BONAVENTURA - DESPRE TREPTELE ILUMINĂRII MINȚII ÎN ÎNĂLȚAREA NOASTRĂ SPRE DUMNEZEU

Abstract

According to Bonaventure, the human mind is capable of knowing God, but knowledge implies an effort to ascend to God in successive stages, and each stage represents a form of illumination of mind. These stages of ascension to God are six, and six are also the faculties through which our mind achieves knowledge: senses, imagination, reason, intellect, intelligence and ”synderesis”, that is moral consciousness. As a result of its supreme illumination, the mind, overcoming itself, directly contemplates God through ”mental ecstasy”. At the same time, the soul rests in ”ecstatic peace”, experiencing merging with the divinity, which for it means the supreme fulfilment of itself, the attainment of the supreme Good and the attainment of its happiness. But transfiguration is, first and foremost, a gift from God, as a reward for man's effort on the path of enlightenment. That is why it is a mystical, mysterious, incomprehensible fact, whereby the mind, encompassed by ”mystical wisdom”, rests fully satisfied in God, as a legitimate presence and a privileged witness to all the divine mysteries.