Abstract
This book, the first major study of Bonaventure’s aesthetics to appear since the publication of von Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit in the 1960s, admirably fulfils its author’s stated aim: to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Franciscan saint's philosophy, theology and mystical theology of beauty that combines the historical and analytic approaches. McKenna begins by setting Bonaventure’s theory of beauty within the overall history of aesthetics from Plato to Kant and more modern authors and historians of aesthetics, like Eco, de Bruyne and von Balthasar, who have furthered the tradition. The author takes Bonaventure’s concept of beauty to be one founded on harmony, proportion and order, showing the breadth of Bonaventure’s sources, not only Platonic and Neo-platonist but also with a Stoic undercurrent (hence the element of order). McKenna diffuses some of the earlier hard-and-fast comparisons of intellectual or affective, Platonic or Aristotelian (for example, Bonaventure’s anthropology of the unity of body and soul is more Aristotelian than Platonic), by subtly showing the compatibility of opposites. The importance of Bonaventure’s aesthetics for the field is that it is the most innovative and extensive of the several main medieval theories. McKenna dismisses the common view that medieval Franciscans and Bonaventure lie purely on the Augustinian, affective side in theology and emphasizes that Bonaventure did not hesitate to make full use of philosophy in his devotional (perhaps we should say ‘spiritual’) works, which were among the most popular of that genre in the Middle Ages, as a way of leading people to the love of God. While philosophical issues dominate in the earlier and middle parts of McKenna’s book, he makes handsome amends in the final and longest chapter on the soul’s union with God, which after all, is the aim of Bonaventure’s aesthetics and of McKenna’s own thinking, since for both the concept of beauty is a means of arriving at that end.
The book has a four-fold structure: after the general introduction to aesthetics, McKenna proceeds to analyse the four main stages of the soul’s ascent to God in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum. For Bonaventure, this journey of the soul or mind is also a reductio, a return of the soul to its origin in God, through the four steps of an aesthetic of music, an aesthetic of light, the experience of the senses and the ascent of the soul itself. In the dispute about whether the aesthetics of light or music was more important for Bonaventure, McKenna takes sides with de Bruyne and a small minority that puts music (with its proportion and order) before light. Bonaventure, as befits anyone who maintains the unity of body and soul in anthropology, gives full weight to the role of the senses and appreciation of the visible, physical creation as the start of the soul’s ascent as it passes from the physical to spiritual, from visible to invisible objects and realities. Throughout his book, McKenna offers careful and lucid accounts of the various theories of scholars in any dispute and supports his own judgement of the issue with solid reasons. In this respect, his book provides a most useful guide to the recent state of scholarly work in the field of Bonaventure’s aesthetics. For example, McKenna does not think that Bonaventure regarded beauty as a fourth transcendental, but only held three: the one, the true and the good, each one of which he associated with a Person of the Trinity, with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (love of the good) respectively. Bonaventure’s aesthetics thus throws light on his theology of the Trinity. The Son, whom Augustine calls ars dei, is beautiful because he is the Image of God. As the Word (or reason) of God, he is the Exemplar of creation, which reflects the beauty of the ideas in God’s mind. McKenna reminds us that Plato’s ideas were beautiful in themselves. It goes almost without saying that McKenna includes an account of Bonaventure’s distinctive theology as part of his aesthetics. Bonaventure contemplates the divine beauty, however, above all in the crucified Christ, although he denied that Christ’s mangled body on the cross had any physical beauty in itself, but expressed his spiritual beauty shining through his scars and wounds. It seems surprising, at this point, that no appeal is made to St John’s thought, that Christ is glorified by his passion. McKenna sees the difficulty Bonaventure had with the aesthetics of Christ crucified as resolved by his subsequent resurrection. Christ’s passion is, for Bonaventure, his Passover to the Father, so the example for our own way to union with God.
Bonaventure begins his description of the final stage of the soul’s journey with a wealth of biblical imagery, built on Isaiah’s vision of the seraphim. It is thus no accident that he is named as the ‘seraphic doctor’ for the ardour of his own love of God. McKenna comments that, in the end, Bonaventure abandons the precise terms of philosophy for affective and poetic expression. In his discussion of whether Bonaventure’s view of the soul’s highest union with God is more intellectual or a purely affective experience, McKenna favours the solution of McGinn that the soul ‘passes over’ from all intellectual activity to a quite inexpressible experience, which places Bonaventure in the tradition of the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. In this darkness, the soul, made in the image of God, realizes its own similarity with God as its activities of memory, intellect and will reflect the perichoresis or circum-insession of the three Persons of the Trinity. McKenna then exposes the Trinitarian basis of Bonaventure’s spirituality (and perhaps the source of Benedict XVI’s own Trinitarian approach to theology?).
These are only a sample of points and topics that can be drawn out of this seemingly inexhaustible book, in spite of its comparative brevity because of its exemplary conciseness and clarity. The detailed scholarship of the earlier parts of the book, including some interesting diversions, for example, on Pythagoras’ theory of music, is brought to life in the final chapter on the true end of Bonaventure’s aesthetics, ascends from the sensible beauty of creation to union with God. In the end, Thomas Aquinas can be seen to agree with Bonaventure that contemplation is specially distinguished by the delight it takes in its object and thus ends in affection rather than knowing in this life.