Abstract

Like his contemporaries, Bonaventure held that creation is a book. He understood that this opinion entails that all the things of the world must be signs, because a book is made up of a particular type of sign, namely, words---words from a mind. Bonaventure transforms the medieval opinion into a metaphysical account of what being is. This dissertation is an examination of what can be called Bonaventure's "semiotic metaphysics." ;Chapter one provides a brief overview of Bonaventure's metaphysics. Chapter two examines his understanding of signs. Since he never wrote a systematic treatise on signs, it is necessary to examine texts where he discusses subjects involving signs: cognition, communication, and the sacraments. Knowing gives rise to an interior expression of the thing known. This interior expression is a mental word or concept. Communicating involves giving exterior expression to this interior, mental word, or concept. Chapter three argues that Bonaventure found in the phenomenon of knowing and speaking a key to the understanding of reality. He argues that the divine ideas function as exemplar causes of the world. Because of the nature of these exemplars as expressions of the word, Bonaventure argues that the things of the world are signs expressing the divine mind. In the light of Bonaventure's exemplarism, it is possible to bring to the foreground the semiotic theme in various texts in which knowing consequently involves a journey of the mind to God. Chapter four investigates the ontological status of the world as sign. This investigation focuses on Bonaventure's adoption of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Matter in its essence is understood to be the medium for the expression of sign. Chapter five specifies the type of sign that reality is and draws out the philosophical implications of this view---implications that also shed light on the historical interpretation of Bonaventure and scholasticism. ;In short, Bonaventure argues that so thoroughly is the divine mind and its own interior word expressed in the universe that the world is truly a book---an intelligible, coherent, structured monograph expressing the Great Mind of all the ages