Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/420

408 actualization (to use our old word) of his religious nature. He belongs among those intellectually gifted men – Augustine, Anselm, Hugo of St. Victor – whose mental and emotional powers draw always to God, and minister to the conception of the soul's union with the living spring of its being. The life, the labours of Bonaventura were as the title of the little book we have just been worrying with, a reductio artium ad theologiam, a constant adapting of all knowledge and ways of meditation, to the sense of God and the soul's inclusion in the love divine. No one should expect to find among his compositions any independent treatment of secular knowledge for its own sake. Rather throughout his writings the reasonings of philosophy are found always ministering to the sovereign theme.

The most elaborate of Bonaventura's doctrinal works was his Commentary upon the Lombard's Sentences. In form and substance it was a Summa theologiae. He also made a brief and salutary theological compend, which he called the Breviloquium. The note of devotional piety is struck by the opening sentence, taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians, and is held throughout the work:

"'I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole fatherhood in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled in all the fulness of God.' The great doctor of the Gentiles discloses in these words the source, progress, and state (ortus, progressus, status) of Holy Scripture, which is called Theology; indicating that the source is to be thought upon according to the grace (influentiam) of the most blessed Trinity; the progress with reference to the needs of human capacity; and the state or fruit with respect to the superabundance of a superplenary felicity.

"For the Source lies not in human investigation, but in divine revelation, which flows from the Father of lights, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named, from whom, through His