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NDIAS Quarterly 2015 - 2016
Education (DETAIL), Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). Public domain.
associated with linking belief in a given nature with religious perfection, such as in the blood and soil mentality of Nazi Germany. Accordingly, the revealed theology that puts the most emphasis on the revelation of God in the Bible, and more specifically in Jesus Christ, takes precedent. But then another problem arises, namely, how and in what sense might there be any relationship between revealed theology and the sciences? Can “natural theology” be dispensed with so easily?7 In order to address this question, it is a good idea to consider the way in which early theologians developed forms of natural theology rather than take examples simply from contemporary science or distorted versions of natural theology in cultural history. A good place to start is with the Franciscan writers who developed a tradition of natural philosophy. Saint Bonaventure, a Franciscan writing in 1259, claimed: The supreme power, wisdom and goodness of the Creator shine forth in created things in so far as the bodily senses inform the interior senses. . . . In the first way of seeing, the observer considers things in themselves. . . . [T]he observer can rise, as from a vestige, to the knowledge of the immense power, wisdom and goodness of the Creator. In the second way of seeing, the way of faith[,] . . . we understand that the world was fashioned by the Word of God.8 Although Bonaventure believed that the Word of God as revealed in Jesus Christ is “superior” compared to the vestiges
of God found in the natural world, for him, God as Creator was a cosmic presence, since God is the Creator of all that is. It would be a mistake, therefore, to think that this form of natural theology was a way of finding God in the natural world somehow independent of faith in God, or that those who were habitual sinners could somehow just “see” God in the natural order of things without prior experience of God in prayer. Bonaventure also seems to go further than this in suggesting that only those who are acting out their faith through actions of justice and only those who already have some knowledge of God through intense meditation can begin the journey and see with a pure heart those vestiges of the wisdom of God in the creaturely world. Given that the believer could reach such heights of contemplative grace, it is hardly surprising that such a view, at first sight, appears antithetical to experimental science. But it is significant that Bonaventure also claimed we need to move beyond mere vestiges, for in creatures “He is present in them by his essence, His power and His presence.”9 Bonaventure, heavily influenced by Augustine in his Platonic descriptions of creatures as “shadows” of that perfect wisdom found in God, also encouraged careful understanding of the truth, including the truth that could come from scientific activity. Such scientific activity is in his case put to a particular goal, namely, the goal of mystical union with God. He believed that the contemplation of the insights of the various sciences takes place in charity. In other words, all knowledge and human endeavor is instilled with the spirit of