Once inside the university realm, the friars found that their ideologies were
rapidly replaced by the normal abstract concerns of academic intellectuals.
Lines of struggle over the focus of attention within intellectual networks be-
came superimposed on their identities as Franciscans and Dominicans. Within
a generation the Franciscan John Peckham could declare that his order and the
Dominicans were so separate in philosophy that they had nothing in common
but the fundamentals of Christian doctrine (Gilson, 1944: 540). At the same
time, there were struggles within each order over its philosophical position.
Much of the intellectual history of the next three generations was taken up
with the Franciscans’ internal factions, dominated by Bonaventure, Duns Sco-
tus, and Ockham. The Dominicans also embraced two related positions: that
of Albert’s Neoplatonic Aristoteleanism, originally a framework for an ency-
clopedia of natural science, later modified in a mystical direction by his fol-
lower Meister Eckhart; and that of Thomas Aquinas’s Aristoteleanism, which
eventually became the official doctrine. For a short period there was also an
anti-Thomist conservatism within the order, represented by Robert Kilwardby.
To complete the picture of the university field, there was a third party based
outside the two orders: the secular priests and clerics, often jealous of the friars,
sometimes opposing them over university privileges. It is among this group
that one finds a struggle for a third party intellectual position, most conven-
tionally with Henry of Ghent, but with greatest effect—not to say consterna-
tion—by the perceived advocacy of extreme “Averroism” by the young secular
arts masters of the 1260s and 1270s.
Let us take first the Franciscans in the generation of the mid-1200s. Bacon
we have already met, the house radical. The house master was Saint Bonaven-
ture, in the center of the network at Paris. Bonaventure attempted to uphold
the conservative Augustinian vision as best he could in the new conditions of
intellectual struggle. Nevertheless, he was a scholastic, marshaling arguments
pro and con with the best of them. His metaphysical vision is a variant of the
doctrine of spheres of light, but carried through with more metaphysical skill
than in Grosseteste. The world is not an imitation or God or even a resem-
blance, since God is entirely different; yet the hierarchy of the world consists
of expressions, signs of God to be read by humans, both externally through
the senses and internally in their own soul. Bonaventure incorporated Anselm’s
ontological proof into his system, adding the characteristic Augustinian doc-
trine that it is God’s illumination within the soul that allows one to grasp the
concept of God which implies its own existence. It is not for nothing that
Bonaventure acquired the soubriquet Seraphic Doctor; he offers the clos-
est thing possible to Saint Francis’s bird sermons turned into a technical phi-
losophy.
At the fairly young age of 36, Bonaventure was elected general of the Fran-474 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths