Medieval philosophy a new history of western philosophy volume 2 ( PDFDrive ) 80

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.
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