St. Bonaventure (c. 1217/1221-1274) was a Franciscan friar, the seventh Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor, Bishop of Albano, and a cardinal.
Born Giovanni di Fidanza, in Bagnoregio, he began his studies at Paris in 1235 and entered the Order of Friars Minor in 1243. Later, he held the Franciscan chair in theology at the University of Paris.
In 1257, he was elected Minister General of the Franciscans. During his seventeen years in that office, he addressed several crises within the Order, such as the mendicant controversy and the Joachimites.
In 1273, he was created a cardinal, appointed bishop of Albano, and charged with preparatory work for the Council of Lyons. He died during the fourth session of the council. He was canonised in 1482 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1557.
In this interview, Randall Smith discusses St. Bonaventure and how to start reading his works.
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There are plenty of books on theology and spirituality. Why read Bonaventure instead of the latest literature? This is always a difficult question because I write contemporary stuff. For example, I write almost once a fortnight in The Catholic Thing, where there is a lot of good articles. So, I do not want to discourage people from reading the many good things that are coming out.
Today, I just read in Church Life Journal a selection today from Fr. Thomas Joseph White's book on the Incarnation and a wonderful piece by Brant Pitre on Christology. However, there are also tremendous writing in the ancient and medieval world that we do not want to miss. One is Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind into God or The Journey of the Mind into God). It has been a mystical masterpiece for generations. Like literary masterworks, such as Hamletand King Lear, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, or St. Augustine’s Confessions, it is a classic that has inspired people for generations, almost a thousand years.
That makes you wonder why it has been one of Bonaventure’s most popular books and a classic of Western mysticism. In fact, one of the major works Bernard McGinn included in the Classics of Western Spirituality series is Bonaventure’s Itinerarium.
“Bonaventure had fourteen years of training at the University of Paris. He had a tremendously high literary sensibility."
At Paris, St. Bonaventure probably studied under a brilliant group of early Franciscan theologians: Alexander of Hales, Jean de la Rochelle, Odo Rigaud, and William of Middleton. Moreover, many of his writings regard the Franciscan order and its spirituality. What are the distinctive Franciscan characteristics of his theology? Bonaventure’s relationship with the Franciscans is fascinating but has also been controversial, both during his own life and ever since. Some believe that he led the Franciscans in the wrong direction. Instead of concentrating on the simple piety of St. Francis, he got them involved in academic pursuits and moved the headquarters of the Franciscans to Paris.
Of course, he was a great scholar. He had been a Master of Theology at the University of Paris. I argue that he was not a bad Franciscan. However, that is a matter for Franciscans to determine.
He was certainly deeply Franciscan in his spirit and his approach to things. However, he also shared more in common with the other Masters of Theology at the University of Paris than any major differences there might be among them. In academia, we make a big deal about the matters on which they differ. However, I like to look at the many ways in which they are deeply similar. There is a deep convergence among them. They all believe that genuine learning begins in humility and should lead ultimately to knowledge and love of God.
Of course, there are also differences among them. People read different texts. For example, the Victorines—Hugh of St. Victor and Richard of St. Victor—are much more important for Bonaventure than they are for Aquinas, whereas John Damascene is very important in the work of Aquinas but shows up hardly at all in Bonaventure. Different people read different books and are inspired by different things in different ways. This makes things interesting.
Bonaventure had fourteen years of training at the University of Paris. He had a tremendously high literary sensibility. His preaching moves at a very high level. Thomas, on the other hand, spent his time at the University of Naples, studying logic. He did not have the same high literary characteristics that Bonaventure acquired at Paris, but was a tremendous logician and, under Albert, studied natural philosophy and the works of Aristotle far more than Bonaventure ever did. That said, Bonaventure showed in his sermon Christ the One Teacher that he too was very knowledgeable about Aristotle.
The mendicant controversy was one of the challenges that St. Bonaventure had to address as Minister General of the Order of Friars Minor. What was the controversy about and how did he deal with it?Both Bonaventure and Aquinas, both the Dominicans and the Franciscans, had to deal with the issue of mendicant life, which was controversial at the University of Paris for various reasons.
There was a debate within the mendicant orders, at least within the Franciscans, over whether they should be professors at a place like the University of Paris. However, the secular clergy who taught at the University of Paris were also against the mendicants being part of the faculty. Before Thomas and Bonaventure were accepted as masters, they had gone on strike but the Franciscans, such as William of Middleton, had refused to join them. The secular clergy disliked the mendicants for that reason and that is why the inception of Bonaventure and Thomas was held up for several years. The pope had to intervene for them to be incepted as Masters at the Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris.
There was also the question of whether it was noble for friars to beg for a living. Were they not stealing money from the more needy? Was it appropriate for them to be masters at a university.
The same sort of objection goes on today. Franciscans and Dominican do not own anything but people give them things. Hence you might see a Franciscan or a Dominican driving a pretty nice car that somebody donated. This kind of thing has always been somewhat controversial. The issue is that the mendicant friars do not own anything yet receive donations from people and sometimes do not look as poor as people who are homeless. Their vocation is not exactly the same as that of Mother Teresa's of Calcutta’s Sisters of Charity, who really do live without anything.
Bonaventure was appointed Minister General to succeed John of Parma, who had been made to step down because he had looked favourably upon the millenarianism of Joachim of Fiore. Why were a significant number of Franciscans Joachimites? That is a good historical question.
Gioachino da Fiore was a monk who saw the Trinity as a sort of historical development. First, there was the age of the Father, followed by the age of the Son, and finally the age of the Holy Spirit's particular activity in the world.
The bottom line was that whoever somehow fully embodied this new final age would also embody Christ. The Joachimites and the Franciscans said that Francis had done so. He was not just a saint nor the founder of an order. For them, he was in some regards the definitive figure within the Church. It was as though Scripture had said, “And in the fullness of time, God chose Francis to be the model and embodiment of this new age.”
You can see why the Franciscans would be happy to suggest that their man was this important. Often, there have been legitimate and wonderful movements of spiritual renewal within the Church. They have their place. The question is whether they are somehow definitive or and whether everyone should live in their way. The tradition of the Church has always maintained that there are different spiritualities. For example, there are Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines, each with a very different life. The Benedictines take a vow of stability and stay in their monastery, whereas Franciscans and Dominicans are monks that have always been able to travel around. Similarly, the Dominicans have promoted the Rosary, a very fine devotion, whereas the Benedictines have promoted the Liturgy of the Hours. The original Benedictine idea was to chant all 150 Psalms every week.
At any rate, the Joachimite tendency was popular among the Franciscans. However, it made them less popular among other religious orders and church officials, who admired Francis but could not approve of the Joachimite tendency to separate the Trinity.
The Joachimites proposed what we would call process theology. Back then, it was deemed heretical. It still is. Joachim was generally considered to be a heretic. Hence, embracing a heretical movement was not the kind thing that would make the Franciscan Joachimites popular in the Church.
What drew you to study St Bonaventure? Thomas and Bonaventure are sometimes called the duo lumina, the two great lights of the Middle Ages. Though I am interested in the theology of the Church in general, my areas of special interest have always been, in addition to Ancient Greek philosophy, patristic and medieval theology.
One of the things I liked about the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame and the reason I went there was that I had always admired classicists. Classicists seem to know something about a whole world. They can talk about works of literature, such as those of Sophocles and Homer, a philosopher such as Plato, or the history of the period. I found their knowledge of a whole world and culture fascinating. So, when I went off to study patristics and medieval theology, although I was primarily interested in Augustine and Aquinas and Aristotle, I was interested in the whole intellectual world of the Middle Ages.
Bonaventure is a very important and interesting part of that world. Hugh of St. Victor and Richard of St. Victor are unbelievably brilliant and amazing twelfth-century figures, Similarly, if you study the thirteenth century you should undoubtedly study not only Thomas Aquinas but also Bonaventure. Sometimes, however, people do not study both.
The works by St. Bonaventure that you have selected for new readers belong to his writings on the spiritual life. However, he also wrote major works of a more academic and systematic character. Presumably, you have not recommended them because they are more challenging and suppose some training in theology. Which of these works are the most important? I did select books that are more accessible to general readers and are related to the Itinerarium, of which are there are several very good translations with notes, such as Into God. One of the beauties of some of the other volumes on the list is that they contain other wonderful works of Bonaventure in them.
If you get a chance, read The Tree of Life. It is very accessible and based on the beautiful image of a tree with twelve branches and fruits.
I would also recommend his Breviloquium, a short summary of theology. Yes, this is a very important work. It is called the Breviloquium because it is a brief introduction to the basics of theology. It is a beautiful and short work. It gives you a sense of Bonaventure’s genius but is just as accessible and readable as St. Thomas’s sermon conferences (collationes) On the Ten Commandments, On the Creed, and On the Hail Mary. The Breviloquium is not deeply philosophical but lays out the basics of the faith. It is Bonaventurian in its simplicity. That makes it very beautiful and elegant.
As you mentioned, St Bonaventure was one of main three main theologians of the thirteenth century. But the school of theology that most Franciscans followed was that of Blessed John Scotus. How come St Bonaventure did not gain as wide a following among the Franciscans as St Thomas Aquinas did among the Dominicans? This is another question for the Franciscans. Though there are brilliant things in Scotus, he has never been quite to my taste.
The Franciscans have been devoted to Bonaventure. For example, St. Bonaventure University has published an English translation of his works. Moreover, the Franciscans brought out a modern critical edition of the complete works of St. Bonaventure at the end of the nineteenth-century while the Dominicans, who were commissioned by Leo XIII to bring out a critical edition of the complete works of St. Thomas Aquinas, have still not completed the task.
However, Bonaventure had barely been appointed Master at the University of Paris when he was elected Master General of the Franciscans. Though the works he wrote as Master General are brilliant and deeply theological, they are not as academic as those of Scotus. Modern academics intent upon comparing Thomas' Summa with the Franciscan intellectual tradition of the period will probably turn to Scotus rather than Bonaventure. Scotus takes the same scholastic approach.
On the other hand, in my works I often ask why we are less interested in Thomas's sermons and biblical commentaries than in his Aristotelian commentaries. Part of the reason is that the nineteenth-century revival of Thomism, promoted by Leo XIII and others before him, was interested primarily in the scholastics for their philosophical arguments: as a way of opposing Enlightenment rationalism and German idealism. In that case, you would turn to Thomas and Scotus rather than the less academic Bonaventure and Bernard of Clairvaux. Similarly, those working in philosophy tend to look at Anselm's ontological argument rather than the less philosophical but equally profound reflections of other twelfth-century authors.
“He was telling them that learning can and should lead to the knowledge and love of God. It begins in humility and leads to Christ."
1.
First up is what is arguably St. Bonaventure’s most famous work, The Journey of the Soul Into God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum). What is its main argument?
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