Peter Lombard

This volume makes available for the first time in English full translations of Book 2 of the Sentences. It consists of forty-four Distinctions and contains an introduction to Book 2, a list of the major chapter headings, and a bibliography.

Peter Lombard is best known as the author of a celebrated work entitled Book of Sentences, which for several centuries served as the standard theological textbook in the Christian West. It was the subject of more commentaries than any other work of Christian literature besides the Bible itself. The Book of Sentences is essentially a compilation of older sources, from the Scriptures and Augustine down to several of the Lombard's contemporaries, such as Hugh of Saint Victor and Peter Abelard. Its importance lies in the Lombard's organization of the theological material, his method of presentation, and the way in which he shaped doctrine in several major areas. Despite his importance, however, there is no accessible introduction to Peter Lombard's life and thought available in any modern language. This volume fills this considerable gap. Philipp W. Rosemann begins by demonstrating how the Book of Sentences grew out of a long tradition of Christian reflection-a tradition, ultimately rooted in Scripture, which by the twelfth century had become ready to transform itself into a theological system. Turning to the Sentences, Rosemann then offers a brief exposition of the Lombard's life and work. He proceeds to a book-by-book examination and interpretation of its main topics, including the nature and attributes of God, the Trinity, creation, angelology, human nature and the Fall, original sin, Christology, ethics, and the sacraments. He concludes by exploring how the Sentences helped shape the further development of the Christian tradition, from the twelfth century through the time of Martin Luther.

Peter Lombard is best known for his groundbreaking theological work, the Sentences. But the exclusive focus on this work has tended to divert attention away from other aspects of his life and work. This book therefore takes a broadly biographical approach to Peter Lombard, examining him in relation to his environment and milieu. The book is divided into two parts, corresponding to its title. The first details Peter's career. He came to Paris to study theology with the assistance of Bernard of Clairvaux and Uberto, bishop of Lucca, key players in the papal schism of the 1130s. After several years building a reputation in Paris, he gained entry to the canons of Notre Dame. Part one finishes with Peter's greatest achievements, the composition of the Sentences and his rise in the church of Paris to archdeacon and finally bishop. The second part, “The Master and His Students,” opens with a comprehensive treatment of Peter's sermons, his most neglected and in some ways most revealing works. They were preached to an audience that included his students. -- from the publisher.

This book presents in translation writings by six medieval philosophers which bear on the subject of conscience. Conscience, which can be considered both as a topic in the philosophy of mind and a topic in ethics, has been unduly neglected in modern philosophy, where a prevailing belief in the autonomy of ethics leaves it no natural place. It was, however, a standard subject for a treatise in medieval philosophy. Three introductory translations here, from Jerome, Augustine and Peter Lombard, present the loci classici on which subsequent discussions drew; there follows the first complete treatise on conscience, by Philip the Chancellor, while the two remaining translations, from Bonaventure and Aquinas, have been chosen as outstanding examples of the two main approaches which crystallised during the thirteenth century.

The first general study of Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160) in a century, this book places Peter's thought in the context of the intellectual debates of his time in the effort to understand the substance of Lombardian theology and the reasons why his principal work, the Sentences , immediately became a classic of early scholastic theology with a durable influence, doing more to shape the education of university theologians and philosophers than any other work of systematic theology for the next four centuries. Attention is paid to the sentence collection as a genre of theological literature, the problem of theological language with which Peter and his contemporaries wrestled, and his contribution to early scholastic biblical exegesis as well as to the development of his systematic theology in the Sentences .

This volume studies how the tradition of the Sentences developed from the twelfth century up to Martin Luther. Its twelve chapters fill major lacunae in current research on the standard textbook of medieval theology.

The focus of the contributions to this third and final volume of Brill’s handbook on the tradition of the Book of Sentences ranges from a thirteenth-century study aid to the role of the Sentences in sixteenth-century Iberia.