Raymond of Sebonde

FL.1434-36. Spanish physician, philosopher, and theologian. Latterly regius professor of theology at the University of Toulouse, it was there he wrote his major work, Liber naturae sive creaturarum, originally written in Spanish, a landmark in the development of natural theology, though Raymond never employs the term. Influenced by Raymond Lull,* and opposing the position of such thinkers as William of Ockham* that faith and reason, theology and philosophy are irreconcilable, Raymond asserted that the book of nature and the Bible are concordant divine revelations, the one general and the other specific. He claimed to find rational, extrabiblical proof for the basic Christian doctrines, particularly through self-knowledge, since man is the image of God, and made it a practice in his work to cite neither Scripture nor other authorities. The Latin translation was printed repeatedly under the title Theologia naturalis from about 1484, most later editions omitting the Prologus, placed on the Index* in 1595. Montaigne popularized it in a French translation (1569).