The first level of St. Bonaventure’s transcendent Aesthetics: Contemplating God as the pure, primary Being

Résumé

St. Bonaventure asserts that man can ascend contemplatively to God through three phases. The first one is to contemplate God outside us by appreciating the corporeal things as vestiges of the deity: this is the “immanent” phase of Bonaventure’s Aesthetics, framed by the first and second stages of contemplation of God. The second phase consists of entering into our soul, as a spiritual image of God: this intermediate phase, in which we can contemplate God inside ourselves by his image in our soul, constitutes the Seraphic’s “introspective” Aesthetics, with the third and fourth stages of contemplation of God. In the third phase, man, transcending the vestiges in objects and the image of the deity in his soul, elevates himself to God, contemplating him as the spiritual and eternal First Principle: that third phase constitutes the Bonaventure’s “transcendent” Aesthetics, in which man can contemplate God considering his essential attributes (fifth stage) and his personal properties (sixth stage). The current article aims to highlight this fifth stage of Bonaventure’s Aesthetics. To achieve this goal, we analyze step by step the reasoning that, to prove his thesis, our author exposes in Chapter 5 of his Itinerarium mentis in Deum.