A Discerning Smell: Olfaction among the Senses in St. Bonaventure's Long Life of St. Francis

The fifth chapter of Saint Bonaventure's Long Life of Saint Francis, the Legenda maior (1260-1263), is a veritable blazon of the body of Francis and its senses, physical and spiritual.¹ The first chapter in the so-called "Inner Life" – the sequence of eight chapters on the virtues (and, I have argued, the beatitudes) of St. Francis – Chapter Five is notable for its insistent focus on sensory experience, due both to Francis's physical mortifications and to his consciousness of the world's beauty, the "comfort" provided to him by the "creatures" he touched, tasted, heard, and saw.² The chapter opens with a declaration of Francis's choice to "carry in his own body the armor of the cross" by holding "in check his sensual appetites," practicing self-denial lest he give in "to the earthbound inclinations of the senses,"³ and they impede his spiritual progress. It ends, after an account of four miracles involving tactile, gustatory, auditory, and visual experience, respectively, with a laud of God, the "entire fabric of [whose] universe / came to the service / of the sanctified senses of the holy man."⁴ The pivot upon which the narrative turns from deprivation to gratification (in the root sense of that word) is, as editors of the Legenda have noted, "a carefully crafted paragraph" on Francis's freely flowing tears, a paragraph "which needs to be understood in light of Bonaventure's theology of the spiritual senses."⁵

That theology has been interpreted, however, in vastly different ways by two major twentieth-century theologians, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, as the comparative work of Stephen Fields has shown,⁶ and as Balthasar himself, writing partly in response to Rahner, emphatically points out.⁷ Curiously, neither Rahner nor Balthasar pay particular attention to Chapter Five of the Legenda maior. (Rahner does not, in fact, even refer to the Legenda.) In this essay I read that chapter closely, partly in light of the questions raised by the disagreement between Rahner and Balthasar (a topic that, taken in itself, is beyond the scope of this study). I argue that the operation of the spiritual senses in Francis's soul already at the purgative stage (which marks not only the beginning of his ascetical life of virtue and of the beatitudes, but also its continuing foundation) is understood by Bonaventure to have affected Francis's corporeal sensory experience, not as a general habitus but in isolated, expressive acts or perceptions involving particular senses at particular times and places. These corporeal perceptions of God's presence and glory in his creatures are, furthermore, an impressive means and safeguard for Francis's eternal beatitude: "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted" (Matt 5:4).⁸

For this reason Chapter Five singles out four episodes in Francis's life that correspond to the four dotes or endowments of the glorified body. These four episodes explicitly highlight four of the five physical senses, but omit, significantly, any direct reference to the fifth sense, that of olfaction. Represented indirectly in Chapter Five, I propose, through a decisive act of charitable discretion, the spiritual sense of smell becomes explicit in Bonaventure's Legenda maior in Chapter Fifteen, when Francis's body is laid to rest in the odor of sanctity. Linked to his earlier exodus from a worldly to a virtuous life, the descriptions of Francis's "passing" (transitu) from this mortal life in Chapter Fourteen and of the "transferal" of his body in the immediately following final chapter return to, complete, and perfect the imagistic pattern of sensory experience established in Chapter Five. As a figure for the virtue of discretion and thus for the free exercise of the rational will at the core of the human personality (liberum arbitrium), the obscure and seemingly unimportant olfactory sense proves to be a vital key for unfolding Bonaventure's Christocentric anthropology.⁹

Purgation, the Spiritual Senses, and the Dotes

Chapter Five is incontestably associated with the purgative stage of St. Francis's life, as signaled...