  Bonaventure’s approach to Aristotle was quite different from Albert and Thomas. He felt no need for detailed knowledge of the text of Aristotle. As a student in Arts he had learned from his Masters, not from detailed study of Aristotle’s text, broadly Aristotelian philosophical principles—the categories and transcendentals, the causes and predicables, and fundamental notions like potency and act, possible and necessary—sufficient to do his own work. As a philosopher and theologian, he was perfectly capable of using such borrowed principles to draw his own conclusions, ones which he himself said depended more on Alexander of Hales than on any philosopher: “For I do not intend to advocate new opinions, but to reweave the common and approved ones.” Consequently, Bonaventure was not a failed Aristotelian for the simple reason that he never tried to be an Aristotelian in the Dominican way at all. On the other hand, while Augustine was clearly Bonaventure’s favorite theological authority, he was not, properly speaking, an Augustinian. Even when he draws Augustinian conclusions, Bonaventure does not employ Augustinian arguments. In truth, Bonaventure was, broadly speaking, an Aristotelian in his philosophical principles, but not in his conclusions. A better way to describe his philosophical conclusions and his way of drawing them is that his thought was Franciscan in inspiration and Bonaventurean in execution.