severities of the Order. Later a reaction followed; and in 1310 Frate Ubaldino of Casale became the head of a party of zealots among the Franciscans who took the name of Spiritualists, and produced a kind of schism in the Order, by narrower or stricter interpretation of the Scriptures. 127. In this line Dante uses the word life for spirit. 66 John of Fidanza, surnamed Bonaventura,-who "postponed considerations sinister," or made things temporal subservient to things spiritual, and of whom one of his teachers said that it seemed as if in him Adam had not sinned," was born in 1221 at Bagnoregio, near Orvieto. In his childhood, being extremely ill, he was laid by his mother at the feet of St. Francis, and healed by the prayers of the Saint, who, when he beheld him, exclaimed " "O buona ventura!" and by this name the mother dedicated her son to God. He lived to become a Franciscan, to be called the "Seraphic Doctor," and to write the Life of St. Francis; which, according to the Spanish legend, being left unfinished at his death, he was allowed to return to earth for three days to complete it. There is a strange picture in the Louvre, attributed to Murillo, representing this event. Mrs. Jameson gives an engraving of it in her Legends of the Monastic Orders, p. 303. St. Bonaventura was educated in Paris under Alexander Hales, the Irrefragable Doctor, and in 1245, at the age of twenty-four, became a Professor of Theology in the University. In 1256 he was made General of his Order; in 1273, Cardinal and Bishop of Albano. The nuncios of Pope Gregory, who were sent to carry him his cardinal's hat, found him in the garden of a convent near Florence, washing the dishes; and he requested them to hang the hat on a tree, till he was ready to take it. St. Bonaventura was one of the great Schoolmen, and his works are voluminous, consisting of seven imposing folios, two of which are devoted to Expositions of the Scriptures, one to Sermons, two to Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences, and two to minor works. Among these may be mentioned the Legend of St. Francis; the Itinerary of the Mind towards God; the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; the Bible of the Poor, which is a volume of essays on moral and religious subjects; and Meditations on the Life of Christ. Of others the mystic titles are, The Mirror of the Soul; The Mirror of the Blessed Virgin; On the Six Wings of the Seraphim; On the Six Wings of the Cherubim; On the Sandals of the Apostles. One golden sentence of his cannot be too often repeated: "The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner. A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue." Milman, Hist. Latin Christ., VIII. 274, 276, says of him: "In Bonaventura the philosopher recedes; religious edification is his mission. A much smaller proportion of his voluminous works is pure Scholasticism; he is teaching by the Life of his Holy Founder, St. Francis, and by what may be called a new Gospel, a legendary Life of the Saviour, which seems to claim, with all its wild traditions, equal right to the belief with that of the Evangelists. Bonaventura himself seems to deliver it as his own unquestioning faith. Bonaventura, if not ignorant of, feared or disdained to know much of Aristotle or the Arabians: he philosophizes only because in his age he could not avoid philosophy The raptures of Bonaventura, like the raptures of all Mystics, tremble on the borders of Pantheism: he would still keep up the distinction between the soul and God; but the soul must aspire to absolute unity with God, in whom all ideas are in reality one, though many according to human thought and speech. But the soul, by contemplation, by beatific vision, is, as it were, to be lost and merged in that Unity. 130. Of these two barefooted friars nothing remains but the name and the good report of holy lives. The Ottimo says they were authors of books. Bonaventura says that Illuminato accompanied St. Francis to Egypt, and was present when he preached in the camp of the Sultan. Later he overcame the scruples of the Saint, and per suaded him to make known to the world the miracle of the stigmata. Agostino became the head of his Order in the Terra di Lavoro, and there received a miraculous revelation of the death of St. Francis. He was lying ill in his bed, when suddenly he cried out, "Wait for me! Wait for me! I am coming with thee!" And when asked to whom he was speaking, he answered, "Do ye not see our Father Francis ascending into heaven?" and immediately expired. 133. Hugh of St. Victor was a monk in the monastery of that name near Paris. Milman, Hist. Latin Christ., VIII. 240, thus speaks of him: "The mysticism of Hugo de St. Victor withdrew the contemplator altogether from the outward to the inner world,-from God in the works of nature, to God in his workings on the soul of man. This contemplation of God, the consummate perfection of man, is immediate, not mediate. Through the Angels and the Celestial Hierarchy of the Areopagite it aspires to one God, not in his Theophany, but in his inmost essence. All ideas and forms of things are latent in the human soul, as in God, only they are manifested to the soul by its own activity, its meditative power. Yet St. Victor is not exempt from the grosser phraseology of the Mystic,-the tasting God, and other degrading images from the senses of men. The ethical system of Hugo de St. Victor is that of the Church, more free and lofty than the dry and barren discipline of Peter Lombard." under the title of John XIX. In the following year he was killed by the fall of a portion of the Papal palace at Viterbo. 136. Why Nathan the Prophet should be put here is a great puzzle to the commentators. "Buon salto! a good leap," says Venturi. Lombardi thinks it is no leap at all. The only reason given is, that Nathan said to David, "Thou art the man." As Buti says: "The author puts him among these Doctors, because he revealed his sin to David, as these revealed the vices and virtues in their writings." 137. John, surnamed from his eloquence Chrysostom, or Golden Mouth, was born in Antioch, about the year 344 He was first a lawyer, then a monk, next a popular preacher, and finally metropolitan Bishop of Constantinople. His whole life, from his boyhood in Antioch to his death in banishment on the borders of the Black Sea,-his austerities as a monk, his fame as a preacher, his troubles as Bishop of Constantinople, his controversy with Theophilus of Alexandria, his exile by the Emperor Arcadius and the earthquake that followed it, his triumphant return, his second banishment, and his death,is more like a romance than a narrative of facts. "The monuments of that eloquence," says Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Ch. XXXII., "which was admired near twenty years at Antioch and Constantinople, have been carefully preserved ; and the possession of near one thousand sermons or homilies has authorized the 134. Peter Mangiadore, or Peter critics of succeeding times to appreciate Comestor, as he is more generally the genuine merit of Chrysostom. They called, was born at Troyes in France, unanimously attribute to the Christian and became in 1164 Chancellor of the orator the free command of an elegant University of Paris. He was the author and copious language; the judgment to of a work on Ecclesiastical History, conceal the advantages which he derived "from the beginning of the world to the from the knowledge of rhetoric and times of the Apostles ;" and died in the philosophy; an inexhaustible fund of monastery of St. Victor in 1198. He metaphors and similitudes, of ideas and was surnamed Comestor, the Eater, be- images, to vary and illustrate the most cause he was a great devourer of books. familiar topics; the happy art of enPeter of Spain was the son of a phy-gaging the passions in the service of sician of Lisbon, and was the author of virtue; and of exposing the folly, as a work on Logic. He was Bishop of well as the turpitude, of vice, almost Braga, afterwards Cardinal and Bishop with the truth and spirit of a dramatic of Tusculum, and in 1276 became Pope, representation." Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Aost in Piedmont, about the year 1033, and was educated at the abbey of Bec in Normandy, where, in the year 1060, he became a monk, and afterwards prior and abbot. In 1093 he was made Archbishop of Canterbury by King William Rufus; and after many troubles died, and was buried in his cathedral, in 1109. His life was written by the monk Eadmer of Canterbury. Wright, Biog. Britan. Lit., AngloNorman Period, p. 59, says of him: "Anselm was equal to Lanfranc in learning, and far exceeded him in piety. In his private life he was modest, humble, and sober in the extreme. He was obstinate only in defending the interests of the Church of Rome, and, however we may judge the claims themselves, we must acknowledge that he supported them from conscientious motives. Reading and contemplation were the favourite occupations of his life, and even the time required for his meals, which were extremely frugal, he employed in discussing philosophical and theological questions." Ælius Donatus was a Roman grammarian, who flourished about the middle of the fourth century. He had St. Jerome among his pupils, and was immortalized by his Latin Grammar, which was used in all the schools of the Middle Ages, so that the name passed into a proverb. In the Vision of Piers Ploughman, 2889, we find it alluded to, "Then drewe I me among drapers and Chaucer, Testament of Love, says, 61 No passe I to vertues of this Marguerite But therein all my donet can I lerne.' According to the note in Warton, Eng. Poet., Sect. VIII., to which I owe these quotations, Bishop Pecock wrote a work with the title of "Donat into Christian Religion," using the word in the sense of Introduction. Alcuin. He became a teacher at Fulda, then Abbot, then Bishop of Mayence. He left behind him works that fill six folios. One of them is entitled "The Universe, or a Book about All Things;" but they chiefly consist of homilies, and commentaries on the Bible. 140. This distinguished mystic and enthusiast of the twelfth century was born in 1130 at the village of Celio, near Cosenza in Calabria, on the river Busento, in whose bed the remains of Attila were buried. A part of his youth was passed at Naples, where his father held some office in the court of King Roger; but from the temptations of this gay capital he escaped, and, like St. Francis, renouncing the world, gave himself up to monastic life. "A tender and religious soul," says Rousselot in his Hist. de l'Evangile Éternel, p. 15, "an imagination ardent and early turned towards asceticism, led him from his first youth to embrace the monastic life. His spirit, naturally exalted, must have received the most lively impressions from the spectacle offered him by the place of his birth : mountains arid or burdened with forests, deep valleys furrowed by the waters of torrents; a soil, rough in some places, and covered in others with a brilliant vegetation; a heaven of fire; solitude, so easily found in Calabria, and so dear to souls inclined to mysticism,—all combined to exalt in Joachim the religious sentiment. There are places where life is naturally poetical, and when the soul, thus nourished by things external, plunges into the divine world, it produces men like St. Francis of Accesi and Joachim of Flora. "On leaving Naples he had resolved to embrace the monastic life, but he was unwilling to do it till he had visited the Holy Land. He started forthwith, followed by many pilgrims whose expenses he paid; and as to himself, clad in a white dress of some coarse stuff, he made a great part of the journey barefooted. 139. Rabanus Maurus, a learned In order to stop in the Thebaïd, the theologian was born at Mayence in 786, first centre of Christian asceticism, he and died at Winfel, in the same neigh-suffered his companions to go on before; bourhood, in 856. He studied first at the abbey of Fulda, and then at St. Martin's of Tours, under the celebrated and there he was nigh perishing from thirst. Overcome by the heat in a desert place, where he could not find a drop of water, he dug a grave in the sand, and lay down in it to die, hoping that his body, soon buried by the sand heaped up by the wind, would not fall a prey to wild beasts. Barius attributes to him a dream, in which he thought he was drinking copiously; at all events, after sleeping some hours he awoke in condition to continue his journey. After visiting Jerusalem, he went to Mount Tabor, where he remained forty days. He there lived in an old cistern; and it was amid watchings and prayers on the scene of the Transfiguration that he conceived the idea of his principal writings: The Harmony of the Old and New Testaments'; 'The Exposition of the Apocalypse'; and 'The Psalter of Ten Strings.' On his return to Italy, Joachim became a Cistercian monk in the monastery of Corazzo in Calabria, of which ere long he became Abbot; but, wishing for greater seclusion, he soon withdrew to Flora, among the mountains, where he founded another monastery, and passed the remainder of his life in study and contemplation. He died in 1202, being seventy-two years of age. says century, some such book existed, and "A thousande and two hundred yere 66 The Universite, that was a slepe, The Eternal Gospel taught that there were three epochs in the history of the world, two of which were already passed, and the third about to begin. The first was that of the Old Testament, or the reign of the Father; the second, that of the New Testament, or the reign of the Son; and the third, that of Love, or the reign of the Holy Spirit. To use his own words, as quoted by Rousselot, Hist. de l' Evang. Eternel, p. 78: “As "His renown was great," Rousselot, Hist. de l'Evang. Eternel, p. 27, "and his duties numerous; nevertheless his functions as Abbot of the monastery which he had founded did not prevent him from giving himself the letter of the Old Testament seems up to the composition of the writings which he had for a long time meditated. This was the end he had proposed to himself; it was to attain it that he had wished to live in solitude. If his desire was not wholly realized, it was so in great part; and Joachim succeeded in laying the foundations of the Eternal Gospel. He passsd his days and nights | in writing and in dictating. ‘I used to write,' says his secretary Lucas, day and night in copy-books, what he dictated and corrected on scraps of paper, with two other monks whom he employed in the same work.' It was in the middle of these labours that death surprised him." In Abbot Joachim's time at least, this Eternal Gospel was not a book, but a doctrine, pervading all his writings. Later, in the middle of the thirteenth to belong to the Father, by a certain peculiarity of resemblance, and the letter of the New Testament to the Son; so the spiritual intelligence, which proceeds from both, belongs to the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, the age when men were joined in marriage was the reign of the Father; that of the Preachers is the reign of the Son; and the age of Monks, ordo monachorum, the last, is to be that of the Holy Spirit. The first before the law, the second under the law, the third with grace." The germ of this doctrine, says the same authority, p. 59, is in Origen, who had said before the Abbot Joachim, "We must leave to believers the historic Christ and the Gospel, the Gospel of the letter; but to the Gnostics alone belongs the Divine Word, the Eternal Gospel, the Gospel of the Svirit.” CANTO XIII. I. The Heaven of the Sun continued. Let the reader imagine fifteen of the largest stars, and to these add the seven of Charles's Wain, and the two last stars of the Little Bear, making in all twentyfour, and let him arrange them in two concentric circles, revolving in opposite directions, and he will have the image of what Dante now beheld. 7. Iliad, XVIII. 487: "The Bear, which they also call by the appellation of the Wain, which there revolves and watches Orion; but it alone is free from the baths of the ocean." IO. The constellation of the Little Bear as much resembles a horn as it does a bear. Of this horn the Pole Star forms the smaller end. 14. Ariadne, whose crown was, at her death, changed by Bacchus into a constellation. Ovid, Met., VIII., Croxall's Tr. :“And bids her crown among the stars be placed, With an eternal constellation graced. Chaucer, Legende of Good Women: 13 "Looke! how the crowne which Ariadne wore Upon her yvory forehead that same day That Theseus her unto his bridale bore, When the bold Centaures made that bloudy fray With the fierce Lapithes which did them dismay, Being now placed in the firmament, And is unto the starres an ornament, Which round about her move in order excellent." 23. The Chiana empties into the Arno near Arezzo. In Dante's time it was a sluggish stream, stagnating in the marshes of Valdichiana. See Inf XXIX. Note 46. 24. The Primum Mobile. 52. All things are but the thought of God, and by Him created in love. 55. The living Light, the Word, proceeding from the Father, is not separated from Him nor from his Love, the Holy Spirit. 58. Its rays are centred in the nine choirs of Angels, ruling the nine heavens, here called subsistences, according Sum. Theol., I. Quæst. XXIX. 2: "What to the definition of Thomas Aquinas, exists by itself, and not in anything else, is called subsistence." 61. From those nine heavens it descends to the elements, the lowest potencies, till it produces only imperfect and perishable results, or mere contingencies. 64. These contingencies are animals, plants, and the like, produced by the influences of the planets from seeds, and certain insects and plants, believed of old to be born without seed. 67. Neither their matter nor the influences of the planets being immutable, the stamp of the divinity is more or less clearly seen in them, and hence the varieties in plants and animals. 73. If the matter were perfect, and the divine influence at its highest power, the result would likewise be perfect; but by transmission through the planets it becomes more and more deficient, the hand of nature trembles, and imperfection is the result. 79. But if Love (the Holy Spirit) and the Vision (the Son), proceeding from the Primal Power (the Father), act 32. St. Thomas Aquinas, who had immediately, then the work is perfect, related the life of St. Francis. as in Adam and the human nature of 34. The first doubt in Dante's mind | Christ, |