The debate about Christ’s incarnation, and the intention behind the incarnation, is wide-ranging and far-reaching. It concerns God’s purpose and the exercise of God’s will; the identity of Christ; the reason for creation; the nature of salvation; and the destiny of humankind. The thirteenth-century Franciscans had a particular perspective on these questions, characterised by their twin emphasis on creation and incarnation. Rupert of Deutz pointed out that if the incarnation was subject to the fall, God must have intended the fall. He countered that God had always intended the Word to have an earthly role in the divine plan for the chosen people. Figures such as Bonaventure, Grosseteste and Duns Scotus amplify and qualify these issues, and Scotus concludes that Christ would have come in the maximal glory of creation – even if there had been no fall.

This chapter examines the importance of teleology (purposiveness) in the understanding of consciousness and nature. Goal-orientation is most evident in human conscious intention. However, this establishes a disjunction between conscious mind and wider nature; the latter, according to much modern science, is not purposive. How, then, does purposive mind arise in a non-purposive universe? It is argued that modern natural science rejects a particular variety of teleological explanation. More sophisticated varieties, particularly in Aquinas’s understanding of action and intention, can be recovered which do justice to our basic intuitions concerning the purposiveness of nature. It is argued, however, that modern natural philosophy rejects a number of metaphysical concepts which make teleological explanation intelligible. Amongst those concepts is ‘habit’. This chapter examines the Aristotelian natural philosophy of habit proposed by the nineteenth-century philosopher Félix Ravaisson. For Ravaisson, habit is a mediating category between matter and conscious intention which indicates that the goal-orientation of mind is, in an analogous sense, present throughout nature, pointing to the possible recovery of a teleological understanding of nature, gleaned from a broad Aristotelian Thomism, which views creation as an expression of divine intention whilst avoiding crude accounts of teleology in modern design arguments for God’s existence.

Early Franciscan theology exerted an important influence but remains insufficiently known. This chapter treats of English theologians Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, and the work attributed to Alexander of Hales and his circle, the Summa Halensis. It discusses topics such as the Trinity, salvation and the nature of theological science.