St Bonaventure

Bonaventure, born John Fidanza near Viterbo in 1221, is one of those saints in whom learning and prayer remain inseparable. Very little about his childhood is certain, but much is clear about the spirit that marked his whole career. As a friar minor and student at Paris under Alexander of Hales, he became one of the great minds of scholastic theology, yet his genius was governed by judgment, humility, and devotion. He did not study for curiosity’s sake. He made prayer the key of everything, convinced that only the Spirit of God could open the things of God. His innocence, cheerfulness, and lowliness impressed everyone around him, and this life lingers over the sense that Bonaventure’s holiness warmed his learning from within. As priest and teacher he preached with fire, wrote major theological works such as his Commentary on the Sentences, and took a leading role in defending the mendicant friars when they were attacked at the University of Paris. His treatise on evangelical poverty answered those who wanted the friars expelled, and in 1257 he and Thomas Aquinas received the doctorate together. Bonaventure’s writings then spread in many directions: great theological syntheses, mystical works, spiritual counsels, and meditations meant not only to inform the mind but to inflame the heart.

In that same year he was chosen minister general of the Friars Minor at only thirty-six, with the order torn by dissension between laxity and harsh rigorism. This life presents him almost as a second founder. He insisted on disciplined observance of the rule, reformed abuses, resisted the excesses of the Spirituals, and gave the order constitutions that permanently marked Franciscan life. At the request of the friars he wrote the major life of St Francis, and he governed the order for seventeen years with prudence and strength. Later Pope Clement IV tried to make him archbishop of York, but Bonaventure persuaded the pope to accept his refusal. In 1273 Gregory X made him cardinal-bishop of Albano and drew him into the preparations for the council of Lyons, where Bonaventure became the central theological and ecclesial figure, especially in the attempted reunion with the Greeks. Even these public honours are kept under the sign of humility, as in the famous story of the legates arriving with the cardinal’s hat while Bonaventure was washing dishes and asking them to hang it on a tree until he could finish. He died during the council in 1274, before the fragile union he had helped secure collapsed again. He is not a dry schoolman, but a saint whose mind, prayer, preaching, government, and love of heaven all belong to the same single fire.