Saint Bonaventure: The Soul's Journey into God

by William Short

Taught by one of the leading experts on Franciscan spirituality, this is the course on St. Bonaventure that you have always wanted.

In the fall of 1259, the Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure traveled from his home in Paris to the mountain of La Verna in Tuscany for a retreat. There, he meditated on the experience St. Francis had on that same mountain, where he experienced a profound vision and the stigmata.

On his retreat Bonaventure discovered that St. Francis was a model for how a person comes to union with God in prayer. The result of this insight was the outline of a book that soon became a classic of Catholic spiritual reading: The Soul's Journey into God. Now you, too, can discover the inspiring model of St. Francis as outlined by St. Bonaventure. Bonaventure talks about this spiritual journey as taking place in six steps, like the six days of creation. On each step of the journey, he explores a new dimension of our relationship with God. Bonaventure presents us with a mystical theology, leading us step by step from reflection on the world around us, through reflection on our inner world as human beings, toward the world above us, the divine life of the Holy Trinity.

Bonaventure shows us Christ as the beginning of this journey, its end, and the way that connects them. Join St. Bonaventure on this powerful journey today. You will cherish this experience.

Genres: Catholic

Audible Audio

Published August 22, 2017

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no idea why modern day religious folk ignore the great scholastics of the past. They would provide coherence to their mad ramblings of their overwhelming inconsistencies within their Evangelical body of hate. Eighty percent of Evangelicals support a racist president. If they derived their foundations from the Doctors of the Church, they would never step away from ‘God as Love’ that Bonaventure embraces and the coherence that the mystics such as Bonaventure would provide, and the Evangelicals would be less likely to support an authoritarian divider, and maybe, just maybe, they would be willing to sell wedding cakes to gay people who were born that way and made in God’s image (a big part of Bonaventure’s believe is how man is born in the image of God) or not give a damn about a person’s self identified gender or which bathroom they want to use.

Bonaventure is obviously a Catholic, but his world view includes a better way of seeing the Christian spirit including a rigorous defense for the Trinity exceeds all the blathering from right wing foundationless Evangelical manipulators that I come across within today’s book stalls such as Franklin Graham (he’s even worse than his father), convicted felon Dinesh D’souza, the always shallow William Lane Craig, the willing to drop out of society if it means not having to sell wedding cakes to gays Rod Dreher, and et.al.,: are their foundationless thoughts even worth a warm bucket of spit?

Just for the sake of context, Bonaventure will put the mystical over the rational, Aquinas puts reason over faith, and Duns Scotus tries to square the circle of faith with reason and all three are roughly contemporaries. Dante knew exactly what he was doing when he puts the Franciscan mystic Bonaventure and the rationalist Dominican Aquinas in Paradise. Scotus is a Franciscan but he is still alive at the time when Dante starts his ‘The Comedy’.

If you must prayer, do not prayer for your desires, prayer for your desires for desires such that they derive from the power, the good towards the best, and the deserving of the highest will. At least, that would be a possible summation of what Bonaventure would say. Note that David Hume would say that ‘I want what I desire, but I don’t desire what I desire’ it just happens. Thus, in Hume’s and Bonaventure’s formulation our desires for our desires are their own cause and define our real selves and therefore, if one must pray, pray for what defines oneself, our desires for our desires.

I now know the seven liberal arts not from rote memory but from their functionality as they relate to the world since the professor of this course seamlessly related them to Bonaventure and how he saw the world. The love of wisdom (philosophy) starts with Grammar and then discovered Logic but realized that Logic only preserves its own truth and needed Rhetoric to get to truth outside of itself, and then the self contained truth of Mathematics with its changeless relational truths is needed for Geometry that is about the shape of the world outside of the mind and the math and shapes is also needed for studying the harmony of Music and the music of the spheres are studied by Astronomy. The seven liberal arts consist of studying God’s order within the universe: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Math, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. Before this lecture, to me the seven liberal arts were rote memorized, after the lecture they flow naturally from their purpose (function).

Bonaventure also talks about psychology and I noticed something that surprised me. There were overlaps with Spinoza and his psychological view points. That’s a compliment to Bonaventure since he came 400 years before Spinoza and in general Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ is a worthwhile book even today.

[Alberto Lagomarsini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buena alternativa de e-book. Resumido, consisto y preciso.

[sch]

For my Dante class.