Vigils: St. Bonaventure
July 15
THE LIFE OF ST BONAVENTURE
From Butler’s Lives of the Saints 2
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Of the youth of this greatest successor of St Francis of Assisi nothing is
known beyond the facts that he was born at Bagnoregio, near Viterbo, in the
year 1221, the son of John Fidanza and Mary Ritella. He was clothed in the order
of Friars Minor and studies at the University of Paris under an Englishman,
Alexander of Hales, ‘the Unanswerable Doctor’; Bonaventure, who was to
become known as the Seraphic Doctor, himself taught theology and Holy
Scripture there from 1248 to 1257.
Bonaventure 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”, and other writings.
Bonaventure, who had to suspend lecturing for a time, replied in a treatise
on evangelical poverty, named “Concerning the Poverty of Christ”. The 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. The new minister general 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 he 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, which he compiled with a spirit which shows him to
have been filled with the virtues of the founder whose life he wrote. He governed
his order for seventeen years and has been justly called its second founder.
2 BUTLER’S LIVES OF THE SAINTS, Concise Edition edited by M. Walsh (Harper San Francisco, 1991) pp. 216-
217.