Four Medieval Ways to God

Abstract

I. The following essay aims to compare the proofs for the existence of God in four medieval theologians, namely, St. Anselm of Canter bury, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent. Being theologians, all four men believed in a divine revelation and their personal intellectual activity took place within the world of revelation. Fides quaerens intellectum, which was St. Anselm's title for the Proslogion before he gave it a name, is a formula that can be applied to all these thinkers in their individual religious adven tures. Their lives were spent in seeking after the God who had met them on earth and in responding to that meeting. St. Anselm belongs to the end of the eleventh century, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas were active during the third quarter of the thirteenth century, and Henry of Ghent's literary activity falls mainly in the embattled twenty years after Aristotelianism in all its forms was condemned in 1277 in Paris. This was the time when Christian