Bonaventure's name is invariably cited today when one speaks of the doctrine of the spiritual senses in Christian history. Early twentieth-century treatments of the spiritual theology of this ‘prince of mystical theology’ referred to the spiritual senses as an integral part of that theology, and his doctrine became more famous thanks to a seminal article by Karl Rahner – and an indirect response to that article by Hans Urs von Balthasar. More recently, Fabio Massimo Tedoldi has published a monograph on the subject.

In his earliest reference to the spiritual senses, Bonaventure notes that one may speak of them broadly or more strictly. Broadly, they refer to ‘any perfect use of grace’; strictly, they refer to the ‘use of interior grace with respect to God himself according to a proportion to the five senses’. Similarly, there can be broader or stricter accounts of Bonaventure's doctrine on the subject, depending on whether one confines oneself to his explicit references to the spiritual senses or casts one's net more widely to encompass many other themes and texts concerning the experience of God. Strictly speaking, Bonaventure locates the spiritual senses fairly precisely within his doctrine of grace and of religious knowledge. However, there are only a dozen or so explicit references to the spiritual senses scattered throughout his corpus. Building a complete doctrine on them presents a challenge, since most of them do not seem to be construed in any systematic fashion. Tedoldi gives the most comprehensive account of a broader reading, arguing that the doctrine of the spiritual senses is implied whenever Bonaventure speaks of spiritual knowledge.