Sublime

Although a primitive form of the ontological argument for God’s existence can be found in St. Augustine, St. Anselm of Canterbury provided its classic formulation in the 11th century. The argument purports to prove God’s existence from the concept of God itself: God is “than which no greater can be conceived”; he must therefore have all properties;

unity in esse – unity at the level of the distinctive act and mode of existing that belongs eternally to the divine Word.

St Bonaventure (c.1217–74), for instance, governor-general of the order from 1257 to 1274, was a university man and speculative theologian of enormous erudition who succeeded grandly in combining the mystical elations of Franciscan piety with the rational disciplines of academic philosophy.

The community is what it is in virtue of the inexhaustible act of God summoning, judging and sustaining it – just as the life of Jesus is not simply ‘the same thing as’ the life of the Word, since it is what it is because of the inexhaustible action that pervades and structures it.

Joseph

The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It’s a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years.

Ours is not just any unraveling: it is a great unraveling,