Franciscan Studies

BOOK REVIEWS Andrea Maggioli and Pietro Maranesi (a cura di). Bartolomeo Barbieri da Castelvetro. Un cappuccino alia scuola di San Bonaventura nell'Emilia del '600. Roma: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini [Biblioteca Seraphico-cappuccina, 55], 1998. 644 pp. On the occasion of the tercentenary of the death of Fr. Bartolomeo Barbieri da Castelvetro (1615-1697), his Capuchin heirs from the province of Parma decided to honor the memory of this important professor of the colleges of Ferrara and Modena, at a colloquium held in Vignola in October 1997. The now available proceedings of this colloquium shed an interesting light on seventeenth-century religious life and church history, at the time of the renovation of theological studies and fight against modern heresies. Whereas Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits initiated an important movement of renovation and reinterpretation of the works of Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, the Capuchins turned themselves towards the work of saint Bonaventure. In this context, Barbieri's work and his two important academic treatises—the Flores etfructus philosophia ex seraphico paradiso excerpti seu cursus philosophia ad mentem Sancti Bonaventurae Seraphici Doctoris (Lyons, 1677) and his monumental Cursus theologicus ad mentem Seraphici Doctoris S. Bonaventurae (Lyons, 1687)—constitute the most complete Summa drawn from the teachings of the Seraphic Doctor. Twentieth-century historiography has often considered Bonaventure as the least "metaphysical" and the most "theological" of the great doctors of the end of the thirteenth century, and he carries with him, at least since Cardinal Ratzinger's famous thesis, a reputation of "anti-Aristotelianism." Barbieri's Cursus allows us to rectify this image, since he strived to develop an authentic "Bonaventurian scholasticism" (p. 117). Among the numerous contributions to this volume, let us therefore single out those directly related to philosophy. Costanzo Cargnoni draws a general sketch of the Bonaventurian culture among the Capuchins between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century (pp. 81-122). He shows how the fathers of the Capuchin reform (1536) were fascinated by 327 Franciscan Studies 58 (2000) 328BOOK REVIEWS the spirituality of St. Francis and wanted to posit themselves as his only and true interpreters. The intellectual activity was therefore initially more centered around devotional and spiritual texts, rather than on the theological and scholastic quaestiones. It is only after the proclamation of Bonaventure as "Doctor of the Church" by pope Sixtus V that we would experience a real "explosion" (p. 102) of a properly scholastic Bonaventurian philosophy and theology—that was to extend between the first incomplete Summa by Pedro Trigoso de Catalayud (1593) and the work of Barbieri (1687). This scholastic "explosion" is also documented by the studies of Fabio Gambetti and Pietro Maranesi. The first offers a contribution on the "Philosophy of Bonaventure read by Barbieri" (pp. 197-220), showing the real desire of the Capuchins to "found" a philosophical school as strong and coherent as Thomism or Scotism. He also underlines that the attachment to Bonaventure did not exclude the comparison with nor even the adoption of Thomistic or Scotistic doctrines, of which we find numerous traces in Barbieri's work. He reveals how Barbieri manages to extract from the Bonaventurian corpus its implicit metaphysics, in particular through his reflections on exemplarism, on the Bonaventurian conception of hylomorphism (matter being not reducible to pure potentiality) and on seminal forms (pp. 207-212). One can often observe a conciliation with Thomistic positions, or at times even a real "Scotistic contamination" (p. 213), in particular in his decision to embrace the doctrine of the univocity of being. Nevertheless, Barbieri remains faithful to the particularity of the symbolism and the evocative character of Bonaventure's language, founded on the experience of the spirit. On his side, Pietro Maranesi analyses more in detail the Cursus theologicus in order to determine its relationship with his model. He describes the finality, the scope, the sources and the method of this vast enterprise intending to renew the devotional objective that animates the study of theology. He also underlines the "multiple relation of dependence" between Barbieri and the three medieval masters, Thomas, Scotus and Bonaventure (p. 351). However, his final judgment on Barbieri's philosophical achievement is severe: he reveals himself a "typical representative of a literalistic loyalty to...