Sapientia est cognitio aeternorumla relación entre “verdad filosófica” y “verdad teológica” en el pensamiento bonaventuriano

Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of knowledge and its sapiential synthesis in the works of St. Bonaventure. The methodological approach consists of an analytical and critical reading of the theological and philosophical work of the Seraphicus in synchronic order in order to draw a series of conclusions -as a synthesis- that give an answer to the problematic enunciated in the title of the work. The introduction and the conclusion respond to the normal methodological approach in this type of work. Therefore, a very important part of the thesis will be the conclusions -both the partial conclusions drawn in the partial recapitulations and the final conclusions themselves-. In them we will try to offer a synthetic view of Bonaventurian thought in dialogue: either with important existential questions for the man of today, or with the problem of identity that the university in the West is going through today. The aim of this work is to offer a revision of the reductivist readings of the Seraphicus, which entrench him in an anti-Aristotelian or anti-philosophical camp, in a pretended debate between faith and reason or between philosophy and theology. In this sense, we seek to discover an open thinker, dialoguing, synthetic in his sapiential view of the world, metaphysician as well as theologian and mystic, with a thought that is in good measure a brother of the Thomist or the Scotsman -all of them sons of St. Augustine, although each one with his own very personal influences-. These differences are precisely those that enrich each of these heirs of the great tradition of Christian thought with an intellectual and charismatic character. To achieve this discovery, we propose to start from a fundamental gnoseological analysis to identify the basic structure of Bonaventurian thought that sustains every link of the human being with the world and with God. In this analysis, it should be emphasized that the predominant and culminating note is the sapiential gaze that, from Christ (especially the crucified one) can illuminate the whole world. Such a gaze, which is more heavenly than earthly, more loving than intellectual, more divine than worldly, is the historical moment in which the definitive marriage of man with God takes place and is, therefore, the definitive truth, to which all other meanings of "truth" are reduced. In this sense, Aristotle and Plato (like Socrates or Plotinus) are seekers of a truth that had not yet arrived historically (and such is their merit and their limit). In the same way, the work of the philosopher cannot be understood as an itinerary independent of this manifestation of the "Triplex Verbum", in search of a series of truths unanchored from revelation and redemption (and, therefore, from the culminating moment of the history of humanity in general and of each human being in particular). On the contrary, philosophy is a way of walking the first steps or of traversing the first stages of the itinerary that ascends to Calvary or Mount Alvernia, in the same way that theology considered in the strict sense supposes a continuation and a definitive moment of that journey and in the broad sense supposes a total look - synthetic, final, eschatological, celestial - of the entire return journey of the human being to the definitive embrace with the Father in Christ. The chapters of the third part will be a landing of all these ideas in some of their spiritual, anthropological, aesthetic, epistemological, etc. conclusions. We are aware that many fronts are still open and many roads are still to be traveled. Bonaventurian thought continues and will continue to be very fruitful for the thought of human beings of all times and, in a very particular way, for Christian thought.