Peter Lombard, trans. Giulio Silano, The Sentences: Book Three—On the Incarnation of the Word
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010, 189 pgs.
Summary: In 3.6.3.2 (pg. 27), he quotes as Augustine (354-430) Lanfranc (1010-1089) as found in Berengar (c.1010-1080) in defense of essentially transubstantiation. Here we have simply reached the point of no return as to Peter accidentally misquoting from bad notes or quotations. Peter is correcting Augustine according to current church practice. Augustine ought to have taught the current practice of the church and so he is spoken of as if he did.
At the same time, we find that Peter is defending Augustine’s view of God’s sovereignty and man’s free will as compatible: “The work of Christ and the Father was good, because the will of Christ and the Father was good; the work of Judas and the Jews was evil, because their intention was evil. The deeds or works there differed, that is, the acts were different; but there was one thing or deed, namely the passion itself” (3.20.5.2-3, pg. 87).
Peter also follows Augustine in non-egalitarian love or ordered love: [God] loved some of them for greater goods and others for lesser goods, some for better uses and others for less good ones. For all our goods come to us from his love. And so, from all of eternity and even now, he loved and loves some of the elect more and others less, because out of his love he prepared greater goods for the first and lesser ones for the second, just as in time he confers greater goods on some and lesser ones on others, and as a result of this he is said to love these more and those less” (3.32.2.3, pg. 133). . .Yet it is not to be simply said that he loved [the reprobate], lest they be understood to be predestined, but with this qualification: he loved them insofar as they were to be his work, that is, he loved what and of what kind he was going to make them” (3.32.5, pg. 134).
And the Master of the Sentences rounds out his Augustinianism by articulating what will come to be known as limited justification or limited atonement: “He offered himself on the altar of the cross not to the devil, but to the triune God, and he did so for all with regard to the sufficiency of price, but only for the elect with regard to its efficacy, because he brought about salvation only for the predestined (3.20.5.1, pg. 86).”
There are some rather strange tensions created by Peter on the issue of the two great commandments: “But we are to love Christ as ourselves, insofar as he is man; love of him according to humanity is contained in that precept [love of neighbor]. Even insofar as he is man, we are to love him more than ourselves, but not as much as we love God because, insofar as he is man, he is less than God” (3.29.3.3, pg. 120).
The issue is that Peter believes that Jesus’ in his human nature is nothing or he allows this as a possibility (3.10.1.2, pg. 41). The ostensible purpose for making a distinction between worshiping Jesus in his human nature and in his divine nature is that to worship the “the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25) would be an act of idolatry. And so we have this rather inflammatory line, “Christ, according to his being man, is not a person or anything else.” The technical term for this is Christological nihilism, and Peter apparently picked it up from Abelard (1079-1144).
Regardless, this creates a curious tension in the worship of the elements of the mass, which is the current Roman doctrine (CCC-1378). If “Christ, according to his being man, it not a person or anything else,” then receiving his body is also nothing. This is likely why Pope Alexander III condemned such nihilism twice.