Bonaventure's mind's road to God
Franciscan mystical theology
Bonaventure is the Minister General of the Franciscan order — its administrative head, the man responsible for holding together the increasingly fractious community that Francis founded — and he retreats to Mount La Verna in 1259 AD to think and pray.
La Verna is the same mountain where Francis received the stigmata thirty-five years earlier. Bonaventure goes there to write a short book that will become one of the classics of Christian mysticism: the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, The Mind's Road to God.
The Itinerarium is structured around the six wings of the seraph that appeared to Francis at La Verna — three pairs of wings, three stages of ascent: the soul contemplating God through the traces of God in the external world, through the image of God in the soul itself, and finally through the direct contemplation of God's being and goodness.
Bonaventure is not Aquinas. He is not primarily interested in the rational structure of theology. He is interested in the movement of the soul toward God — in what happens in a person when the mind and heart turn toward their source and discover, in that turning, that they were always already being drawn.
He writes with the elegance of someone who has been in the place he is describing.
At the end of the Itinerarium, having traced the soul's ascent through all its stages, he says: Pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father. And then: This is a mystical secret which no one knows except him who receives it.
“Whoever loves this death can see God, for it is indubitably true that man will not see me and live — not the bodily life, but the life of the soul, which must die if it will see God.”
— Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum VII, c. 1259 AD
“He said, You cannot see my face, for man may not see me and live.”
Bonaventure's mystical theology reaches the same destination as Aquinas's rational theology — the same final silence before a reality that surpasses all description.
Aquinas arrives through argument and stops when the argument runs out. Bonaventure arrives through contemplation and stops when the soul crosses into the presence it has been seeking.
Both routes lead to the same place. Both end in silence. Both are necessary — the mind that thinks and the heart that contemplates are not different faculties pointed in different directions. They are two movements of the same creature toward the same God.
Aquinas reaches silence at the end of argument. Bonaventure reaches silence at the end of contemplation. Same silence. Same God.
The route you resist is usually the one that has something to teach you.