On the Eternity of the World (de Aeternitate Mundi)

A conservative French Franciscan, Bonaventure was an active propagandist in the campaign against radical Aristotelianism. He regarded even Thomas Aquinas as too radical and was the first of a series of Franciscans to oppose the new Aristotelian with an older, Avicennan-Augustinian, view. He has been a favorite of his order, in part because of his early conservatism, which, in the period following the Reformation, provided the Franciscans with a master free from the modernist taint of the fourteenth century. Yet he is also a talented allegorist and a perceptive spiritual and mystical thinker. His thought is rooted in the Neoplatonic mystical tradition of the twelfth century, but it has been updated under the influence of thirteenth-century Aristotelianism, despite Bonaventure's opposition to the radical side of that movement.

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