Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology by Clare Monagle (review)

Riding on the coat-tails of Robert Moore’s idea of the first European revolution, Clare Monagle drives home the important observation that medieval clerics were embedded in the cornerstone of that cultural epoch. They were the engines that produced a new world order. Crucially important was theology, that quarrelsome old woman (to borrow a phrase from Erasmus), which received a specific and striking endorsement at the Fourth Lateran Council that approved Peter Lombard. This often overlooked event constituted a watershed in the recognition of academic theology as an indispensable factor within the medieval world. The correlation between theology and heresy in the Middle Ages was alleviated to some extent when Lombard emerged from the shadows of heterodoxy into the light of official approbation. Suspicion did not vanish overnight and detractors remained convinced that Lombard’s Sentences did threaten ecclesiastical identity. Not even the endorsement of an ecumenical council was sufficient to establish academic theology as essential to Christian faith and institutional power. The struggle that occupied the schoolmen for two centuries indelibly marked medieval Europe. The story Monagle elaborates is one of controversy around the reception of the Sentences and the acrimonious struggle for the freedom of theology.

Bernard of Clairvaux was a great man, but he was also an ass. His opposition to Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers (among others) was predicated upon the fear of questions and a commitment to maintaining simplistic faith. The critics of schoolmen between Berengar and Gilbert were motivated by fear of a heresy virus that they suspected incubated in the hothouses of questions and unrestrained thinking. Those participating in such behaviour were considered not only in error but in evil. Monagle provides vivid portraits with persuasive links to the development of theology. Christological, Eucharistic, Trinitarian, and even language issues became battlefields in the struggle for the minds of Christendom. None of this is overwrought. Roscelin of Compiègne recanted to avoid being murdered while Bernard tried to rally the faithful to cut down the ‘forest of heresy’ planted by the likes of Abelard and sought to convince curial officials that the latter was toxic to the faith. These were dramas on the high seas of theology and Monagle displays sound navigational skills.

Many of these theologians were (in Southern’s words) ‘prolix, enigmatic, strikingly original’. The schoolmen were not homogeneous but in their diversity were profoundly unified in the development of intellectual authority. The legacy of Lombard’s Sentences was an intellectual struggle for a definitive text that flew in the face of the arrogance of orthodoxy that conceived of having built a tower of truth established for all eternity. Lombard and his successors did not imagine they were again laying foundations but they believed the past could be improved upon. The Patristics may have been authoritative, but modern problems demanded modern truths. Abelard had said much the same and fell under Bernard’s withering protests that warned against the evils of theological inquiry while characterising heresy as a life or death matter. The schoolmen stood resolute and declared that ideas were transformed as that quarrelsome old woman staggered onward. The task of doing theology in the twelfth century was undertaken both with humility and confidence and the schoolmen often exhibited anguished concern over heresy while defenders of earlier traditions insisted that some theological matters were beyond investigation and ought simply to be followed, believed, and defended. Those who disagreed were dismissed as ‘putrid frogs’. Monagle rightly eschews the notion of ‘Lombard the bore’ and lays the blame for that perception on John of Salisbury’s biased account of the schools as mired in intellectual decline. No other medieval text was read more than the Sentences and its author was both convincing and controversial.

Monagle explicates the controversy surrounding the Sentences by showing that much...