Holiness of Life

Although written primarily for women living in Religion, Saint Bonaventure's treatise on Holiness of Life (De Perfectione Vitae ad Sorores) will strongly appeal to every Catholic heart. Its value as a manual of spiritual reading, at once elevating, inspiriting and practical, can hardly be over-estimated. It opens an easy way to a sound and profitable self-knowledge; it wins the soul to Christian humility, and to an unworldliness which is the secret of a contented and joyful heart; it teaches a method of contemplation on the Passion of Our Lord, full of devout attractiveness; it reveals the secret of fruitful and heartfelt prayer. In a word it treats of the great and permanent things in spiritual life and practice, and does this with such living fervour that it sets our hearts on fire. There are no gloomy spaces darkened by the shadow of that Calvinism that was to come; no hard lines of rigour to remind us of Jansenism. Everywhere we find the cheerful seriousness of Catholicism, the reflection of the soul of a saint who lived in the bright and spacious days of that glorious and supremely Catholic century, the Thirteenth.