Illumination in Bonaventure's Epistemology
    By Alexander Koudlai
    I
    The telos of this essay is to support the axiology of the literary work of the great man, which impressed me who lives almost eight hundred years later. What makes it so important to me and may be to our contemporary culture? The epistemology and metaphysics are considered there together and in such a way that the ethics of human life is affected in a reasonably defensible manner. Probably our contemporary axiology (and particularly in the matters of acquiring and evaluating of knowledge) may benefit from the investigation of Bonaventure's theory.
    Today we are used to hear that a theory has to be verifiable in order to be considered as knowledge. By verifiable it is usually meant empirically provable. The latter means observable to senses and capable of repeated observations. The theories of ancient and medieval thinkers are usually treated lightly and accused of dogmatism, i.e. of claims not supported by experience. Nevertheless, it is not accurate because the spiritual and miraculous experiences reported by many individuals from different countries in every century and the communities of monks and nuns living in the monasteries (those laboratories of spiritual life) do support those theories again and again. Our W. James wrote of those prejudices of the scientific community of his time and of their refusal even to consider those "hard cases" not easily explicable by the contemporary scientific theories. There is still a huge problem in this department today, and we just have to be aware about its existence. As James, claiming himself to be a radical empiricist, suggested, if a theory (and he meant a modern theory) cannot deal with some facts reported by honest people, it is too bad for the theory and not for the facts. This sounds at least consistent and fair.
    When observation is artificially limited only to the observation by physical senses, the observer risks to lock himself into a dogmatic circle, especially when he judges about non-empirical claims, or claims of the human observations which transcend merely sensual ones*. Those people who do this usually claim themselves materialists and are opposed to theories of spiritual thinkers. As we can see, the empiricists are not all materialists, who are extremely dogmatic themselves, but even though their theories are based on axioms which are not always shared by the rest of humanity and may seem dogmatic in certain respects to those who prefer to think differently. Another objection to theories of spiritual thinkers was that "they all disagree", hence the truth, the existence of which they claim, could not be the universal truth.
    In my opinion, the ontological claims of different prominent thinkers from different traditions have more points in common then not and others are arguably convertible. Those thinkers from different times and cultures universally claim the existence of truth beyond sensual experiences and somehow human access to that truth. They also say that some people persist in some kind of blindness to the truth and teachings of it. This blindness does not exclude productive thinking in the empirical mode, but it does secure the dissatisfaction of the soul and many kinds of suffering.
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    *Professor D. Robinson said once: "A scientist taking a corpuscular approach to explanation of the world, usually sets parameters for observations of corpuscles, build instruments capable to pick corpuscles, observes what those instruments show him and then says: I claimed that the world was corpuscular and see: it is corpuscular ..." (The Great Ideas of Philosophy)
    Jesus says:
    But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me. . . . And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me? He who is of God hears God's words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God". (John 8:45-47)
    In the Lankavatara Sutra Buddha says:
    Then there are materialistic philosophers. No respect nor service is to be shown them because their teachings though they may be explained by using hundreds of thousands of words and phrases, do not go beyond the concepts of this world and this body and in the end they lead to suffering. As the materialists recognize no truth as existing by itself...(D. Goddard "A Buddhist Bible", p.312-313).
    Bonaventure respects the empirical knowledge. He read Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, but he also read Neo-Platonists and was impressed by Plato's theory of archetypes, which we cannot say where he received from*. Bonaventure is a friar and a mystic, and the existence of the spiritual light, bliss and the visions beyond physical senses is an immediate reality for him; also he is a scholar. Therefore, he attempts to synthesize different theoretical views into one consistent theory, which would account for the empirical, speculative and spiritual knowledge, and would be consistent with the Revelation of the Holy Scripture and Bonaventure's favorite thinker St. Augustine, "the wisest of them all".
    II
    How do we know? Plato used to say that there is knowledge and beliefs or opinions, and there are lovers of knowledge, or wisdom philosophers, and lovers of opinions philodoxers. The beliefs (opinions) could be beautiful but not true, while
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    * Possibly Plotinus, Porphyry, Augustine or some medieval writers before Bonaventure.
    knowledge is always true. While certain beliefs when tested could collapse, the truth is resilient to any tests whether empirical or speculative (logical). ............