ortrayal of the
personal experience of the Saint himself. The title of _Seraphic_
Doctor bestowed upon Bonaventure is an undeniable tribute to his
all-absorbing love for God. To the minds of his contemporaries,
impregnated with the mysticism and supernatural atmosphere of the
Middle Ages, the spirit that breathed in his writings seemed to find
its parallel only in the lives of those heavenly beings--the
Seraphim--whose existence is depicted as like to a glowing flame of
divine love.

Furthermore, in his utterances concerning the workings of the soul in
prayer, there is what I consider a very striking revelation of the
intensity of Bonaventure's love for God. It is the love of God that
vivifies prayer. Prayer is more or less perfect according to the
charity that reigns in the soul--it reaches its highest perfection
where love is all-pervading. Then we look for raptures and ecstasies
such as marked the lives of the greatest saints. {79} Bonaventure's
reflections on prayer imply this most burning love. The following
utterances, [Footnote 35] of which I give the substance, are clearly
indicative of this.

[Footnote 35: "Opera Omnia," Tom. VIII, "De Perfectione Vitae," Cap.
V, _passim_.]

"In prayer we must enter with the Beloved into the chamber of the
heart and there remain alone with Him. We must forget all external
things, and with our whole heart and all our mind and all our
affections and desires endeavour to lift our souls up to God. We
should endeavour by the ardour of our devotion to mount higher and
higher until we enter even into the heavenly court, and there with the
eyes of the soul having caught sight of our Beloved, and having tasted
how sweet the Lord is, we should rush into His embrace, kissing Him
with the lips of tenderest devotion. Thus are we carried out of
ourselves, rapt up to Heaven, and as it were, transformed into
Christ." The Saint proceeds to explain how the ecstatic state is
reached. "It sometimes happens," he says, "that the mind is rapt out
of itself when we are so inflamed with heavenly desires that
everything earthly becomes distasteful, and the fire of divine love
burns beyond measure, so that the soul melts like wax, and is
dissolved--ascending up before the throne of God like the fumes of
fragrant incense. Again, it sometimes arrives that the soul is so
flooded with divine light and overwhelmed by the vision of God's
beauty that it is stricken with {80} bewilderment and dislodged from