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The question of whether it was possible for God to create the world from all eternity
caused extensive discussions in the thirteenth century which engaged the greatest scholastic
theologians. Debates led to differing answers among Christian thinkers with St. Thomas Aquinas
and St. Bonaventure representing two opposing positions. Bonaventure argued that the world
could not have been created from all eternity because the notion of eternal creation was self-
contradictory. Aquinas, on the other hand, maintained the possibility of eternal creation. Both
Aquinas and Bonaventure struggled with the paradoxes arising from their attempts to grasp the
notion of infinity. In fact, the concept of infinity and their respective understanding of the notion
of creation were at the heart of Aquinas’ and Bonaventure’s responses and the source of their
disagreement. In the nineteenth century, Georg Cantor’s extension of the notion of number to the
transfinite numbers ignited a philosophical battle over the place of an actual infinity in
mathematics.
The goal of this thesis is to analyze and compare the notion of an actual infinity held by
Aquinas and Bonaventure with that of Cantor and to show that Cantor shares the conviction of
Bonaventure and Aquinas that mathematics alone cannot demonstrate the temporal beginning of
the world. The five arguments of Aquinas and Bonaventure against the eternity of the world,
which employ the notion of an actual infinite, are useful in exposing the difficulties arising from
an infinite past time but are, by themselves, insufficient to settle the question of the eternity of
the world.
In Chapter 1, a sketch of the history of the question of the eternity of the world is
presented as well as some important preliminary topics including the speculative nature of the
question of the eternity of the world; Aquinas’s distinction between eternity and infinite temporal
extension; and Bonaventure’s and Aquinas’s definitions of creation. Chapter 2 considers in detail
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