EPIPHANY · 28 JANUARY & TRINITY · 15 JULY Priests & Doctors of the Church
Thomas Aquinas & Bonaventure
Priests & Doctors of the Church · The Angelic and Seraphic Doctors · d. 1274 & 1274
Aquinas — ah-KWY-nas · Summa Theologiae — SOO-ma thay-oh-LOH-gee-ay · Bonaventure — bon-ah-VEN-chur · Itinerarium — ih-tin-er-AIR-ee-um · Doctor Angelicus — dok-tor an-JEL-ih-kus · Doctor Seraphicus — dok-tor ser-AF-ih-kus · Albertus Magnus — al-BER-tus MAG-nus · quinque viae — KWIN-kway VEE-ay
O God, who by thy servants Thomas and Bonaventure didst show that all knowledge belongs to thee and all beauty leads to thee; Grant us the grace to think clearly about what we believe and to love ardently what we think, until understanding and adoration are no longer two acts but one; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
They died in the same year, 1274, within a few months of each other — Thomas Aquinas (ah-KWY-nas) in March, Bonaventure (bon-ah-VEN-chur) in July — as if the thirteenth century could not bear to part with either of them singly but required both at once. They had been friends and colleagues at the University of Paris, a Dominican and a Franciscan who shared not only a faculty but a vocation: both understood themselves as students of the same wisdom, both working out in their different idioms the full implications of Francis’s and Dominic’s different insights, both building on the foundation that Anselm and Bernard had laid. Thomas was the Angelic Doctor, Doctor Angelicus (dok-tor an-JEL-ih-kus) — the name given to him by his order in recognition of the purity and precision of his intelligence. Bonaventure was the Seraphic Doctor, Doctor Seraphicus (dok-tor ser-AF-ih-kus) — the name given to him in recognition that his intellect was always on fire, always ascending, always burning with the love that does not rest until it rests in God. Their joint feast falls in two separate seasons — Aquinas on 28 January in Epiphany, Bonaventure on 15 July in Trinity — and the liturgical distance between them is the distance between the light that illuminates and the fire that transforms.
Thomas Aquinas was born into the south Italian nobility in 1225 and entered the Dominican order over the furious opposition of his family, who kidnapped him and held him under house arrest for over a year in an attempt to make him abandon the friars. He was unmovable. He studied under Albertus Magnus (al-BER-tus MAG-nus) in Cologne and Paris, was so quiet in the schools that his fellow students called him the dumb ox — to which Albert reportedly responded that this dumb ox would one day bellow so loudly that the whole world would hear him. His Summa Theologiae (SOO-ma thay-oh-LOH-gee-ay), left unfinished at his death, is the most comprehensive theological synthesis in Western history: a systematic examination of every question in theology, philosophy, and ethics, organised with a clarity and rigour that has never been surpassed. His famous five proofs for the existence of God — the quinque viae (KWIN-kway VEE-ay) — are arguments not from scepticism but from wonder: the man who is astonished that anything exists at all, and follows that astonishment back to its source. Near the end of his life, after a mystical experience at Mass in Naples, he stopped writing. When his secretary urged him to continue, he said: I cannot. All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what I have seen. The greatest intellectual achievement of the medieval West ended in silence before the mystery that had always been its subject.
Bonaventure entered the Franciscan order and became its Minister General in 1257, governing it through the bitter internal disputes between those who wanted absolute poverty and those who sought accommodation with the world. He was a theologian of the first rank — his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard is a towering achievement — but his supreme gift was the synthesis of intellectual and mystical theology in works of extraordinary beauty. The Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (ih-tin-er-AIR-ee-um MEN-tis in DAY-um) — the Soul’s Journey into God — written in a single burst of inspiration on Mount La Verna, the mountain where Francis had received the stigmata, is one of the shortest and most perfectly formed works of mystical theology ever written: six stages of ascent corresponding to the six wings of the Seraph that Francis had seen, each stage a deepening of the soul’s gaze from the world as vestige of God, through the soul as image of God, to the pure divine light that transcends all images and all thought. Where Aquinas builds upward from careful argument, Bonaventure ascends on wings of love: both arrive at the same summit, but by routes so different that a reader who knows only one of them knows only half of what the summit looks like.
The Epiphany season in which Aquinas’s feast falls is the season of light and manifestation — fitting for the man who made the whole of Christian doctrine luminously clear, who showed that reason and faith are not enemies but partners in the single enterprise of knowing God. The Trinity season in which Bonaventure’s feast falls is the long season of the Church’s ordinary life — fitting for the man who spent his life governing a fractious order with the patience of a saint and writing mystical theology in the margins of administrative labour, whose greatest work was written on a mountain and whose greatest governing achievement was holding together a community of men who disagreed about almost everything except the man they were following. Between Aquinas and Bonaventure, the full intellectual and spiritual inheritance of the medieval West is held: the five ways and the six wings, the argument and the ascent, the light that shows and the fire that consumes.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Thomas didst illumine the mysteries of the faith with the light of reason, and by thy servant Bonaventure didst draw the seeking soul toward thee on the wings of love; Grant that we may think as clearly and love as ardently as they, until, like Thomas, we find all our words straw before thy glory, and, like Bonaventure, we ascend beyond all words into the silence of thy presence; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.