The Honor Of God

THE FLESH FLOWERS AGAIN: ST BONAVENTURE AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE RESURRECTION
by
JOHN SAWARD

God is beauty, says Bonaventure, and with his beauty every creature is charged. [2] Many rivers of the tradition flow into this ‘theological aesthetic’. Augustine, Denys, Anselm, Bernard, all merge in the flood, but one current is strongest, and that is the influence of the Poor Man of Assisi, who ‘in beautiful things saw Beauty Himself and followed his Beloved everywhere‘. [3] Like his master, Bonaventure does not want to miss a single gleam of the Bridegroom’s glory. Whichever facet of revelation he contemplates, he finds loveliness. Every page of his writings is dense with aesthetic vocabulary — pulchritudo, species, speciositas, forma, formositas. Bonaventure is a man who has been overwhelmed by the shining richness of God’s Word, uncreated and incarnate. In this Franciscan theology, investigation is inseparable from wonder, speculation from devotion, understanding from humility. [4]

It is no surprise that scholars should have recourse to comparisons with art when they try to describe the works of Bonaventure. They have a geometrical, almost architectural structure reminiscent of some glorious Gothic church. If, as Émile Mâle once said, [5] the cathedral is a hook, doctrine in stone, a hook by Bonaventure is a cathedral, an edifice of interconnected truth, with Christ on the altar as its living centre. Like the men who built Amiens, Chartres and Notre Dame, Bonaventure is not interested in decoration for its own sake. Every pattern in the building has dogmatic meaning. For example, when he arranges entities in threes, it is not because of some fad, but because of the fact that all things hear the trace, image or likeness of their Creator, the Blessed Trinity. [6] Beauty in this theology is not the delightfulness of the dream, but the splendour of the true, the glory of the real. It is the truth’s power of attraction, calling forth wonder, gratitude, self-abandonment The marvellous connections which Bonaventure finds within and between the cosmos and salvation history, in the two ‘books’ of creation and Scripture, are not the work of his own fancy, hut reflect the brilliance of divine Wisdom, which orders all things well, does everything quite beautifully.

This essay is a study of what St Bonaventure has to say about the central ray in revelation’s glory: the beauty of the risen body of Jesus, the glory to which he will configure our lowly bodies at the end of time (cf Phil. 3.21). This ‘aesthetic of the Resurrection’ has, I believe, three benefits. First, it sheds light on that without which there is no Christian faith: ‘If there he no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain‘ (1 Cor. IS. 13-14). By displaying the beautiful coherence of the Resurrection with the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation and the Church, Bonaventure confirms our faith, strengthens our assent to revealed truth. Secondly, Bonaventure’s theology has the power not only to enlighten the intellect, but also to enkindle the affections. It arouses in us both gratitude and wonder, heartfelt gratitude to the incarnate Son of God, who loved us to the end (cf John 13. I), even into the ugliness of death, joyful wonder at his rising refulgent in the flesh . Bonaventure’s Easter preaching fills the listener with the longing to see Christ in all his risen beauty, stirring us out of ourselves into joyful surrender to the Bridegroom-Lamb. Thirdly, Bonaventure offers the late twentieth-century theologian new possibilities tbr the defence and exposition of orthodox faith in the Easter mystery. He helps us see that the spiritualized interpretations of the Resurrection favoured in our own time by Liberal Protestants are not only fallacious, but brutal and ugly, for they consign the material order to the unending foulness of corruption, empty the sacraments of their meaning, and in every way deform the harmony of God’s wise and loving plan for his creatures.

http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/jsaward/fleshflowers.htm