Editing Bonaventure (section)

===Philosophy===
{{Catholic philosophy}}
Bonaventure wrote on almost every subject treated by the [[Scholasticism|Scholastics]] and his writings are substantial. A great number of them deal with faith in Christ, God and theology. No work of Bonaventure's is exclusively philosophical, a striking illustration of the mutual interpenetration of philosophy and theology that is a distinguishing mark of the Scholastic period.<ref name=robinson/>

Much of Bonaventure's philosophical thought shows a considerable influence by [[Augustine of Hippo]], so much so that De Wulf considers him the best medieval representative of [[Augustinianism]]. Bonaventure adds Aristotelian principles to the Augustinian doctrine, especially in connection with the illumination of the intellect and the composition of [[human being]]s and other living creatures in terms of matter and form.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.franciscan-sfo.org/bonavent.htm |title=Brother John Raymond, "The Theory of Illumination in St. Bonaventure" |access-date=2013-01-04 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150224134712/http://www.franciscan-sfo.org/bonavent.htm |archive-date=2015-02-24 |url-status=dead }}</ref> Augustine, who had introduced into the west many of the doctrines that would define scholastic philosophy, was a critically important source of Bonaventure's Platonism. The mystic [[pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite]] was another notable influence.

In philosophy, Bonaventure presents a marked contrast to his contemporaries, [[Roger Bacon]], [[Albert the Great]], and [[Thomas Aquinas]]. While these may be taken as representing, respectively, physical science yet in its infancy, and [[Aristotle|Aristotelian]] scholasticism in its most perfect form, Bonaventure presents the mystical and [[Plato]]nizing mode of speculation that had already, to some extent, found expression in [[Hugh of St Victor|Hugo]] and [[Richard of St. Victor]], [[Alexander of Hales]], and in [[Bernard of Clairvaux]]. To him, the purely intellectual element, though never absent, is of inferior interest when compared with the living power of the affections or the heart.<ref name=EB1911/>

[[File:Francisco de Zurbarán 012.jpg|thumb|right|Bonaventure receives the envoys of the [[Byzantine Emperor]] at the [[Second Council of Lyon]].]]

Like Thomas Aquinas, with whom he shared numerous profound agreements in matters theological and philosophical, he combated the Aristotelian notion of the eternity of the world vigorously (though he disagreed with Aquinas about the abstract possibility of an eternal universe). Bonaventure accepts the general Christian Neoplatonic doctrine, found in Augustine and pseudo-Dionysius, that "forms" do not exist as subsistent entities, but as ideals, predefinitions, archetypes, or in Bonaventure's words: "exemplars", in the mind of God, according to which actual things were formed. This conception has no slight influence upon his philosophy. Physicist and philosopher [[Max Bernhard Weinstein]] described  Bonaventure as a "half-mystic" and wrote that he showed "strong [[Pandeism|pandeistic]] inclinations".<ref>Max Bernhard Weinsten, ''Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis'' (''World and Life Views, Emerging from Religion, Philosophy and Perception of Nature'') (1910), page 303: "Andere Ganz- oder Halbmystiker, wie den Alanus (gegen 1200), seinerzeit ein großes Kirchenlicht und für die unseligen Waldenser von verhängnisvoller Bedeutung, den Bonaventura (1221 im Kirchenstaate geboren), der eine Reise des Geistes zu Gott geschrieben hat und stark pandeistische Neigungen zeigt, den Franzosen Johann Gersan (zu Gersan bei Rheims 1363 geboren) usf., übergehen wir, es kommt Neues nicht zum Vorschein."</ref>