PETER LOMBARD (c.1100–60), the ‘Master of the Sentences’. He was born near Novara in Lombardy, and after studying in Italy went to Reims and then to Paris, where he taught at the Cathedral School from 1143 or 1144. In 1148 he opposed Gilbert de la Porrée at the Council of Reims, and in 1159, shortly before his death, was appointed Bp. of Paris. His Commentaries on the Psalms and on the Pauline Epistles were written before and after 1148 respectively, and his chief work, the ‘Sententiarum libri quatuor’, probably 1155–8. This last work, to which he owes his fame, is arranged in four books, on (1) the Trinity, (2) the Creation and Sin, (3) the Incarnation and the Virtues, and (4) the Sacraments and the Four Last Things. It contains a wealth of quotations from the Latin Fathers, esp. Sts Augustine and Hilary, as well as (of the Greeks) from St John of Damascus, hitherto almost unknown in the W.

After Peter Lombard’s death the book was violently attacked by Walter of St-Victor on the ground of its Abelardian Christological ‘Nihilianism’, i.e. the doctrine that Christ acc. to His humanity is nothing (quod Christus secundum quod est homo non est aliquid), which, however, was apparently given only as an opinion. Later, under the influence of Joachim of Fiore’s ‘Liber de vera et falsa philosophia’, which attacked Peter Lombard’s Trinitarian teaching, efforts were made to have the work censured at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, with the result that Joachim’s doctrine was rejected and the ‘Sentences’ pronounced orthodox (Lateran 4, canon 2).

After this rehabilitation it became the standard textbook of Catholic theology during the Middle Ages, despite the early rejection of several opinions advanced in it, e.g. the identification of the Holy Spirit with the virtue of charity. Its teaching on the Sacraments marked an important development; Peter Lombard is one of the first to insist on the number seven, to distinguish them (like Alexander of Hales later) from the sacramentals, and to clarify the conception by asserting the efficacity and causality of the sign. The book, which owed its success chiefly to its lucid arrangement, its comprehensiveness, and its absence of individuality, was commented on by nearly all theologians of repute and even versified. It was finally superseded as a textbook by the ‘Summa Theologiae’ of St Thomas Aquinas, but in the 17th cent. commentaries were still produced, among the last being that of the Jesuit, J. M. de Ripalda (1635).

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