보나벤투라의 빛의 형이상학 = The Metaphysics of Light in St. Bonaventure

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Honoured as the ‘Seraphic Doctor’, St. Bonaventure must without a doubt be counted among the most important theological figures of the thirteenth century. Today’s readers, however, are unlikely to recognize him as a philosopher in so far as he took a leading role in checking what he considered to be a dangerously uncritical acceptance of Aristotelianism. My aim in this paper is to depict Bonaventure as a philosopher who developed his metaphysics in terms of the notion of light.
Bonaventure considered light as the Absolute Being or God who is the first principle and the source of all goodness and truth, and explained creation of every finite being by virtue of the mode of rays radiated from the source. Light in the created universe is a participation in God's light. All the activities of finite beings stem from the basic energy of light. Even knowledge, sensible and intellectual, takes place through light, or illumination. At this point, his understanding of light goes beyond the level of physics. Furthermore, this metaphysics of light leads us to claim that Bonaventure was one of the most distinguished philosophers in the middle ages.