Who was Peter Lombard?

"To impose some restraint," says Dean Waddington, "on this great intellectual licentiousness — to revive some respect for ancient authorities — to erect some barrier, or at least some landmark, for the guidance of his contemporaries, Peter the Lombard published his celebrated "Book of the Sentences." Having studied for some time in the famous school at Bologna, he proceeded to Paris for the purpose of prosecuting his studies in divinity. The Book of the Sentences is a collection of passages from the Fathers, especially from St. Hilary, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and St. Augustine — a sad mixture, no doubt, of truth and error; but the Lord is above all and could use His own word, though intermixed with fashionable subtleties, for the conversion and blessing of souls. It long retained an undisputed supremacy in the theological schools, and its author was raised to great honours.

195 Now the early church called a hundred and fifty things a sacrament — every solemn truth mysteriously expressed. And as to what is now called a sacrament, if I look at Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Augustine, I find two, baptism and the Lord's Supper, distinctly referred to, and the rest ignored. Anointing accompanying baptism is spoken of as fully by Cyril or Tertullian, but no other such ordinances are taught; and Lombard does not attempt, nor does T. Aquinas (De Sacr., 45); nor I am assured (for I do not pretend to have read them all) do the rest of the schoolmen, who make seven, attempt to quote the Fathers for them. It was Lombard defined them as seven (Lib. 3, Diss. 2, etc.).

64 Now that is exactly what is the truth as to the doctrines of Romanism. Peter Lombard, in the twelfth century, was the first who taught there were just seven sacraments, and Bellarmine confesses that Christ taught nothing directly as to some, and Cardinal Bessarion admits there were originally only two, baptism and the Lord's supper. And we can give the date or gradual growth of the doctrines in which we differ from them.

310 I add only these to shew that it is no individual mistake of Jerome's. Ambrose (de Mys. Pasch. 4) says, "Christ being void of sin when He descended to the bottom of Tartarus, breaking the bars and gates of hell, recalled the souls bound by sin, the dominion of death being destroyed, out of the jaws of the devil into life." So many others. Now this was not delivering merely those in repose. Either all the just were in repose and better off than Christians, who go (I may say) all to purgatory — and then those fathers are all condemned; or else they were in purgatory, and this deliverance of peaceful souls in a distinct place from purgatory, as taught by the Catechism of the Council of Trent, is all wrong. And what is come of those that were in purgatory none can tell. St. Augustine will help us out a bit perhaps (Enchiridion, 110, 29): "When therefore sacrifices, whether of the altar or of any alms-giving whatsoever, are offered for all baptized persons deceased, for the very good they are givings of thanks; for the not very bad they are propitiations; for the very bad, even if they are no help to the dead, they are certain consolations of the living. But to whom they are profitable, they are profitable either to this, that there should be full remission, or at any rate that damnation itself may be more tolerable." Albert the Great teaches that that must mean purgatory; but the famous master of sentences, as he was called, Peter Lombard, declares that it is not to be denied that it is accepted for the punishment of those who are never to be set free. All who are in purgatory are middling good: the least bad, who are never to be freed, are middling bad, and their pains may be mitigated. They can do better, it seems, than what the Lord taught as to Abraham and Lazarus: but, oh! how we see the wild unbridled imagination of these Fathers. They had lost the plain truth of scripture, and wandered in every uncertain and unstable thought of their own imagination.

Thus, in their effort to support the sacramental system, the doctors and teachers of the middle ages fell into thoughts which were really degrading thoughts respecting God; and they worshipped with divine worship that which a mouse can eat. Though the divinity is said to be there, with the soul, body, and blood, it is inert and cannot hinder a mouse eating it, nor move nor give any sign of life. Peter Lombard, whose influence was supreme in the theological schools, after insisting, at length, that the unworthiness of the priest did not invalidate the consecration of the sacrament, adds: "That indeed it may be soundly said that the body of Christ is not taken by brute animals, though it may seem so. What, therefore, does the mouse take, or what does it eat, God knows."

N*. Most painful, I admit; but you are altogether wrong in your statement. We will speak of the Fathers by-and-by. It does tend to degrade Christ. All spiritual apprehension is lost in this doctrine, and the Roman doctors, not liking to retain that in their knowledge, as the heathen of old the truth of the Godhead, have been allowed of God to fall into these degrading thoughts, and worship with divine worship that which a mouse can eat: and though the divinity is there with the soul, body and blood, it is all inert, and cannot hinder the mouse's eating it, nor move nor give a sign of life, and what ought to have been a symbol of Christ's dying love, and dealt with, in so using it, as being such. But they have carnalised and degraded everything in their sacramental system. But I was not thinking or speaking of the Reformers. I cannot say how they used it against the Roman Catholics, save as Bellarmine charges them and Berengarius with doing so. I speak of the most celebrated doctors and popes of the Romish church who discussed these questions elaborately: Peter Lombard, whose influence was supreme in theological schools, Innocent III, Alexander of Hales, and Thomas Aquinas who rivalled Lombard in his influence.

Lombard, after insisting at length that the unworthiness of the priest did not invalidate the consecration of the sacrament, adds, "That indeed it may be soundly said that the body of Christ is not taken by brute animals, though it may seem so. What, therefore, does the mouse take, or what does it eat, God knows." Pope Innocent 3 is more precise (de sacro altaris mysterio, c. 4, 2), "If it is sought what is eaten by the mouse when the sacrament is devoured, or what is consumed when the sacrament is burned, it is answered that as the substance of bread is miraculously converted when the Lord's body begins to be under the sacrament, so in a certain miraculous manner it returns, when itself (that is, the body) ceases to be there. Not that substance of bread returns which passed into flesh, but that in its place something is miraculously created, although its accidents may be thus devoured as well as eaten." Alexander of Hales, it seems, taught otherwise. Bonaventura, a more spiritually-minded man, a mystic, holds that however this opinion may be sustained, it can yet never be so sustained that pious ears should not have a horror in hearing that the body of Christ should be in the belly of a mouse, or in a sewer. No wonder. Yet the famous Thomas Aquinas supported this view, because the other derogates from the truth of the sacrament; and his authority prevailed. Now these are the highest authorities of that age: Lombard was some 400 years before the Reformation; Innocent, 300; Thomas Aquinas 50 or 60 years after Innocent. His statement will be found in Part 3 of his Summa, quaest. 80, Art. 3. His doctrine is that, as long as the species or form of bread and wine remains, the body of Christ is there, whether it be sinner or animal that has taken it. As to the subtleties as to species and accidents and substance, as to which we may read folio pages, I leave them. They only shew, when faith and spiritual perception are gone, the degradation to which the holiest things are reduced. Thomas Aquinas, and so Bellarmine, excuses what the more pious mystic Bonaventura says, and justly, cannot but give horror to a Christian mind, such as a mouse eating Christ, by comparing it to Christ's voluntary humiliation in going to the cross. Can any one go lower? This was not the Reformation, Mr. D., but the full bloom of Roman orthodoxy and learning.

But God had more important work for Wycliffe than worldly politics. His lectures to his students were those of one "having authority." Other masters taught from the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which Sentences, as their name implies, were a collection of aphorisms compiled from the works of Augustine and other of the early "Fathers" on various points of Christian doctrine. But Wycliffe went direct to his Latin Bible and showed his hearers that in the Word of God there was not only the way of life, but the rule of life, and that both flatly contradicted the doctrines of Rome.

Though he speaks with great respect of the holy scriptures, he strangely contends for an alliance between philosophy and Christianity, reason and faith. He denounces the sophistry of the fashionable learning of his time, and complains that the original languages of the Old and New Testament were neglected; that children got the knowledge of scripture, not from the Bible itself, but from versified abridgements; that lectures on the "Sentences" were preferred to lectures on scripture. In this way he exposed the ignorance, the superstition, and the idleness of the religious orders, and so brought down upon himself the charge of heresy and the censures of the church, though he lived and died a strict Roman Catholic, probably about the year 1292. His last work was a compendium of theology.

Thomas Aquinas, the "angelic doctor," was the most renowned of the schoolmen in the thirteenth century, and the truest type of a theologian. He was descended from an illustrious family, and born in the neighbourhood of Naples about the year 1225. He entered very young into the Dominican order, greatly against the will of his nearest relations, and studied at Cologne and Paris. In 1257 he was professor of theology in Paris; but died at the early age of fifty and was canonized by the pope. When his collected writings were published at Rome, in the year 1570, they extended to seventeen folio volumes.

The ecclesiastical doctors of our own day tell us — for we are wholly unacquainted with the writings of such authors — that among the best known of his works are, the "Sum of Theology," a commentary on the four Gospels, and on other books of the Old and New Testament; an elaborate commentary on the "Sentences" of Peter Lombard, the great textbook of the schools; his expositions of Aristotle; and a treatise in favour of the Catholic faith, and against the Greek church. But notwithstanding the greatness of his learning and the number of his books, it is to be feared that he was a stranger to the saving doctrine of justification by faith alone, without the deeds of the law; though, when on his death-bed, he showed great signs of piety, similar to that of Augustine. So that we may hope he belonged to the saved remnant of the schoolmen in those days. We rejoice in the conviction that there will be a saved remnant in heaven from all classes — emperors, kings, popes, and philosophers, which will manifest the sovereignty and the power of the grace of God in all ages, and to all classes of men. The riches and the glory of the grace will be to His praise for ever.

N*. I do not say that exactly. That he believed the Eucharist was the true body and blood of Christ is quite clear. But the scholastic view, brought in later by Lombard, was not yet established. He was the first that spoke as plainly as he did, but he does not bring it out as it was brought out afterwards, and has no thought of it being a dogma of the church, but twice over in his second letter says many doubted it. And he puts baptism, the chrism, and the Eucharist on the same ground, but he holds that it was the same body that hung upon the cross. He calls it a figure, but says it was the truth of the thing too as Christ was as to God. What I insist on with Sirmondi and Bellarmine is that he was the first that propounded the doctrine; and this tells the whole story: it is a doctrine which came in quite late and was opposed, as we shall now see, by the greatest men of the age.

N*. Exactly so, I cite them not as any authority, but to shew how late a doctrine which subverts transubstantiation passed current in Christendom as orthodox and right. Bernard is generally counted the last of the Fathers: I have already quoted him shewing that till the twelfth century the most eminent men of their day held this with impunity. Bernard had more influence in his day than any man in Christendom.