Saint Bonaventure was the
almost exact contemporary of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). The
‘Angelic Doctor’ (Thomas) and the ‘Seraphic Doctor’
(Bonaventure) were the two great brainy saints of the thirteenth
century, and indeed of all time. They were both Italians,
Bonaventure hailing from Viterbo, and Aquinas, obviously enough, from
Aquino. In their time, before the founding of the Jesuits, the
Franciscans and the Dominicans, the two new mendicant orders to which
Bonaventure and Aquinas belonged, were rivals. Aquinas is the model
Dominican theologian (I recently caught a Dominican writing, ‘our
father Saint Thomas’, and had to point out to him that ‘our
Father’ in the order is Saint Dominic). And as I will say later,
Bonaventure really did take up the baton from Saint Francis in an
important way. So these two great saints, Bonaventure and Thomas,
are often taken as rivals, as if they had been competing athletes,
like two tennis champions of the same age who year after year batted
it out in the Wimbledon final.
Because they were the two
leading lights of high scholastic theology, Thomas and Bonaventure
have often been contrasted, and indeed, to put it more strongly,
theology has often made the two saints to represent two opposing
paths in theology. The Franciscan Saint Bonaventure is made to
represent a rigorist, anti-intellectual, Augustinian path, whilst the
Dominican Thomas Aquinas is taken as a model of pro-intellectual,
Aristotelian theology which is tough-minded, inclusive and open.
There is some truth in
the contrast, but also a mistake. Let’s start with the mistake.
It’s a mistake to think that Aquinas was a mediating, inclusive
theologian and Bonaventure was not. Aquinas’ great vocation was
to mediate Aristotle to his contemporaries. He had to ‘baptize
Aristotle’ for his contemporaries because a determined group of
people in the Latin West were set upon taking up the new discovery of
Aristotle’s writing and using it to promote untrammeled naturalism, secularism and a radical separation of philosophy and
theology which made theological faith sound ridiculous and
contradictory. So Thomas had to baptize Aristotle because in the mid
13th century, an unbaptized Aristotle was not just a
neutral pagan from the 5th century BC, but a dangerous and
deliberately anti-Christian thinker. I’m sure Thomas Aquinas also
loved Aristotle and rightly thought the Metaphysics and the
Ethics are great stuff, but above all, this rigorist Dominican
saint recognized the danger of Aristotle-the-loose-canon, whose
thought had not been integrated with Christian thinking.
Bonaventure performed
just the same task of mediatory integration, only not with Aristotle
but with ‘radical Gospel Christianity.’ It’s well known that
after Saint Francis died, the Franciscan order was split between the
‘radical’ group, who wanted the order to follow Francis very
literally, and the more moderate, worldly, ‘spirit of saint
Francis’ Franciscans. The first lot, the radical Franciscans also
quickly got mixed up with imminent eschatology, that is, with folks
who took the book of Revelation very literally and saw the life of
Francis and the birth of their own Franciscan order as harbingers of
the End Times, end times which would be played out in technicolour in
the very near future. The radical Franciscans were fervently
attached to poverty because it was all part of the literalistic
reading of Scripture which made them hope that the marriage of heaven
and earth depicted in the last chapters of Revelation would soon be
consummated. At the time that Bonaventure took the helm as General
of the Franciscan Order, in 1257 his predecessor had been put in the
slammer for professing and promoting Radical Franciscan doctrines.
The radical Franciscans
were known, annoyingly enough, as the ‘Spirituals.’ The
moderates were called ‘Relaxati’, which brings to mind chilling
out with a good glass of red wine after a bowl of spagetti. Being
relaxed is obviously preferable to being grim and ‘Spiritual.’
What Bonaventure did,
nonetheless, was to attempt to mediate between the Spirituals and the
Relaxed, that is, between those who wanted to follow Francis’ rule
literally, and who likewise took Revelation as a literal historical
documentary-depiction of the End-times, and the Relaxed, who took
things more lightly and prudently. If the Franciscans were going
to survive in a world which did not, after all, come to its End very
‘soon’, they had to own property and they had to made provisions
for that future. All of this Bonaventure saw quite clearly. He
realized that Francis had to be followed not in the letter but in the
spirit, if the Franciscan charism were to be made capable of
transmission through the generations. But in every way that it was
possible prudently so to do, Bonaventure attempted to absorb what was
true in the Spirituals’ vision into his guidance of the
Franciscans.
Just as Thomas recognized
that his beloved Aristotle was dangerous, and so baptized and
integrated that danger, so the other-worldly Bonaventure recognized
that Spiritualism and eschatologism were dangerous, and therefore
needed, not to be expelled and expunged, but rather integrated into
the Franciscan charism. Bonaventure, too, was a mediating thinker, integrating ‘Gospel radicalism’ back into the mainstream of
mendicant life. In short, he did what he could to relax the
Spirituali, and to redirect their dynamism into a more prudent,
tenable channel.
Bonaventure’s theology
is said to have been an intellectualization of the spiritual
experience of Saint Francis. All of his theology, in other words,
transmutes Saint Francis of Assisi’s spiritual experiences, his
conversion, his opting for poverty, his living by faith, his
stigmatization by the Seraph, into a doctrine and a thought out
‘wisdom.’ At the base of Bonaventure’s theology is a
spiritual experience, the experience of Francis in which ‘the
creation’ lives and breathes its Creator.
So Bonaventure’s
theology has been spoken of an ‘expressionism,’ in which aspects
of ‘the creation’ are seen to express the Creator. Bonaventure
is named by Hans Urs von Balthasar as a ‘theological aesthetician,’
not least because of this tendency to think of God like an artist,
expressing himself in the creation, and thus to understand divine
creation as an act of ‘self-expression’ on the part of the
Creator. Bonaventure is a patron saint to artists because he
envisages God as an Artist.
Bonaventure
turned Francis’ unique, untransmissable personal experience into a
communicable theology and integrated it into the rules of the
Franciscan Order. Here it where there is a real contrast with
Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is not an ‘experiential’
theologian. Bonaventure is. For Bonaventure, the bedrock of
theology is experience.
If you want to read about
Bonaventure, I recommend these texts. 1) very long and hardgoing:
Etienne Gilson, Saint Bonaventure and Joseph Ratzinger, The
Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure. This latter book is
Ratzinger’s ‘Habilitation’ thesis, and its not a limpid read
like some of the professor’s later works. 2) Medium range
difficult would be the chapter in volume 3 of Hans Urs von
Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: Theological Aesthetics:
Clerical Styles, on Bonaventure. 3) A nice clear easy read is
a much later, short(ish) sermon by Benedict XVI on Bonaventure,
called “Saint Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas: Love Sees Further than Reason.”
Grumpy is a professor of theology in the Midwest.
If you want to see all of the posts in this series, click HERE.
What a fun blog post! I learned so much.
ReplyDeleteI am glad you like it. Grumpy
ReplyDeleteYes, it's very good. I did not know anything about Bonaventure before.
ReplyDeleteAMDG
I wonder why not.
DeleteAMDG
I owe the re-invigoration of my Catholic faith my senior year in College in no small part to St. Bonaventure, especially the Itinerarium. There is also probably a connection between St. Bonaventure and my eventual entry into the Secular Franciscans and my interest in de Lubac.
ReplyDelete