Franciscans and the Elixir of Life. Zachary A. Matus
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the importance of nature, and in fact comments on it frequently in his works. As a follower of Francis and a mystic himself, Bonaventure was deeply moved by Francis’s connection to the created world. And, as a theologian, Bonaventure linked the encounter with the world to more traditional avenues of thinking about the created universe.
Genesis and Natural Philosophy
The notion that the opening chapters of Genesis constituted a text of natural philosophy is recognizable at the beginning of the scholastic era. Masters of cathedral schools such as William of Conches and Thierry of Chartres considered the cosmology of Genesis from a philosophic standpoint. Peter Abelard, in his commentary on the Hexaemeron, to take another example, begins his gloss of Genesis 1:1 (In the beginning God created heaven and earth) by stating that this passage refers to the creation of the four elements, which are themselves the basis of all material created things.36 Written before the widespread dissemination of the Aristotelian corpus, Abelard’s discussion of Genesis relies on the Platonic cosmology discussed in Timaeus. For example, he considers heaven properly speaking to be composed of fire, rather than of a fifth, immiscible element, and later refers to these initially created elements as hyle, or prime matter.
While the discussion of heaven or aether as fire is cause for some mental gymnastics when discussing the separation of the waters (Gen 1:6), this in itself is a notable point. Rather than spiritualizing the text of Genesis to skip over what appears to be a plain contradiction to Plato’s cosmology, Abelard goes to great length to explain and synthesize.37 This is rather a common refrain in later Franciscan commentaries as well. Like Abelard, who relegates the spiritual value of Genesis to a brief passage at the outset of his work, Franciscan exegetes concentrate almost exclusively on the natural philosophic or cosmological implications of the six-day work. Abelard also understood Genesis as a jumping-off point for discussions of practical philosophic elements. Abelard does not discuss alchemy—the alchemical corpus translated and adapted from Muslim scholars were not yet fully diffused in Latin Christendom—but Abelard does connect the six-day work to the practice of astrology.38 This leap from biblical to philosophical is made natural by Abelard’s offhand comment that Moses, according to tradition the author of Genesis, learned astronomy among the Egyptians.39 The implication of such a comment is that Moses knew full well he was writing a philosophical text when he penned Genesis and intended it to be understood precisely in the way Abelard wrote about it.
Latin Christians inserted Genesis into discussions of alchemy almost as soon as they began to compose original treatises. In the 1257 Liber seceretorum alchimie, Constantine of Pisa (or the master who taught him) took pains to adapt the Neoplatonic heritage of alchemy to the manifest reality of the truth of Genesis.40 Though not a clerical author per se, Constantine is pressed to make Genesis present in his work. As the word of God, the book of Genesis presented an authoritative view of the world. This view in turn colonized and rewrought surviving Neoplatonic and Aristotelian theories.
Genesis, like any text, derived its meaning as much from the context in which it was read as from its content. Among Franciscan scholastics the Hexaemeron was certainly a font of spiritual wisdom, but such wisdom came from meditation on the nature of the material world described therein. Just as was the case in the meditations of Francis, spiritual value flowed from meditation on the material. The physics of creation was not an ancillary aspect of Genesis. Rather, the nature of the material world undergirded spiritual assumptions and religious truths. Assumptions about the physical composition of the world were imbricated with assumptions about God, and humanity’s relationship to Him. Neither the physical nor the spiritual could sidestep the other.
Bonaventure’s Book of the World
A century after Peter Abelard, Bonaventure approached the story of Genesis in a rather different manner in his Breviloquium. Bonaventure composed the Breviloquium the year (1257) he left his academic post at the University of Paris to take on the role of Minister General of the Franciscan Order. Unlike the Collationes in Hexaemeron, which approaches creation almost entirely symbolically, the Breviloquium addresses scripture as “partly plain speech, partly mystical (partim plana verba, partim mystica).”41 Like the Summa produced by Aquinas and other like texts spawned by Bonaventure’s contemporaries in the universities, Bonaventure idealized the Breviloquium as an introductory theological text that was, as Dominic Monti has said, a “coherent synthesis” of critical theological issues. Yet, as a text that achieved (and not just aspired to) brevity and that used deductive logic, the Breviloquium was not typical of the theological treatises of its era. Bonaventure forewent the quaestio method he employed in his Sentence Commentary, and penned instead a cogent and authoritative treatise that invited neither debate nor argument.42
While the Breviloquium is not a work of exegesis per se, the authority of Bonaventure’s authorial voice emerges from his assumption that he is presenting the essential wisdom of Christian scripture, rather than engaging in a kind of specific philosophical or theological inquiry. Scripture, Bonaventure points out in his prologue, is not restricted (coarctatus) by reason or philosophical condition. Rather, it deals with every aspect of the universe pertinent to salvation.43 While modern readers might see salvation as a limiting factor to philosophical discussions, this was not the case among Bonaventure’s contemporaries—at least in theory. Bonaventure elsewhere was quite caustic in regard to philosophical speculation, especially Aristotelian philosophical speculation, which had no spiritual aims, though he was happy to employ Aristotelian logic and principles when useful.
Fortunately for this discussion, the creation of the physical world did pertain to salvation, and hence makes up the subject of the second part of the Breviloquium. After dealing succinctly with any possible opinions contrary to the notion that God made the universe from nothing (an argument against Aristotle’s claim that the cosmos was eternal), Bonaventure proceeds to outline the six days, listing the things created on each (day 1, light; day 2, firmament; day 3, separation of the waters to make land; day 4, heaven adorned with celestial bodies; day 5, air and water filled with birds and fish respectively; day 6, the land gets animals and human beings). Bonaventure is keen to note that the six days allow for many groupings of threes, which he regards as a sign of the Trinity.44 The religious symbolism, however, does not detract from his focus on the physical description of the cosmos, but rather relies on it. “The creation of the world is like a kind of book, in which the Trinity, its artificer, shines forth, is represented, and is read.”45 Bonaventure regards the world not merely as a creation to be praised, but as a manifestation of God.46
In the Breviloquium, Bonaventure reads the book of the world quite literally. Having detailed the six days, Bonaventure describes the present world schematically, by creating a series of subdivisions. The first division is between the heavenly (caelesti) and the terrestrial (elementari). Heaven he subdivides into, not surprisingly, “three principal (tres principales)” categories, the empyrean, the crystalline, and the firmament. This does not include the starry heaven, which is somewhat awkwardly tacked on to the “principal” categories, until he promptly divides it into seven parts for the seven planets. Therefore, when Bonaventure later states that the world is perfectly ordered, part of his argument rests on the implicit correspondence between significant Christian numbers and the observable world. Bonaventure also notes the traditional four elements as terrestrial spheres. His discussion of the elements is interesting, for even though the elements are changeable and prone to degradation, Bonaventure notes that they too are part of the perfect order as they allow for a diversity of forms to exist.47
Bonaventure is particularly concerned about the relationship between heaven and earth, which he understands to be mediated by the planets. Therefore, like Peter Abelard before him, Bonaventure uses his reading of Genesis to make some statements about astrology. While Bonaventure objects to the concept of fate, he does hold that the seven planets correspond to the three heavens and the four elements.48 The effect of celestial bodies on the terrestrial world is his focus here. Celestial influences, according to Bonaventure, affect “the production of generable and of corruptible things, such as minerals, plants, sentient creatures and human beings.”49 The relationship