Seeking ecstasy: St. Bonaventure's epistemology

The purpose of this dissertation is to re-examine two central elements in St. Bonaventure's (1217--1274) epistemology: "illumination" and "ecstasy." The focus of the thesis is Bonaventure's Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi (cir. 1254) and the Itinerarium mentis in Deum (1259), but it also draws extensively on the early Commentary de Sententiarum (1240's), the Legenda major S. Francisci (1261), and the Collationes de Hexaermeron (1279), as well as on works by Thomas Aquinas ( Summa theologiae, I, I, Q. 84, a. 1--8, De veritatae Q. 1) and Henry of Ghent (Summa theologiae, Q. 1, art. 1, 2). The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first two chapters treat "illumination" and establish the argument that, contrary to the prevailing assumption in the secondary literature for the past two centuries, Bonaventure does not continue nor does Aquinas reject what has come to be known as an "Augustinian doctrine of illumination." Chapter one traces the historical development of the idea of "Augustinian illumination" and demonstrates that the prevailing notions of "illumination" reflect specific, evolving notions of what counts as properly philosophical during the era of the retrieval of medieval thought. Chapter two contains an analysis of the texts considered central to Bonaventure's continuation of "illumination" and Aquinas's rejection of it in order to demonstrate that the most common assumptions which underlay the notion of "illumination"---the idea that Augustine follows an essentially Platonic schema in which certain knowledge is derived not via the senses but instead via direct awareness of the eternal reason and the idea that Augustinian and Aristotelian epistemologies are fundamentally different and incompatible---are not ones that either Bonaventure or Aquinas share. Chapter three provides an analysis of the "ecstasy" of the final chapter of the Itinerarium and traces how the term evolves from the Dionysian/Victorine streams of thought, through the texts in Bonaventure's corpus, suggesting that the Itinerarium be seen as a text of pilgrimage for academics containing two different patterns of cognitive transformation, wonder and cognitive arrest, and that the multi-layered nature of the ecstasy of the Itinerarium resists reduction into the categories of either affectus or intellectus.