Distinction Three examines Baptism as a sacrament. Distinction Four questions infant baptism, and Distinction Six examines baptismal character.
In the first of these, Distinction Three, Bonaventure asks, “What is the integrity of the sacrament of Baptism?” He first responds by examining the created external element, the form of the words, and the faith required. In the three questions of article one in this distinction, one begins to see Bonaventure’s sacramental theology at work.
Drawing from Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, John Damascene, Dionysius, and the Glossa Ordinaria, he addresses the primary external element of Baptism: “The act of water washing is a sign of the grace that cleans within and the washing itself is a sign of interior cleansing.” Water washing is a sign of interior grace washing. Bonaventure here introduces three ways of looking at the sacrament of Baptism, and he incorporates for the first time in this text the three distinctions that become common for explaining dimensions of the sacraments: the sacramentum tantum (the visible element), the res tantum (curative grace) and the res et sacramentum (the character).1 One can speak of Baptism in these three ways.
Although the external sign of water washing has a natural significance appropriate for the sacrament, it effectively becomes a sacrament with the spoken word. Here Bonaventure begins hinting at his theology of the word: “…regeneration was accomplished through the Incarnate Word, and the Incarnate Word is most fittingly signified through a word clothed with voice.” He then develops that the expression of the word spoken in Baptism is also the perfect expression of faith in the Trinity, and the immersion into water is expression of faith in the passion of Christ. “In the action of immersion, there is a profession of faith in the passion, and in the word there is a profession of faith in the Trinity.” Baptism, as a gateway to the other sacraments, requires an extraordinary profession of faith in the Trinity and in the Passion of Christ.
Distinction Four addresses further the role of faith in Baptism, especially in infant baptism. Although he accepts that “Baptism does not signify to the infant, nevertheless it signifies to others the grace which it conveys to the infant.” In the case of an infant, Bonaventure argues, it is not that personal guilt is remitted, but rather the infant’s share in the original guilt inherited as a member of the human race. Just as one inherits original guilt from another, so the faith of another provides assistance of faith for the infant: “If Adam was able to corrupt them without their consent, so much the more so is the sacrament of Christ able to save them.”
Distinction Six follows up with a discussion of baptismal character. First, Bonaventure describes various ways of defining baptismal character. He concludes by defining it as “a certain quality that does not entirely perfect the soul, but which disposes the soul to further perfection, namely grace.” So, character as an effect of the sacrament is for signing, disposing, and also for distinguishing. He draws from John Damascene that in distinguishing, character configures individuals to God and assimilates them into the Lord’s flock, “distinguishing them from those who are not of the flock.”
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1 Yves Congar beautifully explains the significance of these three categories in his work At the Heart of Christian Worship, pp. 4-5. He writes, “This schema, already equivalently present in the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Cyprian, is the source of Augustine’s famous analysis of the sacraments that scholasticism will systematize in the categories of sacramentum (the ritual of the sacraments, the exterior sign), res et sacramentum (the effect produced that is not, however, the complete fruition, not the ultimate reality that the sacred action of the sacramental rite intends), and finally the res tantum (that which is the complete fruition of the sacrament, the spiritual reality signified by the sacred ritual and brought about in the mystery by rite).