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THE SCHOOLMEN Bonaventure received his licence to teach in 1248 and wrote his own commentary on the Sentences; he became head of the Paris Franciscans in 1253, though troubles in the university made it diYcult for him to exercise his oYce During this period he wrote a textbook of theology called Breviloquium Four years later he was made minister-general of the whole order, and was faced with the delicate task of reconciling the diVerent factions who, since St Francis’ death, claimed to be the true perpetuators of the Franciscan spirit He reunited and reorganized the order and wrote two lives of St Francis, one of which he imposed as the sole oYcial biography, ordering all others to be destroyed Not every Franciscan, of course, welcomed his reforms: ‘Paris, you destroy Assisi’, objected one dissident But it would be quite wrong to see Bonaventure as primarily an academic and an administrator In the middle of his troubles as minister-general he wrote a devout mystical treatise, The Journey of the Mind to God, the book by which he is nowadays best known It presents itself as an interpretation of the vision of St Francis on Monte Alvernia, where he received the stigmata, the impression of the wounds of Christ Bonaventure’s administrative gifts were widely admired, and in 1265 he was chosen by the Pope to be archbishop of York He begged to be excused, thus depriving that see of its chance to compete in the history of philosophy with Canterbury’s St Anselm He was unable, however, to decline appointment in 1273 as cardinal bishop of Albano In that year he wrote his last work, Collationes in Hexameron, dealing with the biblical account of creation A year later he died at the Council of Lyons, having preached there the sermon that marked the (short-lived) reunion of the Churches of East and West In his writings Bonaventure, unusually for the Latin Middle Ages, presents himself explicitly as a Platonist Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s Theory of Ideas, he believes, are quite easily refuted From the initial error of rejecting the Ideas there follow all the other erroneous theses of Aristotelianism: that there is no providence, that the world is eternal, that there is only a single intellect, that there is no personal immortality, and therefore no heaven and no hell (CH, vision III 7) Bonaventure did not, however, believe that Ideas existed outside the divine mind; they were ‘eternal reasons’, exemplars on which creaturely existence was patterned These, and not the material objects in the natural world, are the primary objects of human knowledge 61
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