§ 109. BONAVENTURA. 681
an equipoise of judgment which usually keeps him from ex travagance in doctrinal statement. However, he did not rise above his age and he revelled in interrogations about the angels, good and evil, which seem to us to be utterly trivial and have no bearing on practical religion. He set himself to answer more than one hundred of these, and in Peltier's edition, his angelology and demonology occupy more than two hundred pages of two columns each.1 The questions discussed are such as these : Could God have made a better world ? could He have made it sooner than He did ? can an angel be in several places at the same time ? can several angels be at the same time in the same place ? 2 was Lucifer at the moment of his creation corrupt of will ? did he belong to the order of angels ? is there a hierarchy among the fallen angels ? have demons a foreknowledge of contingent events ?3 Descending to man, Bonaventura discusses whether sexual intercourse took place before the fall, whether the multipli cation of men and women was intended to be equal, which of the two sinned the more grievously, the man or the woman.
Bonaventura differs from Thomas in giving proof that the world is not eternal. The mark of a foot, which represents created matter, is not of the same duration as the foot itself, for the mark was made at some time by the foot. And, following Plato as against Aristotle, he declared that matter not only in its present form but also in its essence is not eternal. The world is not thinkable without man, for it has all the marks of a habitation fitted up for a human being. Christ would not have become incarnate without sin.
In the doctrine of the immaculate conception, Bonaven-
1 II . 296-520.
2 Peltier's ed., II. 298 sqq. The arguments given for an affirmative answer to this question are that the angels are in a place not after a "bodily but spiritual fashion." They are spiritual lights, as the Areopagite said, and consequently are independent of space, etc. Bonaventura, however, answers the question in the negative.
8 Peltier's ed., II. 415 sqq. Bonaventura answers that foreknowledge be longs to God alone, but that by reason of their intellectual acuteness and long experience the demons are sometimes able to accurately predict contingent events.
G82 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
tura agreed with Thomas in denying to Mary freedom from original sin and disagreed with his fellow Franciscan, Duns Scotus, whose teaching has become dogma in the Roman Catholic communion.
It is as a mystic and as the author of the life of St. Francis, rather than as a dogmatician that Bonaventura has a characteristic place among the Schoolmen.1 He evidently drew from the mystics of St. Victor, used their terminology 2 and did not advance beyond them. His mysticism has its finest statement in his Journey of the Mind to God.* Upon this pilgrimage of the soul to the highest divine mysteries, no one can enter without grace from above. Nor can the journey be continued without earnest prayer, pure medita tion, and a holy life. Devout prayer is the mother and beginning of the upward movement towards God. Con templation leads us first outside ourselves to behold the works of God in the visible world. It then brings us back to consider God's image in ourselves and at last we rise above ourselves to behold the divine being as He is in Him self.4 Each of these activities is twofold, so that there are six steps in the progress of the soul. In the final step, the soul contemplates the Trinity and God's absolute goodness.
Beyond these six steps is the state of rapture, the ecstatic vision, as the Sabbath day of rest followed the six days of labor. The doorway to this mystical life is Christ. The experience, which the soul shall have hereafter, is an ocean of beatific ecstasy. No one can know it but the one who re ceives it; he only receive it who desires it; he only desire it
1 Stockl, II. 880, says, Bonav. ist vorzugsweise Mystiker, and expresses the opinion that the mysticism of the Middle Ages reached its highest point in him.
2 e.g. Cogitatio, meditatio, contemplatio, ascendere, etc.
8 Itinerarium mentis in Deum. Peltier's ed., XII. 1-22. His Meditations on the Life of Jesus, his commentaries on Ecclesiastes, the Book of Wisdom, and John and Luke belong to this class. The mystical element is also strong in the Bremloquium and the Centiloquium. Other mystical writings ascribed to Bonaventura, such as Incendium amoris, de septem verbis domini, etc., are disputed.
* These three activities constitute the theoloyia symbolic a ^ theol. propria, and thcoL mystica.