Two men climbed Mount La Verna in Italy, St. Francis of Assisi in 1224 and thirty years later St. Bonaventure. What the Seraphic Francis lived, the mind of the Seraphic Doctor Bonaventure sought to understand so "as much as possible (to) be restored, naked of knowledge, to union with the very One who is above all created essence and knowledge."1 Both men had the same ideal: to rise from the contemplation of God’s symbols in creatures to the vision of uncreated goodness itself.

LIFE AND WORKS2

Appointed in 1248 to the Franciscan chair as regent-Master at the University of Paris, Bonaventure lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and wrote his Commentary on the Sentences3 and its compendium, the Breviloquium,4 theological works along Augustinian lines. As Minister General of the Friars Minor, he reconciled traditional and innovative minded Franciscans and wrote his most famous work, The Journey of the Mind to God.5 In his Collations on the Six Days6 he affirmed the noblest truths of Christian thought and warned university students against current errors. Shortly after playing a major role in the reunion of the Eastern Church with Rome at the Council of Lyons, Bonaventure died. In recognition of his holiness, he was canonized in 1482.

Bonaventure agreed with Solomon "that God made man simple; man’s complex problems are of his own devising" (Ecclesiastes, 7:29-30). Rather than entangle himself with an infinity of questions, Bonaventure, like Augustine, reflected on those core problems of knowledge and reality that centered around man’s relation to God. To be sure that he was investigating these central issues within a Christian perspective rather than merely within a context of purely natural reason, Bonaventure would have to determine the relationship between faith and reason.7

Bonaventure followed the general medieval tradition of recognizing two sources of knowledge: faith founded on the authority of God and the Church, and reason which is based on the natural evidence of things. He was strongly concerned about thinkers who came to rational conclusions at odds with the teachings of faith. Some Masters of Arts at the University of Paris followed Averroes’ view of a necessary eternal world and the same separate intellect for the whole of mankind. Such conclusions from the principles of natural reason could not be reconciled with the Christian belief in the free creation of the world in time and in man’s personal responsibility and immortality. Siger of Brabant, a Latin Averroist, wanted both faith and reason, though he could not reconcile them.8

Within the framework of a faith seeking understanding, Bonaventure investigated the central problem of God’s transcendence and immanence in creation. Aristotle’s world with things possessing a definite essence seems to make them unduly independent of God and cast doubt upon their intrinsic relation to the creator. The lessening of God’s presence in the universe undermines human knowledge of him. In addition, the Aristotelian conception of a world moved by natural necessity runs contrary to the Christian view of a universe presided over by a free God. Bonaventure specified the question of God’s transcendence and immanence in terms of his exemplar, efficient, and final relation to creatures.9

which illumines intellectual truths, and the "superior light" of theology which illumines salvific truths.10 Enlightened by God through Jesus Christ the exemplar, man can read the great books of the universe, the soul, and God himself.11

The pure philosophy of Plato and Aristotle operating by natural reason begins with the inferior light of sense perception and is consummated in the interior light of understanding which illumines intelligible truths.12 This illumination is required for both abstraction from sense images of material things and for self-reflection. Since philosophy has its own proper object, intelligible natural truths, and proceeds according to its own inner illumination, it is methodologically distinct from other sciences.

Although philosophy is de jure capable of conferring certitude upon thought, de facto it is severely limited in the present human condition, incapable of concluding from the evidence of first principles without intermingling the grossest errors, for example, the eternity of the world in Aristotle. Pure rational philosophy stunts truth with error.13

The man of simple faith is wiser than the most learned philosophers who are like ostriches with wings enabling them not to fly but only to run more quickly. To attain wisdom, "the order is to begin with the firmness of faith and proceed through the clearness of reason that you may arrive at the sweetness of contemplation, . . ."14 Philosophy, guided away from error and towards truth, becomes an organic part of Christian wisdom.15

Theology overcomes the limitation of philosophy to reason and sense experience by beginning with revelation accepted as true by faith. This procedure enables theology to descend from God as he shows himself to his effects, whereas philosophy needs to ascend from visible effects to God as the first cause.16 The supernatural truths which theology demonstrates to render the "credible" intelligible transcend the natural truths of philosophy.

The superior illumination of Sacred Scripture enables the mind to see salvific truths. Human vision has been so dimmed by Adam’s sin that "this book, the world, became incomprehensible; the key to its understanding was lost."17 Like a dunce before some Hebrew script, he is puzzled by the book of the universe. With the revelation of Sacred Scripture, man has a kind of dictionary to help in translating that forgotten language of the world. Scripture unlocks the secrets of the cryptogrammic creation: the Trinitarian exemplar of creation; the symbolic, moral and mystical expressions of the Trinity in all creatures; the return of the universe through man to the knowledge, love and praise of God.

- Mysticism. Knowledge of creation and the creator is deepened by the theological application of metaphysical concepts to revelation. To light man’s way to God, the mystical theologian translates theoretical conclusions into practice by giving love priority over speculation about revelation.19 The soul rises to God by reading with unction, reflection with devotion, seeking with admiration, deep attention with joy of heart, skill with piety, knowledge with charity, understanding with humility, application with grace, and light with the inspiration of divine wisdom.20

- Resolution to Theology. The cognitional light of science and philosophy can be resolved to the superior illumination of sacred theology, which enables the mind to see the mystical meanings expressed by divine wisdom in the world. Analogies of the eternal generation of the Word, the Christian pattern of life, and the union of the soul with God are disclosed respectively, for example, in natural philosophy as sensible forms in matter, abstract forms in the mind, and ideal forms in divine wisdom.21 The resolution and subordination of all the sciences to theology brings about the unity of Christian wisdom.22

In view of creation as an exemplification of divine wisdom, Bonaventure investigated reality by analogical reasoning. Aristotelian demonstration is an inadequate tool for uncovering the metaphysical structure of a universe which is sustained, controlled and animated by divine analogy. With syllogistic reasoning subordinated to the logic of proportion, analogical thinking can demonstrate a true correspondence between the created symbol and the uncreated exemplar.23

- Augustine and Aristotle. Bonaventure found Augustine more effective than Aristotle in defining and developing the Franciscan vision. He admired Augustine as the "greatest of the Latin Fathers"24 and adopted him as "the master whose authority is definitive and whose words can never be contested."25 Consistent with this Augustinian preference, he favored Plato’s spiritual vision of God and ideas to Aristotle’s empirical concern for things in themselves. By no means did Bonaventure neglect to adopt Aristotelian ideas such as act and potency, substance and accident, abstraction, the agent and possible intellect. Whatever he inherited, however, he adapted to the mind of Augustine, the master who combined Aristotelian science of things in themselves and Platonic wisdom of transcendent realities to understand the Christian faith.

In his encounter with the issues of knowledge and reality within a philosophico-religious framework, Bonaventure responded under the influence of Augustinian and Aristotelian ideas by developing his main themes in relation to God, the world, and man. Like Pseudo-Dionysius, he cyclically unfolded his leit motifs: from God as the exemplar expressing himself in creation to God as the final goal towards which man moves by divine illumination. The ontological basis of this cycle is the axis of divine goodness which is self-diffusing and finalizes all other beings. "Our whole metaphysics is concerned with exemplarism, emanation and the consummation of beings, namely, to be enlightened by spiritual rays and to return on high. Thus you will be a true metaphysician."26

Metaphysics, like creation, must begin with God as the exemplar cause of all things27 to acquire a true understanding of reality. The key to Bonaventure’s whole philosophy is the concept of exemplarism, a doctrine originating from Plato’s archetypal forms or ideas. To overcome the limitations of the Platonic theory of ideas, Bonaventure adopted Augustine’s vision of the divine Word as the exemplary cause of all reality and knowledge.28

When the intellect correctly views reality in the light of exemplarism, it can know God who is eminently knowable in himself. On the limits of man’s knowledge of God, Bonaventure reaffirmed Hugh of St. Victor’s classic formula: "God has so tempered man’s knowledge of himself that he can never be wholly ignorant that God is even as he can never fully comprehend what God is."20 The universe is a book inscribed with brilliant characters of the Divine on every page. The man who reads the symbols of this sacred book in the spirit of St. Francis will find God manifesting Himself, like a thought revealing itself in a spoken word.30

Mystical reflection upon reality in the light of exemplarism reveals three steps of ascent to God: abstraction, self-reflection, and faith, successively deepening one’s awareness of God’s self-manifestation. "Through these successive levels, comparable to the rungs of a ladder, the human mind is designed to ascend gradually to the supreme principle who is Cod."31

A. Abstraction. Abstracting from sense data, the intellectual soul finds God in His vestiges presented by the senses in their experience of natural forms of the corporeal world, and reasons from sensible efforts to their intelligible efficient and exemplary cause. "As the cause shines forth in the effect, and as the wisdom of the artist is manifested in his world, so God, the artist and the cause of the creature, is known through the creature."32

- Evidence. The myriad properties of the things caused offer evidence of manifold relations to the cause. First, whatever is produced and posterior presupposes a prior or first being, since every effect implies a cause. Second, whatever depends upon another for its origin, operations and purpose, presupposes an independent being which exists by itself, of itself and for itself. Third, possible being presupposes a necessary being which has no possibility of nonexistence, otherwise the former would never be brought into existence. Fourth, a being composed of potentiality and actuality presupposes a being of pure actuality, for no potency is reducible to act save through the agency of what is itself in act. Fifth, whatever moves must be moved by what is unmoved, as the motion of the hand is based upon the relative immobility of the elbow. Sixth, relative being, which is in one genus or the other and unable to account for its own being, presupposes an absolute being whence all others derive such being as they have.33

B. Self-Reflection. Through self-reflection independent of sensation — a typical Augustinian approach — man turns inward and discloses his soul, not as an indistinct trace of God as a shadowy efficient cause of being, but as an image of God as a vivid object of its knowledge and love. "By the light externally given; we are disposed to re-enter the mirror of our mind’ wherein shine forth divine things."34 As individual beings are grasped and defined in view of the idea of pure being, so imperfect being is conceived in relation to perfect being. "How could the intellect know that this being is defective and incomplete, if it had no knowledge of being without any defect?"35 This knowledge of the perfect in the mind implies the presence of God in the soul.

- Evidence of Divine Truth and Goodness. With God present in human knowledge as an image naturally infused into the intellect,36 Bonaventure reaffirmed the position of Augustine that the human mind can be certain of truths in the light of divine truth. True knowledge in the soul is an image of eternal truth. As an image of God, man’s intellect naturally aspires to eternal wisdom, his will desires happiness in the possession of the supreme good, and his heart thirsts for peace in immutable being.

Unable to seek that of which he is ignorant, man’s soul must have some innate idea of supreme wisdom, sovereign good, and immutable being.37 This idea is none other than the image of the Divine in the soul. "Knowledge of this truth (God) is innate to the rational soul, inasmuch as it involves the notion of image, in virtue of which a natural appetite, knowledge, and remembrance of Him has been implanted in it, . . ."38 So evident is God’s existence within man that if concupiscence and sensible images do not veil his mind, it is unnecessary to prove that God exists.

Man’s dim, implicit awareness of the Divine becomes explicit as he grows more conscious, independently of sense experience of the external world, of his dependence on God. At most, this innate knowledge implies the real possibility of affirming God’s existence without a clear concept of his essence. Bonaventure agreed with Hugh of St. Victor that God has measured out man’s knowledge of himself in such a way that he can never be either totally ignorant of his existence or wholly comprehend his essence.39

- Anselm’s Argument. The innate idea of God validates the Anselmian argument. "God, or the highest Truth, is Being itself, than which nothing better can be thought of; hence, he cannot not exist, nor be thought of as not existing."40 Without a correct conception of God as that than which nothing more perfect can be conceived, one cannot discover the necessity of his existence. It is a contradiction to think of the most perfect being, which must exist of itself, as not existing.41 The necessity of the conclusion that God exists is grounded in the necessity of God himself present in the human mind. As necessary being, God’s existence can be simply proved by reasoning that "if God is God, God exists."42

C. Faith and Love. In its faith encounter with Jesus, the mediator between God and man, the noblest visible image of the invisible God, the soul is likened as a similitude to God by the grace of the Holy Spirit in a "love (that) goes further than vision."43 In the silence of knowledge, love transforms the soul into the similitude of God it formerly was in that earthly paradise of old.

In his understanding of the Trinitarian nature of the divine exemplar, Bonaventure reasoned that, as pure self-diffusive activity, God’s nature is fruitful: the Father begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from both through a spiration of love. God "supremely communicates Himself by eternally possessing One who is beloved (Son) and One who is mutual love (Spirit), so that He is both one and triune."44 As supreme exemplar cause, the divine Trinity is the center of reality and the key tn metaphysics.

- Simplicity. Bonaventure reasoned that as pure activity God enjoys unique attributes to a supreme degree.45 Because God is first in existence, most perfect in nature, and the ultimate end of all things, he is absolute simplicity without any composition whatsoever.46 Simplicity unifies all the divine perfections and is the ground of God’s other attributes.47 "Being absolutely simple, He remains completely undivided,"48 and one in being while his power exercises many operations. Because God’s simple essence is not limited by potency, it is infinite, and because it transcends space, it is immense so that God can be present everywhere.49 Finite creatures, impermanent because of their element of nonbeing and finitude, would like running water cease to be unless they are supported by the divine presence.50

God’s eternity flows from his simplicity and infinity. The infinite is without beginning or end, and the Simple without succession of priority or posteriority. This interminable and totally simultaneous duration of presence or possession of life is eternity.51 God’s immutability also follows from other attributes: "He does not change in place, because He is everywhere; not in time, because eternity is simultaneous; not in form, because He is pure actuality."52

- Knowledge. As sovereign truth, God is a unity of perfect intelligibility and perfect intelligence in his simple essence. The divine Father, knowing himself perfectly, eternally expresses his being in the perfect image of the Word, a generation dimly mirrored in the human intellect’s production of a concept.53 Knowing himself eternally and unchangeably in the production of the divine Word with its ideas, God also eternally and immutably comprehends all the possible reflections of his essence without any dependence on things, like the spectator’s eye motionlessly observing a passerby.54

- Ideas. The ideas of the Word, "expressions of the divine truth as far as it concerns things"55 which God’s power can produce, are the exemplar causes of all possible effects.56 Since God’s infinite power can cause an infinite number of possibles, there must be an infinity of ideas in God.57 Since the divine exemplar infinitely transcends every kind of genus, it "can be the expressive likeness of a great number of things."58

But how can there be an infinite number of ideas in God without violating his simplicity? For Bonaventure, the ideas, as regards their reality, are otologically one in God’s absolutely simple essence which transcends every distinction of existing things. How, then, can there be an unlimited plurality of these ideas? In Bonaventure’s words, "ideas are many, not by reason of what they are, but by reason of that to which they are."59 As regards what they connote, the ideas are understood as distinct — a distinction of reason — and expressed by different names. The basis of the distinction lies not in God but in the multiplicity of things connoted and in their real relation to their creator on whom they depend as copies on a model. From the human viewpoint, the divine ideas can be understood as connotatively distinct like the many rays emanating from a single source of light.

- Power. Of the infinity of possible ideas known by God, he has the power and the will to realize those which his wisdom selects. His immeasurable presence enables him to exercise his power directly over the totality of creatures.60 Since a contradiction is repugnant to God’s perfection and truth and reducible to nothing, it cannot be the term of any power; to be able to do nothing whatsoever is equivalent to not being able to do anything.61 Identical with his infinite essence and able to produce unlimited finite effects, God’s power must be infinite.

- Will. God’s power can be exercised only through his will. As will, God loves and possesses himself as the object of supreme beatitude.62 The causality of the will flows from the divine goodness which embraces both self-diffusive productivity and the end to which everything else is ordered.63 Efficient causality springs from the essence of good communicating itself as an end. Conscious of itself as cause and end, divine goodness communicates beyond itself. The conjunction of all the good’s productivity with all its desirability is the act of the divine will.64 Through the medium of the will, knowledge and power participate in converting possibles into the reality of creation.

Bonaventure unfolded the implications of exemplarism for creatures in his metaphysics of expression. The origin and structure of the physical world can be seen as it really is only when viewed as an expression of the divine exemplar.65

A. Diffusion. As the divine goodness necessarily and eternally diffuses itself inwardly in three equal, infinite persons, so it freely and temporally expresses itself in a multiplicity of unequal, finite beings without increasing or decreasing its perfection, as a point adds nothing to a line.66

B. Purpose. God’s self-diffusion terminates in his own goodness as the reason for his existence. This complete self-fulfillment in his own goodness constitutes God’s all-perfect glory. Outward expansion is "for the sake of his glory, not to increase but to manifest and communicate his glory, in whose manifestation and participation is found the highest glory of the creature, namely its glorification or beatitude."67 So intimately has the divine artist impressed his goodness upon creatures that his end becomes their goal.

C. Universal Analogy. Since God’s outer expression imitates his perfect inner emanation, all creatures resemble him in some degree. This real likeness, which excludes both an equivocal separation between the finite and the Infinite and a univocal identity of beings and Being in the same substance, gives rise to analogical relations which may be either expressive or proportionative. Analogy of expression between a model and its copy arises from the productive act engendering the likeness.58 Thus creatures are analogous expressions of the divine exemplar who made them.

Of less importance is analogy of proportion between two sets of beings of different classes. In the relation of presiding, for instance, God is to creatures as a teacher to his students and a pilot to his ship. Analogy of expression arises from the creature as an effect of God and conformed to his divine idea. It is the foundation of analogy of proportionality which presupposes the creature’s production of an effect similar to God’s causality.69

The divine artist expresses his likeness in being in three ways: vestige, image, and similitude.70

Some things are conformed to God as a vestige of Him, some as an image, some as a similitude. The vestige bespeaks a relation to God as to a causal principle; the image not only as to a principle, but also as to a motive object . . . namely through knowledge and love. The similitude looks to God not only through the modality of principle and object but indeed even through the modality of an infused gift.71

 

Vestige in the strict sense is a distant but distinct intelligible representation of God in all creatures. This divine trace in a created being flows from God’s presence as either efficient, exemplary, or final cause. Measure, order, and weight (extension, order of parts, and inclination) express attributes appropriate to each person of the Trinity: the power of the Father, wisdom of the Son, goodness of the Holy Spirit.72

- Image. The image, a proximate and distinct representation of God in every spiritual creature, arises from God’s presence not only as a cause illumining the human mind and inspiring the will, but also as an object, the truth to be known and the good to be loved.73 The image of God in rational souls and angelic spirits is "memory, intelligence and will, in which the Trinity shines forth."74 These three faculties in the soul are attributes respectively proper to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

- Similitude. The similitude, the closest and clearest likeness of God in souls gifted with divine grace,75 the most immediate and eminent mode of participation in the divine essence, the indwelling of God in every sanctified soul, arises from the presence of God who assimilates the soul to himself by a created but divine quality which prepares it for its final glorification in eternity. Graced with divinity, the soul is united to God by the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.76

D. Creation. Bonaventure criticized the inadequacy of ancient Greek theories of the world which explained only an aspect of its origin and generally assumed the eternity of matter.77 He believed that everything in the totality of its being was created by God as its total cause. "The entire fabric of the universe was brought into existence in time and out of nothingness, by one first Principle, single and supreme, whose power, though immeasurable, has disposed all things `by measure and number and weight’ (Wisdom 11:20)."78 This belief can be confirmed with decisive arguments from efficient and final causality.

- Efficient Causality. God’s creative efficient causality can be shown from his transcendence, self-sufficiency, and simplicity. What God is in being, that he is in action. Transcendent in action as in essence, God’s absolutely primary and perfect causality extends beyond the partial influence of secondary causes to produce the total substance of matter and form. God’s transcendence arises from his self-sufficiency. As God exists absolutely independent of every creature, so, as the most perfect agent, he exercises causality independently of any external instrument or pre-existing matter. God’s self-sufficiency is rooted in his absolute simplicity. An effect is proportional to its cause. Accordingly, as a composed being can produce a form in pre-existing matter, so the absolutely simple being, acting as a whole, can produce the total substance of a thing.79

- Exemplar Causality. Bonaventure agreed with Plato that the divine efficient cause works in view of the exemplar ideas to form the world. However, he strongly objected to Plato’s assumption that God, matter, and the ideas are three eternal separate causes. Bonaventure reaffirmed Aristotle’s criticism of the difficulties raised by such a supposition. To admit that matter has subsisted from all eternity in an imperfect state is tantamount to maintaining that the same form (or idea) can exist simultaneously in a state of separation and in combination with matter.80 If, as Plato held, God formed the world in view of ideas separate from himself, he would depend on them, and consequently would not be absolutely self-sufficient. To avoid this consequence, Bonaventure followed Augustine’s position that the exemplar ideas, according to which things are caused, are really identical with God. Since God alone possesses the totality of exemplar causes after which all things are patterned, he alone can create their whole substance.

- Final Causality. The necessity of God’s unique creative causality for the origin of the world can also be shown from finality. Efficient and final causes are correlative. If "all things in the world are in their whole being for the sake of another," namely, the supreme good which all beings seek, "then they are from another,"81 who is the total efficient cause of their existence. Every creature, therefore, bears a threefold causal relation to the first cause: "For everyone exists by virtue of the efficient cause, is patterned after the exemplary cause, and ordained toward the final cause. For this reason, every creature is one, true, and good,"82 thereby reflecting the Father as single source of all things, the Son as wisdom, and the Spirit as love.

- Immediacy of Creation. The very notion of creation as the production of something from nothing (ex nihilo) implies that God acted without any intermediary. Only infinite power can immediately span the unlimited distance between not-being and being to produce the total substance of a creature.88 In creating, God has no direct need of a creature’s partial instrumental causality.

- Temporality of Creation. Bonaventure opposed Aristotle’s view of the eternity of the world as a denial of the creation of the world from nothing. If the world is created from nothing, Bonaventure reasoned, it receives existence after non-existence; this means it could not have always existed.84 He also adapted arguments from Aristotle to show the impossibility of a world created eternally out of nothing. If the world were of eternal duration, then infinite time would have already passed by; yet new days added to old ones would increase the infinite number of days; but it is impossible for an actually infinite multitude to be augmented.

Thomas Aquinas objected that one can conceive of time being unlimited as regards the past and finite as regards its present to which an addition may be made.85 To this, Bonaventure retorted that if the past were infinite, there would be an infinite number of solar revolutions. Since there are twelve lunar revolutions to one solar revolution, an infinite past would involve two infinite numbers, one being twelve times greater than the other. This is an impossibility.86

- Continuation. Nothing continues to exist except by God’s power. Were creatures left to themselves they would lapse into the nothingness from which they were created. The element of nonbeing in every creature’s nature makes it naturally "vertible" or possible of falling into nothingness, unless it is held in existence by God’s will upon which it is radically contingent.87

Bonaventure understood the structure as well as the origin of contingent beings against the horizon of universal analogy. The composition of creatures, the root of all their imperfection, differentiates them from the absolutely simple uncreated exemplar.88 Hence being belongs primarily and per se to God, and secondarily and analogously to creatures.

In view of his theory of exemplarism, Bonaventure raised the Aristotelian distinction of substance and accident from the physical to the metaphysical order to explain the composition of creatures. Their being and actions not identical, creatures must develop through powers and functions which are accidents inhering in their substance.89 The fact that a created essence is common to all the individuals of a class shows that it is not identical with the individual limited subject in which it is realized. In other words, every creature is composed of the essence and the individual being. These various compositions presuppose "the difference of being and existence,"90 as Avicenna insisted. Having received their existence from God, creatures must be composed of essence and existence.

A. Hylomorphic Structure. Bonaventure inherited from Avicebron via his Franciscan teacher Alexander of Hales the doctrine of universal hylomorphism. Following Aristotle, Bonaventure conceived created essences as composed of potential matter and actual form which complement each other in the unity of a being.91 All change implies that which is moved by reason of form and that which is moved insofar as it is matter. Even angelic spirits who communicate and receive knowledge, must act by reason of a form and be acted upon by reason of matter. The universal hylomorphic composition of creatures radically distinguishes them from God who is pure act.

- Matter. Bonaventure viewed matter metaphysically and physically.92 The metaphysician recognizes abstract, common matter as lacking all form, an absolutely indeterminate potential principle of becoming. Without any shadow of formal act, "matter considered in itself is neither spiritual nor corporeal."93 Matter in itself is indifferent to receiving either the form of a body and being corporeal, or the form of a spirit and being spiritual.94 Form confers a determined existence on the corporeal or spiritual substance, and matter gives it permanence. The physical philosopher, however, restricted to considering matter as already determined in the concrete by a corporeal form, cannot bring himself to attribute any matter to angelic spirits or human souls.

- Plurality of Forms. Bonaventure also developed Aristotle’s notion of form within the Augustinian tradition of a plurality of forms hierarchically ordered in a substantial composite. Unlike Thomas Aquinas’ concept of substantial form as limitative and definitive, Bonaventure viewed it as a preparation of the body’s reception of further perfections. The form, having determined the matter, is in potentiality to a more perfect form within the unity of the individual essence. The diverse physical, vital, and intellectual properties of man indicate his possession of a multiplicity of forms. Matter has a natural appetite for a higher form, until the creature attains its perfect actuality.95 The form most perfectly fulfilling its appetite is the human soul, the crowning act of a body already determined by all the prerequisite inferior forms.96

The ordering of forms as principle of action and development is hierarchically organized in a substance. Every physical body consists of the ultimate common form of light and the elemental or mixed forms which vary with different beings.97 The elements, endowed with their own forms and ordered under the forms of mixed bodies, constitute various substances which in turn combine to make more complex substances. The substantial ordering of all the formal parts in the totality of a being constitutes a single composite.

B. Light. Like Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, Bonaventure viewed light as the substantial form of corporeal beings. Created before the sun, the empyrean heaven is pure, substantial light which confers on matter the aptitude to receive all the corporeal forms and extension.98 Highly active in nature, light is a pure luminous form inseparably actuating corporeal matter as its primary act, the most eminent created expression of God’s luminosity.99 From the greater or lesser participation of corporeal beings in the fundamental form of light arises the universal hierarchy of mystical bodies ranging from the most luminous empyrean through intermediary substances to the darkest and lowest body, the earth.

Active of its very essence, light is "multiplicative and diffusive of itself,"100 emitting itself successively as a luminous ray in bodies which it conserves, supports, and controls. Its presence is manifest in sunlight, the formation of minerals over which it presides, the disposition of matter for vegetative and sensitive souls, and the actualization of the sense powers.101 Intellectual knowledge requires the higher light of divine illumination. As a participation in God’s pure inaccessible light, light in the universe mirrors the beauty of its creator. Bonaventure’s metaphysics of light combined the Neo-Platonism of Augustine and the theories of Alfarabi, Avicenna and the pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de causis.

C. Seminal Reasons. As light explains the formal similarities of corporeal substances, so Augustine’s theory of seminal reasons accounts for their formal differences and development into new beings. This theory also enabled Bonaventure to emphasize the work of the creator by diminishing the independence of the natural agent. Aristotle taught that new forms are brought from potency to act through the efficacy of secondary causes.102 This statement may be interpreted in two ways. It may mean that the forms, passively present in matter, are effectively and originally in a particular agent who educes the form by multiplying the form in itself, as one burning candle lights a multitude of candles. This hypothesis, though it is not suggesting creation out of nothing, implies the production of some new essence. Bonaventure rejected this hypothesis for attributing the semblance of creative power to a created agent.

Incapable of actualizing itself, the virtual form needs to be perfected by an external efficient cause to attain complete being.104 As due conditions arise, the seed-forms implanted by God in the bed of matter become completely actualized under the efficacious influence of secondary agents. The superior forms develop in matter as soon as the inferior have brought it to the degree of organization that permits them to evolve.105 All living beings return to the slumbering potentiality of nature’s store and await the animating forms to actualize them anew. Never complete nor definitely annihilated, the seminal principle is always the imperfect essence of a form which may perfect itself at any moment or the receiver of a complete form in disintegration.106

D. Individuation. Bonaventure agreed with Aristotle that only individuals actually exist. Nothing can exist unless it is substantially "undivided in itself and distinct from another."107 Matter, as pure indetermination and univocally common to all creatures, cannot be the principal cause of individuation. Form, abstracted from matter, is universal and consequently can be shared by others. Comprising the whole being, the individual must be constituted from the intrinsic principles composing its total substantial reality. "Individuation arises from the actual union of matter and form, from which conjunction one principle appropriates the other."108 While matter makes something singular, the form constitutes it a definite kind of being. As a distinct impression is made by the conjunction of wax and a seal, so individual beings are constituted and multiplied by the actual union of matter and form.

- Person. The union of matter and an intellectual form constitute a person, the noblest individual among all created beings. Because of its unique dignity, a person cannot be in potency to a higher substantial form; it is immediately ordered to God alone as its end. The ultimate value of a "personality arises from the existence of a noble and supereminent nature in the substance,"109 namely, in the intellectual form, and resides incommunicably and differently in each subject. Angelic persons are formed from the actual union of spiritual matter and a preeminent intellectual form.110 Less noble are human persons who are composed of corporeal matter and a rational soul.

The glory of God finds its highest fulfillment in the corporeal universe with man who "brings in himself from his origin the light of the divine countenance."111 Man’s sovereignty over nature lies in his intellectual capacity to possess the essences of all beings and in his volitional power to master all things for his good pleasure. All sensible things exist for man through whom they are ordered to God, and man himself exists for God alone.112

A. Origin. Destined by God to preside over corporeal creation, man was created when the universe was sufficiently prepared to receive him as its crown. The bodies of all men wore contained seminally in the body of Adam, the first man, and transmitted by means of the human seed. So noble is the human soul, "signed with the image of God,"113 that it is directly created out of nothing by God and immediately infused into an organized body to constitute man a living, sensible, intellectual being.114

B. Soul and Body. The substantial union of an intellective soul and a corporeal body constitutes a human person, a distinct, incommunicable, individual rational substance of eminent dignity. This union is natural inasmuch as "the rational soul is the act of the human body."115 Composed of spiritual matter and form, the soul is individuated in itself and formally perfects matter which limits and multiplies. "Since human bodies are distinct, the rational souls which perfect those bodies will also be distinct."116

- Plurality of Forms. The soul, although individuated by its own principles and a spiritual substance in its own right, has a natural inclination to inform the body. Likewise, the body with its composition of matter and form also has a natural appetite for being actualized by the soul. In their union and mutual fulfillment, all forms, for example, the vegetative and sensitive, are essentially and hierarchically ordered under the ultimate completing form, the rational soul, to constitute a substantial unity of the human person.117

- Presence. The individual rational soul completes and subsumes lesser forms by its animating presence in the whole body. Because the soul "is the form of the whole body, it is present," not in a determinate part of the body, the heart for instance, but "in the whole body; because it is simple, it is not present partly here and partly there."118 Since the soul as the moving principle of the body is not extended in space, it can be present in its entirety in each of the body’s parts to integrate them into the organized body, without communicating the perfection of the whole to any part.

C. Soul. The limitation and changeableness of the soul imply its possession of passivity and matter, the principle of receptivity for perfections of being, life, and intelligence.119 Spiritual matter enables the soul to undergo successive determinations while enjoying a simplicity transcending quantitative parts.120 Individuated by its own forms and matter, the soul subsists in its own right.121 Form guarantees the soul’s essential being, and matter its fixed existence. If this is so, why is it united with the body? Both body and soul are constituted in such a way by their proper matter and form that they are naturally inclined to find perfection in union with each other. The soul, for example, exercises its powers fully only in informing the body.

The human soul can be briefly defined as "a form endowed with being, life, intelligence and liberty."122 Bonaventure, therefore, modified the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism with the doctrine of spiritual matter which was suggested by Augustine, taught by Avicebron, and continued by Alexander of Hales.

- Immortality. This modified version of Aristotelian hylomorphism enabled Bonaventure to uphold the unity and independence of the soul in itself, thereby facilitating the proof of its immortality. A complete individual substance in itself, independently of the body which it perfects, the rational soul can subsist separately, surviving the destruction of the body at death. The human soul’s "aptitude not to die"123 can be shown from its threefold resemblance to its creator in the order of final, exemplar, and efficient causality.

According to the principal argument from finality, the soul’s desire for perfect happiness implies a definitive possession of the most perfect good without fear of losing it. Such permanence requires the immortality of the soul as the necessary means rigorously imposed on it by the end.124

To enjoy perfect happiness, the soul must be capable of possessing God. Its form must have a perpetual duration which images the eternity of the divine exemplar. The eminent form of the rational soul so actualizes its spiritual matter that the entire soul is ennobled with an incorruptible reflection of God’s eternity. With the appetite of spiritual matter so completely satisfied in union with this form, an incorruptible image of God is constituted.125

Since the soul as an intellectual agent resembles God by its knowing without the help of the body, especially by its self-reflection and loving itself, not aging and decaying like the body but remaining young and growing in wisdom, it must be independent in being, and consequently incorruptible.126

Finally, divine justice implies a survival of the soul as a precondition to restoring the balance of the moral order by punishing the wicked and rewarding the just, especially those who sacrifice their life rather than seriously transgress the laws of God.127

D. Powers. Bonaventure accommodated Aristotle’s division of the faculties to the Augustinian tradition of the soul as the image of God. Alcher of Clairvaux viewed the different vegetative, sensitive, and rational activities of intellect and will as simply functions of the soul, as though they were wholly identical with the substance of the soul, whereas Hugh of St. Victor considered these powers simply as accidents of the substantial soul.128 With Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure regarded the faculties as distinct powers of the soul which uses them as instruments to attain their various objects.129 Consubstantial with the soul from which they immediately flow, the three powers of remembering, knowing, and willing expressly resemble the three divine persons in the unity of the divine substance.130

E. Knowledge. Bonaventure integrated Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas to explain the soul’s acquisition of knowledge through sensory and intellectual activities. He upheld the unity of human knowledge by maintaining that the distinct operations, without becoming identified, pass into one another by moving from the inferior to the superior until their reunion in the soul, their common source.131

- Senses. Following Aristotle closely, Bonaventure viewed human knowledge as beginning with sensation, the operation of a corporeal organ receiving, independently of the matter of objects, the sensible species or form existing in matter.132 As the animator of the body, the soul senses through the five organs of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell. Sight and touch directly attain their objects,133 while the others indirectly reach theirs by species which emanate from the thing through the medium. Whereas the first kind of sensations grasps absolute properties of bodies, resistance and color, the second perceives properties which are producible, but not necessarily possessed, by objects.134 The distance between a sensible object and an organ is spanned by each body’s self-diffusing form of light radiating a resemblance of itself through the surrounding medium and determining the sensory organ.135

- Act of Sensation. With the object activating the organ, the act of sensation takes place as the likeness contacts the soul.136 Bonaventure departed from Augustine’s view of the soul forming the content of sensation from its own substance, and agreed with Aristotle that the soul is determined in its perception of the sensible species from the exterior physical world.137 But Bonaventure was quick to add in true Augustinian fashion that the moment the soul’s sensitive faculty is stimulated, the soul spontaneously discerns and judges the content of the sensible object. Bonaventure, evidently, attempted to reconcile the Aristotelian conception of sensation as a passive modification of the human composite and the Neoplatonic notion of sensation as an action of the soul.

- Internal Senses. The activities of the lower external senses are united to those of the higher internal senses in their common source, the soul. The soul’s powers ramify in the different external senses through the common sense which penetrates them, perceiving the bodily organ, and comparing, ordering the unifying the various sensations.138 The sensible species gathered up by common sense are preserved in the imagination and revived by memory.139 Memory in its recall of the likeness of things shows itself as the soul always present to itself.

- Intellect. Rationality passes through common sense to enrich and complete the senses. "The act of reason redounds upon the senses, and the act of the senses is ordered and subserves the act of reason; and hence one is stimulated by the other."140 The cycle of psychological activities with the influence of the superior penetrating the inferior and the experiences of the inferior returning to the superior, begins and ends in the soul.

The soul’s intellectual power can discover the nature of material things by transposing the sensible content of images into the intelligible order. The intellect illumines the sensible content by abstracting the intelligible likeness informing it. The single intellect performs both passive and active functions. As the possible intellect abstracts the intelligible content from sensible matter and judges it only insofar as it is influenced by the active intellect, so the active intellect illumines the intelligible likeness insofar as the possible intellect is informed by the abstracted likeness.141 These two interdependent functions belong to the single activo-passive intellect.

- Abstractive Knowledge. Bonaventure reaffirmed Aristotle’s teaching that the intellect can abstractively acquire scientific knowledge of sensible things. Created a clean slate (tabula rasa), as Aristotle described it, with nothing written on it, the intellectual soul needs to turn its "lower face," as Augustine would say, towards the material world to abstract the intelligible content of sensibles. Recourse to sense experience enables the soul to know corporeal beings foreign to its own spiritual nature.142

- First Principles. In abstracting the intelligible content of sensible things, the intellect spontaneously apprehends first principles in their universality. They are rightly described as virtually preformed in thought as "the habit of first principles," or "the created light of principles."143 Directly responding to sense experience, the intellect can readily judge with certainty that the whole is greater than the part, or that man should respect and obey his parents.144 The intellect is innate, the principles acquired.

- Reflection. In addition to Aristotelian abstraction via sensation to know the material world, Bonaventure recognized along with Augustine the possibility of grasping incorporeal objects in the purely intelligible domain without sense images needed only when corporeality is interposed between the object and the soul. Without the intervention of sense perception, the "higher face" of the soul, "superior reason," can turn directly inward upon itself and upward towards noble realities such as the virtues of the soul and God. Always present to itself in memory as habitual knowledge, the soul immediately experiences itself in self-reflection.145 The soul also directly encounters God who is even more present to it. With knower and known as one and the same in self-reflection, the soul enjoys habitual self-consciousness.146

- Innate Idea of God. Reflecting upon itself as an image of the divine exemplar, the soul becomes aware of God’s existence. The knowledge of this truth (God’s existence) is innate in the rational mind, inasmuch as the mind is an image of God, by reason of which it has a natural appetite and knowledge and memory of Him in whose image it has been made and towards whom it naturally tends, that it may find its beatitude in Him.147 As this dim, implicit idea of God becomes clear and explicit through self-reflection, the soul discloses God as the exemplar of truth and tends towards him as the end of desire.

- Innate Knowledge of Virtues. Contemplation of the experience of virtue discloses its meaning resident in the soul. In the presence of its affection of love and its natural light for recognizing truth and rectitude, the soul reflexively acquires an explicit consciousness of love rightly directed towards God.148 The innate knowledge of the virtues is impressed on the soul by God in the form of a natural light and direction of the will towards good.

F. Truth. Bonaventure viewed truth in terms of being or essence. The truth of being is the essence insofar as it is that which it is. The essence grasped and fully conceived by thought is the truth of knowledge. Truth includes both the essence of the thing and the representation of the essence in thought. This twofold character is expressed in the classic definition of truth: "The adequation of the thing and the intellect."149

- Illumination. Like Plato and Augustine, Bonaventure found two conditions necessary for truth and certitude: immutability of the object and infallibility of the knowing subject. These two prerequisites cannot be adequately accounted for by changing sensible objects or by a fallible, mutable mind.150 Man’s intellectual soul is infallibly converted to immutable intelligible objects such as God, the soul itself, and necessary principles, only insofar as it is influenced by God’s infallible, unchangeable light, or eternal ideas.

To reach what is infallible in God’s light and what is unchangeable in his truth, superior reason must experience an immediate contact with God’s eternal principles.151 Whatever the variable content obtained by abstraction or reflection, divine illumination assures the mind of certitude in infallibly grasping the invariable formality of truth without implying a direct vision of God’s ideas.152 The Augustinian doctrine of illumination, therefore, completes the Aristotelian theory of abstraction.

- Regulation. Eternal principles directly regulate human knowledge of truth by communicating stability and necessity to it. In obedience to these absolute rules governing its thought, the intellect can infallibly judge with certitude concerning the content derived by abstraction and reflection. In the intellect, the eternal ideas organize the multiplicity of sensible experiences by ordering it towards simple universal first principles of being and complex first principles of knowledge and ethics.153

- Idea of Being. The resolution of judgments to the necessary first principles assures the mind of God’s immediate collaboration and guarantees the truth-value of propositions. Thought conceives every object in terms of the idea of being which cannot be viewed by means of any other concept inasmuch as it is the first principle expressed by the intellect.154 Infallibly known and necessary, the notion of being, immediately presenting itself to the intellect as first and absolute, can represent none other than God, total being itself. The reduction of any act of understanding to the idea of being shows that nothing can be apprehended without knowing God, the measure of all true knowledge.155

- Contuition. The divine light, without which nothing can be understood, is not directly known, remaining inaccessible to intuition.156 The divine ideas are only indirectly affirmed by thought in view of the results flowing from them, as the existence of an unseen source is known in the flowing waters that are seen. The mind "contuits," or mediately apprehends, God’s presence in his effects — the soul, things, and transcendent principles — immediately experienced.157 Truth is seen, not through, but in the eternal ideas.

Moral self-reflection intuitively discloses that man desires knowledge in his investigation of the sources of things, happiness in his seeking to procure good or to avoid evil, and peace in the repose following from the attainment of truth and goodness.158 Out of love, the will freely pursues peace.

A. Will. The "will is nothing other than a rational affection or appetite"159 of the soul for an object. As a natural power, the will is immutably inclined to happiness, while as a deliberative faculty, it can adhere to good or to evil as though it were good. At one and the same time natural and deliberative, it remains unchangeably directed towards happiness in its indeterminate relation to different objects.160

- Liberty. The human will exercises liberty as regards act and object. Master of its own willing and in absolute possession of itself, the will is capable of acting or not acting as it so desires. It can choose its objects without being externally determined to seek this or that good proposed to it.161 In this dominion of a rational will lies man’s exalted dignity.

Self-dominion is rooted in the depths of a rational being. Man wills goods such as virtue which are values desirable in themselves and intelligible only to the mind. Freedom with respect to values such as justice and charity presupposes reason.162 The will’s mastery over its proper act requires rationality. Appetition arises from the rational command of the will which, at its pleasure, can move and restrain its own operations as well as the bodily members, detest what it formerly loved and love what it formerly disliked. Whereas servitude is the lot of irrational animals, liberty is the privilege of rational animals.

- Choice. "Choice is the same as judgment, at whose will the other powers are moved and obey."163 Free choice involves the collaboration of the intellect’s self-reflection with the will’s decision to set it in motion. "Choice implies the act of reason regulated according to the command of the will."164 Though a habit of two powers, free choice enjoys a permanent unity emanating from the essence of the soul.

- Primacy of Will. In the spirit of Augustine, Bonaventure held for the priority of the will over the intellect. The process of free choice begins in reason and is consummated in the will. While disposing the will to act rationally, knowledge comes to perfection with the command of the will in the act of choosing.165 The rational dictation of the good to be followed or the evil to be avoided finds fulfillment in the will’s approving or rejecting, eliciting or refraining.166 The godlike gift of free choice, inchoate in reason, is competed in the will, its master.

Adequately conceived, "free choice bespeaks a faculty free from coercion and ordered to the conservation of rectitude."167 In this orientation of liberty towards goodness, Bonaventure viewed free will as analogically the same in man and God. So essentially inviolable and absolute is freedom of action in relation to good that it cannot be less plenary in man than in God.168 Compared to the infinity of divine freedom, however, human liberty is limited by physical and moral conditions that come into play in the total act of man’s free will. In God, free choice is his essence which is rectitude and justice itself, whereas man’s free choice as a habit to observe rectitude is defectible and able to commit moral evil.169

- Evil. The capacity to sin, however, is not essential to liberty.170 This capacity for deficiency is neither good because it is not something nor evil because it does not denote a privation of some good, but rather an impotency arising from the imperfection of the human condition.171 The malice of an act is from free choice not as an efficient but as a deficient cause.

- Necessity. While external acts commanded by free choice can be coerced, internal elicited acts of willing, choosing, and consenting, cannot be compelled, but only be induced or impeded.172 The necessity of immutability is not repugnant to liberty. "In the act of willing itself," a being "moves itself and has dominion over itself, so it is said to be freed, although it is immutably ordered to the object,"173 thereby excluding the possibility of preferring its opposite.

Perfect Liberty. The capacity for choosing opposites arises, not from liberty, but from the imperfection of man’s earthly condition as a voyager distant from his ultimate end. In the perfect condition of the blessed in heaven, liberty is purified of the impotency of sinning. The attraction of the supreme good does not in the least remove man’s self-dominion over his affection: "Clarity of knowledge is not in our power, but the ardor of affection is in our power."174 In the state of glory, man freely moves himself to love God in an immutable order of love, and enjoys perfect liberty.

B. Charity. Charity is the original, universal, moral perfection of free will. Man freely wills another as other insofar as it is good and worthy of love. The universal object of the will is good as such, and the adequate object for all its tending to good is God, the supreme good. In terms of its object, then, "charity is the love by which God is loved on account of Himself and one’s neighbor on account of God."175

The meaning of charity can also be shown from an analysis of the twofold affection of the will for one’s own good in concupiscent love and for the good of another in the love of friendship.176 Charity, love of the supreme good, is the highest kind of friendship. The depth of charity depends on the intensity of affection: "The order of charity looks less to the magnitude of the desirable good than to the preponderance of the lover’s affection."177 Charity is "love inestimably esteeming what is loved."178

In the intensity of charity, man loves God with his whole heart. Affection can be total either as a love of God fully dominating one’s heart in its every movement towards God to the exclusion of every extraneous inclination, or as a love preferring God above everything else. Complete charity in the first sense belongs to the blessed in heaven, and in the latter case it can be experienced on earth through the infusion of God’s grace.179 Charity can be aptly described as "a weight inclining to the supreme good and perfect beatitude."180

The supreme good is the unifying object of charity, for in loving God man wills every good for himself and his neighbor through grace and glory.181 Since love of self and others is ordered to love of the supreme good as one’s principal end, charity is man’s basic spiritual perfection, grounding his whole moral life.

Charity can be resolved into a twofold movement of affection. In the first inclination, love for God is prior. "Since God is the more principal object, the inclination with respect to God Himself is the cause of the inclination towards one’s neighbor."182 In the second movement, love of neighbor is antecedent. Loving others in the active life is a sure way towards loving God in the contemplative order, as an image to its exemplar. Love of self is involved in both inclinations. "Through charity I love the supreme good in God and the supreme good for myself,"183 desiring through participation much more for oneself than oneself.

Charity is the unifying cause of the other virtues. Its object the supreme good, charity is the "head and principle" of the other virtues which it commands. As the mover of other virtues to make their works meritorious, charity is said to be their form. Because meritorious works are destined for the enjoyment of God through charity, it is ". . . the end of the other virtues and the precepts."184 As the root of all good affections, charity is the synthesizing source of man’s spiritual life.

Charity informs the other virtues so they can dispose the soul to tend to its ultimate end. In ordering the other virtues to the supreme end, it makes them meritorious by presenting man with the great challenge of loving and adhering to God above all beings.185 Without charity, the affections and moral habits of the soul are disordered, and its spiritual life is formless and chaotic.

Charity deforms the soul. Since love transforms the lover into the person loved, charity conforms the soul to the divine exemplar, God, the source and goal of its affection.186

C. Moral Illumination. Man cannot do good without a moral illumination from God. Drawn hither and thither by the impressions of the senses and the disorderly desires of the flesh, the will alone is incapable of acquiring moral virtues, and the practical intellect is unstable in judging moral principles. Mutable and contingent powers cannot explain the necessary and universal element in the law dictated by moral conscience and set in action by the virtues.187 To overcome his moral impotency, man needs a divine illumination in the moral order. As the exemplar of virtue, God can communicate the cardinal virtues to man’s powers of knowing, loving and acting by causing the ultimate determinations necessary for his doing good and ordering his moral operations towards God.188

D. Cardinal Moral Virtues. Plato’s four cardinal moral virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice, fully equip man with the determinations necessary for the right regulation and strengthening of his relation to himself and his neighbor.189 With its natural aptitude for good gradually perfected by repetition of good actions, the soul acquires moral virtue. Incomplete and incapable in themselves of acquiring merit, the natural moral virtues can be fully developed only if they are transfigured by God’s gifts of faith, hope, and charity.190 The grace of divine life renders them meritorious, and charity orders them to God.

E. Moral Goodness. The intention, object, and subject determine the moral goodness of a virtuous action. A human act is directed by the will which, on the occasion of rational knowledge, freely intends an object to find fulfillment in it.191 The right ordering of human acts, then, depends upon the intentional agreement of intellectual assent and volitional consent. The will is good not only because the goodness of the end is communicated to it but also because the affection for the end makes it good.192 The right intention of a good end makes a work good.

Through its habits of conscience and syneresis, the soul intends the end. Conscience, a habit of the practical intellect, judges upon the primary moral principles to which conduct should be conformed. This subjective norm dictates the direction of moral actions and prescribes the object to which the will ought to be inclined, for example, to love and adore God.193 When conscience commands what is good, it should always be followed, whereas a bad conscience prescribing some act against the law of God ought always to be reformed.

Syneresis, an inborn natural "weight" of the will, spontaneously inclines it towards good for its own sake. A spark of conscience, syneresis moves the soul to desire good for itself, and orients it towards God by attracting its faculties away from evil and directing it to love of God. This irrepressible force strives to lift the soul to a good life, or if this is not possible at the moment, to stir up remorse of conscience.194

F. Fonts of Morality. The difference between a good and evil action arises from the moral fonts of object and circumstance. The act of loving God, for example, possesses a due object, whereas hating God has undue matter. The generic morality of the object is specified by the concrete circumstances, among which the principal condition is the end. In charity, the conversion of man to God through an appreciative love of friendship, the proper end and due object are one, whereas an "aversion from God and a conversion to creature"195 constitute a bad action.

G. Eternal and Natural Law. The eternal law of God is the archetype of rectitude in the wisdom and will of God, according to which all things are ordered and free action can be good.196 Virtue is conformity to the eternal rule of rectitude. Because "the natural law is an impression made on the soul by the eternal law,"197 it is an image deriving all its obligatory force from the divine exemplar. An expression of man’s rational nature, natural law can be defined as "that which right reason dictates"198 to the will. In practical life, conscience dictates the natural law and syneresis inclines man to its precepts. Charity perfects the natural law so as to move man to render not only good for good but good for evil inflicted by enemies.199

Bonaventure’s ethical analysis laid the groundwork for his exposition of the soul’s mystical journey into God. Man is a viator whose desire for knowledge, happiness, and peace can be fulfilled by journeying into God who is wisdom, goodness, and beatitude. The itinerary of the soul passes from the world outside to oneself, and beyond self to God. In this threefold elevation, the soul undergoes purgation, illumination, and unification through divine grace: "purgation leads to peace, illumination to truth, and perfective union to love."200 Engaging in meditation, prayer, and contemplation, the soul advances in fear, hope, and charity towards God.

A. Purgation. The journey begins in the sensible order with the transition of the soul from the contemplative love of God through traces in the universe to the contemplative love of God in the divine vestiges of the act of perception. Conscious of its misery, sin, and fear, the soul deplores sin and asks for mercy in prayer, pitting "alacrity against negligence, austerity against concupiscence, and benignity against malice,"201 to rise from the flesh towards God in a process of purgation. In the first step of ascent to God, the purged soul turns its sensory powers to the outer sensible mirror of the universe through which the "eye of the flesh" discovers traces of God. From the observation of weight, number, and measure, as well as of substance, power, and activity, the soul "can rise, as from a vestige, to the knowledge of the immense power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator."202

As the soul turns its imaginative power of representing things to sense data, it recognizes in its psychological experiences traces of God. In producing a likeness of themselves, all knowable things "manifestly proclaim that in them, as in mirrors, can be seen the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son, eternally emanating from God the Father."203

Passing from the exterior to the interior realm, the illumined soul withdraws into itself to contemplate and love God as he is naturally imaged in itself. The spiritual eye of reason sees God through "the soul as memory, intelligence, and will, which are consubstantial, co-equal and contemporary, and interpenetrating."204 These three powers of the soul disclose "the Blessed Trinity, the Father, the Word, and Love, three Persons co-eternal, co-equal and consubstantial,"205 in one divine nature.

As the soul recalls, contemplates, and loves God through its image, it retreats more deeply into itself by going beyond itself, as Jacob ascending the ladder to God. In faith, the soul finds God dwelling within its own being sanctified by grace with a divine likeness. In the mystery of the sanctified soul, the similitude of God Himself is beheld with contemplative love. Reformed by the divine life of faith, hope, and charity, the soul "believes and hopes in Jesus Christ and loves Him, Who is the incarnate, uncreated, and inspired Word, Who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life."206

C. Unification. As the soul journeys beyond itself, it is united with the Divine. In this final stage, the mind contemplates God through and in the ideas of being and goodness. The soul enters the Holy of Holies as it intensifies its love. Meditation enkindles the soul to go beyond the senses, imagination, and understanding, to the divine bridegroom; prayer unites the soul with God; and contemplation perfects the soul in the love of God.207

Departing from images, the soul transcends itself to enter the Ark of the idea of being. Through the mirror of the idea of being in its purity and absolute actuality, the essential divine attributes, especially unity, are grasped. "Behold, if you can, Being in its purity and you will find that . . . it appears to you as having no diversity and through this, is supremely one."208

Being shows itself to be good, a self-communicating love. In the mirror of the idea of good, the soul pursues God in his personal attributes. As the mind at the apex of its powers contemplates the self-diffusiveness of being, it realizes that "through the supreme communicability of the Good, there must be the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."209

The soul ardently desires to exceed its apprehension of God and reach God Himself. But the distance between one’s finite self and the infinite can be bridged only by the crucified Christ, the mediator between the human and the Divine, to whom the soul can be united by plunging into the darkness of "learned ignorance."210 While understanding sleeps, love is awake and active, for "love extends further than vision"211 to touch God in the deepest wisdom, the highest happiness, and the finest peace possible during this earthly pilgrimage to heaven.

In the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, followers of Bonaventure, such as John Peckham and Matthew of Aquasparta, will attempt to resolve this difficulty to preserve the theory of illumination as indispensable for defining the soul’s dependence on God. Matthew of Aquasparta reasoned that the human intellect is so naturally deficient that it cannot succeed in seeking truth unless it is helped by divine light. Convinced of the inadequacy of the human intellect and of philosophy, he turned to Christian theology for truth.212

The force of Bonaventure’s writings, his eminence as a scholar, his ecclesiastical statesmanship, and above all, his sanctity, coalesced as a cachet to make him the unofficial founder of a movement.213 Noteworthy among his immediate followers were John Peckham and Matthew of Aquasparta who faithfully elaborated his ideas.

52. Sent., I, 8, 1, 2, 1, C.