A reading of the holy gospel, the good news according to Saint Matthew. Once on a Sabbath, our lord walked through the standing grain to a wheat field. His disciples fell hungry. So, they began to pull off the heads of the grain and eat them. We've all done that.
Now, when the Pharisees saw it, they protested. Look here, your disciples are doing what is not permitted on the Sabbath. In other words, they were harvesting grain which was work and therefore they were violating the Sabbath day. Jesus replied, have you not read what David did when he and his men were hungry? How he entered god's house and ate even the holy bread?
A thing forbidden to him and to his men or to anybody else who was not a priest. Have you not read in the law how the priest on temple duty can break the Sabbath rest without incurring guilt? I assure you, there is something greater than the temple here. If you understood the meaning of the text, it is mercy I desire and not sacrifice. You would not have condemned these innocent men.
The son of man is indeed the lord of the Sabbath and this is the gospel. The good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. And this is the feast of Saint Bonaventure. Franciscan, who became head of the order, became a bishop, a cardinal, and was declared the sixth doctor of the church after Thomas Aquinas, with the titles doctor Seraphicus, meaning angelic doctor.
Saint Bonaventure is a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas. Saint Bonaventure came into the order founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. He never met Francis. He never knew him personally. When he was 10, Francis of Assisi died.
Saint Bonaventure was born in 12/15 or 12/17. And Assidi die Saint Francis died around '27 12/27. Aquinas, of course, was a follower of Saint Dominic. They without a doubt, they were both at the University of Paris at the same time. Without a doubt, we can say, both became doctors in the university faculty.
They were both religious. One a Dominican, a mendicant friar, remember, not a Benedictine, but a mendicant, a beggar friar. Saint Francis, also a beggar friar. And these men became doctors or magisteres in the University of Paris. Both were hugely, grievously, bitterly resented by the lay doctors, Because this seemed to be an infringement upon their domain, that the religious were moving in and taking over, which of course they were.
As far as we know, we have no evidence that Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure ever met, but it's unbelievable that they didn't. And it's incredible that there's not some record that they did, but there is no record so far. There is no evidence that they ever met each other. I say there's no evidence, I'm not saying they did not. These men were chasms apart in many ways.
Bonaventure is a tremendously complex person. Aquinas is simple compared to Bonaventure. Just remember this. First of all, he he has a missed some kind of an experience which he thought was a miracle by the influence of Saint Francis. That turned him to the Franciscan order.
Order. Then, remember the University of Paris is very young. It was founded only, if we can say it was founded in the twelfth century. So Bonaventure is going up to Paris, he's born down in Italy, he goes up to Paris at the in the early stages of the university when it's in tremendous tumult. Because here you had in this seat of learning, which was whatever it was, it was the seat of learning of Europe.
You had a tremendous conflict between Aristotelianism, Platonism, Neo Platonism, and Augustanism, and then what we should call Augustinianism. And then you had an influence of Mohammedan philosophy by from Averroes, by the Jewish Moses Maimonides. It was a tremendous turmoil, and this is what I wanna stress. The Catholic church didn't wait till the twentieth century to have turmoil. It didn't wait till the sixteenth century to have turmoil.
The Catholic church had turmoil from its very beginning. They put the founder on the cross. Bonaventure was a man of his time. He was a man of the people. He was a man who can best be described as a mystic.
And don't me ask me what to define mystic. I don't know the definition of a mystic. I can tell you some of the characteristics, and that is and one of them is we rise above human knowledge, the ordinary ways of human knowing. You might call it religious experience. You may call it anything you want.
But Bonaventure, he didn't belong to any single group of theologians. He didn't belong to any single group philosophers. You can't call him a Platonist. You can't call him an Aristotelian. If you can call him anything, he tried to be a follower of Saint Augustine of Hippo, who of course was the great name down through the ages.
You can't underrate Augustine of Hippo. But remember, when they call him an Augustinian, what was supposed to be of Saint Augustine was highly debatable. So we rather use the word August Augustinist. And then again, Bonaventure put his own unique stamp upon all of this mix up. Because he the thing he wanted to do was to bring the the Christ, the savior, to human beings.
That was his driving force. He was not a he was not an academician in the sense of Aquinas. He was a man of practical affairs. He was at councils. He was a friend of the popes.
He he did a lot to put the the the new, the young Franciscan order on its feet to save it from its exaggerations and from its moderations, which would have destroyed it too. He was a man of very practical affairs, and yet he rose above all of them. He's called the angelic doctor. The the doctor who is like an angel. And whereas Aquinas was in all kinds of controversies, Bonaventure seemed to to to be able to maneuver out of them.
We have a contemporary witness that says that anyone who met and saw and talked with Bonaventure loved him. No one said ever said that about Aquinas. Bonaventure's one aim in life was a devotion to Christ crucified and to bring that home to human beings. I don't think I'm oversimplifying when I say that. He was not a a theologian as Aquinas was.
He was much more a man of the of the of the vital, the militant church. He was much more in the trenches with the people, much more so than Aquinas. And he felt that all of these attempts to and he would he he did his part in rationalizing theology. But he made a very good distinction, a very necessary distinction between what we have on the basis of revelation of God's truth and what the theologians can can deduce. Believe me, there's a huge difference between the two.
He made that distinction. His approach to God was what much more of the imagination of the feeling of experience. He appealed much more to the people. He was tremendously popular all over Europe, and especially in Northern Europe, up in the Scandinavian countries, in Germany. He had a tremendous influence in the initiation of what came to be called the Devotio Moderna, that is the modern devotion, which got into Thomas a campus and became the evidence to the imitation of Christ.
Bonaventure had tremendous influence, tremendous in his day, in his day. But Scotus, another Franciscan, became the dominant thinker of the Franciscans. The final point I want to make is this. We say that Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas was the great thinker, the great theor, the great theologian. He was much more, in my estimation, a philosopher, and all the books he wrote a tremendous library.
But remember this, at the end of his life, he wrote not a single word more. And somebody said, why are have you stopped writing? And Aquinas said, I can write no more. The knowledge of contemplation. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit.
Amen. The