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. He studied arts at Paris, entered the Franciscans, took the theology chair in the early 1250s, and in 1257 was elected minister general — the order’s head — at a moment when it was tearing itself between those who wanted strict poverty and those who wanted to be a working presence in the schools and cities. He steadied it, wrote the official life of Francis of Assisi that displaced earlier biographies, and was made cardinal-bishop of Albano near the end. The Church later counted him among its Doctors. Much of his administrative legacy is a matter of suppressing rival accounts of the founder, a fact medieval historians weigh carefully.

His thought is where the interest concentrates. Against the drift of his younger contemporaries, Bonaventure held that the created world is not a neutral object for analysis but a book of signs — every creature a vestigium, a footprint, of its maker — so that knowledge rightly pursued ends in worship rather than mere description. In the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (the Soul’s Journey into God), written after a retreat on the mountain where Francis received the stigmata, he set out six stages by which the mind climbs from the traces of God in the sensible world, through the image of God in its own faculties, to the divine names themselves — and then a seventh step, in which intellect falls silent and the soul passes over into God in a darkness beyond knowing. That final move he took directly from the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, whose negative theology gave the Latin West its vocabulary for the limit of thought.

What he believed, and asked his order to believe, was that learning and love are not rivals: that the most rigorous theology is finally ordered toward an experience reason cannot supply. Scholarship reads him as the great counterweight to the Aristotelian confidence of his age — the figure who kept the Augustinian and contemplative current alive inside the university just as it was being rebuilt on Greek logic. Whether his synthesis held, or only postponed the divorce it feared, is still argued. The Itinerarium outlasted the argument; it is read where the question of how far the mind can go is still open.

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

→ Related: Hugh Of Saint Victor · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Ramon Llull · Aristotle