Book Review ...

...The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's 'Sentences' (Rethinking the Middle Ages) by Philipp W. Rosemann

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This is a wonderful book of history. The author Philipp W. Rosemann offers a fascinating examination of Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences and its treatment over four centuries. Rosemann provides a look at a rare slice of medieval life, specifically the role that the Book of Sentences played in the developing universities. Finally, he shares an insight into a feature of human thought, namely its tendency to unfold a text into insights, theories and speculations until it fractures, at which point there is a refolding of the diverse skeins of insights, theories and speculation back into the original text.

Rosemann organizes his book in a century by century form, devoting a chapter to each of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, with the final chapter on the "Long Fifteenth Century" culminating in Martin Luther's involvement with the Book of Sentences.

The Book of Sentences was written by Peter Lombard, aka "The Master of Sentences" or "The Lombard," in the mid-12th Century as a "study aid" for his students. In the 12th Century, education was moving from the monasteries to the universities. Paris hosted a number of private theology teachers such as Peter Lombard. The Master based his book on the lectures he had been giving to his students for the previous thirty years. The book organized the opinions of religious authorities, such as Augustine and Gregory, on various subjects in a format that covered topics ranging from the Trinity to the sacraments. As the centuries went by this organizational format would persist as the way that systematic theology was structured during the ensuing centuries, even after theologians stopped interacting with the Lombard's actual text.

Lombard's book was an instant hit. Lombard became Bishop of Paris in 1159. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 consecrated the Sentences as supremely orthodox by approving Lombard's understanding of the Trinity. (p. 61.)

The Sentences were used by teachers of theology throughout Catholic Europe. Some universities had regulations requiring that the Sentences be taught. After Lombard, every theologian of note, including Aquinas, Ockham, Scotus and Luther, wrote a commentary on the Sentences.

Although it was a study aid, the early history of the Sentences involved developing study aids to assist in the use of the study aid. This resulted in the production of glosses and abbreviations. The glosses were the lecture notes that were added to the sides of the student's texts. Eventually, these glosses became books in their own right, although they required the text of the Sentences in order to follow the explanations in the glosses. Interestingly, one can see this format in Aquinas' commentaries on Aristotle and the various books of the Bible. Eventually, the gloss commentaries developed into stand-alone texts, beginning the tradition of writing commentaries.

Abbreviations were summaries of the texts. One interesting point made by Roseman is that at the time of the earliest abbreviations, in the 13th Century, the alphabetical order was still new, which resulted in a certain incompetence in creating alphabetical indexes. (p. 89.) Previously, and continuing throughout the 13th Century, the practice had been to arrange references in a "logical or indeed cosmological order," such as starting with God and working down through creation, as the Master had done in his book. (p. 89.) Rosemann makes the priceless observation that the move from the "cosmological" to the alphabetical order constituted a Copernican turn whereby men moved from being readers of signs, whose principle task was to understand the cosmos, to writers of signifiers, whose task was to impose an order on the universe. (p. 90.) Rosemann doesn't explore the issue, but one has to wonder how much of that "Copernican turn" eventually resulted in Nominalism and modernity. It's a topic worth contemplating.

Rosemann does a brilliant job of explaining the "crisis" provoked by the condemnation of various scholastic teachings by Bishop Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, in 1277. Tempier's condemnation was based less on the fact that anyone was actually teaching heresy, but on his concern that such a heresy might develop. The errors condemned in 1277 seem to be those teachings that sought to put philosophy on a higher plane than theology. The condemnation led directly to Nominalism, according to Rosemann, in that one of the earliest figures in the development of Nominalism - Duns Scotus - was deeply influenced by Henry of Ghent, who had been one of the members of the commission that drew up the list of errors that were condemned in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris. (p. 103.)

Rosemann's follows the development of Nominalism into its ever more abstract mode of thought. Nominalism was inspired by an effort to carve out an area of autonomy for theology by distinguishing between God's inscrutable absolute power - potentia absoluta - and God's power as exercised in a covenantal relationship with creation - potentia ordinate. (p. 137.) In contradistinction to Thomism, Nominalism taught that because all of creation was absolutely contingent on God's exercise of his absolute freedom, there was no "metaphysical structure" that could be traced back to the Creator and thus the created order was "best analyzed at the level of the existing individual." ( p. 138.) Over time, it appears that once God's freedom had been secured, theologians felt "authorized to unleash the tools of liberal arts without restraint." (p. 187.)

A theme that runs through Rosemann's book is the movement from "signs" to signifiers." Rosemann writes, "If there obtains no necessary, metaphysical connection between the Creator and the creation - if the connection is historical, covenantal, and hence contingent - then creation needs to be analyzed in itself, without recourse to a foundation in the meta-realities such as God or universal, abstract natures that sustain it. For this reasons the nominalist project is no longer aimed at understanding the cosmos through the analysis of signs, but rather at understanding the signifiers that we employ in speaking about the world." (p. 188.)

Another theme of Rosemann's book is that the move from signs to signifiers as the basis for thinking about the world was accompanied by a decoupling of theology from piety. As theology moved from sacra pagina - the study of scripture - to scienta divina - the divine science - theology became less and less concerned with lived spirituality, such as moral theology (p. 47; Cf. Servais Pinckaer, Morality: The Catholic View), scripture (p. 76), spirituality (p. 108), and salvation and the nourishing of faith. (p. 128.) By the "long Fifteenth Century," the project of theology was looking for a return to its roots as some theologicans, including the "Ecstatic Doctor" - Denys the Carthusian - sought to restore a concern for the nourishing of faith to theology. Eventually, the separation of theology from spirituality had reached the point where Martin Luther could condemn "Aristotle, the stinking philosopher" (p. 182) and, eventually, after Rosemann's book closes, advocate a wholesale return to sources in a return to the Bible alone.

Rosemann's book is an excellent read. He manages to move the story along by a narrow focus on the Book of Sentences, and, yet, offer a panoramic view of the major shifts in thought and ideology that were associated with the treatment of the Sentences. Rosemann also provides a nice glossary of the scholastic terms of art used in the book.