In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS 471 even the Church's use of them is always responsive to particular currents of thought and particular, changeable and changing, vocabularies, and there have been and will be again periods when these enterprises recede even further into the background than they are at the moment. The fundamental point is that these matters have always been and will always remain, much more murky than doctrine itself. Guarino's metaphors mislead him, too often, into thinking the opposite, into thinking that the mistress's ancillae can be sure, in the arguments they have among themselves in the antechamber, about which dress will best set off her beauty. But they can't. Their concern should be for ornamentation and display, not for the single best dress; and if that is not the concern, there are many more possibilities than Guarino acknowledges. University ofIllinois at Chicago Chicago, Illinois PAUL J. GRIFFITHS Through Holiness to Wisdom: The Nature of Theology according to St. Bonaventure. By GREGORYlANAVE. Bibliotheca Seraphico-Capuccina 76. Rome: Istituto storico dei cappuccini, 2005. Pp. 241. 20 €(paper). ISBN 88-88001-33-6. Gregory LaNave has undertaken to articulate Saint Bonaventure's understanding of theology. Others have investigated this territory before, but none have charted it as fully and carefully. LaNave's understanding of Bonaventure is, in outline, simple. Theology is a science, requiring holiness, and ordered to wisdom. When so stated, the thesis is clear enough. Such clarity is always admirable in scholarly writing, perhaps especially in scholarly writing on Bonaventure. But that is not the substantive contribution of this book. At a certain point in reading Bonaventure, one cannot help but be struck by the very capaciousness of his mind. The breadth of his inquiry, it would seem, is without limit. But he is no intellectual magpie; the synthetic powers of his intellect are such as to give location to whatever he turns his mind to. Things have a place, a place determined by their relationships to other things. Bonaventure sees and strives to articulate the deep lines of unity among all things created and God. The power of his penetration into things is further manifest in the often painstaking details of analysis. He is, after all, a Scholastic, and it shows. But the distinctions are in the service of articulating reality and the ultimately interconnected character of things. I confess to an odd reaction on reading much of the scholarship on Bonaventure. It often seems accurate enough, but somehow madequate to the scope of Bonaventure's thought. The difficulty is that in focusing on some aspect 472 BOOK REVIEWS of a topic, the larger frame is lost; in proposing a key to a given topic, or even to the whole of the doctor's thought, one does not simply set aside topics (as one must always do in sound scholarly writing) but one sets aside topics that are intrinsic to the one under consideration. LaNave has, remarkably, avoided this. He might, most simply, have done a word study of the term theologia in Bonaventure. Such a study would have required cutting "theology" loose from vital elements with the effect of distorting, if not simply misrepresenting, the master's thinking. And so LaNave looks to articulate those terms, those elements vital to "theology." They are, on his account, three: scientia, sanctitas, and sapientia. Any one of these three would have made an interesting enough study. What makes this book valuable is the careful articulation of the relationship between science, holiness, and wisdom suchthat a remarkably full portrait oftheology emerges. LaNave's point, so clear in execution, is that a consideration of theology in Bonaventure that neglects any one of the three is not simply truncated, it is deficient. The three ideas establish the basic structure of the book. LaNave first considers Bonaventure on theology as a science. His principal source here is, as one might suspect, the commentary on Lombard's Sentences, especially, but not exclusively, the prologue to book 1. LaNave delineates the lines of Bonaventure's thought with reference to Odo Rigaldus and the Summa fratris Alexandri, noting what Bonaventure has adopted and where he has departed from his own masters. LaNave gives the Aristotelian elements...

pdf

Share