Klöster im Hochmittelalter

Place, Analogy, and Transcendence | 87
passion in his own broken body, exemplifies this affection and the resulting transformation
into the image of the beloved.
“There is no other way but through the most ardent love of the Crucified,
which so lifted Paul up into the third heaven and transformed him into
Christ that he said: With Christ I am nailed to the cross; it is not I who live
now, but truly Christ in me; which indeed so absorbed the soul of Francis
that spirit appeared in flesh when, two years prior to his death, he carried the
most sacred stigmata of the passion in his body.” ¹⁴
With this opening reference to the stigmatized flesh of Francis, Bonaventure shifts
the historical horizon of mystical ascent in Christianity. Earlier writers in the
Christian East and West appealed to biblical figures like Moses (Origen/Gregory
of Nyssa) or Rachel (Richard of St. Victor) as contemplative archetypes. With his
striking epistemological claim regarding a contemporary figure from a small town
in Umbria – an individual many in Europe and the Middle East had known and
some still vividly remembered – Bonaventure introduces Francis to readers as a
tangible touchstone of transcendence for his followers now and, as time will tell, as
a stumbling block to his would-be detractors. ¹⁵
In the Itinerarium Bonaventure identifies the departure point for the reader’s
ascent as in loco, quem posuit. ¹⁶ From this place, identified here as the desert of the
world, the would-be contemplative sets out on a six stage transcendent journey
through the wilderness upward into God. The destination is the Tabernacle of the
Most High in the heavenly Jerusalem. Poor by nature since personal existence rests
entirely on the divine choice to create ex nihilo, the sojourner, in the company
of fellow travelers, first considers the vestiges or footprints of the Creator in and
through the material universe. ¹⁷ This visible world of material creatures is a macrocosm,
and it initially enters the microcosm of the soul through the five senses in the
act of apprehension. As Bonaventure notes, these material creatures are shadows,
14 Via autem non est nisi per ardentissimum amorem Crucifixi, qui adeo Paulum ad tertium caelum
raptum transformavit in Christum, ut diceret: Christo confixus sum cruci, vivo autem, iam non ego;
vivit vero in me Christus; qui etiam adeo mentem Francisci absorbuit, quod mens in carne patuit, dum
sacratissima passionis stigmata in corpore suo ante mortem per biennium deportavit. Bonaventure of
Bagnoregio, Itinerarium (note 13 above), prologus, n. 3, p. 295b.
15 On Bonaventure’s view of Francis, transcendence, and the world, see Timothy J. Johnson, Dream Bodies
and Peripatetic Prayer. Reading Bonaventure’s Itinerarium with Certeau, in: Modern Theology, 21/3,
2005, pp. 413 – 427; Id., Prologue as Pilgrimage. Bonaventure as Spiritual Cartographer, in: Miscellanea
Francescana, 106 –107, 2006 –2007, pp. 445 – 464.
16 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Itinerarium (note 13 above), cap. 1, n. 1, p. 296a–b.
17 Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Itinerarium (note 13 above), cap. 2, n. 11–13, pp. 302b–303a.