Saint Bonaventure

Theirs was one of the great friendships in the history of the Church: two towering figures of medieval thought who taught at the same university and defended their orders together against attacks from the secular clergy, yet followed clearly different theological paths. If Saint Thomas Aquinas used the perfect clarity of reason and philosophy to build a massive cathedral of faith, Saint Bonaventure made theology soar on the wings of a heart burning with love. He is called the “Seraphic Doctor” (Doctor Seraphicus) because every page he wrote and every sermon he preached seemed to blaze with the fire of love of the Seraphim, the angels who stand closest to the throne of God in the tradition of Scripture. He was also the man who saved the Franciscan Order from the brink of collapse after its founder’s death, and he is honored to this day as the “second founder” of the Order of Friars Minor.

Foreseeing a bright and holy future for the boy, Saint Francis cried out in Italian:

“O buona ventura!”

(“O good fortune!”). From then on, the boy was known by the name that stayed with him all his life: Bonaventure.

At the time, the Franciscan Order was facing a very serious internal crisis. Within a few decades of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, the order had grown at a dizzying pace, to tens of thousands of friars all over Europe; but that very growth split it into two bitterly opposed factions. One, called the “Spirituals” (Spirituali), demanded that the original poverty be kept to the letter, even to extremes: forbidding friars to study, forbidding solid friaries to be built, not even allowing books to be kept in one’s own cell. The other side favored “relaxation”, wanting to turn the order into an ordinary clerical institution, gradually settling into a more comfortable way of life so as to adapt easily to the order’s ever larger role in the Church.

In that work, he compared the believer’s life to a spiritual climb of six steps, corresponding to the six wings of the Seraph Saint Francis had seen, leading the soul gradually into complete union with God. The three main stages of that journey are, in turn:

• seeing the traces of God in the visible world of created things around us — Vestigium;
• contemplating the very image of God in the human soul, through memory, understanding and will — Imago;
• and finally, beholding God Himself in His absolute goodness and the fathomless mystery of the Trinity — Similitudo.

But the summit of the whole journey, according to Bonaventure, is not a purely rational understanding, but an ecstasy of love, where the soul enters into complete silence before the Beloved hanging on the Cross, beyond all words and concepts the human mind can grasp.

He summed up that spirit in a few words about his own work as a theologian:

“Theology is not only for satisfying the curiosity of the mind; the ultimate purpose of theology is to make us better and to make us love God more!”

When the envoys arrived solemnly carrying the cardinal’s hat and robes, they were astonished to find the famous Minister General of the whole Franciscan Order with his sleeves rolled up, busily washing dishes in a corner of the friary kitchen, work no one expected a man of his standing to do himself. Seeing that his hands were covered in grease and not fit to receive the solemn insignia just then, he simply smiled and said to the envoys:

“Please be so kind as to take that cardinal’s hat out into the garden and hang it on that tree branch over there for me, until I finish washing these dishes!”

The envoys were moved to tears by such serene, almost childlike humility in a man whose scholarly fame had spread across Europe, yet who kept the simplicity of a true mendicant friar.

In 1274, together with Pope Gregory X, he presided over the Second Council of Lyon, one of the important councils of the Middle Ages, which brought together large numbers of bishops and delegations from all over Europe. With diplomatic skill and deep charity, he helped bring about a historic result: a partial healing of the split between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox East. Sadly, the unity reached at that Council lasted only a short time before the old tensions surfaced again.

Lyon had never seen a funeral like it: the Pope himself, all the Council Fathers, the cardinals and bishops, even the king of Aragon, who was at the Council, followed his body together with thousands of friars. The official record of the Council still preserves these moving lines:

“A man of outstanding gifts, of indescribable holiness and wonderful gentleness has died... He was loved by everyone, because he loved everyone with all his heart!”

Pope Sixtus IV solemnly canonized Bonaventure on April 14, 1482, more than two hundred years after his death. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church with the title “Seraphic Doctor” (Doctor Seraphicus). The Church celebrates him on July 15 each year.