SOURCE: Colish, Marcia L. “Peter Lombard as an Exegete of St. Paul.” In Ad litteram: Authoritative Texts and Their Medieval Readers, edited by Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery, Jr., pp. 71-92. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Colish explains why Lombard's exposition of the Pauline Epistles was the most acclaimed commentary of its kind in the twelfth century.]

There is no doubt that medieval Christian thinkers saw the Bible as the book of books and its study as the discipline of disciplines. Nor is there any question of the privileged position they gave to the Pauline Epistles. In the twelfth century, as before, the Epistles of Paul received more sustained attention than did any other part of the New Testament. They now also did so from more than one quarter. The twelfth century continued to witness interest in Paul on the part of monastic exegetes. As had always been the case, their goal remained to inspire unction and compunction in their monastic readers, and their treatment of the text drew on the meditative and homiletic techniques embedded in monastic lectio divina. At the same time, the emergence of scholastic theology in the first half of the twelfth century created a demand for a different kind of Pauline exegesis, a systematic study of Paul geared to the needs of doctrinal debate and to the training of professional theologians. The scholastics seized on Paul for these purposes. For them, he was not only a key source of Christian doctrine, but a model theologian and an authority who often needed the help of other resources in his interpretation. Hence, Paul was a test case for the developing hermeneutic strategies which the professionalizing of the liberal arts, no less than the professionalizing of theology, brought to the fore in the reading of the biblical text.¹

Among these scholastic exegetes of Paul in the first half of the twelfth century, Peter Lombard holds pride of place. Like his well-known Sentences, Peter's Collectanea, the commentary on Paul he composed between 1139 and 1141, became an instant classic in its own sphere. It at once became the most frequently cited, copied, and studied of the Pauline commentaries produced in the twelfth century. The Collectanea was swiftly dubbed the Magna glossatura, out-pacing both the earlier Glossa ordinaria and the Media glossatura of Gilbert of Poitiers, as well as contemporary and immediately subsequent Pauline glosses, whether of Abelardian, Porretan, or Victorine provenance.² In grasping why that outcome was the case, the Lombard's handling of Paul as an authority requires investigation, an investigation that will shed light on two important points. First, it will show us how the most authoritative commentator of Paul during the twelfth century went about his work. Then, by comparing Peter with his leading competitors, we will be able to see what most twelfth-century scholastic readers of Paul commentaries wanted out of Pauline exegesis and why they preferred the Collectanea to its alternatives. The scholastic exegetes of Paul with whom Peter will be compared are those falling within the target period between about 1120 and about 1160. Where they exist, the printed editions will be used, despite their acknowledged shortcomings. Three main issues will be considered. There is, first, the exegete's address to the text, how he discovers what Paul has said and how he presents the text to his readers. We will consider next the use that the exegete makes of Paul as an authority, whether as an author whose meaning is deemed to be clear and who can be used as the basis for theological reflection, or as an author who needs to be explicated through the exegete's own analysis or that of intervening authorities. Finally, in third place, we will consider the appeal of the Collectanea from the standpoint of the exegete's presentation of the material in the physical format of his commentary.

In approaching the exegete's address to the text, it must be stressed that it was the scholastics of the first half of the twelfth century who were chiefly concerned with recovering a literal and historical reading of Paul. This observation may require some insistence, for the prevailing views of this subject still rely heavily on the work of Henri de Lubac and Ceslaus Spicq, who stressed the pervasiveness of the taste for a polysemous reading of the Bible in the twelfth century, as well as on those of Beryl Smalley, who emphasized the centrality of the Victorines in the quest for the literal sense of Scripture.³ De Lubac and Spicq simply soft-pedaled or ignored those forms of twelfth-century exegesis that did not interest them, while Smalley paid insufficient attention both to the scholastics and to the fact that the Victorines were concerned with erecting a symbolic, contemplative superstructure on the literal foundations they laid.⁴ The literalism of the Victorines and their interest in the hebraica veritas of the Old Testament did not, for them, extend to a literal study of the Pauline Epistles of the sort required by the twelfth-century scholastics.

A partial corrective to the traditional picture of twelfth-century exegesis has been supplied by Gillian Evans, who accents the ways in which scholastic exegetes imported into their work the technical contributions of their colleagues in the liberal arts.⁵ But this style of exegesis might, or might not, associate itself with a primary interest in the literal or historical level of the Pauline text. On the other hand, the scholastics wanted to recover the literal sense of Paul's teaching because they aimed at using it as a basis and a model for dogmatic speculation and construction. Their interest in the historical setting in which Paul had written derived largely from their perception that this background was a help in understanding what he had said, and also from their desire to place Paul in historical perspective as a means of contextualizing his teaching so that its force could be relativized.

With these concerns in mind, let us turn to Peter Lombard's address to Paul in comparison with that of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries. The Glossa ordinaria offers a straightforward, no-frills summary of the Pauline text, or of a patristic reader's summary of that text, often accompanied by a polysemous interpretation. For the most part, its contributors are content to rephrase what Paul or the patristic authority says in their own words, and rarely do they go very much farther.⁶ When they are literal, then, they could almost be called literalists by default. While in advance of the Glossa ordinaria in other ways, the unpublished glosses of Gilbert of Poitiers, dating to about 1130, are much more consistently interested in connecting the literal with the allegorical senses of the text.⁷ And, while original, and even idiosyncratic in other respects, Peter Abelard's commentary on Romans, dated provisionally to the years 1135-39, does not depart from the Glossa ordinaria tradition on this point.⁸ By contrast, in Peter Lombard's gloss there is only one instance in which he reads any event or personage in the text as pointing beyond the literal or historical sense of the text. As we will see below, this sole instance is an explanation of Paul's teaching on the Antichrist, a doctrine that points to the future in any case. But this is the exception that proves the rule. The Lombard's rule is to expound Paul's message, language, style, and emphasis as it was directed to Paul's own audiences in their particular time and place.

The most sustained example of the Lombard's contextualization of Paul is his commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. As with previous scholastic commentators on this text, Peter reprises Jerome's brief introduction, which observes that Paul wrote to a group of converts from Judaism, that he wrote in Hebrew not Greek, and that he attacked the vice of pride. The Glossa ordinaria stops there, and it is only at verse 7:9, where the apostle refers to Melchisedech and the Levites, that the glossator makes any effort to connect Paul's actual argument to this stated agenda.⁹

For his part, Peter takes the argument of Jerome found in the Glossa ordinaria as his starting point, but he goes on from there to a full and detailed introduction of his own, in which he emphasizes the point that Paul's whole strategy in Hebrews is to remind the Jewish converts of the Old Testament events and prophecies which have been fulfilled in the revelation of Christ. Peter urges that Paul is, indeed, the author of Hebrews even though his salutation in this epistle differs in style from those prefacing his other epistles, notably by omitting reference to his name and his status as an apostle. This tactic, according to Peter, is a deliberate omission on Paul's part. Following Jerome, he observes that Paul was sensitive to the fact that his name was hateful to the Jews. Hence, he does not identify himself, lest this opinion prevent his readers from profiting from his message. Likewise, Paul's omission of his status as an apostle is designed to teach a lesson in humility, since the major thrust of the epistle is that faith is sufficient, and that the Jewish converts cannot pride themselves on their former status as the chosen people or on their observance of the ceremonial law. Peter notes as well that Paul has written this epistle in Hebrew, and that it displays a style more eloquent than in his other epistles, “et longe splendidiore et facundiore stylo quam aliae resplendeat.” This fluency is attributable to the fact that Hebrew is his native language. As Peter observes, the apostle's overall strategy in Hebrews is to emphasize the connections between the truths adumbrated in the Old Testament and perfected in the New, “quasi ibi umbra, hic veritas.”¹⁰

This preface sets the stage for Peter's thoroughly typological analysis of Paul's Old Testament references. Conscious of the fact that this is Paul's own tactic, he amplifies on it himself. At Hebrews 1:8-12 and again at 1:12-14, he weaves additional quotations from the Psalms into the main body of Paul's text and combines them with other Old Testament passages that bolster the apostle's own technique of argument.¹¹ At chapters 7 and 8, Peter explores in detail the parallels between Melchisedech and Christ and between the Levitical and the Christian priesthood, accenting as well the superiority of the latter in that it is not confined to any one tribe or group. Moreover, the sacrifice of Christ is greater than the sacrifices offered by the Old Testament priests in that it is the sacrifice of God's own son for the whole human race, rather than the sacrifice of a purely created being for a limited community.¹² Throughout, and in response to Paul's intentions, Peter preserves a balance between the continuities linking the old and new covenants and the consummation of the former in the latter. For its part, the Glossa ordinaria makes no comment on why Paul interlards his argument with references to the Psalms and other passages from the Old Testament, and it tends to emphasize the differences between the two covenants while omitting their continuities.

There are two coevals of Peter who, although they paraphrase his introductory remarks, ignore in their actual handlings of the text the Pauline agenda which those remarks announce. The Abelardian author of a commentary on the Pauline Epistles called the Commentarius Cantabrigiensis, produced between 1141 and 1153, alludes to Paul's main theme in passing only twice. The gloss is otherwise notable primarily for the heavy attention it pays to dogmatic matters and to its unusual number of digressions and irrelevancies. Glossing Hebrews 5, the author asks how the Old Testament sacrifices remitted sin. On Abelard's authority, he responds that they did so only partially, saving their practitioners from Hell and assigning them to Purgatory instead. What he really wants to talk about are the differences between these two posthumous states. Similarly, he argues that circumcision, even in its own time, was less efficacious than baptism in the Christian dispensation. The author goes on to note that Christ received both rites even though he needed neither. In these two passages, the relations between the Old and New Testaments stressed by Paul slip away into discussion of Last Things and Christology which are not germane to Paul's argument in this context.¹³

The author's only other effort to respond to Paul's agenda is also found in his gloss on the same chapter. How, he asks, are we to understand the idea that Abraham is our father in faith? The question suggests to him the idea that faith, not circumcision, was salvific in Old Testament times since some men, like Abraham, were saved by their faith before circumcision was instituted. So far, so good. But he moves from this point to an idea that Paul could not have addressed, a critique of monks who devote their wits to the praise of poverty, from which he segues to a recapitulation of the aut liberi aut libri topos as treated by Jerome and Theophrastus. This batch of apparent non sequiturs is loosely strung together and connected to Paul by the thought that people should do whatever they do for the right moral reasons, not for reasons that may be externally applauded or condemned. The glossator caps this conclusion with a quotation from ‘Jerome’ which is actually a citation of Gregory the Great.¹⁴ As this passage illustrates, Abelard was not always fortunate in his disciples. Nor, in this case, are Paul or the reader seeking to discover his concerns in Hebrews.

Another exegete of Hebrews in our target group is Robert of Melun, whose commentary on Paul dates to between c. 1145-1155 and who draws on both the Lombard and Abelard. Robert strays even farther from Paul's text than does the Cambridge commentator. He raises only two questions that even touch on it: the comparison between Melchisedech and Christ and the sense in which Abraham is our father in faith. His treatment of the first question is extremely abbreviated, both as a comparison and as a contrast. He fails to take Paul's point about the second. Discussing how various figurae can be understood as descent from the loins of Abraham, Robert treats the connection between Abraham and the rest of humanity physically, not in terms of faith. Robert's chief concern here is how this connection can be true of Christ since Christ lacked original sin, which is transmitted physically through the loins of the parents.¹⁵ With this problem we drift perilously far from both Paul's subject matter and his meaning. While Robert's commentary is replete with other debates and questions, none of them bears any particular relationship to the text of Hebrews.

In these extended examples drawn from Hebrews commentaries, what stands out in the Lombard's handling of Paul as an authority is his respect for Paul, in the first instance, as an auctor. He holds that Paul must be understood as such because he composed a text that needs to be read according to the same principles embodied in the accessus ad auctores, that is, according to a method used for approaching texts more generally in the twelfth-century schools.¹⁶ As we have seen, Peter is not content to repeat the potted introduction to Paul's epistles given by Jerome and repeated in the Glossa ordinaria. Instead, he supplies an elaborate accessus of his own. In this respect, his treatment of Hebrews is thoroughly typical of his handling of all the Pauline Epistles. In each case he outlines the author's situation, when he wrote, the nature of his audience and its problems, the issues which Paul, in consequence, has emphasized, his overall strategy of argument, the subdivisions into which the text falls, and how Paul deals with this assignment in each part.

We should note that Peter was not the only exegete of his time to move to this kind of full-blown accessus ad Paulem. Abelard, for instance, supplies a detailed accessus of much the same type in his commentary on Romans. But, having given it, Abelard proceeds to ignore the rhetorical program developed in his introduction to the text, and he goes off instead on a host of peculiarly Abelardian theological tangents, which often have little to do with Paul's concerns as Abelard himself has outlined them. His chief interest in this work is rather to treat Paul, ex post facto, as a prop for some of the highly idiosyncratic positions that he had taken in his own earlier works or that he was planning to expound separately. He does not use his elaborate accessus to Romans in any real sense as a guide to, or a control on, his commentary.¹⁷ Both the Cambridge commentator and Robert of Melun postdate the Lombard and both make shorthand use of his accessus to each epistle. But, following Abelard, each proceeds immediately to ignore the accessus, moving to pursue his own theological excursions.

Within this group, then, Peter is the only Pauline exegete who takes Paul's agenda seriously and who uses it to direct what he actually discusses in his commentary. This overriding commitment to the literal and historical contextualizing of Paul sets the Collectanea apart from the other Pauline commentaries of the day. It clearly displays the Lombard as an exegete who sees his first responsibility as the elucidation of the mind of Paul himself. Whatever theological reflection is then to be based on Paul, it must, for Peter, be grounded in an accurate and contextually sensitive grasp of the authority as he is, in situ.

This consistent interest in contextualizing Paul and in allowing Paul's goals and rhetorical strategies to control his own interpretation does not mean that Peter regards a literal and historical reconstruction of Paul as his sole obligation. There is another dimension to Peter's handling of Paul as an authority that must also be appreciated, the application of historical criticism to Paul as a biblical writer. As is well known, both canonists and theologians in the early twelfth century were developing modes of criticism for patristic and other post-biblical authorities in the effort to ascertain how weighty their authority was, how generally their teaching had been intended, and the degree to which it could be magnified or relativized in aid of contemporary needs and debates. What is less well known is the fact that exegetes such as the Lombard were willing to extend the same kind of criticism to Paul himself. In so doing, they show a keen sense of the changes which the Church had undergone over the centuries, changes in its beliefs, its doctrinal emphases, and its institutions. Like others in this group, Peter accepts this phenomenon of change, not necessarily as a sad departure from the apostolic age held up as a timeless norm, but rather as a natural development. It permits one to see that what made sense in the ecclesia primitiva may not be appropriate here and now. Peter's historical criticism of Paul, in this sense, partakes more of the contemporary theologians' “moderns versus ancients” conception of the primitive church than it reflects the canonists' desire to modernize or reinvent the primitive church as an ideal.¹⁸ A few examples will serve to illustrate this point.

To begin with, there are cases in which Peter treats developments in church history simply as facts we need to know in order to understand what Paul is saying. He treats these neutrally with respect to Paul's authority. Thus, in commenting on the apostle's warning against building doctrine on false foundations (Romans 15:15-22), Peter observes that Paul was referring to the pseudo-apostolic tradition and to the apocrypha, which had not yet been weeded out of the biblical tradition, since Paul wrote before the canon of Scripture was established.¹⁹ Another comparatively neutral historical scholium, but one suggesting the transitoriness of the Church's institutional arrangements, is Peter's discussion of the women whom Paul addresses or refers to in his epistles as exercising a leadership role in the Church, and his reaction to Paul's countervailing rule that women should remain silent in church. In commenting on this apparent contradiction at 1 Corinthians 14:34-40, Peter sees the injunction to silence as conditioned, for this particular community, by the apostle's desire to correct moral and doctrinal error which had been spread by the teaching of women immediately before his composition of the epistle. Here, then, Paul's rule is a tactic designed to correct a local abuse and not a general prohibition. Customs of this type, Peter concludes, are not fixed, as is the substance of the Gospels.²⁰

The silence of women recurs in 1 Timothy 2:12-15, and here Peter orchestrates the theme rather differently. In this passage, he accounts for Paul's rule as a corollary of the subjection of wives to their husbands in punishment for original sin. But his main point is to criticize Paul, who goes on to say that women can nonetheless be saved through childbearing. Peter regards this claim as ludicrous. He does not hesitate to explain why. Like men, he observes, women will be saved by their faith, their love, and their persistence in virtue, whether they are married or single, fruitful or barren. Childbearing cannot be regarded as salvific, since it is a natural biological function found among all women regardless of their beliefs. At 1 Timothy 3:5-6, Peter notes that Paul himself had no objection to the then-current practice of ordaining women as deacons, a fact that Peter then uses to undercut the apostle's apparent relegation of women to purely domestic roles.²¹

It might be noted, by way of a footnote to the Lombard's exegesis of 1 Timothy, that the Cambridge commentator enthusiastically endorses his critique of Paul on women. Yoking it with an opinion of Abelard's, he amplifies Peter's point about female leadership in the Church by observing that abbesses nowadays perform functions similar to those of the female deacons of Paul's time. Furthermore, abbesses fitly exercise the teaching office in the Church.²² This argument, like Peter's, uses historical criticism to point up Paul's apparent inconsistency, as well as to underscore the exegete's own preference for one aspect of Paul's teaching over another, bringing to bear on the text the fact that institutions and the rules governing women, in this case, do change with the times, and do so appropriately.

There are two other contexts, marriage and the coming of Antichrist, in which Peter imposes a much more stringent mode of historical criticism upon Paul in an effort to limit Pauline authority. In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, where Paul concedes marriage while urging those who can to remain celibate like himself, Peter pointedly dismisses the apostle's preference for celibacy. He uses the occasion to develop a treatise on marriage that highlights the essentials of the position on marriage which he later develops in his Sentences. Peter insists that marriage is a good thing and a sacrament that was instituted before the Fall. Marriage is grounded in the present consent of the spouses. Their sexual relations, when ordered to the ends of marriage, are either not sinful at all or at most minimally sinful and so excusable. Customs regarding marriage have changed over time. This being the case, Paul was mistaken in regarding marriage, not as a requirement, but as an indulgence. In truth, Peter states, the reverse is the case: it is continence that is the indulgence. Marriage, after all, is the calling followed by the many. Theologians and preachers, from Paul to the present, he implies, have a duty to address the realities in the lives of most believers. After all, continence requires a special grace that God concedes to very few—something that Paul ought to have kept in mind. Peter hastens to add that marital chastity and fidelity are also charisms and gifts of God, though they are distributed more widely. Given the fact that the apostle was aware of all this, Peter finds Paul both logically and theologically inconsistent in his advocacy of the celibate life.²³

How is it then, Peter asks, that the apostle has arrived at these misguided conclusions? It is at this point that Peter detonates the exegetical time-bomb that he has dropped. Paul's counsel on all of these matters, he points out, was predicated on his belief that the Second Coming was imminent, a belief that encouraged him to advise against marital entanglements for those who were single. Now this belief about the impending end of the saeculum is, to be sure, a historical datum about Paul and his times. But, Peter continues, as we are well aware, this world is still very much with us. Thus we can and should adjust our perspectives on marriage and celibacy accordingly. Not even Paul deprived married people of future glory, he observes, implying that Paul's teaching is not wholly consistent even judged in terms of its now superseded eschatological expectations. But the full force of Peter's historical criticism of Paul on marriage in 1 Corinthians is to use it to qualify Paul's theological authority on this subject to the point of dismissing it, and so to legitimate his own sharp departures from Paul on the theology of marriage.²⁴

In addition to misguiding his views of marriage, Paul's teaching on the imminent end of the age also yields some other difficulties that Peter seeks to iron out by means of historical criticism, with the effect of scaling down Paul's authority. The problem is located in the discrepancies between Paul's handling of the Antichrist in 1 and 2 Thessalonians. In his accessus to these epistles, Peter acknowledges that Paul was responding to the Thessalonians' curiosity about Last Things and to the errors that they had embraced on the subject. The content of the two epistles, he notes, is quite similar, even redundant. Whence, “licet obscure” why Paul felt the need to repeat himself.²⁵ This is especially obscure given the inconsistent descriptions of Antichrist in the two epistles.

The difficulties involved lead Peter to depart from his usual exegetical practice. This is the one place in his commentary on Paul where he adds to a strictly literal reading of the text a spiritual dimension, for reasons that will now be apparent. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul depicts the Antichrist as a supernatural being who will reign for three years before being killed by the Archangel Michael. On the other hand, in 2 Thessalonians, he identifies the Antichrist with the Roman Empire of his own time. The fall of the Antichrist is thus equated with the downfall of the Roman Empire as a world power. This discrepancy had been noticed in the Glossa ordinaria. The glossator had amplified on the account in 1 Thessalonians, drawing on Daniel for additional information on the Antichrist and the Apocalypse, but he had repeated the Roman imperial version of the story in glossing 2 Thessalonians without trying to square the two accounts.²⁶

Peter seconds the glossator's strategy on 1 Thessalonians, bringing additional Old Testament prophetic material to bear on Paul's scenario in that epistle.²⁷ But he takes a rather different tack on 2 Thessalonians. Warming to his task, he advises his readers that Paul was not forecasting the fall of Rome as an actual historical event. Paul was, no doubt, upset by the persecution inflicted on Christians by the emperors during his time. Still, Peter notes, we know that the Roman Empire later declared Christianity its official religion and protected the Church. So a different understanding of Rome must be supplied in order to remedy the limitations of Paul's view read literally.

Peter's solution is to associate Rome, in 2 Thessalonians, not with the political imperium of Nero, but with the spiritual imperium of the Roman Church. He thus turns Paul's argument around by 180 degrees. The fall of Rome cannot mean the future political collapse of an empire that has not been in existence for centuries. It must rather mean the falling away of the churches from the Christian faith and from obedience to Rome. Paul's sense in 2 Thessalonians thus would be that Christ will not return to judge the world until all Christians have apostasized and all churches have fallen into schism. Peter has recourse to Augustine and Haimo of Auxerre for this interpretation. He depoliticizes the account in 2 Thessalonians still further by refusing to identify Antichrist with any human leader, whether of church or state. The Antichrist, he says, will be the son of the devil, though by imitation, not strict filiation. He will arise in Babylon out of the tribe of Dan, as the Old Testament foretold. But ‘tribe’ must be read broadly to include the Greeks as well as the Jews. For just as Christ possesses a fullness of divinity, so the Antichrist possesses a fullness of malice, and his activities embrace all the sons of pride of whatever nation. The key point Peter makes is that the reign of Antichrist represents a negative spiritual condition, which humans will help to bring about by allowing faith to wane and charity to grow cold. In so arguing, Peter rejects Paul's equation of the Antichrist and the historical Nero. By spiritualizing the idea of Antichrist, Peter can treat Nero, not as the literal Antichrist, but as a type of the Antichrist to come. To be sure, Nero's activities, like those of the other persecuting emperors, were evil and can be seen as having been motivated by the devil. Peter concludes, even so, “et sunt Nero et alii umbra futurae, scilicet Antichristus, sicut Abel et David fuerunt figura Christi.”²⁸ This resolution of the problem of Nero as Antichrist found warm support from Peter's immediate successors.²⁹

In developing this theology of the Antichrist, Peter does not confine himself to contextualizing and relativizing Paul's belief in the light of superseded apostolic expectations and the warping experience of persecution. He goes on from there to reinterpret the whole subject as pointing to a more general, and less institutional, mystery of evil in which the infidelity of the churches is paralleled by the falling away from faith and charity on the part of individual Christians. He thus finds a way of handling Paul's treatment of Antichrist in 2 Thessalonians that is compatible with the account in 1 Thessalonians, while he expands Paul's more historically limited position into a universal moral doctrine. Peter can thus yoke his historical critique of Paul with a constructive theology of Antichrist, one which draws on other post-biblical authorities and his own ingenuity in the interest of clarification.

This leads us to another striking feature of Peter's Collectanea in comparison with other commentaries of Paul dating to our target period—his use of patristic and more recent authorities, both to provide a running commentary on the text and to assist in the unravelling of problematic passages. His recourse to such authorities for the light they shed on Paul as an authority is both deft and apposite. In particular, Peter is more concerned than are other scholastic exegetes of Paul during his time with confronting the fact that the authorities may not agree in their interpretation of Paul. When this is the case, Peter seizes on the fact as an opportunity to explain, by his own word and example, how theological reasoning can be brought to bear on conflicts among the authorities. We can thus see in his Pauline exegesis the same kinds of methodological concerns that surface more systematically in his Sentences. In Peter's case, there is an organic relationship between his study of the sacra pagina and the teaching of systematic theology, from the standpoint of methodology no less than from the standpoint of doctrinal development.³⁰

Consistent with his handling of conflicting authorities on all subjects in the Sentences, Peter's exegetical treatment of this problem accents two important methodological principles, ones often ignored by his contemporaries. In the first place, he finds it insufficient to resolve conflicts by the naked tactic of countercitation. The inadequacy of that method is plainly visible in the Glossa ordinaria. The glossator responsible for the Gospels of Matthew and Mark takes exception to Origen on salvation and on angels; he seeks to neutralize him by citing Augustine or Bede against him. But the commentary does not stop to explain why Origen's position is unacceptable or why Augustine and Bede are preferable.³¹ Peter does explain the reasoning that leads his authorities to the conclusions they adopt, thus giving his reader the capacity to judge the merits of their conclusions. At the same time, he is aware of the fact that the same authority sometimes contradicts himself. This circumstance may result from the rhetorical requirements of the arguments made by the authority at various points in his oeuvre. It may result from the fact that he has genuinely changed his mind. But these considerations need to be taken into account in deciding whether the authority's views in one case cancel out his views in another, or whether the problem in Paul's text on which one is seeking help from the authority can be resolved within the framework of that authority's thought more generally. Some examples will illustrate how Peter handles issues of this type.

At Romans 2:3-6, for instance, Peter grapples with the question of whether the sin against the Holy Spirit can be remitted. Some say, he observes, that this sin cannot be remitted because the souls of such sinners are so hardened by despair that they cannot feel the need or desire for penance. Others say that the sin cannot be remitted because such sinners do not actually do penance even though they are capable of it. Peter adduces Augustine on Matthew in support of the first position, Augustine on Mark in support of the second. Peter has yet another resolution of the question that he wants to advance. He rests his own case on a third argument, made by Augustine on John. There, Peter notes, the sin against the Holy Spirit is held to be irremissible, not because the sinner cannot or does not repent, but because he repents so rarely and with great difficulty. This conclusion Peter finds the most persuasive of the three. He also finds it compatible with the broader outlines of both Augustinian and Pauline theology. To say that this type of sinner could not repent would be to undercut his own freedom to respond to the grace of repentance. Equally, if not more importantly, it would limit the freedom and power of God to extend mercy in converting the sinner. This example shows nicely that the Lombard knows that Augustine is not a monolithic source. It also shows that he thinks that one can discover, through an analysis of the reasoning in assorted loci, which Augustinian position is not only characteristic, as being consistent with his idées maîtresses, but also which Augustinian position sheds the most light on Paul.³²

Another case of conflicting authorities is one that requires far more of a virtuoso turn to resolve. This is the vexed debate between Augustine and Jerome, arising from the text of Galatians, over whether the apostle Peter had dissimulated his beliefs as a missionary tactic and whether Paul had been right in criticizing him on that account. The issue had been a sticky one from the patristic period on, not only because it raised the question of whether apostles can lie or err, but because Porphyry had seized on this text, and the clash it provoked, as a means of taxing the Christians for immorality and inconsistency. Jerome stated that Peter had dissimulated his faith in complying with Jewish dietary practices. Augustine had rejected that possibility out of hand.

The Lombard's first line of attack is to bring the Acts of the Apostles to bear on Galatians. Acts, as he notes, shows that, on another occasion, Peter ate the flesh of animals used in pagan sacrifices, but without having participated in those sacrifices or having approved of them. This kind of dietary practice, he continues, is permitted elsewhere by Paul if it does not give scandal. By analogy, then, Peter was fully aware of the suspension of the Jewish dietary laws by the new dispensation, but he followed them in the instance mentioned in Galatians so as not to alienate those he sought to convert. Peter was here acting out a species of Paul's own advice, to become all things to all men for the sake of winning souls.

With this reasoning in mind, the Lombard argues that we can say that Jerome is literally correct in stating that the apostle Peter behaved like a Jew when he was a Christian. But Augustine is even more correct in stating that Peter's behavior was not mendacious. In the Lombard's view, Peter's actions were “honesta” because they were guided by good intentions. For his part, Paul was misinformed. His own intention to preach the Gospel vehemently was a good intention, but on this occasion it had prevented him from grasping what Peter was really up to. Paul was wrong to attack Peter. Peter's missionary zeal was also good, but it too had prevented him from seeing that, in the new dispensation, Jewish and Gentile practices are not matters of indifference and that his missionary tactics might therefore be counterproductive. The Lombard treats both apostles as well intentioned, but he holds that neither apostle translated his intentions into appropriate action in the case at issue. He also sees the merits of the positions of both Augustine and Jerome, although with a preference for Augustine's.³³

A comparison between the Lombard and other contemporary exegetes of Galatians shows how much his analysis of the patristic authorities on this passage helped to clear the air. The Cambridge commentator thinks that Peter can be excused because he was not truly lying and because of the difficulties attached to evangelizing the Jews. His gloss on this text gives no indication that there is a patristic debate about it.³⁴ But Robert of Melun has clearly profited from the Lombard's exegesis. After reviewing his reasoning, Robert supplies an elegant refinement of it. He concludes that both apostles behaved in ways that can be thought of as wrong externally. Both can be excused, however, by mitigating factors in each case.³⁵ Robert thus retains the balance between correct intention and appropriate action central to the Lombard's analysis, but he invokes the principles of dispensation and the lesser of the two evils as a way of reconciling Jerome and Augustine. And, like the Lombard, Robert shows how Paul's authority can be weighed, judged, and relativized in the light of post-biblical authority and the ingenuity of the expositor.

While it is most typically the confrontation of conflicting authorities or the effort to extract theological principles from the time-bound perspectives of the apostolic age that engender these displays of ratiocination, there are also cases in which the Lombard draws on the disciplines of the trivium as tools of analysis in his Pauline exegesis. As we have already seen, his accessus to each epistle exerts a firm control over the handling of each commentary, suggesting the centrality of the discipline of rhetoric for him as a source of hermeneutical principles. Less pronounced, but also present, are his appeals to logic, although it has to be said that they are sparing in comparison with those in works by Abelardians or Porretans. Both metaphor and logical analysis help Peter to gloss Romans 8:20-23, where Paul describes the entire creation as groaning and travailing as it awaits salvation. The proper subject of salvation is man, not the rest of creation, says Peter. So what does the phrase “all creation” mean here? It can be regarded, he observes, as a “universale locutione.” It is a universal not in the sense that it collects the individual traits of all beings, but rather in the sense that it collects all the traits of the singular beings, namely human beings, who are to be saved. For all aspects of human nature—mind, body, and spirit—are saved. At the same time, since he is composed of mind, body, and spirit, the human is a microcosm of the rest of creation, and it is saved in him metaphorically.³⁶ There are two passages in the same epistle where the Lombard rephrases the text at issue in the language of cause-effect relationships. In commenting on the point that one man brought sin into the world and one man redeemed it, he argues that the roles of Adam and Christ as causes are not isomorphic. While Christ is the sole cause of the redemption he effects, Adam is not the sole cause of damnation when it occurs, since the actual as well as the original sins of Adam's posterity are involved. Also, the potentiality for damnation does not always get actualized, since God's grace can overcome sin and does in some people.³⁷ Similarly, in glossing the point that the law gives rise to sin because of human inability to adhere to it, Peter also treats the topic in the language of cause-effect relationships. The law, he notes, is not the efficient cause of sin, but rather the occasion of sin.³⁸

Both the substantive explanations Peter gives in these examples and the terminology from the disciplines on which he draws are clear, unexceptionable, and easy to understand. Therein lies much of their success, especially in an age when other masters were using a bizarre and rebarbative lexicon or were invoking the language of the artes in defense of highly problematic conclusions. This may well have been one reason for Peter's contemporary popularity as a guide to Paul. There are some other reasons which may also be mentioned, in addition to his rigorous commitment to the accessus method, noted above, which controls his exegesis of each epistle and gives the reader a clear road map so that he always knows where he is in Paul's itinerary. There is, further, Peter's balanced combination of the continuous commentary, the gloss on particular words and phrases that require more explanation, and the development of theological quaestiones on a more extended basis.³⁹ Peter gives more attention to questions and to theological speculation than his immediate predecessors. At the same time, in comparison with his immediate successors, his questions are related more integrally to the continuous commentary, and he never loses sight of the text from which the questions are derived. However long an excursus he may make, Peter always returns the reader to Paul's argument. And however much he may disagree with Paul's emphasis or take stands on controversial issues in his questions, they never become non sequiturs or theological Flying Dutchmen. Peter adduces more authorities in resolving vexed questions than either his predecessors or contemporaries. He chooses them aptly and he analyzes and deploys them perceptively. He is concerned with showing the reader how to evaluate the authorities when they conflict.

There is also another advantage that the Collectanea has over all of its twelfth-century scholastic competitors—the advantage of a physical format that makes it far easier to use. The other commentators confine themselves to lemmatizing individual words or phrases extracted from Paul's text, often quite selectively, without indicating their literary context within the epistle. Peter quotes the text of each epistle in full, subdividing it into units of coherent length. He gives a general summary of the apostle's argument in each of these units. Only then does he proceed to his more specialized glosses on particular words or lines within that unit or to questions on larger theological problems which it may contain. Hence the larger literary frame of the text is never lost, and the reader does not have to have a text of Paul in one hand, alongside of the Collectanea, in order to follow the sense of Peter's commentary. Similarly, in citing authorities, Peter provides a full quotation or paraphrase of the passage cited, unlike other twelfth-century exegetes who, following the Carolingian exegete, Florus of Lyons, tend to give only the first and last few words of the citation, with the phrase “usque ad” linking them. This method makes their citations mere finding tools that would be usable only in a library as extensive as that used by the glossator himself. The format that Peter gives to his Pauline commentaries makes his Collectanea a one-stop operation, supplying the reader both with Paul's text, the text or full sense of the authorities, and Peter's commentary, all laid out on the page in an immediately comprehensible visual format. This physical organization of the Collectanea is a feature of the work from the very beginning; it is witnessed in the earliest twelfth-century manuscripts.⁴⁰ Ease and convenience of use, not to mention its other strengths, help to explain why Peter Lombard's commentary on Paul should have been the commentary of choice for his century.

In facilitating the study of Paul, the Lombard also left his own distinctive legacy to the twelfth-century understanding of Paul as an authority. Leaving aside the doctrinal conclusions that he derives from Paul's text, some of which are traditional, some of which are avant-garde, and some of which articulate the mid-century theological consensus, we may summarize that legacy under three main headings. First, Paul is and remains for Peter a privileged source of theological truth. But his authority has to be appropriated in relation to that of other biblical authors. Writers from the Old Testament and from other parts of the New Testament need to be brought to bear on Paul to explain what he means and to shed light on his rhetorical strategy. Most important, in positioning Paul within the larger framework of biblical authority, Peter regards him as less weighty than the Gospels. The Gospels report Christ's teaching, whose authority reigns semper et ubique. On the other hand, Paul adapted Christ's teachings to the needs of the several communities to which he wrote.

This point leads to Peter's second major legacy as an expositor of Paul, his insistence on the need to understand Paul in context. This requires both a sensitivity to the literal and historical sense of the text, which enables the exegete to avoid an erroneous or anachronistic reading of it. It also enables the exegete to recognize what was timely for Paul, but what has since been superseded in later chapters of church history. Paul thus provides not only a dossier of theological truths on which the systematic theologian may expatiate, he also supplies a model for the ongoing task of theological development, even at Paul's expense when necessary.

Third, and last, Peter's sense of Paul as an authority who lived in time leads him to draw Paul into focus through the insights of post-biblical authorities. These authorities include the arts masters, most notably the rhetoricians, but they are primarily the Church Fathers and more recent Christian writers. Paul, to be sure, plays the senior partner in his association with these later writers, but he does so within an organically conceived system of authority in which he is regarded as a major interpreter of the Christian message and not just as a source of it. The coherence with which the Lombard links these insights on Paul to the theological enterprise of his century, and the exegetical and critical skills he honed in developing them, thus help us to appreciate Peter Lombard's appeal as a guide to Paul as an authority for his own age.

Notes

1. The best introduction to this subject is Jean Châtillon, “La Bible dans les écoles du XII^e siècle,” in Le moyen âge et la Bible, ed. Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon (Paris, 1984), 163-197. See also Heinrich Denifle, “Quel livre servait de base à l'enseignement des maîtres en théologie dans l'Université de Paris?” Revue thomiste 2 (1898): 149-161; Arthur Michael Landgraf, Introduction à l'histoire de la littérature théologique de la scholastique naissante, ed. Albert-M. Landry, trans. Louis-B. Geiger (Montréal, 1973), 47; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1952), chap. 1-4, and more recently, Smalley, “L'exégèse biblique du XII^e siècle,” in Entretiens sur la renaissance du XII^e siècle, ed. Maurice de Gandillac and Édouard Jeauneau (Paris, 1968), 273-283; Smalley, “The Bible in the Medieval Schools,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge, 1969), 2:197-220; Gillian R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984). A good summary of monastic exegesis is provided by Jean Leclercq, “Écrits monastiques sur la Bible aux IX^e-XII^e siècles,” Medieval Studies 15 (1953): 95-106. Older but still useful guides include Arthur Michael Landgraf, “Der Methode der biblischen Textkritik im 12. Jahrhundert,” Biblica 10 (1929): 445-474; Landgraf, “Familienbildung bei Paulinenkommentaren des 12. Jahrhundert,” Biblica 13 (1932): 61-72, 164-193; Landgraf, “Untersuchungen zu den Paulinenkommentaren des 12. Jahrhundert,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 8 (1936): 253-281, 345-268.

2. H. H. Glunz, History of the Vulgate in England from Alcuin to Roger Bacon: Being an Inquiry into the Text of Some English Manuscripts of the Vulgate Gospels (Cambridge, 1933), 219-224; Châtillon, “La Bible dans les écoles,” 192-193; Jacques-Guy Bougerol, La théologie de l'espérence aux XII^e et XIII^e siècles (Paris, 1985) 1:9; Werner Affeldt, Die weltliche Gewalt in der Paulus-Exegese: Röm. 13.1-7 in den Römerbriefkommentaren der lateinischen Kirche bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1969), 138; Z. Alszeghy, Nova creatura: La nozione della grazia nei commentari medievali di S. Paolo (Roma, 1956), 8-11, 23-24; Guy Lobrichon, “Une nouveauté: Les gloses de la Bible,” in Le moyen âge et la Bible, ed. Pierre Riché and Guy Lobrichon (Paris, 1984), 109-110. These authors correct the position stated by Smalley (Study, 51, 64-65) and by Margaret Gibson (Lanfranc of Bec [Oxford, 1978], 54-61), who stress the continuities between the Glossa ordinaria and Peter Lombard's exegesis to the point of obscuring his differences from his predecessors.

3. Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l'écriture (Paris, 1961-64), vol. 2, parts 1-2; Ceslaus Spicq, Esquisse d'une histoire de l'exégèse latine au moyen âge (Paris, 1944), 70-71; Spicq, “Pourquoi le moyen âge n'a-t-il pas davantage pratiqué l'exégèse littérale?” Recherches des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 30 (1941-42): 169-179; Smalley, Study, xvii, xxi, 83-195.

4. Grover A. Zinn, “Historia fundamentum est: The Role of History in the Contemplative Life According to Hugh of St. Victor,” in Contemporary Reflections on the Medieval Christian Tradition: Essays in Honor of Ray C. Petry, ed. George H. Schriver (Durham, 1974), 138-144, 146-158. See also Châtillon, “La Bible dans les écoles,” 186-188, 194.

5. Evans, Language and Logic, passim.

6. On the authorship of the Glossa ordinaria, see the essay in this volume by Margaret Gibson.

7. Vincenzo Miano, “Il Commento alle Lettere de S. Paolo di Gilberto Porretano,” Scholastica: Ratione historico-critica instauranda, Acta congressus scholastici internationalis, Romae, 1950 (Rome, 1951), 171-178; Maurice Simon, “La Glose de l'épître aux Romains de Gilbert de la Porrée,” Revue d'histoire écclesiastique 52 (1957): 68-70. I have not inspected these manuscripts myself. On the dating, see H. C. van Elswijk, Gilbert Porreta: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (Leuven, 1966), 57-58; Bruno Maioli, Gilberto Porretano: Della grammatica speculativa alla metafisica del concreto (Rome, 1979), xxiii.

8. Damien Van den Eynde, “Les écrits perdus d'Abélard,” Antonianum 37 (1962): 468; confirmed by Eligius M. Buytaert, ed., Peter Abelard, Opera theologica, CCCM 11-12 (Turnholt, 1969), 11:16; Rolf Peppermüller, Abaelards Auslegung des Römerbriefes, BGPTMA [Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters] NS 10 (Münster, 1972), 10; Peppermüller, “Exegetische Traditionen und theologische Neuansätze in Abaelards Kommentar zum Römerbrief,” Peter Abelard (Proceedings of the International Conference, Louvain, 10-12 May 1971), ed. E. M. Buytaert (Leuven, 1974), 117-119.

9. Epistola ad Hebraeos, Glossa ordinaria, PL 114:643A, 655A-B.

10. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Hebraeos, argument and 1:1-7, PL [Patrologia Latina, edited by J. P. Migne, 1880] 192: 399A-401A. The quotations are at 400B and 401A respectively.

11. Lombard, Ad Hebraeos, PL 410C-414A.

12. Lombard, Ad Hebraeos, PL 447B-460C.

13. Anonymous, In Epistolam ad Hebraeos, as in Commentarius Cantabrigiensis in Epistolas Pauli e schola Petri Abaelardi, ed. Arthur Michael Landgraf, 4 vols. (Notre Dame, 1937-45) 4:724-735, 734. On the dating of this commentary, see Landgraf's analysis (1:xv).

14. Anonymous, Ad Hebraeos 4:738-741.

15. Robert of Melun, In Epistola ad Hebraeos, as in Quaestiones de Epistolis Pauli, ed. Raymond M. Martin, Spicilegium sacrum lovaniense 18 (Louvain, 1938), 302-304. For the date, see Martin's analysis, pp. lvi-lvii.

16. On this development see, in general, Edwin A. Quain, “The Medieval Accessus ad auctores,” Traditio 3 (1945): 215-264, who makes passing reference to exegetes (p. 261, nn. 1, 2). More recent treatments, which include discussion of accessus to books of the Bible in the twelfth century, are A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984), chaps. 1-2, and A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-c. 1375 (Oxford, 1988), 69-71, although the latter work misdates Peter's exegetical works. Both confine themselves to his commentary on the Psalms, and do not comment on his Pauline glosses.

17. Peter Abelard, Commentaria in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, prologus 1:1, ed. Buytaert, CCCM 11:43-55, for the accessus and Abelard's introductory remarks. His departure from this agenda in the body of the work has been noted by Buytaert (17-20) and Peppermüller (Abaelards Auslegung, 10-24). An analogy to this full accessus followed by an extremely narrow exegetical focus is also found in the monastic exegete Hervaeus of Bourg-Dieu (c. 1080-c. 1150) in his Commentaria in Epistolas divi Pauli, praefatio, PL 181:591D-596C and ff., although his concern is with the moral edification of his monastic readers.

18. On the prevailing attitude of the canonists here, see Glenn Olsen, “The Idea of the Ecclesia Primitiva in the Writings of the Twelfth-Century Canonists,” Traditio 25 (1969): 61-86. For the countervailing attitude of the theologians, see Marcia L. Colish, “Another Look at the School of Laon,” Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du môyen age 61 (1986): 12-17.

19. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Romanos, PL 191:1524C.

20. Lombard, In I Epistolam ad Corinthos, PL 191:1672B-C.

21. Lombard, In I Epistolam ad Timothaeum 2:12-15, 3:5-6, PL 192:340A-342C, 345C-346A.

22. Anonymous, In primam Epistolam ad Timotheum, Commentarius Cantabrigiensis 3:251.

23. Lombard, In I Epistolam ad Corinthos 7:1-28, PL 191:1585D-1597A.

24. Lombard, In I Epistolam ad Corinthos 7:29-35, PL 191:1597B-1598D. For Peter's fuller views on marriage, see Sententiae in IV libros distinctae 4.26-42.

25. Lombard, In Epistolam I ad Thessalonicenses, argument; Lombard, In Epistolam II ad Thessalonicenses, argument, PL 192:287D-290A, 311A-312C. The quotation is at 311A.

26. Epistola I ad Thessalonicenses 4:15, 5:3; Epistola II ad Thessalonicenses 2:3, 2:6-7; Glossa ordinaria, PL 114:618D-619B, 622A-D.

27. Lombard, In Epistolam I ad Thessalonicenses 5:1-11, PL 192:306A-308A.

28. Lombard, In Epistolam II ad Thessalonicenses 2:1-16, PL 192:317B-321D. The quotation is at 318C.

29. Anonymous, In secundam Epistolam ad Thessalonicenses 2:1-16, Commentarius Cantabrigiensis 3:539-541; Robert of Melun, De Epistola ad Thessalonicenses prima 2:7, p. 296.

30. The most important studies of these interrelations have been made by Ignatius C. Brady, in his prolegomenon to Bks. 3 and 4 of the Sentences (Grottaferrata, 1971-1981) 2:8*-52*. Compare his edition of three texts reflecting Peter's earlier exegetically derived positions on the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and marriage (pp. 53*-87*), which can be collated with Peter's handling of these themes in his reworking of Romans and 1 Corinthians and in the Sentences. This material supplements Brady's earlier discussions of Peter's life and works in “Peter Lombard: Canon of Notre Dame,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 32 (1965): 277-295 and “Peter Lombard,” The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967) 11:221-22. On the double redaction of the Collectanea, see also Jean Leclercq, “Les deux rédactions du prologue de Pierre Lombard sur les Épîtres de S. Paul,” Miscellanea lombardiana (Novara, 1957), 109-112; Ermenegildo Bertola, “I commentari paolini di Pietro Lombardo e la loro duplice redazione,” Pier Lombardo 3:2-3 (1959): 75-90. On the connection between exegesis and theology in Peter, see also Glunz, History of the Vulgate, 232-258 and Gillian R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford, 1980), 42. These treatments of the point supersede that of Smalley (Study, 75).

31. Matthew 25:48; Mark 1:2, 3:29; Glossa ordinaria, PL 114:166D, 179C, 193C.

32. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Romanos 2:3-6, PL 191:1340A-D.

33. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Galatas 2:14, PL 192:109D-114A.

34. Anonymous, In Epistolam ad Galatas, Commentarius Cantabrigiensis 2:351.

35. Robert of Melun, In Epistola ad Galatas 2:11, pp. 245-246.

36. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Romanos 8:20-23, PL 191-1444C-D.

37. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Romanos 5:15-16, PL 191:1392D-1394B.

38. Lombard, In Epistolam ad Romanos 7:12-13, PL 191:1420B.

39. On the mix between the gloss, the question, the continuous commentary, and the sources for each, as well as the shift in taste toward the question by the end of the twelfth century, see Smalley, Study, 42-86; Lobrichon, “Une nouveauté,” 93-114; Gustave Bardy, “La littérature patristique des ‘Quaestiones et responses’ sur l'Écriture sainte,” Revue biblique 41 (1932): 210-236, 341-369, 515-537, and 42 (1934): 14-30.

40. Lobrichon, “Une nouveauté,” 109-110. The only other contemporary exegete who quotes entire chunks of the Pauline text before glossing individual words and phrases is Hervaeus of Bourg-Dieu. But he is not interested in developing theological quaestiones on the basis of the text.