Reading Bonaventure in a Time Of Crisis | Prof. Gregory LaNave

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's Quarantine Lecture series. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org.

About the Speaker:

Dr. LaNave was born and raised in St. Cloud, Minnesota, but has lived in the Washington, D.C. area since 1991, when he came to Catholic University to begin a doctoral program in theology. After stints in publishing at the New Catholic Encyclopedia and The Catholic University of America Press, he joined the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception as a full-time faculty member in 2006, and was promoted to full professor in 2014. His special expertise is medieval theology and fundamental theology. He is the author of Through Holiness to Wisdom: The Nature of Theology according to St. Bonaventure (Rome: Istituto storico dei cappuccini, 2005), and scholarly articles on Bonaventure and/or Aquinas in Theological Studies, Franciscan Studies, and The Thomist, as well as essays on “Bonaventure on the Spiritual Senses,” in The Perception of God: The Spiritual Senses in the Christian Tradition (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012) and “Bonaventure’s Theological Method,” in A Companion to Bonaventure (Brill, 2013). Since 1996 he has served the Pontifical Faculty as managing editor of The Thomist, the quarterly journal of philosophy and theology published by the Dominican Fathers, and is the series Editor for The Fathers of the Church: Mediaeval Continuation, published by CUA Press. He is working on a book on the relationship between theology and holiness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why turn to Bonaventure in a time of crisis?
0:03.0	There are really two answers, depending on the kind of crisis we're talking about.
0:08.0	Some crises are single historical events.
0:12.0	And surely that's what we mean when we think about the word today.
0:15.0	The crisis of the pandemic, or a war, or aggravated racial tensions.
0:21.6	But there's also the sense of crisis as a perennial challenge, the way our thought or experience
0:28.6	tends to go wrong and how to correct it. I'll speak of the first, the sense of crisis as a
0:33.6	single historical event more briefly than the other. But to do this, it's necessary to know something about who Saint Bonaventure was.
0:42.3	He was born Giovanni di Fadanza in Banyarjo, Italy, probably in 1217.
0:50.3	Some scholars say it's late as 1221, but most would give the earlier date.
0:55.2	He tells us that as a child, he had been saved from a serious illness by the intercession of St. Francis.
1:03.0	St. Francis died in 1226.
1:05.0	It's not clear whether this intercession was something that happened during the saint Saints lifetime or was by prayer to the saint.
1:11.9	But in any case, Bonaventure attributes his healing to St. Francis.
1:16.9	He began his studies at the University of Paris around 1235, beginning with philosophy and the liberal arts.
1:25.6	He became a Franciscan eight years later, taking the name Bonaventure, and began to study theology.
1:31.3	He had several notable Franciscan teachers, most famous of which was Alexander of Hales, who commented of his student that, quote,
1:43.3	I do not see in him that Adam sin, end quote.
1:48.4	For his part, Bonaventure regarded Alexander as his father
1:52.0	and made the interesting comment that it was a sign of the rightness of the Franciscan order
1:58.9	that it mirrored the beginning of the church.
2:02.6	Beginning with the very humble and unlearned, it grew to encompass the greatest minds.
	...

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