Confessor Bonaventure

Saint Bonaventure, known in the world as Giovanni di Fidanza, was born at Bagnoregio, a hill town near Viterbo in the Papal States, in the early thirteenth century; later tradition most often gives the year 1221, though the precise year is not fixed by a contemporary record. Hagiographical accounts, which cannot be verified independently, relate that as a child he was saved from a mortal illness through the intercession of Saint Francis of Assisi, and that his mother thereafter dedicated him to God; the name Bonaventure, meaning good fortune, is attached to this story. He entered the Order of Friars Minor as a young man and was sent to the University of Paris, then the chief center of theological study in the Latin West. There he was formed in the Franciscan school associated with Alexander of Hales, lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and was recognized as a master of theology. In the 1250s he taught in the Franciscan chair at Paris during the conflict between the mendicant orders and the secular masters of the university, and he wrote in defense of the mendicant vocation.

His theological corpus is among the most substantial of the thirteenth century. The commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences set out a systematic vision in which God is known as first and last, and creatures as vestiges, images, and likenesses of the Trinity. Shorter works such as the Breviloquium offered a condensed summa of doctrine. The Itinerarium mentis in Deum, composed after a retreat on Mount La Verna, described the soul's ascent to God through the traces of the divine in the sensible world, in the soul, and in God himself, culminating in mystical excessus. Other treatises, including De reductione artium ad theologiam and the later Collationes in Hexaemeron, related the arts and sciences to theology and to Christ as the center of all wisdom. His thought is commonly characterized as a Franciscan Augustinianism: illuminationist in epistemology, exemplaristic in metaphysics, and both affective and speculative in its account of the journey to God. He taught in the same academic generation as Thomas Aquinas, with whom he is often paired as a representative of the two great mendicant schools at Paris.

In 1257, while still a relatively young master, he was elected minister general of the Friars Minor, an office he held until he was raised to the cardinalate. The order was divided between those who pressed for a strict poverty close to the primitive Franciscan ideal and those who accepted convents, studies, and papal privileges. Bonaventure attempted a middle course. He visited provinces, issued the Constitutions of Narbonne, and sought to stabilize observance without destroying the order's intellectual and pastoral work. At the chapter of 1263 he presented the Legenda maior, his official life of Saint Francis, which the order adopted as its standard narrative of the founder; earlier legends were ordered withdrawn, a decision that shaped subsequent Franciscan memory. He also wrote a shorter legend for choir use and treatises on the religious life. In 1273 Pope Gregory X created him cardinal-bishop of Albano and relied on him in preparing the Second Council of Lyon, convened to reform the Church and to pursue reunion with the Greeks. Bonaventure took a leading part at the opening of the council in 1274. He died at Lyon on 15 July 1274, before the council had concluded, and was buried in the church of the Friars Minor in that city.

Pope Sixtus IV canonized him on 14 April 1482. In 1588 Pope Sixtus V numbered him among the Doctors of the Church with the title Doctor Seraphicus. The General Roman Calendar keeps his feast on 15 July, the day of his death; in the Tridentine calendar it had been observed on 14 July so as not to conflict with another feast. He is venerated as a patron of theologians and of students, of his native Bagnoregio, and of Franciscan tertiaries; popular devotion connected with the childhood miracle has also invoked him against intestinal illness. His tomb in Lyon was wrecked in 1562 during the Wars of Religion, when Huguenots desecrated the Franciscan church; surviving relics have been claimed at Bagnoregio and elsewhere. His writings remained a standard of Franciscan education for centuries and continue to be read as a classic of medieval mystical and scholastic theology.