Perceiving God: The Spiritual Senses in Bonaventure’s Mystical Theology

Abstract

This essay examines the distinctive features; unchanging basic elements and changing emphases of Bonaventure’s interpretation of the spiritual senses based on four works selected from different periods of his life and considered significant for the subject. In the first chapter, I analyse the relevant passages of Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Book of Sentences; in the second the De reductione artium ad theologiam; in the third the Breviloquium; and in the fourth the Itinerarium mentis in Deum. The objects of investigation are as follows: the correlation between the acts of spiritual senses and their object; the basis of the hierarchical order of spiritual senses; the relationship between spiritual senses; mental excesses and mystical transit; and the relation to Dionysian mystical theology.