Chapter one closes with little that is novel; for we seem to be retracing

the thoughts of Hugo of St. Victor. The second chapter is on the “Contemplation of God in His Footprints in the Sensible World.” This is the next grade of speculation, because we shall now contemplate God not only through His footprints, but in them also, so far as He is in them through essence, power, or presence. The sensible world, the macrocosmus, enters the microcosmus, which is the _anima_, through the gates of the five senses. The author sketches the processes of sense-perception, through which outer facts are apprehended according to their species, and delighted in if pleasing, and then adjudged according to the _ratio_ of their delightfulness, to wit, their beauty, sweetness, salubrity, and proportion. Such are the footprints in which we may contemplate our God. All things knowable possess the quality of generating their species in our minds, through the medium of our perceptions; and thus we are led to contemplate the eternal generation of the Word--image and Son--from the Father. Likewise sweetness and beauty point on to their fontal source. And from speculation on the local, the temporal, and mutable, our reason carries us to the thought of the immutable, the uncircumscribed and eternal. Then from the beauty and delightfulness of things, we pass to the thought of number and proportion, and judge of their irrefragable laws, wherein are God’s wisdom and power.

“The creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God; in part because God is the source and exemplar and end of every creature; in part through their proper likeness; in part from their prophetic prefiguring; in part from angelic operations; and in part through superadded ordainment. For every creature by nature is an effigy of the eternal wisdom; especially whatever creature in Scripture is taken by the spirit of prophecy as a type of the spiritual; but more especially those creatures in the likeness of which God willed to appear by an angelic minister; and most especially that creature which he chose to mark as a sacrament.”

From these first grades of speculation, which contemplate the footprints of God in the world, we are led to contemplate the divine image in the natural powers of our minds. We find the image of the most blessed Trinity in our memory, our rational intelligence, and our will; the joint action of which leads on to the desire of the _summum bonum_. Next we contemplate the divine image in our minds remade by the gifts of grace upon which we must enter by the door of the faith, hope, and love of the Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ. As philosophy helped us to see the image of God in the natural qualities of our mind, so Scripture now is needed to bring us to these three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), which enable the mind of fallen man to be repaired and made anew through grace.

From this fourth grade, in which God is still contemplated in his image, we rise to consider God as pure being, wherein there is neither privation, nor bound, nor particularity; and next in his goodness, the highest communicability (_summam communicabilitatem_) of which may be contemplated, but not comprehended, in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. “In whom [the persons of the Trinity] it is necessary because of the _summa bonitas_ that there should be the _summa communicabilitas_, and because of the latter, the _summa consubstantialitas_, and because of this the _summa configurabilitas_, and from these the _summa coaequalitas_, and through this the _summa coaeternitas_, and from all the preceding the _summa cointimitas_, by which each is in the other, and one works with the other through every conceivable indivisibility (_indivisionem_) of the substance, virtue, and operation of the same most blessed Trinity....” “And when thou contemplatest this,” adds Bonaventura, “do not think to comprehend the incomprehensible.”

From age to age the religious soul finds traces of its God in nature and in its inmost self. Its ways of finding change, varying with the prevailing currents of knowledge; yet still it ever finds these _vestigia_, which represent the widest deductions of its reasoning, the ultimate resultants of its thought, and its own brooding peace. Therefore may we not follow sympathetically the _Itinerarium_ of Bonaventura’s mind as it traces the footprints of its God? Thus far the way has advanced by reason, uplifted by grace, and yet still reason. This reason has comprehended what it might comprehend of the traces and evidences of God in the visible creation and the soul of man; it has sought to apprehend the being of God, but has humbly recognized its inability to penetrate the marvels of his goodness in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. There it stops at the sixth grade of contemplation; yet not baffled, or rendered vain, for it has performed its function and brought the soul on to where she may fling forth from reason’s steeps, and find herself again, buoyant and blissful, in a medium of super-rational contemplation. This makes the last chapter of the mind’s _Itinerarium_; it is the _apex mentis_, the summit of all contemplations in which the mind has rest. Henceforth

“Christ is the way and door, the ladder and the vehicle, as the propitiation placed on the Ark of God, and the sacrament hidden from the world. He who looks on this propitiation, with his look full fixed on him who hangs upon the cross, through faith, hope, and charity, and all devotion, he makes his Passover, and through the rod of the cross shall pass through the Red Sea, out of Egypt entering the desert, and there taste the hidden manna, and rest with Christ in the tomb, dead to all without; and shall realize, though as one still on the way, the word of Christ to the believing thief: ‘To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.’ Which was also revealed to the blessed Francis when in ecstasy of contemplation on the high mountain, the Seraph with six wings, nailed on a cross, appeared to him. There, as we have heard from his companion, 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 sufficeth 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’.”[559]

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 religious yearnings may interest and move us; but one needs perhaps the cloister’s quiet to follow on through the allegorical elaboration of this pietism. Bonaventura’s _Soliloquium_ might weary us after the _Itinerarium_, and we should read his _De septem itineribus aeternitatis_ with no more pleasure than Hugo’s _Mystic Ark of Noah_. It is enough to witness the spiritual attitude of these men without tracking them through the “selva oscura” to their lairs of meditation.