Faith and Philosophy

Volume 15, Issue 2, April 1998

Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of the Society of Christian philosophers

Bonaventure’s Contribution to the Twentieth Century Debate on Apophatic Theology

To what extent does Bonaventure’s work contribute to a renewal of negative theology? Rather than answering this question directly, this article focuses on the negative moments which, according to Bonaventure, characterize the human quest for God and the docta ignorantia to which it is oriented. Bonaventure’s synthesis of Aristotelian ontology and Dionysian Neoplatonism is a wisdom that admires God’s being good as manifested in Christ’s human suffering and death.