Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Cardinal-Bishop & Doctor of the Church
July 14 · d. 1274
also known as John of Fidanza, Giovanni Fidanza, Doctor Seraphicus
Bonaventure was the great theologian and mystic of the early Franciscans, the friar who gave the order of Saint Francis a mind to match its heart. As Minister General he held the Franciscans together through a bitter quarrel over poverty, wrote the official Life of Francis, and in his masterwork The Soul's Journey into God charted the ascent of the soul to mystical union. The church calls him the Seraphic Doctor and counts him among the Doctors of the Church.
Bonaventure was born around the year 1221 at Bagnoregio, a hill town in the Papal States, today in the province of Viterbo in central Italy, and given the name John of Fidanza. Franciscan tradition holds that as a sick child he was healed through the prayers of Francis of Assisi himself, and that the name Bonaventura, good fortune, came from that deliverance; whether or not the story is exact, the bond it describes was real, for Bonaventure would give his life to Francis's vision. He went to study at the University of Paris in the brilliant generation of Thomas Aquinas, joined the Order of Friars Minor, and became one of its most luminous teachers.
He took up that vision at its moment of greatest danger. Francis had left his followers a calling to absolute poverty, and after his death the order had split over how literally to keep it, the stricter Spirituals against the more moderate brethren, a quarrel fierce enough to threaten the whole movement. In 1257, at about thirty-six, Bonaventure was elected Minister General, and for seventeen years he labored to hold the two sides together, to defend the Franciscan life against its critics in the university, and to give it a stable rule and a settled mind. He is called the order's second founder, and the title is just.
Yet he was a contemplative before he was an administrator. He withdrew to pray on Mount La Verna in Tuscany, the very mountain where Francis had received the wounds of Christ in his flesh, and there the vision of the six-winged Seraph became for him a map of the soul's road to God. Out of that retreat came The Soul's Journey into God, a small book of burning prose that leads the reader up through the creatures, through the image of God in the mind, to the threshold of a love that passes beyond all thought. It ends not in argument but in surrender: "Let us die, then, and enter into this darkness," he writes, in the translation of Oleg Bychkov, "let us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father." He had warned his reader at the outset not "to assume that reading is sufficient without unction, speculation without devotion."
In 1273 the pope made him a cardinal, and the next year, at the Second Council of Lyons, he stood at the center of the great effort to heal the breach between the Latin West and the Greek East. He died there, in the midst of the council, in July of 1274. He had spent himself reconciling: the brothers of his order to one another, the mind to the love of God, and at the last the divided halves of the church. In his Life of Francis he had written that the grace of God had "appeared in His servant Francis" to teach the humble to live after the manner of Christ, and that is what Bonaventure himself labored to make visible, a learning lit from within by love.
How we know Bonaventure is from his own large body of writing and from the records of his age. The primary witnesses are his works: The Soul's Journey into God, the Breviloquium, the great Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the Collationes in Hexaemeron, and the Legenda Maior, the Life of Francis that the order commissioned and that displaced the lives written before it. The acts of the Second Council of Lyons document his final months. He was born about 1221 and died in 1274; the details of his Paris years are less firm than later accounts make them sound, and he is best placed in the school of Alexander of Hales and certainly under John of Rochelle rather than, as is sometimes said, trained directly by Alexander, who died in 1245. He took his mastership at Paris in the mid-1250s, was canonized in 1482, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1588.
Bonaventure's feast is kept on July 14, the traditional date of the Western calendar before the modern Roman revision moved it to July 15, the day of his death; both dates are in use. He is honored as the Seraphic Doctor, a title drawn from the Seraph of Mount La Verna and from the warmth of a theology centered on love, set beside Thomas Aquinas the Angelic Doctor. In art he appears as a Franciscan friar in the brown habit, often with a cardinal's hat; a favorite legend shows the hat hung on the branch of a tree, for when the papal envoys came to bring it, they are said to have found him washing the dishes and were told to hang it there until his hands were free. He is patron of the diocese of Bagnoregio and is invoked in bodily illness. Above all he is remembered as the friar who proved that the deepest learning and the simplest love of God belong together.
Further reading. Bonaventure's signature work is The Soul's Journey into God (the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum); the standard accessible edition is the Paulist Classics of Western Spirituality volume translated by Ewert Cousins, which also contains his Life of St Francis. A free online translation by Oleg Bychkov is posted by St Bonaventure University, and E. Gurney Salter's public-domain translation of the Life of St Francis is online. For an introduction to the man and his thought, Ilia Delio's Simply Bonaventure is the best lay starting point.
Online resources. Bychkov's translation of the Itinerarium (St Bonaventure University) and Salter's 1904 translation of the Legenda Maior are freely available online.
British (Received Pronunciation): Bonaventura /ˌbɒnəvɛnˈtʊərə/; Collationes in Hexaemeron /ˌkɒlæʃiˈoʊniːz ɪn ˌhɛksaɪˈɛmərɒn/; Doctor Seraphicus /ˈdɒktər sɪˈræfɪkəs/; Hexaemeron /ˌhɛksɪˈɛmərɒn/; Legenda Maior /lɪˈdʒɛndə ˈmaɪɔːr/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Bonaventure special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.