Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

On at least two occasions in the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (II, d. 23, a. 2, q. 3; II, 547 and II, prol.; II, 1–2), bonaventure speaks of his spiritual father, alexander OF hales . In so doing, he follows a long biblical and church tradition of acknowledging indebtedness to the teachers of spiritual realities, fathers in the faith. Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians (4: 14–15) stated: “I am not writing this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you might have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers. Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel.” Clement of Alexandria ( Stromata ( Miscellanies ) I, c. 1; PG 8, 687–90) led a long list of those who acknowledged the importance of spiritual fathers when he explained: “It is a good thing, I reckon, to leave to posterity good children. This is the case with children of our bodies. But words are the progeny of the soul. Whence we call those who have instructed us, fathers.” The Fathers of the Church, according to Clement, replaced the fathers of the pagan world, Homer and the other “theologians of vice” ( Logos protreptikos ( Exhortation to the Heathen ), 4; PG 8, 133–4). In biblical times, the spiritual fathers were the writers of the Old and New Testaments. Later, the spiritual fathers became those Catholic writers ... log in or subscribe to read full text