Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/430

418 panion, he passed into God through ecstasy of contemplation, and was set as an exemplar of perfect contemplation, whereby God should invite all truly spiritual men to this transit and ecstasy, by example rather than by word. In this passing over, if it be perfect, all the ways of reason are relinquished, and the apex affectus is transferred and transformed into God. This is the mystic secret known by no one who does not receive it, and received by none who does not desire it, and desired only by him whose heart's core is aflame from the fire of the Holy Spirit, whom Christ sent on earth. ... Since then nature avails nothing here, and diligence but little, we should give ourselves less to investigation and more to unction; little should be given to speech, and most to inner gladness; little to the written word, and all to God's gift the Holy Spirit; little or nothing is to be ascribed to the creature, and all to the creative essence, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."

Here Bonaventura loses himself in an untranslatable extract from Eriugena's version of the Areopagite, and then proceeds:

"If thou askest how may these things be, interrogate grace and not doctrine, desire and not knowledge, the groaning of prayer rather than study, the Spouse rather than the teacher, God and not man, mist rather than clarity, not light but fire all aflame and bearing on to God by devotion and glowing affection. Which fire is God, and the man Christ kindles it in the fervour of his passion, as only he perceives who says: 'My soul chooseth strangling and my bones, death.' He who loves this death shall see God. Then let us die and pass into darkness, and silence our solicitudes, our desires, and phantasies; let us pass over with Christ crucified from this world to the Father; that the Father shown us, we may say with Philip: 'it sufficed! us.' Let us hear with Paul: 'My grace is sufficient for thee.' Let us exult with David, saying: 'Defecit caro mea et cor meum, Deus cordis mei et pars mea Deus in aeternum '."

It is best to leave the saint and doctor here, and not follow in other treatises the current of his yearning thought till it divides in streamlets which press on their tortuous ways through allegory and the adumbration of what the mind disclaims the power to express directly. Those more elaborate treatises of his, which are called mystic, are difficult for us to read. As with Hugo of St. Victor, from whom he drew so largely, Bonaventura's expression of his