The Journey of the Mind to God

Overview

About sixty pages, written by Bonaventure, minister general of the Franciscan order and one of the leading theologians of the thirteenth century, in 1259, on Mount La Verna in Italy, the same site where Francis of Assisi, the order’s founder, had received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion appearing on his own body, thirty-five years earlier, in a vision of a six-winged seraph. Bonaventure went to La Verna specifically to seek solitude and to pray at this site, and the treatise he wrote there takes the structure of Francis’s own vision, the seraph’s six wings, as the literal architectural plan for the whole work: six successive steps by which the human mind ascends toward contemplation of God, followed by a seventh and final movement that passes beyond the six altogether.

Bonaventure was a Franciscan and a scholastic theologian trained at the University of Paris, and the treatise combines two strands that might seem, to a modern reader, to sit uneasily together: the careful, structured, step-by-step method characteristic of scholastic argument, and a deeply Franciscan sensibility that finds genuine spiritual significance in the physical, created world, in sensory experience, and in Francis’s own particular charism of seeing God’s presence directly in ordinary created things, sun, water, fire, the animals Francis famously preached to and addressed as brothers and sisters.

The argument

The plan of the six wings. Bonaventure opens by explaining the treatise’s governing structure directly: just as Francis’s seraph had six wings, the mind’s journey toward God proceeds through six successive stages of illumination, three pairs corresponding to three ways God can be contemplated, as reflected outside us in the physical world of creation, within us in the soul’s own powers and their restoration by grace, and above us in the divine names themselves, with the seventh and final chapter passing beyond all of these into a state Bonaventure calls mystical and ecstatic, no longer properly a further step of the same kind but a genuine departure from the whole rational, structured ascent that preceded it.

Steps one and two: God traced in creation. The journey’s opening stage does not begin, as some strands of medieval spirituality might expect, by turning away from the physical world toward purely inward contemplation. Instead, Bonaventure insists the mind must first attend closely to the created world itself, reading in the size, number, beauty, fullness, activity, order and diversity of ordinary created things a set of traces, vestigia, pointing toward their divine source, much as a footprint in sand points toward, without fully representing, the foot that made it. Bonaventure is unusually direct in his moral judgment of anyone who fails to make this first step: whoever is not enlightened by the splendor of created things is blind, whoever is not moved by their outcry to praise is deaf, whoever fails to draw the obvious inference to a first principle from such clear evidence is a fool.

The second step deepens this same attention to the sensible world, moving from creation considered simply as traces to creation considered as it is apprehended through the specific structure of sense perception itself, examining how the outer senses and the process of perception, judgment and delight in what is perceived can themselves become a further, more articulated mirror reflecting the wisdom and goodness of their maker.

Steps three and four: the soul as the image of God. The journey’s middle stage turns inward, from the external world to the soul’s own powers, memory, understanding and will. In the third step, Bonaventure examines these three powers as a natural image of the Trinity within every human mind, memory corresponding to the Father, understanding to the Son, and will to the Holy Spirit, a structural parallel drawn from Augustine’s own earlier exploration of psychological analogies for the Trinity in his treatise on that subject.

The fourth step considers this same threefold image not merely in its natural condition but as it is reformed and restored by grace, through faith, hope and love, arguing that sin has damaged and disordered the soul’s natural capacity to reflect God clearly, and that only grace, working through the theological virtues, can repair this damaged image and prepare the soul for the higher stages of contemplation that follow.

Steps five and six: the divine names. The journey’s final pair of steps turns from the soul’s own image of God to a direct contemplation of God’s own nature, approached through two of the most fundamental names by which God has traditionally been known. The fifth step considers God under the name of Being itself, drawing on the biblical revelation to Moses at the burning bush, I am who I am, and developing an extended meditation on pure, unqualified, necessary Being as the most fundamental thing that can be said of God. The sixth step considers God under the name of the Good, developing a parallel meditation on the self-diffusive, overflowing nature of goodness itself, and Bonaventure treats this sixth step as the culmination of the entire six-stage rational ascent, the point at which contemplation of the divine Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit understood through the dynamics of self-communicating goodness, becomes most fully and explicitly present to the mind.

The seventh step: beyond the intellect. The treatise’s final and most striking chapter departs decisively from the careful, structured method of the six preceding steps. Having climbed as far as reason, contemplation and the mind’s own natural and grace-assisted powers can carry it, Bonaventure insists the soul must now let go of intellectual operation altogether and pass into what he calls a mystical and secret darkness, in which nothing further can be understood but everything can be loved. This is not, he is careful to insist, an anti-intellectual dismissal of everything the preceding six steps achieved, since those steps remain the necessary preparation without which this final passage could not occur, but a genuine claim that the mind’s highest possible act, union with God, exceeds and lies beyond what intellectual understanding, however elevated, can itself achieve. Bonaventure closes with an image drawn directly from Francis’s own life and death, urging the reader to die to all ordinary cares and pass over, with Christ crucified, from this world to the Father, ending the treatise not with a further argument but with an exhortation to a kind of death that only love, not understanding, can accomplish.

How to read it

Read the treatise as a single continuous journey, in the order Bonaventure presents it, since each step is explicitly built to prepare for and lead into the next, and the whole architecture depends on the sequence from external creation, through the soul’s own powers, to the divine names, and finally beyond all of these.

Pay particular attention to the first two chapters if you come to this text expecting a purely inward, world-rejecting mysticism. Bonaventure’s insistence that the physical, created world is itself a genuine and necessary starting point for the mind’s ascent toward God, rather than an obstacle to be overcome, reflects a distinctively Franciscan sensibility that finds real spiritual significance in ordinary sensory experience.

Notice how carefully structured and scholastic the first six steps are, with their explicit pairings, parallels to the Trinity, and systematic movement from outside to within to above, before the seventh chapter departs from this structure almost entirely. That contrast, rigorous system followed by a deliberate move beyond system, is itself part of the treatise’s argument about the ultimate limits of rational, structured contemplation.

Read the seventh chapter slowly and resist the temptation to treat it as simply more of the same kind of content as the preceding six steps. Bonaventure is making a genuinely strong claim here, that the intellect’s own highest operations must finally be set aside for union with God to occur, and taking that claim seriously, rather than assimilating it back into ordinary rational argument, is essential to understanding what the chapter is actually doing.

Read this treatise alongside Augustine’s Confessions, whose psychological analysis of memory and the soul’s powers Bonaventure draws on directly in steps three and four, and consider reading it alongside Dante’s Paradiso, another thirteenth or early fourteenth century work that similarly ends by gesturing toward an experience that exceeds what ordinary language and rational description can fully capture.

Questions it raises

• Does beginning the mind’s ascent to God with attention to the physical, sensory world represent a genuinely different spiritual method than traditions that begin by turning away from sensory experience toward pure inward contemplation, and if so, what does each approach gain or risk losing?
• Is the seventh step’s claim, that the intellect must ultimately be set aside for union with God, compatible with the careful, rigorously argued scholastic method of the six steps that precede it, or does it represent a genuine departure from, even a quiet critique of, that method?
• What work is the Trinity analogy in steps three and four actually doing? Does finding a natural threefold structure in the soul’s own powers constitute real evidence for the Trinity, or does it function more as a meditative aid than an argument?
• Bonaventure calls anyone who fails to read God’s traces in creation blind, deaf or a fool. Is this a fair characterization of someone who simply does not experience the natural world as evidence for a creator, or does it assume too readily that the inference is self-evident?
• How should a modern reader, who may not share Bonaventure’s framework of traces, images and divine names, engage productively with a text this thoroughly structured around specifically medieval theological categories?
• The treatise ends by urging the reader to die and pass over with Christ crucified. What does it mean for a work of careful, structured theological argument to conclude by gesturing beyond argument entirely, toward an experience it explicitly says cannot be taught or understood, only desired and received?