Meditation Class: The Soul Renewed by Grace

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Meditation Class: The Soul Renewed by Grace, The Mind’s Journey to God by Saint Bonaventure. A Mystic’s Journal Entry: December 8, 2005


Wednesday, December 7
1 a.m.

A bitter cold night. I lit a fire in the coal stove for the first time this season. The warmth from the stove filled the downstairs, and the clear Christmas lights I have strung over the presents in the living room added a nice glow. After class, Serge and Pam emptied the ash and filled buckets with coal, and Serge and I replaced a flood light than had burned out, from my studio to the back garden. The sky was magical; big, fluffy white clouds and a few stars and planets scattered here and there, in their fixed orbs, glimmering against the black sky.

We continued our studies of Saint Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey to God in class tonight, and began Chapter Four: Contemplation of God and the Soul Renewed by Grace. (trans. Lawrence S. Cunningham; Franciscan Herald Press; 1979.) I have put Saint Bonaventure’s words in italics.

Chapter Four of The Mind’s Journey to God brings us to the fourth level of contemplation. This state can be arrived at only through Grace.

St. Bonaventure begins: “We can perceive the First Principle not only through ourselves as a means but also in ourselves.” (Here, the italics belong to St. Bonaventure.) We decided that Bonaventure was drawing on Greek philosophy, and the First Principle is the One, or God.
Here Bonaventure is saying that we can see or perceive God both working through us and also His Presence within us. He continues: Since God is so close to our minds (as we have already shown) it seems strange that so few people contemplate God’s presence within themselves. The reasons he gives are simple: the human mind is so distorted that it does not reflect upon the Eternal. The mind is clouded by the imagination, and buffeted by unruly thoughts. He concludes: Immersed in the sense world, it fails to enter itself as to the Image of God Himself. These are the factors that prevent us from seeing God working through and in us.

We took this to mean that the human mind is filled with thoughts arising from the ego and its own imagination, unruly thoughts concerned with the sense world. Therefore, in order to find God within ourselves, we must set aside time each day for meditation, or what St. Teresa of Avila calls mental prayer. When we clear our mind of the imagination, the thoughts produced by the ego, then we have opportunity to perceive God both working through us and resting within the soul. Otherwise, we will be of the world, and our memory of the Eternal will be lost.

Bonaventure then gives us the threefold means of arriving at Truth. First he says: A man may be enlightened by reason and acquired knowledge but that is not enough if we are to “delight in the Lord”(Ps. 36,4) i.e. feel the Living Presence of God within us. St. Bonaventure first reminds us of Christ’s words: “I am the Gate.” (Jn. 10,9) Bonaventure then says: We do not come near this gate unless we believe, hope and love, and that to enjoy the Truth as Paradise itself we must enter with faith, hope and love... i.e. We enter through the gate of this level of contemplation with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love.

Bonaventure then began a beautiful discourse on the inner senses. Just as we have the five outer senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing - once we have entered into this fourth level of contemplation, through Grace we are given five new inner senses which correspond to the outer senses.

He begins: Our soul, the image of God, must be clothed with the three theological virtues by which the soul is purified, enlightened and perfected. Through Faith, the believer recovers the spiritual sense of hearing and seeing: hearing the words of Christ and seeing the splendor of His light. For this, we are using different eyes and ears, i.e. our spiritual eyes and ears. When one desires the inspired Word he recovers a spiritual scent ... When one desires we interpreted as the theological virtue of hope; a spiritual scent, we took to mean supernatural fragrances such as those that we have been aware of in class, although Bonaventure might not mean it as literally or as outwardly as the perfumes that fill my house. Lastly, through the theological virtue of our love for Christ, the Incarnate Word, we can receive light and ecstatic love from Christ, the lover has recovered spiritual taste and touch.

In the fourth level of contemplation, we experience the Divine, rather than merely arriving at its truth through reason. In this stage of contemplation, the interior senses are restored to see the Beautiful, to hear the Highest Harmony, to savor the most perfect of Scents, to taste that which is truly Sweet, and to experience that which is authentically desirable, the soul is ready for pure spiritual ecstacy according to the triple exclamation of the ‘Song of Songs’. (The Song of Songs, written by Solomon, is found in the Old Testament. M. explained that in some versions of the Bible, The Song of Songs is referred to as the Canticles.) In other words, that which is experienced by the outer senses can not in any way compare to that which is experienced by the interior senses in this fourth stage of contemplation.

Bonaventure then says that the first exclamation found in the Song of Songs arises from an exuberance of devotion by which the soul is a “column of smoke laden with myrrh and frankincense” (cant. 3,6). Here our faith brings us to the path of devotion. We found this image interesting, because of the supernatural fragrances of myrrh and frankincense we have been experiencing in our meditation classes. These fragrances began with our studies of the Desert Fathers, many months ago. They are fleeting or lingering, faint or powerful - but always wondrous and delightful. The Desert Fathers used the image of these divine fragrances to signify the prayers of the saints, or the souls of the saints.

Bonaventure continues: the second exclamation arises from an overflowing wonder in the soul so that it is like “the dawn, the moon, and the sun” (Cant. 6,9)- this corresponds to the successive steps of illumination that finally transfix the soul as it contemplates the Spouse in ecstatic wonder. In the ecstatic state, one is filled with great wonder, for the experience cannot be compared to any other. It is truly illumination: for in this state of ecstasy, one experiences the most unearthly and powerful Light, a Divine Light of a luminescence and radiance beyond our imagination. And we are transfixed: while in ecstasy, we cannot of our own free will or thought or intent disengage our gaze. In this state, we are no longer aware of the physical body, nor of time, nor of the material world; we are fully immersed in the Divine Light and Radiance.

Bonaventure continues: the third cry (in the Song of Songs) comes from a superabundance of joy through which the soul, “flowing with delight” at such sweetness rests entirely “upon her Beloved.” (cf. Cant. 8,5) In ecstacy, the joy and bliss one feels is incomparable. Nothing in the physical, material world is capable of bringing us this same delight, the radiant joy we are given in this unity with the Divine.

Bonaventure then says that the soul is ready for pure spiritual ecstacy according to the triple exclamation of the ‘Song of Songs’: so we were not sure if this ecstatic state is actually achieved in this fourth stage of contemplation, or if the soul is still being prepared for this experience. According to the schema given to us by Saint Teresa of Avila of the three stages of the Interior Life - ecstasies can begin near the end of the second stage of Illumination, and prior to the second Dark Night of the soul.

At this fourth level of our spiritual development, which would correspond to the fourth Mansion of Saint Teresa of Avila, Bonaventure says: the Heavenly Jerusalem ... descends into the soul by grace. According to a footnote, here the Heavenly Jerusalem refers to the hierarchical orders of the angels in heaven, i.e. the nine choirs of angels. This footnote ends: “Bonaventure is here trying to establish an analogy between this heavenly hierarchy and its image in the soul of the believer.”

Bonaventure continues: The Heavenly Jerusalem descends into the heart when, through the reinstatement of the divine image, by the theological virtues, by the delight of the spiritual senses, and by mystical ecstasy, our soul is in that hierarchical order, i.e. when it is purified, illuminated and perfected.

When Bonaventure writes: The Heavenly Jerusalem descends into the heart, this indicates that the spiritual Heart is the seat of the soul, and that our experience of the Divine is found there. When it is purified, illuminated and perfected suggests that Bonaventure here is speaking of later stages in the mind’s journey to God: for in this fourth stage of contemplation, the soul is not yet perfected. On the other hand, Bonaventure might be saying that in this experience of ecstasy, the soul is in the process of being purified, illuminated and perfected. And in that experience, the soul has been temporarily purified, illuminated and perfected. We decided that until we had read further, we could not fully understand Bonaventure’s meaning.