102 Timothy Noone 3 S Truth, Creation, and Intelligibility in Anselm, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure What I should like to pursue as the theme of this essay is the following line of interpretation: the idea of truth as expounded in Anselm, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure is, on the one hand, developed so as to accommodate the biblical doctrine of creation, but, on the other, has features that are more or less directly continuous with the idea of truth (ἀλήθεια) as it is treated commonly among ancient pagan thinkers unacquainted with the doctrine of creation. By examining the doctrine of truth in these three authors, I hope that we may gain some further insight into the intellec- tual milieu of thirteenth-century discussions of epistemology, which is itself part of a longer and more complicated history of reconciling the notion of truth—above all the idea of eternal truth—with the doctrine of creation, as Fr. Armand Maurer noted over thirty years ago. 1 To gain some sense for the scope of the discussions we shall be fol- lowing, let us start with the Greek notion of truth. he classical notion of truth in the sense of the truth of things or ontological truth received its earliest and most telling expression in the poem of Parmenides entitled “On the Way of Truth.” Truth, according to Parmenides, is the unity of being and expresses what intellect knows about that which is or being. 2 1. Armand Maurer, “St. homas and Eternal Truths,” Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970): 91. Re- printed in Armand Maurer, Being and Knowing: Studies in Thomas Aquinas and Later Medieval Philosophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1990), 43. 2. Parmenides, fragment 1, lines 27–30, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Frag- mente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Hildesheim/Zürich: Weidmann, 1985), 230. Pritzl first pages.indd 102 7/14/09 8:12:39 AM