Bonadventure

“ We had our philosopher too, Phillips, the chief engineer, veteran of Khartoum, master of machinery, physician less active but more reliable than the steward; but above all, the Diogenes–with a slush-lamp. His philosophy might be no ill store about this time, when in the heat the pitch melted from the seams of his cabin roof and mottled his bed, as he put it: a circumstance not yet mentioned in sonnets wooing tardy sleep, and which of course called upon that nimble sixpence of Bonadventure conversation, “She is a dirty ship.” ”

“ For technical purposes, as I supposed, I was put down “purser.” The rank was given, but not the talents.
Now, the hour of the Bonadventure’s sailing being imminent, the ship’s officers who had been away were returning. The chief engineer, obviously regarded as a wise man; the second mate, full of stories; the wireless operator, youthful and brilliantined, appeared at the cabin table. The captain’s wife drew up matrimonial plans for the third mate, who was not beyond blushing over his late tea–the not impossible, but improbable, She was evidently a recognized memory of Hamburg. ”

“ The pilot came aboard at three, and the tug Lydia presented herself to guide the Bonadventure out: there was much business with ropes fore and aft, and the ship swinging round was free of the wharf about the top of the tide. The warehouses with their stacks of bags, slippered blue-trousered handymen, surpliced overseers with their sampling hollow bayonets, railway trucks and capstans, ubiquitous dogs and all, began to recede. But we had not come more than a couple of miles from the elevators, nor out of sight of the refugee-like town behind them, when we anchored to await 129 Hosea. ”

“ The shouts of the pilot on the bridge, his “Hard-a-port,” his “Hard-a-starboard,” were taken up from the forepart of the ship, where a number of substantial figures were at work with winch and cable. The Bonadventure was guided with nice gradation into a channel not much exceeding her own width; on the quay beside men were shouting and scampering; the wireless clerk leaning over against all gravity grabbed a bag of “mail” from one of them; and out we passed. The wind livened. ”

“ Into the channel close after the Bonadventure came the green lamp of another ship. Soon the Bonadventure was definitely, at a growing speed, running down the Bristol Channel, under a veiled sky through which the moon always seemed about to emerge, and among the scattered lights of other ships going into Barry, or waiting in readiness to go in.
The thing had never occurred to me before, and I may be pardoned for reflecting, while I stood 24 watching, in a manner somewhat grandiose. The energy of Man, maker of cathedrals, high-roads, aqueducts, railroads, was passing before me ”

“ The old gentleman was expected. I was sorry that he did not come, after all, with his “baptism,” shave, and medicine (and I believe other rites) , when at about four in the afternoon the Bonadventure crossed the Equator; but old customs can scarcely be eternal. The steward’s cough mixture was the only medicine I got that day. Neptuneless, the ship furrowed a sea almost silent, and evening came on tranquilly among woolpacks of warm-kindled colouring.
52IX
Mary, what news? ”

“ The breakfast steaks were leathery past anticipations. The flies in the cabin were thousands strong. But the Bonadventure was homeward bound, and a general spirit of liveliness prevailed. Conversation was running much upon the value of the mark, for it was to Hamburg that we were believed to be going. Base hopes were expressed that the rate of exchange might be a thousand to the pound. No one imagined that this would some day be surpassed by eleven thousand. The Argentine had been expensive; the cheapness of Germany was thrown up all the clearer. ”

“ When we have time, we must make a little harbour for her."
"Famous!" exclaimed Pencroft. "A harbour with a lighthouse, a pier, and a dock! Ah! really with you, captain, everything becomes easy."
"Yes, my brave Pencroft," answered the engineer, "but on condition, however, that you help me, for you do as much as three men in all our work."
Herbert and the sailor then re-embarked on board the Bonadventure, the anchor was weighed, the sail hoisted, and the wind drove her rapidly towards Claw Cape. Two hours after, she was reposing on the tranquil waters of Port Balloon. ”

“ Bonaventura does not hesitate to treat as an accepted fact that the souls of the just will see God, and he asserts that some of them are already in heaven, while others wait confidently in their graves for the appointed time. ”

“ 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 rela tions 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. ”

“ The life, the labours of Bonaventura were as the title of the little book we have just been worrying with, a reductio artium ad theologiam, a constant adapting of all knowledge and ways of meditation, to the sense of God and the soul’s inclusion in the love divine. No one should expect to find among his compositions any independent treatment of secular knowledge for its own sake. Rather throughout his writings the reasonings of philosophy are found always ministering to the sovereign theme. ”

“ To this notion of absolute being, which is perfect and the greatest of all, objective existence must be ascribed. In its last and highest form of activity the mind rests in the contemplation of the infinite goodness of God, which is apprehended by means of the highest faculty, the apex mentis, or synderesis. This spark of the divine illumination is common to all forms of mysticism, but Bonaventura adds to it peculiarly Christian elements. ”

“ Above him great live-oaks stretched their arms clad in green vestments and gray drapings, the bright sugar-cane fields were on his left, and on his right the beautiful winding bayou. In his face, not joy, only pallid eagerness, desire fixed upon fulfilment, and knowledge that happiness was something else; a young, worn face, with hard lines about the mouth and neck; the face of one who had thought self to be dead and buried, and had seen it rise to life again, and fallen captive to it. So he was drawing near to Carancro. Make haste, Bonaventure! ”

“ The police will tell you, as they told Bonaventure, that in these days of steam and steel and yoked lightning a man may get lost and be found again; but that when he stays lost, and is neither dead nor mad, it is because he wants to be lost. So where was to be the gain in finding ’Thanase alive? Oh, much, indeed, to Bonaventure! The star of a new hope shot up into his starless sky when that thought came, and in that star trembled that which he had not all these weary months of search dared see even with fancy’s eye,—the image of Zoséphine! ”

“ Bonaventura’s reasoning in the above treatise is for us abstruse and fanciful; yet many will agree with the conclusion, that all kinds of knowledge may minister to our thought of God, and of man’s relationship to Him. And with Bonaventura, all his knowledge, his study of secular philosophy, his logic and powers of presentation, had theology unfailingly in view, and ministered to the satisfaction, the [Pg 408] actualization (to use our old word) of his religious nature. He belongs among those intellectually gifted men—Augustine, Anselm, Hugo of St. ”

“ Thus Bonaventura writes his prologue to this devotional tract, which will also hold “pertinent speculations.” Remarkable is the intellectuality and compacted thought which he fuses in emotional expression. He will write seven chapters, on the seven steps, or degrees, in the ascent to God, which is the mind’s true itinerarium. Since we cannot by ourselves lift ourselves above ourselves, prayer is the very mother and source of our upward struggle. Prayer opens our eyes to the steps in the ascent. ”

“ Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woollen sash that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure’s above one green mound in the churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster’s care, and had gone to join his son. Of course, not as an idler; such a perfect woodsman easily made himself necessary to the engineer’s party. The company were sorry enough to lose him when Claude went away ”

“ To Bonaventure, in his system of thought as in his spiritual ideals, God is constantly and emphatically the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, the Source and Centre, by Whom and in Whom and from Whom all things are. Throughout the whole of his writings God is ever the central idea round which all converges. As in his writings so in his life. In this continual and abiding presence of God--the very spirit as it is also the ideal of monastic solitude--his soul, his entire being, grew and blossomed, turning ever to the light and warmth of the Divine Beauty as the sunflower to the sun. ”

“ A withered smile came over the dry visage of the wise Bonabben at the menace. “Let your majesty’s heart be as easy about your son, as mine is about my head: am I a man likely to give lessons in the idle passion?”
Under the vigilant care of the philosopher, the prince grew up in the seclusion of the palace and its gardens. He had black slaves to attend upon him—hideous mutes who knew nothing of love, or if they did, had not words to communicate it. His mental endowments were the peculiar care of Eben Bonabben, who sought to initiate him into the abstruse lore of Egypt ”

“ Thus, in the transubstantiation controversy of the ninth century, Realism and Superstition conquered together. It taught them to deduce all knowledge from certain mental abstractions, Platonic Ideas and Aristotelian Forms. Thus Bonaventura (who exhibits this tendency at its height) resolves all science into union with God. The successive attainment of various kinds of knowledge is, in his system, an approximation, stage above stage, to God—a scaling of the heights of Illumination, 1-150as we are more closely united with the Divine Word—the repertory of Ideas. ”

“ From age to age the religious soul finds traces of its God in nature and in its inmost self. Its ways of finding change, varying with the prevailing currents of knowledge; yet still it ever finds these vestigia, which represent the widest deductions of its reasoning, the ultimate resultants of its thought, and its own brooding peace. Therefore may we not follow sympathetically the Itinerarium of Bonaventura’s mind as it traces the footprints of its God? Thus far the way has advanced by reason, uplifted by grace, and yet still reason. ”

“ What he saw was Grande Pointe in the sunset hour of a spring day six years gone, the wet, spongy margin of a tiny bayou under his feet, the great swamp at his back, the leafy undergrowth all around; his canoe and paddle waiting for him, and Bonaventure repeating to him—swamp urchin of fourteen—the costliest words of kindness—to both of them the costliest—that he had ever heard, ending with these two that Marguerite had spoken. As he resumed his work, he said, without lifting his eyes:
“Seem’ to me ’f I could make myself like any man in dat whole worl’, I radder make myself like Bonaventure. ”

“ Could the second nature of lifetime habits bear the change? Of his higher spirit there was no doubt. Neither father nor son had any conception of happiness separate from noble aggrandizement. Nay, that is scant justice; far more than they knew, or than St. Pierre, at least, would have acknowledged, they had caught the spirit of Bonaventure, to call it by no higher name, and saw that the best life for self is to live the best possible for others. “For all others,” Bonaventure would have insisted; but “for Claude,” St. Pierre would have amended. They could not return to Grande Pointe. ”

“ On the farther, the eastern, side, Claude stood leaning against a pile, looking off far beyond West End to where the sun was setting in the swamps about Lake Maurepas. There—there—not seen save by memory’s eye, yet there not the less, was Bayou des Acadiens. Ah me! there was Grande Pointe.
“O Bonaventure! Do I owe you”—Claude’s thought was in the old Acadian tongue—“Do I owe you malice for this? No, no, no! Better this than less.” And then he recalled a writing-book copy that Bonaventure had set for him, of the schoolmaster’s own devising: Better Great Sorrow than Small Delight. ”

“ Think of Bonaventure, the slender, the intense, the reticent—with ’Thanase limping on rude but glorious crutches for four consecutive Saturdays and Sundays up and down in full sight of Zoséphine, savior of her mother from widowhood, owner of two fine captured horses, and rewarded by Sosthène with five acres of virgin prairie. If the young fiddler’s music was an attraction before, fancy its power now, when the musician had to be lifted to his chair on top of the table! ”

“ Bonaventura’s position is the same; but his heart never tarries with the handmaid; for with him heart and mind are ever constant to the queen, Theology. Yet he recognizes the queen’s need of the handmaid. Holy Writ is not for babes; the fulness of knowledge is needed for its understanding: “Non potest intelligi sacra Scriptura sine aliarum scientiarum peritia.” [547] And without philosophy many matters of the Faith cannot be intelligently discussed. There is no knowledge which may not be sanctified to the purpose of understanding Scripture ”