Unlocking Bonaventure: The Collationes in Hexaëmeron as Interpretive Key

Abstract

Unlocking Bonaventure:The Collationes in Hexaëmeron as Interpretive Key Junius Johnson JAY HAMMOND'S new translation of Bonaventure's Collationes in Hexaëmeron1 fills a critical gap in the availability of the Seraphic Doctor's works in English and forms the capstone of the Works of St. Bonaventure series by Franciscan Institute Publications. This text is arguably the most important of Bonaventure's works, and yet no English translation of it was in print prior to the publication of the current version. Hammond's translation is based on the text of the Opera omnia, but the hundreds of footnotes track, among other things, all the places where the competing edition of the Latin text, published by Marie Ferdinand Delorme in 1934 and surviving in only one manuscript, departs from the critical edition. The apparatus alone makes this translation a huge advance over its out-of-print predecessor by José de Vinck.2 This does not exhaust the importance of this new translation, however. In order to cause that importance to appear, it is necessary to look at several factors: (1) the importance of the text within the Bonaventurean corpus and Bonaventure scholarship, (2) the content of the text, (3) its relevance for [End Page 277] contemporary scholarly discussion, and (4) the merits of the translation itself. What follows is an attempt at a sketch that will at least convey the significance of this publication. I. The Importance of the Text The Hexaëmeron is a text whose genre is not easy to fix and whose style is striking and, for most readers, unfamiliar. Various factors contribute to this situation, and several of them are crystallizations of what is so peculiar to Bonaventure himself, namely, his ability to move easily from one genre to another and to synthesize disparate material in surprising ways. The particularities of the text combine to define its importance. First, it must be said that though this text ranges over a wide variety of topics, in most cases it does not represent Bonaventure's most complete discussion of these questions. For example, topics in philosophical theology are more fully addressed in both the Breviloquium and the commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, and the path to holiness is more clearly spelled out in the Threefold Way. And yet, the form of the discussions we get in the Hexaëmeron are of critical importance, for two reasons. The first is that, because they were composed in the last year of Bonaventure's life, they constitute his most mature reflection on these topics. Discussions in the Sentences commentary have to be compared to the positions Bonaventure takes here, and texts such as the Itinerarium mentis in Deum must be considered in light of passages in the Hexaëmeron where Bonaventure returns to the very parts of Dionysius the Areopagite with which the Itinerarium ends. Second, this text fulfills a unifying role within the Bonaventurean corpus, linking the work of his early years at the University of Paris with the spiritual treatises of his years as minister general of the Franciscans. It performs this task by means of its own genre and style, which resume something of the Scholastic manner of discourse, but in a mode that is changed by the intervening years. Consider, for example, conference 21, which belongs to the fourth vision (understanding elevated by contemplation). Here Bonaventure is [End Page 278] concerned with the celestial hierarchy, corresponding to the creation of the sun on the fourth day. He begins with a consideration of the Trinitarian persons, who may each be considered as they are or as they are related to the other persons. To each of these ways of thinking about the Trinitarian persons belongs an illumination: three illuminations as they are considered in themselves, and six as they are considered in relation to each other (the Father in the Son and in the Spirit, the Son in the Father and in the Spirit, the Spirit in the Father and in the Son). The six relational considerations are correlated to the six days of creation specifically through the divine speaking of "let it be; and there was made."3 Bonaventure will detail...