Today is the feast of St. Bonaventure, Bishop (also Cardinal), Confessor, and Seraphic Doctor of the Church. I’m not sure if this should signal a day of rest for me or a day of extra intense research and writing. Given that by the time Bonaventure was my age, he had written (somehow) a Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard that runs to 4000 pages folio, it should probably signal for me a day of renewed effort.

Clara can tell you more about this herself, but I’ll just mention that there is a sale on right now of (among other things Franciscan) various volumes in Bonaventure’s Opera Omnia as published by Quarrachi (ad Claras Aquas). They’re offering these volumes at half-price, which is quite a deal; the only catch is that they’re soft cover. So that means that you have to take care of having the binding done yourself. About which it now occurs to me, Clara, that all their volumes must be like that: I don’t know that there is an “original” hardcover binding. Instead, I imagine that Quarrachi takes care of the printing and then lets individual buyers and institutions decide how they would like to decorate the outside.

We give a tip of the hat to Br. Alexis Bugnolo of the Franciscan Archive for his most noble effort to put the whole of Bonaventure’s Sentences commentary online along with an English translation by the same brother. I think he’d agree that this is no easy task, not least because of the work’s massive length; but in addition, scholastic Latin is filled with words that are often impossible to translate except with cumbrous English paraphrases. Br. Bugnolo tends to punt when it comes to such words, but I don’t think that’s a bad strategy given the scope of his project. Probably better, I think, to signal that one of these words has occurred by anglicizing it and moving on rather than to mistranslate it or miss the particular shade of meaning that it should carry in a given passage.

If you’re ever looking for artwork of the saint as well as notes on that artwork, look no farther than S. Bonaventura: 1274-1974 (Collegio S. Bonaventura: Grottaferrata, 1974), a series of volumes published in honor of the 500th year since the saint’s death. One of those volumes is entirely dedicated to the various depictions of the saint which have appeared over time. Even a quick glance at this volume reveals that saintly portraits are often (or, generally) the work of artistic imagination rather than true-to-life representation. In some, Bonaventure appears as a real iron man; in others, he looks like a dumpy, bookish type. I prefer to regard the former type as more true, but I don’t have anything to base that on.

Although the Church has told us that St. Thomas Aquinas is the studiorum dux, yet after becoming more acquainted with Bonaventure, I can’t help but thinking that he is more truly the heir of Augustine and of what was best in the neo-Platonist tradition. This is part of reason, I imagine, why Joseph Ratzinger, the Augustinian, published in 1959 an examination of Bonaventure’s theology of history, in which he is careful to note some differences in view between Bonaventure and Aquinas. Of particular interest to me in connection with my chapter on Bonaventure, Ratzinger offered some good thoughts about part of Bonaventure’s motivation for rejecting the possibility of an eternally created world (unlike Aquinas, who endorsed the possibility). His suggestion is decidedly unlike those of contemporary analytic philosophers who have written on Bonavneture on this question; naturally enough, the point is more theological, but it comes down to Aquinas’ embrace of Aristotle’s notion of time. For Thomas and Aristotle, says Ratzinger, past time can be infinite because it consists of an accidentally ordered series of events. Whereas “Bonaventure sees that this concept of history is incompatible with the Christian view. He demands an ordering of causality also on the horizontal level of world events and their temporal sequence. He must make this demand because he sees an entirely different form of world-history. For him, the history of the world is ordered in an egressus and a regressus; in the center of these stands Christ. Any form of infinity in this closed and ordered movement is unthinkable from the very start.”

At any rate, it’s not as though I’m sad that Aquinas won; I only write to remind us that Catholic theology is an extremely rich field, and that we ought not to forget that Thomas’ Summa is very far from being the only summa out there. Bonaventure’s Sentences commentary is another such “summa” and profoundly worthy of investigation, especially for those who are interested in the heirs of the Augustinian tradition in the later Middle Ages.

(I hesitate to repost the verses that I had written two years ago on this day in honor of St. Bonaventure. They are correct - at least they were last time I checked - but horribly convoluted and, thus, difficult to follow. I posted them last year here and for the first time here. I want to make them better, but I don’t know that I should take the time now . . . .)