Thomas’s Franciscan friend, John Fidenza, better known by his nickname of John Bonaventura, was a hymn-writer also, but he did a good many other things better. To many Protestants his name has been made offensive through its association with the _Psalter of Our Lady_, a travesty of the Book of Psalms, with which he had nothing to do, and which was made in a later century. Indeed, as Martin Chemnitz pointed out three centuries ago, Bonaventura protested against the excessive reverence for the Virgin, which had already become common, as likely to lead to idolatry. That he was called the Seraphic Doctor shows that men felt in him a warmth of heart and a tenderness of devotion, which they missed in his greater contemporary, Thomas Aquinas, the Angelical Doctor. Indeed he was the incarnation of the Franciscan spirit of love and helpfulness, as Thomas of the Dominican spirit of theological research and orthodox defence. Yet Bonaventura’s _Breviloquium_ has been praised by good judges as the best compend of Christian doctrine that the Middle Ages have left us.
Bonaventura’s Latin poems are rather devout meditations than hymns. They are not the voice of the Christian congregation in song, but of the monk meditating before his crucifix. To him is sometimes ascribed the Christmas hymn,
but not on sufficient authority. His best known hymns are the
of which latter we have English versions by Dr. Henry Harbaugh, Dr. J. W. Alexander, and E. C. Benedict. Five other hymns are ascribed to him in the collections. They all have the Franciscan note; they turn on our Lord’s human sympathy and sufferings. This explains the ascription to him of a long hymn on the members of our Lord’s body as affected by the passion, which is found in Mone (I., 171-74), but which is more frequently and quite as erroneously ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not worthy of either, although Mone thinks the ascription to Bonaventura “worthy of attention.” The hymn furnishes the point of contact of the Latin hymnology with that of the later Moravians, the Franciscans of Protestantism.
So we leave the two great scholars, thinkers, doctors, and poets, each representing one of the two chief streams of spiritual influence in the Church of the thirteenth century. “They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided.”