St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio: Holding Intellect and Humility Together to Hold Fraternal Communion of the Faithful

The life of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1217-1274) is a great inspiring example as to be an intellectual Catholic without becoming what Jesus calls “the wise and the learned” but remaining to be “childlike” so that the Father does not withhold “these things” committed to His Son, Christ (i.e. Matthew 11:25-27).

One episode of keeping childlike humility of St. Bonaventure is when he was selected to Cardinal of Albano. For this new leadership, papal envoys brought him Cardinal’s hat. But when they brought this, Bonaventure was busy doing house chore with his fellow friars. Instead of pulling himself from the house work with other friars to try out his Cardinal hat, Bonaventure chose to continue on his chore and told the envoys to just to hang the hat on the tree outside. Bonaventure never let his commitment to the service leadership in the fraternal and communal context fall compromised for the sake of ecclesiastical authority. Whether he was a great theological to be recognized as Doctor of the Church, Minister General of the Franciscans, or Cardinal of Albano, Bonaventure remained to be a humble brother Franciscan friar. And this is not so easy to those who climb up on the ecclesiastical hierarchy ladder as many of them tend to fall into the blindness of clericalism.

Since he is one of the Doctors of the Church, Bonaventure’s contribution to the intellectual heritage of the Catholic Church is enormous, especially, his commentary of Peter Lombard’s “Libri Quattuor Sententiarum”( The Four Books of Sentences), titled, “Commentaria in quartum librum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi”. Through this, Bonaventure made Lombard’s essential teaching more systematic to understand. Through his theological works, he also devoted himself to bring all believers as brothers and sisters under one Master, Christ. And this is reflected in the Gospel Reading of his memorial feast (July 15): Matthew 23:8-12.  As Doctor of the Church, as a bishop, and, as Minister General of the Franciscans (Order of Friar Minor), Bonaventure, remaining humble, committed himself to the fraternal unity of the Franciscans, his diocese, and all the faithful in the Church, held together by the indwelling Christ the Master, strengthened and nourished by the Holy Spirit, under the Father’s beatifying providence, as reflected in the First Reading (Ephesians 3:14-19).

By following St. Bonaventure’s great examples of holding intellect and humility together, integrating faith and reason in a dialectic way, and striving for fraternal unity of all Christians, we can enjoy studying theology and philosophy without slipping into the paralysis of analysis as a result of “theologizing” and “philosophyzing”, without becoming a sophist.  Though being a great theologian, the way St. Bonaventure taught always steered his students on the middle course to prevent them from getting lost in details.  It was not because of his intellect but because his humility, for which the Father revealed things about Christogical and soteriolgical truth in the Trinitarian context through His Son and the Holy Spirit.

It is truly a good fortune (bonus venture) that we have St. Bonaventure as our inspiration!