Bonaventure

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Bonaventure — born Giovanni di Fidanza at Bagnoregio in central Italy around 1217, dead at the Council of Lyon in 1274 — was the Franciscan theologian who tried to hold two things together that his century was pulling apart: the new university science of theology and the older monastic art of contemplation. He read Aristotle, lectured at Paris alongside Thomas Aquinas, and governed the Franciscan order at the height of its crisis; he also wrote one of the most compressed maps of mystical ascent in the Latin tradition. Later ages named him the Seraphic Doctor.

The bare history is well attested, though the first date in it is not. The traditional birth year is 1221, the one carried by centuries of devotional literature; recent scholarship leans toward about 1217, on the ground that the canon law of the order set forty as the minimum age for a minister general, and Bonaventure took that office in February 1257. Both dates are still in print, and the honest form is to give both. The rest is firmer. The boy was the son of a physician, also named Giovanni di Fidanza, and a mother called Maria di Ritella; he recorded that a grave childhood illness was lifted through the intercession of Francis of Assisi, though the pretty legend that the name Bonaventura came from an exclamation of Francis over the sick child is a later, probably fifteenth-century, addition.

He went to the University of Paris around 1235, took the master of arts, and entered the Order of Friars Minor in the early 1240s. He studied theology under Alexander of Hales — the first Paris master to join the friars — and John of La Rochelle, lectured on the Bible and then on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the standard textbook of the schools, and became a regent master of theology in the early 1250s. The university recognized him and Aquinas together as masters only in 1257, after a bruising fight: the secular masters, led by William of Saint-Amour, had tried to shut the mendicant friars out of the teaching chairs altogether, and Bonaventure spent part of the decade defending the right of a begging order to hold a place in the schools at all.

In 1257 he was elected minister general — the order’s head — at a moment when it was tearing itself between those who wanted strict, literal poverty and those who wanted to be a working presence in the schools and cities. The Franciscans by then numbered in the tens of thousands and ran from rigorist Spirituals to the lax, with an apocalyptic Joachite wing reading the coming of Francis as the dawn of a new age of the Spirit. Bonaventure steered a middle course for seventeen years. He codified the order’s law in the Constitutions of Narbonne in 1260, and the general chapters commissioned from him the official life of Francis, the Legenda maior, completed in 1263; a chapter of 1266 then ordered the earlier biographies destroyed in its favor. That act — a saint’s memory fixed by suppressing its rival accounts — is the part of his administration medieval historians weigh most carefully, because it shaped what every later age could know of Francis. Near the end Gregory X, whose election Bonaventure had helped secure, made him cardinal-bishop of Albano in 1273. He was a central figure at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, called to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, and he died there suddenly on 15 July, mid-council. Two centuries later Sixtus IV canonized him; in 1588 Sixtus V named him a Doctor of the Church under the title that had long been his by acclamation: the Seraphic Doctor.

Creation as a book of signs

His thought is where the interest concentrates, and it begins with a claim about what the world is. Against the drift of his younger contemporaries, Bonaventure held that the created order is not a neutral object laid out for analysis but a book of signs — every creature a vestigium, a footprint, of its maker, and the rational soul something more, an imago, an image. The doctrine behind this is called exemplarism: the eternal patterns of all things, the rationes aeternae, reside in the mind of God, and each thing that exists is a trace, an image, or a likeness of the Trinity that thought it. The world is therefore legible, a ladder and a mirror, and knowledge rightly pursued does not end in description but in worship — to read a creature to the bottom is to be turned back toward the one it points at. This is why, for Bonaventure, the sciences are not autonomous. In a short, dense piece called On Retracing the Arts to Theology he argued that every form of human knowing, from the mechanical crafts up through the liberal arts to philosophy, is a light derived from the one light of Scripture and bends back toward it. Certain knowledge itself, on this account, requires more than the mind abstracting forms from the senses; it requires a divine illumination, an eternal art that guarantees the truth of the soul’s judgments — the Augustinian doctrine he inherited and made his own.

That inheritance is the key to him. Where Aquinas was rebuilding theology on the recovered logic and physics of Aristotle, Bonaventure stood with Augustine and with the older monastic science of the soul taught at the Parisian abbey of Saint-Victor — Hugh of Saint-Victor above all, whose program of reading the visible world as sacrament Bonaventure absorbed and tightened. He has been called the last of the great Platonists of the Middle Ages, and the description fits: for him the structure of reality is exemplary and descending, the Good pouring itself out, and the mind’s task is to trace the outflow back to its source. He did not reject Aristotle — he used him constantly in the schools — but he distrusted a philosophy that took the world as a thing sufficient to itself, and late in life, in the unfinished Paris conferences on the six days of creation, the Collationes in Hexaëmeron of 1273, he named three errors he laid at the door of a too-confident Aristotelianism: the eternity of the world, the unity of the intellect in all human beings, and the rule of fate. Against them he set Christ as the medium, the center — metaphysical, cosmic, and mystical — through which alone the rest holds together.

The Itinerarium

The fullest statement of where this leads is the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, the Soul’s Journey into God, written in 1259 after a retreat to Mount La Verna, the mountain where Francis had received the stigmata. There Bonaventure took the vision Francis had seen — a six-winged seraph fixed to a cross — and made its wings the architecture of an ascent. Six stages carry the mind upward, in three pairs. The first pair looks outside the soul, contemplating God in the vestigia, the traces strewn through the sensible world, seen first through creation as through a mirror and then within it. The second pair turns inward, to the image of God in the soul’s own powers — memory, understanding, and will — first in their natural working and then as grace reforms them. The third pair rises above the soul to the divine names themselves: to Being, the name given at the burning bush, the He Who Is of Exodus, and to the Good, the self-diffusive Good that necessarily pours itself out and so grounds both the inner life of the Trinity and the act of creation. That last idea — bonum diffusivum sui, the good is by nature self-communicating — Bonaventure drew from the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous Syrian Neoplatonist of around 500 whom the Latin West took for Paul’s Athenian convert, and whose negative theology had given that West its vocabulary for the limit of thought.

Then comes the seventh stage, which is not a further stretch of the same climb but its breaking-off. Having ascended through traces and image and name, the mind reaches the point where it can go no further by its own power, and the work is finished not by understanding but by love. Intellect falls silent; affect, the soul’s loving edge, is carried over into God in a darkness beyond knowing. This is the transitus, the passing-over, and Bonaventure makes it explicitly Christ’s passover and the crucified Christ the only door: one passes into God the way one passes through a gate, and there is no other gate. He cites Dionysius’s Mystical Theology at exactly this summit, where speech runs out — the apophatic, negative-theological moment that the Neoplatonist tradition had bequeathed to Christian mysticism. But the governing logic of the whole journey is not Dionysius’s; it is Franciscan. The counsel Bonaventure gives at the threshold of the seventh step is to ask grace and not learning, desire and not understanding, the groaning of prayer and not the study of books — to seek the bridegroom, not the teacher. Where the schools made contemplation the reward of knowledge, he made love overtake knowledge and pass beyond it. That ordering — the most rigorous theology bent finally toward an experience reason cannot supply — is the heart of what he believed and asked his order to believe: that learning and love are not rivals, and that the proper end of thinking about God is not a conclusion but a silence.

The Itinerarium is the most compressed of a family of contemplative works he wrote alongside his scholastic output. The Triple Way, his single most copied book in the centuries before print, lays out the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways. The Tree of Life meditates on the mysteries of Christ as the branches and fruit of a tree, and seeded a whole tradition of devotional diagrams. The Soliloquium stages a dialogue of the soul with itself, and the Breviloquium compresses the whole of theology into an ordered short summa — what the Breviloquium is to the schools, the contemplative handbooks are to the mystical life, and for Bonaventure the two were never two enterprises. A celebrated devotional literature later traveled under his name and is in fact not his: the Meditations on the Life of Christ, the Goad of Love, the Mystic Vine. The nineteenth-century editors who produced the great critical edition of his works sifted the genuine from this pseudo-Bonaventurine mass, and several of the most loved Bonaventurine devotional books belong to other, often anonymous, hands.

The scholarship and the texts

The critical foundation for all of this is the Opera Omnia produced by the Franciscan editors at Quaracchi, near Florence, in ten volumes between 1882 and 1902 — the edition that established which works are authentic and supplies the Latin every later study cites. The Itinerarium, the Breviloquium, and On Retracing the Arts stand in its fifth volume of 1891; the contemplative handbooks fill the eighth, of 1898. The Latin is in the public domain and mirrored in full, including the Quaracchi fifth volume that carries the Itinerarium. The earliest complete English version, literal to the point of strain, is Thomas Davidson’s “The Soul’s Progress into God,” printed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1887; the modern readable renderings — George Boas’s The Mind’s Road to God (1953), Philotheus Boehner’s edition (1956), and Ewert Cousins’s The Soul’s Journey into God in the Classics of Western Spirituality (1978) — remain in copyright and are cited rather than reproduced.

For the figure and the thought, the turning point in modern reading was Étienne Gilson’s La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (1924, translated 1938), which recovered Bonaventure not as a hesitant proto-Thomist but as the coherent culmination of a Christian Augustinianism with its own integrity — the source this entry follows on his Platonism. The Catholic Encyclopedia article of 1907 by Paterius Robinson notes that the Itinerarium was the lifelong delight of Jean Gerson, the chancellor of Paris who, more than a century after Bonaventure’s death, held him up as the safest and most balanced of the mystical doctors. The reference treatments at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lay out the exemplarist metaphysics and the structure of the ascent; the older Catholic Encyclopedia entry remains the fullest public-domain account of the life and the editorial history.

His line did not stop at his death. The Augustinian-Franciscan school continued through Matthew of Aquasparta and Peter John Olivi before Duns Scotus bent it in another direction; the affective, Dionysian ascent he systematized fed the Rhineland speculation of Meister Eckhart and, through Eckhart’s successors, the late-medieval devotional reform. His near-contemporary Ramon Llull built another Franciscan art of ascending the ladder of creatures to God; and in the next century Nicholas of Cusa carried the learned-ignorance of the seventh step into the Renaissance. Scholarship reads Bonaventure as the great counterweight to the Aristotelian confidence of his age — the figure who kept the Augustinian and contemplative current alive inside the rebuilt university just as it was being remade on Greek logic, and who refused to let the new scholasticism forget that it was, in the end, a kind of prayer. The institutional life of vows and silence in which that prayer was practiced ran in parallel, through Western monasticism and back to the desert fathers whose imageless approach to God his summit recovers.

So the Itinerarium ends where its own logic must. Six stages of looking — at the trace, at the image, at the name — bring the mind to the edge of what mind can do, and there the book stops climbing. On the seventh day there is rest, and the counsel is to leave the door open behind and let the soul, with the crucified Christ for vehicle and gate, pass over into a dark the intellect cannot enter. Bonaventure asks the reader, having read this far, to put the reading down: not to understand the passage but to make it, in the silence on the far side of every name, where, he says, the one who taught Dionysius will teach again, and where fire — not light — does the rest.

→ In the library: Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Hugh Of Saint Victor · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Ramon Llull · Aristotle · Thomas Aquinas · Francis Of Assisi · Augustine Of Hippo · Apophatic Theology · Scholasticism · Western Monasticism