Bonaventure

He was born Giovanni di Fidanza at Bagnoregio in central Italy, about 1217. The story he tells is that he was gravely ill as a small child and his mother prayed to Francis of Assisi for him, and he recovered. He went to Paris to study, joined the Franciscans around 1243, and studied theology under Alexander of Hales.

He was teaching at Paris in the 1250s alongside Thomas Aquinas, the two friars, a Dominican and a Franciscan, at the same university at the same moment, both under attack from the secular masters who wanted the mendicant orders thrown out of the schools. They were admitted as full masters on the same day in 1257. By then Bonaventure had already been elected Minister General of the Franciscan order, at about forty.

The order was tearing itself apart. Francis had died in 1226 leaving a movement committed to absolute poverty. One party, the Spirituals, held that the founder's rule must be kept literally, no property, no buildings, no books. The other wanted an order that could run schools, staff parishes, and own the roof over its head. Both sides claimed Francis.

Bonaventure spent seventeen years holding it together. He legislated, travelled constantly, deposed his radical predecessor's supporters, and wrote an official life of Francis, the Legenda Maior, that was so carefully balanced the general chapter of 1266 ordered all earlier lives destroyed so that his would stand alone. That order was an act of governance, and it cost the church some early sources.

His theology went the other direction from Aquinas. Where Thomas built out from Aristotle, Bonaventure stayed with Augustine and with the Victorines, and insisted that the point of learning is love. His most famous work, The Journey of the Mind into God, was written in 1259 on Mount La Verna, where Francis had received the stigmata. It maps the ascent in six stages, from seeing God through the created world, to seeing him in the image of the soul, to contemplation above the mind, and ends by saying that at the summit the intellect must fall silent and only love goes further.

He also wrote the Breviloquium, a compact summary of theology, the Collations on the Six Days, and a commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences.

He was made cardinal bishop of Albano in 1273, the legend says the envoys found him washing dishes and had to wait, and did much of the work of the Second Council of Lyons, which briefly reunited the Greek and Latin churches. He died during the council, on 15 July 1274, four months after Aquinas.

Sources: Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind into God, Breviloquium, and Legenda Maior; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. V; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); The Little Flowers of St. Francis.