Once a peasant from the nearby village came to us when we were visiting to Saint Seraphim in his retreat place a few miles in the forest from the Sarov monastery. He asked: “Who is the man of God?” We pointed at the old man working in his small garden. The peasant ran to the Saint and fell face down before him embracing his feet: “Help, my horse got stolen – and now all my family will surely die!” St. Seraphim lifted the man and embraced him pressing his forehead against the man’s one. Then he said: “Go to the village so and so, enter the second fenced property on the left. There you will find your horse tied to the fence behind the house. Quietly untie it and take it home without talking to anyone”.
The peasant left in a hurry. On the next day he came back and thanked the Saint heartily: “You saved us all”. The saint answered: “Go and thank God who helped you and not the humble Seraphim who is nothing”. The man returned to his family (My translation by memory).
Having mentioned the existence of the Intelligences (angels) and that they receive power from the first cause, God, which they in turn dispense in the work of administration . . . , i.e., the work which is assigned for them by God (like also in the case of those great Saints with miraculous powers) sent for service, for the sake of those who shall inherit salvation, Bonaventure continues to present in detail the regular kind of knowledge of the physical things:
Man . . . . has five senses, which serve as five portals through which knowledge of all things existing in the visible world enters his soul . . . Through these portals . . . enter also common sense objects, such as number, form, rest and motion. And since everything that is moved is moved by another . . . .we are led, when we perceive bodily motion, . . . . to the knowledge of spiritual motions, as through the effect of the knowledge to the knowledge of causes (3).
In this common mode of acquiring knowledge the sense perception in connected with the active intellect, which forms an immediate idea of an object in passive intellect by means of abstraction. The knowledge of super-sensual but real is deduced in a manner of philosophical speculation. Again:
The whole of the visible world enters the human soul through apprehension. . .
Yet things enter not through their substances, but through similitudes generated in the medium, and through the medium they pass into the organ and thence into the apprehensive faculty. Thus the generation of the species in the medium, and from the medium they pass into the organ. From the external organ they pass into the internal organ, and the directing of the apprehensive faculty upon it leads to the apprehension of all those things which the soul apprehends outside itself (4).
When does the divine light belong in this doctrine? For Bonaventure it is the certainty of knowledge even of sensibles constitutes the ground for deduction of the existence and even the necessity of that light in the process of knowing. As C. M. Cullen mentioned of the theory: “The mind is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the attaining of truth”. And I would add that the mind could be in different modes depending on different degrees of its conformity, therefore, the above portion of the theory applies only to the empirical mode.Bonaventure following Aristotle (in his Metaphysics) continues with the notion of “the delight we take in our senses” (A I,1):
From this apprehension, if it is a suitable object, pleasure follows. The senses are delighted in an object, perceived through the abstracted similitude . . . , proportion is observed in the similitude in so far as it has the character of the species of form, and then it is called beauty, because beauty is nothing other then numbered equality, or a certain disposition of parts, together with a suavity of color. Again, proportionality is observed in so far as it has the character of power or strength, and then it is called sweetness, when the active power does not disproportionally exceeds the recipient sense. For the senses are pained by extremes and delighted by moderation . . . . Thus through pleasure, external delights enter the soul by means of their similitudes… (5).
Where does the beauty come from? It comes from the Good, or the ordering aspect of the First Principle, which is reflected in nature and the human soul. Many goods, or those mini reflections, become possible for the soul because of the constant participation in the Good, or “contuition of God, and the divinely given signs wherein we can see God” (11).
Explaining further judgment as “an action which, by purifying and abstracting the sensory likeness received sentiently by the senses, causes it to enter into the intellective faculty” (6), and repeating that “this whole world must enter the human soul through the doors of the senses”, Bonaventure says:
“Yet these activities are vestiges in which we can see our God. For the perceived species is a similitude generated in the medium and then impressed on the organ itself, through this impression it leads us to its starting point, that is to the object to be known. Hence, this process manifestly suggests that the Eternal Light begets of Himself a Likeness or a co-equal, constubstantial, and co-eternal Splendor; that He who is the image of the invisible God and the brightness of his glory and the image of his substance, Who is everywhere by His first generation like an object that generates its similitude in the entire medium, is united by the grace of union to the individual of rational nature as the species is united with the bodily organ, so that through this union He may lead us back to the Father, as to the Fountain-head and Object” (7)
In this formula the explanation of the regular knowledge finds its teleology and transcends the empirical knowledge itself forming the true metaphysics.
Here the big question: WHY? finally may be answered. The final cause of this kind of knowing finds its explanation, and it is inseparable with the notion of the Eternal Light.
If, therefore, all knowable things must generate likeness of themselves, they manifestly proclaim that in them, as in mirrors can be seen the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son, eternally emanating from God the Father (7).
Bonaventure emphasizes this final cause in his theory of knowledge again and again. He follows Aristotelian logic but shows that the philosopher stopped short and never actually became a true metaphysician. That is why he also needs Plato, whom he also attempts to correct, taking him as having proclaimed the impossibility of empirical knowledge at all. There is the way of knowing by abstraction and the way of knowing by ascending directly to archetypes into the divine mind. There is also a midground where the regular knowledge is judged by the eternal, which is never completely absent from the human mind. That is what Bonaventure says about judgment, which speaks for “beholding of eternal truth”:
For judgment has to be made by reason that abstracts from place, time, and change, and hence it abstracts from dimension, succession, and transmutation by a reason which cannot change nor have any limits in time or space. But nothing is absolutely immutable and unlimited in time and space unless it is eternal, and everything that is eternal is either God or in God. . . .
All things shine forth in this light. . . . Therefore, those laws by which we judge with certainty about all sense objects that come to our knowledge, since they are infallible and indubitable to the intellect of him who apprehends, since they cannot be eradicated from the memory of him who recalls, for they are always present, since they do not admit of refutation or judgment by the intellect of him who judges, because St. Augustine says, No one judges of them but by them, these laws must be changeless and incorruptible, since they are necessary. . . . eternally in the Art (9).
As I see it, the theory is consistent, broad, has many levels, answer many questions and reconciles different positions. It is realistic and highly speculative, includes empirical considerations but also transcends their artificial limitations. It entails the moral theory and calls for a certain type of action. These actions are seen in efforts of self-perfection in the traditional Christian mode where the highest respect is shown to the First Principle, the Word and the Holy Ghost. The final destination of all efforts to know invariably lies there, and our minds being created and in this sense unsubstantial are still grounded in the divine source and in this way participate in the divine light of this source. It could be considered more and more but now is the time to stop at this point leaving the rest for the future investigation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Works of Saint Bonaventure: 1) Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, The Franciscan Institute, 1956; 2) Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, 1992; 3) Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, 1979; 4) On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, 1996; 5) On the Eternity of the World, Marquette University Press, 1964
2. Aristotle: The Basic Works, Random House, New York 1941: 1) Phyisica; 2) De Anima; 3) Metaphysica; 4) Ethica Nicomachea
3. Plato: Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company, 1997: 1) Timaeus.
4. The Holy Bible, the New King James Version, 1990
5. Cullen C. M. , Bonaventure, Oxford University Press 2006.
6. Gilson E., History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Random House< New York, 1954.
7. Великие Святые России, Преподобный Серафим Саровский в воспоминаниях современников, Сретенский монастырь, 2000.
8. A Buddhist Bible, edited by Dwight Goddard, Beacon Press, Boston 1994.
9. Upanishads, the principle texts selected and translated from the original Sanskrit by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, © 1975.
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