Pedro Lombardo

Lombard, Peter (1095/1100–1160)

Peter Lombard’s philosophical views are important given the formative role his Sententiae in IV libris distinctae (Four Books of Sentences) played in the education of university theologians in the high Middle Ages, many of whom were also philosophers. Peter staunchly opposes theologies, cosmologies and anthropologies of a Platonic or Neoplatonic type. While conversant with new trends in logic in his day, he is disinclined to treat theological issues as illustrations of the rules of formal logic or natural philosophy, preferring to view them from a metaphysical perspective. In his doctrine of God he deliberately eschews terminology associated with any one philosophical school. In his anthropology and sacramental theology he shows a marked preference for Aristotelianism. The hospitability of his theology to Aristotelianism and to a philosophical treatment of a range of theological questions made his Sentences elastic enough to accommodate the reception of Greco-Arabic thought and to serve as a pedagogical framework usable by philosophers of every persuasion during the succeeding three centuries.

Born in the Novara region of Italy, Peter left no traces on the historical record until he was noticed by Bernard of Clairvaux in the mid-1130s. With Bernard’s advice and help, he went to France to study theology, first at the cathedral school at Rheims and then, in 1136, at Paris, probably under Hugh of St Victor. His earliest works were commentaries on the Psalms, written before 1138, and the Pauline epistles (first rescension 1139–41). He had become a recognized master by 1142. In 1145 Peter became a canon of Notre Dame, an unusual honour for a foreigner, teaching there until 1159 when he was elected bishop of Paris, a post he held until his death in 1160. His major work, the Sententiae in IV libris distinctae (Four Books of Sentences), sums up his systematic theology. The final version of this work was completed in 1155–7.

For Peter, not all branches or schools of philosophy are equally pertinent to theology. He is uninterested in natural philosophy and says less about it than do the patristic authorities on whom he relies for his account of creation. He is familiar with the logicians’ debates over universals. Without taking a personal stand on the priority or posteriority of universals to concepts standing for individuals, he refers to them in glossing ‘all creation’ (Romans 8: 19), which, he states, is a universal collecting all aspects of the human nature that is to be saved. Peter applies the contemporary nominalist view of the unitary signification of nouns and verbs and their consignification in oblique cases or past and future tenses, using this principle against Peter Abelard’s argument that God could do otherwise or better than he does, in a defence of divine omniscience and omnipotence that contributes to the development of the distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power (see Abelard, P.; Nominalism; Omnipotence).

Peter rejects any kind of emanationist, exemplarist or immanentalist understanding of God and his relationship to creation, as well as the equation made in some quarters during his time of the Platonic One, Nous and World Soul with the Trinity (see Neoplatonism). In glossing Romans 1: 20, he agrees with Marius Victorinus that the Neoplatonic triad of being, life and thought is apposite to the Trinity but his appreciation of the Platonic tradition stops there. Sometimes he favours a philosophical vocabulary neutral enough to shoulder its theological duties, unconstrained by the denotations which particular schools impose on key terms. At other points he opts for Aristotelianism. Opposing the Platonic notion of the human being as a soul using a body, he joins the Aristotelians in defining it as an integral union of body and soul. This principle undergirds his treatment of the creation of mankind, the fall and its consequences, Christ’s human nature, the redemption, ethics and the sacraments. While he accents inner intentionality in ethics, he thinks that good intentions should be expressed in appropriate external actions, and while he holds that it is consent that makes a marriage, he regards the physical as well as the spiritual union of spouses as sacramental. He calls the present consent of spouses the efficient cause of marriage, and the ends of marriage (fidelity, lifelong commitment and offspring) its final cause. He applies ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’ in their Aristotelian sense to the change in the eucharistic elements at the time of consecration.

In other areas, Peter’s use of Aristotelianism is muted by his felt need for a more neutral lexicon or because he wants to emphasize something else. He offers four proofs for God’s existence, including Aristotle’s argument from motion to a prime mover. His other proofs move from physical to metaphysical arguments in accenting the idea that the deity is the ground of being of the creation, rather than the idea that he is the cause of effects in the phenomenal world (see God, arguments for the existence of). In treating the deity, Peter prefers a generic definition of ‘substance’ as referring simply to an entity’s basic nature, because the Aristotelian understanding of ‘substance’ as referring to composite created beings is inapposite to God. Similarly, he rejects the Aristotelian definition of ‘relation’ as an accident when he discusses the mutual relations that name the persons of the Trinity. In another case, his doctrine of conscience as the spark of reason not extinguished even in the worst of sinners, Peter draws on an idea ultimately Stoic in provenance which he is the first medieval thinker to revive (see Stoicism).

More generally, Peter’s acknowledgement of natural reason as a real epistemic state and his positive use of it in theology in opposition to Neoplatonic negative theology, his resolutely metaphysical approach to the deity and to the unmanifested Trinity as the supreme objects of knowledge that reason can address, and his interest in human nature as such, before the fall, open up zones for philosophical reflection which later scholastics could and did develop, whatever their philosophical proclivities. While issuing Aristotelians a warning concerning the appositeness of ‘substance’ and ‘relation’ to the divine nature, he provides notable support for that school. At the same time, he throws down the gauntlet to defenders of a more thoroughgoing Platonism.