Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

His central idea is simply to reject Avicenna’s supposed insight that something could be both created and eternal. For Bonaventure this is just a contradiction in terms. Creation means bringing something to be “from nothing (ex nihilo).” If God genuinely creates something, then it must be preceded by nothingness. Bonaventure assumes that the philosophers who believed in eternity were not so stupid as to miss this point. Their mistake was falsely supposing that God performs His works the way a created cause would by bringing things to be from preexisting matter or potentiality, like a carpenter who makes things out of wood, or fire which transforms fuel into flames. On this misconception the universe would at least have to come from eternally preexistent matter, if not actually being eternal in the finished form that we see. To this core idea Bonaventure adds a battery of further arguments. For one thing, he thinks that an infinite period of time cannot already have elapsed so as to reach the current instant. For another, even the Aristotelians would admit that it is impossible for an infinity of things to exist actually and all at the same time. But this is exactly what would happen if the universe were eternal. Just consider the souls of all the humans who have lived. If there have always been humans and if human souls survive death, by now we would have gotten to an infinite number of souls. Bonaventure connects this point to that other central dispute concerning philoso...