ABSTRACT
In the twentieth century the influential German Lutheran Gerhard Ebeling, along with other proponents among the so-called hermeneutical theologians, popularized the idea that all of Church history could be accounted for in “evangelical” terms—meaning in terms of a process of ceaseless reinterpretation and reevaluation of Gospel life. In addition to biblical texts, certain classics of early ascetic literature provided the later Middle Ages with the verbal and pictorial imagery of primitive religious life within the Church. Students of Franciscan art do well to acknowledge the unique relationship between Francis and Bonaventure, which is both more profound and more intimate than that between any other religious founder and major theologian of the entire Middle Ages. There is a magisterial chapter in J. Guy Bougerol’s Introduction a l’Etude de S. Bonaventure, where he masterfully distills a lifetime of scholarship on Bonaventure’s exegesis.
