Here let the motions of the world be still!—­
       Here let Time’s fleet and tireless pinions stay
       Their endless flight!—­or to the present day
     Bind my Love’s life and mine.  I have my fill
     Of earthly bliss:  to move is to meet ill. 
       Though lavish fortune in my path might lay
       Fame, power, and wealth,—­the toys that make the play
     Of earth’s grown children,—­I would rather till
     The stubborn furrows of an arid land,
       Toil with the brute, bear famine and disease,
       Drink bitter bondage to the very lees,
     Than break our union by love’s tender band,
     Or drop its glittering shackles from my hand,
       To grasp at empty glories such as these.

SAINT BONAVENTURA

(1221-1274)

BY THOMAS DAVIDSON

Saint Bonaventura, whose original name was Giovanni di Fidenza, was born at Bagnarea in Tuscany in 1221.  At the age of four he was attacked by a severe illness, during which his mother appealed to St. Francis for his prayers, promising that if the child recovered, he should be devoted to God and become one of Francis’s followers.  When the child did recover, the saint, seeing him, exclaimed “O bona ventura!” a name which clung to the boy ever afterwards, and under which he entered religion and the order of St. Francis in 1243.

Soon after, he went to the then world-renowned university of Paris, where he had for his teacher an Englishman, Alexander of Hales, the first of the schoolmen who studied the whole of Aristotle’s works, and attempted to construct a Christian theology on the basis of them.  Even at this time the young Italian’s life was so saintly that his master (so it is reported) said of him that he seemed to have been born without the taint of original sin.  He graduated in the same year as Thomas Aquinas, and immediately afterward began his career as a public teacher under the auspices of the Franciscan order, while Thomas did the same under those of the Dominican.  These two men, the greatest of the schoolmen, and the sweetest and sanest of the mystics, were bosom friends; and one can hardly imagine a loftier friendship.

In 1256, at the early age of thirty-five, he became general of his order, a post which he held till his death.  He did much to ennoble and purify the order, and to bring it back to orthodoxy, from which then, as nearly always, it was strongly inclined to swerve.  In 1265 Clement V. nominated him to the see of York; but Bonaventura, unwilling probably to face so rude a climate and people, persuaded the Pope to withdraw the nomination.  A few years later, under Gregory X., he was raised to the cardinalate and appointed bishop of Albano.  In 1274 he attended the Council of Lyons, and must have been deeply affected when he learned that Thomas Aquinas had died on his way thither.  The success of the efforts of the council to come to terms with the Greeks was mainly due to him.