Peter Lombard and the Biblical Gloss

This monograph presents altogether new and substantial evidence showing that the view of the development of Scholasticism and Scholastic thought going back three centuries at least is mistaken. Peter Lombard's Sentences and his career did not mark and mirror a transition from the traditional biblical theology to the newer systematic theology, as so long supposed. Rather, the traditional genres of medieval theology served as the indispensable foundation for the development of new forms for teaching Christian doctrine to clerics, forms organized systematically. The Bible was not displaced or abandoned in favor of various summas but was rather integrated into a medieval theology that looks surprisingly like the ideal of the Second Vatican Council. Dei Verbum, the dogmatic constitution that deals with the place of Sacred Scripture, doesn't mention the Schoolmen, because longstanding historiography on Scholastic thought in the High Middle Ages misled popes and prelates into supposing the medieval theology had abandoned the Bible in favor of cold, logical, systematic treatises. In fact, however, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas and many others could themselves have authored Dei Verbum, which reads like the prologues and primers that the masters teaching theology to clerics in the High Middle Ages wrote themselves.

Mark Clark is Ordinary Professor of Church History and John C. and Gertrude P. Hubbard Chair of Medieval Church History and Theology at The Catholic University of America.