Bonaventure, the Body, and the Aesthetics of Salvation

Examines the link between Bonaventure's aesthetics and anthropology in light of contemporary anxieties surrounding bodily diminishment.

Rachel Davies (Author)

9781108485371, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 December 2019

198 pages
22.3 x 14.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.36 kg

'Davies has offered a lucid study of Bonaventure's theology, one that is noteworthy for the elegance of its argumentation and attentiveness to the mutual intersection of a theology of the body with aesthetic concerns ... readers of Franciscan theology from a variety of disciplines and vantage points will find [this] study erudite, engaging, and provocative.' Peter Casarella, Theological Studies

In this work of historical theology, Rachel Davies considers the relationship between aesthetics and anthropology in Bonaventure's thought, and shows how bodily diminishment can become a sign and source of the self's renewal. Drawing from texts like the Collations on the Six Days, and the Major Life of Francis, Davies reconfigures traditional accounts of the fallen body's rebellion against the soul and emphasizes instead the soul's original abandonment of the body. Her interpretation draws attention to the crucial but undervalued role that Bonaventure assigns to the body in the self's coming-to-be, and shows how contemplation involves the soul's tender recovery of the body it once rejected. Though contemplation makes body-soul integrity possible again, Davies argues that the body never fully recovers from its primordial alienation. Instead, Bonaventure suggests that individuals can experience brokenness and healing at the same time, and that suffering bodies can become paschal spaces, graced and open to beatific wholeness.

Introduction
1. Bonaventure's aesthetic vision
2. Beauty and the soul's ascent in the Collations on the Six Days
3. The journey of the body to God
4. Transfiguration in the Tree of Life
5. Corporeality reclaimed in the Major Life of Francis
6. Paschal bodies.

Subject Areas: Theology [HRLB], Philosophy of religion [HRAB], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC]