Bonaventure on La Verna

In 1257 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, a master at the University of Paris, was elected Minister General of the Friars Minor. In the prologue to his Itinerarium mentis in Deum he calls himself the seventh to succeed Francis in governing the brothers, and he says that he was seeking peace with a longing spirit, after Francis’s example.

Around the anniversary of Francis’s death, in the thirty-third year after it (that is, in the autumn of 1259), Bonaventure turned aside to Mount La Verna, as to a quiet place, out of love for seeking peace of spirit. It was the mountain where Francis, two years before his death, had seen a winged Seraph and received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, in his own body.

While he was there, Bonaventure writes, he was turning over in his mind certain ascents of the mind to God. Among other things, there came to him the miracle that had happened to Francis in that very place: the vision of the winged Seraph in the likeness of the Crucified. As he considered it, he saw at once that the vision showed both Francis’s own rapture in contemplation and the way by which one comes to it.

The six wings, he explains, can rightly be understood as six stages of illumination. They begin from creatures and lead up to God, and by them the soul is made ready, as if by steps or stages of a journey, to pass over into peace. Yet the way, he insists, is only through the most burning love of the Crucified.

From this meditation came the Itinerarium mentis in Deum, often translated The Soul’s Journey into God: six chapters that follow the six wings, and a seventh on mystical rest. It remains his most popular work today, and Pope Benedict XVI called it a “manual” for mystical contemplation.