to PNC (partially) in virtue of acquaintance with what ultimately grounds PNC’s truth: God. Understanding PERFECT BEING and acquaintance with God grounds knowledge of the proposition <God exists>, albeit under a different description.

In the second half of my paper, I reconstruct and develop Bonaventure’s defense of his God-First Model. In response to the Intelligibility Question, I motivate a principle of the Conceptual Priority of the Perfect and argue that PERFECT BEING and IMPERFECT BEING are primitively distinct and analogically related (i.e., they share no conceptual content univocally). Further, by positing that humans have acquaintance with what ultimately guarantees that conceivability reliably tracks modal space, the God-First Model better explains how humans know necessary truths, including PNC. Then, I consider several concerns about the God-First Model, especially (i) that knowledge of PNC seems more certain than, and prior to, knowledge that God exists and (ii) that the God-First Model commits its proponent to the objectionable claim that adequately understanding PERFECT BEING entails knowing that God exists.

I close by considering some interesting implications of a God-First Model: If knowledge of God’s existence is prior to knowledge of PNC, then knowing that an argument is valid presupposes knowing God’s existence. Affirming the soundness of an argument that God does not exist therefore contradicts a pragmatic presupposition of making that affirmation—that God exists (the metaphysical ground of logic) and that God is known (the epistemic ground of logic).

Abstract: Aquinas and Bonaventure agree that for any human knower S and any instance of knowledge k, a necessary condition for S to be certain of k is that S be suitably related to the ultimate, immutable ground for the truth of k—that is, to God, or something in God. The thinkers differ, though, on what this relation (call it the “certainty-making relation”) actually is. My project is threefold. First, I detail each thinker’s theory of the certainty-making relation, isolating three particularly pertinent conditions at the crux of the thinkers’ disagreement. Second, I reconstruct the rationale behind their respective theories. Finally, I evaluate the relative philosophical merits of each theory and suggest ways in which contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of religion could appropriate elements of both Aquinas’s and Bonaventure’s accounts. What emerges is not only a clearer vision of each thinker’s cognitive theory, but also a significant challenge: by making certainty less directly dependent upon Christ, the true Teacher, has the Doctor Communis afforded too much autonomy to human knowledge?

Abstract: I defend a broad reading of Bonaventure’s illumination argument for God’s existence, arguing that it consists in two species. SPECIES I arguments entail that illumination by divine exemplars is required for (a) the certainty of true cognition and (b) the very acquisition of concepts of empirical origin—against R. E. Houser’s influential reading that restricts illumination to certifying knowledge already acquired. SPECIES II arguments hold that an intuited, highly abstract concept of God explains the very meaningfulness of concepts, whether of empirical origin or not, since understanding any being presupposes understanding esse, and Bonaventure identifies understanding of pure esse with understanding of divine being.

Jointly, these arguments entail that understanding any concept or proposition—whether true or false, certain or uncertain—presupposes knowledge of God’s existence. Since knowledge is factive, this entails that God exists: even entertaining the proposition <God does not exist> performatively presupposes knowledge of the proposition <God exists>. I close by considering how a SPECIES II-style argument might be developed for contemporary philosophy of religion, particularly in the tradition of Reformed epistemology.

Abstract: I defend a broad reading of Bonaventure’s illumination argument for God’s existence, arguing that it consists in two species. SPECIES I arguments entail that illumination by divine exemplars is required for (a) the certainty of true cognition and (b) the very acquisition of concepts of empirical origin—against R. E. Houser’s influential reading that restricts illumination to certifying knowledge already acquired. SPECIES II arguments hold that an intuited, highly abstract concept of God explains the very meaningfulness of concepts, whether of empirical origin or not, since understanding any being presupposes understanding esse, and Bonaventure identifies understanding of pure esse with understanding of divine being.

Jointly, these arguments entail that understanding any concept or proposition—whether true or false, certain or uncertain—presupposes knowledge of God’s existence. Since knowledge is factive, this entails that God exists: even entertaining the proposition <God does not exist> performatively presupposes knowledge of the proposition <God exists>. I close by considering how a SPECIES II-style argument might be developed for contemporary philosophy of religion, particularly in the tradition of Reformed epistemology.

Abstract: I defend a broad reading of Bonaventure’s illumination argument for God’s existence, arguing that it consists in two species. SPECIES I arguments entail that illumination by divine exemplars is required for (a) the certainty of true cognition and (b) the very acquisition of concepts of empirical origin—against R. E. Houser’s influential reading that restricts illumination to certifying knowledge already acquired. SPECIES II arguments hold that an intuited, highly abstract concept of God explains the very meaningfulness of concepts, whether of empirical origin or not, since understanding any being presupposes understanding esse, and Bonaventure identifies understanding of pure esse with understanding of divine being.

Jointly, these arguments entail that understanding any concept or proposition—whether true or false, certain or uncertain—presupposes knowledge of God’s existence. Since knowledge is factive, this entails that God exists: even entertaining the proposition <God does not exist> performatively presupposes knowledge of the proposition <God exists>. I close by considering how a SPECIES II-style argument might be developed for contemporary philosophy of religion, particularly in the tradition of Reformed epistemology.

Proclus’s and Thomas Aquinas’s arguments for a first, transcendent cause share a formal structure: both proceed by resolutio toward the simple, independent causes of complex, dependent beings. Yet their respective approaches differ sharply. For Proclus, an intuition of absolute unity is the unhypothetical presupposition (ἀνυπόθετον) of all knowledge, symmetrical with unity’s status as the first principle of being; discursive ascent to the One thus discovers hyper-intellectual cognition of the One already presupposed within human experience. For Aquinas, by contrast, the fundamental presupposition of all knowledge is a concept of being in general, reached by an analysis of intrinsic (formal) causes distinct from the analysis of extrinsic causes that yields knowledge of God—such that knowledge of being as such does not imply knowledge of God, and theistic argument genuinely causes new knowledge rather than merely awakening implicit knowledge. Thus, Proclus’s approach to theistic argument is marked by immediacy, whereas Aquinas’s is marked by mediacy. This contrast clarifies Aquinas’s distinctive place among his more Platonist and Augustinian contemporaries.

Recent scholarship on Calvin’s relation to scholasticism has tended to emphasize continuity, sometimes at the expense of overlooking, or even misconstruing, real differences. Comparing Aquinas and Calvin on natural arguments for the soul’s survival past death, I argue for an important discontinuity.

Aquinas’s arguments for the soul’s incorruptibility are philosophical demonstrations resting on self-evident principles which are intelligible independently of any prior knowledge of God. By contrast, Calvin’s arguments for the soul’s immortality are not designed to be acceptable without qualification to people who have not been regenerated by the Holy Spirit: rather, they depend upon, and ultimately derive their persuasive force from, an implanted knowledge of the soul’s immortality (the sensus immortalitatis) and God’s existence (the sensus divinitatis)—both of which fallen humans suppress.

I argue that Calvin simply designs his arguments to describe, in the light of Christian Scripture, what the implanted knowledge of God and the soul’s immortality reveals. If directed toward non-Christians, the point of these arguments is not to philosophically demonstrate the soul’s immortality from neutral starting-points but to awaken the implanted knowledge which Calvin supposes that all people possess.