Saint Bonaventure

Giovanni di Fidanza was born in Bagnoregio between 1217 and 1221. He took the name Bonaventure when he joined the Franciscans. He studied and taught at the Sorbonne, in Paris, in the same years and the same places as Thomas Aquinas, who was his friend: the two came up for their doctorates together, and together they had to face the hostility of the secular masters toward the mendicant orders. At thirty-six he was elected minister general of the Franciscans, and he held the post for seventeen years. He got the hardest job of all: the order was splitting between those who wanted Francis’s absolute poverty and those who wanted convents, books and study. Bonaventure held the two together, and that is why he is called almost a second founder. Under him the Constitutions of Narbonne were approved, on which all the later ones were based. He was also asked to write the life of Francis, and his Legenda Maior became the official one — so much so that the chapter of 1266 ordered the earlier ones destroyed, which still pains historians today. It was that text that inspired Giotto’s cycle in Assisi. As a philosopher he started from the idea that all knowledge begins with the senses, but that the soul knows God and itself without them. He is called the Seraphic Doctor. He died in Lyon on July 15, 1274, during the council. Sixtus IV proclaimed him a saint in 1482. If your name is Bonaventura, today is your name day.