Peter Comestor and Peter Lombard: Brothers in Deed

Abstract

PETER COMESTOR AND PETER LOMRARD: RROTHERS IN DEED By MARK CLARK According to medieval legend, Gratian, Peter Lombard, and Peter Comestor were bro7thers.1 What united these men in the medieval imagination were the three great works they produced, respectively, over the course of the twelfth century: the Decretum, the Sentences, and the Historia scholastica .2 The two Peters, in particular, were connected. Stephen Langton, one of the most prominent teachers of Scripture and theology at Paris during the last decades of the twelfth century, praised both Peters for their mastery of Sacred Scripture.3 The joint ascendancy of the reputations of Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor can also be seen in the tradition of medieval chroniclers such as Otto of St. Rlaise, who wrote that "in those days Peter Lombard and Peter Comestor shone forth as distinguished masters at Paris."1 In the twentieth century as well, historians of scholasticism found truth in the supposed kinship of these men. Joseph de Ghellinck, recalling the legend of the fraternity of the three men, emphasized the complementarity of their The following abbreviations are used throughout: GI = Gtossa interlinearis and GO = Glossa ordinaria, Facsimile reprint of the Edilio princeps by Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/81, introduction by K. Froehlich and M. Gibson (Turnhout, 1992); Peter Lombard, / and II. Sent. = Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis Episcopi senlentiae in IV libris distinctae , ed. Ignatius Brady vol. 1, part 2, books 1-2 (Grottaferrata, 1971); RTAM = Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale. 2 The chronicler Godfrey of Viterbo started the resilient medieval legend that Comestor was the brother of Peter Lombard and Gratian, the authors of the two most celebrated works in theology and canon law, respectively. See Joseph de Ghellinck, Le mouvement théologique du XIIe siècle, 2nd ed., rev., Museum Lessianum, Section historique 10 (Bruges, 1948; repr. Brussels, 1969), 214 and 285. See also Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols., Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 41 (Leiden, 1994), 1:16 and n. 5. 3 Smalley wrote that "Langton puts their author on the same level as the author of the theological classic, the Sentences; both are of the fellowship of Wisdom," citing (in her own translation) Langton: "Blessed is the man . . . that lodgeth near her house and fasteneth a pin in her walls [Eccles. 14:22-25] as they do who hand down some writing on Scripture, the Manducator who compiled the Histories, the Lombard who established [statuit] the Sentences" (Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed., rev. [Oxford, 1984], 214 and n. 1). "His diebus Petrus Lombardus et Petrus Manducator apud Parisiensum magistri insignes claruerunt" ( Continuatio Sanblasiana, MGH, Scriptores [Hannover, 1868], 20:308, cited by Colish, Peter Lombard, 1:31, n. 51). 86TRADITIO three great works in the development of twelfth-century scholasticism.' Marie-Dominique Chenu viewed the link between the great works of the two Peters as especially keen: "the legend of the brotherhood in the flesh of Comestor and of Lombard is a symbol full of truth."6 The bond between the two Peters and their work, in particular, would seem to be especially well founded, for they were joined not only in legend but in life. Comestor was the Lombard's student, and it is chiefly through him that we know about the Lombard's oral teaching.7 It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to discover that the works that made the two Peters brothers in legend, namely the Sentences and the History, while products of the same distinctive historical stream, are nevertheless seen as wholly unrelated in substance, approach, and genre. Twentieth-century scholarship, while it established a close link between Comestor and the Lombard, nevertheless clearly separated the Sentences and the History. Martin Grabmann, in his classic study published in 1911, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, distinguished sharply between the works of the two Peters.8 The Lombard, together with Hugh of Saint Victor, Peter Abelard, Robert of Melun, and Peter of Poitiers, whom Grabmann called "the truest student of the Lombard," represented "the theoretical side of theology" in the twelfth century.9 Grabmann grouped Comestor with Peter the Chanter into an alternative, "more positive-practical stream...