SOURCE: McEvoy, James. “Robert Grosseteste on the Ten Commandments.” Recherches de Theologie Ancienne et Medievale 58 (January-December 1991): 167-205.

[In the following essay, McEvoy argues that Grosseteste's popular treatise on the decalogue was written for a well-educated clerical public; that its most notable doctrinal theme is Christian love; and that it comments favorably on the structure of feudal society while also pointing out and castigating abuses within that system.]

The treatise of Grosseteste on the decalogue bore in medieval times a number of titles: de decem preceptis; de mandatis; summa de decem mandatis; de dileccione et decem mandatis; libellus de decem preceptis decalogi¹. No such doubt, however, or variation of opinion affected its authenticity, and no scribe attributed the treatise to any but Lincolniensis. Such connoisseurs of Grosseteste as Gascoigne and Wyclif were quite certain of its attribution, about which indeed no doubt has ever been entertained: the bibliographers, beginning with Boston of Bury, all knew it as a writing of Grosseteste.

If we are to judge by the surviving witnesses to the text and by their owners, the treatise on the decalogue was read less in the century of its composition than in the subsequent period up to c.1500; almost all of the manuscripts date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of the known references made to it the earliest is that of Boston of Bury (early fourteenth century). No less than twenty-four surviving manuscripts attest the popularity of the work, but it is significant for the shape of Grosseteste's theological influence that all the owners and readers who can be identified were Englishmen: Master John Malberthorpe; Nicolas Kempston; M. Medekoke; Thomas Gascoigne (who owned a surviving copy, viz Oxford ms.Lincoln College lat.105); Robert Flemmyng, Bishop of Lincoln (who inherited Gascoigne's copy); John, Lord Lumley; William Gray; Simon Greene; William Horman; Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton; Thomas Nevile, and William and Gregory Webb². Wyclif quoted from it in his De Mandatis Divinis and his Opus Evangelicum. Only two of the manuscripts are held in continental libraries, and one of these, the Douai ms B.M.451, belonged to William Hyde, who was professor at the English College there c.1650, while the other, Vat.lat.4367, was copied in England. As in the case of De Cessatione Legalium, all the evidence suggests that some of the most important theological and pastoral writings of Grosseteste reached an English readership only³.

The first printed edition of DXM has been published by the editors who have so recently given us the DCL (De Cessatione Legalium), Professors Dales and King. It will be warmly welcomed by all students of Grosseteste and of his age. The importance of this edition as a contribution to the study of Grosseteste warrants a close examination of the purpose and achievement of the treatise itself⁴.

DATE OF COMPOSITION AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WRITINGS

Thomson was prepared to place the composition of DXM [De Decem Mandatis] firmly between 1225 and 1230, but if he is right (which is by no means clear) then he is so entirely for the wrong reasons⁵. The editors plump for 1230 or shortly after then. They argue that the pastoral purpose of the book fits well with Grossesteste's period of pastoral experience after his priestly ordination, which presumably took place in 1225 that in DXM themes later to be developed in DCL and Hexaëmeron appear in a preliminary draft; and that Grosseteste's knowledge of Greek is in its early stages only, so that the work was written not much later than 1230, ‘the date of the beginning of his interest in the Greek language’ (p. vii).

Now it appears to me that DXM allows us no grounds at all for judging Grosseteste's knowledge of the Greek language. The single quotation from Chrysostom (p. 2) is taken from a work, the Homilies on Matthew, which was known and widely used in the Latin translation of Anianus from late patristic times onwards; it is too short to allow us to say whether Grosseteste was correcting Anianus from a manuscript. The brief reference to Aristotle is to the De Generatione Animalium, but this is not of much help since the translation cannot be pinpointed in time; it survives in only one manuscript and is anonymous⁶. The single reference to the LXX (‘in greca autem translacione’, p. 84) may well have been taken from a Latin source such as Jerome, who frequently refers to it in his exegetical writings. Does this negative evidence allow us to conclude that Grosseteste ‘had certainly not made much progress in his Greek studies at the time he wrote’ (p. vii)? I do not think so. For one thing, some students of Grosseteste will certainly feel that this argument assumes too much about our knowledge of the stages of his acquisition of Greek, a subject on which the traditional position (as represented especially by Thomson) is currently undergoing revision⁷; and for another (to take a parallel case), Grosseteste revealed comparatively little use of Greek even in DCL (after 1230; I am inclined to place its composition towards the end of his teaching career, or even at the beginning of his episcopate, c.1235)⁸, even though he had already shown considerable and refined knowledge of the language when writing what he called his exposicio parvula on Galatians, a work which was certainly composed prior to the DCL, as two back-references in the latter clearly attest⁹.

DXM is silent concerning its own place in Grosseteste's output; as a general rule he was extremely sparing of cross-references. I cannot find any external evidence, such as the use of recently-translated sources, which would help to place it in time. However, there is the theme of the work itself, which fits in with a major preoccupation of his mature theological teaching, namely, the interrelationship of the two testaments and the originality of the New Testament teaching. If we view the treatise in this light we can relate it quite directly to two other important works, the Expositio in Epistolam ad Galatas and the De Cessatione Legalium, and we can regard the three as a sort of trilogy, despite the differences of genre manifested internally as among them.

I have long been convinced that the project which took the form of De Cessatione Legalium grew out of Grosseteste's commentary on St. Paul and above all out of his reading of Galatians. In the letter to Galatians Paul vigorously attacks the counter movement of certain Jewish members of the Church of Galatia, who wished to re-impose the Old Testament legislation upon all who believed in Christ, both gentiles and former Jews, and who had seized upon the rite of circumcision as their test case for the continuity of the covenant, which they regarded as one and indivisible. As against these, Paul argues that there have been two covenants and two Israels, and that in the second covenant and the true Israel of God there is no place for ethnicity, nor for the traditional practices with which the Mosaic covenant was surrounded. For Paul, the Torah has served its pedagogical function in bringing the human child to the school of Christ. In his commentary Grosseteste developed the themes of Galatians in depth and at considerable extent, and even used the words cessatio legalium¹⁰.

The treatise on the ending of the Torah grows naturally out of Grosseteste's preoccupations with the Pauline writing, and indeed refers back to the expositio for a crucial point (viz, the question, debated with some heat between Augustine and Jerome, as to when precisely the old law ceased to have effect)¹¹.

Beginning from his reconstruction of the judaïzing movement within the primitive Church, Grosseteste studies the interrelationship of the Old and New Testaments. He shows how the prophecies, especially those of Isaiah, are fulfilled in the paschal events. He finds abiding value in the moral precepts of the Mosaic code (as distinct from its ritual and ceremonial law), since none of these is abolished but rather subsumed, and manifested as an expression of true, redeemed love. He extends his reflections magnificently to the unity and harmony of the entire divine plan of redemption, attempting to show that providence could not be frustrated by the fall of Adam but worked truly in and through the long preparation of the covenanted people towards the Incarnation, an event which, he argues, would have taken place even if man had not sinned¹².

Now as it happens, one of the titles of DXM (or at least of its prologue), preserved in ms British Library Royal 11 B III is ‘de dileccione et x mandatis’; nothing more apt could be found to express the theme of the work¹³. The commandments, after all, do remain in force within Christianity where, furthermore, they are surrounded by thickets of laws and regulations; how is this multiplicity to be understood and lived in a unity, in the light of the mandatum novum of love which is Christianity's unique precept? This is, clearly, the perspective of the treatise and the way in which its central problem is addressed, from the very first lines of the prologue right through to its concluding paragraphs.

If the perspective I have advocated is correct, and if we should regard the three works mentioned as a sort of trilogy carried by a broadly unitary project in the mind of Grosseteste, does that help to date DXM? Not with the accuracy one might desire, I think, save that it places it in quite close thematic connection with a project of the mature Grosseteste. The Expositio in Galatas cannot, unfortunately, be dated with precision either. It was certainly based upon Grosseteste's lecturing activity as a theologian, as several school references make clear; it was re-written and is sometimes quite literary in form and finish; but its origins in teaching notes is not in doubt. It betrays a developed knowledge of Greek, but other criteria (independently of the Expositio [Expositio in Galatas] itself) would have to be found if the actual stage of Grosseteste's Greek learning in it were to be used for dating the Expositio; but there is not much that is hard and fast in this line before the episcopal period. The ‘trilogy’ may have occupied a good deal of Grosseteste's time off and on during his final decade of teaching (c.1225-1235), but beyond that I do not see grounds for any further precision of dating, not at least at the present time.

The relationship between DXM and the Expositio is extremely close and will merit detailed study when the edition of the latter is published. In the meantime, a few illustrative details may be given concerning the nature of an interrelationship which strikes the reader of both works already in the opening lines of the prologue to DXM. After quoting from Rm 13.10, Grosseteste passes at once to a thought of St Augustine, one of which he likewise makes use in the Expositio: ‘who possesses charity in act has both what is latent and what is patent in the words of God’¹⁴. Now the Augustinian theme of charity in practice as being the sole valid interpreter of the senses of Scripture (for the quotation really makes reference to the literal and spiritual senses) runs throughout both works of Grosseteste like a dominant theme, accompanied by the doctrine of amor ordinatus and the reduction of the commandments to one, which is inseparably the love of God and of neighbour—the Johannine theme so beloved of Augustine. The hallowing of the Day of the Lord as the prophesied fulfilment of the Old Testament Sabbath is developed in closely parallel terms in the two works, and indeed in De Cessatione Legalium also¹⁵. I Tim.5.8 (on the care of members of the household as a criterion of faith), is invoked in the discussion of the Fourth Commandment, and also in the exegesis of Gal.6.2: ‘Bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfil the Law of Christ’¹⁶. The only direct reference to the Philosopher in the DXM is one of only two found in the Expositio¹⁷. When Grosseteste argues that the Sixth Commandment prohibits not only adultery but also fornication and the unnatural acts of homosexuality, he quotes from Ephes.5.5 and Gal.5.19-21, and continues: ‘the act of unnatural sexual indulgence is in this context called uncleanness, as the expositors say’¹⁸. This cryptic reference to the commentators on Scripture is illuminated by his discussion of the same Galatians passage in the Expositio, where, distinguishing within the Pauline list of vices of the flesh between fornication and adultery, on the one hand, and immunditia ‘and what is called in Greek aselgeia’, on the other, he states that a Greek expositor has called the latter two ‘unclean modes of union which should not even be named’ (cf Ephes.5.3)¹⁹.

I have referred to this sample of detailed interrelations between the two works to suggest how close they are to one another; the reader who comes to one of them finds many significant words and phrases already familiar from the other. He will discover no differences even in nuances of doctrine, nor any hint of development of thought as between the two writings. I can find no clear evidence to establish relative priority as between the two, but I think it is fairly likely that both were written around the same time, and that when Grosseteste came to write on the commandments he had already made his serious study of Galatians and its commentators. Now the Expositio in Galatas is certainly a work of his mature years in the schools, it arises directly from his teaching and it manifests a good reading knowledge of Greek, including extensive and independent access to what was apparently a new exegetical work in the Latin world, viz Chrysostom's commentary on Galatians; Grosseteste used it in a way and to an extent that suggests he may have possessed a full copy rather than simply extracts in a catena, and it is entirely possible that he read it in Greek, since no trace of any medieval Latin version has been found.

If DXM and the Expositio are roughly contemporary in origin, why then does the Expositio throw so much light on Grossesteste's study of Greek whereas DXM might as well have been written by an author who knew nothing of the language? I am inclined to think that the answer must lie in the different readership Grosseteste had in mind for the two writings. The Galatians commentary was intended for the use of scholars, that relatively restricted group of masters in theology, whereas the DXM seems to have been aimed at the growing number of learned priests whose ministry and general influence Grosseteste was ever anxious to support: in his eyes there never were and never could be enough of them. Hence the treatise DXM is quite learned without being at all pedantic or self-indulgent in a scholarly sense. In the Prologue and in many places scattered throughout, Grosseteste addresses his reader with the familiar ‘tu’; such familiarity is absent from the Expositio, where it would have been quite out of place. Moreover, the hypothesis of the difference in intended readership is in a way borne out by the very different pattern of circulation of the two writings: the Expositio survives in a single manuscript (of the early fifteenth century) once in the possession of Gascoigne, and it was read by Wyclif and used by Alexander Carpenter²⁰; but of any readership beyond those two no trace has hitherto come to light. DXM, on the other hand, was copied and read throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, and the large number of surviving manuscripts attests to a very respectable number of readers²¹. Indeed, one fifteenth-century student of the work throws light on its readership by bequeathing his copy to preachers, to be handed on but never sold ‘by one priest, learned in the law of the Lord for the preaching of the Word of God, to another, and so on for as long as this book lasts²²’.

In general, Grosseteste's intended readership provides an important clue to his employment or otherwise of Greek in a given work. This hypothesis receives support from a comparison between the Expositio and De Cessatione Legalium. In the latter work, which was written with a wider readership in mind and which (rather like DXM) attained an influential dissemination within England, there is little of Greek learning exhibited, save for frequent references to the LXX—and it is always possible that some of these were derived from his reading of Jerome. Greek authors are quoted in existing Latin versions, including the Ps-Dionysius and Damascene, both of whom Grosseteste was later to render in the form of correctae translationes. If we were to regard the use of Greek in a given work as a firm criterion for relative dating we would have to place the composition of the Expositio in Galatas a good deal later than that of De Cessatione Legalium; but in fact, the precedence of the Galatians commentary is affirmed by two very explicit back-references to it in De Cessatione Legalium. Grosseteste's knowledge of Greek was greater by far than he was prepared (taking his intended readership into consideration) to show while composing De Cessatione Legalium; the same may very well have been true in the case of DXM.

There is one other writing of Grosseteste to which DXM can be related, and a dateable one at that. In a letter (printed as Epistle 2) addressed to his sister, Grosseteste says the following:

‘“Man”, when taken without qualification, means the interior man, with the result that a man remains one and the same even when parts of the exterior man have been cut off. For if my hands and feet were to be cut off and my eyes torn out, I still could truly affirm—or at least think, if my tongue were cut out—that I am Robert and that I am I, and that this ‘I’, formerly whole, has suffered truncation’²³.

Now in the richly reflective prologue to DXM we find the following close parallel, given in answer to the question as to how a man can love himself if he hates the better part of himself, that is to say his soul:

‘For if my hand has been cut off, I still remain ‘I’ without qualification. In the same way, even after individual members are cut off I remain ‘I’ and can truly say that I have been cut, I suffer, I live, I am dying’²⁴.

Part of the interest of these two passages is that they reveal Grosseteste as the avid reader he was of the De Anima of Avicenna²⁵. For Grosseteste, self-consciousness is immediate and belongs to the soul, it does not depend upon the body; for the interiority of the soul, the immediate access it has to itself without the mediation of images (through which external things and even the body's members are communicated to it) constitutes the subject or ego as such. Grosseteste's thoughts on these matters were those framed by St Augustine in De Trinitate X under the heading cognosce te ipsum: the soul does not need to seek to know itself, as though it were originally unknown to itself: it simply has to distinguish itself from all that it knows as other than itself. To know what I am I have only to leave aside all the knowledge that comes to me from without by the mediation of the senses, and to consider myself; for every soul knows itself with a certitude that is only further revealed and reaffirmed by doubt (si fallor, sum). What is most truly the self is the inner self, or homo interior²⁶.

In the two passages in question, however, Grosseteste is drawing less immediately upon Augustine than upon Avicenna. It is admittedly difficult to distinguish between the two sources, so much do they agree that the experience of the self is immediately given²⁷. In a famous passage, which occurs twice in the De Anima and is also found closely paralleled in the same author's Book of Directives and Remarks, the philosopher Avicenna argues that the presence of the mind to itself is spontaneous and immediate, and is not dependent upon sensible experience²⁸. Let us suppose, he argues, that a man were created in the adult state, but in a void such that no sensible reality affected his senses and he had no impressions from without, his members being spread out so that they did not touch: tamen sciret se esse—the ‘flying man’ would know that he existed, even though he would not be conscious of his limbs. Avicenna uses this ingenious illustration to double effect, arguing (against the Peripatetic view) that not every intellectual act of knowledge reposes upon sensible experience, the vital exception being the immediate affirmation of self-conscious existence; and that the limbs and other members are not constitutive of the human being but are like clothing in which the self is dressed, but which, because they cannot be taken off like clothes, run the risk of being confused with the self, granted their continual state of adherence. ‘Sciendum quod esse animae aliud est quam esse corporis; immo non eget corpore ad hoc ut sciat animam et percipiat eam’. G. Verbeke concludes his exposé of Avicenna's doctrine with the well-chosen words: “Le moi est donc conçu comme le centre spirituel de la personne humaine qui est immédiatement présente à elle-même”²⁹.

Grosseteste's argument may seem to diverge from that of Avicenna, since it goes at the business in another way, imagining the hand or the tongue cut off in order to affirm that the ‘I’ remains the ‘I’, even in loss or under torture. I suggest, however, that the inspiration of Grosseteste's ‘tortured man’ remains the ‘flying man’, and that Grosseteste, struck by a detail in Avicenna's argument, pursued and developed it to create his own illustration of the superiority of self-consciousness to the body. In Avicenna we read the following:

Si autem, in illa hora, possibile esset ei imaginari manum aut aliud membrum, non tamen imagineretur illud esse partem sui nec necessarium suae essentiae … Et quoniam essentia quam affirmat esse est propria illi, eo quod illa est ipsemet, et est praeter corpus eius et membra eius quae non affirmat, ideo expergefactus habet viam evigilandi ad sciendum quod esse animae aliud est quam esse corporis.

The ‘flying man’, in brief, affirms that he is; but what he affirms is over and beyond his body and his members, which he does not affirm; for if he could represent to himself his hand or any other member (which, of course, ex hypothesi he cannot), he would not represent it as necessary to the very essence of what he is.

Grosseteste extended the thought and made it more graphic, not to say imaginatively traumatic: if my hands were cut off, and my feet, and my tongue torn out, I remain to the end I; I affirm as long as I live, and even as I expire, that ‘I am I’. He argues that to anyone who looks carefully further within his makeup (interius perscrutanti), it becomes apparent that if he hates his own soul by loving iniquity, then it is himself that he hates; but if he hates himself, how can he love another? The evil are incapable of true love or friendship; in order to love, we must first love ourselves and our own true good, in order to discover that the true good is the absolute common good, God himself, who is neither mine nor yours, but ours.

Grosseteste's argument differs somewhat, then, from Avicenna's. He would, of course, agree with Avicenna on both points of the latter's argument, i.e., the substantiality of the soul and its immediate self-awareness. His is, however, more of a spiritual exercise, an invitation to true interiority, than an abstract argument. What am I in truth? For one accustomed from his youth to the pratice of the interior life, the answer is that verus homo homo est interior: yes, my hand is my hand and my foot is my foot; but I, Robert, am a knowing and a free self, constitued by love in relationship to myself and others, and above all to God. In DXM, as in the Expositio in Galatas, the emphasis on relational freedom is striking: no created power can overcome my interior freedom, neither by force not by torture or seduction, provided only that my freedom stands in true relationship to God and to his Spirit, the giver of that inner fruit in which truest liberty consists. Love grounded upon truth and ordered by Being is invincible³⁰.

The reader does well to bear in mind that the Sermon on the Mount has come between the ‘flying man’ and the man contemplating his mutilation, for the latter is at the task of convincing himself that if the right hand is a stumbling block then it is to be cut off, if the alternative would be the loss of his soul. Or if the right eye, then pluck it out, for the same eternal stakes³¹.

I have tried to relate the prologue of DXM to the second letter, which is dated c.1232. This relationship lends some support to the other strands of evidence suggesting that DXM was written somewhere in the final decade of Grosseteste's teaching career.

THE DECALOGUE UP TO THE TIME OF GROSSETESTE

In undertaking his study of the Decalogue, Grosseteste was contributing in his own way and in his rather unique voice to a need that evidently was widely felt in his time. The series of Lateran Councils had served to focus the minds of two or three generations of ecclesiastics upon the renewal of the Church and the intensification of its spiritual life at every level. In the face of heresy the faith was to be defined and defended; superstition was to be countered by the active instruction of the people; parish priests were to be formed with a new consciousness of their vital local role and were to be given the means of instructing the peole in simple and memorable terms; and the practice of the faith was to be attached more and more to participation in the sacraments of the Church. Fr. Leonard Boyle is inclined to trace the sudden and unprecedented appearance, between 1179 and 1215, of penitential summae and other pastoral manuals of diverse genera to three principal causes: the parish clergy became aware of its collective identity and tasks in a new way, as presbyteri parochiales; the teaching developed in the schools was available for wide diffusion; and the literary forms of summae, distinctiones etc. were to hand, or were created. Among these pastoral genres Boyle ranges above all, of course, the summae penitentiales and summae de casibus; and side by side with these, treatises on the virtues and vices, the articles of faith, the Ten Commandments, the paternoster and the sacraments. All of these were aimed above all at the academic or practical formation of priests with the cure of souls³².

The impact of the Fourth Council of the Lateran upon the life of Robert Grosseteste has been for too long underestimated. The year 1215 marked the culmination of the activity and influence of the most impressive, attractive and innovative Pope since Gregory VII. The Council he convened carried his message of pastoral renewal, of ecclesiastical liberty of action, and of administrative centralisation, to every corner of the Latin Patriarchate. Grosseteste's pastoral writings and his activity as bishop (including the statutes he instituted for the Diocese of Lincoln, which were to be widely imitated in England for the remainder of the century), all bear the stamp of the great reforming council³³. We may legitimately see even in his expression of disappointment with the council in which he himself had participated, at Lyons in 1245, a continued effect of the deep impression left upon his mind by 1215; for the council of Innocent IV, proclaimed as a reforming council, inevitably invited comparison with the model of the genre, and that comparison could only have an unfavourable outcome³⁴.

Thanks to a number of recent editions we are afforded a much better insight into Grosseteste's pastoral mind than was possible even a decade ago, and we can furthermore attempt to place the series of pastoral writings within the rest of Grosseteste's work, to the extent that it is known³⁵.

DXM can be placed broadly within the genre of pastoralia, as a work of haute vulgarisation, rather than of simple vulgarisation in the style of Templum Dei; it occupies as it were a place on the highest shelf of popular writings. It is not the equivalent of a school treatise, such as that incorporated into the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and hence mirrored in the commentaries on that work up to the close of the Middle Ages; nor is it destined, on the other hand, for the use of simple parish priests, who were better served by more easily memorizable material—such as the Templum itself. DXM was, I feel, intended for the more learned higher clergy, who combined developed reading tastes with correlatively higher pastoral responsibilities.

The newer literature on the Ten Commandments, whether taking the form of simple manuals, of a treatise like that of Grosseteste himself, or of groups of questions incorporated into properly scholastic syntheses of theology, all goes back fairly directly to St Augustine, who may be considered as in a way its progenitor, at least as regards content.

The Decalogue appears to have had an uneven history within early Christianity³⁶. Though the variations between its two biblical forms (Exod.20.2-17 and Deut.5.6-18) are minor, the numbering of the Ten Commandments betrays a variation which is of Jewish origin. According to the Talmud, Philo and the Fathers of the Church before Augustine (e.g., Gregory of Nazianzen and Jerome), the verses are to be divided up as follows:

1. adoration of the one God—Exod.20.v.3;
2. prohibition of idols—v.4-6;
3. do not take the name of the Lord in vain—v.7;
4. work on six days but rest on the sabbath, a rest for Jahweh—v.8-11;
5. honour father and mother—v.12;
6. do not kill—v.13;
7. do not commit adultery—v.14;
8. do not steal—v.15;
9. do not bear false witness—v.16;
10. do not covet the wife or goods of another—v.17.

Now Augustine was to exercise a lasting influence by linking 1 and 2 of the old enumeration, thus assimilating polytheism to idolatry under a single prohibition, and in making the final commandment double, thus according due respect to the status of woman. In doing so he opened the way to a new bipartite classification of the Decalogue. In the enumeration which preceded him, the First Table of five elements prescribed the proper religious attitude to the God who gives life and to the parents who transmit it, in a way that no doubt reflects an Israelite mentality. The re-division of the two tablets into three commands relative to God and seven relative to the neighbour, Augustinian in origin³⁷, was to become part of the common wisdom of Latin Christendom (and eventually to be retained by Lutherans also); it is faithfully reflected by Grosseteste in the prologue and in the concluding lines of DXM (p. 91).

Augustine was also responsible for a theology of the Decalogue which was in its own way to become part of the patrimony of medieval Christianity and to exercise an influence which continued up to and even beyond the Council of Trent. His originality emerges by way of contrast with the treatment of the commandments in the primitive Church and up to his own time. The earliest Church was conscious above all that the Lord himself had presented the New Law as the perfection and completion of the Old, not its abolition (Mt.5.17-20; 19.17; Mk.10.19; Lk.18.20); hence the Old Testament was indeed to be read and studied within the Church. Perhaps it was the effort of the Post-apostolic Church to detach itself from the Synagogue that led to an emphasis upon originality and difference, so that the Sermon on the Mount appeared almost in the light of a rejoinder to the Mosaic Decalogue together with its entire accompanying context of Torah and rabbinical commentary. The Didache accords no place to the Decalogue in its catechetical and moral instruction. The early writers (Justin, Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, for example) regarded the Decalogue as a summary of the natural law, but placed no particular stress upon it; Ambrose remained within their tradition. It is with Augustine that the commandments enter the instruction of both catechumens and the faithful in general, and find a place in the articulation of Catholic doctrine. Perhaps it was his opposition to Manichaeanism which more than anything else inspired his upgrading of the Decalogue, for the Manichaeans shunned the Old Testament as the work of the evil creator. Augustine displays the Decalogue in his sermons and elsewhere as the natural law written in the heart of man and expressly repeated by God to his chosen people. This legislation is taken up again, purified and completed, in the New Law which, adding to it a higher ideal as well as further precepts, proposes it as the foundation of practical morality.

The theological study of the Decalogue, begun by the Fathers, held a prominent place in the renewal of theology in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Hugh of St Victor included a treatise on the commandments in De Sacramentis³⁸. The School of Abelard explained the Decalogue within the comprehensive framework of salvation history, applying the great categories of promise, sacrament and commandment. Peter Lombard gave later commentators on his work the opportunity to extend his own quotations, references and reflections, which went largely in the same sense as those of the Victorines and Abelardians. Extensive and independent scholastic treatises appeared on the Decalogue and the New Law, for instance the De Legibus of William of Auvergne and the De Legibus et Praeceptis of Jean de la Rochelle and Alexander of Hales³⁹. Bonaventure and Aquinas discussed the commandments and the new dispensation when commenting the Sentences, and Aquinas returned to the theme in the Summa⁴⁰. Following Augustine unanimously regarding the enumeration of the commandments and the divisions of the tablets, the Scholastics accepted his theology also: the commandments are the expression of the natural law written in the hearts of men; only the third contains a determination of positive divine law, prescribing in the Old Testament the observation of the Sabbath and in the New that of the dies dominica. Within the Church the theological virtues are to give life to the commandments, and the Christian ideal is to be their crown. In this way the lex Moysi was understood as having been ordered to the lex evangelii and promulgated in a movement of salvation history towards the freedom and grace of love.

It may be of interest to outline the structure of the distinctiones accorded by Peter Lombard to the Decalogue⁴¹.

The Lombard reproduced faithfully the Augustinian division of the two tables: Table I, Commandments 1-3, is discussed in the first three chapters of Distinctio XXXVII; Table II, including Commandments 4-10, is treated from chapter 4 to the close of the discussion in Dist.XL. Regarding the First Commandment, Lombard (drawing on the Glossa Ordinaria) reports that for Origen it is two commandments, whereas for Augustine it is only one. The second and third are discussed in a few lines, but with a distinction made each time between the literal and allegorical senses. In the wake of Isidore (quoted to this effect in the Glossa)⁴² the first three commandments are interpreted as referring successively to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (ch.3). The first three of the Second Tablet are dealt with summarily in a few lines, but once more with reference to literal and spiritual senses. The fourth (the prohibition of stealing) allows the Lombard to comment on sacrilege, rapine, usury and the spoliation of the Egyptians. The fifth, on false testimony, is a series of extracts from Augustine (including De Mendacio, which Grosseteste will quote extensively) on a subject on which that Father held a firm and unshakeably severe view. Dist.XXXIX explores the permutations of periurium. Dist.XL spends little time on the Sixth and Seventh Precepts of the Second Tablet, but rather more on the distinction between lex and evangelium, or inner and outer adherence. The Lombard concludes with a resounding quotation from St Augustine on the difference between the Law and the Gospel. Thus the transition is prepared between the third book of the Sentences and the fourth, on the sacraments.

LITERARY FORM

Thomson listed DXM, aptly enough, under ‘Pastoral and Devotional Works’. In the manuscripts it takes the form of a prologue followed by nine sections: Grosseteste discusses the Ninth and Tenth Commandments together in one section. This may seem strange for one who unreservedly accepts the division by three and seven proposed by Augustine, with the First Tablet of three concerning the love of God, and the Second, of seven, that of the neighbour. Augustine, it will be recalled, separated the commandments of Exodus 20.1-17 into two, which became the ninth and the tenth, the ninth referring to the neighbour's wife and the tenth to his possessions. Grosseteste is not retrograde by comparison with Augustine nor is he less affected by the dignity of woman, but he has worked out his own approach to the ninth and tenth and sets it out lucidly at the beginning of his discussion of both⁴³.

In Exodus 20.17, he remarks, the prohibition of coveting the neighbour's wife is not placed first and given priority over the prohibition of coveting his goods, but is placed in the middle of the commandment which prohibits both. In the Greek translation, however (which he quotes, in Latin), reference is made in the first place to the neighbour's wife. Following the LXX order, it is clear that the Ninth Commandment prohibits coveting the neighbour's wife; the sixth and seventh prohibit respectively acts of sexual wrongdoing and taking what is another's; while it is reserved to the ninth and tenth to prohibit illicit desire to do the things prohibited by the sixth and seventh. True to his conviction of the value of the LXX, Grosseteste devotes his final chapter to the twofold concupiscence distinguished by Paul in Galatians 5.17⁴⁴, i.e., of the flesh and of the spirit, to which he opposes amor ordinatus or caritas, which renews the soul and reforms it in the image of the Creator, who is supreme Beauty. Grosseteste then discusses Commandments Nine and Ten as one because, even though he is indeed sensitive to the dignity of woman, he has decided that both are sins of the will, and that being the case he has the opportunity to analyse the very root of evil, which is disordered desire and wilful abandonment of the true order of love.

The structure of the work is given by Exodus 20.1-17, in so far as Grosseteste comments each phrase and each word, even of the longer commandments. Thus the literary form of DXM is that of an exegetical study. Though aimed at a wider audience than his more academic commentaries, such as the Hexaëmeron and those on Ecclesiasticus 43 and Galatians, certain of its stylistic features are commonly met with in the writings mentioned. The longer commandments are broken down into lemmata, and the sections of comment connected by sequitur; where several explanations are possible he lists them (vel … vel … vel forte) and adds quasi diceret, or potest sic intelligi, or et est sensus sermonis quasi diceret⁴⁵. He draws freely upon the expositores for help, above all on Augustine and Jerome. He may be said to avoid points of detail in exegesis in favour of the broad picture and to give himself great freedom to quote parallel scriptural passages and authors, just as he does in De Cessatione Legalium. And there are certainly more exempla in DXM than in the exegetical writings properly speaking—destined no doubt for preachers to retain and adapt. Despite all that, the differences that separate DXM from the more academic scriptural commentaries should be regarded as being of degree rather than kind.

DXM manifests Grosseteste's usual attentiveness to the spiritual sense of the Bible, and in particular of the Old Testament. Of course, not every commandment is susceptible of a mystical interpretation according to the rules expounded in De Cessatione Legalium; for there is no need to attend to a mystical sense unless the literal or historical sense either gives no instruction in faith or charity or else invites the passage to a higher understanding⁴⁶. The prohibitions on stealing, lying and coveting simply are what they are and say what they say, whereas on the other hand the prohibition of graven images and of idols (’non facies sculptile’ DXM I,17-18, p. 15) does, Grosseteste thinks, contain a spiritual sense, for any creature at will can be distorted by elevation to the rightful place of God. The keeping holy of the Sunday is already a spritualisation of the Sabbath Commandment; beyond that, the Sabbath/Sunday has the mystical sense of rest and peace in God through faith, and of the everlasting resurrected life which Sunday in a special way prefigures⁴⁷. Commandments 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are not, it seems, susceptible of mystical interpretations—not as Grosseteste sees it, at any rate.

One other stylistic feature is worth adverting to, viz the lengthy question raised about Exodus 20.5 (‘visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children’), for quaestiones are very rare in Grosseteste's writings. This question has a loose and unscholastic allure. Grosseteste finds an apparent contradiction between Cicero, who opposes the justice of punishing children for parental misdeeds⁴⁸, and the text of Scripture, and suggests ‘various solutions’ which he explores by means of a distinction (temporal punishment—eternal punishment) destined to defend the perfect justice of God. In a passage reminiscent of portions of De Cessatione Legalium he expresses his conviction that in the great republic of creation no-one is made to suffer any penalty unjustly, despite the wrong introduced by the abuse of freedom; suffering is in fact always the providential restoration of true order after its disturbance by wrong action. His question is aimed at reconciling his authorities.

THE PROLOGUE

Grosseteste prefaces his study of the commandments with an introduction that stands among the finest pages in the entire corpus of his writings. Destined to set the theological framework in which the Ten Commandments are to be understood and lived by the Christian believer, it opens with Rom.13.10: Plenitudo legis est dilectio … The sources of moral precepts are multiple: written (Scripture and its expositores—but also the mundane philosophie expositores or ethnici) and unwritten (for deeds can be a rule of life as well). Thus, unobtrusively, Grosseteste announces the place that Cicero (De Natura Deorum) and Seneca (De Beneficiis and Epistulae) will occupy in the book⁴⁹.

The wisdom of God has subsumed the multiplicity of precepts into one mandate, indeed into one word: ama! This word must, he insists, be understood dialectically, as ordered love: love nothing that must not be loved; do not fail to love anything that must be loved, but love each thing as much as it ought to be loved by you and in the way it ought to be loved. If you find that as a pilgrim on the way you are unable to do this, then at least retain the invincible love of this love, and love your loving each single thing, as and as much as it should loved by you. For if you love that love, then in a way you have that love as it were in its very root, though not as yet unfolded into the branches of the tree. This tone of patience with oneself and others on the way or pilgrimage of life towards perfection is a notable and pleasing feature of the book. It comes back again in the discussion of desire, for desire cannot be wholly overcome in this life, and the Ninth and Tenth Commandments point us in the direction of a process which ressembles the building of a house: a man may be commanded to build, but he cannot be commanded to build in a day; the finished job takes as long as it takes … (pp. 88-89). The Golden Rule, which follows (quoted from Mt. 7.12), is also a theme of the book.

Grosseteste embarks upon an allegory of the Tree of Love. Its purpose is to show how from a unique root there comes a bifurcation (the twofold commandment of love), and from these two shoots there ramify ten branches, three from one shoot and seven from the other; like twigs from branches are the almost innumerable⁵⁰ moral precepts of scripture. Chrysostom is quoted on the twofold law of love, but in fact it is Augustine's Johannine theology of the indissoluble unity of the love of God and of neighbour that is expressed in the prologue. Unless we love ourselves we cannot love others: Grosseteste finds the old theme of Aristotle included in the evangelical precept of love. Once again, this love of ourselves must be conceived in dialectical terms, for there is a yawning gulf between base and vicious self-regard (the evil are incapable of loving either themselves or others—a reminiscence of Aristotle, perhaps, as well as of Psalm 10.6), and love of the verum bonum which is the summum bonum⁵¹. The study of the commandments in their organic relationship to their unique root and double shoots is to command all our attention, for that is the scripture in a privileged sense, written by the Spirit of God for our salvation⁵².

NON-BIBLICAL SOURCES

The number of quotations in DXM is very great in proportion to the relatively short work, and practically all the explicit quotations have been identified by the patience of the editors. Grosseteste, however, does not attach a name to certain ideas and expressions he uses; life is short but pedantry long. Still, a few notes on words and expressions that betray some part of his reading that has found its way through his pen may be of some interest, without pretending to be exhaustive.

A glance at the Index Auctorum reveals many writers and books that were perennial favourites with Grosseteste (Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory, Anselm, Bernard, Isidore and Bede)⁵³. Philosophers are incomparably less present, but I detect a brief reminiscence of Aristotle in the discussion of the Second Commandment: Quicquid enim minus est quam Deus, aut creatura est aut artificium aut ymaginacionis figmentum aut corrupcio aliqua aut privacio (si tamen et has aliquomodo inter encia numerare velimus), quia et hec esse dicuntur, cum tamen vere nihil sint. These things, which are scarcely to be called being, are in Metaphysics Γ2 privations and negations of being, which, though nothing in themselves, still derive their meaning from being, which is expressed in many ways. The Aristotelean notion of science as habitus adquisitus per experientiam, which Grosseteste develops in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics, makes a brief appearance (p. 56.34) but is not developed for its own sake. A further philosophical note is struck with the deservedly famous definition of justice: ut sic observata iustitia reddatur unicuique quod suum est; Cicero has this at De Finibus V.23,65 and it went into Justinian's Instituta (I,i) as a sort of headline for the entire codification.

There is a discreet but detectable presence of the Glossa Ordinaria. Much of Grosseteste's discussion of the Second Commandment is structured by the repeated association of the commandment with—rather perplexingly, for it looks at first sight like sheer literary artifice—Rom.8.20: creatura vanitati subiecta est. It is puzzling, as I say, until one looks at the Gloss on Exodus and finds there the source of the association: taking the name of the Lord in vain includes thinking of the Son of God as a creature, and hence as subject to the vanitas of every creature⁵⁴.

‘God will not leave unpunished the man who has taken his name in vain’ (Exod.20.7); yet God cannot possibly be harmed by the words of man. To this difficulty Grosseteste replies that although neither God nor man is harmed, and men, who judge ‘by the face’, may not punish the blasphemer, the judgment of God is not external and legal but of the heart, will and intention. Now the phrase quorum legibus manus, non animus, cohibetur (’the laws of man restrain the hand but not the mind’) appears a number of times, both in DXM and in the Expositio in Galatas. The Lombard also has it in his Gloss, but he applies it to the contrast between the Old Law and the New; though he limits the force of the opposition in the Sentences by referring it to the caeremonialia, not the moralia. The Lombard's source in turn is the Gloss at Psalm 18.8: lex Domini immaculata convertens animas, to which the Gloss adds ‘Voluntates, non modo manus, ut vetus.’ The Lombard comments in his own Gloss (which Grosseteste employed frequently when commenting upon Galatians), that the Old Law ‘manum maxime, non animum cohibebat’⁵⁵.

USE OF CONCORDANCE

The reader of DXM cannot fail to be struck by the regularity with which Grosseteste quotes from both scriptural and non-scriptural (patristic, early medieval and philosophical) sources on themes which he considered of special importance. He seems to be able to summon up parallel or related texts almost at will, and to develop their sense by apt quotations from his favourite authorities one after another, interlocked sometimes by little more than connecting words and phrases. To quote is part of his method for handing on the tradition he has received, for he is not in search of any personal originality—even though he is quite capable of it⁵⁶.

The concordance of scripture and ecclesiastical authorities which Grosseteste compiled gives the clue to his remarkable facility for quotation and offers an insight into his working method⁵⁷. Just for interest I decided to compare the DXM with the concordance, selecting two topics which seemed a priori to depend upon a ready-made string of entries.

The First Commandment prohibits and outlaws superstition, and Grosseteste gives examples of the sort of sins he has in mind when expounding it, such as new moon rites which have survived from pagan times with only a thin veneer of Christianity. He passes from that to the frequentation of the games, circus and amphitheatre, which was forbidden by the Fathers under the First Commandment because of the paganism and the hint of demonic worship they sensed there⁵⁸. He quotes from Isidore (Etymologies bk 18), Rabanus (De Universo bk 20.27), Jerome (Ad Furiam Viduam) and Augustine (’in primo libro de civitate dei’), to show the offensive nature of the games.

Now if we turn to fol.28^r of the concordance we find, under the heading De prohibitione spectaculorum, the following list of references⁵⁹:

ys.5 / aug.ep.43. De ci dei l. 1.2.4.8. de 10 cordis.de vera relig.ser.10. om.7.100. de concordia evangeliorum./ iero.ep.88. contra iovin.c.23. / basillius exa.4.6.8.10 / isid.etym.l.27 c.5.15.c.6.10.c.7.8./rabanus de natura rerum 1.20.c.15.25.33.36./ cris.super mt.om.6.7.

Grosseteste did not use all his references but selected among them; one would only discover on what basis he made his selection by looking up all the references he gives, but I have not done that. Isidore bk 18 is present in DXM, though the chapter numbers do not correspond to those of the modern edition; Rabanus De Natura Rerum bk XX is in both; Jerome also, but with a different letter-number; and Augustine, De Civitate Dei bk I, again with a chapter reference that differs from the modern edition.

The second probe took the exposition of the Fourth Commandment, which has a strikingly large number of quotations, for purposes of comparison with the entry De honorando patrem et matrem in the concordance. This time the entry is double, the first level containing scriptural references, the second ecclesiastical authors. In the margin, separated from the Biblical references, appears seneca de benef.1.3./ aristoteles de animalibus 8. The list reads as follows:

tob.4.11 / ec.3.7.23 / exo.20.21 / deuter.21./ iere.2./ leviticus 2./ ephes.6./ hebreos.12. aug.ep.40.112 / de c.dei.1.22. ser.10. / om.100.19./ de vera relig. / gregor.mor.1.7. ambo.exa.1.5.c.33./ is.c.13./ iero. ep.86.88.118./ basilius exa.9.

The comparison is more positive this time. Though Grosseteste does not follow the order of the entry, it does indeed contain substantially the references and authorities he quotes.

I list these as follows, in the order of his use of them in DXM (omitting doubles):

Exod.20.12; Ephes.6.1; Ecclus 3.8-9; Matt.25.31-46; Augustine, Epist.243.12; I Tim.5.8; Jerome, Epist.54.3; Ps.26.13; Ecclus 3.9-10; Ecclus 3.11; Prov.9.1; Jerome, Epist. 117.2; Tob.4.3-4; Jerome, Epist. 117.4; Ecclus.7.29-30; Seneca, De Beneficiis 3,35.1-3 and 3,28.2-3; Ioan.19.26-27; Augustine, Tract.in Ioan. 119.2; Reg.2.19; Ambrose, Hexaëm.5; Levit.20.9; Deut.21.18-21; Exod.21.15-17.

Exodus chs.20 and 21, Deut. ch.21, Eccles. chs.3 and 7, Tobias ch.4, Ephesians ch.6, and Hebrews ch.12 are found in both lists (Leviticus 2. in the concordance might just be a mistake for 20); Ambrose, Hexaëmeron 5, is in both; the references to letters of Augustine and Jerome differ, but that might remain a topic of further study concerning the numbering of their letters in medieval collections⁶⁰. Seneca, De Beneficiis bk 3 is common to both lists.

The evidence strongly suggests that Grosseteste drew on his concordance, making a methodical choice among the entries, using the concordantial sign prefacing the entry in order to refer to his library, and turned up the passages marked within, say, bk I of De Civitate Dei with the sign for ‘honouring father and mother’. In composing DXM he had added references over and beyond those entered in the concordance, something which indicates that the concordance as we have it represents only a stage on the way of his study of the Scriptures and the ecclesiastical authors.

The limited sounding made here cannot throw much light upon the general nature of the compilation and its employment in other works, for that will of necessity have to be a piecemeal undertaking; it can scarcely be said even to have begun as yet. Nevertheless, it is sufficient to give us an idea as to how he went about things and just how he managed to pack his treatise with such an anthology of biblical and ecclesiastical references.

DOCTRINE

Grosseteste wrote on the Ten Commandments to disseminate solid doctrine among the clergy of his country; he did not seek originality. None the less, some doctrinal points in his book deserve a word of comment, either because they do in fact attain to an originality not aimed at, or because they are particularly representative of his approach in theology.

The opening page on the First Commandment belongs decidedly in the former category (DXM I, paragr.1,2, pp. 6-7). I translate it as follows:

From the love of God, then, there grows like a first branch the First Commandment of the Decalogue: Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. For he who loves God above all clings lovingly to him as the supreme good and believes that he alone is the supreme good. For if he believed something other to be a good equal to or greater than that which he loves supremely, then that thing loved supremely would not be God, since God is that greater than which cannot be thought, and is indeed greater than can be thought. Therefore, since faith is nothing other than thinking with assent (as Augustine says), if he believed in, and thus thought, a good equal to or greater than that which he loves supremely, then that thing loved supremely would not be God, and so he would not love God.

Furthermore, he who loves God incomparably above all does not accord to another the reverence and worship due to God alone, for by giving to another what he believes to be due to God alone he knowingly insults God and does not turn upon him a loving affection incomparable above all. It follows, therefore, that if he loves God supremely he clings lovingly to him alone as the supreme good, he believes him alone to be the supreme good, and he renders to him alone the reverence and worship which are due to him alone; and thus neither does he believe something other than God to be the supreme good, nor does he cling lovingly to something else as the supreme good or offer to something else the reverence and worship due to him alone; in other words, he has no strange God. To have a strange God is to believe something other than God to be the supreme good, or to love it maximally as the supreme good, or to give to something other than God the reverence and worship due to God alone—or to do all three, viz to believe something other than him to be the supreme good and to love it maximally as the supreme good, and to give to that other reality the worship due to God alone.

For since God is by definition the supreme good, what the supreme good is for each man, in his belief or his love or his worship or his reverence—in all of these at once, or in several of them—is God. We are forbidden by the First Commandment to believe anything other than the true supreme good to be the supreme good, or to love it as such, or to adore it with the reverence and worship due to the supreme good alone. Thus the First Commandment opposes both the impiety of idolatry and the declension of love from the supreme good to lower things.

We can safely say that not many expositors of the First Commandment in medieval times—or modern for that matter—would have been capable of giving it such a dialectically metaphysical turn as we find it accorded here; I can think of only one other theologian who interweaves the argument of St Anselm with the First Commandment: even allowing for all the contextual differences that separate their thought, there is an analogy (if I may be permitted to use the word!) between Robert Grosseteste and Karl Barth⁶¹. The dialectical element is for the most part muted in Grosseteste, but it may never be neglected by his reader, for it is a feature intrinsic to a mind which frequented over many years authors who were themselves imbued with Neoplatonism, such as Augustine, Boethius, Anselm and (especially after 1235 or so) the Pseudo-Dionysius.

The idea of ‘strange gods before me’ (i.e., before the face of Jahweh), evokes at once in Grosseteste's reflective mind the metaphysical absurdity of any reality's being placed higher than God, who is Being itself and the source of all ‘other’ beings, supreme good and creator of all goods or values. Since God is not the first being in a merely hierarchical sense, like the summit of a pyramid which, though placed at the top of the structure, is nevertheless related to its lower levels and dependent upon them for its crowning place, but is on the contrary first and supreme in the sense of incomparable to any (for if God had not created, the fulness of all that there could be would none the less be present in Him, and indeed not only present but also reflected and expressed in the Verbum), it follows that anything aliud, or other than God, cannot ontologically speaking be his rival; and if our love is to mould itself upon the order of being, rather than attaching itself to its own self-generated fantasies and arbitrary whims (and that is the whole sense of the Augustinian ama et fac quod vis—the amor ordinatus of the prologue to DXM), then to posit as an object of unrestricted and exclusive love something other than the summum bonum is every bit as much a contradiction, as to try to take as the object of thought a reality equal to or greater than ‘that than which no greater can be thought’⁶².

St Anselm himself would have admired this page and recognized in it a legitimate and genial extension of his unum argumentum to the order of the will. Anselm, who was surprisingly little read in the twelfth century, was being revived in Grosseteste's time, and no-one was more responsible for the new interest being taken in his thought than Grosseteste himself. Alexander of Hales, Jean de la Rochelle and St Bonaventure were to be the promoters of a similar revival at Paris within a few years⁶³.

By the way, it would be difficult to convince me that this page was written with barely-lettered parish priests in mind.

If we may generalize for a moment, we might say that Grosseteste's theology is trinitarian, Christocentric and biblical in character, its biblicism being of that mystical-allegorical and spiritual character that goes right back to Origen (whom Grosseteste knew, in part at least through the sometimes lengthy extracts quoted or reported by Jerome), and which Ambrose and Augustine developed with particular conviction within the Latin Church. Grosseteste remains within the patristic trinitarian outlook, which finds the tri-personality of God revealed and manifested in creation and in both Testaments, as distinct from the more Aristotelean-inspired theological approach which was just beginning to show itself at Paris during his old age. This new theology saw the Creator and provident Lord revealed in different ways in nature and in the Old Covenant and it regarded the existence of God as provable by arguments taken from creation, but considered that the mystery of the Trinity was revealed in the New Testament exclusively.

In DXM, trinitarian theology is a vein of reflection that runs right through the exposition: every occasion is welcomed that allows the writer to relate the living of Christianity to the Trinity. The dialectical reconciliation of the unity of nature and the trinity of persons in God is pursued in a way that recalls the Hexaëmeron, where it is a major theme of discussion⁶⁴. The reference to the triad of magnitudo, species and ordo, present in even the least of creatures, recalls the Dictum devoted to the same theme⁶⁵. And Grosseteste adopts Augustine's view that the Commandments of the First Tablet relate distributively to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit⁶⁶.

Christology is represented in a sense throughout DXM, since the whole law and the prophets, including the commandments and the ceremonial law of the Old dispensation, have their place in salvation history in virtue of the promise which is fulfilled by the coming of the Messias. The paschal event puts a definitive end to the rituals, and the enactment of the mandatum novum of love subsumes into itself the moral precepts. This perspective is shared fully with De Cessatione Legalium where, however, it is incomparably more developed.

Grosseteste's theology is biblical, and heavily textual at that, devoting a large proportion of space and of effort to the meaning of words. At Exod.20.5, for instance (’Ego sum Dominus Deus tuus, fortis, zelotes’) each word is analyzed, and a biblical conjugation is made with Exod.3.14 (’Ego sum qui sum’)⁶⁷. Augustine's rationale of the application of the allegorical method is adopted with approval⁶⁸. Particular attention is given to the justification of divine providence in nature and history, something quite typical of Grosseteste, who explores the concept of providence both biblically and theologically; biblically, through research into the truth of the literal sense of God's rewarding and punishing (Exod.20.5)⁶⁹; and theologically, by developing the theme of the finality of nature⁷⁰. Since nature is the product of the divine ideas and not of chance, it is shot through with intelligibility, there is nothing in that is vacuous or purposeless, and man can learn the setting of the moral order and the true nature of his own dignity by studying the behaviour of the animals, their care for their young and spirited defence of them, their provision for the aged of their species. Grosseteste has recourse to Ambrose for these themes, for Ambrose was an attentive and receptive student of the Stoic nature-piety⁷¹.

Grosseteste's ecclesiology may be said to centre upon the Augustinian vision of the Head and body of the Church as one: caput et corpus unus est Christus, totus Christus caput et corpus est.⁷². By a sort of extension of the Mystical Body doctrine he regards humanity itself as an organic body, with the result that he can view certain sins in the light of the damage inflicted by one member of the body of humanity upon another. Oppressors guilty of rapine are like deformed members of that body, who act in contradiction to the health and well-being of the organic whole. Raptores, who seize and appropriate to themselves the life-requisites of others, act like a member of the human body which tried to consume the nutriment of the other members and stock it in an immense pile, while the others became emaciated⁷³. He draws upon the Prophetic and Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament⁷⁴, including the ringing condemnation of Ecclesiasticus 34.25: ‘The bread of the needy is the life of the poor man; he who defrauds him is a man of blood’⁷⁵.

To the Mystical Body belong the souls of the dead. Honour to one's parents should continue after their death; their children are not to forget those who may suffer the pains of purgatory, but are to assist them by the giving of alms, by their own devout prayers and through the prayers of the Church⁷⁶.

Finally, we may pick out the theme of the dignity of man, a recurrent and deeply-meditated motif of Grosseteste's philosophical theology. He conjugates the biblical theme, of man made in the image and likeness of God, with the philosophical idea that man is the microcosm of the universe, in order to underline the uniqueness of man among creatures: not even the angel is superior to him. Under the Seventh Commandment, he views the crime of homicide as the destruction of the representative product of the entire handiwork of the Creator, an assault as it were upon the finality of the entire universe:

Since the rest of the universe was made with man in mind, he who attempts to bring death to man, who is placed over the remainder of creation (Gen.1.28), does violence to the other creatures, made as they are on account of man. For he does his very best to wrest from them the purpose of their existence, if he takes a man from the centre of creation and kills him: he does his best to deprive them of their well-being, since a reality is in a good state when it has attained to the end for which it was made. And since man possesses something of every creature (whence he is called the microcosm, and even the voice of Truth itself refers to him as ‘every creature’, when it says ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature’), he who deprives a man of his existence by that very act mutilates the being of every creature, in some part of itself⁷⁷.

FEUDALISM

‘Who deceives a judge and corrupts his judgment disrupts the bonds of peace, so far as in him lies. Since, moreover, judges are the throne of God, sitting on which the Lord decrees his judgment by their mouths, what does the false witness do in deceiving the judge, but to do his utmost to withdraw the support of truth and to unsettle the seat of God?’⁷⁸. The reader who ponders these lines on the Eighth Commandment (which prohibits false testimony), may be tempted to view them as a thread which, when pulled gently, might begin to unravel a considerable part of the woven garment, that part, namely, which can be headed ‘feudal’; for the bonds of peace of which Grosseteste writes so earnestly he calls not vincula, but foedera; and those oaths of loyalty which made the always-threatened unity and peace of medieval society—whether in the Empire or in the kingdoms—depended entirely upon truth, fidelity and the sense of honour. It is not to be wondered at if medieval discussions of the commandments, and Grosseteste's among them, accorded an important place to lying, the swearing of oaths and perjury in the judicial setting, in proportion as all of these represented incomparably more than merely individual aberrations: they were social sins right from the start, since they threatened the very fabric of peace.

Now the medieval theologian found in patristic texts a thoroughly social view of language, of truth and lying, he did not have to invent it for his own contemporary purposes. In the nature of things, his purpose coincided largely with that of Jerome and Augustine, namely, to inculcate the virtues of truth-telling and of faithfulness to one's given word, and to the Lord who had instructed his disciples to let their yes be yes and their no, no (Mt.5.37).

Between the Fathers and the medieval theorists, however, the dimension of feudalism had intervened, to render all the more urgent the task of ensuring in so far as possible the public peace and order that depended upon fealty and loyalty, both of which reposed in their turn upon the sense of honour. Liars, pronounces Grosseteste, have no honour⁷⁹. Liars bring it about that even those who tell the truth are not believed, Jerome had complained—and Grosseteste prolongs the thought to the social consequences of this vice: their evil practice has brought mistrust into the affairs of men; from mistrust there has ensued the requirement of oath-taking, and thence the evil of perjury. Only truth can reconcile the inner with the outer, the heart with the tongue, and prevent their alienation from one another. Grosseteste resorts to the fairground for an analogy, in a few vivid, though excoriating, lines:

Men who lie are like illusionists (prestigiatores), for as these make white appear black to the bodily eye, or a dead thing seem alive, or a motionless object appear moved, liars make the false appear true to the eye of the mind, even though the truth is no less far removed from falsehood than white from black, and the grasp of truth is more precious than the sight of white or black—and the deception of the interior sense worse by far than illusionism⁸⁰.

The trouble in medieval times was that oaths abounded where documents were lacking, as the means of filing and retaining them were only being discovered, above all at the Roman Curia following the accession of Innocent III, through practices which administrations throughout Europe sought, in fairly amateurish ways for the most part, to imitate. You had no document to prove what you asserted—but you could always offer to raise your right hand and invoke the name of God, swearing that you had indeed fulfilled the requirements for the examinations at another (suitably inaccessible) place; that you were of legitimate birth; that you would not remove books from the library of the college … No wonder that Grosseteste inveighs against the multiplication of oaths (which offends against the Second Commandment) and invokes the Sermon on the Mount; however, it would have required more than literary and theological fulminations to rid society of a bad habit to which there appeared to be no ready alternative. Perjury makes God, the invited witness to a lie, into a liar; Grosseteste gives a current formula for oaths: the taker of the oath looks upon holy objects and swears: ‘hoc est verum, sic adiuvet me Deus et hec sacrosancta’—and if they perjure themselves then they have turned their backs upon God's help, they have invited illness and the plague and evil and everything that is fearful⁸¹.

Grosseteste does not hesitate to sacralize the judicial power, as we have seen, assimilating judges through a reminiscence of Psalm 9 to the throne of God's judgment: ‘Sedisti super thronum, qui iudices iustitiam … Et Dominus in aeternum permanet … Paravit in iudicio thronum suum’. The judge who under just laws condemns the guilty to death, the judge's servant who carries out the sentence ex officio, the soldier defending his country against an unjust invader, do not sin against the Fifth Commandment; but at this point Grosseteste is merely repeating the teaching of Augustine⁸². He adds, however, the severest condemnation of the abuse of legal or military power for gain or vengeance, just as he condemns public authority which turns that chaste matron, justice, into a whore by the oppression of subjects whom by right it is there to protect⁸³.

Grosseteste's book is rich in brief exempla relating some aspect of the commandments to the society in which he lived. It is possible that they are not all his own; but that is of little account, for they are so embedded in his work as to be an integral part of it and they contribute quite disproportionately to its savour. They have a feudal setting, they are memorable and they are not overdrawn. I paraphrase a sample of them.

(The Fourth Commandment). Let us imagine an earthly king seated upon the throne of the kingdom and a servant of his expelling him from the throne and heaping ordure from the streets and the squares upon the throne, as an insult: that such a deed merits the most severe punishment is patent to all. But how much more severely will they be punished who place something before God in their love—before the high king, the high priest and the high judge! Is not the faithful soul his city and his temple, and is not the heights of faithful love like the soil of the kingdom, and the throne and the priestly seat and the judge's tribunal? Those who expel God from the most inward reach of their love, and who pile up in that high and inward place the filth of gluttony or of luxury or any other evil desires, there to be the object of their highest love—how they insult him, and what great punishment they merit it would be difficult to say⁸⁴.

(The Ninth and Tenth Commandments). The concupiscence of the flesh is like an enemy who is part of the family household, fighting in our own castle, simulating friendship but in truth acting out of enmity. Against such a one we need greater prudence and livelier fortitude and more measured temperance and sterner justice, and in a word, resistance that never tires⁸⁵.

(The Sixth Commandment). The marriage of husband and wife is the sacrament of the spiritual union (copula) of the Word of God and the faithful soul which adheres to God, and which is one spirit through union with the Word. Therefore, to violate so sacred a thing and the manifest sign of so sacred a thing by adultery, is a heinous sin. If someone were to take the royal standard, or some such object that signifies the king's person, and trample it in the mud, he would do no little dishonour to the king and the insult would be no small one. Worse still if he of his own will were in the midst of battle to throw the royal standard down in the mud, for in that case he would be adjudged worthy of death. But how much greater dishonour is done to Christ and the Church by the one who in the dirt of indulgence tramples the diginity of wedlock and soils it, especially since that which matrimony signifies is incomparably more excellent than all royal dignity, and the filth of indulgence incomparably more sordid than any mud of the field⁸⁶.

PERSONAL

There never was a writer but was greater than his book. Grosseteste's style is unhurried, purposeful and objective; but despite his objectivity the man himself, though on only a very few occasions, slips unselfconsciously through, and we catch him in a moment of uncommonly good common sense, or even in a vein of humour—just sufficiently so to make us aware of his massive intellectual and spiritual presence, as he dictated his thoughts to an amanuensis or an adiutor—or perhaps to both at once, the one to write and the other to fetch and carry the many volumes of reference as they were in turn required.

Grosseteste is a scholar, and as such is distinctly aware of the engrossing nature of studies and the way they can wholly possess the person who feels their attraction; not that there are not higher things than philosophy and scholarship, though, as he reflects at the close of his prologue:

The emergence of the Ten Commandments from the twin love (of God and neighbour) is put before us for our consideration. We should concentrate upon that emergence with all our power and effort, because these Ten Commandments are referred to as the Writing of God in a altogether privileged way. Now if the discoveries in some domain of human enquiry and writings produced by human toil frequently arouse our total interest and involvement, how much more should we rise with all our powers of concentration to meet what is written down by the eternal and ineffable all-knowing Wisdom of God for the salvation of our race, and by the finger of God; which is to say, by his own work, or by His Spirit!⁸⁷.

Christians are to pass the entire Sunday in good works: before breaking fast, in praise and prayer, in listening to the Word of God or teaching it, or in reading and meditation; while eating (with moderation, of course), they should engage in edifying conversation with one another on the things of eternal life, or on historical or other stories. And they must take care to see that the holiness of morning and midday should not become something else entirely in the afternoon, because the afternoon is, after all, closer to our death than was the morning—and as the Philosopher says, the nearer you come to the goal the more you must increase the good you do!

One can imagine Grosseteste's smile, as he thought of readers who might take this lugubrious warning seriously, lent apparent weight and pseudo-solemnity as it was by what he himself knew to be a wholly forced quotation from Aristotle, on animals!⁸⁸.

Grosseteste's exhortations to parents concerning the education of their children are based upon Scripture and the common sense of the ages, and have much of the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ about them. Education, he insists, must begin early:

Fatherly discipline must begin from the tender years of childhood, for just as wax receives impressions more easily and truly when it is soft than when it is hard, so a young and tender age can be formed more easily to moral teaching than when it has grown tougher with the passage of time. A young reed takes easily the bent given it by the shaping hand, but when it has grown strong it usually is more easily broken than bent. Horses and even wild animals, while still young and tender, take the discipline of their trainers, but if they grow old undisciplined and untamed it is a waste of time even to try to tame them. That is why the holy Tobias did well to ‘teach his son from infancy to fear the Lord’ (Tob.1.9-10). And the wise author of Ecclesiasticus warns, ‘You have children? Instruct and shape them from their very childhood ‘(Ecclus.7.25); for if you did not mould them when you could you may not complain that you cannot mould them when you would, but instead find them rebelling, whom you indulged to your own harm and were unwilling to subject to stern discipline⁸⁹.

At the close of his discussion of the Ninth and Tenth Commandments Grosseteste turns from the theme of the double concupiscence back again to that of love, in lines warmly replete with overtones of St Augustine, the Doctor amoris.

As against these, well-ordered love, which is virtue and charity, is to be sought with all one's might. For it is what is best in creatures, and the rational creature is called good, and is good, from none other than the order of love. That is why the order of love is the very good itself of the rational creature, and love is more exalted than knowledge, just as the angelic order called the Seraphin, which means ‘burning’ or ‘burnt’, is more exalted than the order of the Cherubin, whose name means ‘fulness of knowledge’. Furthermore, ordered love is what renews the soul and reforms it to the image and likeness of its creator, that is to say, of the supreme beauty. This is the ‘fire that consumes’ (Deut.4.24) the scarlet of vices, that separates the alien, lower things that cling basely to the soul by cupidity, and that collects the soul together again, from dispersal and unlikeness into wholeness and harmonious likeness. This love is the sweetest thing, because things cannot be sweetened save by it, whereas lacking it everything is bitter. Through it the most difficult things become easy and the most burdensome things light; for it is the sweet yoke of the Lord and his light burden (Mt.11.30); and if it cannot while we live here below be entirely pure, then it can at least be upright through repentance⁹⁰.

Notes

1. Robert Grosseteste, De Decem Mandatis, ed. Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King (Oxford 1987), Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi X, pp.xix-107; see pp. 1 and 92.

   The treatise will hereafter be referred to as DXM.

2. ibid., pp.xviii-xix.

3. For an assessment of Grosseteste's medieval reading public see Beryl Smalley, ‘The Biblical Scholar’, in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. D. Callus (Oxford 1955), pp. 70-79.

4. For a study of the biblical allusions and other related matters, see the writer's review-article, in this issue of Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 58, 1991.

5. S. H. Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253 (Cambridge Mass., 1940), p. 131.

6. See The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, p. 77. Grosseteste had access to a copy of De Animalibus while compiling his concordance (see p. 190 ff.).

7. See the fresh and comprehensive survey of Grosseteste's Greek learning by A. C. Dionisotti, ‘On the Greek Studies of Robert Grosseteste’, in The Use of Greek and Latin. Historical Essays, ed. A.C. Dionisotti and J. Kraye (London, The Warburg Inst. 1988), pp. 19-39.

8. Arguments in favour of this dating may be found in the present writer's The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford 1982), pp. 489-490.

9. Robert Grosseteste, De Cessatione Legalium, ed. Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King (Oxford 1986), Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi vii; see pp. 68 and 179.

10. For example, when commenting on Gal.5.18 Grosseteste remarks: ‘Iusto igitur solummodo lex caerimonialis est posita, sed non lex mandatorum moralium. Legitur quoque et hoc secundum consequentiam doctrinae apostolicae de cessatione legalium, et est sensus: si ducimini spiritu, hoc est, spirituali intelligentia legis scriptae, non estis sub lege’.

    The commentary has been edited by the present writer and is being prepared for publication in the British Academy series of medieval authors, where it will appear accompanied by the edition (by R. C. Dales) of the extracts made by Thomas Gascoigne from Grosseteste's lost Pauline glosses.

    DXM, by the way, uses the following interesting words when introducing the Third Commandment: ‘Nunc autem, exhibita et patefacta nostre redempcionis gratia, cessat hec legalis observancia, sicut in multis locis veteris testamenti est predicta cessatura’. That is an excellent summary of De Cessatione Legalium!

11. See n. 9.

12. See the present writer's article ‘The absolute predestination of Christ in the Theology of Robert Grosseteste’, in Sapientiae Doctrina. Mélanges de théologie et de littérature médiévales offerts à Dom Hildebrand Bascour O.S.B. (Louvain 1980), pp. 212-230.

13. DXM, p. 1.

14. DXM, Prologus, p. 1. The reference is given to St Augustine, Sermo 350, 2, but see also qu. 73 of the Quaestiones ad Simplicianum, which is in turn quoted in the Glossa Ordinaria on Exodus ch.20 (P.L.,113, col.255).

15. DXM pp. 30-31; De Cessatione Legalium I.2, pp. 7-9.

16. DXM 42.1-3. On both occasions Grosseteste is inspired by Augustine's reflections on I Tim.5.8 in De Civitate Dei XIX, 14.

17. ’ … iuxta sententiam philosophi dicentis, quanto appropinquas fini plus bonum cum augmento operare’, DXM iii, 2, p. 31; the ed. refers to Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium III,5, 756a, but this does not seem to correspond.

18. DXM vi.1, p. 65.9.

19. I reproduce the entire relevant passage (Ms Magdalen College 57, fol.26^r):

    Dividitur autem vitium in fornicationem simplicem et immunditiam quae fit contra naturam, et impudicitiam, quae est specialiter contra legem matrimonii, scilicet adulterium.

    Luxuriam forte nominat expletionem libidinis caeterorum carnalium sensuum exterius agentium, utpote libidinem videndi, audiendi, olfaciendi, et toto exteriori corpore mollia et temperata tangendi. Fornicationem et impudicitiam vocat, ut dictum est, fornicationem simplicem et adulterium, ubi non est turpis modus mixtionis contra naturam; immunditiam vero et luxuriam vocat modos turpes mixtionum, quos non necesse est nominare. Sic enim habet codex graecus: Manifesta autem sunt opera carnis, quae sunt fornicatio, adulterium et immunditia, et quod dicitur graece aselgeia, quae duo ultima dicit graecus expositor modos turpes mixtionum, quos non necesse est nominare.

20. In Destructorium Viciorum; noted by B.Smalley, The Biblical Scholar, p. 83 n.

21. DXM was copied four times with De Cessatione Legalium, and quite frequently with pastoral works by (or attributed to) Grosseteste: sermons; De Confessione; or the spurious De Lingua, De Venenis and De Oculo Morali. See DXM Introduction, pp. x-xv.

22. DCM, p. xviii, n. 6.

23. ‘Homo namque simpliciter est homo interior, unde et exterioris hominis partibus detruncatis, non minus remanet unus et idem homo. Manibus enim et pedibus abscissis, oculisque erutis, adhuc vere dicere, et lingua praescisa vere cogitare possum, quod sum Robertus, et quod sum ego, et quod ille ego sum truncatus, qui prius fui integer’. Robert Grosseteste Epistolae, ed. H. Luard (Rerum Brit.Medii Aevi Scriptores), London 1861, p. 19.

24. DXM, prol. p. 3.

25. For an account of the influence of Avicenna on Grosseteste's theory of the relationship between soul and body, see McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste, pp. 257-258.

26. St Augustine, De Trinitate X.12-16.

27. It has been suggested that Avicenna somehow knew and used Augustine for the inspiration of the ‘flying man’ argument; but in fact the ressemblances between the psychology of Avicenna and of Augustine are sufficiently accounted for by their common dependence upon Greek Neoplatonic sources, as Gerard Verbeke has remarked; see his doctrinal introduction to the De Anima in the edition of S. Van Riet, Liber de Anima IV-V, Louvain-Leiden 1968, p. 37* n. 127.

28. De Anima I.1.49-68; V.7.51-64; also the commentary of Verbeke (with additional references to works of Avicenna), vol. I, pp. 36*-37*.

29. Ibid. p. 37*.

30. This very theme of the invincibility of spiritual freedom by any created reality is developed vigorously in the lines following the example under discussion.

31. Mt.5.29: ‘Quod si oculus tuus dexter scandalizat te, erue eum’ (cf Grosseteste, oculis erutis) … Et si dextera manus tua scandalizat te, abscinde eam’ (cf Grosseteste, manibus abscissis).

32. L. E. Boyle, O. P., ‘The Inter-conciliar Period 1179-1215 and the Beginnings of Pastoral Manuals’, in F. Liotta, ed. Miscellanea Rolando Bandinelli, Papa Alessandro III, Sienna 1986, pp. 43-56. See also the same author's Summae Confessorum, in Les genres littéraires dans les sources théologiques et philosophiques médiévales. Définition, critique et exploitation (Louvain-la-Neuve 1982), pp. 227-237.

33. C. R. Cheney, English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century, Oxford 1968, ch.v: ‘The Statutes of Robert Grosseteste … and Related Texts’, pp. 110-139.

34. Hans Wolter & Henri Holstein, Lyon I et Lyon II, Paris, Ed. Orante 1966, p. 122.

35. These editions are the work of that remarkable ‘double act’, J. Goering and F.A.C. Mantello, beginning with Templum Dei. Edited from Ms.27 of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (PIMS Toronto 1984) (cf BTAM 1985, n° 1844); ‘The Meditaciones of Robert Grosseteste’, in Journal of Theol. Stud. NS 36,1985, pp. 118-128 (cf BTAM 1987, n° 729); The ‘Perambulavit Iudas (’Speculum confessionis’) attributed to Robert Grosseteste, in Rev. Bénéd. 46, 1986, pp. 125-168 (cf BTAM 1987, n° 726); ‘The early penitential writings of Robert Grosseteste’, in Rech.Théol.anc.méd. 54, 1987, pp. 52-112 (see BTAM 1987, n° 732); Notus in Iudea Deus: Robert Grosseteste's Confessional Formula in Lambeth Palace Ms 499, in Viator 18, 1987, pp. 253-273 (cf BTAM 1989, n° 732).

    BTAM carries annually reviews of books and notices of articles relating to Grosseteste.

36. See the articles ‘Décalogue’ in Catholicisme, vol.III, cols 500-505 (R. Brouillard) and in Dictionnaire de Théologique Catholique, vol.IV, cols.164-176; ‘Dekalog’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, Bd.3, cols.649-651 (L. Hödl).

    Aside from studies of individual thinkers, there is no historical-theological synthesis of the discussions of the Decalogue in the medieval schools.

37. Augustine, De Decem Chordis (= Sermo 9, P.L. 38,79; CCL 41, 117-122): ‘Habet enim decalogus decem praecepta, quae sunt decachordum psalterium. Quae sic sunt distributa, ut tria quae sunt in prima tabula pertineant ad Deum, scilicet ad cognitionem et dilectionem Trinitatis; septem quae sunt in secunda tabula ad dilectionem proximi’. Cf Epist.55, 11-13, quoted by Grosseteste in DXM, on p. 36.

38. I,12,5-8, P.L. 176, 352A-360B.

39. Summa Halensis III, pars 2.

40. Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae qu 100,a.4 ff.

41. Mag.P.Lombardi Sententiae, t.II, l.III et IV, ed. 3a, Grottaferrata (Romae) 1981, see Dist. XXXVII-XL (pp. 206-229).

42. Glossa Ordinaria, P.L. 113, col. 250.

43. p. 84.26 ff.

44. By a slip of the pen, which apparently remained uncorrected, he actually wrote ad Ephesios.

45. e.g., p. 18

46. De Cessatione Legalium I.6-8 (pp. 50-51).

47. DXM III, 13-18 (pp. 35-38) studies these meanings, largely by means of quotations from Augustine, Ad Inquisitiones Ianuarii (= Epist. 55), CSEL 31/2, pp. 190-195

48. Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3,38,90.

49. The study of the Stoic influence on Grosseteste would be worthwhile. The first to draw attention to Grosseste's use of the De Beneficiis of Seneca was Thomson, ‘Un unnoticed Autograph of Grosseteste’, in Mediaevalia et Humanistica 14, 1962, pp. 55-60. In DXM, aside from the quotations from Cicero and Seneca, the themes of self-preservation (p. 61.28) and of finality (p. 25) reveal Stoic influence.

50. Reading numerabilia at 4.18, for sense.

51. The passage on the true love of self (or love of the true self) has been discussed already; see pp. 175-178.

52. The kernel of scripture, consisting of the commandments in their organic relationship to love, was written ‘digito Dei’; Grosseteste finds a spiritual sense here of Exod.8.19 (’digitus Dei est hic’): the finger of God is the Spirit; cf Ambrose, In Lucam 7.93, and the digitus paternae dexterae of the hymn Veni creator Spiritus.

53. The unidentified paraphrase of Augustine at 6.9 refers to De Praedestinatione Sanctorum 2.5 (P.L., 44,962): ‘ipsum credere nihil aliud est, quam cum assensione cogitare’.

54. P.L., 113, col.250: ‘Non assumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum, id est, non putes creaturam esse Christum Dei Filium, quia omnis creatura vanitati subiecta est, sed aequalem Patri, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine’. Grosseteste takes up this theme at p. 24.6.

55. P.L., 191, col. 210.

56. DXM p. 69, lines 9-12 depend upon Etymol XIII.19.3, ‘De lacis et stagnis’, but the following lines (12-15) do not appear to come from this source.

57. Thomson identified the concordance in the Lyons Ms B.M. 414: ‘Grosseteste's Topical Concordance of the Bible and the Fathers’, in Mediaevalia et Humanistica 9, 1955, pp. 39-53. The surviving codices containing indexing symbols of Grosseteste related to the concordance were studied to remarkable effect by R.W. Hunt, ‘Manuscripts containing the indexing symbols of Robert Grosseteste’, in Bodleian Library Record 4, 1952-3, pp. 241-255. Fr. Servus Gieben has made original use of the concordance to tell us what authorites Grosseteste would have drawn on, had he written on the meaning of ‘philosophy’: ‘Das Abkürzungszeichen Φ des Roberts Grosseteste: Quom do philosophia accipienda sit a nobis’, in Die Metaphysik im Mittelalter (Misc.Mediaev.2), Berlin 1963, pp. 522-534. More recently, R. H. Rouse has found a different, perhaps later, form of the Concordance in Paris, B.N.n.a.l. 540 (which I have not seen). Finally, R. Southern has added to our knowledge of Grosseteste's employment of the concordance in conjunction with his own indexed books, but thinks it likely that he failed to keep it up to date after c.1230; see R. Southern, Robert Grosseteste, pp. 188-193.

58. DXM I,9 (pp. 10-11). It should not be forgotten that as Bishop of Lincoln Grosseteste included in his diocesan Statutes a ruling forbidding the Feats of Fools to take place in churches or churchyards; however, when discussing the patristic opposition to the ancient games he makes no contemporary application, and in fact his reasons for introducing the ban had little or nothing to do with those given by the Fathers for prohibiting attendance at the amphitheatres. See Glynne X. G. Wickham, ‘Robert Grosseteste and the Feast of Fools’, in Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium Occasional Papers, n. 2, 1985, pp. 81-99.

59. The hand is small and some of the numbers I find difficult to read; I may have mistranscribed certain of them.

60. According to Hunt, ‘The Library of Robert Grosseteste’, in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop (ed. Callus), the Epistolae of Augustine are numbered in the Lyons Tabula up to 124, and those of Jerome to 119; see p. 142.

61. K. Barth, Anselm: ‘Fides Quaerens Intellectum’, transl. I. W. Robertson (London, SCM Press 1960). Barth interprets Anselm's premise as a prohibition which commands us not to try to think of anything greater or better than God: ‘It does not say that God is, nor what he is, but rather, in the form of a prohibition that man can understand who he is’ (p. 75).

62. An echo of the Proslogion is found in the discussion of the Second Commandment: ‘intelligamus eum non hoc vel illud verum, sed ipsum verum verum; non hoc vel illud bonum, sed ipsum bonum bonum. Intelligamus eum quo nichil est superius, nichil est melius: non solum optimum quod excogitari potest, sed et melius quam excogitari potest’. DXM II,5 (p. 24). Anselm clearly has become in Grosseteste's eyes the theologian of the transcendence of God and of his incomparability with creation.

63. Fr. Michael Robson, O.F.M.Conv., author of a Cambridge Ph.D. on Anselm and the Franciscan theologians (1988), presented a paper entitled ‘St Anselm, Robert Grosseteste and the Franciscan Tradition’, to the Warburg Colloquium on Robert Grosseteste (May 1987); it will appear in the acts of the colloquium.

64. Hexaëmeron, VIII, chs.I-V.

65. S. Gieben, ‘Traces of God in Nature According to Robert Grosseteste. With the Text of the Dictum, “Omnis creatura speculum est”’, in Franc. Stud. 24, 1964, pp. 144-158.

66. DXM III, paragr. 15 (p. 36), including a quotation from Augustine, Ad Inquisitiones Ianuarii (= Epist. 55).

67. DXM I, paragr.19-23 (pp. 16-18).

68. DXM III, paragr.16 (pp. 36-37).

69. DXM I, paragr.24-33 (pp. 18-22).

70. DXM II, paragr.7,8 (pp. 25-26).

71. Under the Fourth Commandment Grosseteste writes: ‘Habemus quoque exemplum pietatis prolis in parentes etiam ab ipsis irracionabilibus’. He quotes Ambrose, Hexaëmeron V,16,55, who gives examples of animals which by instinct (nata lex) succour their parents.

72. This is a ubiquitous theme in Augustine: see, for example Ennar.2 in Ps. 90.1 (P.L. 37, 1159): En.3 in Ps. 36.4 (P.L. 36, 385); In Ioan.Evang.tr.108.5 (P.L. 35, 1916). Grossesteste developed this doctrine and even proposed it as the unifying context for the study of theology, in the Prologue to the Hexaëmeron. Robert of Melun before him, and the Dominican Roland of Cremona, his contemporary, likewise took the subiectum of theology to be Christus integer.

73. DXM VII, paragr.3 (p. 76).

74. Amos 5.11; Ecclus 21.9; 34.21; 24-25; Prov.11.24; Exech.19.3; Mic.3.24; Amos 3.9-11.

75. DXM IV, paragr.8 (p. 62), which takes up the same quotation.

76. DXM V, paragr.24 (p. 48). Purgatory also features in the commentary on Galatians.

77. DXM V, paragr.4 (p. 61).

78. DXM VIII, paragr.1 (p. 80).

79. DXM VIII, paragr.9 (p. 83).

80. DXM VIII, paragr.7 (p. 82). The word Grosseteste used for ‘illusionist’ is prestigiator. It is an uncommon word, but is attested in later Latin: Souter (Glossary of Later Latin) refers to the Ps.-Ausconius and Prudentius for the meaning ‘imposter’, ‘deceiver’, and praestigio is attested in the 5th century with the meaning ‘to do conjuring tricks’. In Latham's dictionary, prestigium, c.731, has the meaning of ‘wonderful work’; prestigiatura, c.1114, that of deceit, illusion; and prestigiatrix, 1513, a witch. The Petit Robert notes ‘prestige’ (1518) in the senses of illusion: artifice séducteur (vieilli ou littéraire); magie. ‘Prestidigitateur’ is a later and literary word (1823). The modern meaning of ‘prestige’ dates from the 18th century: that which produces an impression of artifice or magic.

81. DXM II, paragr.11 (p. 28).

82. Augustine, De Civitate Dei I.21.

83. DXM V, paragr.11 (p. 64).

84. DXM I, paragr. 6 (p. 8).

85. DXM IX and X, paragr. 5 (p. 6).

86. DXM VI, paragr. 5 (p. 66).

87. DXM, prol. (p. 4).

88. DXM III, paragr. 2 (pp. 30-31).

89. DXM IV, paragr. 27 (p. 49). At 44.34 read quos instead of quod.

90. DXM IX and X, paragr. 11 (p. 90).