Abstract
Robert Glenn Davis’ The Weight of Love offers an important reassessment of the role of affective desire in the mystical theology of the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Written self-consciously in the wake of the new wave of studies on the history of emotions and affect theory, it seeks to integrate Bonaventure’s technical scholastic theology with his role as a Franciscan devotional author. Without entirely downplaying the role of intellect in Bonaventure’s account of mystical ascent, Glenn Davis argues forcefully for his character as an affective theologian.
In this light it is significant that Glenn Davis should seek to resituate Bonaventure within the context of the enthusiastic reception of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For his principal thesis is that Bonaventure’s understanding of affective desire is intimately connected to Dionysian eros and excess. In this sense the affective movement towards God, which Glenn Davis argues characterises every stage of Bonaventure’s mystical ascent and not just the culminating moment of union as has often been suggested, is itself to be understood in terms of Dionysius’ famous motif of mystical unknowing.
Bonaventure has long been characterised as a Dionysian theologian but this work marks the first in-depth study of his relation to the sixth-century mystic. Glenn Davis fascinatingly traces the origins of Bonaventure’s affective mysticism to the Victorine school and especially to Thomas Gallus, the first to characteristic the Dionysian state of unknowing as affective. He then shows how Bonaventure’s scholastic treatment of synderesis, as both highest affective part of the soul and innate bond with God, provides the dynamic motor for this ascent. In a dramatic, highly paradoxical turn, Glenn Davis then argues that for Bonaventure the affective perfection of the soul is seen in its increasing embodiment—what he calls the becoming-body of the soul. In the final chapters he illustrates this with reference to the Franciscan ideal of conformity to the Crucified Christ, and Francis of Assisi’s shocking image of the obedient Christian as a pliant corpse.
There is a great deal to commend in Glenn Davis’ fascinating study and he argues convincingly for the central place of Dionysian affective mysticism in Bonaventure’s theology. While critics might suggest that he needed to do more to show the place of this Dionysian notion of affect within Bonaventure’s broader Augustinian philosophy, Glenn Davis has certainly opened up an important new line of enquiry into the Franciscan’s mystical theology.