There should be little need of apologizing for a new translation
into
English of Saint Bonaventura's "Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum," for
it has been recognized by all serious historians of philosophy as
one of the shorter masterpieces of medieval philosophy. It sets
forth in very few pages a whole system of metaphysics; it
illustrates a philosophical method; it typifies the thinking of
one of the great monastic orders of the West; it stands at the
beginning of Renaissance science as one of those documents in
which the future can be seen in germ. Besides its importance as an
outstanding work in metaphysics, a work comparable to Descartes'
"Discourse on Method," Leibniz's Monadology, or Hume's "Enquiry"
in its compactness and suggestiveness, it represents a strain of
medieval thought which has
been too much neglected since the publication of "Aeterni Patris,"
in 1879.
That encyclical with its emphasis upon Thomism has given many
people, both Catholic and non-Catholic, the impression that the
philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas is the "official" philosophy of
the Roman Catholic Church. The result of this miscomprehension has
been disparagement of writings other than Thomistic. Yet even in
the thirteenth century Catholic philosophers were far from being
in agreement, either on matters of doctrine or method. One has
only to mention such figures as Alexander of Hales, the master of
Saint Bonaventura; Roger Bacon; and the various monks of Saint
Victor, to realize that the confusion and disagreement which
certain writers of today find in our own time were just as
characteristic of a period to which they refer as one of universal
concord.
The metaphysical point of view of Saint Bonaventura can be traced
back to Plotinus, if not to Philo. Fundamental to his whole system
is that fusion of the three hierarchies of Neo-Platonism: the
hierarchy of logical classes, that of values, and that of reality.
Elementary students of logic are accustomed to the doctrine that
individuals can be grouped into classes which belong to certain
species; that these species are again susceptible to
classification in certain genera; that these are capable of being
grouped into still larger orders and families, until we come to
the class which includes all other classes and which is usually
called being. This hierarchy of classes in the textbooks of
classical logic is called the Tree of Porphyry. In non-philosophic
work we find the same sort of thing illustrated in the Linnaean
classification of plants and animals. The higher up one goes in
this hierarchy, the more inclusive are one's classes. Thus the
class of vertebrates is more inclusive than the class of mammals,
and the class of animals is more inclusive than the class of
vertebrates.
If we assume, as most classical writers did, that such a
classification
reproduces the structure of reality, that classes are ordained by
God and are not simply convenient groupings made by man for his
own purposes, then we can see in this order of beings a scale of
creatures which might be thought of as a map of all things, a tree
not only of life but of all existence. But an added assumption is
usually introduced into the discussion at this point, the
assumption of both Plotinus and Saint Bonaventura, that the more
general a class, the more real and the better. This assumption may
be argued, but one can at least imagine why someone contemplating
this arrangement of classes within other classes, running from the
least inclusive to the most inclusive, would maintain that there
was logical priority in the more general. For before one can
define, let us say, man as a rational animal, it would be
necessary to know the definition of "animal"; and before one could
define "animality," one would have to know the definition of
"living matter." This logical order of priority and posteriority
might be thought of as corresponding in some mysterious way--and
it has remained mysterious to this day--to some relationship in
the order of reality. The problem was to discover precisely what
this
relationship was.
Plotinus answered the question by the invention of a basic
metaphor. The universe was subject to something which he called
"emanation." The lower classes flowed out of the upper classes as
light flowed from a candle. Such metaphors have been of the
greatest influence in the history of thought, both philosophic and
scientific. Thus we have had such figurative terms as "affinity"
in chemistry, or the "life force" in biology, or the "life cycle
of a nation" in history, terms which were taken literally by some
people but which upon scrutiny turned out to be figures of speech.
In Plotinus' case there is little doubt that he believed emanation
to be literal truth; though when he came to explain how lower
orders emanated from higher, he could do it only by means of a
more elaborate figure of speech or by having recourse to what he
thought of as a law of nature, namely, that all things produced
something and that what they produced was always "lower" than they
themselves. Thus, Being produced the kinds of Being, and each kind
produced less inclusive kinds; and so on down to the smallest
classes in which individual things were comprised.
This hierarchy of Being appears throughout the work of Saint
Bonaventura, though he did not derive it immediately from Plotinus.
It had become a medieval commonplace which few were willing to
question. And yet he could not accept the whole theory of
emanation, since he was bound by his religious faith to believe in
actual creation out of nothing. The God of Plotinus was The One
from whom everything flowed like light; the God of Saint
Bonaventura was the personal God of Genesis. His metaphysical
problem was to accommodate one to the other. This accommodation
appears most
clearly in the fifth chapter of the "Itinerarium."
The second hierarchy which was fused with the logical hierarchy
was that of value. There is no purely logical reason why the
general should be any better than the particular, though there are
good traditional grounds for thinking so. Plato, Aristotle, the
Neo-Platonists, and even the Stoics had a tendency to confuse
goodness with the ideal or the general. In ancient Pagan thought,
there was a standard belief that no particular was ever a perfect
exemplification of its class--no triangle made of matter being a
perfect geometrical triangle, no human being a perfectly rational
animal, no work of art a perfect realization of the artist's idea.
Arguing in this way, one could see that no species would ever
perfectly exemplify its genus, no genus its higher order, and so
on. Hence the process "downward" from Being was degeneration. When
one stops to think that the Christian religion insisted upon man's
nature as having been vitiated by sin--sin which, though committed
by our primordial parents, was nevertheless inherited by us--one
can also see why, to a Christian, the fusion of the logical and
the value-hierarchy was natural enough. We still look in vain for
the perfect exemplification of animal and vegetable species,
though we are inclined to believe that the species is an ideal
formed for intellectual purposes, and not to be expected to exist
in anything other than scientific books and articles. But to a
Christian thinker of the type of Saint Bonaventura, the species
and genera were the ideas of God in
accordance with which He had created the world. It is they which
are
responsible for the orderliness of the universe; they are
sometimes called by the Stoic term, seminal reasons. In the
nineteenth century, when men were as impressed by the regularity
of scientific laws as they had been in the thirteenth, people like
Lord Russell found a religious satisfaction in contemplating them,
the only difference being that Lord Russell did not use the Stoic
term; nor did he think of scientific laws as the ideas in the mind
of God. If permanence and invariability are marks of goodness,
then indeed the more general the law, or the more inclusive the
idea, the better. And since the most general and inclusive term is
without question the term "Being," it would follow that "Being"
was the best of all things. In the sixth chapter of the "Itinerarium,"
in which Saint Bonaventura discusses "Good" as the name of God,
the importance of this fusion appears
most clearly.
The third hierarchy, as we have said, was that of reality. In
common speech we are accustomed to think of particular things in
this material world of time and space as more real than ideas, or
logical classes, or mathematical concepts, such as circles and
triangles. We should, if untutored in the history of philosophy,
think that a given man, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, was
more real than the idea of mankind though it is doubtful whether
we should proceed to maintain that the idea of "rational animal"
is more real than that of "animal." The fundamental question for a
philosopher is what we mean by the adjective "real" and whether we
should give it a meaning such that it may be used in the
comparative and superlative degrees. Saint Bonaventura was far
from being unique in thinking that this adjective was comparable;
indeed such modern thinkers as Hegel and his
followers seemed to have taken that for granted. In any event
Saint Bonaventura did believe in its comparability, and he
identified the hierarchy of reality with those of logic and value.
This fusion of hierarchies lies behind the whole method of
thinking which is illustrated by the "Itinerarium," and it must be
accepted by a reader who wishes to study the work sympathetically.
But along with this metaphysical matrix a certain philosophical
method is to be found which is of particular importance in
studying this work. That method is resident in a theory of
knowledge which makes true knowledge a matter of inspection, of
seeing. We all have to believe that certain ideas must be taken
for granted, whether they are the postulates of a system of
geometry which we accept merely for the purpose of deducing their
consequences or whether they are the simple matters of perceptual
fact which we are likely to call the truths of observation. Again,
when we deduce a conclusion from a set of premises, as in a simple
syllogism or a bit of arithmetical reasoning, how do we know that
the conclusion is not merely logically entailed in the premises,
but true also to fact? Cardinal Newman, in his "Grammar of
Assent," distinguished between what he called "real assent" and
"notional assent"--the former being the assent which we give to
propositions of
existence or, roughly, fact; the latter, that which we give to the
logical
conclusions. Thus the following syllogism is logically accurate,
but no one would believe in the truth of its conclusion:
1. All triangles are plane figures.
2. John Doe is a triangle.
3. John Doe is a plane figure.
We should be obligated to maintain that the conclusion followed
from the premises, but we would not give real assent to it
nevertheless. Just what do we mean by real assent, and how does it
arise?
The most obvious case of real assent occurs in the acceptance of
the truths of observation. If someone is asked why he thinks sugar
is sweet, he will tell you that it is because he has tasted it. If
someone asks why a person believes that the sky is blue, he will
be told that the person has looked and seen. Sensory observation
looks like simple and direct and incontrovertible knowledge. It is
not quite so simple and direct and incontrovertible as used to be
thought, but we are dealing with the common-sense point of view
here, and from that it has all these traits. Throughout the "Itinerarium"
Saint Bonaventura emphasizes that knowledge in the last analysis
comes down to seeing, to contemplation, to a kind of experience in
which we know certain things to be true without further argument
or demonstration. On the lowest level, this occurs in sensory
observation, on the highest in the mystic vision.
Along with this insistence on direct experience as the source of
all truth runs a practice which goes back at least to Philo-Judaeus
in the Hebraic-Christian tradition: the practice of the
allegorical method. In Philo, who was mainly interested in the
Pentateuch, the allegorical method was employed in interpreting
Scripture. It was believed by him that if every verse in the Bible
was accepted literally, then we should have to believe things
which were contrary to reason. Thus we should have to believe that
God, Who is not in space, actually walked in the Garden of Eden;
that He spoke as human beings speak with a physical voice; that He
literally breathed into Adam the breath of life as we breathe our
breath into things.[1] But to hold such beliefs is to deny the
spirituality and ubiquity of God, and that is repugnant to our
religious and philosophical theories. Consequently Philo
maintained that these and similar texts must be interpreted
allegorically, and he naturally believed that he had the key to
the allegory. Similarly the "Itinerarium," which begins as a
meditation upon the vision which Saint Francis had on Mount
Alverna, continues as an interpretation in philosophical terms,
not only of the vision itself, but also of certain passages in
Exodus and Isaiah in which details of the vision are paralleled.
The Seraph which Saint Francis saw, and which had three pairs of
wings, has to be interpreted as a symbol of a philosophical and
religious idea. The wings become stages in the process of the
mind's elevation to God, and their position on the body of the
Seraph indicates the heights of the stages. Furthermore, it will
be seen that even the physical world itself becomes a sort of
symbol of religious ideas. This was in keeping with many
traditions which were common in the Middle Ages--ideas that
appeared in the Bestiaries and Lapidaries, and which we retain in
weakened form in some of our pseudoheraldic symbols, such as the
Eagle, the Lion, and the Olive Branch; or the use of certain
colors, such as blue for hope, white for purity, red for passion.
Among these more popular symbols was that of the macrocosm and the
microcosm, according to which a human being exactly mirrored the
universe as a whole, so that one could pass from
one to the other and find corresponding parts and functions. Much
of this was undoubtedly fortified by Saint Francis' fashion of
humanizing natural objects--the sun, the birds, the rain, and so
on--in his talks and poems. Few, if any, of the saints seem to
have felt such an intimate relationship with the physical world as
the founder of the Order to which Saint Bonaventura belonged.
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