Bonaventure

Bonaventure was an Italian Franciscan theologian and philosopher who taught at the University of Paris and later led the Franciscan order as Minister General and became a cardinal. Working in the Augustinian tradition, he saw all knowledge as a path back to God, and he rejected the Aristotelian view that the world could have existed from eternity. His short Journey of the Mind into God, conceived on Mount La Verna in 1259, traces an ascent from the traces of God in the world, through the soul's own powers, to mystical union. He is known as the 'Seraphic Doctor'.

Key ideas

• The created world is a book in which traces, images and likenesses of God can be read.
• The mind rises to God in stages: through things outside it, through its own inner powers, and finally above itself.
• Certain knowledge of unchanging truth requires divine illumination, not human reason alone.
• Reason can show that the world had a beginning, so it cannot have existed from eternity.
• All branches of learning lead back to theology.

Major works

• The Journey of the Mind into God (1259)
• Breviloquium (1257)
• Commentary on the Sentences (1250s)
• Life of Saint Francis (Legenda maior) (1261)
• Collations on the Six Days (1273)

In the Book corner

• The Journey of the Mind into God 1259 · Intermediate
  A short spiritual treatise written in 1259, when Bonaventure, then minister general of the Franciscans, withdrew to Mount La Verna, where Francis…

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