Light

The premise of Bonaventure’s “reduction of arts to theology” is that all knowledge, skill, perception is about light. Good and perfect gifts come down from the Father of Lights, James says, and Bonaventure sees that light refracted into four types of light. Some are obvious: the inner light of reason that yields philosophical knowledge that the “higher light” of grace and Scripture.

More unexpected is Bonaventure’s inclusion of “the external light, or the light of mechanical skill” and “the lower light, the light of sense perception” in his scheme. Of the light of mechanical arts, he writes:

“The first light . . . since it enlightens the mind for an appreciation of the arts and crafts, which are, as it were exterior to man and intended to supply the needs of the body, is called the light of mechanical skill.” This is indeed lower than philosophical light or the light of grace, but Bonaventure does see that this light too is a gift of God. When he gets to the “reduction,” he tries to show how the structure of artistic construction mimics the main themes of Scripture – the generation and Incarnation of the Son, the pattern of human life, and the union of the soul with God. Ultimately, he seems to treat all human action as a sort of art, with the skill provided by divine light.

Sense experience is also illumination. This too is lower than intellectual illumination, since it “begins with a material object and takes place by the aid of corporeal light.” Yet, again, Bonaventure sees sense perception on a continuum with intellectual illumination, rather than placing a caesura between the two. He matches the five senses to five variations in the intensity of light. When light or brightness exists in a high degree and with purity, the sense is sight; hearing occurs when light is “commingled with the air,” and smell when light is mixed with vapor; taste has to do with liquid light, and touch with light mediated in a bodily corporeal fashion.

It is not entirely clear what he means. On the one hand, he could be saying that the world is radiant with a complex spectrum of light. The reason you can touch something is because the radiance of the solid thing comes to you through that sense. If that’s what he’s saying, it’s a pretty cool idea. On the other hand, he could be focusing subjectively on the person: “the sensitive life of the body partakes of the nature of light.” Senses thus are all imagined by analogy with sight; they are variations of sight. But sight is light, not reception of life; sight radiates, and doesn’t just capture light’s external radiation. That too is a rather interesting idea, since it suggests that the eye, and all the other organs of sense, are actively reaching out to the world, not passive recipients of the world.

In the end, Bonaventure seems to be saying both: The world is charged with the grandeur of God, which radiates in five different ways that match the five senses. The world consists of visible light, aromatic light, audible light, tasteable light, tangible light, and we not only “receive” the light, but reach out with the light of our senses to grasp the light of the world.

And, of course, since Bonaventure is reducing arts to theology, the light of the senses is, like the light of the mechanical arts, a radiance of divine light, coming down from like all good and perfect gifts from the Father of Lights.