Final answer:
According to Augustine, we should seek God by using our free will to choose good, supported by divine grace, and reflecting internally to reconcile our freedom with God's omniscience. Aquinas expands upon this by suggesting we know God through His causal presence in the natural world. Bonaventure further argues that knowledge of God is imprinted on every soul, which we can access through reasoning and inner reflection.
Step-by-step explanation:
St. Augustine suggests that we seek God through the exercise of our free will to choose the good over sinfulness, aided ultimately by divine grace. According to Augustine, even though humanity bears the original sin of Adam and Eve, it remains within our individual power to choose goodness. In this process, divine grace plays a critical role, resolving the conflict between our will to do good and our desires that lead to sin. Augustine's perspective highlights the necessity of an active, deliberate search for God, characterized by an inner reflection that can reconcile the presence of an all-knowing God with the capacity for human freedom.
Augustine's contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, builds upon this idea by suggesting that while we cannot know God directly, we can infer God's existence through the natural world as the Necessary Cause of all that we observe. This approach is considered natural theology and doesn't rely solely on church authority but rather on logical deduction based on the observation of the natural world and the recognition of God as the mover, cause, and design behind it all.
Building further upon Augustine's ideas, Bonaventure argues that the knowledge of divine truth is impressed upon every soul, and we can move from effect to cause, from observations of the outer world to knowledge of God. This process involves reasoning, abstract thinking, and notably, Augustine's process of inner reflection to ascertain the truth.