Bonus of Ferrara · Lexicon

From the book

Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Heinrich Khunrath · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordBonus of Ferrara enters through his new precious Pearl, cited by Latin title and chapter.
In KhunrathAt the end of page 134 Khunrath asks how Bonus could defend his book if the objection against knowledge before achievement were valid.
In this editionThe German witness prints LOMBADVS, lacking the r; the English supplies it in brackets.
A reading distinctionThe sentence is divided by the original page-turn inside Operationi.

Meaning

Bonus of Ferrara enters through his new precious Pearl, cited by Latin title and chapter. His function is as an acknowledged philosophical author whose stated devotion to manual work was limited. Khunrath uses him to question the inference that only someone who has completed the work may write with authority.

Use in the book

At the end of page 134 Khunrath asks how Bonus could defend his book if the objection against knowledge before achievement were valid. He quotes chapter 15, where the author says that he has seen the books of many wise men and studied according to his ability and modest intelligence. The sentence continues onto page 135 with the admission of being rarely given to operation and labour. That acknowledgement is not offered as a reason to throw Bonus out of the corpus. It makes the objector's criterion threaten a book that already belongs within it.

The example follows the author of the Rosarium, whose observation supposedly reached only as far as the Lion. Khunrath then returns to that author's claim of knowing how the work must develop and generalizes that true Philosophers knew through several possible routes. Bonus is one part of this cumulative argument. He is not made to say that books alone suffice, nor does the citation establish that he never operated. 'Rarely' is a limitation, not a complete absence.

The place also shows how intellectual modesty can support authority. The quoted author acknowledges limited ability and limited labour while reporting serious study. For Khunrath, these admissions need not invalidate the knowledge embodied in a philosophical work; they help distinguish what an author actually claims from the stronger condition an opponent retrospectively imposes.

Places to read

1599 p. 134Bonus and chapter 15 of the new precious Pearl are introduced as a challenge to the opponent’s criterion of authorship.
1599 p. 135The quotation admits rare devotion to operation and labour before Khunrath generalizes the available sources of knowledge.

Translation in this edition

The German witness prints LOMBADVS, lacking the r; the English supplies it in brackets. The modern note gives a date and place of composition for Bonus's work. Those details are editorial background and are not necessary to explain the argument made by the two primary pages.

Source note

The sentence is divided by the original page-turn inside Operationi. Reading page 134 alone would miss the admission on which Khunrath's question depends.