ABSTRACT
Placide Tempels was an extraordinary thinker, philosopher, theologian, missionary and Franciscan. In contemporary terminology, one could say that Tempels practiced “methodological conversion” and discovered the “polyphony” of his “self”. He expressed their worldview in words and published his book on Bantu Philosophy, arguing that the Bantu had their own logic. It was a breakthrough in philosophy and theology, which until that point had held that the Africans were primitives and could not think logically. Apart from neo-Thomism, however, the Franciscans valued their own tradition of Saint Bonaventura and Duns Scotus. The “Franciscan School” stressed a radical difference between “the God of philosophers” and “the God of Christianity”. In the neo-scholastic tradition, belief was systematized and rational. It became a doctrine against the ideologies of the time: modernism, liberalism and socialism.
