ABSTRACT
Chattillon, Pegis and others have remarked that, in approaching Anselm's argument, Thomas was reacting to his contemporaries rather than to Anselm himself. Though historians have been willing enough to see Bonaventure as expressing a Franciscan spirituality through philosophy, they have generally been less inclined to view Thomas and the Dominican order in quite this way. Unlike St Thomas Aquinas, whose highly technical prose is the work of intelligence pure and simple and can be read in a purely impersonal way, the prose of St Bonaventure is the mirror of a visibly devout theologian. As with the spirituality of St Dominic, it is the very impersonal character of Thomas's prose that communicates a particular approach to God. Just as Bonaventure had given the Franciscan project its most detailed articulation to date in the Journey of the Soul into God, Thomas gave the Dominican strategy its most detailed expression in the Summa contra gentiles at roughly the same time.
