Thesis advisor: Boyd Taylor Coolman / In the life of Christ—from his humble birth to his horrific death—Francis of Assisi saw nothing less than the full revelation of God. In this dissertation I study how Francis’s impulse toward the historical dimension of the incarnation finds theological expression among Paris’s first generation of Franciscan theologians as represented in their Summa halensis. I argue that the Franciscans’ attention to the historical character of the incarnation facilitates a christology that unites and integrates speculative and practical theological concerns. Speculatively, the Summa halensis prioritizes the full integrity of Christ’s humanity without compromising the existential dependence of that humanity on the Word who assumes it; practically, the Summa halensis grounds the salvific efficacy of Christian penitential practices in the salvific quality of the entire trajectory, and not just the final moments, of Christ’s life. This study, then, offers grounds for a reappraisal of the Summa halensis as a hitherto unrecognized inflection point for the development of scholastic christology, as an early instance of scholastic theology’s tendency to integrate the speculative with the practical. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

In this thesis, my purpose is to determine why Augustine’s theory of knowledge by illumination was rejected by Franciscan theologians at the end of the thirteenth century. My main methodological assumption is that Medieval accounts of divine illumination must be interpreted in a theological context, or with attention to a scholar’s underlying doctrines of God and of the human mind as the image of God, inasmuch as the latter doctrine determines one’s understanding of the nature of the mind’s cognitive work, and illumination illustrates cognition. In the first chapter, I show how Augustine’s understanding of illumination derives from his Trinitarian theology. In the second chapter, I use the same theological methods of inquiry to identify continuity of thought on illumination in Augustine and Anselm. The third chapter covers the events of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that had an impact on the interpretation of illumination, including the Greek and Arabic translation movements and the founding of universities and mendicant orders. In this chapter, I explain how the first Franciscan scholars transformed St. Francis of Assisi’s spiritual ideals into a theological and philosophical system, appropriating the Trinitarian theology of Richard of St. Victor and the philosophy of the Arab scholar Avicenna in the process. Bonaventure is typically hailed the great synthesizer of early Franciscan thought and the last and best proponent of traditional Medieval Augustinian thought. In the fourth chapter, I demonstrate that Bonaventure’s Victorine doctrine of the Trinity both enabled and motivated him to assign originally Avicennian meanings to philosophical arguments of Augustine and Anselm that were incompatible with the original ones. In the name of Augustine, in other words, Bonaventure introduced a theory of knowledge that is not Augustinian. In the fifth chapter, my aim is to throw the non-Augustinian character of Bonaventure’s illumination theory into sharper relief through a discussion of knowledge and illumination in the thought of his Dominican contemporary Thomas Aquinas. Although Aquinas is usually supposed to reject illumination theory, I show that he only objects to the Franciscan interpretation of the account, even while he bolsters a genuinely Augustinian account of knowledge and illumination by updating it in the Aristotelian forms of philosophical argumentation that were current at the time. In the final chapter, I explain why late thirteenth-century Franciscans challenged illumination theory, even after Bonaventure had enthusiastically championed it. In this context, I explain that that they did not reject their predecessor’s standard of knowledge outright, but only sought to eradicate the intellectually offensive interference of illumination, as he had defined it, which they perceived as inconsistent with the standard, in the interest of promulgating it. In concluding, I reiterate the importance of interpreting illumination as a function of Trinitarian theology. This approach throws the function of illumination in Augustine’s thought into relief and facilitates the effort to identify continuity and discontinuity amongst Augustine and his Medieval readers, which in turn makes it possible to identify the reasons for the late Medieval decline of divine illumination theory and the rise of an altogether unprecedented epistemological standard.

Thesis advisor: Boyd Taylor Coolman / Many vaunt the Summa halensis, conceived but not drafted entirely by Alexander of Hales, for its aesthetics. Few, however, read the text’s aesthetics theologically—as a teaching about God. This dissertation argues that Alexander’s aesthetics are deeply and inexorably theological. It takes as its keystone a passage in which Alexander identifies beauty with the “sacred order of the divine persons.” If beauty be a trinitarian structure instead of a divine attribute, then we should find beauty where we find Trinity. This dissertation trawls the massive Summa halensis for trinitarian beauty. And it finds beauty nearly everywhere. The result is a study of Alexander’s aesthetics that appreciates beauty beyond the constricted limits and categories of modern aesthetics. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.