For several
years, in a couple of different courses I have taught, I have had to attempt to
teach Bonaventure’s Soul’s Journey to God. Anyone familiar with this text
will know how difficult a task it is, especially with freshmen. On top of that, I
am not by any stretch of the imagination a Bonaventurian scholar. However,
teach it I have had to do. I found my first experiences in trying to convey Bonaventure’s
medieval text, using his medieval categories, to be a losing battle. (I am sure
an actual Bonaventure scholar might succeed). So, I decided to use his schema
of the seven days and translate as best I could his medieval categories into
modern categories. Because of my interest in Girardian studies, as well as the
profound influence of Vern Redekop’s description of identity needs, I
translated Bonaventure’s concepts into Girardian and human identity needs
categories. This seems to resonate with many students. For some time, I have
been thinking about putting my efforts into writing. I thought that I would start
with writing the basics of what I present in class. In time I hope to expand
this. But first, I need to get the basics down into a text of some form. Here
is the beginning of this endeavor. I hope to actually finish this in four
parts. Fingers crossed.
I begin this
adventure with days 1 and 2 of the Bonaventure’s journey.
Part One:
Day 1 & 2
Life is a
journey as the saying goes. Like any journey, if there is a particular destination,
one needs some kind of map to direct one’s path. The map itself is the result
of previous journeys by others. The problem is, whose map should we follow?
Bonaventure begins the journey paying
attention to the created world. He believes, as a Christian, that creation came
about by the will of a benevolent deity. And like an artist, creation contains
traces, vestiges (footprints), of the artist. In the macrocosm of God’s
creation, Bonaventure looks for patterns, for order. As God brought about order
from chaos in Genesis 1, so we should see order in the created world around us.
While Bonaventure lived a life infused
with theological reflection, most of us live in a world in which the culture is
no longer so infused with religious influences. Much of our life is primarily a
plethora of secular concerns. There is no dominant, or hegemonic, ideology by
which one can order one’s life. We are instead offered a smorgasbord of
possible paths to follow. Yet, we intuitively know that order is a human need.
We order our lives in order to experience a sense of security, a sense of
meaning, a sense of connectedness with others. When our world of constructed
security, meaning, and connectedness are disturbed or severed, we suffer a
sense of chaos. In these moments, we seek to regain our sense of order by
whatever means available.
Bonaventure looked to the outer world
of creation to find traces of order. He did this in a couple of different ways.
One was to look at the world as if through a highly polished mirror. When we
look into a mirror, of course we see an image of ourselves, surrounded by those
objects around us. However, Bonaventure wants to look at actual created
objects, like rocks, animals, and plants as though these were mirrors. What
does he expect to see? He sees patterns, which he attributes to the intelligence
of the creator.
Most moderns rarely look at objects
expecting to find some traces of the divine, and thus vestiges of divine order
and intelligence. However, we do look to society and culture, seeking, both
consciously and unconsciously, patterns by which to navigate the contingencies
of our lives. This attentiveness to ordered patterns is typically focused on
the many models presented to us in our social and cultural location. It begins
with our parents, our siblings, and the various friends we make. It also
includes the many other models our society offers us – celebrities, sports
figures, intellectuals, and so forth. It is from these various models that we begin
to build our internal maps. And from a Bonaventurian schema, these models are
related to day 1 as they are parts of the created world outside our selves.
For Bonaventure, looking attentively
to the patterns and order of the created world, one not only sees vestiges of
the divine, but one also begins to acquire wisdom. Of course, for Bonaventure,
such wisdom is associated with the second person of the Trinity, who is the logos,
the wisdom and reason of God. However, for most of us in the contemporary world,
such reflection on the created world rarely leads to such religiously inclined
conclusions. However, in our reflection and attentiveness to the social and
cultural world outside us, we begin to recognize patterns of ideological
constructs that offer promises of wisdom. We see this in such myths as the ‘American
dream’, and the various nationalistic ideologies that promise security, connectedness,
and meaning.
Bonaventure will associate these
various reflections on the order and wisdom of creation with goodness. For Bonaventure,
in contradistinction with the heresy of Catharism – which claimed the world to
be created by an evil deity – the world is good, created by the fulness of
goodness, God. And as he reflects on this goodness, he realizes that we begin
to perceive degrees of goodness. The height of goodness for Bonaventure manifests
as beautiful. Goodness is beautiful. I think we can agree with him that when we
experience goodness, we find it beautiful. We even say things like, ‘she has
such a beautiful soul’ in relation to one’s goodness.
However, in our contemporary lives,
while we may experience aspects of goodness, we may not reflect beyond immediate
experiences to the conclusion that life, and the universe, is ultimately good
because it has been created by goodness itself. While Bonaventure, by means of
his Christian lens, sees in the ordered, patterned created world, with its wisdom
and goodness, the vestiges of the triune God, most of us merely experience
random events that rarely lead to such a vision of the divine. Our universe is,
rather, contracted by the immediacy of everyday events and responsibilities.
Despite our different ways of
reflecting on the world, i.e., looking at the created world (Bonaventure), or
looking at social and cultural patterns (moderns), I believe we can still
utilize Bonaventure’s schema. In our journey to God, we can see reflections of
the divine in the cacophony of human voices offering us maps to a meaningful
life that includes a sense of security and connectedness. We see such
reflections of the divine in human identity needs. Every person, no matter
where one comes from, no matter one’s cultural particularities, shares in some
basic needs. Each one of us needs to be loved. Such love is experienced through
connection with another, or others. Related to such connectedness is the fact
that another, or others, have recognized us as worthy of such connectedness. In
such recognition we experience the reality of our own goodness and lovableness.
This in turn gives us a sense of wellbeing, of security. Together with these
satisfied needs, we form a sense of meaning about life, a sense of purposefulness.
At the same time, the failure to
satisfy these needs can lead to the formation of inner angst and insecurity,
leading to a variety of negative results. We may form dispositions of
resentment towards the world, accompanied by attitudes of envy or jealousy. This
in turn may impede one’s ability to form loving and trusting relationships.
Such negative experiences tend to lead to occasions of conflict. Such formation
by the influences of the outer world leads, as Bonaventure will tell us, to
inner worlds reflecting such influences.
After reflecting on the created world
outside us (which, in my reflection is turned to the social and cultural world
outside us), Bonaventure will, from his medieval scholastic training, turn
to a reflection on the processes of how the world outside us finds its way into
our inner world. He takes this up in his reflection on day 2 of his journey.
While Bonaventure had issues with
aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy – Bonaventure seems to have preferred Plato –
he nevertheless knew Aristotle well. He utilizes Aristotle’s epistemology as to
how one’s knowledge of the outer world is obtained via the senses of touch,
taste, smell, and sight. These senses are doorways into the mind. They bridge
the world outside us to the world within.
We begin early in life constructing an
inner world shaped by a plethora of experiences of social and cultural
influences. We will form dispositions, memories, attitudes, and ideologies that
will inform our relationships with those in our social spaces. Bonaventure
tells us that one’s relationship with the outer world will in turn form in us
various judgments, evaluations, and analysis about the world around us.
Much of Bonaventure’s discussion of
day 2 has lost its appeal, as it focuses on scholastic categories that we
simply do not find meaningful in our contemporary world. Bonaventure felt the
need to defend the positive gift that the material world is, along with our physical
bodies. This was due to the matter-hating Cathars who believed the material world,
including the body, was an obstacle to one’s spiritual progress. Fortunately,
though there are still those who denigrate the body, we modern Christians have
come to see the gift of embodiment, including the positive gift of sexuality. It
is in such embodiment that we encounter other bodies, whose influence on us is
immeasurable. Bonaventure will embrace the goodness of the created world. We
too, in our journey to God, must embrace the goodness of our embodied reality,
as it relates to our relationship with both God and others. It is only in our
embodied state that we can experience anything at all. It is the means by which
the outer world is brought into our inner worlds.
However, the constructions of our
inner worlds are fraught with complications and distortions. Our perceptions of
the world are formed and deformed by the many different relationships we encounter
and maintain. Bonaventure tells us that in one’s reflection on day 2 of the
journey, we recognize that we learn to give names to the many objects we
encounter. Such acts of naming give us the ability to understand the
relationships between these many objects. Bonaventure sees such reflections as
leading to a deeper understanding of God, moving beyond the vestiges
(footprints) of the divine in the world, to a recognition of the image of God more
clearly within ourselves. He makes this conclusion because, in reflecting upon
our ability to make such connections, we can see in our depths a trace of the
intelligent creator, who is loving and wise, and who has ordered all things for
goodness.
Unfortunately,
most of us simply do not come to the same conclusions as Bonaventure. We tend
not to think in terms of the imago Dei (seeing ourselves created in the
divine image). We see ourselves as formed by our own self-autonomous choices.
We even neglect to see how our mimetic nature necessarily informs our need to imitate
other’s maps in order to direct our journey. Such blindness is a real
impediment to one’s journey to God. Such blindness creates the illusion of
self-creation. In fact, until one acknowledges such illusions, one will never
go further in the journey. This is why so many live lives of quiet, or not so quiet,
desperation. The many sources of meaning and connectedness are ephemeral, changing
with the social and cultural winds.
The
heart of the first two days of the journey is twofold. First, we need the
desire to take the journey in the first place, wanting to see the deeper
meaning of one’s life. Second, we need a willingness to strive for a deeper
self-knowledge, even when this might lead to unpleasant acknowledgement of one’s
limitations, shallowness, and brokenness. In the search for such self-knowledge,
one looks to the profound influences of one’s many models in the formation of
one’s worldview, dispositions, attitudes, ideologies, and behaviors. Bonaventure
would most likely encourage us to ask whether such influences are true, good,
and beautiful, reflecting the creator’s truth, goodness, and beauty.
If
one does in fact choose to continue this journey, there will be the difficult but necessary requirement of looking honestly at one’s brokenness, one’s illusions, one’s
lack of love, and the need for conversion and transformation. Such reflections are
taken up in days 3 and 4 in Bonaventure’s journey of the mind into God. I will
look at this part of the journey in Part Two.
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