Bonaventure's Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind to God), written in 1259 during a period of retreat on Mount La Verna - the site of Francis of Assisi's stigmatization - is one of the most beautiful and philosophically rich texts of the medieval period. In thirty pages of Latin prose, it presents a complete philosophy of the soul's ascent to God, structured around the six days of creation in Genesis 1 and the vision of the seraphim in Isaiah 6:1-2, developing Augustinian illumination theory into a comprehensive account of how the natural world, the human mind, and the mystery of being itself are all traces of the Trinity.
The Thinker and His Work
Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274), born Giovanni di Fidanza in Tuscany, joined the Franciscan Order around 1243, studied at Paris under Alexander of Hales, and became the most learned Franciscan theologian of the thirteenth century. He served as Minister General of the Franciscan Order from 1257 to 1274 - a period of intense internal controversy about the proper interpretation of Franciscan poverty - while simultaneously producing some of the most important theological and philosophical works of the medieval period. His biography of Francis of Assisi became the definitive account; his Breviloquium is the most concise systematic theology of the age; and the Itinerarium is the summit of his mystical philosophy.
Bonaventure was a contemporary and colleague of Thomas Aquinas at Paris - both received their doctorates in the same ceremony in 1257 - but represents a significantly different philosophical tradition. Where Aquinas built his synthesis on Aristotelian philosophy, Bonaventure remained deeply Augustinian and Neoplatonic, emphasizing illumination, exemplarism (the doctrine that created things exist as divine ideas in the Word), and the affective rather than purely intellectual character of the soul's union with God.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Genesis 1:1 - 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth' - grounds Bonaventure's metaphysics of creation as expression. The six days of creation in Genesis 1 provide the structural framework for the Itinerarium's six stages of ascent: as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, so the soul's journey to God passes through six stages before arriving at the sabbath of contemplative rest. Each stage illuminates one way the created world mirrors the Trinity: the world of creatures (chapters 1-2), the human senses and powers (chapters 3-4), and the divine names of Being and Goodness (chapters 5-6).
Isaiah 6:1-2 - 'In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew' - provides the book's controlling image. The six-winged seraphim (understood through Francis's vision on La Verna, where Francis saw a seraph with the figure of Christ) become Bonaventure's figure for the six stages of the soul's illumination: two wings for the external world, two for the internal world of the soul, and two for the transcendent divine reality.
Exodus 25:18 - God's command to make the two cherubim of gold facing the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant - is invoked in the Prologue as the image of contemplation: just as the cherubim faced each other and the mercy seat, so the contemplative soul turns inward and upward to encounter the divine presence.
Core Argument
The Itinerarium's philosophical argument rests on three foundational claims. First, the entire created world is a mirror (speculum) of God: God has left traces (vestigia) of himself in all created things, and the illumined mind can read these traces as words in the book of creation. This Franciscan conviction - rooted in Francis's own joyful reverence for creation as God's gift - becomes a sophisticated epistemological and metaphysical thesis: created beauty, truth, and goodness are participations in and reflections of divine Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.
Second, the human soul is not only a trace (vestigium) but an image (imago) of God, and therefore a more adequate mirror of the divine Trinity. The three powers of the soul - memory, understanding, and will, drawn from Augustine's De Trinitate - are the proper object of the third and fourth stages of the ascent: the illumined mind recognizes in its own structure the Trinity it seeks.
Third, beyond both the created world and the human mind, the soul encounters God directly in the divine names of Being (Exodus 3:14, 'I AM WHO I AM') and Goodness (1 John 4:8, 'God is love'). Bonaventure draws on Pseudo-Dionysius's affirmative and negative theology to argue that Being and Goodness are the most adequate of the divine names, but that even these fall short of the divine reality that exceeds all conceptual capture.
The seventh chapter - the goal of the journey - describes a Dionysian 'mystical darkness' in which all intellectual activity ceases and the soul is united with God through love. This is not a permanent state but a foretaste, an anticipation of the beatific vision.
Intellectual Context
Bonaventure was synthesizing three streams: Augustinian theology (particularly the psychological analogy of the Trinity and the concept of divine illumination as the foundation of human knowledge), Franciscan spirituality (Francis's reverence for creation as God's gift, his identification with the suffering Christ), and Pseudo-Dionysian mysticism (the negative theology of divine transcendence, the hierarchical ascent through creatures to God). His synthesis is more aesthetically and affectively oriented than Aquinas's: where Aquinas emphasizes the intellect's role in the soul's return to God, Bonaventure emphasizes love.
Reception and Critique
The Itinerarium influenced Meister Eckhart's speculative mysticism and the Rhineland mystical tradition. Dante's Divine Comedy, with its hierarchical ascent from earth through purgatory to the beatific vision, is structurally indebted to Bonaventuran exemplarism. In the twentieth century, Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics - the idea that beauty is the first transcendental through which God is glimpsed - draws on Bonaventuran insights. Zachary Hayes and Ilia Delio have developed Bonaventure's creation theology in dialogue with evolutionary cosmology and Teilhard de Chardin.
Legacy
The Itinerarium established an enduring model of philosophical theology as spiritual itinerary: the philosophical analysis of creation, self, and God is not merely an academic exercise but a movement of the whole person toward its source and goal. This integration of intellectual rigor with contemplative practice has continued to attract philosophers and theologians who find purely speculative or purely devotional approaches inadequate.
Key Passages
'No one is disposed for divine contemplation which leads to mental elevation unless he be like Daniel, a man of desires. Such desires are enkindled in us in two ways: by an outcry of prayer which makes one cry out with groaning of heart, and by the flash of speculation by which the mind turns most directly and intently to the rays of light.' (Prologue)
Contemporary Relevance
Bonaventure's vision of the created world as a book of divine traces has generated renewed interest in the context of ecological crisis and environmental philosophy. If creatures are traces of God's presence and expressions of divine Wisdom, then their destruction is not merely environmental damage but a kind of theological impoverishment - the defacement of the book in which God has written himself.