Category: Blog

We come to our final pair of stages in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium. The first pair of stages considered God as present in created things outside of us (extra nos), and the second pair considered God as imaged within us (intra nos). The last pair of stages considers God as supra nos—above us. The reflections here become even more speculative and theological, while also recognizing the limits of human language in describing God.

Instead of summarizing these stages sequentially, it may be helpful to describe them together. This pair considers God according to his two most proper names: Being (esse) and Goodness (bonum). Bonaventure represents these two names as the two cherubim facing each other atop the Ark of the Covenant. In the Old Testament, the space of the two cherubim was also known as the “mercy seat,” over which the presence of God hovered within the tabernacle. Just as the cherubim were close to yet beneath God, so do the names Being and Goodness represent the closest and most general human descriptions possible for God’s essence. Scripture and tradition use all sorts of metaphors for God; for example, God is described as a rock, a fortress, a warrior, and a king in various parts of the Bible. However, all metaphors limp and eventually fail. When we contemplate God as Being itself (what Thomas Aquinas described as ipsum esse) or as Goodness itself, we are using the most perfect names we have for God which are not subject to limitation and change. That the two cherubim face each other is taken by Bonaventure to mean that these most perfect names of Being and Goodness are meant to be contemplated together in preparation for the final ascent to God.

At the end of the sixth stage, one has ascended as far as possible by a maximum of human effort. However, all these stages remain preparatory in light of true union with God, which cannot be achieved by human effort alone but only received. After six chapters describing six stages of ascent, Bonaventure concludes the Itinerarium with a paradoxical seventh chapter describing the perfect and final ascent which was granted to Saint Francis when he received the stigmata. This involves a recognition that God is beyond anything that human words can adequately describe. It requires humility and self-denial to the point of becoming like Christ—and in the case of Francis, this was manifested in his own wounded body. Bonaventure makes the radical claim that, in this final passing over into God, “we must cease all intellectual operations, leaving behind all created images and earthly cares and desires.” Even contemplating God as Being and Goodness must also be left behind, if we are to truly rise beyond the cherubim and behold the seraphim, as did Francis. Let us close our series on Bonaventure by quoting the end of the Itinerarium’s seventh chapter, where Bonaventure explains what full conformity to Christ entails.

But if you ask how these things should come to pass, seek grace, not doctrine; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not the study of lectures; the bridegroom, not the university master; God, not man; the dark cloud [caliginem], not clarity; not light, but a fire totally enflamed and transferred into God with excessive anointings and most ardent affections. This fire is God, and this path is in Jerusalem, and Christ ignites it in the fervour of his most ardent passion, and he who truly perceives it, says: “My soul chooses hanging and my bones choose death” (Job 7:15). Whosoever loves this death can see God, for it is doubtlessly true: “No man shall see me and live” (Ex 33:20). Let us die [moriamur], therefore, and enter into the dark cloud; let us impose silence on our cares, desires, and phantasms; let us pass over [transeamus] with Christ crucified from this world to the Father, so that, with the Father shown to us, we might say with Phillip: “It is enough for us” (Jn 14:8); let us hear with Paul: “My grace is enough for you” (2 Cor 12:19); let us rejoice with David, saying: “My flesh and my heart fail, O God of my heart, and you O God are my portion always (Psalm 73:26). Blessed be the Lord forever, and let all the people say: let it be, let it be. (Ps 106:48)” Amen.

Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, pray for us.

Following our previous look at Bonaventure’s first two stages of ascent in the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, we now rise to consider the second pair of the seraph’s six wings. Here, noting how the human person is a microcosm of the wider cosmos, Bonaventure explains how the powers of our mind also reflect something of the Creator’s wisdom, but, since we are uniquely made in the image and likeness of God, the similitude between our created faculties and God enjoys a much closer link.

In the third stage, the Seraphic Doctor looks at our process of cognition, or the way we know things. We have, for Bonaventure, the three following faculties. The memory is the faculty which stores and recalls past events. The intelligence or intellect is that by which we understand the nature of things. The will is the faculty by which we choose certain goods and particular actions. Memory precedes and begets intellect; and by remembering things and knowing what they are, we can—by means of the will—choose or not choose certain goods and actions. In this threefold structure of the mind, Bonaventure finds an analogy for the Blessed Trinity. The memory is like the Father, summing up all things in his eternal mind; the intellect is like the eternal Logos or the Son, which is begotten by the memory. Finally, the will is like the Spirit—the love which chooses all things well and in right order. Thus, in the study of the human person’s unique powers—what today we call philosophical anthropology—we discover an even stronger vision of the divine nature.

In the fourth stage, the mind can reflect even more intensely on the beauty of the faith, discovering through its threefold faculties more sets of threefold mysteries which are unfolded with the aid of revelation, scripture, and the Church. For example, let us take a paraphrased quotation from this fourth stage:

The image of our mind must be clothed in the three powers of spiritual wisdom, by which the soul is purified, enlightened, and perfected… So while the soul, believing, hoping, and loving Jesus Christ, who is the incarnate, uncreated and inspired Word—that is to say, the way, the truth, and the life—in faith believes Jesus Christ to be the uncreated Word, which is the Word and splendour of the Father. In hope, [the soul] it yearns to receive the inspired Word. And in love, it embraces the incarnate Word, delighting in Him and entering into Him in ecstatic love.

The significance of this series of threes, rooted in the three powers of the soul which are known by natural reason, is further bolstered by a reflection on the revealed data given through Sacred Scripture and the tradition of the Church. Thus, theology begins to take its place on the ascent to God here, in the fourth stage. “These two middle steps,” says Bonaventure, “through which we enter so as to contemplate God within ourselves, as in the reflections of created images, are like wings, stretched out in order to take flight.” Let us therefore pray for those engaged in the study of anthropology and theology, that in their investigations of things human and divine, they might take flight into a higher knowledge of both man and God. In doing so, may we also come to know the truth about God and man through the one who is himself God-made-man.

In our previous reflection, we introduced the life and person of Saint Bonaventure, describing him as a mediator and unifier in a context of crisis for both the Franciscan order and for the Church at large. Now we can begin to consider one of his most famous works, the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum or Journey of the Mind to God, as a way to help us to think about prayer and union with God.

After Bonaventure was elected as Minister General, he went on retreat to Mount Alverna—the same mountain where Saint Francis witnessed a vision of a six-winged crucified seraph and thereafter received the stigmata, or the wounds of Christ on his own body. Moreover, Bonaventure identifies the crucifed seraph as Christ himself. Contemplating this episode of Francis’s life, Bonaventure recounts how the seraph’s six wings could be understood as “six levels of uplifting illuminations though which the soul is prepared, as it were by certain stages or steps, to pass over to peace through the ecstatic rapture of Christian wisdom. There is no other way but through the most burning love of the Crucified.” Just as the prophet Isaiah described the six seraphic wings as divided into pairs (“with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying”), the six stages of ascent in the Itinerarium are also divided into successive pairs. In this reflection, we will treat of the first pair of stages, wherein the mind considers God through the signs of the created world.

In stage one, the mind contemplates the wisdom, power, and goodness of God present in all creatures, and acknowledges God as the source of all created perfections. Through our senses, we observe the physical and sensible properties of various created things, such as the sweetness of honey or the refreshment of a spring, and we can attribute to God the maximum of these properties—God is most sweet or the source of all sweetness; God gives eternal refreshment to the soul. Thus, learning about the observable world through what we today call the natural sciences and the historical sciences can also help point us to God. Beyond the study of these sciences, which treats of creation and being in their changeable properties, we also can study being in itself, or the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. Together, natural science, history, and metaphysics form part of this first stage of ascent, for they look as the world as it is, seeing glimpses of God’s wisdom across the breadth of creation.

In the second stage, the mind more deeply considers the created world but sees in the numerical and proportional harmony of creatures certain traces or vestiges of the mysteries of faith. Bonaventure explains this through, for example, the seven sensible properties of beings as reflecting the sevenfold perfection of the created order. Or, we can think about how an object giving delight is at once beautiful, pleasing, and wholesome (in Bonaventure’s alliterative Latin, speciosa, suavis, et salubris), and that this threefold delightfulness reflects the eternal Trinity. Therefore, in a first level of abstraction from the material and changeable world, the field of mathematics can also assist us in the contemplation of God, in that it helps us understand the universal harmony and structure of the created world. Here Bonaventure quotes Augustine: “number is the foremost exemplar in the mind of the Creator”.

These two stages, Bonaventure says, are “the two wings around the feet of the seraph”. In these lower levels of contemplation, we gaze upon the beauty of the created world, reflecting upon its proportionalities and harmonies, and see in them a faint trace of the Creator’s mind. Natural science, history, metaphysics, and mathematics are means for this end. Therefore, the role of physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and historians can also be prayerful enterprises, for they illuminate the divine wisdom present in the events of history and in the structure of creation. Let us therefore pray for scientists, mathematicians, and historians, that as they unfold the mysteries of the created world, we might more fully recognize and appreciate the mind of God present in all things.

After the last series of reflections on St Teresa of Avila, we now return to the high medieval period, with a focus on another Doctor of the Church and contemporary of Thomas Aquinas: the Franciscan friar and bishop Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Just a few years older than Saint Thomas (born either 1216 or 1221), Saint Bonaventure’s baptismal name was Giovanni di Fidanza. Suffering from an unknown illness as a child, he recounts that he was healed by the prayers of his parents through the intercession of Saint Francis of Assisi. Giovanni demonstrated acute intellectual acumen from his earliest years, and by the age of fourteen he was studying at the University of Paris, the premier academic institution of medieval Christendom. By 1243, he had attained the degree of Master of Arts and shortly thereafter entered the Franciscan Order at Paris, taking the name Bonaventure. Undertaking his formation in the French capital, he embarked on formal theological studies from 1248 onward, around the same time that the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas first arrived in Paris. The paths of these two future saints would cross often, both in and out of Paris, to the point that both would succumb to untimely deaths, separated by less than five months, in 1274.

In the 1250’s, the Franciscans and Domincans at Paris were embroiled in a controversy with the secular or diocesan clergy of the university. We cannot go into the full details of the crisis here, but suffice to say that the jealousy of the noble-born secular clergy, especially the canons of Notre Dame, had prevented the acceptance of Aquinas and Bonaventure as Masters of Theology in the university. The two saints engaged in extended polemics defending the mendicant way of life against the often apocalyptic and unhinged accusations of the seculars. It took the intervention of a pro-mendicant pope, Alexander IV, to secure the promotions of Aquinas and Bonaventure in 1257, finally allowing them to enter fully into the academic life. But while Aquinas was allowed to embark upon that life, another twist of events changed the trajectory of Bonaventure’s career: he was elected Minister General of the entire Franciscan order.

From 1257 until his death in 1274, Bonaventure was occupied with leadership of an order beset by many internal problems. He had to mediate a conflict between two major factions of Franciscans: the “Observants” or “Spirituals,” who advocated a strict interpretation of the Rule of Saint Francis, and the “Conventuals,” who understood that the growth and effectiveness of the order required adapting the Rule to new situations. This background conflict explains why the works of Saint Bonaventure from 1257 onward are no longer in the scholastic style which he and Thomas had learned at Paris. Rather, Bonaventure’s later works take the form of sermons, meditations, and spiritual treatises for his brother Franciscans. Another important work produced at this time is the Major Legend of Saint Francis, which continues to be the official biography of Francis for the Friars Minor. This biography filtered out the improbable stories, hearsay, and contradictory accounts previously in circulation among the friars, which were often used and abused by the competing factions to score points against each other. But perhaps the best known treatise of Bonaventure is The Journey of the Mind to God (Latin: Itinerarium mentis in Deum, often shortened to Itinerarium). This is where Bonaventure, reflecting on the image of the six-winged seraph who appeared to Saint Francis, explains the ascent to God according to six stages, culminating in a union which exceeds all creaturely understanding. The Itinerarium will be the basis of the next three reflections on Bonaventure.

This brief introduction to Saint Bonaventure offers a mere glimpse at the trials and tribulations of his life. From his sickly beginnings, to the mendicant controversy at Paris, to his election as Minister General, and—much later—his work to unite the Eastern and Western churches at the Second Council of Lyon, this great Doctor of the Church often found himself as a mediator, striving to bring together bitterly opposed factions into peaceful, brotherly unity. His own devotion to prayer sustained his monumental intellectual and leadership endeavours. As a synthesis of his approach to prayer, which we will explore in greater depth in the following reflections, perhaps a pithy quote from his treatise De Triplici Via (the Triple Way) can help us to enter into the mind of this great Doctor of the Church: “In prayer, there are three steps or stages: first, we deplore our misery, then we implore God’s mercy, and finally we worship Him.” These three stages correspond to the three cardinal virtues: by faith we recognize the greatness of God and our lowly state before him; by hope we dare to call on the Lord for forgiveness, and by charity we offer to him the worship and love due to him alone. By the example of Saint Bonaventure, may we also grow in faith, hope, and love for the crucified Christ whom he served so well.