Having confessed my fascination with lists yesterday, I feel the need now to offer a good example. Today the church commemorates the foremost Franciscan theologian St Bonaventure, the 'Seraphic Doctor'. He got that title largely because of a certain list. This will sound strange to the modern mind, but I find it strangely appealing. When St Bonaventure was seeking some inner peace, he took a retreat at Mount Alverna, the site where his spiritual father Francis saw a vision of a seraph fixed to a cross and received the stigmata. Bonaventure used this image as the focus for his mystical theology, which is a wonderful synthesis of Franciscan insights and piety and the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius. The list is a progressive one which describes the mystical journey into God as an ascent with six steps; six being the number of the seraph's wings.
In his prologue to this work, Bonaventure said that the goal of the spiritual life is peace, such as Francis preached unceasingly. His little work of mystical theology proposed 'paths to pass over to peace through the ecstatic raptures of Christian wisdom.' He describes the ascent from the sensible world (interior and exterior) which bears the image of God to the interior world of darkened thought and union with God. He has a high place for the human intellect, but when it comes to the point of 'passing over into God' (pesach), all thought must be left behind:
I you ask how all this comes to be, ask grace not teaching, desire not understanding, the groan of prayer not the effort of reading, the Bridegroom not the teacher, God not man, darkness not brightness, not light but rather the fire that wholly enflames and transforms into God by its extreme anointments and most ardent affections. [from chapter 7, The Mind's Journey into God trans. Bernard McGinn]
To some, it may seem that Bonaventure was responsible for domesticating the wild and free Franciscan movement but it seems to me that he provides another strand to the Franciscan way - a passionate theology of contemplation to accompany the way of radical poverty. His vision lacks nothing of the vigour and warm intensity of Francis' unique spiritual outlook and he gives some intellectual credibility to a movement that might otherwise risk a kind of anti-intellectual bias. But his interest is not in ideas for their own sake, but practical wisdom to lead people into the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.
He is a slightly neglected figure from the mediaeval church and I am sad that he does not appear in the Scottish Episcopal Church's calendar of saints. Maybe I should do something about that...
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