Luke V. Togni

Bonaventure is among the most Dionysian thinkers of his age, heartily embracing the diffusivity of the Good, hierarchy as the worshipful participation in God’s distribution of divine life, and the excessive nature of divine union beyond intellect. It is therefore curious that he neither employs nor even discusses Dionysius’ creative proodoi—aside from one instance in the De Mysterio Trinitatis—despite an abundance of citations from the Dionysian Corpus, and especially the Divine Names across his career. Nevertheless, what Bonaventure read of these proodoi or processus (in Latin), and Dionysius’ account of divine egress can be detected in his corpus. This two-part article will argue that Bonaventure’s use of rationes, an equivalent for the Dionysian logoi, present the best avenue for assessing how the substance of Dionysian proodoi enters his thought. Furthermore, it will argue that by following Bonaventure’s use of the rationes a development can be traced through a remarkable trajectory, from an early reticence to admit a divine egress in the Sentences Commentary through to a profound integration of that egress in Trinitarian life under the image of the rationes birth from eternal Wisdom on the cross.

Part I of this article will address Bonaventure’s early use of the rationes aeternae from the Sentences Commentary to the more robust entry of the substance of Dionysius proodoi in Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, which develops into a virtual account of divine procession unto creatures in Bonaventure’s articulation of ‘causal knowing’.