It’s late, and I’ve got to get this up quickly or else I’ll end up posting it on the Seraphic Doctor’s Novus feast day! Of course Iosephus has already put up a post in honor of St. Bonaventure, but I’m sure he won’t mind if I make a little contribution as well. This is from Gilson’s Philosophy of St. Bonaventure. I will not include such a long quote as I posted on St. Francis’ feast day, but hopefully this succinct quote will still capture something of the excitement of studying the philosophy of this great saint.

“Wisdom, in its highest acceptation, is the inexpugnable occupation of the centre of things by the purified soul; but philosophy, in its legitimate acceptation, is the science of the roads which lead to Wisdom, and the formation which enables the soul to traverse those roads. It is more true of this philosophy than of any other that its spirit needs not only to be described, but still more to be accepted, willed and obeyed, before it can be truly known. To know how the summit of Alvernia is reached, it is not enough to be able to rattle off a description of all the roads that lead to the summit; rather we must choose one of these roads and set our foot upon it with the firm resolution to travel it to the end. The closer we approach the interior dispositions that St. Bonaventure demands of his reader, the better we shall understand the sense of the formulas he employs, and the root reason of the ways he chooses.

It may be added that, for the man who is able to bring these dispositions to life in himself in their perfect form, the universe and the soul are immediately ordered into a totally unified system.”

I titled this “encouragement”, though maybe that depends on how you look at things. Studying St. Bonaventure begins to look like a difficult thing indeed, and particularly so for those of us bound by the forms and expectations of analytic philosophers, not to mention pragmatic deadlines by which things need to be finished. There’s no doubt that Bonaventure is forbidding to the trained philosopher of today — much more so than his Dominican counterpart. The works of St. Thomas are so clear, so organized, so many times translated into English. But even in his more Scholastic writings (i.e. the Commentaries), Bonaventure can have a kind of ethereal quality that both fascinates and repels. One readily believes that he was a very holy man. His yearning to taste the divine seeps through all of his works. But when it comes to distilling his thought into a modern philosophical language, we wrestle constantly with tensions. How to render his thought intelligible to the analytically-trained, very possibly non-religious reader, without utterly distorting his real views? I frequently implore him for help/forgiveness in this regard, because the truth is, fidelity to the saint’s true thought is probably not very necessary for my career (and may often be a liability), but is quite possibly necessary for my soul.

Still, this quote from Gilson does give me encouragement. It is a rocky soil that we till, those of us who have elected to work the fields of contemporary academia. I can’t say how many times I’ve reflected on what it might have been like to be one of the students of these great doctors, attacking questions of the faith with a directness and zeal that is quite impossible in a modern-day philosophy department. And yet. Somehow it is evidently God’s will that we should be where we are. We can rejoice at least that there is plenty of work for us to do, and if we are diligent and earnest in our desire to be faithful, God may reward even our radically imperfect appetites with that sweetest of gifts, wisdom. St. Bonaventure, pray for us!