Klöster im Hochmittelalter

Place, Analogy, and Transcendence
Bonaventure and Bacon on the Franciscan Relationship to the World
Timothy J. Johnson
“Since everything that is in motion is moved in some place, it is obvious that
one has to grant priority to place, in which that which causes motion or is
acted upon will be. Perhaps thus it is the first of all things, since all existing
things are either in place or not without place.” ¹
This text from the Neo-Platonic philosopher Simplicius’ (6 ᵗʰ century CE) commentary
on Aristotle’s “Categories” reflects the view of Archytas (5 ᵗʰ century BCE), a
contemporary of Plato, on place. Referred to as the “Archytian Axiom” in contemporary
literature, ² this dictum maintains the inseparability of being from place, and
the subordinate significance of space. To be out of place or to be without a place is
to be non-existent, and therefore without identity. This abstract philosophical language
may seem to be “out of place” when analyzing transcendence and innovation
in medieval religious communities, especially with regard to the “Minorites” or
“Poor Men from Assisi.” Nevertheless, this essay contends that place, or locus in
Latin, is essential to understanding Franciscan identity in the world and the efforts
of Bonaventure and Bacon to elucidate their innovative perspectives vis-à-vis transcendence
through differing positions regarding analogical reasoning.
1 Quoted in Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of Place-World
(Studies in Continental thought), Bloomington 2009, p. 14. For the translation, see Simplicius, In Aristotelis
Categorias Commentarium, as translated (in part) in: The Concept of Place in Late Neoplatonism,
ed. Shmuel Sambursky, Jerusalem 1982, p. 37. On the various interpretations of topos and chôra in early
Greek thought, see Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Philosophia antiqua 65), Leiden
1995. For late antiquity and the early medieval period see L. Michael Harrington, Sacred Place in Early
Medieval Neoplatonism (The New Middle Ages), New York 2004. Casey’s intellectual project aims to retrieve
the ancient-medieval primacy of place, in contradistinction to the modern-contemporary privileging
of space and time in contemporary phenomenology. For a concise summary of the hermeneutic, see Edward
S. Casey, Getting from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time in: Getting Back into Place. Toward a
Renewed Understanding of Place-World (Studies in Continental thought), Bloomington 2009, pp. 317–348.
2 Casey, Getting Back into Place (note 1 above), p. 313.