A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus began to reproach the towns where most of his miracles had been worked with their failure, in spite of the miracles, to reform. It will go ill with you, Korazin, and just as ill with you, Bethsaida. If the miracles worked in you had taken place entire in sight, would have reformed in sackcloth and ashes long ago. I assure you, it will go easier for Tyre and Sidon than for you on the day of judgment.
As for you, Capernaum, are you to be exalted to the skies? You shall go down to the realm of death. If the miracles worked in you had taken place in Sodom, it would be standing today. I assure you, that is Caparnaum, it will go easier for Sodom than for you on the day of judgment. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Today, we honor, we memorialize, and we make present in the reality of his actuality the great saint of the Franciscan order, Saint Bonaventure, Doctor Seraphicus, the Seraphic doctor. Now some of you didn't notice, I suppose, that I'm saying the mass for bishops, not for the doctor. And the reason is that when you try to say who was Saint Bonaventure, you're up against a hard problem. It's not like dealing with a Thomas Aquinas.
Saint Bonaventure was a man indeed for all seasons. He died in December, I think. He was a contemporary of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Every bit of evidence shows that they were at the University of Paris together, but there's not the slightest bit of evidence that they ever met. That doesn't mean they didn't meet.
All we have is no textual evidence that they did. Now they were contemporaries. One's the great Dominican and the other one, as from our point of view, is the great Franciscan. But if you would just read in an authentic biography the lives of either of these men, your eyes will be opened because we have such a false impression of the lives these men live. You talk about being an international character.
Well, just think of a Bonaventure or an Albert the Great. They roamed all over Europe. Europe had a unity which it has lost. When a man was made a doctor by the chancellor of the University of Paris, he could go to any part of the Christian world, which meant the whole Western world as it was known, and be accepted as a legitimate authoritative teacher. Now notice that the Bonaventure has gotten the title this is an official title of the Seraphic Doctor.
Seraphic Doctor, Angelic. Why? Before answering that question, I'd like to point out that he was a great reformer of the religious way of life. He became the minister general of his order. He became a bishop.
He became a cardinal. He wrote books on theology, and above all, on what we call mystical theology. That is however you want to define mystic, and I don't attempt to do it. But it has to do with man's approach to God, the cultivation of God's awareness with a with the effect of what we call holiness. Now that is a very important aspect of of Bonaventure.
He was much more a theologian than he was a philosopher. He was much more a mystic than a rationalist. He wouldn't have liked to to be call him a rationalist, I am sure, because he didn't want any parts of that. He was a follower of Saint Augustine. Now that of of Hippo, that needs to be qualified.
Because in the thirteenth century, Augustine was the great teacher, but we better put quotation marks around Augustine because who or what was a saint Augustine? Most everybody who read him or thought they read him or thought they knew something about him thought they were giving the authentic teaching of saint Augustine, whereas we we know for sure that there was no such thing. And so you have a vast body of teachers who are more correctly called Augustinists than Augustinians. And the Augustinists, they were the establishment. They were the party in power and had been for centuries.
They traced their ancestry back to the great saint of Hippo. And when these upstarts, like Aquinas or Albert the Great, basing their doctrine through channels which came through Judaism and through through the Moslem and Mohammedan world, they were looked upon as scant. So you had a conflict between these so called Augustinists and the so called Aristotelians. Then it's and, of course, Bonaventure was in their hook, line, and sinker. Then you had another great conflict between the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans.
They were begging friars. They lived by begging. They lived on alms founded in the twelfth century. This was a whole new concept. Remember, the mendicant fires, the begging fires, they didn't they were not self supporting as the other religious orders had been.
This was a whole new concept, and they were resented. And they were resented bitterly when they came into the University of Paris and lo and behold, you seemed to be intelligent enough to be professors. Today, that wouldn't be a great effort, but in those days, it was. Now, so I can't begin to give you a description of the vitality, the controversy, the bitterness which existed around Paris, was the hub of the academic and intellectual world in the thirteenth century. I can't exaggerate it.
On every plane, there was conflict. And when I say bitterness, I mean people were shooting bow arrows at each other, throwing stones at each other. And if they'd if they'd have had the atom bomb, they probably would have used that because they were all good, god fearing citizens pursuing truth. That said, not sarcastically, but simply a factual statement. That's the reason I'm such a champion of sincerity.
But, anyway, this was a wild time. And here you have a a Franciscan, Bonaventure. His order isn't a 100 years old, and he has to reform it on the because of their way they've gotten away from Francis' idea of poverty. Now I don't know much about Saint Bonaventure. Let's lay that on the line right away.
Well, I it's all secondary. But one thing I what what you have to understand about this great saint, he was not an academician. He was a pastor of souls. His great concern was not abstract truth, but but the salvation of men and women. He wanted to bring the truth of god to men and women to save them.
Now how do you get the truth? What is truth? Now in those days, people were interested in this question, and it still is a hot potato. And where do you get it? Even if you admit that it exists somewhere, how do you get it?
Now we can't go into that this morning, but Saint Bonaventure, you see, was he thought he was a good Augustinian. And being a good Augustinian, he leaned heavily upon what we call the Augustinian view of knowledge, and that is that in some way or other, god enlightens my mind. We call these these theories the theories of illumination. Of course, it's basically platonic, although Augustine didn't know that. But Bonaventure in the notice how we hop over centuries.
Here we have Saint Augustine in Northern Africa, March. Now we're talking about Saint Bonaventure in Paris and in Italy and in Germany in the thirteenth century as if nothing had happened in between. You have hopped over from March to the thirteenth century, and yet Augustine was pulling in there all the time. He was the great doctor of the Western world. Nobody can exaggerate his influence.
And so when you have a man like Bonaventure, the outstanding person one of the outstanding persons of the thirteenth century in the Western world, no matter how you look at it, you have him leaning heavily upon Augustine and upon theories of knowledge which directly or indirectly invoke God's individual illumination of my mind. I don't buy that at all. Let's put that right down. But this was a a Bonaventure's point of view. And you can if but and you will see that he had no choice if understanding him in the way that we today try to.
As a man who was close to God, who had almost an awareness of divinity, and just think yourself how often in the liturgy we speak of of the truth as light. We beg God we beg God to enlighten our mind. Oh, I believe that alright. I believe that god can enlighten my mind. But the question is, is that the normal thing?
Is this the natural thing? Is this the way it it usually happens? The nitty gritty day in and day out humdrum way of human knowing. There's the problem. So that and here's another thing to keep in mind with Saint Bonaventure.
It is that you see in the thirteenth century, we had an awakening, I call it an awakening, to at least two vast channels of knowledge with reference to God. The channel of human reason using our own natural factors. What can we know about God and of religion and all the and of duty and of morality? And on the other hand, what does God tell us about himself? What does God tell us about his law?
In other words, we today say it's a distinction between theology and philosophy. Remember, that distinction wasn't at all clear at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but was much clearer at the end of it, but in the minds and the writings of some of the brightest lights. It's not a clear cut distinction. Now another way of putting that is this, What is the distinction between the natural and the supernatural? Is there a distinction?
Well, of course, one way of avoiding a problem is to deny there is a problem. So you can say that there is nothing supernatural, that everything is natural, or you can say that everything is supernatural and there's nothing natural, and that will that simplifies the problem enormously. Or you can take the hard way out and say they're both actual, and we have to deal with them both, and they're not the same at all, and that creates many problems. Now with Saint Bonaventure, as far as I can see, see, in many instances, that distinction between the natural and the supernatural disappears. It vanishes.
And you can understand that because he was a man so conscious of his relationship with divinity, with God almighty, that he was overwhelmed by it. As I say, he was given the title of the an seraphic doctor. He had a he had an innocence, a naivete, you might call it, that he showed it in early youth and that he kept it throughout his life. So that this man who you don't well, his name isn't as popular as Aquinas, for example, or Albert the Great in certain quarters, let me hasten that. But if you're among Franciscans, Bonaventure is a pretty well known character.
But the thing is Bonaventure was a great person, and in the heterogeneity of his life, he is matchless. He wrote, he taught, he was an administrator, he was a pastor, he was a bishop, he was a cardinal, he was a friend of the popes, you name it, and he was there. A great man and a saint, and that's the company we keep. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.