According to the Saints, God is said to be master of all knowledge. This is the case because God cooperates in general with every intellect, or because God infuses the gift of grace, or because - in the act of knowing – the intellect attains to the divine. If God cooperates in general, then we would be lead to say that the divine being teaches the senses as well as the intellect. But this is absurd. If it is because God infuses the gift of grace, then all knowledge would be gratuitous or infused, and non would be innate or acquired. But this is most absurd. Nothing remains, therefore, except to say that our intellect attains to the divine as to the light of our minds and the cause of the knowledge of all truth (34).
Here the ideas of cooperation and grace are understood as having only limited application and not in general, while the preference is given to the idea of attaining of the intellect to the divine in the general case of knowing.
The arguments for the negative position are considered in their turn. They do not break the Bonaventure’s conviction that God does participate in all our knowledge and that the latter is ultimately based on the illumination, but they oblige him to explain the complications and restate his positive position carefully in the Conclusion:
For knowledge with certitude, even in the state of wayfarers, the intellect must attain to the eternal reasons as that reason which regulates and motivates. It is not the sole principle of knowledge, nor is it attained in its clarity; but together with the proper created reason it is known obscurely and as in a mirror.
Bonaventure clarifies this conclusion explicitly on the next four pages, but I would
emphasize a few important points:
In the case of certain knowledge the mind must be regulated by unchangeable and eternal rules which operate not by means of habit of the mind but by means of themselves as realities which are above the mind in the eternal truth (p.133).
For certain knowledge, the eternal reason is necessary involved as a regulative and motivating principle, but certainly not as the sole principle nor in its full clarity (134).
But along with the created reason, it is continued by us in part as is fitting in this life.
A creature is related to God as a vestige (as to its principle), as an image (as to its object), and as a likeness (as to an infused gift) (p.135).
Bonaventure proclaims divine cooperation “in any work accomplished by a creature”:
as far as it is a vestige. . . as the creative principle
as far as it is a likeness. . .in a manner of an infused gift
as far as it is an image . . . as the moving cause (136)
The difficulties with the opposition are resolved in the following paragraph:
Since certain knowledge pertains to the rational spirit in as far as it is an image of God, it is in this sort of knowledge that the soul attains to the eternal reasons. But because it is never fully conformed to God in this life, it does not attain to the reasons clearly, fully, and distinctly, but only to a greater or lesser degree according to the degree of its conformity to God. . . . . it always attains to the reasons in some way (136).
So the mysterious existence of certainty in our seemingly contingent minds is explained
with this doctrine of light. The fact that we can doubt sometimes even the very existence
of God and his light is explained by the lesser degree of conformity of the image to the
exemplar. The latter is due to the deformity of gift and glory and could be mended. The
observable fact that we do learn from the world of sense is also explained:
Since the soul is not an image in its entirety, together with these eternal reasons it attains to the likeness of things abstracted from the sense image. These are proper and distinct principles of knowledge, and without them the light of the eternal reason is insufficient of itself to produce knowledge as long as the soul is in this wayfaring state.
But at the same time mysterious cases of knowledge by saints an prophets which
seem to break the rule are also explained in the following lines:
. . . unless perhaps because of a special revelation, it transcends this state. This happens in the case of those who are drawn up into ecstasy and in the case of the revelations of certain prophets (p.136).
We can see that the theory does explain natural kinds of knowledge as well as the
supernatural ones and gives it a real metaphysical perspective. Aristotle’s knowledge and Plato’s wisdom find their reconciliation, and the teachings of the Fathers are paid homage, the theology is confirmed by the philosophy. Doesn’t it look like an ideal picture? To me it is very attractive, and it gives me a great pleasure to continue the investigation of the theory, going through more and more details. So let us also look at the Itineraruim.
As we have seen in the On the Reduction of Arts to Theology and the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, there are various kinds of knowledge and the knowledge of the eternal reasons or the divine mind is the highest of them all. While all of them naturally desirable to the human beings – as Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” (I:1) – the knowledge of God is the most desirable. I have also shown that Bonaventure believed that this knowledge depends on the degree of mind's conformity to God, and those degrees differ in different human beings. Therefore, the question arrives: “How to get there?” Bonaventure attempts to answer this in his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. He wants to show how this conformity can be increased in the mind, and the model for the project (Saint Francis) is chosen not accidentally.
The saint was that ecstatic soul who perceived the world pure and beautiful and loved every creature in it as an expression of his Beloved, the Creator of them all. This pure love, so common among saints, is understood by Bonaventure as the most important precondition for that spiritual journey of the mind to perfection. It is not by accident Bonaventure calls “upon the Eternal Father through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that through the intercession of the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother . . . . and through that of blessed Francis. . . . He may enlighten the eyes of our mind…” (Prologue 1, p.31.) Jesus had such love, that he sacrificed himself for the sake of men. His Mother Mary had such love to her Son, and St. Francis had such love and deep respect to Jesus and Mary.
It is interesting to me that a Russian Saint Seraphim Sarovsky (1754 – 1833) also loved and worshiped the Mother of God, constantly remembered her and often was visited by Mary and her Blessed Son Jesus. The Saint even died before the icon of the Mother of God standing on his knees in his final prayer. He was extremely like St. Francis, and also many great miracles happened in his life. The Saint’s ecstatic love to all creatures and God, their source, was constantly felt by all people who ever met him and received multiple blessings from that encounter. May be there are also other means to conform the mind to God, but pure love surely is the most commonly mentioned by great Saints condition, and they know it from their own experience. The latter is not easily understood by those empiricists who speak of “impossibility” of spiritual knowledge.
Thеy do not have the necessary precondition for sufficient conformity of their minds to the divine mind, therefore, they do not have the spiritual experience, hence , for them the theory like Bonaventure’s cannot be easily verifiable. It is very much like when people who were told about certain observable facts do not want (or incapable) to go to the laboratory and see for themselves. Those are usually indifferent to the achievements of science or very often even hostile to the whole enterprise, because they feel that the talk about that knowledge of others reveals their ignorance, laziness or other infirmities and incapability, which is not flattering to their egos. Modern psychologists call it defense mechanisms, and denial in particular, when the truth when painful for the psyche is denied explicitly but at the same time is driven into sub-consciousness implicitly causing other trouble. But the itinerary of the mind into God leads the soul to the ecstatic peace, as Bonaventure puts it, and this very peace people of all ages and nations observe in the characters of those saints and sages who are conformed to their exemplar. This peace and extreme happiness are usually felt like physically emanating from those wise men and women, and they do not depend on anything material but on rather something extremely subtle. Saint Seraphim of Russia described that in following words:
Fast, prayer, vigilance and all other Christian deeds are very good in themselves, but not only observing of those constitutes the purpose of our Christian life. Those are only means of the latter. The true purpose of our Christian life is accumulation of the Holly Spirit of God. (Reverend Seraphim Sarovsky, p.26-27, my translation).
I quote this Saint as well as some other enlightened teachers of different times and places here only in order to show the universal appeal of those ideas expressed by Bonaventure in XIII century, which constitute the object of my investigation. When we read the descriptions of lives and teachings of real Saints and sages, it becomes obvious that they possess certain extraordinary knowledge and powers. It is also obvious that they live extraordinary style of life. One is connected with the other. So, it is not just about theories we have to learn in school in order to acquire similar intuitions and other abilities, but we have to consider also the lifestyle variable in this experiment. I believe that in this way we have much better chances to receive the data, so to speak. It is precisely on this account Bonaventure writes his Itinerarium, where besides another theoretical representation of his doctrine of light he also emphasizes the desirable character of the soul which might be successful in this journey to God, so in the process she might see for herself the light from above together with the eternal archetypes this light might reveal to the soul. Of course, as students of philosophy we are interested mostly in the doctrine expressed there, but would those really speak to us if the intuitions were nor ours? Is not it the reason why any doctrine seems appealing to some and crazy to others? People often say: “It may be clever, but it is not real”. As we remember, Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason: “Concepts without intuitions are empty…” We can consider mere concepts only on the basis of their internal consistency, but the mind unenlightened by intuitions can still think about any of them as possible dreams of a logician. It is not the case with Bonaventure’s concepts in the Itinerarium, because they refer to the real experiences of light by Saints and others being on their way to become Saints. I see that it is, without a doubt, also an experience of Bonaventure himself. Having said this, let us gather some more information on illumination presented in seven consequent steps but looking at the theory expressed only in Chapter II:
We may behold God in the mirror of visible creation, not only by considering creatures as vestiges of God, but also by seeing Him in them; for He is present in them by His essence, His power and His presence. And because this is the higher way of considering than the preceding one, it follows as the second level of contemplation, on which we ought to be led to the contemplation of God in every creature that enters our mind through the bodily senses (1).
It is not that Bonaventure suddenly becomes a pantheist here speaking of essential presence of God in creatures, but creatures get their reality only because of that presence of God (the only true, and not merely superficial reality!). They are real and could be known as real only through this kind of contemplation and not by sensual contemplation with abstraction. Still he says that those creatures on this stage enter our mind through the bodily senses. This is one of the legitimate categories of knowledge Bonaventure does not want to ignore (being in this an Aristotilian), so he repeats:
It should be noted that this world, which is called the macrocosm, enters our soul, the microcosm, through the portals of the five senses in so far as the sense objects are apprehended, enjoyed and judged. (2)
I would notice also that this kind of knowledge heavily depends on the connection of the mind to the senses and looses its secondary reality as soon as the mind gets disconnected from the senses in the case of those saints who meditate in isolation for a long time. And who still sometimes show their knowledge of this physical world; and not just a confused knowledge, but sharp and precise. Here I will give a description by witnesses of one of those cases:
Once a peasant from the nearby village came to us when we were visiting to Saint Seraphim in his retreat place a few miles in the forest from the Sarov monastery. He asked: “Who is the man of God?” We pointed at the old man working in his small garden. The peasant ran to the Saint and fell face down before him embracing his feet: “Help, my horse got stolen – and now all my family will surely die!” St. Seraphim lifted the man and embraced him pressing his forehead against the man’s one. Then he said: “Go to the village so and so, enter the second fenced property on the left. There you will find your horse tied to the fence behind the house. Quietly untie it and take it home without talking to anyone”.
The peasant left in a hurry. On the next day he came back and thanked the Saint heartily: “You saved us all”. The saint answered: “Go and thank God who helped you and not the humble Seraphim who is nothing”. The man returned to his family (My translation by memory).
Having mentioned the existence of the Intelligences (angels) and that they receive power from the first cause, God, which they in turn dispense in the work of administration . . . , i.e., the work which is assigned for them by God (like also in the case of those great Saints with miraculous powers) sent for service, for the sake of those who shall inherit salvation, Bonaventure continues to present in detail the regular kind of knowledge of the physical things:
Man . . . . has five senses, which serve as five portals through which knowledge of all things existing in the visible world enters his soul . . . Through these portals . . . enter also common sense objects, such as number, form, rest and motion. And since everything that is moved is moved by another . . . .we are led, when we perceive bodily motion, . . . . to the knowledge of spiritual motions, as through the effect of the knowledge to the knowledge of causes (3).
In this common mode of acquiring knowledge the sense perception in connected with the active intellect, which forms an immediate idea of an object in passive intellect by means of abstraction. The knowledge of super-sensual but real is deduced in a manner of philosophical speculation. Again:
The whole of the visible world enters the human soul through apprehension. . .
Yet things enter not through their substances, but through similitudes generated in the medium, and through the medium they pass into the organ and thence into the apprehensive faculty. Thus the generation of the species in the medium, and from the medium they pass into the organ. From the external organ they pass into the internal organ, and the directing of the apprehensive faculty upon it leads to the apprehension of all those things which the soul apprehends outside itself (4).
When does the divine light belong in this doctrine? For Bonaventure it is the certainty of knowledge even of sensibles constitutes the ground for deduction of the existence and even the necessity of that light in the process of knowing. As C. M. Cullen mentioned of the theory: “The mind is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the attaining of truth”. And I would add that the mind could be in different modes depending on different degrees of its conformity, therefore, the above portion of the theory applies only to the empirical mode.Bonaventure following Aristotle (in his Metaphysics) continues with the notion of “the delight we take in our senses” (A I,1):
From this apprehension, if it is a suitable object, pleasure follows. The senses are delighted in an object, perceived through the abstracted similitude . . . , proportion is observed in the similitude in so far as it has the character of the species of form, and then it is called beauty, because beauty is nothing other then numbered equality, or a certain disposition of parts, together with a suavity of color. Again, proportionality is observed in so far as it has the character of power or strength, and then it is called sweetness, when the active power does not disproportionally exceeds the recipient sense. For the senses are pained by extremes and delighted by moderation . . . . Thus through pleasure, external delights enter the soul by means of their similitudes… (5).
Where does the beauty come from? It comes from the Good, or the ordering aspect of the First Principle, which is reflected in nature and the human soul. Many goods, or those mini reflections, become possible for the soul because of the constant participation in the Good, or “contuition of God, and the divinely given signs wherein we can see God” (11).