“For one is not prepared for the divine contemplations, which lead to the rapt visions of the mind, unless he be with Daniel, a man of desires.[558] Desires are stirred within us by the cry of prayer and the bright light of speculation. I shall invite the reader first to the sighings of prayer through Christ crucified, lest perchance he believe that study might suffice without unction, or diligence without piety, knowledge without charity, zeal without divine grace, or the mirror (speculum) without the wisdom divinely inspired. Then to those humble and devout ones, to whom grace first has come, to those lovers of the divine wisdom, who burn with desire of it, and are willing to be still, for the magnifying of God, I shall propose pertinent speculations, showing how little or nothing is it to turn the mirror outward unless the mirror of our mind be rubbed and polished.”
Thus Bonaventura writes his prologue to this devotional tract, which will also hold “pertinent speculations.” Remarkable is the intellectuality and compacted thought which he fuses in emotional expression. He will write seven chapters, on the seven steps, or degrees, in the ascent to God, which is the mind’s true itinerarium. Since we cannot by ourselves lift ourselves above ourselves, prayer is the very mother and source of our upward struggle. Prayer opens our eyes to the steps in the ascent. Placed in the universe of things, we find in it the corporeal and temporal footprint (vestigium) leading into the way of God. Then we enter our mind, which is the everlasting and spiritual image of God; and this is to enter the truth of God. Whereupon we should rise above us to the eternal most spiritual first cause; and this is to rejoice in the knowledge of God’s majesty. This is the threefold illumination, by which we recognise the triple existence of things, in matter, in the intelligence, and in the divine way—in arte divina. And likewise our mind has three outlooks, one upon the corporeal world without, which is called sense, another into and within itself, which is called spiritus, and a third above itself, which is called mens. By means of all three, man should set himself to rising toward God, and love Him with the whole mind, and heart, and soul.
Then Bonaventura makes further analysis of his triple illumination into
“six degrees or powers of the soul, to wit, sense, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence, and apex mentis seu synteresis scintilla. These degrees are planted within us by nature, deformed through fault, reformed through grace, purged through righteousness, exercised through knowledge, perfected through wisdom.... Whoever wishes to ascend to God should shun the sins which deform nature, and stretch forth his natural powers, in prayer, toward reforming grace, in mode of life, toward purifying righteousness, in meditation, toward illuminating knowledge, in contemplation toward the wisdom which makes perfect. For as no one reaches wisdom except through grace, righteousness, and knowledge, so no one reaches contemplation, except through meditation, a holy life, and devout prayer.”
Chapter one closes with little that is novel; for we seem to be retracing the thoughts of Hugo of St. Victor. The second chapter is on the “Contemplation of God in His Footprints in the Sensible World.” This is the next grade of speculation, because we shall now contemplate God not only through His footprints, but in them also, so far as He is in them through essence, power, or presence. The sensible world, the macrocosmus, enters the microcosmus, which is the anima, through the gates of the five senses. The author sketches the processes of sense-perception, through which outer facts are apprehended according to their species, and delighted in if pleasing, and then adjudged according to the ratio of their delightfulness, to wit, their beauty, sweetness, salubrity, and proportion. Such are the footprints in which we may contemplate our God. All things knowable possess the quality of generating their species in our minds, through the medium of our perceptions; and thus we are led to contemplate the eternal generation of the Word—image and Son—from the Father. Likewise sweetness and beauty point on to their fontal source. And from speculation on the local, the temporal, and mutable, our reason carries us to the thought of the immutable, the uncircumscribed and eternal. Then from the beauty and delightfulness of things, we pass to the thought of number and proportion, and judge of their irrefragable laws, wherein are God’s wisdom and power.
“The creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God; in part because God is the source and exemplar and end of every creature; in part through their proper likeness; in part from their prophetic prefiguring; in part from angelic operations; and in part through superadded ordainment. For every creature by nature is an effigy of the eternal wisdom; especially whatever creature in Scripture is taken by the spirit of prophecy as a type of the spiritual; but more especially those creatures in the likeness of which God willed to appear by an angelic minister; and most especially that creature which he chose to mark as a sacrament.”
From these first grades of speculation, which contemplate the footprints of God in the world, we are led to contemplate the divine image in the natural powers of our minds. We find the image of the most blessed Trinity in our memory, our rational intelligence, and our will; the joint action of which leads on to the desire of the summum bonum. Next we contemplate the divine image in our minds remade by the gifts of grace upon which we must enter by the door of the faith, hope, and love of the Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ. As philosophy helped us to see the image of God in the natural qualities of our mind, so Scripture now is needed to bring us to these three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), which enable the mind of fallen man to be repaired and made anew through grace.
From this fourth grade, in which God is still contemplated in his image, we rise to consider God as pure being, wherein there is neither privation, nor bound, nor particularity; and next in his goodness, the highest communicability (summam communicabilitatem) of which may be contemplated, but not comprehended, in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. “In whom [the persons of the Trinity] it is necessary because of the summa bonitas that there should be the summa communicabilitas, and because of the latter, the summa consubstantialitas, and because of this the summa configurabilitas, and from these the summa coaequalitas, and through this the summa coaeternitas, and from all the preceding the summa cointimitas, by which each is in the other, and one works with the other through every conceivable indivisibility (indivisionem) of the substance, virtue, and operation of the same most blessed Trinity....” “And when thou contemplatest this,” adds Bonaventura, “do not think to comprehend the incomprehensible.”
From age to age the religious soul finds traces of its God in nature and in its inmost self. Its ways of finding change, varying with the prevailing currents of knowledge; yet still it ever finds these vestigia, which represent the widest deductions of its reasoning, the ultimate resultants of its thought, and its own brooding peace. Therefore may we not follow sympathetically the Itinerarium of Bonaventura’s mind as it traces the footprints of its God? Thus far the way has advanced by reason, uplifted by grace, and yet still reason. This reason has comprehended what it might comprehend of the traces and evidences of God in the visible creation and the soul of man; it has sought to apprehend the being of God, but has humbly recognized its inability to penetrate the marvels of his goodness in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. There it stops at the sixth grade of contemplation; yet not baffled, or rendered vain, for it has performed its function and brought the soul on to where she may fling forth from reason’s steeps, and find herself again, buoyant and blissful, in a medium of super-rational contemplation. This makes the last chapter of the mind’s Itinerarium; it is the apex mentis, the summit of all contemplations in which the mind has rest. Henceforth
“Christ is the way and door, the ladder and the vehicle, as the propitiation placed on the Ark of God, and the sacrament hidden from the world. He who looks on this propitiation, with his look full fixed on him who hangs upon the cross, through faith, hope, and charity, and all devotion, he makes his Passover, and through the rod of the cross shall pass through the Red Sea, out of Egypt entering the desert, and there taste the hidden manna, and rest with Christ in the tomb, dead to all without; and shall realize, though as one still on the way, the word of Christ to the believing thief: ‘To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.’ Which was also revealed to the blessed Francis when in ecstasy of contemplation on the high mountain, the Seraph with six wings, nailed on a cross, appeared to him. There, as we have heard from his companion, he passed into God through ecstasy of contemplation, and was set as an exemplar of perfect contemplation, whereby God should invite all truly spiritual men to this transit and ecstasy, by example rather than by word. In this passing over, if it be perfect, all the ways of reason are relinquished, and the apex affectus is transferred and transformed into God. This is the mystic secret known by no one who does not receive it, and received by none who does not desire it, and desired only by him whose heart’s core is aflame from the fire of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ sent on earth.... Since then nature avails nothing here, and diligence but little, we should give ourselves less to investigation and more to unction; little should be given to speech, and most to inner gladness; little to the written word, and all to God’s gift the Holy Spirit; little or nothing is to be ascribed to the creature, and all to the creative essence, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”