The Hierarchical Center in the Thought of St. Bonaventure

The relationship between Bonaventure and Dionysius in scholarship is a little peculiar. Bonaventure's use of hierarchy or other Dionysian tropes and concepts, together with his knowledge of Dionysius, is taken for granted but he is rarely analysed as a reader of Dionysius. Their ideas are compared while their texts, generally, are not. Since so many different Dionysii have been proffered in the last hundred years, from a duplicitous pagan holdout to a cryptic Constantinopolitan scholar to a liturgically-oriented Syrian monk, against just which one Bonaventure might be compared is practically a matter of taste. The profusion of Dionysii makes it all more necessary to crack open the Corpus Dionysiacum (hereon, CD) to measure Bonaventure's dependence upon, recasting of, and divergence from the Areopagite.

As a mid-thirteenth century, Paris-educated theologian, the CD Bonaventure knew was an assemblage of multiple translations, annotations, and commentaries, that is, Corpus Dionysiacum Parisiense (hereon, CDP) represented in the ms. BnF Lat. 17341.¹ Besides that weighty corpus, Jacques-Guy Bougerol argued that Bonaventure also made use of another edition of Eriugena's translation of the CD modified by John Saracen's nova translatio.² It is through these texts with their particular narratives, vocabulary, interpretations, explanations, and even corrections that Bonaventure the Dionysian will be found.

Developing such an account of Bonaventure's Dionysianism based on a close reading of his thirteenth century sources, even in outline, is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I will provide one illustrative example of the benefit of reading Bonaventure against the backdrop of Dionysius' ipsissima verba. I will analyze a similarity in the way Bonaventure uses the Dionysian concept of hierarchy to coordinate the relationships and activities of God, the angels, and redeemed humanity in (primarily) three works, the Breviloquium (1257), the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (1259-60), and the Collationes in Hexaemeron (1273).³ In all three of these works (and elsewhere in his corpus) hierarchy appears in the fourth and central section of a septenary structure. Bonaventure's regular use of numbers in a coordinating and symbolic function suggests that this common placement is no accident. The number four's centrality expresses his evaluation of hierarchy as the axis upon which the spiritual life turns. I will show, however, that these three works read together tell of more than just hierarchy's centrality, but rather, that hierarchy and Christ's saving incarnation are inseparable and constitute a unified act of worship. My interpretation is based on reading the fourth sections of the Breviloquium, Itinerarium, and Collationes in Hexaemeron alongside Dionysius' On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy IV⁴ (hereon, EH), itself the fourth of seven sections, where Bonaventure would have read of the incarnate Christ's deifying power throughout the ecclesiastical and angelic hierarchies. Appreciating Bonaventure's literary familiarity with EH IV and the Christ's role as the ἀρχή of hierarchy in the EH and On the Celestial Hierarchy (hereon, CH) in general explains that, contrary to Jacques-Guy Bougerol's opinion that Bonaventure "inserted Jesus Christ into the Dionysian system to the point of transforming it entirely", Dionysius supplies Bonaventure with a Christocentric notion of hierarchy which he develops and deploys in the novel, but nonetheless largely congruent, figure of "Christ the hierarch" and the doctrine of the triplex verbum: the un-created, incarnate, and inspired Word who creates, redeems, and deifies.⁵ The Dionysian scholarship of he first half of the twentieth-century privileged the metaphysical, taxonomical, and epistemic aspects his Divine Names, Celestial Hierarchy, and Mystical Theology to the neglect of the soteriological and liturgical concerns of the EH (and CH, too) and the treatment of hierarchy Bonaventure has been framed accordingly.⁶ Beginning in the 1980s, Dionysian scholarship began to re-evaluate the importance of the liturgical dimension of Dionysius' thought and, especially, hierarchy.⁷ This turn in Dionysian studies, however, has no yet raised new questions of Bonaventure's reception of the Areopagite's liturgically-oriented thought, which retained its sacerdotal and cultic terminology in both Eriugena's translation and the commentaries based upon it.⁸ By...