Works of Bonaventure

This Doctor of the Church, in a lifetime crowded with absorbing activities—as ruler of his Order for almost twenty years, as Cardinal-Bishop, as director of the deliberations of an ecumenical council—yet became one of the Church’s supreme expositors of the theology of love. From the first he was known to be a giant, and succeeding centuries saw almost innumerable editions of his works. Archbishop Paschal Robinson has pointed out that no writer from the Middle Ages onward has been more widely read and copied. Yet comparatively little of this interest is reflected in publications in the English tongue.

Of course, the Prince of Mystics (as Leo XIII called him) is not wholly unknown among us. So great is the power of his genius, so insistent his message to the heart and spirit, that these qualities have in some degree forced their way through whatever barriers exist. Translators of merit, both Franciscans and others, have brought over into English separate chosen opera; and these have conveyed enough of his greatness to establish it as a fact. But though he is an acknowledged master, he remains, by and large, to us a master still unread.