São Boaventura

Bonaventure (c.1217–74)

Bonaventure (John of Fidanza) developed a synthesis of philosophy and theology in which Neoplatonic doctrines are transformed by a Christian framework. Though often remembered for his denunciations of Aristotle, Bonaventure’s thought includes some Aristotelian elements. His criticisms of Aristotle were motivated chiefly by his concern that various colleagues, more impressed by Aristotle’s work than they had reason to be, were philosophizing with the blindness of pagans instead of the wisdom of Christians.

To Bonaventure, the ultimate goal of human life is happiness, and happiness comes from union with God in the afterlife. If one forgets this goal when philosophizing, the higher purpose of the discipline is frustrated. Philosophical studies can indeed help in attaining happiness, but only if pursued with humility and as part of a morally upright life. In the grander scheme of things, the ascent of the heart is more important than the ascent of the mind.

Bonaventure’s later works consistently emphasize that all creation emanates from, reflects and returns to its source. Because the meaning of human life can be understood only from this wider perspective, the general aim is to show an integrated whole hierarchically ordered to God. The structure and symbolism favoured by Bonaventure reflect mystical elements as well. The world, no less than a book, reveals its creator: all visible things represent a higher reality. The theologian must use symbols to reveal this deeper meaning. He must teach especially of Christ, through whom God creates everything that exists and who is the sole medium by which we can return to our creator.

Bonaventure’s theory of illumination aims to account for the certitude of human knowledge. He argues that there can be no certain knowledge unless the knower is infallible and what is known cannot change. Because the human mind cannot be entirely infallible through its own power, it needs the cooperation of God, even as it needs God as the source of immutable truths. Sense experience does not suffice, for it cannot reveal that what is true could not possibly be otherwise; so, in Bonaventure’s view, the human mind attains certainty about the world only when it understands it in light of the ‘eternal reasons’ or divine ideas. This illumination from God, while necessary for certainty, ordinarily proceeds without a person’s being conscious of it.

1 Life and works

The scholastic philosopher and theologian John of Fidanza, honoured as the ‘Seraphic Doctor’ but better known as Bonaventure, was born in Bagnoregio, a small town in Tuscany. After preparatory education in his home town, he completed a master’s degree in arts at the University of Paris. There he joined the Franciscan order (circa 1243), taking the name Bonaventure probably to mark his entry into religious life. Bonaventure went on to study theology under the leading Franciscan masters at Paris during the years 1243–8, first with Alexander of Hales, a famous theologian whose influence is evident in Bonaventure’s works, then with John of La Rochelle and Odo Rigaud. As an advanced theology student, he lectured on the Bible (1248–50) and the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1250–2). From 1253 to 1257, when he resigned his position to serve as minister general of the Franciscan Order, Bonaventure was regent master of the Franciscan school at Paris. Works composed during this period include the disputed questions De scientia Christi (Concerning Christ’s Knowledge) and De mysterio Trinitatis (On the Mystery of the Trinity). The Breviloquium, a highly condensed summary of theology for beginners, probably dates from around 1257.

The Franciscans were badly divided when Bonaventure became the Order’s head. Many believed that the prophecies of Joachim of Fiore concerning a new, spiritual age of history were to be fulfilled by drastic institutional changes and commitment to the life of wandering mendicancy exemplified by St Francis. Though Joachim’s teachings influenced Bonaventure’s view of history, he himself thought that only a chosen few were suited to live as St Francis did: the time had not yet come for the transformation of the world. Bonaventure did his best to control the extremists, give the order a firmer institutional structure and articulate an understanding of Franciscan poverty compatible with university study and teaching.

Bonaventure’s struggles as minister general often receive only passing mention in philosophical accounts of his work, and his conflicts with heterodox masters of arts at Paris naturally appear to have greater philosophical import. However, the emphasis on the latter tends to conceal one of the most serious dilemmas Bonaventure faced. As he opposed the cult of Aristotle at Paris, so he opposed the cult of apocalyptic asceticism in his own order. The same thinker now sometimes regarded as an anti-intellectual theologian was regarded by some of his own confrères as a creature of the universities who had betrayed the spirit of St Francis. When viewed in context, Bonaventure’s writings are remarkable less for the occasional polemics than for the balanced vision he consistently worked to communicate.

After two years of governing the Franciscan Order, Bonaventure retreated to Mount Alverno in Italy, where he wrote the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Journey of the Mind to God). The intellectual ascent described in this work suggests a solution to the problem of learning within the Franciscan Order (see Brown 1993). Bonaventure does not urge his readers to repudiate the world; he tells us how we may see there the power, wisdom and goodness of its creator. Beginning with contemplation of sensible things, we may rise by stages to contemplation of the soul as the image of God, God’s presence within the soul and the attributes of God himself. Philosophical studies aid in the ascent, but only if pursued with humility and as part of a morally upright life: the external world has little use as a mirror ‘unless the mirror of our soul has been cleansed and polished.’ Bonaventure explains the relations between philosophy and other divisions of human knowledge in De reductione artium ad theologiam (On Retracing the Arts to Theology), a highly condensed treatise of unknown date, possibly based on a sermon preached towards the end of his regency at Paris.

Bonaventure’s ‘collations’ – Collationes de decem praeceptis (On the Ten Commandments), Collationes de septem donis Spiritus Sancti (On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit) and Collationes in Hexaemeron (On the Six Days of Creation) – represent three series of sermons given during Lent to Franciscans studying and teaching theology at the University of Paris. The third series was cut short in May of 1273, when Pope Gregory X appointed Bonaventure cardinal bishop of Albano. He left Paris to meet with the pope, to be consecrated as bishop (November 1273) and to help with preparations for the Second Council of Lyons. He died unexpectedly in July 1274, shortly before the Council ended, and was buried in the Franciscan church at Lyons.

The three series of Lenten sermons mentioned above bear witness to growing tensions at Paris. Some members of the arts faculty at the University of Paris had taken to defending views contrary to Christian doctrine – defending them, if not as true in the absolute sense, at least as positions that human reason, unaided by faith, seemed legitimately to reach. They tended to see Aristotle as the pinnacle of human reason, and Averroes, who advocated the separation of philosophy from theology, as Aristotle’s foremost interpreter (see Aristotelianism, medieval; Averroism). Scandalized by the trend toward neo-pagan philosophizing, Bonaventure in his sermons cites various doctrines popular in the arts faculty as examples of the errors philosophers inevitably make when their reasoning is unillumined by faith. Some of the same views he attacked in 1267 and 1268 were formally condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1270, but apparently with little effect. Bonaventure’s sermons of 1273 accordingly display an even greater sense of urgency. The crisis culminated, three years after his death, in the most extensive doctrinal condemnation of the Middle Ages.

Bonaventure’s works fall into different genres, related to the two stages of his career: the period when he was studying and teaching at Paris and the period beginning in 1257, when he resigned his university position to become minister general of the Franciscans. Most works from the first period are academic exercises with a conventional form. In his commentary on the Sentences and disputed questions, for example, Bonaventure cites authorities and marshals arguments on both sides of an issue before presenting his own resolution and answering objections to it. His later works differ strikingly from these academic compositions. The collationes, it should be remembered, are university sermons, and even the Itinerarium has some of the hallmarks of a sermon. The genre should be kept in mind when comparing Bonaventure’s later works with academic productions by contemporaries, such as the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas.

2 Neoplatonism and mysticism

In the second stage of his career Bonaventure’s writing becomes rich in metaphor and heavily reliant on symbolic modes of expression. An elaborate hierarchical structure, itself of symbolic significance, replaces the pro-and-con method characteristic of scholastic compositions. Here we see a writer who, though eloquent, operates within a carefully controlled structure. Unfortunately, even the best translations cannot preserve the many layers of meaning in Bonaventure’s language. Today’s readers are likely to recognize that the metaphysics of participation and exemplarism, like the themes of light and illumination, emanation and return, have older philosophical roots in Plato and the ancient Neoplatonists. At the same time, they may be tempted to dismiss all the complicated divisions and subdivisions in Bonaventure’s writings as so much stylistic embellishment. The temptation should be resisted, for what looks like ornament turns out to be more substantial.

Works like the Itinerarium and the collationes draw on a Christian tradition well known to Bonaventure’s contemporaries but now generally neglected. Perhaps the most basic idea is that all creation emanates from, mirrors and returns to its source – a fundamentally Plotinian doctrine prominent in the writings of Augustine (see Plotinus). Because the meaning of human life can be understood only from this broader perspective, the overarching aim is to show an interrelated totality hierarchically ordered to God. The structure of Bonaventure’s later works reflects this ordering. As the structure is significant, so too is the symbolism, derived partly from mystical writings by the twelfth-century school of St Victor. Building on the thought of Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius, Hugh of St Victor taught that God communicates his plans everywhere, in a symbolic language we must learn to recognize and decipher. The world is like a book, revealing its author no less than Scripture does (see Zinn 1973). All creation reflects the triune character of God; all visible things represent an invisible, transcendent reality. The theologian must accordingly use symbols to show what cannot be expressed more directly. He must demonstrate the deeper meaning and order of the world, helping us to rise above the confusing multiplicity presented by our senses. To do so, he must teach especially of Christ, the Word through whom all things are created, the source of all true wisdom and the medium enabling us to return to God (see Mysticism, history of).

This sketch of the intellectual background may help to explain not only the hierarchical structure of Bonaventure’s later works but also the significance he attached to numbers: threefold divisions symbolize the Trinity, sixfold divisions symbolize the six days of creation and so on (see Neoplatonism). Of course, Neoplatonic and mystical writings are hardly Bonaventure’s only sources. Like all masters schooled at Paris in the mid-thirteenth century, he studied Aristotle closely and often appealed to Aristotle’s teachings. Stoic doctrines, derived from Cicero and patristic writers, are equally present in his thought (see Patristic philosophy; Stoicism). The philosophical eclecticism displayed by the earliest Christian thinkers is even greater among the scholastics, so that scholarly debates about whether a given master is Aristotelian, Neoplatonic or something else – debates extremely common in the literature on Bonaventure – are fundamentally disagreements about the dominant strains in a mixed breed.

3 Happiness and the limits of philosophy

What Bonaventure considers to be the place and function of philosophy becomes easier to understand if one reflects upon happiness, the end of human life. By nature we strive for happiness, and we can never be fulfilled unless we attain it. This ultimate goal has both practical and speculative implications. As Bonaventure explains in Chapter 1 of the Itinerarium, ‘Since happiness is nothing else than the enjoyment of the Supreme Good, and the Supreme Good is above us, no one can enjoy happiness unless he rise above himself – not, of course, by a bodily ascent, but by an ascent of the heart.’

The ascent of the heart involves the ascent of the mind, and yet the mind takes us only so far. The complete happiness experienced through union with God comes more from love than from knowledge, more from will than from intellect. Small wonder, then, that Bonaventure consistently emphasizes the higher purpose of speculation. Anyone who remains ignorant of this purpose, or who knows it but loses sight of it, is doomed not only to frustrated desire but also to intellectual confusion. A good philosopher must therefore understand the place of philosophy within the wider context of human life. As no one can perceive the beauty of a poem unless he sees the whole, Bonaventure argues, so no one can grasp the beauty of the order regulating reality unless he views it in its totality (see Faith).

Bonaventure’s conviction that union with God constitutes the ultimate goal of all learning might well lead one to wonder whether philosophy has any genuine place in his thought. Why devote time to studying logic, much less the writings of pagan philosophers, when the example of St Francis proves such studies unnecessary for attaining the goal of eternal happiness? The title of one of Bonaventure’s best-known treatises, De reductione artium ad theologiam, can reinforce the impression that he values the art of philosophy only insofar as philosophy can be ‘reduced’ to theology. This impression is misleading not only because the title, like the titles of many scholastic works, was invented by later editors rather than the author himself, but also because the term reductio is properly translated as ‘retracing’ rather than ‘reducing’.

For Bonaventure, reductio signifies both a process and a method of analysis (Bougerol 1964, 1988). As a process, it is the return to God, in whom all rational beings find their fulfilment. While individuals may or may not choose the path that leads them home, the process of humanity’s return to its source continues to operate. God’s grace, working ever to draw us back to himself, governs the historical process and gives it meaning. Hence, reductio can also serve as a method of analysis. Humans, as rational beings, find the path home more easily when someone shows them how the various areas of human knowledge are so many rungs of a ladder, all leading in the same direction. As a method of analysis, reductio accordingly seeks to demonstrate how the many lead to the one, the composite to the simple, even as the many and the composite are based on and derive a deeper meaning from the one and the simple. The aim is to articulate an intelligible order and direction by bringing out fundamental organizing principles; it is not to boil away everything else, as cooks do in ‘reducing’ a sauce. While philosophy should point in the right direction and understand its place in the wider context, it need not be distilled into theology to become valuable. Logic is well worth studying, even though it teaches us nothing about the meaning of life.

The culinary interpretation of Bonaventure’s reductio of the arts to theology arises partly from his claim that all divisions of human knowledge are ‘handmaids of theology’. They surely are ‘handmaids’ in the sense that they have a higher purpose. Anyone who pursues philosophy or any other art strictly as an end in itself, as if there were nothing more exalted or fulfilling, is making a disastrous mistake. On the other hand, to say that philosophy is not the pinnacle of human life is not to say that it has value only insofar as it can be distilled into theology. As Bonaventure makes philosophy a handmaid of theology, so he also makes agriculture and navigation handmaids of theology. Is he arguing that farmers are worthless unless they sow their crops in threes, or that sailors cannot chart a course to Rome without fixing on God? Not at all. To argue that an art has a higher purpose is not to insist that it has no legitimacy or value in its own domain.

Bonaventure’s attitude towards Aristotle’s philosophy should be understood within the context of his views on philosophy in general. In the Collationes in Hexaemeron, where he traces the most serious errors of philosophy to Aristotle’s rejection of exemplar ideas and his affirmation that God knows only himself, Bonaventure’s preference for a broadly Platonic metaphysics is evident. His diatribe, however, is much less against Aristotle than against members of the Paris arts faculty who defended as philosophically sound virtually every position they believed Aristotle had held. In Bonaventure’s view, even the best philosophers of antiquity were ignorant of original sin and the need for God’s grace. Knowing nothing of Christ, and having to rely exclusively on their own powers of reason, the ancients could not help but make grave mistakes. Bonaventure accordingly urges the arts masters to philosophize as Christians, with the illumination of faith to guide them (see Aristotelianism, medieval; Platonism, medieval).

4 Knowledge of God’s existence

Though Bonaventure offered proofs for the existence of God in other works, the twenty-nine arguments in his disputed questions De mysterio Trinitatis represent his most developed treatment of the topic (see Doyle 1974). The arguments go on to prove three conclusions: that every truth impressed on all minds is an indubitable truth, that every truth which all creatures proclaim is an indubitable truth and that every truth that is in itself most certain and evident is an indubitable truth. Bonaventure’s position combines these three conclusions into a single master conclusion: that the existence of God is an indubitable truth in its own right and can be doubted only because of some defect in the knower. A human being might doubt God’s existence from failing to understand correctly what the term ‘God’ signifies. Doubt might likewise spring from failing to carry one’s thinking far enough, or from having only a partial view of the evidence. In all cases, Bonaventure argues, doubt arises from failures of the human intellect, not from God’s existence as a truth considered in itself.

In arguing that God’s existence is self-evident, Bonaventure repeatedly appeals to Anselm’s Proslogion (see Anselm of Canterbury). He argues, for example, that God is ‘a being than which nothing greater can be thought’; but that which exists only in thought does not meet this description, for something existing in reality would be greater, and hence God cannot be thought not to exist in reality. Anselmian arguments are supplemented by Augustinian arguments for the existence of truth (see Augustinianism). To Bonaventure, each particular truth implies the existence of an absolute truth that is its cause. To affirm any particular truth is thus to affirm, even though one might fail to recognize it, the existence of God (see God, arguments for the existence of).

Bonaventure’s arguments reflect his belief that all human souls belong to a hierarchically ordered intelligible realm that is more real and more knowable than the world of the senses. Belonging to the same realm as God, the soul can know God’s existence directly, through thought. This position stands in sharp contrast to the views of Bonaventure’s contemporary, Aquinas. Sharing Aristotle’s belief that we obtain knowledge from the initial data of sense experience, Aquinas taught that we can know God’s existence by considering creatures and reasoning from effect to cause, but that God’s existence is not self-evident to us.

5 The question of an eternal world

Bonaventure again differs from Aquinas on whether the world could have been created from eternity, a topic of heated debate in the thirteenth century. The problem, as he formulates it in his commentary on the Sentences, is ‘Whether the world has been produced from eternity or in time.’ The idea that the world was indeed produced is crucial to the question. To Bonaventure, there is nothing incoherent in believing that the world is eternal, only in believing that the world is both created and eternal (see Bonansea 1974).

Bonaventure’s principal argument rests on the very notion of creation. Whatever is created in the truest sense – that is, produced from nothing rather than from pre-existing material – must come to have ‘being after non-being’: it must have a beginning. To say that something with a beginning is eternal, meaning that it has no beginning, is an obvious contradiction. Thus the thesis that the world was created from eternity is not merely false but unintelligible. In offering this argument, Bonaventure does not mean to imply that creation took place at some point within time, for he accepts the prevailing view that time began with creation. His challenge is to those who conceive of the world as both beginningless and created ex nihilo.

Another argument points to a problem with positing an actual, as opposed to merely potential, infinity. Bonaventure reasons that it is impossible to make the actually infinite greater, for this would be contrary to its nature, so that if the world existed from eternity, it would admit of no additional duration. In effect, extra days could not add to the number of days preceding the present, since the number preceding the present would already be infinite, and all actual infinites, Bonaventure assumes, must be equal. How could we even have reached the present day if infinitely many days had to elapse before today? One need not review all of Bonaventure’s arguments to see how the notion of a world created from eternity raised issues, such as the problem of unequal infinites, that were of more than theological interest (see Eternity of the world, medieval views of).

6 Metaphysics

Bonaventure’s metaphysics, by his own description, is a doctrine of emanation, exemplarism and consummation or return. To his mind, anyone who denies the existence of exemplar ideas might reasonably draw the kind of conclusions drawn by Aristotle: that the first cause knows only itself and ‘moves’ the world only as a final cause, as an object of desire rather than as an agent and efficient cause. Even though his teachings recall Plotinian doctrine on emanation from the One, Bonaventure’s metaphysics owes much more to the distinctively Christian Neoplatonism of Augustine. In place of the One we find God; in place of a world emanating necessarily from the very nature of the One we find a world God created freely, out of nothing. The world comes from God as its efficient cause, mirrors God, the exemplar cause, and is destined to return to God as its end or final cause (see Creation and conservation, religious doctrine of).

As archetypes of all actual and possible creatures, exemplar ideas help to explain both how God made what exists and how he knows everything that could be. The plurality of ideas does, however, raise questions about the unity of God. Bonaventure explains that there is no real plurality of ideas in God. As they are not distinct from God himself, so they are not distinct from each other. Properly understood, the exemplar ideas are distinct only from the standpoint of reason. What ‘idea’ actually signifies is a creature’s relation to God.

Bonaventure’s ‘universal hylomorphism’ – the doctrine that all creatures are composed of matter and form – turns out to be less bizarre than it seems at first glance. For him, ‘matter’ is a principle of potentiality that may or may not be corporeal. Because all beings other than God are susceptible to change, and change is the actualization of potential, all beings other than God must have an element of potentiality. Thus the ‘spiritual matter’ of angels is matter understood on an analogy with the corporeal matter of human beings, similar only in its status as a principle of potentiality and necessary complement to form.

7 The illumination of the intellect

Bonaventure’s theory of knowledge roughly conforms to that of Aristotle as regards knowledge of the sensible world. Declaring the human mind a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth, he teaches that we cannot acquire concepts of material objects, much less a knowledge of biology, without abstracting from sense experience. Aristotle’s empiricism nonetheless has limitations: it fails to account for our idea of God, and fails even more miserably in accounting for certitude.

Bonaventure does not claim that the idea of God is innate in the sense that it is present at birth or will inevitably develop as the child matures. The idea might nonetheless be considered innate insofar as it is does not depend on abstraction from sense experience. To acquire the idea of God, the soul need only turn inward and reflect on its own nature, or on its natural desire for complete happiness, which God alone can provide. In arguing that the idea of God does not come from presentations of the senses, Bonaventure’s purpose is mainly to emphasize that the human soul, made in God’s image and belonging to the intelligible realm, need not have recourse to the material world to know its creator.

The theory of illumination, well presented in question 4 of Bonaventure’s disputed questions De scientia Christi, aims above all to account for the certitude of human knowledge. In his view, there can be no certain knowledge without both infallibility on the part of the knower and immutability on the part of the object of knowledge. Because the mind of a creature cannot be entirely infallible through its own power, it needs the cooperation of God, even as it needs God as the source of immutable truths. Sense experience does not suffice, for it cannot reveal that what is true could not possibly be otherwise. The human mind attains certitude about the world only when it understands it in light of the ‘eternal reasons’ or divine ideas. In doing so, the mind will ordinarily be unconscious of divine illumination. Certitude, however, would be impossible if God did not provide an immutable object of knowledge and move the mind to assent (see Illumination).

In arguing for his theory of illumination, Bonaventure expressly denies that God is the sole source of human certainty. Such a view would fail to distinguish earthly knowledge from heavenly knowledge, knowledge of nature from knowledge of grace, and knowledge by reason from knowledge by revelation. On the other hand, Bonaventure thinks it insufficient for the knower to benefit from the eternal reasons without attaining to them. The human mind could not acquire certain knowledge if it did not in some way rise above the created order. According to Bonaventure, this is possible because, and insofar as, the soul is the image of God. Sense experience remains necessary as a source of our ideas about the world, but what certainty we attain comes from the cooperation of God.

8 Virtue

Bonaventure’s doctrine of virtue, as presented in his Collationes in Hexaemeron, clearly reflects his metaphysics and theology (see Synan 1973). Since the end of virtue is happiness, which comes from the enjoyment of God in the afterlife, virtues must be ordered to that end. They must help us return to our creator. Return, however, is possible only through Christ; without Christ, human beings remain infected with original sin and doomed to remain forever separated from God. Indeed, at their fourth, highest level of reality, the virtues exist in Christ as exemplar ideas.

Virtues in human beings participate in these divine exemplars to various degrees. The cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude may accordingly be possessed at any of three levels. At the lowest level they are ‘political’ and belong to us insofar as we are social animals; at the next they are ‘cleansing’ and belong to us insofar as we are fit for God; and at the next they belong to those already completely cleansed. At all levels of the hierarchy human virtues depend for their reality on the exemplars. The cardinal virtues likewise also depend on the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity to attain their perfection and achieve their ends.

The four-level hierarchy of virtue comes from Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, a work that explains the teachings of Plotinus. This Neoplatonic material is nevertheless transformed, not only by the addition of the theological virtues but also by Bonaventure’s recasting of the cardinal virtues as products of grace and the foundation of that ‘merit’ which makes us deserving in the eyes of God. In his commentary on the Sentences, he explains that merit is rooted in free decision (liberum arbitrium). Thus the cardinal virtues can belong only to the intellect and the will, those powers of the soul that share in free decision. Bonaventure even argues that all virtues, insofar as they are virtues, must belong to the rational part of the soul. Virtues are attributed to the lower, emotional part of the soul only because habituation makes it more submissive to reason; they cannot exist principally in the seat of the passions because they would then be beyond the scope of free decision. One would be attributing virtues to the part of the soul we have in common with animals instead of to the part we have in common with angels (see Kent 1995).

For Bonaventure, then, a virtue such as fortitude has less to do with our emotional responses to danger than with what we freely decide. The appropriate emotional responses are not essential to virtue; at most they are ‘annexed’ to it. While this view would seem to have distant origins in the Stoic restriction of virtue to what lies within the agent’s control, the emphasis on virtue as the basis of merit is of no small significance. It is one thing to see virtues as traits of character that make us happy in this life, another to see them as traits of character that make us deserving of happiness in the afterlife.

The influence of theology in Bonaventure’s thought appears to have two results that some of today’s moral philosophers – especially those sympathetic to Kant – would find appealing. First, virtue comes to depend on the freedom that all rational creatures have in common, even as the moral significance of emotions declines sharply. Second, it becomes quite reasonable to say that someone is both virtuous and unhappy, for virtue is now what makes someone deserving of happiness, even though internal emotional conflict, illness and misfortune may in fact cause the person great suffering (see Virtue ethics; Virtues and vices).