Bonaventure on Habitual Grace in Adam: A Change of Heart on Nature and Grace?

Abstract:Bonaventure asserts in his Sentences commentary that Adam was created without sanctifying grace, a point noted by Christopher Cullen and John Milbank. However, he does not advert to this claim in the Breviloquium, Itinerarium Mentis, and Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, and his theology as a whole is more consistent with the position that Adam was created in the state of grace. The similarities between Bonaventure's Sentences commentary and the Summa Fratris Alexandris lend credence to this argument; in his early work Bonaventure followed the established expert, but he did not defend the inherited position in his later works, where his theology of the human end points towards a single supernatural end. Created good and ordered to his supernatural end, Adam's creation in grace puts Bonaventure in tension with Cullen's development of Bonaventure's theological anthropology.