Vigils Reading – St Bonaventure

A reading from “Butler’s Lives of the Saints” on

ST BONAVENTURE

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This greatest successor of St Francis of Assisi…was born at Bagnorea, near

Viterbo, in the year 1221… He was clothed in the order of Friars Minor and

studied at the University of Paris under Alexander of Hales… Bonaventure, who

was to become known as the Seraphic Doctor, taught theology and Holy

Scripture at the University from 1248 to 1257.

He was called by his priestly obligation to labor for the salvation of his

neighbor, and to this he devoted himself with enthusiasm. He preached to the

people with an energy which kindled a flame in the hearts of those that heard

him. While at the University of Paris he produced one of the best-known of his

written works, the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which

covers the whole field of scholastic theology. The years of his public lecturing at

Paris were greatly disturbed, however, by the attack made on the mendicant

friars by the other professors at the university. Jealousy of their pastoral and

academic success and the standing reproof to worldliness and ease of the friars’

lives were in part behind this attempt to get them excluded from the schools.

The leader of the secular party was William of Saint-Amour, who made a

bitter onslaught on the mendicants in a book called The Perils of the Last Times.

Bonaventure, who had to suspend lecturing for a time, replied in a treatise on

evangelical poverty, named Concerning the Poverty of Christ. Pope Alexander

IV appointed a commission of cardinals to go into the matter at Anagni, and on

their findings ordered Saint-Amour’s book to be burnt, vindicated and

reinstated the friars, and ordered the offenders to withdraw their attack. A year

later, in 1257, St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas received the degree of

doctor of theology together.

In 1257 Bonaventure was chosen minister general of the Friars Minor. He

was not yet thirty-six years old, and the order was torn by dissensions, some of

the friars being for an inflexible severity, others demanding certain mitigation

of the rule; between the two extremes were a number of other interpretations.

Some of the extreme rigorists, called Spirituals, had even fallen into error and

disobedience, and thus given a handle to the friars’ opponents in the Paris

dispute. Bonaventure wrote a letter to his provincials in which he made it clear

that he required a disciplined observance of the rule, involving a reformation of

the relaxed, but giving no countenance to the excesses of the Spirituals.

At Narbonne in 1260, the first of the five general chapters which

Bonaventure held, he produced a set of constitutions on the rule, which were

adopted and had a permanent effect on Franciscan life, but they failed to pacify

the excessive rigorists. At the request of the friars assembled in this chapter, he

undertook to write the life of St Francis, with a spirit which shows him to have

been filled with the virtues of the founder whose life he wrote. St Bonaventure

governed his order for seventeen years and has been justly called its second

founder.