Appropriating Apocalypse in Bonaventure's Breviloquium

This essay argues that in his Breviloquium Bonaventure expands the doctrine of trinitarian appropriation beyond its fixed scholastic frame; that he applies this expanded grammar of appropriation across the text both synchronically and diachronically, or formally in its literary structure and narratively throughout its account of salvation history; and that Bonaventure does so, or at least there are good reasons for so thinking, in response to the Joachite controversy that embattled the Franciscan Order of his time, to whose benefit he composed the Breviloquium.1 This is, then, an essay whose central task it is to investigate how a highly technical idiom of the scholastic mastertext features within Bonaventure’s particular iteration. The results are striking. There is scarcely a depth in the Breviloquium that trinitarian appropriation does not reach.2 I write with an eye to certain question marks drawn by Bonaventure scholarship. First among these questions concerns the deeply trinitarian character of Bonaventure’s thought. It’s a feature many think sufficiently obvious to be regarded as a truism.3 But it’s axiomatically true, too, as