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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2019
This article puts Michel Foucault's conception of power into critical engagement with that of Bonaventure. For Foucault power is manifested in wills to knowledge or meaning-making in a senseless universe in order to legitimate the drama of dominations. Bonaventure, however, roots his notion of power in the essence of God, so that any act of power from God cannot be classified as domination, but rather donation – a free-willed gift. This is especially evident in Bonaventure's theology of creation and sacrament. As such, Bonaventure provides a way to deal with Foucault's critique theologically without dispensing with it altogether.
1 As David Bentley Hart writes: ‘[The] Nietzschean contour of the postmodern passes from Deleuze most obviously to Foucault: not only insofar as Foucault's philosophical project, at its most fruitful, emulates the model of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, but also insofar as Foucault develops, with such remarkable and persistent historical specificity . . . that interpretation or evaluation is an act of power, that the will to knowledge expresses a will to power, and that language and discourse are, before all else, forms of power . . . There is violence antecedent to every contingency, history's forms emerge from a struggle of forces, and the course of history comprises merely a concatenation of dominations in which humanity installs its violences’. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 67–8.
2 E.g. Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again’, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 266–93Google Scholar; and Taylor, Charles, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. Hoy, David (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 69–102Google Scholar.
3 Foucault, ‘Critical Theory/Intellectual History’, in Kritzman, Lawrence D. (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 43Google Scholar.
4 Given space restrictions, I do not intend here to provide a comprehensive account of Foucault's thought on power. For example, Foucault admires certain expressions of power, such as the discipline of military training. As I note below, Foucault does not see power as ubiquitously ‘bad’ – that would be inconsistent with his overall project. Rather, I mean to specifically latch on to Foucault's thought on power in reference to knowledge/meaning, history and domination.
5 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 92–3.
6 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 154–5. Foucault believed that one could isolate the instance of ‘entanglement’ in our participation in ‘discursive formations’. See his The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 118–19. As Vincent J. Miller has commented: ‘[Foucault] asserted that meaning is ultimately a comforting illusion that obscures the real dynamism of history – chance and violence’. Miller, Vincent J., ‘History or Geography? Gadamer, Foucault, and Theologies of Tradition’, in Theology and the New Histories: The Annual Publication of the College Theology Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), p. 56Google Scholar. For more on the place of Foucault in the history of historical understanding and method, see Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 113–19Google Scholar.
7 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, pp. 151–5.
8 Ibid., pp. 161–2.
9 Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 97–9. See also Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)Google Scholar, esp. pp. 195–228.
10 Foucault, ‘Genealogy’, p. 154.
11 Ibid., pp. 150–1.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., pp. 151–2.
14 Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge, p. 119; see note 4 above.
15 Ibid., pp. 114–15. That is, these relations lack intrinsic meaning.
16 Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, p. 148.
17 This is consonant with the scholastic notion, which Bonaventure upholds, of analogously understanding God as ‘pure act’.
18 Hart, Beauty, p. 4; emphasis added.
19 Ibid.; emphasis added.
20 I do not mean to say here that Hart does not account for gift in his metaphysics of beauty and peace – he does (see Beauty, pp. 260–8). He also connects it specifically with creation: ‘If creation is not to be conceived as the overcoming of something that must be overcome in order for creation to be at all, then it must be conceived as gift’ (ibid., p. 260). I will not here discuss the critiques of gift such as those given by Derrida, as Hart does that quite sufficiently.
21 Breviloquium (hereafter Brev.), prol. 6. All translations of Bonaventure's works are my own. For the Latin text, I have utilised the standard Quaracchi critical edition, Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae opera omnia, vols. 1–10, ed. the Fathers of the Collegium S. Bonaventurae (Ad Claras Aquas: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1882-1902). All cited texts can be found in vol. 5, except those from the Commentaria Sententiarum, or Commentary of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which are located in volumes 1–4.
22 In fact, the heptad, as a 1-4-7 structure, is a further elucidation or even emanation of the triad, with an origin point, a middle or mediating term, and an end.
23 While the De mysterio has eight questions, the first is considered preliminary, as prolegomena, to the seven attributes discussed in questions 2–8.
24 Joshua C. Benson, ‘Structure and Meaning in St. Bonaventure's Quaestiones Disputate De Scientia Christi’, Franciscan Studies 62 (2004), p. 70.
25 This should not be confused with pure Neoplatonic emanationism, which is often understood to hold that God or the One emanates according an extrinsically necessary act, thus making creation a necessary and determined act of the divine.
26 1 Sent. d. 31, p. 2, dub. VII.
27 This happened in 1257. For more on the chronology of Bonaventure's life, see Hammond, Jay M., ‘Dating Bonaventure's Inception as Regent Master’, Franciscan Studies 67 (2009), pp. 179–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 E.g. Monti, Dominic, ‘Introduction’, in Breviloquium, trans. Monti, Dominic (New York: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2005), pp. xiv–xxiiGoogle Scholar.
29 Cf. Johnson, Timothy J., ‘The Franciscan Fascination with the Word’, as well as the other very helpful articles in Johnson, Timothy J. (ed.), Franciscans and Preaching: Every Miracle from the Beginning of the World Came about through Words (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 1–14Google Scholar.
30 Or as Bonaventure would conceive of it, ‘salvation history’. For Bonaventure, history is not a meaningful concept until one perceives the destiny and thus the aim and intention for history. Cf. Collationes in Hexaëmeron (hereafter, Hex.) 1.10 ff., De reductione artis ad theologiam 1, et al.
31 This distinction in Bonaventure's thought is generally referred to as the ‘Triplex Verbum’; cf. Hex. 2.
32 Cf. 1 Sent. d. 31, p. 2, dub. VII.
33 Bonaventure here, following Peter Lombard's error, believes he is quoting Gregory the Great; cf. Lombard, Liber 4 Sent. 13.1.
34 Bonaventure deals very specifically with God's power and omnipotence in 1.7 of the Breviloquium. It is worth noting that Bonaventure correlates sections 7–9 of this book to his privileged triad of ‘power, wisdom, and goodness’. This further maps onto his notion of emanation, exemplarity and consummation discussed above. Bonaventure's commitment to the logic of trinitarian structuring is relentless.
35 DMT q. 4, a. 1, concl., emphasis added.
36 It should be kept in mind that Bonaventure views all of these attributes as essentially interchangeable.
37 DMT q. 4, a. 1, fund. 10.
38 DMT q. 4, a. 1, concl. Here again Bonaventure calls upon the Philosopher, Aristotle (though actually Pseudo-Aristotle): ‘This conclusion agrees with what is said in the Liber de causis [Proposition 17]: “Every power is more infinite to the degree that it is more unified”’.
39 This indicates the completeness and order of the divine power. See Brev. 1.7.2–3.
40 Itinerarium mentis in Deium (hereafter Itin.) 6.2; cf. Dionysius, De coelesti hierarchia 4.
41 This is because infinite knowledge would, of course, be cointensive with infinite being and power. This further addresses Foucault, because it provides knowledge with an ontological, intrinsic ground in the divine essence.
42 But not in the Sartrean sense, of course.
43 Q.1, a.1, concl.; cf. Brev. 7.7.2.
44 Johnson, Timothy, in his chapter ‘Poverty and Prayer’ (in The Soul in Ascent: Boanventure on Poverty, Prayer, and Union with God (St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 2012), pp. 34–5)Google Scholar calls this ‘ontological poverty’. Katherine Wrisley Shelby makes excellent use of this categorisation in her discussion of grace in the Breviloquium; see ‘Part V: “On the Grace of the Holy Spirit”’, in Monti, Dominic V. and Shelby, Katherine Wrisley (eds), Bonaventure Revisited: Companion to the Breviloquium (St Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 2017), pp. 215–43Google Scholar.
45 For example, when one tries to mentally consider nothingness, one will still see in the mind's eye a blank or black space. But nothingness is the absence even of space and time itself.
46 Brev. 3.1.1: ‘Sin is not another essence, but a defect and corruption, in which namely the mode, species, and order of the created will is corrupted. And this corruption of sin is contrary to the Good. It possesses no being [on its own] except in something good, nor arises [from its own source] except from something good’.
47 Brev. 3.1.3. Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei 12.7: ‘Let no one seek the efficient cause of an evil . . . for it is not efficient but a deficiency . . . to abandon what supremely exists for what is lower . . . to wish to discover the causes of these deficiencies . . . is as if someone should wish to see darkness or hear silence . . . But let no one seek to know from me that of which I know I am ignorant, unless perhaps to learn not to know what must be known to be unknowable.’
48 In every chapter of book 6, Bonaventure provides Christ as the ratio of restoration to uphold the specific aspect of sacrament he is addressing: Christ as the ‘Restorative Principle’ (1.3; 2.2; 3.2; 4.2–3 and whole chapter; 5.2; 6.2; 7.3; 8.2; 9.2; 10.2; 11.2; 12.2; 13.2).
49 Cf. Rev 1.
50 Brev. 6.3.1; cf. Hex. 3:31: ‘The [seventh] day does not have evening. And after it, an eighth day follows, which is not from those preceding it, but is a reiteration of the first day, when the soul again takes up its body.’
51 See J. A. Wayne Hellmann and T. Alexander Giltner, ‘Part VI: “On the Sacramental Remedy”’, in Monti and Wrisley Shelby, Bonaventure Revisited, pp. 245–72.
52 Bonaventure speaks of reduction quite frequently in the Breviloquium, although this is obscured by the custom of translating reducere as ‘tracing/leading back’, an unfortunate practice, as this befogs the technical import of this term for the Seraphic Doctor. Guy H. Allard provides an excellent discussion of reduction in ‘La technique de la Reductio chez Bonaventure’, in Jacques Guy Bougerol (ed.), S. Bonaventura 1274–1974, vol. 2 (Rome: Collegio S. Bonaventura Grottaferrata, 1973), pp. 395–416. It is crucial to note that by reduction Bonaventure does not mean annihilation. Rather, the more something is reduced and brought back to its source, the greater it becomes. That is, while not in a temporal way, everything moves through the ratio that gives rise to its instantiation back to its source, thus more fully actualising what it is. Thus, reduction as a theological concept for Bonaventure is not only a methodological movement but also an ontological reality, through which all things are fundamentally returned in every possible way through Christ to God, specifically the Father. Cf. 1 Sent. d. 31, p. 2, dub. VII.
53 Brev. 6.4.1
54 Ibid., 6.4.3.
55 Ibid., 1.1.2.
56 See n. 19 above for David Bentley Hart's use of this criterion.