In the long story of the critical relations between Platonic philosophy and Christian faith the name of Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1217–74), the Franciscan minister general, scholastic master and ‘prince of mystics’ (so Leo xiii), stands out. As a part of the renewal of Bonaventuran studies that began in English-speaking scholarship some fifty years ago with the work of people like Zachary Hayes and Ewert Cousins, Rachel Davies's relatively slim volume now takes an important place.

Davies's book is in the line of the aesthetic approach to the Franciscan, perhaps most associated with Hans Urs von Balthasar and the chapter he devoted to Bonaventure in vol. ii of The glory of the Lord (ET 1984). She even gives a rather too-long review of Balthasar's argument for how beauty works in the Franciscan's writings (pp. 16–29). Nevertheless, what I found most suggestive about Davies's account, at least from a speculative point of view, is how it prompts a re-evaluation of Bonaventure's use of the Platonic/Neoplatonic paradigm of exitus and reditus, emanation and consummation. The core of the Platonic aspect of Bonaventure's thought is well expressed in the noted passage from the Collationes in Hexaemaron i.17 that says of Christ, ‘This is the metaphysical center that leads us back and this is the summary of our metaphysics dealing with emanation, exemplarity, and consummation, that is, illumination through spiritual irradiations and return to the Supreme Being.’ Emanation and consummation, the underpinning of the Platonic paradigm, are here viewed through the lens of exemplarity, and not just the exemplarity of the divine ideas taken in themselves (the Platonic perspective), but more specifically through the essential Exemplar, that is, the Word of God, and again not just in his cosmic activity in creation, but precisely in his activity as the God-man Jesus Christ, who suffered, died, was buried and rose again to fulfil his exemplary function for all humans, both individually insofar as they are affected by sin, and collectively as the community of the saved, that is, the Church. In other words, Bonaventure radically revised the Platonic world view through overturning its ideal and a-cosmic tendencies by means of a Christological lens, one that not only privileged the flesh (God became man), but that also specifically elevated the wounded, diminished flesh of the suffering Saviour, gloriously renewed in the Resurrection, and set out as a model for all his followers in the eschatological resurrection of the body. For Bonaventure, this whole aesthetics of salvation is not only present in the sacraments, but also in its re-imaging in the life and work of Francis of Assisi, especially his reception of the stigmata as signifying his exemplary relation to Jesus, the great Exemplar. Davies also argues, suggestively, that this aesthetics of salvation has an important contemporary relevance for current theological discussion on the role of human suffering and diminishment.

Davies's case is set forth in individual chapters analysing Bonaventure's major spiritual writings, especially in chapter iv devoted to the Franciscan's Tree of life. The analysis is carried through in terms of what she calls seven converging themes: Christocentric Trinitarianism, contemplation, luminosity, proportion, virtue, poverty and hiddenness and ecclesiology (pp. 30–2). The properly aesthetical dimension of these analyses is primarily seen in the luminosity and proportion revealed both in created things and in the actions by which Christ draws things back to the ‘fontal plenitude’ of the Trinity. This return process becomes active in humans through the practice of the virtues and the fruitful action of souls on the return path, something which might be called an eighth theme. In concluding, and elsewhere (the book is not without repetition), Davies specifies three aims of her book directed to contemporary concerns: first, to discern whether the Franciscan's anthropology offers believers helpful language for expressing anxieties about bodily diminishment; second, to show how the body participates in the soul's soteriological journey; and third, ‘to articulate a Bonaventurean spirituality able to harness experience of bodily diminishment for redemptive purposes, without glorying suffering’ (p. 172). This is an ambitious agenda, one which, despite the many suggestions made in the volume, would seem to call for more effort to set out in a fully convincing way. What we can say is that the book demonstrates that Bonaventure's view of the role of the body in the aesthetics of salvation is certainly still worth pondering for contemporary theologians.