St. Bonaventure on Order
As the Cambridge Dictionary says, order denotes “the way in which people or things are arranged, either in relation to one another or according to a particular characteristic.” If it is true that, for us moderns, at the root of reality are the will to power from above or evolution by a process of selection from below, then the way any order is arranged must ultimately be either by imposition or by chance. Both are forms of arbitrariness that turn any order into an imposed arrangement devoid of truth and goodness. It is worth re-sourcing St. Bonaventure (d. 1274) for a different view of order.
