Pons, M. Bonaguil, château de rêve: essai sur le château de Bonaguil dans le Haut-Agenais.
Toulouse: Privat, 1959.
BONAVENTURE
(John of Fidanza; ca. 1217–74). Bonaventure was born in Bagnoregio, near Viterbo, and
sources say that he fought his well-to-do family to enter the Franciscan order; this he did
in Paris, probably in 1243. Legend has it that as a child he was miraculously cured by St.
Francis’s intervention. He was educated in the Franciscan friary in Bagnoregio and
moved to Paris for the arts course ca. 1234. He studied theology in the Franciscan school
under Alexander of Hales, John of La Rochelle, William of Melitona, and Odo Rigaldus;
his wide use of the Dominican Hugues de Saint-Cher suggests that he may have been
Hugues’s pupil as well. He was made regent master, probably in 1253, but formal
acceptance for him and for Thomas Aquinas was delayed until October 1257 by the
dispute between secular masters and the mendicants.
In February 1257, Bonaventure was made minister-general of the Franciscans, on the
suggestion of John of Parma, who had resigned under pressure from Pope Alexander IV.
His nomination suggests that the divide between the two wings of the order (Conventual
and Spiritual) was not yet unbridgeable, since John was later characterized as a Spiritual
and Bonaventure a Conventual. As a master, he composed a commentary on Peter
Lombard’s Sententiae (by far his longest and most systematic work) and biblical
commentaries, as well as various theological “questions.”
Bonaventure’s accession to the minister-generalate effectively ended his academic
career, but he continued to write devotional works. His writing is marked by a lucid
latinity and deep devotion, qualities that he could also bring to academic argument. He
combined academic discipline with fervent piety: for Bonaventure, more clearly than for
any other scholastic theologian, the point of any theology was the building up of the life
of faith and prayer. After a visit to La Verna, in Italy, in 1259, he began to write mystical
texts of great influence; he had, in the Franciscan tradition, a particular devotion to the
Passion.
During the 1260–70s, he worked to defend the order, which did not practice the
absolute poverty of its founder, against charges of hypocrisy, especially by his Apologia
pauperum (1270). His aim was to reinterpret Francis’s Testament for subsequent
generations. He was called the “second father of the order,” because of his attempt to
produce a theology of the Franciscan life. On the publication of his new Life of Francis
(1266), all previous Lives were ordered to be destroyed, as had happened similarly when
Humbert of Romans had produced his new Life of Dominic (1260). Bonaventure was
made Cardinal-Bishop of Albano in 1273; he died unexpectedly at the Second Council of
Lyon in 1274.
Bonaventure’s theology is traditionally Augustinian. He is willing to make use of
whatever tools come to hand, and to this end he was prepared to use Aristotle, but he held
no specifically “Aristotelian” opinions. As well as Aristotle, his sources include Pseudo-
Dionysius the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchy, John Damascene, Boethius, and mystical
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