edge of God is the most desirable. I have also shown that Bonaventure believed that this knowledge depends on the degree of mind's conformity to God, and those degrees differ in different human beings. Therefore, the question arrives: "How to get there?" Bonaventure attempts to answer this in his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum . He wants to show how this conformity can be increased in the mind, and the model for the project (Saint Francis) is chosen not accidentally. p> The saint was that ecstatic soul who perceived the world pure and beautiful and loved every creature in it as an expression of his Beloved, the Creator of them all. This pure love, so common among saints, is understood by Bonaventure as the most important precondition for that spiritual journey of the mind to perfection. It is not by accident Bonaventure calls "upon the Eternal Father through His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that through the intercession of the most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother. . . . and through that of blessed Francis. . . . He may enlighten the eyes of our mind ... "(Prologue 1, p.31.) Jesus had such love, that he sacrificed himself for the sake of men. His Mother Mary had such love to her Son, and St. Francis had such love and deep respect to Jesus and Mary. p> It is interesting to me that a Russian Saint Seraphim Sarovsky (1754 - 1833) also loved and worshiped the Mother of God, constantly remembered her and often was visited by Mary and her Blessed Son Jesus. The Saint even died before the icon of the Mother of God standing on his knees in his final prayer. He was extremely like St. Francis, and also many great miracles happened in his life. The Saint's ecstatic love to all creatures and God, their source, was constantly felt by all people who ever met him and received multiple blessings from that encounter. May be there are also other means to conform the mind to God, but pure love surely is the most commonly mentioned by great Saints condition, and they know it from their own experience. The latter is not easily understood by those empiricists who speak of "impossibility" of spiritual knowledge. p> Thеy do not have the necessary precondition for sufficient conformity of their minds to the divine mind, therefore, they do not have the spiritual experience, hence , For them the theory like Bonaventure's cannot be easily verifiable. It is very much like when people who were told about certain observable facts do not want (or incapable) to go to the laboratory and see for themselves. Those are usually indifferent to the achievements of science or very often even hostile to the whole enterprise, because they feel that the talk about that knowledge of others reveals their ignorance, laziness or other infirmities and incapability, which is not flattering to their egos. Modern psychologists call it defense mechanisms , and denial in particular, when the truth when painful for the psyche is denied explicitly but at the same time is driven into sub-consciousness implicitly causing other trouble. But the itinerary of the mind into God leads the soul to the ecstatic peace , as Bonaventure puts it, and this very peace people of all ages and nations observe in the characters of those saints and sages who are conformed to their exemplar . This peace and extreme happiness are usually felt like physically emanating from those wise men and women, and they do not depend on anything material but on rather something extremely subtle. Saint Seraphim of Russia described that in following words:
Fast, prayer, vigilance and all other Christian deeds are very good in themselves, but not only observing of those constitutes the purpose of our Christian life. Those are only means of the latter. The true purpose of our Christian life is accumulation of the Holly Spirit of God. ( Reverend Seraphim Sarovsky , p.26-27, my translation).
I quote this Saint as well as some other enlightened teachers of different times and places here only in order to show the universal appeal of those ideas expressed by Bonaventure in XIII century, which constitute the object of my investigation. When we read the descriptions of lives and teachings of real Saints and sages, it becomes obvious that they possess certain extraordinary knowledge and powers. It is also obvious that they live extraordinary style of life. One is connected with the other. So, it is not just about theories we have to learn in school in order to acquire similar intuitions and other abilities, but we have to consider also the lifestyle variable in this experiment. I believe that in this way we have much better chances to receive the data, so to speak. It is precisely on this account Bonaventure writes his Itinerarium , where besides another theoretical representation of his doctrine of light he also emphasizes the desirable character of the soul whi...
