Saint Bonaventure, Doctor of the Church

A few days ago now, I set out two paragraphs on the Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas, a powerful mind in the great days of the high medieval period, whose theology has come to define the Latin Church as a whole, in the way that Saint John Chrysostom characterises the Greek churches and Saint Ephrem the Syrian churches. But today we have another powerful figure from only a little later, from the other great Order of friars, then only young: the Franciscans. 

Born Giovanni di Fidanza in about AD 1215, with an early devotion to Saint Francis, that grew when he encountered the Friars Minor in Paris, where he had completed his secondary education. Convinced that the life of Saint Francis was similar to the life of the earliest Christians, and so of divine origin, he applied to join and was clothed in the habit in 1243, with the name Bonaventura. He then acquired a strong formation in theology at Paris, specialising in Scripture and the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In Paris at the time, there was a movement by the secular clergy against the Dominicans and Franciscans teaching at the university, for they had upset the status quo with their unique (for the time) lifestyles and they were receiving much acclaim. Bonaventure attempted a defence of the new Orders and their approximation to the perfection demanded by the Gospel. By the personal intervention of the Holy Father Alexander IV, in 1257, Bonaventure was made doctor and master of the university, but he was obliged to give it up when he was made master general of the Order. To unite the friars, he at once proposed and had ratified a compilation of the norms regulating the life of the Order. To standardise the teaching of Saint Francis, he also researched and put out the biography of the Saint called the Legenda Maior, which was revised and reduced to form the Legenda Minor, which became the official biography. In 1273, the Holy Father Gregory X made Bonaventure a bishop and cardinal and asked him to prepare the second council of Lyons, attempting to reunite the Latin and the Greek churches, which Bonaventure worked hard at but was unable to complete, dying in 1274.

Bonaventure is known by the Church as the Seraphic Doctor. Like Saint Thomas, he was optimistic about human nature and human reason. Thomas thought that theology was both an intellectual exercise of coming to know God and a practical exercise of growing in moral rectitude. But, where he prioritised the intellectual practice, Bonaventure provides a third way, which embraces both the first two: knowledge of Christ naturally proceeds towards love and moral development. His priority is love of God and unity with God in love, over knowledge through study. But these are two approaches to union with God; reason is still valid, but is transcended by love, as shown by Christ Crucified. And finally, in the ascent towards God, always beyond our strength and so the work of God Himself, Bonaventure thought that prayer was indispensable.