Bonaventure

Giovanni di Fidanza was born around 1217 at Bagnoregio, near Viterbo in central Italy. He studied at the University of Paris, joined the Franciscan order, taking the name Bonaventure, and became a master of theology there, a colleague of Thomas Aquinas.

In 1257 he was elected minister general of the Franciscans, an order then divided over how strictly to keep Francis’s poverty, and he led it for seventeen years, writing the official Life of Saint Francis. In 1259 he went to Mount La Verna, where Francis had received the stigmata, and there wrote The Journey of the Mind into God.

In 1273 he was made cardinal bishop of Albano, and he died in 1274 during the Second Council of Lyon, where he had worked for the union of the Greek and Latin churches. He was later named a Doctor of the Church, known as the Seraphic Doctor. His thought joins the Augustinian and Dionysian traditions with Francis’s love of creatures and of the crucified Christ.

Besides the Journey, his spiritual works include The Tree of Life, a meditation on the life of Christ, and The Triple Way, on purification, illumination and union. His sermons and scholastic writings, among them a great commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, shaped Franciscan theology for centuries.