SOURCE: Colish, Marcia L. “Peter Lombard and Abelard: The Opinio Nominalium and Divine Transcendence.” Vivarium 30, no. 1 (1992): 139-56.

[In the following essay, Colish examines the conflicting positions of Lombard and Abelard concerning the relationship between the power of God and the will of God.]

This paper has a double inspiration. One is my own investigation of Peter Lombard's doctrine of God, as part of a larger study of his theology. The second is the discovery, on the part of William J. Courtenay, following Artur Michael Landgraf, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Johannes Schneider, of the fact that the Lombard appeals to an argument derived from the Nominales of the early twelfth century. Citing this argument, whose earliest expression he traces to Peter Abelard, Courtenay describes it as “the principal opinio Nominalium, namely, that whatever God at one time knew, willed, or was able to do, He always knows, wills, or is able to do. By the third quarter of the twelfth century, this theory had been reduced to the axiom: once it is true, it is always true (semel est verum, semper est verum).”¹ As Courtenay points out, this principle, stated in Abelard's Theologia “scholarium”, rests on the idea that nouns have a unitary signification, although they also have other consignifications when they are used in propositions that include verbs in different tenses, voices, or moods. In the Theologia “scholarium”, Abelard uses this notion to support one of his most notorious ideas, the claim that God cannot do better, or other, than He does.²

There is another argument of the Nominales, mentioned in passing by Courtenay,³ to which Landgraf, Chenu, and Schneider called attention earlier, a parallel analysis of verbs. According to this view, a verb signifies two things, an action and the time when the action takes place. A single action is signified, irrespective of the time. The time is only a passing circumstance. It is a consignification which does not alter the proper signification of the verb. Thus, the nominalist maxim, semel est verum, semper est verum, can be applied just as easily to propositions stating actions as to propositions making statements about the things signified by nouns. As these earlier scholars note, the Lombard makes express reference to this nominalist argument concerning verbs in his treatment of God's power.⁴ For his part, Courtenay adds as well that the Lombard reprises Abelard's nominalist argument in his treatment of God's knowledge. As with Abelard, Courtenay observes, he uses it to defend God's immutability. At the same time, the Lombard turns the self-same argument against Abelard, in attacking his claim that God cannot do better or other than He does.⁵

It is precisely the Lombard's appeal to this nominalist principle of the semantic unity of nouns and verbs and his concurrent anti-Abelardian application of it that I want to address in this paper. At first glance this looks like a paradox or inconsistency. But, I will argue, the Lombard's tactics are perfectly comprehensible in the light of the doctrine of God which he defends more generally, in the light of his views on what we can know about the divine nature, and in the light of how he sees the function of the artes in helping us to clarify our ideas in so doing. In this connection, what is at issue is not only the nominalistic understanding of nouns and verbs but also the type of logic which this understanding accompanies. As for the first point, the Lombard seeks to reclaim for western Christian thought a theology of divine transcendence.⁶ In this theology the deity is seen as absolute being, being as such, the supreme metaphysical reality. Man, according to Peter, can gain an understanding of this reality through metaphysical reasoning. He views the deity as utterly inexhaustible in Himself and as totally unconditioned and unbounded by His workings in the creation and man. At the same time, Peter's goal is to de-Platonize the nature of God. For him, God's actions are always free. They are never constrained, either by anything external to Him or by any internal necessity of His own being. In considering God's manifestations of Himself ad extra, Peter views them as God's effects, not as emanations or as participations of the divine being. For this reason, the Lombard takes sharp exception to the theology of Abelard, because he sees it as too economic, treating God as knowable primarily or exclusively in the light of His action in the cosmological and charismatic orders. By precisely the same token, he objects with equal force to other economic theologies of the day, be they those of Hugh of St. Victor, the Chartrains, or Rupert of Deutz.

But, Peter singles out Abelard in particular as his target for two other reasons. First, in his own estimation, what Abelard has done has been to take the eternity of God, which ought to be seen as transcendent, and to collapse it into God's created and time-bound ordinance. And second, the nominalist analysis of nouns, by means of which Abelard buttresses his own economic inversion of the Lombard's own theological priorities, is also articulated in the context of a logic that, in the Lombard's view, is ill adapted to the scrutiny of metaphysical objects of knowledge, and above all, the deity. In clarifying the Lombard's objections to Abelard's use of the opinio Nominalium and in showing how he makes his own countervailing application of that same principle, it will help to examine the wider framework in which both Abelard and the Lombard develop their arguments.

It was Abelard who made the initial sally here, and he did so in treating the question of divine providence, foreknowledge, and predestination and their relationship to future contingents, or, alternatively stated, the relationship between necessity and possibility. This alternative is not a matter of mere, idle phraseology. For, the first and most important point to be made is that Abelard viewed this whole issue primarily as a logical, not as a theological, one. He takes it up, initially, in his early logical works, written before he decided to move on to theology. When he did make that transition, he retained the logical mode of handling it. This fact is worth noting, in and of itself. Equally important is the kind of logic that Abelard draws out of, or applies to, the Boethian-Aristotelian materials which he makes his point of departure. In this connection, his understanding of the scope of logic itself needs to be recalled, since it affects powerfully his overall method and also the kinds of claims he will be able to make for his logical arguments on this subject when he transposes them into his theological works. Notwithstanding the fact that he begins by commenting on the Aristotelian texts available in the Latin school tradition, Abelard takes from Boethius and sharpens a Stoic-Megaritic approach to logic bound by its own rules. In his earliest works, he confirms that, for him, logic is a science of discourse, not a mode of analysis whose goal is to seek verification of its conclusions in the world of nature or in the ontological order. Concepts may, initially, derive from things. But, once in the mind, they are usable, comprehensible, and meaningful in propositional form apart from things. It is the internal structure and relations of the propositions and the terms that comprise them that determine the truth claims they make. Asserted initially in his commentaries,⁷ these same principles are developed by Abelard in his own logical treatises, both in his express statements defining the nature and scope of logic as such⁸ and, implicitly, in his reformulations of syllogistic arguments drawn from his authorities, in which arguments that involve priority and posteriority in time, or conditions that are verifiable empirically, are converted into propositions and syllogisms that display exclusively logical relations.⁹ The fact that Abelard's logic is not envisioned by him as capable of establishing any truth but the intrapropositional truth of logic itself has received general recognition from modern students of his philosophy.¹⁰ The fact that a logic understood as a science of discourse, not as a science of things, a logic understood as having jurisdiction only within its own realm and as unable to establish truth anywhere else, would make an imperfect instrument of theological analysis was also noted, in the early 1140s, by disciples of Gilbert of Poitiers, and held against Abelard's theological use of logic on just that account.¹¹ It does inspire Abelard at times to argue that theological language is metaphorical, or to invoke arguments from theological appropriateness. But it does not dampen his enthusiasm for the claim that dialectic, “to which the judgment of all truth or falsity is subject” (cui quidem omnis veritatis seu falsitatis discretio ita subiecta est) should be used to demonstrate the teachings of the Catholic faith and to refute heretics.¹²

The first theological topic to which Abelard gives logic this somewhat ambiguous assignment, on his own accounting of it, is God's providence and future contingents. Abelard takes up this issue for the first time in his Logica “ingredientibus”, where he indicates, by his very address to it, his desire to treat it as a technical topic in logic. He urges that the subject of future contingents be taken out of a temporal framework altogether. Past, present, and future, to be sure, are conditions that occur in nature. But the problem, he argues, should be treated on a purely conceptual and not on a natural level.¹³ Our concepts, whatever their content, exist as if in the present. This report, from the precincts of logic, is used by Abelard to reinforce the analogy made in Augustine's Confessions between the soul's present memory, attention, and expectation as reducible to the soul's present action and the eternity of God, dwelling in the eternal present. But Abelard's analysis, unlike Augustine's, is based on the workings of logic, not on those of human psychology. One can, he notes, argue against those who think that God's providence is undermined by natural contingency and human free will, equating God's providence with universal divine determinism. This can be done, he shows, as Augustine had done it, by distinguishing between providence and predestination. As he reads this distinction, providence is understood as God's foreknowledge of what will happen, whether good or bad, whether caused by God Himself or by the actions of men or other secondary causes. On the other hand, predestination is confined to God's determination of those things He wills to occur by His own direct agency, specifically the granting of grace to the elect. As with the late Augustine, Abelard holds that this grace has two aspects. It prepares the elect to respond to God's call and it helps them to persevere in it. Strictly speaking, predestination is the grace of preparation, and it can be distinguished from the gift that makes salvation possible once that initial grace has been received. Since predestination has this consequence, we can say that its causative effect is always good. Now God knows from all eternity which men He will endow with grace. He also knows which sins men will commit, although He does not cause them.

This Augustinian attack on the question is in no sense the whole story, for Abelard; nor, in his estimation, is it the most interesting way to address it. He next introduces Boethius's reprise of the key chapter in Aristotle's De interpretatione, where a more strictly physical and logical account of necessity, possibility, and contingency is provided. In chapter 9 of that work, Aristotle frames the issue in terms of a sea battle that may or may not be fought tomorrow. There is always the possibility that the captains may cancel the battle because the rulers they represent have settled their differences. Or, hostilities may still prevail, but bad weather may prevent the battle from taking place. The natural or human contingencies involved in these possibilities lie within the structure of natural laws and the nature of man. But whether or not they will be activated so as to prevent or call off the battle is a matter of chance or contingency. With this analysis in mind, Abelard now distinguishes providence from fate. Fate he sees as the natural necessities built into the physical order. Fate is ineluctable in the sense that, once the relevant physical laws of cause and effect are set in motion, the outcomes flowing from them will necessarily follow. God knows that these consequences will occur if these physical laws are activated, since He created the universe with the natural laws in question. At the same time, agreeing with Aristotle and Boethius, Abelard observes that there are areas of contingency and human choice here which determine whether or not these natural laws, and their consequences, will be activated in a particular instance. He adds that there are also physical events which God permits to happen—miracles, for instance—even though they occur outside of the causal nexus of the laws of physics. This observation aside, along with Aristotle and Boethius, he accents the idea that creatures, as they are created, possess certain built-in capacities to do or to refrain from doing what they choose. Giving an Aristotelian example here, he notes that a man, by nature, is capable of sitting down, but whether he will do so at a particular moment is a matter of choice, not necessity, on his part. The same analysis applies to a man's capacity to sin. The fact that God knows how the man will exercise this capacity does not mean that God causes him to sin, just as God does not personally cause the other outcomes that are effects of contingencies.

Thus far, Abelard has shifted an initially Augustinian argument preoccupied with grace and predestination to an Aristotelian argument for possibility and contingency as compatible with a universe in which natural laws impose their own physical necessities. He now proceeds to shift his argument once again. Still another way of handling the problem is to transpose it from the realm of necessity, possibility, and contingency as they operate in the natural order to the realm of modal propositions. This option is even more attractive to Abelard, since, once the subject has been reformulated in these terms, the propositions in which they are framed express the ideas of possibility and necessity and their relationships according to the formal structure of the propositions used. The conclusions flowing from these propositions can be evaluated in terms of whether they follow logically from their antecedents quite independent of times, places, and conditions that may or may not exist in the physical or metaphysical order. From this perspective, Abelard now seeks to expose the logical fallacy of the claim that God errs if it can be shown that anything can happen in a way different from the way in which it does happen. The rule he invokes here is this: if the antecedent is possible, the consequent attaches the judgment “Yes, it is possible” to the proposition itself, not to the subject matter or content stated by the antecedent. His treatment of this rule is a clear articulation of the strictly logical approach to the problem of possibility and necessity he is taking at this juncture, an approach which he also advocates as more elegant and satisfactory than the ones that he had set forth before presenting it.

If one applies this kind of logical analysis to the question of foreknowledge and predestination, as defined above, it follows that propositions admitting of possibility and contingency can be constructed from propositions in which foreknowledge is asserted. Also, as Abelard points out, it depends on how the word “differently” (aliter) is used in propositions that hypothesize on whether things could have turned out differently than the way they do turn out. Aliter can be used as a relative term, and also as a negative term. Its causal force is stronger in the latter usage. In the former case, when aliter is used as a relative term, the presence of logical possibility can be entertained without a contradiction with foreknowledge, in stating a contingent claim. The use of hypothetical syllogisms to structure the propositions in question here itself emphasizes the formal quality of the logical analysis involved.¹⁴

It is perfectly obvious what Abelard is trying to accomplish in this handling of the question of God's foreknowledge and future contingents in the Logica “ingredientibus”. In moving from a theological account derived from the late Augustine to a physical account derived from Aristotle to a strictly logical account of the issues, to which he is guided by Boethius, he places his arguments in, what is, for him, an ascending order of importance and persuasiveness. Even though Abelard gives a far more elaborate treatment of the De interpretatione formulation of the problem than Boethius does in his commentary on that work, taking it through its paces in great detail, and offering a host of variant syllogistic forms in which the ideas involved can be stated, situating them within the larger context of the logical rules for affirmation, negation, and contradiction, and yoking them to an express discussion of hypothetical syllogisms, equipollent propositions, and their probative force, he ends by reducing the Aristotelian position to the position of formal logic far more systematically than Boethius does. Abelard grants more authority to logic understood purely as a science of discourse than to anything else in his handling of this problem, reading across Aristotle and across Boethius himself to obtain a more consistently post-Aristotelian logic than his sources provide. He shows his instinct for moving away from theological reasoning, in redefining the divine nature, or propositions which refer to it, as part of the subject matter of logic. While Abelard does admit that the debate at issue can be approached in other ways, the other alternatives are clearly less compelling and persuasive, for him. Above all, the logical sense of propositions is his point of conclusion, whatever sense they may have in the world of physical or metaphysical reality.

Abelard also takes up these same questions in his Theologia “scholarium”. His argument here is similar to that in the Logica “ingredientibus” except for the fact that he frames the issue of future contingents here along the lines of Aristotle's account of the sea battle in De interpretatione 9, giving attention to the claims made in terms of natural law as well as in terms of logic itself. The main differences between his initial treatment of the subject and this one are that, in the Theologia “scholarium”, Abelard wants to accent man's freedom and responsibility in the moral life under the heading of contingency; and he wants to emphasize more strongly the point that God can suspend the natural law when He performs miracles. From a logical standpoint, it is also at this precise juncture that Abelard frames the question of the compatibility of God's eternal foreknowledge and contingent events in the light of the nominalist theory of the unitary signification of the noun, although its consignification in statements using the past or future tenses of the verb may reflect shifts in our knowledge or in our description of what the noun signifies.¹⁵ Let us keep in mind the company in which this nominalist theory travels, in Abelard's presentation of it.

Abelard returns to the argument offered in the Logica “ingredientibus” for a third time in his most mature logical work, the Dialectica, there offering a refinement on it.¹⁶ He reprises the point that past, present, and future are categories irrelevant to God, since He lives in the eternal present. He also repeats the observation that God so ordains things that some events are capable of occurring contingently, and that, when this happens, these contingencies do not conflict with divine providence. Nor do events which, as God ordains them, occur of necessity as consequences of the laws of nature which He put in place. In this work, Abelard moves as well from the Augustinian and Aristotelian arguments to attach the idea of possibility to the logical relations between antecedent and consequent propositions that formulate the alternatives in hypothetical form. At the same time, in the Dialectica Abelard admits that the idea of necessity also attaches properly to actual natural outcomes, and that, even propositionally, a future contingent can only be defended as a possibility. This conclusion imparts a rather more Aristotelian coloration to his handling of necessity and possibility than he had given to it in the Logica “ingredientibus”. Another shift is that, in the Dialectica, he omits the distinction between God's foreknowledge and God's causation in treating divine providence. He collapses these two ideas into a view of providence that takes it to mean God's legislation for, and action in, the natural order, and not merely God's oversight of that order. The theme of predestination and grace likewise departs from Abelard's agenda in this work. These shifts in emphasis notwithstanding, the bottom line for his handling of the entire question, both early and late, remains logic as a science of discourse alone, and not the divine nature.

By express contrast with Abelard, when the Lombard addresses himself to the same constellation of ideas, he does so in an unambiguously theological way. The first topics he takes up in Book 1 of the Sentences deal with the Trinity and the theological language appropriate to denote the divine nature as such and, alternatively, to denote the persons of the Trinity vis-à-vis each other. As he shifts to the next part of the book, he remarks that all the remaining questions that he plans to address there deal with the divine nature possessed equally and in common by all members of the Trinity. This condition applies, in force, to all God's actions relative to the creation and man.¹⁷ Peter's observation is a rejoinder to Abelard in two ways. In the first place, it attacks Abelard's attribution of the names power, wisdom, and goodness as proper names to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Secondly, the first issue he takes up under the heading of God's action ad extra, divine providence, foreknowledge, predestination, and future contingents, is raised expressly from the standpoint of God's knowledge, not that of human logic. In introducing the subject in this way, the Lombard makes it clear that his chief focus is going to be the divine nature as a theological and metaphysical reality. While God's role as a cause in the physical order is going to receive some attention and while care is going to be paid to the logical consistency of his arguments, and to those of thinkers whom he criticizes, Peter never lets the reader forget that he is writing about God here, and that the subject at issue is not a mere pendant to, or illustration of, the sciences of natural philosophy or logic.

God's knowledge is one and simple, he begins. Yet, it can be thought of, in relation to man and the creation, in terms of foreknowledge, disposition, predestination, and wisdom. Foreknowledge is God's knowledge, from all eternity, of all things that will happen, whether for good or for ill. Disposition can be regarded not only as God's general governance of the universe but also as His foreknowledge of the laws of nature that He will put in place before He creates them. Similarly, predestination covers the preparation of grace which God grants directly to His elect and His salvation and coronation of them with bliss in the next life, as well as His knowledge from all eternity of who they will be. Wisdom, finally, is God's knowledge of all things, whether past, present, or future.¹⁸ Having mentioned the dimension of time in setting forth these definitions, Peter next addresses a set of problems not raised by Abelard, but ones with which Hugh of St. Victor and Honorius Augustodunensis had wrestled ineffectively earlier in the period.¹⁹ In so doing, he acknowledges the fact that he has a responsibility to respond to questions, posed by other masters of the day, that are properly theological and not just logical. Supposing that there were no temporal order at all, and hence no future in which events not yet in being might take place, and given that God's knowledge is one with His essence, would this not mean, he asks, that God's very being would be in jeopardy? Peter answers this question in the negative. As he observes, when we speak of God's foreknowledge, disposition, and predestination with respect to the created world and man, we speak in a relative sense (relative, ad aliquid), just as we do when we refer to the deity as the creator. Such activities vis-à-vis other, created, beings as these relative terms denote in no sense exhaust or diminish the infinite reservoir of being as such which the divine nature possesses, prior to and apart from the creation. Further, there are two ways of regarding foreknowledge. First, if we consider the subject matter, the future, on which God's foreknowledge is exercised, as capable of being there, or not, then His foreknowledge can be understood as relative to the future. But, secondly, if we think of the knowledge that God possesses, with which He is able to know the future when it eventuates, then we speak of His knowledge with respect to His essence, whether or not the temporal world exists at all, or any particular eventuality that may take place within it. In any event, since He is eternal, God knows all things from eternity. His knowledge is not limited by the temporal order applying to creatures.²⁰

This solution responds effectively to the dilemmas propounded by Hugh and Honorius and at the same time addresses a question, raised but not answered by the author of the Summa sententiarum,²¹ of whether God foreknows those future contingents that are not going to eventuate. For, as Peter continues, he next makes the point that, in the second sense of foreknowledge which he has just indicated, God's knowledge is of His essence; it would be incorrect to say that, because He knows all things, all the things that He knows are God or that they share in His essence. Here, he stresses, we have to distinguish between what God is, and what God has in His presence or has within Him. As an illustration of that point, Peter notes, God knows who the elect are; but the elect are human, not divine. They are in God's presence, not His nature. Similarly, God knows the evils that will occur, without being identified with them, just as He knows the good things that will occur and that He will approve, good outcomes which, in this case, He helps along, to a greater or lesser extent, being partially or wholly an auctor as well as a knower. For, the creation and the temporal order are from God. They are not of God; that is, they are not of the same nature as God. It is at this juncture that Peter acknowledges the utility of Abelard's distinction between the unitary signification of a noun and the differing consignifications it may have in statements using the past, present, and future tenses of the verb. He also indicates the limitations of this argument, from his own perspective.²² What is strikingly Lombardian about this whole analysis is Peter's success in finding a cogent substitute for the reduction of this problem to an exercise in formal logic. At the same time, he retains a philosophical no less than a theological perspective on it, by grounding the subject in the metaphysical distinction between God viewed in His transcendent essence and God viewed in those aspects of His being that He displays in His relations with other beings.

Peter moves on, then, to a series of other questions pertinent to God's foreknowledge that had been raised and, in his view, answered unsatisfactorily by other masters. He deals in a swift and streamlined manner with God's foreknowledge and its relationship to causation, relying here on Augustine and other patristic sources and not on Boethius and Aristotle. Foreknowledge, he agrees, is not causative. There are some things that God knows, contemplating them in His own mind before He brings them into phenomenal existence as their one and only cause, as is the case with the created universe. In this example, He causes the things He knows, not vice versa. In the case of contingencies, such as the willed actions of created beings who possess free will, God foresees the consequences of contingent actions but does not cause them. His lack of direct causation here is in no sense a failing or imperfection in the divine nature, or in the divine foreknowledge. For, He freely chose to create beings with free will and He knows how they will freely exercise it.²³ This section of Peter's discussion reminds the reader that the divine nature is the perspective from which he thinks this topic ought to be examined. The exercise is designed to enlighten the reader about God, the subject of this book of the Sentences, not about the behavior and constitution of creatures.

Another feature of God's foreknowledge that requires discussion, not only in and of itself but because of its bearing on predestination, is its immutability and its exhaustive coverage. As Peter observes, God's knowledge, like His essence, cannot change, enlarge, or diminish. God may direct His attention to this or that subject, or not, without changing His knowledge. Since He is omniscient and always has been, He knows things that have not yet occurred in the temporal order, and beings that have not yet come into existence. In the case of contingent outcomes, He knows whether or not they will occur. With respect to such future events, beings, and outcomes, this does not mean that God knows them better when they do occur. For, while they are conditioned by time, He is not; He has always been omniscient. In this respect, God cannot know more than He knows because that would be a self-contradiction, a point on which Peter agrees with the author of the Summa sententiarum.²⁴

As for predestination, Peter notes, reminding the reader of his definition of terms at the beginning of this section of Book 1 of the Sentences, predestination is included in what God foreknows but it is different from foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is not causative, while predestination is causative, referring specifically to God's direct decision to extend the grace of preparation and perseverance to those people He chooses to save.²⁵ Here Peter summarizes the standard late Augustinian teaching that was the consensus position on predestination in this period. At the same time, he uses the argument just developed on the immutability of God's foreknowledge to criticize versions of that teaching that he finds aberrant or problematic. In the first place, there is the question raised by Abelard and debated by the author of the Summa sententiarum and by Roland of Bologna²⁶ as to whether God can alter the number of the elect. Given the way in which Peter has framed his argument here, he can dispose of the idea that God could make such a change as a non-question, not only from the standpoint of God's will but also in the light of God's immutable omniscience. Just as God does not alter His eternal decree, so, since He knows eternally what that decree will be with regard to His elect and since His knowledge never changes, the alteration of God's arrangements here is a non-possibility.²⁷ There is also the question of the relation between election and the behavior of the elect. Here, Peter wants to criticize the position of William of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon, who argued that God chooses the elect in the light of their praevisa merita.²⁸ For the elect, predestination enables them to be justified, to live uprightly, to resist temptation, to persevere in the good, and to attain beatitude in the next life. God foreknows that the elect will respond appropriately to the grace He extends to them, just as He knows that the reprobate will fall into sin, although in the first case He actively prepares the elect for their salvation while He prepares nothing for the reprobate. But, Peter insists, with Augustine and against Anselm and William, God does not choose the elect because He foresees that they will respond positively to His grace and earn merit. Rather, what He foresees is the fact that His grace will provide the elect with the enabling condition for their acquisition of merit after the fact.²⁹

In the case of God's foreknowledge and related matters, as can be seen from the above, Peter demonstrates clearly that this constellation of ideas can be treated in as sweeping a manner as needs be, embracing issues of genuine theological interest and pertinence which Abelard omits as well as those he includes, from the perspective of God's knowledge. Throughout, he grounds his support for the compatibility of contingency and free will with divine foreknowledge, and with the existence of direct divine causation in some areas, not on the relations between necessity and possibility in natural philosophy or in logic but in the distinction between the transcendent God and the God Who acts, in a variety of ways, in the world He created, but without being exhausted or consumed by His economic role.³⁰ Peter's resolutely metaphysical address to this question enables him to put it on as philosophical a foundation as is true for Aristotle or for Abelard, although it is a metaphysical foundation, and one that also affords a good vantage point from which to consider the specifically theological dimensions of these problems as well.

While space does not permit as extended an analysis of the topic, the Lombard's handling of the related issue of whether God can do better, or different, than He does, and his rejection of Abelard's negative answer to that question, yields additional evidence as to why he finds Abelard's reasoning, and the uses to which Abelard puts it, fundamentally wrong-headed. In the Theologia christiana, Abelard's urge to tackle this problem as a logician leads him to conflate God's power with God's will, forcing him to conclude that God always acts in the best possible way, since a consequent stating a divine action that is not good or just cannot follow logically from an antecedent stating that He is good and just. As Abelard puts it: “What He wills, He must will necessarily, and what He does, He must do necessarily” (Quae vult, necessario velit, et quae facit, necessario faciat.) Logical necessity constrains God's behavior, behavior which, he states, takes place inevitabiliter.³¹ Reformulating this claim in the Theologia “scholarium”, Abelard still frames it in the language of antecedent and consequent propositions, but shifts his accent to the nature of God as a perfect being. Since God is perfect, Abelard reasons, He must always act perfectly, as a necessity of His own being. The perfection of God's being thus entails, for Abelard, the perfection of the exercise of His will. Hence, God could not have made a better world.³² This version of the argument imposes a metaphysical as well as a logical necessitarianism upon the deity.

It is, among other things, precisely in order to free God from the axiological necessitarianism with which Abelard encumbers Him, whether logically or metaphysically, that the Lombard takes his own stand. His aim is to liberate God simultaneously from an economic theology and from the limits of logic understood purely as a science of discourse. His emphasis on God's freedom is reflected by his placement of this topic under the heading of God's omnipotence, and by his reimporting into the discussion an Augustinian distinction which Abelard had dismissed, the distinction between God's power and God's will, employed as well by recent thinkers such as Anselm of Canterbury. From this perspective, God's power is His ability to do whatever He wills.³³ In actual practice, according to Peter, what God does is good and just. But, he argues, this fact imposes no constraints upon the choices God might have made and it does not limit His capacity to have done what He has chosen not to do. In making His just and good choices, God remains free. Bringing to bear on this question an argument he had made concerning God's foreknowledge, where he had argued that divine omniscience includes the range of options out of which God selects the actions that He decides to perform, Peter observes that the force of the Augustinian distinction to which he adheres is decidedly not to reduce God's power to the scope of whatever He actually wills to do, but rather, just the reverse. What the distinction means is that God not only is capable of doing whatever He wills, but also that whatever He can do always remains more, in principle, than what He actually does do. What the Lombard is articulating here, although without using this terminology, is the distinction between God's absolute and ordained power.³⁴ So acute is Peter's desire to emphasize the principle that God always remains free to act differently than the way in which He chooses to act that he does not hesitate to maintain that, although Christ was incarnated, crucified, and resurrected once for all, if God willed it, He could be incarnated, crucified, and resurrected again. It is in defense of this extreme example of his general point that Peter brings forward the nominalist analysis of the unitary signification of the verb first noted by Landgraf, Chenu, and Schneider. On the analogy of the action signified by the verb, God's power is always the same. What He was able to do in the past, He is able to do in the present or the future: “Deum semper posse et quidquid semel potuit id est habere omnem illam potentiam quam semel habuit.”³⁵

If anything, this nominalist argument concerning the verb is even more appealing to Peter than the nominalist argument concerning the noun which he applies to God's knowledge. For, the dimension of time is built into the verb, by its very nature as a part of speech. This fact enables him to underscore the transcendence of the timeless, omnipotent God over the things He decides to do in the temporal order, relative to creatures. Peter's use of this argument thus allows him to stay in the essentially metaphysical arena within which he plants his standard in treating the divine nature. While the Lombard is not so forthright as the early Porretans in hoisting Abelard explicitly on his own logical petard, he agrees with them, implicitly, that logic seen only as a science of discourse is indeed a feeble instrument for the work of theological research.

With respect to the Lombard's contribution to the history of nominalism in the twelfth century, then, we may offer three conclusions. First, from our consideration of Abelard's case, it is clear that the opinio Nominalium could be, and was, yoked to a post-Aristotelian kind of logic. From our consideration of the Lombard's case, it is equally clear that the opinio Nominalium could just as easily be yoked to a mode of reasoning deemed capable of yielding cogent ontological conclusions. In this respect, the fact that a twelfth-century thinker espouses the opinio Nominalium does not mean that he is automatically or necessarily required to embrace one rather than the other of these different conceptions of logic. Second, it was not just the fact that the Lombard was a theologian but his particular agenda as a theologian who sought to affirm God's omnipotence and God's essence as the transcendent metaphysical reality that accounts for both his borrowings from Abelard and his more fundamental hostility to Abelard in this area. And, finally, thanks to the rapid and enduring success of the Lombard's Sentences as a textbook, he was able to place both his position on divine transcendence, the distinction between God's absolute and ordained power, and the opinio Nominalium with which he bolstered these teachings squarely before the eyes of his scholastic contemporaries and successors.

Notes

1. Courtenay 1990, 46. I have capitalized “He” in referring to the deity in this quotation for the sake of consistency.

2. Ibid., 46-50.

3. Ibid., 46, 56 nn. 8, 12.

4. Landgraf 1943, 192-4, 199; Chenu, 1957, 93, 96, 99; Johannes Schneider, Die Lehre vom dreieinigen Gott in der Schule des Petrus Lombardus, München 1961, 43-4, 53.

5. Courtenay 1990, 53-5.

6. To date, the best accounts of the Lombard's doctrine of God are Ermenegildo Bertola, Il problema di Dio in Pier Lombardo, in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, 48 (1956), 135-50; closely followed by Guiseppe Lorenzi, La filosofia die Pier Lombardo nel Quattro libri delle Sentenze, in: Pier Lombardo, 4 (1960), 24-8. Also important, particularly for accenting his emphasis on God as essence, are Cornelio Fabro, Teologia dei nomi divini nel Lombardo e in S. Tommaso, in: Pier Lombardo, 4 (1960), 79-81; Étienne Gilson, Pierre Lombard et les théologies d'essence, in: Revue du moyen âge latin, 1 (1949), 61-4; Schneider, Die Lehre, 25-30, 224-6.

7. See, for example, Peter Abelard, Editio super Porphyrum; Glossae in Categorias; Editio super Aristotelem de Interpretatione, in: Peter Abelard, Scritti di logica, 2nd ed., ed. Mario dal Pra, Firenze 1969, 3, 61, 84-5, 105-6, 110-3.

8. LI 17, 20-1, 28-9, 60-1; 112-5; 307-10, 320-2; LNPS, 585; Dialectica, 2.1.1.4, 2.28, 153-60, 163-4, 210-3.

9. Dial. 3.1.4, 4.1.2 ff., 270-309, 469-532.

10. Dal Pra, intro. to his ed. of Peter Abelard, Scritti di logica, xxii-xxiii; Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli, 1974, 153-63; The Logic of Abelard, tr. Simon Pleasance, Dordrecht 1969, 13-23, 28-36; Geyer, comm. on his ed. of Peter Abelard, Philos. Schriften, Heft 4, 621-33; Jolivet, 1977, 312-8; Arts du langage et théologie chez Abélard, 2nd ed., Paris, 1982, 19-22, 44-5, 67-72, 74-7, 96-104, 229-335; Tweedale, 1976, 93-5, 130-7, 185-8, 210; Richard E. Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love: A Critical Analysis of the Soteriology of Peter Abailard, Oxford 1970, 11-31. The principal dissenters are De Rijk, intro. to his ed. of Peter Abelard, Dialectica, xxiii-xxviii, xl, lv-lix, xcv-xcviii and Lucia Urbani Ulivi, La psicologia de Abelardo e il “Tractatus de intellectibus”, Roma 1976, 85-93, 95-100, who follows De Rijk in holding that the achievement of a purely formal logic was Abelard's goal but that he did not actually arrive at that destination.

11. Nikolaus M. Häring, ed., Die Sententie magistri Gisleberti Pictavensis episcopi I, 2.38-39, in: AHDL [Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire], 45 (1978), 119; idem, ed., Die Sententie magistri Gisleberti Pictavensis episcopi II: Die Version der florentiner Handschrift, 2.38-39, in: AHDL, 46 (1979), 54.

12. Dial., 4.1 prologus, 470.

13. LI, 26-7.

14. Ibid., 426-47.

15. TSch, 3.5, 3.87-116, 526, 536-47.

16. Dial., 2.2.10-11, 217-22.

17. Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 1, d. 35, c. 1, 3rd rev. ed., ed. Ignatius C. Brady, 2 vols., Grottaferrata 1971-81, I, 254.

18. Ibid., c. 1-6, I, 254-8. On predestination as the grace of preparation in the Lombard, see Johann Schupp, Die Gnadenlehre des Petrus Lombardus, Freiburg im Breisgau 1932, 105-15, 141-58, 204-6.

19. Honorius Augustodunensis, Elucidarium, 1.13, 1.15, ed. Yves Lefèvre, Paris 1954, 363; Hugh of St. Victor, De sacramentis fidei christianae, 1.2.14-18, PL [Patrologia Latina, edited by J. P. Migne, 1880] 176, 211D-213B.

20. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 35, c. 7-9, I, 255-8.

21. Summa sententiarum, 1.12, PL, CLXXVI, 61C-62C.

22. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 36, c. 1-5; d. 41, c. 3, I, 258-63, 293. This is the point noted by Courtenay 1990, 53-5; see also Courtenay 1991a, 11-48.

23. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 38, I, 257-79. See Calvin Normore, Future Contingents, in: Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzman et al., Cambridge 1982, 363-4, who notes, correctly, Peter's accent on God's freedom here.

24. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 39, c. 1.1-4.3; d. 41, c. 3, I, 280-3, 292-3. Cf. Summa sent., 1.12, PL CLXXVI, 63A-64D. On this point, see Schneider, Die Lehre, 54.

25. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 39, c. 4.3, I, 283-84. Peter makes the same point in Sermo 112, PL CLXXI, 860C. See Schneider, Die Lehre, 55, 57-60.

26. Roland of Bologna, Die Sentenzen Rolands, ed. Ambrogius Gietl, Amsterdam 1969 (repr. of Freiburg im Breisgau 1891 ed.), 62-67; Summa sent., 1.12, PL CLXXVI, 63A-64D.

27. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 40, c. 1, I, 285-86.

28. Sentences of Anselm of Laon, 11; Sentences of William of Champeaux, 240, ed. Odon Lottin, in: Psychologie et morale aux XII^e et XIII^e siècles, Louvain 1959, V, 22, 199-200.

29. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 40, c. 2-d. 41, c. 1, I, 286-92.

30. This orientation is also found in the Lombard's Pauline exegesis. See Peter Lombard, In Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, 1:7, 8:29, PL CXCI, 1310B-1311D, 1449B-1450B.

31. Tchr, 5.42, 366.

32. TSch, 3.27-64, 511-27. A good discussion of this point is provided by Lawrence Moonan, Abelard's Use of the Timeaus, in: AHDL, 56 (1989), 30-3, 72-4.

33. The best treatment of this subject is Ivan Boh, Divine Omnipotence in the Early Sentences, in: Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish and Christian Perspectives, ed. Tamar Rudavsky, Dordrecht 1985, 193-200. See also Schneider, Die Lehre, 39-41.

34. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 43, I, 298-303. This point has been noted by Courtenay, 1990, 55; Mariateresa Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli and Massimo Parodi, Storia della filosofia medievale da Boezio a Wyclif, Bari 1989, 254-5.

35. Peter Lombard, Sent., 1, d. 44, c. 2.1-4, I, 305-6. The quotation is at c. 2.4, 306. The comparison with the verb is at c. 2.3, 306: “Verba enim diversorum temporum, diversis prolata temporibus et diversis adiuncta adverbiis, eundem faciunt sensum, ut modo loquentes dicimus: Iste potest legere hodie; cras autem dicemus: Iste potest legisse, vel potuit legere heri; ubi unius rei monstratur potentia.”