In THE MIND'S ROAD TO GOD, St. Bonaventure maintains that one does not have to be a great rationalist, an erudite theologian, or a doctor of the church to know religious truth. One has only to look about one and observe that certain laws obtain, that there is order - and when it is seen, one has glimpsed a reflection of the Divine Mind. The mysticism of Bonaventure is based on a theory of knowledge that is direct, immediate and nonrational. One sees God's traces in the sensory world, one sees His image in the mind, one sees His goodness in human goodness, one sees His powers in the operations of our own powers. THE MIND'S ROAD TO GOD sets forth in very few pages a whole system of metaphysics; it illustrates a philosophical method; it typifies the thinking of one of the great monastic orders of the West. This book is a kind of prose poem, with a dramatic development of its own as one rises from step to step toward a mystic vision of God.
In THE MIND'S ROAD TO GOD, St. Bonaventure maintains that one does not have to be a great rationalist, an erudite theologian, or a doctor of the church to know religious truth. One has only to look about one and observe that certain laws obtain, that there is order - and when it is seen, one has glimpsed a reflection of the Divine Mind. The mysticism of Bonaventure is based on a theory of knowledge that is direct, immediate and nonrational. One sees God's traces in the sensory world, one sees His image in the mind, one sees His goodness in human goodness, one sees His powers in the operations of our own powers. THE MIND'S ROAD TO GOD sets forth in very few pages a whole system of metaphysics; it illustrates a philosophical method; it typifies the thinking of one of the great monastic orders of the West. This book is a kind of prose poem, with a dramatic development of its own as one rises from step to step toward a mystic vision of God.