Bridging the Sacred and the Secular: Selected Writings of John Courtney Murray Book

This small "guidebook" was written in 1259 by St Bonaventure, the then-minister of the Fransiscan order. It describes how the human soul in the christian worldview must ascend through 7 steps to finally come to rest in God.

The spirit of the book lets itself summarize in the closing paragraphs:
(on how one should conduct life in order to reach God)
"If you wish to know how these things may come about, ask grace, not learning; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligence in reading; the Bridegroom [Jesus], not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity; not light but the fire that wholly inflames and carries one into God through transporting unctions and consuming affections" (Chapter 7, 6)

In short, truth or enlightenment is not to be found in human knowledge or exploration, but only through subjection to Gods will. All truth is to be found in spiritual exhaltation and in devotion to climbing out of the body and into the higher realms of the soul. The rest is just phantasmal images distracting from the one true path.

The book is an interesting read in so far as one tries to understand the medieval mentality, but the long-winded heavily religious arguments are tedious and confusing, rendering the book difficult to read with little intellectual gain. As an atheist the view that mankind should subject itself to some kind of non-empirical deity that created a sort of "game" for us that we all should play for his delight is abhorrent. It is a tragedy for me that humans for so long avoided intellectual pursuits in favour of religious ecstasy.