- Length
- 160 pagesBoehner and Hayes, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, Franciscan Institute, 2002
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Journey of the Mind into God
The Franciscan answer to the Dominican synthesis, written fifteen years before the Summa by a man who ran an order of thousands while producing it. Its argument is that every science is a step toward God and that the last step is not a science at all.
- Date
- 1259
- Author
- Bonaventure
- Region
- Italy
- Language
- Latin
- 1937 English, James de Vinck An early complete English version Consensus
- 2002 English, Boehner and Hayes The standard scholarly edition; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 861 years
Written by the head of the Franciscan order fifteen years before the Summa, and read ever since as the Augustinian alternative to what Aquinas was building.
What the book says
A short book organising the whole of knowledge into six stages of an ascent, on the model of a vision Francis of Assisi reported on the mountain where it was written. The six wings of the seraph Francis saw become six ways of knowing, arranged in three pairs. The first pair looks outward: God is seen through the created world as a footprint, and then in the world, as the mind takes what the senses deliver and finds order in it. The second pair turns inward: God is seen through the mind itself, in memory, understanding and will, and then in the mind, once grace has restored what sin deformed. The third pair looks above: God is contemplated through his name as Being, which is the route Exodus opens, and through his name as the Good, which is the route the Trinity opens. Then comes a seventh stage that is not a stage, in which the intellect stops and the affections pass over entirely - and Bonaventure, having built six careful ladders, tells the reader that the last step is taken by love and not by thought.
What it argues
That knowledge is ordered toward union and is incomplete when treated as an end. Bonaventure's six stages are not a psychology of religious experience but a map of the disciplines: the study of the physical world, of the mind's own operations, of being and of goodness each disclose something of their source, and a person who studies them without noticing has misread what they were doing. Two commitments hold it together. Everything created is a sign - a footprint where the likeness is distant, an image where it is close - so the world is legible rather than merely useful. And the light by which the mind judges is not the mind's own, which is the Augustinian doctrine of illumination that Aquinas would replace with a natural power of abstraction. The final chapter then does something the preceding six do not prepare the reader for: it stops the argument and hands the last stage to love.
What it answered
Augustine on the shape of the ascent, and the new Aristotelianism arriving through the Paris arts faculty. Bonaventure had studied and taught in Paris alongside Aquinas, was made master in the same year, and knew Aristotle thoroughly; his objection was never to the philosophy as such but to the claim that it could stand on its own. In his last lectures he named three Aristotelian errors he thought fatal - the eternity of the world, the denial of exemplary ideas, and the unity of the intellect - and treated them as what follows from philosophy pursued without its destination.
How it argues
By an architecture the reader can hold in mind, which is the reason it survived when longer works did not. Six stages, three pairs, one figure from a vision - and every philosophical claim hung on that frame. Bonaventure writes densely and symmetrically, with numbered correspondences that a modern reader finds either beautiful or airless, and he is doing real philosophical work inside the symmetry rather than decorating it. It is short enough to read in a sitting and compressed enough to need several.
The moment
Bonaventure was elected minister general of the Franciscans in 1257, at thirty-six, taking charge of an order that had grown enormously and was tearing itself apart over whether to keep Francis' poverty literally. He spent the rest of his life governing it, writing its official life of Francis, and defending the mendicant orders' right to teach at Paris against a hostile secular faculty. This book was written in the middle of that, on a mountain, in what appears to have been a few weeks.
How it travelled
As the Franciscan school's founding statement and as a devotional classic at once. Scotus and Ockham come out of the tradition it anchors, and the long argument between the Franciscan and Dominican schools - on illumination, on the primacy of will over intellect, on whether theology is a speculative or a practical science - takes this book as one of its poles. It also stayed in devotional use continuously, which is unusual for a work of this technical density, and has been in print somewhere in Europe since 1495.
The strongest objection
That the last chapter cancels the first six. Bonaventure builds a graded ascent in which each science genuinely discloses its object, and then tells the reader that the transition to what they were climbing toward is made by love with the intellect at rest - which raises the question of what the six stages were for. If the summit is reached by affection, the scaffolding is preparation rather than argument, and a reader who cannot make the last move has been given a philosophy that does not reach its own conclusion. His defenders answer that this is precisely the claim: reason is not defeated but completed by something beyond it, and pretending otherwise is what he thought the Aristotelians were doing. The objection is not that he is inconsistent, but that the position cannot be assessed from outside the experience it ends in.
Why read it
Because it is short, unlike anything else in the medieval group, and organises a whole intellectual world into a shape you can carry. The prologue and the first two chapters are the accessible part; chapters five and six on Being and the Good are the philosophically dense ones. Read it against the Summa rather than instead of it - the two together are the medieval argument.
- First printed
- 1495
- First in English
- 1937
- Digitised
- Yes
His On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology is the compact statement of the same programme and is often printed with it. The Collationes on the Hexaemeron, delivered in 1273 shortly before his death, are the sharpest form of his attack on the Aristotelians.
The Latin is public domain. The Boehner and Hayes English is the standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Bonaventure is read in medieval philosophy as the principal alternative to the Thomist settlement, in the philosophy of religion for the illumination doctrine, and increasingly by writers interested in accounts of nature as meaningful rather than merely available.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain but the accurate English translations are modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Bonaventure is a philosopher or a theologian using philosophical materials was argued through the twentieth century, with Gilson and Van Steenberghen taking opposite views, and the answer determines how the book is read. Whether his objections to Aristotle are philosophical or disciplinary is disputed. And how far the Franciscan-Dominican opposition is a real difference of position rather than a difference of emphasis retrofitted by later historians is a live question in medieval studies.