Are the divine ideas involved in making the sensible intelligible? the role of knowledge of the divine in bonaventure's theory of cognition

In this article, I investigate the way in which knowledge of the divine (and particularly of the divine ideas) is involved in the mechanism of human cognition. On the basis of a discussion of Bonaventure's pivotal texts on this subject, I show that knowledge of the divine is involved in making the created intelligible: by means of an act of judgment, in which recourse to the divine ideas is taken, an intelligible species can be abstracted from a sensible representation. This means that Bonaventure does not maintain an 'Aristotelian account of abstraction,' as some scholars defend. Furthermore, I show that both abstraction and analysis (i.e., resolution) involve an act of judgment in terms of a comparison of created being to first being. Therefore, the priority of the divine in the first act of cognition is twofold: both on the level of abstracting the intelligible from the sensible and on the level of a complete analysis of what has become known, preliminary knowledge of the divine is necessary.