St. Bonaventure’s Medieval Theory of Doctrinal Development

It is often assumed that the quandary of doctrinal development first came to the fore in the modern period with the advent of a new historical consciousness and unprecedented access to historical documents and artifacts that were largely absent to our medieval predecessors. As a result, the common narrative tends to portray St. John Henry Newman as the first great Christian thinker to really wrestle with both the gains and losses, the opportunities and difficulties, introduced by a distinctly historical awareness of the various forms that Christian teaching, disciplines, and life have taken over the course of two millennia. From the influence of Newman, we then get other important Catholic figures who have built upon his monumental work: Maurice Blondel, Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Joseph Ratzinger, and so on.

While it would certainly be anachronistic to apply uniquely modern concerns and intellectual frameworks to the medieval scholastics, this common narrative does not do justice to history itself, for it would overlook the unique contribution made by the Seraphic Doctor, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, specifically his Christocentric response found in his Collationes in Hexaemeron to some of the difficulties created by the theology of history that emerged from the reception and application of the prophetic works of Joachim of Fiore. As a result, “anticipation of the future,” one of Newman’s very notes of authentic developments, would seem to be lacking in his own account, which would be deeply ironic and problematic.

To both correct the historical record and introduce a relatively new voice into the conversation around doctrinal and disciplinary development, I will first briefly introduce the person and thought of Joachim of Fiore, as well as the “Spiritual Franciscans” who received and problematically developed his thought; then I will turn to consider the life and work of Bonaventure in his Collationes in Hexaemeron to see how he articulated his own account of Christian development in response to radical Joachimism; and, finally, I will draw three important parallels between Bonaventure and Yves Congar, O.P., and Henri de Lubac, S.J., to showcase why and how Bonaventure’s own medieval theory of development is, in fact, uniquely “modern.” The intended fruit of this line of inquiry will be to demonstrate that the fruitful developments of a theory of development found in the likes of Newman, Congar, and de Lubac have actually been anticipated in the medieval age itself via Bonaventure.

Joachim of Fiore and His Theology of History

Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202 AD) was and is a deeply divisive, though often misunderstood, prophetic voice in Christian history. At the heart of his theological vision resides the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, who does not simply create the universe and author the Scriptures in and through the unity of the Godhead but also directs and unfolds all things such that they bear a uniquely Trinitarian character and form. As Bernard McGinn explains in The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought,

For the abbot of Fiore the Trinity is always primary. It is not that cosmos and history in some way change or condition God, but rather that history must adopt the structure it does precisely because God, its creator, is three Persons. The course of salvation history has an overarching unity because it is the product of the one Lord who performs all works ad extra as a single cause, but it must also have a threefold structure insofar as there are two Persons, Son and Spirit, who proceed from one, that is, the Father. It must, as well, have a twofold structure, because the Holy Spirit proceeds from two.[1]

This basic conviction concerning the Trinitarian nature and structure of not only the eternal act of creation but also the temporal unfolding of salvation history is, ultimately, the source of both Joachim’s theological greatness and his susceptibility to being misinterpreted and misunderstood.

With respect to Joachim’s theology of history, in particular, it is well known that he interprets the salvation history recorded in the Scriptures and continued in the life of the Church through the highest principle of the Tri-Unity of God. To quote Marjorie Reeves in Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future, “The Trinity was built into the fabric of the time-process in such a way that its very inner relations were expressed therein.”[2] What this practically entails, writes Reeves, is that

Because the Son proceeds from the Father, the origins of His work must lie back in the Father’s sphere. Because the Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son, there must be a double root to His work, one in the “status” of the Father and the other in that of the Son. Because the Three are One in Joachim’s theology, all are active in all three spheres, even though each has its own distinctive work.[3]

What has been outlined thus far is not only uncontroversial but, also, wholly orthodox and profoundly insightful, for any theology of history worth its salt must proceed from the depths of divine revelation, wherein ultimately lies the Trinity, if it is to rise above a mere philosophy of history. After all, true wisdom entails understanding all things in light of their highest principles, which, for the Christian, is the Trinity, and, so, any Christian reading of history that misses either the divine unity of the Godhead or diversity of divine Persons is, by definition, theologically bankrupt.

Joachim, however, goes further than this basic theological conviction by articulating a more detailed account of salvation history. While most tend to believe that he understood history as unfolding in three opposing and successive ages or stages—the Age of the Father, then the Age of the Son and, finally, the Age of the Holy Spirit—“in fact,” writes Reeves, “his conception is more subtle than that of a straight progressive sequence, one after the other,”[4] and this is so for two primary reasons. First, as mentioned above, Joachim believed that there is a fundamental unity to God’s acts and the history that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit unfold together but in diverse, though complementary, ways; second, Joachim speaks of the status of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which actually means “state” or “condition” rather than “age,” when speaking of the various dimensions of salvation history that pertain to its growth and development.

Thus, for Joachim, there is no “Age of the Father,” which is in turn upended and replaced by the “Age of the Son,” which is in turn upended and replaced by the “Age of the Holy Spirit.” As Reeves explains, “It is notable that Joachim never uses the word etas or tempus when he is thinking in terms of the pattern of threes: for this he always uses status. Thus ‘third age’ is really incorrect.”[5] Instead, Joachim presents a framework of salvation history in which the status of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit overlap within a given age. As he writes in his Book of Concordance:

For that tempus in which men lived according to the flesh was one block of time, the period that began with Adam and continued up to Christ. This is another tempus in which people live between two poles, that is between the flesh and the spirit. This tempus had its starting point with Elisha, the prophet, or with Josiah, king of Judah, and has continued to the present time. There is still another tempus in which people live according to the spirit, a tempus that began in the days of Saint Benedict and will continue until the end of the world.[6]

As a result, the status of the Father was lived during the time of the Old Testament and the status of the Son, though it has its beginnings in Elisha and Josiah, has been lived since the time of Christ in and through the Church (and, in this sense, these are distinct ages, but only accidentally so); however, the status of the Holy Spirit is not a distinct third age that will succeed and move beyond the Son and the Church that he founded. Rather, the status of the Holy Spirit is coincident with the Church, wherein its fruits begin to be realized, though Joachim also finds its beginnings in Elisha as well, and, just as the Holy Spirit in Scripture speaks not on his own authority but continues the work and plan of Christ, so, too, does the Holy Spirit more deeply unfold that which has already been given and established. As Joachim writes

The first status was under the law, the second status under grace, the third status, which we expect soon, will be under a more ample grace; to the first belonged scientia, to the second sapientia, the third will be that of plenitudo intellectus; the first was lived in the servitude of slaves, the second in the servitude of sons, but the third will be in liberty; . . . the first was lived in fear, the second in faith, the third will be in love; . . . the first was lived in starlight, the second in the dawn, the third will be in the perfect day.[7]

As Reeves comments, “Institutionally, the Latin Church will stand until the Second Advent just as the Synagogue did until the First, but its quality of life will be transformed from that of the ecclesia activa to that of the ecclesia contemplativa.”[8]

Since each status unfolds in history, there is an inescapable temporal dimension to each, which—when it comes to the status of the Father and of the Son—is uncontroversial in light of the basic distinction between the Old and the New Covenants and Laws. However, an intractable difficulty emerges when it is believed that the manifestation of the status of the Holy Spirit will mark a wholesale break with that of the age or status of the Son, for this would necessarily entail moving beyond the definitive self-revelation and new and eternal covenant established by Christ.[9] However, what Joachim actually proposes is not an Age of the Holy Spirit that replaces the Age of the Son, but, instead, an emergence of the state or life of the Holy Spirit amidst the age (or time) of the Son and his Church that fulfills and more deeply unfolds what has already been established through a new and more profound outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which Joachim himself sees as the fulfillment of Joel 2: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even upon the menservants and maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”

As Reeves explains, “History is, in one sense, completed in its two parts [Old and New Covenants], but hovering over each there is a third development, a new quality of life rather than a third set of institutions, a quasimystical state rather than a new age.”[10] And yet, even though there exists this “third development,” it is nonetheless rooted in the Old and New Covenants, just as the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son and is sent by them together, following the Ascension of the risen Christ.

Thus the accusation of tritheism levelled against him does not take into account either his insistence on history as the work of the Unus Deus, or the subtle inter-weaving of the three Persons in their activity throughout time. Nonetheless, although Joachim certainly believed in the equality of the Persons, he did see the work of the Third Person as the culmination of history in the third status, just as in the life of the individual the Spiritual Intelligence was the crowning illumination.[11]

The Rise of Radical Joachimism and the Three Ages Paradigm

Be this as it may, it is important to recognize that the impact of Joachim’s thought both on the history of Christianity generally and the writings of Bonaventure specifically cannot be ascertained without understanding how his prophetic reading of Scripture and history was received and re-interpreted in the thirteenth century by his later followers, particularly Bl. John of Parma and Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, in the wake of the earth-shaking emergence of Francis of Assisi, Dominic de Guzmán, and the mendicant movement that they unleashed upon Christendom.

Since Joachim’s status of the Holy Spirit centered on a more profound outpouring of grace, which would lead to the appearance of a Spirit-filled people, who—in accordance with the prophecy of Jeremiah 31—would have the law written on their hearts and, therefore, have no need for a teacher, the emergence of Francis, Dominic, and the mendicants was seen as a profound confirmation of Joachim’s prophetic testimony. And here we should remember that the rise of the mendicants was as novel and impressive in their own day as the first desert fathers and mothers were in their own. The Franciscans and Dominicans took the Catholic world by storm, growing from a small band of followers gathered around their founders to tens of thousands of friars by the end of the thirteenth century.

And so, that Joachim’s prophecy concerning the rise of Spirit-filled men began to take center stage in the 1240s, just forty years after his death, is no great surprise, for it was during this time that the Franciscans and Dominicans were in full swing. “The recognition of the Friars Preacher and Minor as the fulfillment of his prophecy greatly enhanced Joachim’s reputation,” explains Reeves,

But in the 1250s . . . the appropriation of Joachim’s concept of the three status by a rash and revolutionary Franciscan, named Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, suddenly highlighted the dangers, even heretical implications, which could be drawn from the Abbot’s doctrine. The scandal of the Eternal Evangel, as it was called, caused a furor in the University of Paris in 1254 and led to a papal commission and condemnation.[12]

In the eye of this storm were the Fraticelli, or the “Spiritual Franciscans,” namely, those thirteenth-century Franciscans who understood themselves to be the true disciples of Francis and the inheritors of the “new age” of the Spirit upon which salvation history was now marking a turning point and new beginning, and John of Parma and Gerard of Borgo San Donnino played a significant part in the development of this wayward movement. It was Gerard, explains Reeves, who “announced the advent of the third status” via a book, consisting of a collection of three of Joachim’s primary works, along with Gerard’s Introductorius in Evangelium æternum, an introduction and gloss to Joachim’s work, which was to supersede the Bible.[13] In this book, he proclaims the impending third Age of the Holy Spirit, which would usher the Church into a new saeculum over and against that which Christ established in and through his Church.

Christocentrism, Scripture, and Historicity in Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaemeron

Bonaventure, who entered the Franciscans in 1243, was an outstanding theologian at the University of Paris during this time, having held the Franciscan chair of theology there just ten years later in 1253, and it was at this same time that Gerard published his Introductorius in Evangelium æternum. In 1257, Bonaventure was unexpectedly (and reluctantly) elected to succeed John of Parma as the Minister General of the Franciscans, and he would remain in this post until the end of his life in 1274. The bulk of Bonaventure’s adult life, then, unfolded during the crisis of the Spiritual Franciscans and the emergence of radical Joachimism.

At the end of his life, he delivered twenty-three university sermons to his brother friars in Paris, the Collationes in Hexaemeron, wherein he provides a rich commentary and exposition of the spiritual and symbolic meaning of the six days of creation found in Genesis 1, although he would regrettably die before he could complete his task. These sermons, however, were no mere academic exercise; rather, in and through them, he sought to, among other things, elucidate a theology of history that could directly confront and correct some of the more problematic aspects of the radical Joachimism of his day, though—as was mentioned previously—there are strong reasons to doubt that this was actually faithful to Joachim’s own thought.

And yet, like the Spiritual Franciscans, Bonaventure was as deeply impressed by the life of Francis, for he did see in Francis something genuinely new and profoundly meaningful for himself, his order, and the wider life of the Church. In other words, Bonaventure, in his attempt to course-correct the Franciscan order, was unwilling to concede the person and spiritual glory of Francis to his opponents and, in so doing, turn himself against his inspiration and spiritual father.

But with this the most pressing question remains: how could the life of Francis and the Franciscans, who lived a radical form of poverty, asceticism, and contemplation in the world hitherto nonexistent in the tradition of the Church, be genuinely new, a veritable fruit of the Holy Spirit, and yet not be in discontinuity with the definitive revelation of Christ and the final stage of the Economy of Salvation that he inaugurated through his Paschal Mystery? Bonaventure’s ingenious solution was to see in Francis a simultaneously active and contemplative mystic, who, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, was able to “see” more deeply into the limitless meaning of Scripture and thus enter more deeply into the life and revelation of Christ, all of which unfolds within the wider horizon of God’s providentially guided history.

With this, we are brought to the aforementioned Collationes in Hexaemeron. In these sermons, Bonaventure articulates a vision of revelation in which Christ holds the “central position in all things,” for he is “the Mediator between God and men. . . . Hence it is necessary to start from Him if a man wants to reach Christian wisdom.”[14] Furthermore, in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and that He Himself is the central point of all understanding”;[15] from Christ “flows[s] forth the certainty and the understanding of all sacred Scripture.”[16] Bonaventure’s Christocentrism is the key that unlocks the profundity of Scripture, which contains a plenitude of spiritual meanings (spirituales intelligentia), sacramental symbols (figurae sacramentalis), and manifold truths (multiformes theoria), as he explains in Collation XIII, commenting on the third day of creation wherein God separates the waters and the dry land and the earth is henceforth commanded to bring forth various seed-bearing plants and trees.

Commenting on the manifold truths of Scripture, Bonaventure writes in Collation XIII.2 the following:

Who can know the infinity of seeds, when in a single one are contained forests of forests and thence seeds in infinite number? Likewise, out of Scriptures may be drawn an infinite number of interpretations which none but God can comprehend. For as new seeds come forth from plants, so also from Scriptures come forth new interpretations and new meanings, and thereby are Sacred Scriptures distinct [from everything else]. Hence, in relation to the interpretations yet to be drawn, we may compare it to a single drop from the sea all those that have been drawn so far.

Within a single seed of a Scriptural event, teaching, passage, or figure, there are “forests of forests” and an entire sea of latent meanings and truths waiting to be known and lived. For Bonaventure, the manifold truths of Scripture are rooted in the relation between the Old and New Testaments, which is prefigured in the two cherubim seated upon the Ark of the Covenant, who face not only one another but also the mercy seat where God would become really present. The maturation of these Scriptural “seeds” thus pertains to a certain providential ordering of time and history wherein what was said and done in the Old Testament can only attain its true significance in light of the New. Likewise, the New Testament’s inner meaning is hidden and prepared for in the Old Testament.

With that being said, it is important to recognize that, according to Bonaventure, such meanings and truths do not give themselves up by mere theological speculation alone. Instead, Bonaventure believed that God’s providential ordering of time plays an essential role in the uncovering and unfolding of the latent pluripotency of Scripture. As a result, Bonaventure will go on to articulate the following two extraordinary statements:

But this germination of the seeds procures the understanding of the different theories through adaption to the different times; and the man who overlooks the times cannot know the theories. For one who ignores the past cannot know the future. If, indeed, I do not know from which tree a seed comes, I cannot know what tree is to grow from it. Hence the knowledge of future events depends on the knowledge of those of the past. Moses, indeed, in his prophecies concerning the future, was telling about the past through revelation.[17]

But it should be noted that as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, so also the mystical body of Christ has six ages, and [a] seventh that runs concurrently with the sixth, and an eighth. These are the seminal reasons that lead to the understanding of Scriptures.[18]

From these two passages can be seen the manner in which the apprehension of these seeds of infinite meanings and truth within Scripture are historically situated and conditioned, and their realization and flowering in due time has a real, as opposed to merely accidental, relation to history itself.

If one lacks this historical awareness, then one is incapable of unveiling the hidden meanings of the Scriptures by understanding the present in light of the past and vice versa. However, since this understanding extends beyond the mere fact and face-value meaning of a Scriptural text, it requires a subject who not only apprehends the words and meanings of Scripture but also prayerfully contemplates it in light of the present moment and draws forth its deeper meaning and purpose in Christ. As a result, Ratzinger writes in his The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure:

For Bonaventure, the basic statement concerning the new and final Order is the same as it had been for Joachim: It will be an order of contemplatio. But this contemplatio is to be a new insight into Scripture. It is here that Scripture will be fully and truly opened, so that we can speak of a new and extensive “revelation” which consists in a new understanding of the old Scriptures.[19]

Much more can be said of Bonaventure’s theory of doctrinal and disciplinary development in his Hexaemeron, but this suffices to articulate his basic response to the problematic posed by the life of Francis and the rise of radical Joachimism. In short, Bonaventure’s solution is to frame authentic doctrinal and disciplinary development as the invaluable fruit of the prayerful engagement of the uniquely-wise mystic-contemplative with the limitlessly meaningful Scriptures, for whom Christ is the center, in the midst of the passage of time and its corresponding historical situations through which the Church is sojourning. As a result, Francis and the Franciscan charism are not a discontinuous novelty relative to Christ and the divinely instituted Church and sacramental economy; rather, they are simply a deeper unfolding of the eternal Gospel of Christ. As a result, the novelty of Franciscanism is only a relative—and, thus, not absolute—novelty when considered within the contingencies of Salvation History, but even this history is under the providence of God and is directed to the unfolding of the infinitely rich revelation of Christ in and through the Church.

Modern “Theological” Theories of Development

One of the overarching contentions of the above is that, due to Bonaventure’s profound admiration for St. Francis of Assisi, his rich Christocentric reading of the superabundant meanings of Scripture, and his need to respond to the historically focused errors of radical Joachimism, he very interestingly articulates a theory of doctrinal development in the medieval period that mirrors uniquely modern theories of development. Thus, Bonaventure provides a “modern” medieval theory of development. Having outlined the basic structure of Bonaventure’s proposal, we are now positioned to expeditiously examine some of the key similarities between the Seraphic Doctor’s theory of development and the theories of two quintessentially modern theologians: Yves Congar, O.P., and Henri de Lubac, S.J., both of whom articulate modern “theological,” as opposed to “logical,” theories of development.

Whereas the distinguishing feature of logical theories of development is an emphasis on a necessary relation of reason between later doctrines and the articles of faith and the literal sense of Scripture,[20] theological theories recognize, alongside reason and logic, a supernatural principle behind theological developments, which ultimately corresponds to the supernatural character of revelation itself. De Lubac, for example, writes in his essay “The Problem of the Development of Dogma”:

It [divine revelation] always remains a mystery for us. Our natural observation will never embrace it as it does all the others. Our natural logic is not going to be able to display itself in everything in its regard as it does with the objects of our reason. Not having conceived it, not having formed it in ourselves, we will never be the masters of it. . . . No mystery is a simple truth, and if we become attached with too narrow an attestation to one of its aspects in order to establish the main part of it, we risk ending in many an absurdity or many a heresy. A mystery can never be, in a way, handled in the way a natural truth can; we will never have the right to apply the laws of our human logic to it univocally, without precautions and correctives.[21]

Here, de Lubac pushes back against a reductionistic account of Christianity to a mere collection of clear and distinct propositions and of Christian development to a simple exercise of logic and reason. Instead, de Lubac asserts that Christianity consists of what he calls “the Whole of Dogma,” which is the unfathomably rich and dynamic mystery of revelation of all things in Jesus Christ.[22] The apprehension of the “Whole of Dogma,” furthermore, resides in a more profound awareness of the Church and her members in a manner that is beyond exhaustive articulation and the necessary reasonings of speculative theology. Consequently, the relationship between the explicitly known and the implicitly apprehended is reversed and re-ordered, for the explicitly known and lived elements of revelation are now grounded in the supernaturally and implicitly apprehended Whole of Dogma.

As such, the explicitly articulated features of the Deposit of Faith are now secondary to the Church’s more primary implicit awareness and grasp of the integral mystery of revelation through supernatural faith.[23] As a result, Fr. Guy Mansini, O.S.B., writes of de Lubac’s theological theory, “Given this higher awareness of the deposit, it therefore follows, development is not merely logical, and we should not expect, at least in every case, to be able to show how a new definition is logically contained in previously confessed truths of faith.”[24]

Alongside de Lubac, Congar also perceived certain shortcomings of the logical theory due to its difficulty to account for the validity of certain dogmas, such as the Immaculate Conception, which is not readily deduced via necessary reasoning and logic from the words of Scripture alone, as well as its lack of circumscription with respect to what can and should be defined out of all the possible and valid theological conclusions.[25] Congar does not dismiss the logical theory in toto but instead allocates reason and logic to the realm of faith as its instrument.

The deeper penetration into and understanding of the faith of the Church and her members is ordered to what Congar deems the dessein [design or intention] of revelation.[26] This design consists of the whole of what God has revealed in the concrete form in which it has been communicated and enacted throughout salvation history, culminating in Jesus Christ and the Church. To reason from the dessein entails “reading” the design according to the analogy of faith by understanding the whole of revelation according to the central mystery of Christ’s Incarnation, Paschal Mystery, and the Mystical Body of Christ.[27] This is done in manifold ways and according to a number of different motivating factors.

It is the fullness of the faith, including faithful living, religious contemplation, theological elaboration, the rejection of heresies, the study of the secular sequence of testimonies, the perpetual return to the depths of the biblical text in union with the liturgy in its celebration of the Christian mystery: all of this is integrated under the guidance of the magisterium and under the grace of the Holy Spirit, the soul of the Church, the principle of identity of her supernatural life and consciousness. There is in all this enough elements of reason, either theological or historical, for the Church to give an account to the men who question her or her faith and hope; but there is always a surplus in the supernatural consciousness of the Church in relation to what it can rationally account for: theology surpasses apologetics.[28]

Through his appeal to the design of revelation, which includes the literal sense of Scripture and the articles of faith but also extends beyond it, Congar seeks to ground Christian developments in the overarching mystery of revelation and the Church’s multi-faceted life and sojourn through the manifold contingencies of history as the bearer of it. In this account, the exercise of reason via theological speculation is but one element in the Church’s ecclesial toolbox to arrive at a deeper understanding of revelation and its implications for Christian life, praxis, belief, and worship. Interestingly, because Congar’s design of revelation engages with the mystery of revelation not as an abstraction but as the concrete economy established across Salvation History, he has found a way to solve the riddle of de Lubac’s rather mysterious ecclesial apprehension of the Whole of Dogma, for the implicit truth that development explicitly articulates is ultimately grounded in the specific form of the design. Because the Church has received the whole of the design of revelation in Christ, there is a fullness and depth that can only be further unveiled and unfolded as the Church grows into maturity, though it is always also wholly present to the Church from the beginning. As I have written elsewhere,

Thus, the design is not infinitely mysterious in that it is essentially non-propositional and beyond reason, always subject to change in essence and fundamental substance since it in principle cannot communicate lasting truth across every age and historical context; rather, apprehension of the design for Congar is in fact propositional, but it is simply not exhausted by propositional formulations and remains open to deeper understanding and development due to its dynamic structure.[29]

Conclusion: Bonaventure’s “Modern” Medieval Theory of Development

With this brief survey of de Lubac’s and Congar’s theological theories of development, we can now see three important ways in which Bonaventure, due to his need to respond to the radical Joachimism of his day, anticipates certain modern theories of doctrinal and disciplinary development, which—as was mentioned at the beginning of this essay—actually fulfills one of Newman’s notes of authentic development: anticipation of the future.

First, according to the Seraphic Doctor, the Church can grow into greater wisdom, knowledge, and expression of the Christian mysteries thanks to the mystic-contemplative, who is uniquely endowed with certain spiritual gifts to more readily apprehend the manifold meanings of Scripture. Like de Lubac, Bonaventure did not believe that such divine truths and goods suddenly appeared in the Scriptures at a later historical moment ex nihilo, nor did he think that the mystic-contemplative is eisegetically reading something into Scripture that is not already there implicitly. Instead, such manifold meanings and truths were there all along, waiting to be unearthed at the right moment within God’s overarching providence. It was the error of radical Joachimism to assert that certain spiritual goods emerged in a new age beyond the Scriptures, Christ, and the Economy that he inaugurated in his person; however, this is exactly what Bonaventure was himself contending against. Thus, all that was genuinely new about Francis was only relatively new, for it was contained in seed form in Christ, the beginning, middle, and end of all things, and what de Lubac calls “the Whole of Dogma.” However, the apprehension of such truths and goods—for both Bonaventure and de Lubac—is not the product of mere rational deduction of the literal sense of Scripture and the articles of faith, for it proceeds first and foremost from the gift of faith and its accompanying charismatic gifts in living contact with the revelation that Scripture makes known. And so, Bonaventure, like de Lubac, provides an alternative way to think about Christian developments that is more akin to “theological,” as opposed to “logical,” theories of development.

Second, according to Bonaventure, it is not simply the apprehension of the Christian mysteries in the abstract or the person of Christ simpliciter that is responsible for authentic developments. Instead, like Congar, Bonaventure recognized that the spiritual senses of Scripture, as seen primarily in the interrelation of the Old and New Testaments, is the driving force for unveiling the hidden meanings of revelation. While pre-modern theologians certainly recognized the value of the spiritual senses of Scripture, the logical theory quite famously limits theological argumentation and the drawing of new conclusions to reasoning upon the literal sense. As Aquinas argues in his Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 10, ad 1: “Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the senses are founded on one—the literal—from which alone can any argument be drawn, and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says” (emphasis mine). However, for Bonaventure as for Congar, new theological insights and understanding can be achieved by way of the spiritual meanings of Scripture, for it contains manifold truths that can be discerned through a consideration of what Congar calls the design of revelation and what Bonaventure deems the dynamic layering of historical ages across Salvation History and seeds within seeds and forests within forests. And so, Bonaventure, like Congar, places a high priority on the spiritual meanings of Scripture as the foundation for new theological insights and applications.

Finally, according to Bonaventure, the ages of Salvation History and its accompanying historicity play a significant role in the Church’s ability to authentically develop her understanding and expression of the Christian life. This is seen, for example, in Bonaventure’s belief that the ages of the New Testament are folded over the ages of the Old Testament, which are in turn folded over the days of creation of Genesis 1. As he writes in XV.11, “The germination of the seeds procures the understanding of the different theories through adaption to the different times; and the man who overlooks the times cannot know the theories. . . . If, indeed, I do not know from which tree a seed comes, I cannot know what tree is to grow from it. Hence the knowledge of future events depends on the knowledge of those of the past.”

This basic paradigm finds expression in Congar, who believed that Christian development is spurred on by innumerable historical contingencies, as opposed to mere theological speculation and reasoning in the abstract. As he explains, “The Church is in the world, and the world is in the plan of God,”[30] which means that—in line with a truly theological understanding of history—divine providence is at play not only in Salvation History but also in world history, and God providentially unfolds world and ecclesial history to allow for the ever greater expression and understanding of Christian revelation. “Even though the seed is oriented from the very beginning toward the fullness and perfection that will only be revealed at the end,” writes Congar in True and False Reform, “it nonetheless only develops the potential it holds within itself progressively and by stages. It works within time, drawing upon the resources of time.”[31] And as Andrew Meszaros explains in The Prophetic Church concerning Congar’s historically focused understanding of Christian development, “The connection between the historical causes of doctrine and the mystery of God, then, at the very least, on the most basic level, is the creative activity of God working through authentically created (historical causes), which, in turn, somehow condition, shape, or modify Church teaching.”[32] Thus, with Bonaventure, we see, again, a uniquely modern emphasis on historicity and the role that it plays in the development of the Church’s understanding and expression of revelation.

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