Reflections on St. Bonaventure’s The Soul’s Journey into God and Srila Vishvanath Chakravarti Thakura’s Cloud Bank of Nectar: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

As often in these annual dialogues, we are going to be reflecting this year on texts from our two traditions that have a number of common traits. Even so, St. Bonaventure’s treatise The Soul’s Journey into God is perhaps not the best choice as our Christian text, despite the fact that the great twentieth-century medievalist Etienne Gilson claimed that it is the most complete synthesis that Christian mysticism ever achieved. Various factors make the treatise difficult. In addition to its extremely condensed character, there is Bonaventure’s love of playing with numbers (especially the traditionally sacred numbers of three and seven), his lack of clarity regarding distinctions between “through” and “in” (for example, seeing God “through his vestiges” [ch. 1] and “in his vestiges” [ch. 2]), and the work’s rather obscure correspondences between certain academic disciplines and Trinitarian theology (as in Bonaventure’s claim that metaphysics leads to the First Principle, the Father; that mathematics leads to the Father’s image, the Son; and that physics leads to the gift of the Holy Spirit). Much of this will surely strike modern readers as too artificial and contrived. For these reasons, Cloud Bank was actually the easier text for me to understand, despite the fact that I had never heard of it before last year, whereas I have taught classes at The Catholic University of America dealing with Bonaventure’s treatise.