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Last week on Five Minutes in Church History we looked at the Abbey at St. Victor and I mentioned one of the famous Medieval figures who studied there, Peter Lombard. Well, on this week we’ll just focus on Peter Lombard. He’s not to be confused with the Italian sculptor Pietro Lombardo. Pietro, he designed, among many other things, the tomb of Dante. This Peter Lombard was Italian just like Pietro, but he was not a sculptor. Instead, he was a Theologian. And when he started his life out in Italy he ended up in Paris. After his early studies, Peter Lombard taught at the Cathedral School at Notre Dame and also, as we learned, he spent some time at the Abbey at the School at St. Victor. He was born in 1095 and he died in 1160. From 1155 to 1158, just shortly before his death, he wrote his magnum opus, the Four Books of Sentences. These are indeed four books. The first one he entitled The Trinity, the second he titled The Creation in Sin, the third is The Incarnation and the Virtues, and the fourth is The Sacraments and the Four Last Things.

These were instantly well received and throughout the Medieval Ages there were many commentaries written on them by leading lights including the leading light, Thomas Aquinas. By 1222, the fourth Lateran Council declared them mandatory for the curriculum. And it was just a few years after that that one of the professors at the University of Paris, Alexander of Hales used Lombard instead of the Bible. He replaced the Bible with Lombard as the textbook and many followed suit. That was true right on down to Luther’s day. When Luther was working through his doctorate in Theology, and this was actually his second doctorate, he had his first doctorate in Jurisprudence and then worked his way through a Bachelors, and Masters, and a Doctorate in Biblical Studies and Theology. One of his qualifying exams concerned Peter Lombard’s The Sentences. Luther had to master it and be able to recite it in order to qualify for his doctorate. And after he received that in the Fall of 1509, he was at Erfurt and tasked with his first assignment to lecture through Theology. And this was his textbook. And Luther’s personal volume of Lombard’s Sentences survives down to this day. The volume is full of lengthy marginal notes and we assume these notes were the basis of his lectures. Well, while Luther had to study it, and while he lectured from it, very quickly Luther is going to come to disagree with it.

In one of the books – book four on the Sacraments – Peter Lombard lays out for us, the church at that time, the Roman Catholic Church’s view on the Sacraments. And in chapter one he tells us, first of all, the number of the Sacraments. And so, as I read them, keep track. He says, “Now let us approach the sacraments of the new law which are Baptism, Confirmation, the Bread of Blessing (that is, the Eucharist), Penance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Marriage.” Now, that’s seven. In the Protestant world we’re used to two. They are, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Here’s seven. What’s also telling is not just the number, but the understanding of the Sacraments. And a little bit later in the book, what Peter Lombard tells us is that the Sacraments are a second plank after the shipwreck of Adam’s Fall. The first plank is Baptism. And this is what Lombard said, “the first plank is Baptism whereby the old man is put off and the new man put on. And the second plank is Penance by which we raise ourselves again after a fall.” His view is that at Baptism we are made new creatures through the Sacrament of Baptism. And then, as we live our lives and we sin, those are like spots on our new garments, as it were. So, along comes the Sacrament of Penance to remove those spots form our garments.

Well, as Luther was looking at Peter Lombard, then he started looking at Augustine, and then he started looking at Scripture and he began to see some discontinuity between what he had learned from Peter Lombard and what he had learned in the Scriptures. And one of the first books Luther writes is the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and he challenges head-on Lombard’s view of the Sacraments.

The Abbey of St. Victor in Paris was founded around 1108. It began as an Augustinian community, and a number of very famous medieval people made their way through the abbey. Thomas Becket studied there. He was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral, so that’s a fascinating story. Peter Lombard spent some time there. He would come to be the author of the Four Books of Sentences, a standard medieval textbook on theology. It was the book that Martin Luther had to study and master. We’re going to look at three key figures who had a long association with the abbey. They’re all from the 1100s, and they are Hugh of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, and Adam of St. Victor.

Hugh was born around 1096 in Saxony. He made his way to Paris and died there in 1141. From 1120 through 1140, he was master of the school at St. Victor. He gets credit for books he likely didn’t write; they were probably written anonymously by others in the abbey and were later attributed to him. But one book that we know he did write was his book on the sacraments. In this book, he starts by talking about why we need the sacraments. The first line says, “Man’s first sin was pride.” From that first sin came three consequences—death, depravity of the flesh, and depravity of the mind. So far, Hugh of St. Victor is rather Augustinian in his outlook, and when he turns to Christ, he remains Augustinian. This is what he says:

From our nature he took a victim for our nature that the whole burnt offering to be offered up for us might come from that which is ours. In other words, this Redeemer, Christ, had to be us; had to be flesh; had to be truly human. This he did in order that the redemption might have to do with us by this very fact that the offering had to be taken from that which is ours. We are truly made partakers of this redemption if we, through faith, are united to the Redeemer Himself who, through the flesh, entered into fellowship with us.

We also have Richard of St. Victor. Richard was born in Scotland and also made his way to Paris. From 1162 until 1173, he was head of the abbey at St. Victor. He died there in 1173. He is classified as a mystic, but he also wanted to systematize and bring a structure to mysticism. Among his many books was a book on the Trinity. He opens that book by talking about the three ways we have of knowing: by experience, by reason, and by believing. He continues, “The main things we know, or the main reason we can know, is by faith, by believing. That is first.”

Finally, there is Adam of St. Victor. He was a theologian too, but he was also a poet. Let’s just end with a stanza from one of his poems. “Here the world’s perpetual warfare holds from heaven the soul apart; Legioned foes in shadowy terror vex the Sabbath of the heart. O how happy that estate where delight doth not abate! For that home the spirit yearneth where none languisheth nor mourneth.”

In the past, we have looked at what would be the big events of a century, the events that, if there had been a social media buzz, would have been “trending” in that century. So, in the fourteenth century, what would the buzz be about?

Let’s begin with three honorable mentions. The first—and I’m just throwing this in because I think it’s fascinating—is Władysław I, who was the ruler in Poland for thirteen years. What’s fascinating about Władysław I is what he was called more popularly, which was “Elbow-high.” I’m not sure what that is all about; it might have had to do with his shortness of stature. The second honorable mention is the Hundred Years’ War. This war was actually more than a hundred years long; it spanned 116 years, from 1337 to 1453. It involved England and France, and I guess if you had to pick a winner, it would be France. One of the results of the Hundred Years’ War was more wars, as it led to the War of the Roses in England. This involved the House of Lancaster, symbolized by the red rose, and the House of York, symbolized by the white rose. And the third honorable mention is the Yersinia pestis bacterium, which we call the Black Plague. One-third of all people in Europe were taken by the Black Plague between 1347 and 1351.

Well, those are the honorable mentions. We have three other events that were the true trending events. The first was the Avignon Papacy; it stretched from 1309 all the way to 1377. There was a dispute at one of the conclaves—the gathering of the cardinals to choose the next pope—and out of that dispute, Clement V was elected pope, but he did not want to move to Rome. So, he simply set up the papal palace in Avignon. In total, seven popes, all French, reigned from Avignon and not from Rome.

A second thing that was trending in the fourteenth century is some good literature. We have Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales and Dante and his Divine Comedy of Purgatorio, Inferno, and Paradiso. What’s interesting about these authors is that they wrote in their native language—Chaucer in English and Dante in Italian. Most of the writing up to this time was in Latin, so this is the beginning of literature in these languages and in one sense the beginning of the cultures of these places.

And we’ve saved our best for last: our friend John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was also interested in getting literature into the English language and he was interested in getting the finest of all literature into the English language, and that, of course, is the Bible. He worked not from the original Greek and Hebrew but from the Latin, but he labored to turn that Latin text into a text that could be understood by the masses. So, he produced an early translation of the Bible into English. He died of natural causes, but that didn’t stop the church from later condemning him as a heretic, digging up his body, and burning his bones.

A $14 million book sounds expensive, right? Believe it or not, that’s not the most expensive book of all time. That honor goes to Leonardo Da Vinci’s codex, a seventy-two-page notebook that sold for $30.8 million at auction; it was purchased by Bill Gates. There are other books that are pretty expensive too. In 1987, a Gutenberg Bible went up for auction at $5 million, and if you have $6 million just lying around and you don’t know what to do with it, you could purchase a first folio of Shakespeare. There have been some other medieval manuscripts that have gone for significant money. There was a text called The Gospels of Henry the Lion. Henry the Lion was the Duke of Saxony. He commissioned this particular edition of the Gospels; it was a very elaborate book with a very elaborate cover. He commissioned it for the altar at the Brunswick Cathedral in Germany. It’s a twelfth-century manuscript of the four Gospels and it sold for $11 million.

But the book we’re talking about is known as the St. Cuthbert Gospel. This is a book from the late seventh or early eighth century. It’s a rather simple book. It’s only five and a half inches by three and a half inches, and it has a stamped leather cover over a wooden board binding. Its pages are cord bound and its pages are vellum. Vellum was a bit of a technological advance over papyrus; it is the skin of animals, in this case calfskin. Vellum is very durable and very smooth and it provides a great surface for writing. This particular text is a gospel of John. It was found in 1104 inside the coffin of Cuthbert.

Now, who was Cuthbert and why were they looking in his coffin? Cuthbert was a monk and also bishop in the Lindisfarne area of England and he died in 687. He was buried at the monastery at Lindisfarne. When the Vikings came along, they took all sorts of things from Lindisfarne, including Cuthbert’s coffin. It was finally returned and ended up being installed at the Durham Cathedral in 1104. When his coffin was opened, tucked away inside there was this little, leather gospel of John—the St. Cuthbert Gospel.

The book sort of disappeared from that point. It was in personal hands until the 1700s, when it ended up in a Jesuit monastery in Belgium. In 2012, the British Library purchased it for £9 million, or $14 million. You can see the book at the British Library site. There is actually a CT scan of it on the site and every single page is digitized.

The text is laid out in a single column, and it is very simple. The scribe was very careful. Occasionally, there is an adorned capital letter, and sometimes you will find a letter painted in red. It begins simply, “In principio erat Verbum”—“In the beginning was the Word.” There are no chapters, there are no verse numbers, there is no table of contents; it just starts right in and goes right through the gospel of John. There are nice margins, and there is a clean crisp text.

This text is Europe’s oldest intact book, and so it reminds us of the beginning of book publishing, which of course at that time was done carefully by hand. But it also reminds us of the role that the Gospels have played and it reminds us of the role that the gospel of John has played in the history of the church.

So, there we have it—a $14 million book. And what’s fascinating about that book, of course, is the content, because in there are not just simply words of value; there are words of eternal value.