Academic literature on the topic 'Lombard Theological School'

This study documents the discovery of Peter Lombard's long-thought-to-be-lost lectures on the Old Testament, which were hidden in plain view in the Old Testament lectures of Stephen Langton, who lectured on the Lombard's lectures. The presence in the Lombard's lectures on Genesis of the logical theory of supposition, the single greatest advance in logical theory during the High Middle Ages, means that those lectures not only postdate the Sentences but also represent the beginning of a radical advance in speculative theology that would continue to develop through the end of the High Middle Ages. This means in turn that lectures on the Bible from the 1150s to 1200, and in particular those of the School of Paris, headed by Peter Lombard, play a central role in one of the greatest speculative developments — logical, philosophical, and theological — of the Middle Ages.

To honour the scholar whose distinguished contribution to medieval intellectual history has included examination of the early history of Parisian scholarship, I have chosen to examine an aspect of the work of two major teachers and authors in that ‘monde scolaire qui préfigure déjà le monde universitaire de demain’, the school of Notre Dame. The work of Peter Lombard and Peter Cantor makes clear that in the second half of the twelfth century, Judaism was being placed firmly and permanently on the Parisian theological agenda. Peter Lombard (d. 1160) lectured on the Psalms and the Letters of St Paul. His commentaries on these books came quickly to be received as the standard teaching texts in Paris, the magna glossatura replacing, for those books, the glossa ordinaria of Anselm of Laon and his associates. Medieval exegetes held these particular books of the Bible in esteem. For Aquinas, articulating common opinion, they contained ‘almost the whole of theological doctrine’. And thus, it might well be claimed, almost the whole of theological doctrine about Judaism.

The discovery of a copy (in Lincoln MS 230) of Peter Lombard's lectures on the Sentences in three books (starting with the hexameral discussion that follows the treatise on the angels in the four-book version edited by Brady) makes possible for the first time investigating the development of the Lombard's theological teaching during his Parisian teaching career and the fortuna of that teaching outside of Paris. The fact that the Lombard began his early-career lectures on the Sentences in precisely the same place as he began his lectures on Genesis means that all of his teaching originated with Scripture. Moreover, the fact that Lincoln MS 230 is one of many early copies of the Lombard's Parisian teaching found in English cathedral libraries — Lincoln's Cathedral Library has another manuscript containing another copy of the Sentences, Lincoln MS 31, this one on four books, almost certainly copied within the Lombard's lifetime — has revealed the inadequacy of Brady's edition for scholarly understanding of the Lombard's career and teaching. Until now, no scholar paid much attention to the fact that Brady's choice of manuscripts was largely arbitrary and that his edition reflected the state of the Lombard's text around the time of Bonaventure in the mid-thirteenth century. Thus this discovery makes clear that the Sentences, like Gratian's Decretum and Comestor's History, developed over time. The Sentences were not, as so long assumed, a book written by the Lombard late in his career but rather the product of lectures delivered over the course of his career. The discovery of a treasure trove of English manuscripts preserving the Lombard's earliest extant Parisian teaching will enable scholars for the first time to trace the origins and development of the institutional practices of the cathedral school of Paris right up to the time of its transformation into the University of Paris.

The confluence between speculative thought and universities on the one hand and broad-based heretical movements on the other hand was a predominant theme in Bunny Leff’s great and monumental Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, notably in the case of Wyclif, Hus, and the popular propagation of their ideas. The first arm of this theme, university learning, seems to have no place in the history of Catharism. Where are there equivalent Cathar masters? In a university setting we do have Catholic theologians’ discussion of dualism, but is this more than a footnote in the history of Catharism? Take for example the University of Paris, its theology faculty, and the bachelor’s exercise of lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, where the question of there being one or several principles of things arose in the first distinction of the second book, and take three 1250s commentators. Tackling this question during his bachelor years (1252-6), St Thomas states five arguments in favour of plurality of principles, citing one logical and three natural works of Aristotle. He postpones naming the proponents of plurality until his response. Here he combines Aristotle’s survey of them in the first book of the Metaphysics and the Church’s experience of dualist heresy in a list: early natural philosophers, Empedocles and Pythagoras, and the heresy of the Manichees. Such a sentence commentary, showing us a formal proposition, one among several philosophical dualisms which were being ventilated in the theological schools of Paris, seems remote from the inquisitor’s register through which we see Cathar perfects and their followers living out theological dualism in fortified villages down south in Languedoc.