The Coincidence of Opposites in the Christology of Saint Bonaventure

THE COINCIDENCE OF OPPOSITES IN THE CHRISTOLOGY OF SAINT BONAVENTURE The coincidence of opposites has had a long history in religious and philosophical thought. It appears often in primitive myths, as for example, in the sacred marriage of the Sky-God and Mother Earth.1 It is found in both primitive and developed theologies in the union of the terrible and beneficent aspects of the divinity, as for example, in the Indian god Shiva, who is both the creator and destroyer.2 In China Taoism speaks of the harmony of opposites — the dark and the light, the weak and the strong, the male and the female.3 In Greece the PreSocratics saw a cosmic straggle between love and hate, justice and injustice.4 Heraclitus said: "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger; all opposites are in him."8 The name most closely associated with the formula coincidentia oppositorum is Nicholas of Cusa; for he caused the term to become enshrined in our culture; he used the paradoxical method formally and made it the characteristic perspective of his entire thought.6 In modern times it has appeared in the dialectical idealism of Hegel and the dialectical 1 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), pp. 240 ff.; 417—23; cf. also Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, trans. John Cohen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), pp. 108—24; cf. also Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1954), pp. 8—10. 2 Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 417—23. ' Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Too Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934). 4 Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols., ed. W. Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, i960—61); cf. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Adam and Black, 1930). 5 Heraclitus, Fr. 67. ' „Dies Prinzip hat Nikolaus selbst als seine maßgebende Entdeckung betrachtet; und er war überzeugt, vermöge dieses Prinzips die hinter ihm liegende Philosophiegeschichte neu durchleuchten, die Philosophie seiner Zeit von Grund aus reformieren zu können." Ernst Hoffmann, in introduction to Über den Beryll (Leipzig: Meiner, 1938), p. 1. Cf. also Joseph Stallmach , ,,Zusammenfall der Gegensätze: Das Prinzip der Dialektik bei Nikolaus von Kues," Mitteilungen und Forschungsbeiträge der Cusanus-Gesellschaft , I (Mainz, 1961), 52 ff. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, in Nicolai de Cusa Opera Omnia ed. Ernst Hoffmann and Raymond Klibansky (Leipzig: Meiner, 1932). 28EWERT H. COUSINS materialism of Marx.7 In the twentieth century, it plays an important role in the psychology of C. G. Jung.8 More recently it has emerged in the 'death of God' theology, in the Christology of Thomas Altizer, who sees in Christ's kenotic incarnation the basis for a dialectical coincidence of the sacred and the profane.9 How is Bonaventure situated in this long history? By speaking of the coincidence of opposites in Bonaventure's thought, we do not wish to imply that he used the phrase or employed the method of contraries thematically as Nicholas of Cusa did. Yet on the other hand, we mean more than the mere fact that the coincidence of opposites is implicit in his thought. This would be true of any theologian who speaks of God and creation, and especially true of a Christian theologian who sees Christ as a mediator between God and man. In Bonaventure the coincidence of opposites has more prominence than this. It appears at times in his writings as a formal structure, and it is always present as an underlying metaphysical principle, which is frequently brought into consciousness. At times the coincidence of opposites provides the rhetorical and logical structure of a passage. This paradoxical structure leads the reader to a reflection or reductio, leading him back to the coincidence of opposites at the base of Bonaventure's metaphysics. In the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, reflection on the coincidence of opposites becomes part of the mystical ascent, leading the soul into the final stage of estatic contemplation. Bonaventure's treatment of the coincidence of opposites is...