Tria Opuscula: Breviloquium, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, De reductione artium ad theologiam

What it is about

Three short works of Bonaventure in Latin: the 'Breviloquium', the 'Itinerarium mentis in Deum' and the 'De reductione artium ad theologiam'.

Context and history

The 'Itinerarium' is the most read and the most beautiful: six steps by which to climb from the things of the world to God, written in 1259 on Mount La Verna, where Francis had received the stigmata thirty-three years before. The mind ascends by looking first at the outer world, then at the soul, then at what is above it, and the last step is not a thought but a silence. The 'Breviloquium' is a systematic summary of the whole of theology in a few pages, and the 'De reductione' holds that all the arts and sciences lead to the same light. Bonaventure was a Franciscan and an exact contemporary of Thomas Aquinas: his works are the way to see the other road of scholasticism, the one that goes by love rather than by argument.

Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.