Bonaventure
Italian Franciscan friar, theologian, philosopher and cardinal (Giovanni di Fidanza, c. 1217–1274), born in Bagnoregio, Tuscany, cured, according to tradition, of a serious childhood illness through the intercession of Saint Francis of Assisi, an episode said to have prompted his later entry into the Franciscan order, and educated at the University of Paris under Alexander of Hales, where he became a fellow student and close friend of Thomas Aquinas, despite representing within thirteenth-century scholasticism a notably different philosophical synthesis, more deeply rooted in the Augustinian and Franciscan tradition than in the Aristotelianism Aquinas was introducing. Elected Minister General of the Franciscan order in 1257, at a moment of deep internal crisis between the more rigorist factions (the 'Spirituals', proponents of absolute poverty) and the more moderate ones, Bonaventure exercised decisive conciliatory leadership that averted a split in the order, while also drafting the Legenda maior, the official biography of Saint Francis that the order adopted as its sole canonical version, ordering the destruction of earlier biographies deemed less convenient. His most influential philosophical and mystical work, The Journey of the Mind into God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 1259), traces, in one of the most elegant mystical texts of the entire Middle Ages, a systematic six-stage ascending spiritual journey — from contemplating traces of God in the sensible world, through the soul itself as a divine image, to the final contemplation of God as Being and as the Good — culminating in a mystical ecstasy transcending all discursive rational comprehension, in a personal synthesis of scholastic philosophical rigour and Franciscan mystical depth. Philosophically, Bonaventure defended an Augustinian-rooted theory of divine illumination according to which all certain human knowledge requires the participation of God's uncreated light, in contrast to the empiricist Aristotelianism Aquinas would develop, and argued against radical Aristotelians that the world must necessarily have had an absolute temporal beginning, unable to be eternal. Canonised in 1482 and declared the Seraphic Doctor for his mystical depth, Bonaventure is regarded, alongside Thomas Aquinas, as one of the two great theological systematisers of thirteenth-century high scholasticism.