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  • Bonaventure Revisited: Companion to the Breviloquium ed. by Dominic V. Monti, OFM
  • Michael Robson (bio)
Bonaventure Revisited: Companion to the Breviloquium, edited by Dominic V. Monti, OFM, and Katherine Wrisley Shelby. St. Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2017. Pp. 1- 171. ISBN: 978-1-57659-418-6. $49.95.

Bonaventure's Breviloquium is a concise compilation of the principal points of theology, from creation to the last judgement. It is the gateway to the seraphic doctor's major treatises, such as the classical De reductione artium ad theologiam and Itinerarium mentis in Deum. It articulates Christian teaching on God, creatures, the Fall, the Incarnation, grace, the sacraments and judgement. It provides a summary of material treated elsewhere in his Opera Omnia and is accorded the first place among his authentic works by Balduinus Distelbrink in his Bonaventurae Scripta. This persuasive text is revisited by a team of bonaventurean scholars. The genesis of this project is explained by J. A. Wayne Hellmann, OFM.Conv., in the foreword. The four years of conversations among scholars have given the volume a cohesion and greater unity. Each study follows the format of I. Approaching the text, II. Interpreting the text, III. Theological Significance of the text. The contributors are a mixture of household names in bonaventurean studies and a younger group of scholars. The volume is introduced by Dominic V. Monti, OFM, whose English translation of the Breviloquium was published in 2005 by the Franciscan Institute. He comments on the influence of this text both in the Franciscan community and beyond it, citing the commendations given by Dominique Chenu and Henri de Lubac. He previews the ground to be investigated by the individual contributors to the book, which he and Katherine Wrisley Shelby edited. The contributors to this companion to the Breviloquium are Stephen F. Brown (The Theological Context: Reflections on the Method of Bonaventure's Breviloquium), Jay M. Hammond (The Textual Context), Catherine A. Levri (The Prologue to the Breviloquium), J. Isaac Goff (On the Trinity of God), Boyd Taylor Coolman (On the Creation of the World), Timothy J. Johnson (On the Corruption of Sin), Corey L. Barnes (On the Incarnation of the Word), Katherine Wrisley Shelby (On the Grace of the Holy Spirit), Wayne Hellmann and T. Alexander Giltner (On the Sacramental Remedy), Kevin L. Hughes and Benjamin P. Winter (On the repose of the Final Judgment) and Bert Roest (Bonaventure's Breviloquium: A Sketch for a Reception History).

The title of the volume, Bonaventure Revisited, sets the scene for this review of the bonaventurean treatise. Jay M. Hammond maintains that Bonaventure's decision to remain in Paris as minister general was due to his strategy of staying at the heart of theological debate and to ensuring that the friars received a sound theological education in preparation [End Page 295] for the pastoral ministry. His hypothesis is that the Breviloquium was a propaedeutic catechism on the Scriptures and Christian doctrine for the friars in the 1260s. Scholarly debate about the date at which this treatise was completed has produced three camps: one, composition in 1256-57; two, the date of 1257, when Bonaventure was elected as the minister general; and three, and sometime after 1260. The author aligns himself with the third group and believes that the treatise was intended to assist friars in the novitiate and students of theology as well asthose already engaged in the order's pastoral mission. This reappraisal gains additional credence from the finding that the Breviloquium was frequently found in volumes which contained materials for preaching and teaching, suggesting a readership outside the order's three studia generalia of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge in the thirteenth century. The hypothesis requires careful consideration by those immersed in the manuscript tradition and the educational history of the order in the later 1250s and the 1260s. One of the potential obstacles to be circumnavigated is the explicit of a manuscript from the Cistercian Abbey of Clairvaux (Bibliothèque Municipale de Troyes, MS.1891), affirming that Breviloquium fratris Bonaventure, de ordine fratrum minorum ad intelligenciam sacre Scripture et fidei christiane, anno Domini M.CC.LVII. Professor Hammond observes that 'the widespread dating of the treatise 1256-1257...

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