In this study, I share the first fruits of my investigation into the complicated manuscript tradition that preserves the massive biblical corpus long attributed to Stephen Langton, itself the largest portion of “the mountain of manuscripts that constitute the biblical legacy of the School of Paris and its successors.”Footnote 1 I show that Langton's Old Testament corpus is not exclusively his but rather constitutes the culmination of a heretofore unknown and unsuspected twelfth-century tradition of lecturing on the Bible in which orality and the oral transmission of the lectures of other masters lies hidden beneath most writings preserved in the extant manuscripts. I show too that the proximate foundations for Langton's lectures date to the 1150s, when the lectures of a preeminent Parisian master were passed on in the schools and used by Stephen Langton as the foundation for his own.
These foundational lectures were by a master so well known and universally respected that no one, neither the masters who succeeded him nor their own students, needed to specify his name: everyone knew who he was; he was referred to simply as “magister.” More importantly still, everyone knew his lectures. The name that comes immediately to mind is Peter Lombard, the preeminent Parisian master during the 1150s, and the evidence presented in this study connects Stephen Langton's biblical corpus directly to lectures on the Old Testament that can now with confidence be attributed to Peter Lombard. These biblical lectures of Peter Lombard were “embedded” in lectures on different Old Testament books that have long been attributed to Langton. This study brings to light two reasons why they were never found and why their very existence was never before now even suspected by scholars. The first is that no scholar imagined that the Lombard's biblical lectures would have been passed on and preserved orally in the lectures of his students. The second is that scholars missed the unmistakable signs in Langton's corpus of those earlier foundational lectures.
The existence of this oral tradition has radical consequences for our understanding of four crucial twelfth-century scholastic legacies. The first three, the biblical Gloss, Peter Lombard's Sentences, and Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica, are well known, at least by reputation; the fourth consists of Peter Lombard's lectures on the Old Testament (to be distinguished from those on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles), long thought to be lost and hence unknown to scholars until now. Finally, there is evidence to suggest that this deep-rooted twelfth-century oral biblical tradition was taken over and passed down in all of its fullness and complexity to the thirteenth century by Hugh of St. Cher and the Dominicans who composed his Postills on the Bible.
In showing all of this, I introduce as well the first fruits of a radically different approach to editing and interpreting the extant manuscript tradition of the High Middle Ages. It is owing to this novel approach that even the limited evidence that I present and rely upon for this study suffices for knowledge certain enough to overturn existing theories about Langton's biblical legacy. For this reason and to support such a bold and novel claim, a preliminary word about method and approach is in order here.
The whole Lachmannian approach to editing presupposes the ability to get back to a primitive model that is commonly supposed to be the best expression of authorship and authorial intention.Footnote 2 It further assumes that from that primitive model all subsequent and hence imperfect copies have derived. To a great extent, the evidence for the existence and integrity of the original copy is the feature of collatability of extant witnesses, whether in manuscripts or early printed editions. The fundamental assumption is that the author produced a text meant to be read, or in other words a book.
The scholastic manuscript, however, was not a “book” in our sense of the word and thus escapes for the most part Lachmannian editorial method, a sign that the scholasticism of the High Middle Ages was not primarily a book culture, as has been commonly supposed by scholars editing medieval manuscripts; instead, the vast majority of scholastic texts preserved from this period are rather the products and vestiges of an oral culture.Footnote 3 And here I must be precise, lest I be misunderstood to be repeating in banal fashion what every medievalist knows, namely, that Scholastic classroom teaching was oral.Footnote 4 Rather, the point that I am making is that few if any scholars have viewed, interpreted, or edited the extant manuscripts that preserve Scholastic teaching as the records of orality. For editorial purposes the difference is revolutionary, since features in texts long viewed to be anomalous will henceforth instead be viewed as predictable features of oral discourse embedded in texts.
In the present study, which does not bear on editorial method and practice, this Gestalt shift in how to view the relationship between oral teaching and extant manuscript traditions has made all the difference in approaching and interpreting the history that lies underneath and that explains Langton's manuscript corpus. Those scholars such as Lacombe and Smalley who approached Langton's corpus assumed it to be the product of books.Footnote 5 So too the Franciscans who edited Peter Lombard's Sentences three times in one century and who searched high and low for his works on the Bible were thinking in terms of and looking for books.Footnote 6 They had no idea that the Lombard's oral teaching on the Bible was transmitted orally, through the teaching of Comestor, Langton, and others.
I divide my study into four main parts and a conclusion. In the first, I review scholarship on Langton's Old Testament lectures up to the present day, all of which depends on foundational researches conducted by George Lacombe and Beryl Smalley.
In the second, I show Langton's use of and dependence on the lectures of an illustrious predecessor for his own lectures. The evidence presented leaves no doubt that the prefatory materials here considered actually contain not only Langton's lectures but also those of another master, whose prologues and lectures served as the foundation for his own.
In the third, I present evidence from the predecessor's lectures, both prologues and on biblical books, and from Langton's lectures on the same, that leaves no doubt about the authorship and date of some of those foundational lectures. The author whose lectures Langton lectured upon is none other than Peter Lombard, whose lectures date to the 1150s and, as I show in Part Three, postdate his Sentences.Footnote 7
In the fourth, I consider the consequences of these many discoveries for medieval scholarship on a variety of topics: about Peter Lombard, his writings, and his career; about the biblical Gloss during the 1150s and how it developed; about Peter Comestor and the Historia scholastica; about Stephen Langton, his writings, and the transition between the schools of Paris to the University; about the theological legacy of the School of Paris up to Hugh of St. Cher and the Dominicans under his supervision; and about future scholarship in general on the Bible and theology at least up to 1250.
A brief conclusion summarizing the main findings of the study follows.
Part One: Langton's Old Testament Lectures
Historiography and State of the Question
The last time scholars attempted a comprehensive examination of Langton's entire manuscript corpus was 1930, when George Lacombe, in Part I, and Beryl Smalley, assisted by Alys Gregory, in Part II, published their preliminary investigations on the commentaries of Stephen Langton.Footnote 8 To Lacombe fell the task of listing manuscripts for various works as well as analyzing and describing what he supposed to be Langton's commentaries on the Historia scholastica,Footnote 9 what he called Langton's postills on Peter Lombard's own glosses on the Pauline epistles,Footnote 10 and what he called Langton's postills on the rest of the Old Testament.Footnote 11 To Smalley fell the task of analyzing the manuscript tradition, which she aptly described as of “the most astonishing variety.”Footnote 12
Individual parts of Langton's work have since received a considerable amount of attention from scholars. Phyllis B. Roberts produced an edition and study of some of Langton's sermons in 1968.Footnote 13 A watershed moment was 1994, when Riccardo Quinto published his doctoral thesis, an up-to-date overview of Langton's academic career and work.Footnote 14 Working with Sten Ebbesen, Gilbert Dahan, and others, Quinto launched and sustained, until his tragic death some years ago, what can only be described as a renaissance in Langton scholarship. Notable fruits of this renaissance are the recent volume published in 2010, Étienne Langton: Prédicateur, bibliste, théologien, which gathers together studies from a Langton conference held in Paris in September, 2006Footnote 15 and the magisterial first volume of Langton's Quaestiones, jointly edited by Riccardo Quinto and Magdalena Bieniak and published in 2014.Footnote 16 In spite of Quinto's death, the latter volume promises continued progress for Langton scholarship, since Bieniak is committed to carrying on the work of editing the remainder of Langton's corpus of theological quaestiones.Footnote 17
The former volume would seem to be even more relevant to this inquiry, since it contains six studies explicitly devoted to Langton's exegetical corpus.Footnote 18 To those six studies must be added Bataillon's examination of the content of Langton's sermons that dealt with the twelve minor prophets, which adds considerably to our knowledge of the manuscript tradition preserving these works.Footnote 19 Somewhat paradoxically, however, no study in the volume subjects the pioneering studies of Lacombe and Smalley to critical scrutiny.
The reason for this is provided by Gilbert Dahan, author of the study broadest in scope in the entire volume, which takes for its subject the entirety of Langton's biblical corpus and his mode of commenting and interpreting the Bible.Footnote 20 Dahan addresses himself to the central importance of Langton's biblical corpus within the Middle Ages considered as a whole.Footnote 21 I touch upon one portion of Dahan's study, below in Part Three, since he provides at the end of his study a transcription of what he considers to be Langton's “Moral Prologue” to the Pentateuch, which also forms part of the central evidence for this study.Footnote 22
Dahan is explicit about his decision not to essay coming to grips either with the manuscript research or with the findings of the twin studies published in 1930 by Lacombe and Smalley, which as he notes were amplified over time by Smalley in other studies, including her monograph, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.Footnote 23 Dahan's observation in this regard is as crucial as it is accurate, since not only does the rest of Smalley's scholarly output depend to a great extent on the research and findings presented in these studies but so also does most of the edifice of biblical scholarship produced under her direct influence during the second half of the twentieth century and to the present day.Footnote 24
Like so many scholars, however, Dahan assumes that the foundation for Smalley's scholarly corpus, namely, her manuscript research, is sound. He notes that to attempt an examination of the foundational 1930 studies of Lacombe and Smalley would require several years of dedicated study of the manuscript tradition preserving Langton's corpus.Footnote 25 And he gives his opinion that such an effort would not be worth the trouble, given what he describes as the richness of those studies and the few holes that would be found in their findings after such exhaustive work.Footnote 26
It turns out, however, that this view, namely, that any serious examination and verification of Smalley's manuscript work would not be worth the trouble, is mistaken. Quite the contrary, investigation of the manuscripts reveals that Smalley's manuscript research was neither as thorough nor as sound as so many scholars like Dahan have supposed. In fact, the evidence presented below not only shows that many of Smalley's conclusions about what she found in the manuscripts, including her central theory about Langton's biblical corpus, are false, but it also raises serious questions about the quality of her work with manuscripts in general.
Before providing the evidence that documents these claims, it will be helpful first to review briefly the central findings in the studies of Lacombe and Smalley. I do so in four subsections, beginning (in subsection A) with an account, principally in Smalley's own words, of her central thesis about Langton's biblical corpus, namely, that he wrote an original commentary or commentaries, in which he treated both the literal and moral senses of Scripture, and that these “full” or “integral” commentaries were subsequently divided by others into separate literal and moral commentaries. I then review (in subsection B) the essentials of Lacombe's study of Langton's Old Testament corpus, providing a concise summary of his classification of the extant manuscripts containing that corpus.Footnote 27 There follows a brief summary of Smalley's classification of the same (in subsection C).Footnote 28 I conclude the review and this introduction (in subsection D) with a fuller account of the discussion, both by Lacombe and Smalley, of the prefatory materials to Langton's Old Testament works, since these are the focus of the present study.
A. The Smalley Thesis
Smalley's study follows that of Lacombe, and she wastes no time in presenting what she considers to be the state of the evidence and the key questions left unanswered by her colleague:
In part one of these studies Mgr. Lacombe has described the mss. containing Langton's commentaries on the Historical Books of the Old Testament, and grouped them according to their incipits. His work reveals the most astonishing variety of tradition, to which fortunately we were able to supply a key. After much difficulty a threefold distinction has been obtained. There are three types of commentary: “full,” literal, and moral, the “full” being a combination of the other two types. All three, it has been shown, clearly originated in the same recensions. It remains to determine the relationship between them. Is the full commentary the parent or the offspring of the literal and moral? Does it represent the first draft or is it a compilation? Mgr. Lacombe gives reasons for favouring the claims of the full commentary to priority. We decided that I should take up the problem at exactly the point where he left it and make a detailed study of the relationship between the “full,” literal, and moral types.Footnote 29
She then answers these questions, pointing out the difficulties in supposing compilation rather than division:
From the first there was a strong common sense argument in favour of the full type of commentary's being the original, the parent and not the descendant of the other two. The work involved in separating the literal and moral senses, and copying them down as excerpts, one at a time, would be appreciably less than the work of compilation. The latter would imply copying from two works at once, perpetually finding and refinding the place. In the full commentaries no discoverable rule is observed as to proportion or division between literal and moral sections. The length of each passage chosen for explanation varies to suit the author's convenience, he may take a sentence or several complete episodes as his unit to comment first in the literal, then in the moral sense. It is almost incredible that a compiler would not have used, in every case, the simple arrangement found only in Chronicles, which is a briefer, more summary work than the other books; the whole of the first book of Chronicles at once is commented literally, then morally. The second is treated in the same way. The method followed in the other commentaries, of proceeding by arbitrary divisions, one step at a time, which would be natural to the author of an original work, becomes incomprehensible in a compiler.Footnote 30
By the close of the main part of her study, it is clear that Smalley's mind is made up and that any doubts she may have had have been resolved. She writes as though wholly convinced that Langton composed the original, “full” commentaries and that subsequently unknown persons divided these into separate literal and moral commentaries: “Whatever we think of the results, we cannot but sympathize with the objects of those who divided the unwieldy ‘full’ commentaries into the literal and moral series.”Footnote 31
Smalley, both in posing the question of the order of Langton's corpus and in considering whether the “full” commentary came first or last, is thinking clearly in terms of books written by an author, books that are subsequently either divided or compiled. Both her analysis and her conclusion presuppose a single author, Langton, whose biblical works, referred to both by Lacombe and Smalley as commentaries, were first composed by Langton and subsequently divided by someone other than Langton into separate literal and moral works.
In considering Smalley's theory and the assumptions beneath it, namely, that Langton was an author who produced “books,” it will prove helpful to keep in mind all that has been learned about the Historia scholastica, which Langton not only lectured upon but edited while Comestor was still alive.Footnote 32 Lacombe applied Smalley's theory to what he believed to be two separate “commentaries” by Langton on the History, one literal and the other moral.Footnote 33 I showed Lacombe's theory to be false.Footnote 34 All three of the versions of Langton's course on the Historia scholastica (an initial set of lectures, a first revision of those lectures, and a final revision) are, not surprisingly, literal, since the Historia scholastica itself is dedicated exclusively to the literal sense of Scripture.Footnote 35
More interesting for the purposes of this study is the fact that the History was itself the product of lectures, by Comestor, Langton, and many other masters including, as we learn below, Peter Lombard. In truth, the History was the product of a scholastic oral culture in which it was constantly revised and amended, by Comestor, Langton, and other masters who lectured upon it.Footnote 36 Langton was in Paris much earlier than scholars, who have credited 1180 as the date when Langton incepted, have previously recognized.Footnote 37 Quinto, however, showed this to be no more than a guess.Footnote 38
In fact, his lectures on the History predate 1176, as does his first revision of those lectures; Langton even revised the text of the Historia scholastica while Peter Comestor, whom Langton constantly praises as his Master, was still alive and was himself revising the History.Footnote 39 If as it seems Langton was already fulfilling the duties of a theologian prior to 1176, then in fact his studies in the Arts Course place him in Paris already in the 1160s.Footnote 40 He may have been in Paris even before then, since the evidence presented below will leave no doubt that he considered Peter Lombard, who died in 1160, his own master.Footnote 41
Throughout this study, we shall have to keep this oral scholastic culture and this recently established chronology firmly in mind, for both will prove essential in unraveling the tangle of Langton's biblical corpus. The former is helpful for establishing not only the order of Langton's biblical opinions but also the context for those opinions. The latter, namely, the chronology of Langton's Parisian residence in general and of the versions of his course on the History in particular, proves to be of central importance, since as I show below in Part Three, the lectures upon which Langton founded his own lectures on the Bible are also, together with the biblical Gloss, the foundation for the Historia scholastica itself, put together over the course of the 1160s.Footnote 42
B. Lacombe's Classification of the Manuscripts Preserving Langton's Old Testament Corpus
Lacombe was under no illusions about the difficulty of assessing Langton's enormous extant biblical corpus:
There is no medieval writer who has left more varied and enormous literary remains than Langton…. When brought face to face with the 120 odd mss. which contain these commentaries, the 100 incipits of what purports to be this work, it seems incredible that anyone should have written so much. It looks as if Langton glossed the Bible not once, but twice and perhaps three times.Footnote 43
Lacombe was right to be suspicious about the possibility of one person's authoring so much. I show below in Part Two of this study that the extant corpus attributed unanimously to Langton by the tradition is not all his. Lacombe, however, who did not know this, endeavored “to get some order out of this chaos of mss.”Footnote 44 In his view, the “mass of ms. material can be classified through external resemblances into a certain number of homogenous groups,” yet Lacombe admits that “this does not preclude diversities within each group.”Footnote 45
Ultimately, Lacombe classifies the manuscripts into five general groups, a scheme based upon how the biblical books are organized within the manuscripts. The cautiousness of his language and the many caveats he adds make clear that he is well aware that his method of classification is unusual and provides at best only a rough approximation.Footnote 46 Lacombe assigns a letter to each group. Group A contains either the Pentateuch or individual books within it or the Heptateuch (group AI), group B includes Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, or Joshua through Maccabees (BI), group C the Pentateuch plus Joshua through Maccabees, group D the prophets, major and minor, and group E collections containing both the historical books together with the prophets.Footnote 47 To group F are assigned the many manuscripts preserving what Lacombe refers to as collections without order.Footnote 48 Lacombe provides incipits and explicits for all of the manuscripts in each of the five ordered collections (A through E).Footnote 49 But he admits that he himself only looked at the manuscripts of class B, those “containing Joshua, Judges, Ruth.”Footnote 50
Having classified the manuscript corpus into five quasi-ordered groups and one without discernible order and having provided incipits and explicits for all known manuscripts in the so-called five ordered groups, Lacombe continues his examination of Langton's Old Testament corpus with the following admission:
In spite of a certain amount of external classification, it is evident that there still remains a great deal of disorder in this manuscript tradition. We must make due allowance for variations in the incipits which mislead us into thinking that a difference in incipit indicates a different work.Footnote 51
He then comments on the bewildering variety of incipits that begin Langton's works on various biblical books. Even after attempting to order these incipits themselves, Lacombe faces the same problem of a multiplicity of commentaries: “However, even after a certain amount of order has been established by a classification of the incipits, it still looks as if Langton glossed the Old Testament not once but two separate times.”Footnote 52
Ultimately, however, Lacombe ends up endorsing wholeheartedly Smalley's theory about Langton's Old Testament corpus:
The contention that the original form of these glosses is that found in the Peterhouse ms. 112 and the other mss. belonging to the same family, will be conclusively proved by Miss Smalley's collations of the various mss. of Langton's Gloss on the Historical Books of the Old Testament. In her studies she shows that frequently enough either the moral or the literal Commentary will contain a word, a phrase, or a section, which, meaningless in the context, gives satisfactory sense when found in its place in the full Commentary. This argument leaves no doubt that the original form of Langton's gloss is to be found in the complete form — literal and moral — which is preserved in Peterhouse ms. 112 at Cambridge, in ms. lat. 384 of the Bibl. nat. at Paris, and in ms. 294 of Chartres.Footnote 53
In a footnote, Lacombe provides an example of the sort of evidence that he deems conclusive: “where the moral commentary on Ruth, as found in Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. 510, contains much of the matter which should be proper to the literal commentary, and vice versa.”Footnote 54 In spite of his notable caution, therefore, Lacombe ends with certainty.
Lacombe, however, does leave open the question of whether Langton or another editor accomplished the division of the “full” versions into separate literal and moral commentaries.Footnote 55 He is inclined to think that someone other than Langton was responsible for doing so, writing that it “seems very doubtful that it was the work of Langton himself” and noting that “the excerpts are too slavishly literal, and show no signs of the retouches which an author would inevitably make in the course of such a task.”Footnote 56 He concludes by pointing out that “the incoherencies already noted would hardly exist if the work had been done by Langton” but that “more light will be thrown on this problem by Miss Smalley, who is studying this point in great detail.”Footnote 57
C. Smalley's Classification of the Manuscripts Preserving Langton's Old Testament Corpus
We are now familiar with Smalley's typology for Langton's Old Testament corpus, but it remains to be seen which manuscripts belong to which classification. Given that this study treats only prefatory materials that introduce the five books of Moses, I restrict my discussion here to her treatment of the manuscripts preserving the Pentateuch. These suffice to illustrate Smalley's actual manner of proceeding, since she relies upon them extensively in her analysis.
It is worth noting that Smalley begins that analysis as cautiously as Lacombe, writing: “I have attempted to apply Mgr. Pelzer's rules to the Langton commentaries. No definite conclusions could be obtained without a thorough collation of all the mss, but I shall briefly indicate the problems centreing [sic] round each commentary from those mss. which I have examined.”Footnote 58 Smalley, however, did not stick to this cautious manner of proceeding nor to her plan of indicating problems and leaving definitive statements until after comprehensive collation of all the manuscripts.
Smalley starts off as follows: “We may begin with the Pentateuch. Identical copies are in Peterhouse, Cambridge 112; Trinity College, Cambridge 86; Trinity, Oxford 65; Chartres 294; Durham A. I. 7 (for all except Genesis).”Footnote 59 She provides in a footnote her basis for claiming that certain copies are identical: “I test the identity of two works by collating the incipits, explicits, and some other passage.”Footnote 60 This statement makes plain first that Smalley had adopted a test that was seriously inadequate for her intended purpose, and second that she had moved a long way in just fifteen pages from her initial statement that “no definite conclusions could be obtained without a thorough collation of all the mss.”Footnote 61
I am myself convinced that Smalley's initial statement was correct and that the only way to sort out definitively the relations between these and the many other extant manuscripts preserving Langton's corpus will be to edit them critically, such that the various redactions are sorted out. For now, however, it suffices to note that the transcriptions of the extensive prefatory materials in each manuscript (except for Chartres 294, destroyed in World War II) suggest startling diversity rather than identity with respect to the works contained in the manuscripts grouped together by Smalley.Footnote 62
Besides asserting their identity, Smalley also notes that these manuscripts, together with three others that contain only certain books from the Pentateuch, contain commentaries that “are all ‘full’ (both literal and moral).”Footnote 63 The “full” works contained in these eight manuscripts constitute her “Group One.”Footnote 64
Smalley then discusses what she considers to be the products, first literal and then moral, of the supposed division of the “full” version containing both. Paris, BNF, lat. 14414 and Mazarine 177 are the manuscripts listed by Smalley as the former products of this division; each contains “a literal commentary on the whole Pentateuch.”Footnote 65 Because the prefatory materials in both of these manuscripts are minimal, neither features prominently in the evidence presented below in Part Two of this study. But because both manuscripts are central to showing how Langton's Old Testament biblical corpus came to have the form that is seen in the extant manuscripts, a few words are warranted here about each.
In fact, the formatting of the lectures in these two manuscripts is sufficient by itself to call into question Smalley's overall theory of a division.Footnote 66 The lectures in Mazarine 177 indicate rather that Langton's corpus underwent the same process of accretion so typical of any scholastic context in the High Middle Ages. Like the earliest manuscripts preserving the Historia scholastica and Langton's course on the same, these manuscripts reveal multiple layers of addition in the marginal notes which, as in the manuscripts of the History, preserve the record of lectures and glosses that originated separately from those already in the main columns of the manuscripts.Footnote 67
Although Smalley groups Mazarine 177 and BNF, lat. 14414 together, she says nothing about how the lectures are found in the manuscripts. It is clear, however, from preliminary transcriptions of all the prefatory materials in both manuscripts, including portions of Genesis, that Mazarine 177 preserves in the main columns very early lectures on Genesis by Langton, who refers unmistakably both to Comestor's History and to the lectures identified below as those of Peter Lombard.Footnote 68 The glosses added in the margins of Mazarine 177 supplement and expand those lectures. By contrast, the lectures in BNF, lat. 14414 preserve a tradition that encompasses both the original lectures in Mazarine 177 and the added marginal glosses together with additional material from the primitive lectures predating Comestor's Historia scholastica, identified below as those of Peter Lombard; the two manuscripts, therefore, are collatable, at least up to a certain point. But the format of the glosses in Mazarine 177 — one set is found written continuously in the main columns of the manuscript, whereas another set is copied into the margins — reveals that those two sets of glosses originated separately.Footnote 69
In short, how these two manuscripts are related to each other suggests a much more complicated history than Smalley's theory, and her placing these two manuscripts together in the same “group,” would suggest. Whatever the true history of their provenance — and this will only be revealed by careful editing — the one certainty, discernible at a glance, is that the original form of these “literal” lectures was not, as Smalley insists, an integrated whole subsequently copied and divided into parts.Footnote 70 They are rather the records, the written vestiges, of lectures, founded one on top of another, of different theological masters.
As regards the other product of the alleged division, the moral half, Smalley does nothing more than list the four manuscripts containing the so-called moral version of the Pentateuch: “The moral Pentateuch is in Bibl. Nat. 355 and Arras 68. Lincoln College, Oxford 15 has the moral Genesis. Bibl. Nat. 385 the moral Numbers and Deuteronomy.”Footnote 71 I do not address in this study the prefatory materials preserved in these manuscripts, although I do show that the prologue Tabernaculum Moysi, which I transcribe and translate below, is not a “Moral Prologue.”
Smalley concludes her survey of the manuscripts containing the Pentateuch by mentioning three manuscripts that she deems to contain variant versions: Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55; British Library, Royal MS 2 E xii; and Durham Cathedral MS, A. I. 7. About the first, Corpus Christi 55, Smalley, like Lacombe, says very little.Footnote 72 Since the contents of this manuscript are featured extensively below, both in Parts II and III, nothing more will be said about it here.
About the second, British Library, Royal MS, 2 E xii, Smalley says only that it “has a Genesis identical with Corpus 55, except for the prologue”Footnote 73 and remarks for the second time that it “is notable that the Royal Deuteronomy, which follows Genesis, is identical with the first group, not the second.”Footnote 74 By the second group Smalley understands the variant version contained in Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55; she means therefore that Royal MS, 2 E xii contains works that belong to two different groups: its Genesis to the second or variant group and the Deuteronomy that follows to the first or regular group.Footnote 75
Smalley is wrong that British Library, Royal MS, 2 E xii is identical with Corpus Christi 55 apart from the prologue. If one compares the lectures on Genesis in these two manuscripts from the beginning, one sees right away that they are not identical.Footnote 76 Royal 2 E xii does have material common to Corpus Christi 55 but also has material not in the other manuscript. This is fascinating in itself, but the prologues in Royal 2 E xii make the contents of this manuscript even more interesting. A number of these prologues appear before the lectures on Genesis, and from examining this manuscript I know that they are of great interest for several reasons.
The first is that the prologue that begins, “In Exodo legitur,” is also preserved in BNF, lat. 14415 and 14435, two manuscripts of great interest because the lectures on Genesis preserved in them are also collatable with those in Royal 2 E xii and dependent on those in Corpus Christi 55. This British Library manuscript, therefore, is very clearly related to those two Paris manuscripts.Footnote 77
Because of the connection to Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55, British Library, Royal MS, 2 E xii and all of its contents — the British Library catalog lists the contents as anonymous postills not only on Genesis and Deuteronomy but also on Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Baruch — will need to be studied thoroughly. Smalley says nothing about the other books in the manuscript, but each will have to be classified in relation to the lectures on the same book in all known manuscripts attributed to Langton. The same holds true for the prologues and the lectures on Genesis, whose relationship to the lectures preserved in other important manuscripts will also need to be sorted out carefully.
The third manuscript listed as containing a variant is Durham Cathedral MS, A. I. 7, which Smalley had previously classified with Group One except for the commentary on Genesis contained therein.Footnote 78 When she discusses it in connection with the variant versions, she addresses herself specifically to Genesis:
A third variant of Genesis is Durham A. I. 7. This is very much fuller — at least in the Hexemeron [sic], the only section I have examined — than either of the other two groups. Certain passages would give the impression that “one” is a drastic abbreviation of “three” (Durham), since “three” contains various instances of consecutive lines identical with “one”; I could not find any identity between “two” and “three.” “Three” makes the best sense; that is to say, if there is any connection between “one” and “three,” we might start from the hypothesis that “three” was the original, and that “one” had been unskilfully [sic] cut down from “three.” On the other hand there are passages where “one” and “three” differ not only in wording but even in matter; they might be two different works. It is not the same kind of variance as that between “one” and “two,” where the matter corresponds but not the words.Footnote 79
I will have much more to say, below in Part Three, about the contents of this manuscript relative to those in Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55 and in other manuscripts deemed by Smalley to be part of her Group One. Smalley herself, following the paragraph just quoted, mentions and quotes a passage from the lectures on Genesis in Durham A. I. 7, analyzed in detail below in Part Three when I discuss the question of authorship, that would have clarified for her right away the relationship of the lectures contained in that manuscript to those contained in Corpus Christi 55, but she never checked the corresponding passage in the latter manuscript.Footnote 80 For now, let it suffice that Smalley's observations about the Genesis materials by themselves indicate a complicated tradition, at least for Genesis. Since in her own words “the prologues to Genesis present a distinct set of problems as baffling as those connected with the main commentary,”Footnote 81 let us turn our attention to what Lacombe and Smalley have to say about them.
D. Lacombe and Smalley on the Prologues
Lacombe notes the extreme diversity of the prologues for many of the biblical books in the manuscripts attributed to Langton. Since those leading up to Genesis constitute the proper focus of this study, it seems fitting to quote Lacombe about the diversity of the incipits for Genesis:
The MS of Durham A. I. 7 begins: Volavit ad me unus de Seraphim et tulit cum forcipe calculum ignitum de altare [sic]Footnote 82 ad purgandum labia mea. It is only after 17 lines that the prologue reaches: Quod Dominus precepit Moysi facere tabernaculum coopertum V cortinis hinc [sic]Footnote 83 et inde etc. which is practically the ordinary incipit of the prologue to Genesis in most of the mss. More disconcerting still is the same Commentary on Genesis hiding behind the incipit: in Exodo XXXVIo capitulo: Facies michi altare; this is the prologue to Genesis in Brit. Mus. Royal 2 E XII, f. 1 and Paris, Bibl. nat. ms. lat. 14435, f. 147a;Footnote 84 it is the second prologue to Genesis in Peterhouse 112 and is likewise found at the bottom of f. 1 in Chartres ms. 294 in a simplified form: Facies michi altare. Thus we have four incipits for Genesis.Footnote 85
Lacombe is wrong about the number of incipits for Genesis in the manuscripts attributed to Langton — he does not include the abbreviated introductions to Frater Ambrosius found in a number of manuscripts — and he gives no indication that he is aware of the diversity of prologues within works sharing the same incipit. He does, however, recognize that the incipits and prologues are not necessarily indicative of the works to which they are attached.Footnote 86 He puzzles over why the prologues introducing the literal and moral versions would refer to all four senses of Scripture yet does not pursue the matter in depth other than to express serious doubt about Langton's authorship of such a prologue.Footnote 87 His main concern is to introduce Smalley's typology.Footnote 88
Smalley's treatment of the prologues is fuller yet still falls well short of any in-depth examination. She notes the justness of Lacombe's puzzlement over the seeming lack of fit between the prologues, all of which for every book of Scripture mention the various senses of Scripture, and the literal and moral versions, which seem to be restricted to just one sense.Footnote 89 She notes further that “this is merely one example of the curiously incomplete and haphazard nature of the literal and moral commentaries as compared with the full type.”Footnote 90 And she concludes her general discussion of all of the supposed Langton prologues with a description and classification that in her view lends support to her theory of a tripartite classification resulting from the division of a “full” original into partial and imperfect literal and moral versions. Speaking of the former “full type,” she writes:
In the latter each book is prefaced by a prologue of Langton's own composition, followed by the Hieronymian prologue (if it exists of that particular book) with Langton's explanatory comments on it. The literal commentaries have only the Hieronymian prologues, the moral only Langton's with their unfulfilled promise of the twofold exposition of the text. In the full commentaries the second prologue follows the first with some connecting formula such as “Hieronymus huic libro premittit proemium,” and possibly some information about St. Jerome's purpose and the circumstances of his writing. In the moral commentaries we occasionally find this formula still attached to the last words of Langton's prologue, as in the full type. It is quite out of place, being followed, not by St. Jerome's prologue, but by the opening words of the text. The effect produced is naturally that of a hiatus, and points to a process of separation rather than of compilation.Footnote 91
The disconnect noticed by both Lacombe and Smalley is in fact real, although there is no a priori reason for thinking that it suggests separation or division rather than compilation or addition. As will be seen below, both in Parts II and III, the evidence makes clear that the truth is far more complicated than Smalley supposed.
Smalley also discusses the prologues to Genesis, noting that they “present a distinct set of problems as baffling as those connected with the main commentary.”Footnote 92 Nevertheless, she gives a determinate classification. She divides the prologues to Genesis into two classes, A and B, but subdivides class A into three variants.Footnote 93 Since these materials constitute the focus of this study, it would be useful to repeat here her analysis of the four groups that she identifies:
Thus we have four types of prologue altogether. We have prologue B, and we have three variant versions of prologue A. They are not textually identical but have enough resemblance in substance to be described under the one heading “A.” The “A” and “B” forms have much in common, but in the judgment of Mgr. Lacombe they are distinct compositions rather than variant versions of the same composition. One possible theory is that A, with its insistence on the significance of the number five, was the original prologue to the Pentateuch. B starts from an allegory which deals with the Scriptures as a whole, then reproduces more shortly some of the observations on the Pentateuch and other matters to be found in A, and ends with a few introductory remarks on Genesis, similar to those in A. The original A may have been rewritten with the object of providing a prologue which would be suitable as an introduction, not only to the Pentateuch, but to a long series of commentaries following after; thus we get B. This would account for the difference between A and B. The three mss. containing B actually do continue beyond the Pentateuch.
The Durham form of A would serve as well as B for this purpose. The additional ten lines deal with another aspect of the Scriptures in their entirety, and so give the prologue a wider application than to the first five books immediately following. We return to the old question. What is the relationship between “one” “two” and “three”?Footnote 94
Smalley does not provide transcriptions of these prologues, and her classification and discussion is difficult to follow without the texts to which she is referring in plain view. I provide all relevant texts, below in Part Two, except for Chartres 294, destroyed in the World War II, but, since this was very closely related to Peterhouse 112, the key manuscript for Smalley's conclusions about how to classify Langton's entire corpus, we shall still have the same basic evidence that was available to her to form our own conclusions. Even though that evidence has led me to drastically different conclusions, it will still be useful to have her theory of the prologues handy, since it manifests a very different way of approaching these materials.
Part Two: Langton and the School of Paris
His Reliance on the Lectures of an Illustrious Predecessor
The first and most important discovery to be shown is that the vast corpus of biblical material preserved in the complicated manuscript tradition attributed to Langton is not all by Langton but is founded upon the work of another master.Footnote 95 The second and related discovery is that the biblical corpus preserved in the manuscript tradition unanimously attributed to Langton consists entirely of lectures, rather than “commentaries” or “postills,” the designations for Langton's works used by Lacombe and Smalley and, following them, by scholars to the present day. In fact, as we shall see, Langton's lectures are part of a tradition of lecturing. They form part of a “School of Paris” in the sense that Langton, like Comestor and other masters, founded his classroom lectures on those of an illustrious predecessor. He did so by lecturing on that master's lectures.
The whole story, therefore, is much more complicated than has heretofore been supposed or imagined. Rather than a series of books composed by and attributable to individual masters, which were then passed on as books, we have instead in the manuscripts the record of an oral tradition passed down from master to master in the mid-twelfth-century schools of Paris. We find Peter Lombard reporting the oral teachings of other masters.Footnote 96 We find Peter Lombard referring to his own teaching on Colossians.Footnote 97 We find Stephen Langton reporting the oral teaching of both Peter Comestor and Peter Lombard.Footnote 98 The evidence to be presented, which suggests that Brady barely scratched the surface on what there is to know about Peter Lombard's career, is itself complicated. Indeed, how that oral tradition was passed down raises fascinating questions of how to edit these texts, for that “passing down” takes many forms. Orality, however, is the theme: we find ourselves, arguably for the first time, understanding just how oral a culture was the twelfth century.Footnote 99
A. Langton's Old Testament Lectures: The Tip of an Iceberg
The evidence presented in this and the next section will show that Corpus Christi MS 55 not only preserves lectures by Langton but also contains earlier lectures upon which Langton founded his own.Footnote 100 Indeed, this evidence will reveal that the carefully crafted prologue, Tabernaculum Moysi, that introduces the lectures on Genesis in this manuscript is not by Langton but is rather by an illustrious predecessor, whose identity both Langton and his students take for granted, whom I show below to be Peter Lombard.
Somehow, the uniqueness of this manuscript's contents has been completely overlooked. Lacombe lists it in Group C (Pentateuch plus Joshua to Maccabees) of his classification, noting the addition of Isaiah.Footnote 101 He quotes its title, “Stephanus Langton super Vetus Testamentum,” noting that the same title is shared in many of the manuscripts preserving works attributed to Langton.Footnote 102 Yet it is obvious that Lacombe never examined its contents, even preliminarily, for had he done so he could not have failed to notice the uniqueness of its prefatory materials relative to those in other manuscripts attributed to Langton, much less the startlingly unique character of the lectures on the biblical books themselves. Indeed, we can be confident of this in spite of his silence, since he does not mention this manuscript when he discusses the bewildering variety of incipits for the different versions of the prologues to Genesis.Footnote 103
Smalley too says very little about this manuscript, although what she does say is characteristically determinate. Like Lacombe she notes its title, writing that it “has a ‘full’ Pentateuch ascribed to Langton” and adding that “the remaining books are certainly his.”Footnote 104 Curiously, she makes the following observation: “There are passages identical with the first group in this Pentateuch, but with a great deal of divergence.”Footnote 105 I say curiously, because the evidence presented below shows that, had she examined that divergence even a little bit, she would never have thought, much less asserted so confidently, that the contents of this manuscript were exclusively Langton's.
Finally, Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55 is never discussed in the recent collection of studies from a Langton conference held in Paris in September 2006 and published in 2010.Footnote 106 It is, however, listed, together with other Cambridge manuscripts supposed to preserve works of Langton, in Appendix II of an article on Stephen Langton and the Victorines.Footnote 107
It is, therefore, safe to say that Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55, long assumed to contain yet another copy, albeit a variant version, of Langton's Old Testament lectures, has been overlooked by scholars. Its inside cover records the following list of the contents of the lectures contained within:
Except for Esdras, which in the Old Testament normally follows the Books of Kings and precedes Tobit, Judith, and Esther, and except for Isaiah, the final item here named, the list seems a straightforward index of the first part of the Old Testament.
Three facts make this particular list interesting. The first is its close resemblance to the Old Testament books contained in the Historia scholastica. The Old Testament portion of the History omits First and Second Paralipomenon, includes brief histories of Ezechiel and Daniel, and omits Isaiah. The list is otherwise identical.
The second is its striking resemblance to the order of the Old Testament books lectured on by Langton. Cambridge MS, Peterhouse 112, after the heading “Stephanus Cantuariensis Archiepiscopus et sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalis super Bibliam,” has the following index of Old Testament books lectured upon by Langton:
Smalley repeats several times that both Comestor and Langton seem to have followed Hugh of St. Victor's prescription for which historical books to study and in which order.Footnote 108 That seems right, but as I show below the more proximate source is the lectures of Peter Lombard on the Old Testament, which are embedded in Langton's lectures and appear to be the basis both for Comestor's History and Langton's lectures on the Old Testament.
The third is the overlap with the list of books known to have been glossed by Peter Lombard. The record provided by the obituary notice of the Church of St. Mary (the old church that was replaced by the Cathedral of Notre Dame, built by Maurice de Sully, the Lombard's successor as Bishop of Paris) lists both the entire New Testament and in the Old Testament, besides the well-known Psalter, “the five books of Moses, the four major prophets, the twelve minor prophets, the Song of Songs, Job, Esther, Tobit, Judith, the Book of Wisdom, Sirach, his Sentences and Gratian's Decretum.”Footnote 109 If one adds the lectures on the major and minor prophets in Peterhouse 119 — the lectures on Isaiah therein are collatable with those preserved in Corpus Christi 55 — it would appear that we have a good basis for comparison, at least for the Old Testament.
To make the analysis to be presented herein easier to follow, I first provide the text of the lectures containing these prefatory materials in Cambridge MS, Corpus Christi 55 — I have divided the lectures themselves into separate paragraphs to make the internal divisions easier to see — and then furnish a translation of the entire text, which is also divided into paragraphs and presented with the original Latin text.
Because the manuscript contains a defective copy of the original lectures, I have emended its text in several places, but I alert the reader to the most important of these by means of footnotes explaining the emendation:
Prologus in Genesim.
Tabernaculum Moysi coopertum erat quinque cortinis et quinque cortinis. Tabernaculum Moysi est militans Ecclesia. Quinque cortinae sunt quinque libri Moysi, qui sunt nobis ad ornatum et ad refrigerium contra aestum vitiorum et ad munimentum contra intemperiemFootnote 110 aëriumFootnote 111 tempestatum. Unde non vacat quod Dominus iussit cortinas esse distinctas quattuor coloribus: bisso retorta, iacincto, purpura, coccoFootnote 112 bis tincto. Quattuor colores figurant quattuor modos legendi: istoricum; allegoricum; anagogicum; tropologicum. Istoria figuratur per bissum retortam et bene dicit “retortam,” ut fortis sit. Istoria enim fundamentum est, et ideo bene figuratur per bissum retortam. Allegoria figuratur per iacinctum, tropologia per purpuram, per coccum bis tinctumFootnote 113 anagoge, et bene dicit “bis tinctum,” quia cumFootnote 114 coccus semel tingitur in viaFootnote 115 et iterum tingitur in patria.Footnote 116
Prologue to Genesis.Footnote 117
Moses's tent was covered by five curtains and five curtains.Footnote 118 Moses's tent is the Church militant. The five curtains are the five books of Moses, which serve for us as adornment, for cool refreshment against the summer heat of the vices, and for fortification against the inclemency of stormy weather. Whence it is not for nothing that the Lord God ordered that the curtains be distinguished by four colors: by wrapped cotton linen; by reddish violet; by royal purple; and by twice-dyed scarlet. These four colors depict the four ways of reading <Scripture>: historical; allegorical; anagogical; and tropological. History is depicted by wrapped cotton linen, and Moses does well to say “wrapped,” so that it is strong. For history is the foundation and is therefore well depicted by wrapped cotton linen. Allegory is depicted by the Hyacinth flower, tropology by royal purple, anagogy by twice-dyed scarlet, and Moses does well to say “twice-dyed,” since the scarlet berry is dyed once on the road of this life and is dyed again in the Fatherland.
The lecture is prefaced by the words “Prologue to Genesis,” but the opening lines make plain that the lecturer has in mind an introduction to the entire Pentateuch. Making use of the references in Exodus to the five pairs of curtains covering the tent of Moses, he equates these to the five books of the Pentateuch, which in his elegant words serve both for graceful adornment of Scripture and for proof against the vices. The four colors named in Exodus as the distinguishing feature of the curtains introduce the fourfold division of Scripture. History, the foundation depicted by tightly wound cotton linen, is strong. Allegory and tropology are depicted by beautiful colors, the unique tint of the hyacinth flower and royal purple, respectively. Like history, anagogy, the sense of Scripture that comprises the last things, gets special attention. The lecturer wants his hearers to have in mind the admonition of Moses, whose twice-dyed scarlet berry reminds us of our Christian status as sojourners here on earth — we are as the lecturer puts it “on the road” — and also of our true fatherland in heaven.
The lecturer continues his discourse founded upon these curtains as follows:
Item non vacat quod legitur cortinas factas esse opere plumario id est acu cuius una extremitas perforata est, alia vero acuta. Per quam figurantur, dico, adventus Christi: primus in quo erat lancea perforatus. Unde: videbunt in quem transfixerunt. Et secundus in quo punget et puniet.Footnote 119 Omnia ergo quae fiunt in sancta Ecclesia debent fieri opere plumario. Debemus enim habere unum oculum ad primum adventum ad minuendum timorem, <et alteram oculum ad secundum adventum ad incitandum timorem> et ita semper simus inter duas molas, et videamus, ne altera <altera> impingeretur.Footnote 120
Likewise it is not for nothing that we read that the curtains had been fashioned by the work of an embroiderer, that is, by a needle whose one end is pierced, while the other is sharp. Through this are depicted, I say, the comings of Christ: the first, in which he was pierced by a lance. Whence: they will look upon him whom they have pierced. And a second coming, in which he will sting and punish. Everything, therefore, which is done in the Holy Church must be done by the work of an embroiderer. For we should have one eye towards the First Coming for diminishing fear, <and the other towards the Second Coming for inciting fear>, and let us be always thus between two millstones, and let us keep watch, lest by the one the other be impinged.
In continuing to develop his chosen theme of the five pairs of curtains covering the tent of Moses, the lecturer speaks of the fine quality of the work that made the curtains: the work has been accomplished in the best possible fashion, by embroidery done by hand. This interpretation allows our lecturer to make use of the imagery of a needle, whose two ends, the one perforated and the other razor sharp, depict Christ himself, his side pierced by a spear, on the one hand, and coming to judge the living and the dead, on the other. The work of the Church, therefore, like the curtains on Moses's tent, has to have the same quality, and all Christians must look backwards and forwards: to Christ's passion and death on the cross, which gives us courage and attenuates fear; and to his Second Coming, when Christ himself will do the stinging.
The lecturer continues to use the ten curtains covering the tent of Moses to develop his introduction to the Pentateuch, but now he begins to focus on the other five.
Vel alia quinque cortinae sunt quinque libri Moysi aliter intellecti. Duplex enim est intellectus: literalis et spiritualis. Cortinae autem iungebantur per ansulas et circulos. Per “ansulas” intelliguntur promissa Veteris Testamenti; per “circulos” Novi Testamenti. Et nota quod quinquaginta erant ansulae, per quod nobis datur intelligi quod omnia quae facimus debemus referre ad remissionem in praesenti et ad quietem in futuro.
Or the other five curtains are the five books of Moses otherwise understood. For the understanding of these books is twofold: literal and spiritual. By the hooks holding up the curtains we understand the promises of the Old Testament; by the rings those of the New Testament. And note that there were fifty hooks, through which are given to understand that everything which we do we should refer to the remission of sins in our present state and to the repose of the blessed in our future state.
These are “the five books of Moses otherwise understood,” namely, by both the literal and the spiritual senses. And for the latter our lecturer, explicating the hooks and rings that held up the five pairs of curtains on Moses's tent, contrasts the promises of the Old Testament, symbolized by the hooks, with those of the New, symbolized by the rings. The number of hooks is also significant, for as with the scarlet berry which is dyed twice, one on the road of this life and a second time in Heaven, and also with the embroiderer's needle, whose two ends depict the First and Second Comings of Christ, the number fifty points to both states, to the forgiveness of our sins in this life and to beatitude in the next.
It is worth emphasizing that there is no separation of the Bible and theology in this lecturer's introduction. His systematic explication of the significance of the curtains covering Moses's tent not only introduces the Pentateuch in expert fashion but also keeps his hearer's attention on the historical and spiritual realities that truly matter: Christ's incarnation and death on the cross together with our own actions, redeemed by Christ's suffering, and those of the Church in this passing life; and Christ's Second Coming and the Final Judgment together with our own eternal destiny.
So too just as the lecturer repeatedly emphasizes the connection between this life and the next, he also connects explicitly the Old and New Testaments in developing his theme:
Isti quinque libri significati sunt in Evangelio per quinque panes hordeaceos. Ordeum enim quinqueFootnote 121 habet proprietates: tenacis est paleae, humilis culini, cibus est iumentorum, aristam habet pungentem, et frangibilem. Quinque modo libri Moysi humilis culini, quia literaliter promittunt temporalia, et ita serpunt iuxta terram. Tenacis sunt paleae, quia spiritualis intellectus vix separatur a literali, sed ex quo separatur dulcis, sicut medulla hordei. Cibi sunt iumentorum id est rudium. Vel pungentes erant, quia lex inferebat mortem, ut ait Apostolus. Item frangibilis erat lex, quia parum durans superveniente nova.
Those five books were signified in the Gospel through the five barley loaves. For barley has five properties: it has an extremely firm and hard chaff, it is found in humble kitchens, it is the food of beasts of burden, the beard of its grain is stinging, and it can be broken into pieces. The five books of Moses found in the Pentateuch are only of a humble kitchen, since they promise according to their literal sense earthly things, and thus they creep along the ground. Their chaff is firm and hard, since their spiritual understanding can scarcely be separated from their literal understanding, but when the one is separated from the other it is sweet, just like the pith of barley. Those five books are the foodstuffs of beasts of burden, that is, of the untutored. Or they were stinging, since the law carried with it death, as the Apostle says. In the same way, that law was breakable, since with the coming of the new law, which transcended the old, it lasted for only a short time.
Turning from five pairs of curtains that covered the tent of Moses, the lecturer finds another prominent scriptural five but this time in the New Testament, namely, the five barley loaves made use of by Jesus in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. These signify aptly the five books of Moses, for barley and the Pentateuch share the same five properties. Like barley, the Pentateuch is low and humble; in stark contrast to the Gospel, it promises only earthly things. Indeed, the Old Law, brought by Moses, carried with it death until it was transcended by the New Law, brought by Jesus.
At this point in his introduction, the lecturer concludes his explication based upon scriptural artifacts such as the curtains covering Moses's tent and the barley loaves multiplied miraculously by Jesus. But he continues to develop his theme of the connection between the five books of Moses and the Gospel:
Vel quinque libri Moysi dicuntur pentatheuchus, et dicitur a “penta,” quod est quinque, et “teucus,” quod est volumen. Primus dicitur Genesis Graeco vocabulo, quia agit de generatione veteris Adae. In primo libro Novi Testamenti scilicet in Matthaeo agitur de generatione novi Adae. Ita in primo libro Veteris Testamenti agitur de creatione caeli et terrae, antequam agatur de generatione, ita in Matthaeo primus agitur de caelo et terra et de illis qui sunt caeli id est boni, et de illis qui sunt terrae id est mali, antequam perveniatur ad generationem Christi. Et quia Moyses vidit in Spiritu Christum esse descensurum de generatione Abrahae, ideo magis inmoratur in generatione Abrahae quam in alia.
Or the five books of Moses are called “pentateuchus” and this is said from “penta,” which is “five,” and “teucus,” which is “volume.” The first book is called Genesis after a Greek word, since it treats about the begetting of the Old Adam. In the first book of the New Testament, namely, in Matthew's Gospel, we find treated the begetting of the New Adam. Moreover, just as in the first book of the Old Testament the creation of heaven and earth is treated, before it treats of the first begetting, so too in Matthew heaven and earth are first treated and also those things that are of heaven, that is, of the good, and of those things that are of earth, that is, of the bad, before it arrives at the begetting of the Christ. And since Moses saw in the Spirit that Christ would be descended from the line of Abraham, therefore the Pentateuch dwells at greater length on the begetting of Abraham than on that of any other person.
Having contrasted the limitations of the Pentateuch as compared with the fullness of truth found in the Gospel, the lecturer here shows the extent of the similarity and parallelism between the two. They constitute two parts of the same story that stretches from the creation of heaven and earth, whose sequel was the begetting of Adam, to the story of redemption through the new Adam, Jesus Christ, recounted in the Gospels.
The lecturer now concludes his carefully crafted introduction of the Pentateuch with a threefold commendation. I translate all three parts at one time, since it is this tripartite encomium that will serve as conclusive evidence that Langton is not the lecturer whose introduction we have been studying:
Item ad commendationem Pentatheuci sufficiat quod Dominus temptationem Diaboli ad nihil avit per auctoritates sumptas de Pentatheuco scilicet de Deuteronomio.
Vel alia est commendatio huius libri de hoc quod dicitur in Spiritu: capite libri, id est bibliotecae, scriptum est de me, quia per terminum supponentem supponitur Filius Dei, per hunc scilicet “principio.” Est enim sensus “in principio,” id est “in Filio creavit Deus,” id est Pater.
Vel alia est commendatio eiusdem, que in principio Genesis vocatur distinctio trium personarum: persona Filii ubi dicitur, “in principio”; persona Patris ubi dicitur, “creavit Deus”; persona SpiritusFootnote 122 ubi dicitur, “Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas.”
Likewise, let it suffice for the commendation of the Pentateuch that our Lord brought the temptation of him by the Devil to nought through authorities taken from the Pentateuch, namely, from Deuteronomy.
Or there is another commendation of the Pentateuch from that which is said in the Spirit: in the first part of the book, that is, of the Bible, it was written about me, since through the suppositing term there is understood through supposition the Son of God, namely, through this suppositing term, “beginning.” For here is the sense of “in the beginning,” that is, “in the Son God created,” that is, the Father.
Or there is another commendation of the Pentateuch, which in the beginning of Genesis is called the distinction of the three Persons of the Trinity: the Person of the Son where it is said, “in the beginning”; the Person of the Father where it is said: “God created”; the Person of the Spirit where it is said: “the spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters.”
This tripartite commendation of the Pentateuch is noteworthy for several reasons. First is our lecturer's wide-ranging command and use of Scripture. He first notes our Lord's use of quotations from Deuteronomy to frustrate the Devil's temptation in the desert. He then quotes the Psalms, connecting the language of Psalm 39:8 to the Bible in general and to the opening verse of Genesis in particular. Third, he explicates those opening verses of Genesis, showing how those verses reveal the Trinity itself.
The second noteworthy feature of this threefold commendation is its rhetorical structure, which anticipates and matches perfectly the substance of the third commendation, in which the Trinity itself is seen in the opening lines of Genesis.
The third noteworthy feature of this tripartite commendation is the lecturer's use of the language of supposition theory together with the language of terminist logic to explain what he calls the “suppositing term” of the opening line of Genesis, namely, “beginning,” from the phrase “in the beginning.” Speaking through the Spirit, the Psalmist, presumably David, utters the line: “in the first part of the book it was written about me.” Taking the reference to “book” to refer to the Bible itself, the lecturer understands “beginning” in the opening words of the Bible in Genesis to refer to Jesus, the Son of God. He does so through the theory of supposition (suppositio), by which medieval thinkers understood a word's actual meaning in a specific context, as distinct from its signification (significatio), its meaning apart from any such context.
The lecturer's use of this technical language of supposition and terminist logic from the logica modernorum is as interesting as it is important from the standpoint of dating these lectures and determining their authorship. For this reason, and because the presence of supposition theory in these lectures is likely to transform our understanding not only of the place of the Bible in medieval theology but also to tear down disciplinary barriers between those medievalists who study logic and medieval philosophy, on the one hand, and the many medievalists who tend to ignore medieval logical developments, on the other hand, a brief historiographical summary of scholarship on supposition theory is warranted here.
The standard and best account of the development of supposition theory and terminist logic during the twelfth century remains that of De Rijk.Footnote 123 His first volume, On the Twelfth-Century Theories of Fallacy, traces the influence of Aristotle's Sophisti elenchi on the development of medieval logic and shows that the doctrine of fallacy was one of two basic foundations of the logic developed by the terministae. In his second volume, The Origin and Early Development of the Theory of Supposition, De Rijk argues that the other foundation, namely, developments by medieval thinkers of the theory of grammar, was even more central to the development of terminist logic.
The grammatical basis of terminist logic has particular bearing on the questions of date and authorship because, building on the seminal studies of Hunt, De Rijk argued for the central importance of Petrus Helias, who is known to have been teaching in Paris around 1142 and who may have lived until 1166, in the development of grammatical theories of language that led to the development of the logica modernorum.Footnote 124 Eminent scholars continue to debate whether De Rijk was correct in identifying twelfth-century grammatical developments as an important source for the origins of supposition theory. In a study published in 1981, Ebbesen argued against twelfth-century grammar as a formative basis for the logical theory of supposition.Footnote 125 Subsequently Kneepkens, in a study published in 1987, added to the case that the roots of logical supposition theory were likely related to grammatical discussions of Priscian's use of the word suppositum.Footnote 126 Quite recently, Ebbesen graciously acknowledged the force of the argument advanced by Kneepkens, while at the same time expressing his own reservations.Footnote 127
Scholars have also looked to twelfth-century theological sources in the ongoing hunt for the origins of supposition theory. Valente has argued repeatedly and forcefully for the school of Gilbert de la Porrée as the likeliest and earliest place for the origins of supposition theory in the twelfth century.Footnote 128 In particular, her research into the origins of supposition theory focuses on the Summa Zwettlensis.Footnote 129 Stephen F. Brown, another preeminent historian of medieval philosophy and theology and an expert on the use and development of supposition theory before and after Ockham, also urged scholars to look to the theological literature of the twelfth century for the origins of supposition theory.Footnote 130 In this regard, it is worth noting that both Ebbesen and Valente think that Langton is a key figure in the early history of supposition theory but date Langton's use of it to the 1180s/1190s.Footnote 131
To this day, therefore, the chronology of the origins of the logical theory of supposition remains a subject of doubt and debate. Valente, resting her chronological argument upon Häring's date for the Summa Zwettlensis, argues for the 1150s.Footnote 132 Ebbesen, however, believes that such an early date rests on a doubtful attribution and that the Summa Zwettlensis dates instead to the 1170s.Footnote 133 Ebbesen's critical review of the dates of all of the logical treatises edited and tentatively dated by De Rijk provides the latest summary and overview of all available research into the chronology of the early development of logical supposition.Footnote 134 His summary is worth quoting in full here owing to its relevance to the present study:
A host of questions concerning the dates of the relevant texts remain unresolved, but this is what I think the available evidence points to at this moment: The main outlines of the story about supposition remain as in 1967, but the dates change. First, the birth of supposition theory took place in the very late twelfth century. The first signs of what was to come appear in the 1170s, but in logic centered around the notion of appellation, while supposition was becoming a key notion in theology. A stage with a fairly developed terminology for types of supposition is not reached till about the 1190s, when also suppositio begins to outmanoeuvre appellatio, though this was to be a slow process. The majority of our early texts that teach or employ supposition, English and continental alike, were composed in the thirteenth century.Footnote 135
It is noteworthy that Ebbesen here also speculates about the use of supposition theory in theological texts.
The theological texts quoted above in this study and others still to be quoted below show that the unnamed lecturer referred to in Langton's lectures on the Bible and his knowledge of supposition theory provide evidence crucial to resolving these longstanding and ongoing debates about the origins and dates of this logical development so central to the most important developments in medieval philosophy and theology. I shall take up the thread of this discussion once again, below in Part Three, when I consider in more detail the related questions of the authorship and date of these lectures. For now it suffices to note that the discussion of supposition theory and terminist logic in the preface to these lectures is of great importance not only in dating these lectures and determining their author but also in providing one of the earliest known examples of the use of terminist logic in twelfth-century theology.
Having set forth the prefatory materials that precede the lectures on Genesis in Cambridge manuscript, Corpus Christi 55, it is time to turn our attention to Langton's own lectures and prologue built upon that of his predecessor. In this case, however, rather than proceeding from start to finish, we shall start from the close of those prefatory lectures, since this will enable us to see clearly that Langton did not give the lectures recorded in Corpus Christi 55.
B. Comparison of Langton's Lectures with Those of His Predecessor on These Prefatory Materials
In the manucripts thus far known to me, besides the prologue just presented from Corpus Christi 55, which begins Tabernaculum Moysi, there are six or seven different and later prologues, all attributed to Langton but not all by Langton. All of those by Langton presuppose and are founded upon the Corpus Christi prologue that begins Tabernaculum Moysi: two branches of another version of Tabernaculum Moysi, both by Langton and both modeled explicitly upon the version in Corpus Christi 55; one version of Volavit ad me, also by Langton, which is yet another variation on the same theme but later and much expanded; one version of In Exodo legitur, also related to the Tabernaculum Moysi found in Corpus Christi 55 but in a different way — the author of this prologue may be either Langton or his authoritative predecessor — and two or three versions of Frater Ambrosius.Footnote 136
In this study, the aim of which is to show only that Langton founded his own lectures on the Bible on those of an illustrious predecessor, I shall restrict myself to comparing the prologue of Langton that begins Tabernaculum Moysi with that of his predecessor, since this will suffice to accomplish that aim. A separate study, which will sort out the relationship between all of Langton's prologues and also between his prologues and those of his predecessor, will follow.
i. Langton and his Predecessor: Tabernaculum Moysi
I shall begin with a brief remark about the two branches of the Langton version of Tabernaculum Moysi, which is constructed upon the Tabernaculum Moysi, the lectures on his predecessor, found in Corpus Christi 55. These two branches are themselves collatable with each other. The Langton version is found in the following six manuscripts that I have examined: Arras BM, 68, Cambridge Trinity College, B. 3. 7, Charleville BM, 210, Paris, BNF, lat. 355, Oxford, Trinity College Lat. 65, and Oxford, Lincoln College Lat. 15.Footnote 137 In four of these manuscripts, namely, Arras 68, Charleville 210, Oxford, Lincoln College Lat. 15, and Paris, BNF, lat. 355, lectures exclusively devoted to the moral sense of Scripture follow immediately after the prologue, Tabernaculum Moysi, transcribed below.
The remaining two manuscripts, Cambridge B. 3. 7 and Oxford, Trinity College Lat. 65, are also obviously related to each other: they share most of the same variants. Both are evidently copies and were either copied from the same model or from each other.Footnote 138 In contrast to the format of the manuscripts just named, in which the prologue precedes directly lectures on the moral sense on Genesis, the prologue in these two manuscripts precedes copious lectures on Frater Ambrosius and Desiderii mei.
One obvious difference between the two branches is the following text not found in the latter two manuscripts:
Hystoria est quae narrat rem prout gesta est. Allegoria est quae per unum factum aliud figurat. Tropologia est quae quid faciendum sit ostendit. Anagoge refertur ad supernam civitatem. Ista quattuor inveniuntur in hoc nomine Ierusalem: historice est civitas illa materialis; allegorice Ecclesia militans; tropologice anima fidelis; anagogice Ecclesia triumphans.
This insert, doubtless a note added subsequently to a copy of the original lecture, is a cogent disquisition on the four senses of Scripture, which we find in the middle of an existing explication of those same four senses. We can be sure that it is a later addition to the prologue, since there is no discernible basis for supposing a copyist's mistake in omitting it. The supposition of an intentional addition, combined with the fact that this branch of Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi precedes lectures on Frater Ambrosius and Desiderii mei, which themselves precede lectures on Scripture that are evidently constructed on those found in Corpus Christi 55, inclines me to consider this a separate branch of Langton's version of Tabernaculum Moysi, consciously adapted to different circumstances. But whatever the historical truth of the origins, all the manuscripts preserve the same language showing Langton's reliance on the Tabernaculum Moysi contained in Corpus Christi 55.
To make that abundantly clear, I juxtapose here the closing section of Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi with that found in Corpus Christi 55, re-presented here for purposes of convenience:
End of Tabernaculum Moysi in Corpus Christi 55:
Item ad commendationem Pentatheuci sufficiat quod Dominus temptationem Diaboli ad nihil avit per auctoritates sumptas de Pentatheuco scilicet de Deuteronomio.
Vel alia est commendatio huius libri de hoc quod dicitur in Spiritu: capite libri, id est bibliotecae, scriptum est de me, quia per terminum supponentem supponitur Filius Dei, per hunc scilicet “principio.” Est enim sensus “in principio,” id est “in Filio creavit Deus,” id est Pater.
Vel alia est commendatio eiusdem, que in principio Genesis vocatur distinctio trium personarum: persona Filii ubi dicitur, “in principio”; persona Patris ubi dicitur, “creavit Deus”; persona SpiritusFootnote 139 ubi dicitur, “Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas.”
Likewise, let it suffice for the commendation of the Pentateuch that our Lord brought the temptation of him by the Devil to nought through authorities taken from the Pentateuch, namely, from Deuteronomy.
Or there is another commendation of the Pentateuch from that which is said in the Spirit: in the first part (literally, “in the head”) of the book, that is, of the Bible, it was written about me, since through the suppositing term there is understood through supposition the Son of God, namely, through this suppositing term, “beginning.” For here is the sense of “in the beginning,” that is, “in the Son created God,” that is, the Father.
Or there is another commendation of the Pentateuch, which in the beginning of Genesis is called the distinction of the three Persons of the Trinity: the Person of the Son where it is said, “in the beginning”; the Person of the Father where it is said: “God created”; the Person of the Spirit where it is said: “the spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters.”
End of Tabernaculum Moysi as found in Arras 68, Cambridge B 3 7, Charleville 210, Paris, BNF, lat. 355, and Oxford, Trinity College Lat. 65:
Item ad commendationem huius libri facit quod Dominus confundit Diabolum iaculis Pentateuci, quando temptavit eum. Sumpsit enim tres auctoritates de Deuteronomio et eum confutavit.
Item facit ad commendationem huius libri quod dicitur: in capite libri scriptum est de me. Dicit Christus in psalmo in capite libri scilicet bibliotecae, quia ibi dicitur in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Et haec dictio “principio” supponit pro Filio.
Item facit ad eius commendationem quod per hoc quod dicitur “in principio” huius libri manifeste exprimitur trinitas personarum: in principio creavit Deus. Ille terminus “principio” supponit pro Filio, ille terminus “Deus” pro Patre; ubi dicitur “et spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas” Spiritus Sanctus supponitur.
Likewise for the commendation of this book is the fact that our Lord confounded the Devil with the darts of the Pentateuch, when the Devil tempted him. For our Lord took up three authorities from Deuteronomy and refuted him conclusively.
Likewise for the commendation of this book there is what is said: in the first part (literally “in the head”) of this book it was written about me. Christ says in the psalm (Ps. 39:8): in the first part of this book, namely, of the Bible, since there it is said: in the beginning God created heaven and earth. And this word “beginning” supposits for the Son.
Likewise is the fact for the commendation of this book that, through that which is said “in the beginning” of this book, there is expressed manifestly the Trinity of persons: in the beginning God created. That term “beginning” supposits for the Son; that term “God” for the Father; where it is said “and the Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters” the Holy Spirit is supposited.
Comparison of these two endings from two different Tabernaculum Moysi prologues makes plain a number of striking facts. First and most strikingly, in Langton's version of the prologue, Tabernaculum Moysi, Langton and his students rely on the author of the earlier prologue of the same title without mentioning his name. There is evidently no need: everyone knows who he is. Langton and his students, therefore, take for granted the authority of the person whose lectures are the basis for Langton's. These lectures are authoritative — Langton would not take them as the basis for his own lectures if their authority were not taken for granted — and their author is so well known that he need not be identified here at the beginning of the lectures. Combined with the fact that Langton routinely cites his authorities, including Peter Comestor, the Master of the Histories, the title Langton frequently uses to refer to his master, this means that the author of these earlier lectures has surpassing authority. He is, whoever he is, the authority par excellence.
The second fact to note is that both authors, Langton's authoritative predecessor and Langton himself, are lecturing. The language of the illustrious master whose lectures are preserved in Corpus Christi 55 is unmistakably oral. This can be glimpsed even from this brief excerpt taken from the end of the prologue, in which our lecturer's phraseology (“let it suffice”) and rhythym (“Vel alia est commendatio,” “Vel alia est commendatio”) are those of a speaker rather than a writer. The same is true of Langton, whose repetitive speech patterns are those of someone lecturing: “Item facit ad commendationem,” repeated three times. I shall adduce more and even decisive evidence below, but for now it is important to remember the oral context for all of this transmission of learning that was established above. We are in a world of lecturers, whose own lectures are passed down and adopted as the basis for those of successive masters.
The third fact, by now obvious, is the dependence of the version or versions found in the five manuscripts listed above on that found in Corpus Christi 55. This dependence is impossible to miss. The original lecturer speaks on his own authority: “let it suffice for the commendation of the Pentateuch”; “there is another commendation of the Pentateuch,” etc. Langton, by contrast, relies on his predecessor's authority and reports what the original lecturer said: “he commends.” Moreover, he follows closely his authority's outline, repeating the same points in the same order. Langton does no more than restate the three points made by our authoritative lecturer. No one who reads the two sections juxtaposed above could miss either the clear dependence of the one upon the other or the difference in authorship. We shall see below, when authorship and date are considered, that Langton also follows closely his predecessor's lectures. For now, however, it suffices to note the explicit and striking dependence of Langton and his students on the authority whose lectures they are using. We are in a “school,” not in the sense of adherence to a doctrine, but rather in the sense of a tradition of teaching passed on from one master to another.Footnote 140
Somehow, Lacombe and Smalley both missed these obvious yet crucial differences between the Tabernaculum Moysi found in Corpus Christi 55 and the version or versions of the prologue headed Tabernaculum Moysi found in the other manuscripts listed by and cited by them. It is clear that if either scholar read these manuscripts, he or she did so superficially, yet Smalley's claims and conclusions about these very materials were not only determinate but false. We can already be sure that the assumption of Dahan and so many scholars that Smalley's manuscript research was so sound as to preclude subsequent investigation is no longer tenable. Smalley's manuscript research as such can no longer be the assumed point of departure for scholars interested in the Bible in the Middle Ages; it is evident that it needs to be checked carefully.
What we learn here about the dependence of Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi on that of his predecessor from the unmistakable language of the end of these two prologues is confirmed by a comparison of the rest of the two prologues: Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi is founded explicitly upon the Tabernaculum Moysi of the author whose lectures he and his students took as the basis for his own. So as to make comparison easier, I juxtapose the individual parts of each prologue that are related one to another. I highlight in bold what Langton added, and I underline key changes in wording. Such a comparison leaves no doubt that Langton's prologue was consciously modeled after that of his illustrious predecessor; indeed, we see that he followed the same order:
Corpus Christi 55:Footnote 141
Tabernaculum Moysi coopertum erat quinque cortinis et quinque cortinis. Tabernaculum Moysi est militans Ecclesia. Quinque cortinae sunt quinque libri Moysi, qui sunt nobis ad ornatum et ad refrigerium contra aestum vitiorum et ad munimentumFootnote 142 contra intemperiem aërium tempestatum.
Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi:
Tabernaculum Moysi coopertum erat quinque cortinis et quinque cortinis, quae erant tabernaculo ad refrigerium contra aestum solis et ad ornatum et ad defensionem contra aëris intemperiem. Tabernaculum istud est militans Ecclesia. Quinque cortinae sunt quinque libri Moysi litteraliter intellecti, qui sunt Ecclesiae ad refrigerium contra incentiva vitiorum et ad ornatum virtutum et ad defensionem contra intemperiem malignorum spirituum.
Langton here substitutes “defensionem” and makes several other changes in wording as well. He also adds several phrases to his predecessor's text. Nonetheless, it is obvious that he and his students are starting with that predecessor's lectures — we know from copying errors that Langton and his students have a copy in front of them — as a base text for Langton's own lectures. There can be no question of an original book that is divided. Instead, we have a series of lectures, one set built on top of another. The process, which is one of accretion, is quintessentially scholastic.
Corpus Christi 55:
Unde non vacat quod Dominus iussit cortinas esse distinctas quattuor coloribus: bisso retorta, iacincto, purpura, cocco bis tincto. Quattuor colores figurant quattuor modos legendi: istoricum; allegoricum; anagogicum; tropologicum. Istoria figuratur per bissum retortam et bene dicit “retortam,” ut fortis sit. Istoria enim fundamentum est, et ideo bene figuratur per bissum retortam. Allegoria figuratur per iacinctum, tropologia per purpuram, per coccum bis tinctum anagoge, et bene dicit “bis tinctum,” quia cum coccus semel tingitur in via et iterum tingitur in patria.
Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi:
Non vacat etiam quod Dominus iussit cortinas fieri ex quattuor pretiosis coloribus scilicet ex bisso retorta, hyacintho, purpura, et cocco bis tincto, quae figurant quattuor modos legendi Sacram Scripturam: hystorice; allegorice; tropologice; anagogice. [Hystoria est quae narrat rem prout gesta est. Allegoria est quae per unum factum aliud figurat. Tropologia est quae quid faciendum sit ostendit. Anagoge refertur ad supernam civitatem. Ista quattuor inveniuntur in hoc nomine Ierusalem: historice est civitas illa materialis; allegorice Ecclesia militans; tropologice anima fidelis; anagogice Ecclesia triumphans.] Per bissum retortam propter fili fortitudinem designatur hystoria, quae firma debet esse et fortis et etiam fundamentum allegoriae, sed illi qui transeunt minus sufficienter exponentes litteram non habent bissum retortam, immo filum simplex in cortina tabernaculi id est Ecclesiae. Per hyacinthum designatur allegoria. Hyacinthus enim aërii coloris est. Per purpuram designatur tropologia, quae invitat nos ad honestam conversationem. Purpura enim flammeum habet colorem. Per coccum bis tinctum significatur anagoge, et significat caritatem quae in praesenti tingitur et in futuro.
The story is the same for this next portion of the two prologues. Langton, using the lectures of his predecessor as the foundation for his own, repeats to some extent those lectures but adds to and expands them. The single biggest expansion is the text on the four senses of Scripture (bracketed to show its status as a note added to the text), which must have been added by Langton (or another master) after his initial lectures and which is found in the tradition prefixed to one branch of the tradition preserving his lectures on all of the senses of Sacred Scripture.
There are, however, other fascinating additions to the previous master's lectures that were found in Langton's original lectures, notably his warning that “those who cross over <from one sense to another> expositing the literal sense less sufficiently have not the wrapped cotton linen, but rather a simple thread in the curtain of the tent, that is, of the Church.” Langton also connects tropology to the traditional Christian theme of honestam conversationem or conversion to a life modeled after Christ. And he modifies slightly his predecessor's theme, presented in the final sentence of the excerpt from Corpus Christi 55, of the contrast between the road of this life and the fatherland of the next, making explicit reference to the charity that must guide the former and constitute the latter. But the most important phenomenon to note is that Langton is expanding on the lectures of his predecessor, even as he explicates them. We have here a master consciously elaborating the teaching of another master.
Corpus Christi 55:
Item non vacat quod legitur cortinas factas esse opere plumario id est acu cuius una extremitas perforata est, alia vero acuta. Per quam figurantur, dico, adventus Christi: primus in quo erat lancea perforatus. Unde: videbunt in quem transfixerunt. Et secundus in quo punget et puniet. Omnia ergo que fiunt in sancta Ecclesia debent fieri opere plumario. Debemus enim habere unum oculum ad primum aduentum ad minuendum timorem, <et alterum oculum ad secundum aduentum ad incitandum timorem>, et ita semper simus inter duas molas, et videamus, ne altera <altera> impingeretur.
Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi:
Non vacat etiam quod cortinae factae erant opere plumario id est acuali. Pluma enim dicitur acus. Acus enim significat Christum et opera omnia nostra, et omnem scientiam nostram debemus referre ad Christum. Bene autem per acum significatur Christus. Acus enim duas habet extremitates: unam perforatam, aliam pungentem. Et Christus in primo adventu perforatus fuit in pedibus manibus et latere. In secundo autem punget malos, quando dicet: ite maledicti etc. Prima ergo pars acus incitat spem, secunda timorem. Et ista duo necessaria sunt, ut scilicet spes sit cum timore. Et ita ista acu omnia vestimenta nostra debemus consuere, quia in omni operatione nostra spem et timorem habere debemus.
The teachings in these prologues are fascinating. The image of the needle serves beautifully to reference Christ, his passion and death, and his second coming. Both masters evidently have Christology at the center of their introductions to Scripture and the Bible. But I must here pass over the teaching and images presented, since their substance would detract from my immediate purpose, which is to show that Langton is following his predecessor's outline faithfully in lecturing and in explicating Tabernaculum Moysi.
Several details, however, are important to point out. First, we see in this excerpt from Corpus Christi 55 conclusive proof that he is lecturing; the insertion of “dico” puts this beyond doubt. Second, even though Langton is tracking closely his predecessor's language and explication, he expands it significantly, adding phrases and changing others. He makes the same points but much more expansively.
The significance of this for Smalley's theory cannot be overstated. Her hypothesis of a book authored by Langton that was subsequently divided by unknown successors paints a picture of Langton's corpus as evolving from large to small. The truth, as we see clearly from this juxtaposition of the lectures of Langton's predecessor and of Langton himself, is the opposite. The lectures upon which Langton founds his own are at least in these passages far more concise. His predecessor lectures in a pithy style; he makes his points and develops his argument in a succinct fashion.
By contrast Langton, incorporating those lectures, expands and develops them considerably in his own way. The styles of the two masters are manifestly diverse. We see this especially since they are explicating the same points. The very fact of one set of lectures constructed on another set indicates accretion and enlargement in size of the corpus. Add to this Langton's more expansive style, and we are faced with a phenomenon that is precisely the opposite of what Smalley proposed.
Corpus Christi 55:
Vel alia quinque cortinae sunt quinque libri Moysi aliter intellecti. Duplex enim est intellectus: literalis et spiritualis. Cortinae autem iungebantur per ansulas et circulos. Per “ansulas” intelliguntur promissa Veteris Testamenti; per “circulos” Novi Testamenti. Et nota quod quinquaginta erant ansulae, per quod nobis datur intelligi quod omnia quae facimus debemus referre ad remissionem in praesenti et ad quietem in futuro.
Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi:
Item aliae quinque cortinae eidem sunt quinque libri Moysi alio modo intellecti scilicet spiritualiter. Coniunctae autem erant istae cortinae cum aliis per ansulas et circulos, quia per promissiones Veteris Testamenti et per promissiones Novi Testamenti coniungitur spiritualis intelligentia litterali. Notandum autem quod ibi erant quinquaginta ansulae, quia omnia ista debemus ad quietem futuram referre. Quinquaginta enim significant remissionem.
Langton here follows his predecessor's outline and language very closely, expanding very little but mainly changing only the phraseology. He makes the exact same points. In the next section of the prologue, however, Langton expands his predecessor considerably, inserting what seems to be a miniature sermon on preaching into the middle of the former's outline.
Corpus Christi 55:
Isti quinque libri significati sunt in Evangelio per quinque panes hordeaceos. Ordeum enim quinque habet proprietates: tenacis est paleae, humilis culini, cibus est iumentorum, aristam habet pungentem, et frangibilem. Quinque modo libri Moysi humilis culini, quia literaliter promittunt temporalia, et ita serpunt iuxta terram. Tenacis sunt paleae, quia spiritualis intellectus vix separatur a literali, sed ex quo separatur dulcis, sicut medulla hordei. Cibi sunt iumentorum id est rudium. Vel pungentes erant, quia lex inferebat mortem, ut ait Apostolus. Item frangibilis erat lex, quia parum durans superveniente nova.
Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi:
Item isti etiam quinque libri significati sunt per quinque panes hordeaceos quibus Dominus pavit quinque milia hominum, ut habemus in Evangelio. Ibi enim dicitur quod, cum Iesus vidit multitudinem magnam venire ad se, dixit ad Philippum: unde ememus panes, ut manducent hi. Et respondit Philippus: ducentorum denariorum panes non sufficiunt etc. Dixit autem Andreas Domino: Est puer unus hic qui habet quinque panes hordeaceos et duos pisces. Et Dominus ad illos: facite homines discumbere etc. Et repleverunt de fragmentis duodecim cophinos. Moraliter sic Philippus interpretatur os lampadis. Et gerit typum praedicatorum. Quando ergo praedicator videt homines esurientes fame verbi Dei et cogitat in animo — unde habebo scientiam qua possim illos reficere — tunc dicit ei Dominus in corde: unde ememus panes, ut manducent hi? Et per hoc quod Dominus communicat se ei, insinuat quod ipse est cooperator noster in operibus bonis, et debet respondere praedicator: ducentorum denariorum panes non sufficient. Per centum significatur perfectio, et notatur ibi duplex perfectio quasi diceret nec perfectio scientiae sive doctrinae, nec etiam perfectio operis sufficit pascere, sed dicit Andreas: est puer unus hic etc. Simili modo dicat praedicator et hoc, si sit Andreas id est virilis in opere et frater Simonis scilicet Christo obediens: est puer unus hic, quasi parvam et minus sufficientem habens doctrinam. Si velit loqui de aliqua auctoritate quinque librorum Moysi, dicat: est puer unus hic habens unum panem hordeaceum. Si de psalmis et prophetis, dicat: est puer unus hic habens unum piscem. Et si ita faciet, Dominus in tantum multiplicabit praedicationem suam quod sufficiet illis quibus praedicat. Et etiam in tantum de residuo habebit quod poterit praedicare etiam immundissimam vitam habentibus, et hoc est replere duodecim cophinos de fragmentis. Sed notandum quod bene dicit, est puer unus hic, quia praedicator mundam et etiam angelicam vitam ducere debet. Unde legitur in Apocalypsi quod Iohannes accepit librum de manu angeli, quia angelicam vitam debet habere a quo subditi accipiunt doctrinam. Bene autem per panes hordeaceos significantur libri Moysi. Hordeum enim est culini humilis et lex quodammodo repebat circa terram, quia tantum temporalia promittebat.
Item hordeum est cibus iumentorum, ita et lex est cibus Iudaeorum, quia rudes erant in lege.
Item hordeum est tenacis paleae. Vix enim elicitur farina a palea, sed cum fuerit separata dulcissima est. Eodem modo spiritualis intelligentia vix elicitur a cortice litterae, sed cum fuerit elicita dulcissima est.
Item hordeum habet aristam pungentem, et ita lex pungebat. Graves enim erant manus Moysi. Ibi enim dicitur oculum pro oculo etc. et huiusmodi.
Apart from the insertion of the extended sermon-like disquisition on preaching, Langton again follows his predecessor's outline very closely, making only small changes. Of the five properties of barley named in the original — it has a rough shell, it is found in humble kitchens, it serves as the food of beasts, it has a stinging endpoint, and it is crushable — Langton repeats all but the last. Langton restates the opening point that the five books of Moses are well signified by the five barley loaves, presumably to make sure that his students follow that original outline.
The principal difference between the two texts is the extended disquisition on preaching, a brilliant and systematic exposition of the miracle of the loaves and fishes that connects each of the elements not only to the duties of a preacher but also to the parts of the Bible upon which he must preach. Although we cannot dwell on its substance here, Langton's exposition has many elements that will surely be of interest to historians and theologians alike.
Corpus Christi 55:
Vel quinque libri Moysi dicuntur pentatheuchus, et dicitur a “penta,” quod est quinque, et “teucus,” quod est volumen. Primus dicitur Genesis graeco vocabulo, quia agit de generatione veteris Adae. In primo libro Novi Testamenti scilicet in Matthaeo agitur de generatione novi Adae. Ita in primo libro Veteris Testamenti agitur de creatione caeli et terrae, antequam agatur de generatione, ita in Matthaeo primus agitur de caelo et terra et de illis qui sunt caeli id est boni, et de illis qui sunt terrae id est mali, antequam perveniatur ad generationem Christi. Et quia Moyses vidit in Spiritu Christum esse descensurum de generatione Abrahae, ideo magis inmoratur in generatione Abrahe quam in alia.
Langton's Tabernaculum Moysi:
Item isti quinque libri Moysi appellantur pentateuchus a “penta,” quod est quinque, et “teucos” sive “teuca,” quod est volumen quasi continens in se quinque volumina. Notandum autem quod liber iste dicitur Genesis, et hoc secundum Graecos. Secundum enim Hebraeos dicitur bresith. Hebraei enim vocant libros suos a principio librorum. Bresith enim idem est quod in principio. Et notandum quod sicut in hoc libro agitur de generatione veteris Adae, ita in Matthaeo, qui est liber primus Novi Testamenti, agitur de generatione novi Adae id est Christi. Et sicut hic praemittitur de generatione caeli et terrae, antequam agatur de generatione Adae, eodem modo in Matthaeo praemittitur de generatione caeli id est bonorum et terrae id est malorum, antequam agatur de generatione novi Adae.
In this, the penultimate part of his prologue, Langton again follows closely the exposition of his predecessor in the prior Tabernaculum Moysi prologue. He expands his predecessor's ideas, filling them out, and changes language and phraseology, but the dependence of the latter prologue upon the former is unmistakable. Langton uses the whole of the prior prologue in his own lecture: he shows himself to be a faithful disciple to the unnamed master.
I have already quoted the final portions of the lectures on Tabernaculum Moysi, showing Langton's repetition and endorsement of his predecessor's tripartite commendation of the Pentateuch. From beginning to end, therefore, we find in these prologue-lectures on the text beginning Tabernaculum Moysi a one-to-one correspondence between those of Langton's predecessor and the two branches of Langton's own lectures as preserved in the tradition known to me. Langton took and used the lectures on Tabernaculum Moysi of the illustrious but unnamed master as the basis of his own lectures on the same theme.
Langton and his students, therefore, had copies of that master's lectures, to which he referred as he proceeded to lecture on those lectures, directing his students to the remarks and insights of his predecessor.Footnote 143 Everyone in the lecture hall knew whose lectures were being lectured upon by Langton: his predecessor was so illustrious that he needed no identification. We see clearly, therefore, an oral tradition that is taken for granted by all. It was in other words well established by the time that Langton delivered his own lectures.
Dahan concedes legitimacy to Smalley's tripartite typology (full and integrated, subsequently divided into literal and moral) as applied to the historical books of the Old Testament but questions its legitimacy with respect to others.Footnote 144 The evidence just presented, however, suggests that Smalley was asking the wrong questions about the entirety of Langton's Old Testament biblical corpus. It should be clear already, even from such evidence, that Smalley's theory about a single author whose work was subsequently divided is no longer sufficient. There may yet prove to be division — we will not know the whole picture until everything is edited — but the underlying reality is the typically scholastic story of accretion. The fact is that we have a scholastic context very much akin to that in which the Historia scholastica developed: a succession of masters, each lecturing on common texts, copies of which were diffused and used throughout the schools. Those copies could have taken and doubtless did take many forms, ranging from expansive explications such as those we have seen here to reductions focused on explications of individual senses of the Bible.
The point to be emphasized here is that Smalley, who did not realize that she was looking at manuscripts that recorded a living and rapidly developing magisterial oral tradition and that encapsulated the teaching of multiple masters, posited a theory far too simplistic to account for the complexities of the underlying reality. With that oral, quintessentially scholastic context firmly in mind and with the knowledge that we have (at least) two authors and sets of lectures, copies of which are defective in places, we can now turn our attention to the question of the identity of our original lecturer.
Part Three: Peter Lombard's Biblical Lectures
the Cornerstone of the School of Paris
If I have intentionally postponed (in Parts I and II) naming with certainty the master whose lectures Langton took as the foundation for his own, it is because I wanted to let the evidence for identifying that master speak for itself. Thus far, the evidence presented has shown only that Langton and his students were using the lectures of an unnamed predecessor for his own lectures. To be sure, the fact that Langton adopted this predecessor's lectures as the basis for his own together with the fact that he and his students took for granted the identity of that predecessor bespeaks authority and prestige. Whoever he was, Langton's predecessor was a master of considerable reputation.
For some time, I myself debated with colleagues the question of the identity of Langton's predecessor, since it seemed to me that the evidence suggested two principal candidates: Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor. On the one hand, reading through the lectures preserved in Corpus Christi 55 persuaded me that they also served as a crucial and proximate source for the Historia scholastica, which would mean that they predated the History.Footnote 145 On the other hand, the related fact that the list of books lectured upon in Corpus Christi 55 so closely mirrors the order in which Comestor treats those same books in the History seemed sufficient justification to consider seriously the possibility that Comestor, Langton's acknowledged master, had lectured on those same Old Testament books before the History itself came into existence.
But the evidence now to be presented settles the issue: there can no longer be any doubt that Langton and his students used, to an extent yet to be determined, the lectures on the Bible of Peter Lombard. I present here decisive proof for a number of books (Genesis, Judith, Tobit). But the same evidence is everywhere to be found, since Langton refers continually to the teachings of the master who is none other than Peter Lombard. Moreover, Comestor, who is not the principal object of this study, also appears to have founded his Historia scholastica on the Lombard's lectures. To gather all of that evidence together is well beyond the scope of this study and those soon to follow. The fact is that we shall have to edit all of the lectures contained in these many manuscripts to ascertain the full extent to which the Lombard's lectures on the Bible served as the foundation for those of his successors in the schools of Paris.Footnote 146 But the evidence here presented suffices to identify the master upon whose biblical lectures Langton founded his own. Like Comestor, Langton had and used the lectures of Peter Lombard.Footnote 147
This is not to say that all questions have been answered about the biblical lectures of Peter Lombard in those of Stephen Langton: far from it. The lectures in the manuscripts used by Lacombe and Smalley and already available to us, especially those at the center of the puzzle, the Cambridge manuscripts, Corpus Christi 55 and Peterhouse 112/119, Durham manuscript, A. I. 7, and Oxford manuscript, Trinity lat. 65, pose a number of thorny questions that will only be answered by comprehensive editing.Footnote 148 It would, therefore, be premature to say anything too determinate about the relationships between these lectures on different Old Testament books without first gathering all available evidence. That said, there is a common underlying story: these manuscripts preserve only lectures, and they preserve lectures, whether in whole or in part, by more than one master.Footnote 149 The same lectures, at least for certain books, form the basis for and therefore predate Comestor's Historia scholastica.Footnote 150 The story is unquestionably one of the accretion of multiple layers of lectures, starting in the 1150s and continuing to 1200.
We have already seen that our unnamed lecturer was a master so prestigious that Langton felt no need to identify him to his students. Everyone knew his name. But we do have reliable evidence for identifying Peter Lombard as our unnamed lecturer.
A. Authorship
The evidence presented in this subsection is twofold: that provided by the Lombard himself and that provided by Langton. We find the former hidden as it were in plain view in Langton's lectures on Frater Ambrosius. We find the latter in Langton's lectures on Genesis and Tobit. As I show in subsection ii, Smalley knew of this latter evidence but missed its significance.
There are of course many ways to prove authorship, ranging from sources used to attributions in manuscripts, but the gold standard is internal evidence and at the top of that same gold standard is self-identification that can be trusted.Footnote 151 Since we have that here, we shall let Peter Lombard speak for himself.
i. Peter Lombard's Identification of Himself
The Lombard's remarks occur in the middle of his lectures on Frater Ambrosius, which are preserved to a great extent unchanged as the foundation for Langton's lectures on the same.Footnote 152 To make those remarks more intelligible, it would be helpful to have the section of Frater Ambrosius upon which he is lecturing at hand:
Nisi forte rusticum Petrum, rusticum dicimus et Iohannem, quorum uterque dicere poterat: etsi inperitus sermone, non tamen scientia. Iohannes rusticus, piscator, indoctus? Et unde illa, obsecro: in principio erat uerbum, et uerbum erat apud deum, et deus erat uerbum? λόγος Graece multa significat — nam et uerbum est et ratio et supputatio et causa uniuscuiusque rei — per quae sunt singula, quae subsistunt; quae uniuersa recte intellegimus. Hoc doctus Plato nescivit, hoc Demosthenes eloquens ignoravit. Perdam, inquit, sapientiam sapientium et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo.Footnote 153
Unless perhaps we call Peter a country bumpkin and John too, both of whom were able to say: “even if unskilled in speech, not however knowledge.” John a country bumpkin, a fisherman, unlearned? And whence these words, I ask: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word? “Logos” in Greek means many things — for it means not only “word” but also “account” and “computation” and “the cause of each and every thing” — through which are those individual things that exist. All of these meanings we rightly understand <about the Word>. This the learned Plato did not know, about this eloquent Demosthenes was ignorant. I shall destroy, he says, the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I shall condemn as evil.
The key fact for us to note from this passage is Jerome's discussion of John and the beginning of his Gospel, which proves to be the centerpiece of the discussion of the passage both in the Lombard's lecture on it and in Langton's.
We find the Lombard's glossing of this text preserved in Paris MS, BNF, lat. 14415, at folio 2ra in the midst of lectures on Frater Ambrosius at Paris MS, BNF, lat. 14415, at Paris MS, BNF, lat. 14435, and at British Library MS, Royal 2 E xii:
HOC DOCTUS PLATO NESCIVIT quod dixiFootnote 154 de Johanne contraFootnote 155 super Epistolam ad Colossiensem fere in principio super <illud> ut impleam verbum Dei: mysterium quod fuit absconditum a saeculis et generationibus. Dicit Augustinus quod in quodam codice Platonis a Graeco in Latinum translato invenit ipse in principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud Deum. Responsum: dicimus quod illud forte ut somniando dixit. Impossibile enim fuit quod absque spirituali revelatione habuerit distinctionem Personarum. Perdam Inquit quasi dico quod Plato nescivit.Footnote 156
THIS THE LEARNED PLATO DID NOT KNOW, which I said about John as a “contra” in the Letter to the Colossians, <which may be found> almost in the beginning of my remarks about that passage: that I may fulfill the word of God: the mystery that was hidden from the beginning of time and for all generations. Augustine says that in a certain manuscript of Plato translated from Greek into Latin he himself found: in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. Response: we say that he said this perhaps as he was dreaming. For it was impossible that <Plato> apart from a spiritual revelation could have grasped the distinction of the divine persons. I SHALL DESTROY HE SAYS as if, I say that Plato did not know.
This passage is at once fascinating and crucial, because the lecturer speaks consistently in the first person. He refers to a “contra” that he spoke in his own work on Paul's Epistle to the Colossians; he even provides his student hearers with the location of the Contrarium: just around the beginning of his remarks on the Pauline text that begins, “that I may fulfill the word of God.”
Moreover, our lecturer identifies with precision what he is opposing, in this case Augustine's discussion of the opening lines of John's Gospel in the Confessions (book 7, chapter 9), where Augustine famously recounts that he found in the books of the Platonists persuasive evidence that they knew that “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God” but that he found no evidence that the philosophers knew of the Incarnation.
Finally, our lecturer identifies with precision the substance of his “Contrary”: Augustine had to have been dreaming when he said this, for knowledge of the triune God would have been an impossibility for the philosophers apart from a spiritual revelation. The “Contrary,” therefore, focuses on whether or not the philosophers had any knowledge of the Trinity.
We find confirmation that our speaker is in fact Peter Lombard from two sources. The first is the text to which he refers his students, namely, the Lombard's Gloss on Colossians, the text of which I present here in relevant part from two different manuscripts: Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine 268, beginning at folio 140va, and Paris MS, BNF, lat. 650, beginning at folio 213vb:Footnote 157
QUAE DATA EST MIHI IN VOBIS unum est enim a meis discipulis praedicatum est vobis quantum si a me ipso ministrum evangelii inter gentes a Deo per Christum factum se esse dicit. Ad quid autem ostendit, scilicet ut mysterium a Deo ceptum per idoneum servum impleatur, quod ignotum a saeculis sint scilicet mysterium nativitatis ex Deo et nativitatis ex Maria et salvationis gentium et totius operis Christi. Unde subdit UT IMPLEAM quasi data est mihi dispensatio ad hoc, UT IMPLEAM id est impletum ostendam. VERBUM id est dispositionem vel ordinationem DEI id est quod Deus praeordinavit de vobis gentibus vos scilicet per Christi incarnationem salvari. Hoc dicit ne videatur salus non esse promissa gentibus, quia Verbum est mysterium id est occultum, quia si notum erat in prinicipio erat verbum nusquam erat lectum verbum caro factum est etc. quae ad sacramentum incarnationis pertinent. Unde: abscondisti haec a sapientibus et revelasti ea parvulis.Footnote 158 “Quosdam enim Platonicorum libros ex Graeca lingua in Latinam versos vidi et ibi legi non quidem his verbis sed hoc quidem omnino multis et multiplicibus suaderi rationibus quod in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum. Sed quod verbum caro factum est non legi. Indagavi quippe in libris varie dictum esse quia Filius sit in forma Patris sed quod se exinanivit non habetur in illis.”Footnote 159 Recte ergo illud verbum dicitur mysterium id est occultum quod Verbum a Deo fuit occultum quia absconditum fuit a saeculis id est a principio saeculorum.
WHICH WAS GIVEN TO ME FOR YOU. For it is one thing that was preached to you by my disciples, as much as if he says that he was made a minister of the Gospel among the peoples by God through Christ. And to what end he shows, namely, that the mystery begun by God may be fulfilled by a suitable servant, that which was not known from the beginning of time, namely, that there be the mystery of the Nativity from God and of the Nativity from Mary and <that> of the salvation of the Gentiles and <that> of the whole work of Christ. Whence he adds, THAT I MAY FULFILL, as if to say, THERE WAS GIVEN TO ME stewardship for this, THAT I MAY FULFILL, that is, that I may show it fulfilled. THE WORD that is the arrangement or regulating of God, that is, what God preordained about you Gentiles, namely, that you be saved through the Incarnation of Christ. This he says lest salvation seem not to have been promised to the Gentiles, since the Word is a mystery, that is, something hidden, since if it was known, in the beginning was the Word, nowhere was it read, and the Word became flesh, etc., which pertains to the sacrament of the Incarnation. Whence: you hid these from the wise and revealed these things to the little. “For I read certain books of the Platonists translated from the Greek language into the Latin, and there I read, not indeed by these words but this certainly I was altogether persuaded, by many and various arguments, that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. But that the Word became flesh I did not read. I was to be sure on the trail in books where it had been said in various ways that the Son is in the form of the Father, but that he emptied himself of his glory is not found in these books.” Rightly therefore that Word is called a mystery, that is, something hidden, because the Word was hidden by God that had been hidden away from time without end, that is, from the beginning of time.
We should note first the explicitly Christological context that provides the framework for the Lombard's response to Augustine. The Lombard refers to a series of mysteries: that of Christ's nativity from God, that of his nativity from Mary, that of the salvation of the Gentiles, and finally that of the whole work of Christ.
Christology also provides the substance of the Lombard's explication of Paul's statement that he was commissioned to fulfill the word of God, which even though it does not seem to have promised salvation to the Gentiles, nevertheless intends their salvation through Christ. The Lombard repeats that the word of God is a mystery, before introducing John's famous prologue. The Lombard makes clear that even if it was known that “in the beginning was the Word,” nowhere else was it read that “the Word was made flesh.”
It is at this point that the Lombard switches into the first person, but he is not speaking for himself. Rather, he is mouthing and restating Augustine's own words, as the Augustinian original makes clear:Footnote 160
Et primo volens ostendere mihi, quam resistas superbis, humilibus autem des gratiam et quanta misericordia tua demonstrata sit hominibus via humilitatis, quod verbum tuum caro factum est et habitavit inter homines, procurasti mihi per quendam hominem immanissimo typho turgidum quosdam Platonicorum libros ex Graeca lingua in Latinam uersos, et ibi legi non quidem his uerbis, sed hoc idem omnino multis et multiplicibus suaderi rationibus, quod in principio erat uerbum et uerbum erat apud deum et deus erat uerbum : hoc erat in principio apud deum; omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est, in eo vita est, et vita erat lux hominum; et lux in tenebris lucet, tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt; et quia hominis anima, quamvis testimonium perhibeat de lumine, non est tamen ipsa lumen, sed verbum deus est lumen uerum, quod inluminat omnem hominem uenientem in hunc mundum; et quia in hoc mundo erat, et mundus per eum factus est, et mundus eum non cognovit.
Quia uero in sua propria venit et sui eum non receperunt, quotquot autem receperunt eum, dedit eis potestatem filios dei fieri credentibus in nomine eius, non ibi legi.
Item legi ibi, quia Verbum, Deus, non ex carne, non ex sanguine non ex voluntate viri neque ex voluntate carnis, sed ex Deo natus est; sed quia Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis, non ibi legi.
Indagavi quippe in illis litteris varie dictum et multis modis, quod sit filius in forma Patris non rapinam arbitratus esse aequalis Deo, quia naturaliter id ipsum est, sed quia semet ipsum exinanivit formam servi accipiens, in similitudine hominum factus et habitu inventus ut homo, humiliavit se factus oboediens usque ad mortem, mortem autem crucis: propter quod Deus eum exaltavit a mortuis et donavit ei nomen, quod est super omne nomen, ut in nomine Iesu omne genu flectatur caelestium, terrestrium et infernorum et omnis lingua confiteatur, quia dominus Iesus in gloria est Dei Patris, non habent illi libri.
Quod enim ante omnia tempora et supra omnia tempora incommutabiliter manet unigenitus filius tuus coaeternus tibi et quia de plenitudine eius accipiunt animae, ut beatae sint, et quia participatione manentis in se sapientiae renovantur, ut sapientes sint, est ibi. Quod autem secundum tempus pro impiis mortuus est et filio tuo unico non pepercisti, sed pro nobis omnibus tradidisti eum, non est ibi.
Abscondisti enim haec a sapientibus et revelasti ea parvulis , ut venirent ad eum laborantes et onerati et reficeret eos, quoniam mitis est et humilis corde, et diriget mites in iudicio et docet mansuetos vias suas videns humilitatem nostram et laborem nostrum et dimittens omnia peccata nostra. Qui autem cothurno tamquam doctrinae sublimioris elati non audiunt dicentem: discite a me, quoniam mitis sum et humilis corde, et invenietis requiem animabus vestris, etsi cognoscunt Deum, non sicut Deum glorificant aut gratias agunt, sed evanescunt in cogitationibus suis et obscuratur insipiens cor eorum; dicentes se esse sapientes stulti facti sunt…. Inveni haec ibi et non manducavi. Placuit enim tibi, domine, auferre opprobrium diminutionis ab Iacob, ut maior serviret minori, et vocasti gentes in hereditatem tuam.
The Augustinian original is manifestly the source for the Lombard's restatement, and it is interesting to see the Lombard adopting Augustine's voice without any indication to his students that he is doing so. Moreover, it is also interesting to note that he condenses and reorganizes the Augustinian original to suit his own purposes.
The Lombard's use of the word “contra” or “contrarium,” which indicates a dispute with Augustine, may seem puzzling at first, since both men seem to agree completely. They certainly agree that the philosophers, even if they knew about God as logos, had no idea about the mysteries surrounding the Incarnation. Moreover, they both seem to agree that God's calling of the Gentiles was also hidden, apart from Revelation. But the Lombard's objection focuses specifically on knowledge of the Trinity, and there is ample justification in the Lombard's closing words, which are his own — “Rightly therefore that Word is called a mystery, that is, something hidden, because the Word was hidden by God that had been hidden away from time without end, that is, from the beginning of creation” — to support an understanding of a dispute with Augustine (even if based on a misunderstanding of Augustine) over how much the philosophers apprehended the Trinity.
The most important point for this study is that the Lombard's reference in his lectures on Frater Ambrosius to his Gloss on Colossians makes perfect sense, since it correlates to the teaching there. Indeed, at this point we can be certain that the author of the Gloss on Colossians and the lecturer quoted at this point in the lecture on Frater Ambrosius are one and the same person, namely, Peter Lombard, since he clearly refers his student auditors in his lectures on the latter to this particular discussion in the former.
Independent confirmation not only that Peter Lombard was responsible both for the Gloss on Colossians and this part of the lecture on Frater Ambrosius but also that the Lombard's explication of this passage in his Gloss on the Colossians was understood clearly as a “contra,” an objection, comes from our second source: Langton's lectures on Frater Ambrosius, quoted here from Cambridge MS, Peterhouse 112, at fol. 1vb:
Hoc doctus Plato nescivit ita Augustinus dicit super Iohannem se legisse quosdam libros Platonis translatos de Graeco in Latinum in quibus multis rationibus persuadebat Trinitatem personarum. Respondeo: Plato scivit hoc non certa sed quadam scientia aenigmatica et exili qualem non habent Christiani. Et licet sciret hoc in principio erat etc., tamen nescivit totum hoc: in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Verbum caro factum est. Nullus enim philosophorum ad noticiam incarnationis Verbi et sic (si in cod.) ad noticiam Trinitatis potuit penetrare, ut dicit Augustinus. Item Contrarium legitur super Epistolam ad Colossenses circa principium fere super illum textum, ut impleam verbum Dei. mysterium etc., ut dicit Glossa, “mysterium, id est occultum, quia si erat notum, in principio erat Verbum etc.” Ibi dicit Augustinus quod Plato hoc scivit. Ad hoc dici potest quod ipse nescivit hoc certa scientia.
This the learned Plato did not know thus Augustine says on John, that he read certain books of Plato translated from Greek into Latin, in which by many arguments he came to know the Trinity of Persons. I respond: Plato knew this not by certain knowledge but by a certain enigmatic and feeble knowledge of the kind that Christians do not have. And although it was permitted that he know this, in the beginning there was, etc., nevertheless he did not know this whole: in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word became flesh. For none of the philosophers was able to penetrate to the knowledge of the incarnation of the Word and thus to the knowledge of the Trinity, as Augustine says. Likewise, a “Contrary” is read in the Letter to the Colossians, in the beginning right around that text, that I may fulfill the word of God. MYSTERY, etc., as the Gloss says, “mystery, that is hidden, since if it was known, in the beginning was the Word, etc.” There Augustine says that Plato knew this. To this it can be said that Plato did not know this with certain knowledge.
In this passage Langton, in walking his own students through the controversy, gives us everything we need to understand what was happening in his classroom. He first summarizes the heart of the matter, paraphrasing and summarizing Augustine even more concisely than had the Lombard, making clear that the issue has to do with knowledge of “the Trinity of Persons.” He then gives his own pithy solution, namely, that Plato and his students, although they may have had some sort of knowledge of the mystery of the Trinity, nevertheless never attained to the certain knowledge possessed by Christians owing to revelation. In this Langton seems to side with Augustine, splitting the difference as it were with a distinction between different kinds of “knowledge.” At the same time, he does not stray far from the Lombard's point of view, for even if the philosophers knew about the Word featured in John's prologue, they did not have the whole text; and since they had no possible knowledge of the Incarnation, it follows, as Augustine says, that they did not penetrate to knowledge of the Trinity. At this point in his explication of this line of Frater Ambrosius, Langton's students had the whole argument in a nutshell.
Happily for us, he continues by referring them to two authoritative sources. First, his next line (“Likewise, a ‘Contrary’ is read in the Letter to the Colossians, in the beginning right around that text, that I may fulfill the word of God.”) makes plain that he and his students are familiar with and indeed that Langton is presupposing the Lombard's lecture on Frater Ambrosius in his own. The fact that Langton uses his master's very words in referring his own students to the relevant passage in the Lombard's Gloss on Colossians is helpful, since it confirms the conclusion that Langton and his students have the Lombard's text. It also puts beyond doubt the identity of the lecturer preceding Langton's own lectures on Frater Ambrosius: Langton's use of language taken from that original lecture and his retention of the reference to the Gloss on Colossians is definitive. Here again, we see that there is no need to name Peter Lombard. His identity and connection to both sources is taken for granted.
Second, in quoting explicitly from the Lombard's Gloss on Colossians (“MYSTERY, etc., as the Gloss says, ‘mystery, that is hidden, since if it was known, in the beginning was the Word, etc.’”), Langton reveals to us that he and his students are familiar with that source, whether by impressive memory or by means of copies available to them, as he is lecturing: they have instant access to both of the Lombard's treatments of this issue! This should not surprise us in the least given the Lombard's preeminent reputation among his successors in the schools.
The juxtaposition of these two sources in Langton's twelfth-century classroom should, however, abash us a bit. Modern scholarship has taken for granted that the Lombard's glosses on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles, both of which have survived independently, constituted his sole “biblical” legacy worth mentioning.Footnote 161 Yet had scholars looked at the work of his successors to assess whether or not this was true, they would have found here, on the very first folio of the manuscript upon which, as Lacombe tells us, Smalley based her entire theory of Langton's biblical corpus, clear evidence that our modern theory of the Lombard's biblical legacy is not true.Footnote 162
Instead, we learn what we should have suspected all along, namely, that the Lombard's successors in the schools would have made full use of his entire body of work.Footnote 163 Small wonder then that we find the Lombard's reference to his own teaching side-by-side with Langton's references to the master's teachings.Footnote 164 Moreover, we not only have two generations but rather three generations of oral teaching preserved on the same folio, since in this same lecture preserved in these same two manuscripts we find Peter Lombard's reference to the oral teaching of John of Salisbury.Footnote 165
Not surprisingly, Langton's own lectures on Colossians are founded on the Lombard's.Footnote 166 In those lectures, Langton brings the whole discussion back full circle by providing the broader context from Jerome's Frater Ambrosius and by situating the whole developing twelfth-century oral tradition that we have just seen in the context of Jerome's original “Contrarium”:
QUOSDAM ENIM etc. quasi unde dico quod notum erat philosophis in principio erat Verbum, quia QUOSDAM ENIM PLATONICORUM LIBROS EX GRAECA LINGUA IN LATINAMFootnote 167 VERSOS VIDI <ET IBI>Footnote 168 LEGI dicit Augustinus NON QUIDEM HIS VERBIS SED HOC QUIDEM OMNINO ET MULTIS ET MULTIPLICIBUS SUADERI RATIONIBUS QUOD IN PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM ET VERBUM ERAT APUD DEUM. Ergo Plato et eius discipuli cognoverunt quod in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum, sed Ieronymus dicit contrarium in prologo illo super Bibliotecam super Ambrosium etc., ibi ubi dicit: “Iohannes rusticus, piscator, indoctus,” et “unde illa,” vox, “obsecro: in principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum? Hoc doctus Plato nescivit, hoc Demosthenes eloquens ignoravit.”
FOR CERTAIN BOOKS, etc. as if, whence I say that it was known to the philosophers that in the beginning was the Word, since FOR I SAW CERTAIN BOOKS OF THE PLATONISTS TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK LANGUAGE INTO LATIN AND READ THERE, SAYS AUGUSTINE, NOT INDEED BY THESE WORDS BUT THIS CERTAINLY I WAS ALTOGETHER PERSUADED, BY MANY AND VARIOUS ARGUMENTS, THAT IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD AND THE WORD WAS WITH GOD. Therefore Plato and his disciples knew that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. But Jerome says the contrary in that prologue on the Bible entitled “On Ambrose,” there where he says: “John a country bumpkin, a fisherman, unlearned?” and, in that utterance, “And whence these words, I ask: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word? This learned Plato did not know, about this eloquent Demosthenes was ignorant.”
Langton, however, then provides his own solution, one obviously related to the one presented so concisely in his lectures on Frater Ambrosius:
Sed illud contrarium potest solvi per hoc quod Ieronimus dicit, “Hoc doctus Plato nescivit.” Non enim dicit, “Hoc Platonici nesciverunt.” Augustinus vero dicit se legisse “in principio erat Verbum etc.” in libris Platonicorum et non in libris Platonis. Id est melius, licet Plato et eius discipuli aliquam scintillam scientiae habuerunt quod in principio erat Verbum etc. et quasi somniantes persuadere. Volverunt tamen versum, nisi somniantes respectu noticiae quam iam habent Christiani, et habuit hoc Plato ex libris Moysi in Egypto, quod Platonica suae dixit esse inventionis. …
But that “Contrary” can be solved through the very thing that Jerome says, “This the learned Plato did not know.” For he does not say, “This the Platonists did not know.” In truth, Augustine says that he read “in the beginning was the Word” in the books of the Platonists and not in the books of Plato. This is better, although Plato and his disciples had a certain glimmer of knowledge that in the beginning was the Word, etc., and as if dreaming were persuaded. Nevertheless, they turned this verse around, except for sleeping in respect to the knowledge that Christians now have, and Plato had this from the books of Moses in Egypt, which the Platonists said were of his own invention….
Langton here goes back to the original source for a distinction that lets Augustine off the hook so to speak: the distinction is to be found in Jerome's original language. Moreover, Langton is still following his master's trail in using the language of dreaming, but here he applies it to the Platonists and not, as does the Lombard, to Augustine himself. It is not immediately clear from this passage whether it predates or postdates Langton's lectures on Frater Ambrosius; that remains to be determined. Nevertheless, what is crystal clear is how closely all of these lectures are related and also how they form a unified tradition.
Although we have a great deal still to learn about that tradition, we can already see its broad outlines. For one thing, we know that it is oral from start to finish. For another, we know that it is multilayered with the lectures of one master serving as the basis for those of another. In the present case, we find Langton and his students referring to the Lombard on Colossians as the Gloss. We know from his own directions to his students that the Lombard's Gloss on Colossians predates his lectures on Frater Ambrosius, just as we shall learn below, both from Langton's lectures on Frater Ambrosius and the Lombard's lectures on Genesis, that those lectures also postdate the Sentences. These lectures, therefore, will prove invaluable to anyone interested in the Lombard's thought and career, since their contents will provide scholars with a basis for comparing all of his prior works and for assessing the development of that thought.
It is important to note that the same person responsible for the lectures on Frater Ambrosius just considered is also the lecturer for the comprehensive lectures on all of the senses of Genesis preserved in Corpus Christi 55. We know this from an abundance of editorial evidence, but it suffices here merely to note the transition between the lectures on Frater Ambrosius and those on Genesis: “Sequitur IN PRINCIPIO.”Footnote 169 The copyist here records the lecturer's going on from one text to another, in this case from Frater Ambrosius to the beginning of Genesis. The word “sequitur” serves as an oral transition. By contrast, in Langton's early lectures on Genesis, which, just like the lectures on Frater Ambrosius discussed above, presuppose those in Corpus Christi 55, even though most of the lecture material in Corpus Christi 55 is taken over verbatim by Langton, this word is omitted.Footnote 170 The reason for this is obvious. Langton, lecturing himself, had no need to repeat this one-word transition employed by his illustrious predecessor.
Langton does, however, let us know that he is thoroughly familiar with the teaching methods of his illustrious predecessor. In later lectures on Genesis, which also presuppose those in Corpus Christi 55, Langton, while discussing the four senses into which he customarily divides Scripture, remarks to his students that the anonymous master whose lectures they are following, whom we now know to be Peter Lombard, explicates history, allegory, and tropology but does so twice for allegory.Footnote 171 The Lombard himself, in explicating the opening line of Genesis in those lectures, tells his students that he is doing precisely that which Langton later attributes to him.Footnote 172 Indeed, this is the very practice that the Lombard customarily follows in the lectures on Genesis preserved in Corpus Christi 55. The Lombard's self-identification, therefore, is amply corroborated both by his own lectures on Genesis and by multiple lectures by Langton on the same book.
In short, the Lombard's self-identification, repeated subsequently and attested in multiple ways by Langton, is invaluable when combined with the certainty that the same individual is also responsible for the lectures on Genesis preserved in Corpus Christi 55. We have the best possible evidence for a secure attribution, namely, that of the Lombard himself and the masters who founded their own teaching on his. There is, however, other evidence for the identity of Peter Lombard as the anonymous master responsible for these lectures, namely, that provided by Comestor and Langton in considering the opinions of their venerable master.
ii. Stephen Langton's Identification of his Predecessor
If the Lombard's self-identification leaves no doubt that Langton had his lectures on Frater Ambrosius, then the evidence to be presented in this section shows that Langton and his students had the Lombard's lectures on Tobit and Genesis and of other Old Testament books at their disposal. Most of this evidence was actually known to Smalley, who cited it and relied upon it in her study of Langton, but, as we shall see, she did not look closely enough at the manuscripts to understand its significance.
The first such evidence has to do with the captivity of Tobit, narrated in the opening verses of the Book of Tobit, which I present here for the convenience of ready comparison:
Tobit (1:1) Tobias ex tribu et civitate Nephtali, quae est in superioribus Galilaeae supra Naasson, post viam quae ducit ad occidentem in sinistro habens civitatem Sephet (1:2) cum captus esset in diebus Salmanasar regis Assyriorum, in captivitate tamen positus, viam veritatis non deseruit.
Tobias, of the tribe and inhabitants of Nephtali, which is located in upper Galilee above Naasson, past the road that leads westward keeping the settlement of Sephet on your left, after he had been captured, during the reign of Salmanasar King of the Assyrians, although he was in captivity, nevertheless he did not abandon the way of truth.
Smalley found a passage in Exeter College MS 23 (at fol. 1b), which preserves lectures by Langton on Tobit, Judith, Esther, and the Minor Prophets, and in which Langton refers to his master's objection: “Hic obicit magister de quodam contrario quod ad presens pretermittimus”Footnote 173 (Here the Master raises an objection about a certain “Contrary,” which for the present we will pass over). She considered but rejected the possibility that Langton was referring to Comestor in the History: “The Manducator sometimes referred to as ‘the master in the histories’ would not be meant, since he does not raise an objection at this point.”Footnote 174 I show below that she was wrong, decidedly so, about the latter point: Comestor actually repeats the objection in the first few lines of his Historia Tobiae. If she did read this section in the History, she could not have read it closely. In any case, the master to whom Langton refers is not Comestor but rather Peter Lombard.
In my study showing that Peter Comestor incorporated Peter Lombard's prologue to John's Gospel into his lectures on the glossed John, I reviewed in detail the history of Smalley's position on the question of how to interpret references to “magister” in Comestor's lectures.Footnote 175 Initially convinced that all such references were to Comestor's master, she subsequently changed her mind, inexplicably and without evidence.Footnote 176 In doing so she erred — her initial position was correct — and this error led her (and Brady following her) to miss the significance of what is clearly a reference by Comestor to his master, Peter Lombard, and his master's prologue to John's Gospel.Footnote 177
In the present instance, we are faced with a reference in Langton's lectures on Tobit to his “magister.” Smalley is right that Langton refers to Comestor, his master, as “magister Historiarum,” but Langton also frequently refers to Comestor simply as “magister.”Footnote 178 It would, therefore, be significant, were the objection not raised in the History.Footnote 179 But it is so raised, and Smalley clearly overlooked the fact that Peter Comestor's treatment of this episode takes full account of the lectures that we are now about to examine. I will come back to this below. For now, it suffices simply to note that Comestor had the lectures of Peter Lombard, upon which his own student, Langton, founded his own.
To understand the discussion that follows it will be helpful to juxtapose Smalley's discussion of Langton's lectures on Tobit and her remarks about several important manuscripts with her comments on this particular passage in Tobit 1:2:
Beryl Smalley on Tobias and two manuscripts, Peterhouse 112 and Corpus Christi 55:
The commentaries on Tobias, Judith and Hester may be treated as a group…. Variant versions, full, are … Peterhouse 112 and Corpus 55 form a third group also full.Footnote 180
Beryl Smalley on Tobit 1:2:
Comment on Tobias 1:2. “When he was made captive in the days of Salmanasar King of the Assyrians.” Chartres 294, fol. 178a and Bibl. Nat. 510 fol. 55a, representing the first three groups, discuss the opinion of the Interlinear Gloss which suggests that Tobias was captured with the two tribes, instead of with the ten tribes. “Nota quod non est captus cum duabus tribus [sic] sed cum x, et tamen Interlinearis Glosa videtur velle quod cum duabus, quia dicit ‘inter alios adductus.’”Footnote 181
Smalley, who treats Tobit with Judith and Esther as one group, classifies the lectures in Peterhouse 112 and Corpus Christi 55 together. Here she is correct; these two manuscripts are collatable, at least in part, as we are about to see. Somehow, however, Smalley missed that the very objection of the master referred to by Langton is found in both manuscripts, as is the “contrary” that Langton tells his students they are passing over for the moment. I provide here a single Latin text for the lecture in question, corrected to adjust for copying errors and accompanied by an English translation:Footnote 182
Original lectures as found in Corpus Christi 55 and Peterhouse 112:
Cum captus esset in diebus Salmanasar Nota quod non est captus cum duabus tribubus sed cum decem, tamen glosa interlinearis videtur velle quod cum duabus quae dicit “inter illos abductus,” de quibus dicitur: primo tempore alleviata terra Zabulon et terra Nephtali etc.Footnote 183 Prima autem duarum tribuum captivitas facta est per Teglaphalasar; secunda decem tribuum per eundem, qui et Salmanasar. Si ergo diceretur quod captivitatus esset a Teglaphalasar, reduceretur etiam ad Sennacherib, quia eius pater captivavit eum, et ita haec hystoria incipit a captivitate Salmanasar, sed non determinatur sub quo terminata sit. Sed obicitur (emphasis supplied): infra dicitur quod filius eius captivatus est cum patre, et ita in cantico eius dicitur: Ierusalem civitas Dei castigavit te Dominus.Footnote 184 Loquitur ibi de captivitate Ierusalem, sed illa facta est per Nabugadnezzar. Ergo Tobias vixit ultra captivitatem Ierusalem, quia Nabugadnezzar. Sed contra (emphasis supplied): hoc stare non potest ad litteram, quia sexto anno regni Ezechiae facta est captivitas decem tribuum, et regnavit undetriginta annis, ergo remanserunt viginti duo anni, et quinquaginta quinque de Manasse, duo de Amon, de Josia triginta unus, et post, anni filiorum eius, scilicet viginti usque ad destructionem Ierusalem, et ita patet quod plures anni fuerant a captivitate decem tribuum usque ad captivitatem Ierusalem quam legatur ille habuisse Tobias, et ita nullatenus potest esse verum quod vixerit usque ad destructionem Ierusalem secundum computationem annorum. Et hoc verum est; mistice tamen ita dicitur….
English translation:
After he had been captured, during the reign of Salmanasar Note that he was not captured with two tribes but with ten. That interlinear gloss seems to favor the former reading, namely, that he was captured with two, which says “abducted among others,” about which it is said: in the beginning the lands of Zabulon and Nephtali were dealt leniently with, etc. But the first captivity of the two tribes was accomplished through Tilgath-pileser; the second, of the ten tribes, through the same, who is also Salmanasar.Footnote 185 If therefore it were to be said that he had been captured by Tilgath-Pileser, he would also have been brought back to Sennacherib, since his father captured Tobit, and thus this historyFootnote 186 begins from the captivity wrought by Salmanasar. But it is not clear under whose reign it ended. But it is objected (emphasis supplied): it is said below that his son was captured with his father, and so in his canticle it is said: O Jerusalem, city of God, the Lord has chastised thee. He is speaking there about the captivity of Jerusalem, but that was accomplished by Nebuchadnezzar. Therefore Tobit lived beyond the captivity of Jerusalem, wrought by Nebuchadnezzar. But against (emphasis supplied) <this it must be said>: this understanding cannot stand according to the letter, since in the sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah there occurred the captivity of the ten tribes, and he reigned for twenty-nine years. Therefore, there remained twenty-two years, and fifty-five for Manassas, two for Amon, thirty-one for Josiah, and afterwards, the years of his sons, namely, twenty up to the destruction of Jerusalem, and so it is evident that more years elapsed from the time of the captivity of the ten tribes to the time of the captivity of Jerusalem than our man Tobit is read to have had, and so in no way can it be true that Tobit lived to the destruction of Jerusalem according to this computation of years. And this is true; understood mystically however, it is said….
I have highlighted the objection (“Sed obicitur”) and the contrary (“Sed contra”) to make it easy to see that Langton's words to his students — “Hic obicit magister de quodam contrario quod ad presens pretermittimus” — must be related to this original lecture. The “master” raised an objection, namely, that Tobit survived the destruction of Jerusalem, about a certain “contrary,” which as we see makes clear from the computation of years that such a thing was not possible according to the letter of Scripture. Langton clearly knows and is basing his own lecture on Tobit upon this earlier lecture. Here again, even though Smalley discerned that for Tobit, Peterhouse 112 and Corpus Christi 55 form a third group, she overlooked crucial evidence in these lectures that can help us ascertain their authorship.
Again, it is obvious that we have here in Corpus Christi 55 and in Peterhouse 112 the teachings of the master referred to by Langton in his lectures on Tobit preserved in Exeter College MS 23. We have the objection raised and we have the contrary discussed at length. The question that remains, though, is who is the master raising the objection and discussing the contrary. Is it Peter Lombard? We have several helpful clues that indicate that Peter Lombard is in fact the master responsible for the original lectures.
First, it is clear from Comestor's treatment of this same issue in the History that he is not the master here referred to by Langton. Indeed, the beginning of his Historia Tobiae makes plain that, like Langton, Comestor had those same lectures of this master whose identity everyone in his and in Langton's circle knows. Indeed, Comestor's treatment is a summary of the heart of the whole matter; he gets straight to the points made by the “master.” To make this abundantly clear, I will present here several excerpts that are unmistakably based on the lectures of our “master”:Footnote 187
Incipit historia Tobiae:
Historia Tobiae exordium habuit in captivitate decem tribuum quam fecit Salmanasar. Quo vero tempore terminum habuerit non satis lucet. Videtur enim secundum litteram historiae Tobias vixisse post excidium Ierusalem et incendium Templi. Ait enim in cantico suo: Ierusalem civitas Dei castigavit te Dominus.
Here begins the history of Tobit:
The history of Tobit had its beginning in the captivity of the ten tribes which Salmasar accomplished. But at what time this history had its end there is not sufficient light. For it seems, according to the letter of the history of Tobit, that he lived past the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple. For Tobit says in his canticle: O Jerusalem, city of God, the Lord has chastised thee.
No student ever summarized more concisely the lecture of his teacher, point by point, than Comestor does here. He provides for his own students a medieval version of Cliff's Notes. He has condensed the original, but his reliance on it, both in outline and in substance, is unmistakable. For while it is true that Comestor does not use the word “objection,” he nevertheless presents the very same objection found in the original lecture in a nutshell: Tobit's own canticle reveals that he knew of the destruction of Jerusalem in 580 bc, and therefore he must have lived past this date. Here again, Smalley somehow overlooked the very evidence, both in Comestor and in Langton, necessary to understand not only the chronology but also and even more importantly the relations between and among the various layers of this tradition.
It is of course possible that Comestor is here summarizing his own lectures, which would make him our master. But the solution that he pursues, even as it reveals more explicit borrowing from the same lectures, cuts against such an identification. After supplying the rest of the passage from Tobit following the passage just quoted (Tobit 13:11) — “Benedic Deum saeculorum, ut raeedificet in te tabernaculum suum, et revocet ad te omnes captivos” (Tobit 13:12) — Comestor here paraphrases and condenses key passages from the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Tobit to make his own lemmata, a mixture of Scripture and scriptural paraphrase, in accordance with his standard mode of proceeding in the History:Footnote 188 “In diebus autem mortis suae, cum praediceret filiis suis de reditu captivorum, ait: terra deserta replebitur et domus Dei, quae in ea incensa est, iterum raeedificabitur.”Footnote 189 He then gets to his own way of resolving the problem, which is far more determinate than that of our unnamed master:
SicFootnote 190 vero attendamus terminum vitae Tobiae filii Tobiae. Fuit enim terminus hystoriae, quae fuit ei terminus vitae. Non inveniemus descendisse historiam ad plus ultra tempora Iosiae. Ponamus enim filium cum patre captivatum sexto anno Ezechiae et avinculum esse; cum nonaginta novem annis tantum vixerit, circa vicesimum annum Iosiae mortuus est.
In this fashion, then, let us attend to the end of the life of Tobit, son of Tobit. For there was an end to a history, which was for him the end of his life. We shall not find that his own history extended past the times of Josiah. For let us posit that the son had been captured and enchained with the father in the sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah; when he had lived only for ninety-nine years, around the twentieth year of the reign of Josiah, he died.
Comestor's solution reveals clearly the traces of the original master's lecture. Like that master, he emphasizes the crucial detail of the capture of the son, Tobias, together with his father of the same name, during the sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah, although he does so in a different manner. But he gives his students a determinate solution not found in the lectures of our master, namely, that Tobit the son lived to be ninety-nine years old and that he died during the twentieth year of the reign of Josiah.
That original lecturer had emphasized both the objection and the contrary, around which he structured the entire lecture. Moreover, our master gave no solution. He merely made sure that his students understood the impossibility of reading the evidence in the Book of Tobit too literally as regards Tobit's lifespan. By contrast, Comestor's agenda is different. He summarizes, neatly as we have seen, that whole initial lecture but then goes on at some length: filling out the scriptural background, positing a precise solution, and finally discussing at some length Jerome's treatment of the history of Tobit.Footnote 191
Any possible doubt, however, about the chronology and order of the lectures is removed by Langton, whose lectures on this passage in Tobit show clearly that we have three discrete layers of lecturing. Moreover, the fact that Langton incorporates into his own lectures whole chunks of the original master's lectures, just as we saw in his lectures on Frater Ambrosius, where Peter Lombard identifies himself, clinches the matter in my view, at least for Tobit. I have not been able to consult Chartres MS 294 (named by Smalley but destroyed in World War II). I did, however, examine BNF, lat. 510, the other manuscript mentioned by Smalley.
In the lectures attributed to Langton on Tobit in BNF, lat. 510, we find a concise mixture of the original master's lecture and Comestor's treatment in the History. Langton of course knew the History as well as anyone not named Comestor, having lectured upon it and revised its text before 1176, while Comestor was still alive.Footnote 192 He revised his course on the History a second time in 1193, when he was a mature master.Footnote 193 It would, therefore, be surprising, if he did not take some account of Comestor's teaching on the subject of Tobit.
He clearly does, but what is far more interesting is the extent to which Langton in this lecture follows the outline of the original master's lecture while incorporating all of Comestor's main points. I highlight in bold lines taken directly from the original master's lecture and underline those clearly redolent of Comestor's explication in the History:
BNF, lat. 510, fol. 55va:
In diebus Salmanassar Si inveniatur quod captivatus fuerit a Teglatfallassar exponendum est id est a regno eius vel attribuit filio quod pater fecit, et ita patet quod hystoria Tobie initium habuit a captivitate facta per Salmanassar. Ubi autem finem habuit ignoramus. Videtur autem quod duraverit usque ad captivitatem Ierusalem, quia infra dicetur in cantico: Ierusalem civitas Dei castigavit te Dominus etc. Et ibi loquitur de reductione populi in Ierusalem, et ita videtur quod Tobias vixerit quando captivatus est populus Ierusalem. Sed hoc falsum est, quia quando captivatus est Tobias, filius eius captivatus est cum eo, et filius vixit nonaginta novem annis. Et Samaria destructa est sexto anno Ezechie, et postea regnavit Ezechias triginta tribus annis, et Manasses filius eius quinquaginta quinque, et Amon duobus annis, et Josias triginta, et ita sunt centum decem anni, et ita patet quod non vivebat Tobias, et ita non vidit captivitatem.
In the days of Salmanasar If it should be found that Tobit had been captured by Tilgath-pileser, this must be explained, that is, from his reign, or what the father did was attributed to the son, and so it is clear that the history of Tobit had its beginning from the captivity wrought by Salmanasar. But when that history had its end is something we do not know. But it seems that he endured all the way up to the captivity of Jerusalem, since it is said below in his canticle: O Jerusalem, city of God, the Lord has chastised thee, etc. And he speaks there about the subjection of the people in Jerusalem, and thus it appears that Tobias was alive when the people of Jerusalem were captured. But this is false, since when Tobias was captured, his son, Tobias, was captured with him, and the son lived for ninety-nine years. And Samaria was destroyed in the sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah, and afterwards Hezekiah reigned for thirty-three years, and Manasses his son for fifty-five, and Amon for two years, and Josias for thirty, and so these add up to one hundred and ten years, and thus it is clear that Tobias was not still living, and therefore did not see Jerusalem's captivity.
There is no need to go through the details, for the highlighting makes clear at a glance which lines Langton got from which master. Langton's lecture is a straightforward mixture of the original master's lecture and Comestor's account of Tobit's “history” in the History. Langton's students get our original master's clear proof that Tobit could not have lived to see the destruction of Jerusalem; they also get Comestor's teaching that, although we are ignorant of the end of the history of Tobit, we nevertheless know that he lived to the age of ninety-nine and was captured with his father during the sixth year of the reign of Hezekiah. Langton adds some details too, filling in the picture for both masters: Samaria was destroyed at the same time that Tobit and his father were captured, and Tobit would have had to have lived more than one hundred and ten years to have seen Jerusalem's destruction.
Most important for our purposes, this lecture by Langton on Tobit, which is preserved in BNF, lat. 510, made available to his students three generations of oral teaching: that of the original master, that of Comestor, and that of Langton himself. Langton's combining of the first two layers reveals that they are different in origin: Comestor was not responsible for both but rather represents a middle stage. The original lectures predate Comestor and the History.
Two other manuscripts known to me preserve lectures by Langton on Tobit: BNF, lat. 14414 and Mazarine 177, which as I noted above are formatted differently but are clearly related. The lecture preserved in these two manuscripts is patently different from that preserved in BNF, lat. 510. We know, therefore, that Langton lectured on this text several times after his lecture preserved in Exeter College MS 23. The common thread, however, is the layering, for here again we can distinguish three levels of lectures on Tobit.Footnote 194 This time, however, the three levels represented differ slightly. The first remains the original master's lecture, which is taken over verbatim for the most part; the second, discernible by the few changes in wording that Langton here makes (highlighted in bold to make obvious at a glance), is Langton himself in his lectures preserved in BNF, lat. 510; and the third is made up of the few sentences from Langton's earlier lecture on Tobit that he has incorporated into this lecture. I underline these. There is no reason to provide an English translation, since this lecture tracks so closely the earlier master's lecture, which is translated above:
Cum captus esset in diebus Salmanassar Nota quod non est captus cum duabus tribubus sed cum decem, et tamen glosa interlinearis videtur velle quod cum duabus, quia dicit “inter alios adductus,” de quibus dicitur: primo tempore alleviata est terra Zabulon et terra Nephtali. Prima autem duarum tribuum captivitas facta est per Tegla Phalassar, secunda decem tribuum per eundem, qui et Salmanasar dicitur. Et si ergo diceretur quod captivatus fuerit a Tegla Phalasar, reduceretur etiam ad Sennacherib, quia pater eius captivavit eum, et ita patet quod hystoria Tobiae initium habuit a captivitate facta per Salmanasar, sed non determinatur sub quo terminata sit. Secundum hoc in diebus Salmanasar expone sic id est a regno eius vel attribuitur filio et pater fecit, sed ex isto et sequentibus orietur contrarium. Infra dicitur quod filius captivatus est cum patre et de filio dicetur in fine huius libri quod nonaginta novem annorum erat quando mortuus est, et infra in cantico eius dicet Tobias de Ierusalem filio suo: Ierusalem civitas Dei castigavit te Dominus etc. Ergo loquitur ibi de captivitate Ierusalem, sed illa facta fuit per Nabugodonosor, et ita videtur ex serie textus quod Tobias filius vixerit ultra captivitatem Ierusalem per Nabugodonosor factam. Quod stare non potest cum annis eius ad litteram. Sexto anno enim Ezechiae captivatus est; sunt decem tribus cum quibus captivatus est Tobias et filius eius,Footnote 195 et regnavit Ezechias undetriginta annis, ergo remanserunt viginti tres anni, et quinquaginta quinque de Manasse filio eius, et duo de Amo, de Josia triginta unus, et post, anni filiorum eius, scilicet undecim, usque ad destructionem Ierusalem, et ita patet quod plures anni fuerunt a captivitate decem tribuum quam legatur filius Tobiae habuisse, et ita nullatenus potuit vivere usque ad destructionem Ierusalem filius Tobiae secundum computationem annorum, et hoc verum est. Illa ergo quae dicetur infra dicta sunt prophetice.
It is fascinating news indeed, not only to learn for sure that Langton lectured more than once on the literal sense of Tobit — it seems from what we have just seen that he did so at least three times, if we count the lecture in Exeter 23 — but also to discover how he did so. Comestor and the History disappear without a trace in this lecture, perhaps because Langton treats Comestor's version three times in his own course on the History, or perhaps for another reason. Whatever the reason, his doing so is as interesting as it is unexpected.
Even more interesting is the fact that the earlier master's lecture again takes center stage. If one were not paying close attention, one might even think that here we had a version, slightly adapted, of that original lecture. But Langton's use of his own earlier lecture renders any such supposition impossible. What is striking is that the enduring influence of the original master's lecture becomes more and more evident. Comestor based his treatment of Tobit's “history” explicitly upon it, even if in a summary fashion. Langton then combined it with Comestor's treatment. Then, returning to the same subject in a later lecture, Langton abandons Comestor altogether and gives a lecture that very closely resembles that original.
Smalley found a second reference in Langton's lectures on Tobit to the teaching of our mysterious “magister.” It concerns the admonition of the angel recorded in Tobit 7:12: “dixit ei angelus: Noli timere dare eam isti, quoniam huic timenti Deum debetur coniunx filia tua; propterea alius non potuit habere illam” (the angel said to him: Do not be afraid to give her to this man, since to one fearing God is owed your daughter as a wife; for this reason another was not able to have her). As her remarks show, Smalley was positive that the master referred to by Langton was neither Comestor nor the Lombard:
For the second passage I have unfortunately only the version of group IV and cannot compare them with the others. On Tobias VII.12 “Be not afraid to give her to this man, for to him who feareth God is thy daughter due to be his wife. Therefore another could not have her,” the question is raised whether Sara was given in marriage to Tobias as a reward of his merits. If we concede this point, then it must be allowed that man may be worthy of a temporal reward. Exeter 23, f o 5d: “Sed an meritis Tobie debebatur uxor illa? Si ita, ergo a simili potest homo mereri temporalia. Quod bene concedit magister. Mystice legitur hoc …” the subject is abruptly changed. This “magister” is neither the Lombard nor the Manducator (emphasis supplied). It is quite possible that one of the first group might here have a “questio” “whether man may merit temporal rewards,” which is answered in the affirmative.Footnote 196
Since writing the above I have been able to compare the passage in Exeter 23 with Bibl. Nat. 510 f o 59d. The result is quite satisfactory; there is a questio: “hoc videtur homo meretur temporalia, quare non similiter uxorem bonam, cum ex gratia sit, quod concedimus….”Footnote 197
The question raised, again found by Smalley in Exeter 23, which we now know to be one of Langton's earlier lectures on Tobit, is “whether by Tobit's merits that wife was owed to him?” And the answer — “If so, then it follows that man is able to merit temporal rewards” — was conceded, according to Langton, by our master. Smalley thought that the same question and answer were seemingly granted by Langton in BNF, lat. 510, which we now know to be later than those in Exeter 23.
Smalley, however, not only mistranscribes this passage in BNF, lat. 510, but fails to quote the passage in its relevant context. In fact, the excerpt that she quotes, which seems to indicate Langton's concession of the very point conceded by the original master, is misleading when quoted apart from its context. The truth is nearly the opposite: Langton is actually calling into serious doubt the point conceded by the original master. Here is the passage, corrected and in its full context:
BNF, lat. 510, fol. 59vb:
Alius non potuit habere illam, immo potuit, sed non habuit. Solutio: quando impeditum est, ne fiat aliquid, dicitur illud non posse fieri. Unde in Iohanne (Jn. 12:39): non poterant credere id est obstinatione impediti sunt, ne crederent. Similiter hic. Non potuit id est impedimentum fuit, ne haberet. Sed nota quod dixit: huic timenti Deum debetur coniunx; propterea alius non potuit eam habere. Estne verum causaliter? Meruitne ille habere hanc uxorem? Hoc videtur. Homo enim meretur temporalia, quare non similiter uxorem bonam? Cum ex gratia sit, quod concedimus. Sed estne vera illa locutio causaliter? Estne verum istud: quia virgo portavit Christum, propterea nulla alia portare potuit? De talibus dubitari potest si causaliter accipiatur; si consecutive accipiatur non est dubium.
Another was not able to have her, rather he was able but did not have. Solution: when there is an obstruction, to prevent something from happening, we say that that something is not possible. Whence in John: they were not able to believe, that is, by their obstinacy, they were prevented from believing. Likewise here. He was not able, that is, there was an impediment to his having her. But note that he said: to one fearing God is owed a wife; for this reason another was not able to have her. Is this true in terms of causation? Did Tobit deserve to have this wife? This seems to be. For man merits temporal goods, why not likewise a good wife? Although it be for beauty? This we concede. But is that statement true in terms of causation? Is this also true: since a virgin bore the Christ, on that account no other female was able to bear <him>? About such matters there is reason to doubt whether they should be understood in terms of causation; there is, however, no reason whatsoever to doubt whether they should be understood in terms of one thing following another.
Langton's lecture, although it clearly presupposes the original master's lecture, goes in a very different direction. He calls into question right away the original point conceded by the master, namely, that by reason of merit man deserves temporal rewards owing to the passage in Tobit. Specifically, Langton questions whether the passage in Tobit can be understood causally, as it seemingly was by our master, and he himself expresses serious doubts about the matter to his own students. Indeed, he presses rigorously the logical distinction between actual causation and mere temporal sequence.
We know, however, that this lecture is by a more mature Langton, one who has already lectured on Tobit. He and his students are still starting from the original master's lectures, but in this lecture he is independent. We see the exact same thing in the second revision of his course on the History, accomplished in 1193, where he disagrees with Comestor and corrects him freely.Footnote 198 We should, however, be able to trace the whole discussion, from beginning to end, which would likely help us to understand how Langton's views evolved as they did. It turns out that we can in fact do so.
We find the original master's lecture preserved in both Corpus Christi 55 and Peterhouse 112:Footnote 199
Noli timere dare eam isti quam huic timenti Deum debetur filia tua Per hoc videtur quod bona coniunx alicui iusto detur ex meritis, sicut alia temporalia. Propterea alius non potuit habere illam. Impedimentum fuit peccatum illorum quo minus eam haberent, quia coniunx debita erat alii. Simile dicitur in Iohanne: propterea non poterant credere id est obstinatione impediti erant, ne crederent.
Do not be afraid to give her to this man, she whom as your daughter is owed to one who fears God Through this it seems that a good wife should be given to someone just on account of his merits, just as other temporal goods. For this reason another was not able to have her. The impediment was the sin of those, which prevented their having her, since she was owed as a spouse to another. A similar thing is said in John: for this reason they were not able to believe, that is, by their obstinance, they were impeded from believing.
We find here the same story as above. Had Smalley looked at either of these two manuscripts, she would have found right away the source for Langton's statement in Exeter 23. We see that Langton has again taken over chunks of the original master's lecture wholesale, quoting whole passages verbatim. We also see the reason for the discussion in his lecture in BNF, lat. 510: our master speaks in terms of causation (“quia”) when he explicates Tobit 7:12.
The source for the discussion of temporal rewards owed by merit is unmistakable. What about the identity of the lecturer? As we have seen, Smalley dismisses the possibility that it is either Comestor or the Lombard. She does not say so, but it is certainly possible that she checked the History, which says nothing whatsoever about the matter.Footnote 200 But it is evident that she did not look at the lectures on Tobit in BNF, lat. 14414 and Mazarine 177, which we know to preserve a lecture by Langton later than those in Exeter 23 and in BNF, lat. 510. These reveal that Langton's disagreement with the master's position, something that as we have seen she was unaware of, continued to develop (I highlight in bold material adopted directly from the original master's lecture; as before, I underline material Langton has retained and developed from his earlier lecture, preserved in BNF, lat. 510).Footnote 201
Quoniam huic timenti Deum debetur coniunx filia tua, propterea alius non potuit habere illam. Nota haec verba scrupulum habere, primo illud: huic timenti Deum debetur coniunx filia tua, ergo quod timebat Deum merebatur illam habere uxorem, ergo haec fuit causa quare eam habuit, ergo haec est vera: haec debetur huic in uxorem illo demonstrato scilicet timere Deum, ergo iste meruit istam uxorem. Quod probo: homo meretur bonum temporale, et temporalia merito hominis debentur, ergo cum uxor bona sit, et donum egregium debetur huic ex meritis. Quod bene concedimus, et hanc concedimus ex meritis huius debetur huic merito debiti et congrui. Vel propterea debetur, quia scilicet timebat Deum alius dicitur septem prae mortuis non poterat habere illam. Hoc falsum, immo poterat. Respondeo: res autem difficultatem notat vel habet et impedimentum magnum, ne fiat, et si etiam fieri possit, dicitur tamen non posse. Simile in Iohanne de Iudeis dicitur: propterea non poterant credere. Respondeo: sensus est non poterant id est obstinatio eorum impediebat eos. Unde Augustinus ita glosat: non poterant id est nolebant, sed numquid haec vera similiter: quia Beata Virgo fuit predestinata ut pareret Christum, propterea nulla alia eum peperit a simili et hic. Respondeo: si propterea sit causale in huiusmodi locutionibus, dubitationem habet. Si vero sit consecutivus, tunc planum est.
Since to this man who fears God your daughter is owed as a wife; for this reason another was not able to have her. Note that these words have a subtlety to them, first there: to this man fearing God is owed your daughter as a wife, therefore because he feared God he deserved to have that wife, therefore this was the cause why he had her, therefore this is true: this woman is owed to this man as a wife, once the former has been demonstrated, namely, that he fears God, therefore Tobit merited that wife. This I prove: a man merits a temporal good, and temporal goods by the merit of a man are owed, therefore since a wife is a good, an outstanding gift is owed to this man by reason of his merits. Which we willingly concede, and we grant this wife by reason of the merits of this man is owed to this man by the merit of something owed and fitting. Or for this reason it is owed, namely, that he feared God another this refers to the seven men who died beforehand attempting to marry Sarah was not able to have her. This is false, the truth is that another was able. I respond: this thing notes a difficulty or has also a large impediment, lest it should happen, and even if it were possible, it is said nevertheless not to be possible. A similar thing is said in John about the Jews: for this reason they were not able to believe. I respond: the sense is they were not able, that is, their obstinacy impeded them. Whence Augustine glosses this: they were not able, that is, they did not want to, but surely it is not true that this is similarly true: that the Blessed Virgin was predestined to give birth to the Christ, for this reason it follows that no other woman bore him, etc. I respond: if “for this reason” is causal in expressions of this kind, a doubt is raised. But if it is consecutive, then it is plain.
We can see at a glance the material from this lecture that Langton uses and expands from his earlier lecture preserved in BNF, lat. 510. The principal difference between the earlier and the later lectures is the extent to which Langton explicates by means of logic the discussion in the former. For our purposes what is most important is that Langton's positions relative to those of our master were already staked out in the lectures preserved in BNF, lat. 510: he agreed with that master's explication of the related passage in John's Gospel but forcefully disagreed with the notion, which he took to be set forth in that original lecture, that the central passage at issue in Tobit should be understood causally.
The fact is that we have three layers again, but this time they are different: the original master, then Langton (in BNF, lat. 510), then another lecture by Langton (preserved in BNF, lat. 14414 and Mazarine 177), who incorporates and elaborates the substance of his earlier lecture. Comestor is not in this particular picture, but we still need definitive proof that Comestor is not our original master, that the lectures preserved in Corpus Christi 55 and Peterhouse 112/119 are not his. Fortunately, we have it, and it is Langton who provides it, but not in these lectures.
I show in my monograph on the making of the Historia scholastica that Langton routinely provides valuable information about who is responsible for which texts in the ongoing development of the History. It is in fact his copious textual testimony that made it possible not only to see that the the History itself was a work in progress, added to regularly by Comestor, Langton, and other masters, but also that he himself had adapted the actual text of the History itself, even while Comestor was still alive.Footnote 202 Turning to his lectures on the History, which predate 1176, we find that the young theologian Langton again gives us the information that we need to know for sure that Comestor is not the original lecturer.
For one thing, we know that Langton the young theologian is familiar with the whole controversy over Tobit's lifespan, since he summarizes it succinctly in the beginning of his own lecture on Comestor's Historia Tobiae:Footnote 203
HISTORIA ETC. Iste inquit et filius eius eodem nomine … scilicet Tobias, quorum historia incipit a patre et terminatur in morte filii. Pater vero, ut supradiximus, iuxta opinionem quorundam captivatus est cum duobus tribubus a Teglafalasar rege Assyriorum, sed verior est opinio quae dicit postea captivatum esse cum decem per Salmanasar filium eius.
HISTORY, ETC. This man, he says, and his son of the same name … namely, Tobit, whose history begins from the father and ends in the death of the son. The father, however, as we said above, according to the opinion of some was captured with the two tribes by Tegla Phalasar, King of the Assyrians, but the truer opinion is that which says that he was captured afterwards with the ten tribes by Salmanasar, the son of that king.
Langton, as we have seen, had both the original master's lectures and Comestor's version, but we have not yet established when he had them. Here we see that even before 1176 he had these sources for his lectures on Comestor's History. The reporter's use of “inquit” in the first line refers to Langton's own speaking. The remainder of Langton's introduction in the lecture makes plain that, in addition to Comestor's Historia Tobiae, he also had the original master's lecture as well, either at hand or in his memory, since he quotes directly from it and explains why the Book of Tobit will be read allegorically rather than literally.Footnote 204 We know, therefore, that Langton, lecturing prior to 1176, is already familiar with the original master's lectures.Footnote 205
It is now time to review the evidence adduced for identifying Peter Lombard as the anonymous but preeminent lecturer whose lectures Comestor and Langton take as the basis for their own. The first and best evidence, namely, Peter Lombard's self-identification, confirmed and corroborated subsequently by Langton's own lectures, is sufficient by itself to attribute to Peter Lombard not only the prologue Tabernaculum Moysi, which is meant as an introduction to the Pentateuch, but also the lectures on Genesis that follow it in Corpus Christi 55.
The second, which is also persuasive, is the weight given to the anonymous magisterial opinions discussed and relied upon by Comestor, Langton, and their students. These opinions all predate Comestor's Historia scholastica and form the basis for it. As we have just seen, Langton in his own lectures on the Old Testament makes use of them repeatedly over the course of his scholastic career and assigns them weight at least equal to that of those in the History, which he also privileges as an authority. Add to this the weighty fact that this primitive lecture material, in Genesis as in other books, forms the foundation for the magisterial lectures both of Comestor and of Langton, and a consistent picture emerges of an outstanding magisterial authority from the generation preceding Comestor and, shortly thereafter, Langton.
The third and final evidentiary basis is the prologues that both Comestor and Langton attribute to this same “anonymous” master. In a recent study, I showed beyond any reasonable doubt that Peter Comestor had and used Peter Lombard's newly composed prologue to John's Gospel.Footnote 206 Comestor told his students that the “Master” had composed this prologue to serve as a better introduction to John's Gospel than all those available.Footnote 207 In Part Three, above, we learned that Langton, in his lectures on Frater Ambrosius, Jerome's letter and the traditional Christian accessus to the Pentateuch, had and used Peter Lombard's own lectures on Frater Ambrosius, in which the Lombard referred to his own gloss on Colossians. In Part One, above, we saw that Langton, in his own lectures introducing the Bible, made use of a library of prologues composed for this very purpose by a master so preeminent that his identity was known to all. All of these prologues betray a common feature that is new to the schools: they each take their point of departure from a line of Sacred Scripture, which is then explicated to develop the theme of the prologue.
All of this “prologue” evidence suggests that this practice may have started with our unnamed master, and both Comestor and Langton bear witness to Peter Lombard as its originator. We shall have to wait, of course, for comprehensive editing to say anything more conclusive, but it is at least fair to say that preliminary evidence raises the possibility that Peter Lombard undertook to remake the entire Christian tradition in the Latin West of accessus to the Bible, an 800-year old tradition that had remained unchanged since the late-fourth century.Footnote 208
Given these three types of evidence, the identification of Peter Lombard as the master whose teaching forms the basis for that of Comestor and Langton appears very secure indeed. I am myself persuaded that our so-called anonymous master was not anonymous in the least, that everyone knew and took for granted both his identity and his magisterial authority, and that we have found in Langton's biblical lectures, if not all of them, at the least substantial portions of Peter Lombard's long-thought-to-be-lost lectures on the Old Testament.Footnote 209 And if we scholars reflect a bit, we must ask ourselves: how could it be otherwise? How is it possible that the Lombard's lectures on most of the Bible could have been lost? The only way that it seemed possible until now is because for centuries medievalists and manuscript scholars have been thinking in terms of books rather than in terms of lectures. Had we thought about it for even a minute, we would have gone straight to the works of the Lombard's many students, and there we would have discovered what has long been hidden in plain view.
It is hard to imagine that any other Parisian master from the 1150s could inspire and influence both Comestor and Langton to such a degree that they would each choose to found some portion of their biblical teaching on that other master's legacy to the exclusion of the Lombard. It is in fact almost impossible to imagine either master's incorporating large verbatim chunks of that other master's lectures into his own, as we know that Langton incorporated huge chunks of the Lombard's in his lectures on Frater Ambrosius and Tobit, when the Lombard's were available. It is even harder to imagine Langton's lecturing on Tobit at least three times and in the latest of the three suppressing not only the teaching of his own beloved master, Peter Comestor, but also his own, in favor of some master other than Peter Lombard.
Let us be skeptics for a minute and suppose that the lecture material clearly predating Comestor's Historia scholastica in Corpus Christi 55 (and in other manuscripts whose contents are collatable with those) is not that of Peter Lombard — we already know for sure that some of this lecture material is the Lombard's — but rather those of another master. If so, we will have discovered the lectures of a Parisian master of the 1150s so preeminent that he rivaled the Lombard to such an extent that the Lombard's own students used his lectures instead of the Lombard's for certain books. This seems preposterous, especially given the extent to which Langton relies on and reveres the Lombard's lectures in all that we have seen thus far.
The simplest explanation is the best: we have not only substantial portions of the Lombard's lectures, to an extent yet to be determined, embedded in Langton's massive corpus of lectures; these lectures from the 1150s form the foundation upon which an entire edifice of oral teaching is built. Comestor builds the History upon the foundation of the Lombard's lectures. Langton relies on both the Lombard and Comestor but returns time and again to the Lombard's original. If this is right, and it is hard to imagine that it is not, then both Comestor and Langton passed on the Lombard's teaching on the most of the Bible to the thirteenth century, Comestor by means of the Historia scholastica, and Langton by means of all of his many lectures.
At this point in this study, to multiply examples from more books of the Old Testament in which every layer of the whole oral tradition is set forth would be tedious, even though those examples are in some cases even more probative. Smalley, for example, noticed a reference to “magister noster” in Langton's lectures on Genesis in Durham A. I. 7, which she opined could be neither the Lombard nor Comestor, since neither “the Lombard in the Sentences, nor the Comestor in the Histories suggest such a solution.”Footnote 210 She even goes so far as to write that she “cannot find any mention of this in the glosses on the likely texts in Genesis, nor in a gloss on Exodus XII.3, referred to by Langton further down in his discussion of the same question.”Footnote 211
As we would expect at this point, however, having seen Smalley repeatedly make claims contradicted by the evidence, the whole layered oral tradition is in plain view in the manuscripts. We find Peter Lombard's original discussion and solution of the problem preserved in Cambridge, Corpus Christi 55, at fol. 2vb; in BNF, lat. 14415, at fol. 6rb; and in BNF, lat. 14435, at fol. 151ra.Footnote 212 Notwithstanding Smalley's assertions to the contrary, we find the Lombard's views discussed and summarized by Peter Comestor in the sixth chapter of his Historia Genesis.Footnote 213 And again notwithstanding Smalley's assertions to the contrary, we find the same, much more fully developed, in other lectures on Genesis by Langton, where he again repeats whole parts of the Lombard's lecture in his own.Footnote 214 It is all in plain view, accessible even to a cursory reading.
There is, however, one other report by Langton of the Lombard's teaching that is worth mentioning here, since in this case he reports the Lombard's teaching in the Sentences:Footnote 215
DOMINI SUNT VERBA qui dicit hoc in Sententiis de quarto libro aliquam agat de penitentia in margine illius capituli: Solet etiam quaeri utrum pravi sacerdotes etc.
THE LORD'S ARE THE WORDS He who says this treats in the Sentences about penance, in the fourth book, in the margin of that chapter. It is also customary to be investigated whether bad priests, etc.
There are several interesting points to be made about this passage. The first is that it reveals that Langton and his students had an early version of the Lombard's Sentences. We know this because Langton provides to his students only a chapter number and no distinction, which shows that the reference must be early, prior to the time when the books were ordered by distinctions.Footnote 216 Given Langton's habit of identifying for his students texts at various stages of their development, we are likely to learn from Langton's lectures (and the Lombard's) a great deal more about the Sentences at an earlier stage of its development than we now know.
The second is that we here see the Sentences as a taught text. We know this, because the version that Langton is using has the teaching at issue in the margins. Indeed, the margins are where we find teachings added to texts, which then make their way into the texts themselves. This is the story told by the manuscripts of the History.Footnote 217 And I suspect strongly that we would find the same story in the manuscripts of the Sentences. The edition that we now use of the Sentences, the third such edition produced in the last 120 years and the product of the tireless scholarship of the great Franciscan scholar, Ignatius Brady, reveals no trace of the oral origins of the Sentences as a taught text. This study reveals the extent to which the Lombard's teaching, like that of his predecessors in the schools, in Laon, Paris, and doubtless elsewhere, was oral.
As admirable as Brady's edition is, it would be worth our while to look again at the manuscripts preserving the Sentences, since it would certainly be revealing to understand with more precision how it came to be and the form in which the Sentences were taught decade by decade over the course of the second half of the twelfth century. The fact that the distinctions, which are commonly thought to be the essential divisions in the Sentences, were added by another master long after the Lombard's lifetime, shows just how little we know about the Lombard's text, as he and his successors taught it.
B. Dates
The certain identification of Peter Lombard as the author of the lectures upon which Langton lectured settles the date, at least to the extent of a terminus post quem. The Lombard died in 1160, and so the lectures that are his must date to the 1150s or before. Since they evidently postdate not only Langton's magna glosatura on the Psalms and on the Pauline epistles but also the Sentences, the great likelihood is that they date to the later 1150s. But comprehensive and critical editing of these lectures will doubtless result in some surprises as regards the dating of the Lombard's entire corpus.
The key text for establishing secure dating and for identifying with precision which portions of Langton's lectures are the Lombard's is Comestor's Historia scholastica, for those lectures in Langton's that predate the History and form a foundational source for it cannot be Langton's but must instead be the lectures of Lombard, upon which Langton based his own.
All of Langton's lectures will themselves also have to be dated with precision — we will of course be able to order them in relation to each other, as we have in this study, according to the state of the questions and opinions treated therein — but this will prove to be less difficult owing to the fact that we have precise dates for each of the three versions of Langton's course on the Historia scholastica, where he treats much of the same material to be found in his many lectures on the Old Testament.
Part Four: Consequences for Scholarship of These Discoveries
The discovery that Stephen Langton, like Peter Comestor, had and used the lectures of Peter Lombard on the Old Testament has many ramifications for our understanding of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and indeed of scholastic culture and practice in general. This corpus of heretofore unknown and unstudied evidence will affect our understanding of the twelfth century as a whole, for so great a figure was Peter Lombard that he literally redirected the entire course of theology, if by theology we mean what he and all twelfth-century masters understood, namely, a common project founded on the Bible and spilling over into an oral tradition of asking questions and applying logical tools, new and old, that would bear extraordinary fruit in the thirteenth century and beyond.
It begins to look very much as if Peter Lombard were the Janus of the twelfth century. On the one side, all of the various scholastic streams from the first half of the twelfth century that flowed into Paris were gathered up by him and his circle of students: grammatical-logical developments; lectures on the Gloss spanning most of the Bible; theological questions of every kind; collections of theological sentences; and finally the long and venerable Christian tradition of glossing the Bible itself. Much of this inheritance, far more than has ever been suspected, was oral. Oral teaching preserved from Laon and from other centers of cathedral-based learning was brought to Paris. So too, the oral teaching of other masters whose teaching the Lombard either heard in person or inherited in the forms of lectures recorded and preserved, became part of the Parisian inheritance of learning. All such streams seem to have been gathered into his multifaceted interests and expertise and became the subject of his own lectures.
On the other side, this massive amount of learning continued to flow outwards from him in streams of remembered teaching that would transform in many ways the scholastic landscape of the second half of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By means of the little evidence seen so far from his Old Testament biblical lectures, we can see the emergence of supposition theory and terminist logic, the precise state of the biblical Gloss in the Lombard's lecture halls, and the full flowering of the scholastic method in those same lecture halls, where the Lombard organized not only the tradition of sentence collections but also the enormous library of questions raised by the biblical text.
It would appear that Peter Lombard, in spite of the many recent scholarly works celebrating his greatness, has been underestimated by scholars, if such a thing is possible, for no scholar has imagined that he had the authority and expertise to redo the 800-year old tradition of accessus to the entire Bible.Footnote 218 No scholar has dreamed that the Lombard systematized and gathered into one work the whole of Christian theology, including the massive Christian tradition of glossing the Bible. Finally, no scholar has divined that Peter Lombard himself was at the base of the entire theological project that would flourish and grow so impressively in the three centuries after his death, that he was responsible not only for the Sentences but for the redirection and refoundation of the entire Christian tradition of biblical exposition, from the Gloss to the History to the unbroken tradition of lecturing on the Bible itself.
A. The Scholarship of the Past
Two large and influential twentieth-century scholarly streams must now be reconsidered and to a great extent discarded. The first is the division between so-called speculative and biblical-moral theology spawned by Martin Grabmann with the publication of his Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode in two volumes in 1911.Footnote 219 Grabmann divided twelfth-century theologians into two separate groups, the one speculative (Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Abelard, Robert of Melun, and Peter of Poitiers) and the other practical (Peter the Chanter, Peter Comestor Stephen Langton, et al.), centered on interest in the Bible and morality.Footnote 220 Over the course of the twentieth century influential scholars such as Chenu, Smalley, and Baldwin adopted and reinforced Grabmann's division.Footnote 221
With the discovery that Peter Lombard himself viewed his work on the Sentences and his multifaceted work on Sacred Scripture as two sides of the same coin, there is no reason to give any credence whatsover to Grabmann's division, based as it was on the relationship of various thinkers to Peter Lombard himself. Had Grabmann himself seen in the opening pages of the Lombard's lectures on Genesis the first known application of supposition theory and terminist logic to the discussion of the Trinitarian theology, had he seen in the Lombard's lectures on the whole of the Old Testament the unending succession of theological quaestiones, solutiones, and responsiones, could he have proposed such a division? It seems unlikely.
At the very least the notion of a twelfth-century split between speculative theology, on the one hand, and biblical theology, on the other hand, which Grabmann based on the work of Peter Lombard himself, must now be dead and buried once and for all. It has no basis whatsoever in fact. The truth, as we now know, is the opposite: theology for Peter Lombard, as for his students and immediate successors, was a unified project founded first and foremost on the Bible and its historical sense. That said, it is undeniable that thirteenth-century thinkers argued over such a division in theology. The Oxford Dominican, Richard Fishacre, for example, who was active in the decade following Hugh of St. Cher at Paris, distinguishes explicitly in the prologue to his Sentences commentary, between aspectus and affectus, doctrine and morals, and argues that Lombard's Sentences was the proper locus for the former.Footnote 222 Other equally prominent scholastic thinkers, such as Robert Grosseteste, by then Bishop of Lincoln, criticized such a view.Footnote 223 The historical reality as it unfolded during the course of the thirteenth century is undoubtedly complex, but we now know that for Peter Lombard at least no such division existed. Moreover, if over time scholastic theologians saw the wisdom of considering theological questions apart from the biblical text, there is no reason to suppose that any of them ever lost the sure knowledge that the Bible was the foundation for all Christian theology.
The second and even more influential stream that must be reconsidered in the light of this study is the scholarly legacy of Beryl Smalley, whose The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages is such a standard work that it is still required reading for graduate students, even those in biblical departments.Footnote 224 I was myself inspired by this famous work of Smalley's to undertake the study of Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica and the Bible in the 1150–1250 period. Her chapter in that work entitled “Masters of the Sacred Page,” in which she deals with Peter Comestor, Peter the Chanter, and Stephen Langton, was for many years my guiding light for research. For this reason, it is painful to acknowledge that the manuscript work that is famously the basis for Smalley's many studies may be altogether unreliable.
As the evidence presented throughout this study shows, one finds time and again that the manuscripts do not in fact support Smalley's arguments and assertions based upon them. Most troubling is the abundant evidence that she seems to have read very little of what is in the manuscripts upon which she ostensibly relied to support her all-too-determinate claims. All manuscript scholars make mistakes, but the evidence presented in this study about the quality of Smalley's work with manuscripts has nothing to do with simple mistakes. Instead, we see a systematic failure to examine the contents of the manuscripts, even preliminarily. Any scholar who so wishes could verify with little time or trouble my findings in this regard, since every passage that I have transcribed for this study, and indeed all of the evidence presented, is found in the opening folios of the manuscripts cited and relied upon by Smalley for the many determinate conclusions that have turned out to be baseless. A few minutes of reading would have sufficed to alter and, one hopes, to discard her theories; one can only suppose that she worked either in extreme haste or that she assumed that whatever cursory reading she did do in those manuscripts sufficed to understand the whole. Neither hypothesis is reassuring.
Were Smalley a scholar of little influence, there would be no reason to point this out. The fact is, however, that scholars, myself included, have long taken her manuscript work at face value, and many studies by fine scholars — the list is long and continues to be added to yearly — presuppose the solidity of Smalley's research. Dahan's assumption that Smalley's manuscript work was so thorough that there would be little left to do is typical and represents the view of the many scholars who have simply taken its quality for granted.Footnote 225 Synthetic studies on the Bible in the Middle Ages based explicitly on Smalley's legacy continue to appear regularly — Lesley Smith's monograph on the biblical Gloss, Frans van Liere's An Introduction to the Medieval Bible, and Suzanne LaVere's monograph, Out of the Cloister: Scholastic Exegesis of the Song of Songs: 1100–1250, are three conspicuous examples published within the past decade alone — which presuppose without question the solidity of Smalley's manuscript work and her conclusions based thereon.Footnote 226 No better example could be adduced to document the unquestioning acceptance of Smalley's scholarly legacy than an article published in 2015 by De Gruyter, which purports to survey all scholarship on the medieval Bible since Smalley's death in 1984.Footnote 227 The authors, Ocker and Madigan, presuppose without question the quality of Smalley's scholarship, which they view as a solid foundation; neither suspects that the many studies that they cite with approval may well be founded on sand.
The findings in this study raise the unfortunate possibility that, to whatever extent those many studies rely on Smalley's manuscript research, to that same extent they may themselves be suspect. At the very least, following this study we now know that all of Smalley's work must be checked; this is especially true where manuscripts are concerned. Henceforth, none of her conclusions based on manuscript work can be taken for granted.
Certainly, all that Smalley wrote about Stephen Langton must be revised in the light of the manuscript corpus that preserves Langton's works. Her chapter on the so-called Masters of the Sacred Page, one of the centerpieces of her famous monograph, can no longer stand: she had no idea that Peter Lombard was the foundation and centerpiece of what I call the School of Paris, nor that Langton's work was so inextricably tied to the Lombard's own. And it is obvious that her manuscript research, such as it was, barely scratched the surface of the one body of evidence indispensable for understanding the study of the Bible in the cathedral schools, and most especially in Paris, from 1150 onwards.
B. The Scholarship of the Future
Quite apart from the scholarly legacies of Grabmann and Smalley, it is evident that what scholars have long taken to be complete understandings of twelfth- and thirteenth-century works and figures must now be viewed as partial. For no figure is this more true than Peter Lombard, for what we have to learn from what we ultimately recover of his lectures on much of the Old Testament (and on the New, should we discover those lectures as well) will also likely rewrite much of what we know about the biblical Gloss, about Peter Comestor and his Historia scholastica, about Stephen Langton, and about the transmission of this Parisian tradition into the thirteenth century. To show just how much we have to learn from these lectures, I shall provide in this subsection sample evidence taken from the opening folios of the Lombard's lectures on Genesis, which shows beyond question the extent to which historiography on all of these works and figures will have to be revised.
i. Peter Lombard
We have already seen clear evidence from Langton's lectures that he and his students had a version of the Sentences that reflected the record of an oral tradition of lectures, multilayered like that of the History. Doubtless we shall find a great deal more of such evidence, since Langton habitually reveals his own knowledge of the positions and habits of his masters.Footnote 228 Far more important, however, is the discovery that the Lombard's lectures on the Old Testament postdate not only his lectures on Paul — as we have seen, this is clearly the case for Colossians — but also his lectures on and subsequent codification of the Sentences.
Colish shows that the Lombard was least original in the Sentences in his treatment of creation and the hexameral materials.Footnote 229 Brady himself makes this clear enough when he documents that in treating Genesis 1–3, Peter Lombard actually depended on the Gloss, and not on original sources, for the first twenty-four distinctions (as well as distinction 29) in Book Two.Footnote 230 There is certainly no evidence that the Lombard made use in Book II of the Sentences of the new logic, supposition theory and terminist logic, which we know to have made its way to Paris around the mid-twelfth century. Indeed, his treatment of Trinitarian persons and relations is standard and straightforward Augustinian fare, as we see also from the key section in Book I where the Lombard discusses the Trinity in connection with Genesis 1:1:
Nunc vero ad propositum redeamus, et ad ostendendam personarum pluralitatem atque essentiae divinae unitatem alias Sanctorum auctoritates inducamus. — Moyses dicit: In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram, per Deum significans Patrem, per principium Filium. Et pro eo quod apud nos dicitur Deus, hebraica veritas habet Elohim, quod est plurale huius singularis quod est El. Quod ergo non est dictum El, quod est Deus, sed Elohim, quod potest interpretari dii sive iudices, ad pluralitatem personarum refertur.Footnote 231
In this passage the Lombard repeats the traditional interpretation of Genesis 1:1, according to which the word “God” refers to the Father and the word “beginning” to the Son, but there is no indication that he is using supposition theory or terminist logic to arrive at this conclusion. Indeed, for most of the Christian tradition, as I document in several studies, in the explication of the opening line of Genesis and the Bible, interpreting the word “beginning” to refer to the second person of the Trinity is an allegorical rather than a literal understanding of Genesis 1:1.Footnote 232
That story changes radically in his lectures, both on Frater Ambrosius and on Genesis. For the former, as we have seen, the language of supposition theory and terminist logic is front and center in the Lombard's commendations of the Pentateuch, explicitly in the second and implicitly in the third:Footnote 233
End of Tabernaculum Moysi in Corpus Christi 55:
Vel alia est commendatio huius libri de hoc quod dicitur in Spiritu: capite libri, id est bibliotecae, scriptum est de me, quia per terminum supponentem supponitur Filius Dei, per hunc scilicet “principio.” Est enim sensus “in principio,” id est “in Filio creavit Deus,” id est Pater.
Vel alia est commendatio eiusdem, que in principio Genesis vocatur distinctio trium personarum: persona Filii ubi dicitur, “in principio”; persona Patris ubi dicitur, “creavit Deus”; persona SpiritusFootnote 234 ubi dicitur, “Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas.”
Or there is another commendation of the Pentateuch from that which is said in the Spirit: in the first part (literally, “in the head”) of the book, that is, of the Bible, it was written about me, since through the suppositing term there is understood through supposition the Son of God, namely, through this suppositing term, “beginning.” For here is the sense of “in the beginning,” that is, “in the Son created God,” that is, the Father.
Or there is another commendation of the Pentateuch, which in the beginning of Genesis is called the distinction of the three Persons of the Trinity: the Person of the Son where it is said, “in the beginning”; the Person of the Father where it is said: “God created”; the Person of the Spirit where it is said: “the spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters.”
There is no mistaking the difference between the Lombard's treatment of Genesis 1:1 and of Trinitarian agency in creation in the Sentences and in this lecture: these passages introduce something altogether new. Moreover, it is evident from the manner in which the Lombard takes for granted the familiarity of his students with the language of supposition theory and terminist logic that these are already well known.
As in his lectures on Frater Ambrosius, we find analysis based on supposition and the logic of terms in the Lombard's treatment of agency in creation in the beginning of his lectures on Genesis itself:
His visis procedamus, in principio . Hoc nomen “principium” quandoque tenetur tantum essentialiter et dicitur de tribus personis respectu creaturarum; quandoque ponitur essentialiter significatione et personaliter suppositione, ut patet in quęstione, De Trinitate; quandoque ponitur personaliter significatione et personaliter suppositione; et quandoque supponit sic pro Patre, ut ibi: In principio erat verbum etc., quandoque pro Filio, ut hic: In principio creavit etc., quandoque pro Spiritu Sancto. Ista diversitas satis alibi patet.
Sic ergo lege, in principio , temporis, vel ante sęcula, vel in Filio, contra hoc quod dicit “temporis.” Sic alibi dicitur: “nihil creavit in tempore.” Solutio: “nihil creavit in tempore” id est infra tempus.
These things having been seen, let us proceed, In the beginning. This name “beginning” is sometimes held only essentially and is said of the three persons <of the Trinity> with respect to creatures; sometimes it is posited essentially in signification and personally in supposition, as is clear in the question, on the Trinity; sometimes it is posited personally in signification and personally in supposition; and sometimes it supposits for the Father thus, as there: In the beginning was the Word, etc., sometimes for the Son, as here: In the beginning God created, etc., sometimes for the Holy Spirit. This diversity is sufficiently clear elsewhere.
Thus, therefore, read, In the beginning, of time, or before all ages, or in the Son, against that which is said “of time.” Thus elsewhere it is said: “he created nothing in time.” The solution: “he created nothing in time,” that is, within time.
There is a lot here, theologically, logically, and philosophically, that is nowhere to be seen in the Sentences.Footnote 235 The Lombard and the students in his lecture hall now have at their disposal logical tools that must not have been widely available at the time he treated creation in his most famous work. That changed dramatically by the time he lectured on Genesis and the rest of the Bible. Indeed, we see in these lectures that the whole framework for discussing agency in creation and the various possible interpretations of Genesis 1:1 changed radically. The Lombard end ups with essentially the same traditional interpretive options but gets there using different tools. De Rijk places the origins of supposition theory and terminist logic “in the second half of the twelfth century.”Footnote 236 As noted above, Ebbesen, Valente, and other scholars who have continued the investigation have not been able to agree on when precisely within that half century. The Lombard's use of supposition theory, which must date to sometime during the 1150s, gives us a much more precise date for these logical developments.
Both lectures, therefore, those on Frater Ambrosius and those on the opening lines of Genesis, reveal a significant gap between the Lombard's teaching in the Sentences and his later teaching, which is far more sophisticated. This necessarily raises a question about the standard chronology for the dating of the Lombard's works in general and of the Sentences in particular. These lectures must predate the Lombard's death in 1160, yet scholars date the Sentences just a few years earlier.
Brady, following Van den Eynde and relying on scattered scraps of evidence, assigns what he refers to as the composition (compositio) of the Sentences to the years between 1155 and 1158.Footnote 237 More recently Doyle, without adducing any evidence or authority other than Brady, is more specific, writing that the Lombard's Sentences were “released for publication and introduced in Peter's classroom in 1156.”Footnote 238 In truth, however, Van den Eynde, Brady, and the scholars who have followed them have all estimated this chronology based on correlations between a few passages in the Sentences and either a very few passages in other works of the Lombard or the little that is known for certain about the Lombard's career. With respect to the former, since neither the Lombard's gloss on the Psalms nor that on the Pauline epistles has been edited, scholars have had very little to go on. These lectures on the Old Testament promise a great deal more in terms of what we can date with certainty, since they represent clear development in his thought. With respect to the latter, they will almost certainly add to what we know for certain about the Lombard's career. Moreover, Langton's tendency to provide full information about the state of texts at various times will augment by degrees of magnitude the data we now have about the Lombard's career and works.
There is another issue raised regarding the Sentences besides that of a possibly erroneous chronology. The evidence presented in this study suggests that Brady and Doyle and all the other specialists who have written on Peter Lombard's Sentences (Colish, Rorem, Rosemann, Zier, et al.) may not have the whole picture in thinking that the Sentences were composed and then published, for it may prove true that the Sentences became the Sentences through lectures and over the course of years during which the Lombard lectured and taught.Footnote 239 It is no aberration that Langton, lecturing on the Bible between 1170 and 1200, had a version or versions of the Sentences that still reflected those oral origins and the process of gradual accretion.
My own guess is that the Sentences continued to be added to by other masters long after Peter Lombard's death, just as happened with Peter Comestor and the Historia scholastica. Whatever the truth of that guess, which remains to be investigated, it is certain that Langton knew of the Lombard's Sentences as a work in progress, just as he had specific knowledge of Comestor's History as a work in progress.Footnote 240 It follows that Langton too is likely to add to what we know about the Lombard's career and about his teaching on various matters at different points in his career.
Even from the little bit seen so far, we have already learned a great deal. We know that the Lombard's thought on creation developed over time and in significant ways before his teaching career ended. We know too that he and his students were already taking for granted the new logic, that of terms and its correlative, supposition theory. So too we learn of the existence of a question, “On the Trinity,” also likely to be by Peter Lombard, which is related to the analysis he presents in his lectures. Last of all for now, we learn something else of fundamental importance from these lectures about how the Lombard taught: his method of lecturing on the Bible in these lectures is to pose questions, respond to them, and then offer solutions. His lectures are replete with quaestiones, responsiones, and solutiones.
Dahan makes a distinction between what he refers to as “true commentaries” on the biblical Gloss that appear near the end of the twelfth century and earlier works on the Bible, such as those by Peter Comestor, that do not have the same mature form.Footnote 241 Prescinding from the word “commentary,” which is, as we have seen, misleading to the extent it implies learning transmitted primarily in writing, we can state with confidence that the presence of a fully developed scholastic method in the lectures of Peter Lombard on the Bible during the 1150s calls into question scholarly assumptions about the chronology of scholastic practices and their development. At the very least, the presence in these biblical lectures of the latest logical tools and of a fully formed scholastic method suggests an earlier development in the schools than is commonly supposed.
All this we learn from the opening sentences of his lectures on Genesis: it is obvious that we can expect to learn a great deal more about Peter Lombard, about his works, and about his career from the lectures preserved in Corpus Christi 55 and in other manuscripts that preserve the same.
ii. The Biblical Gloss
These lectures are also likely to transform what we know about the biblical Gloss in general and about its role in Parisian theological teaching in particular, for they form the basis for the teaching on the Bible of the School of Paris from 1150 to 1200. Our editing already shows that the lectures on Genesis preserved in the main columns of Corpus Christi 55, substantial portions of which we now know to be by Peter Lombard, take the biblical Gloss as the principal source to be explicated. The notes entered into the margins of that same manuscript make clear that at least for the literal/historical sense of Scripture, Comestor's History has already supplanted the biblical Gloss as authoritative. Langton's many lectures confirm that Comestor's History had displaced the Gloss for much teaching. That said, the biblical Gloss continues to be cited and used, even in lectures on the Sentences dating to the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote 242 The story, even from the little that we can already see, is one of rapid development and nuanced evolution, but what is absolutely clear is that Peter Lombard's lectures on the Bible are at the bottom of the whole story.
Contrast this with the standard view of Peter Lombard's contribution to the Gloss, set forth by Smith in her recent monograph, according to which “Peter Lombard began making commentaries on the Psalms and Pauline epistles, using the Gloss as a source, and incorporating all of the Gloss material into his own work.”Footnote 243 Smith makes no mention whatsoever of the Lombard's having lectured upon most of the rest of the Bible. The discovery of his long-lost lectures on the Bible, therefore, which are replete with specific references to the Gloss, alters that standard view for good.
It is even possible that Peter Lombard played an important role in the development of the text of the Gloss for books other than the Psalms and the Pauline epistles. Smith does not mention this possibility, and her silence on this subject is understandable, since in a series of three articles published in the 1930s Smalley famously demolished the thesis of Hans Hermann Glunz, set forth in his History of the Vulgate in England,Footnote 244 that Peter Lombard was responsible for the biblical Gloss.Footnote 245 Instead, Smalley pointed to Laon as the likely place for the origins of the Gloss, although the story of its origins is much more complicated than she ever suspected.Footnote 246 But if Smalley was right to dismiss Peter Lombard and Paris as the person and place responsible for the Gloss's origins, she was nevertheless wrong, at least logically, to dismiss the relevance of Peter Lombard and Paris for the development of the text of the Gloss. In fact, the insights of Glunz about the importance of Peter Lombard for the Gloss may prove to be correct after all in this sense: for certain books, what happened to the text of the Gloss at Paris at the hands of Peter Lombard may be quite significant.
This is especially true since scholars know next to nothing about what happened to the Gloss in Paris in the middle of the twelfth century. The view long held by scholars that the Gloss was early on a stable text has now been discarded by those doing the manuscript work necessary to edit individual books. The story is much more complex: the text for some books, John's Gospel for example, appears to stabilize early on, while the text for many others is quite fluid. For Matthew's Gospel, we may have as many versions as we have manuscripts. Owing to this textual dynamism, we shall have to produce many different editions of the Gloss for different books of the Bible at different times, so as to provide snapshots as it were of its text in various decades. Because we know so little of what happened to the text of the Gloss in Paris in the mid-twelfth century, the information about the text and format of the Gloss to be gathered from these lectures, which predate 1160, is likely to be both considerable and important.
I should note that, unlike Comestor's lectures on the glossed Gospels or Langton's lectures on most of the books of the Old Testament, the lectures preserved in Corpus Christi 55 (and in the other manuscripts known to us thus far that contain the same lectures) are not on the biblical Gloss but rather on the Bible itself. Nevertheless, because the Lombard refers to the Gloss so frequently and provides to his student auditors such precise information about its contents, often making clear whether he is referring to a marginal or to an interlinear gloss, we shall be able to compare the state of the biblical Gloss for each book of the Bible lectured upon by the Lombard during the 1150s with the text used in their lectures on the Gloss by Comestor, Langton, and other masters in the schools in the decades following the Lombard's death in 1160. That promises to fill a huge gap in our knowledge.
It may be that scholarly attention has focused for far too long on the manuscripts of the Gloss itself and that scholars should instead focus their efforts on the use of the Gloss. We now know that the Gloss was widely used as a set text for teaching, at least throughout the second half of the twelfth century. Besides the copious lectures of Comestor on the four glossed Gospels and those of Langton on most of the Old Testament, we are even discovering lecture courses on the biblical Gloss by anonymous masters. Almost all of these lectures are as yet unedited and unstudied — to my knowledge only one such work, Langton on Chronicles, has been editedFootnote 247 — yet this corpus of manuscripts is our only way forward for understanding not only how the Gloss was used after 1150 but also how its text developed. The fact that Peter Comestor, Stephen Langton, and doubtless other masters as well had the Lombard's lectures at their disposal as they lectured on the biblical Gloss makes them a resource of considerable importance for our understanding of the Gloss in the twelfth century.
Finally, these lectures also promise to revise our understanding of the use of the Gloss well into the thirteenth century, which at least from our editing of three principal sources for Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas, namely, the lectures on the Sentences of John of La Rochelle, Hugh of St. Cher, and Odo Rigaldus seems to have sustained its importance.Footnote 248 In these lectures we find the biblical Gloss cited frequently and for a variety of biblical books, both from the Old and New Testaments.Footnote 249 The recent volumes dedicated to the so-called “commentaries” — here again, I bracket this word, since there is not the slightest evidence that the works attributed to Alexander of Hales, John of La Rochelle, Hugh of St. Cher, Odo Rigaldus, and other such masters are anything other than lectures, copies of which then circulated — on the Sentences make no mention whatsoever of the biblical Gloss.Footnote 250 Our research, however, indicates that the Gloss is an important source for understanding this developing tradition of lecturing on the Sentences. Given the potential importance of Peter Lombard for the development of the Gloss itself, this should come as no surprise.
iii. Peter Comestor and the Historia scholastica
In an article published in 2005 I showed that Peter Comestor relied on the Lombard's Sentences for his treatment of the first three chapters of Genesis, both in terms of outline and substance.Footnote 251 Moreover, the Lombard's Sentences provides one of the key twelfth-century contexts for the whole of Comestor's History.Footnote 252 With the discovery of these lectures on the Old Testament by Peter Lombard, we now have an even more direct link to the work of Comestor's master, for not only does the order of books lectured upon by the Lombard match closely the order in the Historia scholastica but Comestor also routinely borrows directly from these lectures, often in verbatim fashion, for the History.Footnote 253 That should not surprise us in the least, for he was no doubt present at the Lombard's lectures, just as he had been for his master's lectures on the Sentences.Footnote 254
The discovery of the Lombard's lectures on the Old Testament could not be more timely for the business of editing the Historia scholastica. We are well on our way to an edition and translation of the History based upon the earliest extant manuscripts.Footnote 255 This edition will be much richer owing to these lectures, which appear to be (together with the biblical Gloss) Comestor's source of first resort. Should Peter Lombard's biblical lectures prove to be as important for the History as they appear at first glance, then the medieval legend that made of Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor brothers will seem that much more apt.Footnote 256 Certainly, Peter Lombard will deserve even more acclaim, since he will have proven to be the foundation for the entire theological curriculum adopted by the incipient university, and Comestor's works, his lectures on the four glossed Gospels to be sure but especially the Historia scholastica, will henceforth be seen as part of the Lombard's tremendous legacy. We may even be able to begin to understand and to appreciate the History’s importance and popularity in the schools long after Comestor's death.
Finally, Comestor's History will be invaluable in determining which sections of Langton's lectures on the Bible are actually the Lombard's. Whatever material predates the History cannot be Langton's. Conversely, that which postdates it cannot be the Lombard's.Footnote 257
iv. Stephen Langton
This study, which begins with Langton and ends with Peter Lombard, also makes clear that Langton's biblical corpus must henceforth be considered a priority for understanding the study of the Bible during the High Middle Ages, founded as it is squarely upon the biblical legacy of Peter Lombard. This is true even though it may occasionally prove difficult in the end to know where the Lombard ends and Langton begins. The prosopographical work of sorting out the many references to “magister” found in the manuscripts and also of sorting out the even more numerous references to anonymous authorities (“quidam dicunt,” “sunt qui dicunt,” etc.) will be as indispensable as it is likely to be fruitful: for establishing chronologies of various opinions and disputes, for solidifying attributions, and for understanding the tradition of lecturing on the Bible that developed throughout the second half of the twelfth century.
This study also reveals that we have heretofore understood very little of this developing tradition. It is clear that Smalley did not understand Langton's corpus; it is equally clear that she did not look at it very closely. As a consequence, all that she wrote about Stephen Langton and most of what she wrote about Peter Lombard and the Bible (together with whatever has been repeated by other scholars on the same subjects) can and should be discarded. We are starting anew. That said, we do have some valuable information:
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1. Like Peter Comestor, Stephen Langton had Peter Lombard's prologues that served as new introductions to the Bible as a whole, to large sections of the Old Testament such as the Pentateuch, and to individual books as well;
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2. the Lombard, therefore, may well have undertaken a comprehensive reformation of the Christian tradition of accessus to the Bible that was founded principally on Jerome, his predecessor by almost 800 years;
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3. Stephen Langton and his students were also thoroughly familiar with the contents of Peter Lombard's lectures on the Old Testament, copies of which were circulating in Paris;
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4. the Lombard's lectures on the Old Testament still survive in manuscripts containing works attributed to Langton;
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5. his lectures on the New Testament likely survive in Peter Comestor's lectures on the four glossed Gospels.
None of this should surprise us, given that it doubtless mirrors exactly the situation with respect to the Lombard's magna glosatura on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles. What I found for Colossians, namely, that Langton not only founds his lectures on those of the Lombard but also incorporates whole chunks of those original lectures into his own, will, I predict, be the invariable pattern for all of this biblical material. What would be shocking would be a situation in which the Lombard's lectures were available and Langton did not use them.
Langton's own works, part of a tradition that is manifestly complicated, must nevertheless now be edited critically, ideally together with the lectures on the Bible and the Gloss of Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor, respectively. The three versions of Langton's course on the Historia scholastica will be especially helpful in this regard, as we have just seen, since they give us precise information about his opinions at certain times: two predate 1176 and the final revision dates to 1193. Owing to my familiarity with this material, I can see at a glance material common to all three versions of that course on the History and to his lectures on the Old Testament. By comparing Langton's explication of this common material in the various works that preserve it, we will be able to establish a timetable for the development of Langton's views on the many questions and difficulties that he revisited over the course of his career.
v. Hugh of St. Cher
This study is not the place for any kind of in-depth evaluation of the extent to which the multilayered oral tradition discovered here made its way into the so-called Postills of Hugh of St. Cher and the Dominicans under his supervision in the 1230s. There is, however, room to show that Hugh and his Dominicans had the same lectures by Peter Lombard that Comestor and Langton had. We can do so readily by comparing teaching on the first line of Genesis (“in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram”), which we can accomplish briefly, since we reviewed above the Lombard's teaching, using supposition theory, on this very passage regarding the philosophical problems raised by the teaching in the interlinear glosses that God created heaven and earth “in tempore.”
In the beginning of those Postills, in the exposition of the first line of Genesis, we find the following: “Interlinearis dicit quod creavit in tempore. Contra alibi: Nihil creavit in tempore. Solutio: Nihil creavit in tempore id est infra tempus.”Footnote 258 The Lombard discusses the same issue in the Sentences (in Book II, Distinction 2, chapter 1) but in different and less precise terms.Footnote 259 But returning to the Lombard's lectures preserved in Corpus Christi 55 and three other manuscripts, we find the source used verbatim by the Dominicans: “Sic ergo lege, in principio , temporis, vel ante saecula, vel in Filio, contra hoc quod dicit ‘temporis.’ Sic alibi dicitur: ‘nihil creavit in tempore.’ Solutio: ‘nihil creavit in tempore’ id est infra tempus.” Is it possible that they took this from an intermediate source? Certainly, although I have not found this part of the Lombard's lecture repeated either in Comestor or Langton. Far more likely is the supposition that Hugh and the Dominicans had the Lombard's original lectures on the Bible, just like Comestor and Langton.
This raises the tantalizing possibility that the School of Paris was transmitted to the thirteenth century in one piece, from beginning, that is, the Lombard's lectures, to end, that is, Langton's massive corpus of lectures, founded as it was on those earlier lectures. If true, the thirteenth-century masters and students would have inherited this multilayered oral tradition of teaching on the Bible and the Gloss together with the biblical Gloss itself as it developed in Paris under Peter Lombard, the Lombard's Sentences, and Comestor's History, which would mean that Peter Lombard exercised an influence on the High Middle Ages undreamed of, even by those scholars who have most championed him. It would also mean that we have our work cut out for us in editing the works of the Lombard, of Comestor, and of Langton, since the School of Paris, the existence of which was not even known to scholars until quite recently, would be by far the most important twelfth-century legacy to the remainder of the High Middle Ages. Those works, so long either unknown or ignored, must now become a priority for scholars interested in that era.
Conclusions
In a recent study I showed why the search for the Lombard's long-lost glosses on most of the glossed Old Testament (hereinafter “Lombard's Old Testament lectures”) had gone astray.Footnote 260 Conducted first by Beryl Smalley and subsequently by the great editor of the Sentences, Ignatius Brady, the search derailed from the start owing to crucial mistakes in interpretation by Smalley and the adoption by both scholars of fallacious tests for authenticity of attribution.Footnote 261 Observing that “what happened to this collection of glosses is one of the great mysteries of medieval theology,”Footnote 262 I proposed that the search be reopened, noting that, apart from all four of Comestor's lectures on glossed Gospels, “the next obvious place in which to look will be the biblical commentaries of Stephen Langton.”Footnote 263 As the evidence presented in this study shows, the corpus so long attributed to Langton was indeed the right place to look.
It is now also clear that the question of whether the High Middle Ages were primarily an oral culture, as opposed to a written or book culture, bears directly on the survival of Peter Lombard's missing biblical corpus in the extant works of Stephen Langton. Brady himself came around to a firm belief that the Lombard's library, bequeathed in his last will and testament and recorded in the Cartulary of Notre Dame, the predecessor to the present-day Cathedral, contained not only his own personal copy of the Sentences and Gratian's Decretum but also his own glosses on most of the Bible.Footnote 264 He hypothesized that either the Lombard's students had purchased the volumes for use in their own lectures or the Canons of St. Mary's had sold them to pay for debts.Footnote 265 In discussing the disappearance of the Lombard's glossed Bible, Colish mentions the second possibility, speculating that “they were sold by his successor to the see of Paris, Maurice of Sully.”Footnote 266 It is now apparent, however, that, whatever the fate of the Lombard's personal library, his Old Testament lectures survived owing to that oral culture.
The evidence presented in this study shows clearly that they survived in two ways: they were passed on orally, just as were the lectures of Anselm of Laon and other masters before and after the Lombard. And copies of those lectures, whether authorized by the Lombard or not, were made, some from reports and others from memory, assisted by good notes. Augustine famously complains that copies of his works were being made and circulated even before they were finished. Anselm of Bec, that noted eleventh-century Augustinian, makes the same complaint about the copying of his own works. But both authors were complaining about the unauthorized copying and dissemination of their written work, which had not necessarily issued from lectures or conferences. Indeed, neither Augustine the North African bishop nor Anselm the English abbot lived and wrote in a scholastic milieu so thoroughly oral as that of the mid-twelfth-century Paris in which Peter Lombard, the preeminent Master of Theology, lived and lectured.
The Lombard had many students, and many others besides Peter Comestor heard his lectures. It is to this twelfth-century oral tradition that we owe the survival of the Lombard's lectures on the Bible. We know now that Comestor had the Lombard's prologues on John (and in all probability all four Gospels).Footnote 267 I have shown herein that Langton and his students had and used copies of the Lombard's lectures, both prologues to and lectures on the Old Testament. I have also shown that those copies, as all copies, were defective in places owing to copying errors. It strains credibility to suppose that Comestor and Langton were the only two students to have and use copies of the Lombard's lectures on the Bible. Now that we know where to look, more evidence is sure to come to light. Nonetheless, Langton's corpus, which is enormous, constitutes a gold mine for scholars. Just as Langton has proven to be our most valuable source for understanding the early history of Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica, so too it turns out that he may be, along with Comestor himself, our most valuable witness to the Lombard's oral teaching: on the Bible and on the Sentences.
My sincere hope is that the discovery that the massive corpus of works attributed to Langton in the extant manuscripts is not all his and that Langton founded his own lectures on those of Peter Lombard, whole sections of which we also now have, will soon lead other scholars and students to undertake serious study of the large corpus of manuscripts that is the legacy of the School of Paris. David Luscombe, who has done so much fine work on the first half of the twelfth century, once teased me at a conference that I work on the boring half of the twelfth century. But the discovery of the School of Paris and of the extent of its ambitions and influence will I hope alter that picture a bit. At the very least Peter Lombard can now be claimed by all of his students and successors, notwithstanding Grabmann's long-accepted views.
A second and related hope is that the Bible and theology will henceforth be viewed by scholars as inseparable and studied together. That Peter Lombard viewed the Bible as of supreme importance is no longer debatable. His magnificent prologues introducing the Bible and the Pentateuch make plain enough his views. Stephen Langton too, who together with his students had and used the Lombard's entire corpus, clearly endorsed the same integrated view of theology. In studying them separately, twentieth-century and twenty-first-century scholars have missed not only the unity of that project but also its essential outlines. We put logic on the one side and moral questions on the other, a mistake Peter Lombard and his Parisian successors never made. If we wish to understand them correctly, we will have to study their work as it existed in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. It is a historical fact that twelfth- and thirteenth-century masters treated all manner of questions, be they historical, logical, philosophical, theological, etc., whenever they arose in their classrooms. Modern scholars, therefore, cannot hope to understand those thinkers without studying their works in their entirety.
This leads to my third and final hope for this study, which is that scholars will begin to rethink how medieval manuscripts are viewed. I am confident that the evidence I present herein for oral transmission is only the tip of an iceberg, long hidden from sight owing to the simple but erroneous assumption that we scholars were making about how learning was transmitted during the High Middle Ages. Indeed, at the heart of this study stands a revelation about the formation of schools in twelfth-century Paris. Grabmann thought that the salient feature of the scholastic method was logic, but this study suggests something even more central, namely, whether or not a master's lectures were adopted by his successors as the basis for their own. The Lombard's lectures on the Bible (apart from those on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles) were “lost” for so long because we did not know where to look. We were looking for and thinking in terms of books.
If it is right that learning was transmitted primarily orally during the High Middle Ages, and that orality is the kernel from which most surviving writings arose, then we also have a new and powerful key for understanding and interpreting its culture and norms. Smalley thought that the works of Andrew of St. Victor and his embrace of the literal sense were unique.Footnote 268 Following her lead, scholars have edited and studied all of his works.Footnote 269 But no twelfth-century master made Andrew's works the basis for his own.
By contrast, we see the lectures of Anselm of Laon preserved in collections of Sentences and in the works that become the biblical Gloss, and we then see the appearance of this tradition in Parisian lectures, including those of the Lombard.Footnote 270 We see the biblical Gloss serving as the basis for classroom lectures, and, even when that ceases, we see that lecturers on the Sentences in the 1230s, 1240s, and 1250s still have it at their fingertips and on their lips. We see the Lombard's own lectures, on the Sentences, on the Pauline epistles, on the Psalms, and on other books of the Old Testament, adopted as the basis for the lectures of his successors. The same holds true for Comestor and the History, upon which Langton lectures. Langton's lectures on the History and on the Bible are in turn passed on by Hugh and the Dominicans. This goes on in an unbroken line through the thirteenth century and well into the fourteenth.Footnote 271 The transmission of knowledge is oral from first to last, at least in the sense that orality is the kernel out of which writings, some of them polished and some of them not, take shape.
Landgraf wrote long ago, in speaking about the formation of “Schools” in the early Scholastic period, that “the common element is a text that served as the basis for subsequent elaborations.”Footnote 272 He was right, but what he did not suspect was just how oral the whole scholastic tradition already was. As a consequence, in speaking of the “literature” of the early Scholastic period and in specifying genres of “texts,” he listed “Sentence Collections,” “Commentaries on Sacred Scripture,” and the like. Like everyone else, Landgraf was thinking in terms of books. This study, which hints at the extent to which almost all scholastic transmission of knowledge during this period was oral, at least in origins, modifies Landgraf's view in this way: granting that he was right about the knowledge of one master serving as the base for that of his successors in the schools, we now know that what was passed on were the lectures. Some of these, like those that became the Lombard's Sentences or Comestor's History, resulted eventually in a stable text that was itself passed on. But this was the end result of a scholastic process and method that was in its origins and essence oral.
We now know that there really was a School of Paris, not in the sense of a common doctrine but rather in the sense of a tradition of teaching and lecturing, carried on by one master after another. Peter Lombard was its founder, and Peter Comestor and Stephen Langton two distinguished successors who carried forward the Lombard's foundational teaching. There are doubtless others whose works we shall now look at in quite a different light. They too may prove to be important contributors to this scholastic tradition that came out of the cathedral schools in Paris.
Whatever we discover, one thing is abundantly clear. The manuscripts that preserve the teaching on the Bible of the School of Paris and that hold the key to understanding the development of theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond, which have for so long lain unstudied and unedited in libraries around the world, must now be edited and studied, if we are serious about understanding not only Scholasticism but the place of the Bible in the theology of the High Middle Ages as well. The truth is that the teaching on the Bible of the School of Paris, founded on that of Peter Lombard, fills a longstanding gap in our knowledge of medieval theology between 1141, the year in which both Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor died, and the start of the thirteenth century, when Praepositinus and other masters undertook the long speculative advance in medieval philosophy and theology that was not to diminish before 1350. Until now medievalists interested in medieval theology have assumed that the Lombard's Sentences filled this gap and have largely ignored as superfluous lectures on the Bible dating to the second half of the twelfth century.
The discovery of the Lombard's lectures on the Bible, however, and the startling discovery that they not only postdate but greatly surpass the theological teaching of the Sentences owing to their incorporation of the newly invented logical theory of supposition renders that conventional narrative obsolete. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the introduction of supposition theory revolutionized Trinitarian theology. Before now, no scholar has ever suspected that the roots and foundation of that great thirteenth-century speculative advance are to be found in twelfth-century lectures on the Bible. We now know otherwise, and the real work of understanding not only the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages but the full story of the development of medieval philosophy and theology must now begin.
