St. Bonaventure's Collationes in Hexaëmeron: Fractured Sermons and Protreptic Discourse

107 Franciscan Studies 63 (2005) ST. BONAVENTURE’S COLLATIONES IN HEXAËMERON: FRACTURED SERMONS AND PROTREPTIC DISCOURSE Until recently, St. Bonaventure’s last great work, the Collationes in Hexa ëmeron, has been praised as “a masterpiece of symbolic and mystical theology ,”1 but it has received little specific attention as a work in its own right. The balance has begun to be redressed in recent years, but I submit that we have not yet been able to read this text well because we have paid insufficient attention to its literary form. Eager to place Bonaventure ’s thought in the context of the debates of the day, scholars have tended to focus on the doctrinal positions he seems to take with regard to the role of Aristotle, the apocalyptic vision of Joachim of Fiore, and/or the mendicant controversy. Those who attend to formal questions tend to view only the logical order of ideas without attention to the rhetorical structure of the work.2 I submit that such attention to form will bring new 1 Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism – 1200-1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 97. 2 Two classic insights have dominated scholarship onSaint Bonaventureingeneralandon his last work, the Collationes in Hexaëmeron, inparticular. The first, by Etienne Gilson, is cited in every study of Bonaventure’s theology I have come across. Marvelling at Bonaventure’s capacity for synthesis, he remarks: “. . . the totality of the system means so much that the mere notion of fragments has no meaning at all. You can either see the general economy of his doctrine in its totality, or see none of it.” So much is true, I think. Bonaventure is a remarkably synthetic and systematic thinker, and efforts to trace significant shifts or developments inhis thought have not yielded much fruit. Bonaventure does seem to be a scholar who was animated by a vibrant theological vision, a constellation of influences and insights that remains remarkably stable across his written works. However, such consistency has often become an excuse to pay little or no attention to questions of genre, audience, rhetorical or literary structure, etc. It is no betrayal of the unity of a system to look for the ways in which this system is applied, adjusted, presented, argued in a particular time and a particular place. This all the more when the document in question is an series of lectures/homilies, the record of which comes not through an autograph but two separate reportationes. So what I am doing in this essay is reading this work as a work, with its own structure, style, integrity, etc. The second influential insight comes from Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, whose Ha- KEVIN HUGHES 108 insight to the question of content, such that Bonaventure will no longer appear simply as the polemical last lion of the Augustinian synthesis in the “battle of the Hexaëmeron”3 or the Platonic foil to Aquinas’s Aristotle . In brief, my argument is as follows: The Collationes in Hexaëmeron are best understood as sermons adapted to the mode of protreptic. Protreptic is a mode of discourse that aims to exhort readers to pursue a particular form of life and provides exemplary instances for the practice of that form, even in the exhortation. Bonaventure’s protreptic exhorts his Franciscan audience to pursue a life of Franciscan holiness even as they pursue their academic study in Paris, for it is only in the integration of holiness and insight that one may find the Wisdom of God. Given room to exist as protreptic discourse, the Collationes emerge as a very nuanced butpassionate exhortation to an integrated life of study and holiness, of scholastic bilitationsschrift, published in 1954, was a study of the Collationes. Ratzinger came to St. Bonaventure with an interest in theology and ecclesiology. The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure might be seen, then, as a sequel to his first dissertationonSt. Augustine, Volk und Haus Gottes. In his preface to the English edition of the Bonaventure book, Ratzinger acknowledges that his interest grew out of concerns in German Catholic theologicalcircleswith the relationship between biblical salvation-history and Hellenic metaphysics. Had metaphysics been...