Saint Bonaventure

In 1257 the Franciscans were close to shipwreck. Francis had died in 1226, and by now the order had split between friars who wanted poverty preserved to the letter and friars who thought thousands of men could not live on begging alone. They elected Bonaventure — a Paris theology professor still in his thirties — to hold it together, and he did, for seventeen years, earning a title the order still uses: its second founder.

He wrote the order's official life of Francis, the Legenda Maior, at the friars' request — an attempt to settle, in one authoritative text, who Francis actually was and what he had asked of them. Alongside the governing he kept writing theology: the mind's ascent to God traced through the wounds of Christ, wisdom tasted rather than merely proved. Paul tells the Colossians that in Christ

“are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3)

— Bonaventure spent his life arguing that theology is finally about that hiddenness opening, not closing.

In 1273 Gregory X made him a cardinal and drew him into the Second Council of Lyon, meant to reunite Rome and Constantinople after two centuries of division. Bonaventure helped prepare it and preached at its opening. He died in Lyon before the council closed; the reunion he had worked for held barely a few years past his death.

Three centuries later the Church declared him a Doctor — the Seraphic Doctor, for a mind that never let love and intellect come apart.

Saint Bonaventure, you held together what threatened to split apart. Ask for us the wisdom that unites rather than the certainty that divides.

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