Tempels’s Franciscan training shaped his openness to Bantu thought

Evidence

Based on the model of the Dialogical Self, Wijsen concludes that one could say in contemporary terminology that Tempels practiced “methodological conversion” (Cox 1998), and he discovered the “polyphony” of his “self” (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka 2010). Moreover, Wijsen points out that, in addition to neo-Thomism, Tempels was trained in the tradition of Saint Bonaventura and Duns Scotus. Thereby, the “Franciscan School” stressed a basic 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. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 1001

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Dialogical Self theory of Hermans and the historic Franciscan/Thomist divide, relevant background to my wider reading on the fate of schools of thought.