Reviews for Bonaventure

The average rating for Bonaventure based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-19 00:00:00 Shellina Rush Cullen's Bonaventure is exhaustive ... and exhausting. The series Great Medieval Thinkers perhaps sets up its authors for frustration. The series introduction states that the books are designed to be accessible to the general reader with no prior knowledge, while still engaging and entertaining (?) specialists. Most of the books in the series cut toward the general reader. This one may confound the specialists. Cullen's book can be seen as a counterpoint to the trend of presenting a mystical, cosmic, theological, developing, almost Eastern Bonaventure, read largely through his later works (à la Ewert Cousins)and interpreted through grids (such as the coincidence of opposites) not explicitly found in Bonaventure's works. Instead, Cullen lays out a locus by locus exposition of Bonaventure's thought, following the order of sciences laid out in his De reductione and the theological topics found in his Commentary on the Sentences. The chapters are information overload. Terse formulas are jammed next to each other with insufficient exposition, just the opposite of a good introduction. Because so many details are treated, the book has a flat quality. The relative predominance of concepts is hard to judge. The reader gets no sense of Bonaventure as a synthetic thinker. On the other hand, the comprehensiveness of the book makes it useful as a reference tool. It does genuinely capture the breadth of Bonaventure's thought; far from a specialist, he wrote on every theological topic of his day. Bonaventure the philosopher shines through here in a way that he does not in some other introductions. Also, Cullen helpfully distinguishes Bonaventure from Thomas, a useful feature for those who tend to equate scholasticism or even medieval theology with Thomism.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-26 00:00:00 Jewelrit Stewart Very good primer on Bonaventure's philosophy and theology. Cullen writes adeptly with clarity and depth in just under 200 pages on the thought of a great systematizer and synthesizer of ideas during the medieval period. Bonaventure displays a fecundity of ideas, dispelling reductionistic post-Enlightenment assessments and notions of the "dark ages" and, perhaps, pointing to our own modern myopia of anti-philosophies and the uninspired and unambitious specialists in philosophy who continue to beat the "tin drum" of empiricism, radical autonomy, and naturalism. The problems and issues Bonaventure grappled with as a Catholic, Franciscan, and mystic are a reminder that philosophy and theology need imagination to accompany rational rigor to see new horizons. The book may be a challenge to those not well-versed in the vocabulary and controversies of classical and medieval theology and philosophy.