Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

the sensible world cannot be the true objects of our knowledge, because none of them endures forever. And what about us as knowers? Here Bonaventure and the sources he has quoted argue that our minds are simply too limited to achieve genuine knowledge by their own power. How can a limited mind come to grasp the unlimited (122), as when we come to understand number, which is potentially infinite? How can creatures who are fallible by nature enjoy knowledge, which is infallible? The mismatch between imperfect knowers and the perfection of knowledge can be overcome only if some other perfect principle is involved, and that principle is provided by divine illumination (121). We can bring the whole line of argument together by referring to the key word in the title of Bonaventure’s disputed question: how is it that humans achieve certainty? Only if there is no hint of unreliability on either side, in the subject or in the object. The things we know must be guaranteed to be permanently knowable, and our act of knowing must be guaranteed to grasp the truth about those things. Speaking of truth, Bonaventure repeats an argument from Augustine to the effect that God must be involved in our knowledge, since knowledge is always true and God is nothing other than the Truth itself (115). We can see here that the theory of illumination connects to the now familiar doctrine of the transcendentals. God is the source of being and truth for all created things, so when we know them, we are in...