The Birth of an Idea: How Bonaventure Reformulates Dionysian Procession as Eternal Wisdom Birthing the Divine Ideas on the Cross Part I: Virtual Procession from the Sentences Commentary to the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ[1]

Bonaventure is among the most Dionysian thinkers of his age, heartily embracing the diffusivity of the Good, hierarchy as the worshipful participation in God’s distribution of divine life, and the excessive nature of divine union beyond intellect. It is therefore curious that he neither employs nor even discusses Dionysius’ creative proodoi—aside from one instance in the De Mysterio Trinitatis—despite an abundance of citations from the Dionysian Corpus, and especially the Divine Names across his career. Nevertheless, what Bonaventure read of these proodoi or processus (in Latin), and Dionysius’ account of divine egress can be detected in his corpus. This two-part article will argue that Bonaventure’s use of rationes, an equivalent for the Dionysian logoi, present the best avenue for assessing how the substance of Dionysian proodoi enters his thought. Furthermore, it will argue that by following Bonaventure’s use of the rationes a development can be traced through a remarkable trajectory, from an early reticence to admit a divine egress in the Sentences Commentary through to a profound integration of that egress in Trinitarian life under the image of the rationes birth from eternal Wisdom on the cross.

Part I of this article will address Bonaventure’s early use of the rationes aeternae from the Sentences Commentary to the more robust entry of the substance of Dionysius proodoi in Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, which develops into a virtual account of divine procession unto creatures in Bonaventure’s articulation of ‘causal knowing’.

Part II will follow the further development of the externalization of the rationes as part of Bonaventure’s account of cosmic completion in the De Reductione Artium, which externalization is ultimately described as a birth on the cross in Collationes in Hexaemeron. I will argue that the combination of the rationes’ role in causal knowing and externalization in the Hexaemeron locates a divine egress-without-departing in the Trinity itself in the shape of an eternal cross embracing the historical cross, whereby Bonaventure enfolds the Dionysius proodoi with Augustinian logocentrism within his own Franciscan spirituality and thereby anticipates the intratrinitarian speculations of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov about an eternal cruciformity and even divine humanity by several centuries.

Jacques Guy Bougerol—a scholar of no small exposure to Bonaventure or his use of Dionysius—called the Seraphic Doctor ‘one of the most Dionysian among the great masters of the thirteenth century’.^[2] Bonaventure’s distinctive Dionysianism is reflected in his own prioritization of God as Good and the resultant primacy of charity that culminates in a supranoetic union with God, in a superluminous darkness expressed and actualized in the God-glorifying and human-divinizing mercy of the cross. And this Dionysianism is also shown in the Bangroregite’s assimilation and expansion of the triadic divisions that perform the Areopagite’s hierarchies.^[3] That Platonic inheritance is on display in the Franciscan’s committed, even relentless, use of the cycle of exitus and reditus,^[4] the intelligible circle that describes the latter’s whole metaphysics,^[5] such that every iota and corner of creation is an expressed vestige of triune divinity manifesting and reducing spirits, and in them, all creatures, to God. Hence, even Bonaventure’s famous exemplarism is indebted to the Areopagite.^[6] In short, Dionysius’ conceptual presence permeates Bonaventure’s corpus, even preferentially in some cases,^[7] not slavishly but by rumination, reframing, and repurposing that Greek mind in Latin Paris.^[8] Perhaps most disctinctively, the Franciscan beheld an eternal cross borne amidst the sweep of the intelligible circle that itself echoed Dionysius’ circular image of divine ecstasy. This article, in its two parts, proposes one avenue to explain how Bonaventure saw the cross in the circle, namely, by attending to the development in the Bonaventure’s use and understanding of the divine ideas or rationes. Furhthermore, his development aroubd the rationes simultenously exhibits his maturing integration of Dionyius’ legacy.

Yet there is a noteworthy absence in that Dionysian legacy. Despite being an avid reader of the Divine Names, Bonaventure avoids mentioning the proodoi, the divine processions unto creatures that lie at the heart of that influential work.^[9] In the Corpus Dionysiacum (CD), the term proodos names every going-forth of divinity, both as creating all things and also drawing us into union with God by the incarnation or philanthropia of Jesus.^[10] Proodos refers to God’s acts ad extra, to use Latin terms, the work of creation and the missions of the Son and Spirit. The terms, however, that would come to translate proodos were processus (in Hilduin, Saracen, and Grosseteste’s versions of Corpus Dionysiacum) and processio (in Eriugena’s).^[11] Bonaventure used the translations of Eriugena and Saracen, and was thereby exposed to both translations of proodos in his works.^[12] Furthermore, Bonaventure used the terms in those versions that functioned as translations of proodos, but processio would frequently, as was common, name the intratrinitarian processions, while processus was a broad term that naming any progress or going forth, including occasionally Trinitarian procession.^[13] He did not, however, outside of sparing quotation, use those Latin terms in Dionysius’ sense of proodos.

In DN 2.5, proodos names that common egress or progression (that is, not predicated of any single divine person) as a manifestation of the divine hiddeness and a divine self-multiplication of divine more-than-goodness that is a substantifying, life-giving, wise-making, distribution of itself, or as DN 2.6 and 11.2 state so clearly, imparts itself to all for participation without its own diminution of confusion or even contact.^[14] For Dionysius, it is not, of course, a spatial progression, even if many of the things to which God so proceeds are spatial, but a granting to all a share in itself, so that it is not only prototypical and causal of all things, but even ‘life of the living, and essence of beings’,^[15] not only as leading and sustaining things to being or their existence, but as the ‘being itself’ of things that are.^[16] And it is so for all the divine names^[17] that name the impartation and correlate participation of God as a self-existent being (as a transcendent more-than-source going forth as source) and self-existent essentializing (as an impartitive power going forth from God, and so immanent in the effect)—all without supposing some intermediate essence or agent,^[18] and also of God as self-existent life and life-making, wise and wise-making and the like. All these names constitute the proodoi, the progression of the good to every kind and degree of that which is not God under all the aspects in which those beings, and even non-beings, participate God and have God as their ground.  As noted, processus was not entirely absent from Bonaventure in this sense only in virtue of quotation rather than his own terminology.^[19] Therefore, assessing Bonaventure’s embrace or at least similarity to Dionysius on the topic of such a proodos in substance cannot rely on a direct linkage of proodos to processus, processio or their cognates, but only upon the conceptual comparisons supplemented with attention to Bonaventure’s use of Dionsysius’ citations.

Since the size of Bonaventure’s corpus prohibits a thorough comparison of his thought to Dionysius’ proodos, a more restricted—but proportionally more useful—endeavour is called for. And one lies at hand: a comparison of Bonaventure’s treatment of the divine ideas to the processive purpose of Dionysius’ divine logoi permits an examination of Bonaventure’s conceptual proximity to the Areopagite’s proodos. While the causal and creative impartations of divinity identified as the proodoi of the divine names (Good, Being, Life, etc.) in the eponymous work display an egressive continuity (i.e., that they are the same as the God whence they came) that simultaneously posits God’s transcendence on the one hand and on the other, creatures’ existence and access to a divine union exceeding being and knowing in its full breadth,^[20] for Dionysius, God’s proodoi also include in their number the more particular providences, the logoi that are the paradigmata, the paradigms, of individual creatures.^[21] These, logoi, even in their particularity, share the same egressive continuity as the divine names, inasmuch as they are God going forth for each and every creature.^[22] They offer a point of comparison because Bonaventure, too, locates the particularity of God’s effects in distinct expressions from eternity analogous to the logoi:the divine ideas. Beginning with the Sentences Commentary onward, he posits rationes aeternae or ideae as the exemplary similitudes of all creatures (and all possible things) and specifies that they are identical with the divine essence. Usefully for this article, he deploys them across his career in a range of topics from to divine knowledge, and even glorification/eschatology, which in turn allows one to assess Bonaventure’s adoption of the meaning of the Dionysian proodos in the view of the Fransican’s wider theological vision.

Initially, Bonaventure’s treatment of the rationes was drawn from his Augustinian framework—and would always be shaped by it—especially by Augustine’s logocentrism, which located these rationes or ideas as eternally expressed in the Son.^[23] However, Bonaventure increasingly cited Dionysius’ texts to discuss Augustine’s doctrine of rationes, which although they had passed through a great number of minds and hands, retained several ambiguities, including:

How they did not violate divine simplicity.

How they were in the Word.

Whether both exemplary and efficient causality belonged the rationes.

Whether each individual thing had a ratio and how that ratio related to that thing when created.

Whether and what it would mean for souls to behold these rationes.

What relationship exists between their rationes and God’s role in created cognition (illumination).^[24]

While Bonaventure would initially address such ambiguities in the Sentences Commentary with occasional references to Dionysius, by the Questiones disputatae de scientia Christi (DSC), Bonaventure found in the Areopagite a support for clear answers about the rationes’ eternal role in God and persistent importance for creation’s existence and fulfillment. Bonaventure’s use of Dionysius to clarify Augustine offers us a two-fold opportunity: to assess not only his conceptual similarity to but also his interpretation and integration of the Areopagite’s account of divine causality through divine logoi.

There remains, however, a further reason for taking the rationes as a point of comparison to Dionyisius’ proodoi beyond their analogous likeness to (and even translation of) the paradigmata or logoi: it is around these rationes that Bonaventure, in his Collationes in Hexaemeron, ultimately admits God’s egress to creatures in the birth of the rationes exemplares from eternal Wisdom on the cross, which Bonaventure fuses with the image of divine ray that he also drew from Dionysius. Thus, the development of Bonaventure’s use of the rationes does not only furnish a neat table of comparable points of doctrine, but a distinctive account of divine egress through the rationes that yokes eternal and intrinsic divine wisdom and the cross, one which does not only take the cross as a remedy or complement to creation, but as constitutive of the fruition of creation and God’s presence in the world. Outpacing Dionysius in daring, where that ancient secretive author perceived each thing and every relation between them as a manifestation of God, Bonaventure would come to see in every thing’s redemption God’s own birth inasmuch as the rationes born are essentially God. It is that birth, the final trajectory of the rationes in Bonaventure’s thought, that has given a name to this article.

By attending to the chief appearances of the rationes in his corpus, I will show how Bonaventure’s manner of discussing and employing the rationes aeternae undergoes that striking development across his career in three basic periods, periods that also provide illustrative examples of the maturation of Bonaventure’s handling of Dionysius.

The first period belongs to Bonaventure’s early thought in the Sentences Commentary and shows a general agreement with Dionysius about God’s causality and effects in creation, yet a total reticence to ascribe the image of a creative or substantializing egress to God. In the Sentences Commentary, Dionysius’ presence is noteworthy but hardly central in the questions on divine knowledge and divine causality, and he certainly does not rival Augustine’s footprint, let alone authority on the rationes.

The second period, Bonaventure’s period as a master in Paris, in which the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ and the Reduction of the Arts to Theology were written, sees the rationes figure centrally in his epistemology and wisdom mysticism, a tremendously creative period in Bonaventure’s life where his theology came into its own with a fusion of doctrinal elaboration and symbolic structures that the disputation method and sheer girth of the Sentences Commentary precluded. It is in that middle period, as Tommaso Manzon observes, ‘where Bonaventure’s engagement with Dionysius reaches new levels of systematic relevance’, a development noticed also by Joseph Ratzinger and Zachary Hayes.^[25] During this magisterial period, Bonaventure’s reworking and integration of his treatment of divine knowledge and creation privileges Dionysius as a source on par with, or even surpassing and interpreting,^[26] Augustine, and results in a virtual—i.e., in all but name—account of creative procession through the intrinsic rationes in God. At the same time, Bonaventure also experimented with an externalization of the rationes in the incarnation, whereby their entrance in Christ contributed to the world’s completion.

Third and finally, the period of Bonaventure’s openly Franciscan theologizing, the period of his minister generalship from 1257 onward, but practically inaugurated with the Itinerarium in 1259, initially saw little direct discussion of the rationes until their pervasive reappearance in the Hexaemeron, wherein he situated them within his account of eternal providence and intratrinitarian communication, and presented their birth from eternal wisdom through the cross as the fulfillment of an eternal conception and gestation in time. That presentation in the Hexaemeron constitutes an account of divine egress in a manner not anticipated by Dionysius, but characteristic of Bonaventure’s reconfiguration of the Areopagite’s mystical and ecclesiastical theology through the experience of Francis’ conformation to the cross. Furthermore, while Bonaventure had always differed from Dionysius by his Augustinian logocentrism, whereby the rationes were expressed by the Father in the eternal Word (whereas Dionysius merely located the logoi in the Logos without elaboration),^[27] the development of Bonaventure’s use of the rationes tracked an increasing importance of their trinitarian location. While the rationes initially supplied an account of divine knowledge, and later the divine ground of all knowledge in his theory of illumination, the Hexaemeron threads the rationes into God’s self-consciousness, providence, and the implications of the Trinity itself, culminating in their identity as the form of God in the shape of cross implicit in the Trinity and even drawing God outward—to birth, or the dilation of divine glory on the cross.^[28]

The rationes’ role has been well recognized in Bonaventure’s account of divine knowledge and his well-known illumination theory, and especially in his fundamental exemplarism—so much so that Romano Guardini makes them the starting place for his overarching account of Bonaventure’s pervasive exemplarism at the heart of his theology.^[29] Indeed, studies of Bonaventure’s philosophy have given significant space to the rationes, from Etienne Gilson who prioritizes the role of expression,^[30] Jean-Marie Bissen,^[31]

John Quinn,^[32] Zachary Hayes,^[33] and most to recently Carl Vater, who contrasts the noetic and causal aspects.^[34] The rationes, at least intended by the catchall term ‘divine idea’, are indeed so central that any general treatment of Bonaventure’s metaphysics must say a word about them.^[35] To a lesser extent, the rationes have also served as an entry point for a discussion for Bonaventure’s Dionysianism.^[36]

None of these studies,however, have focused on the rationes’ implications for not only Triune life but even the cross’s presence therein, that is, their place in the relationship between Deus aeternus et Deus humanatus, to use the Hexaemeron’s terms. That facet, lately developed explicitly late in Bonaventure’ career in the Hexaemeron—which most of the scholarly accounts of the rationes aeternae does not treat as a locus of development but only of restatement—exemplifies the nature of Bonaventure’s theological development. His development is not that of a Copernican revolution from one center to another so much as the unfolding of his commitment to the centrality of Christ and Christ’s cross that stood at the heart his own understanding Franciscanism: namely, that the cross is not only the vehicle of redemption, but the shape of deification, and more, the historical expression of the form of divinity. That Bonaventure’s center is the revelation of the Triune God in the cross of Christ is not borne out from any single direct statement of his later works but rather the interface of his particular points of doctrinal development and spirituality with his numerological and architectural symbolism—symbolism addressed explicitly in the Hexaemeron. In it, Bonaventure’s treatment of divine wisdom and the rationes intimate that the cross-form of divinity, the eternal coincidence of opposites form an intelligible cross that is the very mundus archetypus^[37] appropriated to the Son and Word. That intelligible cross and mundus archetypus accounts for the whole sweep of God’s freely willed providence including creation, knowledge, salvation, and deification, And therefore,this eternal archetype is not only the divine foreseeing of the incarnation but a causal likeness of the incarnation, and so even an eternal proto-humanity in its characteristically human joining of every difference—including humanity itself—in itself. In this way, in creation and redemption that comes to fruition on the cross is also the entailment of the “rational freedom” intrinsic to trinitarian act and life.^[38] Where Dionysius attributes the proodoi substantiating and recalling every degree of created goodness to a common^[39] divine hyperbolē, Bonaventure sets the world’s creation, salvation, and glorification as an exteriorization of intratrinitarian communication through the rationes.

Bonaventure’s development beyond Dionysius’ account of the proodoi by casting God’s egress as a birth on the cross—inasmuch as it is the externalization of the intratrinitarian communication through the very rationes expressing the shape of the cross—even anticipates modern Trinitarian speculators. This includes Hans Urs von Balthasar’s enfolding of God’s eternal glory with kenosis, a cruciform glory, and Sergei Bulgakov’s sophiology with its positing of an eternal humanity in God.^[40] The exact likeness of either modern author’s discourse did not, of course, flow from Bonaventure’s pen, but when all the facets of the rationes, their source, form, and end, are triangulated, the similarities are as compelling as Bonaventure’s own vision: that all things are found in God so that they might come to be in God, not according to any capriciousness in God, but according to who God is eternally.

Ultimately, assessing Bonaventure’s approximation, appropriation, and adaptation of Dionysian proodoi, especially in their particularity, through the rationes aeternae discloses his increasing utilization of the Areopagite. His creative synthesizing that held that the goodness at the root of God’s tri-personality (the Ricardian lover, beloved, and co-beloved) is just the same extended when goodness, as Dionysius taught, goes forth to all, retaining its embeddedness in the person of the triune God. Moreover, insofar as that same extension of Trinitarian goodness is stretched out in the shape of the cross, Bonaventure transforms the Dionysian principle that even the lowest is precontained^[41] by God and the most unlike images are the highest images of God,^[42] into a revelation of the abyss of triune life where the source of divine humility is in God’s glory.

Bonaventure’s ultimate development of the rationes did not appear de novo, but as the integration of several doctrines elaborated over his career. Above I outlined three stages in this development, an earlier period in the Sentences Commentary, next the embrace of Dionysius and greater experimentation with the rationes, and a final development of the rationes in their cruciformity. This article will chart a course from the first to second moments in its first part in the present volume, and from the second to third moment in its second part in the next volume.

The first part will follow the early into the middle period, beginning with very brief preliminary considerations of the role of goodness in Dionysius’ proodoi and in Bonaventure’s early thought. Then it will examine Bonaventure’s uses of the rationes to explain divine knowledge and causality to show his gradual embrace of the shape, but not terminology, of Dionysius’ proodos.  First, I will explain how the rationes and their synonyms his Commentary on the First Book of the Sentences (I Sent) are identified as the instances of divine cognition and as exemplary forms of things, and then how the use of rationes in the discussion of creation his Commentary on the Second Book of the Sentences (II Sent) identifies them more closely with efficient causality. Those uses of the rationes will serve as the backdrop against which Bonaventure’s embrace of Dionysius and the doctrinal development of causal knowing that amounts to a virtual procession in Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ (DSC) will be more easily demonstrated. The first part will conclude with a consideration of how Bonaventure’s two senses of similitudo, epistemically available likenesses (which the rationes are) and then likeness to God by grace, point towards an integration of these senses in the works that would follow, especially the Hexaemeron.

The second part will then follow the middle period’s creativity into the final expression of the rationes in the Hexaemeron. It will begin by showing how Bonaventure’s virtual procession paved the way for him to affirm the language of processus in the Dionysian sense to mean a creative egress and the providential coming of Christ. Then it will turn to On The Reduction of the Arts to Theology (De Reductione) as the beginning of the more creative uses of the rationes, where the rationes are understood to seek to belong to creation for the sake of creation of completion as a form of egress. The bulk of the second part will examine the elements of the more creative position to argue that Bonaventure’s account of the birth of the rationes from divine wisdom is an account of the birth of God insofar as the eternal divine fruition is extended through the cross, which gathers all things into God by God’s standing outside God so that all may stand within God. My arguement will begin with Hexaemeron 20, where the image of birth in the suffering in the flesh is introduced but will then proceed to examine the earlier sections of the Hexaemeron to explain that this birth from Wisdom names the externalization of a cruciformity that belongs to the divine Wisdom expressing that divine essence in the Trinity. I will demonstrate that the Hexaemeron argues, albeit diffusely, that God goes forth as both the agent and subject of providence expressed by the rationes because God is essentialy identical with that providence. Thereafter the second part will conclude with a brief review of Bonaventure’s distinction from and appropriation of the Dionysian doctrine of the proodoi that reaffirms the Seraphic Doctor’s knowledge of the doctrine, his apparent reticence to speak of it, and his ultimate embrace of it in a Franciscanized, cruciform mode that anticipated modern trinitarian speculators.

Preliminaries: Divine Goodness and Divine Egress

To effectively compare Bonaventure’s account God’s intrinsic causal act ad extra^[43] through the rationes aeternae to Dionysius’ divine proodoi in the CD, I will first lay out in this preliminary section a) the criteria for comparison from the Areopagite, b)  Bonaventure’s fundamental position that creation’s purpose and the manner of God’s will to create refer primarily, like Dionysius, to God’s goodness, c) that Bonaventure always admitted an egress of creation of from God, and d) a preliminary comparison of the logoi and rationes. The first provides an instrument for analysis. The second establishes a background that sets any of Bonaventure’s divergent positions or expressions within the view of a more fundamental agreement preventing overexaggerated differences from Dionysius. The third clarifies that it is the notion and language of a divine motion or externalization that is at issue and not motion from or out of God more broadly. The fourth highlights the narrower likenesses and differences between rationes and logoi, attending especially to Bonaventure’s initial avoidance of egressso as to provide a point of reference for Bonaventure’s development throughout this article, but especially in its final form as it will be explained in the second part.

To the first, the elements of Dionysius’ conceptual constellation that belong to the common creative proodoi (setting aside the fullest meaning that includes Christ’s philanthropia in and through the hierarchies^[44]) which have been mentioned above, are as follows:

The divine super-goodness (sometimes just called goodness) is the source and principle of God’s causal goodness which is the proodos itself and is the principle of all proodoi therein.^[45]

Divine egress as proodos is an ecstasy of God from God entailed by the superabundance or overflow of that super-goodness.^[46]

Divine egress is a multiplication and manifestation of the untity of the hidden God according to God’s effects that are precontained in God as a knowledge beyond mind that knows as causing.^[47]

Divine egress entails neither alteration nor diminution in God.^[48]

The proodoi are the impartation of God to those effects upon whom they depend.^[49]

The participation of God is necessary for those effects to actually be what they are in as much as they are, even in the case of non-beings which yet participate the good.^[50]

There is a likeness or similitude between God and creatures such that every creature names God both according to its particularity and the genera to which it belongs (being, living, knowing, etc.).^[51]

The divinization of the creature is the goal of the proodos.^[52]

The proodoi do not entail a confusion of God and the creature.^[53]

Stated succinctly and integrally, God’s proodos (i.e. God’s goodness) is a function of God’s more-than-goodness; it is the divine egress or ecstasy as an impartation of God as cause to each creature in a manner according to its nature, which from the side of the creature is the participation constitutive of the creature.^[54] It is, moreover, a doubly communicative more-than-goodness, communicating not only existence or reality to all things (ontologically) according to the nature of each, but also beckoning them to union with God (teleologically, both noetically and erotically) beyond that nature, like the returning motion of a circle.^[55] In a word or two, by his proodos God speaks to creatures by speaking to God as creatures. Granting that this constellation describes the general shape of the proodoi, or at least the facets elaborated principally in the DN, it offers a measure against which Bonaventure’s doctrine of the rationes can be compared.

To the second point, near the end of I Sent and in the first distinction of the II Sent, Bonaventure establishes that God’s goodness is the root of creation. Distinction 45 of I Sent teaches that God’s creative act follows from God’s goodness and not some other attribute (e.g. eternity or power), because goodness is both self-diffusive and the end of all things (propter quod), and thereby goodness is the ratio of willing as liberal.^[56] He cites Dionysius to explain that the act of willing, especially the fundamental divine willing, is the turning of goodness upon itself (reflectere) that supplies simultaneously the source and end for creation.^[57] Hence, quoting Dionysius, the divine goodness, which creates, is the divine amor, a ‘certain eternal cycle, from the highest good (optimus), through highest good, and unto the highest good’.^[58] That logic of the cycle, that will as goodness, is both the source and end and gives Bonaventure his answer when he asks in the II Sent whether creation is more principally for the glory and praise of God or the benefit of creatures: it is for the glory of God by glorifying creatures.^[59] While God’s glory does not depend on and is not increased by creatures, nevertheless, the communication and manifestation of God’s glory cannot occur apart from creation.^[60] Bonaventure stops short of saying that God was bound to manifest and communicate his glory, yet that communicativeness accords with the diffusiveness of God’s goodness, and in turn implies creation, not because of a lack on God’s part, but entirely because goodness is, in itself, a diffusive source and end, and utterly free.^[61] Indeed God has created freely but resolutely because God is good, and anything less than the benefit and beatitude and glory of the creature would not be to communicate in accord with God’s own goodness. Therefore, God’s goodness and glory ad extra is drawn from and for God’s goodness and glory ad intra.^[62] By God’s will, which is goodness, and so ordered to Glory,^[63] all things are caused to be, are caused individually and immediately.^[64]

To the third point, Bonaventure identifies the creation of each and every thing as an egress in a double way, from God (ex Deo) and from not-being or nothing (de nihilo) to being. Creation’s egress is to be understood as the creature coming into being, but specifically from God as a vestige, that marks it as an egress—that is marks an originating source of that vestigial likeness.^[65] There is also an exitus from non-being, insofar as that movement indicates it is a change.^[66] Bonaventure would, after the Sentences Commentary, occasionally speak of the creature’s creation with procedere, the verbal form of processus.^[67] Such egress is understood as a change, and thus is not applied to God as is not the one moved but the source of motion.

To the fourth point, the rationes aeternae, exemplares, ideales, or under any other appellation, stand in an explanatory role between the willing-goodness of God and the egress of creation. How they explain the relationship of these poles is the matter to which we must now turn, first by looking at them beside Dionysius’ logoi, for both stand as exemplars in their relative systems. In the Corpus Dionysiacum, DN 4.10 and 5.8 identify the paradigmata or logoi ouisiopoioi, the divine exemplars and wills (thelemata) that are the more particular providences in the divine progression, as the manner by which God, unto whom all things can be predicated, goes forth to all things not only as Good, Being, Life, and the like, but even as intending every particular.^[68] God goes forth to all things, thereby bringing to them to being according to the essence of each because God is already each by containing those things in his providence (pronoia).^[69] These logoi describe the multiplicity of the divine procession to each any every creature, and while Dionysius does not speak of these logoi as self-existent in the manner of Being, Life, Wisdom, and the other divine names that identify the more general divine proodoi, the logic of the DN, that one and the same God that goes forth to each in each creature in accord with every way that it exists (as being, and/or living, and/or wise etc.)^[70], nothing stands in the way of reading each exemplary logoi as a procession, since they specify distinct modes of God’s being out of himself (exō heautou) by ekstasis, ekbasis, hyperbolē, and even methē (drunkenness, itself being ‘phrenōn ekstasis’, that is, ‘out of mind’).^[71] Indeed it because the logoi, like the more general proodoi, are precontained in the divine hiddenness that they are truly the egress of God.

In contrast to that Dionysian notion, Bonaventure, in his early career in Paris, and before fully employing Dionysius’ writings on the topic does recognize these exemplars in God, but without any implication of a divine progression in or through them,^[72] and nevertheless in a way similar to Dionysius’ logoi, the particular rationes aeternae or exemplares—or any of the other terms Bonaventure would call them—express a multiplicity in God’s unity and simplicity of essence that has a multiplication of effects. In the Sentences Commentary, both I Sent and II Sent, that multiplication without explicit egress, which might rather be called an implicit multiplication as a necessary condition for the creation’s egress, is embraced in several points about the rationes relevant to the present comparison:

The divine ideae, the exemplary rationes or similitudes (similitudines) are eternal and essentially distinct from those things of which they are exemplars.

The rationes are essentially identical to God, and so one secundum rem, but infinite in number secundum rationem by which they each infer a res.

By the rationes, God is an expressive similitude of creatures and creatures are expressed similitudes of God.

These rationes do not enter into the constitution of those things of which they are exemplars.

The exemplars are causal of that of which they are exemplars but not identical with the work of creation, secundum rationem, and are identified with Augustine’s primodiales causae.

The exemplary rationes are an expression internal to the Trinity.

The exemplary rationes are expressed in the Word, though God, and function as a quasi-medium between God and creatures.

The Sentences Commentary, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (DMT), and the Breviloquium will all agree on these points even as they track Bonaventure’s diverse purposes for appealing to the eternal exemplars. However, as Dionysius’ teachings are increasingly absorbed by Bonaventure, a virtual procession appears that maintains continuity with the above points on the eternal intrinsic expression and distinction of the exemplary rationes from the exemplated res while approximating the image of the causal motion of God’s departureless approach to creatures of Dionysius’ divine hyperbolē. In both Dionysius and Bonaventure, divine goodness is the root of creation and creation’s reduction to its source, the classic exitus-reditus cycle, but in the former the multiplication is God’s presence beyond God as constitutive of things; in the latter, an internal multiplicity of ideas is the source of a multiplicity of effects outside, of which the rationes are in no way constitutive. In the former, the logos of each, also assuming in itself the necessary proodoi, is the constitution-without-mingling of each thing, while in the latter the eternity of the ratio of each, which in no way enters into the constitution of the creature, is the guarantee of its causal power. The former is creative approach, the latter a transcendent source in God’s knowledge. Yet in both in both accounts, the shape and meaning of causality stands at the very center; in the case of Bonaventure, the consideration of causality will drive the development of a conceptual apparatus adequate not only to his metaphysical principles, but the God revealed in Jesus Christ. And from this beginning we may turn to follow the course to the birth of the ideas.

Eternal Knowledge:
Distinguishing the Exemplar aeternum, Rationes and Res in I Sent

In the first book of Bonaventure’s Sentences Commentary, which is effectively a doctrine of God, Bonaventure affirms the real distinction between God as the eternal exemplar (note the singular) and that of which God is the exemplar in multiple ways (i.e., all possible and actual things), navigating the scriptural language that says that God is in things and things are in God as he does so. From the internal, intrinsic expression of ideas through the generation of the Son, to all things being in God, and to God being most intimately in creatures, the topics Bonaventure addresses in I Sent, especially, in d. 35 and d. 36, both affirm God’s intimacy to creatures while avoiding any language of a creative procession or externalization. Yet, simultaneously, The Seraphic Doctor’s manner of affirming God’s exemplarity and creative power and presence according to God’s own goodness through the eternal rationes or similitudines of creatures results in a doctrine that approaches the general shape of the Dionysian proodoi as a divine multiplication with its effects ad extra on account of divine goodness, albeit without positing an egress or motion of God even by image or analogy.

First, Bonaventure’s treatment of God’s knowledge of creatures develops the theoretical underpinnings for discussing God’s relation to creatures from the standpoint of God’s own eternity and essence. Bonaventure first opposes the opinion that God knows creatures as knowing himself as the cause of creatures (which he takes as a misunderstanding of DN 7.2, which states that God does not admit ideas of singular things, but knows according to his singular causal power^[73]), by arguing that there are ideas or rationes in God by which God knows (cognosere) creatures apart from the notion of actually creating, which ideas or rationes are reckoned as similitudes.^[74] These ideas and rationes are what, according to Bonaventure, Augustine called causae primordiales.^[75] He posits a distinction in God between the ratio cognoscendi and the ratio producendi, and further, explaines that God does not know distinct things by producing, but produces distinct things because God knows distinct things first (logically, not temporally speaking).^[76] This is the distinction, to be discussed below, between divine wisdom and power, that secures the difference between the generation of the Son and the creation of the world. Furthermore, that distinction is a guard that prevents the ex-pressive character of divine knowledge from being identified as an immediate externalization in that act of the generation of the Son that would amount to an unacceptable eternal creation in Bonaventure’s eyes.

Having made that distinction between knowledge and creation, Bonaventure focuses on the similitudes in God themselves. He explains that God, as the divine Wisdom, is the one similitude of infinite things, of both the infinite possible things and the finite created among them.^[77]  Yet, with regard to their distinction one from another, there are infinite similitudes of things at the same time that, realiter, so that God is this one similitude by which he knows them all in their individuation.^[78] The similitude between God and things that God has in mind is not univocal nor does it indicate a participation,^[79] as when two (or more) things convene in a common third thing or quality (e.g. roundness shared in balls and organs), since between God and creatures nothing is held in common. Instead, it is a similitude in which one thing is a likeness of another in the manner of an image and its prototype.^[80] Thus God is the similitude of creatures (and non-created possibilities), and it follows that all creatures are similitudes of God, not only according to universal forms, but individually.^[81] God is the ‘truth itself’ (veritas ipsa) expressing its own perfect knowledge of all that may and will be, and so is the most highly expressive similitude, while creatures are similitudes as distinct truths and are limited imitations of God.^[82] Or, to emphasize the difference, because God knows each and every thing, there is an expressive similitude in God, whereas creatures come to knowledge through the reception of an impressed similitude.^[83] By way of comparison to the proodoi, Bonaventure rejects any extrinsicity in God’s actus purus just as much as he rejects the admission of any act upon God from the outside, as in the creaturely manner of knowledge or elicited action from an external object.

Next, on account of God’s expression in se of these infinite similitudes, Bonaventure also accepts that things, both those merely possible and those that do come to be are ‘life in God’, because, following Augustine, they are all found in the Son who is the ars Patris, the art of the Father, ‘full of the all reasons of living things’.^[84] For Bonaventure, this means that life refers to the presence of the infinity of rationes in God, regardless of the eventual coming into being of their referents, or even of their of their nature, so that even non-living things are incorruptible life in God.^[85] In I Sent, Bonaventure intends this being in God not for things as they have their proper being, but for the rationes by which things may have their proper being according to which they are known and exist potentially in God—two distinct modes.^[86] Thus, in a manner of speaking, the rationes are in God as cause, particularly according to the appropriations that are frequently mapped to divine causality as power, wisdom, goodness, or as efficient, exemplary, and final cause, and the like.^[87] Bonaventure, however, presses further and clarifies that while all things are life in God as a triple cause, they cannot be present in simply the same way. God is the producing principle as the expressing exemplar, and as the conserving end, that is as efficient, exemplary, and final cause, or as power, knowledge (notitia), and will.^[88] As producing, everything is in God as nothing, because God creates from nothing, and so not as life. Alternatively, as things are conserved by God according to the proper being they actually have, whether being, motion or life, not all things are life in God as a conversing cause.^[89] It is only in God as exemplar that all things—whatever they are regardless of whether they come to be—are life, for they are in the exemplar who lives.^[90] Thus, Bonaventure does not say that all things live in God, but are life itself insofar as they exist in God (habent esse in deo), for in God who lives there is the principle of all things without any corruption.^[91]

However, Bonaventure clarifies that although one may say things (res) exist more truly (verius) in God as the eternal exemplar or in the created mind than in their own proper being, it is not strictly true.^[92] Since they are in God the exemplar or the created mind by similitude but not in their proper being (propria entitas), a thing more truly exists in itself than in God because that is the only way it exists, although the mental and divine similitudes are more noble.^[93] Thus, strictly speaking a thing does not exist in God, but rather a more perfect similitude of that thing and upon which that thing depends—yet this not in any way the creature.

On the other hand, Bonaventure affirms that God is in all creatures by an immediate presence inasmuch as God as immense has no limit, and as most simple is most powerful, so that God’s power, which is identical with divine essence, effects everything.^[94] Further, no creature is the cause of its being, having been created from nothing has in itself only emptiness and possibility, and so must receive its being (esse) from another.^[95] Thus, there is no creature, no effect, which does not depend entirely upon God who makes the being of the creature (qui eam fecit esse).^[96] According to the law that the cause is present in the effect through causation, God is present in all things as Truth, that which makes things what they truly are.^[97] It is for this reason, looking back to the question of whether all things are life in God, that in a manner of speaking the divine exemplar can be said to be truer than the exemplated, because it is the causative truth.^[98]

Finally, in I Sent, the notion of similitudes in God is, quite naturally, connected with the Son as the Word, by whose generation all that the Father (and Spirit) knows is expressed.^[99] For the Son as Word is an imitative similitude of the Father (a perfect imitation, unlike the creature’s imitation of God) but an exemplative similitude and an operative similitude towards creatures. The latter two, however, are not so in the manner of an act, as if the generation of the Son were absolutely identical with the act of creation, but as the dispositive habit unto creation. Through this double similitude, towards the Father and creation—a doubling that embraces both modes of similitude seen in both sides of the world’s relation to God, (i.e., exemplation and imitation)—the Son is not only to be named the ‘Power and Wisdom of God’—Power as operative, but Wisdom as exemplative—but also a quasi-medium^[100] between God and creatures.

From these elements alone that address divine exemplarity in I Sent, a broad similarity to the creative proodos of Dionysius can be affirmed in Bonaventure’s early thought, lacking only the element of divine externalization or ‘overflow’ and the specific language of God going forth in common (and not, say, in the missions) and the element of the more intimate relation of knowledge and causality. For Dionysius explains that the attribution of motion to God (or three motions) and the divine proodos names God’s bringing-to-being and sustaining and gathering-into-one-in-God of all beings by the ‘providential processions (proodoi) and energies’,^[101] in those words recalling God’s procession not only according to the broadly encompassing names but also the ‘more particular providence’ of the paradigmatic logoi.^[102] Put simply, God’s proodos is creation in all genera and particulars. In Bonaventure’s sharp differentiation between the rationes as similitudes and creatures, God’s creative act ad extra must not to be confused with the intrinsic expression of the rationes aeternae while God’s presence to and in creatures as cause may be understood as an approach towards creatures assuming yet distinguishable from the expression of the rationes. For as reading I Sent d. 35–37 with 45 highlights, the rationes are not appropriated to the will (d. 35–37), which alone is properly causal of creatures because the will joins efficacy to end. If that willing is God’s causal approach to res, the expression of the rationes whereby all things exist in God must be carefully delineated, otherwise, it would seem that an impossible infinity of res would be positively willed.^[103] And yet, Bonaventure recognizes that the divine intellection of res does not precede the willing in the order of time, nor are the two separated or without respect to each other.^[104] Furthermore, although any notion of the participation of res in their similitudes or rationes as such is eschewed, a sense of divine multiplication in the generation of the Word, which is also the expression of an infinity of possibilities, and also in the multiplicity of effects, is not absent from I Sent.

Thus, what remains to distinguish Bonaventure from Dionysius’ proodoi, ultimately is the notion of a divine externalization through the exemplars or even in the manner of the more general divine names, which are participable causes of creatures and, further, that divine knowledge is interior to this causal exteriorization. That Bonaventure drew a sharp notional line between the exemplars or similitudes as representative of creatures and God’s creative act, although essentially one, marks the most definitive difference from the Dionysian proodoi and signals a wariness to introduce explicit language of a divine ‘overflowing’ and ‘egress’ that defines the continuity-in-transcendence presented in the Divine Names. Bonaventure’s insistence continues through his career as a university theologian at Paris, but it also makes his ultimate relenting all the more noticeable.

Eternal Causes:
Distinguishing Rationes from Causae in II Sent

Bonaventure’s answers to I Sent’s questions can be marshalled into the lineaments of the Dionysian proodos. For Bonaventure’s rationes-as-causae primordiales in their paradigmatic particularity as God’s effective providential presence for creatures through the eternal ideas (or rationes) together with God’s creating love (will) and power approximate the multiform efficacy of Dionysius’ more general proodoi and God’s specific intention in the more particular providences in the logoi. Yet that approximation in I Sent underscores all the more how Bonaventure keeps the rationes and God’s actual will and its consequent act of creation neatly distinguished while avoiding any language of divine egress.

The strict delineation of the rationes from the divine will would not hold forever. In II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2 he analyses Augustine’s causae primordiales and rationes causales from De genesi littera 6,^[105] not as methods of God’s knowledge as in I Sent d. 35, but to explain the created and uncreated causes of and in creation without confusion. Where Augustine’s own ambiguity could have supported a divine egress as is found in Dionysius, Bonaventure tidied the ambiguity in his scholastic workshop. As Bonaventure distinguished his teaching from his predecessor’s, he states his resistance to any language of a divine externalization. Nevertheless, this question also marks an advance towards virtual procession, since where I Sent d. 35, a. q. 1–6 treated the rationes-as-causae principally under divine cognitio or knowledge,^[106] II Sent d. 18, following Augustine, locates the rationes causales in the hiddenness of the divine will without any apparent plurification of the rationes beyond that secundum rem, and so anticipates Bonaventure’s resolution of the divine knowing and willing in causing that would appear in DSC.

His chief purpose, as noted, in II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2 is to disambiguate Augustine’s location of eternal causes both in God (insertae Deo) and in creatures (insertae rebus) by developing a schema for all the senses Augustine (should have!) had in mind.^[107] Here, Bonaventure’s discussion offers scholastic clarity between created and uncreated causes and rationes, resulting in a schema that designates the ideas’ directive rather than effective causality, but attributes efficacy to God without a specification (at least in d. 18, a. 1, q. 2). Indeed, in its clarity, where Augustine’s ideas and causae were identified with rationes in Albertus Magnus’ own commentary on I Sent d. 18, Bonaventure differentiates them. Importantly, Bonaventure’s question includes no explicit reference to exemplaria (a translation of Dionysius’ paradigmata) nor any citation of the Corpus Dionysiacum, though he was obviously familiar with it on account of its citation elsewhere in that tome and in I Sent. Thus, it does not appear at this point in his career that Dionysius openly impacts his teaching on the divine ideas and their causality.^[108]

Bonaventure’s clarification of his commitments regarding eternal exemplars tussles with Augustine’s terminology in De Genesi littera: causae and rationes primordiales and seminales—and other distinctions—what do they mean and how to they differ? The question of whether Eve was formed from Adam’s side according the rationes seminales (the answer is no, except in a broad sense) affords Bonaventure the opportunity to examine the meaning and difference of Augustine’s terminology. He follows Albert the Great’s own commentary on the same distinction, as he is wont to do. Both scholastics faced Augustine’s lexical imprecision a with weary-but-dutiful tidying of terms.^[109] But where Albert pitched the primordial causes as a broad tent for Augustine’s rationes and causae,^[110] terminologically speaking, Bonaventure insisted on stricter distinctions.

Bonaventure outlines a schema built upon three distinctions to explain Augustine’s multiplication of names:

Causae and rationes causales are to be distinguished from each other as intending different meanings.

Causa names a productive principle, while a ratio causalis names a principle directive (regula) of that production.

Both may name an extrinsic or intrinsic principle.

Both may name an uncreated or created principle ^[111]

Bonaventure explains with comparison to these general distinctions and names, that the particular terms semen and rationales seminales name intrinsic, created principles, allowing the more general names, although technically descriptive of all causes and rationes, to be applied to the uncreated causae and rationes, resulting in the following schema:

Causa names an extrinsic, uncreated productive principle.

Ratio causalis names an extrinsic, uncreated principle directive of production.

Semen names a created and intrinsic productive principle.

ratio seminalis names a created and intrinsic principle directive of production.^[112]

 

With his conceptual framework laid, Bonaventure supplies a further terminological identification along the created/uncreated divide, stepping aside entirely from the discussion of causes, but only rationes for the rest of his response. It is here that Bonaventure identifies the rationes causales with the ideas, the similitudes of I Sent, which are by way of a negative implication consistent with I Sent not as effective causes but as exclusively directive principles:

Furthermore, the rule of the uncreated agent is the exemplary form (forma exemplaris) or ideal form (forma idealis), but the rule of the created agent is the natural form (forma naturalis). And so rationes causales are ideal or exemplary forms, but rationes seminales are natural forms.^[113]

Lexicographically, that clarification’s identification of forma exemplaris with rationes anticipates the term rationes exemplares before Bonaventure would employ it in his discussion of the exemplaria from Saracen’s translation of paragigmata of DN 5.8 in DSC q. 2 and 3 (see below) and, further, provides it a baseline meaning for comparison inasmuch as forma exemplaris names an uncreated directive principle.

Metaphysically speaking, Bonaventure’s analytical axe falls on any ambiguity spanning the created-uncreated divide that might occur in any historically closer treatment of the rationes drawn from Augustine’s writings. As Bonaventure wrestles with Augustine’s language, he devises a fourfold distinction within the uncreated and created rationes derived from his earlier division of cause and rationes, wherein he locates the primordiales, not causes (departing from Albert), but rationes. He explains that there are two sorts of uncreated rationes: primordiales and causales. Both are God’s will to bring creatures into being, creatures that have an absolute dearth of capacity to do so themselves, but they are in no way intrinsic or interior to and so not constitutive of creatures nor even of those creatures’ participation in God.^[114] Furthermore, these uncreated rationes and causae are identical secundum rem, i.e. because they are God, but distinct secundum rationem. Their distinction lies in this: the rationes primordiales are said with respect to God as the source as first principle, rationes causales with respect to God as the end of all things as the cause of causes, effectively, as Alpha and Omega. Although Bonaventure would eventually leave the language of rationes praemordiales to the side,^[115] the boundless inclusivity of the uncreated rationes, their function as Alpha and Omega would continue to be developed, as I will show in the second part with respect to the De Reductione and Collationes in Hexaemeron.

The created rationes seminales and naturales are likewise one secundum rem, but distinguished differently, not by direction, but by specificity. The rationes seminales are the potencies in matter (and all creatures so constituted) to be the source of any further product or effect (an ex quo)—as snakes from the rod of Pharaoh’s magicians—but the rationes naturales are the power in creatures to produce effects in accord with their natures (an a quo) as in the production of offspring—as one tree from another.^[116] They are not, therefore, identified with the perfective form or formal cause or nature, but directive principles looking to the unfolding of history, not only naturally, but in accord with divine providence. Ultimately, Bonaventure’s completion of his classification of the rationes solidifies his strict objection that uncreated rationes in no way enter the constitution or capacities of creatures.

There is no expressed sense in II Sent d. 18, a. 2, q. 1 in which the rationes or formae primordiales, exemplares, and ideales constitute a progression towards creatures in the manner of a divine ekbasis or hyperbolē, nor a continuity-in-transcendent difference in the manner of DN 2.11’s articulation of God’s remaining-and-self-imparting to all things as Being and Being-beyond-Being. The divine will and the powers of creatures sit on either side of ex nihilo’s chasm. Nevertheless, every effect in creation depends upon rationes causales, which are guarded in the depth of God’s own will and the ‘exigency of the eternal disposition’. Every effect of natural power to generate operates through either the ratio naturalis insofar it makes something like unto its subject, or the ratio seminalis insofar at it has the potency in itself and in another to cause an effect at all, which both depend on the rationes causales. Other effects, such as the multiplication of loaves, depend upon obediential potency in matter in concert with the eternal divine disposition of the rationes causales. And other effects still, such as creation ex nihilo (and in the Breviloquium, the resurrection), depend on the divine disposition alone. Thus, there is no created effect that does not trace back to the rationes causales. But whereas the rationes seminales and naturales are accounted virtutes, directive powers in creatures, the rationes causales are not termed virtutes qua rationes, and certainly not in creatures. While Bonaventure understands Augustine to use rationes causales to name powers in creatures in some instances, that is not the sense that he himself intends.^[117]

In sum, in II Sent d. 18, where Bonaventure could have used Augustine’s ambiguous location of the causae primordials to justify some manner of divine egress, he swiftly cuts off that possibility. Moreover, having distinguished causae from rationes, Bonaventure avoids any discussion of causae primordiales at all, circumventing the ambiguity altogether with his new schema. The uncreated rationes primordiales and causales are directive principles, but the application of any language of cause or virtus to them is avoided by the Seraphic doctor. Yet, they accord with God’s will and are directive of nature and salvation history, the pattern for every creature and miracle (creation, the making of Eve, etc.), and express God as source and end of all things. Such are the divine ideas by II Sent. Bonaventure’s language and doctrinal approach to the uncreated rationes, the imitative similitudes that are directive of creation, however, would draw even nearer to the logic of Dionyius’ proodos. For while Bonaventure’s understanding of divine presence to creatures is a matter of God’s effective power in the Sentences Commentary—a power not explicitly attributed to the similitudes or ideas as rationes—the later discussions of these uncreated rationes would treat them as causes, and not circumscribed to the will, but as in an integral causal knowing.

Enter Dionysius:
Causal Knowledge and Virtual Procession in De Scientia Christi

Bonaventure returns to the topic of uncreated rationes in his Questiones Disputatae De Scientia Christi (DSC), the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, in 1254 only a few years after working out the meaning of causae and rationes with reference to Augustine’s De Genesi Littera in the Sentences Commentary.^[118] However, in this foray, he joins the Dionysian perspective, even preferentially,^[119] to the Augustinian perspective, resulting in a more explicitly causal account of the rationes and divine knowledge, assuming the voluntariness of true causality into the rationes themselves.^[120] His explanation of the rationes occurs primarily in two questions: whether God knows creatures through their essences or through similitudes in God (q. 2) and whether there are a plurality of real similitudes in God (q. 3), although they figure throughout the whole disputation.^[121] These questions engage an underlying concern that God’s knowledge cannot be dependent on creatures, and yet God must really know creatures in themselves while avoiding the pantheistic identity of the creature with God. Thus, as in I Sent, he continues to teach that God himself is the known similitude of each thing and does not draw knowledge from the essence of any created thing itself in its proper existence.^[122] But to take seriously that it is indeed creatures themselves known, be they actual or possible, in God’s knowing of himself as a similitude rather than in the manner of a separated blueprint, Bonaventure articulates the causal character of divine knowledge—so far is it may be called knowledge for Dionysius—from Dionysius’ logic of the creative proodos.^[123] For, as is patent by the end of DSC, God really loves us, not a likeness, more really than we could ever conceive.^[124] So really, indeed, that eternal rationes or similitudes by which we know God even grasp and draw into ecstatic union the res they cause as God’s knowing, and more intimately, as God’s willing or, simply, loving.

The full admittance of Dionysius to the discussion of the rationes, now cast implicitly as a translation for his logoi,^[125] is thus itself a development in Bonaventure’s advance towards externalizing language, and more, an embrace of Dionysius’ logic of a causal approach to creatures in the proodoi—which is for Dionysius, at least analogically, God’s knowledge. Yet Bonaventure still avoids the language of a divine, creative processus in DSC q. 2 and 3. Nevertheless, in DSC, Bonaventure’s treatment of the rationes trends closer to Dionysius, signalled by modifications in his own language (rationes ideales and aeternae), but more importantly by the approximation the conceptual constellation of the proodoi as found in Dionsysius with their exitus-reditus structure. Bonaventure approximates the rationes to the proodoi’s exitus by his application of egressive images of light drawn from Dionysius to those rationes and by his direct consideration of the multiplication and causal efficacy of those rationes. He approximates the rationes to the proodoi’s reditus by assigning the rationes role in human (and angelic) cognition as the avenue of creatures reduction to God. On the other hand, Bonaventure also issues his strongest statements denying that the external divine causes enter creatures—not least because Dionysius’ language makes this interpretation a possibility. Altogether, the pressure exerted by the CD is seen in DSC’s divergence from the Sentences Commentary and testifies to Bonaventure carefully considering the Areopagite’s challenging ideas.

I will identify and elaborate the aspects of this conceptual development towards the logic of Dionysius’ divine proodos below. Then I will identify the implications that follow from Bonaventure’s attention to the Areopagite. First, I will outline how the expansion of Dionysius’ voice contributes to the articulation of causal knowledge (notitia causans res) together with an explanation thereof. Second, I will explain how the account of causal knowledge undergirds the reality of those things preconceived in God’s providence. Third, I will draw from that reality how that causal knowledge of things truly conceived is also causative of created knowledge (recognized in Bonaventure’s famous illumination theory) and even of ecstasy in the created knowers. Fourth and finally, I will argue that Bonaventure’s image of light that never departs from itself yokes all these aspects together and so approximates both Dionysius’ presentation of God’s multiplication and overflowing egress without motion, amounting to a virtual procession, an account of God’s approach to real creatures distinct from the divine essence—virtual because it describes God’s potentiating and substantiating all things besides God without reference to any language of procession or exteriorization.

The full admission of Dionysius to the discussion of divine knowledge sees the fuller development of knowing as a cause, establishing that God’s knowing proceeds to res themselves. Bonaventure’s response to DSC q. 2., whether God knows through similitudes, retreads the central aspects of Sent I’s question whether God knows through ideas or rationes (I Sent d. 35 a. unic. q. 1) and II Sent’s distinction of created and uncreated causes (d. 18, a. 1, q. 2) but appeals to DN 5.8’s definition of these rationes to do so:

We say that the exemplars (exemplaria, translating paradigmata) are the substantifying rationes (translating logoi) of the things that exist, preexisting in God as one, which theology terms pre-definitions, and also the divine and good wills (voluntates) determinative and effective (substantificae) of things that exist, according to which the supersubstantial existence (i.e. God) has pre-defined and produced all things.^[126]

Remarkably, where Bonaventure previously distinguished in I Sent habitual, causal, cognitive, and exemplary similitudes from the unique casual will of God—a will not composed of discrete voluntates^[127]—the softening of II Sent to guard the rationes in the divine has collapsed further, so that not only does Bonaventure not mention any distinction between causae and rationes causales, he adopts Dionysius’ definition to identify rationes aeternae as voluntates that are substantificae. By grace of adopting Dionysius’ definition, Bonaventure shows that his notion of the rationes have assumed the voluntarity that yokes efficacy and end into their character, and therefore he, too, teaches that they are causes, unreservedly so, as will be explained below, of things caused, whether created or potential.

These rationes, however, are no less cognitive and that principally causal definition of logoi from Dionysius that sets the stage for the discussion of the nature of divine knowing throughout DSC q. 2 and q 3. Indeed, that definition even forms an inclusio with the concluding quotation from the latter question, DN 7.2’s declaration that God knows from himself being the cause of all. Accompanying DSC q. 2’s principal definition of the rationes from Dionysius are two citations from Augustine that refer to rationes, this time from Confessions and the De Civitate Dei, demonstrating Bonaventure’s thoughtful examination of his authorities on the matter, where he had previously relied upon De Genesi ad litteram.^[128] Nonetheless, pride of place in the response to the question is ceded to Dionysius’s discussion of creative logoi, so that Augustine’s words corroborate, are framed by, and are even structured by—but do not offer an alternative or expansion of—Dionysius’ teaching on the logoi or rationes.^[129] That citation of DN 5.8, from John Saracen’s nova translatio of the Dionysian Corpus, places Bonaventure face to face with the heart of DN’s explanation of the divine proodoi to each and every being in their particularity. Indeed, had Bonaventure quoted but a few lines further he would have found himself discussing the causing of all things ‘from the essence of the substantifying procession and goodness’.^[130] Whether by deliberate avoidance or happenstance, such a direct citation of the Dionysian processions would not occur for a couple of years until he does so just once in De Mysterio Trinitate. But Bonaventure was reading that term and forced to consider it. His consideration is on display in the organization of DSC q. 2. Gone is I Sent’s objection from Dionysius that God does not know through admitting ideas from without but knows the caused as their cause, and gone with it is the response refuting those who want to say that God knows as a cause. On the contrary, that very citation from I Sent appears again positively in the concluding citation of DN 7.2 in DSC q. 3. It is not that Bonaventure suddenly embraces that God knows because he causes, as the earlier objection in I Sent proposed, but that in order to explain how God’s knowing is the very causing of what is known he introduces the idea of causal knowing, notitia causans res.^[131] That notion explains not only that God’s knowing is intrinsic, i.e. not from without or receptive, but of what it is for God to know: that the simplicity of the similitudinous expression of all res is their origination in all the ways each res comes to be, whether in Deo solely or also in time. Notia causans res is the resolution of cognition with causality, so that what was off the conceptual table previously, namely the notional unity of knowing that joins expression, exemplarity, and creation, has been reconsidered, and cautiously embraced, as both DSC q. 2 and 3 readily demonstrate.

The cited passages from Dionysius and Augustine in DSC q. 2 are all taken as evidence that God cognizes real things by rationes aeternae, but no direct textual analysis follows, instead, a rehearsal of the aforementioned questions from the Sentences Commentary, albeit now reflecting the speculative pressure exerted by Dionysius in the development of the phrase notitia causans res to describe divine knowing. Returning to the question of the rationes’ role in creation, Bonaventure, even beyond II Sent’s denial that the rationes are insertas rebus, forcefully clarifies that these rationes are neither the ‘essences or quiddities of things because they are not other than the Creator’ but formae exemplares.^[132] The force of substantificae in DN 5.8 prompts Bonaventure to specify that the rationes are not essences twice (here and in q. 3)—not least because DN 5.9 speaks of essence of the ‘substantifying procession and goodness’ filling all things with itself.^[133] That denial is the pivot point to the topic of divine knowledge, tracing the path from the identity of the rationes with God as formae exemplares to representative similitudes of the cognizable in the cognizer. Bonaventure retreads the topic of divine knowledge through ideas (although he does not use that term in this text^[134]), i.e. similitudes or rationes, affirming what was said about the nature of the similitudines as the basis of cognition in I Sent (i.e. not as through the third, but as of one thing like another) and adding the distinction too between imitative (of God in Creature) and exemplative similitude (of creatures in God). Yet, both kinds of similitude are cast in DSC as expressive, and so communicative, God of creatures and creatures of God, whereas he previously distinguished similitudes in God and in creatures as expressing creatures and impressed by creatures, respectively.^[135] As in the earlier treatment, Bonaventure’s arguments in favour of God knowing by similitudes appeal to God’s pre-existence and independence from creatures. However, compared to I Sent, with which DSC q. 2 shares arguments to the contrary that protest variously that a likeness of creatures in God is inapposite the divine essence,^[136] and that knowledge of something besides an essence is defective,^[137] DSC introduces the objection that God’s immediacy to all things outside of God would be compromised by knowledge through exemplars—an objection implicitly recognizing that the divine proodoi or processus in DN ought to be as a conceived as manner of immediacy.^[138] Bonaventure’s answer and his replies to the objections affirm the fittingness, nobility, and intimacy of divine knowledge through similitude in distinguishing it from creaturely similitude: not only is divine knowledge by similitude most expressive (as in I Sent) it is also exemplarily expressive similitude, even causal similitude^[139] that intimates an effective or productive approach of the similitude to the exemplated res. That divine similitude is not only cognitive but effective will be shown in DSC q.3’s description of the rationes aeternae as ‘rerum productivae’, defining them as the similitudes by which things are produced or caused.^[140] That very description underlines the advance in Bonaventure’s position by articulating causal knowledge, since the rationes were previously differentiated in II Sent as directive rather than productive.^[141]

To the first implication, thus, although it retreads old questions, DSC q. 2 nonetheless offers new answers by resolving knowing and causing into a single causal knowing, uniting previously divided categories of power and knowledge, and so introduces the new distinction between the causal knowledge of God (notitia causans res) and the caused knowledge (notitia causata a rebus), advancing upon I Sent’s distinction upon intrinsic (divine) and extrinsic (creaturely) knowledge^[142] and its twofold distinction of the presence of res in God as cognitive substaces as known (Deus cognoscens res) and in God as a cause able to produce them (Deus potens producere).^[143] DSC q. 2’s novel positing of notitia causans res accounts for the first development resulting in and indicating a greater approximation to the logic of the prodooi and logoi, namely that the causal dimension of knowledge is the guarantor of the genuineness of the res known. Bonaventure retains I Sent’s distinction between God’s knowing as expressing similitudes and creaturely knowledge through expressed similitudes, but the earlier distinction articulated between the ratio cognoscendi and producendi, (the definitional distinction between cognizing and producing creatures), while not eliminated—as DSC q. 3 shows (see below)—, has been complicated so that everything is known in accord with how it is to be produced (or not!).^[144] Bonaventure concedes, implicitly, that the expressive similitude by which God knows is also that which causes, it is that act whence the res obtains its propria entitas (or not!), although it must be cautioned that that act is not its propria entitas. Indeed, that the knowledge through an expressive similitude is causal serves Bonaventure in responding to the objection in a way that hits the very heart of the matter: that it would be better to know things through their own essences. The integration of knowing and causing supplies an answer: the immediacy of knower and known can occur two ways: by the immediacy of the causing and by knowledge by essence rather than an intermediate similitude. Both are true of God who is the cause of the essence through one and the same exemplary similitude that is God’s own essence, and therefore it is a simple and so more perfect knowledge.^[145] Moreover, per the argument of DSC q. 2, both modes of immediacy are reduced to each other, because God’s knowing is a causing. Accordingly, a res as it is expressed in God is God’s highest immediacy to the res itself.

Furthermore, the resolution of causing and knowing is also on display in the choice of evidence. Of the passages chosen to testify to divine knowledge through similitudes that are rationes, Dionysius’ text addresses the rationes’ causality and role in creation with no mention of divine knowledge. The passage from Confessions focuses on their role in creation more than divine knowledge. Only that from De Civitate Dei prioritizes divine knowledge—though it concludes by referencing creation. Bonaventure’s response in DSC q. 2, binding knowledge and creation more closely, counterbalances his earlier caution against the position that God does not know by the act of creating as a point knows the line it principates.^[146] Instead, in accord with DSC q. 1 and I Sent d. 35, there is in God a simple aspectus, a single gaze intrinsic to God, so that that God does not therefore create by a second look in response to the similitudes with which he is identical, or look upon what has been created from a template, but simultaneously approves the goods to be created, sees the acts to be done, and understands every possibility according to the divine will that undergirds all causality.^[147] Thereby, God creates in knowing according to willing and by God’s self-intimacy, is understood to be maximally close the res caused. Causal knowledge is virtually processive insofar as knowledge is an intrinsic approach to the res, an approach that substantiates res in accord with the divine will.

The second noteworthy development toward the logic of the proodoi is Bonaventure’s commitment to the reality (i.e. that it is a genuine res of its own) of everything precontained in God by God’s own providence. DSC q. 3 follows through on the braiding together of knowledge and causation, signalled, but not fully explained, in Bonaventure’s freedom to call the rationes aeternae that were formerly identified with the ratio cognoscendi rather than the ratio producendi, as rationes ‘rerum productivae’. Like DSC q. 2, the link between knowledge and creation remains at the center of the question, and casts the topic not as knowledge but, really, providence. For DSC q. 3’s explanation of why many rationes are one in God does not so much examine the relationship between God and the multiplicity of what God can know as much as that between the creator and the many creatures known. Far from reneging on his commitment to the divine knowledge of infinite possibilities, which was argued for in DSC q. 1, Bonaventure leans into that infinite divine knowledge as causative.^[148] As rendered causative by the divine will, the divine truth knows all things according to its own power and actual disposing, and so knows all exemplated effects in their creatureliness precisely as potential and even actualized according to the divine will.^[149] For inasmuch as God is pure act, all other things are unto God as ‘material and possibilities’ unto their form—but it is truly them outside God according to their reality (hence genuinely distinct res) that are known by God, but in God (hence not differing from God secundum res), with God as the very expressive similitude of each insofar as God is  the power to make each and every possible thing.^[150] For although similitudes or rationes are themselves divine, they are the knowledge of the creature in potency as God has disposed it to be or not be in God’s own goodness. It is unto them, these res, that the one truth in its unity has a plurification of expression, such that there are similitudes,^[151] an inner motion in stability by which God is an infinitude of similitudes, not for the sake of the similitudes, but for the res, creatures-to-be-or-not-to-be that God truly knows.^[152] And thus, although Bonaventure denied in I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 2 that creatures existed more really in God for a lack of their propria entitas, but only a more perfect similitude, here he grants that the plurality of rationes in God is the plurality of things (res) themselves existing in their cause, which is not only their lively possibility, but their even more intrinsic being-willed-as-they are-to-be, which is inseparable from the res themselves.^[153] It is for this reason that the rationes, which although they do not enter into things, can be said to be the existing of creatures in their cause and, thus, substantifying as expressing and effecting their substances.^[154] The causal knowing expressed in the rationes is, thus, no less than God’s intrinsic providence, and so the rationes are productive as God’s gaze ad intra upon all things ad extra, and so are virtually processive, that is, in all but name.

A third further indication of Bonaventure’s approximation of the logic of the proodoi is seen in Bonaventure’s most famous concern from the DSC, that God is the cause of certain knowledge, otherwise known as the doctrine of divine illumination, which is also combined with excessive reduction. For the same providence causing things by the rationes as the principle of being and knowing also extends into the inner world of creatures too, the life of spirits, causing their knowing-being, and even draws them above themselves to a union beyond mind. For Bonaventure, God’s interior gazing on creatures is the also the illumination in spiritual creatures endowing their knowledge with certainty, as DSC q. 4 explains, and so the rationes or divine similitudes are productive not only of infinite possibilities and finite created goods exteriorly, but even of certain knowledge within created intelligence.^[155] For productive rationes are the way that creatures have existence (habent esse) not only in their proper nature (proprio genere), and in the mind, but even in the eternal art, and certain knowledge can only be had by attaining to things as they exist (habent esse) immutably in the eternal art on account of the defectability of things in themselves and of created minds.^[156]

Therefore, that account of certain knowledge, too, is virtually processive because of the proximity of rationes aeternae by their certifying entrance into human knowledge but also by elevating that knowing subject beyond its nature. For Dionysius proodoi were also not only a procession to beings as being, but living things as living, and intelligent things as intelligent. As Dionysius teaches in DN, God’s proodoi are the ‘essentiating, life-giving, and wise-making cause of those who partake of essence, life, and mind, reason, and sense’.^[157] And regarding excessive reduction, the presence of that ‘super-wise and wise cause … of the whole and the hypostasis of each thing’, draws created intellects above their intellect, as the rationes aeternae do in grasping the knower purified by grace in an ecstatic knowledge.^[158] Thus, for Bonaventure, in the Dionysian logoi, the rationes aeternae are the principles of being and cognition and mystical ascent^[159] as the causes of knowing beings, beings to be known, and of the certainty of knowing—perfecting the knowledge had through abstracted created forms—and so these rationes are even the causes of hemselves being contuited by created knowers as causes (or simply, God) in their effects and in proportional clarity (and even beyond clarity) unto the deiformity of those created knowers,^[160] even to the point of ecstasy or excessive knowledge (modeled on Dionysius’ union beyond knowledge, especially in DN 7.1)^[161] wherein creatures attain to, but do not comprehend, their rationes’ infinitude by graced beatitude.^[162]

Fourth and finally, Bonaventure’s use of the image light of God as simultaneously light-source and rays folds together the previous three aspects of Bonaventure’s virtual account of procession in DSC. Although these aspects rehearse the ontic, epistemic, and beatific lineaments of Dionysian procession, they are virtual because they do so in all but name, avoiding the mention of any explicit externalization of God with the added redoubt of Bonaventure’s insistence that God’s knowing and creative act is entirely intrinsic, i.e not elicited from without. Bonaventure’s choice of light imagery, however, thins that sole deficit even further on account of the directional, processive character of light. Bonaventure employs light imagery—imagery not employed in the relevant questions of I Sent and II Sent—in DSC q. 2, 3, and 4 to express the modes and manners of God’s self-diffusion, and so multiform causality, similar to descriptions of divine multiplication in DN 2.11, 5.6 and elsewhere.^[163] In DSC q. 2, God’s knowledge intrinsic to actus purus is likened to the highest light-source (summa lux), depicting God’s expression in its perfection and clarity as simultaneously most distinct in its specificity and yet unbroken and undiminished in the similitudes expressed in divine causal cognition.^[164] In sum, the shining of the light source is never impeded.^[165] On the other side, the image of divine illumination in DSC q.4 depicts a corresponding certainty in created minds knowing created and creatable things on account of their presence to that same infallible light-source (lux)^[166] and the light it casts (lumen) in its rationes aeternae.^[167] Spanning them, DSC q. 3, encapsulates its teaching on the simultaneous identity (secundum rem) and multiplicity (secundum rationem) of the ideas/rationes/similitudes by an appeal to a purposefully imagination-stretching illustration that all but collapses the light-source and its light:

Therefore, it ought to be said that rationes ideales in God are plurified not according to the thing itself, but according to their definition (secundum rationem), which definition arises not only from the side of the one understanding (i. e. God) but even from the side of the thing understood.

A likeness of which [reality] cannot be found perfectly in creatures, but if it were to be understood by something impossible, it would be by this, as if the light-source (lux) were the same as its own illumination and irradiation, and so we would be able to say that there would be many (plures) irradiations of one and the same light-source and light, because ‘irradiation’ means the diametrical or right-angle direction of the light itself; according to which it would be said that there are many irradiations of the diverse things illuminated, but nevertheless in one light-source and one light-shining. Thus, in the proposed [image] it ought to be understood that the divine light is the light, and its expressions with respect to things are the luminous irradiations—but as intrinsic, which lead and direct into that which is expressed.^[168]

‘Pardon me,’ one might ask, ‘lead and direct whom?’. A clarification would be understandably sought from Bonaventure’s coy reluctance to say explicitly; but the answer it simple: lead and direct God from within (i.e. intrinsically), as the willing and knowing cause of each, and potentializing all and actualizing each in accord with his own actuality. But it is indeed God, and the thing that God proposes according to its true distinctiveness, that leads God not out and yet towards each and every infinite thing according to the divine disposition, the divine will.^[169] The plurification of causal ideas or rationes in God is indeed this very—if one dares to say it—motionless motion, rendering each thing possible, some actual, and all actually knowable to God (DSC q. 2) and available to spiritual creatures (DSC q. 4). These particular providences and substantifying rationes are processive—DMT will even say so outright—moreover they show that what appears as extrinsic causality from the perspective of creatures, since we receive our being from without, is utterly intrinsic with respect to God, who contains all things. And therefore, Bonaventure supports his image of intrinsic irradiation of the light source by once again citing Dionysius DN 7.2, when he explains that:

… this [image of the identity the light-source and its irradiation] is what Dionysius means in the seventh chapter of the Divine Names saying ‘The divine intellect does not know beings (entia) from their being, but from himself and in himself as the cause of all things, pre-holding and pre-conceiving the perception, knowledge, and substance of them, not as individual things breaking in as [distinct] ideas [from without]’ that is, not according really different ideas, ‘but according to the unified excellence of the cause knowing and containing [them], just as light as a cause holds itself the notice of things dark and does not know them other than a defect from light. Therefore, the divine wisdom, not knowing itself knows all things materially immaterially, and divisible things divisibly, and the multitude of things singularly, as in one and the same [act] produces and knows all things.^[170]

That quotation does not only explain that the plurality secundum rationem of God’s knowledge impugns neither God’s simplicity nor perfection, but furthermore, although Bonaventure does not say outright at that this point in the text—but in accord with the various doctrines of DSC—that God’s knowing towards things inwardly is, or, more cautiously, includes, the production of things outwardly, both possibly^[171] and actually. Ultimately, the image of light’s folding together of source and effluence speaks not only to the multiplicity of rationes but encapsulates the virtual procession that Bonaventure intends throughout DSC in the manner of the Dionysian procession that is everywhere without departing itself, that is, the divine multiplication without sundering God’s simplicity.

In the DSC, turning to the indefatigable question of Word Incarnate’s knowledge, with Dionysius foremost among his guides, Bonaventure walks to the precipice of admitting divine externalization as he integrates the Areopagite’s guidance on the nature of divine production and providence unto divinization. He faces both the concern that God does not really know real things and the commitment that God does not receive the knowledge of things extrinsically and finds an answer in causal knowledge and its causal reasons that describe an intrinsic exteriorization, wherein God goes to all things without change or departing from himself. And DSC’s epilogue affirms that God’s is the true knowledge of infinite things in themselves:

For it ought the be declared (fatendum) that God knows infinite things as one (ad unum) not by a likeness, but by his very self; and not by receiving any likeness [from outside], but by the very truth exemplating and expressing the whole scope of things (rerum universorum) with respect to which [things] there are said to be many similitudes or expressions […]. These are the similitudes or eternal reasons whence emanates the certitude of created cognition [of things].^[172]

God is the foundation of certainty, as has been demonstrated above, because God’s knowledge is the source of truth as the causal knowledge expressed eternally in the uncreated Word, which by its very expression does not light upon infinite possible things as if hanging in the ether, but brings them forth from its fontal unity in such a simplicity of the divine will so that the expression of each thing is an approbation and providence according to the genuine capacity of each thing. The Word causally expressing each thing is the same Word who is also the guarantor of the inner world of the soul, wherein that Word must, in a manner of speaking, begin to be born in our creaturely knowing because its truest and final object is, in the end, the Word—even in the case of Christ:

[For certain cognition] in the state of not only this life but of heaven, not only is the presence of the eternal light required, but its influence, too; not only the Uncreated Word, but a word conceived within. And since that word is finite, neither the soul of Christ nor any soul is able to comprehend the Word nor the infinity of knowable, but rather, is able to be borne into them [the Word and infinite knowables] by an exceeding [excessus].^[173]

Thus, this departureless approach reaches its summit, the fullness of its effect, in the grasping of the creature by God, wherein God grasps and embraces the knowers he has made with the knowings (the rationes) by which he has made them. This grasping occurs, moreover, by the love by which God wills things to be as they are because it is rooted in charity, and so:

This excessus is the ultimate and most noble mode of knowing, which Dionysius praises in all of his books, but especially he Mystical Theology. Almost the whole of scripture speaks mystically of this [mode of knowing], about which Apocalypse chapter two says: I will give a tablet to him, on which is written a new name is written, which none knows unless they receive it; it says so because that mode of knowing hardly even ever comes except to one who experience it, nor does one experience it unless they are rooted and grounded in charity, so that they might be able to comprehend with the saints what is the length, breadth, height, and depth, to know the love God that surpasses all understanding.^[174]

The hope of comprehending the infinitude expressed by and identical with the divine wisdom is, at the last, the creature’s hope to be comprehended by the one containing all, so that the word known (cognitum) and conceived interiorly (verbum conceptum interius) in the creature may be the expressing Word, who in truth, grasps the creature.^[175] To be so ecstatically grasped, however, only occurs thanks to the incarnation and mission of the Holy Spirit, whereby the creature becomes a dwelling for God, wherein the image of the creature as an image of the Trinity becomes a similitude—in the sense meant in Bonaventure’s doctrine of grace, as therefore also in the manner that God has approved in the divine similitude. It is the fulfillment of the circuit of divine love, as Dionysius termed it, a divine ecstasy as proodos eliciting the creature’s ecstasy in union above mind.

Having embraced the image of the departureless illumination or irradiation but not yet the image externalization, Bonaventure is remains a thinker on the move. For as Bonaventure approaches very nearly to the logic of Dionysius’ divine proodos with its multiplicity of proodoi, at least in the mode of the more particular providences, he bends that doctrine around an interior conception of the Word in the created soul’s own innerword, as in the mmodel of Christ’s soul, so that what was first a question about God’s knowledge as eternal and incarnate relaxes into the longing sigh to experience being infinitely known. But this doctrine developed in a Dionysian manner around the Word uncreated and incarnate also marks an inflection point; for although Bonaventure could scarcely bring himself write ‘processus’ in the Areopagite’s sense, he would come to frame the exteriorization of God more boldly than ever came from that mystagogue’s hidden pen.

***

At last, we have arrived at this article’s midpoint, amidst the middle period of Bonaventure’s thought, his period of magistracy between his march through the Sentences and his writings as a mendicant minister general. We have seen Bonaventure examine and employ the rationes aeternae (or under similar names) on three successive occasions, incrementally developing his understanding of the rationes until they were merged explicitly with the Dionysian logoi, so that Bonaventure assumed therein a virtual account of procession in the implicit resolution of the account of divine knowledge and causality. That is, a resolution to the tension in the rationes’ role and location in the doctrinal and philosophical explorations of his Sentences Commentary. For Bonaventure in I Sent identified the rationes, the similitudes by which, or more precisely, as which, God knows creatures, with Augustine’s primordial causes and explained that they were res generally or creatures existing eternally in God’s knowledge and power but not in will. Yet in II Sent’s explication of Augustine’s language of causae primordiales he distinguished causae from the rationes causales (of course, secundum rationem not rem) that were directive of creation and located them both as guarded in the divine will, whereby the world was created ex nihilo not by any ‘exigence on the part of the creature, but according to the exigence of the divine disposition’.^[176] Bonaventure identified the divine will, according to its goodness, as the effective power in I Sent, and so it seems clear why at first the rationes or the eternal existence of creatures should not be located in the divine will, because the infinite rationes not all are effective of actual creatures nor are their effects from eternity, but in time. By implication, II Sent’s location of the eternal principles in the divine will represented either a specification of the causae primordiales as causes and rationes causales to the subset of things to be actually created either taking up an additional notional residence alongside divine knowledge or power or the proliferation of yet another category of principles distinguished secundum rationem from the cognitive similitudes.

Granted that cognitive similitudes might be treated as exemplary causes in notional isolation from the will, Bonaventure was clear in I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1, sourced from Dionysius, that causality is proper to willing-goodness because the will is the act wherein Goodness, as diffusive principle and as end, turns upon itself in the accomplishment of the act for the end, and no exemplar attains to sufficiency apart from the end of the exemplated. Bonaventure did not skirt the voluntary character of causality, nor did he utlimately bifurcate cognitive-exemplary and causal principles. Instead, he synthesized causal knowing, notitia causans res, embracing Dionysius’ definition of rationes as at once exemplaria and voluntates. Here, the rationes have reabsorbed the character of a cause without distinction, and furthermore, have accepted willing as intrinsic to the knowing, so that all divine knowing is an approach to each thing as it is disposed to be for the glory of God, a virtual exteriorization in intrinsic multiplication of the divine causality in its potentializing effects and effective potencies in eternity. Moreover, the rationes’ causality in DSC is most saliently displayed in their recapitulation of the Areopagite’s cycle of divine love that Bonaventure takes as a definition of the Good’s causality: the rationes are not only productive principles but also the final object of the creature produced, turning upon themselves as Good because they are God’s exemplation of creatures, not only of those produced, but the infinity never produced. By being exemplary, the rationes have the shape of a general cause, efficient and final, calling forth, calling in, and recalling creatures to themselves by thier efficacy, certitude, and excessus.

A Turning Point:
The Two Similitudes of Creation and Grace

Bonaventure’s embrace of the logic of the Dionysian proodoi in DSC regarding creation through God’s rationes and exemplaria, which are voluntates and praedefinitiones, lights upon its complementary prong to which Dionysius was equally committed: divine procession as the means of return or consummation in God, that is, grace and deification, just as Dionysius compared the divine motion not only to the line-like creation and spiral-like sustenance of things, but even to the circular recollection of all things to God.^[177] DSC q. 4 and 7 with its epilogue point to that return as an integral complement to creation and in particular when it addressed the need for grace to become a similitude of God in order to perceive God as a similitude of creature with any clarity. There are, accordingly, two senses of similitude corresponding to two different questions: how God knows and how the soul comes to its perfection. Both follow the logic of a similitude of one thing to another, rather than through a common third, but the former means likeness between God and the creature employed since I Sent. The latter is the famous completion of the scale of likeness to God as vestige, image, and similitude, where the latter names the highest likeness to God.  The trajectory of Bonaventure’s thought, however, even in DSC’s epilogue, is that these questions converge, so that the two senses of similitude are two sides of the same coin: to truly know God as the similitude of all creatures one must become as far as possible not only a similitude of God, but the similitude God has of oneself. That convergence of similitudes previews a necessary pivot in considering the role of the rationes in Bonaventure’s thought. He does not only appeal to them to explain knowledge and creation, but the consummation of the creature in God, and when he does so he is much freer in using images of motion.

Perhaps that embrace was natural, as Bonaventure comfortably used images of motion to speak of perfecting grace, so that in expounding the consummative role of the rationes, his accustomed images of motion accompanied it. For in contrast to his avoidance of the language of procession or exteriorized motion for God’s creative act (except virtually in the image of light), he readily uses the images of the divine missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit and the soul as a temple or habitaculum for God, which are biblical images, but also the language of infusion and influence (litterally ‘flowing in’).^[178] The similitude between God and creatures that describes deiformity through grace or the hierarchization of the soul is framed as the result of a kind of motion that indicates not only God’s presence but the extension of God’s life to the creature.^[179] For while Bonaventure regards all creatures as a similitude of God, and God as a similitude, humanity is not properly a similitude for Bonaventure unless God has gone forth to the creature as the saviour and as the uncreated gift, the communication of God to as a creature (Son) and in the creature (Spirit).^[180] For that reason, the fullness and end of creation, that is the human love and praise of God, does not come to be until God has entered creation, not as a substantiating cause, but as a deifying cause that leads the creature to ecstatic union with God, the motion corollate to God’s perfecting approach.^[181]

Although the eventual adoption of the language of motion for the rationes reflects the convergences of the two senses of similitude and Bonaventure’s embrace (at least in substance) of the two aspects of Dionysius’ proodoi, the distinction between each sense should not be erased. For preserving the distinction of the two senses and uses of similitude and their associated arguments and images opens a window on Bonaventure’s methods of integrating diverse doctrines and symbols. The ecstatic knowledge of DSC q. 7 with its epilogue is an exemplary integration that points to the inner unity of both senses of similitude without collapsing them, yet it is but a narrow and incipient sketch of more comprehensive integration that would occur in the Hexaemeron. Generally, Bonaventure’s distinct framing of the doctrines of epistemology, creation, grace, and eschatology, all trade on one of these two senses of similitude within different patterns of images, even with overlap between them, construct potent tensions that invite resolution and reduction, as Bonaventure is want to do in the Hexaemeron—not least because creation, knowledge, grace (and union), and the cosmic renewal of the eschaton, all hinge on one and the same Word, the center of all things. And therein the contrast of logic and symbolism between doctrinal centers of gravity lend themselves to producing a superior presentation of God and creatures for Bonaventure when he folds them together—and for us readers—and also allows us to detect the crossover and resolution between doctrinal centers with greater clarity.

Although Bonaventure (largely) avoided the language of a common divine procession ad extra in creation—however much of its substance like unto Dionysius’ was there, especially when Bonaventure appeals to the language of light—the language of motion, especially motion into, finds its way back to address what creation was always meant to be in the perfection of humanity (and the angels). Thereby do the two senses of similitude come together in the realization of God’s will for the creature, although it underlines the difference of images. As much for Bonaventure as for Dionysius, it is a fundamental element of creation that what comes forth from God returns to God, and it is that return, inclusive of human deification, that makes creation an intelligible circle and so a full similitude of the eternity and integrity of the Triune God. Through his threading together the perfection of creation with the knowledge and even greater union with rationes, Bonaventure will embrace motion and a portrayal of the divine proodoi that is indebted to Dionysius. Yet it will be distinctively his own not only through his logocentrism, indebted to Augustine, that has marked his treatment of the rationes from the beginning but especially in the image of the birth of those rationes from Wisdom, even the birth of the Word from Wisdom. That birth of the rationes will manifest the resolution of both senses of similitude, when the fulfillment of what the creature has received in the incarnation and in the gift of the Holy Spirit by the influence of grace, so that the creature having become a spouse and temple of God is nothing less than the farthest extent of the divine intention expressed from eternity. Indeed, the eternal fulfillment of divinity will dwell in that spouse-temple, outside God by its dwelling in the eternal temple of God’s eternal expression.

This mystic reading of rationes, if in a virtual mode without yet an explicit imagery of exteriorization, was present in the DSC as succinctly stated by Manzon:

Arguably, we could say that just like the eternal reasons can be seen as the forms of God’s creative excess outside of himself, they also stand for the forms through which the creatures exceed themselves and move into God.^[182]

And yet even more can be said when we turn to the Hexameron’s birth of the ideas. In this double crossing over, this double transitus, by the rationes, even God’s eternal, intrinsic, necessary fruition will be understood to be freely externalized in accord with itself. Indeed, the shape of that fruit of divinity indwelled by creatures and indwelling in creatures will have the shape of the cross.

Appendix:
The meaning of Causal Knowing Notitia causans res

A more detailed consideration of what causal knowledge (notitia causans res) is and in what way it causes would have distracted from the body of the article. Thus, in this excursus, I will address why the category is important, what it means for knowledge to be ‘causal’, and how that causality relates to God’s knowledge such that it is simultaneously causal knowledge for all res yet differentiates what is or is not actualized. The answer hinges on the interiority of the divine will to every res expressed through the Word, whether it is ultimately made in creation or not, or, stated otherwise, it hinges on the mutual interiority or circumincession of power, knowledge, and will. Accordingly, I propose in the following excursus to show that Bonaventure’s account of causal knowledge shifts away from Bonaventure’s earlier logically linear account of the divine attributes’ relationship in causation (see I Sent d. 35, dub. 2 [1, 614A-B]), i.e. from power, to knowledge, to will (cf. Vater, ‘The Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 79, 97), to the perspective that recognizes the coinherence of these attributes in each other even as they effect their finite objects. It is not that Bonaventure rejects the order of divine appropriation, for he will continue to follow it after DSC (e.g. Breviloquium 1.6 [5, 215A]), but that the case of causal knowledge anticipates his conceptualisation of Trinitarian order in the full account of circumincession that will follow in his later writings, especially in Hexaemeron 21.

The genuine distinctiveness and the true possibility of the res as the referent in divine knowledge is central to this causal knowledge and is emphasized in DSC compared to the earlier writings. II Sent d. 18, already saw the association of rationes causales with formae exemplares in relation to the topic of creation and located them in the divine will, but DSC integrates divine knowing and willing more explicitly by citing DN 5.8 to identify the rationes aeternae with exemplaria and voluntates, which he will also call similitudines exemplares. While the distinction between God as exemplar by expressing similitudes of exemplated res as set apart from production in the question of knowledge (I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, pro 4 [1, 600B]) and the rationes themselves being the many exemplars of willing (as voluntates) may seem negligible, Bonaventure’s change in expression exhibits, again, the strength of the Dionysian notion of causal, substantifying rationes with which Bonaventure must contend, so that an emphasis is laid on the res themselves exemplated and known as they turn out according to providence (cf. Vater, ‘The Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 65–66 ). For if the infinite rationes aeternae stood neutrally towards the true possibility and actual existence of that which they are the similitudes, one would hardly recognize those rationes as voluntates and praedefinitiones of the created order. Furthermore, the kind of similitude proper to God’s knowledge, as explained above, is of one thing’s likeness to another, and so there must be some knowable thing in some mode besides God, otherwise the similitude would be self-referential and simply the divine essence and so not a similitude at all. Bonaventure recognized this in DSC q. 3, where he differentiates veritas (simple divine truth), expressio ipsa, and res ipsa. Veritas is the single expresser, while expression is ad rem, whether a res of actualized potency or of potency alone (DSC q. 3, conc. [5, 14A]). The res of (or even that is) each causable thing, even if never existent properly speaking, is always in God, as an effect in its cause, and is also distinct from God as causable or possible and so is not the divine essence, secundum rationem (ibid., ad 20 [5, 16B]; Gilson makes just this point, too, in The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure (154–45). Thus, the rationes, as expressions, at least as understood in the DSC, do not stand neutrally towards their exemplated res as sheerly exemplary or informational form, but as possible, and thence to some as even actual (DSC q. 1, conc. [5, 5A–B]). In other words, in God’s knowledge, all res are known as causable by the cause potentiating them even as, and not posterior to, expressing them according to its simple causality per DSC q. 1, conc. (5, 5B]): ‘quia divinum scire non solum abstrahit a ratione causae actualis, sed etiam causae simpliciter. Scit enim mala, quorum non est causa; scit etiam futura, quae nondum facit; scit etiam possibilia, quae nunquam faciet’. There, in the simple ratio or definition of a cause, all genuine dependencies follow as knowable. This is not far afield from Dionysius, who recognizes even non-beings as partaking in the Good (DN 4.3 697A [CD 1, 146.6–12]; 4.8 708D [CD 1, 153.4–9]), but even he seems to speak specifically of what may yet be rather than what may or may never be simply. In short, God approaches the infinity of res in a causal knowing, not res as always-already and self-subsistent possibilities, but as originating and establishing those very res in their identity and possibility as the cause of their identity and possibility on account of the infinity of divine power. As both Gilson and Quinn recognize, the plurality of rationes is not a function of prism of discursive creaturely knowing, but God’s own expression (Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 144–47, 153; Quinn, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy, 495). Therefore, there is indeed an inherent externalization in God of that which is not God, since the res as possible are necessitated from the divine power and expressed necessarily in the divine wisdom as possible. As the res in the rationes are identical with divinity yet their implied possible-essence is distinct, that externalization may even be viewed as a hyperbole or overflowing, God’s standing outside himself, as Dionysius expressed the matter, and as in the identities-as-distinct from God are identical with God, by the inverse in virtue of that exemplary likeness in their potentiality and even actuality, the likeness which is God is in a manner externalized so as to express God. Indeed, Bonaventure’s adoption of both created and divine similitude as expressive (DSC q. 2, conc. [5, 9A]) suggests as much.

The chief question that arises from his development is how causal knowledge, if simple and consisting of a single look (aspectus), is causal of things both merely possible and the actual while remaining one and the same knowing, secundum rationem. Bonaventure does not address that problem directly in DSC but the answer is available through both the DSC and other works, including the earlier Sentences Commentary and later Breviloquium. Causal knowledge is causal of both merely possible and actualized res because the providential creation or non-creation of any thing figures into its exemplation. It is not that the ratio of any res carries a necessity within it from the side of the thing itself, but that God’s will—including not willing, disposing, or making—for each res is interior to its ratio and thereby supports the modal differentiation in God’s simple knowledge between approbation of the goods to be created, vision of the good and evils to occur, and the understanding of all possibilities (DSC q. 1, conc., [1, 5A–B]). For, as I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1 conc. (1, 804A–805A) explains, the will, to which goodness is appropriated, is properly causative and it renders knowledge dispositive of effects rather than treating divine willing as a response to precognition. Thus, the divine knowledge expressing similitudes knows all things as they are willed to be or not be, and so is causal for that reason, while even granting space for the similitude of a res-never-to-exist to be as such because it is known as such. While Bonaventure treats only goods as properly willed in I Sent d. 45, a. 1, q. 2 conc. [1, 801A–B]) when he denies the fittingness of the title ‘omnivolent’, yet the Quarrachi editors’ scholium there explains that Bonaventure does teach both in the second dubium of I Sent d. 45 (1, 812A) and in III Sent d. 31 q. 1, ad. 1 (3, 698B), that God wills or loves all those rationes that habent esse in deo with the love of complacency, but not all with actual causality. Whence it may be inferred from I and III Sent that it is pleasing to God that not-all are willed, while simultaneously recognizing in the DSC that like distinction is borne out from God’s simple causality (per DSC q. 1) that follows in the rationes aeternae, wherein each res is known according to God’s good pleasure as caused or not. And yet, in DSC, there remains a providential place for the infinite uncaused res inasmuch as by this infinity, creaturely knowing is grasped by ecstatic knowing (DSC q. 7, conc. and epilogue [5, 39A–40B and 42B–43B]).

Indeed, that Bonaventure recognizes an inherent finality in all rationes aeternae, at least according to the full shape of God’s plan wherein all rationes are one in God, is suggested by Breviloquium 1.8 (5, 216B), where he explains that an idea in God is called a ratio ‘secundum actum perfìciendi, quia superaddit intentionem finis’, which finality (intentionem finis) and efficacy and goodness is appropriated to the divine will, with which divine power and wisdom are not only essentially identical (ibid, 1.9 [5, 218A]) but circumincessive (cf. Quinn, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy, 507–9). For one never lacks the other, so that power is ordered by wisdom’s rationes, which include the will’s finality (ibid. 1.7 [5, 216A]; see also I Sent d. 45, dub. 3 [1, 812A-B]), while power and wisdom render the will efficacious and regulating (ibid. 1.9 [5, 218A]), and power and will render wisdom a dispositive exemplar (ibid. 1.8 [5, 216B]). The fully trinitarian form of the circumincession of these powers would be implied by the intratriniarian structures of Hexaemeron 21.5 (5, 432A), of the trinitarian location of the rationes causales in Hexaemeron 16.9 (5, 404B), and of the expression of what God can and will do in the Word of the Son in Hexaemeron 1.13 (5, 331B). DSC’s causal knowledge, therefore, anticipates his clear statement that will and power are intimately present in wisdom, wherefore divine knowledge inasmuch as it is wisdom can be construed as causal. That later circumincessive trinitarian approach was even anticipated in I Sent d. 36, a. 1, q. 2 (1, 622B), which explains that the rationes are in God as a cause, not according to God’s essence or persons, but to the appropriations, whereby the essentialia are considered according to the persons. It was, furthermore, anticipated in the integrity of the divine will as intrinsically rational (I Sent d. 45, dub. 3 [1, 812A-B]) and not preceded by divine knowledge (I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1 [1, 805B]). Thus the location of causal knowing in the circumincession of the divine attributes a too-straightforward process through the divine attributes that would sunder the simple aspectus by making the approbation through will posterior or responsive to infinite divine knowledge by either superadding a set of willed res over and above the possible or introducing a change in knowing without eliding the distinction between those attributes. (Cf. Bettoni who does not address causal knowledge, but the manner of the Sentences Commentary holds to the sharper distinction between knowing and power, see Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, 51–52; Vater also describes the divine  will as choosing similitudines to become actualized, and while that would offer a route to explain how the rationes are causal as ‘giving existence’ to things, it still begs a second aspectus see Vater, ‘The Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 69, 71.)

Accordingly, it stands to reason that Bonaventure has indeed adopted Dionysius’ definition of logoi or rationes as his own, with the volitional and providential aspects intact (what Manzon calls the voluntaristic aspect, see ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 332), the adoption of which suggests that the rationes aeternae or similitudines exemplares’ role in causal knowledge is not only formal (what a thing would be) but even existential and perfective (whether and how a thing should be)—as if substantifying could be taken as inclusive of not-substantifying-as-actual-but-only-potential. Furthermore, it agrees that the good or love interior to every expression of divine providence, God’s purpose, is interior to divine knowledge as similitude, and even subtly agrees with Dionysius’ prioritization, quoad nos, of goodness over being.  Although Bonaventure’s deployment of the category of causal knowledge might seem to reverse his answer in I Sent d. 35, that God does not know as a cause, God’s causal knowledge does not follow from causing, but rather causes as knowing (see Vater, ‘The Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 66–67). For God knows that which is not made but possible as causable and yet not caused-to-be, and so knows them according to causality and as cause.

Bonaventure’s appeal to causal knowledge, therefore, posits not only a more intimate relationship between divine willing and knowing, as noted above in the body of the article and as worked out in Breviloquium 1.6–8, but even an eschatological orientation from the side of that willing (or loving) all creatures to their fruition as willed by God (see Manzon, ‘According to Blessed Dionysius’, 332–33, who suggests that assimilation Bonaventure speaks of between the knower and known in DSC q. 2, conc. [5, 8B] might be read and the creature’s assimilation to God, too), and even includes the eschatological role of incarnation of the very Word as the wisdom expressing all things. That eschatological and logocentric cast of Bonaventure’s will or love-oriented vision of rationes is patent in the De Reductione and especially in his more mature treatment of rationes aeternae in the Hexaemeron, which regards predestinationes as preeminent among the rationes (Hexaemeron 20.5 [5, 426A]). However the role of the rationes in creation’s fulfillment was even anticipated in I Sent, especially, in the presentation of the fittingness of the name ‘Word’ for the Son because it simultaneously denoted emanation in God, the eternal expression of the divine disposition of the world as the mundus archetypus through that expression, and the union of God with a human nature in that actual world of which the Word is the archetype (I Sent d. 27, a. unic, q. 4, conc [1, 490A]). For though the Son is generated according to the divine nature principally, it is also an act of love as pleasing to the Father who is properly understood as charity and as loving source (as distinguished to the Holy Spirit who is charity as bond) (see I Sent d. 10, dub 2 [1, 205B–206A]), and so in expressing all through the generation of the Word, loves all according to God’s eternal will in so expressing through the Son, per I Sent d. 27, a. unic, q. 2, conc. (1, 485B). Whereas in I Sent, where Bonaventure cautiously distinguished the Word’s expression as a dispositive habit that does not connote an effect in act, the causal knowledge, in the simple aspectus of DSC (DSC q. 1, conc. [5, 5A]) includes the approbative mode as knowing positively willed actualities and makes the rationes or similitudes that are one as the Word—but multiplied unto the many known—substantificae, substantifying. It follows that as approbative, the divine wisdom is an exemplar for making (exemplar factivum), but as understanding of all is the expressive exemplar of all (expemplar expressivum) (DSC q. 7, conc. [5, 39B–40A]). Yet in this double aspect of the Word as example, the rationes themselves are not doubled. For DSC q. 2’s question, whether God knows the infinity of res, both to be and never to be created, by essence or similitudes is answered by one and the same causal knowledge (DSC q. 2, 6A).

There is thus in DSC a measured reproachment between the formerly distinguished knowing and creating through the interiorization power and will to knowing. That reproachment is even on display here in DSC q. 2. For although Bonaventure introduces the question as about the mode divine knowledge of res and begins his answer with respect to res, his analysis of the two modes of knowing through similitudes, or notitia rerum, pivots to the distinction between notitia causans res and causata rebus, thereby identifying God’s knowledge of res as a causal knowledge, implicitly, even of the things uncaused-qua-possible-and-causable. Hence, the sphere of knowledge is indeed intimately related to the causing to be and not to be (ergo, standing not neutrally to the ideas), to creatures that are and are not. Every res that is known is known according to causality and thus as creatures-created and creatures-not-created.

This turn to res-qua-creature is borne out in the frequency of the discussion of creatures, rather than res, in his responses to the objections in DSC q. 2. Generally, the response looks to the creator/creature relationship rather than God/res, and when they do refer to res (ad. 9 and ad. 12) it is referring to the difference in knowing through exemplary similitudes rather than the created (or never-to-be created, as I have proposed above) essentia rei. In particular, ad. 5, sourced from I Sent d, 35, a. unic., q. 1, contra 2 and ad. 2’s objection that there is no similitude between God and the creature specifies that there is similitude between God and creature (which the earlier reply has dropped) by imitation, adding by degrees through the approach to divine goodness, and in God’s expression, adding that this expression is exemplary. Indeed, were it not for DSC q. 1, and the clear question about how God knows the infinity known, and how that infinity is plurified, one might easily read DSC q. 2 and 3 as simply under the condition of creation.

In conclusion, the exemplary character of divine knowledge that underlies God’s act as creator is causal because it expresses the creatures-to-be or not-to-be according to God’s will. It is brought to the forefront of Bonaventure’s thought by his attention to the effective power of the Dionysian logoi. The topic of divine causal knowledge is not without tensions or questions to be answered, but it is no less emphasized for those wants.

 

^[1]  In the first place, I offer my thanks to my friends and colleagues who for the inspiration and suggestions for this article or solutions to its occasionally twisted prose: Susan Potters, Jordan Daniel Wood, Anne-Michelle Carpenter, Gene Schlesinger, Kevin Hughes, and Jared Goff.

 

^[2]  Jacques Guy Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, Études Franciscaines 18, no. Suppl. (1968): 34, 113.

 

^[3]  It must be noted that when Dionysius refers to a hierarchy, a term he coined, he means the God-glorifying and deifying participation and imitation of God’s entrance into creation as Jesus’ philanthropia. A hierarchy, per Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (EH) 5.1.1 (501A [CD 2, 104.11–15]), consists in initiators, initiates, and the teletai, the God-initiating acts of worship—sensible rites in the Church and an immaterial equivalent among the angels—by which the initiators initiate the instantiated. Divisions of persons are diakosmeseis; hierarchy is priestly action or disposition to that action. All citations from the Corpus Dionysiacum include the numbering from the Migne’s Patrologia Latina 4 and the pagination and lines from the recent critical editions: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, Corpus Dionysiacum I: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De Divinis Nominibus, edited by Beate Regina Suchla. Patristicshe Texte und Studien 33, (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1990), abbreviated as CD 1, and Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, Corpus Dionysiacum II: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De Coelesti Hierarchia, De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia, De Mystica Theologia, Epistulae, edited by Günter Heil and Adolf M. Ritter. Patristicshe Texte und Studien 67, (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), abbreviated as CD 2. Translations from the Greek text of Corpus Dionysiacum, as opposed the Latin versions, are based upon The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (1897), translated by John Parker (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library), https://ccel.org/ccel/dionysius/works/works.i.html, accessed May 6, 2023.

 

^[4]  Jacques Guy Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, 114.

 

^[5]  Hexaemeron 1.17 (5, 332A–B). This statement was made at the end of his career but applies throughout. All citations from Bonaventure, except for the sermon Omnium Artifex Docuit Me Sapientia, are taken from the Quaracchi edition: Bonaventure, Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera omnia, 10 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1902). All citation therefrom include not only book, chapter, and paragraph numbers, but also the volume, page number, and column.

 

^[6]  Jacques Guy Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, 51.

 

^[7]  Bonaventure’s identification of negative theology, or approaching God by ablation (aphaeresis) because it is the way of love in De Triplici Via 3.7 (8, 16B–17B) and the Hexaemeron 2.33 (5, 342B).

 

^[8]  Jacques Guy Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, 113ff.

 

^[9]  Bougerol counts 142 citations from DN of 248 overall from the CD across Bonaventure’s career, see ‘Saint Bonaventure et Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, 38.

 

^[10]  DN 1.4 589D–592C (CD 1, 112.7–115.5).

 

^[11]  See Phillipe Chevalier, Dionysiaca, vol. 1, (Brüges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1937), 23, for an example of these translation choices.

 

^[12]  Jacques Guy Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, 39–40.

 

^[13]  For example, of the processus of the Word, see I Sent d. 12, a. unic., q. 4, pro 1 (1, 225A), and of the Spirit, d. 14, a. 1, q. 1, contra 3 (1, 245A).and I Sent d. 10, a. 2, q. 1 (I, 201A), and of the Son and Spirit I Sent d. 12, a. unic, q. 2 (I, 223A).

 

^[14]  DN 1.4 589D (CD 1, 112.6–10); DN 2.5 641D–644A (CD 1, 128.14–129.5); DN 2.6 644C–D (CD 1, 130.5–13); DN 11.2 952A (CD 1, 219.22–24).

 

^[15]  DN 1.3 589C (CD 1, 112.5–6).

 

^[16]  DN 5.4 817D (CD 1 n, 183.8–11).

 

^[17]  DN 1.4 589D (CD 1, 112.6–10).

 

^[18]  DN 5.2 816C-817A (CD 1, 181.16-21); DN 5.5 820A–C (CD 1, 183.12–184.16); DN 9.6 953C–956B (CD 1, 222.2–223.14).

 

^[19]  Quotations and discussions of Dionysius that include processus are found in Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, q. 6, a. 1, ad. 1 (5, 100A) and De Septem Donis Spiritus Sancti, 2.1 (5, 462A).

 

^[20]  DN 2.5 641D–644A (CD 1, 128.14–129.5); DN 4.11 708D (CD 1, 156.15–19); DN 7.3 872A–B (CD 1, 198.12–20); DN 11.6 953B–956A (CD 1, 221.13–223.3).

 

^[21]  DN 5.2 816D-817A (CD 1, 181.18–21).

 

^[22]  David Bradshaw takes the position that the relationship between the divine proodoi and the logoi is not fully worked out by Dionysius and that the logoi are treated as different from the proodoi, so that it is not until Palamas’ teaching on the divine energies that the logoi are identified as a more particular procession see David Bradshaw, ‘The Divine Processions and Divine Energies’ in Philosophy of Religion: Analytic Researches 4, no. 2 (2020): 59, 68–70. Bradshaw has good reason to say so, given that the clearest definitions of these logoi at DN 5.8 places them in God and does not count them among the longer lists of the divine names such as being, life, wisdom, greater, lesser, and the like. Their location in God, however, does not prevent them from being also God’s method of procession to particulars any more than the causal divine processions as being, life, etc. are precluded from being in God. Indeed, God has more general and more particular providences (DN 5.2 [CD 1, 181.20–21]), the most particular of which attend to the individual existences in the world (see DN 5.7 821A–821C [CD 1, 185.12–25]), which are ordered and harmonized by the logoi (ibid.). It is for this reason that Dionysius uses the image lines radiating from the center of a circle as if from God to express the particularity of the processions more readily perceived in lesser creatures (DN 5.6 820C–821A [CD 1, 184.17ff]). These particularising logoi are referenced as causal (ta aitia poietika) along with the divine powers by way of a counterexample (DN 4.31 732B [CD 1, 176.9–11]), and their definition in DN 5.8 (824C [CD 1, 188.6–10]) as ‘substance establishing’ confirms that they are not only representation ad intra, but the methods by which God, the one true cause of all, causes particulars. Furthermore, it is in the Word, ho Logos, that all the causes of things were precontained, a nod to the causal logoi (DN 7.4 [CD 1, 872C 198.21–23]). Therefore, the logoi are implicitly processions, which was admittedly made much clearer by Palamas.

 

^[23]  Augustine’s appropriation of the rationes to the Word and even their ‘living in the word’ is explained by Giovanni Catapano ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Reasons: A Textual Dossier’ in Theories of Divine Ideas: From the Church Fathers to the Early Franciscan Master, edited by Tommaso Manzon and Irene Zavattero (Rome: Arcane, 2022), 19–21. Guardini also specifies that Bonaventure’s doctrine of the divine ideas or rationes stand upon the ‘augustinisch-anselmishen’ doctrine of the expression of the ‘inner word’, wherein God as generating the Son as ars Patris is a ‘double speech’, to God’s own self and outward, Romano Guardini, Systembildende Elemente in Der Theologie Bonaventuras, Studia et Documenta Franciscana, III (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 41–42.

 

^[24]  Catapano, after his analysis of the rationes as divine ideas, developed a list of ambiguities to complement his doctrinal summary, see ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Reasons: A Textual Dossier’, 30. Guardini, likewise, produced a list of Augustinian doctrines which Bonaventure drew upon as the basis of his account of the rationes, see Guardini, Systembildende Elemente, 75–76.

 

^[25]  Tommaso Manzon, ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius: the Areopagitic Character of Bonaventure’s Exemplarism, with Particular Reference to the Quaestiones de Scientia Christi’, in Theories of Divine Ideas: From the Church Fathers to the Early Franciscan Master, edited by Tommaso Manzon and Irene Zavattero (Rome: Arcane, 2022), 327, n. 14. Manzon draws upon Ratzinger’s assessment that Bonaventure had beyond the reception of Dionysius from scholastic sources from his The Theology of History According to St. Bonaventure, see Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes (Chicago, Ill.: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971), 90. Zachary Hayes’ own ‘Introduction’ to the English translation of the DSC saw a new emphasis when Bonaventure draws the question of Christ’s knowledge in a mystical direction, see Zachary Hayes, ‘Introduction’ in Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, Works of St. Bonaventure 4 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publication, 1992), 42–43.

 

^[26]  Manzon, ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 327.

 

^[27]  DN 7.4 872C (CD 1, 198.21–199.3). The Word or Logos contains all causes, yet Dionysius does not set the Logos’ expression in an explicitly Trinitarian context (cf. DN 2.4 640D–641C [CD 1, 126.3–128.8]) as the Word of the Father. This is not to say that Dionysius would at all deny this, but it was simply not part of his programme.

 

^[28]  Etienne Gilson’s reading of the divine ideas as interior to divine self-identity and self-consciousness has identified half of this aspect, especially coming from Hexaemeron, although he does not develop its relation to glory and the cross, see Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, ed. F. J. Sheed, trans. Illtyd Trethowan (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938), 141–43, 146–47.

 

^[29]  Guardini, Systembildende Elemente, 6–17. The rationes, discussed under the name of ‘die Lehre von den Ideen’, appear throughout the first half of Guardini’s systematic exposition of Bonaventure’s doctrine, drawing across his corpus to do so, from the Sentences Commentary through to the Hexaemeron. Guardini’s treatment of die Ideen immediately connects the rationes’ role in divine knowledge with creative exemplarity (ibid. 10–11), their Trinitarian location (12), role in knowledge (12–13), the relationship of vestige/image/likeness and efficient/exemplary/final causality (14–16), and even the relationship between creative similitude and the doctrine of grace. (13, 16–17). For Guardini, all these aspects answer a fundamental question at the heart Bonaventure’s thought: whether and how there is nexus or mediation of the eternal simplicity and mortal, contingent multiplicity (ibid., 6). The answer is of course: yes; all the above aspects of the rationes or die Ideen show that they constitute a middle or mediation between God and creation, and this role of the middle and center is accordingly at the heart of Bonaventure’s theological and philosophical thought (ibid. 12), so much so that though that God is the middle, inasmuch as the rationes are God, essentially, even humanity in the image of God is a middle too (16) as microcosm (by all aspects of creation in human nature), and even in the human interior spiritual life where all things are held together (ibid.). In sum, Guardini grasps Bonaventure’s spirit, with its centrality of the middle, through the rationes, and so places it at the head of his systematic elaboration of Bonaventure’s doctrine. Furthermore, because Guardini looks across Bonaventure’s career, he also addresses the manner in the which the doctrine of the ideas must include the ‘Heilsplan’, predestination, whereby God cannot not love us (ibid. 44). On the other hand, because Guardini refers to Bonaventure’s doctrine wholistically, he does not attend to the way Bonaventure’s expression and particular doctrine shift between the Sentences Commentary and Hexameron. Nevertheless, he has an impressive ability capture succinctly the warp and woof of Seraphic Doctor’s distinct style, as he does when he (I think quite correctly) aligns the Trinity, creation, and redemption as the nexus of Augustine’s and Dionysius’ Grundideen, in an account of the exemplary making and remaking of world, a not primarily ethical but ontological restoration that sees Christ in the middle of all precisely as the ‘Verbum aeterna, ars aeterna, mundus archetypus, mundus intelligibilis, Inbegriff der Ideen, Urbild der wirkliche Dinge’ who entering the world, the divine middle entering the creaturely middle to mediate either side (ibid. 48–9). If anything could be counted absent here, it would the Franciscan cast of Bonaventure’ thought that sees the cross through that middle, which would counterbalance Guardini’s understandable deprioritization of the ethical by recapturing it in the primacy of piety and charity expressed in Franciscan poverty, an expression not only of total dependence upon God but also unrestrained love for the other.

 

^[30]  Gilson, recognizing the fundamental orientation of philosophy, in Bonaventure’s mind, towards revelation and the authority of theology, finds that because the efficiency of beginning and the finality end are revealed, the true metaphysician can only lay claim to properly study God’s exemplarity, which constitutes ‘the very heart of metaphysics’. But to reach that point, one must begin with the Incarnate Word and rise to the triune exemplar. See Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 140–43. Set in relief to that theological dynamic, Gilson hones in on the unique character of divine knowledge as a self-reflection and self-identity that is at once the grasp of every otherness, in accord with what it is to be God’s act, which holds at once in itself God’s being and nature, possibilities, and God’s will for those possibilities—all of which are gathered together and expressed in the Son (ibid, 142–44). Therein, the divine ideas, and so divine ideas rationes are cast as integral to God’s self-fulfillment, wherein the sufficiency of eternal self-identity that ‘dwelling in identity with Himself’ gives rise to the other (ibid, 141, 144–6). The productivity of the inner word, the image for our inner life, provides for Gilson the principal logic of Bonaventure’s expressive ideas, grounded in God’s self-reflection. For Gilson, therefore, expression, with its reference to the generation of the Son, rather than exemplarism, is at the heart of Bonaventure’s doctrine of ideas from the Sentences Commentary, to the DSC, to the Hexaemeron (ibid, 146–7, 160–61). For Gilson, ideas are exemplars, no modal difference exists between them of the sort Carl Vater posits (see below). Regarding the place of Dionysius, Gilson sees the Areopagite’s claim that God knows without ideas, (cf. I Sent d. 35, a. unic. q. 1, contra 1 [1, 600B]) as summons for Bonaventure to defend the ideas as necessary to knowledge according to the assimilative character of knowledge (Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 149–50). Regarding the ideas causal character, Gilson affirms with without distinction, the ideas are causes precisely because they are not received from ab extra, with no distinction offered between the ideas of created and uncreated things, since that would be precisely backward, letting the creature determine the creator (ibid. 155–57). Yet in all, the precise language of rationes and its relation to logoi never enters the Gilson’s discussion.

 

^[31]  Jean-Marie Bissen, L’Exemplarisme divin selon Saint Bonaventure (Paris: J. Vrin., 1929) is a book-length treatment of the exemplarism that, necessarily, considers divine ideas or rationes, which in its earlier chapters rehearses many of Bonaventure’s arguments, especially from the Sentences Commentary, with a healthy dose of comparison to Aquinas. Bissen’s assessment of Bonaventure’s distinctiveness notes his reliance on Augustine through Alexander of Hales (ibid, 88). Where others stress Bonaventure’s reliance on the Augustinian tradition, Bissen defends the centrality of Aristotle for Bonaventure’s arguments, especially against Platonic separate ideas (ibid. 89–90). As Quinn (see below) will note, Bissen takes the rationes or divine ideas as principally ‘idea-forms’ rather than the ‘voluntaristic approach’ (ibid. 90–91). Of the passage from Hexaemeron 20.5 discussing the birth of the ideas, Bissen quotes it partially (omitting the description of birth in the passion) and opines that it is the perfect image of Truth’s fecundity, whereby all inferior truths are conceived, borrowing Gilson’s sense that Bonaventure’s language of God’s ‘expression’ convenes perfectly with the original sense of conception as generative (ibid, 93; Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 147). Finally, Bissen takes Bonaventure’s exemplarism as an indication that Bonaventure departs the Augustinian primacy of the Good by establishing the principality of being (especially the divine name ego sum qui sum) and truth above the good, which he even attributes to the influence of Dionysius (ibid, 95)—a claim that does not contend with Bonaventure’s own appeal to the primacy of the good as ‘the most principle name’ in Itinerarium 6, on the authority of Dionysius, no less.

 

^[32]  John F. Quinn, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy, Studies and Texts Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 23 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973) attends to the role of the rationes as God’s knowledge causing things and as knowing his own intention for each therein (ibid, 493). Quinn also observes that while the rationes are one in God’s self knowledge, and so signify God, properly speaking, and connote res besides God, nonetheless, the rationes has a plurification in that it expresses many while remaining one, so that the multiplicity of rationes does not only describe the created knowers’ lighting upon the divine ideas of distinct creatures (ibid, 495)—for God does know distinctly in simplicity. Quinn’s account treats the Sentences Commentary without distinction, however, so that the emergence of exemplaria or rationes exemplares is overwritten by the earlier account of God as the exemplar (ibid. 497). Quinn, helpfully, also identifies the ultimate theological location of the rationes, explaining that philosophers cannot grasp the full truth of creatures apart from the trinitarian shape of their exemplar (ibid. 498–500). He also argues that Bonaventure’s chief difference with Aquinas on the matter of the rationes lies in the Angelic Doctor’s emphasizing the finality of the rationes over the Bonaventure’s analogical exemplarity, whereby the creatures display their dependence upon the rationes as equally as ‘principles of their being and as the immutable rules of their truth’ (ibid., 507–9). Of course, Bonaventure does point to the approved finality of the rationes in DSC and much more their providential character in the Hexaemeron, nevertheless, Quinn’s point is principally that Aquinas does not teach that creatures manifest their dependence upon the rationes aeternae in order to be seen in their truth, but rather, that creatures are available in se to be known according to God’s will (ibid. 508).

 

^[33]  Hayes, in his introduction to his translation of the Questiones Disputatae de Scientia Christi, leads his discussion of the rationes by foregrounding that the expressive Word about which Bonaventure inquires is that which the western, Augustinian theological tradition identified as the Son as God’s self-knowledge (Hayes, ‘Introduction’, 49) and this locus is where God’s intrinsic knowledge of infinite possibilities can be located. Hayes points out that DSC q. 2 never uses the term idea, but only similitude, ratio, species, and exemplar, with similitudo and ratio carrying the force of idea (50–52). Hayes holds that the doctrine of the divine ideas was given fuller explanation in the Sentences Commentary, with causes as exemplary causes or models for God as the artist of creation, and the way all things have existed in God from eternity (ibid, 51, 53). Hayes does not address at all the introduction of the language of notitia causans res nor what, if any, difference is made by the inclusion of Dionysius texts to definition of the rationes aeternae in DSC q. 2. He does recognize Dionysius’ contribution to DSC q. 3 as providing language fit to describe the virtual multiplication of ideas according to the many ideata, yet still this is not treated as amounting to a difference from I Sent d. 35 and 36 on the ideas in God. It is in DSC q. 7 that Hayes recognizes Bonaventure’s development of the distinction between Christ’s habitual and actual knowing with the distinction between comprehensive and ecstatic knowledge, which depends upon Dionysius, and which makes the rationes in their infinity a source of human beatitude as such and sees a resolution between God’s exemplarity of finite creatures and of infinite possibilities, when the products of the former are satisfied in the latter (ibid, 64–67).

 

^[34]  Carl Vater in his dissertation ‘The Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’ (Catholic University of America, 2017) foregrounds his claim that Bonaventure taught an ordered distinction within the divine ideas, between ideas as principally God’s means knowing before causing and the subset of which are also causal according to God’s will, which he takes to be Bonaventure’s sense of the term ‘exemplar’ (see esp. 111–14). Vater’s distinction emerges from a recognition of the difference between I Sent and DSC, inasmuch as the treatment of divine knowledge in the latter also involves a more extensive consideration of divine causality, a change of expression that he does not regard as a development but differing routes to the same answer (ibid. 69, 86, 89, 98). He argues that the appearance of the Latin translation of Averroes commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics introduced an anxiety among Latin theologians that God does not know particulars, and locates Bonaventure’s doctrine of the divine ideas, and so rationes, among the several scholastic responses to that significant concern (ibid. 56–57). Like Guardini and many others before him, Vater recognizes the centrality of exemplarism in Bonaventure, but he isolates exemplarism as the proper field of metaphysics, turning to Hexaemeron to substantiate that claim (ibid. 58–59), but nevertheless points to the ideas’ Trinitarian importance, reminding his reader of Bonaventure’s borrowing from Augustine, that one who would deny the existence of ideas would, in fact, deny the Son (ibid. 60; I Sent d. 6, a. unic., q. 3 [1, 130A]). Despite turning first to the Hexaemeron, Vater considers the divine ideas or rationes as having been given a ‘full picture’ from I Sent and DSC (Vater, 61), and to an extent the Breviloquium, but aside from a few initial references, the Hexaemeron does not contribute to his argument. That full picture is centered on understanding, before all else, that the divine ideas explain God’s causality as knowing that proceeds to a willing or causing, wherein a-causal ideas become properly causal exemplars, and it is against this background that the imitative and multiplicative character of the ideas or rationes is approached (ibid. 61, 69–70, 79). Vater’s argument, as it sees little to no doctrinal development from I Sent to DSC, likewise does not attribute any change to the greater deference given to the Areopagite in the latter text, although he explains how the DSC displays Bonaventure’s argumentative maturation (ibid., 89).

 

^[35]  For example, Efrem Bettoni sets the account of Bonaventure’s divine ideas within a demonstration of his account of Neoplatonism, which draws multiplicity from unity, and begins with assimilation or God’s similitude to all possibilities and actualities as a launching point for his account of Bonaventure’s exemplarity, see Efrem Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, Notre Dame Pocket Library 4 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1981), 47–50. Furthermore, Bettoni stresses that the rationes expression exclaim the necessary character of God’s exemplarity in contradistinction from God’s freedom to create (ibid., 59–61). As another example, Christopher Cullen’s Bonaventure says that Bonaventure’s exemplarism is not a part but the ‘heart, and center’ of his thought and that expressionism, by which Bonaventure seeks to resolve Plato and Aristotle’s epistemologies, results in a ‘semiotic metaphysics’, see Christopher M. Cullen, Bonaventure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 71, 72–73, 76-77. A third example is in R. E. Houser and Timothy B. Noone’s introduction to their translation of selected passages from I Sent, which frames the rationes as not only God’s knowledge, but as the basis all knowledge, see R. E. Houser and Timothy B. Noone, ‘Introduction’ in Commentary on the Sentences: Philosophy of God, trans. R. E. Houser and T. B. Noone, Works of St. Bonaventure 16 (St. Bonavenure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2013), lviii–lix. They note that two questions arise around these rationes: their plurality and necessity. On the former, their plurality is ‘determined, not by the mind of the divine knower, but by the differences in kind and in individuality of the things known’, stressing less the diffusiveness of God’s expression and more the proto-reality of the ideated (ibid, lx). Finally, House and Noone consider the relation of knowledge and causality in I Sent explaining that knowledge, and by implication, the rationes are necessary, yet they do not make what is known thereby necessary, so that God’s foreknowledge can be called contingent according to the continency of its objects—but without any detriment to the necessity of such knowledge on God’s part—and such foreknowledge is even denied being a cause at all as foreknowledge because it includes some things not caused, such as sin (ibid, lx–lxii). The rationes’ role as causal or as primordial causes does not enter the discussion. What does loom large in Houser and Noone’s view, is that the rationes, inasmuch as they are secundum rem intrinsic to God hold together yet draw their contingency and multiplicity from without. Of course, when divine power and will are taken into account, the simultaneous infinity and finitude, the necessity and contingency of divine knowledge follow from the divine essence, nevertheless, Noone and Houser approach the facets of the divine essence distinctly according to I Sent’s organization, so that causality is only properly considered under the topic of will. A discussion of causal knowing as it will appear in DSC q. 2 is, therefore, simply not on their agenda.

 

^[36]  Bougerol observed the borrowing from the Areopagite on this point by attention to the particular citations across Bonaventure’s career, and concludes that Dionysius suffused Bonaventure’s thought, appearing even without explicit citatation, at first doctrinally, and then after his magisterial period, particularly shaping his spirituality of henosis or deification, see Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventue et le Pesudo-Denys’, 113–14. While he recognizes the individual contributions of Dionsysius to Bonaventure’s teaching of the rationes, Bougerol does not count them among the major Dionsyian facets whereby the Seraphic Doctor was furnished a ‘spirit, method, and fundamental themes’ (ibid., 114–22), except, perhaps, the sapiential character of contemplation introduced in DSC q. 7 (Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et le Pseudo-Denys’, 52–53, 116; see also Quinn, The Histoircal Constitution of St. Bonaventure’s Philosophy, 415). Although Bougerol does not count Bonaventure’s exemplarism as a specifically Dionysius theme, he does regard the citation of DN 5.8 in DSC q. 2 and 3 as very important in course of Bonaventure’s exemplarism and even goes so far to as suggest that his exemplarism is derived from Dionysius (Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et le Pseudo-Denys’, 50-51). Regarding the sole appearance of proodoi in its sense of a common creative motion of God, found in DMT q. 6, a. 1, ad. 1 (5, 100A), Bougerol has nothing substantial to say, only rehearsing Bonaventure’s explanation that wisdom can be called mobile because it is present to all things (Bougerol, ‘Saint Bonaventure et le Pseudo-Denys’, 55–56). In the final regard, for Bougerol, Bonaventure’s theology and spirituality join Augustine and Dionysius, along with Anselm, Bernard, and the Victorines—an expression of a monastic theology reanimated by Francis, which of course, brings the cross into sight, yet not in sight of the rationes (ibid., 122–23). Guardini, on the topic of the Ideenlehre, explains Dionysius’ contribution as providing a solution for the God’s knowledge of evil and the image of God’s goodness as a distributive light, see Guardini, Systembildende Elemente, 77–78 and 81–82. Quinn, too, recognizes Dionysius’ contribution of the image of light recalling creatures to God, as an approach to creatures that might know God (Quinn, The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure Philosophy, 504–6). More recently and very perceptively, Tommaso Manzon has argued that Bonaventure’s theological sources are quite widely varied, contrary to earlier assessments that it was principally Augustinian, even if they circulated under Augustine’s name, and further, that the theological weight of Dionysius on his corpus must be reassessed, too (cf. Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, 68). Manzon’s entry point is an assessment of the doctrine of the divine ideas in the Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, which he uses to argue that Dionysius actually provides a framework for interpreting Augustine and thus indicates an increasing Dionysian commitment and conceptuality in progress of the Seraphic Doctor’s career, see Manzon, ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 325–27, 331–32.

 

^[37]  The mundus archetypus will play a larger role in the second part of this article. While it figures briefly in Boanventure’s Sentences Commentary and DSC it will return in the Hexaemeron. Manzon notes that it was treated in the Franciscan Summa Halensis, (Tom. II, 1, p. 1, inq. 1, tr. 2, q. 2) and so an idea current in Bonaventure’s circle, but more importantly, developed around the convertability of rationes aeternae, ideae, and God as exemplar in such as way that suggested familiarity with the Dionysianism of the School of St. Victor, see Manzon, ‘According to Blessed Dionysius’, 330–31. Of course, as H. F. Dondaine demonstrated, Hales’ intellectual community also had access to the content of Eriugena’s Periphyseon under the identity of Pseudo-Maximus in the Corpus Dionysiacum Parisiense, a family of texts represented in its fullest form by BnF Lat. 17341 «Œuvres de s. Denis, double traduction et commentaires», see H. F. Dondaine, Le Corpus Dionysien de l’Université de Paris Au XIII. Siècle (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1953), 13 and 88. BnF Lat. 17341 257ra included among its commentary on DN 5, an excerpt from Periphyseon 615D–617A that explains DN 5.8, but it was placed just a few folios ahead, which identified causae primordiales, ideae, species, formae aeternae, rationes, principalia exempla, praedestinationes, and voluntates. In short, the connections between all these terms were long established beginning with Eriugena’s own integration of Augustine and Dionysius, and available through multiple routes in thirteenth-century Paris. See also Guardini, Systembildende Elemente, 44–45, where he briefly explains the relation of the Ideenlehre to the mundus archetypus as the medium and also identifies its place as freedom in God.

 

^[38]  I Sent d. 45, dub. 2 (1, 812A-B). Bonaventure early in his career establishes a principle from which he will not depart, that when God acts (or rather causes any effect) simply because he wills to do so, it is not nihilistically irrational, but according to that act’s identity to God’s own ratio, God’s interior shape or proportionality, which is expressed in divine wisdom.

 

^[39]  DN 2.5 641D–644A (CD 1, 128.14–129.5) teaches the proodos and its proodoi is common to the whole of divinity, meaning that this proodos is not appropriated to a person.

 

^[40]  Hans Urs von Balthasar’s wide-ranging theological work has argued that God’s eternal glory revealed in Christ, or the Gestalt of Christ is itself cruciform in his multi-volume theological aesthetics, Herrlichkeit, published in English as seven-volume The Glory of Lord. Aidan Nichols summarizes that theology so: ‘For the ‘ground’ appears in the ‘gestalt’, above all in the moment of the Cross is the love that the Trinity is’, see Aidan Nichols, A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 21. Likewise, that eternal glory is further described in the Theo-Dramatik, the five-volume Theo-Drama in English, which argues that glory has the form of an eternal sacrifice in the life of the Trinity whence the cross not only takes it form in the incarnation, but which also finds creation’s role in the divine fruition, see Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 70–78. Sergius Bulgakov proposes that the incarnation of Christ was is no way an act violence to either the human or divine nature because the divine person of the Son has, in a manner of speaking, always been human, not incarnate, but as the proto-image of humanity because of the Son’s, the Logos’ connection with Sophia, which holds in itself all creatures in potencies or ideas, including the providence of the incarnation, and which is therefore, the Son’s ‘eternal divine-humanity’, while on the other hand, humanity is such that it has always awaited the incarnation to truly be itself, and so has always borne in itself a certain divinity in anticipation of the incarnation, see Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, trans. B. Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 182–92. Like Balthasar, Bulgakov also identifies God’s eternal glory with the internal form of kenosis, an intrinsic Trinitarian offering of worship that is disclosed in the mysteries of Christ’s life, and for an overview of Balthasar and Bulgakov’s similarities on these points, see also Katy Leamy ‘A Comparison of the Kenotic Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov’ (PhD Dissertation, Marquette University, 2012). The perspectives of Balthasar and Bulgakov, which I argue Bonaventure anticipates in his own account of Wisdom, will also be useful in the second part to frame Bonaventure’s unfolding the relationship of freedom and necessity in God’s liberal and not natural act of creation, and his accounting of creation’s relation to God’s eternal fruition in the Hexaemeron, see especially Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, 120–21; Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 70–78; Leamy, ‘A Comparison of the Kenotic Trinitarian Theology’, 22.

 

^[41]  DN 4.3 697A (CD 1, 146.6–12); 4.8 708D (CD 1, 153.4–9); DN 7.2 869A–B (CD 1, 196.8–197.2); DN 13.3 980B (CD 1, 228.3–6); Ep. 9.5 1112B–D (CD 2, 204.8–205.7).

 

^[42]  CH 2.5 145A (CD 2, 15.19–21).

 

^[43]  As I Sent d. 45, dub. 3 (1, 812A) explains, the effect of God’s will goes forth, but the act itself does not, in Bonavnture’s understanding: ‘Prout tamen dicit progressum effectus ab ipso. quamvis actus non egrediatur extra, tamen res egrediuntur, et ideo dicit respectum ad extra.’ While Bonaventure will after two decades arrive at the birth of the ideas, he will never abandon the intrinsicity of the act of will, for in God’s act of willing, his act of loving, he first loves himself, an act of self-reversion which is, of course, expressed in the Holy Spirit, who is called the nexus of the Father and Son, and to whom Bonaventure appropriated goodness and love.

 

^[44]  DN 2.6 644C–D (CD 1, 130.5–13).

 

^[45]  DN 2.5 641D–644A (CD 1, 128.14–129.3); DN 3.1 680B (CD 1, 138.1-4) ; DN 11.6 956A-B (CD 1, 223.4-7); Ep. 2.1 1069A (CD 2, 158.7-11). For an explanation of the superlative language of God as beyond source and beyond goodness, see John Jones, “Introduction” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology [italicize], trans. and ed. John Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2011), 15-16.

 

^[46]  DN 4.10 (CD 1, 155.17–20) 708B; DN 1.4 593A (CD 1, 115.6–18); DN 4.13 712A (CD 1, 158.19); DN 4.13 712B (CD 1, 159.9–20); DN 5.8 824C (CD I, 188.6); DN 9.2 909C (CD 1, 208.8–17).

 

^[47]  DN 2.5 641D–644A (CD 1, 128.16–17); DN 2.6 644C–D (CD 1, 130.5–13); DN 2.11 649B (CD 1, 135.14–136.1); DN 5.6 820C–821A (CD 1, 184.17ff).; DN 7.2 869A–B (CD 1, 196.8–197.2); DN 9.5 912D (CD 1, 210.6–11); DN 9.5 913B (CD 1, 211.10–13); DN 13.3 980B (CD 1, 228.3–6).

 

^[48]  DN 2.11 649B–C (CD 1, 136.1–5); DN 9.2 909C (CD 1, 208.8–17); DN 9.4 912B (CD 1, 209.11–14); DN 9.5 913B (CD 1, 211.10–13); DN 10.2 937B (CD 1, 215.8–13).

 

^[49]  DN 2.11 649B (CD 1, 135.14–136.1); DN 9.2 909C (CD 1, 208.8–17).

 

^[50]  DN 8.5 892C–D (CD 1, 202.6–14); DN 9.5 912D (CD 1, 210.6–11).; DN 11.6 953B–956B (CD 1, 221.13–223.14)

 

^[51]  DN 1.6 596A–C (CD 1, 118.2–119.9); DN 2.3 640B–C (CD 1, 125.13–18); DN DN 9.5 912D–913B (CD 1, 210.11–211.6).

 

^[52]  DN 2.11 949C–D (CD 1, 136.13–17); DN 8.5 892C–D (CD 1, 202.20–23); DN 9.5 912D (CD 1, 210.6–11).

 

^[53]  DN 2.5 644A–B (CD 1, 129.9–11); DN 2.11 649B–652A (CD 1, 136.1–137.7). While there is no confusion of God and the creature, Jones also notes that inasmuch as God there is both a unity (the proodoi) and differentiation in the divine manifestation, just as there is a divine unity (one more-thanessence) and differentiaion (the Trinity of persons) in the divine hiddenness, that differentiation of the divine difference is the multiplicity of caused creatures, the otherness which God causes as God. In short, their not being God is the manifestation of God in and as them, see Jones, 27-40.

 

^[54]  DN 4.4 697C–700A (CD 1, 147.4–148.8); DN 12.3 969C–972A (CD 1, 225.4–13).

 

^[55]  DN 4.4 700A–B (CD 1, 148.8–18); DN 4.7 701C–704A (CD 1, 151.5–17); DN 4.14 712C–713A (CD, 160.1–18); DN 9.9 916C–D (CD 1, 213.7–20).

 

^[56]  I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1 (1, 804A–B) explains that humans cannot enunciate God’s simple infinity but must approximate it under a multiplicity of modes congruent to our intellect, resulting in the human need to associate certain divine acts and attributes, and powers.

 

^[57]  I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1 (1, 804A). The notion of good reflecting upon itself appears to have come from Thomas Gallus Explanatio on DN 4.14, who described the nature of divine love, see Evan King, ‘Eriugenism in Berthold of Moosburg’s Expositio Super Elementationem Theologicam Procli’, in Reading Proclus and the Book of Causes, vol. 1, Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition, 22 (Brill, 2019), 408–9.

 

^[58]  I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1 (1, 804B–805A). See

 

^[59]  II Sent d. 1, p. 2, a. 2, q. 1, conc. and ad. 4 (2, 44B–45B).

 

^[60]  II Sent d. 1, p. 2, a. 2, q. 1, conc. and ad. 3 (2, 44B–45A).

 

^[61]  II Sent d. 1, p. 2, a. 2, q. 1, conc. and ad. 3 (2, 44B–45A). See also I Sent d. 45, dub. 3 (1, 812B).

 

^[62]  I Sent d. 45, dub. 2 (1, 812A).

 

^[63]  II Sent d. 1, p. 2, a. 2, q. 1, conc. (2, 44B).

 

^[64]  I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 2, conc. (1, 806B–807A).

 

^[65]  I Sent d. 45, dub. 2 (1, 811B-812A); II Sent d. 1, p. 1, a. 1, q. 2 (2, 22B); II Sent d. 1, p. 2, dub. 2 (2, 36B).; II Sent d. 5, dub. 3 (2, 143A–B).

 

^[66]  II Sent d. 1, p. 1, dub. 4 (2, 38B); II Sent d. 2 p. 1, a. 2, q. 2 (2, 64B).

 

^[67]  For example, Breviloquim 2.8 (5, 223A); Hexaemeron 9.24 (5, 376A).

 

^[68]  DN 4.10 705B–D (CD 1, 154.7–22); DN 5.2 817A (CD 1, 181.20–21); DN 5.8 824C (CD 1, 188.6–10); DN 7.2 869A-C (CD 1, 196.7-197.16); 7.3 869C-D (CD 1, 197.17-198.3); 7.4 872C (CD 1, 198.21-199.3).

 

^[69]  DN 4.13 712B (CD 1, 159.9–20).

 

^[70]  DN 11.6 (CD 1, 221.13ff) 953Bff.

 

^[71]  DN 4.10 (CD 1, 155.17–20) 708B; DN 4.13 712A (CD 1, 158.19); DN 4.13 712B (CD 1, 159.9–20); DN 5.8 824C (CD I, 188.6); Ep. 9.5 1112B–D (CD 2, 204.8–205.7). See also n. 22 above.

 

^[72]  See I Sent d. 45, dub. 2 (1, 812A).

 

^[73]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, contra 1, conc. and ad. 1 (I, 600B–601B); cf. DN 7.2 869C (CD 1, 197.10–16). Bonaventure will return to use this passage in his response to De Scientia Christi q. 3.

 

^[74]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. (1, 601A–B).

 

^[75]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. (1, 601A). In Catapano’s textual overview of the transcendent senses of the rationes in Augustine, he does not count the causae primordiales as indicative of the transcendent but rather immanent causes, see Catapano, ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of the Eternal Reasons’, 2. In II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2 (2, 435B–436A) Bonaventure addresses Peter Lombard’s discussion of Augustine’s ambiguity, and notices the distinction between rationes causales and incommunicablies in De Genesi ad litteram 5 and 5, but does not directly address the use of causae primordiales as immanent causes per op. cit. 6.10.17, and likewise of rationes primordiales in 6.11.9. Nonetheless, he does recognize the ambiguity of the term primordiales in II Sent, a nuance not yet developed in I Sent that flatly identifies the divine similitudes with causae primordiales, indicative of Bonaventure’s increasing precision regarding the language of causes later in the Sentences Commentary.

 

^[76]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. (1, 601A).

 

^[77]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. and ad 2. (1, 601B); I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 2, conc. (1, 605B-606A).

 

^[78]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 2, conc. (1, 605B–606A); I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 3, conc. (I, 608A–B). I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 5, pro 1–2 and conc. (1, 611A and 612A). Bonaventure is more sure on this point than Augustine, who was somewhat reticent to grant rationes for each human, while nonetheless conceding that individuals are known in the multitude of humanity known by God in its ratio, as Catapano explains from an examination of the rationes in Augustine’s Epistula, see ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Reasons: A Textual Dossier’, 26–7, 29. See also, Guardini, Systembildende Elemente, 8.

 

^[79]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. and ad. 2 (1, 601A–B).

 

^[80]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. (1, 601B).

 

^[81]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. and ad. 2 (I, 601A–B); I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 4, conc. (1, 610A–B).

 

^[82]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 4, conc. (1, 610A–B).

 

^[83]  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, conc. (1, 601B).

 

^[84]  I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 1, conc. (1, 623B).

 

^[85]  I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 1, conc and ad. 4 (1, 623B-624B).

 

^[86]  I Sent d. 36, a. 1, q. 1 conc. (1, 620–621A)

 

^[87]  I Sent d. 36, a. 1 q. 2, conc. (1, 622B).

 

^[88]  I Sent d. 36 a. 2, q. 1, conc and ad. 4. (I, 624A-B).

 

^[89]  Ibid.

 

^[90]  Ibid.

 

^[91]  I Sent d. 36 a. 2, q. 1, ad 4. (1, 624B).

 

^[92]  I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 2, conc. (1, 625B).

 

^[93]  I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 2, conc. (1, 625B–626A).

 

^[94]  I Sent d. 37, a. 1, q. 1, conc. (1, 638B–639A).

 

^[95]  I Sent d. 37, a. 1, q. 1, conc. (1, 639A).

 

^[96]  Ibid.

 

^[97]  I Sent d. 37, a. 1, q. 1, pro 2 (1, 638A).

 

^[98]  I Sent d. 36 a. 2, q. 1, conc. (1, 624A).

 

^[99]  I Sent d. 27, a. unic, q. 2, conc. (1, 485B).

 

^[100]  I Sent d. 27, a. unic, q. 2, conc. (1, 485B). The Son is a quasi–medium because creation is not necessitated but only disposed in the generation of the Son.

 

^[101]  DN 9.9 916C–D (CD 1, 213.7–20). The circularity of explanation is not lost on the author of this article. Dionysius describes the proodos as an act of creation through the providential proodoi. It might best be taken as simply the divine motion of procession being accomplished in every aspect of its particularity.

 

^[102]  See n. 22, above.

 

^[103]  I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1, conc. (1, 804B) where Bonaventure distinguishes the divine intellect whereunto the rationes are appropriated from the will whereby some are caused: ‘…ideo multis modis intelligimus Deum et diversis nominibus exprimimus; et secundum quod per illos modos intelligimus, plura enuntiamus, ita quod Deo aliquid attribuimus secuudum unum modum, quod uon secundum alium, et vere quidem, quia omnia in Deo habent veram existentiam  Et ideo cum alio modo intelligamus Deum, cum dicimus Demn bonum, alio, cum dicimus Deum aeternum; concedimus, eum se diffundere, quia bonus est, non quia aeternus; haec enim est proprietas bonitatis, non durationis. Hinc est, quod cum intelligimus, vere voluutatem esse in Deo, et proprietas voluntatis sit producere ea quae exeunt per modum liberalitatis , quod dicimus, Deum, in quantum voluntas est, esse causam rerum’. Furthermore, in I Sent d. 45, dub. 8 (1, 813B), Bonaventure contrasts the plurality of the ideata with the singularity of the divine will, rejecting, at this point, and in noteworthy contrast to DSC q. 2’s quotation of DN 5.8, predication voluntates to God

 

^[104]  I Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1, ad. 4. (1, 805B): ‘Ad illud quod obiicitur, quod Deus non est agens praeconcipiens; dicendum, quod hoc verum est de praecogitatione, quae praecedit voluntalem, sed non est verum de preconceptione respectu operis. Et primo modo loquitur Dionysius: ipse vero opponit secundo modo’. Bonaventure had also explained earlier that in the order of causality, will follows power and knowledge and proceeds to making, which is the recapitulation of or reduction to power (I Sent d. 2, dub 2 [1, 614A–B]) and that divine knowledge, in its simultaneity with will, can be named not only science or wisdom in respect to God’s self knowledge but in respect to creatures, so that God’s knowledge of events is named prescientia, of effects providentia, and so on with other names naming God’s knowledge of willed effects (I Sent d. 2, dub 2 [1, 614B–615A]). Finally, by their interrelation with will, Bonaventure recognizes power and will as habitually causal compared to the will’s actual causality, see 1 Sent d. 45, a. 2, q. 1, ad. 2 (1, 805A–B).

 

^[105]  De genesi littera 6.10.17 and 6.14.15 show causae primordiales and rationes causales respectively. For comparison the logocentrism of the other references to rationes in De genesi littera, see Catapano, ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Reasons: A Textual Dossier’, 19–21. Catapano’s approach is to refer only to the transcendent sense of rationes, equivalent to the divine ideas, and so he elected to pass by the references in Book 6, treating them as immanent causes in a thing (Ibid., 2). Catapano faced just the same situation as Bonaventure nearly eight centuries earlier, namely the need to distinguish between transcendent and immanent causes in Augustine.

 

^[106]  I Sent d. 35 uses the language of scientia sparingly, except in the dubia, but cognoscere and its cognates frequently, however it is clear from the context and a salient usage that cognitio underlies divine scientia (I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 5, pro 5 [1, 611B]).

 

^[107] II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, Ad. 6 (2, 437A–B).

 

^[108]  See Manzon, ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 325–27.

 

^[109]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436 A). II Sent d. 18; Albertus Magnus, Super II Sententiarum, II, d. 18, a. 7, conc. (Borgnet vol. 27, 322A). Bonaventure remarks that it is most necessary but not at all easy to distinguish the meaning of these ambiguous names, while Albert laments that because Augustine provided the names without any distinction, many writers have multiplied the meanings but not in any harmonious way, but that he will skip all those interpretations and give an explanation in accord with the names.

 

^[110]  Albertus Magnus, Super II Sententiarum, II, d. 18, a. 7, conc. (Borgnet vol. 27, 322A–323B). Albert treats the primordial causes as having several meanings. First and according to itself, it names the idea in the divine mind that relates to everything ideated, be they wonderful/miraculous (mirabilia) or natural, hidden in God from eternity. But there is also a second sense, itself subdivided to name all those causes in creation universally (inditae primae conditioni rerum) from the beginning necessary for all further generation (i.e. causales rationes, causae naturales, causae seminales), or particularly as the causes need for each thing to come to be from what preceded it.

 

^[111]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436 A–B).

 

^[112]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436A–B).

 

^[113]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436B): ‘Regula autem agentis increati est forma exemplaris sive idealis, regula vero agentis creati est forma naturalis: et ita rationes causales sunt formae ideales sive exemplares , rationes vero seminales sunt formae naturales’.

 

^[114]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436A)

 

^[115]  The term rationes primordiales would reappear once in the Breviloquium to explain the resurrection of the body as not resulting from any created principle (see Breviloquium, 7.6 [5, 287A–B]), but from God alone.

 

^[116]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436 B–437A). First, rationes primordiales and causales are one and the same (secundum rem), kept (servari) in God’s own eternal will, and refer to God as the first principle (thus, primordial) and as final end as the ‘causa causarum’, that for which all else comes to be (thus causales). These ideal and exemplary reasons are thus naught but the dispositions of the divine will. Second, each ratio seminalis and naturalis is likewise one and the same (again, secundum rem) in each thing. As seminal, such a reason name inchoate and intrinsic power in a creature (virtus) to produce an effect (ex quo), but as natural, in that it names the capacity of an agent to produce an effect like or in accord with itself (a quo).

 

^[117]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, Ad. 6 (2, 437 A–B).

 

^[118]  For the dating, see Hayes, ‘Introduction’, 41–2.

 

^[119]  Manzon argues that Bonaventure actually ‘grafts Augustine onto Dionysius, and this not only with respect to what concerns contemplation and mystical theology’ and provides the metaphysical context to understand Augustine, see Manzon ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 327, 331–32, 345–47.

 

^[120]  Vater points out that Bonaventure’s account of the divine ideas or rationes was concerned with causality from its beginning in I Sent d. 35, see Vater, ‘The Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 61. Yet he himself notes that in the earlier account: ‘we can see that truth is emphasized …. Ideas are defined completely in terms of their cognitive role for God. Exemplarity is present, but only as a motive for positing divine ideas. When it comes to the ideas themselves, we can explain them completely without reference to exemplarity’. (ibid., 65). That early account was one in which, compared to DSC, the full vision of the rationes as causal was circumscribed.

 

^[121]  Rationes exemplares is not Augustine’s language, nor idealis, though the ideae are discussed in relation to the ‘formae aut rationes rerum’ in De diversis questionibus octaginta tribus 46.2, where Augustine understands ratio as a translation of logos yet treats it as concurring instead with the Platonic sense of idea as the causal truth of thing, see Catapano ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Reasons: A Textual Dossier’, 3–5.

 

^[122]  See Hayes, ‘Introduction’, 50–53.

 

^[123]  Hayes’ summary of DSC q. 2, the questions that introduces this novel account of causal knowledge (notitia causans res) glides over this point and instead says the discussion of divine knowledge is a compression of the fuller treatment of the divine ideas in I Sent d. 35 and 36. Although his commentary is helpful, it passes by a key development: that divine knowledge is causal through itself rather than only dispositive relative to divine power. It is that causal divine knowledge that makes human knowledge certain (DSC q. 4) and that grasps knowers ecstatically as they approach similitude to God by grace, God who is their similitude (DSC q. 7).

 

^[124]  Bonaventure’s forthrightness on the individuality of the res contrasts Catapano’s reading of Augustine that ‘There is an eternal reason for each species of individuals and for each collective entity of which individuals are a constituent part, but not for each individual as such’. See ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of Eternal Reasons: A Textual Dossier’, 29.

 

^[125]  It is so because rationes stands for logoi in the Latin translations of Dionysius produced by Eriugena and Saracen, see Chevalier, Dionysiaca, vol. 1, 360. Manzon notes the happy coincidence of the Latin translations and Augustine’s own ‘Questio de ideis’ from De Diversis questionibus octagina tribus, q. 46, and notes furthermore that Thomas Gallus discussed the relationship of the Greek logos to the Latin ratio and that Alexander of Hales exhibited an approach to idea, ratio, and exemplar in a way that suggested a similar understanding, see Manzon, ‘According to Blessed Dionysus’, 330–31.

 

^[126]  DSC Q. 2, conc. (V, 8B): ‘Exemplaria dicimus esse in Deo existentium rationes substantificatas et singulariter praeexistentes, quas theologia praedefinitiones vocat, et divinas et bonas voluntates existentium determinativas et effectivas, secundum quas supersubstantialis existentia omnia praedeflnivit et produxit’.

 

^[127]  I Sent d. 45, dub. 8 (1, 813B).

 

^[128]  Catapano, ‘Augustine’s Doctrine of the Eternal Reasons’, 8–10, 22–23.

 

^[129]  Manzon, ‘According to Blessed Dionysius’, 331–32.

 

^[130]  DN 5.9 825A (CD 1, 188.17–198.4). Compare the Latin translations in Chevalier, Dionysiaca, vol. 1, 362.

 

^[131]  Furthermore, the order the response proceeds in DSC q. 2 reverses the order of I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1. In the older text, Bonaventure dealt with causality first and then moved to discuss knowledge through similitude. In DSC q. 2, after quickly clarifying that rationes aeternae are not the essences of things, he first discusses knowledge through similitude and proceeds to discuss causality or causal knowing. Vater’s position warns against just such a reading, namely that Bonaventure has reversed his earlier position and now knows because he causes, and Vater is correct to say so because Bonaventure does not make knowledge follow from causality (Vater, ‘Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 66). However, I depart from Vater’s argument that the introduction of causal knowledge does little more than rehearse I Sent d. 35 q. 1 under the condition of creation having occurred, so that knowledge precedes causality just as in the earlier treatment and that exemplarity follows is inferred from the fact of creation (ibid. 66–67), for as the body of this article shows, by affirming Dionysius’ text in DSC q. 3, which was under scrutiny and in I Sent d. 35, a. unic, q. 1, contra 1, and by recognizing the rationes as ‘logoi ousiopoios’ and ‘productivae rerum’ (DSC q. 3, contra 10 [5, 13A]), Bonaventure presents knowing the notitia of all res, possible and actual, as causal and so every similitude as an exemplary cause (DSC q. 3, contra 2 and 5 [5, 12B]) without restriction establishing the res as such even in their possibility and knowability according to providence (see the excursus on causal knowing below). In short, pace Vater’s position that rationes are principally ideas only then become exemplars, and so properly metaphysical in the case of production of select res (Vater, ‘Divine Ideas: 1250–1325’, 69–70, 79) upon production or at least the will to produce, DSC does not teach notitia causantis res but notitia causans res. Moreover, as DSC q. 2 asks how God knows the infinite res affirmed to be known by q. 1. The answer is resolutely by exemplary similitudes, whereby God is the expressive exemplar of infinite res (DSC q. 7, conc. [5, 39B–40A]). Granting, however, that idea and exemplar may connote different aspects of the rationes aeternae without a strict subordination inasmuch as expressing exemplating is God’s mode of knowing, nevertheless, even the De Reductione identifies rationes ideales as causal and the subject of metaphysics, see De Reductione 6 (5, 321A). On the other hand, Vater’s approach reflects the later language of the Breviloquium where exemplar denotes God’s knowing of things foreseen and disposed, and yet there idea refers to the exemplar as the act of foreseeing (actus praevidendi) (Breviloquium 1.8, [5, 216B]), all with a healthy dose of recognizing the flexibility of the names according to reality that all modes of knowing predicated of God are one, simple, and intrinsic: ‘Quia vero haec omnia unum sunt in Deo, ideo unum frequenter accipitur pro alio’ (ibid.).

 

^[132]  DSC q. 2, conc. (5, 8B).

 

^[133]  DSC q. 2, conc. (5, 8B); DSC q. 3, ad. 3 (5, 14B). Cf. DN 5.9 825A (CD 1, 188.17–189.6); see also Dionysiaca vol. 1, 362. Note, the Greek of the Dionysiaca volume here is missing the Greek term proodou, which is a simple typo.

 

^[134]  Hayes, ‘Introduction’, 50.

 

^[135]  DSC q. 2, conc. (5, 9A); I Sent d. 35, a. unic. q. 1, conc. (1, 601B). Gilson sees in these dual ends of creating and created expression a process, image, production, and generation in every instance, which is the fundamental truth of the Son as the medium in divinity and creation, see The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 146–47.

 

^[136]  DSC q. 2, contra 2–6 (5, 7A–8B). Cf.  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, contra 2 (600B).

 

^[137]  DSC q. 2, contra 1, 7–10, 12. (5, 7B–8A) Cf.  I Sent d. 35, a. unic., q. 1, contra 3 (1, 600B).

 

^[138]  DSC q. 2, contra 11, 13 (5, 8A).

 

^[139]  DSC q. 2, conc. (5, 8B): ‘Ad notitiam autem causantem res requiritur similitudo exemplative…’. A more detailed consideration of what causal knowledge (notitia causans res) is and in what way it causes would distract from the body of the article, thus an excursus on causal knowing is provided in Appendix A. In brief, DSC exhibits a development in Bonaventure’s understanding of the role of the divine ideas or similitudes so that whereas Bonaventure’s earlier writing resolutely appropriated the efficient causality to the divine will in a cautious distinction from expressed divive similitudes, Bonaventure would recognize the divine will as expressed even in the similitudes, rendering them causal of things to be or not to be.

 

^[140]  DSC q. 3, contra 10 (5, 13A). This point belongs to the arguments which Bonaventure concedes.

 

^[141]  Cf. II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2, conc. (2, 436 B).

 

^[142]  I Sent d. 35, a. 1, q. 1, conc. (1, 601A).

 

^[143]  I Sent d. 36, a. 1, q. 2, conc. d (1, 621A).

 

^[144]  See the excursus on causal knowing in Appendix A.

 

^[145]  DSC q. 2, conc. (5, 9A) and ad 11 (5, 10b). By comparison, in I Sent d. 35, art. Unic, q. 1, ad 3 (1, 301A), the reply to the objection that it is better to know the essences of things than a similitude argued that because God’s is veritas and the source of the ratio of the creature, it is known better in God as veritas. This is not the same argument as the simplicity of the notitia causans res.

 

^[146]  Cf. I Sent

 

^[147]  DSC q. 1, conc. (5, 5A); ibid. q. 2 conc. (5, 9A); I Sent d. 35, a. unic, q. 1 (1, 601A): ‘Primum quidem, quia Deus cognoscit non per collocationem deveniendi a principio ad principiatum, sed simplici aspectu’. See Appendix A below on the difficult question of causal knowledge.

 

^[148]  DSC q. 3, conc. (5, 14A)

 

^[149]  DSC q. 3, conc. (5, 14A). Cf. I Sent d. 45, a. 2., q. 1, ad 2 and ad 4 (1, 805A–B). Bonaventure explains that causality properly belongs to the will, as goodness, and that the will renders divine knowledge dispositive and divine power executive, and so God disposes and makes because God wills, and so there is not precognition of things before willing them. Rather, it is divine will that, in a manner of speaking, precedes knowledge and power with respect to creatures. See excursus on causal knowing at Appendix A.

 

^[150]  DSC q. 3, conc. (5,)

 

^[151]  Cf. Sent I d. 35, conc. (1, 601B). In I Sent, Bonaventure explains that whereas creatures know because they have similitudes, in God it is the opposite. Because God knows res, there are similitudes, or rather, God is the similitude of each res. God’s knowledge is not knowledge through a simulacrum nor received intrinsically. Rather God does not know through the essence but knows so that there is an essence. Because God’s knowledge is causative of the essence and distinct from what it potentially and actually produces, God’s knowledge is logically prior but also fully expressive of each res. Therefore, God’s knowledge must be a perfect similitude on account of its precedence and independence with respect to the essence it causes.

 

^[152]  DSC q. 3, conc. (5, 14A): ‘Unde expressio unius rei et alterius rei in divina, vel a divina ventate, secundum id quod est, non est aliud et aliud; sed secundum id ad quod est, plurificari dicitur’. The ad quod is not the similitude, but the res themselves.

 

^[153]  DSC q. 3, conc. (5, 14A–B); ibid. ad 18 and ad 20 (5, 16A–B). Cf I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 2, conc. (1, 625B-626A). God knows the temporal things eternally, inclusive of creation and predestination. Although Bonaventure does not dwell on it here, the importance of predestination among the rationes aeternae will have greater prominence in the Collationes in Hexaemeron. Manzon explains that the relation between the rationes aeternae and res is two sides of the same coin wherein without the confusion of the divine ideae and the real ideata, the former is the principle of outworking of the latter, a position that avoids both pantheism and the denigration of the res as a ‘bad copy of the eternal reasons’, see ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 339. Compared to Bettoni’s concern that an actual, created res must claw back its own autonomous quid lest it become all symbol-and-no-thing, Manzon’s position lets the causal ratio substantiate its res by the exemplarity of both, since it is by God’s similitude of the creature that it can be a creature at all, so that exemplarity stands at the creature’s ground in the act of God’s expression (cf. Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, 62.) Indeed, Bettoni himself recognizes that the final cause of all creatures is the glory of God for Bonaventure, and while Bettoni seeks to maintain that creatures can be known and not understood as exemplars, it goes against the general orientation of the creature to reserve its being from its manifesting purpose. What Manzon recognizes is an adoption of the Dionysian notion that in creating God stands outside himself by Bonaventure’s making God’s intrinsic expression of the creation present in the creature’s expression of God.

 

^[154]  DSC q. 3, ad 3 (5, 12B).

 

^[155]  DSC q. 4, conc. (5, 23B–24B).

 

^[156]  DSC q. 4, conc. (5, 23B–24B); cf. I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 2, conc. (I, 625B–626A). I Sent qualified that things exist most really in their proper being and can only be said to exist more really in God in virtue that their corresponding similitude in God is God. No qualification is made to differentiate the modes of having being in DSC, however as the similitudes are explicitly productive and the mode by which the effect exists in the cause (see DSC q.3, ad 20 [5, 16B] ; cf. DMT q. 5, a. 1, ad 17 [5, 91B]), there is a more robust sense of the res’ pre-existence in God, which corresponds to the citation of DN 7.2 in DSC q. 3, conc. (5, 14A–B) stating that God ‘pre-holds (praehabet) preconceives (praeconcipit) the cause, recognition (notitiam), knowledge (scientia), and substance of all things’ .

 

^[157]  DN 5.2 816C (CD 1, 181.11–15).

 

^[158]  DN 7.1 865C–868A (CD 1, 194.7–195.2); DSC q. 7, (5, 40A–B).

 

^[159]  DSC q. 4, ad 14 (5, 25B).

 

^[160]  DSC q. 4, conc. (5, 24A–B). Deiformity here includes the differentiation between the knower as an imago Dei, whether in innocence or in darkness of the fallen state, and then the deiformity of the state of glory when the soul, by grace, comes into the fullness of its similitude as a temple or habitation for God by the hierarchization of the soul—hierarchically means, in this context,ing when the soul shares in the divine life (the divine hierarchy) through worshipful ministrations of the angels (the angelic hierarchies) and earthly church (the ecclesiastical hierarchy) according to the saving work of the Christ the hierarch.

 

^[161]  DSC q. 7, conc. (5, 40A); DN 7.1 865C–868A (CD 1, 194.10–15).

 

^[162]  DSC q. 7, conc. (5, 40A) and DSC q. 7, epilogue (5, 42B–4B). The knowledge of excess is explained in relation to Christ’s knowledge of the rationes aeternae’s infinitude, but applies to all created spirit in principle, as the highest form of cognition, wherein one does not grasp but is grasped by the rationes as an unspeakable experience of Wisdom. It pertains to Christ’s knowledge on earth (in via) and in heaven (in patria), perfectly in Christ, but is possible with other created spirits in accord with the extent of their cooperation with grace and God’s own will. It is also similar to the gift of rapture through special revelation, but such rapture is not habitual, see DSC q. 4, conc. (5, 24B), cf. II Sent d. 23, a. 2, q. 3, conc. (2, 544A–B), where Bonaventure associated Dionysian excessus with Paul’s rapture in contrast with the vision of God in patria, highlighting how DSC has made Christ’s knowledge the model for all human knowledge, even all human experience, while simultaneously integrating Dionysius’ doctrines.

 

^[163]  DN 2.5 641D–644A (CD 1, 128.16–17); DN 2.11 649B (CD 1, 135.14–136.1); DN 5.6 820C–821A (CD 1, 184.17ff).; DN 9.5 912D (CD 1, 210.6–11); DN 9.5 913B (CD 1, 211.10–13). Gilson regards the image of light as  describing the unity secundum rem and infinite multiplicity secundum rationem being its own irradiation, an intrinsic irradiation as ultimately unfitting saying: ‘but the comparison is crude, because no light is its own  irradiation and we  cannot imagine what an intrinsic irradiation would be’. (Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 153). But Gilson’s critique seems to miss the point. Bonaventure’s image is intentionally transgressive and attempts to capture of the spirit of Dionysian progression.

 

^[164]  That is to say, where the plurification of beings often adopts an imagery diminution of participation inversely proportionate to the extent of God’s effect (as the distinction between creatures as similitudes, images, vestiges, and shadows indicates, as representative see DSC q. 4 [5, 24A]; see also Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, 63–68) that diminution of participation according to the distinction of the nobility of a thing known does not result in a relative pre-eminence or order of the divine similitudes since secundum rem, the rationes are God, DSC q. 2, ad. 6 (5, 9b); .I Sent d. 36, a. 2, q. 1, ad. 4 (1, 624B); I Sent I d. 35, a. unic., q. 5, conc. (1, 613AB). See also Hayes, ‘Introduction’, 55. This accords with Dionysius’ multiplication of the proodoi and their effects, wherein even the least effects are effected without any diminution on the part of their cause, and, on the contrary, show the extent of God’s goodness

 

^[165]  DSC q. 2 conc. (5, 9A).

 

^[166]  DSC q. 4 conc. (5, 23B).

 

^[167]  DSC q. 4 conc. (5, 24B).

 

^[168]  DSC q. 3 conc, (5, 14A).

 

^[169]  Manzon counts this light imagery as yet another instance of the ‘voluntaristic framework within which God’s self-irradiation is to be understood’, adding that ‘Subsequently, while the deity is described in terms that resemble those of natural processes, there is nothing compulsory in his expressing forth himself; all is due to his intention’, see ‘According to the Blessed Dionysius’, 337. What Manzon describes is, of course, nothing less than what Dionsysius himself says of God’s ecstatic eros in DN 4.12 through 4.14, especially 4.13 712A–B (CD 1, 159.9–20) with its desirous jealousy and purposeful providence that is also appropriated to divine wisdom.

 

^[170]  DSC q. 3 conc, (5, 14A–B).

 

^[171]  That is, inasmuch as God’s actuality is true potentializing and quasi-first actuality.

 

^[172]  DSC q. 7, epilogue (5, 42B).

 

^[173]  DSC q. 7, epilogue (5, 42B). The ambiguity of the conceived word appears intentional. Indeed, it is finite, even in Christ, but the point of the passage is to say that inner word, by which what creature knows, its cognitum, might become, in a mystical mode of ecstasy—mystical because both the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of the experience are initiatory and hidden—the infinite cognitum of God’s knowledge se ipso, namely, the infinity of Word and the entirety the Word expresses.

 

^[174]  DSC q. 7 (5, 43A–B).

 

^[175]  DSC q. 7 (5, 40A–B), conc.: ‘Differt autem in Christo modus comprehensionis et excessus multipliciter : primo, quia in comprehensivo cognoscens capit cognitum, in excessivo vero cognitum capit cognoscentem.’ The cognitum in in the latter case, in excessive knowing, is the divine wisdom not as making (exemplar factivum) but as expressing of the infinity of things (expemplar expressivum): ‘Christi utroque modo per cognitionem fertur in divinam sapientiam, sed differenter. In ipsam enim, secundum quod est exemplar factivum, fertur comprehendendo, quia illa quae in exemplari ut factivo et dispositivo continentur et repraesentantur finita sunt, ac per hoc et comprehensibilia. In exemplar vero, secundum quod est exemplar expressivum seu repraesentativum , fertur non comprehendendo , sed excedendo; quia, cum in ipso repraesententur infnita, incomprehensibilia sunt, scilicet a substantia finita’. While Bonaventure argues thus of Christ, it is extended to all as the most noble kind of knowledge.

 

^[176]  II Sent d. 18, a. 1, q. 2 conc. (2, 435).

 

^[177]  DN 9.9 916C–D (CD 1, 213.7–20).

 

^[178]  On occasion, Bonaventure does speak of God’s creative act as a ‘general influence’ or ‘general grace’, but it is not a frequent occurrence, see DSC q. 4, conc. (5, 23A) and Breviloquium 5.2 (5, 253B); De septem donis Spiritus Sancti 9.8 (5, 500B)

 

^[179]  Breviloquium 5.1 (5, 252A–253A), but especially this point, that with the infusion or influence of created grace, the habit of deiformity, is also the uncreated gift, whereby the soul both held by and holds God: ‘Rursus, quoniam qui fruitur Deo Deum habet cum gratia, quae sua deiformitate disponit ad Dei fruitionem, datur donum increatum, quod est Spiritus sanctus, quod qui habet habet et Deum. Et quoniam nullus Deum habet, quin ab ipso specialius habeatur; nullus habet et habetur a Deo, quin ipsum praecipue et incomparabiliter diligat et diligatur ab ipso sicut sponsa a sponso; nullus sic diligitur, quin ad aeternam hereditatem adoptetur pro filio: hinc est, quod gratia gratum faciens facit animam templum Dei, sponsam Christi et filiam Patris aeterni’. This passage contributes to the dual presence of God and deiformation, which alongside other elements of Bonaventure’s spirituality and mysticism, of course the conclusion of the Itinerarium and its transformation of the soul into God, amount to what Bettoni regards as the communication to the creature ‘not merely analogous life and perfection, but His (God’s) very life’. (Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, 67–68).

 

^[180]  Breviloquium 5.1 (5, 253A).

 

^[181]  Breviloquium 2.13 (5, 230A–B); 5.1 (5, 252B).

 

^[182]  Mazon, ‘According to Blessed Dionysius’, 348.