Summary
First transcribed:Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 1259 (The Journey of the Soul to God, 1937; also as The Mind’s Road to God, 1953, and The Journey of the Mind to God, 1993)
Edition(s) used:The Mind’s Road to God, translated with an introduction by George Boas. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Subgenre(s): Allegory; guidebook; instructional manual; mysticism; spiritual treatise
Core issue(s): Contemplation; the divine; God; illumination; soul; the Trinity; union with God
Overview
Giovanni di Fidanza was born in central Italy near Viterbo in 1221. He studied under Alexander of Hales at the University of Paris, where he later became a professor of theology. He entered the Franciscan order in 1242, was made general of the Franciscans in 1257, and became bishop of Albano in 1273. Gregory X made him a cardinal shortly before Bonaventure’s death in 1274. He was canonized by Sixtus IV in 1482 and in the sixteenth century was made a doctor of the Church by Sixtus V. Bonaventure’s other notable works include De reductione artium ad theologiam (before 1274; On the Recution of the Arts to Theology, 1938) and De triplici via (1260; The Enkindling of Love, Also Called the Triple Way, 1956).
In the prologue to The Mind’s Road to God, Saint Bonaventure tells of ascending Mount Alverna thirty-three years after the death of Saint Francis and shortly after having become minister general of the Franciscans to meditate and seek spiritual peace in the very place where Saint Francis had experienced the miraculous vision of the crucified Seraph. While in that place Bonaventure had the same vision, and he reports, “While looking upon this vision, I immediately saw that it signified the suspension of our father himself in contemplation and the way by which he came to it.”
The six wings of the Seraph, he writes, are to be understood as signifying the six stages of spiritual illumination by which the soul ascends to God. The way is only by the blood of the Lamb, Bonaventure adds, for the six stages of illumination begin with God’s creatures and lead up to God only “through the Crucified.” (The recounting of the miraculous vision illuminates Bonaventure’s subtitle, “The Mendicant’s Vision in the Wilderness,” and makes understandable Bonaventure’s honorific designation as “The Seraphic Doctor.”)
The basic image of Bonaventure’s spiritual allegory is that of a six-winged angel, seen as bearing three pairs of wings, each pair symbolizing one of the three major phases in the ascent to God. The first pair of stages involves reflecting on the sensible, corporeal world; the second pair consists in the contemplation of the mind’s own powers; the third is contemplation of God’s essence. The ascent to God, then, calls for seeing God through and in the body, then through and in the mind, and, finally, through and in the features of pure being. Bonaventure accordingly divides his treatise into seven chapters, the first six having to do with the six stages of illumination, and the seventh with the mystical experience of the union with God by which peace comes to the spirit.
Throughout his account of the stages in the ascent to God Bonaventure emphasizes that the securing of beatitude, the “fruition of the highest good,” requires divine help. None can be blessed, the saint writes, “unless he ascend above himself, not by the ascent of his body but by that of his heart,” and then he adds, “But we cannot be raised above ourselves except by a higher power raising us up.”
Prayer is vitally important also, Bonaventure writes....
(This entire section contains 2611 words.)
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Divine help comes to those who seek it by means of prayer “from their hearts humbly and devoutly.” Just as Bonaventure himself was illuminated about the stages in the ascent to God only after having humbly and devoutly prayed on Mount Alverna, so others can find through prayer the kind of knowledge needed for the ascent.
The world is a ladder for ascending to God because just as a work of art reveals much about the artist, so the world bears traces of God’s hand. Accordingly, Bonaventure advises, “we ought to proceed through the traces which are corporeal and temporal and outside us; and this is to be led into the way of God.” To seek God through recognizing and appreciating the signs of his creative power in the world we sense is the first mode of understanding and ascent.
The second mode of understanding is by taking our own minds as the objects of reflection, for our minds “are the eternal image of God, spiritual and internal.” Having learned the way of God by examining the world, we proceed to awareness of the truth of God through and in our minds.
The third and final mode of ascent is by turning our minds to what is “eternal, most spiritual, and above us,” the First Principle of being, God himself.
Bonaventure summarizes his preliminary account of the three modes of understanding and ascent by calling attention to the three aspects or, one might say, prospects of the mind. In the first mode, the mind refers to body, “whereby it is called animality or sensuality”; the mind then looks into itself, and in that aspect it is spirit; finally, the mind looks above itself, and here it is properly called “mind.” Body, spirit, and mind, then, are aspects of the soul realized in the contemplative ascent to God.
These three modes are twofold, he next comments, “in so far as we happen to see God in one of the aforesaid modes as through a mirror and in a mirror.” Thus, just as God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, so the “microcosm,” the soul, “by six successive stages of illumination is led in the most orderly fashion to the repose of contemplation.”
Corresponding to the six stages of ascent are the six stages of the soul’s powers by which that ascent is made; namely, sense, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and “the illumination of conscience.” These powers of the soul must be exercised through prayer, holy living, and striving for truth by way of the sixfold ascent.
The soul can become aware of God’s power, wisdom, and benevolence by contemplating, believing, and reasoning: By the contemplation of created things one may come to understand the significance of their actual existence; by believing one can become aware of the significance of the habitual course of things; and by reasoning one can grasp the principles of things and their potential excellence.
Having explained in chapter 1 how the soul by the use of its powers can begin the ascent to God by reflecting on the traces of God to be found in the created, corporeal things outside us, Bonaventure proceeds in chapter 2 to explain how one can move from seeing God through the objects of our senses to seeing God in the sensible world.
Bonaventure declares: We apprehend the world through the five senses. We then delight in the natural form, power, and operations of things. Finally, we judge insofar as we use our intellectual powers of abstraction to appreciate the principles of things. It is the “number” in things, their rhythmical proportion, that is the primary trace of God. Through apprehension, responsive delight, and intellectual judgment, then, we realize the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.
In the third chapter Bonaventure calls upon us to enter into ourselves, to examine our own minds as the mirror through which God can be seen, for in our minds “the divine image shines.”
To see the reflection of God in our minds requires use of the powers of memory, intellect, and choice. Memory enables us to retain and represent all things present, past, future, simple, and eternal. (According to Bonaventure, memory “retains the past by recalling it, the present by receiving it, the future by foreseeing it.”) Memory, intelligence, and will reflect the Blessed Trinity, “Father, Word, and Love,” Bonaventure concludes; memory leads to eternity, intelligence to truth, the power of choice to goodness. Thus, the soul in the “trinity of its powers” is “the image of God.”
Bonaventure turns now to “The Reflection of God in His Image Reformed by the Gifts of Grace.” He begins chapter 4 with the remark that “since not only by passing through ourselves but also within ourselves is it given to us to contemplate the First Principle, and this is greater than the preceding, therefore this mode of thought reaches to the fourth level of contemplation.” The emphasis is on the word in; on the third level of contemplation the soul recognized the powers of God through contemplation on the mind’s powers, but now one is called upon to see God in the mind.
No one, however, can be illuminated and find the First Principle in the finite, created mind who does not receive the gift of grace. The soul cannot intuit the divine in itself unless “the Truth, having assumed human power in Christ, should make itself into a ladder, repairing the first ladder which was broken in Adam.” We are called upon, therefore, to “believe in Him, hope in Him, and love Him”; Christ will then be the Mediator by whom the soul can so enter into itself as to find and accordingly take delight in the Lord in itself.
The third mode of contemplation, the fifth and sixth stages of the ascent to God, may now be undertaken. Bonaventure reminds us that we may contemplate God not only outside ourselves through his traces and inside ourselves through his reflected image in the mind, but also above ourselves “through His light, which has signed upon our minds the light of eternal Truth.” By reflection on God as Being, one realizes God’s essential attributes (this would be the fifth stage); and then by knowing God as Goodness, one would know the three Persons of God (the sixth stage).
Bonaventure advises (in chapter 5, “Of the Reflection of the Divine Unity in Its Primary Name Which Is Being”), “If you wish then to contemplate the invisible traits of God in so far as they belong to the unity of His essence, fix your gaze upon Being itself.” God is pure Being in that there is nothing of nonbeing in God and there is absolute actuality. Pure Being is divine.
We are accustomed to thinking of particular beings and of potentialities and possibilities, and often we are absorbed with what is not actual; hence, it is difficult to fasten our minds on being, pure being that is Being, the divine unity that is God. Bonaventure writes of the “blindness of the intellect” and of the “mind’s eye, intent upon particular and universal beings” that accordingly does not contemplate Being itself. However, if one can concentrate on pure Being, Bonaventure writes, “If you see this in the pure simplicity of your mind, you will somehow be infused with the illumination of eternal light.”
In chapter 6, “Of the Reflection of the Most Blessed Trinity in Its Name, Which Is Good,” Bonaventure begins by developing a point introduced at the close of the previous chapter; namely, that pure Being is goodness, the Good. The Good is the foundation of the contemplation of the “divine emanations,” the Trinity. Since the Good is better than nonbeing, “it cannot rightly be thought of unless conceived as both three and one.” The Good must be “self-diffusive”; that is, the Good must be productive of good, pouring forth love and receiving love; it must be Word and Gift in virtue of being Good; it must be Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Hence, as pure Being, God is unity and the Good, but since the Good is necessarily a Trinity, God is necessarily both Unity and Trinity.
Bonaventure’s effort to reconcile polarities and resolve paradoxes is more a celebration of God’s essence and emanations than it is a clarification. The emphasis is on the blessedness of God and the wonders of discovery at the heights of contemplation. Bonaventure’s principal theme remains clear even in the midst of his most intellectual, theological efforts: By reflecting on the world outside, the soul inside, and the God above, one is brought to the elevated condition of repose in the presence of God.
In the closing chapter of his work, Bonaventure emphasizes the proposition of faith that the passage up the six steps of contemplation to the seventh stage of repose and illumination by supreme wisdom is made possible by Christ: “In this passage Christ is the way and the door, Christ is the stairway and the vehicle, like the propitiary over the ark of God and the mystery which has been hidden from eternity.”
The seventh and final stage of mental and mystical elevation (of the kind granted to both Saint Francis and Bonaventure on the heights of Mount Alverna by the vision of the seraph with six wings nailed to the cross) is one in which all intellectual operations cease, “and the whole height of our affection should be transferred and transformed into God.” This ultimate stage of elevation, Bonaventure adds, is “mystical and most secret, which no man knoweth but he that hath received it.”
Despite his effort to describe the mind’s six stages in the passage that culminates in the unifying experience of divine illumination, Bonaventure exultantly concedes that “If you should ask how these things come about, question grace, not instruction; desire, not intellect; the cry of prayer, not pursuit of study; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the wholly flaming fire which will bear you aloft to God with fullest unction and burning affection.”
Christian Themes
The Mind’s Road to God allegorizes the Christian spiritual path as follows: The six wings of the Seraph correspond to the six stages of illumination by which the soul ascends to God. Six stages of the soul’s powers enable us to ascend by six stages to God: sense, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and conscience. We may ascend to God by reflecting on his traces in the sensible world, by considering our natural powers as reflecting God, and by achieving illumination through Christ as mediator. Each of these three modes of understanding is twofold: We see God through them and in them.
The six stages, then, are these: We understand God through sensible things as bearing the traces of his creative power; we see God in sensible things as essence, potency, and presence; we enter our own minds and see God’s image stamped upon our natural powers; by grace we see the First Principle in ourselves; by reflecting on pure being, we know God as unity; by reflecting on the goodness of pure being, we know God as Trinity.
Sources for Further Study
- Bonaventure, Saint. Bonaventure: “The Soul’s Journey into God,” “The Tree of Life,” “The Life of St. Francis.” Translated with an introduction by Ewert Cousins. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. This is a useful and clear presentation of three of Saint Bonaventure’s most important writings.
- Bougerol, Jacques Guy. Introduction to the Works of Bonaventure. Translated by José de Vinck. Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1964. A helpful guide to Bonaventure’s principal works.
- Cullen, Christopher M. Bonaventure. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. A concise volume in the publisher’s Great Medieval Thinkers series, introducing Bonaventure’s thought for a student and general audience. Bibliography, index.
- Gilson, Étienne. The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure. Translated by Dom Illtyd Trethowan and F. J. Sheed. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938. Gilson’s scholarly analysis enhances his careful presentation of the historical context of Bonaventure’s life and works.
