Justified True Belief

(●) The friar who ran Francis’ order for seventeen years and drew the century’s best map of the road from the world to God. + On the twelfth of August, 1257, the university of Paris finally admitted two friars to its faculty of theology after years of resisting them. One was Thomas Aquinas. The other was Bonaventure, and by then he had already been elected head of the Franciscans and was about to spend the rest of his life governing an order of thousands rather than lecturing to a hall of students. Those two men are the reason the thirteenth century still matters to Christian thought. Aquinas took the newly recovered Aristotle and built a theology that reasons upward from the world. Bonaventure took Augustine, added Francis, and built one that reads the world as a book about its maker and then insists that the reader will not get to the last page by reading harder. His short masterpiece, the Journey of the Mind into God, lays out six steps of ascent and then says something no textbook says: at the top, put the books down. He was born Giovanni di Fidanza in a hill town of central Italy. Nobody is certain when. The date printed most often is about 1221, and a substantial body of scholars argues for about 1217 instead, reasoning back from the rule that a Franciscan minister general, meaning the friar elected to govern the whole order, had to have reached forty, and he was elected to that office in 1257. No document settles it, so every age given for him is an approximation. What is not in doubt is the arc: an Italian boy sent north to school at about fourteen, a master of theology at about thirty-three, a minister general at about thirty-six, a cardinal at fifty-two, and a corpse at the Second Council of Lyons with the pope and the whole council at the funeral.

(●) c. 1221 AD: Born Giovanni di Fidanza at Bagnoregio, and nearly dead there before he was old enough to remember it. + Bagnoregio sits on a ridge of soft volcanic rock in central Italy, between Orvieto and Lake Bolsena, in territory the popes governed. The town is still there, and so is the older settlement beside it, now nearly emptied and reachable only by a footbridge, because the rock keeps crumbling away beneath it. Later sources name his father Giovanni di Fidanza, a physician, and his mother Maria di Ritella; the boy was given his father’s name. He tells the one story from his childhood himself, more than thirty years later, and he tells it to explain why he agreed to write about Francis of Assisi at all. He had been gravely ill as a small boy, and he was, in his own word, snatched from the jaws of death by the invocation and the merits of Francis. He does not say what the illness was, and he does not describe the scene. A legend that surfaces only in the fifteenth century fills in the gap with his mother making a vow to the saint, and with Francis himself exclaiming O buona ventura, "O good fortune," over the healed child, which is where the name Bonaventure is supposed to have come from. That story is charming and very late, and Bonaventure never breathes a word of it. What he vouches for is only the debt. Even the year is uncertain. Around 1221 is the date most often printed, four or five years before Francis died; a number of scholars prefer about 1217, working back from the rule that a minister general had to be forty years old. Nothing else in the life turns on which is right, but it is why every age given for him is an approximation.

(●) 1235 AD: Sent north to Paris at about fourteen, he entered the schools and never really left them. + Paris in the 1230s was to theology what Florence would later be to painting. A boy arriving from Italy went first into the faculty of arts, which meant the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic and rhetoric, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Lectures happened in rented rooms on a narrow street where the floor was covered with straw for the students to sit on, and the whole course took six or seven years of listening, disputing, and memorizing. The masters who taught that way, and who wrote the way they taught, are the ones later histories call the schoolmen: teachers of the new universities whose settled habit was to put a question, line up every objection to it, and then answer them one at a time in order. He came out of it a master of arts in 1243, licensed to teach the subjects he had just spent his adolescence learning. He was, on the usual reckoning, about twenty-two. Everything he wrote afterwards has the marks of that training on it: the numbered divisions, the objection answered before it is raised, the habit of setting three things in a row and showing that they are one thing seen three ways. He never lost the schoolman’s scaffolding, and he learned to hang warm and startling things on it.

(●) c. 1243 AD: He took the Franciscan habit, and then spent a decade earning a chair the university did not want to give him. + Francis had died in 1226, and in the seventeen years since, his movement of barefoot preachers had turned into an order with houses in every city and lecturers in the universities. Bonaventure joined it, most likely in the year he finished his arts course, though some scholars put his entry as early as 1238. He studied theology under Alexander of Hales, a celebrated English master who had done something the university found nearly incomprehensible: past fifty, and comfortable, he gave away his income in 1236 and put on a patched grey habit. What he did not give away was his chair, meaning the teaching post that came with a seat in the faculty of theology, and that is the point of the story. He carried the chair into the order with him, which is how the Franciscans came to hold one at Paris at all, and how a boy from Bagnoregio came to inherit it. Alexander died in 1245, and another of Bonaventure’s teachers, John of La Rochelle, died in the same year. There is a saying about the young Italian that his later biographers report and attribute to Alexander: that in Bonaventure it seemed as though Adam had never sinned. It is a lovely line. It also comes to us at second hand, from men who were writing his praises. The career that followed was the standard one, and every step of it had a name. A man taught first as a bachelor, which in a medieval faculty meant a junior lecturer still working toward a licence of his own, and the bachelor owed two courses. Bonaventure gave the first on the Bible, taking the Gospel of Luke. The second was on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the textbook in four books that every medieval theologian had to comment on, and out of that requirement came his own longest work. By Easter 1254 he was a licensed master. Then the trouble started. The secular masters of Paris, meaning the teachers who were not members of a religious order, had come to resent the friars, and the grievances were concrete ones. The friars held chairs out of proportion to their numbers. They charged their students no fees, which was what a secular master lived on. And when the university went on strike, they kept teaching. A strike was the one weapon the masters had, since a body of teachers who owned no buildings could always stop lecturing and threaten to carry the schools off to another town, which is a threat that works only if everybody stops together. On top of all that, they answered to a minister general in Italy rather than to the faculty they taught in. William of Saint-Amour turned all that resentment into an argument, publishing in 1256 a book called On the Perils of the Last Times that read the begging orders, meaning the friars who lived on alms rather than on land and rents, as the false teachers Scripture had warned about. It was a serious charge, and Bonaventure answered it seriously, in his disputed questions on evangelical perfection. A disputed question was a formal classroom debate in which the objections were put at full strength first and answered afterwards, and what he defended in this one was voluntary poverty, argued from the practice of Christ and the apostles. Pope Alexander IV condemned William’s book in October 1256 and ordered the masters to receive the friars. They stalled for another ten months. On 12 August 1257 the faculty finally admitted Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas together.

(●) 1257 AD: Elected head of the Franciscans at about thirty-six, with the order pulling itself in two. + He was elected minister general on 2 February 1257, six months before Paris got around to admitting him as a master, and he held the office until two months before his death. Seventeen years, and by the end the order had him down as its second founder. The job was a mess. Francis had left a rule, a testament, and a movement that assumed everyone in it would be as free of possessions as he was; fifty years on there were thousands of friars, university chairs to staff, libraries to keep, and churches going up. One party inside the order, the strict wing whose heirs would later be called the Spirituals, wanted the founder’s poverty kept literally, down to the cut of the habit and the refusal of books. Another wanted the order to do the work the church was asking of it, which took buildings and study. The quarrel had already cost his predecessor, John of Parma, who resigned in 1257 in the wake of a scandal over the writings of a friar named Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, whose Introduction to the Eternal Gospel announced a coming third age of the Spirit and was condemned in 1255. Bonaventure’s settlement was to hold both ends. Poverty was real and not negotiable, and property could be used without being owned; study was not a betrayal of Francis but a service to the church, provided it ended in love rather than reputation. He put the order’s law in order at the general chapter of Narbonne in 1260, a chapter being the assembly where the heads of the provinces met to legislate for everybody, and then he spent the rest of his generalate, which is what a minister general’s term of office is called, on the road, visiting provinces and writing letters to the whole order about the things he found there, including friars who begged more comfortably than they needed to.

(●) 1259 – 1266 AD: On Francis’ mountain he wrote his masterpiece, and then he wrote Francis’ life. + In October 1259 he went up La Verna, a wooded crag in the Apennines that a Tuscan count had given to Francis, to be alone for a while. It was on that mountain, thirty-five years earlier, that Francis had received the stigmata: the wounds of the crucified Christ appearing in his own hands, feet and side, reported by the brothers who washed the body after his death. Francis had seen, in the vision that came with them, a seraph with six wings. A seraph is one of the burning angels of Isaiah’s vision, who cover their faces with one pair of wings, their feet with a second, and fly with the third (Isaiah 6:2). Bonaventure sat down with those six wings and turned them into a book. The Itinerarium mentis in Deum, the journey of the mind into God, is about thirty pages long and lays out six steps: God found outside us in the things he made, God found inside us in the mind that is his image, God found above us in Being itself and in Goodness itself, and then a seventh chapter that is not a step at all but a rest, where thinking stops and love keeps going. The order asked him for something else. At the chapter of Narbonne in 1260 the friars commissioned an official life of Francis from their minister general, and he went to Assisi to interview the men who had known him while they were still alive to be asked. The Legenda Maior, the Major Legend, was finished by 1263 and approved by the chapter at Pisa that year. Three years later, at the chapter of Paris in 1266, the order decreed that the earlier lives of Francis should be destroyed now that the authorized one existed. That decision was normal administrative practice in its century, and it was taken for reasons a governor of several thousand men would recognize. It also did real damage, and of everything in his record it is the one charge that sticks.

(●) 1267 – 1273 AD: He went back to Paris to argue that the new philosophy was swallowing theology whole. + While he had been governing the order, the arts faculty at Paris had been reading Aristotle in earnest, with the commentaries of the Muslim philosopher Averroes at their elbow, and some of the masters there were teaching conclusions that could not be squared with the creed: that the world had always existed and was never made, that there is one shared intellect for the whole human race rather than a mind of your own, that everything under the heavens happens by necessity. Bonaventure came back to Paris three times in seven years to give sets of evening talks, called collations, to the students. He gave the first in Lent 1267 on the Ten Commandments, the second in Lent 1268 on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the last at Easter 1273 on the six days of creation. They are not gentle. His charge is not that Aristotle is worthless, since he uses him constantly, but that a philosophy which will not take correction from revelation ends by contradicting itself, and that a teacher who begins by explaining the world without God will end by explaining God away. The Paris talks of 1273 stop in mid-course, at the twenty-third collation, because the man giving them was made a cardinal and had to leave. What survives of them is not even his own manuscript. Everything we have was taken down in the hall by students trying to keep up with him.

(●) 1273 – 1274 AD: Made a cardinal against his wishes, he spent his last year working for peace with the Greeks and died in the middle of the council. + Pope Gregory X made him a cardinal on 28 May 1273 and bishop of Albano, and consecrated him that November. A story that his biographers liked has the papal messengers arriving with the cardinal’s hat and finding him washing the dishes outside a friary near Florence, so that he told them to hang it on a tree until his hands were free. It is a good story and a late one. Gregory had called a council at Lyons to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, which had been out of communion since 1054, and to get the crusade and the reform of the clergy moving again. Bonaventure was one of the men the pope leaned on to prepare it. He resigned as minister general on 19 May 1274, twelve days after the council opened, having governed the Franciscans for seventeen years. The union with the Greek delegation was proclaimed in July, in a session where the creed was sung in both languages. He died at Lyons on 15 July 1274, in the middle of the council, at about fifty-three. Peter of Tarentaise, a Dominican who would be pope himself within two years as Innocent V, preached the funeral sermon, and the pope and the fathers of the council buried him. The union he had worked for did not hold; it was repudiated in Constantinople within a decade. He was canonized in 1482 by Sixtus IV, and in 1588 Sixtus V named him a doctor of the church, which is the title reserved for the handful of writers whose teaching the church holds up for every Christian and not only for their own order. The same pope fixed on him the name that had followed him for more than two centuries already: the Seraphic Doctor.

What He Taught

(T1) Every created thing is a footprint of its maker, and the world is a book written in his hand. + You know a friend’s handwriting before you read a word of the note. You have never thought about how you know it; the shape of the letters simply is the person, in the only way a person can get onto paper. Bonaventure thought the world was like that, and he built almost everything else on it. His word for a creature considered this way is vestigium, a vestige, which in Latin means the print a foot leaves in soft ground. A footprint is not a foot. It tells you nothing about the walker’s face. But it is genuinely caused by the foot, it genuinely resembles it, and a tracker can follow it. Every stone and starling, he says, is a vestige of God in that sense: it exists, so it points to the one who is Being; it has a form, so it points to the Word through whom things are shaped; it is good for something, so it points to the Spirit. He arranges creation in three grades. Everything whatever is a vestige. A rational soul, which can remember, understand and love, is an image, because those three powers are a created echo of Father, Son and Spirit. A soul made holy by grace is a likeness, which is nearer still. Rocks bear the trace, minds bear the picture, saints bear the resemblance. He is not inventing this out of nothing. Paul had already written that God’s invisible attributes "have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20), and the psalms had said the heavens do the declaring (Psalm 19:1). What Bonaventure adds is the metaphor that stuck: the world is a book, and the Trinity is what is written in it. He also adds the sober half of the thought, which is that the book has become hard to read. The eye that was supposed to read it is damaged, and so a second book was given, the Scriptures, to teach a blinded reader how to read the first one. That is why he never treats the argument from creation as a substitute for revelation. It is the same God signing his name twice, once in things and once in words.

(Q) "All the creatures of this world of the senses lead the soul of the one who contemplates them wisely into the eternal God, since they are the shadows, echoes and pictures of that first principle most powerful, most wise and most good ... they are traces, likenesses and displays set before us for the seeing of God, and signs divinely given." + Source: Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum II.11 (Quaracchi Opera Omnia V; translated from the Latin). He has just finished the two chapters on the senses, and this is the summary he draws from them before turning inward to the mind. The omitted words pile up more names for the one thing creatures point back to: that eternal origin, light and fullness, that art which makes and models and orders. The three words at the turn are worth slowing down for: umbrae, resonantiae et picturae, shadows and echoes and pictures. A shadow is not the thing; an echo is not the voice; a picture is not the sitter. All three, though, are caused by what they are not, and all three are how you find it (T1).

(T2) The world has not been going on forever, and reason alone can show it. + Here is a small exercise that has been bothering people for eight hundred years. Counting upward from one is easy enough, and you can keep at it as long as you have breath. Now try counting down to zero from infinity, and watch what happens. Wherever you decide to begin, you have already cheated, because the number you picked out sits a finite number of steps from the end, and the steps before it were the whole trouble. There is no way to run that film. Something about arriving at a definite point after an unlimited number of steps refuses to work, and that refusal is the engine of the argument Bonaventure is most remembered for outside his own order. The question in his century was live in a way that is easy to miss now. Aristotle had taught that the cosmos never began; it has simply always been going, with no first day. When his complete works came into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the best philosophy available to Christendom arrived with an eternal universe attached to it. Bonaventure’s response, worked out in his commentary on the Sentences and pressed again in the Paris talks of 1273, is that the eternity of the world is not merely unproven but impossible, and that six separate arguments show it. Three of them still get used: - You cannot add to an infinite. Whatever receives an addition becomes greater, and nothing is greater than the infinite. But every day the sun makes another circuit, and the past is longer today than it was yesterday. So the past was never infinite to begin with. - You cannot walk across an infinite. If the world had no beginning, an unlimited number of days had to elapse before today. The film has to have been run, and it cannot be. - You would have an actual infinity of souls. An actual infinite is a collection that is already complete with infinitely many members in it, as against a series that merely keeps going without ever stopping. Human souls, on the Christian account, do not die. So if the past never began, infinitely many people have already lived, and there would exist right now an infinite collection of souls, every one of them real and all of them at once. Aquinas, lecturing in the same city in the same years, agreed that the world in fact began and disagreed about the proof. He held that a beginning is known by faith, on the word of Genesis 1:1, and cannot be demonstrated, since God could in principle have kept a world in being from everlasting. The picture he uses for it he takes from Augustine: a foot that has rested in dust from everlasting would have an everlasting print beneath it, and nobody would doubt the foot had made the print. The two friars are not divided about the creed. They are divided about how much of it unaided reason can reach, and that particular argument has never gone quiet.

(Q) "It is impossible to add to the infinite. This is evident of itself, for everything that receives an addition becomes greater, and nothing is greater than the infinite." + Source: Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences II, d.1, p.1, a.1, q.2 (Quaracchi Opera Omnia II; translated from the Latin). The first of his six arguments against a beginningless world, stated as a bare principle before he applies it to the revolutions of the sun. The move that follows is the whole case in one line: if the world had no beginning, its duration is already infinite, and yet today has been added to it (T2).

(T3) Every kind of knowledge is a small light, and all of them are lit from one. + A workshop can have one window and still light forty tools. Bonaventure wrote a short piece called De reductione artium ad theologiam, which means retracing the arts back to theology, and which began life as the second half of his inaugural sermon as a master before it travelled on its own. It sorts human knowing into four lights coming through that one window: the outer light of the crafts, the lower light of the senses, the inner light of philosophy, and the higher light of Scripture. By "the arts" he means both halves of what a medieval man could learn. There are the seven liberal arts of the schools, and there are the seven mechanical arts he lists as weaving, armour-making, farming, hunting, navigation, medicine and the theatre. He takes them seriously, and his argument runs through the shop floor rather than around it. Watch a craftsman: he holds an idea in his mind, he makes something outside himself that answers to it, and if the work is good he loves it. Father, Word, Spirit. The carpenter is not being used as a decoration. Bonaventure thinks the structure of making is a real trace of the maker, so that even joinery, honestly examined, has the Trinity’s shape in it. What he does not mean is that the sciences should stop and let theology do the talking. He means that they are ordered to something, the way a road is ordered to a destination, and that a study which forgets what it is for goes strange. He had a second reason for saying so, which is his doctrine of illumination: when a mind judges that something is certainly true, it is measuring the case against a standard it did not invent and cannot revise, and Bonaventure holds that the standard is the eternal light of God shining in the mind. Nobody has to be aware of this to do arithmetic. But on his account the reason arithmetic works at all is that a creature is being lit from somewhere.

(Q) "And so it is plain how the manifold wisdom of God, which is handed down clearly in Sacred Scripture, lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature. It is plain too how all branches of knowledge are handmaids to theology." + Source: Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam 26 (Quaracchi Opera Omnia V; translated from the Latin). The opening of the last section of the piece, after he has walked through the crafts, the senses, philosophy and Scripture in turn. The Latin word behind "handmaids" is famulantur, they serve; a handmaid in a great house is not despised, she is trusted with the household (T3).

(T4) The road to God runs through the crucified, and the last step on it is love rather than thought. + A man can read every book ever written about swimming and still drown. There is a kind of knowledge that only arrives when you are in the water, and Bonaventure’s most famous book is about the moment when the reading has to stop. The Journey of the Mind into God takes the six wings of the seraph Francis saw and makes them six ways of looking. Two look outward at creation, which bears the footprint. Two look inward at the mind, which bears the image, since memory, understanding and will are three in one soul. Two look upward at God himself, first as Being and then as Goodness, and the second of those contains an argument he loved: the good, by its nature, pours itself out and shares itself, so the highest good must be pouring itself out perfectly and eternally, which is to say there is a Father who gives everything he is to a Son, and a Spirit who is that love. Then comes the seventh chapter, where the whole apparatus is set down. He calls it a passing over, a passover. The mind goes quiet, the affections do not, and what carries a person the last stretch is not a better argument but fire. This is where the word mystical earns its keep, and it is worth taking it away from the fog it usually sits in. For Bonaventure it does not mean a special feeling for gifted people, and it certainly does not mean a technique. It means that God is not an object the mind can get around and hold, so that the closer you come the less there is to grasp and the more there is to love. The safeguard he builds in is blunt and stands at the front of the book: there is no way up except through the burning love of the Crucified, and no one enters except through him. Paul had said the same thing in one line: "For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). The ladder in Bonaventure is not a stair for the clever to climb; it is a man on a cross, and the climbing is done by being drawn.

(Q) "If you ask how these things come about, ask grace, not learning; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligence in reading; the Bridegroom, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not daylight; not light, but the fire that sets a man wholly ablaze and carries him over into God with ecstatic anointings and burning affections." + Source: Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum VII.6 (Quaracchi Opera Omnia V; translated from the Latin). It opens the last paragraph of the book, and it is a remarkable thing for a Paris master to write at the end of a work of tightly argued theology. He has just spent six chapters teaching a reader to think, and he closes by telling him that the last stretch is not covered by thinking (T4).

(T5) A life can be an argument, and the life he trusted most was Francis’. + Ask most people what convinced them Christianity might be true and you will not usually get a syllogism. You will get a person: a grandmother, a neighbour who kept showing up, someone who forgave something that did not deserve forgiving. Bonaventure would not have found that a lowering of the standard. He thought a holy life was evidence, and he wrote a whole book on the strength of it. The Legenda Maior is not a modern biography and does not pretend to be. It is arranged by virtue rather than by year, so that the chapters climb the same ladder the Journey climbs, and it treats Francis as a man in whom the pattern of Christ became visible enough to be read. That reading has an edge on it. In the prologue Bonaventure identifies Francis with the angel of Revelation 7:2, ascending from the rising of the sun with the seal of the living God, and the seal he has in mind is the stigmata. It is his own interpretation of the text and not a doctrine anyone is bound to; but it shows what he thought he was doing. He was not writing an appreciation of a good man. He was arguing that God had put something on public display in Umbria in the 1220s. The book did what he wanted, and it also did what he did not intend. Every friar in Europe now had one authorized Francis, which quieted the arguments inside the order about what the founder had really meant. It quieted them by narrowing them, and that narrowing is the one entry his own record cannot get out from under.

(Q) "For I, who remember as though it happened but yesterday how I was snatched from the jaws of death, while yet a child, by his invocation and merits, should fear to be convicted of the sin of ingratitude did I refrain from publishing his praises." + Source: Bonaventure, The Life of Saint Francis (Legenda Maior), Prologue 3 (E. Gurney Salter translation, Temple Classics, 1904). He is explaining why he took the commission when he felt unworthy of it. The whole of his relationship to Francis is in that sentence: a debt contracted before he could understand it, and a book written more than thirty years later to pay it (T5).

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The order got one settled founder, and the church made the man who gave it to them a teacher of everybody. + Within a generation of his death Bonaventure was being read outside the Franciscans and outside the schools. Dante, at work on the Paradiso in the last years before his death in 1321, put him in the sphere of the sun among the wise, and did something deliberate with him: in the eleventh canto the Dominican Aquinas delivers the praise of Francis, and in the twelfth the Franciscan Bonaventure delivers the praise of Dominic. Each order is honoured by the other, which is exactly the courtesy the two men had shown each other in Paris. A century and a half after his death Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the university of Paris and one of the most careful minds of his age, built his own teaching of the contemplative life on Bonaventure and pressed him on students of theology as the safe author to read. He gave his reason in the treatise he wrote on how to test a teacher’s doctrine: Bonaventure’s pages carry no vain trifles and no useless quibbling, and he does not mix worldly digressions into serious theology the way so many do. The church made the judgment formal in stages. Sixtus IV canonized him in 1482. Sixtus V named him a doctor of the church in 1588, putting his teaching on the short shelf the church recommends to every Christian, and confirmed the nickname that had attached itself to him long before: Doctor Seraphicus, the Seraphic Doctor, after the six-winged seraph of La Verna. His Legenda Maior did its own quieter work. For six centuries it was simply the life of Francis, the one read aloud in the refectory while the friars ate their dinner, the one preached from and painted from, and the twenty-eight frescoes of the cycle in the upper church at Assisi carry inscriptions that paraphrase his text scene by scene. Almost everything the ordinary Christian in Europe knew about Francis, he knew from Bonaventure.

(†) He and Aquinas became the two settings the Christian mind still runs on. + The two of them lived a few streets apart, taught the same students, entered the faculty on the same day, and died four months apart in 1274 with the same council in view, Aquinas on the road to it and Bonaventure in the middle of it. Later readers have used them as a matched pair ever since, and the comparison is genuinely useful as long as it is not turned into a contest. Aquinas begins from the world and reasons up. He takes Aristotle as a working instrument, keeps philosophy and theology methodically distinct, and is content to prove less by reason if what reason proves is solid. Bonaventure begins from God and reads back down. His master is Augustine; he holds that a mind is lit from above whenever it judges, that creation is a book rather than a mechanism, and that theology exists to make its student holy rather than merely correct. The Franciscan tradition after him ran along his lines, and John Duns Scotus a generation later is working in the house Bonaventure built even where he rebuilds the rooms. The modern recovery of him has come mostly from that comparison being taken seriously. Étienne Gilson’s study of 1924 argued that Bonaventure has a coherent philosophy in his own right rather than a half-finished version of Aquinas’, which had been the lazy verdict. In the 1950s a young German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger wrote his second doctoral thesis on Bonaventure’s theology of history, had it sent back by one of his examiners, rewrote it, and published it in 1959; half a century later, as Benedict XVI, he was still teaching from Bonaventure in public. For a reader today the pairing is worth more than either half. One of them shows what Christian reasoning about the world looks like at its most disciplined; the other shows what it looks like when it has not forgotten what it is for.

(†) His case against an endless past is still being run, by people who have never read him. + Of everything he wrote, the piece with the longest afterlife outside theology is the one that looks most like a bare puzzle: whether an infinite series of past days could have been got through. Bonaventure said no, and said it in a form philosophers can still pick up. The argument travelled. In the century after his death the question of whether the world’s beginning is demonstrable stayed open, with Aquinas’ more cautious position gradually winning the field among the schoolmen. It surfaced again in the modern revival of the cosmological argument, which is the family of arguments that reasons from the existence of the world back to a cause of it. William Lane Craig’s work from the 1970s onward on the kalam argument, which takes its name from kalam, the theological reasoning of the medieval Muslim schools, where the case for a beginning was pressed hardest, treats Bonaventure at length and defends a descendant of his second argument: that a collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite, so the series of past events had a first member. Critics answer that the mathematics of infinite sets, worked out by Georg Cantor in the nineteenth century, shows that an actually infinite collection is coherent, and that the intuitions Bonaventure trusted are intuitions about finite things. That exchange is live, and honest accounts of it do not declare a winner. What is worth noticing is the shape of it. A friar arguing in 1250 against a thesis of Aristotle’s produced a piece of reasoning that a physicist or a philosopher of mathematics can still take up and test on its own terms. He would not have found that surprising. It was exactly his claim that the light one thinks by is not one’s own.

(†) Where his own record is open to criticism: he gave the order one life of Francis by getting rid of the others. + The honest entry against him is a decision taken under his government, at the general chapter of Paris in 1266. With the Legenda Maior approved as the official life, the chapter ordered that the earlier lives of Francis be destroyed. There was a real case for doing it, and the case deserves stating before the cost is counted. Superseding an old official text with a new one was ordinary practice; the Dominicans had displaced the earlier lives of their own founder a decade before, when Humbert of Romans wrote the legend of Dominic that their general chapters approved between 1254 and 1256. The order was tearing itself apart over what Francis had really wanted, and rival lives were ammunition. A minister general trying to keep several thousand men in one body had a real reason to want one authorized account. The cost was real too. The lives written by Thomas of Celano, a friar who had known Francis personally and had written within a few years of his death, went out of circulation. They survived only because copies existed outside the order’s houses, and scholars had to recover them centuries later. A movement that believed its founder’s life was itself evidence had thinned the evidence, and the sources closest to the man are the ones it thinned. That is a fair thing to hold against him, and it does not require assuming bad faith to say so. A second charge is harder to weigh. The later chroniclers of the Spirituals, the strict wing that wanted Francis’ poverty kept to the letter, tell a darker story, and Angelo Clareno tells it most fully in his Chronicle of the Seven Tribulations. They report that Bonaventure presided over the examination of his own predecessor, John of Parma, for sympathy with the prophetic writings of Joachim of Fiore, the abbot whose reading of history lay behind the coming third age of the Spirit that had got Gerard of Borgo San Donnino condemned, and that John was confined afterwards at the hermitage of Greccio. Those chroniclers were writing decades later as partisans in a quarrel Bonaventure had ruled against, and the details of their account cannot be taken at face value. That his settlement of the order was enforced, and that men on the strict wing paid for it, is not in dispute.