Words Made Flesh: Essays Honoring Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M.

History, Metaphysics, and Theology in St. Bonaventure

History, MEtaPHysics, and tHEology in st. BonaVEnturE ZacHary HayEs, o.F.M. Aristotle describes the difference between poetry and history in the following words: Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars .1 Concerning the universal, the same author says that poetry speaks about “what such and such a kind of person will probably or necessarily say or do.” History, on the other hand, with its 1 Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 9, 1451b, 1463-64, as found in Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, NY: Random House, 1941/1970): “Any other claim to wisdom must be brought into relation with this wisdom. Philosophy, then, which at the level of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphysics is a search for the ultimate principles of reality, is best seen not as a self-sufficient form of human knowledge, but as a stage in the larger pattern of the spiritual journey of humanity to God. But that journey, which in the case of Francis of Assisi was uncomplicated by extensive rational inquiry, takes a different form in the life of the intellectual scholar. In the latter case, rational philosophy is seen as a necessary and important development of the human mind. But it cannot be allowed to rest in itself. The intellectual person is to move through the process of rational inquiry in philosophy, and even in theology, only to culminate in a form of ecstatic, transforming love in which the human soul is drawn beyond the categories of rational discourse ever deeper into a mystery that it never comprehends.” Words Made Flesh: essays honoring Kenan osborne 74 “singular statements,” deals with what a particular person “did or had done to him.” This text sets out the elements of an interesting discussion when it suggests a preference for philosophy over history and for the knowledge of universals over that of particulars. If philosophy in its highest form turns out to be what Aristotle offers in the writings that have come to be known as the Metaphysics, then this text from the Poetics suggests what would become an explicit debate during the high Middle Ages when the fuller library of Aristotelian writings entered the intellectual life of the Christian West. This would be the debate between the understanding of Christian theology cast in the form of a history, and the understanding of metaphysical knowledge as the knowledge of universals. Allusions to this problem are present in the opening pages of the Summa of Aquinas.2 How it appeared to St. Bonaventure is the issue we wish to discuss in this paper. The term metaphysics as it relates to Aristotle was originally the result of an historical accident. It was used at first to designate a group of writings that came literally after the physics as the Philosopher’s writings were put together by Andronicus of Rhodes about the year 70 b.c.e. The title probably meant simply “that which comes after physics.” In subsequent editions, the title and the sequence remained. But in the book known as the Metaphysics, the Philosopher does something that is a long way from what he does in the Physics. For here he speaks about that science which seeks to know the first principles of reality, and he treats of the movement of the mind from the experience of particular things to a knowledge of the more universal causes or principles that underlie particular instances of movement or change. He describes this level of knowledge as the first philosophy , as wisdom, or even as theology. And this, he argues, is one of the ways in which human beings work out their desire to know. It is, perhaps, the pre-eminent way in which we do that. Not surprisingly, in the light of this, the Scholastics came to understand the meaning of the title Metaphysics to be not simply 2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 1a. 1. The opening question of the Summa is clearly shaped by the background problems of Aristotle and Averroes as understood by the philosophers of the thirteenth century. Zachary hayes 75 “that which comes after physics,” but above all, “that which transcends physics.” The science described by Aristotle in the Metaphysics is, then, the knowledge of first causes. As such, it is that knowledge which underlies and transcends all other sciences, and which...