Saint Bonaventure (c. 1217-1274)

A Christendom in full intellectual flowering

The thirteenth century is the great century of the nascent universities. Paris, Oxford and Bologna became the homes of a new thought, in which Aristotle was rediscovered through Arabic and Greek translations, in which the methods of scholasticism were forged, and in which the Church faced the decisive question of the harmony between faith and reason.^[9][10]

It is also the century of the mendicant orders: the Friars Minor of Francis of Assisi and the Friars Preachers of Dominic, born at the beginning of the century, overturned religious life by combining radical poverty, itinerant preaching and intellectual engagement. Very quickly these young orders seized university chairs — to the point of provoking the jealousy and hostility of the secular clergy.^[11][12]

Bagnoregio, an Umbrian childhood

Bonaventure was born at Bagnoregio (Bagnorea), a perched town of the Papal States, near Viterbo and Orvieto, into a family in which his father, Giovanni Fidanza, is said to have been a physician.^[13][14] The exact year of his birth remains uncertain: the sources oscillate between 1217 and 1221, and this range is prudently retained.^[15][16]

A tradition reported only later holds that the child, gravely ill, was healed through the intercession of Saint Francis of Assisi, who is said to have exclaimed: "O buona ventura!" — "O happy fortune!" — whence his religious name is said to come. Bonaventure himself attests that he was preserved from death in his childhood through the intercession of Francis; but the precise linking of his name to this saying belongs to the edifying legend of the fifteenth century. The exact date of this healing is moreover unknown: Bonaventure attests only that he was preserved from death in his childhood through the intercession of Francis, and nothing proves that it took place during Francis's lifetime.^[17][18]

A student at the University of Paris

Around 1235, the young John of Fidanza made his way to Paris, the intellectual capital of Christendom, where he first studied the liberal arts and obtained his master's degree. There he discovered the great theological school of the Friars Minor, led by Master Alexander of Hales, the first Franciscan to hold a Parisian chair.^[19][20]

Entry into the Franciscan order (1243)

Won over by the ideal of Francis, he entered the Friars Minor around 1243 and received the name Bonaventure. He then pursued theology under Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle, whose doctrinal heritage he gathered. Of his master he would later speak with filial veneration; and all his life he would consider himself a disciple, faithfully transmitting the tradition received rather than seeking originality.^[21][22]

Having become a bachelor, he commented on Scripture and then on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the basic manual of theology. Around 1248, he received the licence to teach and became regent master at Paris, where he formed a generation of Franciscan theologians.^[23][24]

The attack of William of Saint-Amour

In the middle of the century, the hostility of the secular clergy against the mendicant orders erupted at Paris. The secular master William of Saint-Amour published a violent pamphlet, the De periculis novissimorum temporum ("The Perils of the Last Times"), in which he presented the friars as forerunners of the Antichrist and contested their right to teach and to live on alms.^[25][26]

Bonaventure took up his pen to defend evangelical poverty and the legitimacy of the mendicants. The quarrel was so fierce that the friars were for a time excluded from the university; it took the pope's intervention to restore them there.^[27]

A doctor in the same year as Thomas Aquinas

It was in this tense context that Bonaventure and the Dominican Thomas Aquinas were, together, delayed in the conferral of their degrees. Both finally received the doctorate in 1257, an event that has remained famous: the two greatest minds of the century, one Franciscan, the other Dominican, acceded in the same year to the magisterial chair.^[28][29]

Pious tradition has embroidered a thousand tales around their friendship — Thomas asking Bonaventure from which books he drew his learning, and Bonaventure pointing to his crucifix. These anecdotes are edifying but of uncertain historicity; what is certain is their contemporaneity, their mutual esteem, and the complementarity of their two geniuses.^[30]

An election at forty (1257)

In that same year, the Franciscan order, torn by internal tensions, turned to Bonaventure: he was elected Minister General of the Friars Minor on 2 February 1257, and would remain so for seventeen years, until his death. He then abandoned regular teaching for government, without ever ceasing to write and to preach.^[31][32]

The order he received was young, immense and fragile. In a single generation, the friars had multiplied by the thousand across the whole of Europe; but the initial charism of Francis — absolute poverty, simplicity, wandering — sat uneasily with the needs of an order grown learned, urban and institutional.^[33][34]

Arbitrating between Spirituals and Conventuals

Two parties confronted each other. The Spirituals wanted a full return to the radical poverty of the origins, some letting themselves be won over by the dreams of Joachim of Fiore about an "age of the Spirit" that would surpass the hierarchical Church. The Conventuals, for their part, leaned towards relaxation and accommodation to the world.^[35][36]

Bonaventure traced a middle way. He refused the Joachite utopia, which would have dissolved the order in an eschatological illusion, as he refused the laxity that would have betrayed its spirit. His thought and his government aimed at rooting the Franciscan charism in obedience to the Church and in a poverty real but ordered to mission.^[37] For him, to govern was not merely to administer:

"Governing was not simply an action but meant above all thinking and praying." — Benedict XVI, on Saint Bonaventure as Minister General^[38]

The Constitutions of Narbonne (1260) and the Legenda maior

To give the order a stable foundation, Bonaventure promulgated in 1260, at the general chapter of Narbonne, the Constitutiones Narbonenses, the first great Franciscan legislation, which would remain the bedrock of the order's law.^[39][40]

It was also he whom the chapter charged with writing the official life of Saint Francis. He composed around 1260-1263 the Legenda maior (and its liturgical abridgement, the Legenda minor), approved at the chapter of Pisa in 1263. In 1266, the chapter of Paris even ordered the destruction of earlier biographies in favour of this single text: a questionable gesture for the modern historian, but one which speaks of Bonaventure's will to fix a unified and pacified image of Francis, capable of rallying the divided order.^[41][42]

An avowed Augustinianism in the face of Aristotelianism

Where Thomas Aquinas boldly integrated Aristotle into theology, Bonaventure showed himself more reserved. Heir to Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Victorines, he feared that a certain Aristotelianism — above all in its radical, Averroist version circulating at Paris — might lead to errors: the eternity of the world, the denial of providence or of the personal immortality of the soul.^[43][44]

His critique did not target Aristotle wholesale, but the use of a reason that would claim to be self-sufficient, cut off from the light of faith. In the Collationes in Hexaëmeron — his last lectures, given at Paris in 1273 and left unfinished — he developed a great vision in which Christ is the centre of all things, including of all true knowledge:

"Our intention is to show that in Christ are hidden all the treasures of the wisdom and knowledge of God, and that he himself is the centre of all the sciences." — Saint Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, I^[45]

Exemplarism: the world, a book that speaks of God

At the heart of Bonaventuran thought lies exemplarism. All creatures are vestiges (vestigia) and images of God: they bear the imprint of their Creator and manifest him. Christ the Word is the Exemplar, the eternal model according to which all things were created. The world thus becomes a great book whose every page refers to God, for whoever can read it with the eyes of faith.^[46][47]

To this doctrine is added illumination: inherited from Augustine, it affirms that the human mind grasps certain truth only in the light of the "eternal reasons", that is, in a participation in the divine Light. The highest knowledge is therefore not a conquest, but a gift.^[48]

The primacy of love over knowledge

Here is marked the sharpest difference from Thomas Aquinas. For the Angelic Doctor, beatitude consists above all in the vision of God; for the Seraphic Doctor, it consists above all in loving God. Benedict XVI summed up this fruitful divergence:

"For Saint Thomas, the supreme goal towards which our desire is directed is: to see God. For Saint Bonaventure, on the other hand, man's ultimate destiny is: to love God, the encounter and union of his love and ours." — Benedict XVI, General Audience of 17 March 2010^[49]

Bonaventure's theology is therefore a wisdom (sapientia) — a savoury knowledge, born of love and leading to love. To know, for him, has meaning only to love better; and whoever loves always wants to know the beloved more. Primacy belongs to charity, not to speculative curiosity.^[50]

La Verna, in the footsteps of Saint Francis

In the autumn of 1259, Bonaventure withdrew to Mount La Verna in Tuscany, the very place where Saint Francis had received the stigmata in 1224. Meditating on the vision of the six-winged seraph which had then marked the flesh of Francis, he composed there his spiritual masterpiece: the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, the Journey of the Mind into God.^[51][52]

The six degrees of the ascent

The six wings of the seraph become, under his pen, the six degrees by which the soul rises towards God:

"By these six wings may rightly be understood the six suspensions of illuminations by which the soul is disposed, as by steps or paths, to pass over to peace through the ecstatic transports of Christian wisdom." — Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, prologue^[53]

The ascent unfolds in three doubled stages. The soul contemplates God first through the creatures of the sensible world, where he leaves his vestiges; then within itself, the image of God restored by grace; then above itself, in the contemplation of Being and the Good. At the term, a seventh degree: mystical rest, the transitus where the intellect falls silent and where love alone crosses the threshold.^[54][55]

"Ask grace, not doctrine"

The summit of the Journey is not a thesis, but a blaze. Its last page overturns every scholastic method: it is no longer study that saves, but the fire of love, the transitus which carries over into God.

"If you would know how these things come about, ask grace, not doctrine; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligent reading; the Spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the fire that inflames all and transports to God." — Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, VII, 6^[56][57]

This admirable page explains his surname: a doctor whose entire science resolves into seraphic flame.

Bonaventure leaves a considerable output, at once academic, spiritual and apologetic. The principal works are gathered in the following table.

The Breviloquium offers, in a few dense pages, a summary of all Christian doctrine, organized around Christ; the De triplici via nourished centuries of interior life by codifying the three classic ways of mysticism; the Lignum vitae inspired a whole iconography of the "tree of life". This output makes Bonaventure, in the words of tradition, a theologian every page of whom "begins and ends with prayer".^[58][59]

Refusal of honours, then obedience

A man of poverty, Bonaventure fled dignities: around 1265, he had declined the archbishopric of York offered him by the pope. But in 1273, Pope Gregory X created him Cardinal-Bishop of Albano (23 June 1273) and entrusted him with a decisive mission: to prepare the Second Ecumenical Council of Lyon.^[60][61]

The union of the Churches and death at Lyon

The Council of Lyon, opened on 7 May 1274, aimed notably at the union of the Greek and Latin Churches, briefly achieved. Bonaventure played a central role there, preaching and working for reconciliation. But exhausted by labour, he died at Lyon, in the night of 14 to 15 July 1274, while the council was still in session. His death, like that of Thomas Aquinas a few months earlier on his way to that same council, marked the end of an exceptional generation.^[62][63]

"The works of Christ do not decline, but advance" — Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt — a saying of Bonaventure reported by Benedict XVI^[64]

History has loved to bring together, and to contrast, the two great doctors of the thirteenth century. Rather than a rivalry, the Church has recognized in them two complementary accents of one and the same faith: reason and love, light and flame.

Far from contradicting each other, these two paths complete each other: one recalls that faith seeks understanding, the other that it is fulfilled in love. Sixtus V was not mistaken in crowning them together as Doctors of the Church.^[65][66]

From canonization (1482) to the doctorate (1588)

The surname of Seraphic Doctor was attached to him as early as the fourteenth century — it is attested in 1333. But official recognition came later: Bonaventure was canonized on 14 April 1482 by Sixtus IV, himself a Franciscan.^[67]

A century later, Sixtus V, another Franciscan pope, proclaimed him Doctor of the Church by the bull Triumphantis Hierusalem of 14 March 1588, raising him to the rank of the greatest masters of the faith, alongside Thomas Aquinas.^[68][69]

The Seraphic Doctor in the memory of the Church

Bonaventure's influence runs through the centuries. His theological synthesis shaped the whole Franciscan school, from Duns Scotus to modern masters. His mysticism of the three ways and his Journey nourished countless spiritual lives. In the twentieth century, the young theologian Joseph Ratzinger — the future Benedict XVI — devoted his habilitation thesis to the theology of history in Bonaventure: a sign that this medieval master remains a living source for Catholic thought.^[70][71]

Having become pope, Benedict XVI paid tribute to him in three successive catecheses, in March 2010, in which he hailed in him a doctor of whom:

"his whole thinking was profoundly Christocentric." — Benedict XVI, General Audience of 3 March 2010^[72]

A master for the interior life

Bonaventure reminds every generation that theology is not a game of the mind, but a path towards God. His conviction — that love precedes and crowns knowledge — offers a lasting antidote both to any purely cerebral faith and to any piety without intelligence. The Journey remains a sure guide for whoever would rise, through creatures and through grace, to rest in God.^[73][74]

The doctrinal heir of Saint Francis

Without Bonaventure, the charism of Francis of Assisi might never have found the intellectual expression that allowed it to endure. By giving the Franciscan intuition — God present in every creature, the poor Christ at the centre of all things — a theological framework, the Seraphic Doctor made the joyful poverty of the Poverello a true school of wisdom. Like Anthony of Padua, he shows that Franciscan holiness can unite flame and learning.

The seraphic flame

More than anything, Bonaventure remains the doctor of fire: not the cold light of a knowledge that admires itself, but the blaze of a love that consumes and transports into God. That is the whole meaning of his surname, and the heritage he leaves to the Church.

"Let us ask this grace of God... that, in Christ, we may find all the treasures of wisdom." — after Saint Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron^[75]

• Read Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226): the founder whose official life Bonaventure wrote and whose doctrinal heir he was.
• Read Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274): the contemporary friend, the other great doctor of the thirteenth century, the Angelic Doctor.
• Read Blessed Pope Gregory X (1271-1276): the pope who created him cardinal and convoked the Council of Lyon.
• Read The Second Council of Lyon (1274): the council of the union of the Churches, where Bonaventure died.
• Remember the essential: Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Friar Minor, Minister General and Seraphic Doctor, was at once the great theologian of love, the doctrinal heir of Saint Francis and the master of a mysticism in which learning resolves into flame.