lydia shumacher - bonaventure's journey into the mind of god

1. An earlier, less-developed version of this article appears in French in the jour-nal «Etudes Franciscaines », n.s. 4 (2011).

2. C. Carpenter, Theology as the Road to Holiness in St. Bonaventure, Paulist Press,Mahwah 1999, 76; E. Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, FranciscanHerald Press, Chicago 1978, 73; C. Cullen, Bonaventure, Oxford University Press, Ox-ford 2006, 87; E. Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. I. Trethowan andF. Sheed, St. Anthony Guild Press, Paterson 1965, 441; D. Turner, The Darkness of God:Negativity and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1995, 102;F. Van Fleteren, The Ascent of the Soul in the Augustinian Tradition, in N. van Deusen(cur.), Paradigms in Medieval Thought: Applications in Medieval Disciplines, Edwin MellenPress, New York 1990, 93-110.

3. For example, see E. Bettoni, Bonaventure, trans. A. Gambateste, University ofNotre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1964, 19; Carpenter, Theology as the Road to Holiness,v; Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, 2; Cullen, Bonaventure; Gilson,The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure; S.P. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Scienceand the Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century, vol. 1, Brill, Leiden 2001; P. Robert,Le problème de la philosophie bonaventurienne: Aristotelisme Neoplatonisant ou Augustinisme?,«Laval théol. philos. », 7 (1950), 145-163.

Lydia Schumacher

BONAVENTURE’S JOURNEY OF THE MIND INTO GOD:A TRADITIONAL AUGUSTINIAN ASCENT? 1

Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in deum is widely regarded as thelast and best Medieval account of the ascent to God that Augus-tine outlines in a number of his works, particularly, De trinitate.2

More generally, the Franciscan is considered to be the ultimateMedieval champion of the longstanding Augustinian intellectualtradition.3

These assumptions are founded on the fact that Bonaventurefrequently invokes the authority of Augustine in presenting hisviews. Although he made some use of the recently rediscoveredworks of Aristotle, this usage was apparently more conservative

and critical than that of his contemporaries, including the Do-minican Thomas Aquinas. In the view of many modern scholars,in fact, Bonaventure’s overriding concern was to systematize thepreviously predominant thought of Augustine so that it couldwithstand the threat Aristotle’s rising popularity posed to its au-thoritative status. The decline of the Augustinian tradition to-wards the end of the thirteenth century would seem to suggestthat Bonaventure’s labours were in vain.

In this article, I propose to demonstrate that Bonaventure’swork is far more innovative and impactful than it has been per-ceived. I will do this by showing that his understanding of themind’s journey towards God and its cognitive work overall differsquite significantly from Augustine’s. On my contention, Bonaven-ture does not give full and final expression to Augustine’s viewson human knowledge so much as he codifies an altogether noveldefinition of knowledge, which his immediate Franciscan prede-cessors had developed in the interest of accounting for Francis ofAssisi’s experience of God and reality.4

Though Bonaventure does indeed appeal at regular intervals toAugustine, I suggest that he does this in keeping with the scholas-tic practice of bolstering personal opinions – not necessarily thoseof any authority – by “finding” them in the writings of authoritiesthat represented a relevant cause. Since Augustine stood for thespiritual tradition of the middle ages, and the Franciscans aimed tocast their scholarly work in the mystical light that guided theirfounder Francis, the Bishop of Hippo was the seemingly obviouschoice of sponsor. To sum up: my argument is that Bonaventureenlisted Augustine in promoting Franciscan thought rather thanthe other way around.

4. On Bonaventure’s relationship to his Franciscan teachers, see S. Matthews,Reason, Community, and Religious Tradition: Anselm’s Argument and the Friars, Ashgate,Aldershot 2001. On his originality as a Franciscan, see O. Todisco, Lo stupore dellaragione. Il pensare francescano e la filosofia moderna, Messaggero, Padova 2003; Id., La lib-ertà fondamento della verità. Ermeneutica francescana del pensare occidentale, Messaggero,Padova 2008.

202 Lydia Schumacher

Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God 203

Bonaventure’s reasons for doing this become fairly obviouswhen the historical context of his work is taken into considera-tion. For the better part of the thirteenth century, the intellectualendeavours of Franciscans were regarded with more than mildsuspicion by members of the university faculty, who chargedthem with anti-intellectualism and a variety of other crimes. Tomake matters worse, conservative members of the order itselfprotested the Franciscan involvement in university life, citingFrancis’ original call to abandon intellectual pursuits in favour of alife of poverty and ministerial service.

For Bonaventure, invoking the authority of Augustine was away to locate the Franciscan intellectual tradition in relation to hisbroader intellectual tradition still respected by academics. Sincethis tradition was at once a spiritual tradition, appeals to it posed ameans to persuading the Franciscans themselves that studies couldpromote Francis’ spiritual ends. To summarize, the invocation ofAugustine by Bonaventure promoted the Franciscan intellectuallife and thereby ensured the survival of the order in an increasing-ly learned society which required learned ministers. The concernin this was not or at least not merely or primarily to propoundviews that were Augustine’s.

Although this last point might prove difficult to substantiatethrough a simple comparison of the forms of argument Augustineand Bonaventure employ, since these are often comparable, the dif-ferences in their thought come into relief on further attending to thesource of the meaning Bonaventure attributed to Augustine’s wordsand which Augustine attributed to his own. This source consists inthe theological doctrines that always underlay and motivated the for-mulation of philosophical ones, at least in medieval times.

In the case of human knowledge, the relevant theological doc-trines include the doctrine of the Triune God and the corollarydoctrine of the human mind as the image of God, which deter-mines the nature of the cognitive work the mind performs. By in-vestigating Augustine and Bonaventure’s doctrines of God, Hisimage, and what is involved in re-conforming to His image afterthe fall, I will throw into relief the conceptual disparity in their ac-counts of knowledge and the cognitive ascent to God.

There are three main reasons why I believe it is important to dif-ferentiate Bonaventure from Augustine in this respect. The first isthat doing so highlights the distinctive purposes of the Franciscanintellectual system which is so often conflated with Augustine’sand thus allows for its contribution to be recognized and celebrat-ed in its own right. The second reason I have for undertaking thisproject is to reveal the remarkable continuity of thought betweenBonaventure and his famous Franciscan successor John Duns Sco-tus, who is often supposed to have broken with the early Francis-can school of Bonaventure in favour of a new philosophical way.In taking this way, Scotus has recently been criticized for laying theconceptual foundation for modern thought and certain philosoph-ical problems to which it gave rise; on these grounds, his ideas havebeen pronounced intrinsically detrimental.5

By highlighting the continuity of Scotus and Bonaventure’sthought, I aim to accomplish a third goal of exonerating Scotus ofthe accusations that have been made against him. I will do this byemphasizing that he like Bonaventure was primarily concernedwith articulating a philosophy which would promote the distinctlyFranciscan intellectual and spiritual life, although he did so in somenew forms of argument that were not employed by Bonaventure.If Scotus’ intents are practically benign like Bonaventure’s the im-plication is that he cannot be blamed for any problematic moderndevelopments. Those developments should instead be seen as theby-product of the de-contextualization of Franciscan views, that is,the use of them for purposes other than those intended, namely,the furthering of Franciscan faith and life.

This intervention towards the end of the paper in the currentdebate surrounding Scotus is made possible by the argument thatconstitutes most of this paper which distinguishes Augustine andBonaventure, thereby highlighting continuities between Bonaven-ture and Scotus. That is the argument I will now take up in twoparts. In the first, I will briefly investigate the account of the TriuneGod, the image of God, and the process of coming to know God

5. See footnote 88.



6. Cf. Aug., trin., I, 4, 7 (CCL 50, 35).7. Cf. Aug., trin., II, 3, 5 (CCL 50, 85-86).8. Cf. Aug., Gn. litt., XII, 7, 16 (CSEL 28/1, 388): «Primum ergo appelemus corpo-

rale, quia per corpus percipitur et corporis sensibus exhibetur ».

– re-conforming to His image or “ascending” to Him – that Au-gustine outlines in his De trinitate. Subsequently, I will evaluate thedescription of God’s Triune nature and His image that Bonaven-ture gives in his theological writings, which underlie and anticipatethe account of knowledge he outlines in the Itinerarium.

1. AUGUSTINE’S DE TRINITATE

1.1. The Doctrine of God

In the first half of his De trinitate, Augustine speaks of God as onebeing, which is all that is good, all the time. In other words, he speaksof God as simple. Although he acknowledges that some find the no-tion of divine simplicity difficult to reconcile with the Catholicteaching that God is Triune – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – Augus-tine insists that it is precisely in virtue of the involvement of thesethree Persons that there is one eternal and infinite God who alwaysdoes one thing.6 That one thing is to know His own glory and makeit known through the Son who expresses the Spirit of God, which isthe divine glory the Father first communicated to Him.7

1.2. The Image of God

In De Genesi ad litteram, a treatise that complements De trinitateand was composed over the same period of time, Augustineexplains what it means to be made in the image of this God.On his account, being made in God’s image means being madeto do the one thing God does – which is simply to know andmake known the glory of God – by means of a capacity to en-gage in a unifying pattern thinking analogous to His, which isfacilitated by three elements. Augustine calls the first elementor “mode” of cognition “corporeal vision”. In this mode, themind engages in sense perception.8 The second mode is “spiritu-

al vision” or imagination.9 In spiritual vision, the mind makesmental images (phantasms) of the objects it experiences.

On the basis of multiple images of related objects, Augustine ex-plains, the mind draws up a universal concept in the third mode ofintellectual vision.10 It «distinguishes and connects »11 or « combinesand separates »,12 the images it perceives, « seeking oneness »13 or anelement that unites things that fulfil a related purpose. In this way, itoperates in the unifying mode of cognition that is analogous to thatof God, who thinks one thing – Himself – in virtue of the pluralityof Persons involved in His cognitive act. The more images the mindforms through new experiences, Augustine indicates, the more ithas the opportunity to expand and revise the original concept thathelped it make sense of the new experiences in the first place.

Since the mind cannot grasp the infinite, immaterial God solong as it forms concepts about the realm of finite, material thingsHe has made, Augustine suggests that the mind knows Him in thepresent by thinking in unifying terms about the things it can see inlight of the fact that there is one God who is the ultimate good.By doing this, it comes to see those things as He does, namely, asmanifestations of His goodness. In thus forming ideas about themanner and degree to which things exhibit goodness, the mindforms an indirect idea of the Goodness of God which grows as itsknowledge of reality grows. Through this means, the intellect re-flects God’s image while preparing to gaze upon His reality.14

9. Cf. ibid.: « secundum spiritale: quidquid enim corpus non est et tamen aliquidest, iam recte spiritus dicitur et utique non est corpus, quamuis corpori similis sit,imago absentis corporis, nec ille ipse obtutus, quo cernitur ».

10. Cf. ibid.: « tertium uero intellectuale ab intellectu, quia mentale a mente ipsauocabuli nouitate nimis absurdum est ut dicamus».

11. Aug., ord., II, 11, 30 (CCL 29, 124-125): «Ratio est mentis motio ea, quae discun-tur, distinguendi et conectendi potens ».

12. Aug., trin., XI, 8, 15 (CCL 50, 351-352): «Quae autem conciliat ista atque coniun-git, ipsa etiam disiungit ac separat, id est uoluntas ».

13. Cf. Aug., ord., I, 2, 3 (CCL 29, 90): « sic animus a se ipse fusus inmensitatequadam diuerberatur et uera mendicitate conteritur, cum eum natura sua cogitubique unum quaerere et multitudo inuenire non sinit ».

14. Cf. Aug.,Gn. litt., XII, 26, 54 & XII, 28, 56.



15. Cf. Aug., trin., X, 6, 8–7, 9 (CCL 50, 321-322); X, 8, 11 (CCL 50, 324-325).16. See also Aug., doctr. christ., I, 10, 11–18, 17 (CCL 32, 12-15).17. Cf. Aug., trin., VIII, 1, 2 (CCL 50, 269-720); XIII, 10, 13 (CCL 50/A, 399-400);

XIII, 14, 18 (CCL 50/A, 406-407).

Prior to the fall, human beings presupposed the ultimate good-ness of the invisible God. At the fall, however, they fell prey to thefalse notion that there are things more valuable than God to be ob-tained – knowledge in the case of the first woman, and woman, inthe case of the first man. In doing this, they forfeited the knowl-edge of God as Highest Good and the knowledge of themselves ascreatures made in His image to know Him and make Him known.As a result, their overriding desire to know God was replaced by adesire to obtain whatever they thought would bring them immedi-ate happiness. This desire caused them to perceive the images ofreality that were meant to be organized by an intellect cognizant ofan ultimate God – tangible things and temporal circumstances – asultimate realities themselves and thus falsely to esteem them asthings with the power to make or break their happiness.15

Ironically, Augustine observes, the fallen human proclivity forprioritizing immediate personal happiness tends to lead to great un-happiness, inasmuch as it enslaves humanity to desires for finitegoods that are either hard to find or fleeting in fallen circumstances.This same tendency to operate on a narrow concept of what is goodcreates conflict amongst those with different notions of what bringshappiness. It promotes attitudes like pride, envy, and fear and thedestructive behaviors they engender. To summarize, the fallen habitof pursuing limited goods as though they are the be-all and end-allof human existence makes it impossible for people to find what isgood – and therefore God – in other things and other people,which makes it impossible for them to find happiness.

In the latter half ofDe trinitate, Augustine explains how the Son ofGod restored the knowledge of God as the Highest Good He orig-inally imparted human beings made in His image.16 Since the scopeof human knowledge was restricted to corporeal beings in the wakeof the loss of the knowledge of the incorporeal Good, the Son ofGod took on bodily form.17 In that form, the Son continued His

18. Cf. Aug., trin., XIII, 11, 15 (CCL 50/A, 401-402).19. Cf. Aug., trin., XII, 6, 7–7, 12 (CCL 50, 361-367).20. Cf. Aug., trin., VIII, 3, 5 (CCL 50, 273-274); see also doctr. christ., I, 5, 5; I, 8, 8;

I, 10, 10 (CCL 32, 9; 11-12).


eternal work of reflecting the Spirit of God, who gestures towardsthe Father, His work of being the Image of the Trinity.18 By revealingthe Triune God in the form of a human person, the Son simultane-ously revealed that all human persons are made in the image of theTrinity and are therefore designed to do as He did, namely, to em-ploy the spirit or mind (animus = spirit, mind) they are given throughthe creative work of the Son to the glory of God the Father.19

Although initial faith raises awareness that the mind is made inthe image of God and thus for the purpose of considering allthings in the light of the knowledge of His goodness, Augustineemphasizes that it does not at once break fallen habits and restorethe image in full.20 On his account, it remains for faith to be madeeffective through ongoing efforts to re-learn the skill of using thecognitive powers which were given by the Son in the spirit Hemodelled, which glorifies God the Father, until doing so is secondnature and the image is constantly reflected.

1.3. Conforming to the Image of God

The contention I will bolster in what follows is that the sevenpsychological analogies to the Trinity Augustine delineates in thesecond half of his treatise on the topic – and with which he out-lines the mind’s “ascent” to the knowledge of God – are designedto lead the reader all the way through the process whereby a habitof reasoning under the influence of faith in the Father’s ultimategoodness is formed. That habit, of course, is a habit of cognizingin a manner analogous to Christ, who constantly expressed HisSpirit to the Father’s glory: who consistently bore the image of theTrinity. Although Augustine’s analogies have long been subjectedto serious criticisms, recent research has revealed that those criti-cisms have been based on major misinterpretations of the text,


21. Cf. R. Williams, The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in the «De trinitate », inJ.T. Lienhard - E.C. Muller - R.J. Teske (cur.), Augustine: Presbyter factus sum, PeterLang, New York 1993, 121-134; L. Ayres, The Christological Context of Augustine’s «Detrinitate » XIII: Toward Relocating Books VIII-XV, «Aug. Stud. », 29 (1998), 111-139;E.T. Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999;L. Gioia, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s «De trinitate », Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford 2008.

22. Cf. Aug., trin., bk X (CCL 50, 311-332); cf.Gn. litt., bk XII; conf., bk X.23. Cf. Aug., conf., X, 8, 13 (CCL 27, 161-162).

even while intimating that the treatise is in fact something like aguide to conforming to the image of God.21

The first psychological analogy of “mind, knowledge, love”(mens, notitia, amor) is the way Augustine reinforces the point thatthe mind only ever accumulates knowledge it desires or loves toaccumulate. For this reason, the mind that does not exhibit a de-sire to know God, which is to place faith in Him and His knowa-bility, will never attain knowledge of Him. When Augustine pres-ents his first analogy, it is in the interest of urging his readers tocommit to performing their cognitive work out of an overridingdesire to know and love God.

With the second psychological analogy of “memory, under-standing, and will” (memoria, intellegentia, uoluntas), Augustine eluci-dates how the mind actually performs that work in the thirdmode of intellectual vision.22 On his account, the memory con-tains all the information the mind has acquired through the threemodes of cognition.23 It preserves the understanding or ideas thathave been attained through intellectual operations and second-hand experience, as well as images of objects that have been takenin, some without notice or without understanding. The most ba-sic memory the mind has, Augustine emphasizes, is the memoryof what it thinks will bring it the greatest happiness. That memo-ry dictates everything the mind does. In short, it determines thewill, which in turn forms the intellect’s desire for understandingand so decides what the mind attends to or ignores.

Whenever the memory becomes aware of something that themind’s current understanding cannot explain but has been predis-

posed by the will to desire to explain, Augustine indicates, a willfor new understanding arises. The sense of dissatisfaction or rest-lessness that accompanies the sudden realization that the under-standing is inadequate to the will for understanding incites themind to search through the images in the memory that were pre-viously unnoticed or thought unimportant yet which may nowhelp to render the new experience intelligible.

If the resources needed to come to a conclusion that satisfies thewill cannot be found in the memory, the will may direct the intel-lect to go in search of new information.24 Since this is often neces-sary, Augustine points out that the quest for understanding is notentirely straightforward. The intellect gains understanding not byobtaining it at the outset of an inquiry but by acknowledging at thatpoint that it does not already know what it desires to know. Thisdesire for understanding compels the mind to pursue knowledge ofwhat holds promise to help it acquire the understanding it desires.Through this pursuit, the mind gradually gains the desired under-standing as it forms provisional ideas about the anticipated object ofknowledge and tests and revises or rejects them through experienceuntil the object is grasped and the understanding of it becomes atool that facilitates further efforts to understand the world.25

When the mind remembers that its desire for happiness is in-dicative of desire not for any temporal attainment but for God,Augustine writes that the forgotten thought of Him is reinstatedin the memory.26 This recollection puts the mind in a position tobring faith in God to bear in every cognitive effort that is cooper-atively undertaken by the memory, the understanding, and thewill – to think in unifying terms in ultimate terms of the goodnessof God – and thus to know God indirectly by finding the good inor making the best of the circumstances under consideration.27

24. Cf. Aug., conf., X, 11, 18 (CCL 27, 164-165).25. Cf. Aug., trin., X, 8, 12 (CCL 50, 161).26. Cf. Aug., conf., X, 20, 29 (CCL 27, 170-171).27. Cf. Aug., trin., VIII, 4, 6-5, 8 (CCL 50, 274-279).



The mind that perseveres at performing its work in the Spirit ofthe Son who esteems the Father to be the highest good performsits work in remembrance of Christ and thereby memorizes howto think after the manner of Christ.28 Each time it cultivates thehabit of seeing things from the perspective of Him who remainedconfident in the goodness of the Father’s purposes, even in thehour of His death, it checks the ingrained habit of operating ac-cording to its own norms. It overcomes the limited concepts ofwhat is good that have no place in the mind of Christ; and it be-comes a little more conformed to the image of Him who is theimage of God. To sum up: the human mind becomes an ever bet-ter analogy to that of Christ, who never sought to serve Himselfbut Father God.

The next analogy Augustine presents – that of ability, learningand use (ingenium, doctrina, usus) – is the bishop’s way of validatingthe many different ways of putting memory, understanding, andwill to work. Although he affirms that all people with faith reasonunder the influence of belief in God, Augustine emphasizes thatthey do this in accordance with individual levels and types of gift-edness.29 When they learn to use their abilities in faith, theirlearning becomes their venue for knowing God’s glory and mak-ing it known.

As the intellect learns to work in accordance with its abilitiesfrom the standpoint of faith, Augustine suggests that it learns toconsider temporal things with reference to eternal things andthereby acquires knowledge of what is eternal, or God, throughordinary experiences. As the intellectual faculty is redeemed fromits fallen habit of operating on the belief that the created realities itimages are “all there is”, in other words, the other two modes ofvision – sensation and imagination – that previously distracted itfrom God are redeemed as well. They serve their originally in-tended purpose, which is to enable the intellect to discover God

28. Cf. Aug., trin., VIII, 5, 7-8 (CCL 50, 276-279); XIV, 16, 22 (CCL 50/A, 451-454); XV,2, 2 (CCL 50/A, 460-462).

29. Cf. Aug., trin., XIII, 2, 5 (CCL 50/A, 385-387).

30. Cf. Aug., trin., XII, 15, 25 (CCL 50, 379-380).31. Cf. Aug., trin., XI, 2, 2 (CCL 50, 334-336).32. Cf. Aug., trin., XI, 3, 6 (CCL 50, 340): «Atque ita fit illa trinitas ex memoria et in-

terna uisione et quae utrumque copulat uoluntate, quae tria cum in unum cogunturab ipso coactu cogitatio dicitur ».

33. Cf. Aug., trin., XIV, 8, 11 (CCL 50/A, 435-438).


in the world He has made in preparation to know Him in Him-self.30 For this reason, Augustine argues that analogies to the Trin-ity can be detected in corporeal vision, which consists in the sightof the eyes, the object seen, and the perceptive faculties’ attentionto its object;31 as well as in spiritual vision, which involves thememory of sense perceptions, the internal comparison of percep-tions, and the production of an image.32

By way of synopsis, the five psychological analogies that havebeen discussed thus far were introduced to help the reader ofDe tri-nitate memorize how to operate by faith in God’s ultimate good-ness. When the mind does remember, understand, and love God byforming this habit, Augustine writes, it simultaneously remembers,understands, and loves itself (meminit sui, intellegit se, diligit se), suchthat the sixth psychological analogy becomes apparent upon it.33

This is true because the mind that remembers God remembers thatits purpose is to work for God’s purposes rather than its own.So long as it operates on the notion that its desires are ultimate, themind remains subject to fallen attitudes like envy, pride, and fear,which caused it to over or underestimate its abilities and thus in-hibits its ability to employ those abilities. So long as, and to the ex-tent that it is selfish, in other words, it is prone to the attitudes ofself-absorption or self-deprecation that prevent it from being itself.

A commitment to unlearning the fallen habit of refusing togive up the things regarded as too important to relinquish – to sac-rifice the self – and to cling instead in faith to the God Christ re-vealed represents a choice to follow Him figuratively to Golgothafrom Gethsemene, where He gave up the will to do His own will.Far from a decision to abandon personal identity, Augustine inti-mates that the decision to traverse this sacrificial path only repre-sents a decision to abandon the enslaving desires that encumbered


the free expression of the human spirit.34 As the empty tomb atthe end of Christ’s own sacrificial path confirms, this loss of theself is really the resurrection of the self. In the wake of it, the mindrecovers the ability to employ its skills in the proper manner, or ina manner analogous to that of Christ, who glorified the Fatherthrough every expression of His Spirit – to see where it and allother things fit in His plan to manifest His glory.35

In being thus conformed to Christ’s image, the intellect is pre-disposed to grow in its understanding of God through its appre-hension of reality. By means of its continual reflection of the im-age of God, Augustine further affirms, the mind is prepared for anultimate encounter with the Reality of God.36 For when Christ re-turns and the need for faith passes away, the memory, understand-ing, and love of the self – which is the memory, understanding,and love of the faith one placed in God during life – will be trans-formed into a seventh and final Trinitarian analogue which willdetermine the nature and degree to which the mind will knowand love the Triune God for eternity.37 The whole goal of De trini-tate, Augustine concludes, is to prepare the reader to make a seam-less transition to the beatific vision of the Trinity: to learn to enjoyHim to the greatest possible extent in the present to as to maxi-mize the experience of Him for eternity.

2. BONAVENTURE’S ITINERARIUM MENTIS IN DEUM

2.1. The Doctrine of God

For all intents and purposes, Augustine’s Trinitarian doctrinewent unrivalled in the West until the twelfth century. In the thirdquarter of that century, however, Richard of St. Victor developed« a new and original style of Trinitarian reflection ».38 Although

34. Cf. Aug., trin., IX, 4, 4 (CCL 50, 297).35. Cf. Aug., trin., XIV, 8, 11 (CCL 50/A, 435-438).36. Cf. Aug., trin., XIV, 9, 12 CCL 50/A, 438-440).37. Cf. Aug., trin., XIV, 2, 4 (CCL 50/A, 425).38. Z. Hayes, introduction to Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (DQMT)

by Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure: The Franciscan Institute, 2000), 15; M. Calisi,

Richard not unlike Augustine refers to the Triune God as theSupreme Good, he looks to the mystic Pseudo-Dionysius to ex-plain what this claim means.39 On the grounds that a Good that iscontained is not genuinely good, Dionysius had argued that Godis self-diffusive by definition.40 For Dionysius, in other words, thegoodness of the Good lies in its active or dynamic nature, that is,in its power to re-produce itself.

On the basis of Dionysius’ contention that divine goodness isfundamentally self-duplicating and self-giving, Richard concludesthat love is the supreme content of the Good.41 This conclusionfounds his effort to argue for a plurality of divine Persons, sincelove is something that must be shared by at least two parties. ToRichard’s mind, however, it is insufficient to affirm along Augus-tinian lines that the third member of the Trinity simply is the loveexchanged between the first two Persons. In the attempt to estab-lish that the nature and measure of the love in question is exactlythe same and thus supremely perfect, he contends that the firsttwo Persons of the Trinity must direct their love towards one andthe same third party. Where two Persons love a third in harmony,he writes, there is not the dilectio of Augustine, but condilectio.42

This Trinitarian doctrine greatly appealed to the first Franciscanscholars, likely owing to its voluntarist orientation and its empha-sis on the totally “self-diffusing” or sacrificial nature of God’s love.Such theological emphases were clearly compatible with the Fran-ciscan principles of charity, poverty, and humility. From the timeof Bonaventure’s teacher Alexander of Hales forward, the Vic-

Trinitarian Perspectives in the Franciscan Theological Tradition, The Franciscan Institute,St. Bonaventure 2008.

39. Cf. Hayes, introduction to DQMT, 19.40. Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete

Works, Paulist Press, Mahwah 1987, 639B, ff.41. Cf. Richard of St. Victor, De trinitate, bk III, ch 1-2 (PL 196, 915-916B);

cf. Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libros Sententiarum, inOpera omnia, CollegiumS. Bonaventurae, Quaracchi 1882-1902, I, 2, 1, 2, 1.

42. Cf. Hayes, introduction to DQMT, 16.



43. See K. Osborne, Alexander of Hales: Precursor and Promoter of Franciscan Theology,in id., The History of Franciscan Theology, The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure 2007,28; see also Hayes, introduction to DQMT 13-24.

44. Bonaventure, DQMT, 2, 1, conclusion.45. Cf. Hayes, introduction to DQMT, 42; Bonaventure, comm. sent., I, 2, 1, 2, 1.46. Cf. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in deum (I will quote from the Opera omnia

edition), 6, 2.47. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 3, 8.48. On double procession, see Bonaventure, comm. sent., I, 11, 1.49. Cf. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaemeron (Quaracchi, Firenze 1938), 1, 14.

torine doctrine was generally adopted in the Franciscan intellec-tual tradition.43

In elaborating his Trinitarian doctrine along Victorine lines,Bonaventure speaks of the Father as the first principle of the Trin-ity, the fontal source (plenitudo fontalis) of divine love from whichthe others flow.44 The Seraphic Doctor further affirms the maximof the Liber de causis that what is first is most fecund.45 From thispoint, he infers that God’s self-communication is perfect andcomplete. When He gives Himself, in other words, the Fatherholds nothing in reserve.46

The objective expression of the Father’s communication, onBonaventure’s account, is the Son, who is the exact likeness ormirror image of the Father.47 For Bonaventure, this “mirroring”relationship between Father and Son is the primary relation thatbecomes the basis for all further relations, above all, the relationbetween the Son and the Spirit. According to this Franciscan doc-tor, the Son receives the fountain fullness of the Father’s love andpasses it on exactly as He receives it. The Spirit simply stands asthe fullest possible manifestation of the love that proceeds fromthe Father and the Son.48

Bonaventure summarizes these teachings when he describesthe Father as the Person who produces but is not produced; theSon as He who both is produced and produces; and the Spirit asthe one that is produced but does not produce.49 Because the Sonhas a trait in common with both the Father and the Spirit, whothemselves have nothing in common, Bonaventure concludes that

50. See E. Cousins, The Coincidence of Opposites in the Christology of St. Bonaventure,« Franciscan Studies », 28 (1968), 27-45.

51. Cf. Bonaventure, comm. sent., II, 18, 2.52. Cf. Bonventure, coll. Hex., 11, 1, 15.53. Cf. Bonventure, itin., 1, 14.54. Cf. Bonventure, coll. Hex., 1, 11.55. Cf. Bonaventure, Breuiloquium, 2, 4, 3; 2, 9, 4; 2, 12, 4. 6.56. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 1, 4.57. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 2, 3-4 (p. 301): «Homo igitur [...] habet quinque sensus

quasi quinque portas, per quas intrat cognitio omnium, quae sunt in mundo sensibili,in animam ipsius ».


He is the very center of Trinitarian life – the one uniquely suitedto make the irreconcilable opposites of Father and Spirit coincideand thus to Image the Trinity by summing up in His own Personwhat the three together are.50

2.2. The Image of God

As the Son reconciles the extremes within the Godhead, so inHis creative work Bonaventure affirms that the Son unites the op-posites of creator and created. He work to this end starts with re-ceiving from the Father an infinite number of ideas (exemplars,forms, or “eternal reasons” as Bonaventure, following Augustine,calls them51) for the beings He could create.52 Like all things thatcome from the Father, these exemplars are perfect and complete.The Son instantiates them as such in the created order, to the endthat all beings exactly mirror the divine mind – and thus divinelove – in some finite respect.53 It is by way of these ideas thatBonaventure sees the Son as reconciling the diametric oppositesof created beings – which are the expression of His Spirit – andtheir Creator.54

For Bonaventure, consequently, the imaging of the Second Per-son and implicitly the whole Trinity involves identifying the totalcorrespondence between a created instance of an idea in God’smind and that idea which comes from the Father.55 Like Augus-tine, Bonaventure speaks of three types of knowing that enact thepossibility of performing this cognitive operation.56 The first, ofcourse, is sense perception; the second, imagination.57 Yet since


58. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 2, 6-9 (302): «Abstrahit igitur a loco, tempore, et motu,ac per hoc est incommutabilis, incircumscriptibilis, interminabilis et omnino spiritu-alis. Diiudicatio igitur est actio, quae speciem sensibilem, sensibiliter per sensus ac-ceptam, introire facit depurando et abstrahendo in potentiam intellectiuam».

59. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 2, 11.60.Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 2, 10-11; 3, 3.61. Bonaventure derives this idea from his Franciscan teachers who in turn

learned it from eleventh century Arab philosopher Avicenna, as I show in chapterthree of Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge,Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2011. See also what Dag Nikolaus Hasse suggests in Avi-cenna’s «De anima» in the Latin West, The Warburg Institute, London 2000.

Bonaventure believes that every sense perceptible object is an ab-solute expression of one of God’s ideas, he does not assume as Au-gustine does that multiple images of related objects are importantfor understanding them. For him, by contrast, forming an image issimply a matter of “stripping” the sense perception of all its super-fluous variants such as place and time, in order to lay the objectbare as it really is.58

Once such an image has been formed, he insists, it is stored inthe memory, where it awaits the scrutiny of the intellect thatachieves final understanding of its objects by comparing its imagesto the ideas in the mind of God, after which the imaged objectswere originally patterned. Bonaventure refers to this act of “check-ing” a human idea against one of God’s as the « full analysis » (plenaresolutio) of a thing or as the contuition (contuendum deum59) of it,which entails the co-knowledge of the creature and its exemplar inGod.60 From his perspective, such an act of abstraction does notentail engagement in a unifying mode of cognition that allows forgrowth in the understanding of an object as was the case with Au-gustine. Rather, thinking abstractly means deriving the single, im-mutable, and infallible abstract concept that is latent in each objectfrom the experience of it.61

The attainment of such completely certain ideas is possible,Bonaventure believes, because the memory is impressed with the in-nate knowledge of Being, which is none other than the Being of theGod who is the source of all beings. That is to say, it is impressed

62. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 3, 2 (305): « Ipsa anima est imago dei et similitudo adeosibi praesens et eum habens praesentem».

63. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 3, 3-4 (305): «Non uenit intellectus noster ut plene re-soluens intellectum alicuius entium creatorum, nisi iuuetur ab intellectu entis puris-simi, actualissimi, completissimi et absoluti, quod est ens simpliciter et aeternum, inquo sunt rationes omnium in sua puritate. Quomodo autem sciret intellectus, hocesse ens defectiuum et incompletum, si nullam haberet cognitionem entis absqueomni defectu [...]? ».

64. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 3, 5.65. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 5, 7.66.Cf. DQMT, qu. 1, 1, conclusion.


with His image.62 Although it would appear that the mind knowsthe created objects of its knowledge first, the Seraphic Doctor insiststhat in point of fact it knows its divine object first, inasmuch as theintuitive knowledge of Being is the condition of possibility of anyfurther contuitive ability to make sense of finite beings.63

If the mind loves the divine Being such that its will is orientedtowards Him and implicitly, His ideas, Bonaventure writes, it can-not help but perceive the images of beings that come into thememory as perfectly as God does and thus achieve absolute under-standing of them.64 By impressing on human beings the knowledgeof His own Being, Bonaventure writes, God comes to their con-tinual aid in acts of knowing. He supervises or cooperates with thehuman mind in those acts so as to ensure that the thoughts that re-sult from them correspond to His.65 In affirming this, Bonaven-ture appropriates Augustine’s Trinitarian analogue of memory,understanding, and will in the effort to articulate something like a“correspondence” theory of knowledge which would account forSt. Francis’ remarkable ability to comprehend and commune withall created realities.

Unlike Augustine who had argued that the ability to reflectGod’s image perfectly and constantly through the co-operation ofmemory, understanding, and will was lost at the fall and must begradually recovered, Bonaventure contends that the image wasnever effaced.66 Furthermore, it could not have been, lest the full-ness of God Himself be erased, which is impossible. FromBonaventure’s perspective, what was lost at the fall was not the in-


tellectual capacity but the will to love God that makes the intellectaware of its innate knowledge of the divine Being, which in turnrenders it the perfectly adequate foundation for the perfectknowledge of beings.67

On Bonaventure’s account, Christ compensated for humanity’signorance of the innate intellectual ability by revealing that andhow human beings were made to love God. He did this by hum-bling Himself to appear on earth and above all to die a sacrificialdeath on the cross.68 Those that love Christ and demonstrate thatlove as He did, namely, through humble and self-sacrificial acts ofservice, Bonaventure affirms, instantaneously revert to the fullawareness of the image that was always there and to which theyconsequently need never be re-conformed. Putting it in Augus-tine’s terms, the Seraphic Doctor states that they “remember, un-derstand, and love” themselves, becoming true likenesses of Christ.69

2.3.Christ-Likeness in the Itinerarium

In the Prologue to his Itinerarium, Bonaventure emphasizes pre-cisely this point, namely, that love for Christ expressed as ChristHimself expressed love, through humble acts of charity, opens thedoor to all knowledge. At the start of the treatise, Bonaventure ex-plains that he came to this realization upon Mount Alverna, Fran-cis of Assisi’s favorite place for prayer and the site of his famous vi-sion of a fiery, six-winged Seraph nailed to a cross – a vision afterwhich he was marked with the Stigmata or wounds of Christfrom which he eventually died.70

The Seraphic Doctor made his retreat two years into his term asthe Franciscans’ Minister General and thus far enough along in itto realize the challenges involved in leading an order that facedexternal and internal opposition to its intellectual pursuits and tothe accumulation of the possessions required to undertake them.

67. Cf. Bonaventure, breu., 3, 1, 1.68. Cf. Bonaventure, breu., 4, 9, 2.69.Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 3, 1.70. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., Prol.

71. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., Prol., 2 (296): « in cuius consideratione statim uisum estmihi, quod uisio illa praetenderet ipsius patris suspensionem in contemplando etuiam, per quam peruenitur ad eam».

72. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., Prol., 3.73. Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, 200D-208C; 300B-305C.74. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., Prol., 4 (297): « Igitur ad gemitum orationis per Chris-

tum crucifixum, per cuius sanguinem purgamur a sordibus uitiorum primum qui-dem lectorem inuito, ne forte credat, quod sibi sufficiat lectio sine unctione, specula-tio sine deuotione, inuestigatio sine admiratione, circumspectio sine exsultatione, in-dustria sine pietate, scientia sine caritate, intelligentia sine humilitate, studium abs-que diuina gratia, speculum absque sapientia diuinitus inspirata ».

75. Cf. ibid. (297): «Nihil est speculum exterius propositum, nisi speculum mentisnostrae tersum fuerit et politum».


With these problems weighing on his mind, Bonaventure saysthat he sought peace at Alverna.

As he prayed there, he relates that he suddenly saw that the vi-sion Francis had in that very location illustrates how a vision likehis can be reached.71 The three pairs of wings affixed to the Seraph– one pointing downwards, one folded across the chest, and onepointing upwards – represented the three routes through whichthe knowledge of God can be obtained through the exterior world,through the image of God that is interior to the mind, and throughthe contemplation of the superior God Himself.72

The fiery appearance of the Seraph – a member of that order ofangels that is closest to God and approaches Him without inter-mediary73 – indicated to Bonaventure that sacrificial love – repre-sented by the cruciform posture of the Seraph – opens the way tothese three forms of knowledge, inasmuch as love for the cruci-fied gives access to the source of the truth about all things, whichis Christ.74 The heat of that love cleanses the mirror of the mind,Bonaventure writes, reinstating awareness of the intellect’s intu-itive knowledge of Being – the understanding of the true natureof the self that is the condition of possibility of all genuine under-standing of beings, of the self as an image of the divine Being, andof that Being in its own right.75 It transforms those who becomeaware of themselves as images of God into the likeness to Christ,rendering them competent to comprehend reality with infallible


76. Cf. ibid.77. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 3, 7 (306): «Omnes autem hae scientiae habent regu-

las certas et infallibiles tanquam lumina et radios decendentes a lege aeterna inmentem nostram. Et ideo mens nostra tantis splendoribus irradiata et superfusa,nisi sit caeca, manuduci potest per semetipsam ad contemplandam illam lucemaeternam. Huius autem lucis irradiatio et consideratio sapientes suspendit in admi-rationem et econtra insipientes, qui non credunt, ut intelligent, ducit in perturba-tionem, ut impleatur illud propheticum: illuminans tu mirabiliter a montibus aeternis,turbati sunt omnes insipientes corde».

78. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 7, 1; see I. Delio, The Role of the Crucified in Bonaventure’sDoctrine of Mystical Union, « Studia Mystica », 19 (1998), 8-20; Crucified Love: Bonaven-ture’s Mysticism of the Crucified Christ, St. Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati 1999.

79. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 7, 5 (314): «Tu autem, o amice, circa mysticas uisionescorroboratio itinere et sensus desere et intellectuales operationes et sensibilia etinuisibilia et omne non ens et ens, et ad unitatem, ut possible est, inscius restituereipsius, qui est super omnem essentiam et scientiam. Etenim te ipso et omnibus im-mensurabili et absoluto purae mentis excessu »; 7, 6 (314): « Si autem quaeras quomo-do haec fiant, interroga gratiam non doctrinam; disiderium, non intellectum; gemi-tum orationis non studium lectionis; sponsum, non magistrum [...] non lucem, sedignem totaliter inflammantem et in deum excessiuis unctionibus et ardentissimis af-fectionibus transferentem».

certitude, as Christ does76 – and thus to study any and all of thebranches of knowledge.77

Since the Being that is known in all three cases is one and thesame, to wit, the Being of a God whose essential nature is Love,Bonaventure points out that the three-fold knowledge of Him iseventually bound to lead the one that acquires it to be totally con-sumed by God’s love as Christ was when He was transported tothe Father after His death. Those that come to know the world soperfectly as a result of loving God so deeply thus ultimately tran-scend the realm of knowledge altogether, achieving ecstatic unionwith divine love.78 They ascend to God as a result of having de-scended in humility to the point of losing life completely in Him.

This “ascent by descent”, Bonaventure indicates, was supreme-ly modelled by St. Francis, who followed in the exact footsteps ofthe crucified Christ.79 Once the love of God had brought the littlepoor man to the point of achieving the unbroken comprehensionof and communion with creation and God for which he is fa-mous, that knowledge of the ways in which God manifests His

80. Cf. C. Cullen, Bonaventure, 19: «Bonaventure’s work is understood as an at-tempt to institutionalize the primitive spirit and to preserve the peace of the order inthe face of conflicts over learning and poverty ».

81. Cf. Bonaventure, itin., 7, 4 (313): « In hoc autem transitu, si sit perfectus, oportetquod relinquantur omnes intellectuales operationes, ex apex affectus totus transfe-ratur et transformetur in deum».


love brought about union with the Love that supersedes knowl-edge. By relating Francis’ vision in this way, Bonaventure made abrilliant polemical move towards justifying the intellectual en-deavours of his order in the presence of the university academicsand conservative Franciscans.80 In describing love of a Franciscansort as the way into and the goal of knowing, he implied that theFranciscan perspective – far from opposed to the purposes of aca-demia – is a wholly appropriate, if not the most appropriate, con-text in which to undertake intellectual pursuits.

As he explained how such pursuits culminate in a spiritual expe-rience like Francis enjoyed, moreover, he demonstrated in thesight of the conservative Franciscans the important part that studycan play in the attainment of Franciscan ends. In the final sectionof his treatise, the Seraphic Doctor further reinforces his commit-ment to accomplishing Franciscan goals by emphasizing that intel-lectual activities are only useful until they lead to the ecstatic unionwith divine love, which is the goal of all Franciscan endeavours.81

Those that opposed the intellectual life of the friars minor couldhave no rebuttal to these lines of contention, according to whichintellectual pursuits require a Franciscan perspective for their suc-cess, and those who entertain a Franciscan perspective need intel-lectual pursuits for theirs.

3. ASCENDING TO GOD IN AUGUSTINE AND BONAVENTURE

The description of the ascent to God that Bonaventure gives inhis Itinerarium admittedly sounds in many respects like the onethat is provided by Augustine. For it involves three cognitive lev-els – sensation, imagination, and intellection – and Bonaventureinvokes Augustine’s Trinitarian analogies (to say nothing of ex-


planatory devices like “illumination”) to show how the latter op-eration occurs. Despite these apparent similarities, there are atleast three levels on which Bonaventure’s account can be differen-tiated from Augustine’s, namely, in terms of the account that isgiven of the nature of knowledge, the necessary and sufficientconditions for knowledge, and the apex of the ascent to theknowledge of God through the knowledge of reality.

Regarding the first point: Bonaventure conceives the nature ofknowledge very differently from Augustine. Whereas intellectualactivity for Augustine entails engagement in a unifying mode ofcognition in which ideas about entities are subject to growth anddevelopment, Bonaventure conceives it as the simple act of iden-tifying the “abstract” nature of a thing as it is fully instantiated inan object through efforts to remove conceptually determining fac-tors such as place, time, and change that obscure that nature.To strip an object of these elements so as to behold the “thing it-self” is to see it as it compares exactly to an idea in the mind ofGod. Such a theory of knowledge by complete correspondence,I have suggested, follows logically from the Seraphic Doctor’sdoctrine of God, which implies that imaging God means reconcil-ing created beings with their uncreated exemplars.

On Bonaventure’s account, the unchangeable, irreproachable,and indubitable knowledge that is acquired through such actsis attainable because the knowledge of God’s Being – His image –is innately impressed on the mind, rendering it the adequate foun-dation for the perfect comprehension of beings. Through Hispresence in the mind in the concept of Being, God assists the hu-man intellect in its attempt to accomplish its acts. This model ac-cording to which necessary conditions for knowledge are satisfiedas a result of God’s co-operation (concursus) with human minds canbe contrasted with that of Augustine, according to whom Goddoes not bestow any innate conceptual content, such as that ofBeing, but an innate capacity for cognizing in unifying terms.Inasmuch as the mind thinks along unifying lines in terms of theexistence of one God, it thinks in a way that has been enabled byGod, not because He directly intervenes in human cognitiveprocesses per Bonaventure but because the power to perform cog-

82. J. Schmutz distinguishes between what he calls the influential and concursusmodel of causality, which was newly introduced by Franciscans in the thirteenthcentury, in La doctrine mediévale des causes et la théologie de la nature pure (XIIIe-XVIIe siècles),«Rev. thom. », 101 (2001), 217-264.

83. Cf. Aug., trin., XIV, 5, 7 (CCL 50/A, 429-430).84. Cf. Aug., trin., XIV, 14, 18 (CCL 50/A, 445-446).


nitive work is one that flows in from Him through the creativegift and Incarnate example of His Son.82

In striving to follow that example by grace through faith inChrist, Augustine implies, the intellect satisfies the sufficient con-ditions for knowing. As a result of the commitment it makes toperform its cognitive acts out of an overriding love for God– which is indicative of faith that the desired object may ultimatelybe grasped – Augustine elaborates, the mind becomes able to bringfaith and love to bear in all its efforts. In doing this, it cultivates thehabit of thinking along the aforementioned lines. The more it doesso, the more it expresses its hope to know God and thereby ap-proximates that goal by degrees, recovering in the process the im-age of God on the intellect and thus the ability to do all things forthe purpose of recognizing His glory.

Through his efforts to train his readers to memorize how toglorify God constantly in keeping with individual abilities, I haveshown that Augustine instructs how to express the self freely,without the inhibitions of narrow-mindedness.83 He teaches howto form the perspective from which the good – and God – can befound in absolutely all things. To maintain this outlook on realityis for Augustine the climax of the cognitive “ascent” that can bereached in this life. From this height, the mind not only sees ob-jects and circumstances but also itself and others in their properplaces with respect to one another. In other words, it learns to op-erate within the limits of its abilities and to let others do the same.By these means, it promotes the good of all and thereby realizesand at once reveals the benefits of adherence to belief in God.84

An incidental point worth noting here is that these conclusionsrun counter to certain allegations that have been directed againstthe account of the psychological analogies to the Trinity Augustine


gives in the latter half of De trinitate for quite some time.85 Accord-ing to some interpreters, the bishop’s reflections on the humanmind as the image of God encourage the reader to turn to the selfqua image as the foundation for all knowledge. In doing this, Au-gustine supposedly instigates a proto-Cartesian “turn to the sub-ject” that involves turning away from relationships with others andultimately with God to gain awareness of and access to a fully ac-tualized power to know, thereby promoting a problematic and typ-ically modern individualism. As I have already intimated, however,Augustine’s reflections on the image of God are designed to teachreaders how to recover gradually their lost power to know.

If something anticipating a subjective turn occurs in any context,it happens in the thought of Bonaventure’s Franciscan Augustine,according to whom the presence of the image – which contra Au-gustine was never lost and to which one never need re-conform –predisposes the intellect to be the fully adequate foundation for allits acts, although its adequacy ultimately comes from God throughthe impression of His Being.86 Although many are ignorant of theircompetence for perfect knowing, Bonaventure teaches that thosewho love Christ as Christ loved – humbly, sacrificially – regain fullawareness of their fully functional powers to make definitive senseof all things: beings, human beings, and God.

The point that emerges here is that Bonaventure understandsChrist likeness, that is, the ascent to God, as mainly a matter of thewill to love Him. In this he differs from Augustine who conceivedthe process of ascending to God as a matter of transforming themind’s patterns of thinking through the guidance of love for Godand thus as a matter of knowledge and love, intellect and will.For Bonaventure, love enacts the possibility of obtaining infallibleknowledge; yet the voluntary abandonment of the will out of faithin Christ is not itself based on what is intellectual. By this account,

85. For an elaboration of this point see chapter one of myDivine Illumination, 56-57.86. Bonaventure’s emphasis on interiority is generally taken as a sign of his in-

debtedness to Augustine by Franciscan scholars like E. Bettoni, Bonventure, 84;Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites, 45; Z. Hayes, The Hidden Center:Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure, Paulist Press, Mahwah 1981, 218.


love and knowledge, will and intellect, are mutually exclusive asopposed to inclusive, per Augustine. Once love for God hasopened the door to knowledge of realities, which perfectly reflectGod’s love in a finite respect, it paradoxically propels the mind be-yond the realm of known realities towards union with a God whois Love. In obtaining union with God, Bonaventure writes, themind transcends the realm of reason, thus abandoning itself.

Such a conception of the apex of the ascent to God stands incontrast to that of Augustine, for whom human “transcendence”in this life does not entail a leap beyond the realm of reason andthe obliteration of the self but the attainment of an overarchingperspective from which to see how to order the created realm inkeeping with personal abilities, the prerequisite for which is thegradual recovery of the self. In Augustine’s thought, in summary,the climax of the ascent does not entail the rejection of the worldbut the ability to see it clearly for the first time.

When these points are taken into consideration, it becomes ev-ident that Bonaventure did not promulgate an Augustinian ac-count of the cognitive ascent to God, which is the process of con-forming to the image of His Son. For him, becoming like Christdoes not entail gradual conformity to the image but activating thealready functional intellectual capacity through love expressedthrough characteristically Franciscan modes of poverty and self-abandoning humility of lifestyle.

By explaining likeness or ascent to God in this way, Bonaventurearticulated an account that was consistent with the Franciscan vi-sion and that reinforced the intellectual legitimacy of that vision.His tendency to employ traditional Augustinian terms to do this hasmasked the fact that he makes a conceptual departure from Augus-tine. My strategy for highlighting this divergence has involved trac-ing the accounts of knowledge and the mind’s journey towards Godthat Augustine and Bonaventure give to their theological roots inthe doctrines of Trinity and imago dei. This effort exposed the dis-parity between the ideas about what it means to image God andthereby know Him. It threw into relief the discontinuous notionsof conformity to Christ or the ascent to God that Augustine andBonaventure’s Franciscan Augustine entertained.


87. See chapter six of my Divine Illumination for a fuller account of this argumentconcerning Scotus.

88. Cf. L. Spruit, Species Intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge, Brill, Leiden 2004,262; K. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham, Brill, Leiden 1988, 64.

4. CONCLUSIONS

At the outset of this discussion, I mentioned three reasons why itmight be important to distinguish Bonaventure’s views on the na-ture of the ascent to God from those of Augustine. The first was torecognize and celebrate the distinctively Franciscan features ofBonaventure’s account. Among these are its emphasis – so consis-tent with the Franciscan mission of charitable service – on the pri-macy of love (otherwise known as voluntarism); the notion thatthe divine Being is the first object of the intellect, such that themind maintains an unbroken intuitive connection with it, best ex-emplified by Francis of Assisi; and a correspondence theory ofknowledge that effectively explained the saint’s capacity to com-prehend and commune with all created beings.

The virtues of such emphases are manifold. By prioritizing loveover knowledge, for example, Bonaventure rightly stressed thatknowledge amounts to nothing if it is turned to no useful purposeor even to harmful purposes – if it engenders pride as opposed tohumble acts of service. Furthermore, there is a sense in whichpositing the intuitive knowledge of Being showed how human be-ings are both accountable for and able to maintain the intimate re-lationship with God that would enable them to see things as Hesees them, that is, as expressions of His love, and treat them ac-cordingly. Although Bonaventure’s emphases may have differedfrom Augustine’s, they enabled the beneficial ministry of the Fran-ciscan order to be intellectually supported and carried forward.

Although John Duns Scotus employs different philosophicalforms from Bonaventure, he arguably upholds in new ways thevery Franciscan principles that he inherited, rather than breakingfrom his predecessor as is commonly supposed.87 For instance, thevoluntarist bent in his thought is unmistakeable, as is a proclivityfor a correspondence theory of knowledge.88 Moreover, the idea


89. J. Milbank, The Suspended Middle, Eerdman’s, Grand Rapids 2005, 93-96;C. Pickstock, Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance, «Modern Theol-ogy», 21 (2005), 548.

of the intuitive knowledge of Being is fundamental to his thought.Though Scotus admittedly departed from Bonaventure in defin-ing that knowledge as a purely natural feature of the mind ratherthan the result of an ongoing divine intervention, he still seeming-ly construed the natural life of the mind as operative in the broad-er scheme of the divine order. That is to say, he did not entirely di-vorce natural knowledge from the context of knowledge of Godin the way of a modern philosophical thinker.

This is one of the charges that has been levelled against Scotusby certain contemporary thinkers, who see him as laying the con-ceptual groundwork for modern thought and all the “evils” towhich it gave rise.89 Chief among these, it is said, is the moderntendency to construe human life as fully functional apart from anysupernatural sustenance. This supposition not only renders beliefin God irrelevant for any ordinary matter – thus construing it asirrational – but it also eventually gave credence to the Cartesianand later Kantian notions that human beings can achieve perfec-tion in knowing, and of their own accord. Such a genuine “turn tothe subject” is purported to result in the individualism and senseof entitlement to satisfy individual desires that seems to be at thesource of many problems in current society.

Although such trends may indeed be traceable through moder-nity, the suggestion I have made regarding the likely connection be-tween Scotus and Bonaventure and the fundamentally theologicaland positive orientation of their thought would seem to support theconclusion that Scotus – whose philosophical thought was admit-tedly innovative and radical in many respects – is nevertheless notresponsible for setting any problematic modern trends in motion.t follows from my observations concerning the theological contextof Franciscan thought that Franciscan ideals would have to be re-moved from their proper context and therefore used for purposesother than those originally intended – resultantly becoming, for all

practical purposes, different ideals – in order to create the modernsituation about which certain thinkers are concerned.

For their own part, Bonaventure and seemingly even Scotussimply diverged from Augustine and developed new modes ofthinking for the sake of promoting a Franciscan system of thoughtand life which did and still does revolve around entering into therelationship with God that motivates efforts love and heal andserve the world He made – efforts that would surely go a longway towards addressing challenges we face in our world today.


lydia shumacher - bonaventure's journey into the mind of god

Documents

bonaventure gilson

knowledge of god

cambridge university

darkness of god

franciscanherald press

paulist press

oxford university press

university ofnotre dame