Bonaventure

Bonaventure, born Giovanni di Fidanza, was one of the principal theologians of the thirteenth-century Franciscan school and a major figure in the government of his order. He was born in 1221 at Bagnoregio (medieval Bagnorea), a town in the Papal States not far from Viterbo. Later Franciscan tradition related that in childhood he was saved from a serious illness by the intercession of Francis of Assisi, and that the name Bonaventure—understood as good fortune—commemorated that event; the story cannot be verified from contemporary records but shaped his later cult. He seems to have received his earliest education locally before entering the Order of Friars Minor about 1243. The order sent him to Paris, then the chief center of theological study in Latin Christendom. There he was formed by Alexander of Hales, the first Franciscan to hold a chair of theology, and by John of La Rochelle and others of that school. He commented on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, incepted as master of theology in the 1250s, and taught in the Franciscan convent at Paris. Those years coincided with the quarrel between the mendicant orders and the secular masters of the university, in which Bonaventure, like Thomas Aquinas on the Dominican side, defended the right of friars to teach and to live by begging.

In February 1257 the general chapter elected him Minister General, succeeding John of Parma, who had been associated with the more rigorist and Joachite currents in the order. Bonaventure was still a young master; his election reflected a desire for a leader who was both a trained theologian and acceptable to the papacy. He governed the Friars Minor until 1274. The central problem of his generalate was the interpretation of Franciscan poverty and the tension between the Spirituals, who demanded a literal following of Francis’s Testament, and the majority who accepted papal declarations allowing the use of goods held by the Church on the friars’ behalf. Bonaventure did not satisfy the extreme Spirituals, but he insisted on interior poverty, humility, and devotion to the crucified Christ, and he tried to hold the order together by legislation. The constitutions issued at Narbonne in 1260 became a lasting framework for Franciscan life and studies. He also wrote the Apologia pauperum in defense of mendicant poverty against critics such as Gerard of Abbeville. At the order’s request he composed a new official life of Francis, the Legenda maior, together with a shorter liturgical legend; earlier lives were ordered withdrawn, so that Bonaventure’s portrait of the founder—emphasizing mystical conformity to Christ and the stigmata—dominated later Franciscan memory.

His own theological and spiritual writings were produced both before and during the generalate. Besides the Sentence commentary, the Breviloquium offered a compact summa of doctrine. The Itinerarium mentis in Deum, composed after a retreat at La Verna in 1259, describes the soul’s ascent to God through the vestiges of God in the external world, the image of God in the soul, and the trans-intellectual peace found in the crucified Christ. De reductione artium ad theologiam relates the arts and sciences to theology and to the light of divine revelation. Late collations on the Hexaemeron, delivered at Paris in 1273, attack Latin Averroism and sketch a Christocentric reading of creation and history. Bonaventure’s thought is Augustinian in its doctrine of illumination, its emphasis on the good and on love, and its suspicion of a purely Aristotelian account of the soul and of the eternity of the world, yet he knew Aristotle well and used him freely. He is often contrasted with Aquinas; the contrast is real in method and accent, but both men worked in the same university and both were later named Doctors of the Church.

Pope Gregory X, who had known the Franciscan world, named Bonaventure cardinal-bishop of Albano in 1273 and required him to accept the dignity so that he might help prepare the Second Council of Lyon. The council opened in 1274 with reunion of the Greek and Latin Churches and the crusade among its aims. Bonaventure preached, advised the pope, and took part in the negotiations that produced a short-lived profession of union by Byzantine envoys. He died at Lyon on 15 July 1274, before the council ended. He was buried in the Franciscan church there. In 1482 Pope Sixtus IV, himself a Franciscan, canonized him. In 1588 Pope Sixtus V declared him a Doctor of the Church, with the title Seraphic Doctor. His feast is celebrated on 15 July. Relics connected with him are kept at Bagnoregio; the original tomb at Lyon did not survive the destruction of the medieval convent.