19 Facts About Bonaventure

1.

Bonaventure, born Giovanni di Fidanza, was an Italian Catholic Franciscan bishop, cardinal, scholastic theologian and philosopher.

2.

Bonaventure was born at Civita di Bagnoregio, not far from Viterbo, then part of the Papal States.

3.

Bonaventure entered the Franciscan Order in 1243 and studied at the University of Paris, possibly under Alexander of Hales, and certainly under Alexander's successor, John of Rochelle.

4.

Bonaventure was instrumental in procuring the election of Pope Gregory X, who rewarded him with the title of Cardinal Bishop of Albano, and insisted on his presence at the great Second Council of Lyon in 1274.

5.

Bonaventure steered the Franciscans on a moderate and intellectual course that made them the most prominent order in the Catholic Church until the coming of the Jesuits.

6.

Bonaventure's theology was marked by an attempt completely to integrate faith and reason.

7.

Bonaventure thought of Christ as the "one true master" who offers humans knowledge that begins in faith, is developed through rational understanding, and is perfected by mystical union with God.

8.

The only extant relic of Bonaventure is the arm and hand with which he wrote his Commentary on the Sentences, which is conserved at Bagnoregio, in the parish church of St Nicholas.

9.

Bonaventure was formally canonised in 1484 by the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV, and ranked along with Thomas Aquinas as the greatest of the Doctors of the Church by another Franciscan, Pope Sixtus V, in 1587.

10.

Bonaventure was regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages.

11.

The German philosopher Dieter Hattrup denies that Reduction of the Arts to Theology was written by Bonaventure, claiming that the style of thinking does not match Bonaventure's original style.

12.

Bonaventure's position is no longer tenable given recent research: the text remains "indubitably authentic".

13.

For Isabelle of France, the sister of King Louis IX of France, and her monastery of Poor Clares at Longchamps, Bonaventure wrote the treatise Concerning the Perfection of Life.

14.

Bonaventure wrote on almost every subject treated by the Scholastics and his writings are substantial.

15.

Contrary to Aquinas, Bonaventure did not believe that philosophy was an autonomous discipline that could be pursued successfully independently of theology.

16.

The final route to God is the route of being, in which Bonaventure brought Anselm's argument together with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics to view God as the absolutely perfect being whose essence entails its existence, an absolutely simple being that causes all other, composite beings to exist.

17.

Bonaventure agrees with Albert the Great in regarding theology as a practical science; its truths, according to his view, are peculiarly adapted to influence the affections.

18.

Bonaventure discusses very carefully the nature and meaning of the divine attributes; considers universals to be the ideal forms pre-existing in the divine mind according to which things were shaped; holds matter to be pure potentiality that receives individual being and determinateness from the formative power of God, acting according to the ideas; and finally maintains that the agent intellect has no separate existence.

19.

In form and intent the work of Bonaventure is always the work of a theologian; he writes as one for whom the only angle of vision and the proximate criterion of truth is the Christian faith.