The Soul's Journey into God

La Verna and the Six-Winged Seraph

Bonaventure composed the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum in 1259 during a solitary retreat on La Verna, the rocky Apennine mountain where Francis of Assisi had received the stigmata thirty-five years earlier. This is not an incidental biographical detail. Bonaventure explicitly states that he composed the work while meditating on the miracle of the stigmata, and that the image of the six-winged seraph that appeared to Francis at that moment became the organizing structure of his entire mystical theology. The seraph's six wings correspond to six illuminations or stages of the soul's ascent to God.

Bonaventure was Minister General of the Franciscan Order at the time of writing and had recently completed his authoritative biography of Francis, the Legenda Major. The Itinerarium is in some sense his attempt to systematize the mystical intuition at the heart of Franciscan spirituality — the intuition that all creation bears the mark of the Creator, that the path to God runs through creatures rather than around them, and that the culmination of the journey is a love that overwhelms all understanding. The treatise is short — seven chapters — but is dense with the Augustinian, Pseudo-Dionysian, Anselmian, and Aristotelian sources Bonaventure had mastered as a theologian at the University of Paris.

“For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever.” (Romans 11:36)

This Pauline doxology from Romans 11:36 structures Bonaventure's understanding of the soul's journey: all things come from God, move through God, and return to God. The itinerary is not an escape from creation into a purely spiritual realm but the soul's discovery that creation itself is the first word of God's self-communication — and the return through that creation and beyond it to the source.

The Prologue: Christ the One Teacher and the Threefold Way

Bonaventure's prologue contains one of the most compact and programmatic statements in all of medieval theology: no illumination comes to the soul except through Christ, the one Teacher and the eternal Word through whom all things were made. This is not merely a pious framing device — it is a precise theological claim that organizes the entire treatise. The soul does not ascend to God by its own philosophical or moral effort alone; every stage of the ascent is a participation in the illumination that comes through the Incarnate Word, who is both the medium of creation and the mediator of redemption.

Bonaventure maps his six stages onto three modes of knowing and onto the Franciscan threefold way of purgation, illumination, and perfection. The three modes of knowing are: (1) traces (vestigia) of God in the external, sensible world; (2) the image of God in the soul's own faculties; and (3) the light of God shining directly on the soul. Each mode yields two stages — considered in relation to the world as it is and as it reflects the Trinity; considered in the soul as it is by nature and as it is reformed by grace — giving six stages in all. The seventh chapter stands beyond this structure, pointing to the mystical leap that transcends all the stages.

• Romans 11:36 — all things from, through, and to God: the cosmic itinerary
• Colossians 1:15 — Christ as the image of the invisible God, through whom creation is intelligible
• Ephesians 3:18–19 — comprehending the breadth, length, depth, and height of Christ's love

Stages One and Two: Traces of God in the World

The first stage of the ascent considers creation as vestigia — footprints or traces of God in the sensible world. Bonaventure is heir to a sacramental view of nature that sees the created order not as a neutral backdrop to the spiritual life but as the first book in which God has written his nature. Every creature, insofar as it exists and has a determinate form and exhibits ordered activity, traces back to the three divine attributes of power, wisdom, and goodness — and thus dimly mirrors the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit from whom it comes.

Bonaventure draws here on the Augustinian tradition of the vestigia Trinitatis in creation, but gives it a Franciscan coloring: the whole sensible world is a mirror and a book. The soul that looks at creation with the eyes of faith and reason does not merely observe natural facts but reads a text. The beauty of the world is God's beauty expressed outwardly; the order of the world is God's wisdom imprinted in matter; the goodness of the world is the overflow of God's inexhaustible generosity. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of Brother Sun is the lyrical expression of what Bonaventure here expresses analytically.

The second stage takes the same data — the sensible world — but now considers it through the soul's cognitive powers: sensation, imagination, reason, intellect, synderesis, and conscience. The point is that in the very act of knowing the world, the soul reveals its own nature as something transcending the world it knows. The intellect that can grasp universal truths, abstract from matter, and judge about beauty and goodness is not itself simply material. The soul in the act of knowing bears witness to its own divine image.

“Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created.” (Colossians 1:15)

Christ as the image of the invisible God is, for Bonaventure, the reason creation can serve as a trace of God at all. Things bear traces of the Trinity because they were made through the eternal Word, who is the Father's perfect image and self-expression. To read creation as a book pointing to God is implicitly to read it as a text written in Christ.

Stages Three and Four: The Soul as God's Image

The third stage turns the gaze inward from the world to the soul itself, considered in its natural powers. Here Bonaventure follows Augustine's psychological analogy most closely: the soul bears the image of the Trinity in its three principal faculties of memory, understanding, and will. Memory, in the Augustinian sense Bonaventure employs, is not merely the storage of past events but the faculty by which the soul is present to itself and open to God — it is the soul's capacity to hold its own being in self-awareness. Understanding grasps truth; will tends toward the good. The three are distinct yet inseparable, a structural echo in the creature of the one God who is Father, Son, and Spirit.

Bonaventure finds in the soul's natural structure a kind of argument for the Trinity: the soul that truly understands itself cannot help but conceive of itself as an image — and an image points to an original. The soul is not self-originating or self-sufficient; its very structure as knower, known, and the love between them cries out for the God in whose image it is made. This is the philosophical argument for God from the soul's self-knowledge, deepened by Augustinian and Franciscan faith into contemplation.

The fourth stage considers the soul as it is reformed and elevated by grace — the same three faculties now illumined and reoriented by the theological virtues. Faith purifies and directs memory toward God as its ultimate object; hope elevates understanding toward the divine truth; charity transforms the will's tendency toward the good into genuine love of God and neighbor. The theological virtues are not merely moral additions to the natural soul; they are the soul's recovery of its proper image, the restoration of the likeness that was lost in the fall and is renewed in Christ.

• Colossians 1:15 — Christ as the image in which the soul's own image is grounded
• Romans 11:36 — the soul's return to God mirroring the cosmos's return
• Ephesians 3:18–19 — knowing the love that surpasses knowledge: the goal already present in stage four

Stages Five and Six: Contemplating Being and the Good

The fifth stage moves beyond the soul's image of God to the contemplation of God in himself — first as Being (esse) and then as Goodness (bonum). These two stages correspond respectively to the consideration of God's unity (Being itself) and God's Trinity (the Good that by its nature diffuses itself).

Bonaventure's treatment of Being in the fifth stage engages the great Anselmian argument: if we understand God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived, then the denial of God's existence is self-refuting, for existence belongs necessarily to that which is the greatest conceivable. But Bonaventure deepens this argument in a direction that is more Augustinian than Anselmian: the soul does not arrive at the concept of Being from below, by abstracting from created beings, but receives it from above. Pure Being — unlimited, unconditioned, identical with its own existence — is not arrived at by the natural movement of the intellect but is, in a certain sense, always already known, because it is the light by which the intellect knows anything at all.

“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” (Exodus 3:14)

Exodus 3:14 is, for Bonaventure, the definitive divine self-disclosure and the scriptural anchor for this stage of contemplation. God names himself Ehyeh asher Ehyeh — I AM WHO I AM, or Being itself. This is not a description of one being among others but the declaration of the ground of all being. The soul that reaches the fifth stage of the itinerary stands before the burning bush: it encounters not a thing but the source of all thingness, not a being but Being itself from which all beings draw their existence.

The sixth stage contemplates God as the Good — the bonum diffusivum sui of the scholastic tradition: goodness by nature tends to pour itself out, to communicate itself, to share itself. This is the metaphysical ground of the Trinity: the Father as the primordial principle of fecundity, the Son as the perfect expression and Word of that goodness, the Spirit as the bond of love freely spirated between them. Bonaventure draws here on Richard of St. Victor's argument that perfect love requires a co-beloved — perfect goodness cannot be solitary, for solitary goodness would be self-contained and therefore less than the highest love.

• Exodus 3:14 — God as Being itself: the ground of stage five
• Colossians 1:15 — the Son as the perfect image and Word of the Father's goodness
• Ephesians 3:18–19 — knowing the breadth and depth of divine love: the goal of stage six

The Mystical Passage: Beyond Reason into the Darkness

The seventh chapter of the Itinerarium stands structurally beyond the six stages, just as the mystical union stands beyond all the ordered contemplation that precedes it. Having climbed through traces in creation, through the image of God in the soul, and through the contemplation of Being and Goodness in themselves, the soul now faces what Bonaventure, following Dionysius the Areopagite, calls the mystical darkness: the point at which all the light of reason, all the concepts and images and analogies that have served the ascent, must be left behind.

The Dionysian theologia negativa operates here with full force. God is not being, but beyond being; not good, but beyond goodness; not light, but beyond light. The mind that has exhausted its positive concepts is not therefore at the end of its journey but only at the point where the journey changes character. What remains after the intellect has been stripped of all its contents is not nothing but the soul's naked will, directed by love toward the One who cannot be comprehended.

Bonaventure locates the key to this final passage not in a further act of intellectual ascent but in a cruciform death. The mystical union is a Passover — a passing-over beyond all that the soul has known and achieved. And the door through which this passage is made is the cross of Christ. It is here that Bonaventure's mysticism declares its decisive difference from purely philosophical ascent: the way into the divine darkness is not Platonic intellectualism but conformity to the crucified Christ, in whom all human wisdom was made folly and all human strength was made weakness so that the power and wisdom of God might appear.

“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe.” (Ephesians 3:18–19)

Bonaventure reads Paul's prayer in Ephesians as describing exactly what the mystical journey aims at: a comprehensive knowing — breadth, length, height, depth — that surpasses all knowing, a love that exceeds all understanding, a fullness that is the fullness of God himself. This is not the achievement of a philosophical system but the gift of the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, received by a soul that has been emptied of all its own resources and stands open to God alone.

The hidden wisdom Bonaventure invokes in the epilogue is Christ crucified — the treasure hidden in the field of scripture and tradition that can only be found by those willing to sell all they have. In Paul's language from Colossians, Christ is the one “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” The Itinerarium ends not with a triumphant arrival but with a prayer: let the soul pass over with the crucified Christ, dying to what it knows, so that it may rise to what cannot be known but only loved.

• Exodus 3:14 — Being itself as the threshold of the apophatic passage
• Colossians 2:3 — all wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ
• Romans 11:36 — the cosmic return: all things to God, through and in Christ
• Ephesians 3:18–19 — comprehending the incomprehensible love