Kevin Hughes and Daniel Wade McClain, does this Rorem seem right to you here in his essay Dionysian Uplifting (Anagogy) in Bonaventure’s Reductio? It sounds coherent to me, but I do not know Bonaventure like you guys do. Although many aspects of Bonaventure’s little classic De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam have been addressed in recent literature,1 the translation of the title remains problematic, not only from Latin into English but also from a Greek precedent into Latin. Calling it “On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology” always requires an explanation of the word “reduction.”2 How all the arts, indeed all of human learning, relate to theology and thus to God can hardly be considered a reduction in the usual sense. “Leading back” is better, because it suggests the overall theological structure, but is still an incomplete translation, as revealed by the Greek background. The Latin word family reducere in this case reflects a prior pattern of rendering a key Greek term in the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy, the treatise indirectly invoked at the outset of Bonaventure’s work and generally agreed to be, along with Hugh of St. Victor’s commentary thereon, its key source. In this case the Greek behind the Latin can help our English translation. The standard translation of De Reductione alternates between a simple transliteration for the title, “On the Reduction,” and flexible renderings of reducere as “leading back” or “bringing back.” Sister Emma Healy’s original choice of “Retracing” for Reductio in the title3 nicely avoided the common misreading of “reduction” as a diminishment, and invokes the active movement of leading or bringing the arts back to their source, and to their culmination in theology. Gilson’s oft-cited comments about reductio are narrowly confined to logical categories and dialectic.4 The deeper structure here is Bonaventure’s thorough appropriation of the traditional “procession and return” as emanation, exemplarity and consummation, wherein the consummating return is a reductio, the leading of all things back to God. The entire treatise, and indeed Bonaventure’s overall framework or ordo,5 culminates in this reditus, return, or reductio, as is well known, but the prefix re- is not fully appreciated without some further Dionysian background.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 01:39:46 +0000
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