As an additional help to students of Bonaventure’s eucharistic theology, the following historical excursus is here offered. It is not intended to be exhaustive or fully detailed, but may provide a general overview of the western Church’s historical tradition that formed the basis for St. Bonaventure’s thinking as he began writing his Commentary on the Sentences.
In the West, the history of the theology of the Eucharist begins with St. Ambrose of Milan. While credit must be given to influential eastern writers such as Cyril of Jerusalem, Ignatius of Antioch, and the author of the Didache, their thought is mediated to the Latin West through the Milanese Doctor’s influential pen. Perhaps taking a cue from Cyril, the main locus of Ambrose’s eucharistic thought can be found in two sets of his catechetical lectures, De Sacramentis and De Mysteriis. These were offered to catechumens as preparation for their baptism. These two treatises, which some scholars have reasonably theorized are one and the same in origin (one being a transcript and the other being Ambrose’s own edited version), touch on a wider range of catechetical topics than the Eucharist, but it is from these two that western Eucharistic theology begins.
There are two powerful ideas that Ambrose puts forth in these two sets of lectures, both of which would become the standard basis for eucharistic thought in the West. First, one should understand the fact that Christians, even before Ambrose, believed in the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. He did not originate this idea. Yet, he did provide two further notions for western eucharistic thinkers: first that the power to convert the elements arises from the words of Christ spoken at the recitation of the words of institution, and second, that this conversion is a miracle on a par with the many miracles of the Old Testament. Hereafter, the theology of the West would branch out in a stream separate from the East, focusing on the miracle of the conversion and the exact moment when it occurs. This moment becomes identified with the moment the priest speaks the words “This is my body” and “This is the cup of my blood.” These Ambrosian ideas, the power of the words, the exact content or form of the words, and the miraculous power to convert the elements, all play a prominent role in Bonaventure’s thought as demonstrated in his Commentary.
Second in the line of great influencers of western eucharistic thought was Ambrose’s pupil, St. Augustine of Hippo. While Ambrose focused more on the miraculous nature of the conversion, Augustine dealt more with its signification. Though Augustine’s eucharistic thought cannot be traced to one or even a few of his writings, scholars have catalogued the various texts in which Augustine made reference to the sacrament. While, just as with Ambrose, it would be impossible to distill Augustine’s thought on the Eucharist to any single concept, the most influential concept is the notion that the Eucharist is a sacrament of unity. Augustine agreed with Ambrose that there is a conversion, that this conversion is effected through the power of the words, and that Christ is truly present through this miraculous conversion. Yet, in Augustine’s writings, it is almost as if he saw the true presence of Christ as secondary in importance to the ultimate truth of the sacrament. This ultimate truth is that the signs of bread and wine point to the ultimate signification and effect of the Eucharist: the building up of the Church as the Body of Christ, united to and identified with the Church and the Church united to Christ as her head. In this, Augustine built upon Ignatius of Antioch and Cyprian of Carthage, who through their eucharistic imagery taught that the people of God make up the Body of Christ and thus make up the very reality of the Eucharist. With these authors, utilizing the body theology of St. Paul, Augustine developed and advanced Ambrose’s thought, and he thereby made his own unique and lasting contribution to eucharistic theology.
If one were to draw two lines through the remainder of western eucharistic thought leading up to the time of Bonaventure, it would be these two complementary lines of the miraculous conversion of the bread and wine and the signification and efficacy of the sacrament as ordered toward unity. Four centuries later, Paschasius Radbertus picked up on these two lines of thought and advanced them, especially with respect to the Augustinian theology of body-unity. Paschasius wrote the first full-length treatise on the Eucharist, De corpore et sanguine Domini. Paschasius is somewhat infamous for his supposedly materialistic description of the presence of Christ, yet a careful reader will note that he does nothing more than synthesize Ambrose and Augustine and advance their thought. In fact, much of his well-known first chapter is nothing more than a close recapitulation of the material found in Ambrose on the power of God to miraculously effect the conversion of bread and wine. Yet, though Paschasius closely follows Ambrose on this point, he offers a significant development that will be carried on in the subsequent tradition.
By synthesizing Augustine with Ambrose, Paschasius makes the distinction that the body of Christ in the sacrament is not the historical body of Christ (which Bonaventure later identifies as the body present locally in heaven). Instead of asserting that the physical/historical body of Christ was present in the sacrament, Paschasius identified it as the “Mystical Body of Christ.” This “Mystical Body,” as helpfully pointed out by Henri de Lubac in Corpus Mysticum,1 did not identify the Mystical Body with the Church, as is common today. Rather, the Mystical Body refers to the “sacramental body of Christ,” mystically confected and present. The distinction between the body of Christ locally in heaven and the sacramental body of Christ on the altar carried over into Bonaventure’s theology. Again, this is Paschasius’s development of Ambrose, as Ambrose did not make a clear distinction between the two.
Second, Paschasius also advanced Augustine’s body theology in a way that has impacted the entirety of the sacramental theology found in Bonaventure’s Commentary. Perhaps drawing inspiration from the liturgical theology of Amalarius of Metz, Paschasius finds that when the Scripture speaks of the body of Christ, there is a threefold signification. The first is the Church, the second is the Mystical Body, which refers to the body of Christ confected in the Eucharist, and the third is the historical body born of the Virgin Mary, which currently reigns locally in heaven. According to Paschasius, the Mystical Body transfertur (is carried over) into the body of Jesus Christ, thus maintaining the sacramental distinction between the two bodies. Paschasius closes, however, his discussion of the three bodies by concluding that the ultimate signification and efficacy of the eucharistic body is ordered toward the unity of the ecclesial body – the Church united to her head Jesus. So, in agreement with Augustine, Paschasius’s ultimate conclusion is that of body-unity, and he repeats a rather stark Augustinian notion that the Church so becomes the Body of Christ that in the sacrament her members are mystically eaten and mystically drunk.
Paschasius’s text was later falsely attributed to Augustine himself and was thus mediated to later theologians through a florilegia of writings on the Eucharist. This text is how Bonaventure knew of Paschasius. This text is also how Peter Lombard knew of Paschasius; he quotes him as Augustine at the end of the tenth distinction. This text, finally, is how Innocent III gained access to Paschasius’s thought.
Innocent III was thus the next person to advance the body theology of Augustine, in his treatise De sacro altaris mysterio. Bonaventure draws directly from Innocent’s threefold manner of the existence of Christ: locally in heaven, personally in the Word, and sacramentally on the altar. The word sacramentaliter has, then, replaced mystice in the theological language, but the sense is the same. There are three different modes of existence for Christ, and the distinction between the body locally present in heaven and the one sacramentally present on the altar is maintained. Further, as Innocent III maintains this above threefold manner of existence, the Augustinian notion of the ultimate ordering of the sacrament toward the unity of the Body of Christ loses its importance. Innocent’s more limited vision subsequently moves into official Church teaching.
With this, one comes to the theological milieu of Bonaventure and his Commentary. Although it is not clear who exactly first articulated it, in the Parisian Schools of the 12th century, this threefold mode of existence/signification comes to fruition in the terminology sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, res tantum. This terminology now fully expresses both the threefold manner of existence along with the ordering toward the ultimate signification and efficacy of the unity of the ecclesial body. This is the terminology that Peter Lombard uses in his Sentences, and Bonaventure utilized it in his Commentary, not only for the sacrament of the Eucharist for which it was developed, but also for the sacraments across the board. In this way one can also see the primacy of the Eucharist as a subject and jumping off point for western theology; the ways of speaking about the eucharist are carried over into the overall sacramental theology of the remaining sacraments.
Now that the Augustinian line has been traced, it is necessary to go back a bit and trace Ambrose’s thought forward. As stated above, the Ambrosian contribution to Eucharistic theology centered on the power of the words of Christ to effect a miraculous conversion of the elements. After Paschasius Radbertus, this theology would next come to the fore two centuries later with the controversy surrounding Berengar of Tours in the 11th century. Berengar expressly denied Ambrose’s theological formulation, insisting that the sacrament of the Eucharist was a bare symbol. His main theological opponent was Lanfranc of Bec, who defended Ambrosian orthodoxy, using as his main source the writings of Paschasius Radbertus, whom he thought to be Augustine, as already mentioned. The most theologically significant part of this particular debate is the oath which Berengar was forced to swear at a Roman council, which included the following words: “the bread and wine that are set upon the altar, after consecration are not sacrament alone, but also are the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ and in a sensory fashion and not only as a sacrament but in truth are handled and broken by the hands of the priests, and ground between the teeth of the faithful.” This unfortunate oath became somewhat of an embarrassment to future theologians, as it does not accurately express the thought of Ambrose, either as it was or as it developed. Bonaventure did not hesitate to articulate his dissatisfaction with the wording of this oath.2
One thing that the Berengarian 11th-century controversy revealed, was that theologians were still searching for the appropriate theological language to use when describing the conversion. While both Ambrose and Augustine tended to simply use the verb “to be” (for example, “after the consecration, there is the body of Christ”), later theologians tried out language that was more technical and descriptive and that could serve as an adequate measure of orthodoxy. The words figura and veritas (figure and truth) made their debut with the 9th-century theologians Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus of Corbie. Their main difference was not in a difference of theology, but rather a different understanding of the words “figure” and “truth.” Berengar preferred the way Ratramnus used the word “figure” (though for Ratramnus figura meant something close to what Innocent III meant by sacramentaliter), while Lanfranc preferred the word veritas to describe the eucharistic body. Words such as transformo, transfero, and transmuto had also been used from time to time, even going as far back as Ambrose, though no one could come to an agreement as to which was best. No word could supplant the old mainstay converto.
This brings us to mid-12th-century Paris. In the Parisian schools of that time not only was the terminology for the signification of the Eucharist being developed (as discussed just above) but also the definitive technical term for describing the eucharistic change. Around 1150 in Paris someone coined the term transubstantio, and it would became the standard word in those circles to describe the conversion. Master Lombard did not use the term. He instead leaned on the words of Ambrose, Augustine, and Paschasius and continued to use the language of figure, truth, and conversion. But by the time Bonaventure wrote his Commentary on those same Sentences, the term transubstantio along with the Aristotelian use of substantia and accidentia began to appear. What happened in between Peter and Bonaventure to cause this change in the accepted theological language?
What happened was the growth and flourishing of the Parisian schools. More and more students were flocking to Paris, and subsequently to Oxford. They went in search of renowned theologians. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Abbey of St. Victor, and eventually the Franciscan and Dominican houses all boasted masters and students eager for learning. There was also the advent in the West of Aristotle’s philosophy in the 13th century. Hence, new philosophical tools also became available to describe the conversion.
Thus, sometime in the early to mid-13th century the new concept of “transubstantiation” appeared. Bonaventure utilizes this new concept in order to make the point that the “conversion” is not partial, but is total and complete. By describing the conversion in this manner, Bonaventure argues that there is nothing left of bread and wine, giving importance to these sacramental signs, because every aspect of the sensible external elements of bread and wine signify fully and truly what is contained sub sacramento. Use of this concept was new as the young Bonaventure wrote his Sentence Commentary. However, it is important to note, he utilized this concept as descriptive of this conversion, not as the object or purpose of the conversion.
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1 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
2 Bonaventure, Sentence Commentary, IV, d. 12, p. 1, a. 3, q. 1.