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How, amid this general revival of Catholic spirituality, did the
movement fare which strove to construct a reasoned exposition of
Catholicism? At first, it seemed fated to decline. From the moment when
this tendency to satisfy rationally the interest of the human
intelligence in the truths revealed through the Church first began to
show itself, it had met with opposition; and especially with opposition
from ascetics. Studies of this kind were, they declared roundly, a
menace to the faith of those who engaged in them. What the Church
taught should suffice; and where this presented difficulties to human
understanding, man should be content to bow his head and humbly accept
the difficulties without seeking further to resolve them. Such had been
the attitude of St. Peter Damian in the time of Lanfranc and
Berengarius; such was now the attitude of St. Bernard. The eleventh
century opponent of these studies had been largely influenced by the
spectacle of the new difficulties into which the none too competent
logicians had tumbled. The like catastrophes were not lacking in St.
Bernard's time, also, to serve as a powerful argument against the new
attempt to satisfy the never-old, innate desire to know.
With Abelard, for instance, the three Persons in God appeared simply as
God's power, His wisdom and His love; Original Sin was an
impossibility; the fall made no difference to man's ability to do good;
Jesus Christ is united to God by a union that is no more than moral,
and the supreme value of His life lies in its appeal to love and in its
example. The tendencies of the masters at Chartres -- still the chief
centre of philosophical studies -- were not more reassuring. Here
Neoplatonism was influential, and the Neoplatonist inclination to
Pantheism is evident in more than one of the works that issued from
Chartres. God is the essential form of all things; His presence in
created things is their whole being; apart from that they are nothing,
cannot exist. Such was the teaching of Thierry, head of the school from
1141 to 1150.
His predecessor, Gilbert of la Porree, Bishop of Poitiers from 1142 to
1154, [ ] was Aristotelian rather, possibly because of his devotion to
Boethius, who was indeed his favourite author and upon whose work he
wrote more than one commentary. Gilbert adapted the theory of knowledge
propounded by his master Bernard -- Thierry's elder brother. There are
three kinds of being God, matter and ideas. Ideas are the eternal types
of all individual things. They exist eternally in the mind of God. From
them come, in some way unknown, the copies which, being united to
matter, give rise to individual things. It is in the identity of
characteristics among the individuals of a class, and in their common
resemblance to the ideas in the divine mind, that the fact of
universality exists. So far Gilbert shows himself pupil of the
Platonists. When he proceeds to relate this theory to the mode of human
knowledge we recognise the commentator of Boethius and the author of
one of the earliest Western works on Aristotle’s Logic. [ ] We acquire
our knowledge of the universal by abstracting, as we study the
individual, this copy of the idea that exists in the divine mind,
dissociating the form from the matter, comparing the dissociated forms
and noting their resemblance. From the knowledge of the copy thus
acquired, we proceed to the knowledge of the idea itself. Gilbert,
apparently, used this theory of the dissociation of the universal from
the individual, as a method of explaining the doctrine of the Trinity.
He was accused of dissociating the divinity from the Persons, and of
teaching that in God, too, in the divine nature as well as in each
Person, there is matter and form. Gilbert more than once came into
controversy with Abelard, but he was Abelard's ally in the general
battle against the opponents of the application of dialectic to
theology. [ ]
St. Bernard, then, had ample material to hand to support his case
against the new theologians; and to destroy their influence was, for a
good ten years, one of the main concerns of his busy life. The battle
opened with an assault on Abelard, provoked by that, alas, incurably
bellicose person himself.
Abelard had resumed his lectures at Paris in 1136, and soon the old
complaints, that had brought about his condemnation in 1121, began to
be heard once more. A Cistercian abbot, William of St. Thierry, begged
St. Bernard to intervene and the saint approached Abelard. The
logician, apparently, was so far persuaded that he promised for the
future to use more discretion in his theological expositions. But
temperament was too much for him and, with a return of his old
arrogance, he challenged St. Bernard to debate at the coming Council of
Sens. Very reluctantly the Cistercian consented, but when the council
met (1140) it resolved itself rather into a judicial examination of
Abelard's orthodoxy than into the scholastic tournament he had planned.
St. Bernard had prepared a list of extracts from Abelard's works in
which all could read how far from the traditional faith his use of
dialectic had taken him. These theses Abelard was now asked to deny or
to abjure. He did neither but, appealing to Rome walked out of the
assembly.
In his absence the council continued the discussion, and the theses
extracted by St. Bernard were sent to the pope, to be condemned,
resoundingly if somewhat vaguely, and to earn their author a sentence
of perpetual imprisonment in a monastery.
The condemnation of the theses was inevitable. They destroyed the very
foundations of historic Christianity. For all Abelard's good
intentions, his immense influence was steadily undermining the Faith.
Nevertheless, good his intentions certainly were. He was never in any
sense a freethinker, and he now showed that it was not merely for the
look of the thing that he had given authority, and the Church, a place
in his system. Whereas the humiliation of Sens had momentarily brought
out some of the worst in his character, the sympathy and kindness of
the Abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable, worked a general
reconciliation. Abelard made his submission, was reconciled to the pope
and even to St. Bernard. For the short remainder of his life he lived
under Peter's protection, and in one of the abbey properties he died
(1142).
Four years after Abelard's death the battle was renewed and this time
it was the work of Chartres, or rather of Chartres's greatest luminary,
Gilbert of la Porree, that was in question.
Gilbert had been consecrated Bishop of Poitiers in the year Abelard
died, and it was his exposition, as a bishop, of the theories he had
been teaching for years that brought him up against St. Bernard. An
address to his diocesan synod in 1146 provoked a strong protest from
his archdeacons who, furthermore, denounced the bishop to Rome. The
pope -- Eugene III (1145-1153) -- referred the matter for examination
to a council which met at Paris the next year. But the prosecution, so
to call it, mismanaged the case. They had no definite texts to allege
against Gilbert, and in the debate Gilbert skilfully brought out their
own mutual contradictions. The pope thereupon put off the examination.
It came up a second time at a council in Rheims in 1148.
What accounts of this council survive differ in their details. It seems
certain, however, that a party of the French bishops were strong enough
to draw up a profession of faith and that some of the cardinals present
prevented its acceptance, since they saw in the action a movement on
the part of St. Bernard and the bishops to dictate to Rome. The
profession was, however, published at Rheims after the council and,
later, it was approved by Eugene III. It is certain, too, that Gilbert
submitted. As the four propositions [ ] were read out in which his
alleged errors were contained he declared to the pope, after each one
of them, ' If you believe otherwise, I believe as you believe.,'
Finally, it was forbidden to read or to make copies of Gilbert's
commentary on Boethius until he had corrected it in accordance with his
submission
Gilbert, to the end of his life, believed he had been misunderstood. He
rewrote the prologue to his book and he changed the expressions which
had caused the trouble. But he refused to discuss the matter with St.
Bernard, inviting the saint, as a necessary preliminary, to take some
lessons in the elements of logic. Six years after the council he died
(September 4, 1154), still Bishop of Poitiers, undisturbed since the
condemnation of Rheims, and for many years an object of great
veneration.
Gilbert, not equal to Abelard in power of personality, was one of the
first schoolmen to show a knowledge of Aristotle that goes beyond the
logical treatises. So far Aristotle stood for logic and for little
more. With Gilbert -- who evidently knew the fourth book of the Physics
and the De Coelo et Mundo -- the revolution to be consummated in St.
Thomas makes an important advance. Of Gilbert's later influence it is
not easy to say much. His Liber Sex Principiorum did indeed win him the
rare distinction of being cited, with Aristotle, as an "authority" in
the schools. It was one of the classical texts upon which all the
thinkers of the next centuries commented. But, this apart, he had
little influence, and as a theologian none except on the Calabrian
Cistercian, Joachim of Flora, in whose mystico-prophetical writings
Gilbert's exposition of the mystery of the Trinity becomes the basis of
a real distinction between the roles of the Three Persons in the
history of the world. But on the work of those who, in Gilbert's own
time, laid the foundation upon which all subsequent theological study
in the Church has been built, Gilbert's own theories had, seemingly, no
effect at all.
Three of these contemporaries must be noticed. They are Hugh of St.
Victor, the greatest theologian of the century; Peter Lombard, whose
Book of Sentences [ ] (Liber Sententiarum) fixed for many centuries the
mould in which the theological teaching of beginners was cast; and
Roland Bandinelli, canonist as well as theologian, and later on, as
Alexander III, the first of the great lawyer popes.
Although the chief centres of this intellectual revival lay in the
north of France, the leaders were of very varied origin; Abelard, for
example, was a Breton, Lanfranc and St. Anselm Italians. With Hugh of
St. Victor it was the German mind that made it appearance in
philosophy. [ ] He was perhaps twenty years of age when in 1116 he
entered the abbey of St. Victor at Paris to become an Augustinian
canon, just ten years after William of Champeaux -- since then Bishop
of Chalons -- had founded its school of theology on his own retirement
thither after his defeat by Abelard. Of that school Hugh was to be the
most distinguished product. His most important work was done in a very
short time, between his entry in 1116 and his election as prior in
1133. Eight years later and he was dead, cut off prematurely at
forty-five.
Hugh wrote voluminously, commentaries on Sacred Scripture, treatises on
mythology, on theology, ascetical guides, discussions of mysticism and
its phenomena, works of pure literature, a history, some philosophy.
His most important work is the De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, a
compendium of the whole of the Church's teaching. There exists, too, a
still shorter compendium, the Summa Sententiarum, often attributed to
Hugh, but about whose authorship authorities are by no means agreed.
The Eruditio Didascalica deals with methods of study and the
interrelation of the different sciences, while the De Institutione
Novitiorum and the Expositio in regulam beati Augustini contain the
essence of his teaching on mysticism. [ ]
Hugh never confounds the natural processes of knowledge with the
supernatural, and this careful distinction, consistently preserved
through all his work, is one of the chief sources of its value. We can
know God by reasoning, and we can know God by believing God's
revelation of Himself. This revelation is, in turn, made known to us
normally by external teaching presented to our minds, but, sometimes,
by an internal illumination. Thus Hugh escapes entirely the cloudy
legacy of the Neoplatonic doctrine of divine illumination as the source
of natural knowledge which, coming into Catholic thought through St.
Augustine and the self-styled Areopagite, had done so much to confuse
its development. As a theologian he makes the consequent clear
distinction between the knowledge of God we can have through reasoning
about revealed truths -- the proper office of Theology-and that which
comes through processes above the natural, through contemplation (to
use his own terminology). For all knowledge of truths which are
supernatural, Faith is essential. Faith as an instrument of knowledge
is superior to reason, since the object to which it can reach is
superior. But reason can work on the truths obtained for it by Faith,
examining their content and showing the reasonableness of belief.
Like his predecessors, Abelard and St. Anselm, Hugh made the mistake of
over-estimating the extent of the field in which reason isolated from
faith can work. The full understanding of the nature of the reasoning
process, of the meaning of rational certitude and proof, escaped him.
Like those predecessors, and like others after him, he set reason tasks
for which, by its nature, it is not apt, as, for instance, when he set
it to discover that in God there are three Persons.
As a writer on mysticism, to use in its technical sense that much
abused word, he makes a careful analysis of those special divine
interventions which, without initiative on the part of those whom they
favour, raise such souls to a knowledge and love of God altogether
beyond the normal. He describes this mystical ascent, m which man is
made passive by the divine action, and attempts to analyse its nature.
In his mystical theology he is not a Neoplatonist, for all his reading
of the Neoplatonic authors.
Hugh of St. Victor is no mere compiler, but a highly original thinker,
influenced, of course, by his sources, but influenced chiefly to think
out the problems anew in their spirit. Aristotle he knew so far as
Boethius could make him know; Plato and Plotinus through St. Augustine.
Of all the Fathers it is St. Augustine, of course, who most affects
him, although here too, like St. Anselm, Hugh is a new thinker after
St. Augustine's pattern, rather than a restorer. Abelard, his somewhat
older contemporary, influenced him immensely. From the Introductio ad
Theologiam and the Sic et Non came the new severity of dialectic which
characterises Hugh's work, and its fusion of patristic evidence with
argument from reasoning. Thence also there came the idea of condensing
into a single orderly synthesis the vast whole of Catholic teaching.
Hugh, in his turn, repaid his magnificent creditor, for it was largely
due to his use of Abelard that, after the master's condemnation,
Abelard's valuable spirit and technique were preserved, to be safely
used by the most orthodox.
Hugh of St. Victor died prematurely, and his name was soon to be
overshadowed by that of Peter Lombard, for Peter Lombard wrote the
first and the most celebrated of all theological textbooks. But through
Peter Lombard it is Hugh of St. Victor who still, very often, is
speaking. Peter's own manuscript has its margins filled with references
to Hugh. Idea, expression, text, even whole pages from the De
Sacramentis and the Summa, reappear in the Liber Sententiarum. Another
pupil of Hugh was Peter of Poitiers, master of the canonist who became
Pope Innocent III. A third pupil was Gandulph of Bologna, through whom
Hugh's thought influenced all that great school, too. In the next great
century Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas himself,
were to speak of Hugh with singular veneration. The famous bull Unam
Sanctam of Boniface VIII, in defining the relations between the
spiritual and the temporal power, made use of Hugh's very words; and
another passage of his sacramental teaching passed through St. Thomas
to find its final official sanction in the Catechism of the Council of
Trent. Hugh of St. Victor stands out as the one really great theologian
of his century, the first to effect a real reconciliation between the
new scholastic method and orthodoxy. [ ]
Hugh of St. Victor was a thinker, Peter Lombard a compiler only; but he
was a compiler of genius, and his famous book brought it about that the
right of the intelligence to use all possible means in its appreciation
of revealed truth was, henceforward, accepted universally wherever
theology was studied.
Of Peter Lombard's early life we know nothing, save that he came from
Novara. The year 1139 found him studying at Paris, where St. Bernard
was his first patron. In 1142 he wrote his commentaries on St. Paul,
and six years later his reputation was already such that he took part
in the Council of Rheims as an opponent of Gilbert of la Porree, and
was one of those whom Eugene III consulted in that thorny business. He
had completed his great work, The Sentences, by 1152 and, St. Bernard
again intervening, the pope rewarded him with a canonry at Beauvais. In
1159 he was consecrated Bishop of Paris, and within a year he had died.
The Liber Sententiarum is a student's manual of theology. Its author
does not attempt, like St. Anselm, to show, independently of Scripture
and Tradition, the reasonableness of belief. The work lacks the
originality of Hugh, as it lacks the subtlety of Abelard. Its
philosophical data are scanty; hardly anywhere is there a trace of
metaphysics. Peter hesitates often to declare himself, and at times the
hesitation is willed. In all this the book marks a falling back from
the achievement of contemporaries.
It had, however, two great merits. It was impersonal, concerned, that
is to say, not to instruct the student as to Peter's theories, hut to
set before him all available opinions. Next, it was rigorously orthodox
in its spirit. It provided the student with a vast ordered collection
of authorities, texts from Sacred Scripture and from the Fathers; it
neglected none of the contemporary thinkers; it was clear, brief, not
encumbered with digression; and while it made good use of the
fashionable dialectic. it did so with extreme moderation, chiefly to
harmonise conflicting authorities, to discuss contemporary opinion, and
only rarely for personal speculation. peter had no sympathy for the
victims of logical extravagance-garruli ratiocinatores, he styles them
-- and his studied moderation may be fairly attributed in part to his
association with St. Bernard, and with the great abbot's campaign. It
is another merit of his book that it is entirely free from the spirit
of controversy, although not one of the conflicting opinions of the day
fails to find a mention in it. But Peter's one aim is to expound the
traditional doctrine, and the principal part of the book is not its
dialectic -- for all the immense importance. historically, of the
appearance of systematic dialectic in the work -- but in the multitude
of its citations. So complete, indeed, is the Sentences in this respect
that henceforward ii was a rare scholar indeed -- St. Thomas Aquinas,
for example -- who did more than read his texts in Peter Lombard.
"Egregius collector,'' as a none too friendly contemporary described
him, Peter borrowed often, and as literally as he borrowed liberally.
To his great contemporaries, Abelard. Gratian, Hugh of St. Victor and
the author of the Summa Sententiarum, he is especially indebted, but to
Abelard, whom he never names, most of all. It is Abelard's principles
that guide his interpretation of conflicting texts, and Abelard's Sic
et Non supplied him with most of his patristic erudition. What the
extent of Peter Lombard's own reading was, it is hard to say. A good
ninetenths of his texts are from St. Augustine, from whom there are a
thousand citations, while from the next best used -- St. Hilary he
takes but eighty. Denis the Areopagite is only twice cited, and no one
of the Greek Fathers more than once, except St. John Damascene,
referred to thirty times.
Peter Lombard's success, for all the merits of his work, was hardly
won. Opposition to the method of his book showed itself immediately,
and opposition also to some of his teaching. The first weak point 011
which hostile critics seized was the defective theory, which he had
inherited from Abelard, to explain how Jesus Christ Our Lord is both
divine and human. This theory taught, in accordance with the tradition,
that He is perfect man and truly God, but it failed to understand all
that is meant by the truth that that union is hypostatic, that the
Humanity with the Divinity is one person. Concerned to avoid the
Nestorian error, that makes the humanity itself a person, the
Abelardian theory denied that the humanity is a substantial reality.
The Word s man is not, according to this theory, a new reality. It has
merely received a new mode of being, the full and perfect humanity
being the instrument of the full and perfect divinity.
The question, eagerly debated in the rising schools for thirty years,
was raised at the Council of Tours in 1163. A hundred and twenty-seven
bishops were present and the pope himself, Alexander III, presided,
who, in his own works, written while a master in the schools, had shown
himself also a defender of the new theory. It was in connection with
this controversy that the first attempt was made to bring about the
condemnation of the Liber Sententiarum. It failed, however, as did the
related endeavour to secure a decision on the dogmatic question. At a
second great council, held at Sens in the following year, the pope
contented himself with a strong prohibition of idle and useless
discussions. But six years later, owing perhaps to the writings of John
of Cornwall, the pope reopened the matter. A letter of May 28, 1170,
renewed a command, already given, to the Archbishop of Sens charging
him to see that "the erroneous opinion of Peter Lombard, one-time
Bishop of Paris" is abandoned, the opinion namely that Christ according
to His humanity is not a substantial reality. [ ] The masters are, on
the contrary, to teach that as Christ is perfect God, so is He perfect
man and truly man formed of body and soul. [ ] A further letter, of
June 2 of the same year, repeated this instruction; and finally a
third, dated February 2, 1177, ended the controversy, establishing
sanctions to enforce the teaching.
The history of this so-called Adoptionist controversy is interesting
for many reasons. It affords the spectacle of a pope condemning as pope
the theories he had taught years before as a private individual, and,
more important by far, it witnesses to a considerable theological
progress since the comparatively crude controversies that centered
around Berengarius.
The decree of 1177 was, of course, for the enemies of Peter Lombard's
work an opportunity not to be lost. They took advantage of the change
in Alexander III to attempt yet once again, at the General Council of
1179, what they had failed to secure in 1163. The story of the
manoeuvre is extremely obscure. Walter of St. Victor, here our one
source, represents the pope as willing to condemn the master of the
Sentences, and only deterred by the wholesale opposition of his
cardinals. Walter was, at any rate, one of the most bitter of Peter's
critics, as his pamphlet-provoked by Peter of Poitiers, great
commentary on the Lombard, the first of hundreds -- shows. It is called
Against the Four Labyrinths of France, and attacks with a violence that
knows no limits, Abelard, Gilbert of la Porree, Peter Lombard and Peter
of Poitiers. Another, equally violent, critic was Joachim of Flora his
exaggerations led him into manifest heresy and, after his death, to the
resounding condemnation of the General Council of 1215. This marked the
end of the manoeuvres to condemn the Sentences, for not only did this
council condemn the latest of Peter's foes, but it paid Peter the
greatest compliment any Catholic writer has ever known, of associating
him by name with the decree on the Faith, "We, the sacred and universal
council approving believe and confess, with Peter Lombard. . . .”
The propositions censured by Alexander III were quietly set aside, and
in the course of time others went to join them. They were listed, a
score of them, at the beginning or the end of the manuscripts and a
simple, "Here the Master is not followed” marked that, without any
solemn condemnation on these points Peter's opinions had been
abandoned. By 1220 he was established in the position he was to hold
until, nearly three hundred years later, St. Thomas displaced him, as
the inevitable, universal text on which the teaching of theology was
built; and in all the new colleges the "Bachelor of the Sentences” was
as permanent an institution as the "Bachelor of Sacred Scripture.”
The history of the False Decretals has shown how great an influence in
the development of church law, as a branch of learning, were the
necessities of the ruling authority. But for all the energy of these
primitive ninth-century bishops and scholars, the difficulties against
which they strove persisted, still hampering the ecclesiastical
reformer and the movement to re-establish the old order of Christian
life. The confusion in knowledge as to what the law was, due largely to
the presence of so many divergent collections, still continued.
Authorities -- the collections of canons, that is, which were cited as
such -- differed, and even the collections to which the reformers
appealed were by no means always in agreement. Anarchy ever menaced
this age of institutions half-created, that so lacked any acknowledged
central lay authority, that was so frequently lacking in practical
respect for the acknowledged central spiritual authority.
Realisation of the ever present trouble produced various attempts to
remedy it; the new collection of ancient decrees made by Burchard,
Bishop of Worms about 1020, for example, and the Collection in Five
Books made about the same time in Italy. But even these collections,
compiled as they were in order to guard against the faults of the
earlier collections, still contained too many doubtful texts. Nor did
either of them successfully establish the great desideratum whence
alone an effective unity of law could;. issue -- the active supremacy
within the church of a single, strong, central, legislative and
executive power.
But from about the middle of that same eleventh century the tide began
to turn. The movement of papally-directed reformation that began with
St. Leo IX and St. Gregory VII had its inevitable effect on the
development of legal studies. Thanks to St. Gregory VII especially,
systematic researches were undertaken in all the libraries of Italy,
always in the hope of finding precedents to justify the new,
revolutionary use he was making of the papacy's traditional supremacy.
Towards the end of that century a wholly new kind of collection began
to appear. of which that made by Anselm of Lucca -- nephew of Pope
Alexander II -- is one of the best examples. Doubtful texts are now
eliminated. New authentic texts, fruit of the recent researches, are
inserted and along with these the new legislation which promulgates the
reform principles as laws to be obeyed universally. All these new
collections emphasise the rights of the Holy See, its effective primacy
throughout the Church, its infallibility. They also bring texts to
solve the eagerly debated contemporary question whether the sacraments
administered by ecclesiastics who had themselves bought their
consecration are valid. Anselm of Lucca, in particular, had a great
share in translating into the facts of everyday Catholic life
throughout the Church the traditional belief in the primacy of Rome. [
]
The new collections, scientifically considered, were an immense advance
on all that had gone before. Nevertheless the old faulty collections
did not, even yet, disappear. They were still used and extensively,
partly for the simple reason that they were old, partly because of the
frequent, local repugnance to the new strict centralisation that flowed
from the new texts as their inevitable practical sequel.
The first effect of the spread of the "Hildebrandine" collections was,
then, the appearance of yet more of the hybrid books where the
old-world influence and the new appeared side by side-Burchard for
example with "Hildebrandine,' texts -- and even of new apocrypha. St.
Ives of Chartres, the most distinguished canonist of the generation
that followed St. Gregory VII, is an instance in point. His Decretum is
interesting, too, for the vast amount of space theology occupies in it
-- fruit of the Berengarian controversies on the Holy Eucharist. In
this new fashion of setting together theological texts and decisions of
law, yet another hindrance appeared to the development of Canon Law as
an independent science, and therefore to the establishment of a
universal reign of law within the Church as part of the Church's daily
life. The first quarter of the twelfth century is then, in these
respects, a period where, so far as concerns law, the progress of
Catholic thought comes to a halt.
The need for a homogeneous code was, however, greater than ever. With a
reform party active in every kingdom and diocese, new conflicts were
continually arising which no texts clearly solved. The whole spirit of
the time was towards greater certainty, greater clearness, a
simplifying and a unifying of all religious knowledge. The spirit of
St. Anselm and of Abelard could not but affect the canonists too. Then,
from the end of the eleventh century, the Digest of Justinian began to
be studied again, after being lost to Western sight for centuries. It
offered the nascent Canon Law the stimulus of the conception of Law as
a body of thought, the example of a scientific system of jurisprudence,
with a proper and adequate classification and a system of
interpretation. The time was at hand, and nothing now could delay it
much longer, when, from laws, there would at last be produced the Canon
Law.
The first moving force, in this last stage, was Urban II. No one of St.
Gregory VII's disciples was more loyal to the cause of the reform, but
it was one of the great merits of Urban II that he saw the possibility,
and the need, of compromise within the limits of the essential
Hildebrandine principles. The necessities of the situation as it had
developed since, in 1084, the Normans drove out the emperor and rescued
the pope, left Urban II no choice but to endeavour to harmonise this
conflict by a careful interpretation of the laws; compelled him, for
example, to distinguish between the necessary and the contingent. This
initiative was developed in the next few years by St. Ives of Chartres
and Bernold of Constance, who may be fairly considered the founders of
critical jurisprudence within the Church. They did for the Church's law
something of what Abelard, in his Sic et Non, did for the Church's
theology. [ ] What they did well another man, born during their own
lifetime, was to do with genius. This was Gratian.
Of Gratian's life we know almost nothing, except that he was monk of
the order of Camaldoli, that he taught at the school of Bologna and
that he wrote the great work which is the foundation of the science of
ecclesiastical jurisprudence. We do not, know when he was born nor when
he died, but the book which D gives him his unique place in history was
written, apparently, by 1142. That book is commonly called, was
universally called, Gratian's Decretum. Its author's own title --
Concordantia Discordantium Canonum, that is, A Harmony of Conflicting
Canons-expresses best what it is, a vast collection of decrees of popes
and councils with texts from the Fathers too, arranged systematically
according to their subject matter and so treated as to make, of the
vast miscellany, a single, ordered whole. It is a book to teach not
merely laws but law, in which there is everywhere at work the practical
desire to adapt the texts, intelligently, to all the actual needs of
the Church. By his application, throughout the whole vast field of
ecclesiastical legislation, of Abelard's critical principles for the
interpretation of warring authorities, Gratian did much more than add
to existing collections a newer, and best, collection of all. He
produced a book of a new kind altogether, a private work indeed, but
one which had the distinction not only of serving as the basis of all
subsequent teaching in Canon Law, but also as the exemplar of all
subsequent ecclesiastical legislation.
With Gratian the science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence is born, and
thence begins the series of great lawyer popes thanks to whom the Roman
Church's newly organised supremacy is, in the end, triply armed, with
the great Corpus Iuris Canonici, wherein the subordination of each
member to the whole Church -- realised as so essential an element of
the religion of the Church since the days of St. Paul himself -- is
ordered in as careful a detail as each member's faith, too, is
beginning to be ordered. All earlier collections had had in view some
particular practical end; they were, for example, handbooks of useful
information for whoever had charge of a see, and the selection of texts
they contained was influenced, very largely, by local needs and by
recent local history. Gratian's achievement is fundamental. His sole
aim is the law itself. From now on, the canonist ceases to occupy
himself with theology, and the collections of canons discard the purely
theological decrees and texts. While, until Gratian, the pioneers of
the nascent theological science had quarried in the collections of the
canonists, henceforward the process is reversed and the canonist, free
of theology, will use the theologians as material out of which to
develop his scientific law. Gratian's separation of Canon Law from
theology is not the least part of his fundamental service to the
development of thought.
Gratian, it has been said, made use of Abelard's critical legacy. But,
much more than in Gratian, Abelard's influence is evident in one of
Gratian's pupils, his first great commentator, the Bolognese professor,
Roland Bandinelli, whose personality was to dominate the second half of
the twelfth century as St. Bernard's had dominated the first.
The early life of Roland Bandinelli is wrapt in the same tantalising
uncertainty that obscures Gratian, his master, and Peter Lombard, his
contemporary. He was born -- when we know not -- at Siena. He came to
teach at Bologna, then the chief centre of intellectual life in Italy,
somewhere in the thirties of the twelfth century and he won the name of
being the foremost professor of Sacred Scripture and Canon Law of his
generation. He was rewarded with a canonry at Pisa and, in 1147, with a
like appointment in the Lateran. In 1150 Eugene III made him one of the
cardinal-deacons, and the next year cardinal-priest. In 1153 he became
Chancellor of the Roman Church and thereby the most influential person
in the Curia after the pope. Six years later he was himself elected
pope, Alexander III.
Of the works of the Cardinal Roland Bandinelli two survive, to justify
the immense reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries as a
scholar. The first is his Stroma, an abridgment of the second part of
Gratian's book made for the use of students. It is remarkable for its
order and for the singular clarity of the exposition. The second work,
the Sententiae, is a theological summa. in which the influence of
Abelard is evident throughout, in the method of exposition and in the
scientific spirit which inspires it. Roland Bandinelli is, however, no
mere compiler, and many of the master's errors are corrected in his
work, the Abelardian theory of original sin, for example, the teaching
on the Trinity and on the nature of faith. But other errors of Abelard
he took over; that, for example, on the nature of the union in Jesus
Christ of the divine and the human, which many years later he was, as
pope, to condemn.
The errors into which Abelard and Gilbert had fallen, and their
spectacular defeat at the hands of St. Bernard did not, then, by any
manner of means, ruin the movement towards a more scientific theology
which they led. The spirit which had inspired them inspired in Peter
Lombard and Roland Bandinelli the two most influential minds of the
next generation also. It was to meet the opposition of those who
claimed to be St. Bernard's disciples but who lacked his genius as they
lacked his sanctity. Then, after a sharp crisis, it was finally to
establish itself, as the official tradition of theological exposition.
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