ABSTRACT
Bonaventure's original 'journey' outlined the correct order for studying the academic disciplines to bring about a level of spirituality that ultimately converges on the divine standpoint. A sense of collective memory must be in place that consolidates what remains of value from the past but focuses it in a way that keeps the travellers on track to their ultimate goal. Friedrich Nietzsche was considered deranged when he first began to mine this rich vein of Darwin-inspired nihilism in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Behind Gray's deadpan nihilism lurks a subtle problem with the grand idea of scientific progress that inspires this bipolar swing between heady enthusiasm and cynical scepticism. A proper history of this transvaluation would proceed from the Franciscans through the sixteenth-century Carmelite reformer Teresa de Avila to more secular justifications for rejecting the path of least resistance from Kantian ethics to Marxist politics.
