The Weight of Love is a very able treatment of Bonaventure's basic psychology of affectus and its relation to his understanding of the mystical experience of St. Francis.
In the “Introduction,” Davis begins with the astounding story from Bonaventure's Life of Francis (6.4) in which Francis offers a corpse as a paradigm of spiritual practice. The episode is expressive of Davis's own sense for the relationship of affective devotion and the body in Bonaventure's understanding, but, as he states, his purpose is broader. It is nothing less than to relate such an example of affective devotion to the full range of Bonaventure's philosophy and theology of affectus. Davis cannot, in such a short book, give a comprehensive account of affectus, but he offers a useful trajectory in the subsequent chapters. Chapters 1–3 could be said to display in turn Bonaventure's Dionysian, Augustinian, and Aristotelian understanding of affectus. Chapter 4 uses this material to understand affectus in the Itinerarium, and chapter 5 brings us to the relationship of affectus and the body in the Legenda maior.
Chapter 1, “The Seraphic Doctrine: Love and Knowledge in the Dionysian Hierarchy,” begins by looking at the figure of the seraph in Bonaventure's Dionysian-inspired sources. Especially important is the move of medieval Christian authors to regard Dionysius's “unknowing” as an affective state. This in turn raises the question of the relationship of the speculative and the affective. There is no doubt that, most obviously in the Itinerarium, Bonaventure privileges the affective, but Davis warns against reading this in an anti-intellectual way as well as against interpreting affectus as a different kind of cognition. He helpfully appeals to the distinction in De scientia Christi, questions 6 and 7, between comprehensive knowledge of the creative exemplar and ecstatic knowledge of the expressive exemplar: the key difference is between knowing as grasping and knowing as being grasped.
Chapter 2, “Affect, Cognition, and the Natural Motion of the Will,” looks at conscience and synderesis, especially as defined in the Sentences commentary and the Breviloquium, and culminates in the description of synderesis as the apex mentis that tends toward the Good not by deliberation but by its natural weight. Chapter 3, “Elemental Motion and the Force of Union,” looks at how the affectus moves. Aristotle's understanding of movement among the elements (natural inclination to a place) is important here: the best comparison of the motion of the affectus is not the self-motion of the will but the ascent that occurs through the fire of charity, which purifies the soul of the loves that drag it away from its natural place.
In chapter 4, “Hierarchy and Excess in the Itinerarium,” Davis sets himself a hard task: to see the affective motion he has previously described as pertaining to the natural ordering of both creation and the soul. It is not only in the transitus of Itinerarium 7 that we see the privileging of the affective, but throughout the text. There are two prongs of this argument. First, Davis sees the whole of the Itinerarium as framed by desire. Desire is always moved by and to the highest Good; in Davis's view, this suggests that fundamental to human nature is a movement toward grace. Second, the six stages of the raising of the mind to God are not self-contained but ecstatic: for example, the exteriority of chapter 2 yields to the interiority of chapter 3, and the interiority of the soul transformed by grace in chapter 4 is made ecstatic in its relationship to Christ. Davis makes the interesting argument that what Gilson called Bonaventure's “universal analogy” of vestige, image, and likeness should be read as a “universal anagogy,” for the point is that the creature is in various ways ordered or reduced to God. Here I would note that, without claiming that any level of the Itinerarium is entirely self-standing, the real grounds for intelligibility in any level are proper to it. There may be more possibility of rest in the various speculations of the Itinerarium than Davis's ecstatic interpretation allows.
Chapter 5, “The Exemplary Bodies of the Legenda Maior,” argues that Bonaventure sees the transitus of mystical experience as involving not only the death of the intellect but the death of the will as well and ultimately death as expressed in the body. Looking at Bonaventure's general doctrine of the will, we see that its fulfillment—in the highest exercise of the liberum arbitrium—is joined to the state of being wholly moved by the soul's natural desire for God. This ecstatic movement Davis then finds in the Legenda maior, notably in Francis's compassion (a surrender to affective devotion), his attachment to animals (who are naturally attracted to his love), and his long dying (in which the complete surrender of his will through his desire is manifest in his body).
Davis does a very good job of showing the tensions that surround Bonaventure's understanding of affectus. It is not enough to say, for example, that Bonaventure gives preference to love over knowledge. The important difference is not between two powers of the soul but between the motion of grasping and the motion of being grasped. The turn to the body emphasizes this point: while surely the choice of love (an act of the will) is critical, the result is an actual work in which the person is literally, bodily conformed to the Beloved, entirely expressive of him. Davis's exploration of affectus should help to guide conversations about the character of Bonaventure's mysticism and theology—and philosophy.
