Hans Boersma’s 2018 book Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition surveys a wide range of perspectives from the tradition as Boersma develops his own theology of the beatific vision and its foretastes in this life. Boersma unfolds his argument carefully and with sensitivity to his varied sources, but his interpretation of one figure, Bonaventure, requires more nuance, which I seek to provide here. Boersma’s assessment of Bonaventure focuses on only one of the latter’s works, the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (Journey of the Mind to God), which provides instructions for a mystical ascent through created things to a final experience of God in which the will is united with God in love, but the intellect remains excluded in darkness. Boersma critiques this account of mystical union, since in his view the beatific vision produces a union of intellect and will that he thinks earthly prefigurations of that vision must also reflect.Footnote 1
In this paper, I analyse Boersma’s assessment of Bonaventure in light of Bonaventure’s other works, particularly the Commentary on the Gospel of John. That commentary provides context to explain why Bonaventure divides the intellect from the will in the contemplative vision of the Itinerarium, and it shows that Bonaventure’s understanding of the beatific vision itself parallels Boersma’s closely. Based on this text, I argue that Boersma’s real objection to Bonaventure lies not in how the two conceive the relation between intellect and will, but in how they understand the relationship between this-worldly vision of God and eschatological vision. Bonaventure’s view is that the intellect and will are damaged through sin and perfected by virtue towards the goal of the beatific vision, but that the theological virtues perfect the two faculties in different ways. In many ways, Bonaventure and Boersma are much closer than the latter’s reading implies, as I will show in this paper; but the differences between Bonaventure’s account of mystical union and Boersma’s expectation challenge Boersma’s approach to his sources, suggesting that a more generous view of the theologians and mystics of the past may be necessary.
Boersma’s critique
Boersma’s argument in Seeing God unpacks how his theology of sacramental participation (most fully laid out in his 2011 work, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry) applies to the doctrine of the beatific vision, which he argues has received too short shrift in modern thought.Footnote 2 Boersma’s argument, which he unpacks as he considers his selection of historical thinkers, is that the vision of God is a matter of apprenticeship, in which partial and fleeting experiences of God in this life work as preparation for how God will be seen in eternity.Footnote 3 Based on this interpretive framework, Boersma’s analyses of past theologians sometimes obscure the difference between accounts of the experience of God in the present life and descriptions of that experience in eternity; his assessment of Bonaventure is particularly shaped by this approach.
Boersma offers a sensitive and careful account of the ending of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium, correctly explaining how, in that text, the soul’s journey to God in and through created things culminates in a Dionysian experience of intellectual darkness in which the soul, united with the crucified Christ in love, feels but does not know God. Throughout the Itinerarium ‘it is the will’s desire that properly prepares one for the journey, and it is the affections at the summit of the mind … that in the end carry one into God’, Boersma explains.Footnote 4 But he critiques Bonaventure’s view of the intellect and will, asking, ‘Why is the intellect stymied in its upward thrust by the encounter of the cross, while desire can move on without such self-denial?’Footnote 5 Bonaventure seems to think that ‘the affections are able to bypass … the renunciation of the cross’, but the intellect is trapped in that renunciation.Footnote 6 Boersma focuses his critique of Bonaventure on what he sees as this unjustified separation of intellect and will, which in his view must be completely unified in the vision of God.
On a broad level, Boersma’s critique suffers from a lack of clarity about the scope of the Itinerarium’s vision: one has to probe his words very closely to find any hint that this might not be Bonaventure’s final word on the beatific vision. Michael Root has noted this ambiguity in his response to Seeing God, pointing out that Boersma ‘begs the question whether the closing sections of the Itinerarium are about the heavenly beatific vision’, and that Bonaventure’s commentaries on the Sentences say that God is seen substantially and immediately in heaven, which may come as a surprise to the reader of Seeing God.Footnote 7 As we will see later, Boersma’s critique of Bonaventure has some weight, even if it applies only to the pre-eschatological vision of God. However, Boersma is remiss in failing to acknowledge that Bonaventure clearly states that the heavenly reward ‘consists in the vision, enjoyment, and possession of the one highest good, namely, God, whom the blessed shall behold … plainly and without a veil’, with no distinction between intellect and will.Footnote 8 Boersma’s argument includes no trace of this position, treating Bonaventure’s account of the pre-eschatological life of prayer as his only word related to the beatific vision. This omission in Boersma’s presentation of Bonaventure obscures, to some extent, the real focus of their disagreement.
Nevertheless, Boersma’s dissection of the Itinerarium poses some meaningful questions to Bonaventure’s view of mystical union with God. If Boersma is correct in his operating principle that the vision available in this life is a foretaste of and preparation for the one that will be enjoyed fully in the next, he has a point in asking why the two differ so dramatically for Bonaventure.Footnote 9 ‘The beatific vision – as well as ecstatic raptures that adumbrate this vision – cannot be an experience in which either knowledge or love takes the lead’, Boersma argues, for ‘if even momentarily one of the two were left behind, the ecstatic experience could hardly end up being a participation in the knowledge and love of God’.Footnote 10 For all experiences of God, even this-worldly ones, Boersma thinks that ‘prioritizing between intellect and will is no longer possible and no longer has any meaning in the mystery of the deifying union with Christ’.Footnote 11 Bonaventure agrees with Boersma partially, but not fully, on this point: to understand how, we must explore Bonaventure’s understanding of how the faculties of intellect and will operate in sin, in grace and in glory. This exploration shows that the main disagreement between Bonaventure and Boersma is not primarily about the will and intellect, but about the difference between the present life and the life of heaven.
Grace and glory in Bonaventure
The framework in Bonaventure that responds to Boersma’s critique can be found most fully in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, a work begun very early in his career and likely completed around 1257.Footnote 12 One of the themes that comes to the fore in Bonaventure’s lengthy exposition of the Gospel is the difference between the present time, which he calls the time of grace, and the eschatological time of glory. As he unpacks this difference, Bonaventure demonstrates why the intellect and will behave the way that they do in the Itinerarium, allowing us to place Boersma’s critiques in context. Bonaventure’s claim that eschatological glory is ‘as fruit to the time of grace’, along with his understanding of how faith perfects the intellect and love perfects the will, show that Bonaventure’s prioritisation of will over intellect in the Itinerarium not only fits within his theological framework, but addresses some issues that Boersma fails to consider.
The structure of the different times in the divine economy underlies much of the Commentary on John. Bonaventure claims that the time of the natural man, governed by the law, is followed by the time of grace and then the time of glory, and that ‘the time of grace is like fruit with respect to the Mosaic Law’, while ‘the time of glory is like fruit with regard to the time of grace’.Footnote 13 The law is ordered to the coming of Christ, and grace and glory both depend on Christ, but in different ways: the saints ‘draw from Christ … the life of grace and the life of glory’.Footnote 14 Grace represents the fulfilment of the law and the elevation of nature, a state in which God is present chiefly by his effects, rather than immediately.Footnote 15 In this time, the Christian’s desire for God is like the ‘thirst of a person who has something, that they may have more’.Footnote 16 There is some knowledge of God, but not enough to satisfy desire. In glory, by contrast, the saints desire God in the way of ‘a person who has something completely, that he may continue to have it’.Footnote 17 This full and eternal possession of God comes along with the elevation of soul and body, the experience of perfect freedom and the enjoyment of full vision.
If Boersma’s critique of the Itinerarium were taken as a critique specifically of Bonaventure’s doctrine of the beatific vision, Bonaventure’s account of the full vision of God in glory would fully resolve Boersma’s objections. Where in the Itinerarium’s mystical vision in this life ‘all intellectual activities must be given up, and our deepest and total affection must be directed to God and transformed into God’, the Commentary on John makes it clear that the life of glory is entirely different.Footnote 18 Glory is characterised not by a contrast between intellectual darkness and loving ecstasy, but by intellectual vision in particular: ‘glory consists in the vision of the Divinity that we will see in the heavenly homeland’.Footnote 19 This vision includes love, but ‘greater emphasis should be placed on vision than on love, since vision distinguishes what pertains to the heavenly homeland from what is on the journey whereas love does not’.Footnote 20 Here Bonaventure not only does not separate intellect and will in the way Boersma objects to, he even betrays the same inclination to make vision more basic than love that Boersma himself confesses he has.Footnote 21 But Boersma’s complaint is not just that Bonaventure’s view of the beatific vision separates the intellect and the will (even though it would be possible to read Seeing God this way). Boersma objects to the faculties operating differently in the Itinerarium’s mystical vision than they should in the time of glory, arguing that they should behave in the same way at both times. To understand the disagreement here, we have to see how Bonaventure thinks the intellect and will are damaged by sin and elevated and perfected in grace, in order to be transformed in glory.
For Bonaventure as for Boersma, the will and the intellect are the two main parts of the rational soul: the intellect’s power is to know, and the will’s is to desire, that is, to love.Footnote 22 Bonaventure spells out how these two natural faculties are differently damaged by sin. Sin ‘proceeds from the will as its source, and resides in the will as its proper subject’, turning the appetites from the one true Good to lesser created things, and making the soul prioritise its own wellbeing over anything else.Footnote 23 Sin corrupts the intellect, on the other hand, with ‘knowledge, appealing to the rational power’.Footnote 24 The corruption of the intellect essentially means, for Bonaventure, that the intellect’s ability to reason correctly is damaged, choosing its own, selfish way rather than the truth that it was designed to perceive.Footnote 25
Grace remedies these two disorders, but not in a direct way. The theological virtues of faith and love (faith for the intellect and love for the will) correct the faculties’ disorder, but in the time of grace, the virtues do not make the faculties work perfectly. ‘To be elevated above oneself, that is what pertains to nature exalted by grace’, Bonaventure says, but this is not the full elevation that will be given in glory.Footnote 26 The will and intellect are reordered and elevated in grace by having their disorders thwarted before right order can be implemented. Faith and love enact this chastening, in a sense putting to death the faculties themselves, in order to make possible the perfect order that the faculties will reach in the life of glory.Footnote 27
The virtue of faith perfects the intellect, Bonaventure believes, by taking captive the intellect’s selfish desire for knowledge. In Bonaventure’s reading, Jesus’ title ‘light of the world’ (John 8:12) means that ‘the person who follows [Christ], through the captivity of intellect … will have the light of life, through the vision of divine glory’.Footnote 28 The promised vision of glory will be granted in the eschaton, not in the present life: ‘now we walk in faith, but then we will have comprehension by sight. But in the present the light is not comprehended, but is obscured by the flesh’.Footnote 29 While the intellect at present has its vision obscured, faith takes it captive by requiring the Christian to trust, not her own perception, but the authority of Scripture and divine truth, even when those disagree with what appears to sinful reason to be true.Footnote 30
This means that faith, in a sense, blinds the intellect by requiring it to consent to what is not clear to it; but Bonaventure argues that this still elevates the intellect above its natural state by allowing the intellect to conform to truths, like the Trinity, that it cannot access without grace.Footnote 31 ‘Faith is a journey into knowledge’, Bonaventure says, but the knowledge of faith is a subversion, not the realisation, of full sight.Footnote 32 The heights that the intellect can reach in this life – the Itinerarium’s reflection on how ‘in Christ there is personal union together with a trinity of substances and a duality of natures’Footnote 33 – are still far distant from the complete vision of God for which the intellect is destined. When the intellect is humbled in faith’s blindness, it undergoes purgation that prepares it to be fulfilled in the beatific vision, where the intellect is exercised to the fullest.
Just as faith blinds the intellect to chasten its selfish search for knowledge, love corrects the will by thwarting its natural desire to preserve the soul’s life. Love’s ability to turn the will away from its appetite for self-preservation is seen most fully in Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane: Christ’s human desire to avoid pain and preserve his life was a natural and sinless one, Bonaventure explains, but he still had to overcome that desire in order to assent to death on the cross out of love for the human race.Footnote 34 In sinful humans, though, the natural desire for self-preservation is further twisted by sin, and the Christian needs love to enable her to undergo poverty, chastity, fasting and suffering for the sake of Christ. Love turns the soul from carnal desires towards eternal ones, which brings to light the soul’s and the world’s sin and requires the soul to suffer as it is freed from its selfish bent. These sufferings, for Bonaventure, are undergone in sympathy with Christ: either the Christian mourns her sins because they caused Christ’s sufferings, or she imitates Christ by enduring bodily suffering.Footnote 35 Love’s correction of the will reaches its peak when ‘a person lay[s] down his life for Christ’.Footnote 36 Union with Christ enables the Christian to suffer with him, but ‘suffering is not good unless it is undergone willingly’.Footnote 37 Thus in the life of grace, the theological virtue of love empowers the will to overcome its disorder and subjugate its natural desires, subordinating everything to the highest desire: the desire for God. Love wounds the will, thwarting its natural appetite to avoid suffering, so that the soul can reach glory and have its life perfectly preserved in the perfect love of God.
Bonaventure’s account of how love purifies the will through suffering interfaces with his understanding of mystical vision as it appears in the ending of the Itinerarium, answering one of Boersma’s objections directly. In the Commentary on John, Bonaventure describes four kinds of vision of God: God can be seen through his effects (1) before sin or (2) in a state of sin, or he can be seen as he is either (3) ‘in clarity’ or (4) ‘in darkness’.Footnote 38 Christ and the saints in heaven know God in clarity, but knowing God in darkness belongs to ‘those who contemplate sublime matters and in whose contemplation no creaturely image plays a part. And then these individuals more truly feel than know’.Footnote 39 The experience of God in glory ‘is begun in contemplatives [… and] brought to consummation in the risen’, Bonaventure explains.Footnote 40 These descriptions are clearly reflected in the union reached at the end of the Itinerarium.
But where Boersma objected that in the Itinerarium’s mystical ecstasy, ‘the affections are able to bypass … renunciation’, and the will ‘does not need to undergo the purging of the cross’, in fact Bonaventure thinks that the will has already undergone profound renunciation and purification before reaching union.Footnote 41 The contemplative who is able to ‘transcend not only the sensible world but the soul itself’ in the ecstatic darkness at the end of the Itinerarium must first reach a point where she ‘may then rest with Christ in the tomb, as one dead to the outer world’.Footnote 42 This is a state of perfect purgation: the will’s natural and selfishly perverted orientation to the outer world and its desire to preserve its own life are both completely gone as the soul lies insensate and dead with Christ. By the end of the Itinerarium, the will has experienced a fuller purgation than the intellect has.
Assessing the debate
From Boersma’s critique in Seeing God, it appears as though his main objection to Bonaventure’s view of union with God is to the idea that the will and the intellect experience the vision of God differently. The plausibility of this objection depends heavily on Boersma’s driving principle that the future beatific vision and ‘ecstatic raptures that adumbrate this vision’ in this life must operate according to the same logic.Footnote 43 Bonaventure’s account of the beatific vision outside the Itinerarium satisfies all Boersma’s desire for the will and intellect to be completely united in experiencing the vision of God, even though Boersma does not explore this agreement. However, based on our consideration of Bonaventure’s wider theology here, the crux of Boersma’s problem with Bonaventure is not Bonaventure’s treatment of will and intellect full stop, but the difference Bonaventure sees between how the will and intellect function in grace, and how they function in glory. As we have seen, Bonaventure explains this difference based on the fact that sin damages each faculty in a different way, and so the faculties differ as well in how grace purifies them towards their restoration and elevation in glory. But we can probe further, as I will do in the rest of this paper, into how Bonaventure and Boersma present their respective positions on the matter, and which perspective seems in the end more plausible.
Boersma’s disagreement with Bonaventure rests on two pillars: Boersma’s explanation for how the will and intellect are united in the beatific vision, and his apprenticeship model of said vision. Boersma’s defence of the unity of the faculties depends on his understanding of deification, which he alludes to but does not thoroughly explore in this work. His thickest discussion of deification is found in a few paragraphs of his concluding chapter, where he explains that ‘God’s pedagogy … transforms us into the divine light’, a transformation in which ‘we are ontologically changed so as to become more like God in Christ’.Footnote 44 This ontological change makes us incorruptible and immortal, ‘participating in divine glory and excellence’ as ‘we are transformed into the likeness of the object of our vision’.Footnote 45 The logic of being transformed into the object of our vision is what governs Boersma’s argument, against Bonaventure, that the faculties must be united in the vision of God: ‘because knowledge and love are one in God … they are united also in the deified believer’, Boersma thinks.Footnote 46 Divine simplicity effects something like simplicity in the soul of the one seeing God. This argument would require elaboration to show the implications and limits of what Boersma is arguing here, but the principle is clear from the brief explanations he provides.Footnote 47
The second pillar of Boersma’s critique of Bonaventure is the parallelism that he thinks is necessary between the present vision of God and eschatological vision. ‘Union with Christ constitutes the movement from this-worldly life into an eschatological mode of existence’, Boersma explains, and so ‘it is impossible for the one faculty to precede the other’ in that union.Footnote 48 The will cannot have union with Christ in this life before the intellect does, because that union, at any time, takes place in the eschatological space in which the faculties can only be fully united. Any vision of God available in this life comes, Boersma thinks, from the fact that the beatific vision is ‘not just … our goal but also … the sacramental end that, in some ways, is already present in our lives’.Footnote 49 This is the pivotal claim in his critique of Bonaventure: the Itinerarium, with its separation between intellect and will, cannot be a proper description of mystical union with God, because mystical union with God can only be a sharing in the beatific vision and its union between intellect and will.
In this paper I have laid out a great deal of context for the Itinerarium that Boersma does not engage, context that, I argue, lends some plausibility to Bonaventure’s claim that the intellect and the will do not behave in the same way in mystical union in this life as they do in the beatific vision. Bonaventure’s other works present a clear structure of how the two faculties, will and intellect, are damaged by sin, repaired and chastened by the theological virtues of love and faith, and eventually brought to full operation and unity in the beatific vision. This structure attends much more closely to the logic of the faculties than Boersma can, in the limited space he allots to the question in Seeing God. It seems plausible, even within Boersma’s understanding of the beatific vision, that the two faculties, differently affected by sin, would face distinct challenges in approaching the vision of God in the present life, such that they cannot be unified in that vision until they are perfected in the eschaton. The time of glory will bear the fruit of the time of grace, but that fruit is only brought forth through purgative union with Christ’s sufferings as well as with his divinity.
But granting this view of the faculties, Boersma still has a point: why would Bonaventure say that the will can reach union with God in the present at all? As we saw, Boersma’s objection that the will in the Itinerarium is united to God without purgation does not obtain; but we can flip the question and ask, not why the will is less purged than the intellect, but rather why the will of the contemplative can be so completely purged in this life that it can be united with God, while the intellect cannot. ‘Vision distinguishes what pertains to the heavenly homeland from what is on the journey, whereas love does not’, Bonaventure claims, but he does not say why the love of glory can also be present in grace.Footnote 50 He simply states it as a fact.
I posit that this is because Bonaventure’s account of the will’s union with God is derived, not from logic and argument, but from his reading of his tradition. Boersma implies that Bonaventure’s ‘voluntarism’ is native to him, correctly pointing out that Bonaventure’s Dionysian mysticism amends Pseudo-Dionysius’ position: ‘Dionysius did not suggest that the affections could enter the one place from which the intellect is barred.’Footnote 51 But Dionysius is not Bonaventure’s only authority in the Itinerarium. The text itself is inspired by Francis’ vision of ‘the winged Seraph in the form of the Crucified’, a vision that, according to Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis, revealed to the saint that ‘he was to be wholly transformed into the likeness of Christ Crucified … by enkindling of heart’.Footnote 52 The Itinerarium combines Dionysian darkness with Franciscan fire of the heart in the mystical experience of feeling more truly than knowing. Bonaventure thinks contemplatives can attain union with God in love, not because he thinks the logic of the faculties and the virtues demand it, but because this is what he believes the lived experiences of the saints bear witness to.
This question about tradition and experience directs our attention to a methodological oddity in Seeing God: to a significant degree, Boersma elides the distinction between criticising a theological argument, and critiquing a mystical experience. We have seen this elision in Boersma’s treatment of Bonaventure, where he concludes that the Itinerarium’s theology of the will and intellect is wrong, but he does not address what that conclusion could mean for those in Bonaventure’s tradition who might believe they have had the experience of God in the darkness of love that Bonaventure describes. This methodological problem appears even more clearly in the chapter of Seeing God prior to the one I have been considering.
In that section, Boersma compares Symeon the New Theologian and John of the Cross in light of his apprenticeship model of the beatific vision, determining that Symeon’s vision of God in the light of glory is more correct than John’s account of the dark night. He assesses the two texts almost as pure theological arguments, writing that ‘for Symeon, the insistence on seeing the light of Christ stems directly from his conviction that the real presence of the eschatological kingdom of light pervades the lives of believers already today’, but ‘John’s sharp distinction between mystical union … and beatific vision … prevented him from treating the former as a genuine pledge of the latter’.Footnote 53 Despite Boersma’s sensitive comparison of the two sources, and even despite his acknowledgement that ‘it was the aim of John’s spiritual direction to lead every one of his readers into the dark night of the soul’, Boersma fails to address the knotty implications that come along with theologically critiquing not just an argument, but an experience.Footnote 54 Symeon didn't insist on seeing the light of Christ just because he was convicted of a theological principle, but because he had experienced that vision; and John describes the dark night, not just to drive home the difference between mystical union and the beatific vision, but because of his experience of the dark night and its fruit.
I am not suggesting here that we cannot theologically critique mystical experiences, nor that the theologians who had or relayed these experiences were not themselves performing careful theological work as they analysed and synthesised what these experiences meant. But I think it is a loss that Boersma only tackles the theological side, without acknowledging that his claims must affect how we think of those experiences themselves. If the dark night of the soul doesn't correspond to a right theology of the beatific vision, does that mean the dark night doesn't exist; and what would that mean for those who believe themselves to have experienced it? Did Symeon see the face of God in Christ because he believed in the presence of the eschaton in the present, or did he come to that belief because of his vision of God in Christ? Would his view of the eschaton have changed if he had undergone his own dark night of the soul? And, returning to Bonaventure, if the will cannot, as Boersma argues, have loving union with God without the intellect, does this mean the saints who think they have experienced that loving union are deluded? Boersma fails to answer or even ask any of these questions, leaving unavoidable confusion in how his assessments of past theologians are to be applied for the church in the present.
Conclusion
My goal in this paper has been not necessarily to defend Bonaventure’s position on the will, but rather to show that his position is stronger than Boersma allows it to be in Seeing God. The instructions for prayer given in the Itinerarium, which Boersma discusses as an isolated text, have to be contextualised within Bonaventure’s entire theology of the will and the intellect and their respective damage under sin, purification under grace and perfection in the beatific vision. Boersma poses some significant questions to Bonaventure, particularly why in this life the will might be able to reach an experience of God that the intellect cannot. But to more convincingly critique Bonaventure’s position, Boersma would have to do several things. First, he would have to consider how and why Bonaventure agrees with him on most points about the beatific vision, but crucially disagrees on whether the will can have access to God in this life that the intellect does not. Second, Boersma would have to pay more attention to the specific logic of the faculties of intellect and will in order to give a more careful explanation of why divine simplicity requires the faculties to be united in the vision of God. And third, Boersma would have to grapple seriously with how actual mystical experience, both personal and received from the tradition, shapes the texts he analyses in Seeing God. Without these three methods of approach, Boersma’s analysis of Bonaventure presents some important points, but ultimately fails to respond convincingly to Bonaventure’s position.
