Bonaventura's character seems not unworthy of the eulogistic title, "Doctor Seraphicus," bestowed on him by his contemporaries, and of the place assigned to him by Dante in his _Paradiso_. He was formally canonized in 1482 by Sixtus IV., and ranked as sixth among the great doctors of the church by Sixtus V. in 1587. His works, as arranged in the Lyons edition (7 vols., folio), consist of expositions and sermons, filling the first three volumes; of a commentary on the _Sentences_ of Lombardus, in two volumes, celebrated among medieval theologians as incomparably the best exposition of the third part; and of minor treatises filling the remaining two volumes, and including a life of St Francis. The smaller works are the most important, and of them the best are the famous _Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, Breviloquium, De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam, Soliloquium_, and _De septem itineribus aeternitatis_, in which most of what is individual in his teaching is contained. In philosophy Bonaventura presents a marked contrast to his great contemporaries, Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon. While these may be taken as representing respectively physical science yet in its infancy, and Aristotelian scholasticism in its most perfect form, he brings before us the mystical and Platonizing mode of speculation which had already to some extent found expression in Hugo and Richard of St Victor, and in Bernard of Clairvaux. To him the purely intellectual element, though never absent, is of inferior interest when compared with the living power of the affections or the heart. He rejects the authority of Aristotle, to whose influence he ascribes much of the heretical tendency of the age, and some of whose cardinal doctrines--such as the eternity of the world--he combats vigorously. But the Platonism he received was Plato as understood by St Augustine, and as he had been handed down by the Alexandrian school and the author of the mystical works passing under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Bonaventura accepts as Platonic the theory that ideas do not exist _in rerum natura_, but as thoughts of the divine mind, according to which actual things were formed; and this conception has no slight influence upon his philosophy. Like all the great scholastic doctors he starts with the discussion of the relations between reason and faith. All the sciences are but the handmaids of theology; reason can discover some of the moral truths which form the groundwork of the Christian system, but others it can only receive and apprehend through divine illumination. In order to obtain this illumination the soul must employ the proper means, which are prayer, the exercise of the virtues, whereby it is rendered fit to accept the divine light, and meditation which may rise even to ecstatic union with God. The supreme end of life is such union, union in contemplation or intellect and in intense absorbing love; but it cannot