If Bonaventure is the seed of Modernity, what can we learn from Bonaventure about how Modernity may save the Christian life?

On Bonaventure Day, A Sketch Of A Franciscan Theology Of Modernity

By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Bonaventure, one of the Doctors of the Church I’m very interested in at the moment.

Pope Benedict XVI was a fan of Bonaventure; his habilitation (the diploma that qualified him for full professorship) was on Bonaventure. I am still looking for good reading material on Bonaventure (feel free to chime in in the comments). Benedict did three great homilies on Bonaventure (one, two, three). Today News.va did a very relaxing musical podcast on Bonaventure.

According to Benedict, Bonaventure might be the man we need to “blame” for Modernity:

“Opera Christi non deficiunt, sed proficiunt”: Christ’s works do not go backwards, they do not fail but progress, the Saint said in his letter De Tribus Quaestionibus. Thus St Bonaventure explicitly formulates the idea of progress and this is an innovation in comparison with the Fathers of the Church and the majority of his contemporaries. For St Bonaventure Christ was no longer the end of history, as he was for the Fathers of the Church, but rather its centre; history does not end with Christ but begins a new period. The following is another consequence: until that moment the idea that the Fathers of the Church were the absolute summit of theology predominated, all successive generations could only be their disciples. St Bonaventure also recognized the Fathers as teachers for ever, but the phenomenon of St Francis assured him that the riches of Christ’s word are inexhaustible and that new light could also appear to the new generations. The oneness of Christ also guarantees newness and renewal in all the periods of history.

For Bonaventure, the life of St Francis and the phenomenon of Franciscan life, which differed from the previous modes of monastic life, showed that Progress was not only possible, but guided by Divine Providence. For Benedict, this is apparently the first time that such an idea of Progress makes its decisive entry into the life of the Church and the intellectual life of the West writ large.

This actually intersects with one of my key interests, as readers will know, of “reconciling” Modernity and Christianity.

My overall thesis about Modernity could be stated as such: the phenomenon of Modernity grows out of, and from, a growing awareness of human fallibility or, in Christian terms, of original sin. The three most prominent achievements of modernity–the scientific method, liberal democracy and the free enterprise system–all stem from the recognition of failure; respectively the failure to understand the ultimate causes of things, the failure to wield power without corruption, and the failure of central planning.

If this is true, then, the failure of Modernity occurs when Modernity forgets itself; when Modern Man forgets that he can only be Modern Man when he is aware of his own fallibility, he becomes tempted to utopianism; to coin a phrase, human fallibility becomes a bug, not a feature, and must be fixed–at all costs–, rather than understood and managed.

If Bonaventure is the seed of Modernity, what can we learn from Bonaventure about how Modernity may save the Christian life?

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