Justified True Belief

(●) The poor Italian schoolmaster who put the whole of Christian teaching into one book, and gave the West its theology textbook for four hundred years. + Imagine a student in Paris in the year 1150 who wants to know what the church actually teaches about baptism. The answer exists. It is scattered through Augustine and Ambrose and Jerome and Gregory, through a century of papal letters and conciliar rulings, in a library he cannot carry and mostly cannot afford, and when he does find the passages they sometimes contradict one another. Peter Lombard fixed that, and he fixed it in the plainest way imaginable. He gathered the judgments of the fathers, the great Christian teachers of the first centuries whose settled opinions a later theologian might weigh and interpret but could not simply overrule, on every question a working theologian had to face. He arranged them so that one question led into the next, and where he thought a disagreement could be settled, he settled it. The book was called the Sentences, and it did something no other medieval book managed. From the 1220s until the sixteenth century, no work of Christian literature except the Bible itself was commented on more often. Thomas Aquinas wrote on it as a young bachelor of theology, which was the apprentice rank a man held while he lectured his way toward a licence to teach, and that was years before the Summa. So did Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, and so did a young Augustinian friar at Erfurt named Martin Luther, who scribbled his objections in the margins of his own copy. Aquinas’ own Summa Theologiae did not displace it in the schools for another two and a half centuries. His dates are a convention rather than a record. No document gives the year of his birth; the usual estimate places it between 1095 and 1100, and c. 1096 is among the years commonly printed. The first thirty years of his life are simply blank. What survives of him begins with a letter of recommendation, and ends with a book.

(●) c. 1096 AD: Born in a farming village outside Novara, in a family history did not trouble to record. + He came from Lumellogno, a village in the flat rice country west of Milan, now swallowed up as a quarter of the city of Novara. He was called the Lombard because he came from Lombardy, and the nickname stuck so thoroughly that his family name, if he had one, is lost. His parents are unknown. The date of his birth is a scholar’s estimate, somewhere in the years 1095 to 1100, worked backward from the point where the records begin. He was almost certainly schooled in Italy first, most likely at the cathedral schools of Novara and of Lucca. A cathedral school was what a boy had instead of a university, because there were as yet no universities: a bishop kept a master on hand to train the clergy of his church, and any promising boy who could get himself admitted learned there alongside them. Peter may also have studied at Bologna, where the revival of Roman law was under way and where his contemporary Gratian was assembling the canon law of the church, its own internal body of rules on everything from who may be ordained to who may marry whom, into a single collection. That Italian training shows later: no theologian of his century handles a disputed marriage case with a steadier hand. Everything before about 1136 is guesswork. The first documented trace of Peter Lombard in the whole of Europe is a letter written by somebody else, about him.

(●) c. 1136 AD: A recommendation from Bernard of Clairvaux carried an unknown foreigner into the best schools in France. + The bishop of Lucca, whose name the sources do not agree on, thought enough of the young Lombard to commend him to Bernard of Clairvaux, the most listened-to churchman in Europe. Bernard sent him north to Reims, where the teaching of Anselm of Laon still set the tone, and then wrote to Gilduin, abbot of the young house of Saint Victor in Paris, asking him to look after the Italian. It is worth pausing on how little he had. Twelfth-century France ran on land, lineage and patronage. Peter had no feudal standing, no relatives in the kingdom, no money, and no bishop of his own to push his case. He had a letter, and he had whatever he could do in a classroom. He arrived in Paris around 1136 and studied under Hugh of Saint Victor, the finest theological mind in the city, whose work on the sacraments would shape his own. Within six years the letter had stopped mattering. By 1142 he was being named in other men’s books as a celebrated teacher and writer, on a level with the masters he had come to learn from.

(●) 1144 AD: His commentaries on the Psalms and on Paul made his name, and Notre Dame made him a canon of the cathedral. + What made his name first was not the Sentences but his work on the Bible. He produced a commentary on the Psalms before 1138 and a commentary on the letters of Paul between about 1139 and 1141, and both became instant classics. The one on Paul in particular outran everything else written on those letters in the twelfth century, the most copied and most cited of them all, and later students knew the pair simply as the Great Gloss. The word is worth a moment, because it names the form as well as the books. A gloss was explanation written onto the sacred page itself, short notes squeezed into the margins and between the lines of a manuscript of Scripture, so that a student read the text and the church’s understanding of it in one glance. Peter’s glosses grew until they burst the margins and had to be copied as books in their own right. That was the reputation the cathedral chapter of Notre Dame wanted for its school. A chapter is the standing body of clergy attached to a cathedral, and each of its members is a canon, drawing an income from the church’s lands and owing it his share of the daily round of services and business; in 1144 or 1145 the chapter made Peter one of them. The school he taught in was not yet a university, but it was becoming one. Within sixty years the masters of Notre Dame would form the theology faculty of the University of Paris, and the lecture room where Peter Lombard read the Psalms aloud to his students is, in a straight line, an ancestor of the theology faculties of Europe. Two of the students in that room, Peter Comestor and Peter of Poitiers, would hold the chair after him and carry his methods forward.

(●) 1148 AD: At the Council of Reims he helped judge Gilbert of Poitiers, and signed against a fellow teacher’s words. + A sentence a man said in a lecture room could follow him for the rest of his life, and in the spring of 1148 the whole church watched it happen to one of the best teachers alive. Gilbert of Poitiers was a bishop and a formidable master, and his way of speaking about God had begun to worry people. In the technical language of the schools he distinguished between God and the divinity by which God is God, roughly the way one might distinguish between a burning coal and its heat: two words for what is in fact one thing, kept apart so that a sentence about God stays exact. His critics heard something else entirely. If God and God’s divinity can be pulled apart even in speech, they said, then the divinity starts to sound like a second something standing behind the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and the God of the creed has been divided in two. Bernard of Clairvaux pressed the case. Pope Eugenius III presided. Peter Lombard was among those consulted, and he was among the signatories of the act against Gilbert’s teaching. The scene is worth holding on to, because it is the world he wrote in. A master’s sentences could be copied out by an enemy, carried to a council, and read back to him in front of a pope. Nobody in that room thought theology was a private exercise, and nobody thought a careless formula was harmless. Peter watched it happen to a man far better connected than himself, and then went home and wrote a book made almost entirely of other people’s formulas. Within twenty years of his death, his own sentences would be carried to a pope the same way.

(●) c. 1155 to 1157 AD: He finished the Sentences, and called it a short work. + The Sentences grew out of his lecture course, and the final version is dated to the years 1155 to 1157. It runs to four books: God and the Trinity, creation and the angels and the fall, Christ and the virtues, and then the sacraments and the last things. In the modern critical edition, the text editors rebuilt by laying the surviving manuscripts side by side and judging between them, the book runs to two volumes bound in three stout parts, over a thousand pages of Latin. He describes the thing in his own preface as compact and small, which tells you something about the size of the shelf he was replacing. A word he made famous, and which the title carries: a sentence, sententia in his Latin, is not a sentence in our sense. It is the settled judgment of an authoritative writer on a question, quoted in that writer’s own words. Peter’s method was to state the question, line up the sentences on both sides, and then decide. Peter Abelard had done the first half of that brilliantly in a book called Sic et Non, Yes and No, which sets the fathers against each other on a hundred and fifty-eight questions and leaves the student to sort it out. The difference is the second half. Abelard raised the dust; Peter Lombard settled it, and a beginner could follow him. The order of the whole thing he took from Augustine, who had written that all teaching concerns either things or signs. A thing, in that division, is whatever stands there in its own right: God, the angels, the world, a man. A sign is whatever exists in order to point at something beyond itself, the way a wedding ring on a hand exists to say a marriage. So the things come first, in the first three books, and among them God alone is the one to be loved for his own sake rather than used for the sake of something else. The signs come last, in the fourth book, and the signs are the sacraments. It is a plain plan, and it is a good part of why the book holds together where a mere heap of quotations would have come apart in the reader’s hands.

(●) 1159 AD: An outsider with no connections in France was consecrated bishop of Paris. + He was consecrated in 1159, consecration being the service in which a man is made a bishop by the laying on of other bishops’ hands, and the sources split on the day: some put it at the feast of Saints Peter and Paul at the end of June, others a month later, on 28 July. The usual account of how it happened is a good story and may well be true. Philip, the younger brother of King Louis VII and archdeacon of Paris, was elected to the see, a bishop’s see being his seat and so the city he has charge of, and then stepped aside in favour of his old teacher. A later critic, Walter of Saint Victor, claimed instead that Peter bought the office, but Walter was an enemy of his theology and wrote long after the fact, and no one else repeats the charge. However he got there, consider the distance travelled. A boy from a village in the Piedmont rice fields, with no family, no money and no patron in the kingdom, ended as bishop of the capital of France, and he got there on nothing but his reputation as a teacher.

(●) 1160 AD: He died about a year after his consecration, and his epitaph named the book rather than the office. + He died in the summer of 1160, on 20 July by the reckoning of his tombstone, though some accounts place it a day or two later. He was buried in the church of Saint Marcel in Paris. The tomb was destroyed in 1796, during the French Revolution, but the inscription had already been copied out, and it runs, in Thomas M. Finn’s translation of the text Ignatius Brady prints: "Here lies Master Peter the Lombard, bishop of Paris, who composed the Book of Sentences, Glosses of the Psalms and of the Epistles, the day of whose death is the thirteenth of the calends of August." That last phrase is the old Roman way of writing a date, and it is easier than it looks. The calends were the first day of a month, and a Roman counted backwards towards them, taking in both ends of the count, so the thirteenth day before the calends of August works back from 1 August to 20 July. Notice what the epitaph thinks is worth saying. It gives him one line as a bishop and three works, and it gets the order right. Maurice de Sully succeeded him in the see and three years later began building the cathedral of Notre Dame, so that the stone rising over the Île de la Cité and the book being copied in the schools around it went up together. He had been bishop for about a year. The book he left had four hundred years still to run.

What He Taught

(T1) The whole of Christian teaching can be set out in order, in one book a student can carry. + Anyone who has tried to answer a serious question with twenty open browser tabs knows the feeling the Sentences was built to cure. The material is all there; the trouble is that it is everywhere, in no order, and some of it disagrees with the rest. The twelfth-century version of that problem was a monastery library, a handful of expensive manuscripts, and no index. Peter’s answer had two parts. The first was arrangement. Following Augustine’s remark that all teaching concerns either things or signs, he divided the subject into four books and let each question hand off to the next, so that a reader who began at the Trinity arrived, hundreds of pages later, at the resurrection of the dead, having passed through creation, sin, the Incarnation, faith, hope, love, and the seven sacraments without ever being asked to jump. Later teachers cut the four books into smaller units they called distinctions, a distinction being roughly a chapter, and the numbering everyone still uses when they cite him (Book IV, distinction 27) is that later scheme rather than his own. The second part was honesty about disagreement. He quotes the fathers at length, including the passages that cut against the answer he is going to give, and then gives his answer anyway with his reasons attached. That is why the book could be taught from by people who disagreed with it. A student who worked through the Sentences came out knowing not only what to think but what the strongest case on the other side had been, which is exactly the training a theologian needs and exactly why the universities kept the book for so long.

(Q) "In a short work are brought together the opinions of the fathers, whose testimonies are included so that there is no need for any researcher to open too many books; for such a person the compact, small size of my work provides without effort whatever he needs to find." + Source: Peter Lombard, Sentences, prologue (Frank Mantello’s translation, printed in Thomas M. Finn, "The Sacramental World in the Sentences of Peter Lombard," Theological Studies 69, 2008). The preface is a teacher explaining why he has written the thing, and the stated reason is mercy on his students’ time and purses. A few lines later he asks for something most authors do not: "in this exercise I desire not only a devout reader, but also an open-minded critic."

(T2) A sacrament does not merely picture grace; it carries the grace it pictures. + There is a difference between a photograph of a fire and a lit match. Both of them are about fire. Only one of them will warm the room. That difference is what Peter Lombard was trying to pin down, and pinning it down mattered because the word in play had grown too loose to be useful. Augustine had defined a sacrament as the sign of a sacred thing, which is true and far too wide. On that definition the church had been counting up to thirty sacraments: holy water, ashes, the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer. Hugh of Saint Victor, Peter’s own teacher, had begun to tighten it by saying that the rite does not only resemble the inner reality but contains and conveys it. Peter took that and made it a definition a student could memorise, and then he did something more consequential still: he listed the sacraments, and there were seven of them. Baptism, confirmation, the blessed bread which is the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and marriage. Four of those names have gone quiet since and are worth a word in passing: confirmation is the laying on of hands that follows baptism, penance is confession and the absolution that answers it, extreme unction is the anointing with oil at the end of a life, and holy orders is ordination, the making of deacons, priests and bishops. Seven was in the air by the middle of the twelfth century and he did not invent the number. What he did was attach it to the definition and put both in the book everyone taught from, and after that the question was closed in the Latin West. The Council of Florence in 1439 and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century defined what the schools had been teaching out of the Sentences for three hundred years. He drew one further line that the later councils kept: the signs of the old covenant pointed forward to a grace they did not yet carry, while the sacraments of the new covenant deliver what they signify. The Reformers would part company over the number and over how the delivery works, but they argued on ground he had surveyed.

(Q) "A sacrament is properly so called, which is a sign of the grace of God and the form of invisible grace, in as much as it bears the likeness of the grace and is its cause. Thus, the sacraments were instituted for the sake not only of signifying but of sanctifying." + Source: Peter Lombard, Sentences IV, distinction 1, chapter 4 (translation by Thomas M. Finn, Theological Studies 69, 2008). Two clauses doing two jobs. The first says what a sacrament is, a sign that looks like the thing it stands for. The second says what a sacrament does, which is the whole point of the definition: not only signifying but sanctifying (T2).

(T3) What makes a marriage is the consent of the two, not the marriage bed. + Two people stand in a church door and say, in the present tense, that they take each other. On Peter Lombard’s account they are married before they have gone anywhere or done anything else, and nothing that happens afterwards makes them more married than they already are. That was a live fight in his lifetime, and the other side was formidable. At Bologna, Gratian taught that marriage is a process: a promise about the future begins it, and the couple coming together completes it, and until then the thing is real but unfinished. The word for that completion is consummation. Two cases put pressure on it. One was ordinary: a bride whose husband died on the journey home was left in an undignified legal limbo, neither wife nor widow. The other was not ordinary at all. Mary and Joseph were husband and wife, and the church had always said so, and on the Bologna view their marriage was permanently incomplete. Peter answered that their marriage was perfect, not in the sign but in its holiness. The sign he means there is the joining of two bodies, so his answer is that Mary and Joseph went without that one signifying act and went without nothing else: what makes the marriage is the bond of two wills, and theirs was as complete as a marriage can be. His ruling is the one that won. Pope Alexander III took present consent into the law of the church in a stream of rulings on particular cases, and the shape of a Western wedding, two people exchanging vows in the present tense before witnesses, owes more to this decision than to any other single text. Peter did not thereby make the body irrelevant. He held that a marriage signifies the union of Christ and the church twice over: the agreement of two wills signifies the union of love, and the joining of two bodies signifies the union of natures in the Incarnation, which is what Paul was reaching for when he wrote, "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Ephesians 5:31–32).

(Q) "The consent that forms a marriage is nothing other than that expressed through words, not about the future, but about the present... 'I accept you as my husband, and I accept you as my wife,' this makes matrimony." + Source: Peter Lombard, Sentences IV, distinction 27, chapter 3 (translation by Thomas M. Finn, Theological Studies 69, 2008). The whole weight of the ruling rests on a grammatical tense. "I will take you" is a betrothal; "I take you" is a marriage (T3). Seventeen of the fifty distinctions of Book IV are given to marriage, more than to any other subject in the book, because every hard case in twelfth-century life came through that door: inheritance, legitimacy, consanguinity (whether the two were related too closely by blood to marry at all), desertion, forced consent, the marriages of slaves.

(T4) The love with which a Christian loves God is the Holy Spirit himself. + A woman gets up in the dark on a winter morning and walks to a church that will not be warm for another hour, because she loves God and wants to be there. Ask her where that love came from and she will tell you God gave it to her, and nobody finds the answer strange. What Peter Lombard wanted to know was what exactly God gives when he gives a person that. It is the teaching that made him famous and then made him a problem, and it is worth stating at full strength before anyone objects to it. Start with the word. Charity, caritas in Latin, does not mean giving money to the poor. It is the theological name for the love of God and of neighbour, the love a Christian is commanded to have and knows perfectly well he cannot generate on his own. So where does it come from? The ordinary answer, then and now, is that God gives it: he works a real change in the person, a new disposition, something created in the soul that was not there before, and the loving that follows is the person’s own. Later schoolmen had a name for that something, created grace: a gift that God makes in us, as genuinely ours afterwards as a strengthened muscle is ours, and as genuinely a gift as the training that built it. Peter Lombard read his Bible and drew a harder conclusion. "God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8). If God is love, and the love in us is poured out by the Spirit, then perhaps the charity in a believer is not a created something at all. Perhaps it is the third person of the Trinity, present in the person, doing the loving. He got the idea from Augustine, and he was not being careless; Book I, distinction 17 works through the objections at length. And it is a magnificent thought. It means that when a Christian loves God, that love is not a creature straining upward but God himself, given, at work in a human heart. Almost no later theologian would follow him here, and the reason Aquinas gave against him took only one sentence.

(Q) "The Holy Spirit himself is the love or charity by which we love God and neighbour." + Source: Peter Lombard, Sentences I, distinction 17, chapter 1.2, translated from the Latin of Brady’s critical edition (volume I, page 138): "ipse idem Spiritus sanctus est amor sive caritas, qua nos diligimus Deum et proximum." The chapter heading states it just as plainly: that the Holy Spirit is the charity by which we love God and neighbour. He goes on to say that when this love is in us and moves us to love God and our neighbour, then the Holy Spirit is said to be sent to us and given to us (T4).

(Q) "Wishing, with the poor widow, to give something to the Lord’s treasury out of our penury and poverty, we have dared to scale the difficult heights and to undertake a work beyond our strength." + Source: Peter Lombard, Sentences, prologue (Giulio Silano’s translation). The first sentence of the book, and the widow is the one in Luke 21:1–4 who dropped two small copper coins into the temple treasury while the rich were putting in their gifts. A poor man from Lombardy, opening the work of his life, reached for the poorest giver in the Gospels. A century and a half later Dante remembered the line and put him in heaven for it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) For three centuries a man had to lecture his way through his book before the church would let him teach. + The turn came about sixty years after his death. Alexander of Hales was regent master at Paris in the 1220s, the regent master being the man who held the chair and did the teaching in it, and he began giving his main lectures on the Sentences rather than on Scripture. Roger Bacon would later blame that innovation for the decline of theology. It became the rule everywhere all the same. From then on a young theologian at Paris or Oxford spent years as a sententiarius, a lecturer on the Sentences, reading the whole book aloud to students and arguing with it in public, and he was not licensed to teach theology until he had done it. So the list of men who wrote commentaries on Peter Lombard is very close to the list of everyone who mattered. Thomas Aquinas was a sententiarius at Paris from 1252 to 1256, and the commentary he wrote in those four years came years before the Summa. Bonaventure wrote one, and Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, and hundreds of others whose names are now known only to specialists. Martin Luther lectured on the book at Erfurt around 1509 to 1511 and filled the margins of his copy with notes; a good deal of the Reformation begins as a quarrel with a schoolbook. The canons of the Council of Trent, meaning its formal rulings rather than its clergymen, read in places like a set of answers to questions the Sentences had framed. Dante, who read him as a theologian rather than a textbook, set him in the sphere of the sun among the twelve lights of the wise, beside Aquinas and Isidore and Bede, and identified him by his own preface: "That Peter was who, e’en as the poor widow, offered his treasure unto Holy Church" (Paradiso X, in Longfellow’s translation).

(†) When an abbot called him a heretic, an ecumenical council answered that it believed with Peter Lombard. + Joachim of Fiore was a Calabrian abbot with a reputation for prophecy, and he had read Book I of the Sentences with alarm. Peter had written that there is a certain supreme reality which is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and which itself neither begets nor is begotten nor proceeds. He meant by that the one divine essence, essence being simply what a thing is, so that the one Godhead which the three persons each fully are does not itself do the begetting and proceeding that the persons do. Joachim heard a fourth thing being added to the three, a quaternity instead of a Trinity: Father, Son, Spirit, and now this shared essence standing behind them like a fourth party in the room. He wrote a book saying so, and calling Peter a heretic and a madman. The Fourth Lateran Council took the case up in 1215, fifty-five years after Peter’s death, and decided it against Joachim. The council condemned Joachim’s book and confessed, in its second canon, that it believed with Peter Lombard that there exists a certain supreme reality, incomprehensible and ineffable, beyond what a mind can take in and beyond what words can carry, which truly is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It added, carefully, that it meant no harm to Joachim’s monastery, which had submitted its writings to the papacy. That is a remarkable thing to happen to a schoolmaster. Councils condemn theologians by name often enough. A general council of the church endorsing a private theologian by name, and adopting his words as its own, is close to unique, and it is the reason the Sentences could be criticised freely for the next three centuries without anyone proposing to replace it.

(†) Almost nobody followed him on charity, and a sentence about Christ’s humanity drew a papal condemnation. + The same schools that taught out of him kept a running list of the places where the Master was not to be followed, and a student learned the list along with the text. Two entries matter. - Charity is not the Holy Spirit. His boldest teaching (T4) is the one almost nobody accepted. Thomas Aquinas states it fairly and then refuses it: "The Master looks thoroughly into this question in 17 of the First Book, and concludes that charity is not something created in the soul, but is the Holy Ghost Himself dwelling in the mind." Aquinas’ objection is one sentence long and hard to get around. If the Spirit does the loving and the will is only moved, then loving is no longer a voluntary act, and love that is not willed is not love at all; so charity must be a real gift worked in the soul, by which the person himself loves (Summa Theologiae II-II, question 23, article 2, English Dominican Province translation). The correction does not so much reject his instinct as protect it: the love really is God’s gift, and it really is yours. - Christ as man is not nothing. In Book III, distinction 6, he set out the three accounts then current of how God and man are joined in Christ, and did not clearly choose between them. One of those accounts, pressed hard, ends by saying that Christ considered as man is not a something. The schools nicknamed that conclusion nihilianism, from the Latin nihil, nothing, and the question under it is as concrete as questions get: is the man Jesus, with a body that got tired and a soul that was troubled, a real human something that the Son of God took to himself, or is talk of his manhood only a way of speaking? In the 1170s John of Cornwall and Walter of Saint Victor pressed exactly that charge against him, and Pope Alexander III condemned the proposition. Whether Peter himself held it is still argued; Marcia Colish, who has written the standard study of him, argues that he did not, and that the humanity he assigns to Christ, a real body and a real soul, is plainly a something. Either way the fault is his own and it is a fault of his method: a book that reports every opinion evenhandedly can be read as holding the worst of them, and on the doctrine where precision matters most, he left the reader to guess. Set against a corpus that shaped Western theology for four hundred years, two contested points is a small ledger, and the church said so by keeping the book. But on one of them a proposition was condemned under his name, and the record should carry it.