Bonaventure And Translating “Vestigium”

Last updated on: June 28, 2016 at 10:51 am by Scott Beauchamp

Bonaventure And Translating “Vestigium” 2016-06-28T10:51:33-04:00 Scott Beauchamp

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554px-Maldives_00147_foot_print_on_earth

“Footprint on Earth” – Nevit Dilmen – CC BY-SA 3.0

I’ve mentioned before that I’m doing a lot of background or foundational reading right now in the hopes of better understanding Laudato Si. When working your way back to Francis of Assisi, you’re obligated to go through Bonaventure at some point. Right now I’m reading The Classics of Western Spirituality’s Bonaventure, a text which contains “The Soul’s Journey Into God”, “The Tree of Life”, and “The Life of St. Francis”, translated and introduced by Ewert Cousins.

Cousins explains in the intro:

In making the final selection,…I attempted to chose works which taken together present an integral picture of the essence of Franciscan spirituality as Bonaventure perceived it. The Soul’s Journey into God expresses the Franciscan awareness of the presence of God in creation; the physical universe and the soul are seen as mirrors reflecting God and as rungs in a ladder leading to God. Bonaventure expresses here, in his own way, Francis’s joy in the sacrality and sacramentality of creation and, in so doing, captures an essential element in Franciscan spirituality. Basic though this element is, it would not be complete without its flowering in devotion to the humanity of Christ. There is a natural link between the Franciscan attitude toward material creation, as sacramentally manifesting God, and the Franciscan devotion to the incarnation as the fulness of this manifestation.”

Cousins also mentions that he decided to translate the word “vestiges” instead of, literally, “footprints” to express the reflection of the Trinity in creation, but now how he reached that decision. I know the word vestigium certainly APPEARS to more closely adhere to “vestige”, but from my admittedly rudimentary understanding of Bonaventure, it would seem more fitting to use the metaphor “footprints” for his project. Vestige carries with it the suggestion of uselessness, of something left over that’s no longer necessary. A vestigial tail. Remains. The residue of something long gone. But I think “footprint” might come closer to expressing the full mystical (and poetic) force of how Bonaventure perceives of the natural world’s relationship to the Trinity – “…creatures are shadows, echoes and pictures of that first, most powerful, most wise and most perfect Principle…They are [vestigium], representations, spectacles proposed to us and signs divinely given that we can see God.”

To my mind, to say that we apprehend God’s footprints in the physical world hews closer to Bonaventure’s own “awareness of the presence of God in creation.” But even the word “footprints” might not be enough, implying as they do evidence of past event and not continued presence. Is there a single word able to express the ongoing power of the Trinity in physical creation?

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