 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Law and Order, Gratian and Peter Lombard. In the 12th century, the Church was represented by two separate, yet equally important groups, the theologians who investigated religious doctrine and the jurists who established ecclesiastical law. This is their story. Like the culprits apprehended and prosecuted on the TV series Law and Order, 12th century intellectuals had a lot to answer for. It was at this time that scholasticism began to flower, before blossoming fully in the 13th century. Ground's enough for an indictment according to several leading thinkers of the early modern era. Men like Descartes and Hobbes quietly borrowed from scholasticism but loudly denounced its shortcomings. That attitude still persists today, so that the word scholasticism stands for an inflexible body of authoritative doctrines which only left room for philosophers to engage in pointless distinction-mongering. But I think that scholasticism is like an unjustly accused defendant on Law and Order, or a child who's dressed himself as a mummy for Halloween. It gets a bad rap. While exploring the roots of scholasticism, we've seen remarkably open-minded writers engaging in controversies over fundamental theological and philosophical issues. In this episode, I'll be continuing my defense of scholasticism which will feature a pair of star witnesses, Gratian and Peter Lombard. Far from parroting an unquestioned and monolithic body of teachings, these two authors exposed and creatively reconciled tensions and outright contradictions in the authoritative tradition. Both of them hailed from northern Italy, which along with Paris was an early center for scholastic activity, especially with regard to law. The resurgence of legal activity began in the later 11th century, when the Digest of Roman Law assembled under the Eastern Emperor Justinian was being read in Italy. In the 12th century, the city of Bologna in particular became the place to be for ambitious young lawyers, and law in Bologna had a first name, it's G-R-A-T-I-A-N. We don't know much about Gratian, unfortunately, beyond the fact that he seems to have been active in Bologna in the first half of the century. His masterful compilation of law circulated in different versions during his own lifetime, and it hasn't been possible to determine the date he wrote it, though we know it appeared at some point in a 20-year span from 1125 to 1145. It's usually called the Decretum, but the title that Gratian gave it is more revealing, the Concordantia Discordantium Canonum. This shows that Gratian's goal was not simply to lay down the law, if you will, but to bring discordant legal texts into agreement. Towards this end, he supplied thousands of quotations from a wide range of sources, including Latin and Greek church fathers, earlier church councils, and letters written by popes. He was following in the footsteps of earlier compilers, a notable example being Ivo of Chartres, whom we mentioned last time for his contribution to the investiture contest. Ivo is not exactly a household name, but he really should be, given that he was both an early proponent of the solution accepted in the Concordat of Worms and a forerunner of Gratian. It's important to note that Gratian and Ivo were talking mostly about church law, not secular law. So Gratian's Decretum deals not with general problems of property, contract, or criminal law, but with issues that arise in ecclesiastical contexts. What to do about misbehaving priests, for example, or the range of powers that belong to bishops. He has much to say about the appointment of clergy, as well he might given the context of the investiture contest. Gratian improved on earlier canonists like Ivo by being more comprehensive, but his real innovation was his ambition of bringing the legal tradition into agreement with itself. He does not just quote from earlier texts, but adds bridging passages and comments called dicta, which explain the relevance of the material and resolve apparent conflicts. His favorite single author is Augustine, and as anyone who has read him will know, Augustine alone supplies more conflicting evidence than a double episode of Law and Order. An important precedent for Gratian's harmonizing approach was Peter Abelard's treatise Sic et Non. But Abelard, in characteristically provocative fashion, simply juxtaposed conflicting passages and left the job of reconciliation to the reader. Gratian's Decretum is like a legal version of Sic et Non with an answer key. The result was a work that became canonical in every sense of the word, attracting more than 100 commentaries before this entry was out. When universities began to appear in places like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, Gratian's work provided a textbook for students. Some observers worried that law was outstripping theology as a subject. As bright young men flock to become lawyers, one contemporary complained that, perception that northern Italy was the home of law, and Paris the place for cutting edge theology. Gratian's Decretum would be supplanted as the key legal compilation in the mid-13th century, but he is still quoted liberally by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and remained important to later experts in canon law. One particularly important canonist, a contemporary of Aquinas, was called Acursius, a name which would be equally at home in Voldemort's spellbook. Gratian was certainly influential then, but does he really deserve a place in a history of philosophy? Yes he does, and not just because he followed the example of Abelard and was later quoted by Aquinas. The Decretum touches on a number of philosophical issues, sometimes in passing and sometimes at greater length. The best example is the opening sections, which take up the question of law itself, what it is, under what circumstances it has force, and how we identify the sources on which to base church law in particular. He begins by telling us, Gratian then adds that the so-called golden rule, Christ's exhortation to do to others as we would have them do to us, is an expression of this natural law. This is a big moment, since it's the first time that we're encountering the concept of natural law, which will play a major role in later medieval and early modern philosophy. We may immediately feel wrong-footed though. The phrase natural law conjures up the idea of a set of rules that we should all be able to access with our inborn reason. And Gratian seems to agree, since he will go on to say that natural law emerges along with rational creatures and never changes thereafter. If natural law has to do with reason, and not revelation, then why is he drawing such a strong link between natural law and Scripture? Of course, Gratian is writing about church law, so he wants to stress that Scripture does indeed have a distinctively legal kind of authority. But he does not seem to be saying that the deliverances of natural law can only be reached by turning to Scripture, nor does he think that everything found in Scripture is part of the natural law. Rather, he's doing what he does best, by emphasizing agreement, in this case between natural and religious law. His choice of example is a good one. The golden rule may be found in the New Testament, but it is also something that humans could grasp without the benefit of revelation. Which is not to deny that God is part of the story. After all, human reason itself is a gift from God as far as Gratian is concerned. So heathens too are drawing on a divine source when they discover and follow the natural law with no help from the Bible. Alongside the natural law, there is what Gratian calls human law. This means any law set down by a human authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical. In addition, there are all the requirements and guidelines that fall under the heading of custom. How then does custom relate to human and natural law? One thing is clear, no human law or custom has force if it contravenes the natural law. For instance, let's assume it is part of the natural law that children should respect their parents. If so, then we cannot be obligated to mistreat our parents just because some king lays down a supposed law directing us to do so, or less hypothetically, because we belong to a society where the old are routinely scorned by the young. So the natural law sets boundaries for human laws and custom. There's plenty of room within these boundaries though, which is why there can be so much variation between various human laws and various customs without any departure from natural justice. More difficult is the question of how customs interact with human law. Gratian tries to strike a delicate balance here, as he juxtaposes texts that seem to give priority to custom with others that emphasize the authority of written laws. He reasonably points out that laws are pointless if they contradict deeply ingrained social practices. Had he been alive in 1920s America, Gratian would not have been surprised that prohibition failed to produce a teetotalling population. Custom also gives us rules to follow when human law is silent. On the other hand, Gratian is a great supporter of centralized authority, especially the authority of the pope. He strongly supports the Church's side in the investiture contest, declaring lay investiture as invalid. And his compilation of church doctrine is itself an attempt to strike a blow for law against custom. With a book like Gratian's, the popes and their emissaries would find it easier to insist that local church authorities around Europe were, almost literally, singing from the same hymn sheet. These issues about the nature and sources of legal authority are the most obviously philosophical ones in the Decretum. But there are many more, sometimes raised only in passing as when Gratian mentions that there is one circumstance where we may be permitted to violate natural law when we are faced with an exclusive choice between two evils. Interestingly, a gloss on this passage gives us, as an example, the Jews whose conscience told them they must crucify Jesus. As Peter Appelard pointed out, they were, this time literally, damned if they did and damned if they didn't. Murdering Christ was a sin, but neither would it be right for them to violate their own moral conviction. Gratian also offers influential remarks on another issue, the question of when Christians can justly partake in war. He sets down two basic requirements here, namely that the war be declared by a legitimate authority, and that the war be undertaken for reasons of defense or redressing an injury, and for the sake of justice rather than revenge. At first, this sounds rather restrictive. Armies would be unleashed only in response to the wrongful aggression of others. But when Gratian discusses the source of wrongdoing that could justly provoke a declaration of war, he states that all enemies of the church are fair targets. This was no idle point, given that the First Crusade had been launched in living memory at the end of the 11th century, with the Second Crusade coming up shortly after Gratian wrote the Decretum. Another problem he faces is narrower, and has to do with the role of clergy in war. Priests are forbidden to shed blood, yet it was common for them to go on campaign, with the Crusades again providing a good example. Supposedly, one bishop avoided shedding blood by electing to use a mace rather than a sword in battle. Gratian's solution is slightly less creative. Clergymen may help wage war in an advisory and spiritual capacity, but not do any fighting themselves. Gratian was not the only systematizing thinker of the 12th century to hail from northern Italy. Indeed, he was not even the most famous. That honor must go to another man whose geographical origin is clear from his very name, Peter Lombard. He wrote a massive treatise on theology, whose broad approach was much like the one Gratian took in the Decretum. Apparently conflicting authorities were quoted, with Peter Lombard explaining how the conflicts could be resolved. His masterpiece was called The Sentences. The English version of the title may seem rather generic. One imagines a blurb on the cover saying, if you like Peter Lombard's first two books, The Letters and The Words, you'll love his sentences. But actually, the Latin title, Sentensiae, refers to the authoritative opinions he is quoting. In any case, here's how influential it was. I could spend the rest of this series on medieval philosophy talking about nothing but texts responding to the sentences, and still do a pretty good job of covering the terrain without any gaps. It became standard for theologians to cut their teeth by commenting on the work. This could be the occasion for pathbreaking philosophy, when the commentaries were written by such luminaries as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. The practice would become so well established that we still find Martin Luther commenting on the sentences in the early 16th century. His personal copy, with extensive annotations, still exists today. It's only with Peter Lombard that we finally see the full emergence of something many would assume was an ever-present feature of medieval intellectual life—a systematic and complete presentation of Christian theology. Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers had ambitions in this direction, and Peter drew on both of them. But the most thorough single work of theology prior to his sentences was Hugh of St. Victor's On the Sacraments. All these men were active in Paris, so it's no coincidence that Peter came there early in his career bearing a letter of introduction addressed to the Abbey of St. Victor by none other than Bernard of Clairvaux, whose endeavor to live a godly life apparently involved becoming omnipresent in the history of this period. Peter may even have studied with Hugh of St. Victor personally. But in his sentences he dropped Hugh's distinctively historical approach and adopted a more logical or conceptual structure. Peter also helped his readers by equipping his text with features we take for granted today, but which were not so obvious at the time. The sentences has a table of events, detailed chapter headings, and even dots to indicate where direct quotations of other texts begin and end, the way we use quotation marks. Like Gratian, Peter Lombard wants to demonstrate that the apparent differences between authoritative texts mask a deeper underlying agreement. The approach is summed up in the nifty Latin expression diverse sed non adversi, diverse but not opposed. On some particularly difficult topics, though, Peter simply set out different theological positions without trying to harmonize them or decide between them. One such case was the incarnation. From all the many topics covered in the sentences, I've chosen to discuss this one, not only because it is an important theological issue, but also because Peter's remarks on it occasion some criticism amongst his readers. The basic question is familiar to us from late ancient Christian philosophy. Christ was both fully human and the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, but how can one person be both fully human and fully divine? Peter approaches the question much as late ancient authors had done by asking about the relationship between two natures in Christ, but his immediate points of reference are more recent. He discusses three positions on the question, which recall the theories of the incarnation defended by Hugh of St. Victor, Gilbert of Poitiers, and Peter Abelard. All three shared a basic assumption about human nature, namely that every human has an immaterial soul and a material body. Since the soul seems to be much more like God than the body is, you wouldn't blame these medieval thinkers for assuming that Christ's divine nature had to do especially with his soul. And indeed, Peter Lombard remarks that divinity became united to Christ's flesh through his intellect, or rational soul. On the other hand, Christ's divinity should be somehow joined to his entire human nature, and human nature does include the body. How then was divinity joined to both body and soul in Christ? The first answer, inspired by Hugh of St. Victor, is that the body and soul were both assumed by the divine nature. This avoids the difficulty of leaving Christ's body outside his divinity, but threatens to eliminate the human nature entirely. The second view, which is that of Gilbert of Poitiers, takes more or less the opposite approach by saying that divinity is a third distinct thing in Christ added to body and soul. Here, there's no danger of eliding Christ's humanity, but it's difficult to see how Christ will be a single unified person. Divinity and humanity would be juxtaposed rather than fused. Indeed, you might even wonder how on this view we have one rather than two persons in Christ, and the whole point was to understand how a single person can have two natures. Finally, there's the third view, based on Abelard. This time, the idea is to start with the divine person and imagine it taking on human nature in a more accidental or extrinsic way, like someone putting on a set of clothes that he can later take off. Peter Lombard is too modest to pick from among these options. He simply documents the strengths and weaknesses of all three views without endorsing any of them. Oddly, he was later taken to task for embracing one idea that he seems to reject pretty decisively in the sentences, namely that Christ's human personhood is nothing whatsoever. If it were, then his humanity would constitute a further person alongside the second person of the Trinity. The judgment that in Christ the human person was nothing has been called Christological nihilism, which I mention mostly in case anyone out there is in a religious heavy metal band and is looking for a good album title. There are some hints that Peter may have taught this view in private, but as I say he does not endorse Christological nihilism in the sentences. More generally, the sentences was mostly accepted as being not just acceptably orthodox but the ultimate guidebook to Christian theology and its textual sources. Hence its long career as a basis for commentaries, which gives the work a central role in the history of philosophy. Of course, Peter Lombard was setting out to write about theology, not philosophy. But like Gratian, he touches on many philosophically important topics, some of which are familiar to us from entirely non-theological contexts. The debate over the incarnation we've just been discussing has a variety of philosophical implications. Any solution depends on a theory of human nature and a view on the question of how natures or essences belong to particular things. As we heard in the interview with Andrew Arlig, it connects to questions about parts and wholes, too. Another nice example of the philosophical interest of the sentences comes along later in Book 3 when Peter is discussing Christ's possession of the virtues. This leads him to inquire into the nature of faith, hope, and charity. In this context, he asks whether perfect charity is compatible with treating some people better than others. Modern ethicists still wonder whether we are justified in preferring to promote the welfare of our own friends and family, as opposed to, say, strangers in other countries who are poverty-stricken and need our help much more than our intimates do. Admittedly, in the sentences, the question comes and goes quickly, but that very brevity invited later authors to have their say on this and other philosophical issues Peter had raised, producing more than a few sentences of their own. Either Gratian nor Lombard were exactly philosophers then, but given their importance in the history of philosophy and the many philosophical issues that arise in the Decretum and the sentences, I hope you'll agree that it made sense for me to devote an episode to them. It should also be clear by now why I have put them together. Not that this is a novel idea, there was even a medieval legend that the two were brothers. If you still aren't convinced, though, I can call on support from Dante, who placed Gratian immediately alongside Lombard in the circle of the sun in the tenth canto of his Paradiso. See, I told you they were star witnesses. But I'm not quite done presenting testimony. I'm so convinced about the importance of the history of law for the history of philosophy that I want to spend one more episode on the topic. Next time, you'll be hearing an interview with Caroline Humphress, whom you might remember from episode 100 of the podcast. As an expert on Roman law, she's perfectly placed to provide testimony on the tradition that led up to Gratian. So, ladies and gentlemen of the podcast audience, there is only one verdict you can possibly reach, which is that you should join me again next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.