Bonaventure

Introduction

Bonaventure — born Giovanni di Fidanza, known in religion as Frater Bonaventura — is the Italian Franciscan theologian and philosopher of the thirteenth century whose body of theological and philosophical work stood as the major alternative to the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis that Thomas Aquinas was producing in the same Parisian university milieu. Where Aquinas's framework was Aristotelian and integrationist (seeking to bring philosophical reason and revealed theology into systematic synthesis), Bonaventure's was Augustinian and continued the Patristic insistence on the priority of grace, illumination, and the ascent of the soul to God.

Bonaventure's career was as much administrative as scholarly. He served as Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor (the Franciscan order) from 1257 until shortly before his death in 1274, a position from which he shaped the order's institutional development. The combination of major theological writing with major institutional responsibility makes Bonaventure a distinctive figure in the medieval intellectual landscape.

He died in 1274 at the Second Council of Lyons, called by Pope Gregory X to address the schism between Rome and Constantinople; Bonaventure had been one of the principal organizers of the council and was preaching during it when he fell ill and died. He was canonized in 1482 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1588.

Life

Bonaventure was born around 1221 in Bagnoregio (Italian: Bagnoregio, in modern Lazio), a small hill town in central Italy. The biographical record is comparatively sparse on his early life; the conventional report is that his recovery from a serious childhood illness through the intercession of Francis of Assisi (still living at the time) led to his eventual entry into the Franciscan order.

He was educated at the Franciscan house at Paris from approximately 1235 onward, taking the Franciscan habit around 1243. His teachers included Alexander of Hales (the first Franciscan master at Paris) and John of La Rochelle; his Bachelor of the Sentences came in 1248–50 and his Master of Theology in 1253. The Parisian years were the productive period of his theological writing; the Commentary on the Sentences (composed 1250–52) is the longest single work and the most early statement of his theology.

The career was interrupted by his election as Minister General of the Franciscan order in 1257. Bonaventure was 36 and had to leave Paris for the order's headquarters, where he served for the next seventeen years in a position of institutional and political weight. The Franciscan order at the time was divided between the Spirituals (who emphasized strict poverty and the literal observance of Francis's Rule) and the Conventuals (who allowed for institutional and educational developments that strict poverty made difficult). Bonaventure's tenure was the major formative period of the moderate position; he composed a new Constitutions of the order (the Constitutiones Narbonenses, 1260) and the new official biography of Francis (the Legenda Maior, 1263) that became the definitive Franciscan account.

The later theological work was composed alongside the administrative responsibilities. The Breviloquium (a shorter systematic theology, c. 1257) and the masterpiece Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind to God, 1259) date from the early years of his generalate; the Collationes in Hexaëmeron (lectures on the six days of creation, delivered at Paris in 1273) are the late summative work.

Bonaventure was named Cardinal Bishop of Albano in 1273 and was a major organizer of the Second Council of Lyons in 1274. He died during the council on July 15, 1274, of unspecified illness; the suddenness and the political context produced some early speculation about poisoning, but the contemporary scholarly consensus is that natural illness is the most likely explanation. He was canonized by Sixtus IV in 1482 and declared Doctor of the Church (with the title Doctor Seraphicus) by Sixtus V in 1588.

The problem he worked on

Bonaventure's intellectual project was the systematic articulation of theology within the Augustinian-Franciscan framework against the rising Aristotelianism of the Dominican tradition (Albert and Aquinas) and the Latin Averroist tradition (Siger of Brabant and others). The framework was supposed to give a coherent account of how human beings come to know God, how the creation reflects the divine wisdom, and how the soul ascends to its source through the integration of intellectual, moral, and contemplative practice.

The organizing commitment is the priority of divine illumination over natural reason in serious cognition of God. Where the Aristotelian-Thomist framework gives natural reason a role in knowledge of God (the Five Ways are demonstrative arguments from observed features of the world), the Bonaventuran framework treats serious knowledge of God as requiring the illumination of the human intellect by the divine intellect — a position closer to Augustine's account of divine illumination and ultimately to Plato's account of the soul's recollection of the Forms. The framework integrates philosophical argument, Scriptural interpretation, and contemplative practice into a single project of intellectual-spiritual ascent.

Contributions

Itinerarium Mentis in Deum

The Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind to God, 1259) is Bonaventure's most-read single work and the canonical Franciscan mystical-philosophical text. The book is short (about thirty pages in modern editions) and tightly structured around the framework of a six-stage ascent of the mind to God, modeled on the six-winged seraph that Francis of Assisi had reportedly seen in his vision at Mount La Verna in 1224.

The six stages correspond to six modes of contemplation: God's vestiges (vestigia) in the sensible world; God's vestiges in the senses themselves; God's image (imago) in the rational soul's faculties of memory, intellect, and will; God's image renewed in the soul by grace; God's being (esse) as known through the divine name I AM; God's goodness as known through the divine name good. The seventh and final stage, beyond contemplation, is mystical union with God in which the discursive intellect rests.

The work integrates philosophical argument (the metaphysical analysis of being and goodness), Scriptural interpretation, and contemplative practice into a single project. It has been continuously influential in the Franciscan mystical tradition and beyond; the structural integration of intellect and contemplative practice is one of the major contributions of medieval Christian mysticism.

The Commentary on the Sentences

The Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (composed 1250–52 during Bonaventure's Paris bachelor's years) is his most extensive single work — several thousand pages in modern editions. The Sentences of Peter Lombard was the standard textbook of medieval theology; every aspiring master of theology was required to compose a commentary on it. Bonaventure's commentary engages the systematic theological questions Lombard had organized and produces Bonaventure's positions on the trinity, creation, providence, the incarnation, the sacraments, and eschatology.

The commentary has the methodological feature of being composed before the major Aristotelian turn that defined the second half of the thirteenth century; Bonaventure's positions in the commentary are Augustinian and were modified rather than reversed in the later work as the engagement with Aristotelianism intensified.

The Reduction of the Arts to Theology

The short De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, c. 1255) is a compressed methodological treatise on how the liberal arts and the various branches of philosophy ultimately serve theology as the queen of the sciences. The text develops the framework within which philosophy is given a serious role within the theological project without being granted the kind of independent authority that the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition was beginning to grant it.

The doctrine has been continuously influential in Catholic philosophical and theological pedagogy. The framework provides one of the principal articulations of how secular learning and revealed theology can be integrated without either being subordinated in a way that destroys it.

The Augustinian synthesis

Bonaventure's broader theological work develops the Augustinian framework substantially. The doctrine of divine illumination (that human cognition of God and the higher truths requires the active participation of the divine intellect); the doctrine of seminal reasons (rationes seminales) in creation; the integration of the contemplative life with the intellectual; the Trinitarian theology centered on the exemplary causality of the Word — all are recognizably Augustinian developments and were the principal theological alternatives to the Aristotelian-Thomist framework throughout the medieval and early modern periods.

The Franciscan synthesis

Bonaventure's specifically Franciscan contribution was the systematic integration of the Franciscan spiritual tradition (the imitation of Christ, the centrality of poverty, the ascetic-mystical practice) with the academic theology of the Paris Faculty of Theology. The Legenda Maior of Francis (1263) became the canonical biography that the Constitutions of 1266 required to be used in place of all earlier biographies; the Itinerarium gave the philosophical-contemplative articulation of the Franciscan spiritual ascent; the Constitutiones Narbonenses gave the institutional framework within which the order's growth and academic engagement could be integrated with its founding spiritual commitments.

Key works

• Commentary on the Sentences (1250–52). The most extensive systematic work.
• De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (c. 1255). The methodological treatise.
• Breviloquium (c. 1257). The compressed systematic theology.
• Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (1259). The mystical-philosophical masterpiece.
• Legenda Maior Sancti Francisci (1263). The official biography of Francis.
• Constitutiones Narbonenses (1260). The reformed Franciscan constitutions.
• Collationes in Hexaëmeron (1273). The late Paris lectures.

The standard scholarly edition is the Opera Omnia edited by the Quaracchi friars (ten volumes, 1882–1902), one of the great monuments of nineteenth-century medieval scholarship. Major English translations include the various volumes of The Works of Saint Bonaventure from St. Bonaventure University, the Cousins translation of the Itinerarium and other mystical works (Paulist Press, 1978), and the Boehner-Hayes translations.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Augustine (the fundamental Patristic framework); Anselm (the immediate medieval Augustinian predecessor); Plotinus (mediated through Augustine and through Pseudo-Dionysius); Pseudo-Dionysius (whose negative theology and angelic hierarchies shaped Bonaventure's account of the divine names); Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle (his Paris teachers); Francis of Assisi (the founder of his order and the spiritual model of the Itinerarium).

Influenced: The entire subsequent Franciscan theological tradition, especially through John Duns Scotus (who modified the Augustinian framework but operated within its broad sensibility); William of Ockham (whose nominalism developed within the broader Franciscan tradition Bonaventure had shaped); the mystical tradition through Meister Eckhart (whose engagement with Bonaventure's account of the divine names was substantial), Henry Suso, and Johannes Tauler; the Counter-Reformation Catholic theology that recovered the Augustinian framework against the Thomist hegemony; the modern Catholic theological recovery through Etienne Gilson (whose La Philosophie de Saint Bonaventure, 1924, was the major modern monograph), Hans Urs von Balthasar (whose extensive engagement with Bonaventure shaped much of his theological aesthetics), and the post-conciliar Franciscan theological tradition.

Reception

Bonaventure's reception in the medieval period was substantial. The Commentary on the Sentences was widely used as a teaching text within the Franciscan order; the Breviloquium circulated as a compressed systematic theology; the Itinerarium became a foundational text of Catholic mysticism. The official Franciscan adoption of the Legenda Maior as the sole authorized biography of Francis shaped the Franciscan tradition's self-understanding.

The canonization in 1482 and the doctorate of the Church in 1588 (the latter coinciding with the Counter-Reformation theological recovery) raised Bonaventure's authority. The Quaracchi edition of the Opera Omnia (1882–1902) made the corpus available in a scholarly form that supported the early-twentieth-century recovery through Gilson, Maritain, and others.

The twentieth-century reception, especially through Etienne Gilson's La Philosophie de Saint Bonaventure (1924), Joseph Ratzinger's habilitation thesis The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (1959; the work that nearly cost the future Benedict XVI his academic career), and Hans Urs von Balthasar's engagement, has been substantial. Bonaventure is now widely recognized as a major medieval theologian alongside Aquinas and not merely as the Franciscan counterpart.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Christopher Cullen's Bonaventure (2006), Robert Pasnau's engagement in his work on medieval philosophy of mind, the work of Boyd Taylor Coolman, Zachary Hayes, and the contributors to the St. Bonaventure University edition. Active scholarly debates concern the precise relation between Bonaventure and Aquinas (especially over the doctrines of illumination, the soul, and the eternity of the world), the philosophical status of the mystical works, the interpretation of the Itinerarium's six-stage structure, and Bonaventure's place in the broader history of Christian mystical theology.

Further reading

• Scholasticism — the tradition Bonaventure shaped
• Christian Theology — the broader tradition his work shaped
• Augustine — the Patristic framework his work developed
• Aquinas — the contemporary whose Aristotelian-Thomist framework Bonaventure's Augustinianism was the major alternative to
• Plotinus — the Neoplatonist source mediated through Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius
• Anselm — the immediate medieval predecessor in the Augustinian tradition

The Italian Franciscan whose Augustinian-Neoplatonist synthesis was the major thirteenth-century alternative to Aquinas's Aristotelian framework.