Terms & Principles
These are sensible signs, instituted by God as a remedy for sin.
What are sacraments?
Wayne Hellmann focuses on these three elements to argue for the foundation of the sacraments at the origins of the universe.
What are water, oil, and grain?
Bonaventure wrote the Itinerarium mentis in Deum while on retreat here, the same place where Francis of Assisi experienced a mystical vision.
What is Mount La Verna?
The soul's powers of re-membering, understanding, and this each lead the soul to God by orienting the soul to God's eternity, truth, and goodness.
What is choosing?
Christians are moved to love and imitate Christ more deeply when they consider that his life, even to the point of this, is an example for them.
What is his crucifixion?
What is grace?
Because the eucharist is intended for human consumption, a creature of this kind does not receive the eucharist if it consumes a bit of consecrated bread. (Give it a cookie, though, and you might find it asking for a glass of milk.)
What is a mouse?
Bonaventure uses this term in both the Breviloquium and the Itinerarium: in the Breviloquium, they name the way in which all creatures reflect God as being one, true, and good; in the Itinerarium, they are the primary concern of the first stage of ascent.
What are the vestiges (imprints)?
The soul's power of sensation—particularly when a sense-object produces a likeness of itself, to be taken in by the soul—reflects how the Father does this, resulting in the existence of the Son.
What is generates?
The human being's capacity for knowing and loving God, which Bonaventure calls this, means that the human being's free actions can be judged good or bad.
What is image of God?
To describe Francis of Assisi's nature mysticism as this is to say that it clearly differentiates between Creator and creature.
What is confrontational?
Where baptism brings forth the life of faith and confirmation increases the life of faith, the eucharist does this for the recipient's life of faith.
What is nourishes?
The six wings of the seraph offers one important way for Bonaventure to structure the Itinerarium; these provide the other.
What are the powers of the soul?
Bonaventure's quotations from (Pseudo-)Dionysius in chapter 7 of the Itinerarium call to mind this approach to theology.
What is apophatic?
The Word assumes only some human defects (like hunger and sorrow) but not others (like ignorance or malice) in the incarnation because Jesus has this role to play between God and humanity.
What is mediator?
No stock markets here—Bonaventure uses this Latin term to refer to an alert and continual watchfulness for God's presence.
What is speculatio?
Humans require the aid of grace to enjoy this, which exceeds what humans can achieve for themselves—even when listening to Pharrell Williams.
What is happiness?
Bonaventure doubles the three ways the soul has of looking—around, within, above—by pointing out these two ways of using a mirror.
What are looking through and looking in?
Bonaventure's analysis of this leads him to identify its characteristics of communicability, con-substantiality, con-figurability, co-equality, co-eternity, and mutual intimacy.
What is goodness?
The glory of heaven, according to party 7 of the Breviloquium, consists primarily in this.
What is the vision of God?
This principle, drawn from medieval theories of medicine, helps Bonaventure think through how Christ's suffering brings about restoration.
What is "Contraries are healed through contraries"?
These—for example, the soul's ability to hear the speech of Christ or behold the brilliance of his light—are healed when the soul receives the gifts of grace.
What are the spiritual senses?
Stephen Brown argues that we should think of the genre of the Itinerarium as this, inviting university students to a deeper spiritual life.
What is guidebook?
Bonaventure adopts the three principles of emanation, exemplarity, and illumination from this theological-philosophical school.
What is Christian Neoplatonism?
The idea that creatures in the universe express eternal ideas in the divine mind is called this.
What is exemplarity?