Bonaventure

Works

• 1259The Journey of the Mind into God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum)

  Six steps, after the six wings of the seraph that Francis saw, lead from the traces of God in the world through the mind to God himself; a seventh ends in mystical rest.

• 1273Collations on the Six Days (Collationes in Hexaemeron)

  Unfinished Paris conferences against three errors of the philosophers: the eternity of the world, the necessity of fate and one intellect for all.

Position

Bonaventure is often set beside Aquinas as the other great theologian of the mid-thirteenth century, but he starts from a different place. Following Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, he treats the world as a book in which God can be read: creatures are traces (vestigia) of God, the human mind is his image, and knowledge, rightly ordered, leads back to its source. The Itinerarium sets out this ascent in six stages, from the visible world through the mind’s memory, intellect and will to the contemplation of God as Being and as Good, followed by a seventh, mystical stage in which the intellect falls silent. On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology shows every branch of learning leading back to theology. Certain knowledge, he held, requires divine illumination working together with the natural activity of the intellect. He used Aristotle extensively but opposed what he saw as the errors of the arts masters who followed Aristotle and Averroes. A created world cannot be eternal: what is made from nothing has being after non-being, and an infinite series of past days could never have been traversed. In the Collations on the Six Days (1273) he named three errors – the eternity of the world, the necessity of fate and one intellect for all humans – and traced them to Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s Ideas. Like other Franciscan masters he held that even angels and souls are composed of matter and form, and that one being can have several substantial forms. Étienne Gilson read him as offering a deliberate alternative to Aristotelianism; Fernand Van Steenberghen saw an eclectic Aristotelianism with Neoplatonic features.

Life & context

Bonaventure, born Giovanni di Fidanza, came from Bagnoregio near Viterbo; his year of birth is given as 1217 or around 1221. Around 1235 he went to Paris to study in the arts faculty, entered the Franciscan order around 1243 and studied theology with the Franciscan masters, among them Alexander of Hales. He lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the early 1250s and from 1254 taught as master of the Franciscan school; in the conflict between the secular masters and the mendicant orders the university recognised him, together with Thomas Aquinas, only in 1257. In February 1257 he was elected Minister General of the Franciscans, an office he held for seventeen years. He wrote the order’s official life of Francis and tried to hold its rival wings together. In October 1259 he stayed on Mount La Verna, where Francis had received the stigmata, and wrote the Itinerarium there. In 1273 Pope Gregory X made him cardinal bishop of Albano. He died on 15 July 1274 during the Second Council of Lyon. He was canonised in 1482 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1588.

Further main works

• Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (early 1250s, revised later)
• Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ and on the Mystery of the Trinity (1250s)
• Breviloquium (1257)
• On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology
• Major Life of St Francis (Legenda maior, 1260–63)

Appears in

• Debate ‘Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant: One Intellect for All?’