Presentation: Aristotle spoke of the world as eternal. Bonaventure and Philoponus thought it to be hard to reconcile with the Christian concept of creation ex nihilo. Aristotle however did think the world was made by Intelligence from eternal elements. Aristotle, in Bonaventure’s mind still reached a degree of truth by stating that matter was still eternally perfected by Idea.
“quae dicit omnia esse creata, et secundum omne quod sunt in esse producta”- Everything has been created and brought forth in the totality of what they are. This is revelatory of the effects of the actions of the First Cause. But the question of the creation from elements beings instantaneously or with anterior elements remains unanswered.
We first get to the mathematical impossibility of utilising functions to any infinite quantity. If at the present we state that the world has been infinite, but add days which will know to pass, we suppose an augment to infinity. We can assume the infinite from the perspective of the present, as a value at the very instant of rumination, but the argument supposes a number larger than infinity, rendering it absurd. And this accounts for any unit of time one desires. Philoponus notes, “An infinite series has no first term, so the series of causes of this generation does not have a first term, and as a first term does not exist, the following terms do not exist either”
Then we come to causal series and matters of succession. Both Christian philosophers assert that Aristotle would be wrong to leave the notion of hierarchical ordering open-ended by asserting an infinite series of essences. Aristotelian physics though does not assert this for all movement though, hence the superior movers being moved by an unmoved mover above them. But the movement of bodies by finite superior causes preceded by an infinite number of causes of the same order reads contradictory to them. Of course one can butt in and argue from the perspective of McTaggart’s B-theory of time where the later parts of unit-time in the series is not ontologically dependent on the earlier parts in existence, as are. But this naturally, does not mean the series has to be infinite. But Philoponus’ unit of time, monades can only come into existence as successive from the preceding monad, thus are ontologically dependent. We can classify infinity by two qualities, magnitude and limitude.
Rather than separating the arguments, both the traversal arguments of Philoponus and Bonaventure sum up their previous points.
In that to bridge a distance, one must traverse through to both extremities. However, starting from the present day, we must necessarily be able to fix a day infinitely anterior to it, or else we cannot fix any one; if no anterior day precedes the present day by an infinite duration, then all the anterior days precede it by a finite duration and therefore the duration of the world had a beginning; if, on the contrary, we can fix an preceding day infinitely removed from the present day, we ask whether the day immediately posterior to that one is infinitely removed from the present day or whether it is not. If it is not infinitely removed from it, neither is the preceding one, for the duration which separates them is finite. So if it is infinitely removed from it, we ask the same question about the third day, the fourth, and so on ad infinitum; the present day will not then be further removed from the first than from any of the others. “For the unlimited is untraversable by its own nature”- Philoponus. As such, this is at base an Aristotelian assertion, but once again, Aristotle is open to attack by his own logic.
Philoponus specifically uses the term apeiron with regards to infinity in his responses. Time to Aristotle is wrongly characterised as merely motion, but rather Time is relational to motion, as they are both perceived. By radically demonstrating two distinct nows which differ(mutatis mutandis) and the temporal distance between them, Aristotle superceded temporal becoming. But an object’s aliquid remains the same through change, subsuming all change to possibilitas . Thus his criticism is limited to the idea of non-limitation. The Christian dialogue with antiquity was neither adversarial nor wholly integrated. It was dissolutive and reconstitutive in the a dialogic sense of history. Clement of Alexandria appropriated another Aristotelian concept, possibly from his teacher Pantaneus, that of the infinite magnitude, represented by an asymptote. Indivisibility of parts is related to no self-limiting principle. This retains a mode of divinisation, where the infinite magnitude of Christ is the bridge to the infinite, a journey one might say. Clement was also less subordationist than his contemporaries of the Cathecetal school of Alexandria, whose Middle Platonic tendency for emanation led to inconsistent descriptions of subordination. The Clementine infinity played a part in Augustine’s concept of sensible process and the idea of paedogogus, taught traditon as intimately connected with the idea of intimate Divine insight to fully account for truth, an intellectus raptured by Divine Presence.
Resolution: We can gage from Bonaventure’s own philosophy which is founded upon the idea of Divine Illumination and Providence, that the effects of the Firstmost Cause must penetrate to the smallest details of the world in order to retain a sense of vestigiality. As such, Bonaventure is also a philosopher of History, in a larger sense than human, natural or celestial history because he emphasises the event within the moment. Infinite revolutions also can be construed to suppose accidental ordering. And accidental ordering can be further interpreted to assert non-Mindedness, a lack of meaning to the world and it’s parts, such as Natura. To Bonaventure, this is the root of where the universal order comes from. Indeed, Aristotle’s proscription on the writing of histories involves synchronicity, rather than diachronicity, and denies cause and effect between synchronous events. Mere tyche posseses no necessity. Bonaventure defends the meaning of history, which to Aristotle, by virtue of it’s lack of conceptual universality and epistemic rigour, is a futile exercise. The defence takes the form of a new synthesis of history and myth as interpreted from scripture. The Pater is inchoatio trinitatis, completed by the Son and Spirit in History(completion trinitatis). Poetry, which employs the use of mythos stands between history and episteme in the Aristotelian framework, rendering it’s visual element redundant and one-dimensional, downplaying repetition and it’s importance in human interpretation. The Aristotelian distaste for any eidos ascribed to history becomes evident. The co-ordination of logos and mythos is achieved in works such as the Breviloquium through symbolic mode of thought, mythopoiesis. This achieves a new proposition of relations between episteme, mythos and historia not contradictory as in a syllogistic relation but where mythos and Scientia, epistemia is constitutive of historia, thus including not only biblical mythos but also human action into the wider net of history. Thus it is all in all, historia is mythos and mythos is historia, a new conceptual positive syllogistic framework is fashioned. I cannot resist recalling CS.Lewis’s statement that the Scripture is “myth become fact”.
The constitutionalisation of the historical-critical method was precisely wrong not because it imagined a framework that was universal. It’s loss of recurrence and innate presentism was due to it’s pure focus on particular epistemic Fact. Hence, it is a history stripped off myth and it is not even synchronic, but purely chronitic. The restoration of hermeneutic method is thus not properly, a project to reach an interpretive synthesis but to restore repetition and transcend the limitation of empirical time alone, chronos.
If the momentous is recaptured and the emphasis placed on origin, which is pre-philosophical and pre-memory, we can take from elements from Bergson through the lens of the French integralist poet, Charles Pegúy. The poet’s concept of the mystique, is that of shared interpersonal rituals which link the symbolic and material of whose logic is ineffable as sustained by the vital. Milbank, writing about Pegúy and origin, “The event is the first and the second in the series, it has to have occurred twice in order to have occurred once” Against the belief that such an eidetic view is contrary to human nature, the Bonaventurian conception equally recognises the thumotic as part of human affect and expression as central to incarnated history.
The paradox of non-identical repetition is that the Incarnation establishes the distinction between the City of Man and the City of God but yet the Eternal City of God is given a temporal pinning. Christ is put to the judgement of earthly courts, and time itself has to manifest the divine gradually, the ontologisation of grace. Even coercion and non-coercion are blurred. The rallying of troops and the martyrdom of Joan of Arc at the hands of the Anglo-Burgundians is hailed as having relived in their time the experience of sacrificial death. Much like Peguy’s Bergsonian style of poetry which believes in rupture, a temporal insertion brought forth by interior memory, a saintly experience is wholly novel, because a Saint is of a place, from a particular locale, who transmits their message to their time and beyond their time. The stigmata of Francis and the Seraphic visions demonstrate providential action lived in temporality. A Saint’s actions, properly reactualises dogma but represents it’s progress. A poet repeats to add depth not harken finality. A restitution which returns to origin and is unending, an apocatastasis.
If anything, the “problem of God”, as Miguel de Unamuno put it has entered the philosophical consciousness of history, unable to be unremembered. I return to a previous essay of mine about Reinhart Koselleck, in asserting that the proper logic of history, in keeping with it’s ultimately indeterminacy is the mediation of the subjective horizon of expectation and the objective field of experience. It is beyond empirical validation. Exitus et reditus as the Seraphic Doctor said about his schema. It is momentary passivity in observing the return to the mythical point of origin and the active action to explore the horizon of expectation in the future.
