Isaac was his type indeed.
“O good Shepherd, Bread life-giving,
Us, thy grace and life receiving,
Feed and shelter evermore!
Thou on earth our weakness guiding,
We in heaven with thee abiding,
With all saints will thee adore.”
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,
Adeste fideles,