Bonaventure and the Ascent to God
I recently began reading The Journey of the Mind to God, by St. Bonaventure, and I intend to publish summaries and reflections of each chapter as I make my way through the treatise. This is primarily for my sake; Bonaventure writes in a dense, precise style, and my hope is that, by summarizing and restating his points, I will internalize and remember them better. If someone reads this and gains something from my notes, all the better.
The Beginning and the Need for Prayer
The first chapter has two main parts: In the first part, Bonaventure introduces his thesis and gives a brief outline of the journey to come. In the second, he takes us on the first step by considering how we can come to recognize God through the world. Here, I will deal briefly with his overture.
Before giving us the map of what is to come, however, Bonaventure admonishes his readers of the importance of prayer. Theology is not merely a work of the unaided mind, it must always be aided and guided by God. As Pope Francis said in a 2014 address to university students in Rome, theology must be done "with an open mind and on one's knees."
Triple Existence and the Six Stages
Bonaventure identifies three loci of being. Things exist, he says, in the physical world, in the mind of man, and in God. We must probe this threefold order of being and come to recognize God in each domain. To do so, we first look around us to see His traces in the material world. Then, turning inward, we probe our own mind, made in His image. Finally, we direct our minds upward to grasp higher spiritual things.
Each of these three main stages of our ascent is further divided into two parts. At each level of being, we come to know God through and in His creation. Looking through created things, we see God's handiwork and turn back to Him as the cause. Looking in created things, we see God dwelling in all that He has made.
Thus, the ladder of our ascent has six rungs. On each rung, we must exercise a different faculty of the soul and direct it towards God. When we investigate the material world, we use our senses and imagination. We direct our reason and understanding towards recognizing God within our minds. In the spiritual order, we use our intelligence and moral discernment to grasp higher things.
We must overcome the effects of sin on each of these faculties and train them in virtue. Here, again, is the necessity of prayer. On our own, we cannot rise above our concupiscence, but in Christ, our human nature is perfected. He has won for us the grace to come to know the Heavenly Father through Him.
In the end, when we have turned all the faculties of our soul towards coming to know God, we will be able to rest in contemplation of His divine being. This contemplation is a simple receptivity to the gift of His own being that God makes present to us always, in and through all things. Thus, as God labored for six days in creating all that is, and rested on the seventh; so we shall probe the depths of creation for six stages before coming to the sabbath rest with Him.
Reflections
This first part of Chapter 1 is full of delightful typological models that Bonaventure uses to organize his theology. In addition to reflecting the six days of creation, the six steps of the mind's journey to God follow the pattern of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Bonaventure's threefold organization of being is distinctly Trinitarian, and he explicitly states that the subdivision into pairs of through and in reflects the union of divine and human natures in Christ. Bonaventure truly is doing theology on his knees, receiving first revelation through Scripture, and letting it inform his entire system of thought.
Alongside the other scholastics, most notably Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure clearly draws heavily from the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in his formulations. Notably, his statement that things have being in physical reality, in the mind, and in God suggests a strong notion of Forms. To Bonaventure, it would seem, our recognition of distinct things that we perceive through the senses is not some nominalist imposition, but the forms and distinctions we see in the world have some metaphysical reality.
Another consequence of this model of threefold existence is that it places human beings right at the crossroads of being. We are both things in the material world, all of which have their existence grounded in God; and we are also, like God, subjects in which things may have being. This seems to give the statement that we are created in God's image, momentous enough in itself, an even greater degree of significance. In a way, perhaps, we are participating with God in His continuous act of sustaining creation, for things come to rest in our minds in an echo of how they always rest in God.
Conclusion
I will deal with the second half of Chapter 1 in a future post. In it, Bonaventure begins his investigation of how God is found through his traces in the material world. In the meantime, let us all seek God in prayer.