The Ten Commandments

Studies in the History of Christian

Traditions

General Editor

Robert J. Bast
(Knoxville, Tennessee)

In cooperation with

Paul C.H. Lim (Nashville, Tennessee)

Eric Saak (Liverpool)
Christine Shepardson (Knoxville, Tennessee)
Brian Tierney (Ithaca, New York)
Arjo Vanderjagt (Groningen)
John Van Engen (Notre Dame, Indiana)

Founding Editor

Heiko A. Oberman

VOLUME 175

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/shct

 The Ten Commandments
Interpreting the Bible in the Medieval World

By

Lesley Smith

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: St Laurences Church, Ludlow: Decalogue window, c. 1445. Courtesy of Shaun Ward
(www.flickr.com/photos/shaun_ward).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Lesley (Lesley Janette)

The Ten Commandments : interpreting the Bible in the medieval world / by Lesley Smith.
pages cm. -- (Studies in the history of Christian traditions, ISSN 1573-5664 ; VOLUME 175)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-27392-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ten commandments--Criticism, interpretation,
etc.--History--Middle Ages, 600-1500. I. Title.

BS1285.52.S64 2014
222.16060902--dc23

2014013359

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Honora patrem tuum et matrem

Contents

Acknowledgementsix
Abbreviationsx
Abbreviations for Commonly Cited Commandments Textsxi
The Commandmentsxiii

Approaches1

1 Law16
The Nature of Law16
Eternal and Natural Law18
The Written Law of Moses25
The Status of the Written Law27
The Killing Letter28
Law Creates Sin31
Keeping the Law32
Justification40
Punishment44
The Law of Grace and Human Law46

2 Number48
Number49
Ten57
Connections60
Numbering and Division65

3 God76
The First Commandment77
i I am the Lord Your God, Who has Led you Out of the
Land of Egypt, Out of the House of Slavery78
ii You shall have no Other Gods before me79
iii You shall not Make for Yourself any Carved Image, or
any Likeness of Anything that is in Heaven above, or in
the Earth below, or of those Things that are in the Waters
under the Earth. You shall not Revere them, or Worship them81
iv I am the Lord your God, Strong, Jealous89
v Visiting the Injustice of the Fathers upon the Children, to
the Third and Fourth Generation of those who Hate me;
viii contents

and Showing Mercy to Thousands of Those Who Love me,

and Keep my Commandments91
The Second Commandment93
The Third Commandment98

4 Neighbour107
Who is My Neighbour?107
i Family as Neighbour107
ii Beyond the Family116
iii My Neighbour is Myself120

5 The Hand and the Mind: Action and Intention in Keeping the Law125
The Second Tablet125
You shall not Kill127
You shall not Commit Adultery135
You shall not Steal140
You shall not Covet your Neighbours House; nor shall you
Desire his Wife, nor his Manservant, nor his Maidservant,
nor his ox, nor his Ass, nor Anything that is his146

6 Word and Truth154

You shall not Speak False Witness Against your Neighbour154
Lies and Lying156
Oaths162
Vows170
Perjury170

7 Conformity and Diversity175

Conformity of Method176
The Individual Voice185
Diversity of Genre193

Last Words212

Bibliography217
General Index228
Index of References to Scripture232
Acknowledgements

It was Beryl Smalley who warned me that working on medieval sovereignty

might be an endless task, and suggested I consider the Decalogue instead. She
would doubtless have been horrified at how long, nevertheless, this has taken:
I have always known that, given a free afternoon and a typewriter, she could
have knocked it off rather better herself. Although it was clear she was
omniscient, Beryl somehow managed not to make that knowledge paralysing
for those who wished to follow in her footsteps: one of her many achievements.
After Beryls death, Dick Southern sent me down pathways that made the
whole thing even longer and, with Sheila, offered rare friendship and encour-
agement. David dAvray and Henry Mayr-Harting made me think that one day
I might be a scholar, too.
I was lucky to pursue research at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
in Toronto, and to be part of its community in what I remember as a golden
age; lucky, too, that Commonwealth Scholarships were allowed to go to Britains
former colonies, and not just come from them. In Oxford, the Bodleian Library
and its collections never cease to amaze me, and I have been lucky to have the
friendship and example of a number of fine scholars, including Michael
Clanchy, Henrietta Leyser and Nigel Palmer. My student co-convenors of the
Medieval Church and Culture seminar have always convinced me that the
medieval past will be in good hands in the future. Most of all, I have been lucky
in my college community in Oxford, Harris Manchester, whose Principal,
fellows, librarians and students have given me such a happy academic home.
Iam as ever indebted to Bodleys Curator of Medieval Manuscripts for endless
help too weak a word for what he has given.
Finally, I should like to acknowledge the encouragement of the editor of this
series, Prof. Robert J. Bast, and my two anonymous readers. As always, Brill,
here in the persons of Arjan van Dijk and Ivo Romein, have been exemplary
publishers.
Abbreviations

ahdlma Archives dhistoire doctrinale et littraire du moyen ge

cccm Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis
ccsl Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina
csel Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
eets Early English Texts Society
mgh Monumenta Germaniae Historica
odnb  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew, B.H. Harrison,
L. Goldman (Oxford, 2004), and online
pg Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne
pl Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne
reed Records of Early English Drama
rtam Recherches de thologie ancienne et mdivale
d. distinctio
qu. quaestio
tr. tractatus
art. articulus
c. caput
dub. dubium
 bbreviations for Commonly Cited
A
Commandments Texts

Alexander of Hales, Glossa 

Glossa in IV Libros Sententiarum Petri
Lombardi, ed. V. Doucet, Bibliotheca
Franciscana Scholastica Medii Aevii 1215
(Quaracchi, 19511957).

Biblia cum glossa 

Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria: facsimile
reprint of the editio princeps Adolph Rusch of
Strassburg 1480/81, ed. & intro., K. Froehlich
and M.T. Gibson, 4 vols (Turnhout, 1992).

Bonaventure, Collationes 
Collationes de decem praeceptis, in Opera
omnia, 5 (Quaracchi, 1891) transl. P.J.
Spaeth, St. Bonaventures Collations on the
Ten Commandments, Works of Saint
Bonaventure 6 (St Bonaventure, NY, 1995).

Bonaventure, Glossa Commentaria in IV Libros Sententiarum, in

Opera Omnia 14 (Quaracchi, 18821889).

Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis 

Robert Grosseteste. De Decem Mandatis,
ed. R.C. Dales and E.B. King, Auctores
Britannici Medii Aevi 10 (Oxford, 1987).

Hugh of St Cher, Postilla 

Postilla in totam bibliam (Venice, 1703).

Hugonis de Sancto Victore. De sacramentis

Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis 
christianae fidei, Corpus Victorinum. Textus
historici 1, ed. Rainer Berndt (Aschendorff,
2008); De sacramentis christianae fidei, ed. and
transl. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA, 1951).

John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus 

Tractatus de Legibus, in Doctoris
Irrefragibilis Alexandri de Hales Summa
Theologica seu sic ab origine dicta Summa
Fratris Alexandri. Liber III, ed. V. Doucet
(Quaracchi, 1948).
xii Abbreviations for Commonly Cited Commandments Texts

Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla 

Nicolaus de Lyra. Postilla super totam bib-
liam (Strassburg: 1492; facsimile repr.,
Frankfurt am Main, 1971).

Peter Lombard, Sentences 

Magistri Petri LombardiSententiae in IV
Libris Distinctae, 3 vols, ed. I.C. Brady
(Grottaferrata, 1971).

Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones London, British Library, Royal MS 9

E. XIV, fols 117v-133r.

Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum Tractatus penitentes ad fidei dogmata

in Jean Gerson, Joannis Gersonii Opera
Omnia (Antwerp, 1706), vol. 1, pt 3, cols
244256.

Stephen Langton, In Exodum; In Deut. 

Commentary on Exodus and on
Deuteronomy: Oxford, MS Trinity College
65, fols 123v-126v and 258r-v.

Thomae de Chobham Summa confesso-

Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum 
rum, ed. F. Broomfield, Analecta
Mediaevalia Namurcensia 25 (Louvain
and Paris, 1968).

William of Auxerre, Summa aurea 

Magistri Guillelmi Altissiodorensis. Summa
Aurea, ed. Jean Ribaillier, 7 vols in 5,
Spicilegium Bonaventurianum 1620
(Grottaferrata and Paris, 19801987).
The Commandments

Note on English Translation

For these translations of the Decalogue text, I have used the English of the
Douay (1609)Rheims (1582) version of the Bible, because it is considered to be
the version which presents the closest translation of the Vulgate Latin used by
the medieval commentators we shall be reading. However, to our modern ears,
four-hundred-year-old English sounds at best quaint and at worst is not easily
comprehensible. This was certainly not how medieval theologians saw the
Bible. It was in no way quaint; it was entirely applicable to their own situation;
and their whole aim was to make its meaning clear. More modern versions of
the Bible, however, translate a text which often differs from the Vulgate Latin.
And so in this book I have used a modified version of Douay-Rheims, updating
the language and style and translating myself where the older version seemed
obscure. This may well offend some readers, but my intention was in no way
hubristic. Rather, I want to convey as best I can the sense of a living biblical text
that these medieval commentators took for granted. As they wrestled with the
problems of meaning, their attitude to the text was simultaneously utterly
respectful and completely familiar; they lived with it as a daily companion and
believed in it as a guide to life. The Douay translation of the second-person
singular of the verb as thou conveyed a direct familiarity in the sixteenth cen-
tury that, unfortunately, the contemporary English you has lost. Nevertheless,
I have not thought it useful to ask my readers to try to recreate that sense for
themselves, and to keep the thees and thous: try as we might, it is too hard to
set aside the whimsical gentility that their use conjures up today. Thus, the
Bible text in these pages conforms to no single English translation but is an
attempt to make the language of the medieval scholar sound alive today.

Exodus 20: 117

And the Lord spoke all these words:

I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage.
Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.
Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing
that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in
the waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them. I am the
xiv The Commandments

Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the chil-
dren, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me: and showing
mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain: for the Lord will not hold
him guiltless that shall take the name of the Lord his God in vain.
Remember that thou keep holy the sabbath day. Six days shalt thou labour,
and shalt do all thy works. But on the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy
God: thou shalt do not work on it, thou nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy
man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy beast, nor the stranger that is
within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea,
and all the things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the
Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.
Honour thy father and thy mother, that thou mayest be long-loved upon the
land which the Lord thy God will give thee.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt no commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours house: neither shalt thou desire his
wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing
that is his.

Latin (Vulgate: Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam,

Madrid, 1977)

Locutusque est Dominus cunctos sermones hos:

Ego sum Dominus Deus tuus, qui eduxi te de terra Aegypti, de domo
servitutis.
Non habebis deos alienos coram me.
Non facies tibi sculptile, neque omnem similitudinem quae est in caelo
desuper, et quae in terra deorsum, nec eorum quae sunt in aquis sub terra. Non
adorabis ea, neque coles: ego sum Dominus Deus tuus fortis, zelotes, visitans
iniquitatem patrum in filios, in tertiam et quartam generationem eorum qui
oderunt me: et faciens misericordiam in millia his qui diligunt me, et custodi-
unt praecepta mea.
Non assumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum: nec enim habebit insontem
Dominus eum qui assumpserit nomen Domini Dei sui frustra.
Memento ut diem sabbati sanctifices. Sex diebus operaberis, et facies omnia
opera tua. Septimo autem die sabbatum Domini Dei tui est: non facies omne
 The Commandments xv

opus in eo, tu, et filius tuus et filia tua, servus tuus et ancilla tua, iumentum
tuum, et advena qui est intra portas tuas. Sex enim diebus fecit Dominus cae-
lum et terram, et mare, et omnia quae in eis sunt, et requievit in die septimo,
idcirco benedixit Dominus diei sabbati, et sanctificavit eum.
Honora patrem tuum et matrem tuam, ut sis longaevus super terram, quam
Dominus Deus tuus dabit tibi.
Non occides.
Non moechaberis.
Non furtum facies.
Non loqueris contra proximum tuum falsum testimonium.
Non concupisces domum proximi tui: nec desiderabis uxorem eius, non ser-
vum, non ancillam, non bovem, non asinum, nec omnia quae illius sunt.

Deuteronomy 5: 621

I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage.
Thou shalt not have strange gods in my sight.
Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any things,
that are in heaven above, or that are in the earth beneath, or that abide in the
waters under the earth. Thou shalt not adore them: and thou shalt not serve
them. For I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generation, to them that
hate me: and showing mercy unto many thousands, to them that love me, and
keep my commandments.
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for he shall not be
unpunished that taketh his name upon a vain thing.
Observe the day of the sabbath, to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath com-
mandeth thee. Six days shalt thou labour, and shalt do all thy works. The seventh
is the day of the sabbath, that is, the rest of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not do
any work therein: thou nor thy son nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant nor
thy maid-servant, nor thy ox, nor thy ass, nor any of thy beasts, nor the stranger
that is within thy gates: that thy man-servant and thy maid-servant may rest,
even as thyself. Remember that thou also didst serve in Egypt, and the Lord thy
God brought thee out from thence with a strong hand, and a stretched-out arm.
Therefore hath he commanded thee that thou shouldst observe the sabbath day.
Honour thy father and mother, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:
that thou mayst live a long time, and it may be well with thee in the land, which
the Lord thy God will give thee.
xvi The Commandments

Thou shalt not kill.

Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
And thou shalt not steal.
Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours wife: nor his house, nor his field, nor
his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that
is his.

Latin (Vulgate)

Ego Dominus Deus tuus, qui eduxi te de terra Aegypti, de domo servitutis.
Non habebis deos alienos in conspectu meo.
Non facies tibi sculptile, nec similitudinem omnium, quae in caelo sunt
desuper, et quae in terra deorsum, et quae versantur in aquis sub terra. Non
adorabis ea, et non coles. Ego enim sum Dominus Deus tuus: Deus aemulator,
reddens iniquitatem patrum super filios in tertiam et quartam generationem
his qui oderunt me, et faciens misericordiam in multa millia diligentibus me,
et custodientibus praecepta mea.
Non usurpabis nomen Domini Dei tui frustra: quia non erit impunitus qui
super re vana nomen eius assumpserit.
Observa diem sabbati, ut sanctifices eum, sicut praecepit tibi Dominus Deus
tuus. Sex diebus operaberis, et facies omnia opera tua. Septimus dies sabbati
est, id est, requies Domini Dei tui. Non facies in eo quidquam operis tu, et filius
tuus, et filia, servus et ancilla, et bos, et asinus, et omne iumentum tuum, et
peregrinus qui est intra portas tuas: ut requiescat servus tuus, et ancilla tua,
sicut et tu. Memento quod et ipse servieris in Aegypto, et eduxerit te inde
Dominus Deus tuus in manu forti, et brachio extento. Idcirco praecepit tibi ut
observares diem sabbati.
Honora patrem tuum et matrem, sicut praecepit tibi Dominus Deus tuus, ut
longo vivas tempore, et bene sit tibi in terra, quam Dominus Deus tuus daturus
est tibi.
Non occides.
Neque moechaberis.
Furtumque non facies.
Nec loqueris contra proximum tuum falsum testimonium.
Non concupisces uxorem proximi tui: non domum, non agrum, non servum,
non ancillam, non bovem, non asinum, et universa quae illius sunt.
Approaches

Why write a book about the ten commandments? Surely the purpose of those
simple thou shalt nots is to make interpretation unnecessary? We should
follow them simply and without gloss, as Francis of Assisi would insist.1 Even
more to the point, why write a book about the ten commandments in the
Middle Ages? Isnt adultery still adultery, whatever the date? The answer to
that last question, as to so many historical comparisons, is yes and no: medi-
eval definitions of adultery certainly began with the notion of sex with a mar-
ried person, but they did not stop there. Medieval conceptions of adultery
encompassed behaviour (such as sex with a priest) that modern definitions
would not. Moreover, committing adultery in the Middle Ages took place within
a religious and cultural context which few of those engaged in the act today
could entirely recognise. Basic theology of adultery may have changed little,
but the world to which it speaks has changed a lot. It is in this intersection of
Scripture and social and political life and thought that this book situates itself:
how did medieval scholars interpret the Bible as speaking to their everyday
world? What do they tell us the commandments mean, and what does that
meaning tell us about their wider world view?
The idea of studying biblical commentary and theological thought in its
social and political context is, of course, not a new one we need only think
of the work of Beryl Smalley in The Becket Conflict and the Schools, Sir
Maurice Powicke on Stephen Langton, or John Baldwins Masters, Princes and
Merchants but I hope we shall see that the ten commandments will reveal
themselves to be particularly fruitful ground for this approach.2 The Ten Words,
or Decalogue, stand at the centre of both the Jewish and Christian faiths, form-
ing a bridge between the two.3 But it was a bridge that seemed, in the Middle

1 Francis of Assisi, Testamentum in Opuscula Sancti Patris Francisci Assisiensis, ed. C. Esser
(Grottaferrata, 1978), p. 316: simpliciter et sine glossa.
2 Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools. A Study of Intellectuals and Politics in the Twelfth
Century (Oxford, 1973); F.M. Powicke, Stephen Langton (Oxford, 1928); John W. Baldwin,
Masters, Princes and Merchants. The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and His Circle, 2 vols
(Princeton, 1970).
3 Nowhere in the Bible is there reference to the ten commandments. The closest we come to
it are references to the ten words (aeret haddebrm), in Ex 34: 1426 (and see Deut 4: 13
and 10: 4), which some commentators think represent a different and original set of ten
commandments. See Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus, transl.
I.Abrahams (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 237, and J P. Hyatt, Exodus. The New Century Bible (London,
1971), p. 207.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_002

2 approaches

Ages, to have one or two planks missing. According to the Hebrew Bible, God
wrote the commandments on two stone tablets and gave them to Moses on
Mount Sinai; but for Jews, this Decalogue was only part of the wider system of
God-given law.4 These ten are the first and most important of the 613 mitzvuot
(commands) of the Torah (the five biblical books of Moses), which are the
means by which Jews can know and do Gods will.5 Many of the mitzvuot dealt
with the manner of divine worship, detailing what should be sacrificed and
how it should be done, or how the Israelites should eat and dress, for instance;
others itemised punishments attaching to various forbidden acts. For Jews,
these 613 laws formed a whole package: they were intended to give order to a
whole way of life. Jews accused Christians of picking and choosing what they
wanted to obey, even among the Decalogue precepts: Christian churches were
full of graven images, and although they claimed to keep a day of rest, it was
not the traditional sabbath.
For Christian scholars, the first question posed by the commandments was
whether they had any status at all in the New Covenant of the Gospel, and if so,
what that status might be. Jesus himself seemed to offer two conflicting
answers. Since the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath
(Mk 2: 27), it appeared that the law had been superseded by the coming of
Christ and rendered worthless by the teachings of the Gospel. On the other
hand, Jesus had clearly stated in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5: 17), Do not
think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come not to
destroy the law, but to fulfil it. The Christian solution was to declare that most
of the 613 mitzvuot those which dealt with matters of worship (caerimonia-
lia), and which set punishments for infractions (iudicialia) were no longer
necessary, but that the ten commandments of the Decalogue the so-called
moral law (moralia) retained their force in the new age. Nonetheless, prob-
lems remained: exegetes had to explain why these ten commandments alone
were still important, and also how and why they interpreted some of the com-
mandments differently from the Jews the sabbath precept being a case in
point. So the discussion of the individual commandments had to take place
within a wider context of the meaning and status of law in Christian belief.
Moreover, the fact that some part of the law of the Jews retained its force in the
Christian era of the New Covenant had further implications. To accord some
sort of status to the Jewish law implied an acknowledgement that the Jews
themselves must have some place in the new regime. The Old Law and the

4 Ex 19: 120: 17; Ex 3233; Deut 5: 121. In fact, Moses is given two successive sets of stone tab-
lets: he breaks the first in fury when he sees the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf.
5 As we shall see later, the enumeration of 613 mitvuot is largely traditional and not at all clear
in the biblical text.
Approaches 3

OldCovenant could not just be ignored or swept under the carpet. The con-
tinuing presence of the Jews had to be part of Gods plan, and theologians
needed to work out how the dominant Christian culture should treat the sur-
viving remnant. The Jews were not pagan unbelievers, they were not Saracen
infidels, and they were not heretics; the persistence of these first chosen peo-
ple meant that they had to be treated differently, and theoretically better, than
these other enemies of Christ.
The identification of the Decalogue precepts as a coherent group led to
their exegesis as a whole entity, alongside the exposition of the individual com-
mandments. How many commandments there were, and why, was a recurrent
theme, prompting medieval theologians to consider questions of unity and
division, as well as the importance of number and its properties. It is not obvi-
ous from the biblical text that there are in fact ten commandments. What each
precept contained, and where it should be placed on the two stone tablets, had
long been a matter for exegetical debate, and one which had divided ancient
Christian authorities, not to mention Christians and Jews. Medieval commen-
tators had not only to decide where they stood on these questions, but how
they could explain the differences of opinion amongst their distinguished pre-
decessors. These kinds of questions were meat and drink to the exegetes who
repeatedly debated them. In addition to their group identity, the individual
precepts each addressed an important issue. Taken together, they encom-
passed the key topics of spiritual and earthly life. Seemingly straightforward as
guidance for a just and godly society, the commandments in fact raised ques-
tions of great complexity and pointed up ways in which medieval society
departed from their ordinances.
The point of having two stone tablets instead of just one was that the first
contained the commandments which referred to God, and the second those
that concerned your neighbour. The common medieval position was that the
first three commandments had to do with God, and were placed together on
the first stone tablet.6 In addition to detailing the points they raise individually,
we can use them to draw up a picture of Gods attributes and his desired rela-
tionship with Creation.7 The second-tablet commandments concerned the
relationship with your neighbour, so we must first ask who that neighbour

6 Readers from Christian traditions may be surprised at the medieval numbering and division of
the commandments, since the Reformation caused a split in Protestant and Roman Catholic
opinion (although Lutherans play for the other team). I shall explain the various systems in
chapter 2. Although I use the common medieval numbering, which followed Augustine, for the
sake of clarity I have tried to refer to the commandments by subject rather than number.
7 I refer to the Jewish-Christian God throughout as masculine and capitalised in imitation of
the medieval viewpoint, and to clarify discussions of other gods.
4 approaches

might be. Commentators offered various reasons why these precepts covered
the topics they did and how they were related. Rather than approach the com-
mandments one by one, I have chosen to consider them according to a medi-
eval scheme which asked what, of thought, word and deed, they were intended
to restrain. This allows us to address further questions raised by scholars of the
comparative burden of the law in relation to the Gospel and its salvific power.
The result is intended to present the commandments not as a series of isolated
prohibitions but as medieval theologians saw them a comprehensive descrip-
tion of life in the household of God.
The interpretation of the precepts was not just a question of biblical eso-
terica, interesting only to scholars and the clergy, but was something that could
and should be communicated to the laity. The chronological scope of this
study focussing mainly on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with some
earlier and later excurses is deliberately centred on the period known to his-
torians as the twelfth-century renaissance, which paves the way for the
Church reforms summed up in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council of
1215.8 The flowering of education and scholarly life that was part of the renais-
sance included discussions of the commandments that revived and reworked
their treatment by Augustine and other patristic writers, setting out the
Decalogue for a new, non-monastic academic community in the cathedral
schools.9 One of the hallmarks of twelfth-century learning was its attempt to
divide knowledge into discrete disciplines and to assemble books which
offered comprehensive coverage of each one. For the Bible and its commenta-
tors, this took the form of the Glossa ordinaria, and theological questions aris-
ing from the study of Scripture were dealt with in Peter Lombards Four Books

8 The term twelfth-century renaissance became common after Charles Homer Haskins pub-
lished The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century in 1927 (Cambridge, MA), and is echoed in the
excellent volume of essays published to celebrate Haskins contribution, Renaissance and
Renewal in the Twelfth Century, edited by Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Oxford,
1982). A more recent account of the subject, and bibliography, is given by R.N. Swanson, The
Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Manchester and NY, 1999). For Innocent III and the Lateran
Council, see J.C. Moore, Pope Innocent III (1160/61-1216) (Leiden, 2003), with bibliography; the
decrees or canons of the Council may be found in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed.
N. P. Tanner, vol. 1 (London and Washington, 1990), pp. 227271.
9 For accounts of the schools and their work see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the
Middle Ages, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1983); essays by Leclercq, Southern, Baldwin, Hring, and
Rouse in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal; C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of
Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideas in Medieval Europe, 9501200 (Philadelphia, 1994);
R.W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1: Foundations, vol. 2:
The Heroic Age (Oxford, 1995, 2001).
Approaches 5

of Sentences.10 Both works were fundamental to study in the twelfth-century

schools and the early university of Paris. Both included the commandments,
which meant that questions relating to the Decalogue entered the schools cur-
riculum. This became particularly important when the Sentences was made
the textbook for the theology course at Paris (by then, the European centre for
the study of theology) in the early thirteenth century.
The renaissance was also evident in the burgeoning interest of lay people in
their own religion. It was no longer seen to be enough for regular and secular
clergy to do the praying on behalf of everyone else. A growing number of lay
people wanted a greater share in the liturgical, sacramental and spiritual life of
the Church; and if the Church could not provide it, there were many types of
unorthodox groups who would. Innocent III was not the first to realise the
Church needed to respond to these demands, but he made the most of his
papal office in consolidating the message of reform in the Lateran IV decrees.
Amongst other things, these mandated at least annual participation in confes-
sion and the Eucharist, and provision by bishops for the teaching of clergy: the
care of souls, said the Council, was the art of arts.11 Annual confession may
seem rather basic, but along with the other decrees it provided an opening for
widespread diocesan legislation on teaching and preaching to the laity.12
Although the Lateran canons did not specify what the laity were to know, in
the local diocesan legislation which followed its principles, the command-
ments, along with the Creed and the Our Father, took their place as one of the

10 Lesley Smith, The Glossa ordinaria: the making of a medieval Bible commentary (Leiden,
2009). Magistri Petri LombardiSententiae in IV Libris Distinctae: prolegomena, ed. I.C.
Brady, 3 vols (Grottaferrata, 1971); and Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols (Leiden, 1994).
11 See canons 10 (On the appointment of preachers), 11 (On schoolmasters), 21 (On con-
fession being made, and not revealed by the priest, and on communicating at least at
Easter). Other canons dealt with the conduct of the clergy, to counter accusations that
they brought the Church into disrepute.
12 Three English examples of bishops who took the implications of the canons to heart were
Stephen Langton, at the Council of Oxford (1222): see F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney,
Councils and Synods with other documents relating to the English Church ad 12051313
(Oxford, 1964), pp. 106125, 165167; Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, the biggest
diocese in England (and a circle of like-minded men, such as Alexander Stavensby and
Richard le Poore, who had been Langtons pupils): ibid., pp. 265278; and John Pecham,
archbishop of Canterbury: ibid., pp. 892918. See D.L. Douie, Archbishop Pecham (Oxford,
1952); R.W. Southern Robert Grosseteste: the growth of an English mind in medieval Europe
(Oxford, repr. 1992); and M. Gibbs and J. Lang, Bishops and Reform 12151272 (London
1934). See also J.W. Goering, William de Montibus (c. 11401213): the schools and the litera-
ture of pastoral care (Toronto, 1992), with a good bibliography.
6 approaches

texts the laity were to know and understand.13 Believing in the Creed, praying
the Our Father and living by the commandments were the trinity which laid
the foundations of a Christian life. The fact that the commandments had a life
outside the classroom means that, although this book is rooted in the work of
academics in the schools, that work was not of solely academic interest. What
we find in their commentaries was not only inward-looking. They might not be
addressing the laity themselves, but the teaching masters were aware that
many of their pupils would go on to the pastoral ministry; this was especially
true in the thirteenth century, when many of the theological students were
mendicant friars, whose raison dtre was preaching and teaching. And beyond
the schools, we can take a small sample of how indeed whether what was
taught to professionals made its way down to ordinary believers.
Another central reason why a study of the Decalogue is a useful route into
medieval interpretation is because it allows us to look at the ordinary a cat-
egory of material much overlooked by medievalists and others who are under-
standably attracted by the oddity or the outsider. The maverick (for whom
there is often an intriguing dearth of evidence) can seem more interesting than
the conformist, but the humdrum can perhaps tell us more about what mostly
happened or was mostly thought. The commandments are, in this sense, hum-
drum. They are neither a textual oddity nor a theological peculiarity; their
importance is both central and uncontroversial, agreed on by Christians and
Jews, and even by the majority of heretics, whose complaint is more likely to be
that the orthodox do not adhere to them strictly enough, rather than that they
accept them in the first place. This centrality meant that the Decalogue
was commonly discussed, which in turn provides us with plenty of material to
consider indeed, far too much. I have chosen a particular focus: the schools
in the period before Thomas Aquinas which laid the foundations of the theol-
ogy of the High Middle Ages. The material for this study covers biblical com-
mentary and paraphrase, the Sentences and their commentaries, theological
summae, treatises and questions on the commandments, sermon material and
collationes, with the addition of some confessional and catechetical manuals,
and even the texts of plays. Leaving the authors of the plays aside, the writers
of the other materials are all clerics, in and outside religious Orders, mostly
working in Paris, the hub of theological scholarship in the central Middle Ages.
All were, perforce, men. I have not cited them all in every context; some are

13 Pechams Council of Lambeth (1281) stipulated that priests had to provide teaching at
least once a quarter on the 14 articles of faith, the 10 commandments, the 2 Gospel pre-
cepts, the 7 deadly sins, 7 cardinal virtues and 7 sacraments; the articles of faith, com-
mandments and deadly sins were common to reform constitutions.
Approaches 7

much more prominent in the text than others, but I have tried to give a little of
the limelight to each at one point or other. Since some readers will be familiar
with all or most of these scholars and their material, rather than introduce in
the text each one as he appears, what follows here are very short introductions
to the main characters in the text, in roughly chronological order, concentrat-
ing on their work on the commandments, and the links between them. Readers
who know these men already may join the introduction again at p. 12
I begin with a text instead of an author: The Glossa ordinaria or Ordinary
Gloss on the Bible, was a massive compendium of patristic and Carolingian
exegesis which became the standard method of approach to Bible study in the
twelfth-century schools.14 Anselm of Laon (d. 1117) was the master who, with
his brother Ralph, made the cathedral school at Laon a centre for Bible schol-
arship outside the monastery, and who is credited with being the instigator
(and part author) of the Gloss. However, the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy
were probably glossed by Gilbert of Auxerre, known as the Universal (d. 1134),
who used extracts from Origen, Augustine Jerome, Gregory, Bede, Isidore, and
Rabanus Maurus to fashion his text.
Hugh of St Victor (c. 10961141) was an Augustinian canon and master
of the influential school at St Victor in Paris. No twelfth-century scholar
could be unaware of his work, which is full of unshowy originality. Hugh re-
emphasises the literal sense of Scripture and is interested in Jewish exegesis.
He wrote a short treatise on the Decalogue, Institutiones de decalogum legis
dominicae, but he also deals with the commandments in his substantial com-
pendium of moral theology, the De Sacramentis christianae fidei.15
Peter Lombard (c. 11001160). An exegete and theologian who was mas-
ter of the Notre Dame cathedral school and briefly bishop of Paris. His phe-
nomenally successful Four Books of Sentences (11551158) are an elegant
summing-up of the nascent sententiae tradition, paving the way for the great
thirteenth-century Summae of theology.16 The four books (on the Trinity; on
Creation and sin; on the Incarnation and virtues; on the sacraments and the
Eschaton) of Sentences set out the questions, scriptural examples, and patris-
tic opinions that formed the foundation of the teaching syllabus for more
than a century.

14 Smith, The Glossa ordinaria, for bibliography.

15 Hugonis de Sancto Victore. De sacramentis christianae fidei, ed. Rainer Berndt (Aschendorff,
2008), with bibliography; De sacramentis christianae fidei, ed. and transl. Roy J. Deferrari
(Cambridge, MA, 1951); Institutiones de decalogum legis dominicae, PL 176: 918. Paul
Rorem, Hugh of St Victor (Oxford, 2009) with bibliography.
16 Magistri Petri LombardiSententiae, ed. Brady. Colish, Peter Lombard, with bibliography.
8 approaches

Peter Comestor (d. 1178/9) was a biblical scholar and churchman in

Troyes and Paris, who was influenced by Peter Lombard and the school of
St Victor. He is best known for his late work, the Historia scholastica, a para-
phrase of and commentary on the Bible, written as a continuous history book,
which became the standard approach to the Bible for beginning students.17
Peter the Chanter (d. 1197). Paris master whose concentration on prac-
tical ethics is thought to have been influential on the reforms of the fourth
Lateran Council (1215) and clerics who promoted it, such as his pupil, the future
cardinal Robert Couron. In addition, he probably taught Thomas of Chobham
and possibly Stephen Langton. Peter is commonly said to be at the centre of
the biblical, moral school of medieval theology, which preferred practical to
speculative theology. He wrote a series of Quaestiones, which were gathered
together into an incomplete Summa de sacramentis, but he is perhaps best
known for his more popular Verbum abbreviatum, a treatise on vices and
virtues, which includes the commandments.18
Peter of Poitiers (c. 11301205). Peter was probably a pupil of
Peter Lombard, and possibly also studied with Peter the Chanter. In 1167 he
took over the teaching post vacated by Peter Comestor, and in 1193 was made
chancellor of Notre Dame, in charge of teaching at the schools. Before the
Lombards Sentences had become the standard study text, Peter of Poitiers
wrote a five-book version, about half the questions of which it shares with the
Lombards including a discussion of the Decalogue.19
Stephen Langton (c. 11501228). An English biblical scholar and church-
man who taught at Paris from the 1180s, Stephen became a cardinal in 1206 and
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1207. He seems to have been influenced by Peter
Lombard in speculative theology, Peter the Chanter in moral theology, and
Peter Comestor and the St Victor school in exegesis. Stephen was famous
for his biblical commentaries and quaestiones as well as for his preaching.

17 Historia scholastica, PL 198: 10531644 (Acts was completed by Peter of Poitiers); only one
part has been the subject of a modern edition: Petri Comestoris Scolastica Historia. Liber
Genesis, ed. A. Sylwan (Turnhout, 2005). Gilbert Dahan, ed., Pierre le Mangeur ou Pierre de
Troyes, matre du XIIe sicle (Turnhout, 2013).
18 Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, ed. J.-A. Dugauquier, 5 vols (Louvain, Lille,
195467); Verbum abbreviatum, PL 205: 21554 (short version); Baldwin, Masters, Princes
and Merchants.
19 Sententiarum libri quinque: the first two books have been edited as Sententiae Petri
Pictaviensis, ed. P.S. Moore and M. Dulong (vol. 1) and Moore, J.N. Garvin and Dulong
(vol. 2) (Notre Dame, 1943, 1950). The Decalogue is discussed in book 4: PL 211: 11371162.
P. S. Moore, The Works of Peter of Poitiers, Master in Theology and Chancellor of Paris (1193
1205) (Notre Dame, 1936).
Approaches 9

His Exodus commentary has a full discussion of the commandments, which is

briefly reprised in the commentary on Deuteronomy. As a teacher, his pupils
included a number who went on to be reforming bishops; as a bishop, the con-
stitutions of his council at Oxford (1222) introduced the Lateran IV reforms
into England.20
William of Auxerre (1140/501231). Archdeacon of Beauvais and master
at Paris, William is best known for his Summa aurea, a loose reworking of
Lombards Sentences, halfway between a collection of sententiae and a full-
blown summa.21 He was taught by Praepositinus of Cremona, but also shows
the influence of William of Auvergne and John of La Rochelle. He was one of
the tribunal appointed by Pope Gregory IX to correct the works of Aristotle for
use in the schools. The title Golden summa shows how important Williams
quietly original work was thought to be; as well as using Aristotle, he defines
and discusses new topics, such as usury.
William of Auvergne (c. 11801249). William was a master at Paris and
bishop of the city from 1228. Although a secular cleric himself, he was a strong
supporter of the new Orders of friars and their place in Church reform. He was
an early (if sceptical) user of Aristotle, and of both Maimonides and Avicenna,
both of whom are evident in his treatise On the Laws.22 His vast and original
writings favour rational argument over spiritual exegesis, and he is not easily
categorised as a thinker.
Thomas of Chobham (1158/681233/36). Thomas was probably a student
of Peter the Chanter, but he spent most of his career in his native England, in
the entourage of the (notably reforming) bishops of Salisbury. His successful
Summa confessorum one of the most accessible works of practical theology
produced in the middle ages (Goering) is the earliest English example of this
type of work.23

20 Langtons biblical commentaries have no modern edition. For this study I have used
Oxford, Trinity College, MS 65 (first quarter of the 13th century), checked against
Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 112 and Durham, Cathedral Library, A. I. 7. Powicke, Stephen
Langton; ODNB; L.-J. Bataillon, N. Briou, G. Dahan, R. Quinto, ed., tienne Langton, prdi-
cateur, bibliste, thologien (Turnhout, 2010).
21 Magistri Guillelmi Altissiodorensis. Summa Aurea, ed. Jean Ribaillier, 7 vols in 5
(Grottaferrata and Paris, 19801987). J.A. St Pierre, The Theological Thought of William of
Auxerre. An Introductory Bibliography, RTAM, 33 (1966), 147155.
22 De Legibus, in Guilielmi Alverni [] Opera omnia, facsimile of Paris, 1674 edition, 2 vols
(Frankfurt-am-Main, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 18102. Autour de Guillaume dAuvergne, ed.
F. Morenzoni and J.-Y. Tilliette (Turnhout, 2005).
23 Thomae de Chobham Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield (Louvain and Paris, 1968); see
also his Summa de arte praedicantium, ed. F. Morenzoni (Turnhout, 1988). Goering in
10 approaches

Alexander of Hales (c. 11861245). English master at Paris who became

a Franciscan at the height of his fame in 1236. He introduced the use of
Lombards Sentences rather than the Bible as the basis for his introductory lec-
tures in theology, setting a permanent trend towards theological questions and
away from biblical commentary. He is known for his Quaestiones antequam
esset frater, his Gloss on the Sentences, and a Summa theologica, which was fin-
ished by his fellow Franciscans, including John of La Rochelle.24
John of La Rochelle (c. 1190/12001245). John was possibly a student of
William of Auxerre and Philip the Chancellor in Paris. He became a Franciscan
sometime before 1238, working closely with Alexander of Hales, with whose
work his own is often conflated. His Tractatus de Legibus forms part of
Alexanders Summa theologica, and he also wrote a number of works on the
soul. He was a teacher of Bonaventure.25
Robert Grosseteste (c. 11701253). Locally educated in Lincoln,
Grosseteste began his academic life studying science, turning to theology only
from about 1225. He taught in Oxford and became bishop of Lincoln (Englands
largest diocese, which included Oxford) in 1237. A supporter of and theology
lecturer to the new Franciscan Order in Oxford, as a bishop Grosseteste was a
noted reformer. His treatise De Decem mandatis is, like many of his works,
idiosyncratic.26
Hugh of St Cher (c. 11901263). Early Paris Dominican scholar and
administrator who was the first cardinal from the Order. He directed a group of

ODNB and idem, William de Montibus (c. 11401213): the schools and the literature of pasto-
ral care (Toronto, 1992); F. Morenzoni, Des coles aux paroisse: Thomas de Chobham et la
promotion de la prdication au dbut du XIIIe sicle (Paris, 1995).
24 Quaestiones disputatae Antequam esset frater, 3 vols (Quaracchi, 1960); Glossa in IV Libros
Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, 4 vols (Quaracchi, 19511957); Doctoris Irrefragibilis
Alexandri de Hales Summa Theologica seu sic ab origine dicta Summa Fratris Alexandri, 4
vols, ed. V. Doucet (Quaracchi, 19241948). Beryl Smalley, The Gospels in the Schools, c. 1100-
c. 1280 (London and Ronceverte, WV, 1985); ODNB.
25 Tractatus de Legibus, in Doctoris Irrefragibilis Alexandri de Hales Summa Theologica seu sic
ab origine dicta Summa Fratris Alexandri. Liber III, ed. V. Doucet (Quaracchi, 1948). Beryl
Smalley, William of Auvergne, John of La Rochelle and Saint Thomas on the Old Law, in
eadem, Studies in Medieval Thought and Learning, from Abelard to Wyclif (London, 1981),
pp. 121181.
26 De Decem mandatis, ed. Richard C. Dales and Edward B. King (Oxford, 1987). Southern,
Robert Grosseteste; J. McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste on the Ten Commandments, RTAM 58
(1991), 167205. Grosseteste is experiencing an upsurge of interest at present, with a num-
ber of new editions and collections of essays; Robert Grosseteste and His Intellectual
Milieu: new editions and studies, ed. J. Flood, J.R. Ginther, and J.W. Goering (Toronto, 2013)
is a recent example with bibliography.
Approaches 11

scholars who produced an innovative series of biblical aids and commentaries,

including a complete Bible commentary, the Postilla in totam bibliam, that
brought up to date the Glossa ordinaria for his Orders use.27
Simon of Hinton (fl. 1240s1260s). As far as we know, Simon spent most
of his adult life at the Dominican house in Oxford, lecturing in theology there
after about 1248, and becoming Provincial Prior after 1254. His work shows
influence from William of Auxerre and the Dominican penitentialist, Raymond
of Peaforte. As well as some biblical exegesis, he produced an unfinished
series of theological quaestiones (c. 12401250), which include discussion of
the first three commandments, and his most popular work, a Summa for the
instruction of those new in Orders (iuniorum), a handy manual of systematic
theology, possibly for the use of confessors, which also includes the Decalogue.28
Bonaventure (c. 12171274). A theologian and mystic who was a student
of John of La Rochelle and (possibly) Alexander of Hales in Paris. His academic
career was curtailed when he became Minister General of the fractious
Franciscan Order in 1257; but his successful tenure of the office led to him
being dubbed its second founder. Well-known for his mystical and medita-
tional works, his most extensive academic text is his Commentary on the
Sentences; as Minister General he gave a series of seven Collationes (a type of
lecture-sermon for the brothers) on the Decalogue in Lent and Easter 1267.29

27 There is no modern edition of Hughs Postilla in totam bibliam, but several 16th-century
and 17th-century editions, for example Paris, 15331539, and Paris, 1545. L.-J. Bataillon, G.
Dahan, and P.-M. Gy, Hugues de Saint-Cher ( 1263): Bibliste et thologien (Turnhout, 2004),
with bibliography.
28 The Quaestiones have not been edited. They are found in a manuscript named the Summa
Abendonensis, after another set of questions it contains: London, British Library, MS Royal
9 E. XIV, fols 117v-133r. The Summa ad instructionem iuniorum is printed among the works
of Jean Gerson: Tractatus de Decem Praeceptis, in Joannis Gersonii Opera omnia, vol. 1,
pt 3, Penitentes ad fidei dogmata (Antwerp, 1706); the Exceptiones to the Summa are
edited by P.A. Walz in The Exceptiones from the Summa of Simon of Hinton, Angelicum
13 (1936), 283368. Beryl Smalley, The Quaestiones of Simon of Hinton, in Studies in
Medieval History Presented to F.M. Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin, R.W. Southern
(Oxford, 1948), pp. 209222; W.A. Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers (Rome,
1951); bibliography in Simon of Hinton, in Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi,
vol. 3, ed. T. Kaeppeli (Rome, 1980).
29 Collationes de decem praeceptis, in Opera omnia, 5 (Quaracchi, 1891); English translation
by P.J. Spaeth, St. Bonaventures Collations on the Ten Commandments (St Bonaventure, NY,
1995); Commentaria in IV Libros Sententiarum, in Opera Omnia 14 (Quaracchi,
18821889). J.-G. Bougerol, Introduction ltude de St Bonaventure (Tournai, 1961). C.M.
Cullen, Bonaventure (New York, Oxford, 2006), with bibliography.
12 approaches

Nicholas of Lyra (c. 12701349). Nicholas was Franciscan master at Paris,

and the author of a massive, much-copied biblical commentary, the Postilla lit-
teralis et moralis super totam bibliam.30 Famous for his knowledge and use of
Jewish biblical commentary, often mediated through Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben
Isaac, 10401105), Nicholas concentrated on the literal sense of Scripture, which
he expanded to include much that had previously been considered spiritual.
John Mirk (fl. c. 1382c. 1414). Mirk was an Augustinian canon and prior of
Lilleshall in Shropshire. Little is known of him beyond his three pastoral works,
the Instructions for Parish Priests, which includes a section on the command-
ments; the Latin Manuale sacerdotis; and his collection of sermons, Festial.31
Dederich of Mnster (d. 1515). Dietrich Kolde (or Coelde) was edu-
cated at the University of Cologne, and joined the Mnster Augustinans. He
left the canons to become a Franciscan, and spent his career in Brussels and
Cologne. His catechism, A Fruitful Mirror (Christenspiegel), was the first printed
German catechism (1480); it went into many editions and was translated into
several vernacular languages, making it probably the most widely used
Catholic catechism before and during the early years of the Reformation. After
explaining the Creed, Dederich moves on to the Decalogue.32

***

How did medieval commentators go about deciding what the commandments

meant? Their method always included the interpretation of one authoritative
text by means of others, always beginning with the Bible (weighted in the order
of books which dealt most closely with Christ). After the Bible, interpreters
moved on to any relevant writings of the Fathers of the Church (chiefly Jerome,
Ambrose, Augustine and Gregory); to important early medieval scholars
such as Bede and Isidore of Seville; and after that, occasionally, they could even
consider the opinions of more modern exegetes. It was a method that built on

30 Nicolaus de Lyra. Postilla super totam bibliam (Strassburg: 1492; facsimile repr. Frankfurt-
am-Main, 1971). P.D.W. Krey and Lesley Smith, Nicholas of Lyra: the Senses of Scripture
(Leiden, Boston, Cologne, 2000), with bibliography; Nicolas de Lyre, Franciscain du XIVe
sicle, exgte et theologien, ed. G. Dahan (Paris, 2011).
31 John Mirks Instructions for Parish Priests, edited from MS Cotton Claudius A. II and six other
Manuscripts with introduction, notes and glossary, ed. Gillis Kristensson (Lund, 1974). See
also John Mirks Festial, edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A. II, ed. Susan
Powell, EETS, 2 vols (London, 20092011); ODNB.
32 Br Dederich von Mnster of the Observant Order [Dietrich Kolde]. A Fruitful Mirror or
Small Handbook for Christians, transl. by R.B. Dewell in Three Reformation Catechisms:
Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran, ed. D. Janz (New York, 1982).
Approaches 13

the past, and, in the phrase that was commonplace by the time we read it in
Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century, contemporary scholars felt them-
selves to be dwarves standing on giants shoulders. Nonetheless, the dwarves
were not simply repeating what the giants had said. Although it was not
regarded as suitable (or fashionable) for theologians to claim that they were
doing anything novel, nevertheless theology did develop and expand in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The rationale given for this was not that theo-
logians had created something new, but that, by consideration of past author-
ity, they were discovering knowledge of God and creation that already existed.
The twelfth-century schoolmen with whom our investigation begins devel-
oped a way of working that came into its own in the next century and which we
now call the scholastic method. It proceeds by asking a series of linked ques-
tions, mustering for each of them all the arguments for and against, and then
judging between them, based on the weight of authority on either side and cor-
respondence to the tenets of Christian doctrine. The method aims to be scien-
tific, almost mechanical, in its posing of questions, gathering of evidence,
weighing of sides and, when the conclusion has been reached, responding to all
the opposing arguments; it not only reaches a solution, but reaches one that
answers all reasonable objections. To some extent the method does indeed
function in this way, but the process is not exactly as mechanical as has been
portrayed. The difference lies in the value placed on the evidence for either side,
which is often a matter of judgement rather than science. Answers depended
on pre-determined doctrinal positions more than reason or experience.
In the case of the commandments, their broad and inclusive subject matter
brought them bumping up against a number of other passages from Scripture.
For example, You shall not kill confronted Exodus 22: 18, You shall not allow
evildoers to live.33 Remember to keep the sabbath day holy seemed at odds
with Mark 2: 27, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour sat ill with Matthew
5: 34, I say to you not to swear at all. And the Decalogue as a whole seemed to
be challenged by Jesus words in John (13: 34), A new commandment I give to
you, that you love one another. These inconsistencies were too obvious to be
ignored: they required explanation but how could scholars value the voice of
God on Sinai against the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount? One way
forward was to bring into play the opinions of the Fathers of the Church.
But what if Jerome and Augustine, the two most respected patristic minds,

33 The translation is from the Vulgate Latin version, Maleficos non patieris vivere. Some
modern versions of the text interpret maleficii differently, but for medieval theologians
the point was the contradiction between this and the commandment.
14 approaches

also disagreed? According to Anselm of Laon, such opinions were diverse but
not adverse, since harmony comes from dissonance.34 Our commandments
texts allow us to follow medieval theologians as they try to navigate these rock-
strewn waters. When the Bible contradicts itself, how do they respond?
Questions about method will appear throughout this book, but especially in
the final chapter, which looks at how medieval theologians expressed their
individuality, even in the face of the demands of orthodox doctrine, the needs
of a teaching syllabus, a system governed by authoritative texts, and their posi-
tion as secular clergy or members of religious Orders.
The range of material covered by the Decalogue allows us to get a sense of
what medieval theologians found interesting, and to speculate on why they
concentrate on what they do. When I began this work, I assumed that the
scholars would write at length about the commandment against killing, for
instance, since surely in an age so used to violence that it had to forbid clerics
from personally shedding blood, the taking of life would be at the forefront of
their concerns. Amongst the decrees of Lateran IV, along with annual confes-
sion, comes a call to Crusade. I was soon to discover I was wrong: my view
of what their preoccupations should be was not their own. Adjusting my
microscope to focus on the sources and not on my preconceptions was, as ever,
the first step to understanding. Modern biblical commentators treat the
content of the commandments in a rather cursory fashion; on the whole, they
seem to think that the precepts are self-explanatory. They prefer to focus on
the Decalogues antecedents among earlier near-eastern law, such as the
Hammurabic code and Hittite covenants.35 Ironically, thinking appears to have
come round to the medieval view that Moses was probably the author of much
of this material.36 What they have to say about the meaning of the command-
ments and their place as law is unremarkable. Earlier scholars found much
more in the commandments to expound and explore. In comparison with
today, the patristic and medieval writers who provide the material for this

34 Anselm, letter to Heribrand, abbot of St-Laurent, Lige: Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale
aux XIIe et XIIIe sicles, 6 vols in 8 (Gembloux, 19421960), vol. 5: Problmes dhistoire lit-
traire (1959), no. 230 (lines 1016), p. 176.
35 An interesting summary of this approach is given in E. W. Nicholson, Exodus and Sinai in
History and Tradition (Oxford, 1973). No modern commentary should be singled out here,
but having read the Exodus volume of most of the modern series, I have been disap-
pointed by the lack of interest in their exposition of the commandments. Cassutos 1967
commentary, translated from the Hebrew, is something of an exception, as are Brevard
Childs, Exodus (London, 1974) and Scott M. Langston, Exodus through the Centuries
(Oxford, 2006), for their historical perspective.
36 See for example, Cassuto, Exodus, p. 236.
Approaches 15

study were uninterested in questions of where the commandments may have

come from or what their influences were. This is not to say that they were inca-
pable of understanding the historical and contextual issues that modern schol-
ars raise, only that these were not questions they judged to be most fruitful:
more important were the life lessons the commandments had to offer. The pre-
occupations of each scholarly generation can (and generally do) seem dull,
pointless, or bafflingly nave to those of a different age, but they can tell us
much about the culture from which they arise. For this reason, I want to
attempt not only to describe and discuss the treatment of the individual com-
mandments by medieval commentators, but also to try to explain why they
take the approach they do, and what that can tell us about the practice of
medieval theology in a wider setting. The medieval approach to the command-
ments is at least as interesting and instructive as the answers they give to par-
ticular questions for each precept and is, by and large, harder to fathom. If we
can understand the underpinning for the interpretation of the command-
ments, we can build a more accurate model of the medieval world. Here the
Decalogue does, I think, give us a particularly good place to start, combining as
it does the rigidity of law with the psychological acuity involved in the study of
motive and the need for mitigation, when weak human will comes up against
the perfection of God. I am always struck by the insight of the best medieval
commentators, their careful observation and knowledge of what makes people
tick. When they write of the frailties of old age, the difficult dynamics of family,
or the destructive properties of envy, the centuries between us fall away, and
we can believe we understand them; they are just like us. This is partly true. But
then they begin again to explain why Jacob did not lie to his father, or to what
precise extent Jews may be despoiled of their goods, and we are back in an
alien world of religious fanatics. For me, it is this jagged edge between the com-
pellingly recognisable and the repellently different that makes these medieval
scholars so interesting: they sum up the extremes of human experience. I hope
my readers will agree.
 Chapter 1

Law

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes

Give me understanding, and I shall keep your law
Lead me in the path of your commandments
Ps. 119 [118]: 3335

The Nature of Law

To Christian believers, past and present, Gods law is unlike human law in a
profound way. Although at its best human law makes visible the law of God,
nevertheless it is only a shadow, a kind of reification of the invisible mecha-
nisms that make the universe run harmoniously. At its worst, human law is a
travesty of what God wants humans to do. Gods law, on the other hand,
both creates and describes what the universe is; that is to say, Gods law both
brings the universe as Christians understand it into being, and explains to
them how it works at the most fundamental level. It describes what the uni-
verse truly is. This law cannot be broken; and it is noticeable that medieval
commentators speak only of fulfilling the law, not of breaking it. It is as absurd
to speak of breaking Gods law as it is to speak of breaking the law of gravity
by jumping from a high window. One might well attempt it, but the results
would be grim for the doer, and the law would always be left unchanged. One
cannot, in any meaningful sense, break the law of God; rather, one breaks
oneself against the perfection of the law in attempting to live according to any
other rule.
God gives law to human beings as an act of love, for law reveals how the uni-
verse works what one needs to be and do in order to act in accordance with
what is true. It reveals, in a particular way, something about what God is, since it
is through law and not merely through will that he governs the universe and
imposes order on the chaos of the cosmos. Anyone who tries to live outside the
divine order is asking for chaos to enter his life. If humans live according to law,
however, they live in harmony with the created universe, and they will live well.
God gives law not as a measure for human goodness or as a test, but to show
Creation what it must do in order to live as part of the divine household. In that
way, it is humans who bring ruination on themselves when they try to live out-
side the law, and not God who imposes punishments arbitrarily.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_003

Law 17

The need for order, the lack of arbitary imposition or government by arbi-
trary will, is at the heart of medieval religion, indeed, probably at the heart of
all belief. Faced with the uncertainties of life, it is comforting to think that
there is some sort of plan, indeed a plan in which everyone has a part, be it ever
so tiny. So it is that, at the beginning of the book of Genesis, God makes the
world in six days, according to an ordered plan. It would be easy to imagine
God creating the cosmos in a single thought, the whole emerging fully-formed
from the divine mind in one glorious unified, perfect creative act. Or again, it is
possible to imagine creation as having been piecemeal and sporadic, new parts
being added adventitiously and haphazardly, as and when God willed over
time. But neither alternative is in line with the Judaeo-Christian idea of what
God is; indeed, the latter suggestion would strike the believer as incongruously
unlikely, so much so that it illustrates a key facet in this conception of God
that God is not arbitrary, fanciful or dilettante. In the Judaeo-Christian telling,
God creates the world element by element, according to a rational schema,
and in a diligent weeks work. It is a rather pedestrian portrait of the divine
spark. God is not simply pictured creating everything, and so it existed; God
creates in ranks and types, one step at a time, until all is done. Everything is
made, and is good, and at the end there is rest.
This portrait of a calm, ordered, hierarchical, controlled creation, so at odds
with the daily life of the people who wrote the story down, tells us about thekind
of God they needed to worship. This is a God who brings order and gives law.
Although, being omnipotent, God could and technically of course does act
only out of will, nevertheless, God has, it seems, generally agreed to keep to
certain tramlines most of the time, to do things humans define as good and just,
and to work within the bonds of nature and supernature. God can thus be made,
to a degree, comprehensible, even predictable, as long as one knows the rules.
This sort of God gives humans law so that they can know how to live in a way
that will bring them closer to God, for this closeness is the way to eternal happi-
ness, and is assumed to be what the Creator desires for the Creation. Humans
can thus feel confident in the behaviour of their God: God the legislator is the
sort of God who reassures nothing arbitrary here; and combined with Gods
omnipotence, this presents a portrait of a God one can worship and be proud of,
a God with whom in the long run everything would be all right. We might ques-
tion whether this judicious and consistent figure is recognizable throughout the
Old Testament, given the lengthy history of the writing of the text. The medieval
commentators work hard to establish some sort of single line of interpretation
in the face of the variety the Bible presents. It was certainly not clear that their
own experience of the world reflected the actions of such a God. Much of the
impetus behind Augustines City of God, for instance, was the need to reconcile
18 Chapter 1

the theory of the Creator with his perceived practice; but the theory persisted,
despite or perhaps because of daily evidence of disorder in the world.

Eternal and Natural Law

Although the source of all law God was simple and unitary, the theological
concept of law in the Middle Ages was neither of these things. We can distin-
guish five commonly accepted medieval types of law: eternal or divine law; natu-
ral law; Mosaic or written law; the law of the Gospel; and human or positive law.
These were not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, eternal law is the gold stan-
dard to which the others aspire, and they were measured by the degree to which
their precepts reflected the content of eternal law as far as it was understood.
As with so much of Christian theology, Augustine of Hippo provided funda-
mental and abiding definitions of eternal or divine law. Augustine emphasised
the qualities of reason, order, justice and peace. In the manner of a sacrament,
peace was the outward and visible sign of the inward, invisible grace of divine
unity, a sign that there was only one God, and that God was Lord of all things. For
Augustine, eternal law is divine reason or the will of God, reason and will for
God being, we should note, equivalent: God does not will what is against Gods
reason.1 Gods law, for Augustine, also equated justice and order: eternal law is
that which is just, so that all things might be best ordered.2 This notion of the
best ordered or orderly ordinatissima carries with it the idea both that things
are ordered and not random and that they are ordered to be the way they ought
to be. For things to be ordered the way they should be is the definition of justice.
The third facet of eternal law in Augustine was what it was intended to bring
about in creation: peace; in the City of God Augustine calls God the administra-
tor of the peace of the universe.3 The immediate purpose of Gods eternal law,
then, for humans, though not for God, is that there should be peace on earth.
For God, law is a single thing, one complete and sufficent idea in Gods
mind; but this unitary perfection has to be broken up for comprehension by
Gods Creation, which is why there seem to be so many types of law in exis-
tence, and indeed so many separate laws, rather than just one. It is not that
God changes, or that more than the single idea is necessary, but that Creation

1 Augustine, Contra Faustum, bk 22 c. 27, Lex aeterna est ratio divina vel voluntas Dei. Quoted
in Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe sicles, vol. 2 Problmes de Morale
(Gembloux, 1948), p. 14.
2 Augustine, De Libero arbitrio, bk I, c. 6, Lex aeterna est ea qua iustum est ut omnia sint ordi-
natissima, quoted by John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 224.
3 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, l. 19, c. 12, n. 3, pax universitatis administrator, quoted in Lottin,
Psychologie, 2, p. 14.
Law 19

needed to be given this law in various forms at various times, in ways that it
was capable of understanding: as Gregory the Great put it, Deus non mutat
consilium, sed sententiam, meaning that God does not change fundamental
ideas, but he might alter the expression of them, so that they might be better
understood and realised by his Creation as it attempts to live in closer union
with Gods will.4 In Eden, humans could follow the law of God. The Fall made
this impossible; but part of the built-in recovery plan was laws fissure into a
variety of forms which Creation could perceive and obey. This concept of
Creation (and in particular humanity) progressing was one that medieval
Christian theologians liked to employ: just as children develop over time, so
humanity too grows more able to understand more complex ideas about
God. Above all else, it provided a simple explanation for why the Jews, the
original chosen people, had apparently been abandoned by God in favour of
Christians; it explained why the revelation given by Jesus the Messiah had
not been made to Abraham or Moses, but had been delayed for some thou-
sands of years. It was not that God had been surprised by the choices and
behaviour of the Jews, and forced to rethink the divine plan, rather that the
people themselves had at last reached the stage when they could understand
and accept the greater riches that were to be set before them. This was
reflected in the possibilities of law: after the events on Mount Sinai, natural
law was no longer the only law accessible to rational beings; similarly, the
law given to Moses had to confront another law the law of grace after the
life and death of Jesus Christ.
What these types of law were, and how they related to one another, was the
subject of medieval discussion. The thirteenth century especially saw a rise in
interest in legal theory amongst theologians. In particular, John of La Rochelle,
whose discussion of the Decalogue we shall encounter regularly in the succeed-
ing chapters, presents his exegesis within the framework of an important and
influential exposition of law in general.5 John, a Franciscan, was strongly influ-
enced by Augustines views on law, but manages to gather together the latters
disparate opinions and reformulate them as a systematic scholastic treatise. Law,
says John, is a set of principles gathered together for a single goal, so the created
world knows what to do and what to avoid.6 Eternal law is the law of all things
that are made, the law of the omnipotent maker, which has regard for the divine
purpose, which is the source and instrument behind all good things. All created

4 Cf. Gregory, Moralia in Iob, ed. M. Adriaen, 3 vols, ccsl 143 (Turnhout, 19791985), XVI,
cc. 10 and 37, n. 46; quoted by John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 228.
5 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus. Although I give references to particular places in
Johns work, his argument is cumulative, and demands to be read completely.
6 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 224 and 229.
20 Chapter 1

things are subject to and obey the eternal law.7 We should note that all things
means just that, in Johns opinion: rational and non-rational, sentient and non-
sentient Creation; all are subject to the law of God.
All just law is derived from the overarching, eternal law of God, and so John
divides all law into two main types: eternal law, and those other derived laws
(leges derivatae) which are the means by which God allows Creation to catch a
glimpse of that divine law.8 These latter are natural law, Mosaic law, Gospel law,
and laws made by human rulers for their subjects. This last sort of positive
human law is perhaps the most obvious type, and so cannot go unmentioned,
but it is not usually much discussed by theologians (and John is no different
here), since the theological interest involved in such law is in the power of the
ruler to make laws and not the content of the law itself. This human law is good
or bad depending on how closely it mirrors the other three types of law; but it
should be obeyed insofar as the ruler who made it is legitimate. From the theo-
logians point of view, the other three types of law are much more engrossing.
Each corresponds to a particular period in history and reflects the state of the
relationship between God and humanity.
John is the first theologian to discuss eternal law in any detail, and attempt
to distinguish it from natural law. Humans can know eternal law to some
extent, not fully, since Gods mysterious ways are beyond human comprehen-
sion and are simply to be accepted. Eternal law may be thought of as a kind of
Platonic ideal of law, existing only in the mind of God and without an explicit
external existence. It is an emanation of the will of God, which is the highest
reason (summa ratio), which everything should always obey (cui semper obtem
perandum est) or perhaps better, to which everything should always conform
itself.9 Eternal law existed before creation; given its origin, it must be both sin-
gular and immutable, like God himself.10 It is characterised by power (which it
obtains from God the Father), truth (from God the Son) and goodness (from

7 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus: est lex omnia artium et lex omnipotentis
artificis, respicit causam divinam, quae est ars et causa omnium bonorum, no. 226; Et ita
quaelibet creatura obedit et subicitur legi aeternae, no. 236. John has been quoting
Anselm, Cur Deus homo?, I.15: Unaquaeque creatura, cum sibi praeceptum ordinem
naturaliter aut rationaliter servat, Deo obedire dicitur, maxime rationalis, cui datum est
intelligere quid debeat.
8 Omnes legeset praecepta ab aeterna lege derivata sunt: Augustine, De Libero arbitrio,
bk 1, c. 6, n. 15; dicendum quod omnis lex humana et omnes leges, quantum ad id quod
habet iustum et legitimum in se, tractae sunt a lege aeterna: John, Tractatus de Legibus,
no. 223, and see no. 230.
9 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 226.
10 Ibid., no. 229.
Law 21

God the Holy Spirit).11 It is always at work, since it constitutes the standard
and measure which all Creation should imitate and attempt to attain. The pur-
pose of eternal law which should be reflected in all law is to promote the
best ordering (ordinatissima) of the world, which is characterised by universal
peace and the common (not individual) good (non in singulari sed in ordine
universi).12 Because it is always and everywhere, this law applies to every thing,
whether or not it is recognised in return. Following Augustine, John is clear
that although the law governs evil as well as good, the evil was not made
by God, only the good; rather, evil comes about by a deficiency of good.13 For
John, although humans can perceive eternal law, they cannot explain why it is
as it is:

Nobody is able to judge the eternal law because the person judging is
always superior to what is being judged; but knowing or recognizing it is
imprinted on everyones mind. And so the idea of the law is stamped in
the mind, but that is not a judgement about it.14

Human beings cannot know eternal law directly; rather, they perceive Gods
law through the various types of law derived from it. The first of these is natural
law, which was commonly discussed in the Middle Ages, and is still discussed
among legal philosophers today. For John of La Rochelle, natural law is the law
given in legal terms, promulgated to Creation by God before Moses was
given the written law on Mount Sinai, before the Jews came fully into their
inheritance as the chosen people of God. In contrast to this Mosaic law, natural
law is available for all created things. Following Paul (Rom 2: 15), natural law
was the law written in all mens hearts.15 For Jerome, natural lawtells us
in our hearts that good things are to be done and bad things avoided.16

11 Ibid., nos 227, 229.

12 Ibid., no. 226.
13 Ibid., no. 230; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, bk XII, c. 7. Lex enim aeterna secundum quod est
ius ordinandi, respicit bona et mala, quia Deus bona facit et ordinat, malum autem non
facit, sed ordinat. Unde ordinare est actus communis ipsius legis respectu bonorum et
malorum, John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 226.
14 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 224. John is quoting and summarising
Augustine, De Vera religione, c. 31, n. 58.
15 For an overview see John Marenbon, Abelards Concept of Natural Law in Mensch und
Natur in Mittelalter, ed. Albert Zimmermann and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia
21/2 (Berlin, New York, 1992), pp. 609621.
16 Jerome, Commentarium in Epistulam Pauli ad Apostoli ad Galatis, ed. Giacomo Raspanti,
ccsl 77A (Turnhout, 2006), 3: 2, p. 69.
22 Chapter 1

John shifts the situation from hearts to minds: natural law is the idea of
eternal law impressed in our minds (notio legis aeternae impressa animae).17
In his nice analogy, natural law is related to eternal law as the seal is to the
matrix.18 And just as when the wax has cooled, the image of the seal is imprinted
forever, so the principle of natural law cannot be erased from an individuals
mind, although its effects on their behaviour can be dampened by sin.19 Natural
law is accessible to all and its teachings are the same for all, even children and
those whose reason is deficient, for whom it is more latent than actual.20
Natural law is the easiest law to understand and the easiest to keep. It lays
down the simplest and most accessible of all rules: Do Good and Avoid Evil
or, in the formulation of the so-called Golden Rule: do unto others as you
would have them do unto you. It persists; no matter what other law is given by
God, this basic framework of respect for others is not and cannot be overrid-
den by any other considerations. As John of La Rochelle notes, the purpose of
natural law is to instill the love of God and of neighbour into all people. John
appears to have borrowed this position from William of Auxerre, whose Summa
aurea is the first mainstream medieval theological text to see natural law as the
foundation of moral virtue; the development of human morality requires the
knowledge gained by first following the rules of natural law, which help us
recognise and love God.21 It is not clear how natural law brings this about, but
it is assumed that a sense of the divine and an obligation to the Creator will be
amongst innate human responses. Since natural law is written in the hearts of
all humans, not just believers, the implication is that everyone has the means
to recognise God and to act according to Gods law. Everyone, in short, has the
capacity to develop morality.
In general, medieval theologians do not set out in any detail what the
specific rules of natural law might be. Isidore of Seville is unusual in giving
some particulars, which include the union of man and woman in marriage, the
procreation and education of children, common possession of all things, and
universal liberty.22 Isidores list illustrates the problems of specificity, for
whereas it is relatively easy for theologians to have a common view on natural

17 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 241.

18 Ibid., no. 241.
19 Ibid., no. 246.
20 Ibid., nos 233, 241.
21 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 18.
22 Isidore, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed.
W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911; repr. 1985); The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, transl.
Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, Oliver Berghof (Cambridge, 2006), bk 5, c. 4.
Law 23

law in general, the particulars are more difficult. Any apparent deviations from
natural law, such as the permitting of polygamy in some parts of the Old
Testament, contrary to the natural law which provides for monogamy, are
easily explained as being directives given by God to deal with particular
problems at particular times, in this case, the need to repopulate the earth
after the Flood.23 Since they have free will and differing capacities for reason, it
is also possible for humans to mistake what natural law teaches, or to choose
not to follow it. Natural law differs from conscience (or the related concept
of synderesis), which develops differently in each individual and is capable of
error.24
It was not enough simply to define law. Medieval Christian theologians also
needed to show that there was a point to keeping the law. If natural law
was given to all, how could it be said to have any special theological goodness
(that is, virtue), instead of simply being naturally good? For example, it is
obviously a natural good not to kill people arbitrarily, because no-one wishes
to die in this way; but how is refraining from killing also a virtue? This is a dif-
ficult point to resolve. Because of its origins in eternal law, natural law cannot
be without virtue that is, without any possibility that following natural law
brings about good ends. And yet it cannot be sufficient in itself, for otherwise
there would be no need for the Mosaic or Gospel laws to exist. But if Gods
basic nature is believed to be good, then it must be possible for all those who
lived before the Mosaic law (especially Old Testament Patriarchs such as
Abraham and his family) to act virtuously and be rewarded, to have a way of
finding God. Hence, according to John, natural law is able implicitly to dictate
to everyone all that is necessary for salvation.25 Although natural law cannot
instill the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, it can make believers
ready to receive them by giving what John of La Rochelle and William of
Auxerre call political virtues the cardinal virtues of temperance, prudence,
fortitude and justice and so natural law is a means of preparing for life
withGod.26
For Hugh of St Victor, natural law can also give rise to a kind of sacrament.27
This takes three forms: offering to God a tenth (or tithe) of what you produce;

23 Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk IV, d. 33, cc. 12.

24 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 245.
25 Lex ergo naturalis habet unde posset dictare animae omnia necessaria ad salutem in
universali et implicite: John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 251.
26 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 19.
27 Hugh of St Victor, Hugonis de Sancto Victore. De sacramentis christianae fidei, ed. Rainer
Berndt (Aschendorff, 2008), bk 1, pt XII.
24 Chapter 1

making oblations; and offering animal sacrifices. All are done as thanks for
what God has given. These natural law sacraments, unlike those of the New
Testament, are not salvific in themselves. Any kind of grace they might confer
relies on their being shadows of the Gospel sacraments yet to come. Not
included in this list, but marked out as a natural law sacrament by Hugh, is the
rite of circumcision, which existed to prepare faithful people for the giving of
the written law to Moses and to mark out the community of faith at a time
when it was still scattered and dispersed. In this way, Hugh says, the obser-
vance of the written law began de facto with Abraham, even though the law
was only given to Moses much later.28 This is a reminder that eternal law has
always existed in the mind of God, even though the form in which it appears
for humans has changed over time. Natural law only produces virtue of any
sort when it is followed out of the conscious dictates of reason, rather than out
of a merely innate appetite. This distinction is what marks out humans from
animals and inanimate Creation, which follow Gods law by instinct, according
to their desires; and although this is a good thing in itself, it cannot produce
any virtue in the animal, for no judgement is required. This is also the reason
why, although humans ought to make following natural law habitual for
themselves, merely following habit without a reasoned act of will is an act
which cannot produce specific virtue. The essence of virtue is obligation and
obedience.
If, as Ambrose noted, humans had been able to keep the natural law which
God had instilled in each of them, the written law would not have been neces-
sary.29 Alexander of Hales agrees. In paradise, even human beings followed the
law of nature completely (we should note in passing that he assumes natural
law to have existed before the Fall) and had no knowledge of sin. Thus, he says,
the term (law of nature) has two meanings: that which nature dictated in the
original state, and that which nature dictated after the Fall. The law of nature
encompasses both.30 Human obedience to Gods commands before the Fall
made following natural law easy. But God, of course, had foreknowledge of the
Fall, as of all human history, and so the progressive revelation of different types
of law was always part of the divine plan. In the post-lapsarian world, human
beings needed new laws to attain virtue and their ultimate purpose, eternal life

28 Ibid.
29 Ambrose, Sancti Ambrosi Opera. Epistulae, ed. Michaela Zelzer, csel 82, pt 10.2 (Vienna,
1990): Ep. 62 (Maur. 73), pp. 142143.
30 Alexander of Hales, Quaestiones disputatae Antequam esset frater Bibliotheca
Franciscana Medii Aevi 20 (Quaracchi, 1960), qu. 56, disp. 2, memb. 4: An huiusmodi con
fessio sit de lege naturae.
Law 25

in God. The first of these, Mosaic law, is the subject of John of La Rochelles
next discussion.

The Written Law of Moses

With the giving of the written law to Moses on Mount Sinai, medieval theolo-
gians saw salvation history as having moved onto a different plane. The Law, all
613 precepts of it (though the number, as we shall see, is not biblical), distilled
to the ten commandments written by the hand of God on two tablets of stone,
was first and foremost a sign of the covenant God had made with the people of
Israel; and it was important for medieval theologians because it showed their
own God acting if not in the present, yet among surviving Jewish communi-
ties. This was a God who made promises and kept them; a God who interacted
with created beings and intervened in their lives; a God who wanted Creation
to live eternally in his presence. For Christians, this was a God who shared their
history. In the book of Genesis, God makes three promises to Abraham: that he
will have descendants who will become a nation; that these descendants will
have a land of their own; and that they will have a relationship with God.
Against all natural odds, the old man and the barren woman give life to a son,
Isaac, whose own son, Jacob, is revealed as the person chosen to carry out
Gods purpose. Jacob takes a new name Israel and it is his twelve sons
whose families form the promised nation. To fulfil the second promise, God
frees the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. Led by Moses, they journey
through the desert for forty years until they stand at the entrance to the prom-
ised land. But before they can take possession, one last promise must be
fulfilled: they shall come to know their God more closely than through a ritual
prayer to a distant, silent image. They already know their Gods name
Yahweh since it was revealed to Abraham; but to complete the relationship,
Yahweh shows them how to live in accordance with fundamental truth: he
gives them the precepts of the written law.
The law is thus important to Christian theologians because it has historical
value: it tells them something about how God acts and what God wants
Creation to become. But for medieval interpreters, the Mosaic law also had
importance in the present. For although a New Covenant and with it a new
law of grace came into effect with the advent of Christ, this did not spell the
end of the previous regime; one law did not replace the other: I come not to
destroy the Law but to fulfil it. Like natural law, Mosaic law persists, even in
the time of grace. For as the written law is an expansion of the basic goodness
that is contained in natural law, so the law of grace is an expansion of the good
26 Chapter 1

expressed in the law of the Old Covenant. Thus, although for Christians a
newer and higher stage in the relationship of Creator and Creation had been
reached with the coming of Christ and the giving of the law of grace, neverthe-
less Jesus himself had made it clear that the Old Law was still to be observed.
The law was a sign that God believed the Israelites ready to draw closer to the
life of eternal blessedness. Although they were in many ways still children, nev-
ertheless they had become capable of understanding and obeying rules for life.
After a time of living under and obeying the Old Law, the Jews were eventually
judged to be grown up enough for more, and God gave the law of grace to those
who had eyes to see and ears to hear. For medieval Christians, the giving of this
law of grace, and life under it, was the final stage that humanity would reach
before the Second Coming of Christ and the events that would end time and
history but the law of Moses was a vital step towards that goal.31
It was clear to medieval interpreters that the Mosaic law could not be
ignored, and further, that it had to be explained and observed within the new
law of grace. In addition to its own inherent value, the Law had an importance
as a key part of the Old Testament. Some heretical groups, particularly dualists,
denied the continuing force of the Old Testament; they believed that the New
Testament had rendered the Old invalid, and refused to recognise it.32
Augustine had attacked this position in his anti-Manichean treatise, Contra
Faustum, and it is possible that the renewed interest in the Mosaic law that
seems to be evident amongst Christian academic theologians at the beginning
of the thirteenth century is linked to a concomitant denial of the Old Testament
by some Cathar sects. Smalley suggests this may have been a reason why
Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed was quickly read when it reached the Paris
schools, since it sought to explain the Hebrew Scriptures with reason.33

31 Hugh of St Victor considers why God made the change from the written law to the law of
grace, if the former was also capable of conferring grace. His answer is that the divine
plan demanded it. When Christ was still far away and unknown, so the signs of his salva-
tion had to be obscure; but as he approached, so these signs had to become more obvious.
Hence circumcision, for instance, gives way to baptism. Nevertheless, one should be clear
that it is the same Saviour, the same grace, the same faith: De sacramentis, bk 1, pt 11, c. 8,
pp. 184185.
32 Christiane Thouzellier, Catharisme et Valdisme en Languedoc la fin du XIIe et au dbut
du XIIIe sicle, 2nd edn (Paris & Louvain, 1969). R.I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy
(London, 1975), has some documentary examples: pp. 95, 139; as do W.L. Wakefield and
A.P. Evans Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1991): see their index under Old
Testament.
33 Beryl Smalley, William of Auvergne, John of La Rochelle and Saint Thomas on the Old
Law, pp. 132133. Alexander of Hales seems to have been the first theologian to quote
Law 27

The Status of the Written Law

With the coming of Jesus, Christians believed themselves to be living under a

New Covenant, which brought with it a new law of grace, a regime in which
faith in Christ and the Trinity had superseded the works commanded by the
Old Law. Moreover, in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 56), Jesus seemed to
have recast the old precepts: You have heard it was said to those of ancient
timesbut I say to you. But the casting vote was given to Jesus reply to the
young man wishing to be perfect, Keep the commandments (Mt 19: 1617),
and, once more, the Sermon on the Mount, Dont think I have come to abolish
the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfil (Mt 5: 17). This
was borne out in the Letter of James (2: 10): For whoever keeps the whole law
but fails in one point becomes accountable for all of it. The entire 613 precepts
were not to be binding, but the Decalogue kept its central place, defined by
medieval Christian commentators as part of the unchanging, moral law (mora
lia) of God. The status of at least part of the written law, then, would seem
to be beyond question but what exactly did that entail? Most obviously
(but commentators are never afraid of the obvious), it puts humans under an
obligation to obey: in the words of Alexander of Hales, a commandment is a
commandment inasmuch as it obliges.34 The obligation increases as one gets
closer to God. For John of La Rochelle, the obligation is founded on the debt
that Creation owes to its Creator and to the rest of Creation, inasfar as it is
made in the likeness of God: the greater the debt, the greater the obligation.35
John also draws in the notion of reason: for him a law obliges because its pre-
cepts are in accordance with reason.36 Commentators from Augustine onwards
also ask whether the commandments should be obeyed out of love or fear. The
common response, based on Augustine, is that the Old Law was obeyed out of
fear, but the New is rooted in love. Bonaventure, however, offers a more
nuanced response.37 His solution deals with the Old and New laws in their own
time, not as the Old Law appears in the Gospel since here they knew, from
the words of Jesus, that it could have a sacramental effect: What must I do to
have eternal life? Keep the commandments. Instead, he compares the roots
of each law with regard to two sets of people, the ordinary laity and the perfecti.

Maimonides in his writings, although William of Auvergne was also an early reader of
Maimonides on the Law.
34 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (ae), c. 3.
35 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 279, 282, for example.
36 See for instance, Tractatus de Legibus no. 279.
37 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, art. 1, qu. 1.
28 Chapter 1

For the ordinary person (communis persona), their motive in obeying the Old
Law was largely fear and in the New Law it is largely love; but for the perfecti
(or specialis persona), there is no difference, since in both cases they were led
by the spirit of the love of God. The reason for this difference is that, in the time
of the Old Law, humans were stiff-necked and prone to the bad, and needed
fear of punishment to make them do good. After Christ, however, human
beings are more persuadable and respond to a gentler approach. Bonaventure
is definitely not saying that the Old Law does not and cannot give grace in the
present; moreover, he admits that his answers are only true in general: fear
and love as motives are not exclusive to either Law. For most of his contempo-
raries, he says, the Old Law is still more frightening than the New, because it
seems to contain less help from grace and a more explicit emphasis on punish-
ment, even though the New Law threatens the loss of eternal and not just
temporal life.

The Killing Letter

The written law persists, then, in the new dispensation. Alexander of Hales
quotes the words of Matthew not one letter, not one stroke of a letter shall
disappear from the law until it is all fulfilled (Mt 5: 18) to argue that, by fulfill-
ing the commandments of Christ, believers tacitly fulfil the commands of the
law. This might seem to answer a multitude of questions, but for our scholars,
a series of issues remained to be resolved. As was so often the case, the biggest
and most obvious stumbling blocks were caused by difficult pronouncements
of the Apostle Paul. In his desire to set himself and Christians apart from their
Jewish roots, Paul made statements which seemed to leave a definitive gap
between the two faiths. Seeking to distance the new life of grace from life
under the Law, Paul portrayed Jewish religion in a caricature of practice with-
out belief. The precepts of the law were a topic he returned to more than once,
and the nature of much of his writing, which consciously set out to drive a
wedge between Christian and Jewish life, left Christian expositors with mani-
fest contradictions to explain. First among the awkward passages was 2 Cor 3:
6: the letter kills but the spirit gives life.38 On the surface, this seemed to say
that following the letter of the law was worse than useless, that it positively

38 2 Cor 3: 3, 6: and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with
ink but with the spirit of the living God, but on tablets of stone but on tablets of human
heartswho has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but
of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
Law 29

condemned those who did so (the Jews) to eternal death; and that, on the con-
trary, those (Christians) who lived according to the requirements of the law of
grace were guaranteed eternal life. Reading Paul, it was all too easy to think Old
Law Bad, New Law Good with the implication that Christians could disregard
the Mosaic law entirely. Pauls canonical status in the New Testament meant
that commentators could not simply ignore the image of the letter which kills.
In fact, read in the wider context of the Corinthians passage, Pauls words do
not seem quite so dismissive; but the methods of medieval biblical commenta-
tors and theologians tended to lead them to consider shorter rather than lon-
ger lemmata (passages of scripture), and they seem quite often to be responding
to a rather narrow meaning of the text perhaps a response to blunt questions
from students or a lay audience. Nevertheless, although the way commentators
set up the biblical questions they address seems to reflect something of an
adversarial approach to scriptural inconsistency, their own responses are gen-
erally much more nuanced and subtle.
The source of their response was, as so often, Augustine, who in his treatise
The Spirit and the Letter, attempts to reconcile the Old Law with the New.39 He
presents the Decalogue as a keystone of faith, but one which needs reinterpre-
tation in the age of grace. Augustine begins by putting right a common miscon-
ception, which is that Paul means to say that a literal reading of the Bible is
futile, but a reading according to its spiritual senses will bring eternal life. The
spiritual reading would apply not only when the literal reading of the text
seems to make no sense or, as is the case with parables for instance, is clearly
meant to be understood in a non-literal way. This understanding of Pauls
phrase would imply that no part of the biblical text can be properly interpreted
unless interpreted spiritually reading the text to look for meanings beyond
the literal understanding. Medieval scholars had a variety of theoretical frame-
works for how these spiritual senses were to be defined and divided. The most
common of these added three spiritual senses to the literal or historical read-
ing of a text: the allegorical read the text to show what Christians should
believe in order to be saved; the moral told them how they should act in this
world in order to win eternal life in the next; and the anagogical sense described
life in that world to come. The preference for spiritual readings over literal was
most commonly associated with the third-century Alexandrian theologian
Origen, who taught that the literal sense of the text was suitable only for those
of simple faith, but the perfect could understand its spiritual (and especially its
allegorical) meanings. Such a view had tended towards the heretical, gnostic

39 De Spiritu et littera, ed. C.F. Urba and J. Zycha, csel 60 (Vienna & Leipzig, 1913);
St. Augustine. On the Spirit and the Letter, transl. W.J. Sparrow Simpson (London, 1925).
30 Chapter 1

belief that only initiates or superior believers could truly understand the
Gospel message.
Augustine categorically argued that this was not Pauls meaning. His point is
much subtler. Paul, he insisted, does not mean that a literal reading of scrip-
ture is bad and a spiritual one good, but rather that all readings of scripture,
whether of Old or New Testaments, or of literal or spiritual senses, were worth-
less unless they were informed by the Holy Spirit: the letter of the law, which
teaches that we must not sin, kills, if the life-giving Spirit is not present
Accordingly, the Apostles intention is to extol the grace which comes upon all
nations through Jesus Christ.40 The commandments of the law were given to
the people of the Old Covenant in order to help them come closer to God. For
those who live after the redemptive work of Jesus Christ and the sending of the
Holy Spirit, the situation had certainly changed, but not so that the command-
ments had no further use. In the age of grace it is not sufficient, as it was for the
Jews, simply to obey the law to the letter; for Christians, the commandments
can only save if they are lived in the Spirit, with the aid of grace. Grace is not a
prize to be gained after keeping the law; rather, it is given to Christians as a free
gift, to help them keep the law in a new way:

For grace is given, not because we we have done good works, but in order
that we may be able to do them: that is, not because we have fulfilled the
Law, but in order that we may be able to fulfil it.41

Augustines comprehensive treatise allowed later medieval commentators to

dispose of the problem raised by the Corinthians passage rather easily, but
nonethless it did have to be noted as a problem and discussed. According to
the scholastic method, the fact that a problem had once been solved did not
indicate it could be put to one side or ignored. On the contrary, the aim was to
identify and deal with all issues that could be raised, even if they had long been
decided. Peter Lombard brings up the question at the very end of his treatment
of the Decalogue in the Sentences.42 Peters short discussion is rather a mish-
mash of Augustines long and careful treatment, culled, it would seem, from
the summary of Augustine in the Glossa ordinaria on Corinthians, rather than
from a reading of the original treatise. Nonetheless, he gets down the main
point that the Law is good, but that since the coming of Christ, it cannot be
truly observed without the addition of grace: when grace is lacking, the letter

40 Sparrow Simpson, St. Augustine. On the Spirit, ss. 89.

41 Ibid., s. 16.
42 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 40, c. 2.
Law 31

kills.43 William of Auxerre adds a further note. The Old Law showed believers
what they must do, he says, but not why they should do it, because grace was
not evident; but the New Law perfectly manifests both what to do and why.
Hence the commandments, if kept in the spirit of the Old Law, as the Jews kept
them, out of fear alone, are the letter which kills, but if kept out of love, can
be the completion of virtue.44

Law Creates Sin

Adopting Augustines understanding of the Corinthians passage meant that

medieval theologians could effectively put aside any heretical suggestions that
the Gospel had entirely superseded the Old Law. There was no question but
that the law, as represented in the Decalogue, was still very much in force. Even
so, were there not other facets of the law that might be in doubt? Another
quotation from Paul, this time from the Letter to the Romans, set off a further
discussion. In Romans, Paul is very much concerned with the nature of the
Mosaic law and how to keep it. To the issue of letter and spirit, he adds the
thorny problem of sin:

But now we are freed from the lawwe should serve in newness of spirit
and not in the oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the law sin?
Not at all. Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin;
for I would not have known what it is to covet, if the law had not said, You
shall not covet. But sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment,
worked in me all kinds of covetousness. For without the law, sin is dead.
For I once lived without the law; but when the commandment came, sin
lived again. I died; and the very commandment which was given to me for
life was death to me. For sin, seizing the opportunity of the command-
ment, deceived me, and through the commandment, it killed me.45

Pauls meaning is that, though the first disobedience and the first sin take
place in the Garden of Eden, before the giving of the law to Moses, human
beings could not be said to sin, since if it had not been for the law [they]
would not have known sin. They can only be said to sin when the law teaches
the Israelites what the rules of Gods household are, because only after they

43 Gratia autem deerat, et ideo littera occidens erat.

44 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 44, c. 4.
45 Rom 7: 611.
32 Chapter 1

know the commandments can they reasonably be said to disobey them. Thus
in one sense the giving of the law places a burden on the Jews because they
now know what they should and should not do. Concomitantly, in the world of
the New Covenant, the stakes are raised higher still. Now, simple obedience to
the rules is not enough; the precepts must be obeyed in the spirit of grace. In
Augustines words:

It is then evident that the oldness of the letter, if the newness of the Spirit
is wanting, makes us guilty through the knowledge of sin, rather than sets
us free from sin Not that the law itself is an evil, but because the good-
ness of the commandment consists in the letter which points the way,
not in the Spirit which enables: and if this commandment is obeyed
through the fear of punishment, and not through the love of righteous-
ness, it is obeyed slavishly, not freely, and therefore not at all. For no fruit
is good which does not spring from the root of love. If however, there be
present faith which works by love, then one begins to delight in the Law
of God after the inner man; and this delight is not a gift of the letter but
of the Spirit.46

Keeping the Law

Although the commands of the Decalogue itself seem relatively straightfor-

ward, dealing with the written law in its entirety was not so simple for
Christians. In addition to the ten commandments, the law as a whole was
made up of some hundreds of precepts which are found within the first five
books of the Bible, the Jewish Torah, a word generally translated by Christians
as law rather than its rather less authoritarian meaning of teaching or instruc-
tion. The traditional reckoning of the mitzvuot or commands of the Torah as
numbering 613 goes back at least to the homily of a third-century Rabbi Simlai,
who counted 365 negative precepts (for the number of days in the year) and
248 positive ones (for the supposed number of bones of the body).47 The num-
bers imply both that you should follow Gods law in every part of our body on
every day of our lives, and that the mitzvuot are so comprehensive that they
can regulate everything you do, every day. Beyond this pastoral mnemonic,
the exact number of the precepts and decisions about which of the many

46 Sparrow Simpson, St. Augustine. On the Spirit, s. 26.

47 Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion. A Companion (Oxford, 1995), see mitzvah, and
precepts, 613.
Law 33

possibilities (since there are many more individual regulations than 613) were
to be included was not a preoccupation until the Middle Ages, when rabbis
such as Maimonides and Nahmanides debated what was in and what was out.
The 603 precepts in addition to the ten cover an enormous range of behav-
iour. Some are directed at certain classes of people, such as priests, whilst oth-
ers pertain to very particular situations, such as restitution after various sorts
of injuries, which generally involve the relaxation of other precepts.
Maimonides divides the precepts into fourteen groups, and Alexander of
Hales, who is the first Western medieval theologian to quote him, repeats his
categorisation.48 As we will see, the question of numbering is important for
medieval theologians, and not as a mere detail; but here the issue is important
for reasons other than the numbers themselves. Both medieval rabbis and
Christian theologians needed to consider the question of why God would
order such an extraordinary amount of apparently arbitrary things. Some
rabbis argued that even to ask the question was wrong: God orders what
God orders and the point is obedience; in that sense, the odder the order, the
more faith is shown by obeying. Others, prominent among whom was
Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed, believed that God would order noth-
ing irrelevantly, and that every precept would be seen to have an underlying
rationale.49
For Christians, the problem was slightly different. They needed a system in
which the ten commandments were somehow privileged, so that they could
remain valid for Christian life, and in which some others in particular, circum-
cision, which marked out the Jews as covenant people could be seen as having
had a valid purpose in their own day. But the remainder needed to be classified
in such a way as to allow them to be jettisoned, whilst not doing so in a manner
which made God appear to be either unreasonable (for ordering things that were
impossible), or capricious (for ordering things that could do no good), or change-
able (since it must be clear that it is Creation and not God that changes).
In his De sacramentis, Hugh of St Victor addresses the issue by dividing
the precepts of the law into two groups: moveable and immoveable.50

48 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (ae), c. 7, III. Alexander carefully enumerates

Maimonides fourteen groups and uses them to to answer a number of questions. Moses
Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, London, 1963), III. 35.
49 every commandment from among these six hundred and thirteen commandments
exists either with a view to communicating a correct opinion, or to putting an end to an
unhealthy opinion, or to communicating a rule of justice, or to warding off an injustice, or
to endowing men with a noble moral quality, or to warning them against an evil moral
quality: Maimonides, Guide, III. 31; and cf. III. 13, 17, 2631.
50 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk I, pt 12, c. 4.
34 Chapter 1

The immoveable are the ten commandments, and the moveable are all the
rest. Hugh further divides all acts into three types: those which are so good that
they must always be done; those which are so bad that they must always be
avoided; and an in-between group of acts which can be good or bad depending
on circumstances. The immoveable/unchangeable precepts of the written law
are those deriving from positive and negative commands of natural law, and
consist of the first two groups of actions those so good they must be done or
so bad they must always be shunned: the ten commandments. The moveable/
changeable precepts all the written law beyond the Ten are those which no
longer remain in force after the coming of Christ. They consist entirely of
actions from Hughs third group, which can be good or bad according to their
situation. Hugh takes a middle line on the purpose of these moveable laws.
They can be either for exercise or for meaning, he says.51 Those ordered for
meaning have been ordered for a particular purpose and can be explained as
signs of future truth, which is to say that they prepare the Jews for sacraments
yet to come and can remit sins. Those ordered simply for exercise were put
into the Mosaic law for the sake of teaching the Jews obedience or for cultivat-
ing their worship of God and fostering their piety; with the coming of Christ
and the giving of the sacraments and the new law of grace, these precepts have
no enduring purpose and can simply be disregarded.
By the thirteenth century, it was more common to divide the legalia the
613 precepts of the written law into three types: moral laws (moralia), judicial
law or judgements (iudicialia), which are generally addressed to judges, and
ceremonial laws (caerimonialia), generally the business of priests.52 Moral
laws are timeless and eternal. Regardless of circumstances, they lay down what
is necessary for living with God; it is never wrong to follow them, in any situa-
tion. In the written law, they are represented in the Decalogue. The rest of the

51 Ibid., bk I, pt 12, c. 23.

52 Peter Lombard uses Augustines (Ennar. in Ps. 73, 1, n. 2) twofold division into moral and
ceremonial precepts (Sentences, bk III, d. 40, c. 3). Alexander of Hales (Glossa, bk III, d. 37
[ae], c. 2) uses a more complicated division, into mystical and non-mystical precepts, of
which the mystical are then sub-divided into ceremonial and sacramental precepts, then
further dividing the sacramental precepts (after an intervening step) into moral and judi-
cial precepts. William of Auxerre (Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 44, c. 4) details: moralia, which
are unchangeable, since the likeness of God and the true ordering of humanity is in them;
and caerimonialia, which have departed, with the coming of truth; and iudicia, of which
some things remain, and some do not, because iudicia are given to humans for the order-
ing of external deeds and for the use of temporal things, and hence they vary according to
the manners of the country and situation of the region, and hence it was necessary for
different regions to have different customs.
Law 35

603 precepts are made up of judicial and ceremonial laws. These are morally
neutral or variable: their goodness or badness depends on the circumstances
when they might come into play.
This threefold division should make it almost easy to draw a distinction
between the Old and New Laws the written law and the law of grace since
the moral laws remain in the New Covenant but the judicial and ceremonial
laws fall away. But there is one pitfall. For although the Decalogue is comprised
of the moralia of the Old Law, not every part of every commandment is
included in the New Covenant. The precept about keeping the sabbath is one
which does not seem to fit the pattern of unchangeability, since the Jews keep
the sabbath from dusk on Friday to dusk on Saturday, but Christians keep a day
of rest on Sunday instead. The distinction lies in what is commemorated: for
Jews, it is the seventh day of creation, on which God rested; for Christians, it is
the first day of creation, and the day on which Christ was believed to have risen
from the dead. How can this change be acceptable in unchangeable law?
Medieval commentators allow that only part of the sabbath precept is drawn
from the moral law. The concept of a day of rest, leaving off ordinary, servile
work, and acting only on Gods business, is moral; such a day must be observed.
But the precise time when this must be done is not immoveable it is part of
the caerimonialia. What was right for Jews is thus not necessarily right for
Christians, who choose to remember the resurrection rather than the creation;
but either is possible, as long as the day is kept.
As we have seen, although Christian scholars agreed that the written law
still had force, this did not apply to all 613 precepts. Believers had to obey only
the moralia of the Decalogue. Nevertheless, even though they were not called
upon to follow the remaining 603 mitzvuot themselves, the commentators
were still faced with a further set of problems arising from the Old Law. Why
did God give so many laws to the Jews, and why did so many of them seem
so peculiar? Could they, in fact, all be kept? In short, in what way were the
precepts of the law to be understood? The key question was whether or not all
613 were meant to be could be understood literally (by Jews as well as
Christians). The standard interpretation, transmitted through the Glossa ordi
naria, was that of Origen, who preferred to look for spiritual meanings; but
during the twelfth century views changed. Ralph of Flaixs influential com-
mentary on Leviticus looked to establish meanings according to the letter
wherever they could be found. Andrew of St Victor, influenced by his interac-
tions with Jewish scholars, thought that all the precepts had a literal meaning,
even when he was unable to discern it.53 The move to the literal was important,

53 Smalley, William of Auvergne, esp. pp. 121125 for references to Ralph and Andrew.
36 Chapter 1

but it did not mean, for Christians, that other meanings were not simultane-
ously possible. William of Auxerre could sum up opinion in a phrase he attri-
butes to Augustine: The law was given as a sign to the perfect, as a burden and
scourge to the proud and stubborn, and as a teacher to babes and children.54
In his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides held a similar view. Although he
took time to explain the literal meaning of the fourteen types of mitzvuot,
Maimonides did not think that every detail of the 613 was important in itself.55
Rather, he saw the multitude of the laws as Gods means of drawing the
Israelites from old ways of religion to new: Therefore Hesuffered the above-
mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or
imaginary and unreal things to His own namecommanding us to practice
them with regard to Him.56 Maimonides is aware that his interpretation of
Gods actions will not please his readers, who will ask, How is it possible that
none of the commandments, prohibitions, and great actionsshould be
intended for its own sake, but for the sake of something else, as if this were a
ruse invented for our benefit by God?57 His answer is that God asks nothing
beyond the capacity of humankind, and although some individuals were capa-
ble of understanding at the highest level, most others were not. The law must
be observable by all, and so it works at the lowest common denominator.
Although some would be able to offer suitable worship to God without the law,
the majority could only prosper with the minute direction of their lives that it
offered. Rather than being impossible to observe, then, the miztvuot were
meant to be failsafe.
Christian readers took to Maimonides both because he offered a rational
interpretation of the mitzvuot and because he envisaged a hierarchy of believ-
ers, some able to understand the implicit signs when others could only see the
explicit letter. For medieval commentators, this was just a step away from
admitting that Christians could see clearly what Jews knew only through a mir-
ror darkly. The most important early reader of the Guide was William of
Auvergne, whose own treatise On the Laws (De Legibus) is a tour de force of
literal interpretation.58 Although he does not deny that the law might have a
spiritual meaning, for William it is more important to show that it can be

54 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk IV, tr. II, c. 1: ut dicit beatus Augustinus, lex fuit data
perfectis in signum, duris et superbis in onus et flagellum, rudibus et mamotrectis in
pedagogum.
55 Maimonides classification and explanation of the mitzvuot is found at Guide, III,
3549.
56 Maimonides, Guide, III, 32.
57 Ibid.
58 William of Auvergne, De Legibus, in Opera, vol. 1, pp. 18102.
Law 37

understood according to the letter as long as we interpret the literal sense as

the whole intention of the sacred writer.59 Law in its truest form is nothing
other than honestas legibilis honour or honesty in readable form an alphab
etum honestatis given to prepare the unlearned and simple to receive the
Gospel. He says:

The whole law contains nothing which lacks a rational cause for com-
manding, forbidding or narrating. There is nothing absurd or irrational in
it, and this appears clearly in many items which have obvious worth and
usefulness.60

Instead of the threefold division into moralia, iudicialia and caerimonialia,

William adopts a seven-point organising system: testimonia or narratives of
truth, which should be believed; commandments of honesty or virtue, which
should be fulfilled; judicial opinions of equity, which should be followed;
examples to be copied; promises of reward, to be hoped for; threats of punish-
ment, to be feared; and ceremonies of worship and honour, to be revered.61
Listing these, he admits he knows that four of them testimonia, examples,
promises and threats are not part of the substance of the law proper, but are
there to promote the observance of the law. They are all to be found in Scripture,
and their inclusion suggests the way in which William saw the Bible as an
interwoven whole, with the traditional three parts, morals, judicial opinions
and ceremonies, best seen in the context of the narrative and promise sur-
rounding them. God, William implies, gave humans a narrative of truth, not
simply a set of precepts, and that narrative should be seen as the context for
the unvarnished commands.
Everything in the law is meant to honour God and ornament human life.
Why, then, are there so many laws? If there can never be more than 40 virtues,
why did God give 613 precepts to bring them about? Williams answer plays on
the childishness of the Jews: since the Hebrew people could scarcely under-
stand the alphabet of natural virtue, it was fruitless to give them the riches of
perfect grace. Hence God gives such a multiplicity of commands for three
reasons: firstly, the Jews inexperience and lack of education demands that
God break up the law into small, digestible pieces, just as one gives a child little
bits of bread rather than a whole loaf; secondly, the disgraceful multiplicity
of idolatry, which the law is mostly designed to prevent, requires a similarly

59 Smalley, William of Auvergne, p. 148.

60 William of Auvergne, De Legibus, c. 2, p. 29; quoted in Smalley, William of Auvergne, p. 142.
61 De Legibus, c. 1, p. 19.
38 Chapter 1

multiple response; and lastly, the law has to be sufficient to cover all eventuali-
ties for a people at such a lowly stage of development, so they do not have to
think out anything for themselves or fall back on human traditions and super-
stitions. This, he says, is what happened when the Jews began to be influenced
by their neighbours, the Chaldeans, Babylonians and Arabs, mixing up their
Hebrew learning with philosophy, so that they no longer knew their own
beliefs or the faith of Abraham, and could not defend themselves in debate.
They fell into error and began to believe in the eternity of the world and other
Aristotelian mistakes. They did not follow the precepts of the law, which they
saw as absurd because they could not explain what lay behind them. And that
is why, William says, there are so few true Jews in the world today who are not
tainted with Saracen or Aristotelian beliefs.62
Whatever the Jews themselves might believe, William is quite clear that the
precepts of the old law must have reason behind them: it is unthinkable that
God would have given them, were that not true. So he now embarks on a fasci-
nating series of chapters in which he explains individual precepts, or groups of
precepts, using practical, scientific or anthropological arguments, simple logic
and an appeal to reason. He marches through the law, asking why it is sheep,
cows and goats that are sacrificed, why some animals are clean and others not,
why the calf should be red, why men should not dress in womens clothes, and
how to treat lepers. Sometimes he is a little uncertain, and the reason is
advanced forsitan perhaps (c. 10) but generally he proceeds with confi-
dence, to show, as Maimonides had argued, that the intent of the law is to pre-
vent the Hebrews falling back into the idolatry of the peoples who surrounded
them. When he can show that the reasons for the precept have disappeared,
William admits that it no longer needs to be obeyed; but in all cases, these
chapters show his respect for the law, even when it has been superseded.
Throughout these chapters, William employs biblical quotations drawn almost
entirely from the laws themselves, and his explanations adduce no other
authority than an appeal to common sense. When he has finished, he sums up
with a chapter arguing that the law must make literal sense: without this foun-
dation, nothing else can be built.
Williams analysis was too unusual to be wholly accepted, but it was influen-
tial for both John of La Rochelle and Thomas Aquinas. John could not
agree that every precept had a literal meaning, but he was prepared to admit
that most of them did; and all were certainly comprehensible (and thus,
observable) in a spiritual sense. For John and Thomas (but not William) this

62 De Legibus, c. 1, p. 24; this phrase suggests perhaps Williams opinion of Aristotle for
Christians.
Law 39

confirmation of the importance of the literal implied that learned Jews (if not
the rank and file) should have been able to understand the laws as a sign of
future grace, as Christian interpreters could.63
If the written law could not be said to be ridiculous, could it nevertheless be
said to be a burden to the Jews? In Matthews Gospel, Jesus called those listen-
ing to follow him, For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt 11: 30).
Christian commentators took this as contrasting with the difficulties of keep-
ing the manifold Torah laws. In Jewish theology, keeping the mitzvuot was not
meant to be felt as a burden but as a joy; but Christians liked to portray a life
spent keeping track of and obeying all 613 precepts as one lived under heavy, if
not impossible, demands. In comparison, the law of grace, even though it
required right thinking as well as right doing and speaking, was only pleasure.
Bonaventure has the most developed answer to the question. He looks at three
ways in which something may be a burden: the way in which it is an obligation,
the motives behind its observance, and the resources available to help you bear
it. On all counts he finds the New Law less of a burden than the Old. For
Bonaventure, the issue is not so much the Old Law, but the additions to it that
the Gospel seems to impose in the way that, for example, thought as well as
action is prohibited by the Sermon on the Mount. But these additions are the
reverse of a burden, he says, and in fact they provide an aid to the believer as
feathers are added to a bird, wheels to a wagon, or sails to a ship.64
William of Auxerre judges that there are two sorts of burden a burden to
the flesh and a burden to the spirit. The Old Law is a heavier burden to the
flesh, but the New is heavier for the spirit. This is because the Jews are spiritu-
ally weaker than Christians; they could only cope with a spiritually easier
law.65 It also helps explain why there are so many precepts in the Old Law:
the Jews needed demands on the flesh in order to conquer their pride and hard-
heartedness. In addition, William says such a large number of mitzvuot is nec-
essary to call back the people from the idolatry they would have encountered
in Egypt, and because theirs was a time only of figures (tempus figurarum) or
shadows (umbrae). So for example, the numbers of laws reflects the number of
Christs virtues, with the offerings of a lamb, a dove, or a turtle dove prefiguring
his meekness, simplicity and chastity. Before they knew the reality of the
Gospel, which consummated and abbreviated the written law, Gods people
needed an abundance of sacraments.66

63 Smalley, William of Auvergne, pp. 158, 175, for instance.

64 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, art 1, qu. 3.
65 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk IV, tr. 2, c. 2.
66 Ibid., bk IV, tr. 2, c. 3.
40 Chapter 1

One further question remained concerning the burden of the law, and this
involved the question of whether the law restrained the mind (anima) the
will or simply the actions of the hand. We will consider the issue in more
detail later in this book, but William of Auxerres response will serve as a fore-
taste. William says the law has a double attitude, depending on whether it is
speaking generally to the simple (rudes) or specially to the spiritually
advanced.67 For the simple, the law restrained only the hand, so that even the
commandment against coveting applied only when that moved into action;
but for more spiritual individuals, the law also applied to the will. William
rather crudely equates the simple with the Jews and the advanced with
Christians. The Old Law was a heavier burden to the fleshly nature of the sim-
ple, he says, because it instilled fear, it imposed hefty punishments, and
because there was just so much of it. But to spiritual men of the Old Testament
the law was simply heavybut light as far as they fulfilled it with charity. In the
same way, he says, a bishop has a heavier spiritual burden than his subordi-
nates, because he has to worry about his flock.

Justification

The concern at the bottom of these questions is, in medieval terms, whether or
not the law justifies, that is to say, whether it makes those who follow it just,
so that they are worthy of eternal life. The importance for this question is clear:
if the written law does itself justify, then why was the saving work of Jesus
Christ necessary? If humans could be saved by keeping the commandments,
why did God send the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to usher in the age of grace? If
the law could not justify, then what would be the point of God giving it to
Moses, or of anyone attempting to keep it? What sort of God would require
obedience to a set of useless precepts? This was a very difficult problem. God
could not be seen to act unjustly towards those whom he had given no means
of achieving salvation. Obedience to the law was not of sufficient merit in itself
to bring salvation, but obedience carried out in the spirit of faith in Gods
promises was although the righteous souls of the Old Covenant had to wait
until the advent of Christ before they could enter into blessedness.
The issue of justification was crucially connected to the idea of sacra-
ment, because it was by faithful participation in the sacraments of baptism
and the Eucharist that Christians believed they could be saved. Commentators
thus asked whether the sacraments of the Old Law, circumcision and

67 Ibid., bk IV, tr. 2, c. 2.

Law 41

sacrifices both of which were visible signs of the invisible covenant with
God also possessed invisible grace, in the same way as their New Law coun-
terparts. Circumcision and sacrifices were too central to Jewish faith both
had been discussed by Paul to be dismissed without serious discussion. By
the twelfth century Christian theologians agreed that, by inculcating humil-
ity and obedience, circumcision could lead men to seek out salvation the
cause for which sacraments were instituted.68 William of Auxerre sums up a
common opinion by distinguishing between an actions motive and its
vehicle:

The opus operans is the vehicle for the act itself, that is, the sacrifice of a bull
or a lamb, which justified when it was done in charity. The opus operatum
is the actual flesh of the bull or lamb which was sacrificed, which certainly
did not justify. In the New Law, on the other hand, both opus operans and
opus operatum justify, because the flesh of Christ (the opus operatum) is
justificatory. Thus, when it is asked whether the sacraments of the Old Law
justified, we grant that they did as opus operans, as the foregoing reasons
have proved; but they did not justify as opus operatum.69

William of Auvergne once again attempts to take the letter of the Old Law seri-
ously, and his discussion treats circumcision in fascinating detail.70 He notes
that, like sacrifices, circumcision existed before the law was given to Moses, as
part of the covenant with Abraham. Initially it seems to have had no good pur-
pose except that of simple obedience. But for William it must have more: it is
necessary to uncover the literal and useful reasons for its existence, beyond
this good [obedience].71 He finds five. The first is the weakening of covetous-
ness, which happens on account of the circumcising wound (ex vulnere cir
concisionis); the second is again the weakening of desire, this time brought
about by a decline in sensitivity caused by exposure of the penis to cold and to
friction from clothes, in the same way, he says, as a calloused hand accustomed
to work has less feeling; thirdly, circumcision means that the part of a man
which most demeans his nobility is itself subject to attack and vilification;
the fourth argument is that circumcision reminds individuals that sex should

68 Anselm of Laon, Sententia 88, quoted in A.M. Landgraf, Dogmengeschichte der

Frhscholastik. III. Die Lehre von den Sakramenten, pt 1 (Regensburg, 1954), p. 63, n. 6.
69 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk IV, tr. 2, c. 1.
70 William of Auvergne, De Legibus, c. 3.
71 Ibid., c. 3, p. 33: necesse est aperire causas eius literales et utilitates quas habet praeter
istud bonum.
42 Chapter 1

be taken seriously, so that they do not set about it as though they were animals;
finally comes the function of impressing on men the memory of their creation
and the covenant made with Abraham. This last reason has two parts a
reminder of spiritual chastity (that they should worship only one God and stay
away from idols), and of corporeal chastity (that they should rein in their
unbridled desires). Here, perhaps because the argument about the covenant is
so important, William introduces a verse from Galatians (5: 3), reminding
his readers that this sort of sign is no longer needed as a universal symbol of
the covenant, by which he means one extending to Christians as well; rather,
we have signs like the tonsure, or the red cross borne by the Templars.
The second sort of Old Law sacrament is sacrifices, which also existed before
the giving of the law. William of Auvergne asks how the death of an innocent
animal can be pleasing to God. How can the smell of a carcass have any sweet-
ness? What justice can there be, when men sin, for animals to die?72 William
gives seven reasons for sacrifices, which he argues are not simply a concession
to idolatry, as some people say. Their chief purpose is to give honour and ven-
eration to God, for all worship does this intrinsically. The second reason is that
the death of an animal makes a strong and powerful impression on those
watching of the justice and mercy of God they remember that they them-
selves deserve death but that the animal is dying instead. If they can be
imprinted with a vivid and lasting memory, such as that of the animals death,
to remind them of their sin and of Gods mercy, they should in future flee evil
and place their hope in God. Just as William placed Mosaic law in the context
of the narrative which surrounded it, so here we find him thinking of the whole
person in relation to God; in Williams universe, humans perceive God not just
by reason or revelation but with every sense, and his writing shows his aware-
ness of the impact sight, sound and smell have on their conception of spiritual
things. The next two reasons for sacrifices are the recognition by those present
of the divine beneficence which has provided these gifts to offer, and the sanc-
tification of what is being offered, again through the mercy of God. Next comes
the familiarity with God which is represented by being close to Gods table,
alongside a sense of participation. Eating together, as people do with family, is
the height of closeness; in the case of sacrifices, Gods place at table is taken by
his gift of fire. Thus the sixth point is the drawing together that such commen-
sality produces in Gods people; and here, naturally, William notes the same
effect in spiritual eating and drinking together in the Eucharist. Finally, sacri-
fices attract people to worship, because such a common event, involving eating
and drinking, is enticing in itself.

72 Ibid., c. 2, p. 29.
Law 43

Williams literal approach takes seriously the notion of Old Law sacraments.
Both circumcision and sacrifices have positive effects, beyond their function as
a sign of the covenant. He disposes of the idea that sacrifices are the product of
idolatry; rather, he thinks that idolatry may arise out of sacrifices, but that it
need not. He gives reasons for the inclusion of sacrifices in the law, and leaves
the door open for a spiritual interpretation of sacrifice that makes sense for the
Eucharist too. Williams approach has allowed him to place the law in its his-
torical context, referring both to its predecessors and to its successor the law
of grace. All medieval commentators agree, however, that circumcision,
although essential in its day as a sign of Gods favour, is inferior to the Christian
sacrament of baptism not least because all Christians of both sexes can be
baptised. Since Jewish women were not circumcised, commentators ask how
they were to know that the Covenant applied to them as well as to men. Can
Hebrew women be members of the covenant with God without circum
cision?,William asks. He says they can, because the pact was initially made
between God and Abrahams seed, and those successors enter into that con-
tract through certain baptisms and traditions which are not found in the body
of the law. It is not clear what exactly he means by this or where he gets it
from: might it be his understanding of the Jewish womens ritual bath, the
mikveh? Mostly, however, membership relies on the womens faith the faith
they have in the sign of circumcision amongst their men and this is interest-
ing because it shows the law not merely as something to be done, without
thought or meaning, but as needing to be believed in just as much as the sacra-
ments of the New Covenant. The difference between Old and New Law then is
not simply one of doing and one of believing; both faith and works are neces-
sary for any relationship with God.
Avoiding evil, however, as Augustine taught, was not enough by itself.73 One
also had to do good. In Peter Lombard, the Old Law sacraments are said to be
tokens of things to come whereas in the New Law they convey grace.
Bonaventure, however, allows that grace of a sort is given in the Old Law too,
although he is forced to conclude: all this is very difficult to understand and
explain. I say this not because I believe it impossible to explain but because
I am incapable of understanding it fullyI know and understand, however,
that God is capable of doing many things, even of making sacrament where we
cannot understand.74 His answer in short is that the Old and New Laws mostly
differ in efficacy rather than fulfilment, since the Eucharist is efficacious in and

73 Augustine quoted in Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 37, art. 1, qu. 2, but probably quoted via
the Glossa ordinaria on Ps 33: 15.
74 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, dub. III.
44 Chapter 1

of itself, and does not require our participation in the covenant to complete it.
Nevertheless, the Law can be a route to salvation.

Punishment

The status of the Decalogue as a fundamental description of the created

universe means that it cannot, in any meaningful way, be broken. As we noted
earlier, humans can as well say they will break the law of gravity as that they
will break these laws of God. For this reason, medieval commentators rarely
deal with the question of punishment for disobedience. One commandment
comes with a promise (Honour your father and your mother so that you will
live long) and another with a threat (I am a jealous God, visiting on chil-
dren the injustices of their fathers), but the real punishment for non-com-
pliance is loss of closeness to the divine presence. The disobedient bring this
upon themselves; it is not inflicted upon them by God.
The lack of stated penalties in the Decalogue is in contrast to the often
severe punishments detailed for some of the other precepts of the written law.
In contrast to the promise of the Decalogue, elsewhere in the mitzvuot failure
to honour parents could lead to death: He who strikes his father or mother
shall be put to death (Ex 21: 15); He who curses his father or mother shall die
the death (Ex 21: 17); He who curses his father or his mother, dying let him die
(Lev 20: 9). Maimonides defends the punishments as deterrents, and as part of
Gods mercy:

The utility of this is clear and manifest, for if a criminal is not punished,
injurious acts will not be abolished in any way and none of those who
design aggression will be deterred. No one is as weak-minded as those
who deem that the abolition of punishments would be merciful on men.
On the contrary, this would be cruelty itself on them as well as the ruin of
the order of the city. On the contrary, mercy is to be found in His com-
mand, may He be exalted: Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all
thy gates.75

William of Auvergne agrees with him on the necessity of penalties for breaking
the judicial commandments of the law: discipline must be applied, and not
teaching only.76 Dealing with the Decalogue, however, the commentators shift

75 Maimonides, Guide, III.35.

76 De Legibus, c. 1, p. 27.
Law 45

their focus from the practicalities of the judicial precepts (iudicialia) to the
theology of the moral law (moralia), and so penalties become inappropriate.
This is not to say, of course, that they do not realise that sins which have their
roots in the commandments adultery, for example, or stealing should
attract penalties in other circumstances. Summae for confessors laid down tar-
iffs of appropriate penances for just these sorts of sins; but in the context of
Decalogue commentary, the practicalities of punishment are largely ignored,
in favour of defining the ground that the commandments cover.
Robert Grosseteste is something of an exception to this rule, although he
also tends to favour discussion of restitution rather than simple punishment,
and he never fails to remind his readers that God acts always out of love.
Nevertheless, he repeatedly uses biblical examples to show how those who
have defied Gods law have been and will be punished. To his colourful descrip-
tion of a thief as a bloated limb on the body politic, grown fat by what it has
sucked from other members, he adds a series of scriptural illustrations of crime
and punishment. But whereas other commentators carefully explain what
does and what does not count as stealing, Grossetestes treatment here is both
more broad-brush and more practical: it is clear that, if it is possible to
restore what has been taken away, it should be done, and so justice is complied
with when what was taken is returned to its owner.77 Grossetestes theological
training, such as it was, took place outside the conventional route of the Paris
schools, and this is evident in the way that he approaches the commandments
in his Decalogue commentary. His individuality can be seen again in his treat-
ment of the commandment to honour ones parents. Noting the biblical prom-
ise, and the curses and punishments the rest of the Old Law stipulated,
Grosseteste comments that under the new law of grace these punishments are
no longer literally observed. Nevertheless, he thinks that there will be a spiri-
tual price to pay for breaking the commandment, whether this will be having
no joy of your own children, suffering reproaches, or having to suffer the weari-
ness of a tedious life. In fairness, he does add also his own list of rewards for
keeping the precept. He takes these from examples in Ecclesiasticus (3: 215)
which, with the Roman poet Seneca, is his favourite source for discussion of
parents and children, along with a keen eye for the detailed observation of
human relations. The extra gifts gained from keeping the commandment are:
the joy that you will have in your own children, who will honour you in return;
the blessing of God the Father; the blessing of your earthly father; the reflected
glory that the son receives when it is clear his father is honoured as opposed

77 Robert Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis, ed. Dales and King (Oxford, 1987), pp. 7579, here
p. 76.
46 Chapter 1

to the shame he will bear if his father should be in need; relief from every dis-
tress; and relief from the chains of sin.78
Indeed, relief from the chains of sin was one of the chief purposes of the
law; rather than punishment, law was a remedy for sin. Following Augustine,
commentators said that the commandments, the ten-stringed instrument of
the psalter, when plucked with love, killed every wild beast of vice.79 As we
shall see in the next chapter, it became common from Augustine onwards to
relate the ten commandments to the ten plagues of Egypt. Each precept could
be shown to be the remedy for a particular plague. William of Auxerre includes
a discussion of the plagues in the Summa aurea, but he also spends time show-
ing how the Decalogue is effective against the seven deadly sins.80 William
divides the sins into two groups: four (superbia, invidia, gula, accidia) are sins
against God and are prohibited by the commandments of the first stone tablet;
the final three (ira, luxuria, avaritia) are sins against your neighbour, and are
each dealt with twice, since we can harm our heighbour both by word and will,
or by deed. So anger, for example, is prohibited by the commandments against
false witness and killing; avarice is forbidden both by the commandment
against stealing and by the one against coveting goods.

The Law of Grace and Human Law

Alexander of Hales asks how the Old and New Laws differ. He has five sugges-
tions, all showing the influence of Aristotle. First, they differ in name: a law is
a holy command meant to lead you away from evil, whereas a Testament (the
New Law) is firm promise of inheritance. Next, they differ as to their four
causes. The efficient cause of the Old Law was Moses, but of the New is Christ.
The material cause of the Old Law is its fleshly promises and commands, but in
the New Law these are spiritual. The final cause of the Old Law was the justice
of Moses, which liberates humanity from punishment, whereas the justice of

78 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis, pp. 3858, here 4041. Grossestestes interpretation was
taken up by John Wyclif, De mandatis divinis, transl. Loserth, c. 22.
79 Augustine, Sermon 9 (De Decem chordis), c. 9, n. 13: Tange easdem decem chordas, et feras
occidas Sic enim canticum novum cum amore, non cum timore cantabis. Augustine is
quoted by Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 40, c. 3 (Audistis decem chordas psalterii
quae caritate tangendae sunt, ut vitiorum ferae occidantur), and through Peter the image
becomes common.
80 M.W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: an introduction to the history of a religious concept
with special reference to Medieval English literature (Michigan, 1952), ch. 2. William of
Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 44, c. 1.
Law 47

Christ brings them to salvation. And whereas the formal cause of the Old Law
was fear, in the New it is love.81 We have already compared how our commenta-
tors dealt with some of these issues and we shall encounter more of them later
in this book. Of human laws we should merely note that laws were regarded as
just insofar as they conformed to eternal law, as manifested through the law of
nature. All just law, as Augustine noted, was derived from eternal law: the
closer it came to reflecting that law, the closer it came to truth. Thus any law
which seemed in conformity to eternal law could claim to have force; and so
the moral laws of the Decalogue were still valid for Christians, even after the
coming of Christ.
Such laws should be obeyed because they brought human beings (indeed,
all Creation) closer to the nature of God, whose universe ran according to laws.
Knowing about law was one way for Creation to know about God. This was a
God who acted out of reason and goodness; whose desire was for Creation to
join him in blessedness, and who gave law so that it might know how to do this;
and who adapted that law to the capacities of its subjects, changing over time
though even if the outward signs of the law might seem to vary, the inward
intention was always the same. This was a God who asked nothing impossible
and nothing superfluous; nothing of God was arbitrary and all proceeded in
order. The precepts of the Decalogue reflected the content of Gods will by
ordering the kind of behaviour that God desired; but their content was not the
only way in which the precepts reflected God. The next chapter will consider
signs of God that appeared apart from words.

81 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 40 (AE), c. 2.

 Chapter 2

Number

Remove number from all things, and everything perishes.

isidore of seville

Augustine equates law with the best ordering of all things, and it was the job
of the theologian to show how that order was manifest in Creation. This is
one important reason why, although expositions of the Decalogue always
consider each individual precept separately, the commandments also had an
important life as a whole group, and every academic discussion began by
considering them as a totality. The most basic question asked, which illus-
trates the medieval lack of fear of stating the obvious or rather, their
insistence on beginning with the basics is, why are there ten? A modern
biblical commentator might also ask this question, but his answer would prob-
ably be in terms of a historical comparison with other ancient law codes or of
ten fingers as a mnemonic device. To a medieval scholar, such answers would
be interesting, but not especially fruitful: they tell us little about God and
Creation, which is the overwhelming purpose of studying the Bible. Mystical
revelation of the divine a direct link to Gods mind and will was a
marvellous but unpredictable means of achieving this desired end; but since it
was not available to everyone, and certainly not on demand, biblical interpre-
tation was a more systematic and accessible means of getting closer to
understanding God.
Why ten? We can answer this in two ways: which way the precepts add up to
ten, and, more fundamentally, why they add up to ten at all; for the number is
certainly not chosen at random. Our familiarity with the notion of ten com-
mandments is not thanks to the narrative in Exodus itself, since the command-
ments are not numbered in the biblical text. In fact, in working out a total
exegetes have to struggle to get to ten: nine or eleven or even twelve command-
ments can often appear to be at least as likely a reckoning as ten. But ten was a
special number in the medieval cosmos one, three, five, seven and twelve are
others and adding the commandments so they total ten was an ideological
decision far more than a simple deduction from the text. Moreover, medieval
commentators considered the numbers in Scripture to be neither fortuitous
nor haphazard; they were a integral part of the message, more reliable than the
words of the biblical text. The reckoning of numbers ought not to be despised,

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_004

Number 49

for in many passages of sacred writings it elucidates how great a mystery

they hold.1

Number

The preoccupation with number and division that we see in the command-
ments commentaries is not confined to the exegesis of this text, but is part of a
wider medieval conviction about the central place of number within Creation.
At the beginning of Genesis, God speaks Creation into existence: And God
saidand it was so. God repeats this phrase of creation ten times in the
story a perfect number; and he does this within the space of seven days of
creation another perfect number, here enclosing the perfect number ten.2
For humans trying to understand Gods meaning in Scripture, the words of the
text could seem a malleable foundation on which to build the certainties of
faith. Discovering the meaning of any particular passage was far from straight-
forward. Even supposing that a literal reading of a text was possible, parts of
the Old Testament especially were confusing and contradictory, if not down-
right incomprehensible. This was true for readers of the Hebrew, and was even
more the case for medieval scholars reading in Latin translations not all of
which were made directly from the Hebrew original. Words were in some ways
unreliable: in Alan of Lilles famous phrase, Scripture had a wax nose, and
warmed between the interpretative fingers of a clever reader, it could be
twisted to any shape he pleased.3 A less well-known metaphor likens Scripture
to a harlot, open to any sense whatsoever.4 William of Auvergne, theological
master and bishop of Paris, was very aware of the way that unlikely or even
offensive spiritual readings of the biblical text could bring the whole enter-
prise of exegesis into disrepute. He noted, for example, how King David, an
adulterer who commissioned murder, was commonly interpreted as being a

1 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay; Etymologies, transl. S.A. Barney, et al. (Cambridge,
2006), bk 3, c. iv.
2 Gen 1: 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 28, 29: Tanakh. The Holy Scriptures. The new JPS translation
according to the traditional Hebrew text (Philadelphia & Jerusalem, 1985). See also V.F. Hopper,
Medieval Number Symbolism: its sources, meaning and influence on thought and expression
(New York, 1938), p. 29.
3 Alan of Lille, Auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est, in diversum potest flecti sensu: De Fide
catholica I.30, PL 210: 333.
4 Sicut enim meretrix multis, immo quam plurimis, sese exponit. The image comes from an
unknown late-twelfth-century cleric from Troyes: quoted in Smalley, William of Auvergne,
p. 127.
50 Chapter 2

type or model of Christ: the juxtaposition of an act such as adultery with

Christ was, he thought, neither credible to the laity nor creditable to the faith.
His respect for Scripture and his desire to communicate the faith believably
caused William to stop using spiritual senses as the basis for his own
exegesis.5
In comparison, numbers seemed to offer firmer ground. The prophet
Ezechiel interprets the first word of the Writing on the Wall at Belshazzars
Feast, Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, as God has numbered your kingdom and
finished it (Ez 5: 25), and the Gospel of Matthew similarly promises that The
very hairs on your head are all numbered (Mt 10: 30); the process of counting
and numbering is itself a divine attribute. Knowing the number gives power
over the numbered. Christian interpreters particularly expanded on the idea of
God as supreme numberer in commentary on the book of Wisdom 11: 21, in
which the persona of Solomon says of God: You have ordered all things in
measure, number, and weight:

I do not understand where [order and beauty in the creatures of Creation]

came from, if it is not from the supreme measure and number and order,
which are to be found interchangeable and eternal in the sublimity of
God Whenever you see something with measures and number and
order, look for the craftsman. You will not find one, except where the
supreme measure, the supreme number, and the supreme order are: that
is, with God, of whom it was most truly said that he disposed all things
with measure, number and weight.6

The author of this passage, Robert Grosseteste, was both a scientist and a theo-
logian, so we might expect him to think along these lines; for instance, later in
this Hexameron (Six Days of Creation) commentary he adds: Measure
leads the understanding to the power that contains all things: number to
wisdom, since according to Augustine, number and wisdom are the same
thing.7 But Grosseteste was not alone. He is part of a long line of Christian

5 Quia vero nonnullos offendunt, et graviter scandalisant sacrae scripturae hujus expositio-
nes, unde et abusive impositiones eis potius videtur, quam expositiones quaedam earum;
laborabimus paucis, ut eis super hoc satisfaciamus, De Legibus, c. 17: vol. I, p. 48; see also,
Smalley, William of Auvergne, pp. 151156.
6 Robert Grosseteste, Hexameron, 7.xiv.18: transl. C.F.J. Martin, On the Six Days of Creation
(Oxford, 1999), p. 219.
7 Grosseteste, Hexameron, 8.xiv.5, p. 227.
Number 51

(and non-Christian) writers who associated God with number and arithmetic.
Boethius, for example, begins his treatise on Arithmetic in this way:

[Arithmetic] is prior to all not only because God the Creator of the mas-
sive structure of the world considered this first discipline as the exemplar
of his own thought and established all things in accord with it; or that
through numbers of an assigned order all things exhibiting the logic of
their maker found concord; but arithmetic is said to be first for this rea-
son also, because whatever things are prior in nature, it is to these under-
lying elements that the posterior elements can be referred.8

Isidore of Seville agrees: Take away the number in all things, and everything
perishes. Take away calculation from the world and all is enveloped in dark
ignorance.9 It is important to realise that both the concept of number, and
individual numbers, are prior to their exemplification in the created world, so
that six, for example, is not a perfect number because there were six days of
creation; rather, God created the world in six days because six was a perfect
number.10 This priority means that number is a reliable way for the divine
intellect to become intelligible to us. As Augustine declared, mathematics
was not a human invention but a human discovery of something that was
sewn into the framework of the universe and which proceeded by invariant
laws, and as such it offered a particularly stable point of access into the mind
of God.11
William of Auxerre ends his discussion of the days of creation by asking why
the evening of the seventh day (the day of rest) is not mentioned, unlike those
of the other six (evening came and morning came).12 This is, he says,
because rest in God has no end, unlike everything else made in the hexam-
eron, which has measure, number and weight. The answer leads William to a
series of questions on this trinity of attributes, which he sees as revealing
the divine Trinity: in the triad of measure, number and weight the footprints

8 Boethius, Arithmetic, proemium: M. Masi, Boethian Number Theory: a translation of the De

Institutione arithmetica (Amsterdam, 1983), p. 74.
9 Isidore, Etymologiae, III.4.
10 Rabanus Maurus, De Clericorum institutione, bk 3, c. 22: De Arithmetica, PL 107: 399.
11 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.38.56, ed. W.M. Green, CSEL 80 (Vienna, 1963); Saint
Augustine on Christian Teaching, transl. R.P.H. Green (Oxford, 1997): As for the study of
number, it is surely clear even to the dullest person that it was not instituted by men, but
rather investigated and discovered.
12 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk II, tr. VIII, c. II, qu. 8.
52 Chapter 2

(vestigia) of the Trinity blaze forth.13 The fullness and perfection of all things
rests on them. William follows Augustine in describing God as the measure
without measure; indeed, creation is the action of a measuring mind.14 The
measuring God was, from at least the late twelfth century, envisaged as the
architect of creation, and was pictured in this professional role, using his mea-
suring instruments to draw order from chaos.15 Alan of Lille explains:

When God willed to call forth the fabric of the palace of the Universean
idea which He had conceived from eternityas the choice architect of
the universe, as the golden constructor of a golden construction, the
skilled artisan of an amazing work of art, as the operative producer of an
admirable work.16

Scholars such as Otto von Simson have argued that number in the form of ratio
was integrated into medieval architecture, which was for him primarily sym-
bolic: Everywhere, the visible seemed to reflect the invisible.17 Ratio was cer-
tainly the basis of medieval music theory, as can be seen in music treatises,
such as that by Boethius, which incorporate tables and diagrams of the ratio of
string length to pitch.18 Number was the organizing principle of the quadriv-
ium, the larger portion of the seven liberal arts which formed the fundamental
curriculum for medieval education. The subjects of the quadrivium arithme-
tic, geometry, astronomy and music all relied on an understanding of num-
bers and how they could be manipulated. But it has also been persuasively
argued that number theory made its way across the liberal arts divide to the
trivium of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, which were based on words. E.R.
Curtius and more recently David Howlett have sought to show that much, if

13 Ibid., bk II, tr. VIII, c. II, qu. 9.

14 His reference is to Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, IV, c. 3, n. 4, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 28
(Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, 1894): Summa aurea, bk II, tr. VIII, c. II, qu. 9, art. VII.
15 For God as architect, and illustrations, see Nigel Hiscock, The Symbol at Your Door: number
and geometry in religious architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages (Aldershot,
2007), prologue.
16 Alan of Lille, De Planctu Naturae, bk 8, pr. 4; transl. James J. Sheridan, The Plaint of Nature
(Toronto, 1980), p. 144.
17 The Gothic Cathedral: the origins of gothic architecture and the medieval concept of order
(London, 1956), p. xxi.
18 The diagrams from the manuscripts are reproduced in Boethius: Anicii Manlii Torquati
Severini Boetii, De Institutione arithmetica libri duo; De Institutione musica libri quinque,
ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig, 1867); and in the translation by Michael Masi: Boethian Number
Theory.
Number 53

not all, medieval literature and crafted writing is constructed around an under-
lying numerical structure.19
Both Old and New Testaments are shot through with significant numbers
numbers used to convey meaning rather than simply to count. But the concept
of number as a metaphysical system what Sir Thomas Browne called the
secret magic of numbers20 dates back at least as far as Pythagoras, from
whom the Church adopted its number theory, often by way of the first-century
Platonist, Philo Judaeus, who built number symbolism into his exegesis of
Scripture.21 For the Middle Ages, the keystone of interpretation was the work of
Augustine, for whom number was an image of the absolute: For there is a rela-
tion of numbers which cannot possibly be impaired or altered, since in many
passages of scripture [the science of number] is found to be of eminent service
to the careful interpreter.22 Augustine is careful to note numbers in his exege-
sis. For instance, he asks why the measurements of Noahs Ark are so carefully
recorded, unless they mattered for the devout study of future generations.23
For those who knew Hebrew, there was a close and obvious link between
numbers and the word of God, since Hebrew letters also had numerical values.
This allowed words to be quantified, to be given a precise meaning an exeget-
ical method known as gematria.24 Commenting on Ex 3: 4, the twelfth-century
scholar Abraham Ibn Ezra approached the puzzle of a God with many differ-
ent names by reference to their numerical value. How were EHYH (Eheyeh,
the first-person I am of the Exodus text) and YHVH (its third-person form,
Yahweh) related? Ibn Ezra gives the numerical equivalent of each name:

YHVH = yod(10) + heh(5) + vav(6) + heh(5) = 26

EHYH = aleph(1) + heh(5) + yod(10) + heh(5) = 21

explaining that these, the most important names of God, are composed of the
four most important numbers (1, 5, 6, 10). He writes at length to show why these

19 For example, see E.R. Curtius, Essays on European Literature (Princeton, 1973), and D.R.
Howlett, British Books in Biblical Style (Dublin, 1997).
20 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. James Winny (Cambridge, 1963), i.12.
21 Philo Judaeus, On the Allegories of Sacred Law; and on number symbolism in general see
Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism.
22 Augustine, On the Morals of the Manichees, ed. M. Dods, XI.24; De Civitate Dei, ed. Dombart
and Kalb, CSEL 4780, bk 11, c. 30.
23 Contra Faustum, ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 25 (Prague, Vienna, Leipzig, 1891), XII.38, and many
other examples throughout the work.
24 For examples see Jacobs, The Jewish Religion, q.v. gematria.
54 Chapter 2

four numbers have such status, and in particular he notes that the number-
letters that begin each name are the numbers without which no others could
exist, since without 1 and 10 there could be no counting.25 Precision is always
alluring especially, perhaps, in the ineffable world of religion.
When scriptural comprehension required knowledge of Latin and an under-
standing of the complexities of literary exegesis, one of the attractions of num-
bers was that they were easily understood. One of William de Montibus most
popular works, written to introduce lower-level students to theology, is his
Numerale, a sort of dictionary of faith, organized by numbers: one God, one
faith, one Church, two keys to the kingdom of heaven, three persons in the
Trinity, and so on.26 In the later Middle Ages, the number theories of Isidore or
of medieval architecture exploded into popular piety. If the words in the Bible
remained inaccessible to many, devout lay believers could nonetheless do the
simple sums involved in the arithmetic of everyday devotion. Number was
utterly infused into pious activity. Calculations included the number of wounds
on the body of Christ, the number of drops of blood lost at the Passion, the
length of Christs body or of the wounds in his side, hands and feet, the length
of the nails with which he was crucified, and the measurements of the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre. The numbers were not haphazard. The number of
Christs wounds was commonly calculated at 5475, the equivalent of 15 Pater
Nosters said on each of the 365 days of the year; the 547,500 drops of blood
shed equated to 100 Pater Nosters said every day for 15 years.27 Think of preci-
sion, Nicholas of Cusa urged, for God is absolute precision.28 Churches, such
as the Adorno Church in Bruges, were built with identical measurements to
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; worshippers in these buildings
could follow a pilgrimage experience without having to travel to the Holy Land,
but deriving the same benefit for their effort. Prayers could be said in number

25 H.N. Strickman and A.M. Silver, Ibn Ezras Commentary on the Pentateuch. Exodus (Shemot)
(New York, 1996), on Ex. 3: 4.
26 The Numerale is edited in J.W. Goering, William de Montibus (c. 11401213): the schools and
the literature of pastoral care (Toronto, 1992), pp. 226260.
27 See David Areford, The Passion Measured: a late-medieval diagram of the Body of Christ,
in A.A. MacDonald, et al. (ed.), The Broken Body: passion devotion in late-medieval culture
(Groningen, 1998), pp. 211238; F.M. Lewis, Devotional Images and their Dissemination in
English Manuscripts c. 13501470 (unpublished PhD diss., London, 1989); A.W. Crosby,
The Measure of Reality: quantification and western society, 12501600 (Cambridge, 1997);
and Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: theology and practice in late medieval
northern Germany and beyond (Philadelphia, 2007), p. 16 and n.
28 Nicholas of Cusa, The Layman on Wisdom and the Mind, trans. M.L. Fuehrer (Ottawa,
1989), p.41.
Number 55

that accorded with the holy calculations. Images in the form of cheap, easily
distributed woodcuts, for instance were printed with the wounds of Christ,
life-size: those who kissed the image, if they did so with the right frame of
mind, were promised remission from purgatory. Belts or girdles whose length
accorded with Christs height were urged on pregnant women or the sick, to
guarantee healing, or an easy birth.
Nonetheless, there was a thin line between piety and superstition. Woodcuts
with images of Christs wounds, for instance, were not intended, by theolo-
gians at least, to be talismanic. There was a distinction between a belief in the
ability of an image of the wounds, for example, to heal the bearer which was
not orthodox belief and using the image as an entry point for devotional
meditation, leading the mind to God which was not only acceptable but
encouraged. Jerome, for example, describes the phylacteries worn by pious
Jews which he wrongly believed were inscribed with the Decalogue as used
to remind them to keep the Law.29 This was acceptable in a way that believing
that the tiny scraps of text could themselves have religious power was not. In
his handbook for confessors, the Summa confessorum, Thomas Chobham has a
long discussion of superstitions prohibited to believers.30 These included
Christians carrying words of scripture or writing in curious characters. If this
is done not out of simple devotion but because you believe they can bring good
fortune, it is a serious sin and it is even worse if what is written is in charac-
ters you do not understand.31
Perhaps its very precision was one reason why the employment of numbers
was all too easily diverted into prohibited activities. For all Christian commen-
tators, astrology (where practitioners were known as mathematici) was the
most dubious or worrisome of these, since interest in the stars and planets and
belief that their movement affected life on earth was an ancient one. Once
again, there was a fine line between the orthodox and the heterodox: it was
more than reasonable to think that the heavens, telling the glory of God
(Ps18: 2), could show the mind of the deity to human understanding, but the
belief that the heavens could influence (as opposed to simply record) history
was an insult to divine power and strictly prohibited. The growth of interest in
astronomy as a serious science in the twelfth century did nothing to decrease

29 Jerome, Commentariorum in Matheum libri iv, ed. D. Hurst and M. Adriaen, CCSL 77
(Turnhout, 1969), on Mt 23: 6.
30 Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, ed. Broomfield, art. 7, d. 5, De sortilegiis et
veneficiis. Thomas draws heavily from Augustines treatment of the subject in his
Ennarationes in Psalmos.
31 I am reminded of the current fashion in Britain for tattoos in exotic alphabets.
56 Chapter 2

everyday notions that human life was at the mercy of the stars.32 Christian
writings against astrology date back at least to Augustine in the City of God.33
Augustine attacks mathematici who drew up horoscopes, as well as the belief
that a predetermined fate had charge over human lives. Both he and Gregory
the Great use the biblical example of the twins Jacob and Esau (Gen. 2536) to
show that babies born at the same time in the same circumstances can live
very different lives.
Augustines influence in these matters was widespread. Simon of Hinton is
following Thomas of Chobham and Raymond of Peaforte in retailing
Augustines delineation of the types of superstition and pseudo-science
Christians should avoid.34 Drawing lots, reading horoscopes and interpreting
dreams all come in for ridicule, and you should not allow anyone who claims
to do these things into your house.35 Nevertheless, there was a subtle differ-
ence to be drawn between allowable forms of knowledge gained by observing
the phases of the moon or planets before planting seeds, polling cattle, or col-
lecting medicinal herbs, for instance, and believing in nature as a god.36 All
this concerned ten commandments commentators because it threatened to
trespass into the territory of having no other gods. The fact that such things
are mentioned at all suggests how widespread and deep-rooted they were.
Teaching in Oxford, Simon of Hinton and Robert Grossesteste worked with
students whose careers would probably be humbler than those of their high-
flying counterparts in Paris. Whereas the Paris students were aiming at the top
echelons of secular bureacucracy, the Church, or even academia, the
Mendicants who were Simon and Roberts bread and butter were more
likely to spend their lives working with ordinary people. Discussing the ten

32 M.-Th. dAlverny, Astrologues et thologians au XIIe sicle, in Mlanges offerts M.-D.

Chenu, matre en thologie (Paris, 1967), pp. 3150; Fritz Saxl, The Belief in Stars in the
Twelfth Century, and The Revival of Late Antique Astrology, both in his Lectures, 2 vols
(London, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 8595 and 7384.
33 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ed. Dombart and Kalb, CSEL 47, bk 5.
34 Quaestiones on the Decalogue, in London, British Library, Royal MS 9 E. XIV, fol. 125r-v. See
also Beryl Smalley, The Quaestiones of Simon of Hinton, in R.W. Hunt, W.A. Pantin, R.W.
Southern (ed.), Studies in Medieval History presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke (Oxford,
1948), pp. 209222. Raymonds treatment of superstition is reprinted in Summa sancti
Raymondi de Peniafort de Poenitentia et Matrimonio (Farnborough, 1967), lib. I, c. 11, De
sortilegis et divinis.
35 Chobham, Summa confessorum, art. 7, d. 5, qu. VIa.
36 Charles Burnett has written extensively on such questions; out of many possible exam-
ples, see, Scientific Weather Forecasting in the Middle Ages. The Works of Al-Kindi, ed. G. Bos
and C.S.F. Burnett (London and New York, 2000).
Number 57

commandments, both masters are notable for their lengthy denunciation of

superstition and astrology: these are the kinds of issues their pupils are prob-
ably going to have to address.

Ten

If the concept of number comprehended the fundamental structure of cre-

ation, individual numbers were useful pointers to interpreting unchanging
characteristics of that Creation and of God, too. The most obvious of these is
the number one, which, as we might expect, represented unity and was thus
the number of God; it was the generator of all other numbers. Two, on the
other hand, being the sum of two ones, represented division, and was thus the
number of the division of natures in Christ, God and Man, and of the division
of the soul and the body in each individual. Three is made up of three single
units with an indivisible middle, and is the first whole odd number; for
Christians, of course, it represents the Trinity. Threes are ubiquitous in
Scripture, especially in the Gospels three days between the Crucifixion and
Resurrection, three gifts of the magi, three denials of Peter, and three tempta-
tions of Christ are the tip of the iceberg and threes in the Old Testament
(such as Abrahams three visitors) are seen as prefiguring the New. Four is the
first whole even number (one and two do not count in this respect only num-
bers made up of ones and twos). Four embodies equilibrium, and so represents
equality, justice and balance; and it is because of this equilibrium that there
are four corners of the earth, rivers of paradise, seasons, elements, and bodily
humours, as well as four Gospels and four evangelists. Along with individual
numbers, types of number also had their own character. Odd numbers were
the numbers of men and even numbers those of women, so the sum of the first
odd (3) and the first even (2) number, five, represents marriage. As their sum,
five encompasses both odd and even numbers and has inclusive or compre-
hensive characteristics: there are thus five senses, and five books of the Law
(the Pentateuch), and five can represent the universe. The sum of the first odd
number and the first even number, five, is followed by their product, six. Six is
also the product and the sum of one, two, and three. This makes six the first
perfect number and thus the number of creation: God took six days to create
the world because six was the number of the smallest perfect time. The num-
ber seven is the number of virginity, because it is a prime number which is also
not a factor of any number up to ten. As the number of virginity, it represented
the Holy Spirit and his gifts, as well as the seven planets, days of the week, pil-
lars of the Temple, and original churches, along with the seven petitions of the
58 Chapter 2

Lords Prayer, seven last words on the Cross, seven joys and seven sorrows of
Mary, and seven journeys of Christ. The number of things that must not be
coveted and of those obliged to rest on the sabbath each totals seven. Eight is
the first cube (2 x 2 x 2), which is taken to represent new beginnings. Eight was
thus the number of salvation, of the resurrection, and of circumcision: circum-
cision was carried out on the eighth day after birth, and the resurrection was
eight days after the Crucifixion. There were eight human souls on the Ark,
which meant that eight could signify baptism and death before salvation and
immortality. Nine was the cube of three, and was linked to the triple praises of
the Trinity (Holy, Holy, Holy) and the triple Kyries. The nine orders of angels
are made up of three ranks of three.
Finally, we reach ten. A perfect number, ten is the sum of the first four
integers, one, two, three, and four, and of two other special numbers, three
and seven. Each of the integers from one to nine can be combined in some
way to produce it (9 + 1; 2 x 5; 7 + 3; 3 x 2 + 4, etc.), so that they can all be
seen as being contained within it. Unsurprisingly, then, ten was seen as the
all-encompassing, inclusive number, and the link between heaven and
earth. Because of this comprehensive character, tens are again frequent in
Scripture: Noah was the tenth generation of humanity; Solomons Temple
had ten candelabra, ten tables, ten lavers, and cherubim ten cubits high;
and Job had possessions numbered in tens children (seven sons and three
daughters), sheep and cattle (7000 sheep and 3000 cattle), oxen and she-asses
(500 of each).37
These first integers were not the only numbers to be given characteristics,
but they were the building blocks for the rest, and our examples here give some
flavour of a world in which number was not just a means of counting and in
which the reason for the Decalogue having ten precepts was not simply that
humans have ten fingers. This sort of thought about number was not a game or
superstition; nor was it the province of the uneducated. On the contrary, these
Greek ideas were mediated to the Middle Ages by outstanding interpreters
such as Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and Rabanus Maurus (d. 856). They were
taken seriously as Gods building blocks for the universe, key elements for
understanding the nature of God and Creation. The existence of number, its
centrality in the universe, and our ability to manipulate it gave clues to what
sort of world and what sort of God humans were dealing with. This was a God
of order, of step-by-step development, of stable rules and permutations; a

37 For more examples of number meanings see Hopper, who quotes Isidore of Seville, Liber
numerorum; Rabanus Maurus, De numero; Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et
Mercurii; and Philo Judaeus, among others.
Number 59

God of known quantities, not arbitrary decisions. Knowing the character of

number helped humans understand and control the rest of Creation.
The first-century commentator Philo Judaeus illustrates the importance of
number when he explains why the Decalogue has ten precepts:

Here our admiration is at once aroused by their number, which is neither

more nor less than is the supremely perfect, Ten. Ten contains all differ-
ent kinds of numbers, even as 2, odd as 3, and even-odd as 6, and all
ratios, whether of a number to its multiples or fractional, when a number
is either increased or diminished by some part of itself. So too it contains
all the analogies or progressions, the arithmetical where each term in the
series is greater than the one below and less than the one above by the
same amount, as for example 1 2 3; the geometrical where the ratio of
thesecond to the first term is the same as that of the third to the second,
as with 1 2 4, and this is seen whether the ratio is double or treble or any
multiple, or again fractional as 3 to 2, 4 to 3, and the like; once more the
harmonic in which the middle term exceeds and is exceeded by the
extremes on either side by the same fraction, as is the case with 3, 4, 6.
Ten also contains the properties observed in triangles quadrilaterals
and other polygons, and also those of the concords, the fourth, fifth,
octave and double octave intervals, where the ratios are respectively 1,
i.e., 4: 3, 1, i.e., 3: 2, doubled, i.e., 2: 1, fourfold, i.e., 8: 2. Consequently it
seems to me that those who first gave names to things did reasonably,
wise men that they were in giving it the name of decad, as being the
dechad, or receiver, because it receives and has made room for every kind
of number and numerical ratio and progressions, and also concords and
harmonies.38

Later medieval writers, such as Alcuin in the eighth century and Odo of
Morimond and Geoffrey of Auxerre in the twelfth, produced treatises explain-
ing the biblical meanings of numbers. Alcuin says he is setting out the doc-
trine of numbers, or rather, the comparison which can be found between the
ancient law and the authority of the New Testament.39

38 Philo Judaeus, On the Decalogue, ed. F.H. Colson, The Works of Philo Judaeus, 7 (London
and Cambridge MA, 1937), c. 5, pp. 1517.
39 Alcuin, Epistolae 260, quoted in Hiscock, Symbol, p. 47; and see H. Lange, Traits du XIIe
sicle sur la symbolique des nombres: Odo de Morimond, Cahiers de linstitut du moyen-
ge grec et latin 40 (1981), pp. xxviiixxxiii for Odos Analectica numerorum.
60 Chapter 2

Connections

Because number exists as a fundamental principle, before any particular

instantiation of numbers, theologians thought it valid to compare different
things of the same number the number gave those things something in com-
mon that superseded their accidental differences. In a sermon on the subject,
Augustine compares the Ten Commandments (Ex 20) to the ten plagues of
Egypt (Ex 712), and it became a commonplace for medieval interpreters to do
something similar.40 Comparison or cross-referencing of biblical texts or char-
acters, often between the Old Testament and the New, is a favourite patristic
and medieval exegetical strategy. It relies on extensive knowledge of Scripture
and a fertile imagination, combined with the conviction that the Bible is an
elaborate puzzle full of hidden meanings waiting to be uncovered. Such a view
of the Bible reflects a theology of history in which God gives humanity clues to
understanding. The truth is not all in plain sight, but can be uncovered by fol-
lowing the biblical trails found, for instance, in parables, in similar events
repeated at different times, and in symbolic people and places. Sometimes
these are comparisons sketched out on a grand scale, such as when the four
major prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, are
connected with the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This reit-
eration of one group in the other has a pictorial representation in the thir-
teenth-century windows of Chartres Cathedral, where the four major Old
Testament prophets carry the four Evangelists on their shoulders: the
Evangelists witness to the Messiah who fulfils their predecessors prophecies.41
Other comparisons are more detailed. King David is seen as an Old Testament
type of Christ: both are from humble origins (from the same family lineage, in
fact), both are prophets and kings, both wrestle with temptation, both save
their people. Neither prophets nor Evangelists nor King David are themselves
divine, but all illuminate the divine plan.
Many of these exegetical comparisons go back to the earliest Christian
interpreters, and because medieval exegetical method was heavily reliant on

40 Augustine, Sermon 8 on the Ten Plagues of Egypt (De decem plagis aegyptorum et decem
praeceptis legis), in Sancti Aurelii Augustini. Sermones de vetere testamento, ed. C. Lambot,
CCSL, 41 (Turnhout, 1961); English translation in The Works of St Augustine: a translation
for the 21st century, transl. with notes by E. Hill, ed. J.E. Rotelle (Brooklyn NY, 1990), part 3,
sermons: vol. 1, sermons 119.
41 The windows are also reminiscent of the saying made famous by the twelfth-century
scholar Bernard of Chartres that he and his contemporaries were dwarves standing on
giants shoulders. Without the Old Testament and its prophets, these windows seem to
say, the new dispensation and its witnesses would have no foundation.
Number 61

tradition, repeating and consolidating the work of past scholars before moving
on to new ideas, many of the links between texts had a long history which was
too well-known to be ignored by later commentators. The interpreters make
comparisons between different parts of the Bible because doing so allows
them to point to similarities within the texts. These similarities form part of
the proof that the message of scripture is unified and coherent, despite the
multiplicity of styles and stories in the biblical text: the variety of creation nev-
ertheless points to the one truth of Christ. If two texts are linked by an identity
of number, it is an evident clue that looking at them together will reveal even
more about God. Faced with the ten commandments, the commentators turn
to the ten plagues to see how each will illuminate the other. Unfortunately, this
particular pairing is a difficult one for even the most dedicated commentator
to maintain, for beyond the numerical identity, the individual precepts and
plagues have little in common. As the plagues become increasingly serious,
culminating with the death of firstborn children, the matters covered by the
commandments would appear to become rather less important. So whereas
the trajectory of the plagues is from gentle warning to ghastly threat, that of
the commandments moves in the opposite direction, from the worship of God
to illicit desire for a neighbours goods. Not even the genius of Augustine can
make the link sound credible:

When I look for some point of comparison in this [tenth] plague, nothing
occurs to me for the moment it may occur perhaps to people who are
looking more carefully except the thought that everything men have
they keep for their heirs, and dearest to them among their heirs are the
firstborn.42

William of Auxerre, for example, spends considerable effort matching the

plagues and the precepts.43 His treatment is largely traditional, a re-working of
Stephen Langtons section on the precepts in his commentary on Exodus,
which was itself an adaption of Rabanus Maurus, who in turn borrowed from
Augustine.44 This summary family tree of Williams discussion is a good illus-
tration of medieval working method for this sort of material. Augustines origi-
nal comparison comes (as we have seen) in one of his sermons, themselves
generally expositions of a biblical pericope; Rabanus discussion is in a

42 Sermon 8, transl. Hill, pt III.

43 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. XIV, c. 5.
44 Rabanus Maurus, Commentarius in Exodum, lib. 2, c. 13, PL 108: 100105; Stephen Langton,
In Exodum, c. 20: fol. 97rb and following.
62 Chapter 2

commentary on Exodus, which is taken up by Langton (possibly from an inter-

mediary) and re-used in his own Exodus commentary; William is writing in a
Summa of theology, very loosely based on the plan of Peter Lombards
Sentences. William lists each plague in turn, laying out its spiritual significance
and the spiritual ill the plague represents, and then showing why the similarly
numbered commandment would provide a remedy or cure for this ill. In gen-
eral, he does not explain why each plague has the spiritual meaning he assigns
it; the designation of spiritual meanings to apparently unpromising material
was common in medieval theology and he may not have thought he needed
to either because he thought his choices were commonplace or because the
principle was so unremarkable it needed no further justification. Yet compar-
ing Williams spiritual readings with those of Peter the Chanters well-known
set of biblical distinctiones (a sort of dictionary whose purpose was precisely to
offer non-literal readings of scriptural words), they do not obviously match.45
According to William, the first plague changes water to blood, which signi-
fies a changed, that is to say a false, understanding of who and what God is.
This plague is cured by the first commandment: You shall have no other gods
but me. The second plague was an inundation of frogs. In the Middle Ages
frogs commonly signified heretics, liars, and deceivers, as they do for William.
The plague is cured by the second commandment: You shall not take the
name of the Lord in vain. Already we can see that the sickess-cure axis is not
simple, for although it is clear how having no other gods and not making graven
images would go some way towards eradicating false beliefs, the second com-
mandment needs some clarification as a cure against heresy. Here one has to
know that taking the Lords name in vain was commonly interpreted as under-
standing the true nature of Christ to be both divine and human, and not believ-
ing him to be only a created being. Any plague of heresy would be driven out
by this correct interpretation.
The third plague is of mosquitoes, which signify the constant tiny irritation
of worldly cares. This is cured by the third commandment which orders the
keeping of a sabbath day. Sanctifying the sabbath is done by resting quietly
and delighting in God, seeing everyday cares in their real, unimportant, place.
As long as the reader accepts the spiritualising of the meaning of mosquito, the
pairing can make some sense; indeed, the linking of mosquitoes with a day of
rest is a satisfyingly imaginative interpretation, memorable enough to stick in
the mind, but not so outlandish as to seem ridiculous.

45 Peter the Chanter, Distinctiones Abel, ed. J.B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense, vol. 3 (Paris,
1855), pp. 1308.
Number 63

So long as we accept William of Auxerres spiritualising of the first three

plagues, his links to the commandments about God make reasonable sense.
But the commandments relating to ones neighbour make the plague couplings
more difficult to accept. The fourth plague is of dog flies, which William says
signify men who have the habits of dogs, and which he defines so as to mean
those people who show no sense of piety towards their parents. With this as a
given, it is clear that the cure must be the fourth commandment: Honour your
father and your mother. Why dogs are a byword for filial ingratitude is left
unexplained by William, though according to Augustine it is because when
they are old enough to live independently, young dogs do not stay with their
parents in a family group, but go off to live alone, making it particularly appro-
priate that puppies are born blind, to signal that they will not acknowledge
their parents.46 We would appear to be on firmer ground with the fifth pairing,
since the plague here is the death of the Egyptians animals and the precept
must surely be You shall not kill. But no: as with the other plagues, the mean-
ing is not to be taken literally; rather, the death of the animals signifies the
spiritual death of human beings, and this is cured by the precept against adul-
tery, because adultery involves the breaking of a vow made before God, which
leads to spiritual death. This leaves You shall not kill as the remedy against
the next plague, of boils and sores. The boils signify anger, which disfigures the
interior person in the same way as pustules disfigure the exterior face. Since
anger causes one to strike out and kill a point made in Williams treatment of
the seven deadly sins, and commonly repeated in discussions of them its
remedy is this precept against killing. Another of the seven sins, avarice, is sig-
nified by the next plague, hailstones. Avarice destroys all virtue and sweetness
of soul in the same way that the hailstorm destroyed the Egyptians vines. The
remedy against this destruction is the commandment against stealing, since
when a thief acquires the gold of this world, he loses his chance of life in the
next. This connection between avarice and theft is a good one, and the psy-
chology described is convincing; the problem lies only with the apparently
arbitrary (if entertaining) original signification of the sin of avarice by a hail-
storm. In comparison, the spiritual interpretation of locusts, plague number
eight, as detractors and false witnesses, appears more obvious, since locusts
consume human food (the basis of earthly life) and false speakers consume
truth (the basis of eternal life). But any sense that we are beginning to under-
stand how this process works is destroyed by the next plague, whose spiritual
sense seems once again remote. The plague of palpable darkness is said to sig-
nify adultery, and so its remedy is the prohibition of illicit desire for ones

46 Augustine, Sermon 8, transl. Hill.

64 Chapter 2

neighbours wife. Even further from the literal is the significance given to the
last plague, the death of firstborn male children. Williams reading is that first-
born signifies the faith, hope and love that humans are given by heaven, and
their loss is equivalent to death. By desiring his neighbours goods, a man
shows that he wishes to be his heir so annulling the claim of any other heir,
effectively causing the death of his firstborn. The loss of faith involved ties this
last plague with the first, which had the same meaning, and links the greatest
and the least (both of plagues and of commandments) together.
Just as ten is the number of the plagues, seven is the number of the mortal
or deadly sins. William also shows how the precepts could be cures for these
seven sins, although not on the same one-to-one basis we saw with the
plagues.47 For example, You shall have no other gods is effective against pride
(having yourself as your god), envy (having your neighbour as a god), and glut-
tony (having your belly as your god). Sloth is dispelled by keeping the sabbath.
Since, according to William, killing and false speaking are both rooted in anger,
not acting in response to anger is the way to dissipate the sin. Avarice is simi-
larly at the heart of stealing and desiring ones neighbours goods, and so
respecting those commandments does away with that sin, as refraining from
adultery and desiring ones neighbours wife are remedies for the sin of lust.
Only honouring parents has no place in Williams preceptual pharmacopia,
because it is a positive order rather than a prohibition. William clearly enjoys
making these connections: as well as remedying sin, he shows how the com-
mandments encompass the four cardinal virtues (justice, fortitude, prudence,
and temperance) and the four bodily humours. Along with Stephen Langton,
William generates the second-tablet commandments from Augustines three
powers of the soul.48 Once again, two perfect numbers, three and four, are
added to make another, seven.
I have spent some time setting out these comparisons because they sum-
marise neatly one of the problems of dealing with medieval exegetical mate-
rial. The scholars we are reading are all highly intelligent men. They are engaged
in serious theological research; indeed, one might even imagine that, because
they believe the prize of their researches to be eternal life, scholarship has
more urgency for them than for some of their modern counterparts. Many
of the questions they pose are either still asked today or else are perfectly

47 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, III, tr. 14, c. 1.

48 Ibid.; Stephen Langton, In Exodum, fol. 124ra-b: referatur ad animam propter tres vires
ipsius scilicet rationalitatem irascibilitatem concupiscibilitatem. Langton generates
three commandments from each of the two tablets from these powers; the other four
second-tablet commandments he links to the four corporal humours.
Number 65

comprehensible in context. Although at times, the solutions they propose

seem merely ingenious, at others they have a humanity, psychological acuity
and straightforward sense that resonates easily with a reader today. Their own
rules did not make things easy for them. They labour under the necessity of
showing that the biblical protagonists have always to be acting virtuously,
which means that on occasion much explaining away has to be done. Their
answers can at times sound like what they are the responses of religious
fanatics dealing with an impermeable system; but then, so do many of the pro-
nouncements of todays religious hierarchies. But beyond these situations,
there are other difficulties that they choose to bring upon themselves, such as
the question of connecting the plagues and the precepts. Why do they do it?
The very difficulty for us of understanding why the commentators attempt to
do something that even they have to work to justify should alert us to how
important it is for them, and to show that it touches on fundamental beliefs
in this case, the power of number as an organizing principle that can take
human beings to the heart of God.

Numbering and Division

Number is a way of putting things together, but also of prising them apart.
Having shown the importance of the commandments as a group of Ten, not
simply as individual precepts, the commentators then reverse their strategy
and consider how and why they are divided. Why, at least, is simple. Moses
comes down from Sinai with two stone tablets on which God has written the
ten words. Although some modern scholars have argued that the two tablets
were simply two copies of the same text one for God and one for Israel in
the mind of the medieval exegete, the giving of two tablets meant that the
precepts must somehow be divided between them, and this was the starting
place for their speculations.49 Jewish tradition, known in the Middle Ages
through Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus, divides the ten simply into two
sets of five, although there was a further question as to whether the tablets

49 G.E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East, Biblical
Archaeologist, 17 (1954), pp. 2646 and 4976, compared the two stone tablets with Hittite
tablets of sovereign pacts (suzerainty treaties). These took the form of two identical
tablets, each of which had the entire text of the pact written on it, one of which was given
to each party. Mendenhall suggested that the two tablets of the Decalogue were of this
form, with one copy meant for the Israelites, and one for God: see B.S. Childs, Exodus.
A Commentary (London, 1974), ch. 17(2A).
66 Chapter 2

were single or double-sided.50 For Christians, however, the two tablets were
a prophetic symbol of the two-part answer that Jesus gave to the Scribe who
asked which commandment was the greatest: you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and
with all your strengthyou shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no
other commandment greater than these.51 The first stone tablet must there-
fore hold the commandments which are about God, and the second those per-
taining to ones neighbour. The question then became: which was which?
There were two leading contenders for the correct system of division one
proposed by Origen, the other by Augustine. Origen divided the long text
which begins the commandments (Ex 20: 26) into two separate precepts,
You shall have no other gods and You shall not take the Lords name in
vain.52 This meant he had to consolidate the two commandments on covet-
ousness of your neighbours goods and of his wife into one, in order to keep
within the total of ten. This schema has clear reasoning behind it, and a disin-
terested reader might well consider it to be more in accord with the balance of
the biblical text; certainly, Origens division was by no means forgotten in the
Middle Ages. However, it was Augustines alternative form of numbering and
division that prevailed. Augustines name and reputation were certainly a key
part of its success, but his reckoning had another, deeper principle in its favour.
For whereas Origens method divides the commandments into four which per-
tain to God (and are therefore written on the first stone tablet), and six pertain-
ing to ones neighbour (on the second), Augustines formula divides the ten
into three and seven. Even a low-level appreciation of medieval numerology
will spot the Trinitarian applications of this solution, and the two other special
numbers three and seven in addition to ten which it makes manifest. Since
the remaining seven commandments relating to ones neighbour are then
themselves the sum of three and four two important numbers making up a
third it was inevitable that Augustines division would carry the day. These
numerical prizes were more than worth the inconvenience of having to explain
the existence of two commandments about concupiscence. Augustines

50 Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, III.101, transl. H.St J. Thackeray (London & New York,
1930), p. 365; and Philo, On the Decalogue, c. 12, pp. 3132. The single- or double-sided
question was noted by Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, c. 39, De datione legis, Add. 1
(PL 198: 1164AB). See also Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Exodus
(Jerusalem, 1967), pp. 251252; Jacobs, Jewish Religion, q.v. Decalogue; Ronald
Youngblood, Counting the Ten Commandments, Biblical Review 10 (1994), pp. 3050.
51 Mk 12: 30; cf. Lk 27, and the Jewish Shema in Deut 6: 5 and Lev 19: 18.
52 Origen, Origne. Homlies sur lExode, ed. M. Borret, Sources chrtiennes 321 (Paris, 1985),
cc. 12.
Number 67

solution was given an unbeatable boost when it was chosen by Peter Lombard
as the preferred form of Decalogue division in the Sentences.53 From then
onwards, every theology student learned the Augustinian division as ortho-
doxy, and it predominated until the Reformation.
Origens numbering of the precepts reflected that of the Jews, who divided
the commandments equally, five and five, on the two tablets. Here the ques-
tions were of the placement of the precepts in relation to one another. For
instance, for the Jews as for Origen, the commandment to honour ones par-
ents was number five in the list, and in this ordering it stood as the last precept
on the first tablet. According to Philo, the commandment in this position
forms a bridge between the precepts proper to God and those concerning ones
neighbour.54 This is an apt placement, he says, on a borderline, because par-
ents by nature stand on the border between mortal and immortal existence
mortal because of their own mortality, but immortal because their own act of
creation in begetting children assimilates them to God, the generator of all
things. In begetting children, Philo adds, parents act as the servants of God,
and whoever dishonours the servant the parent dishonours the master
God.55 Thus for Philo and the Jews, the precepts of the first tablet move from
God as spiritual parent to father and mother as temporal parents; and for Philo
this movement is something of a litmus test: those who are unable to show
reverence to their visible and present parents, near at hand and seen by the
eye, are most unlikely to be able to show reverence to the invisible God.56
The conventions of medieval commentary meant that, although scholars
adhered to the Augustinian division, nevertheless they continued to contrast it
with Origens and, occasionally, with the Jewish system. Most unusally, in his
Sentences commentary Alexander of Hales reports the more complicated
exposition of the famous rabbi (and his near-contemporary) Maimonides,
who divides the whole 613 precepts of the Law into fourteen groups.57
Alexander seems particularly interested in the question of the division of the
commandments because he also notes the rarely-mentioned opinion of the
early Greek scholar Hesychius, which is unlike any of the usual groupings.58

53 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c. 1.

54 Philo, On the Decalogue, c. 22, p. 61.
55 Ibid., cc. 2223, pp. 61, 67.
56 Ibid., c. 23, p. 69.
57 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), quoting Maimonides, Guide, III.35.
58 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), c. 4. Alexander knows Hesychius from the
Glossa ordinaria, where he was a major source for the Gloss on Leviticus: Smith, The
Glossa ordinaria, ch. 2.
68 Chapter 2

Hesychius separates You shall have no other gods before me and You shall not
take the Lords name in vain to form the first two commandments, but he also
agrees that the precepts about coveting ones neighbours wife and his goods are
two separate commands. But this brings his total number of commandments to
eleven and, for reasons we have discussed, everyone is agreed that this cannot
be right. Hesychius gets round the problem by jettisoning the commandment
on keeping the sabbath, on the grounds that, as a positive injunction (Remember
to keep the sabbath) and not a prohibition (You shall not), it cannot truly
be a part of the Decalogue as a moral law. It is only a sign of the perfect rest that
is to come with God, and so counts only as one of the ceremonial or judicial
laws. Although the rationale for getting rid of sabbath-keeping has some logic
behind it, nevertheless the commandment is such a keystone of Judaeo-
Christian life that it is not surprising that Hesychius division did not catch on.
Nonetheless, Alexander is careful to note that these disagreements between
theologians, whilst notable, are beyond the substance of the faith, and so there
is no danger in their variety. It is possible, he says, for each of them to be right.59
The common Christian division, then, was that the first stone tablet con-
tained three commandments, all pertaining to God: You shall have no other
gods before me You shall not make for yourselves a graven image; You shall
not take the name of the Lord in vain; and Remember the sabbath day and
keep it holy. Just as the group of ten commandments could be linked with the
ten plagues, so these three precepts called forth a volley of other sets of three.
Obviously, the first step was that the three commandments signified the per-
sons of the Trinity, but through this the commandments could also be related
to characteristics of the Trinity. For Hugh of St Victor and Peter Abelard, for
instance, the persons of the Trinity could exemplify the virtues of Unity (or
Power), Truth, and Goodness, and Alexander of Hales applies these to the com-
mandments in turn.60 Unity can easily be associated with the worship of the
one God; Truth is a by-product of not taking the Lords name in vain, whether
interpreted to mean not swearing oaths or not believing that Christ (the name
of God) is not Gods Son; and Goodness is drawn from the precept to remem-
ber the sabbath because that is the day to remember Gods goodness in giving
his son to the world. According to Alexander, these threes are linked because
faith grows out of knowledge of the Trinity, whether among the faithful people
of the Old Testament or of the New.

59 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), c. 4: Et quoniam istae opiniones sunt praeter
substantiam fidei, ideo non est aliquod periculum de contrarietate illarum. Secundum
enim diversas considerationes, omnes verae esse possunt.
60 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), c. 9.
Number 69

Stephen Langton takes up Augustines dictum that the human soul has three
powers and applies it to the first tablet. The first commandment shows the
rational power of the soul, the second the irascible, and the third the concupis-
cent.61 Langton also links the Trinity with three different types of men, repre-
sented by the Apostle Paul, Moses and Elijah, who in turn signify three types of
life: of grace, of obedience, and of faith. Elijah, living before the Old Law had
been given, had to believe in God through blind faith alone; he is signified in
the first commandment, which tells us that there is only one God and that we
should worship him. Moses, having received the written Law, had then to live
in obedience under it; he is signified in the commandment against taking the
Lords name in vain, that is, not living according to truth. Finally, Paul is
the witness to the law of grace, in the era of the Holy Spirit; he is signified by
sabbath rest, when we remember the resurrection.62
Alexander of Hales gets at the number three in another way, by appealing to
the notion of obligation.63 A commandment is only a commandment, he says,
in as much as it obliges us to do something. Now, obligation can arise in three
ways, in the heart, in words, and in deeds, and when we think about each sort
of obligation in relation to God, we are led to the first three precepts. Obligation
in the heart means we must worship the One God; obligation in words means
that we must never take the Lords name in vain; and obligation in deed means
that we should observe the sabbath rest. Alexander is trying to show that, by
starting with the principle behind the idea of commandment obligation
and applying it to God, the three individual precepts are generated almost
mechanically.
Can the same be said for the seven precepts of the second tablet, those con-
cerning ones neighbour? Alexander believes it can, but the balance of obliga-
tion is different on this tablet from that on the first. Here, the obligation of the
heart produces the commandment to honour father and mother and the two
commandments against concupiscence; obligation in words gives rise to the
commandment not to speak false witness against your neighbour; and obliga-
tion in deed results in the commandments against killing, stealing and adul-
tery. In respect of God, each type of obligation was equally important, and
could be covered by a single precept. In respect of ones neighbour, however,
precepts had to cover not only each type of obligation, but how that type
related to ones neighbours body, spouse, and goods. Ones obligation to deeds
in regard to ones neighbour thus involved respecting his body (by not killing),

61 Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 124ra-b.

62 Langton, In Exodum, fol. 126ra-b.
63 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), c. 3.
70 Chapter 2

his spouse (by not committing adultery) and his goods (by not stealing).
Obligation of the heart respected your neighbours body by honouring par-
ents, who need not be simply biological parents but everyone who made you
what you are, and his wife and his goods by not coveting them. Obligation of
words, however, could embrace all three aspects by the one commandment
not to deal in falsehood. Seven precepts are thus sufficient to cover our obliga-
tion to our neighbour.64
Beginning with a unity the single principle of obligation Alexander of
Hales works to divide that oneness into a comprehensive system of law.65 First
he divides his single principle into two (obligation to God, obligation to neigh-
bour), another perfect number. Then, using a system involving two sets of the
perfect number three (heart, word, deed; self, spouse, goods), he divides his
binary division into the perfect number ten, which has the character of com-
pletion, inclusion and the linking of heaven and earth. His system allows
Alexander to divide his first obligation, to God, into three parts, and his second,
to neighbour, into seven, made up of three, one, and three. Three threes plus
one: he could hardly hope for a better illustration of how the commandments
are all that is needed to understand God in Creation; they are both necessary
for salvation, but also sufficient to it.
Alexanders technique alerts us to an important principle espoused by
medieval theologians, which is that the perfection of unity yet required divi-
sion in order to be understood. Keep the Law of God is not enough, unless
that Law is divided into parts that make sense to us. We can see that principle
taking shape in different ways in the intellectual life of the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries. The twelfth century made a speciality out of gathering
together knowledge in the shape of compendia of materials on various sub-
jects. The Gloss on the Bible, Peter Lombards Sentences, the Articella for medi-
cine, and various law codes and glosses are all examples of the collection of
knowledge to form the foundations of further study. Such compendia may
seem like the opposite of the principle of division, but in fact they rely on it,
since each represents one slice of the whole cake of knowledge, and before
there can be slices, there has to be a method of division. The most famous of
these methods was the theory of categorisation proposed by Hugh of St Victor
in the Didascalicon, but we can also see division in practice when we look at

64 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), c. 7, pt. V. Simon of Hinton uses the notion
of transgression rather than obligation as the basis for these distinctions: see P.A. Walz,
The Exceptiones from the Summa of Simon of Hinton, Angelicum 13 (1936), 283368,
at306317.
65 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), cc. 14 and 7, pt 5.
Number 71

the fledgling medieval universities which developed from the early twelfth-
century schools. These each developed a specialism of curriculum amongst
the faculties of higher knowledge arts, canon law, civil law, theology and
medicine so that Bologna, for instance, was known for law and Paris for the-
ology; and students, too, were divided into nations for the purposes of organ-
isation and discipline. In fact, probably the key element in the success of the
Lombards Sentences was the way in which it divided its material. Sentences
(short opinions on the resolution of a disputed question, using evidence drawn
from authoritative sources) were not new as a means of studying theological
problems.66 What Peter Lombard offered was a logical scheme of dividing the
material that made for easy use in the classroom. Peter grouped his sententiae
into four books, On God, On Creation, On the Incarnation, On the Sacraments
and the Eschaton, and in those books he further divided and sub-divided his
questions and answers into distinctiones and capitula, within which he gives
arguments pro and con and, sometimes, solutions and responses. He proceeds
step by step, one question logically following on from its predecessor, building
his readers knowledge from the ground up.67 He gives no sweeping summa-
ries, nor does he attempt to survey the whole field. On the contrary, his method
is one of divide and rule: the only way to understand the vast subject of God
and Gods works is to divide it into comprehensible parts and look at each in
turn. If he can divide it properly, then his reader will have all that is necessary
and sufficient for correct belief.
All that is necessary and sufficient could, indeed, be the definition of the
summa, the iconic form of thirteenth-century theological writing for which
the Sentences is a precursor. In the summa, a word encompassing both sum-
mary and summation, the principle of division is taken even further. In John of
La Rochelles Tractatus de Legibus, for example, the discussion of honouring
parents is inq. 3, tr. 2, Sect.1, q. 2, tit. 4, c. 4, art. 2, with the article itself involv-
ing arguments for and against, a solution and responses. Given that the funda-
mental doctrinal framework of Christianity had been set by the early Church
councils, such increasing compartmentalisation was the only way forward for

66 Cdric Giraud, Per verba magistri: Anselme de Laon et son cole au XIIe sicle (Turnhout,
2010) gives a full account of the development of sententiae in Laon, and discusses the
Liber Pancrisis as an early attempt at organisation. See also M.T. Clanchy and Lesley
Smith, Abelards Description of the School of Laon: what might it tell us about early scho-
lastic teaching?, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 54 (2010), 134.
67 For example, book 4, distinction 1: On sacraments. What is a sacrament? What is a sign?
Whats the difference between a sign and a sacrament? Why were sacraments instituted?
What is the difference between sacraments in the Old Law and in the New?and so on.
72 Chapter 2

theological knowledge. If the Articles of the Creed would not be changed, then a
scholars task was to interpret their meaning for the contemporary world; if there
could only be ten commandments, they needed to be subject to deeper scrutiny
and wider questioning, covering as many aspects and contexts as possible, in an
attempt to include all possibilities. Thirteenth-century scholars aimed at an
increasingly scientific approach to the matter of Christian belief, which breaking
down the overarching doctrinal principles into their constituent elements, and
addressing one by one the questions this brought to light, was designed to
achieve. This desire for taxonomy, for dividing the world into categories and
naming them, was characteristic of the work of Aristotle; and for twelfth- and
thirteenth-century scholars it was both a lesson they could learn from him,
and a reason for their attraction to his writings. Bonaventure, for example, adds
three of the Aristotelian four causes to the characteristics of the Trinity exhibited
by the first three commandments. The first corresponds to God the Father and
Aristotles Efficient Cause; the second corresponds to God the Son and Exemplary
Causes; and the third corresponds to the Holy Spirit and Final Causes.
Scholastic training meant that, even when they were working in a format
outside of the schools and summae, theologians might advance an argument
by dividing and sub-dividing. Bonaventure, a Franciscan friar trained in and
teaching at the Paris schools, wrote a series of sermon-like collationes on the
commandments which he delivered to his brothers in religion.68 He begins by
discussing motives for keeping the precepts, because, he says, motive always
comes before action. There is, however, not simply one undifferentiated
motive. Motive is divided into parts:

And it should be noted that there are four motives which lead us to
observe Gods commandments. The first is the authority or dignity of the
one commanding. The second is the benefit to be derived from the obser-
vance. The third is the peril from transgressing. The fourth is the faultless
character of the commands.69

But this first division is not enough. On the first motive, for instance, he adds:

First, the authority of the one commanding should move us to observe

the commandments of God, because it is God who commands us to

68 Bonaventure, Collationes de decem praeceptis, in Opera omnia, 5 (Quaracchi, 1891); English

translation by Paul J. Spaeth, St. Bonaventures Collations on the Ten Commandments,
Works of Saint Bonaventure 6 (St Bonaventure, NY, 1995).
69 Bonaventure, Collations, Coll. 1, Sect.2.
Number 73

observe the precepts. That God is of great authority is clear for three rea-
sons. First, it is he who creates us by his great power. Second, it is he who
rules and governs us by his marvellous wisdom. Third, it is he who saves
us by his generous kindness.70

Each of these three reasons is then discussed in turn, with biblical examples to
afforce his arguments: Job says, Isaiah says, Psalms says, Deuteronomy
says, and so on around two for each reason. And this pattern, of dividing
each motive into three parts and adducing examples to support it, is carried on
throughout the collation. So from the initial, undivided notion of motive,
Bonaventure divides first into four, then into three, making twelve in all. Four
and three, as we know, are significant numbers, and twelve was thought to
have mystical properties as the number of the Apostles, amongst many scrip-
tural and natural instances.
Working by dividing in this way allows Bonaventure to do two things at
once. Practically speaking, he can make his argument easier to follow and
remember: four sets of three are easier to work through than than a list of
twelve; but even a list of twelve is simpler to remember than an undifferenti-
ated mass of argument or example. But beyond practicality, the significance of
the numbers around which the collation coalesces confirms to his audience
that Bonaventures argument is sound and that by his division he has encom-
passed the totality of the question. This sort of polyvalence is a hallmark of
medieval exegesis. It was common for interpreters to use both the literal and
spiritual meanings of words to explain what a biblical passage might mean,
reading passages as allegories, for instance, in order to get at a hidden, deeper
reading. The elegance of number and division could provide a similar, addi-
tional sense of the text.
There is a distinct satisfaction to be had from the manipulation of these
numbers. Quite apart from anything they might represent, being able to per-
mutate the figures and map the groups one onto another produces the childish
pleasure of being able to put the sums together and make the numbers come
out right. For medieval theologians, they illustrate the mathematical elegance
of a universe which runs according to reproduceable rules and constants. It is
also a universe where numbers have significance beyond their use in counting.
Same-sized groups whatever their content will have a deeper common
meaning, just because of that identity of number. If they can find that deeper
meaning, they can know more about the divine plan for the world and their
place in it. Of course, this is a circular argument. The theologians look for

70 Ibid., Sect.3.
74 Chapter 2

commonality because they believe the numbers to be significant. To the colder

eye, the facts have to be stretched unreasonably to make the links at all.
Must we then condemn medieval commentators as hopelessly confined by
their interpretative methods? On the one hand, we can view their attempts at
number theory as a pseudo-scientific precursor of modern supersititions (which
can often be traced at least to the Middle Ages) which use numbers in just this
way. Good things, or bad things such as deaths, are often said to come in threes.
Thirteen has been an unlucky number at least since Roman times; even today,
some streets have no house numbered thirteen, some tall buildings no thirteenth
floor. Cats still have nine lives, and nine (three times three) has ancient connota-
tions of good luck.71 But the root of the desire for such manipulation reflects
numbers which really do seem to be constants in the universe, such as or the
speed of light in Einsteins equation, E=mc2. Modern science takes it for granted
that such stable mathematics exists: the universe seems to run on laws; but for
scientists these can say nothing about the existence of God, merely about the
nature of physics. In comparison, modern biblical exegesis has put aside the idea
of finding meaning in number in favour of anthropological exploration, form
criticism and literary theory. Somewhat ironically, as science has become author-
itative, theologians belief in the power and meaning of number has declined.
There is another more obvious, everyday reason for the commentators
interest in number and the relations between these groups of precepts, virtues,
vices, and so on: the links between the numbers make the groupings easier to
remember, and they need to be memorable so that those for whom the com-
mentaries and Summae were written could go out and preach and teach them
to the laity. In their turn, the congregations who heard them were more likely
to remember the cardinal sins or virtues and the plagues and precepts because
they are linked together in numbered ranks. The number attachments mean
that what they hear is not simply a list, it is a gathering, and as such it becomes
more likely to be remembered. Medieval (and modern) memory theory
works by linking one thing to another, so that initially one brings to mind not
the thing itself but an object or place associated with it, which fires off a
mental flash to illuminate the desired memory.72 By linking so many of these

71 The power of numerical coincidence to amaze has not diminished. When in 2013 Andy
Murray became the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years, newspapers noted
that he won on 7th of July (the 7th month), that he and his opponent had been born
7 days apart, that he broke serve in the seventh game of each set, and that the last British
singles winner was in 1977.
72 Mary Carruthers has written extensively on memory, e.g., The Book of Memory: a study of
memory in medieval culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008).
Number 75

theological ideas in numbered relays, the commentators make sure that each
has a better chance of being recalled.
This may also be a motive, conscious or not, underlying the spiritual mean-
ings given to the plagues of Egypt, for instance. The order and content of the
plagues are not important in themselves, in that it would not be a matter of
faith to remember them. But if told vividly, as tiny emotive narratives, bringing
to life the discomfort of boils, or dog flies, or the horror of water running as
blood, they are memorable. Memory works much better when information is
joined to emotion; and so word pictures which link the sins of the plagues to
the commandments which remedy them are much more likely to make them
stick in the brain than trying to learn a straightforward list of plagues or prohi-
bitions. So do the medieval commentators have method in their madness?
What began seeming like a slightly dotty lost cause, linking the ten plagues of
Egypt with the ten commandments, may begin to make some sense. What they
appear to undertake out of mere tradition (because it has always been done) or
as a verbal tick (all tens have to be put together) may yield something more
after all. For the commentator, as a teacher or preacher, joining the lists this
way may help him remember them and their meanings, and he passes that
technique on to his pupils without their conscious knowledge.
Even the bare numbers, however, have their own logic in a worldview
entirely overseen by God. When the rules of arithmetic and mathematics make
sense, when a system of music based on arithmetic is harmonious, where God
has revealed the purpose of history and the divine plan in the written word of
Scripture, and where God wishes humanity to understand that revelation
(using God-given reason), then what is more reasonable than that biblical
numbers tell us more than what they count? Numbers are, after all, the most
fundamental parts of the literal sense of Scripture: a number is a number
across cultures and history, in a way that even a simple noun such as shep-
herd or king is not. If numbers do not have a fundamental meaning, then
what hope can the commentators have of understanding those much more
slippery characters, words?
 Chapter 3

God

The three commandments on the first stone tablet are concerned with God.
Nothing could be more important for the life of the believer, and so it is not
surprising that these three precepts are interpreted as telling Christians and
Jews not only how they should behave, but more importantly, as giving them
knowledge of fundamental characteristics of the deity. Since God was the cre-
ator of the universe, this also tells believers something about the universe in
which they live. Although the nature of God is the overarching theme of this
chapter, we will approach the material by looking at each commandment in
turn, rather than simply gathering together what they tell us as a whole. This
will allow us to get a sense of how medieval commentators approached the
Decalogue, which includes how they thought the precepts fitted together.
We saw in the previous chapter the success of Augustines Trinitarian
schema which dedicated three commandments to God, and situated them, by
themselves, on the first stone tablet. The neat threefold division allowed com-
mentators to make connections between the precepts and the powers and
characteristics of the three persons of the Trinity. Thus the commandment to
remember the sabbath was associated with the Holy Spirit and Goodness; the
commandment against taking the Lords name in vain was associated with
God the Son and the characteristic of Truth; and the first commandment
belonged to God the Father, who was severally linked to Unity, Power and
Majesty. Nevertheless, theologians were quite sure that the commandments
had to be thought of together as well as apart, since the persons of the Trinity
are inseparable. Robert Grosseteste noted that it was Arius heresy to say that
the Trinity was graded or ranked in some order of importance, and this was a
lesson to remember when considering the first three precepts each was as
important as the other, and they formed a single whole.1 For Bonaventure, the
wording of the first commandment itself shows readers that God will lead
them out of unbelief towards the Cross and the Trinity.2 Bonaventures
approach should remind us that, despite this being a Hebrew Bible text,
for these Christian interpreters it was essentially and had always been
unchangeably Christian and Trinitarian; indeed, the existence of the first

1 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De secundo mandato, no. 6.

2 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 2, nos 713.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_005

God 77

three commandments was a sign, for those who could read it, that the
Trinitarian God was not something new, coming into being with the birth
of Christ, but had been there from the beginning. It should not surprise us
that the Trinity is at the heart of the medieval Christian treatment of the
Mosaic law, but we should also not forget just what a challenge this was to
Jewish understanding of the text. Was this a deliberate policy of anti-Jewish
polemic or simply the inevitable result of a consciousness searching for and
steeped in the significance of the number three? It is a question we might bear
in mind as we look at the interpretation of the individual commandments in
more detail.

The First Commandment

I am the Lord your God, who has led you out of the land of Egypt, out of
the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not
make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above, or in the earth below, or of those things that are in the
waters under the earth. You shall not revere them, or worship them: I am
the Lord your God, strong, jealous, visiting the injustice of the fathers
upon the children, to the third and fourth generation of those who hate
me; and showing mercy to thousands of those who love me, and keep my
commandments.

Of the many issues that the first commandment raised, the most fundamen-
talwas exactly what its text consisted of. Compared to the rest of the Decalogue,
this precept was unprecedentedly long and involved. It seemed to be made
up of many parts without a single thread. It was no wonder that Origen
preferred to split the text in two one commandment against other gods,
another against graven images. However, since Augustines threefold division
decreed that this passage was definitely not to be divided, order had to be
imposed on this seemingly disparate material. Nonetheless, even accepting
the Augustinian numbering of the precepts, there was a further question as to
the purpose of the first part of the commandment and how the apparently
unrelated phrases might be connected. What had having no other gods to
do with not making a carved image? Was the first sentence a mere pream-
ble, identifying the speaker, or did it have a deeper purpose as part of the
precept? And then, each sentence or phrase raised questions of its own, in
addition to the matter of their relationship, and it is to those problems that we
shall now turn.
78 Chapter 3

i I am the Lord Your God, Who has Led you Out of the Land of Egypt,
Out of the House of Slavery
Medieval opinion varied as to what exactly constituted the commandment, that
is to say, which part of the words was a command; and if it was not to be the
whole of the text, what was the status of the rest? The Glossa ordinaria cited
Origen in declaring that this first sentence was a mere preamble or introduction,
serving to remind the Israelites (and Christians) of what they already knew: that
their Lord was the one God, Yahweh, the God of the exodus. This is not, it says,
a commandment, but it tells you whose commandments they are.3 Straightaway
we find ourselves in a world where authority is crucial. The commandments are
not to be obeyed because of their inherent goodness, justice or common sense,
but because they are the commandments of the God of the exodus. For medi-
eval Christian commentators, reliance on recognised and respected authorities
was the keystone of their working method. Just as they constantly refer back to
the Bible, so here, the Bible refers back to its author (and authority), God. The
theologians working method is visible in another way in this first phrase, in the
very fact of their dealing with the commandments in this way, phrase by phrase,
in the assumption that each word has meaning. Indeed, Origen can wring yet
more from these initial few words.4 By recalling that he is the God who brought
the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, the text makes it clear from the very
beginning that this God is a God of liberty, a God who brings freedom to his
people and who wishes freedom to be the way they live their lives. Freedom is
thus a fundamental element of serving God and of life in God. The contrast is
clear: unlike the gods of the tribes surrounding Israel, who demand slavish wor-
ship, this God wants his people to grow in independence and free will; he wants
them to make for themselves the decisions that will bring them closer to eternal
life with him. And yet this reminiscence of freedom stands at the head of a set of
rules. The message is clear: freedom is not to be equated with the licence to do
as you wish; it is founded on the restriction of law.
There is a further, spiritual dimension to the interpretation. This first phrase
tells believers that, as well as leading his people from the literal, historical
bondage of slavery in Egypt, with the Decalogue God leads them away from the
spiritual slavery of sin, even before the Incarnation of Christ: We have come
from paradise of liberty to slavery of sin, so the first word of the Ten is about
freedom, says the Gloss, drawn from Origens homily on Exodus.5 Gods agent

3 Biblia cum glossa, Ex 20: Ego sum dominus (interlinear gloss).

4 See, e.g., Origen, Origne. Homlies sur lExode, ed. M. Borret, Sources chrtiennes 321 (Paris,
1985), hom. 8; transl. R.E. Heine, Homelies on Genesis and Exodus (Washington, DC, 1982).
5 Biblia cum glossa, Ex 20: Ego sum dominus.
God 79

in both cases is Moses: he leads the physical escape from Egypt and, with the
giving of the law, the spiritual escape from sin. As a biblical interpreter, Origen
is always looking to the non-literal exposition, so he reads Egypt in this phrase
as this present time. The purpose of the passage is thus to turn believers away
from this world and its slavery of transient preoccupations to the permanence
of eternal spiritual life. Read in this way, this first phrase is not a command-
ment in itself but an interpretative key to the precepts as a whole, illuminating
the manner in which they should be expounded, understood and obeyed. It
teaches that keeping the commandments according to the life of the spirit
rather than the letter will lead believers from the bondage of Egypt the slav-
ery of this world to the freedom and blessedness of the life of the world to
come, the life with God.

ii You shall have no Other Gods before me

Two tricky issues are raised by the next phrase of the precept. Exodus could
have said, There are no other gods, but instead it reads, You shall have no
other gods before me and just as we saw with law in general, it is the Apostle
Paul who causes the trouble. The first letter to the Corinthians reads, For even
though there are those who are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth (as
in fact there are many gods and many lords), but for us there is one God, the
Father (1 Cor 8: 56). Rather awkwardly, Paul here seems to accept that other
gods do indeed exist, but are simply inferior to the God of Israel. This is clearly
at odds with the Christian and Jewish understanding that there is only one
God: nothing else worthy to be called a god exists. Once again, Origen extri-
cates Paul from trouble, or as Origen would perhaps himself say, allows believ-
ers to understand more clearly what the Apostle intends. Even if other nations
think there are many lords who have dominion over them, and many gods
whom they worship, for us there is one God and one Lord.6 The Gloss includes
a point from this same Origen homily, noting that the meaning would have
seemed more absolute if the commandment (and Paul, following it) had said
simply there are no other gods, but saying have no other gods, seems not to
deny that there are others.
Robert Grosseteste takes a more practical line. According to Grosseteste, the
phrase is included because of the ease with which anyone may fall into idola-
try, by which he means not only worshipping as God things other than God,
but also worshipping God in the wrong way.7 He notes in particular those who
call upon God not for his own sake, because they believe God to be the highest

6 Origen, Homlies sur lExode, ed. Borret, hom. 8, c. 2.

7 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De primo mandato, nos 12.
80 Chapter 3

good and the greatest happiness, but rather for what they can get out of believ-
ing.8 Your God is that which is your greatest love, he adds, quoting approvingly
the letter to the Philippians (3: 1819), where those who love their appetite best
are said to make a god of their belly. It can be the same, he says, with money, or
lust, or pride, or envy, as well as with those who worship the sun, moon or stars,
or objects made of gold and precious stones; you do not have to be a declared
pagan or heretic to break this commandment.9 Grosseteste is a keen observer
of human behaviour, and what others might excuse as silliness he fastens upon
as the thin end of the wedge of real idolatry:

There are those who are baptised and call themselves Christians, after
the name of Christ, who yet retain little vestiges or remnants of this sort
of impiety, so that, seeing a new moon, they turn towards it, sign them-
selves with the sign of the cross, say a prayer to the Lord, and then turn
round three times; after this, they kiss the first person they happen to
meet, believing themselves thus to be safe from danger for a whole
month.10

For Robert, these actions are not harmless quirks but demonstrations of how
stealthy and ubiquitous idolatry can be. Nicholas of Lyra has similar concerns.
He quotes his favourite Jewish commentator, Rashi, to say that other gods are
here understood generally to mean all idolatry which alienates you from the
true God, not simply some specific act of irreverence or worship. Nicholas
appears to concur (in opposition to some Christian doctors he does not say
which) that trying to pinpoint which other gods or particular actions are idol-
atrous is beside the point: here, God is God at all times and in all places. For
Nicholas, this is the meaning of the phrase before me.11
It is interesting here that the commentators Rashi as well as the Christians
are concerned to play down the melodrama of this phrase: they do not want
readers to think that having other gods only refers to the sort of falling into
idolatry represented by the episode of the golden calf (Ex 32). The idolatry they
worried about was not a matter of the exotic and esoteric, but the everyday

8 Ibid., no. 3.
9 Ibid., nos 56.
10 Ibid., no. 8. Grosseteste is right to think that such beliefs have lasting power: my mother
has her own new moon ritual which (as Grossesteste mentions in his discussion)
involves turning the money over in her pockets; she would undoubtedly agree that it is a
superstition, but she always does it.
11 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, Ex 20: Non habebis; coram me.
God 81

substitution of something other than God as the most important part of a

believers life. Whether this was money or family or even pride in their own
piety, it was always wrong: there could be no other gods than Yahweh.

iii You shall not Make for Yourself any Carved Image, or any Likeness of
Anything that is in Heaven above, or in the Earth below, or of those
Things that are in the Waters under the Earth. You shall not Revere
them, or Worship them
This was a tricky problem. On the surface, the commandment appears to
indeed does forbid the making of an image of God or of any created thing, in
particular to use them in worship. But Christians lived surrounded by images.
Had they abandoned this precept? When he admits Jewish criticism of the way
Christians keep the first commandment, Bonaventure implies that the Jews at
least appear to stick more closely to the precept than Christians do.12 Indeed,
this was a prohibition closely adhered to by Jews, whose reluctance to make
any kind of image or picture of God extended even to the forbidding of writing
down the whole name of God (the tetragrammaton or four letters), and instead
leaving a space in a text, or substituting an epithet such as The Most High or
The Eternal. But, despite a controversial history, which is never alluded to, the
tradition of religious imagery was too well settled in Christian religious prac-
tice for commandments commentators to consider forbidding it;13 they never
explicitly discuss whether this precept might actually prohibit the making of
images or religious symbols for worship. Instead, the expositors use this part of
the precept to talk about what it might mean to worship such a man-made
image about idolatry. In doing this, they wish, of course, to distance them-
selves from the vivid picture of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai the first
time, carrying the Ten Commandments written on two stone tablets by the
very hand of God, only to find Aaron and the people worshipping a golden calf.
It was a scene often depicted in medieval manuscripts: a golden statue raised
upon a plinth, and the Israelites dancing around it. How could Christians, with
their plethora of religious imagery crosses and crucifix figures, models of the

12 Collationes, Coll. 3, nos 89. In his recapitulation of Coll. 2 in Coll. 3, Bonaventure says
Jews object that Christians worship three gods instead of one (and so, if God has a son,
why not a wife, too?); that their churches are full of images; and that the idea of the bread
and wine of the Eucharist becoming God is incredible.
13 The question of images had been controversial in Byzantium, in iconoclasm, and to a
lesser extent in the West, for example in the Libri Carolini. For an overview, see Alain
Besanon, The Forbidden Image: an intellectual history of iconoclasm, transl. J.M. Todd
(Chicago and London, 2000).
82 Chapter 3

Trinity, images of saints, the whole story of God in the world depicted in paint-
ing, sculpture or artefact really claim that what they were doing was
different?
The commentators take two main tacks, both built on the language of the
commandment. The first asks what an idol is; the second, what it means to
worship. Beginning with the question of what an idol is, the words of the com-
mandment run thus: any carved image, or any likeness of anything. For medi-
eval scholars, the key word is any-thing: they wish to distinguish between
anything and any thing. Their point is to differentiate between something
existing in Creation and something that we can imagine but which does not
exist; only the first is related to God, maker of all things. This approach was
buttressed by another phrase from Paul, an idol is nothing in the world (1 Cor
8: 4), which the commentators read as no-thing in the world; that is, it is no
thing created by God, but only existing in human imagination. According to
this interpretation, believers could make images to use in worship, as long as
they were likenesses of things already created by God forms of humans, ani-
mals, or inanimate creation. However, the precept still strictly forbade making
an image of something not to be found in Creation, or one made up of dispa-
rate parts of created things. Peter Comestor cites the mixed animal gods of the
Egyptians as the kind of hybrid that was forbidden.14
This approach, along with so many others, was drawn from Origen and
Augustine. Origen says, If you make a copy of something that does exist, e.g. of
an animal or bird, and pray to it, this is not an idol but a similitude. An idol is
something fictive.15 Our minds, says Bonaventure, make new compositions
(compositiones); they do not make new things (res).16 This patristic distinction
was commonly accepted by medieval commentators and regularly repeated;
but it was important, as is so often the case in medieval theology, not so much
for what it said in itself, as for what it implied. For the other no thing that is
no-thing made by God was, of course, sin, and Peter Lombard quoted
Augustine in his Sentences discussion of this commandment to make it quite
clear that, although God made everything, God did not make sin. Augustines
words are drawn from his commentary on John (1: 3) through him, everything

14 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, Liber Exodi, c. 40, Primum praeceptum, PL 198: 1164B.
See in general Michael Camille, Hybridity, Monstrosity, and Bestiality in the Roman de
Fauvel, in Fauvel Studies. Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris, Bibliothque
Nationale de France, MS franais 146, ed. Margaret Bent and Andrew Wathey (Oxford,
1998), pp. 161174.
15 Origen, Homlies, hom. 8, c. 3.
16 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 37, dub.1.
God 83

was made: God gives the material but the foolishness of men gives it form;
not made by the Word of God. So, just as sin, not made by the Word, is nothing,
so men make nothing when they sin.17 In order to make absolutely sure that
no-one believes that God has a part in sin, the Lombard expounds this
Johannine text, using Jerome and others to bolster his interpretation. The com-
mandment is not just about idols, then, it is about all sin, and Peter takes the
issue of graven images so seriously not because of their outward meaning but
because they go to the heart of this more fundamental question. For medieval
commentators, the exegesis of this phrase was important not to make a point
about the creation of images or even the worshipping of idols, but to answer
heretics who said that God, maker of all things, must also have made sin. It was
a reply, like a number we shall encounter, which responded to dualist ideas of
a good god and a bad god, whose respective creations battled for supremacy in
the world. The powerful central thrust of dualism answered that persistent
thorn in the side of monotheists: if God is good, who created sin? The com-
mentators reply is that when men make idols, they really make sin.
Scholars were also united in agreeing that this precept addressed the issue
of idolatry rather than the simple making of images, and that idolatry meant
something much more than making a cult out of an object. Bonaventure, for
example, is clear on the point: [In reply] to the objection made here, that this
precept seems only to apply to craftsmen, it must be said that by this [com-
mandment] God did not only intend to prohibit the fabrication of idols, but
the veneration of all idols; and in this he even included, because he wished it,
that all worship [latria] be of him alone, and therefore he prefaces the precept
with God your God is one; for there is only one true God who is to be adored
[unus enim solus Deus et verus est adorandus]. And so this precept is more of an
affirmation than a negation. For no-one fulfils this command if he simply
desists from idolatry, because what the command orders here is adoration,
which is to be shown to God alone.18 This shift from a mere negativity to the
need for positive worship, is an important move, elegantly made. No-one is
allowed to get away with indifference or simple lack of hostility towards God;
everyone is enjoined to affirm that there is only one God.
Given, then, that images are to be allowed in worship, how exactly can they
be used? The most basic difference given in the Gloss, which would have been
generally known by being repeated in Peter Comestors ubiquitous Historia
scholastica, is between adorare, which is the outer, physical manifestation of

17 Augustine, Tractatus CXXIV in Evangelium Ioannis, ed. R. Willems, CCSL 36 (Turnhout,

1965), John 1: 3, tr.1, n.13, quoted in Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c. 2.
18 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, dist. 37, dub. 1.
84 Chapter 3

worship, which can be compelled, for instance by fear, and colere, which is
the inner desire of the heart.19 The sin of idolatry (idolatria), may thus be
defined (in an echo of Romans 1: 25) as all mortal sin in which Creation is loved
more than its Creator. Origen and Augustine address the problem by a careful
use of language.20 They distinguish minutely between the kinds of worship
appropriate to different things. English has lost (if it ever had) the variety of
vocabulary needed to translate from the Latin and Greek the fine distinctions
medieval theologians draw between adorare and colere, and between adora-
tion by latria, dulia, and hyperdulia. Drawing on William of Auxerre, John of La
Rochelle has one of the fullest expositions of the possibilities.21 Johns over-
arching organisational principle for understanding of the world is the notion
of the debt or obligation that each being owes to the others; and it is because
of this emphasis on debt that his treatment of the first commandment is
focussed on the different sorts of adoration and worship every creature owes to
God, to Christ, and to their fellow creatures. He marshalls a marvellous series
of questions to cover the whole field of worship, starting with the core problem
of why it is that God is to be adored at all.22 John is quite clear that, although
the first commandment is especially linked to God the Father, the adoration it
demands is owed to all the Trinity equally; this was orthodox belief and he is
careful to expound it. He asks whether all adoration is fundamentally the same,
although he distinguishes between its various forms: latria, dulia, and hyperdu-
lia. The definitions tend with all commentators to be somewhat vague and

19 Biblia cum glossa, Ex 20: Non adorabis; Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, Liber Exodi, c.
40, Primum praeceptum, PL 198: 1164C.
20 See, for example, Origen, Homlies, hom. 8, c. 4; Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum,
ed. J. Fraipoint, CCSL 33 (Turnhout, 1958), I, qu. 71.
21 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 287304. Johns three distinctiones on ado-
ration take up twenty quarto pages in the modern edition, showing how important he
takes the topic to be, and how particularly full (even by medieval standards) his academic
writing is. He wins out over many of his peers, however, by the logic of the structure of his
work, and the fact that, by and large, he keeps to his working plan. See also William of
Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 26.
22 Dicendum ergo simpliciter quod adoratio est ratione maiestatis, qui maiestas dicitur
respectu maioris et superioris status, quod semper respicit adoratio. Et sicut ratio maies-
tatis plus se tenet ex parte potestatis quam veritatis vel bonitatis, sic magis ratione potes-
tatis debetur Dei adoratio quam veritatis vel bonitatis, cum ratione maiestatis debeatur
servitus illa: Tractatus de Legibus, no. 290. Johns answer (although it comes a little close
to creating a hierarchy in the Trinity) explains in passing why God the Father (associated
with potestas), God the Son (associated with veritas) and God the Holy Spirit (associated
with bonitas) are individually as well as jointly adored.
God 85

circular: latria is that sort of worship which is due only to God. As to what this
worship amounts to, John does not go into detail, but he does quote Rabanus
Maurus on Genesis on the importance of interior adoration: to worship
(adorare) God, who alone should be worshipped, is to turn the whole attention
of ones mind towards him.23 Clearly, it is the whole attention that is neces-
sary if God is to be given his proper place.
John also considers thoroughly the adoration due to created beings is also
thoroughly considered, covering what is proper to angels, to humans, to ani-
mals, and even to inanimate creation.24 The worship due to created things
(even to Christ in his human nature) is termed dulia, although there is a special
classification, hyperdulia, for the Virgin Mary terms borrowed from
Byzantium. There are one or two awkward categories. At the Eucharist, for
instance, the consecrated host is to be worshipped (adorare) in the same man-
ner as God; but if you are not sure whether the host is consecrated or not, you
should give it the benefit of the doubt, as long as you have made some effort to
find out. And even as an image, the Cross is owed more worship than living
people, because the honour and dignity of the image is related not to the image
itself but to the exemplar which it depicts.25 Believers are warned to be on
their guard against Satan pretending to be Christ. Everyone should know that
this can happen, and should be wary of immediately worshipping (adorare)
anything or anyone without first trying to discern the truth. Prayer is always a
remedy against error: if anyone prays to God with his whole heart, the truth
will be revealed, and God will not permit a believer to be deceived. A last resort
for those still uncertain is to worship using the formula, I worship you, if you
are Christ (Adoro te, si tu es Christus). John even asks whether one should
venerate evil men. The question arises because of his belief in the core exis-
tence of an obligation owed between all things, because they were created by
God and made in his image and likeness. And so, insofar as they are creatures
of God, but not insofar as they are evil, even wicked men deserve some form of
veneration. This takes John to the commonly raised question of whether a bad
priest should be venerated, but being John he adds an interesting twist: should

23 Adorare est ad Deum, qui solus est adorandus, tota mentis intentione tendere: John of
La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 289. The reference to Rabanus seems now to be
unidentifiable: see Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 9, art. 2, qu. 3, n. 5.
24 Tractatus de Legibus: on Christ, no. 294; on angels, nos 295297; on humans, nos 298302;
on the Cross, no. 303; on images, no. 304.
25 John takes this position from John of Damascus, De Fide orthodoxa (4, c. 16): Dignitas
imaginisnon est ex parte imaginis, sed ex parte rei quam imaginat. Unde Damascenus:
Honor imaginis ad prototypum, id est exempla, refertur: Tractatus de Legibus, no. 303.
86 Chapter 3

a bad priest be venerated more than a good man? For the indelible character of
his ordination, he should; for his evil character, no, he should not. John leaves
the reader to decide how to do that in practice.
In concentrating on the sense and extent of what it means to worship, Johns
treatment of the first commandment ignores the making of images, the con-
cept of vengeance, or questions of direct and indirect punishment, all of which
were integral parts of other medieval commentaries, as we shall see. But it is
arguable that he is right to concentrate on the central issue of worship, since it
was undoubtedly at the heart of the Mosaic law. These questions were of more
than historical interest for medieval theologians; the issue of right worship
went to the core of the struggle with heretics, since it was argued that worship-
ping wrongly was not worshipping at all; unless God was worshipped for his
proper qualities as God, to the exclusion of everything else and in a qualitatively
different way from veneration shown to anything else, then that god which was
being worshipped was not truly God, as Christians understood him, in spite of
what the worshipper might say. Seemingly technical questions, such as those
about the veneration of the host or of bad priests, also had a place in the argu-
ment against heretics. For some groups, the personal goodness of the minister
(known by Cathars, tellingly, as a perfectus or perfecta) was all-important: if he
or she were in sin, or mistaken about the ceremonial, the sacrament had no
validity. In orthodox theology, even if a priest was personally wicked, or mis-
taken in his beliefs or practices, as long as the believer acted in good faith, the
validity of the sacraments dispensed by the priest was not disturbed. However,
in Johns work, as in most medieval exegetical writing, the targets of these argu-
ments are rarely if ever mentioned. We need to read backwards to understand
why some questions were raised. This may be because everyone listening or
reading knew the key issues of the day; but it may also be that to acknowledge
heretical belief openly would have been to give it a kind of legitimacy that the
commentators did not want to bestow on it. John also reveals himself as an
astute observer of human behaviour and a canny psychologist. He recognises
peoples capacity for making gods of many things (indeed, he may have wryly
noted it with regard to Francis, the founder of his own Order), and the rush to
adoration. Perhaps he worries that a human need for heroes displaces the nec-
essarily repetitive nature of much orthodox quotidian Christian life.
Another mendicant friar, the Dominican Simon of Hinton, writing in Oxford,
was faced with a very direct example of those who did not worship the Christian
God, since the city housed an established and learned Jewish community.26

26 Cecil Roth, The Jews of Mediaeval Oxford (Oxford, 1951). See also W.A. Hinnebusch, The
Early English Friars Preachers (Rome, 1951).
God 87

It was the particular task of the Dominicans, as the Order of Preachers, to teach
right belief and practice to believers, in the face of heretics and non-believers.
To that end, Dominican houses were sometimes found in or near a Jewish
neighbourhood, as was the case in Oxford. Simons discussion of the first com-
mandment focuses on idolatry.27 He distinguishes three types: two where the
duty to venerate God is not properly understood, and a third in which false
gods are directly worshipped. Such worship can be in the commission of men-
tal or physical acts of veneration but Simon also, interestingly, adds the possi-
bility of worship by complicity (consciendo), by which he means taking part
in non-Christian practices. Ignorance is no excuse for any such behaviour. For
instance, Simon asks if it is licit to take part in Jewish rituals, such as sabbath
meals or seders. Eating the food is not sinful in itself, since for Christians,
unlike Jews, food is neither clean nor unclean, so the simple act of eating is
allowable. Nevertheless, Simon thinks it necessary for those who want to take
part in such meals to examine their motives for doing so: if they have any
intention of idolatry, or if doing so would scandalise the faithful or confirm
the infidel in his error, then they should not get involved. Simon is nervous
about the stability of what we might call ritual tourists, whether genuinely
interested in other religions or simply fascinated by the exotic and different.
Neither is to be encouraged. Curiosity was not in any sense a medieval virtue,
especially not where religion was concerned. It is important to remember that
no medieval Christian theologian would countenance any notion of religious
relativism as that might be understood today. On the contrary, all medieval
religious leaders felt very strongly their own responsibility for keeping the
faithful within the limits of orthodoxy, for the good of the whole community.
It is not surprising that Simon is also clear that believers should avoid all
unnecessary contact with Jews, whether at rituals or baths, for medical atten-
tion (Jewish doctors were acknowledged experts), by sharing living quarters,
or in other situations. Significantly, in his view the rules about non-contact
should be stricter with regard to meeting Jews than for Saracens (saraceni),
since the continuing existence of the Jews after the coming of Christ is more of
a scandal to Christians than the existence of Muslims who had never known
him. Although he admits that another opinion that all non-believers repre-
sent the same threat and should be treated in the same way exists, it seems
very likely that Simon is here reacting to his particular circumstances in
Oxford, living close to a settled Jewish community and recognising the ease of
possible meetings with Jews and the attraction that their closed, supportive,
learned congregation might hold for his young Dominican charges. After all,

27 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fols 124va-25ra.

88 Chapter 3

Dominicans were especially interested in biblical textual scholarship and

interpretation. To whom was it more natural to turn than to Jews?
Robert Grosseteste, another Oxford theologian, was lecturer to the citys
Franciscan community who, like Simon of Hintons Dominicans, were preach-
ers to all elements of society. Both extend their consideration of idolatry to a
discussion of one of its indirect forms superstition.28 Simon particularly cau-
tions against astrology, using arguments drawn from Augustine and Isidore.
Among the fledgling scientific community in Oxford, this may have been a
native vice, although distinguishing between astronomy and astrological prog-
nostication of any sort had always been a matter for care. Simon delineates
prohibitions of a number of forms of future-telling, including drawing lots and
divination by aero-, pyro-, and geo-mancy.29 All seem pseudo-scientific and
pretending towards more learning than the simpler superstitutions we earlier
saw Grosseteste condemn. Simons list rather seems directed towards scholars
who might fool themselves into thinking that they know what they are doing;
but for him, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He is especially hard on
priests who indulge in magical practices, condemning them to imprisonment
or banishment in a monastery. Once again, ignorance or gullibility is no excuse:
it is everyones duty to be cautious, to try to be discerning and to use their head;
when someone is utterly confused, the I worship you, if you are Christ for-
mula is always acceptable.
Some commentators were concerned that this first commandment could all
too easily seem like a ragbag of materials with little common thread, an atti-
tude that would undermine their use of Augustines three-seven division of the
precepts. They attempted to employ the phrases prohibiting the making of
images to link the various parts of the commandment together. Hugh of St
Cher argues that You shall not make for yourself a graven image was not said
on its own account, that is, in order to forbid representations, but in order to
prevent adoration of them to prevent idolatry. This means, he says, that it is
actually the same prohibition as the first part of the commandment, You shall
have no other gods but me, which forbids worship of other gods, and so it
makes sense for the two to be joined in one commandment.30 Bonaventure

28 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis, De primo mandato, nos 89; Simon of Hinton,

Quaestiones, fols 125ra-26vb.
29 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fol. 125ra-vb; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and
A. Kalb, CCSL 47 (Turnhout, 1955), bk 5; Isidore, Etymologies, bk 3, c. 27; bk 8, c. 9.
30 Hugh of St Cher, Postilla, on Ex 20: Patrum in filios: Solutio: Et cum dicitur: Non facies tibi
sculptile, nec omnem similitudinem, prohibetur factio sculptilis, et similitudinis, non prop-
ter se, sed propter adorationem, et ita idem est prohibitum, et ideo idem mandatum.
God 89

agrees: the phrase about the making of idols is the glue that holds the precept
together, since it prescribes the worship of the one God who is described by the
rest.31 For him, idolatry includes belief in the profane and superstitious errors
of philosophers, such as Aristotles belief in the eternity of the world; the per-
verse understanding of scripture by Arians, Sabellians, Donatists, Pelagians
and the like; disordered carnal desire such as he sees in Saracens, Nicolaists,
who say that it is allowable for any man to do shameful acts with any woman
and Epicureans, who say there is no life except this one.32 Bonaventure
admits that when as a student he heard that Aristotle taught the eternity of the
world, he was disturbed by the possibility and the force of the arguments in
favour; and this has left him believing that idolatry here also forbids all errone-
ous investigations of unholy and superstitious things a phrase he perhaps
not surprisingly leaves undefined.33 As ever, Bonaventures writing shows a
psychological insight that is instantly recognisable: curiosity is dangerous and
is forbidden because of the danger that it will lead to misunderstandings and
false beliefs.

iv I am the Lord your God, Strong, Jealous

More difficult sections were still to come. Ego sum Dominus Deus tuus fortis,
zelotes: the various English translations of zelotes as jealous or zealous give
an idea of the breadth of its Latin meaning. The emotional resonance of both
words was out of kilter with the concept of an impassible deity. Jealousy carries
overtones of human lovers, of crimes of passion; how could such things be
associated with the Christian God, one who urged his believers to stay above
the fray and turn the other cheek, presumably in imitation of his own charac-
ter and demeanour? The commentators play up this reminiscence of jealous

31 Bonaventure, Glossa, III, d. 37, dub. 1: quod in verbo illo Dominus non solum intendit
prohibere idoli fabricationem, sed omnem idoli venerationemUnde praeceptum illud
plus habet affirmationis quam negationis. Nec implet illud mandatum quis, si solum-
modo desistat ab idololatria, quia ibi praecipitur adoratio, quae soli Deo est exhibenda
Et ex his quae hic tanguntur et ibi dicta sunt, aliqualiter potest haberi primi mandati recta
intelligentia.
32 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 2, nos 2627; Coll. 3, no. 5. These were all sects of the early
Church considered to be heretical. Arians believed that Christ was created not begotten;
Sabellians that the Trinity consisted not of three persons but of three facets of God;
Donatists that poor clerical behaviour invalidated sacraments; and Pelagians that
redemption was a matter of human will. Bonaventure would have known of all these
through Augustine.
33 Non facies sculptile prohibentur omnes profanae et superstitione adinventiones erro-
rum: Collationes, Coll. 2, no. 28.
90 Chapter 3

lovers in their exposition. They speak of God as a husband, a loving spouse to

his bride, Creation. Origen, as usual, produces a reading according to the spiri-
tual sense of Scripture: a woman is either under the law of her husband or else
she is on her own a prostitute.34 If she is unmarried, then it is only to be
expected that she will sleep with whom she pleases, and no man can feel any
emotion on learning that she has no loyalty towards him. But a wife is differ-
ent. Here a husband can expect chastity, and that no other man will interfere
in the relationship. If he discovers that someone else has tried to take his wife
away, he can feel righteous anger while returning her to his hearth. This is the
protective jealousy for his woman, not the selfish jealousy that worries about
his own position. With this anthropomorphism, Origen describes Gods jeal-
ous concern for his bride: it arises from love for the other, to keep them from
harm, not from fear over ones own loss.
Origen takes the picture to a further spiritual plane. Every soul is either the
spouse of God or of the devil: either chaste, or prostituted with demons and
with many lovers.35 Actual physical sex is not a determinant: the physically
chaste can still be the devils bride, and God can make a prostitute into a virgin;
what matters is whom you worship. God agrees to be called jealous, a human
weakness, to teach us to be perfect in these matters. Stephen Langton produces
the same argument, quoting Origen and Augustine. His considerable discus-
sion aims, with many biblical quotations, to turn jealousy into a positive, desir-
able quality, the lack of which denotes a lack of love: and so the Lord is jealous
of the just soul.36 Peter Comestor, followed by Nicholas of Lyra, links this part
of the commandment with the previous phrase, once more trying to hold the
apparently disparate parts of the precept in some sort of union. God, they say,
is zealous to prevent humans fornicating with other gods in idolatry.37
The commentators method for dealing with this phrases seemingly nega-
tive anthropomorphism is to turn the expected motive for jealousy on its head.
The image of a furious deity charged and motivated by the wild emotion of
jealousy is not within the Christian concept of God, so they work to try to
make him seem less like a furious, comic, terrifying, jealous husband, in an
out-of-control situation (why would God need to be jealous unless someone
else had usurped his position?), and return to him the image of the Christian
God whose character is to care for his creation, even including the sacrifice of

34 Origen, Homlies, hom. 8, c. 5.

35 Ibid.
36 Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 124vb: Et sic est Dominus zelotes anime iuste.
37 Comestor, Historia scholastica, Liber Exodi, c. 40, primum praeceptum, PL 198: 1164C-D.
Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, on Exodus 20: Fortis zelotes.
God 91

his own son for the sake of the world. Starting from a description that appeared
full of human rage and volatility, they try to return God to the realm of the
acceptable calm, controlled, loving and on the whole their arguments are
convincing. By re-working jealousy as an emotion of protection, without
thought for self, they have made it legitimately divine. And by doing so, they
have returned order to the world.

v Visiting the Injustice of the Fathers upon the Children, to the Third
and Fourth Generation of those who Hate me; and Showing Mercy to
Thousands of Those Who Love me, and Keep my Commandments
But now to the nub of it. The idea of God visiting iniquity or injustice, not
only upon sinners but upon the children of sinners, seemed so outrageously
unjust that heretics seized upon it, so Origen says, to show that the Old
Testament cannot be acceptable to Christians, for this image of God was sim-
ply not compatible with orthodoxy.38 If anything was certain in the Christian
worldview, it was that God is just and this surely cannot be justice. But reject-
ing the Old Testament was not an option for orthodox believers; so how could
the commentators explain what God meant by this speech?
We should note first of all that they do acknowledge the difficulty. Rather
than trying to pretend it is easy to understand, they admit that the legitimacy
of the passage is disputed by heretics and needs to be explained. To make
things even more awkward, it seems to be at odds with other Old Testament
passages, such as Ezechiel 18: 19, the son does not carry the iniquity of the
father. The contentiousness and expository difficulty of the passage is shown
by the fact that there is no single line of argument in the explanations the vari-
ous commentators advance. One obvious strategy was to shift blame from God
onto the sinners themselves.39 It is not that God holds over the punishment to
the children and grandchildren, but that all sinners need to realise that when
they sin they do not simply harm themselves and their immediate neighbours,
but that their influence flows down the generations. It must be so: parents
teach their children, who teach their children. The precept makes it clear
that actions have consequences and no-one should forget this basic truth.
Inthe lifetime of any one person, their influence is likely to extend to their
grandchildren or perhaps great-grandchildren by memory, if not directly
which accounts for the third or fourth generation. It is, then, the sinners who
are passing on the sin to their progeny and who visit injustice upon them.

38 Origen, Homlies, hom 8, c. 6.

39 Cf. Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex 20: Fortis zelotes.
92 Chapter 3

Indeed, the Gloss says that punishment is visited on the children because their
sinful fathers are unworthy of correction.
Another line of argument recognises this human influence, but also credits
God with a more active role.40 God does indeed punish subsequent genera-
tions, but he waits for the years to pass before doing so because he wants to
give the descendants a chance to redeem themselves. Despite their inheri-
tance, the children of sinners may not automatically become sinners them-
selves, and so God waits to find out whether or not they do. If they imitate the
previous sin, then it is punishment all round; but if they do not, then everyone
is absolved. In this reading, God is particularly merciful, because he waits to
judge evidence before acting.
Other commentators remind readers that no-one can enter into grace with-
out being punished for their sins, so it may be better to take that punishment
in this world than in the next.41 This interpretation again depicts punishment
as the act of a merciful God. Stephen Langton agrees that punishment is neces-
sary before one can be accepted into the state of grace so better to have it
now. A child can never be abandoned entirely by God because of its fathers
fault, but it can suffer temporarily. Langtons exegetical method means that, as
well as considering literal fathers and children, he also interprets the com-
mandment in its two spiritual senses. In an allegorical reading drawn from
Origen and Jerome, Stephen considers the text to refer to God the Father, with
the first generation of children being Satan; the second, the disobedient angels;
the third, Judas; and the fourth, the Scribes and Pharisees of the Jews. According
to a moral reading, however, the first generation of children represents the
prime mover behind an action (i.e., the eventual doer or actor); the second is
the thought or plan of it; the third is approval of the plan in the doers mind;
and the fourth is the deed itself.42
There is space only to mention the variety of approaches taken by the com-
mentators. Langton goes so far as to answer the biblical argument against
delayed punishment (i.e., that a son should not carry his fathers sin) by citing
other scriptural instances where someone has suffered for the wickedness of
another David, for example, and Absalom. The prophet Ezekiel provides the
most famous description: the fathers have eaten of the bitter grapes and the
childrens teeth are set on edge (Ez 18: 2). Nicholas of Lyra, ever observant of
human feeling a trait he shares both with his rabbinic sources and his fellow

40 Cf. Comestor, Historia scholastica, Liber Exodi, 20, c. 40, Primum praeceptum, PL 198: 1164D,
following Origen.
41 Cf. Stephen Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 125r.
42 Ibid.
God 93

Franciscans realises that punishing the child is usually also a punishment for
the parent.43 For the son who imitates his fathers wickedness, even having
witnessed his bad example, no punishment is too harsh. Despite the commen-
tators attempts to explain such apparent injustice, Origen nevertheless admits
that the full meaning of the commandment, of Gods motives, and of justice
itself, will remain a mystery to humans. In his homily on Exodus he declares: It
remains for God to explain this to us.44 Characteristically for him, he notes
that everyone consists of an inner and outer person, and not everything in
Scripture is said can be understood by the outer person. But that inner
being can have two possible fathers, God or the devil, depending on which
seed you allow to grow within you. If you do the devils work, his sins are visited
upon you as his son.
The precept has the last word in the matter, for it reminds believers that God
visits mercy on thousands a finite number, the commentators say (and we
should note that they are provoked by the mention of a number at all, however
vague), which stands for the infinite number of sinners who are nevertheless
saved by God. Langton adds one last remark: those who love God keep his com-
mandments; and the proof of that love is to keep even this one, which seems
so unjust.45 The final positive note of the commandment is echoed by
Bonaventure, who tells his readers that, appearances aside, this command-
ment is much more positive than negative; it is given this negative form only
because it is easier for humanity to observe, he says.46 Rather, its importance is
not the prohibition of idolatry so much as an order to adoration of the only
one, true God.47

The Second Commandment

You shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain: for the Lord shall not
hold innocent he who takes the name of the Lord his God in vain.

In comparison to the length and complexity of the biblical text of the first
commandment, the second is only one Latin sentence. And after their gener-
ally lengthy discussions of the first precept, medieval commentators mostly

43 Postilla, Ex 20: Et facies misericordiam.

44 Origen, Homlies, hom. 8, c. 6.
45 Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 125 rb.
46 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 2, no. 18.
47 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 37, dub. 1.
94 Chapter 3

dispatch the second in fairly short order. Nevertheless, despite its apparent
simplicity, this precept is given a theological interpretation of immense impor-
tance; a seemingly straightforward commandment is used to reiterate and
clarify orthodox Christian doctrine and refute heresy. According to Bonaven
ture, this commandment orders a confession of faith in the Highest Truth,
and truth is the key concept for understanding it.48
The precept is deemed to have two broad meanings. The first, literal, mean-
ing prohibits the swearing of oaths pro nihilo the meaning of which we will
consider below; the second meaning is allegorical or mystical and involves
speaking about Christ in such a way as to deny his dual nature in being both
God and Man. Here is the whole of Peter Lombards discussion:

Non assumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum. Quod est dicere, secundum
litteram: Non iurabis pro nihilo nomen Dei. Isidorus. Allegorice vero
praecipitur ut non putes creaturam esse Christum, Dei Filium, quia
omnis creatura vanitati subiecta est [Rom 8: 20], sed aequalem Patri.49
[You shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain. Which is to say,
according to the literal sense: You will not swear on the name of God
unnecessarily. Isidore. Allegorically, however, it orders that you shall not
think Christ, the Son of God, is a created thing, but rather that he is equal
to the Father, because all creation is subject to deception (Rom 8: 20).]

Lombards analysis, though short, nevertheless makes an elegant linguistic link

between the vanitas (deceit, falsehood, unreliability, impermanence) of
all created things and the taking of the name of God in vanum (pointlessly,
falsely, idly). The Latin word used to express this notion in the second half
of the commandment is frustra, whose English cognate frustrated, to describe
a plan gone awry, conveys something of the same uselessness.
It can be difficult for medieval commentators to know how to structure
their treatment of oaths, since they have to fit them both under the aegis of
this commandment, and much more generally and usually at greater length,
under the prohibition of false witness. Here in the precepts concerning God,
oaths are a matter of calling on God as witness, and discussion focusses on how
to honour God and Gods truth. Amongst the precepts of the second tablet, the
issue is the relationship between you and your neighbour, and commentators
have to work out the allowable limits of vocal dishonesty between people.

48 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 3, no. 15.

49 Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c. 2 (3). Peter is quoting Isidore (PL 83: 301C) and
the Glossa ordinaria on Ex 20: 7.
God 95

Simon of Hinton makes this separation explicit: in this second commandment

the emphasis is on God, and on making an oath with God as your witness; in the
commandment against false witness, the emphasis is on the falsehood involved.50
The principle is clear, but the medieval execution of it is not always so sharp.
Since oaths are central to the interpretation of both precepts, the problems are
mostly of organisation, with medieval expositors getting carried away by their
own loquacity (as is often the case), and losing sight of the wood for the trees.
Peter Lombard equates the literal meaning of taking the Lords name with
swearing an oath, which in this medieval sense means to make a statement
and call upon God as your witness to its truth. The involvement of God entailed
that the action took on the highest seriousness, and was not to be undertaken
lightly. Swearing oaths at all was a contentious issue, since Matthews Gospel
(5: 34) reports Jesus as saying, Do not swear at all. The Greek theologian John
Chrysostom thought oaths should be prohibited at all costs.51 But in a society
where word of mouth was still more the norm than written documents, doing
without sworn oaths was simply not possible. They were an integral part of
daily life, and the commentators had to find a way to accommodate necessity
within their exegesis. This they do with the formula non iurabis pro nihilo (do
not swear for nothing) rather than Matthews non iurare omnino (do not
swear at all). Swearing pro nihilo is defined by Peter Comestor as either
swearing falsely (that is, to say something is true which in fact is not true), or
superfluously (that is, to affirm by an oath something which does not need that
level of seriousness thus using the name of God unnecessarily and in some
sense demeaning his importance), or deceitfully (that is, swearing that some-
thing is true which you know to be false, and so using God intentionally to give
credence to a lie).52 Stephen Langton gives a similar list. Three types of oath
are prohibited here: the excessive (superfluum his variation on the superflu-
ous oath), the rash (incautum not taking enough care to discover what may
or may not be possible or true, and not valuing God sufficiently), and the plain
false (falsum).53 In a society in which someones word sworn on the name of
God, or physically sworn on the word of God, by putting ones hand on a Bible
or Gospel book was necessary to guarantee many and varied contractual rela-
tions, this caution was important. The nearest we come to it today is in legal
proceedings, when witnesses are still sworn on oath to (orally) tell the truth.

50 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fol. 128rb; Summa iuniorum, col. 246B.

51 The Homilies of St John Chrysostom on the Acts of the Apostles, [no editor], vol. 1, Library of
the Fathers 33 (Oxford, 1851), hom. 8.
52 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, c. 40, Secundum praeceptum, PL 198: 1165B.
53 Langton. In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 125va-b.
96 Chapter 3

This action has become rather a rarity for us, but it was common in the Middle
Ages, so much so that the matter of keeping ones word made the command-
ment prohibiting false witness the most discussed of the commandments on
the second tablet.
Peters second, allegorical expansion of this precept, drawn from Isidore, is
the more theologically important: you shall not think Christ, the Son of God,
is a created thing, but rather that he is equal to the Father. Peter is drawing on
a long-held equation of Christ with the name of God which goes back at least
to Augustine. This means that taking that name in vain calls into question the
true nature of Christ, whether by denying his full humanity or his full divinity
and thus distancing the Son from the Father. These were all common heretical
ideas, going back to the first centuries of Christianity. Manichaeans, for exam-
ple, denied Christs humanity; Arians denied his divinity; and they, Noetians
and Sabellians disputed the relationship of the persons of the Trinity.
John of La Rochelle extends this two-fold division of the commandment
into literal and allegorical a little further. He holds that the commandment can
refer to three things: spiritually, it is to say that Christ was merely a created
being; literally, according to its role as part of the law of nature (secundum for-
mam), it is to swear an oath for no good reason (pro nihilo); and, according to
its role as part of the law of grace (secundum virtutem), it is to attribute the
name of God to any thing, that is, to anything other than God.54 This three-
fold division was copied by later commentators, including the influential
Dominican Hugh of St Cher. In keeping with medieval delight in polyvalent
meaning, John does not demand that the commandment be interpreted in
only one of these ways: it is not a question of either/or. In fact, as is often the
case with John, his approach is as least as interesting as his answer. He explains
that the commandment in fact embraces all three possible meanings. For since
the Law of Moses stands midway between the law of nature (which can be
understood only literally) and the law of grace (which is only properly under-
stood spiritually), it is capable of both literal and spiritual interpretation. Thus,
following the interpretation of Hugh of St Victor, the commandment has three
viable interpretations. Spiritually, it refers to God the Son, and forbids declar-
ing his nature to be solely human. Literally, it has two meanings: considered in
terms of the form it takes, it refers to swearing an oath; and considered in terms
of the virtue it pursues, it prohibits idolatry, since swearing on a false god is
idolatrous.55 Thus, according to the law of nature, the name of God is Truth;

54 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 305.

55 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk 1, pt 12, c. 6; Hughs division is also quoted in the
Glossa ordinaria.
God 97

according to the law of grace, the name of God is Christ. Moses is the media-
tor between these two laws and his law gives believers the commandment
which links Christ and Truth.56
For Stephen Langton, too, the name of God has a threefold spiritual signifi-
cance. The first meaning of the name is simply Christ himself; the second is
an invocation of the name, for example when someone is baptised in the
name of God; and the third meaning refers to Gods fama, which we might
translate as good name, in passages such as Your name is as oil poured out
(Song of Songs 1: 3) which implies that the name is as efficacious as holy unc-
tion.57 You can take the name of God in vain if you do not exhibit your faith, or
endure the hardships which may come to you. Bonaventure goes as far as to
allow a figurative exposition of the precept, which includes taking the sacra-
ments in the right frame of mind, for instance, or keeping promises to do good
things, such as go on pilgrimage.58
Although this precept is today popularly thought of as prohibiting swearing
in the sense of blasphemy or spoken obscenity, often with little or no inherent
meaning, this is not what medieval theologians primarily had in mind.
Swearing in this modern sense of the word, although clearly having its roots in
oaths, in that God is called upon (distantly) as hearer, is not the general inter-
pretation of this commandment. However, in his Collationes, Bonaventure
does forbid what he calls shameful speech (locutionem probosam), as when
anyone speaks of the inferior members of Christs body, and he disapproves of
anyone swearing in this way, even if he speaks the truth, because he looks
down on Christwho has humbled himself and assumed our nature. Christ
would not have inferior members if he had not sacrificed himself for cre-
ation.59 Many such common acts were condemned by medieval theologians
less because of what they were in themselves than because they could easily
turn into habitual vices, using the gift of words to speak something other than
the truth. God had given speech to humanity alone, and it was intended that
they use it to praise him, to imitate Christ, who was perfect truth, and not to
tell lies. Although each instance might be minor, such bad habits could
thoughtlessly shift the doer away from God and eternal life, inch by inch.
Calling upon God to be your witness was a serious decision in a society
which believed in the vital and immanent presence of the deity. Here as else-
where, Christians found themselves in a difficult situation: their God was both

56 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 305.

57 Stephen Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 125vb.
58 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 3, nos 2427.
59 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 3, no. 27.
98 Chapter 3

so close as to know their every thought, and so distant as to be above the hurly-
burly of the workaday world. Some groups therefore held it to be impossible to
call God as witness for trivial material questions (as all those with which
humans are concerned must inherently be), to bind God in any sense as a wit-
ness to human truth. As proof of this they evinced Jesus words in Matthews
Gospel (5: 34), Do not swear at all. Augustine, as so often, won the day, hold-
ing it to be possible to swear oaths in limited situations: if this were not so, any
communal life would be severely curtailed.60 Bonaventure declares that only
heretics such as Manichees would believe that no oaths could ever be allowed,
and he defends his position with a careful grammatical distinction between
non iurare omnino and omnino non iurare: But Manichees taunt us and say
that we ought not to swear at all, because it says so in the New TestamentBut
I say that in certain cases or from certain reasons it is perfectly allowable to
swear. The heretics do not pay proper attention to the force of the words. For it
is different to say do not swear in all cases [non iurare omnino the Gospel
formulation] and in every case, do not swear [omnino non iurare] In every
case, do not swear is the same as in no circumstances swear, and do not swear
in all cases is the same as do not swear in all circumstances, but only for cer-
tain reasons.61
Though short, the second commandment and its discussions are a good
example of medieval exegetical method because the commentators take what
seems to be a solidly literal, practical prohibition and extend it to include the
most abstract theological concept of the dual nature of Christ. Once the name
of God is defined as Christ, who is highest truth, the commandment is exposed
as an important element in the correct formulation of the Christian faith and
in the battle against the heretical misunderstanding of the Trinity.

The Third Commandment

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. For you labour for six days
and do all your work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of your Lord God:
you shall not do any work on it, you and your son and your daughter, your
manservant and your maidservant, your beast of burden, and the stranger
who is within your gates. For the Lord made heaven and earth in six days,

60 Augustine discusses oaths particularly in Ep. 47, Ad Publicolam, in Epistulae, ed. A.

Goldbacher, CSEL 34 (Prague, 1895); and De Sermone domini in monte, ed. A. Mutzenbecher,
CCSL 35 (Turnhout, 1967), I, c. 17.
61 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 3, no. 2.
God 99

and the sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day; for
that reason the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.

Compared to the first two, the third commandment has an unusual grammati-
cal structure. It is not primarily a prohibition you shall not but a positive
command: Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. As we have seen, it is
the only one of the ten precepts that cannot be accepted by Christians as being
wholly part of the moral law, for it distinctly orders that the sabbath day should
be the seventh day of creation the day on which God rested and this is not
the day that Christians keep as their day of rest. Commentators are clear
whythe change has come about: it is the move from the rest day of the Creator
to the resurrection day of his Son (who himself rested in the tomb on the
seventh day), and they make some attempt to explain why the change needed
to be made. Modern theologians are likely to conjecture that the difference
gave an opportunity for Christians to mark themselves out from Jews. No medi-
eval theologian could accept such an exposition as an adequate account of
the change. Bonaventure, for instance, answers the question of why the com-
mandment has its unique mixture of moral and ceremonial parts as a matter
of practicality: I say that this preceptis given out of love; and whatever is
clear or hidden in other precepts is fulfilled in this one. And therefore God
mixes the ceremonial and the moral together, so that we might better commit
it to memory; lest, if it had been given to us in detail, it might prove too much
for our memory.62 In part, this is Bonaventures refrain that God wants to make
things easy to observe; but he is also responding to arguments he says Jews
make when they ask why Christians have changed the observance: The Jews
taunt us and say: you keep the Decalogue, and the Decalogue has only moral
precepts; but moral precepts tell us what it is always necessary to do. However,
the seventh dayis the sabbathand you rest on the Lords Day [Sunday]
instead of the sabbath.63
Simon of Hinton is also responding to Jews when he argues that, as long as
there is a weekly day of rest, the day it is taken is unimportant. What is ordered
by both natural and moral law is prayer and the interior praise of God, but
when this takes place is a matter of choice. Simons view is that the Church
changed the day of observation ne videremur iudaizare lest we be seen to
judase.64 This word, judase, is hard to translate into English: it implies that

62 Collationes, Coll. 4, no. 11.

63 Collationes, Coll. 4, no. 5.
64 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 247B.
100 Chapter 3

someone is a Judaeophile and that this is not a good thing to be; they pander to
Jewish ideas at the expense of Christian truth. A parallel is with colonial
administrators who were said to go native. Simon, working in Oxford with a
Jewish community on his doorstep, was keenly aware of the attractions of its
culture. Indeed, how could his students not be interested in a group for whom
the Mosaic law was not an historical study but a daily performance? He asks
(perhaps in response to a student question) why other Jewish festivals aside
from the Sabbath are not specifically ordered in the Law. His answer is that
only the Sabbath contains more of a moral than a ceremonial element, and the
permanence that accompanies all moral laws merits its inclusion.65 In Paris,
Alexander of Hales argues that a change in the day of rest is almost inevitable,
given the nature of the change wrought by the sacrifice of Christ: the change
is natural from the remission of sins to the perfect fulfilment of good things.66
For Alexander, the distinction in the precept is not that it is partly moral and
partly ceremonial, but that part is moral and part mystical. The moral portion
of the commandment signifies a cessation from fault and committing sin, and
it persists because sin persists even after the coming of Christ. But with Christ
has come the age of grace, and so the mystical element of all the Law has been
superseded by the actual presence of God on earth. We can see this most
clearly with the Torah laws on circumcision. As a sign of the convenant with
God which has been fulfilled by the advent of the Messiah and the institution
of sacraments, circumcision has no further purpose and has been rendered
unnecessary. Likewise, as the sabbath was a sign to remind Jews of their cove-
nant with God, the new covenant with Christ has rendered both covenant and
sign otiose, and the new covenant is signified in the new precept by the day of
resurrection.67
Why does the commandment begin Remember? Commentators for whom
every word of the scriptural text is there for a reason (which is not the same as
saying they think the Bible is literally true) were keenly aware of the form that
the text takes. This commandment could have said Do not work on the sab-
bath, but it does not. The choice instead of a positive phrasing that distances
the commandment from the others on this tablet must, therefore, have been
made for a purpose. Bonaventures explanation in the Sentences commentary
is a preview of that in his Collationes: and in this it is not so much a moral
precept, but was rather in a certain way given for the full completion of the
other moral precepts; because as long as people free themselves for God, they

65 Ibid.
66 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), c. 6.
67 Ibid.
God 101

understand better what it is they should do and what they should flee from
doing. And therefore, only this command begins Remember, because the oth-
ers are remembered when we remember this one.68 Bonaventure is fond of
using the rhetorical form synecdoche using part to signify the whole as an
exegetical strategy, and this is one such instance, with this third command-
ment standing for all ten.
John of La Rochelle, with his focus on the place of the Old Law within the
greater scheme of law, explains the imperative Remember by the concept of
a day of rest: a day given to God alone was implicit in natural law long before
Moses received the written law.69 The commandment is not ordering some-
thing new, so much as reminding Christians of what they know already.
Believers should thus literally be able to remember that God consecrated in
the law what was already written in their hearts. Johns habit of going back to
basic questions leads him to ask why only this particular day, and not all days,
should be consecrated to God; after all, there is no time limit on veneration. He
gives a charmingly practical answer. There are two sorts of freeing oneself
(vacatio) for God. One is a mental disposition (habitus), which is unlimited,
because we should always be loving God; but the other is a question of action,
and this has to be limited because there are necessities of life to be taken care
of. Even if one is careless for oneself, to neglect such actions could, for instance,
clash with the precept to honour ones parents, who must be provided for.
Hence God would reasonably only order one day of rest.70
Nicholas of Lyra says that the Hebrews (a word he, like many Christian theo-
logians, uses when speaking positively of Jewish scholarship) teach that the
precept begins Remember because everyone should remember the sabbath
first, since it is the most precious of all the precious things they possess. And
so, if anyone has new clothes or other costly items, they should wait for the
sabbath before using them for the first time.71 For Christian exegetes, the com-
mandment to keep the sabbath holy had two meanings an inward and an
outward understanding. The outward meaning required them to detail what
the external observance of a holy day should look like, viewed from the out-
side. Christians know that Jews should do no work at all, unless, says Nicholas,
it is something that cannot be put off, such as feeding animals, or if there is
an emergency.72 In comparison, the Christian rest day is not as rigorously kept.

68 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 37, dub. 3.

69 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 327328.
70 Tractatus de Legibus, no. 329.
71 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, Ex 20: Memento.
72 Ibid., Sex diebus; Septimo.
102 Chapter 3

On the whole the theologians shy away from making definite lists, but some
give examples of the kinds of things servile work might include: agricultural
and mechanical work, secular business and playing games.73 They make it
clear that the outer signs of keeping the commandment matter much less than
the inward vision, and so they are indifferent to the fact that the Jews appear to
refrain more strictly from servile work than do Christians. Indeed, some even
castigate Jews for the way they observe this commandment. Augustine had
urged his congregation at Chusa to observe the sabbath spiritually, not like the
Jews who kept it in worldly idleness and frivolity.74 For Augustine, just doing
nothing was not enough. Nicholas of Lyra, a much more pro-Jewish observer,
agrees, but chooses to rehearse Augustines points rather differently, in order to
teach his Christian students a lesson. Augustine is right in De decem chordis, he
says: the Jewish man acts better on the Christian day of rest by working in the
fields, or a Jewish woman by making wool, than a Christian does by going to
the theatre or by vulgar dancing.75
By far the more important meaning of the commandment for Christian
exegetes was its inward meaning, which entailed the quietening of the mind
and soul to leave space for the contemplation of God. Merely doing nothing on
the sabbath was not sufficient because, as everyone knew, idle hands make the
devils work. To keep the precept fully required the making of positive efforts
towards sanctification. Bonaventure explains how this may best be done. One
begins with seven steps that lead to divina vacatio, the emptying of the mind in
order to turn it to God: meditation, prayer, rejoicing, holy reading, psalm-
singing, offering sacrifices, and fulfilling divine law. These seven are followed
by the six works of corporal mercy, which move the doer to the imitation of
Christ: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked,
caring for the stranger, visiting the sick, and ransoming the captive. Finally,
the believer should contemplate the five forms of sin which must be avoided:
sinning against the commandments, inciting others to do so, defending
such sinfulness, accepting sinfulness, and ignoring sinfulness so that it goes
unpunished.76
This idea of positively turning towards good, rather than merely turning
away from evil, is a favourite topic for Bonaventure. In both his Collationes de

73 E.g., John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 335.

74 Augustine, Sermon 9, De Decem chordis, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini. Sermones de vetere
testamento, ed. Lambot, c. 3; The Works of St Augustine, transl. Hill, ed. Rotelle, part 3,
sermons: vol. 1, sermons 119.
75 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, Ex 20: sex enim diebus.
76 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 4, nos 1216.
God 103

decem praeceptis and the Sentences commentary, he details what might consti-
tute servile work, including in particular agricultural labour, working with
wool (to make clothes), all fabrication using metal, wood and stone, hunting
and fishing, making medicines, and seafaring (including mercantile trade): he
also prohibits entertainments, including all games and jollification, as well as
drunkenness, litigation and quarrelling.77 But the point of abstaining from this
activity is solely to free the mind for worship, which is why, he says, Augustine
stresses the importance of churchgoing on Sunday, even though some might
argue this to be work in itself!78 Robert Grossteste agrees. For him, the true
meaning of the commandment is entirely spiritual, and greater understand-
ing, rather than rest from work, is the point of it all. He does give a list of what
constitutes servile work, but more importantly adds an Augustinian timetable
of how to spend a profitable day, including being purged of your sins, worship,
and the practice of virtue. He too says that it is not enough just to stop work
and get drunk, a way of spending a rest day that was all too tempting after a
hard week.79 Hugh of St Cher links the commandments to the seven deadly
sins. With this in mind, he says that the sabbath precept prohibits both glut-
tony, because the quiet it demands is not that which follows from having your
mouth full of food, and also sloth (accidia), since it is impossible to keep a rest
day properly if you think that simple tedium doing nothing is good. Hugh
also thinks believers should make a distinction between ordinary time and
holy time: any time can be time for prayer and good deeds, but the clear divi-
sion of holy time on the sabbath should bring this to the front of the mind:
Remember.
What was the real aim of either the outward observance or the inward
reflection, of refraining from work or doing positive good? John of La Rochelle
attempts to discern the principal intention of the precept, and his answer is
that it exists to give the souls of believers inner peace. Unusually, John finds the
key to this precept by using the four senses of scripture, a strategy he may have
borrowed from Stephen Langton.80 Beginning with the literal sense is straight-
forward: the precept clearly prohibits all servile work on a designated day. The
allegorical sense is meant to remind believers about articles of faith, and apply-
ing it to the day of rest brings to mind Christ lying in the tomb before the resur-
rection. The anagogical sense points to the world to come; and here the

77 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 4, no. 9; Glossa, bk III, d. 37, dub. 3.

78 Augustine, Sermon 9, De Decem chordis, ed. Lambot, c. 3, n. 3.
79 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis, De tertio mandato, nos 23.
80 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 326; Stephen Langton uses a threefold rather
than a fourfold exegetical structure to come to similar conclusions.
104 Chapter 3

commandment gives a foretaste of the rest to be enjoyed in heaven. The final,

moral, sense should show the reader what to do, and in this case it is twofold:
having a quiet mind, so that one may see the highest good without impedi-
ments, and refraining from sin, which should be the consequence of quieting
the mind.81 John asks if the commandment simply prohibits all sin in order to
achieve inner quiet, or only a particular sin. This is a good question and one
that might be asked of all the commandments: why do they not just say dont
sin!? Johns answer is that the precept does generally prohibit all sin, but it also
specifically prohibits all servile work on the sabbath, and both for the same
reason that they stop the mind being free to think on God.
Perhaps surprisingly, John allows unnecessary acts of corporal good on the
sabbath (including building hospitals and religious buildings) which would
not otherwise be completed. This sort of flexibility is what it means for the sab-
bath to be made for man, and not man for the sabbath (Mk 2: 27).82 But permit-
ting these works of mercy raises another problem for him: how can it be
allowable to do some things and not others? Should the command not cover
everything or nothing? Moreover, if it was not permitted to cook a chicken or
go on a journey in the era of the Old Law, how could it be allowed in this time
of grace, when believers were held to be more perfect in giving themselves to
God? Johns answer, as so often, is a mixture of old and new: in the time of
the Old Law, the cessation from work was a figure a prefiguring of the
time of grace yet to come. Now that time is here, the commandment as it
stands has no longer to be kept; indeed, it is given up in the time of grace in
case Christians seem to be judaizing, by slavishly keeping what were simply
figures of future rest.83 This theme is taken up by Nicholas of Lyra, who says
that the greatest servile work intended here is the work of the devil sin
because servitude to him is the worst anyone can suffer. And so what the
commandment really forbids in fact is sin in general. This means that if you
commit a sin on the day of rest you sin twice: an adulterous liaison on Sunday
breaches both the commandment against adultery and the commandment to
keep the sabbath.84

***

81 Ibid.
82 Tractatus de Legibus, no. 335. John takes this strand from Bernard of Clairvaux (De
Dispensatione et praecepto, c. 2, n. 5), who himself has taken it over from pope Leo the
Great, as quoted in Ivo of Chartres, Decretum.
83 Tractatus de Legibus, no. 335.
84 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, Ex 20: Sex enim diebus.
God 105

The first stone tablet comprises the trinity of commandments about

God. Each commandment is peculiarly connected to one of the persons of
the Trinity, but, just as there is no hierarchy in the Godhead, so there is no
hierarchy among the commandments all three are to be equally obeyed, and
all three refer to the whole of the Godhead. They stand and fall, as Nicholas of
Lyra notes, as a whole; one stone from the wall weakens the whole construc-
tion. Nevertheless, just as each person of the Trinity has characteristics, so too
do the commandments: the first teaches about the unity and power of the
Father; the second about the truth of the Son; and the third about the goodness
of the Holy Spirit. Each is a remedy for sin, and these remedies are interrelated.
The busy preoccupations of the world that the sabbath commandment
addresses are just as much a form of idolatry, as the worship of the golden calf;
sabbath rest is meant to provide a perspective on the world that leads believers
to know truth, just as much as by not taking the Lords name in vain.
The commandments illuminate some other characteristics of God. God is a
God of freedom the God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of
slavery. And this is not just one god among many, but the only God worthy of
the name. People may make other gods and worship them, but to be a follower
of this God, believers must acknowledge that everything else is secondary
everything else is his creation. Not only has this God made everything that has
been made, but he cares for it jealously; his love is such that he has given the
commandments and the sacraments so that Christians will know how to come
closer to eternal life. For those who believe and obey, God is infinitely merciful,
for this is a just God beyond human justice; those who persist in their sin sen-
tence themselves to the punishment of life without God.
Linking commandments to persons, God is power, truth, and goodness
characteristics humanity is meant to reflect and imitate. He brings freedom
and justice to his creation. And he is, in some sense, limited by these character-
istics. In turn, he gives the commandments to humanity, for humanity in turn
to be limited. But paradoxically, these limitations are boundaries by which
humans can attain freedom and eternal life with God. He gives laws so that
humans can be free. God does not force humanity to keep these command-
ments. His intention is that humans should realise that they owe a debt, an
obligation to God for giving them life; and by extension, they owe a debt to
their fellow humans as fellow creatures of God. From these obligations, the
commandments flow, both necessary and sufficient for salvation. The com-
mandments may seem predominantly negative in form, but their intention is
overwhelmingly to positive good, rather than mere avoidance of sin.
How do the commentators go about interpreting the commandments? They
never assume that a text has a single meaning. On the contrary, in the medieval
106 Chapter 3

scholarly world, multiplicity of meaning was the norm. They look always for
the inner and spiritual meanings as well as the outer and literal ones. We can
see this in the sabbath commandment, where the difficulty of explaining why
Christians no longer keep the sabbath rest but have substituted a rest day on
Sunday means that the commandment cannot just be read literally. This prob-
lem forces them to a more complex, interior exegesis where doing nothing
turns into a positive injunction to think on God. Similarly, understood for its
inner meaning, taking the name of God in vain is really about the complex
theology of the two natures of Christ and the inward truth that this represents.
They work by a careful reading of the language of the Bible. This does not mean
they are simple biblical literalists, but they do think that every part of the Bible
is there for a reason and that the form of the writing is important to compre-
hension. They do not draw out the greater, overarching points themselves. This
is in part because of the piecemeal nature of the exegetical method, which
focuses narrowly on the point at hand. Readers are thus often left to string
together the points themselves to make the bigger picture.
Nonetheless, the commentators are limited in their exegesis by the realities
of everyday life. They know they would never be able to say that Christians
should not swear oaths at all, because if they did, life would come to a halt.
Instead, they accept the framework of existence and work within it. They
admit the swearing of oaths, but concentrate instead on what it means to take
Gods name in vain. The outer forms of life are, in the long run, less important
than the intention of the believer. We should remember that the commenta-
tors we are reading are all churchmen who have become successful interpret-
ers: they would not have the positions they hold, had they rocked the boat too
much. Nevertheless, at their best, these scholars are are often psychologically
acute; what they offer is not a counsel of perfection, but a modus vivendi in a
sinful but redeemable world.
Both Christians and Jews were united in saying that no-one, indeed no cre-
ated thing, stood outside the precepts. The Jewish view was that everyone
converts, gentile servants, even animals, should keep the sabbath; no sex, no
age, nor any vile condition was exempt, the Glossa declared, because sabbath
rest taught Creation about its Creator.85 How did the knowledge of God nur-
tured by this inner quiet work its way through to relations with ones fellow
human beings? To discover this, we must turn to the second stone tablet and
the precepts it contained.

85 Biblia cum glossa, Ex 20: filius tuus (interlinear).

 Chapter 4

Neighbour

Who is My Neighbour?

Who is my neighbour? asks a lawyer of Jesus. And in reply, Jesus tells the story
of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 2737). The travelling Israelite would think his
neighbour to be the priest or the Levite of his own faith; but in fact it was the
stranger from Samaria who put himself out for someone else, who loved his
neighbour as he loved himself. The moral of the story is that your neighbour is
not always the one you expect. In general, however, your neighbour could be
identified by recourse to what theologians called the order of charity a hier-
archy of doing good that we still know in the phrase charity begins at home.
The commentators accept that those closest to you in terms of blood and
sentiment have the greatest call on your compassion. In practical terms,
for most people this meant family; after all, as Robert Grosseteste remarks, it
is in the family that most peoples religious education and observance is
developed, and where they are most able to practise the Gospel command-
ment to love.1

i Family as Neighbour
The seven commandments of the second stone tablet shift the focus from God
to neighbour. The precepts of both tablets could be grouped around a variety
of threes, such as deed, word, and thought, or hand, voice, and mind; and by
comparing the commandments in each group, the precepts of the second
stone tablet could be connected with those on the first. For instance, the com-
mandments which spell out the debt to God via words, that is, by not taking
the Lords name in vain and not bearing false witness, are linked together by
their common reference to spoken truth, and by Christ, who is the Word of
God. The two commandments which stand at the head of each of the tablets
are associated by their common position: it is fitting that the commandment
referring to God the Father on the first tablet is matched by the commandment
to honour human parents on the second. The situation of this apparently

1 Robert Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De quarto mandato. Lesley Smith, The De decem
mandatis of Robert Grosseteste, in Maura OCarroll (ed.), Robert Grosseteste and the
Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition (Rome, 2003), pp. 265288; J. McEvoy, Robert
Grosseteste on the Ten Commandments, RTAM, 58 (1991): pp. 167205.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_006

108 Chapter 4

small-scale, domestic commandment at the head of the precepts concerning

your neighbour indicates the importance of parents and family in relation to
God. In contrast to the Sunday School version of the Decalogue, medieval com-
mentators do not think this commandment was designed to make small chil-
dren obey their parents. In the medieval reading, it is unquestionably adult
children who are to honour their elderly parents, by showing them the rever-
ence that age should be accorded and by providing them with the necessities
of life. As Peter Comestor notes, the honour to father and mother must have
two sides one of showing reverence and the other of ministering to their
physical needs.2 In a society without social benefits and pensions provided by
the State, the protection of the old by the young was both necessary and rea-
sonable: we should honour parents at all times, says Nicholas of Lyra, but espe-
cially in their old age.3 Moreover, the practicality of providing for parents is
always to be coupled with the more affective showing of reverence: the two go
hand in hand. In the words of the Glossa ordinaria, A man opens his eyes
because of his parents, and begins this life on account of their love; hence this
is the greatest commandment of this tablet[and] whoever does not show
reverence to parents will not show it to others either.4
For Jews such as Philo Judaeus, who divided the commandments equally on
the two tablets, honouring ones father and mother was the fifth command-
ment, whose place was as the last precept on the first tablet. This liminal posi-
tion was an apt placement, according to Philo, because parents by nature stand
on the border between mortal and immortal existence mortal, because of
their own mortality, but immortal because their own act of creation in beget-
ting children assimilates them to God, the generator of all things.5 In begetting
children, Philo added, parents act as the servants of God, and whoever dishon-
ours the servant his parent dishonours the master God.6 Thus for Philo, the
narrative of the first-tablet commandments moves from God as spiritual parent
to father and mother as temporal parents, with this precept as a bridge between
the two. This movement is something of a litmus test: those who are unable to
show reverence to their visible and present parents, near at hand and seen by
the eye, are most unlikely to be able to show reverence to the invisible God.7

2 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, c. 40, Explicatio decalogi: quartum praeceptum, PL 198:
1165C.
3 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla litteralis, on Ecclesiasticus 3: 210: Audite filii.
4 Biblia cum glossa on Deut 5: 16.
5 Philo, On the Decalogue, c. 22, p. 61.
6 Ibid., c. 23, p. 67.
7 Ibid., c. 23, p. 69.
Neighbour 109

For Philo there was another reason for the inclusion of this precept on the first
tablet, and that was its positive form: it is the only commandment related to your
neighbour to be cast in positive terms, Honour, in the same way that the com-
mandment about the sabbath day begins, Remember. Since all the remaining
commandments referring to your neighbour are prohibitions (you shall not),
Philo thought it more suitable for the positive precepts to stay together on the first
tablet.8 Bonaventure gives another reason why honouring parents should come
first, which is that kindness (the positive good that comes from Honour) should
come before blamelessness (the abstinence from evil ordered by You shall not).9
Together, these are the two parts of justice, and they distil to two commandments:
do unto others as you would have them do unto you; and do not do unto others
anything you would not wish done to you. The active precept to do good should be
preferred to a precept that merely avoids evil, and so the positive action of honour-
ing is placed before the prohibitions. For other Christian commentators, the very
uniqueness of this positive form was the reason that the precept should stand at
the head of the second tablet, and have priority over the others.
Philos interpretation of this point is reminiscent of an older pagan tradi-
tion. Children who ignore their parents are worse than beasts, he says, which
can often be seen to behave with great piety towards their progenitors. He gives
a number of examples from the animal kingdom, including storks, where the
old stay in nests whilst their offspring fly off to forage for food for them.10 For
children have nothing of their own which does not come from their parents,
either bestowed from their own resources or acquired by means which origi-
nate from them.11 For Robert Grosseteste, children who look on their parents
and despise them should think about the future:

There are those, however, who are either ashamed of, or annoyed and
angry with, or even despise the poverty and old age of their parents, and
the inconveniences their old age brings, such as failing senses, weakening
strength, the ugly shrivelling of wrinkled skin, a curved back, trembling
limbs, tottering steps, the stuttering speech of childhood, the praising of
the past and disliking of the present, being swift to complain and getting
angry over nothing, and many other similar things.12

8 Ibid., c. 12, p. 33.

9 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 5, cc. 34: et beneficentia melior est quam innocentia.
10 Philo, On the Decalogue, c. 23, p. 65.
11 Ibid., c. 23, p. 67.
12 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De quarto mandato, c. 23, an exposition of Ecclus 3:
1415: Son, support the old age of your fatherAnd if his understanding fail have patience
110 Chapter 4

This commandment is given the longest discussion of any in Grossetestes

Decalogue treatise, presumably because he thinks the family is so important.
Uniquely, as far as I have discovered (until copied by John Wyclif), he also
thinks about parents treatment of their children.13 Children must be moulded
like wax, whilst they are still young enough to take on good habits and learn
what is right. He recommends spiritual teaching as the means to encourage
good behaviour, but he also has a more practical prescription, urging that chil-
dren be taught a trade, to keep the devil at bay. Sparing the rod will definitely
spoil the child (Prov 13: 24), and it is sinful not to chastise children who behave
badly: how else will they know the error of their ways? Children treated with
laxity, whose moral and religious education is neglected, will not thank you for
it when they grow up; on the contrary, they will live to punish the parent who
did not teach them to know better.
What sort of behaviour does honouring demand of you? John of La Rochelle
considers the question in his discussion of the fourth commandment. Is it dishon-
ourable, for instance, for a son to denounce his heretical father?14 Very surpris-
ingly, John distinguishes between the father who keeps his heresy to himself, and
the public apostate who corrupts the faith of others. The former should be left in
peace, but the latter must be censured, since the honour of the heavenly Father
must take precedence over that of the earthly. Johns justification for this differ-
ence is that the secret heretic harms only himself a most unusual formulation
for a Christian theologian who believed that God sees all. A common Christian
metaphor for heresy was as a spot of gangrene in an otherwise healthy body. The
affected part might be only an extremity a finger or a toe but eventually it
would spread to infect the whole person. With this understanding, no heresy can
be judged to be a matter solely for the individual. This singular resolution of the
question gives us some idea of how compelling the stipulations of the command-
ments were held to be, if honour can be so important as to trump wrong belief.
The wider question for John here is how it can happen that two such goods
come into conflict in the first place. He can only answer that in a perfect world
the world, that is, before the Fall they would not. God is totally consistent, but
humanitys opaque vision of the will of God is what puts strains upon the law.15

with him, and despise him not. The Latin text is in Smith, The De decem mandatis,
p. 276. As I date this work, Grosseteste would have been seventy years old when he wrote
this passage.
13 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De quarto mandato, cc. 2528; cf. John Wyclif, De man-
datis divinis, c. 23, pp. 328329.
14 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 348.
15 Ibid., no. 388.
Neighbour 111

This fourth precept is one of the rare occasions in the Judaeo-Christian

scriptures when women are referred to as specifically as men. Christian com-
mentators seldom note the specific application of the commandments to
women as well as men, although they sometimes implicitly recognise that this
is the case. According to Philo Judaeus, we should honour each [parent] sepa-
rately and both in common.16 Another Jewish commentator, Rashi, explains
why the commandment text puts father before mother: it is to redress the
natural order of things in which a child is always likely to honour his mother
more than his father, since she endeavours to win him over by kindly words.17
This is in contrast, he says, to the text of Leviticus 19: 3, Let everyone fear his
mother and his father, which places mother before father, because it is natural
to fear father more than mother, and so Scripture puts mother first to show
that she, too, should be feared.
When Christian commentators talk about honouring mothers, they are less
likely to take the meaning so literally. Bonaventure finishes his discussion of
the fourth precept with a lengthy narrative example of what it means to hon-
our your mother. As a story it was probably not original to him but it is a perfect
example of a Mendicant preaching tool. The story concerns a famous and
beloved master of Paris (sometimes said to be Peter Lombard18), whose poor,
elderly mother decides to visit him. Arriving in Paris in her usual rough clothes,
she is taken up by some kindly ladies, who give her food, dress her in finery, and
take her to see her son. But the master does not recognise her claim to be his
mother: I do not believe you, because my mother was very poor and unaccus-
tomed to wear anything but a garment of coarse cloth. The women lead her
away but, having retrieved her own clothes and walking stick, she returns to
the master. This time in the midst of a great crowd, he recognized his mother,
andembraced her saying: Now I know that you are my mother. This story
was spread around the city and it was considered that he had done a great
good. Afterwards he was made the bishop of Paris.19 Clearly, this is a tale
meant to appeal to Franciscans, who were especially vowed to poverty, and it
comes from Bonaventures Collationes on the Decalogue, intended primarily
for internal circulation among the friars. Nevertheless, it is as interesting for
what it does not say as for what it does: the famous master does not alleviate

16 Philo, On the Decalogue, c. 12, p. 31.

17 Rashi on Lev 19: 3: Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, vol. 3: Leviticus, transl. M. Rosenbaum
and A.M. Silbermann (London, 1932), pp. 8486.
18 Peter Lombard, Sentences, vol. 1, pt 1, Prolegomena: Legenda de adventu matris eius,
pp. 38*40*.
19 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 5, no. 20.
112 Chapter 4

his mothers poverty, for example, or regret that his religious vocation has left
him unable to look after her physical needs. He honours her by recognition
and reverence, and by acceptance of her poverty, rather than by improving her
lot. The point is that the commandments have a meaning beyond the literal
world; whoever gave you birth, it is more important that your spiritual mother
is poverty.
The applicability of the precepts to women is also an issue in the command-
ment against adultery, where the discussions can often make it seem as though
the you being addressed is exclusively male. In the case of these clerical com-
mentators, this could simply be because their students were, by necessity,
male, since it was necessary to be a clerk in at least some level of holy orders in
order to study in the schools. Nicholas of Lyra notes that Rashi says Jewish
tradition reads this commandment as applying only to men committing adul-
tery against their wives, and not vice versa.20 However, this is not to say that
women are permitted to be adulterers in Judaism, only that their adultery is
dealt with elsewhere, amongst the judicial precepts of the Law.21 Nicholas
remarks on the Jewish understanding to point out that Christians believe the
commandment applies to men and women equally, although it is generally
true that (as we shall see) they tend to concentrate their exposition towards
men. Augustine certainly addresses men directly when discussing this com-
mandment; but he does so, he explains, because in his opinion men are more
prone to fornication than women, and so they need to look to their wives as an
example to live up to: Your chaste wives show you that what you dont want to
do can be done, and you say it cant be done.22 Nevertheless, it is equally wrong
for a wife to commit adultery with another man as it is for a husband to do so
with another woman. And Augustine is clear that this commandment, like all
the others, applies to both sexes equally: even wives perhaps are convinced
that husbands are allowed to do this, although wives are not.
It is always difficult to judge whether the lack of an explicit inclusion of
women signals their implicit exclusion. This is particularly true in situations
where male clerics are addressing a necessarily male audience of students, fel-
low clergy or religious brethren; their focus is naturally going to be male.
Ordering annual confession and taking of communion, canon 21 of the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215) made sure that all people of either sex (omnis utriusque
sexus) were included in its decrees; and it is possible to argue that if the eucha-
rist and private penance are to be applied to both sexes then nothing else could

20 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla litteralis, Ex. 20: Non moechaberis.

21 See Maimonides, Guide, III. 49, with examples.
22 Augustine, Sermon 9, c. 12, transl. Hill, p. 269.
Neighbour 113

be specific to only one, even when this is not stated directly.23 My sense here is
that the Christian commentators, taking their cue from Augustine, do expect
the commandments to have universal application indeed, this is part of their
definition of the moral law but that, living and working as most of them do
in a very male environment and teaching exclusively male students, their
emphases and examples tend to be directed towards men. Context here makes
a difference to the way they present their exposition of the text, if not, perhaps,
to the unstated fundamental reading of the material. We can see an implicit
inclusion of women in Robert Grossetestes commandments treatise. Although
Robert does not explicitly say that women are forbidden from committing
adultery, his examples of behaviour that can make adultery more likely include
wearing revealing clothes.24 The specific genre under which Grossetestes trea-
tise falls is not exactly clear, but he certainly did not want his teachings to be
confined to an academic environment. Whether his immediate readers were
his Franciscan students or his diocesan clergy, Robert surely envisaged them
passing on what they learned to women as well as men.
How is the family as an entity treated by the commandments? The reason
adultery is forbidden by a precept whereas simple fornication outside mar-
riage is not is because adulterers violate the marriage vow, made before God
and publicly before ones neighbours; in comparison, fornication is a minor
offence. Breaking a vow diminishes the sum of truth in the world; and although
God clearly cannot be harmed by a broken vow, the disrespect to him it implies
is the opposite of the worship he deserves. Humans, however, can be harmed
when vows are broken. Commentators distinguish between the will to adultery
and the act itself, as a question of who is being harmed.25 The distinction
explains why, for Bonaventure, the commandment does not forbid coveting
ones neighbours husband (or a generic spouse), but specifically forbids the
male-against-male coveting of wives as chattels. Bonaventure argues that what
this commandment prohibits is not a longing for sex, but the sort of possession
aimed at oneupmanship, a desire to frustrate ones neighbours happiness
that is the opposite of loving him as yourself.26 Robert Grosseteste once
again shows himself an observer of human life when, following Augustine,
he asks which good things that marriage brings about are violated by

23 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N.P. Tanner, 2 vols (London and Washington, 1990),
vol. 1, p. 245.
24 Robert Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De sexto mandato, cc. 1517 (quoting Jerome).
25 See the next chapter for a fuller discussion.
26 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, dub. 1.
114 Chapter 4

adultery?.27 Again following Augustine, he details three: the sacrament of

matrimony is discontinued; the faith of the bond is broken; and the children of
the union are endangered. Practical as ever, Robert is most concerned with this
last, and he moves to a discussion of illegitimacy and the problems faced by a
society which does not know whose children belong to whom. Since he was a
bishop as well as a scholar, in this instance we can see Robert putting his theo-
ries into practice, for he was a pioneer in the acceptance of illegitimate chil-
dren whose parents had married after they were born. The common position
prior to his legislation was that children born out of wedlock were forever
deemed to be illegitimate a situation which, as well as causing pain and hard-
ship, did nothing to encourage natural parents to marry. Robert abandoned the
theoretical reasoning that saw illegitimacy as a stain which could never be
washed away, in favour of a more humane acceptance of human error, which
could at least partly be put right.
For the purposes of the adultery precept, John of La Rochelle considers who
might count as a wife.28 Unusually, he distinguishes between lawful wives,
prostitutes, and concubines women who used to be called common-law
wives, and here simply covering all those who live together without marrying.
Although, as we have noted, the commandment applied to both men and
women adulterers, John concentrates his discussion on his clerical audience.
Although his remarks could apply to all those who lived together out of wed-
lock, they are surely aimed most towards clergy who have broken their vow of
celibacy and live with a woman. Somewhat shockingly, John says that keeping
a woman as a concubine is not fornication, if she is a wife in all but name; but
for this to be the case, she must be a true lifelong companion (assumpter
inseparabiliter ad semper), not merely used by the man to produce an heir.
This is shocking because it is contrary to canon 14 of the Fourth Lateran
Council, which condemned concubinage and all clerical incontinence, but it is
clear that John wishes to distinguish between casual sex and permanent rela-
tionships. In fact, he is rather lenient towards both concubinage and priestly
marriage, perhaps following the line taken by Peter the Chanter and Peter
Comestor, who held that the prohibition of priestly marriage was simply a mat-
ter of Church tradition rather than a moral teaching of either the Old or New
Testament, one which should be relaxed.29 Indeed, John explains that
such marriage is permitted in natural law and in the Old Law, and that it was

27 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De sexto mandato, c. 4, quoting Augustine, De nuptiis et

concupiscentia, CSEL 42, 1.XI.13; 1.XVII.19.
28 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 365.
29 Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, vol. 1, p. 341.
Neighbour 115

permitted in both the early and the eastern Churches; only the western Church
forbade clerical marriage. For those with a less lenient view, sex with someone
in holy orders was a sort of double adultery, for as well as being fornication it
broke the clerics vow to devote himself to God.30
Medieval theologians (especially Mendicants with a pastoral focus) are pre-
pared to discuss almost anything. A notable exception to this is the question of
homosexuality which, when it is touched on (for example, by Bonaventure)
gets only an oblique mention. There is no single word to name the act, which
Bonaventure simply includes among the sins against nature (peccata contra
naturam), which the nature of all animals teaches them to shun; he con-
demns it as the most wicked deed.31 John of La Rochelle is quite prepared,
however, to continue his discussion of adultery by declaring sex with ones par-
ents to be always anathema, since it is against natural law. The prohibition of
incest (sex between siblings), however, is not part of natural law, since there
were biblical examples of it, including between the first children of Adam and
Eve.32 This tells John that these sexual boundaries must simply be arbitrary
rules set by the Church and dependent on historical context, especially the
necessity of begetting children. Bigamy, however, is given the reverse analysis:
it is against the law of nature, but was allowed by God in some circumstances
(in particular, at the time of the Patriarchs), but solely because it was vital that
the population of the Jews should increase. Since the Old Testament Patriarchs
were much more moderate in their sexual appetites than modern men, John
says, and only had sex for the purposes of procreation, for this to happen they
had to be allowed more than one wife.33 From a commentator as psychologi-
cally astute as John, this is a truly astounding statement. It shows us the over-
riding importance of the Bible as a provider of moral examples, and the duty
felt by biblical scholars to explain even those actions in apparent violation of
the moral law. Modern exegetes simply do not take the Bible as literally as their
medieval counterparts did.
How far does family extend? Included in the commandment against steal-
ing is nepotism giving jobs to relatives when others are in greater need;

30 Bonaventure, for example, distinguishes three kinds of chastity: conjugal, common and
privileged (i.e., referring to vowed religious). A sexual act may violate more than one of
these types: Collationes, Coll. 6, c. 13.
31 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, c. 13. Note that homosexual acts are not the only sins
against nature: incest and masturbation are also included under this loose description.
32 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 367; Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, c. 13,
seems to disagree: incest is against the instinct of nature.
33 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 368.
116 Chapter 4

nonetheless, looking after your family is to be encouraged.34 And the medieval

family could be stretched to include your household. The existence of servants
male and female is presumed by the last commandment, and also by medieval
commentators. Nicholas of Lyra notes that the specific inclusion of ones maid-
servant (ancilla) in this precept is not about desiring her as a woman, but as a
useful servant, just as one might any chattel; desiring her as a woman would be
forbidden as adultery.35 Nonetheless, the Glossa ordinaria follows Jewish teach-
ing in including servants in the commandment to keep the sabbath: no sex, no
age, nor any vile condition is excluded from this commandment.36 For those
with responsibility for big households, big incomes were not unreasonable, as
long as they were shared. Although Simon of Hinton included inordinate taxes in
his definition of robbery, which was part of the commandment against theft, he
did allow overlords to take what was needed for the defence of their subjects and
to provide for a moderate and honest household.37 Animals, however, were a
step too far (although Jewish teaching was that they should not be worked on the
sabbath). Several commentators considered whether the commandment against
killing extended to include animal slaughter.38 All decided it did not; but the
question was likely to have been prompted by the beliefs of dualist heretics such
as Cathars, for whom all corporeal life was an incarnation of the evil god, and
who were, in consequence, vegetarian, so that more animals did not have to be
bred to be eaten. (Bonaventure asks whether the fifth commandment covered
killing plants, but decides it did not.39) God had given humans dominion over
animals in Genesis; and there was too much evidence of animal killing, both for
sacrifice and for food, in all parts of the Bible for the extension of this command-
ment to animals to be a serious consideration for Christian theologians.

ii Beyond the Family

The definition of neighbour has so far remained firmly anchored in the literal
sense, despite extending the discussion to animals, and even to plants. No

34 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 382.

35 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla litteralis, Ex. 20: Non ancillam.
36 Biblia cum glossa, Ex 20: non facies omne opus, interlinear.
37 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 251B.
38 E.g., Robert Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De quinto mandato, c. 2; John of La Rochelle,
Tractatus de Legibus, no. 352; Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, c. 6. What is not discussed
is whether it is acceptable to kill animals solely for sport. Most medieval hunting, how-
ever, and it was a particularly popular pastime amongst those who could indulge it, would
have been for the dual purpose of sport and food.
39 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, c. 6. See also Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis: De quinto
mandato, c. 2.
Neighbour 117

medieval commentary could ignore consideration of the spiritual senses, but

before they were reached, the literal sense could certainly be extended to
encompass the broader meanings implied by the order of charity where, for
instance, fellow members of a religious Order would count as your family.
A flavour of how far the idea of neighbour might be stretched can be seen in
the precept ordering the honouring of parents: beyond the bounds of family,
parents can apply to everyone who has made you what you are: biological
parents, of course, but also teachers and guides of other sorts every wise per-
son who has helped you along the way. A common spiritual interpretation
of the commandment reads father as Christ and mother as Church.
Bonaventure develops these meanings until honour should be shown to any
authority, whether monastic, public, ecclesiastical or political; and it should be
shown to age, to weakness (to the extent that those lacking sense should be
given lessons), and to friendship. Interestingly, the commandment also
embraces honour of infidels or non-believers.40 In the same way that no-one
could stand outside the commandments prohibitions, so no-one could prima
facie be excluded from their benefits.
There was, however, a difference between an active and a passive loving of
your neighbour, best summed up in the question of what it meant to honour.
Most of the commandments are negative in form proscriptions of the active
commission of wicked acts against oneself and others but the fourth com-
mandment orders positive honouring of ones parents and, by extension, of
ones neighbour. The reason for this pro-active character, according to John of
La Rochelle, is that people are more likely to omit than commit such a doing of
good, and so need to be reminded of it.41 When the definition of your neigh-
bour is extended to include everyone else, it may still be clear that the pre-
cepts forbid positive harm to others, but do they also order the doing of good?
Here the theologians are not so emphatic. Everyone should be honoured in so
far as they are made in the image of God; but not inasmuch as they are wicked.
Thus, you are not held to do positive honour to all other people, but only those
who deserve it by being good themselves.42
In the spiritual interpretation, anyone whom the commandments can be
extended to restrain or protect may be counted as your neighbour. The com-
mandment against adultery, for instance, can be spiritually interpreted as for-
bidding idolatry that is, fornicating with other gods and so idolators are
your neighbour. The Glossa ordinaria even extends this to cover those with a

40 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 5, nos 1618.

41 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 345.
42 The position on this is summed up by John Wyclif, De Mandatis divinis, c. 22, p. 293.
118 Chapter 4

wrong-headed understanding of Scripture (scripturarum expositio prava);

your neighbours are not just those with orthodox beliefs.43 The order of charity
laid out a hierarchy of good, where obligation was greatest to those most like
yourself. After family, members of ones own religious Order were to be looked
after before turning to others, even other believers, and certainly before those
of other faiths.44 But there was a hierarchy of doing good in other ways, too.
Although the moral law of the Decalogue, by definition, consisted of those
acts which were always right and could never be wrong, still there was the
problem of what to do when two such rights came into contention with
one another: could there be a lesser of two goods? John of La Rochelle gives
the example of someone who wishes to enter a religious Order but who is
worried that if he does he will not be able to fulfil the commandment to
honour his parents. John urges the man to follow his wish, and resolves his
apparent selfishness by stating that no believer should think that they can
only aid their parents physically: the prayers of a vowed religious will, in
the long run, do them more good than providing them with food and drink.45
Here, the literal sense of the precept, even in the wider literal sense of religious
Order as family, is subjugated to a spiritual interpretation of honouring by an
invisible good.
But the most obvious sort of honour must be shown by helping to keep
someone alive. John of La Rochelles discussion of theft can help define who
your neighbour is and just how far honour extends. In the case of extreme
necessity for instance, if you have nothing at all to eat and no other means of
getting food you may steal to feed yourself; but the relaxation of the precept
does not apply to stealing on behalf of anyone else.46 Similarly, a wife cannot
give alms to the needy from her husbands money, unless he gives permission,
even if he is a usurer or avaricious. And you may take goods from those con-
quered in war so long as it is a just war even to the point where this threat-
ens their survival. However, this rule does not apply where the vanquished are
Christians or Jews: they must be left enough to live on.47

43 Biblia cum glossa, Deut 5: neque moechaberis (interlinear).

44 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 5, nos 1618.
45 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 347348.
46 Ibid., nos 375378: stealing to feed yourself in such extreme circumstances is not only
allowable, it cannot be called theft. The taker is completely excused (excusat in toto)
from sin, because in such necessity, all goods are held in common. John looks to canon
law as well as theology in these answers, quoting here, for instance, the Decretals of
Gregory IX .
47 John cites Rom 10; Isai 6; Ps 58: 11 in support of this argument.
Neighbour 119

Does honouring extend even to spiritual fathers? Certainly it embraces spir-

itual obedience to priests, even if they are personally bad men: if the Church
authority tolerates them, then individual believers must show reverence. Once
again, this is an anti-heretical position, illustrating that the office of priest was
more than the character of an individual, no matter what some heretics might
argue. Going further, Dederich of Mnster in the fifteenth century opens a
window for us onto a contentious world. According to him, the commandment
positively reproves all those who are rebellious against the Church or its prel-
ates; those who make light of Church commands; those who withold offerings,
annoy or are a burden to the clergy; those who do not heed excommunication
orders; those who engage in secret marriage ceremonies contrary to Church
regulations and at forbidden times; those who do not keep fasts or holidays;
those who do not take part in processions; and, finally, those who show no
respect for their confessor.48 The Church and her ministers are your spiritual
parents, and you must honour them with obedience.
But as far as material support of clergy goes, tithes and other benefits are not
necessarily due from needy parishioners, if the church is already sufficiently
endowed. According to John of La Rochelle, if the priest of such a church retains
anything beyond necessity, rather than giving it away to the poor, he commits a
sacrilegious theft by holding goods belonging to the Church for improper use.49
John is similarly anti-authoritarian as far as honouring fathers from the world of
secular power is concerned. Kings and princes need only be obeyed in matters
concerning the res publica: in these cases, individual believers must show rever-
ence.50 But for Dederich of Mnster this writ might run wide. You are disobeying
the precept if you disrespect, never mind attack, the divine right of rulers or of
city authorities, thereby fostering dissent, unrest or treason. Even more broadly,
you disobey the precept if you deprive someone of an honour or a favour, or
keep him from something he is entitled to. In contrast to John, for Dederich lov-
ing your neighbour does not seem to involve questioning the status quo.
If clergy appear to be given special status as neighbours, might they be held
to higher standards elsewhere? It was a question that often surfaced in discus-
sions of the eighth commandment, on lying, as we shall see in a later chapter.
Augustines view was that penalties for lying were greater for clergy than for
laity; but John of La Rochelle, with his legal mind, thinks this cannot be quite
correct, since if the lie itself is wrong, the nature of the person lying must
be irrelevant. There cannot be a real difference in the punishment of a single,

48 Dederich of Mnster, A Fruitful Mirror, ch. 11, iv, pp. 5556.

49 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 350.
50 Ibid., no. 349.
120 Chapter 4

particular lie, because the debt to God (who is immutable) and the obligation
to truth (which is unchanging) must be the same in all cases: it cannot vary
depending on the type of human being involved. John argues that Augustine
meant to say not that the clergy always commit mortal sin by lying but that,
since it is not always clear what sort of sin any one lie might involve, it is best
for a cleric to avoid lying completely, just in case he loses his immortal soul by
lying on behalf of his neighbour.

iii My Neighbour is Myself

We began this discussion of neighbour with the Good Samaritan. Jesus told the
parable in response to a question about personal salvation:

Teacher, the lawyer said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus
said to him, What is written in the law? What do you read there? The
lawyer answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and
your neighbour as yourself. And Jesus said to him: You have given the
right answer; do this, and you will live.

Although the outer purpose of keeping the commandments of the second tab-
let may be to ensure a harmonious community life, for Christian commenta-
tors their deeper purpose was to effect the inner transformation of every
believer. The final answer to the question, who is my neighbour?, then, is that
my neighbour is myself. Although it is never stated in the Decalogue itself, the
commentators take it for granted that in order to love ones neighbour one has
first to love oneself. By this they mean that each believer needs to recognize
him or herself as created by God and belonging to him. The commandments
are meant to speak directly to every individual. The singular you of the Latin
(rendered thou in older English versions of the text, and an accurate reflec-
tion of the singular Hebrew form of the original) is employed so as to make it
clear that the commandments were not given to some hazily-defined commu-
nity, but to every single created you: you shall not.
Precisely because humans were created by God, their lives were not their
own to do with as they pleased. The first implication of this was that suicide
was forbidden, as part of the fifth commandment, You shall not kill. For
Christians, this prohibition stood in contrast to the Roman admiration of the
man who could, for reasons of honour, take his own life.51 John of La Rochelle

51 For examples and discussion see the Theory section in Alexander Murray, Suicide in the
Middle Ages. 2: The Curse on Self Murder (Oxford, 2000).
Neighbour 121

cites the words of Matthew 19: 6, What God has joined together, let no-one
separate familiar in quite another context as evidence that the body and
the soul (what God has joined) cannot be separated by anyone else.52 Robert
Grossetestes analysis of the precept is especially interesting because he asks
why killing is so serious. This is not as foolish a question as may first appear,
given the Christian belief in the relative importance of life after death.
Grossetestes answer has several facets: killing is serious, firstly, because it
brings Christs saving work into contempt; secondly, because it is unnatural,
since the instinctive response of any creature is to try to preserve itself; thirdly,
because humans are the most worthy of Gods creation, so it is a particular
injury to God to kill them; and finally, because humans are made with a little
bit of everything else in them, so if you kill one, a tiny part of the rest of cre-
ation dies too no man is an island.
Suicide was forbidden, even though it had a biblical precedent in Samson,
among others.53 John of La Rochelle raises these scriptural problems, along
with the example of the martyrs, who would seem to have sought death in
opposition to this precept.54 He brings pagan support to bear in favour of sui-
cide, quoting Plato (Phaedo) and Plotinus, drawing his arguments against from
Augustine in the City of God. We shall see in more detail in later chapters that
it was possible to harm oneself in ways other than suicide, and although
the immediate result might seem less final, the longer term harm could be the
same. Fornication (defined simply as sex outside marriage, not involving a
married person), for example, was generally thought to be forbidden by the
commandment against adultery, although the commentators are not always
sure why. Fornication, Robert Grosseteste warns, begins in sweetness, but
ends in bitterness.55 His advice is not to get yourself in a position where you
might commit the sin and harm yourself irreversibly. This blanket ban did not
mean that commentators disapproved of sex per se. Indeed, John of La Rochelle
thinks that sex in itself is a good thing, but it can be made evil by being done
for the wrong reasons or in the wrong circumstances.56 And just as suicide is

52 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 353.

53 Samsons suicide is Jud 16: 30; another example is the death of Razias in 2 Macc 14: 42.
54 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 353.
55 Grossesteste, De Decem mandatis: De sexto mandato, c. 15.
56 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 364: unlike other actions which depend on
circumstances for their rightness or wrongness (eating being a good example), sex cannot
be simply indifferent, because it always involves another person; but the right circum-
stances for sex are rather limited: only with ones wife, in the right place, at the right time,
in the right manner, and for the right reasons.
122 Chapter 4

prohibited on the grounds that you are your own neighbour, so a voluntary
injury to yourself (such as consenting to unlawful sex) is an injury, nonetheless.
Hugh of St Cher uses the difference between the commandments against cov-
etousness and those forbidding theft and adultery to reiterate that you are your
own neighbour. The precepts concerning the actions of stealing and adultery
harm other people, he says, but those which prohibit the desire to take from
others rebound onto yourself: in these cases, it is you who are harmed.57 This is
in part why there are two commandments for these actions one to protect
your neighbour and one to protect yourself.
Does the responsibility to yourself include self-defence? As long as it is
never done willingly, a lay person may indeed kill in self-defence but, accord-
ing to John of La Rochelle, a cleric should never shed blood.58 Simon of Hinton
considers self-defence in the light of the Sermon on the Mount, and its admo-
nition to not resist an evildoer but turn the other cheek.59 Simon cites the
pacifist view that flight is the only option available to a Christian, but he does
not wholly agree. Some measure of resistance is allowable, as long as it is done
to effect an escape and not to exact revenge. Although the letter of the com-
mandment and the Sermon on the Mount would appear to be in accord, in
practice, commentators read the precept as allowing killing of some sorts.
Simon has thus to reconcile the Matthaean text to the precept by defining the
Gospel saying as only a consilium (counsel or advice), which is not as binding
as a full-blown commandment. And of course, killing is never simply a matter
of the body; far more important is not to kill the soul. But your responsibility to
yourself is not only literal: you must make sure you do nothing to injure your
spiritual life, or impugn your honour or reputation.60
The fourth commandment makes it clear that you are indeed your primary
neighbour since, alone amongst the precepts, it comes with a promised reward:
Honour your father and your mother, that you may be long-lived on the earth
the Lord your God shall give you. Although in the first commandment the
punishment falls not on the perpetrators of idolatry but on their descendants,
here the reward is direct. The type of reward offered long life was seen as

57 Hugh of St Cher, Postilla, on Ex. 20: non moechaberis, probably drawing on Thomas of
Chobham, Summa confessorum, ed. Broomfield, art. 3, d. 1, qu. 8a.
58 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 358, 360. John admits that this is not a dis-
tinction derived from the precept itself, which can only be the same for everyone, but
from Church law. For more on clergy shedding blood, see the next chapter.
59 Mt 5: 39; Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 249AB.
60 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 361.
Neighbour 123

particularly appropriate for someone who had spent time looking after adult
parents; but why was it there at all?61 William of Auxerre offers three reasons:
it is there because faith without works is dead; because pro-active works of
mercy, such as piety to parents, commend the believer to God more than the
simple omission of an evil act; and because if, out of love for God, someone
helps another person to live, then it is a fitting example of divine goodness that
they themselves are given life, both now and in the world to come.62 Thomas
of Chobham agrees: with this promise, God invites everyone to undertake the
works of mercy, since it is by these positive acts that he will judge believers on
the Last Day.63

***

According to Bonaventure, your neighbour is someone you are ordered,

obliged, or indebted to love.64 Given that humans have obligations to every-
one who was made in the image and likeness of God, and remembering the
Gospel command to love your neighbour as yourself, Bonaventures definition
seems all-inclusive: who might be excluded? Nevertheless, he agrees with the
medieval notion of an order of charity, starting with yourself and moving out-
wards to family, and then further, from those most similar to you to those most
different. Thus you cannot ignore non-believers or wrong-believers, but you do
not have to treat them in quite the same way (or act quite so swiftly) as you do
your mother, your parishioner, or your fellow Franciscan. So far, so comprehen-
sible, we might think; this is an instance when medieval interpretation fits
with a psychology we ourselves can understand. But we also need to recall the
differences between then and now, often created by the ability of medieval
theologians to focus on the eternal rather than the temporal. To love your
neighbours involves care not only for their corporeal needs, but also for their
spiritual selves. For John of La Rochelle, this means permitting capital punish-
ment: since the law only kills those who have committed grave sins (those sins

61 This does not mean that commentators thought the reward was always in evidence. See
L. Smith, Who is my Mother? Honouring Parents in Medieval Exegesis of the Ten
Commandments, in Conrad Leyser and L. Smith, ed., Motherhood, Religion, and Society in
Medieval Europe, 4001400 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 155172.
62 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 44, c. 3, pp. 839840.
63 Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, art. 3, d. 1, q. 8a, p. 29.
64 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 5, cc. 1618.
124 Chapter 4

which merit eternal punishment in the eyes of God), it is a mercy to take their
earthly lives before they have a chance to sin any more.65
Such confident, other-worldly focus is one of the most difficult parts of the
medieval belief system for modern readers to accept and understand: even
many contemporary Christians (never mind the non-believer) would find it
hard to profess such certainty that they were acting for the good of the guilty
party and not for the victim or the rest of the community. Today it seems
mostly to be suicide bombers who share the assurance of a better reality
beyond this one. But Johns argument is a reminder that the medieval com-
mentators we are dealing with are also religious extremists, and that they may
not represent the beliefs of the ordinary medieval individual or even of the
ordinary medieval believer as much as their questions may sometimes lead
us to think. In the next chapters we will see just how they deal with the com-
mandments on loving your neighbour.

65 John of La Rochelle Tractatus de Legibus, no. 356. Peter of Poitiers agrees: the soul must
be loved more than the body. Therefore he who kills the soul sins more than he who kills
the body (Sententiae, PL 211: 1151).
 Chapter 5

The Hand and the Mind

Action and Intention in Keeping the Law

The Second Tablet

Just as the commandments on the first stone tablet comprised a linked trinity
reflecting the persons of God, so those of the second tablet were never only
understood individually. The precepts of both tablets could be divided between
groups of three (deed, word, thought; hand, voice, mind), which illuminated
their root meanings, and which allowed them to be compared across the two
tablets. For this reason, we shall not approach these precepts one by one, but
rather as they are commonly distinguished by deed and thought, and by
word. Commentators were keen to make connections between the character-
istics of the Trinity, revealed by the first-tablet precepts, and the essence of
your relationship with your neighbour, contained in those of the second. So
the commandments which reify the debt you owe to God through words, for
instance (not taking the Lords name in vain; not bearing false witness against
your neighbour) are linked by their common participation in spoken truth,
and by Christ, the eternal Truth who is the Word of God. Or again, the com-
mandments which begin each tablet are associated by their common position:
it is right that the precept referring to God the Father is matched by that order-
ing honour to human parents; and the prime position of this apparently hum-
ble, domestic precept signals the movement from the spiritual plane of the
first stone tablet to the temporal plane of the second.
But there was a problem with this triad of deed, word and thought. According
to Peter Lombard, the Old Law was said to restrain only the hand and not the
mind, meaning that the Decalogue concerned itself solely with human actions
and not the motives behind them.1 This was in contrast to the words of Jesus in
the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, You shall not
murder; and whoever murders shall be liable to judgement. But I say to
you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to
judgement You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adul-
tery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has

1 Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 40, c. 1 (2).

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_007

126 Chapter 5

already commited adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes
you to sin, tear it out.
Mt 5: 212, 279

Jesus seems to be suggesting that deeds are almost inconsequential in com-

parison with thoughts, and that the Jews concentration on action was to be
overturned by his much more exacting standards. It is true that the majority of
the precepts are about how you should act in regard to God and neighbour, but
they are not the whole story. The ninth and tenth commandments speak of
coveting, which, although not clearly defined in the biblical text, was gener-
ally agreed to be a question of intention and desire. But if adultery and the
desire for your neighbours wife were both forbidden, along with stealing and
the desire for your neighbours goods, why did all the commandments not take
this dual form? Moreover, as we have already seen, at least some of the other
commandments were capable of being interpreted beyond the sphere of
action alone. Remembering the sabbath day, for example, was not only a mat-
ter of doing nothing; keeping the commandment fully required you actively to
empty your mind of distractions and spend the time meditating on the good-
ness of God. If this were the case, why did the law need to specify coveting
goods and wives when the precepts against stealing and adultery could take a
meaning beyond the literal?
For Peter Lombard, the distinction between action and intention the hand
and the mind was linked to the Pauline contrast between the deadening let-
ter of the law and the life-giving spirit of the Gospel (2 Cor 3: 6). Peter follows
Augustines interpretation of the Corinthians passage to assert that, properly
understood, the Old Law was just as able to lead you to salvation as the New.2
But there was still the problem of how to understand Jesus words in the
Sermon on the Mount, which, for all their apparent acceptance of the Old Law
precepts (Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,
Mt 5: 17), nevertheless clearly introduced the question of motive or mental
state to dealings with your neighbour. Why had Jesus added to the words of
Exodus in this way?3 If the commandments were sufficient in themselves, what
else could be needed? Could the precepts be interpreted so that more than a
literal meaning should be assumed? In this chapter, we shall first explore the
three second-tablet precepts which most clearly concerned action killing,
adultery and theft before turning to the exposition of the two precepts which

2 Augustine, De Spiritu et littera, abbreviated by Peter (possibly via the Glossa ordinaria) in
Sentences, bk III, d. 40, c. 2.
3 Peter Lombard refers to this as a superaddition to the Decalogue.
The Hand And The Mind 127

forbade the mental action of coveting, in order to judge whether there really
was a distinction between the hand and the mind.

You shall not Kill

The worst physical act you can do to another creature is to take away its life,
which is why this commandment takes its place as the first of those which
cover deeds. Despite this primacy, the discussions of this precept are usually
short and straightforward. Conventional wisdom holds that this command-
ment reads, you shall do no murder, but the Vulgate Latin text of both Exodus
and Deuteronomy does not use homicidium but the simple verb occidere, to kill
or cut down: non occides you shall not kill. According to the Jews, as recounted
by Nicholas of Lyra and Rashi, this commandment does in fact refer solely to
homicide, but only because other sorts of killing are covered in the judicial
precepts of the law.4 Medieval Christian commentators, however, generally
preferred to begin with the stark prohibition of all killing, as it allowed them to
consider a greater variety of issues, not least the many biblical instances in
which killing was ordered by God or committed by the patriarchs.
A fundamental difficulty for Christian commentators dealing with this pre-
cept was the deeply contradictory nature of biblical texts in regard to the tak-
ing of life. As we have seen, Jesus in the Gospels forbade killing absolutely; but
in the Old Testament the story was very different. Here, God not only orders
killing by the patriarchs, he actually kills himself. In Genesis, God destroys
most of the world in a flood; he orders Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacri-
fice; he sends Moses and the Israelites across the Red Sea before destroying
Pharoah and the Egyptians in its waters. A biblical hero such as David not only
kills to preserve the people and their land, he sends Uriah to certain death in
the front line of battle, simply in order to sleep with his wife, Bathsheba. In
fact, the law itself seems to order two opposing things: the commandment says
you shall not kill, but the judicial precept two chapters further on orders, You
shall not allow evildoers to live (Ex 22: 18).
Piling example upon example, William of Auxerre wonders how it can be
bad to kill when God kills or allows killing. If, as Augustine rightly says, the
height of religion is to imitate God in all his works, where does that leave us?5

4 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, Ex. 20: Non occides.

5 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 55, c. 1: summe religionis est imittari Deum in
operibus suis. William is quoting Augustines City of God, cf. bk 8, c. 17, n. 2, ed. Dombart and
Kalb, p. 234.
128 Chapter 5

William distinguishes between those things in which you should always imi-
tate God those moral laws which represent Gods will, emanating from the
goodness of his heart, and given to Creation out of mercy and those things
which God does out of anger (ex ira sua) to punish wrongdoers. Such actions
demonstrate Gods omnipotence, which it is wrong to try to imitate, as Lucifer
discovered. Bonaventure takes another path through the biblical minefield.
For him, the commandment is always to be understood beyond its literal word-
ing: First I say that in this commandmentis prohibited anger which results
in injuries that ruin natural or substantial life, a safe life, and an honorable
life.6 Thus for Bonaventure, Jesus is not adding to the precept when he forbids
anger and orders his followers to turn the other cheek (Mt 5: 39); he is simply
bringing out the full meaning already present in the commandment for those
who had ears to hear.
Nevertheless, Bonaventure avoids taking a pacificist position. He allows
(indeed, supports) killing, if it is in pursuit of justice and righteousness; his
reading of the commandment explicitly to include the mental state of the
actor and his motive in acting means that killing done with good intentions is
allowable. Simon of Hinton also considers the possibility that the command-
ment might simply order a blanket prohibition of killing, and he asks whether
this would not imply that flight should be the only acceptable Christian option
when you are faced with violence or with having to offer violence yourself.7
Although he does not completely accept this non-violent line, Simon does take
it seriously, and is careful to permit only resistance which is proportional to the
circumstances, allowing you to to effect an escape but not to exact revenge. He
declares that turning the other cheek is not in itself a precept but only a con-
silium, and so does not necessarily apply in all situations.
Thus most of the commentators concluded that some killing is acceptable,
but only in specific situations by specific people. Augustine had already made
a distinction between killing within and without the judicial process, and he
declared that the precept was not intended to prohibit judicial killing.8 He and
others state bluntly that judges do not kill as individual persons, but in
theirpersonae as officers of the law; so they are not to be held responsible for
the taking of life, as long as it is done in defence of justice and to protect the
innocent. Bonaventure agrees: killing is prohibited to men but not to the law.9

6 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, n. 4.

7 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 249AB.
8 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71, no. 5, or Ad Publicolam (Ep. 47), n. 5. For others, e.g.,
Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37 (AE), no. 5.
9 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, no. 6.
The Hand And The Mind 129

Our agents, justly ordained, with just cause, acting justly, may kill on our behalf,
he says. Indeed, a minister of the law cannot refuse to execute a wrongdoer, but
should do as he is ordered. Peter of Poitiers gives an interesting list of those
who may be lawfully killed, claiming Jerome as his authority: killing murderers,
usurers, or those who commit sacrilege is not spilling blood but a ministry of
the law.10
Who has the power to kill? Those who have potestas which for John of La
Rochelle boils down in practice to those recognised and appointed by the
Church. This potestas could be understood through an internal revelation
from his, namely Gods, will (ab eius voluntate, scilicet Dei, intellecta per inter-
nam inspirationem), which solved the problem of biblical cases of homicide,
since those acting were simply agents obeying an internal order from God; but
it was not a very practical way of solving contemporary questions.11 In canon
law, laity were allowed to kill in self-defence, but clergy could never shed blood.
The commandment was not the source of this ban, since the moral law had to
apply to everyone equally; it was simply a rule of the Church. But there could
be circumstances in which the restriction might be circumvented. John of La
Rochelle appears to recognise a whiff of hypocrisy here, since the Church
could authorise killing, even if it did not carry it out. John is aware of how eas-
ily this could look like a pious fiction. His response makes a distinction between
the ministers of the Old Law, who were given the authority to kill, and those of
the New, who were not, because the New Law required that people come to
God out of love, and were not cajoled into belief from fear. All clergy (whom he
defines as those involved with the ministry of the sacraments) should avoid
any situation which involved killing, since this would seem to mirror the killing
of Christ as he puts it, the sundering of Christs body and blood in a human
life. Nevertheless, the pope had the general power, given by God to the Church,
to authorise killing for the right reasons, and officers of the law, authorised by
the emperor on behalf of the Church, could be ordered to carry out such a kill-
ing in the right circumstances. This solution leaves unanswered a number of
questions medieval politics had to confront, concerning the nature, extent and
recipients of this papal donation of power, and the concomitant matter of the
temporal power of the Church. Where did balance of power between clerical
and secular authority lie? Although he does not address these issues, John does
suggest two different sorts of authority: authority to approve (auctoritas innu-
endi), which both pope and priests possess, and which they exercise in respect
of Church business (ab ecclesia); and authority to order (auctoritas iubendi),

10 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1151A), quoting Jerome.

11 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 357.
130 Chapter 5

possessed by the emperor, and exercised on behalf of the Church (pro ecclesia).
Both sorts of authority emphasise the importance of the Church.
Peter of Poitiers further questions the status of those sent abroad by the
Church to kill pagans Crusaders.12 They were allowed to kill in order to
defend the faith or out of a zeal for justice, but not out of bitterness or hatred
(rancore animi); the distinction is important so that the faith should not be
compromised. John of La Rochelle is unusual in expanding the issue into a
serious discussion.13 In his view it is allowable to kill heretics and enemies of
the faith, but only out of the desire for righteousness, not out of malice.
Killing is unlawful when a whole people have turned away from the faith, but
the leaders who deceived them could and should be removed. Alexander of
Hales exhibits a distinct tension when discussing these difficult issues, espe-
cially in regard to the Churchs role.14 How can the Church kill infidels,
Alexander asks, when it is forbidden to clergy to shed blood? He does not
quite think they can. What the Church authorises is merely the acquisition of
the Holy Land itself, not the means by which it might be done. It is the secu-
lar authority which takes responsibility for any killing involved in achieving
the aim. Against heretics, however, whom he says are Christians who have
been corrupted and should know better, he is prepared to go further. Their
bad influence legitimates their execution, which can be authorised by both
king and Church; for as well as being an offence against a Christian state,
heretics are an offence to the law and justice of God. For all of Alexanders
unease in his consideration of these matters, his solutions fit squarely within
contemporary practice.
William of Auxerre is a little more circumspect.15 He too asks how the
Church could justify sending men out in Gods name to kill Saracens. For
William, the Church should favour a New Law emphasis on gentleness, but for
the very practical reason that this approach will attract followers more suc-
cessfully than proceeding by fear. The Church may acknowledge that killing
takes place, but its officers may not take part in person. As we have seen,
William knows that using biblical examples as a template for contemporary
behaviour is not straightforward: it is safe to copy acts of charity, but if you
attempt to imitate other aspects of God, such as his judgement, you are liable
to incur his righteous anger. For this reason, killing is not a matter of following
simple rules; it requires judgement about what to do when.

12 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1150D1151A).

13 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 354, and see no. 377.
14 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37(L), no. 20.
15 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 5, c. 1.
The Hand And The Mind 131

Contrary to myth, medieval Europe in this period was not an especially

violent place. The slaughter of medieval battle was certainly no worse than
the death inflicted by twentieth-century warfare or its repeated genocides. The
ideal ruler should represent the law, not an arbitrary will, and the rule of law
should be applicable to all, and obeyed even in difficult circumstances. In the-
ory at least, killing was not to be random, but the result of an accepted judicial
practice. Thinking legally, as he always does, John of La Rochelle asks if it is
ever licit to kill an innocent man.16 He gives the example of a case which has
been lawfully proved against someone from the testimony of false witnesses,
without the courts knowledge. Johns conclusion emphasises the importance
of due process: if the judge and the court have tried their best to get at the
truth, then the man must die, because upholding the law (and the law being
seen to be upheld) is more important in the long run than the life of one
innocent man. The man himself will be justly and mercifully judged by God in
the next life. Furthermore, it is important that no judge be allowed to act on
his own initiative, even if he suspects that an innocent man is being punished,
because the judge in the next case might take this as a precedent to act on
his own volition. If that second judge has been bribed by a wealthy man to
fix the outcome, then justice will not be served. Hence John argues that, in
the long run, it is in the interests of the powerless that the rule of law should
always be seen to prevail, whether or not perfect justice is done in every
case. A law that applies equally to all is the last refuge of the poor against
the rich.
We noted in the previous chapter that this commandment was held to for-
bid suicide, since your life is not your own property but belongs to God. John of
La Rochelle was the first scholastic commentator to consider the question,
breaking a silence that is noticeable in twelfth-century theologians.17 It is not
that Johns treatment of the issue is startling he considers the biblical exam-
ples of Samson and Razias, as we might expect;18 it is the fact of his including
the question at all which is innovative. Yet for all the novelty of the question,
suicide is still a straightforward extension of the literal sense of killing. This is
also true of the application of synecdoche (the rhetorical device of the whole
standing for the part, or vice versa) to this precept, so that maiming, flogging

16 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 355.

17 Johns term is se occidere not suicidium (Tractatus de Legibus, no. 353). Although suicidium
had been coined by Walter of St Victor in the twelfth century, it was not yet in common
use: Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages. 2: The Curse on Self Murder, p. 205 and
chs 67.
18 Samson: Judges 1316; Razias: 2 Maccabees 14: 3742.
132 Chapter 5

and mutilation, for example, were forbidden here, according to Robert

Grosseteste and Nicholas of Lyra.19
Furthermore, the commentators were prepared to broaden the command-
ment to include much more than physical death and damage. The best illustra-
tion of what the commandment could encompass is found in the exceptionally
comprehensive framework provided by John of La Rochelle.20 Johns analysis
of what killing might encompass lends itself to a diagram, of the sort com-
monly supplied in medieval manuscripts:

unavoidable (e.g., self-defence against an attacker)

inevitabile
out of necessity
necessitate avoidable (if you could run away from an attacker)
evitabile
literal lovingly
vere diligendi
in doing something licit
dando operam rei licitae
not lovingly
by accident non diligendi
casu
in doing something illicit
dando operam rei illicitae
killing

justly
iuste
by will
voluntate
unjustly
iniuste
spiritual by omission
interpretative omittendo
by will (e.g., hating someone)
corde
by disparagement
by detrahendo
commission by word
committendo ore by not countering mischief
malum subtrahendo
by action (e.g., setting a bad example that makes
opere him fall into sin)

Johns schema allows him to extend his notion of killing in two particular
directions beyond the literal sense of carrying out physical injury. Firstly it
includes the duty of positive intervention to save life whenever possible, since
the omission of doing good is prohibited as much as the commission of evil.
Allcommentators agree that there is no merit to be gained from simply doing

19 Nicholas of Lyra quotes catholic doctors on this: Postilla on Ex. 20: Non occides; Robert
Grosseteste notes the same point: De Decem mandatis. De quinto mandato, no. 7.
20 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 361.
The Hand And The Mind 133

nothing; merit requires a positive act of charity. Bonaventure cites Ambrose:

Feed the person dying from hunger; if you do not feed him, you have killed
him.21 John is not alone in this interpretation of the precept. For Hugh of
StVictor, the commandment included within killing anything that could be
done by hand, by tongue, or by consent (in other words, by deed, word, or
thought); and consent could be either positive (by desiring something to
happen) or negative (by not giving assistance to someone who needs it). You
do not have to act yourself; as illustration, he gives the example of the Jews,
who killed Christ merely by suggesting his execution to the judge.22 According
to the Glossa ordinaria, you can kill by hand or by mind or by taking away help
or advice from him to whom you should give it; you can kill even when you see
your (spiritual) brother in hunger and nakedness and do nothing to alleviate
his trouble.23 Peter of Poitiers agrees with this wider definition, adding that
no-one can fulfil this precept simply by doing no harm: you must proactively
do good, whenever you get the chance.24 For Stephen Langton, it is self-evident
that this commandment prohibits killing by will as well as by act. Where
possible, you must actively preserve life.25
Although wide-ranging, this extension nevertheless concerns itself with the
physical person. But John of La Rochelle also takes killing beyond the physical,
into harm done to your neighbours spiritual life. His Brevis explanatio distin-
guishes between the explicit sense of the precept, which is homicide, and the
implicit sense, which is the prohibition of anger. In this broader spiritual exe-
gesis the definition of killing includes disparaging someones reputation, not
countering mischevious talk when you hear it, or not giving good advice when
you can. You kill, in fact, if you do not step in to help, in any way you can, when-
ever you might do so. Stephen Langton provides a particularly nice case of
spiritual homicide for his university audience when he gives as his only spe-
cific example refusing to lend your books (presumably theological and biblical
texts) to those who need them.26 Robert Grosseteste, always a sharp good

21 The Ambrose reference is taken from Decretals, pt 1, can. 21, d. 86, quoted in Bonaventure,
Collationes, Coll. 6, no. 11.
22 Hugh of St Victor, De Sacramentis christianae fidei, bk 1, pt 12, c. 11.
23 Biblia cum Glossa on Ex 20: Non occides (interlinear); on Deut 5: Non occides.
24 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1150B).
25 Stephen Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 126rb: scilicet manu vel mente; nec violentam
manum inferes insonti, nec subtrahes auxilium vite cui potes dare et debes. Unde pasce
fame morientem si non paveris occidisti. Note Stephens use of singular you verb forms,
copying the biblical example.
26 Stephen Langton, In Deuteronomium, fol. 258rb: ergo de genere homicidii est quaternos non
accomodare [sic]. See also L. Smith, Lending Books: the growth of a medieval question
134 Chapter 5

observer of human behaviour, uses this commandment to forbid malice, citing

1 John 3: 15 (He who hates his brother is a murderer) and Romans 12: 21
(Donot be overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good).27 Simon of Hinton
sums up his reading of the commandment with a popular proverb:

Exemplum, mens, lingua, manus, subtractio victus

Corporis et animae dici faciunt homicidam.28

The hand, the tongue, the mind, by example, and by not nurturing the body
and the soul all can be ways to kill.
Johns scheme recognises that not all killing is the same. Murder done will-
ingly and with intent is always wrong, but even some literal (that is, physical)
killing, if accidental or necessary, may be forgiven. Looked at like this, John and
his fellow commentators appear to ignore the strict admonitions of the Sermon
on the Mount and seem instead to make even the literal interpretation of the
commandment more lenient. But they do not stop at the literal sense. Killing
is not only a physical act; it can and must be seen to have a spiritual interpreta-
tion, which encompasses motive and intention, as well as killing your neigh-
bour in non-physical ways. Peter Lombard is unequivocal that this
commandment prohibits the will to kill spiritually, as the New Law makes
clear.29 Why, then, was it necessary for Jesus to speak as he did in the Sermon?
It was a matter of historical context:

what was said in the Gospel and by the Apostle [about not killing] was
said to the times: for the divine Spirit, considering all things from the
inside, foresaw that in the time of the primitive Church while it was still
young, it was useful to wait patiently. But the number of the faithful has
now increased and now allows what was not lawful then.30

from Langton to Bonaventure, in L. Smith and Benedicta Ward, ed., Intellectual Life in the
Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson (London, 1992), pp. 265279.
27 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De quinto mandato, no. 9.
28 See H. Walther, Carmina Medii Aevi Posterioris Latina. II. Proverbia Sententiaeque
Latinitatis Medii Aevi (Gttingen, 1963), pt 1, p. 1068, no. 29; Simon of Hinton, Summa
iuniorum, col. 249C.
29 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c 4(3).
30 quod dictum est in Evangelio et in Apostolo, ad tempus dictum est: Spiritus enim divinus
omnia medullitus considerans praevidit quo in tempore primitivae Ecclesiae, dum par-
vula erat, utile erat sustinere patienter. Sed modo auctus est numerus fidelium, et licet
quod tunc non licebat: Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1151A).
The Hand And The Mind 135

Christians, then, can put aside the total prohibition preferred by Jesus, and
return to the practice of the Jews. Alexander of Hales addresses a slightly dif-
ferent issue in effect asking why the Old Law did not also include the will to
kill.31 Asking whether any good can come out of the evil of killing, his response
is that God commands only as much as he knows his creatures can stand. The
Jews were as children, who could only manage to fulfill limited demands. It
was better that they should fulfil these limited goals completely than only par-
tially accomplish the greater expectations made of Christians in the Gospel.
There was no question of contradiction in what God required, only an incom-
plete knowledge of the divine plan on the part of the Jews.
But this tightening of the rules in the Gospel left the biblical position even
further from the circumstances in which these medieval theologians lived.
Whether or not they wanted to, in order not to seem wholly at odds with thw
world in which they lived, they had to adapt their exegesis to take the world
into account. The law of the state was allowed to kill; even the Church was
allowed to authorise killing, where heretics and non-believers were concerned.
It might even be lawful to kill an innocent man, as long as justice seemed to be
done. This apparent leniency of interpretation went hand in hand with a broad
understanding of the commandment, which was held already to encompass
the motivation and mental state of the person causing injury. The answer to
why this commandment did not need a twin to forbid intention seems, at least
for now, to be because intention was covered in the implicit reading of the text.
Was that not also true of adultery and theft? How did the commentators deal
with them?

You shall not Commit Adultery

Killing comes first in the list of ways to harm your neighbour by an action,
since it causes direct physical hurt. Adultery is next, because the damage
comes via a person linked to your neighbour in a special way, by a public vow
that makes the two one flesh.32 But perhaps this commandment deserves a
higher place among the second-tablet precepts? After all, the first command-
ment, idolatry, is nothing other than spiritual adultery leaving your own
God to run after another so commentators must at least consider whether or
not adultery would not have fitted better as the first commandment on the

31 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 37(L), no. 20.

32 Cf. Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex. 20: Non moechaberis; and cf. Grosseteste, De Decem
mandatis. De mandatis nono et decimo, no. 10.
136 Chapter 5

second tablet.33 As we noted in the previous chapter, adultery in its literal

interpretation was expanded by medieval commentators to include much
more than extra-marital sex. The boundaries could be stretched in a number of
directions. For instance, matrimony called upon God as a witness to a vow.
Breaking that vow did dishonour to God, and so adultery could incorporate
other forms of such dishonour, such as having sex with a vowed religious or
priest, or in a consecrated religious place, such as a church, or at a time conse-
crated to God, such as during Lent. The marriage vow was the reason why adul-
tery was included in the moral law, since marriage meant involving God as a
witness to your promise and intention. As John of La Rochelle notes, sex in
itself was not judged to be a bad thing (malum); in fact, it is essential for human
life. After all, the Decalogue might have specifically forbidden sex outside mar-
riage, but it did not. The marriage vow, however, invoked God, and it was not
possible to bring God into any equation without risking disrespect to eternal
truth; this was always an issue of moralia. Adultery also involved breaking the
bonds of family. Viewed from this angle, the commandment prohibited incest
and bigamy, as well as sex with your wife at unapproved times or places, or in
anything other than conventional positions. Given these broad interpretations
of adultery stressing the primacy of the vow or the importance of family it
is perhaps surprising that the focus of commentary settled on sex per se rather
than on the question of marriage or vows. To understand why this might be, we
once again need to look to Augustine. His definition of adultery as all unlawful
use of those parts (omnis illicitus usus membrorum) was wide enough to
encompass all sexual activity outside marriage and some within it.34 It is such
a catch-all phrase that we find it repeated in almost every theological discus-
sion of sexual matters. Nonetheless, it raises as many questions as it answers,
since what counted as unlawful is left unsaid.
For Augustine, unlawful use involved all sex outside marriage, including
simple fornication (fornicatio simplex), that is, sex between two single, free
people, even though he is aware that such a definition is a stretching of the
biblical facts. But as a bishop, Augustine wished to find a way of regulating
sexual relations and, as he says, if extra-marital sex was not forbidden here,
then I dont know where else in the Bible it might be found.35 Simon of Hinton
goes further. Not only is all fornication (sex outside marriage) forbidden in this

33 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 362. John agrees that this is a viable line of
argument, but that, in the end, it is not proper to this commandment.
34 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71, no. 4: omnis inlicitus concubitus atque illorum
membrorum non legitimus usus prohibitus, often quoted as omnis illicitus usus mem-
brorum in line with the definition of theft.
35 Ibid.
The Hand And The Mind 137

commandment, it is mortal sin, because it destroys grace and damages nature.

Sex is natural, but fornication is a distortion of it; and just as poison mixed with
wine damages nature, so fornication damages the good natural character of
sex.36 Simon appeals to the principle we have seen elsewhere of the whole
being implied by the part, and he uses another commandment (albeit accord-
ing to his own exposition) as a correlative: if by theft one might understand
all unlawful appropriation (usurpatio) of anothers goods, since one under-
stands the whole from a part, so by the word adultery one ought to understand
the prohibition of all illicit sex or illegitimate use of those members.37 This
appeal to synecdoche was widely accepted: the Glossa ordinaria on this com-
mandment quotes Augustine, The whole to be understood for the part: no sex
outside marriage.38 Only Nicholas of Lyra, with his access to non-Christian
interpretation, offers other possibilities: Our doctors say [this command-
ment] prohibits all sex outside marriage; but the Hebrews say it prohibits only
adultery other things are prohibited in other precepts.39 And adultery
encompassed only the actions of the husband; again, wives were considered in
other parts of the Law. For the Jews, just as the previous commandment for-
bade only murder, so this one is limited to adultery by men, in both cases
because other interpretations are specifically prohibited elsewhere in the judi-
cialia of the Law. For John of La Rochelle, however, extending adultery to
include all fornication meant questioning whether it should be part of the
moral law at all. After all, who is harmed by sex with a free (i.e., unmarried)
woman? To explain, he declares that sex can bring you harm, even in a situa-
tion like this, when both parties are free and consenting. John makes the com-
parison with suicide, where even though you are voluntarily inflicting harm
upon yourself, that harm cannot be undone. In Johns view, the prohibitions
laid down in the commandments are reasonable precisely because they restrict
this sort of harm that you might not even realise you are doing to yourself.40
Dualist heretics such as Cathars, who believed in a strict division between
the good spiritual creation and the evil corporeal creation, taught that all sex-
ual activity was illicit because it was a means for sin to enter the world, in the
form of new corporeal life.41 This left orthodox theologians who also wanted to
put restrictions on sex walking a tightrope. Sex in itself could not be bad but

36 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, cols 249D250A.

37 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71, no. 4.
38 Biblia cum glossa on Ex 20: Non moechaberis. Aug. Item quaeri solet, quoting Augustine as above.
39 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, on Ex. 20: Non moechaberis.
40 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 362, and cf. nos 363364.
41 See, for an outline with bibliography, W.L. Wakefield and A.P. Evans, Heresies of the High
Middle Ages (New York, 1991), esp. pp. 919.
138 Chapter 5

tobe lawful it had to come with strict conditions, set within a whole Christian
framework of sexual behaviour, as laid down originally by the Apostle Paul.42
Once more, we turn to John of La Rochelle for a rich and comprehensive
working-out of what such a framework should look like.43 Unsurprisingly, vir-
ginity and celibacy are the best forms of life, since they allow you to concen-
trate your attention solely on God. After this, following Paul, marriage is to be
preferred to damnation (the punishment for fornication or worse); but even
within marriage, sex is allowable only for good reasons: for the procreation of
children; to avoid fornication if you find it impossible to be continent other-
wise; and in order to pay the conjugal debt. The contractual notion of debt
and obligation is one that John returns to often, and in a discussion of sex this
somewhat vague phrasing might well be seen as allowing rather more varied
activity than his bare formulation spells out; but it is followed by a list of times,
places and states (e.g., during menstruation) in which, even within marriage,
sex is prohibited.
If John of La Rochelle has the widest-ranging definition of adultery, his
Franciscan confrre, Bonaventure, takes the strictest line. He uses the famously
misanthropic theologian Peter Damian to authorise his prohibition in the
strongest terms of all sex outside marriage.44 Bonaventure details seven differ-
ent acts of unlawful use, so that no-one can say they do not understand. The
seven acts offend against three types of chastity conjugal, common, and priv-
ileged. Conjugal chastity is violated by adultery; common chastity is violated
by prostitution and fornication; and privileged chastity (i.e., virginity and
vowed religious celibacy) are violated by deflowering a virgin (stuprum), and
having sex with a nun (technically, this was sacrilege). All three are violated by
incest, masturbation and homosexuality, which Bonaventure characterises
together as sins against nature.
In his Sermon on the Decalogue, Augustine directs much of his energy
towards this sixth commandment on the grounds that it is so prevalent, and
because he thinks people (specifically men) are often hypocritical about it:

What has taken more of my time is that evil which spreads its tentacles so
widely Complaints in this matter are a daily occurrence, even though
the women themselves dont yet dare to complain about their husbands.
A habit that has caught on everywhere like this is taken for a law, so that
even wives perhaps are now convinced that husbands are allowed to do

42 E.g., 1 Cor 7.
43 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 362372.
44 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, no. 15, quoting Peter Damian, Opuscula, bk 7, c. 21.
The Hand And The Mind 139

this, wives are not. They are used to hearing about wives being taken to
court, found perhaps with houseboys. But a man taken to court because
he was found with his maid, they have never heard of that though its a
sin. It is not divine truth that make the man seem more innocent in what
is equally sinful, but human wrongheadedness.45

Following Augustine, Robert Grosseteste regards adultery as not just breaking

the vow made to God in matrimony, but as violating all three good things
associated with marriage: the sacrament, represented in the vow; faith in the
other person; and the inheritance of children.46 For Robert, another, practical
reason for outlawing adultery is that it confuses lines of succession and inheri-
tance when children are born who are not their fathers true descendants.
What we have described so far is the commentators forbidding adultery as
an act. They may extend the meaning of the term beyond what we might
expect, but their interpretation is still focussed on actions to do with sex. This
is the literal interpretation of the scriptural text in its simplest form. The theo-
logians also note, although not in detail, the spiritual exposition of the
commandment, which is the forbidding of idolatry and the worship of other
gods forgetting the God of the covenant and lusting after false gods.47 The
Glossa ordinaria even counts the false exegesis of Scripture as spiritual adul-
tery. There is little mention of the will behind adulterous acts, presumably
because the Decalogue includes another commandment forbidding the covet-
ing of your neighbours wife. But illicit desire is not entirely ignored. For Robert
Grosseteste, it is important to note that desire for another person is not in itself
sinful it was only made so after the Fall.48 But the remedy for that sinfulness
is matrimony, which is why desire is appropriate within marriage, but outside
it is defined as adultery. Peter of Poitiers, on the other hand, makes it plain that
this commandment forbids both act and will, just as the Gospel does: the act
of adultery is prohibited in the carnal sense; however spiritually speaking, the
will to adultery is prohibited.49 For Peter, the reason we can be sure that
the commandment covers both act and the will to act is precisely because
theGospel spells out both parts. The Gospel, says Peter, is not an extension or
alteration of the commandment, but a means to understanding it correctly.

45 Augustine, Sermon 9, De decem chordis, transl. Hill, no. 4.

46 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De sexto mandato, no. 4.
47 E.g., Stephen Langton, In Deuteronomium, fol. 258rb-va: hoc omnis fornicatio tam spiri-
tualiter per ydolatriam quam corporaliter per concupiscentie luxuriam prohibetur.
48 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De sexto mandato, no. 3.
49 Peter of Poitiers Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1151CD).
140 Chapter 5

Hugh of St Victor is clear that this precept now prohibits fornication both by
the body and of the soul or mind. The commandment may appear to concern
itself only with the body, but this is because it (and certain others) were only
partially granted under the Old Law, on account of the infirmity of the hear-
ers. But for Christians living in the age of grace, the meaning of the law has
been completed, and as Christ says: Whoever shall look on a woman to lust
after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart, forbidding all
illicit concupiscence of the soul as well as of the body.50 On the command-
ment forbidding adultery, then, commentators assume that, for Christians,
itincludes the desire for the act, as much as the act itself, though this was not
necessarily true for the Jews, for whom the later commandment was a neces-
sary addition. Was this also the way they dealt with stealing?

You shall not Steal

If killing is harm done by an action against your neighbours person, and adul-
tery is harm done by an action with their spouse, stealing represents harm to
your neighbour, inflicted via their goods. The seventh commandment prohib-
its stealing and, like adultery, is shadowed by another which forbids the desire
for your neighbours belongings. Once again, Augustine provides the classic
definition of the precept, which is repeated regularly in the work of medieval
commentators: theft is all unlawful appropriation of another persons goods
(omnis illicita usurpatio rei alienae).51 Like his characterisation of adultery,
this is a simple and comprehensive formula and popular for that reason. But
like the definition of stealing, the unvarnished use of the word unlawful
demands further explanation. One key question is whether theft has to be sur-
reptitious a point raised by the Latin word for theft, furtum, which suggests
(as in its English cognate furtive) that the deed has to be done secretly, with-
out the victim realising what is going on. Although they consider the matter,
commentators are sure that it is not essential. Stealing in the context of the
commandment includes the whole range of the removal of someone elses
property, from silent, night-time theft to more violent, daylight snatch-and-run
rapine (Latin: rapina) or robbery. In fact, according to Simon of Hinton,
rapina is much more common than theft proper, but the commandment
prohibits theft rather than rapine because the removal of goods by stealth
encompasses daylight robbery, but the opposite is not true. He adds that the

50 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis christianae fidei, ed. Deferrari, bk 1, pt 12, no. 12.
51 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71, no. 5.
The Hand And The Mind 141

commandment focuses on furtive theft because that is the kind of stealthy

offence the Jews are prone to commit.52 This precept can even encompass tak-
ing someones property with their knowledge and agreement, however mis-
guided this might be. The best example of this sort of theft is usury broadly
defined as taking excessive interest on a loan which was the subject of much
medieval discussion, as we shall see. Some commentators, such as Peter of
Poitiers, are wary of including usury within the commandment, probably
because of its central position in medieval commerce. Peter thinks that so
much doubt about usury remains that he should leave the subject to be argued
about by lawyers not theologians.53
According to our doctors, says Nicholas of Lyra, meaning Christian theolo-
gians, stealing is all taking of another persons goods or retaining them
unjustly.54 However, he reports that Rashi and the Jews include kidnapping in
the precept, which would attract the death penalty.55 For more conventional
theft, involving goods not people, the penalty is either a double restitution of
what was taken or other sorts of forfeit ordered by the judicial precepts of the
law. Robert Grosseteste is similarly concerned as much with the matter of res-
titution as with the definition of stealing:

The transgression of this precept is ruinous first of all to the transgressor

himself, because if he is penitent, he ought to make restitution of what
was taken, while he has it to return. And having returned it, he might
perhaps be poorer than he was before It is clear that what was taken
should be restored, if it can be restored, so that justice is observed when
a persons goods are returned to him.56

52 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 251A: Judaeiproniores sunt ad furtum quod est
occultum, quam ad rapinam, ubi testis adest. It is likely that Simon is thinking of usury
here, which is furtive in the sense that it takes someones money without them realising it
is being stolen indeed, with their agreement.
53 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1152A).
54 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex. 20: Non furtum facies.
55 In an influential essay, The Origins of the Israelite Law, in idem, Essays on Old Testament
History and Religion (Oxford, 1966), pp. 81132, Albrecht Alt suggested in 1949 that the
original intent of the precept was a prohibition of kidnap stealing people meaning
that this would be another commandment concerning acts against ones neighbours per-
son, rather than acts against his goods. See the discussions in Childs, Exodus and Hyatt,
Exodus, on Ex 20: 15.
56 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis, De septimo mandato, nos 12. Roberts influence here is
likely to be Augustine, who discusses restitution in, for example, Ep. 153, Ad Macedonium,
in Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher, CSEL 44 (Vienna, 1903).
142 Chapter 5

Grosseteste pictures the thief as a swollen limb attached to the body politic,
out of proportion and fat with his gains, because he has succumbed to the sins
of greed and avarice.
We saw in the previous chapter that taking goods in some very limited situ-
ations might not be regarded as stealing at all. A starving person can take food,
but only for her own use (children and dependents are not mentioned) and if
the need is desperate. This is allowable because in such necessity, all goods are
held in common.57 Simon of Hinton does not quite agree. This is still theft, but
it is excusable.58 Pace Robin Hood, you could not steal to help someone else,
even to save their life. Even using your husbands money (without his consent)
in order to give alms is not allowed, unless you are able to donate from money
you have already been given and distribute it in moderation.59 Can it be theft
simply to own a lot of things, and to hang on to them? As John of La Rochelle
puts it, can rich men be called thieves by holding on to their possessions?60
He decides that those with a surplus must make sure that those who are in
extreme need are looked after, precisely in order to stop them from having to
steal and, by this, falling into mortal sin. John uses Ambrose to argue that, if
others are indigent, no-one who has an abundance of possessions can properly
call his own what is common to need: this would be rapine taking by force.61
However, John does note that what is necessary and what is superfluous
differs between men of different status, depending on their responsibilities.
Rulers need to pay for things such as defence and other expenses proper to
princes, so they may rightly argue that their need is greater than that of com-
mon folk. However, Simon of Hinton reminds those in charge that excessive
taxation is certainly part of rapine (as daylight robbery); God allows them only
to take what they need for the common defence and to provide for a moderate
and honest household.62
One of the attractions offered to potential crusaders was the possibility of
material gain.63 Did our commentators agree that warfare, whether spiritual or
secular, was an opportunity for acquisition? John of La Rochelle once more

57 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 375.

58 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 215A: Et nota quod in extrema necessitate excu-
satur fur, quia tempore tantae necessitatis omnia sunt communia.
59 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 376.
60 Ibid., no. 381.
61 Ambrose, De Nabuthe, c. 1, n. 2 (PL 14: 731), quoted by John (Tractatus de Legibus, no. 381)
from Gratians Decretum.
62 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 251B.
63 For the canon law on these issues see J.A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader
(Wisconsin, 1969).
The Hand And The Mind 143

sets out the most developed position on the question. So long as the war is just
and you have the authority of the state behind you, you may take the goods of
those you have defeated, as long as you do so in a spirit of justice, and not out
of vengeance. In this respect, however, Jews must be treated more leniently
than infidels or heretics, who can simply be despoiled and killed. Scripture
does not permit Christians to kill Jews (Rom 1011), and so they must be left at
least with the means of preserving life.64
Citing Augustine and Jerome, Peter Lombard included usury in his discus-
sion of theft, which meant that subsequent commentators were obliged to
consider the question.65 Prohibitions of usury went back to Deuteronomy (23:
1920): You shall not charge interest to your brother interest of money or
produce or anything else; but to the stranger. But to your brother, you shall lend
what he needs without interest. The key phrase your brother was inter-
preted to mean those of the same faith, which allowed Christians to borrow
money from Jews but not from other Christians. As is well known, lending
money became one of the few professions Jews were allowed to practise in
medieval Christendom, forcing upon them the Shakespearean stereotype of
the heartless usurer.66 Usury was difficult to define.67 At its most basic, it meant
lending money and getting back more than you gave taking interest, in order
words. But this was too stark an option for Roman civil law, which was at odds
with canon law on this issue. It developed a more flexible system which allowed
a lender to get back more than he had given, as long as there was risk involved.
For John of La Rochelle, Roman law permitted this regulated form of usury
for the same reason that God allowed the Jews to lend money: it comprised a
lesser evil than allowing a free-for-all.68 The medieval textbook of canon
law, Gratians Decretum, incorporated some of the Roman law rules, so that
usury came to mean not taking interest at an excessive percentage. Practical

64 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 377.

65 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c. 5(3).
66 For example, Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore & London,
1973), pp. 8093; Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending and
Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1990).
67 J.T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA, 1957); John Baldwin,
Masters, Princes and Merchants, ch. 14. T.P. McLaughlin, The Teaching of the Canonists
on Usury, Mediaeval Studies 1 (1939), 81147; 2 (1940), 122, is still seminal. Interestingly,
one of the reasons usury was frowned upon was that it required an oath from the bor-
rower, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, was an issue in itself: A. Esmein, Le
serment promissoire dans le droit canonique, Nouvelle revue historique de droit franais
12 (1888), 248277.
68 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 380.
144 Chapter 5

necessity, however, did not alter theological correctness: John of La Rochelle

notes that although usury is not prohibited by the law of men, it is prohibited
by the judgement of God.69
Amongst our scholars, William of Auxerre was a pioneer of the discussion of
usury.70 He argues that it is rightly included in the moral precepts of the law
because taking interest violates that sense of justice which impels us to aid our
neighbour when he is in distress. His is a rather more nuanced version of the
common argument that usury is forbidden because it offends against charity.
Were we to do this only because of the money we would gain in return, we
would be in breach of the moral law. William explains that usury is always evil
both in itself (in se) and for the effects it produces (secundum se). This makes it
worse even than killing, for example, because killing can sometimes have a
good outcome. Not even God can permit usury, however, because it can never
be a good thing. As well as violating the moral law, usury is against natural law
because at its heart is an attempt to sell time, which belongs only to God.
Unlike a horse or a field of wheat, which might also be loaned out to a neigh-
bour, money does not degenerate when put to work, or grow weaker as it grows
older; it can be given back to the lender in essentially the same state as when it
was received it has not changed in any way that needs to be compensated for.
(The notion of inflation is not part of their calculations.) All that the lender has
lost is time, which was never his to begin with. Thus a usurer acts in contempt
of God in aiming to charge for something that does not belong to him. For this
reason, according to William, the commandment against stealing forbids even
the will to make a usurious loan, with or without the accompanying action.
John of La Rochelle agreed, although he noted that the will to take such exces-
sive interest was not prohibited by human law, but certainly it was forbidden
by the law of God.71 Unlike ordinary theft, however, usury requires two con-
senting parties. Does the receiver of a loan in these circumstances sin as well as
the lender? He does not, as long as he acts out of strict necessity. Bonaventure
is rather stricter in his view of those who take such loans, although he too
allows necessity to be a mitigating factor in the type of sin involved.72 As for the
lender, he must give back any profits he has made under the agreement,
although he may keep what he needs to preserve life.
The stealing involved in usury is very much part of the secular world of
medieval commerce. Of course, the act of taking anything from the Church or

69 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 37980.

70 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 48; see Noonan, Scholastic Analysis, p. 42.
71 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 379.
72 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 37, dub. 7.
The Hand And The Mind 145

its servants was sacrilege;73 but some sorts of stealing were proper to the
Church alone. The Church was financed by money and goods collected from
the laity, rich and poor a situation that naturally led to some resentment.
However, the traffic was not to be all one way. John of La Rochelle denounces
clergy who take goods from the poor to use for themselves, when they already
have all their needs provided for, or even those clerics who splash out on
worldly expenditure unsuitable to their vocation. Everything that a cleric has
that comes to him from the Church ought to be thought of as goods held in
common and so available for hospitality for the poor. Anyone who takes from
the Church beyond their needs is committing rapine.74
Buying or selling Church offices or livings, or anything related to them, was
thought to have been banned in the New Testament story of Simon Magus,
after whom they were named: simony (Acts 8: 1821). Peter Lombard included
sacrilege, which encompasses simony, within his definition of theft, and other
commentators, such as William of Auxerre, agree.75 John of La Rochelle puts
simony per se within the boundaries of this precept, but he thinks that, on the
whole, it is prohibited by the first commandment, on idolatry, because at base
simony puts the worship of money in place of the worship of God.76 What is
forbidden here as receiving stolen goods is the acceptance of anything
attained via simony. William of Auxerre follows the Chanter in defining simony
as including even the will to buy or sell spiritual goods, or material related to
them. For Peter and his academic colleagues this included selling knowledge
by taking money for teaching; they solved the problem of how unbeneficed
teachers could support themselves by distinguishing between bargaining for
pre-arranged fees (which was simony) and accepting donations after the fact
(which was not).77
Recipients of goods or offices gained through simony were allowed to retain
them, as long as they were unaware that that was how they had been acquired.
But John of La Rochelle is not the only commentator to use this command-
ment to condemn nepotism giving jobs and Church livings to relatives
when others were in greater need, although he of course agreed that it was
right to look after members of your household, especially when they had no
other means of support.78 The most important part of this commandment,

73 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c. 5(2).

74 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, nos 382383.
75 Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 37, c. 5; William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk 3, tr. 49.
76 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 384.
77 Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, pp. 122127.
78 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 384.
146 Chapter 5

according to Simon of Hinton, is intention not only yours, but your belief in
Gods intention.79 If you take something, believing that God wishes you to do
so, this is not theft, even if the owner objects. On the contrary, if you believe
you are stealing from the owner, even though he is quite happy for you to do so,
then you are breaking this commandment: intention is all. Bonaventure agrees:
the action is not important; what matters is that it is done ex cupiditate: If it is
not done from avarice, then it is not called stealing.80 He calls in evidence the
common examples of the Israelites who took away the gold and silver vessels
of the Egyptians because God commanded it (Ex 12: 3536), and the liberty of
anyone to remove a sword from someone likely to cause harm with it. Since the
motive in each case was not greed, then the act was not theft. Bonaventure
gives the contrary example, however, in extending theft to include fraudulent
commerce, false weights and measures, and all other means by which, out of
avarice, tradesmen try to cheat their customers: it is, he says, the rarest (raris-
sime) merchant who never does such things.81
Although, unlike the two previous commandments, this prohibition of
theftappears not to be given a spiritual reading, its literal interpretation remains
broad enough to encompass will and intention as well as action. Theft is not
theft unless there is an intention to appropriate goods against the owners will.
Surely this means that, before any can such action can take place, youmust first
desire the goods? Why then is there a need to forbid covetousness? Do the com-
mentators recognise the problem, and if they do, how do they explain it?

You shall not Covet your Neighbours House; nor shall you Desire
his Wife, nor his Manservant, nor his Maidservant, nor his ox, nor
his Ass, nor Anything that is his.

It is ironic that, having decided to follow Augustines division of the Deca

logueand treat coveting or concupiscence (concupiscentia) as falling under
two separate precepts, commentators almost without fail discuss these last
two commandments together rather than separately. Sometimes they explain
this by the fact that, since the Exodus and Deuteronomy versions of the
Decalogue give these precepts in a different order, it would be difficult to
decide which should come first.82 This may be so, but it is also clear that

79 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, cols 250D251A.

80 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, nos. 1718.
81 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 6, no. 18.
82 E.g., Robert Grossteste, De Decem mandatis. De mandatis nono et decimo, no. 1.
The Hand And The Mind 147

Origens arguments for the inherent similarity of the precepts are stronger
than Augustines for their difference, and it is very hard to see how they are
distinct. The Exodus texts runs:

Non concupisces domum proximi tui; nec desiderabis uxorem eius, non
servum, non ancillam, non bovem, non asinum, nec omnia quae illius
sunt.

The structure of the sentence does not make it obvious that there are two sepa-
rate precepts; indeed, it can be argued that the list of things in the second half
of the sentence (wife, servant, ox) is simply an expansion of the summary
house (domus) in the first. The two separate words for desire concupisco,
desidero might be there only for elegant variation in the writing.
The statement of the commandments in Deuteronomy uses only one word
for desire:

You shall not covet your neighbours wife: nor his house, nor his field, nor
his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, all the things
which are his.
[Non concupisces uxorem proximi tui: non domum, non agrum, non ser-
vum, non ancillam, non bovem, non asinum, et universa quae illius sunt.]

The text here makes it even more unlikely that these are two separate precepts;
wives may be listed first in this version, but all the possessions are encom-
passed under one prohibiting verb.
It is testimony to the power of Augustines reputation and to the allure of a
trinity of precepts on the first stone tablet that the division of the Decalogue
which divides this sentence into two commandments was predominant; it is a
real stretch of the imagination to see them as two and not one. If there is any
sort of a rationale apart from the neat trinitarian division, it is that the split con-
tinues the division of precepts into those concerning people (murder, adultery)
and those concerning things (theft). Having accepted Augustines numbering,
commentators must explain why there are two precepts. This is especially the
case since, as we noted earlier, the total number of coveted items adds up to the
important number, seven. Is there a substantial difference between desiring
ones neighbours wife and ones neighbours goods? Augustine states that each
represents a different type of sinning; there have to be two because they must
each forbid the different desire behind adultery and stealing.83 John of La

83 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71.

148 Chapter 5

Rochelles argument makes reference to the threefold root of all sin: coveting
the flesh (concupiscentia carnis), coveting with the eyes or coveting things (con-
cupiscentia oculorum vel rerum) and pride (superbia).84 John argues that these
two commandments are separate because they derive from two different roots
desiring the wife from concupiscentia carnis, and desiring the goods from concu-
piscentia oculorum. They are distinct because each has its own type of pleasure
in enjoyment (delectatio) even before any act might be committed as a result of
the desire. Nicholas of Lyra agrees: there is no question of overlap between the
concupiscentia carnis for your neighbours wife and concupiscentia oculorum for
his maidservant; the desire for the servant has nothing to do with her as a
woman, only with her practical usefulness.85 She is owned goods in the same
way as he owns his beasts.
Is it forbidden to covet your neighbours husband? Apparently not; at least,
Augustine does not make the gender-inclusive point that he does for adultery.
Bonaventure, however, does ask the question, and in doing so helps us under-
stand the more fundamental question of what exactly covetousness is.86
Coveting is hard to define, and not just in English, where this old-fashioned
word is given self-referential definitions in dictionaries.87 The medieval com-
mentators had similar difficulties in understanding what was meant, and
their attempts were not helped by the use of two separate words, concupis-
cere and desiderare, in the Latin. Stephen Langton says he is following
Augustine, in order to refine what is being said by distinguishing between
different sorts of desire (diversam speciem concupiscentie), depending on
whether the object of desire is moveable (mobilis) or not. According to
Stephen, concupiscere is the desire to possess immobile property, and desid-
erare the desire to possess mobile property people; but this seems little
more than a circular argument from the Exodus text, one not backed up by
examples from elsewhere.88
So what exactly is forbidden by these precepts? It cannot be simple desire,
since the Bible makes it clear that intense desire for God is certainly a good
thing:

84 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 281.

85 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex 20: Non ancilla.
86 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, dub. 1.
87 Covet: to desire, especially to desire eagerly. To desire with concupiscence. Concupiscence:
vehement desire. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1962).
88 Langton, In Exodum, c. 20, fol. 126va. Stephen also earlier quotes Origen (fol. 124ra) that all
concupiscence can be accommodated under one type, and so there is need of only one
commandment.
The Hand And The Mind 149

As the deer desires the springs of water, so my soul desires you, O God
(Ps 42: 1);
My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord (Ps 84: 1);
so also is desire for the law:
The ordinances of the Lord are true More to be desired are they than
gold (Ps 19: 910).

The most common solution commentators offer is that it is not desire per se
that is forbidden by these precepts, but disordered or excessive desire: desire
for something that you should not have.89 But this formulation is no real help.
How do you know if desire is excessive, or what it is that you should not want?
Recognising the problem, Nicholas of Lyra passes on a helpful comment from
Jewish exegesis: some Hebrews say that concupiscence is only forbidden
when it bursts out into a shameful act, such as speaking wrongly to another
mans wife or touching her.90 This proposal implicitly acknowledges the diffi-
culty of trying to regulate thought: it is not interior desire that is forbidden, but
desire manifested in action.
But not all Christian commentators agreed with this approach. Peter of
Poitiers attempts a less practical but more subtly theological solution.
According to Peter, concupiscence is a certain quality of mind which is left
after baptism. What is prohibited is not the thought of wanting someones wife
or goods, but the will to sin; that is, the wish to make the thought into some-
thing tangible: to step over the line, if one could, and turn the desire into
action.91 For Peter, then, these commandments prohibit exterior actions which
confirm an interior desire to sin, rather than forbidding the interiority of the
will in itself. Bonaventure takes an entirely opposite view from that of the Jews
reported by Nicholas of Lyra. For him, the point of these precepts is to prohibit
evil thoughts before they find an outlet as an action: they concern avarice
which is the root of all evil, and desire of the flesh, which is the source of all
sin.92 Bonaventure asks and answers the question of what sort of desire is for-
bidden particularly well: Why is it wrong to desire ones neighbours goods,
since it is perfectly allowable to wish to buy such things or to be given them as
a reward? His solution is that these commandments prohibit not just the
desire for things in themselves, but the kind of desire which will frustrate ones

89 For example, Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex 20: Non concupisces, calls it concupiscentia
inordinata.
90 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex. 20: Non ancilla.
91 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1162A).
92 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 7, no. 6.
150 Chapter 5

neighbour, a competitive desire to outdo others that is the opposite of loving

ones neighbour as oneself.93
The problem of recognising when desire had gone too far was also the prob-
lem of knowing how to judge when these commandments had been trans-
gressed. It is easy to identify killing or theft, but how can we know from the
outside when someone has wrong desire? Private confession to a priest once
a year was only made compulsory by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215,
although this was a minimum standard and some people must have confessed
more regularly. Nonetheless, confession required a degree of self-knowledge
that may have been beyond many people. Knowing whether or not you have
done wrong was in part, of course, what teaching the commandments was for.
Outside the confessional, however, all we can do is judge actions; and so
although these commandments appear to intend to inhibit the mind, they can
mostly only be discerned by what is done. Indeed, Augustine says that this is
the way to judge in yourself whether acceptable desire has crossed the line into
unacceptable concupiscence: you go beyond thinking about wanting some-
thing, and take a step towards getting it.94 For Augustine, there is no ban on
thinking about possessing things or even people to which you are not entitled,
things that belong elsewhere; but this desire turns to concupiscence when you
actually decide to do something to make that a reality.
Since the Decalogue forbids both theft and the desire for anothers goods,
andit forbids both adultery and the desire for anothers wife, why does it forbid
killing but not prohibit the desire to kill? The three sorts of desire would seem to
be little different. The question is the most frequently asked of all those concern-
ing these last two precepts, and one which all commentators try to address,
although most of their attempts have a strained quality which reflects the diffi-
culty of the task they have been set. Hugh of St Cher has one of the most compre-
hensive examinations of the question, which he achieves by collecting together
a number of suggested solutions from different sources and setting out all the
possibilities.95 Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, his analysis is not entirely
convincing. His starting point is the underlying sin. Human beings from Adam
onwards have been prone to the sin of lust (luxuria), whether it takes the form of
will or act, in the same way as they have been prone to avarice, both as will and
act. This is the reason why both lust and avarice need two types of prohibition,
because both the desire and the action are temptingly enjoyable in each case.
However, the reverse is true of killing. Humans naturally abhor killing, whether it

93 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, dub. 2.

94 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71, c. 3.
95 Hugh of St Cher, Postilla, on Ex. 20: Item solet quaeri, quare non prohibetur voluntas
homicidii.
The Hand And The Mind 151

be the will to kill or the act itself, which means there needs to be only one com-
mandment forbidding it. Hugh may have derived this part of his discussion from
Thomas of Chobham, who says that the will to theft or to adultery is prohibited
because the actions it can give rise to are so attractive, in contrast to killing.96
Hugh offers another interior explanation, based on the effect of these sins on
the soul of the sinner who commits them, whether by desire or by action.
Together, the will and the act of killing leave only one stain on the perpetrators
soul, whereas in action and desire adultery and theft each leave two. (He does not
explain why this should be.) Consequently, they each need two commandments
but killing needs only one. Then again, and perhaps better, Hugh divides the
precepts on the basis of who is harmed by them. The actions of adultery and of
theft harm your neighbour, but the will to do them harms yourself, the doer; and
so there need to be two prohibitions in order to cover both sorts of harm. It is not
clear, however, why this is not also true of killing. This argument also seems to
have been taken from Thomas of Chobham who, in a clever reversal of the usual
question, asks why it is necessary to prohibit the acts of theft and adultery in
addition to the will that leads to those actions. His answer is that the desire hurts
you yourself but the act hurts your neighbour. However, he also does not explain
why this analysis should not include the will to kill. The answer may come, rather
indirectly, from Robert Grosseteste.97 For Grosseteste, both the actions of adul-
tery and theft and the will to do them are covetousness (concupiscentia or appe-
titus). In each case, the action is a form of carnal concupiscentia: it is the work of
the devil and cannot be totally overcome in this life. The will behind these acts,
however, is a matter of spiritual concupiscentia; it involves diverting the form of
desire we should reserve for God towards human ends, and with effort, we can
eradicate it completely: the spirit is unwilling but the flesh remains weak. Thus
adultery and stealing each have two commandments because they can achieve
different goals. This analysis implies, though Grosseteste does not state it plainly,
that both killing and the will to kill are a matter of carnal concupiscentia, since
the desire to know God could never be so distorted as to desire to take life.
It falls to Augustine to give perhaps the best argument for the dual prohibi-
tions.98 In adultery you may simply want the sex, whether or not you desire
your neighbours wife as an integral part of the deed. Similarly with stealing,
you may want the goods, but not necessarily want to steal those particular
things from your neighbour. So the commandments forbid, to begin with,
the action of taking what does not belong to you, and separately, wanting
totake those goods from an individual neighbour, especially to do him injury.

96 Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum, art. 3, d. 1, qu. 8a.

97 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De mandatis nono et decimo, no. 2.
98 Augustine, Quaestiones in Exodum, qu. 71, c. 3.
152 Chapter 5

Incontrast, if you wish to kill someone, your desire is probably aimed at a spe-
cific individual, rather than being a general will to murder, and so only one
precept is needed to cover both parts. Hugh of St Cher comes close to using
Augustines argument in reverse: some people, he says, only want to think about
evil deeds, without actually doing them, and so adultery and stealing are prohib-
ited in both ways; but no-one who entertains the thought of killing would not
actually prefer to do the deed, which leads to only a single commandment.
Nicholas of Lyras exposition adds to Augustines reading the difference between
use and enjoyment; between, for example, taking money to buy particular goods,
and wanting money simply to delight in possessing it the sin of avarice.99
None of the medieval commentators makes the argument for two prohibi-
tions quite so lucidly as Augustine, meaning that all the discussions of the indi-
vidual commandments end in an unsatisfactory manner. Perhaps it was the
slipperiness of the questions that made Peter Lombard ignore them in the
Sentences. Instead, he moved straight to the related question of whether
theOld Law can (like the Gospel) be said to restrain the mind as well as the
hand. These two precepts make it hard for that distinction to hold even in the
literal sense, although Nicholas of Lyras use of the Hebrew definition of con-
cupiscence (as will bursting out into act) saves it at the last minute. Hugh of St
Victor tries another tack: the law here forbids the coveting only of the wife and
goods belonging to someone else, but the Gospel prohibits coveting in general,
whether or not the woman or the goods have owners. Thus the Gospel goes
further in prohibiting all illicit desire. Peter of Poitiers solution has the same
outcome: that in prohibiting the action attendant on the desire, but not the
desire per se, the Law shows that it is incomplete without the grace of the
Gospel. This question is crucially important, as it allows the commentators to
make a distinction between the Law given to the Jews and the Gospel given to
Christians, and to show that the Gospel is a more severe test with higher stan-
dards; in effect, it allows Christians to regard their faith as superior to that of
the Jews. More importantly, it finds a role for the Gospel and for grace which
would otherwise be lacking, if the Law was sufficient for all. If all that were
needed had been given in the Law, then there would be no necessity for grace.

***

Does the existence of the final two precepts mean that Peter Lombard is incor-
rect, and that the Law does indeed restrain the mind as well as the hand? If it
does, then what need is there for the law of the Gospel, as laid out in the

99 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla on Ex 20: Non ancilla.

The Hand And The Mind 153

Sermon on the Mount? For Hugh of St Victor, these two commandments con-
firm that the law prohibits will as well as action, mind as well as hand.100
Bonaventure agrees; he treats the ninth and tenth commandments together
because they are both about desire the minds interior evil which is the root
of all evil action.101 The point of these two commandments is precisely to stop
mind turning into hand. Peter of Poitiers concurs, but is also careful to point
out that these commandments do not prohibit mere thought, but the kind of
thought that constitutes the will to sin.102 According to Peter (borrowing from
his Lombard namesake), the mind and hand distinction applies only to the
ceremonial parts (caerimonialia) of the Old Law, where, for instance, the mitz-
vuot declared some types of food to be unclean and not to be eaten, or not
eaten in concert with others. These prohibitions were to be obeyed by the
hand, but they were not intended to mandate or engender any particular state
of mind. In the moral law (moralia) of the Decalogue, however, both hand and
mind are included; even when what is explicitly forbidden is the exterior act, it
is only as an indicator of the interior desire to sin.
If this is so, how can the Gospel fulfil the Law, when the Law seems to be
complete? Why would the Gospel be needed? Hugh of St Victors answer lies in
the extent of the laws compass.103 The written law forbids coveting only your
neighbours wife and goods, not all women and property; the Gospel, on the
other hand, teaches moderation in all things, and so excludes all illicit desire.
Whereas the Mosaic Law was given only to the Jews as Gods chosen people,
and made a distinction between your neighbour (fellow Jews) and everyone
else, the Gospel extended Gods grace to everyone who would receive it, eradi-
cating the limitations on who your neighbour might be. A spirit-filled interpre-
tation of the commandments, even before the New Covenant, is the Gospel; a
literal interpretation, even in the age of grace, is the letter which kills.104
Understanding the commandments in the light of the Gospel means under-
standing that they are about what you can do to yourself, through the intention
with which you approach them, just as much as they are about what you can
do to your neighbour. Your habits, desires and motives are as harmful to you as
your actions are to someone else. The Law and the Gospel restrain not only
your hand towards your neighbour, but also your mind towards yourself.

100 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk 1, pt. 12, c. 21.

101 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 7, no. 6.
102 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1162A).
103 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk 1, pt. 12, c. 21.
104 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 4 (PL 211: 1162A-B): when the law is not read this way,
it does indeed become the littera occidens.
 Chapter 6

Word and Truth

You shall not Speak False Witness Against your Neighbour

We have considered the commandments which arise from the obligation due
to your neighbour in deed and thought. A single commandment is sufficent to
encompass the obligation to your neighbour which arises from speech.
Nonetheless, this lone commandment, prohibiting false witness (falsum testi-
monium), is arguably the most interesting, and certainly the most discussed, of
all the commandments of the second tablet. In some commentaries, analysis
of this eighth commandment takes as much space as all the other precepts put
together. Commentators use it to analyse questions which arise from lying,
swearing oaths, taking vows, and committing perjury all important in a daily
life revolving more around oral than written reliability. It is notable how many
of the points the theologians raise are also discussed in Gratian and other legal
texts, giving a sense of their everyday significance. This Christian interpreta-
tion was at odds with the Jewish reading of this commandment which, as
Nicholas of Lyra noted, was understood to prohibit only false testimony given
in court.1 Appearing in court, which involved swearing an oath to tell the truth,
had been a matter of debate in the early Church, since oath-taking appeared to
be prohibited in the Gospel. The Bible provided a variety of problematic texts
and examples of key figures who appeared to lie with impunity or even profit.
The most conspicuous of these was Jacob, one of the twin sons of Isaac the son
of Abraham (Gen 27). Jacob and his mother, Rebecca, hatched a plan to divert
blind Isaacs paternal blessing from the elder twin Esau hearty, open, and
trusting to the more complex, thoughtful Jacob. To his fathers question,
who are you, my son?, a disguised Jacob answered, I am Esau, your firstborn.
Deceived, Isaac bestowed the elder sons blessing on Jacob, leaving nothing for
Esau. To the uncommitted reader this is a clear lie and worse, a lie both to
benefit Jacob himself and harm his brother. But Jacob, with his new name,
Israel, was to become the father of the twelve sons whose families were the
living fulfilment of Gods promise to Abraham that he would raise a great
nation. For medieval commentators, it was simply not possible that the twelve
tribes of Israel could have been founded on a lie; the story had to be inter-
preted another way. Exposition was needed even when the Bible recounted lies

1 Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla, on Ex. 20: Non loqueris.

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_008

Word And Truth 155

spoken for the benefit of others. The two most common examples of this sort
were the story of Rahab the harlot, who hid Joshuas spies in Jericho and helped
them escape (Josh 2), and the tale of the midwives who lied to the Egyptians
rather than expose the Hebrew baby boys (Ex 1: 1521): neither was lying for her
own advantage, but they lied nonetheless, and as a result, the people multi-
plied. How could stories based on untruths be understood as part of the
founding narrative of the people of God? In addition to the biblical case stud-
ies, and to the practical importance of truth-telling in daily life, lies and oaths
were also the subject of two treatises and a sermon by Augustine, all of which
provided our theologians with a challenging set of issues to resolve.2
Commentators began by asking whether this commandment rightly
belonged on the second stone tablet. This was a common starting point for
discussing any of the precepts concerning your neighbour, but in this case the
question had particular force because the first-tablet corollary to false witness
was the commandment which forbade taking the Lords name in vain. Some
scholars, such as William of Auxerre and Simon of Hinton, interpreted the sec-
ond commandment as banning the swearing of oaths, and consequently dis-
cussed oath-taking in their discussions of that precept.3 Simons rationale for
his discussion rests in part on the distinction he makes between oaths per se
and oath-taking: the substance of the oath he judged to be part of the com-
mandment against false witness, but the process of swearing an oath was part
of taking the Lords name in vain. John of La Rochelle splits the discussion in
two, dealing with oaths in the second commandment and lies in the eighth,
having first established that false witness does indeed include lying.
John approached the question of where the commandment belonged
through an abstract discussion of the debt owed by humanity to truth.4 John
distinguishes two types of truth: uncreated Truth is, in essence, Christ, since
Christ is the Word of God; created truth is its shadow, microcosmic form, made
to be comprehensible to humans and other created beings. In Johns system of
obligation, rational creation has a debt to pay with respect to each sort of truth,
owing a debt of reverence to uncreated Truth, but only a debt of observance or
obedience to created truth. It is these two different sorts of debt that lead to two
different commandments. The precept against taking the Lords name in vain
was a reminder to honour the debt of reverence. According to John, Creation in

2 Augustine, De Mendacio; Contra mendacium, ed J. Zycha, CSEL 41 (Prague, Vienna, Leipzig,

1900), pp. 411466; pp. 467528.
3 Simon of Hinton, Summa iuniorum, col. 246B-C; William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III,
tr. 4546.
4 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 385.
156 Chapter 6

all its forms owes the debt of reverence to the Truth of its Creator, but only
humans have the free will that allows them to choose whether or not to repay it;
all other Creation fulfils the debt simply by being what it is. The precept against
false witness is the small-scale reflection of that debt lived out via relations with
your neighbour. You should be truthful towards others in acknowledgement of
and homage to the Truth of God. According to Johns rationale, an oath sworn
pro nihilo is contrary to the first debt, represented by the second command-
ment, because such an oath irreverently and without sufficient cause calls upon
uncreated Truth to witness to this speaking; but speaking a falsehood is contrary
to the second sort of debt (represented in the eighth commandment), in which
your obligation of truth towards your neighbour is not observed. Moreover, the
foundation of obligation means that this eighth commandment is much more
than a simple prohibition of false speaking. Looked at in the round, it forces
human beings to take note of the positive debt to truth which they owe to God.
This debt is not only to small-t truth-telling, but to Truth as emanating from
God; and so in bearing false witness on oath (that is, committing perjury) you
sin twice: once against the debt to created truth, in speaking the falsehood; and
once against the debt to uncreated Truth, by calling God to witness the false
speaking. Perjury, then, breaks both commandments one from each tablet.
This eighth commandment, then, provides a microcosm of the Truth of God
reflected in relations with your neighbour. Indeed, given the positive debt to
truth involved, it might be thought that of all ten precepts, this one has the best
claim to be couched in positive language: tell the truth. Instead, it has a nega-
tive form: dont tell lies. For our commentators, this apparently simple injunc-
tion is once again merely a gateway to a broader and deeper consideration of a
bigger question what is a lie?

Lies and Lying

Medieval considerations of lying were heavily dependent on Augustines

extensive discussion of the subject in his two treatises, De Mendacio and Contra
mendacium. Augustines opinions are not quite the same in both treatises, but
a basic definition of lying drawn from Contra mendacium appears over and
over again in commentaries credited to him: a lie is a false expression made
with the voice, said with the intention of deceiving (falsa significatio vocis cum
intentione fallendi).5 Both parts of the definition are important. For Augustine,

5 Contra Mendacium, c. 12, n. 26: where the formulation is falsa significatio cum voluntate
fallendi.
Word And Truth 157

a lie is not just a falsehood, but a falsehood spoken with the intent to deceive.
In fact, it is the intentio fallendi which is evil in itself it can never be good
and which therefore constitutes the unchanging aspect of the precept which
places it within the moral law. Thus, if someone believes that what they are
saying is false, even if it is in fact true, they are nevertheless judged to be lying,
if their intention is to deceive. In a vivid phrase, which is repeated again and
again in the Middle Ages, Augustine warns his readers of the ease with which
they can fall into this bad habit, for the tongue is slippery, and it is easier to lie
than to remain silent.6
Augustine divides lies into three broad groups, further subdivided into a total
of eight different types of lie. These are, firstly, pernicious or intentionally harm-
ful lies (perniciosum), which subdivide into lies about religious doctrine; lies
which harm some people and benefit no-one; and lies which harm some people
and benefit others. The second group are lies spoken for someones benefit (offi-
ciosum), and subdivide into lying to help someone gain money; lying to save
someones life; and lying to save someones chastity. The third and least impor-
tant group are the joking lies (iocosum), which comprises lying out of desire,
and lies meant to please by smooth talk. This eightfold categorisation became
the standard medieval taxonomy through which lying was discussed.
Importantly, you cannot lie by keeping silent. It is always possible to conceal the
truth without blame; for instance, you may forbear from speaking, if by doing so
you might betray someone.7 This distinction shows us why the commandment
has its negative form, rather than the positive instruction to tell the truth, even
though your obligation is a positive obligation to truth. For these command-
ments constitute the moralia, the moral law which is always right, and which it
is never wrong to obey. It is never wrong not to tell a lie; nevertheless, although
the truth itself is always a good thing, it may be better not to speak at all. This
reasoning may also perhaps be why John of La Rochelle uses the language of
lawyers rather than theologians to justify the acceptability of silence.8 The pro-
hibition of positive lying, says John, stands in all situations without fail, semper
et ad semper; but the affirmation of truth is more flexible: it should be made
semper, pro loco et tempore, that is to say, depending on the circumstances of
the case. John finds this discretionary position hard to reconcile with the

6 From Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 38, art. 1, qu. 6, ad ob. 7; Augustine, Sermon 180 (= 130), n.
12 (PL 38: 978): Lingua facilitatem habet motus, in udo posita est, facile in lubrico labitur.
Quanto illa citius et facilius movetur, tanto tu adversus illam fixus esto.
7 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, ed. Berndt, bk 1, pt 12, quintum praeceptum secunde
tabule.
8 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 388.
158 Chapter 6

always and everywhere morality of the Decalogue. Such discretion, he says,

can only be allowed when the choice is between two positive goods, such as
telling the truth or not harming another person, or entering a monastery or
looking after your parents. In such cases, it is still not allowable to ignore or
break one commandment, but you can choose not to fulfil two commandments
completely. The wider question for John is how two such goods can come into
conflict in the first place. He can only answer that, in a perfect world the
world, that is, before the Fall they would not. God himself is totally consistent;
it is humanitys opaque vision of Gods will that puts these strains on the Law.
Augustines discussions of lying are complex and not entirely consistent,
and not all of his subtlety was reproduced by later scholars. Hugh of St Victor
comes closer than many to capturing what Augustine intended. Hugh takes
false expression to mean that the speaker thinks what he is saying is false,
even though it might in fact be true; thus, although humorous falsehoods,
things said ironically, or storytelling (iocosa mendacia et ironie et parabole) can-
not escape the charge of levity, they are not to be counted as lying a position
Augustine embraces in De Mendacio, but which was lost in the eightfold divi-
sion.9 Hugh also distinguishes between lying per se and false witness: false tes-
timony is more than the simple presentation of a lie; rather, it involves the
effort to defend a falsehood against the force of the truth.10 From the opposite
angle, Stephen Langton knows how easy it is to undermine truth, adding
rumour and detraction to what the commandment covers.11
Augustines neat definition was in some ways too pat to stand up to scrutiny
his treatises could not be summed up quite so simply. Yet the commentators
continued to use the brief formulation while adding discussions of particular
cases, also usually drawn from his deliberations. For example, could the defini-
tion hold if someone is speaking the truth, knowing it to be the truth, but nev-
ertheless speaking with the intention of deceiving? Does it apply to joking lies
where the intention is not to deceive but to make you laugh (a point on which
Augustine appeared to contradict himself)? William of Auxerre approaches the
problem of definition by allowing that Augustines formulation is satisfactory
for lies in genere that is, for a broad consideration of lying but adding that it
does not hold for every single individual lie. This is rather a clever solution,

9 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, ed. Berndt, bk 1, pt 12, quintum praeceptum secunde

tabule.
10 Ibid.: Falsitatis testimonium est cum quis alterius mendacio de ueritate testimonium
peribet. Qui non solum mentiendo reus efficitur. sed quia etiam ipsum mendacium con-
tra ueritate patrocinari conatur, ed. Berndt, p. 262.
11 Langton, In Deuteronomium, c. 5, fol. 258va.
Word And Truth 159

since it allows him to say that Augustine is of course right, whilst also saying
that, when you consider the matter in detail, you will find that he is sometimes
wrong. William does just such detailed work, distinguishing between lies by
consideration of motive (ex intentione), of circumstance (ex causa), and the
person lying (ex persona).12
Bonaventure, as is his habit, approaches the problem by a careful consider-
ation of words.13 He distinguishes between a lie and to lie. The first is pri-
marily concerned with the truth or falsity of the words spoken; the second,
with the intention of the speaker. Bonaventure expresses the subtleties of
Augustines definition in ways that other commentators often do not. He is
clear, first, that it was meant to apply only to pernicious (i.e., harmful) lies, and
secondly that Augustines use of fallere, which usually has the sense of delib-
erate deception, to describe the intention, is here meant merely to suggest
speaking falsely. A lie is a lack of truth, but there is more than one way for this
to be judged: speaking a false statement with the intention to deceive is a lie,
simple and complete; speaking truth with deceitful intent is a less complete
lie; and speaking falsely without meaning to deceive is the least complete lie
of all.14 Peter of Poitiers cites Augustine neatly: whoever speaks a lie, lies; but
the same is not true in reverse.15 For instance, he says, if a Jew says that God is
both God and Man, he is not speaking a lie, since this is a true statement; but
he is undoubtedly lying, in that he does not mean what he says, and so he
cannot be trusted.16 Bonaventure directly addresses the issue of whether a lie
cannot sometimes be good: who is better, he asks, the man who says nothing,
or one who lies in order to draw another into the faith? He is adamant that the
end does not justify these means: God doesnt need our lies, he declares (non
indiget Deus nostro mendacio); you cannot believe that anyone might be con-
verted by falsehood, but only by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.17
Is it always a sin to lie? Peter of Poitiers says it is, and gives a simple reason
why: lies abuse words, which are a gift of God (since only humans have lan-
guage), and so their perversion must always be a sin.18 Peter Comestor notes
that some people wrongly believe that God has tacitly consented to lies which

12 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 45, c. 1.

13 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 38, art. 1, qu. 1.
14 Ibid.
15 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 5 (PL 211: 112D); he is following Peter Lombard here,
who in turn is paraphrasing Augustine.
16 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 5 (PL 211: 1152D-1153A).
17 Bonaventure, Sentences, bk III, d. 38, art. I, q. 6.
18 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 5 (PL 211: 1153B).
160 Chapter 6

do no harm but positively help someone.19 In fact, he says, it is impossible for a

lie to do no harm: by its very nature a lie extinguishes truth in the speakers
heart, as Hugh of St Victor also regretfully notes.20 But is the sin of a lie always
the same? It did not help that Augustine had contradicted himself; his two trea-
tises on lies and lying were written for different purposes, and had rather differ-
ent advice. In Contra mendacium, Augustine says that all lies are sins; but De
Mendacio takes a more nuanced approach. All lies are sins, but not all sins are
irredeemable. Only the third of his three types of lie, those done to harm oth-
ers, are damnabilis unforgiveable or mortal sins; the former two types, benefi-
cial lies and joking lies, are venialis pardonable, given a suitable penance.21
John of La Rochelle adds a slippery slope argument: in reality, only lies which
are mortal sins need be forbidden; but the human propensity to be tempted
into sin means that all lies, even venial ones, have to be included in the prohibi-
tion, since, although not damnable in themselves, they can quickly become
habitual and create an easy path to damnation.22 The dangers of habituation,
which the commentators worry about for all the commandments, are most evi-
dent in dealing with lies because the temptations of lying are so great.
According to Augustine, there is also a contrast, which medieval commenta-
tors are keen to repeat, between the lying of the clergy (perfecti) and that of the
laity. The former is much more serious, and some venial lying becomes unfor-
giveable if committed by a cleric rather than a layperson. As we have seen with
killing, this sort of difference cannot be embedded in the law, which must
apply to all people in the same way: if the lie itself is wrong, the nature of the
person lying cannot matter and vice versa, a forgiveable sin must be forgive-
able for everyone. John of La Rochelle explains how and why Augustine makes
this clerical-lay distinction.23 Joking lies and those done to benefit another per-
son are allowable for the laity and, although not without sin, their fault is par-
donable; only pernicious lies, done to harm, are unforgiveable. But the expected
standard of behaviour is higher for the clergy, and all three types of lies are
damning to them. John says that Augustine intended to say not that the
clergy always sin mortally by lying, but that, since it is not always clear what
sort of sin any one lie might involve, it is best for the clergy to avoid lying com-
pletely, lest they lose their souls by lying in a good cause, that is, on behalf of
their neighbour. There cannot be a real difference in punishment for any one

19 Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, Liber Exodi, c. 40, octavum praeceptum.

20 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk 1, pt 12, c. 15.
21 Augustine, Enchiridion, VI, 18, ed. E. Evans, CCSL 46 (Turnhout, 1969).
22 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 389.
23 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 390.
Word And Truth 161

lie, because the debt to God and to truth must be the same in all cases, given
that the debt arises out of the nature of God and nothing else. God is immu-
table and does not change depending on the sort of human being he encoun-
ters, so every persons debt to God is the same. This argument allows John to
dispose of the suggestion that Augustine has God imposing varying punish-
ments for the same crime, but rather, Augustine is giving a specific warning to
the clergy. This variation would not sit well with Johns legal mind, but in his
explanation it becomes a matter of ecclesiastical discipline rather than of the
law, and so he can argue that clergy are forbidden every sort of lie.
Even though he has explained away the matter of variable sin, John prefers
not to consider lying in these terms. He redefines lies not as a matter of the sin
they entail, peccatum venialis or peccatum mortalis, but by dint of the underly-
ing desires which make people lie libido venialis (forgiveable) or libido morta-
lis (unforgiveable).24 Both types of desire go beyond normal, acceptable limits,
but whereas libido venialis retains the general order of temporal goods as sub-
ordinate to spiritual goods, libido mortalis pursues temporal goods even beyond
a desire for God. This approach is useful because it allows John to minimise the
role of post factum sin, when it is too late to do anything about it, and concen-
trate on the desire that comes before the deed, and which can still be altered.
It also allows the sin of the deed to be the same for all, so that everyone is seen
to be equal under the law. Instead of sin, John focuses on the legal crimen
(offence) of the deed and the penalties it might attract.
John of La Rochelle may think he knows why Augustine brands all lies as
sins, but unusually Bonaventure explicitly admits his lack of understanding:
All lies are sins, he says, but it is hard to explain why. Augustine expressly
says this, he adds, and tries to prove it many times, and the doctors jointly
agree with him; but his reasoning is difficult to see.25 Clearly the intention to
deceive is always evil Bonaventure has no difficulty agreeing to this but, as
we have seen, that intention is not always present in a lie (defined as Augustines
spoken falsehood), and yet intention must be more important than the words
alone. Thus, for Bonaventure, a lie has three levels, in descending order of com-
pleteness: most serious are those with falsehood and false intention; next are
those only with false intention; lastly, and least serious, is the mere speaking of
falsehood.26

24 Ibid.
25 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 38, art. 1, qu. 2: Et hoc Augustinus dicit expresse et nititur
multipliciter probare; et in hoc communiter concordant doctores. Sed rationem huius
difficile est assignare, et ad hoc possumus niti diversimode.
26 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 38, art. 1, qu. 5.
162 Chapter 6

Occasionally commentators do think there can be sinless lies. William of

Auxerre gives the example of a lie (in the sense of a spoken falsehood) uttered
in a classroom for the sake of making an academic argument. This is absolved
from sinfulness, as long as the speaker in his own mind did not mean it to be
true, or mean to persuade others that it was true, but simply used it as a means
for getting at the truth.27 This is an uncommon position, and one at odds with
Peter the Chanter, for instance, who says that even these teaching lies are
undesirable. Scholars had to contend with biblical precepts such as, You
destroy all who lie (Ps 5: 7), or the lying mouth kills the soul (Wis 1: 11), which
prompted discussion as to the circumstances in which they might take effect.
Both would appear to forbid all lying on pain of eternal punishment, but the
commentators agree that they only apply to the worst type of pernicious lies,
designed to cause harm to others.
Can you tell a lie with a deed and not in words? It was a topic raised by
Ambrose, for whom all dissimulation and duplicity is a lie; and so not only
false words but even bogus actions comprise a lie.28 Asking the same question,
Bonaventure once again reinterprets a patristic opinion with finesse. Since
words were given expressly for speaking the truth, a spoken falsehood is always
the sin of lying; and although deeds might in some situations be lies, this is not
always the case, because their purpose was not solely the expression of truth.29

Oaths

The combination of word and deed leads us on to oaths: an oath is a statement

of truth which calls upon God as a witness. Swearing oaths was a practical
necessity of medieval life which ran into the apparently impassible sands of a
Gospel prohibition, although it was supported by a lot of Old Testament prec-
edent and conciliar legislation. It would simply not have been possible for
commentators to disallow oaths entirely, so their discussions focus on elimi-
nating oaths that were unnecessary or badly framed. Like lies, an oath has two
parts the statement which is affirmed, and the circumstances and form in
which the oath is made. Both parts needed to be considered separately, and

27 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 45, c. 2: in disputatione dicendo falsum
non intendimus destruere veritatem.
28 Ambrose, Sermon 30, no. 3: PL 17: 666B: omnis simulatio et omnis duplicitas mendacium
est. Ergo non solum in falsis verbis, sed etiam in simulatis operibus mendacium
comprobatur.
29 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 38, art. 1, qu. 2.
Word And Truth 163

once again, Augustine played a key part in the formulation of the issues at
stake.30
William of Auxerre gives a broad definition, drawn from his reading of
Augustine: to swear an oath is to assert something, calling upon something
else, sacred or non-sacred, as witness (asserere aliquid attestatione alicuius rei
sacre vel non sacre).31 To this, medieval interpreters add a formula from Jerome,
which appears again and again in their commentaries, that an oath has three
friends: truth, justice and good judgement (veritas, iustitia, iudicium).32 His
prescription lays out the conditions that must be fulfilled before any oath can
be declared valid: what is being advanced must in fact be true; making the oath
must advance a just cause; and the circumstances of the oath, especially the
choice of witness, must show good judgement. Swearing by my boots (an
example used by Bonaventure) that Christ is the Son of God may pass the first
condition, but not the third.33 William of Auxerre, for instance, reasons that an
oath becomes sinful if either truth or justice are violated, or if what is sworn
upon is false. For an oath in itself is neither good nor bad; it is indifferent
(indifferens), but the kind of indifferent (he details three sorts) which contains
the seeds of badness within, to be activated only by the circumstances in which
it is made that is, if any of the three friends are lacking.34
But is it ever allowable to swear an oath? The Sermon on the Mount seems
unequivocal on the undesirability of oath-taking:

Again, you have heard that it was said to them of ancient times, You shall
not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord. But
I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of
God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city
of the great king. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make
one hair white or black. Let your Yes be yes and your No, no; anything
more than this comes from evil.
Mt 5: 3337

30 Augustine discussues oaths in Ep. 47 (Ad Publicolam), in Epistulae, ed. A. Goldbacher,

CSEL 34, and his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount: De Sermone domini in monte,
ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CCSL 35 (Turnhout, 1967), bk 1, c. 17.
31 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 46, c. 1; he is copied by (for instance) Raymond
of Peaforte in his Summa de poenitentia (repr. Farnborough, 1967), and Simon of Hinton,
Quaestiones, fol. 128rb.
32 Jerome, In Hieremiam, on ch. 4: 2 (bk 1, c. 4), ed. S. Reiter, CCSL 74 (Turnhout, 1960).
33 Per bottas, which may also be translated by my socks!: Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d.
39, art. 2, qu. 2.
34 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 46, c. 1.
164 Chapter 6

The Epistle of James is equally clear:

Above all, my brothers, do not swear, neither by heaven, nor by the earth,
nor by any other oath. But let your Yes be yes and your No no, so that
you may fall under judgement.
Jas 5: 12

In contrast to these, however, the commentators supply passages in which God

himself swears:

The Lord has sworn, and he will not repent of it.

Ps 109 [110]: 4

By my own self have I sworn, says the Lord.

Gen 22: 16

And they know of other Old and New Testament examples where oaths appar-
ently go unpunished:

But I call God as witness, on my soul

2 Cor 1: 23

the oath David swore to God against Nabal.

1 Sam 25: 22

or Paul calling God is my witness on more than one occasion.

Rom 1: 9; Philip 1: 8

Nevertheless, a Gospel prohibition does present a sizeable obstacle to the

legitimacy of oath-taking per se. How to get round it? Commentators approach
the problem from a variety of angles. Bonaventure uses a favourite tactic of
considering the precise wording used in Matthew and analysing it grammati-
cally. He repeats an argument he used in connection with the second com-
mandment, that the Latin formulation, non iurare omnino (do not swear at
all) does not mean never swear, but do not swear in all cases and without
any reason.35 A commonly-considered question was whether or not it was
valid for a cleric to swear he would not become a bishop. This oath, nolo epis-
copare, was associated with Gregory the Great and was discussed by Gratian

35 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 2, qu. 1.

Word And Truth 165

in the Decretum.36 Was it not right, if you thought yourself unequal to the role
of bishop, to swear that you would never take such a post? The answer involved
a distinction (drawn from 1 Cor 10: 22) between the lawful and the expedient.
Such an oath could be lawful, but it might well not be expedient for the
Church at large, and in such a case the swearer should not be obliged to keep
a licit but inexpedient oath, where there were greater benefits to be gained
from breaking it.37 The question of whether Christians could swear oaths as
part of court proceedings had exercised the Early Church, with John Chrys
ostom and Augustine, for instance, on different sides of the issue. Bonaventure
is sure that to refuse to take oaths at all is a heretical position, and he names
this as an error of the Manicheans and Waldensians. But Bonaventure thinks it
surely cannot be bad in itself to call upon God to be a witness to truth. Other
expositors agree: swearing oaths is a morally neutral act, neither good nor bad
per se, but able to be made so, depending on the truth of the statement and the
circumstances of the swearing.38 The number and variety of biblical examples
of oath-swearing is a powerful argument that it must be allowed.
By common agreement, the commentators allow oath-taking (and receiv-
ing), if no other means is possible in order to keep the peace; to preserve a
treaty or alliance; to allow a witness to tell the truth at a trial; to protect the
faith; and to avoid the spread of calumny. Simon of Hinton adds a series of
rather less high-flown, but more ecclesiastically useful occasions: to preserve
obedience, for example of a cleric to his bishop; to purge any suspicion of her-
esy; to confirm a promise; and in observation of a custom or statute, such as
when a canon swears at his installation to obey the statutes of his church.39
Once again, these preoccupations show Simons rather domestic focus and
give a flavour of the type of student he was addressing. Simons list shows that,
although it is better not to swear if you can avoid it, swearing can be allowable,
if the ends it produces are good; indeed, in those cases, swearing might not
only be permissible but advisable.
Nevertheless, it is clear that oaths are not to be sworn willy-nilly, but only
when they are necessary to do good. Furthermore, it is important not to get
into the habit of swearing oaths, because it is not good to become accustomed
to calling on God as a witness without good reason, and because it is too easy

36 Gregory, Registrum Epistularum, 14 (ep. 11), ed. D. Norberg, CCSL 140A (Turnhout, 1982),
(pp. 10801081); Gratian, Decretum, d. 85, c. 1 .
37 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 46, c. 3.
38 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 2, qu. 1. Special arrangements had to be made for Jews
appearing in Christian courts: J. Ziegler, Reflections on the Jewry Oath in the Middle Ages,
in D. Wood, ed., Christianity and Judaism, Studies in Church History 29 (Oxford, 1992), 209-220.
39 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fols 128vb-29ra.
166 Chapter 6

to use oaths to affirm truth from bad motives. As with lying, there can be differ-
ent rules for different sorts of people. Peter Lombard notes that swearing on
created things is prohibited to the weak-willed but not necessarily to holier
people, because they have the strength and self-discipline not to get caught up
in the bad habit of swearing.40 For Bonaventure, the weak-willed especially
included the Jews, who were (he says) particularly prone to idolatry by swear-
ing on false gods.41 This is the reason that the Old Testament includes this pro-
hibition, so they might avoid what was, for them, a likely opportunity for sin:
God alters his advice depending on the tendencies of the people he is address-
ing. Bonaventure is not the only commentator to contrast the Christian posi-
tion with that of the Jews, who are said to be habituated to swearing oaths,
using the name of God indiscriminately a somewhat ironic statement, given
the Jewish prohibition on speaking or writing the full name of God and the
circumlocutions used to refer to him.
Alexander of Hales discusses the different formulae used for oath-swearing
by Jews and Christians.42 In the Old Law, the formula commonly employed was
The Lord Lives, but under the New Law this obviously had wider implications
and so new forms had to be found, such as By God, or As God is my witness.
Alexander explains that Jews were allowed to swear because they were the
moral equivalent of children, unable to control their behaviour unless they
swore to do so. In the end, however, he thinks the precise formulation will not
much matter, because God will judge the intention of the swearer, not just the
words. This means it is no good trying to swear an equivocal, ambiguous or
intentionally verbose oath and then trying to get out of it: God will judge the
heart.43 Peter of Poitiers reminds his readers that it is usual to swear by putting
your hand into anothers hand, or by touching holy things.44 He allows that if
you swear on an idol, but think you are invoking God while so doing, then the
oath is licit. He, too, thinks that Jews are prone to idolatry, and this is why they
are not allowed to swear oaths on created things it is too easy for them to
mistake Creation for Creator.
Once the acceptance of oath-swearing in some situations was granted, a
further set of questions needed to be addressed. Can oaths be sworn only
on God, or can you call Creation as your witness? Peter Lombard (quoting
Augustine and Jerome, he says) declares that it is only possible to swear

40 Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 39, c. 4.

41 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 2, qu. 2.
42 Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 39 (L), no. 40, and see d. 39 (AE), no. 19.
43 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fol. 131va, recognising his debt to Augustine.
44 Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae, bk 4, c. 6 (PL 211: 1160B).
Word And Truth 167

lawfully on God, since God is the creator of all things and only he can truly be
a witness to what is sworn.45 Simon of Hinton cannot approve swearing
through created things because it would accord them misplaced reverence;
however, he is williing to make exceptions for the Cross, the Gospel, the altar of
a church, and the relics of saints.46 Nonetheless, he is worried that some peo-
ple might think that an oath made through a created thing was less binding
than one sworn on God, thus opening up the possibility of perjury.
The issue of whether it was better to swear truly on a false god or falsely on
the true God was regularly debated. Clearly, truth is to be preferred to false-
hood, but which falsehood was less bad in these circumstances? Commentators
are concerned to find space for non-Christians to give sworn evidence where
necessary, and for Christians to be able to make contracts and treaties with
infidels.47 If an oath is made through a false god or on a created thing, the true
God will judge the oath and its binding nature by the intention of the swearer,
which can make it binding. God can make up any deficiencies in the purely
formal parts of an oath (in forma concessa), if that is all that stands in the way
of completeness. Certainly, if you swear on an idol believing it to be the true
God, the oath is valid.48 But this focus on intention is not a channel for
Christians (or others) to use in order to lessen the binding nature of an oath
by purposefully swearing on a created thing or by not quite meaning what you
say. To get around this possibility, Bonaventure looks at the situation through
the other end of the telescope. He agrees with Augustine that no oath is
any less than binding, even oaths to do evil things, but some can be more sol-
emn and even more binding than others; the more holy the thing sworn
on, the greater the solemnity of the oath. But even a stone can serve as a wit-
ness, if necessary, for although it cannot speak itself, its very existence is testi-
mony to its creator and to eternal truth: even a stone can channel the oath to
Gods ear.49
What if the meaning of an oath was in doubt or contested? Peter Lombard
and Bonaventure attempt to minimise such cases by quoting the synodal
decree that insisted on fasting before oath-taking, to make sure you take pause
for thought.50 If the meaning of the words was debatable, you should follow

45 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 39, c. 5. Peter seems rather to conflate several texts, most
likely drawn from the biblical Gloss.
46 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fol. 129rb.
47 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 3.
48 Ibid., bk III, d. 39, art. 2, qu. 3.
49 Ibid., bk III, d. 39, art. 2, qu. 2.
50 Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 39, c. 12; Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, dub. 6. The
Council of Orleans is quoted via Gratian, Decretum, c. 22, qu. 5, c. 6.
168 Chapter 6

the judgement of a good man, according to the understanding of how the

words appear, for God is a lover of simplicity who rejects ambivalent mean-
ings.51 Oaths taken rashly were unfortunate, but none the less lawful and oblig-
ing, as long as keeping them was for the common good.52 John of La Rochelle
asks what happens if, having sworn to follow the local statutes of the Church,
those statutes should change a situation that reformers and their opponents
everywhere have to face. As ever, he has a nuanced position: if you swore to
obey only in the present, then you need not accept the change; but if your oath
intended your future obedience, then you were bound, whatever the changes
might be.53
Intention is also involved in the case of oaths made under compulsion: are
they valid and should they be kept? Once again, medieval commentators gener-
ally followed Augustine, who argued that usually they had no binding force,
since the intention of the swearer was more important than the form of words.54
Simon of Hinton was not so sure: if what is sworn is lawful, a compelled oath
should still be kept, even if it was made in fear for your life.55 But once again,
context is important, as Bonaventure explained: in general, an oath made in
public in a sacred place (in foro ecclesiae) is always binding, whatever the inten-
tion of the swearer; but an oath taken privately (in foro conscientiae) might be
absolved, although God may yet judge the swearer and find him wanting.56
Bonaventure does not give reasons for his decision, but we can assume that it
was essential that such oaths made in full public view be seen to be fulfilled,
since it might well prove to be too difficult to explain exonerating circumstances
convincingly to the general public; it had to be clear that you could not make
and break oaths at will. When the oath has been compelled, however, the oppo-
site applies. An oath made in public under compulsion creates no obligation,
because it was done only to avoid danger. He who compels another to act by
these means is guilty of extortion and should not benefit from his behaviour.
But an oath made under compulsion in private does have obligatory force, if
and this is the key the intention of the swearer was to carry it out. The serious-
ness of oath-swearing is reinforced when Bonaventure adds that anyone who
knowingly provokes another man to an oath for which he must swear falsely,
commits homicide, since he forces his neighbour to commit a mortal sin.

51 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 325.

52 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 3, qu. 3.
53 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 323.
54 Augustine, Sermon 180 (= 130), n. 12 (PL 38: 978).
55 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fols 132vb-33ra.
56 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 3, qu. 1.
Word And Truth 169

The same oath may be quite different in different circumstances. For

instance, a layman may swear perfectly lawfully that he will take a wife; but
for a priest to swear the same thing would not be allowable! Thus the sinful-
ness of any one oath is dependent on context; there can be no pre-determined
judgement of what is right and wrong. Simon of Hinton asks all the old chest-
nuts about fulfilling oaths, such as whether a man who has sworn never to
take a wife can get married (it depends), whether an oath to keep the peace
stands when one party has broken it (no), whether you should return money
to a creditor who has been excommunicated (not until he is reinstated), even
down to Platos question of whether you should return a sword to a madman,
if he has sworn to do harm.57 His general rule is that nothing should be done
in fulfilment of an oath, if there is the danger of it causing evil. This even
means that money need not be returned to excommunicated creditors
although this changes if and when they are readmitted to the Church.
Furthermore, no-one should obey anyone they have sworn to obey, if what
they are asked to do is dishonest or impossible. Simons general rule is that no
oath can oblige anyone to sin. Augustine had declared that all oaths were
binding, even, for example, an oath sworn to kill another person, but this did
not mean that all oaths should be kept.58 You should act in the best possible
way, even if that means breaking your oath and accepting the punishment for
doing so. Some people might ask why there should be punishment for avoid-
ing an evil act. The penalty is not a consequence of the omission of wrongdo-
ing, but of making the oath in the first place. It is unlawful to call upon God to
witness a promise to do wrong, even if the oath was originally made flippantly
or without a serious intention to complete it (I swear Ill kill him, I really
will!). Using Gods name in that way may not be as bad as carrying out the
oath, but it is certainly not a negligible offence, especially if it has become a
habitual action.
Finally, can you be absolved from an oath? Once again, the Sermon on
the Mount would suggest it is impossible: Carry out your oaths for the Lord
(Mt 5: 33); but William of Auxerre discusses the case of Innocent III, who
absolved the German princes and prelates from their oath of fealty to the
emperor Otto IV. Can the pope absolve you from an oath, if the oath is made to
God? William thinks he can, as long as the absolution would have common
utility and be for the general good.59

57 Simon of Hinton, Quaestiones, fols 129vb-30rb.

58 Ep. 47 (Ad Publicolam), ed. Goldbacher, CSEL 34; De Sermone domini in monte, ed.
Mutzenbecher, CCSL 35, bk 1, c. 17.
59 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 46, c. 5.
170 Chapter 6

Vows

Occasionally, commentators consider the difference between a vow (votum)

and an oath (iuramentum), since the two words seem almost interchangeable.
For John of La Rochelle, a vow must be kept as an obligation to God, but in an
oath, the obligation is both to God and your neighbour.60 William of Auxerre
defines a vow as the drawing-up in the mind of a good plan, with firm delib-
eration, about things concerned with religion; when the plan is made, the per-
son vowing puts himself under an obligation to God.61 Without this intent to
be bound, there is no vow. As he does elsewhere, William draws on Peter the
Chanters Summa for much of his material.62 Here he asks what to do if you
find yourself pulled between two conflicting vows, such as a vow to enter a
monastery and a vow to go on Crusade (he specifically mentions the Albigensian
crusade). If the two vows are not at odds with one another then, apart from a
decision about which to do first, both are binding and both should be kept. If
there is a contradiction, then the most spiritual of the two vows has priority;
moreover, your own spiritual life comes before that of others. Hugh of St Victor
has a commonsense opinion on the issue, as he so often does.63 A manifestly
foolish vow should not be kept; if you vow something but cannot fulfil it, then
the vow can be relaxed, but only by your spiritual superior. It is not up to you to
decide you cannot keep it, even if you successfully vow to do something better
instead. The biblical example of such a vow is that made by Jephthah (Judg 11:
3040), who vowed to kill the first thing he saw, if God would allow him to
defeat the Ammonites. Naturally, when he returned victorious, his daughter
rushed out to meet him and, distraught, he believed he was forced to kill her.
He was, says William of Auxerre, perplexus confused, since the idea that kill-
ing the innocent is ever right, either in natural or Mosaic law, is ridiculous.64

Perjury

Perjury is a lie strengthened by an oath, and it is the last and often

longest concept by which the precept against false witness is expounded in

60 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 316.

61 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 50, c. 1.
62 William gives a variety of examples in bk III, tr. 50; and Peter the Chanter, Summa sacra-
mentis, ed. Dugaquier, pt 3, c. 6, de votis (and elsewhere in the Summa: see the index under
vows).
63 Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk 1, pt 12, c. 19.
64 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 50, c. 5.
Word And Truth 171

commentary.65 Although perjury usually involves a spoken falsehood, it is not

always so. Jeromes dictum that an oath has three friends can come into play, so
that any one of truth, justice, or good judgement can be missing from a perjuri-
ous act. As with oaths and lies, intention is at least as important in matters of
perjury as the words spoken, although this advice from theologians would be
hard to apply in a court of law. Drawing on Hugh of St Victor, Peter Lombard
says that perjury needs both a lie and the intention to lie: there cannot be a
guilty tongue without a guilty mind.66 As with swearing oaths, Hugh thinks
there is a twofold evil in perjury the lie itself, and the irreverent treatment of
truth which is necessary in order to protect the lie. Both offend against God as
eternal Truth and as witness to the oath, and so no-one should stand by and
allow perjury to be committed. If you see another person swearing falsely and
do not step in to correct it, you become part of the sin. However, there is a fine
balance to be struck here, for you should not accuse your neighbour in public,
but rather attempt to correct him in private, if at all possible.
For Alexander of Hales, intention is by far the most important element in
perjury: the oath must be understood according to the intention of the swear-
ing, according to the rule which says: whatever he intends, thats what it
means.67 John of La Rochelle is the first commentator to raise the topical
question of whether or not an oath made by a group he cites a college or city
corporation is binding on its successors.68 As far as the obligation is con-
cerned, the oath has force; the problem comes in its enforcement, for no indi-
vidual successor of the original swearers can perjure himself through an oath
taken by others. If anything, the avoidance of perjury again, presumably
because of its public character is regarded as even more important than
refraining from oaths, even to the extent that perjury committed under com-
pulsion remains perjury and is not excusable because of necessity.69 Fear of
death is no excuse, because God deals in the eternal, and his judgement is
much more to be feared than anything in this world. For Bonaventure, all acts
of perjury are evil, because they involve God as witness. He takes a very hard

65 Periurium est mendacium iuramento firmatum. Summa sententiarum, tr. 4, c. 5: PL 176:

123D: the Summa notes its debt to Augustine for this discussion.
66 Peter Lombard, Sentences, bk III, d. 39, c. 3(3); Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, bk 1,
pt 12, c. 18.
67 Iuratio secundum intentionem iurantis intelligendum est, iuxta illam regulam: Quantum
intendit quis, tantum fecit: Alexander of Hales, Glossa, bk III, d. 39 (L), no. 44; d. 39 (AE),
no. 23.
68 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, no. 323.
69 William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, bk III, tr. 46, c. 6.
172 Chapter 6

line, especially where clergy are concerned, and for him, intention becomes
irrelevant. A perjurious oath must always bring God into contempt, which
means that ignorance of what you were doing, or doubt, or good intentions,
even if the words were false, can be no excuse: the contempt has already taken
place. Bonaventure goes so far as to say that the prohibition of oath-taking is
not so much about oaths themselves but in order to avoid the sin of perjury.70
However, he does admit that the sin involved is not always the same. Where
there was definite contempt for God, the sin is unforgiveable, but merely neg-
ligent perjury may attract lesser punishments.
Robert Grosseteste, as ever, has a rather different focus on perjury from the
Parisian theologians, looking more at the commission of the commandment by
an individual in society. Ignoring most of the usual questions, he concentrates
on what it means to witness to your neighbour. For Robert, bearing true wit-
ness is essential because it is the basis of justice and judgement, allowing all
men to live together in peace.71 Thus, whoever judges falsely and corrupts jus-
tice disrupts the contract of peace, which for him is the purpose of life under
God. Bearing false witness is thus justly reckoned to be a mortal sin, because it
indicates that you cannot rely on your neighbours word in the regulation of
your daily lives together. Lies, along with twisting the proper meaning of words,
are evil because they play on human credulity, and increase its concomitant,
incredulity. The upshot of this is that people are less inclined to believe the truth
in matters of religious faith, because they are caught up by, and realise they are
duped by, superstition. If you cannot rely on another persons word, there will be
an increased need for oaths, which in turn increases the opportunity for perjury.
One evil leads to another and to another. Grosseteste approvingly quotes
Augustine: all sin is in fact a lie because it involves people in lying to themselves
about what is truly good for them.72 For Grosseteste, lying, whether under oath
or not, strikes at the very heart of relations between God and his human cre-
ation, and between individual and neighbour, and so the precept against false
witness, in all its forms, is the essence of the commandments of the Law.

***

Sins committed by the spoken word have a particular fascination for our medi-
eval commentators. They uniquely link high theology and low culture. Christ

70 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 1, qqu. 2 & 3; art. 2, qu. 1.

71 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De octavo mandato, no. 1.
72 Augustine, Contra mendacium, c. 20, in Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De octavo man-
dato, no. 6.
Word And Truth 173

was the Word of God, who is eternal Truth, and the importance of the Word is
reflected in the gift of language which humans, alone amongst Gods Creation,
have been given. The purpose of the gift is that humanity should tell the glory
of God, and words come easily so that God may always be praised. Words were
given so that the Truth of Christ should be heard in the world. With this under-
standing, we can see why sinning against words and truth, even in their lesser,
human form, was so wicked. The worst form of lying, as Augustine points out,
is lying about the truth of religion; but any spoken falsehood, even if uninten-
tional, is an offence against the very rationale for which words were made.
When such lies are strengthened by calling upon God or other holy things to
witness to their truth, the sin is compounded to such an extent that it cannot
be forgiven. The speaker first offends against God by lying, then compounds
the damage when he treats God with contempt in using his name to attest to
falsehood. Worse, the very ease with which words were made to slip from
human tongues means that this sort of sinning is the easiest to commit: the
tongue is slippery, and it is easier to lie than to remain silent. The very profu-
sion of words can be confusing: Robert Grosseteste likens liars to conjurers
who can make black seem white, or the dead appear to be living.73 And if lies
are bad, oaths and false oaths are worse, for they offend against the entire trin-
ity of thought, word, and deed. Worse still, the easy fluency of speech means
that both lies and oaths can quickly become habitual, so that you can sin with-
out really registering what you are doing.
In comparison with the commandments which instantiate the debt to
thought and to deed, only this single precept represents the debt to word. In
the paradoxical world of medieval exegesis, this has a peculiar logic. Sins
against the Word are so important, and so ubiquitous, that they can only be
dealt with in one commandment; more than one would suggest that there
might be more than one interpretation of how the divine gift of language
should be rightly used. In contrast, the interpretation of the commandment
against false witness was fissiparous indeed, it had to be, so as to encompass
all the ways that false speaking might find its way into the world. But the under-
lying meaning was always the same. The solution to the problem of Jacob
claiming to be Esau, his fathers firstborn son, was that the human view of tem-
poral priority Esau had been born first was nothing in comparison to the
divine vision of spiritual priority Jacob was first in the eyes of God. Among
Jacobs gifts was the ability to see Gods intention and to carry it out; his lie
was, in fact, confirmation that he was essential to Gods plan. By recounting

73 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De octavo mandato, no. 7.

174 Chapter 6

this apparently contradictory story in every discussion of false witness, medi-

eval commentators were making it clear that the commandment encompassed
more than spoken falsehood; rather, it required humans to think, to speak and
to carry out the intention of God. Thought, word, and deed come together in
this single precept.
 Chapter 7

Conformity and Diversity

There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must
only try to think it again
goethe, Maxims and Reflections

Of course, the interpretation of the commandments we have read in these

chapters is a fabrication. It has been constructed artificially from a series of
medieval sources to make a relatively coherent whole. It might have been more
faithful to the material to present it commentator by commentator, or at least
to go through each of the precepts individually, giving the views of each expos-
itor in a regular order. Instead, I have chosen to fashion an integrated series of
questions and answers as though the views of our medieval interpreters could
slot together interchangeably to create a single structure. This approach needs
some justification, if it is not to look like an unreasonable flattening-out of a
bumpy medieval landscape.
The first thing to be said is that, in terms of differences of opinion, what the
commentators provide is, in fact, a pretty unbroken prospect. This should not
surprise us; indeed, it is part of the reason for studying commentaries on the
commandments. Instead of presenting the unusual or outright heterodox in
medieval religion some aspect of belief and society that, for all its fascina-
tion, is likely to have been a rather small or insignificant part of the whole
picture the commandments allow us to concentrate on the orthodox and the
ordinary. Neither exotic nor exciting, the Decalogue had a central place in
Christian belief, and the interpretations we have considered were chosen to
represent influential mainstream scholarly opinion. This was commonplace
medieval theology, staying on the right side of the Church (indeed, defining it),
and the kind of material that is often overlooked in modern scholarship in
favour of the exceptional.
We can use the work of these scholars to create a justifiable single narrative
of Decalogue interpretation for two reasons. The first is that medieval theolo-
gians were very aware of method, and the scholastic method most used in
theological writing of this period was guaranteed to elevate similarity over dif-
ference. This is not to say that medieval theologians are all the same, or that
they produce identical work; but they express their individuality within the
confines of methods which severely constrained it. How their individuality
asserts itself is something we will consider later in this chapter. The second

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_009

176 Chapter 7

reason, closely related to the first, is that medieval theological writing, just as
much as other forms of medieval literature, can be categorised by genre, and
within any one genre there are always strong similarities. Looking at the com-
mandments as they were considered as a whole, for instance, or as they appear
in Sentences commentaries, immediately situates us in a particular theological
genre and within each genre there is more similarity than difference. But if
we look at the individual commandments or their subjects as they are dis-
cussed in other contexts, we may find other interpretations which make the
overall picture look different. In this chapter, we will look at the conformity
and diversity of the exposition of the commandments along these three lines:
working method, individual voice, and variety of genre.

Conformity of Method

Medieval theologians were not proposing to create a series of radically new

concepts; rather, they sought to elaborate and elucidate those they had inher-
ited from the Bible and the Early Church. Their outlook was predicated on
continuity rather than change, and on similarity rather than difference, and
the fundamentals of their working practices were a result of their view of God
and Creation. God had already created everything that could be known; for
humans, the task was to re-discover what God had made. It was Gods inten-
tion that they do this, subject to their changing capabilities. What had been
given to (and was expected from) the Jews fitted their development as par-
vuli children; Christians were as adults given greater gifts, but with greater
obligations expected in return. God did not set impossible tasks or play tricks,
and he had given them all the tools necessary for the task; in particular, he
had given his word in the Bible, and his Word in Christ on earth. But his inten-
tions were not always given in plain sight. A few specially blessed individuals
were given direct revelation of the divine, but this was a rare and uncertain
gift. For most, progress towards God was built on incremental additions to a
stock of knowledge gained by tried and tested means. For medieval theolo-
gians, Gods position as the supreme author (auctor) of Creation led them to
a working method which incorporated the idea of authorship and authority
at its centre. The Bible stood for God, as the heart of all knowledge. To clarify
its hidden meanings, a small band of human authors, whose exposition of
the Bible and theological subjects had been acclaimed by the Councils of the
Church over time, worked as archaeologists of the text. They had authority
(auctoritas). They invented nothing new they merely brought to light
what was already present. Although exclusive, their membership was not
Conformity And Diversity 177

closed it was quite possible for more modern scholars to be added to their
number but those with long experience were always more reliable than
relative newcomers. In theory, medieval theologians employed a working
method that involved discovery rather than invention; relied on an authorita-
tive text (the Bible) and authoritative interpreters; was backward-looking and
believed in the test of time; and trusted small additions to the stockpile of
knowledge over wholesale changes. New and improved was not a sentiment
to be readily espoused.
In practice, things were, if not different, then certainly more complex. The
combination of factors that brought about and reinforced the virtuous spiral
of the twelfth-century renaissance allowed increased space for life beyond
subsistence, and not only for those in the topmost echelon of society.1 In the
case of the Bible, this rebirth was signalled by a contextual change in who was
making exegesis, where they were doing it, and who they were working for
that is, what audience they were expecting to address. During the twelfth cen-
tury, the cutting edge of biblical exegesis (though not all exegetical activity)
shifted from a monastic setting to a world of secular schools (that is, clerical
but not monastic classrooms). Initially, these were schools attached to cathe-
drals and mostly presided over by a single scholar; their level of sophistication
depended largely on the calibre of the master in charge. But as the twelfth
century progressed, the constellation of schools in Paris coalesced into some-
thing appreciably more solid than the classes offered by individual teachers;
they became in effect the proto-university of Paris, and Paris became the
European capital of academic work on the Bible and theology, drawing in
scholars from across the continent, and looked to by popes for theological
expertise.2 Roughly speaking, in terms of personnel, this was a shift from
monks working (ideally, in a contemplative manner) for themselves and for
their fellow religious, to clerics who were professional teachers teaching stu-
dents who may or may not have been intending to continue either as scholars
or as Churchmen, and finally to a corporation of university teachers who,

1 For bibliography, see my opening discussion of Approaches, note 8.

2 For accounts of the schools and their work see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the
Middle Ages, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1983); essays by Leclercq, Southern, Baldwin, Hring, and
Rouse and Rouse in Benson and Constable, Renaissance and Renewal. For early university, see
Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, rev. and ed. F.M. Powicke and
A.B. Emden (Oxford, 1936); Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries: an institutional and intellectual history (NY, 1968); Hilde de Ridder-
Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 1992); John van Engen, ed., Learning Institutionalized: Teaching in the Medieval
University (Notre Dame, 2000).
178 Chapter 7

increasingly during the thirteenth century, were mendicant friars working

with and for fellow friars whose vocation was centred on work amongst
thelaity.
These changes in who was studying the Bible, in what circumstances, and
to what end or for what audience, were bound to alter the focus of exegetical
writing. Whereas monastic study could be unstructured, schools and univer-
sities required (again, increasingly over the thirteenth century) a syllabus,
examinations, and qualifications which recognised the achievement of a cer-
tain standard. Just as today, medieval students had to produce work which
followed set models in order to show they were competent. Working to a
model, especially with biblical and doctrinal material, was bound to engender
a certain continuity of approach, even as the character of schools was chang-
ing. The twelfth-century syllabus involved commentary on one or more bibli-
cal books a format which took as its foundation the Glossed Bible or Glossa
ordinaria, where the biblical text was surrounded by nuggets of interpretation
drawn from patristic sources or authoritative re-workings of their writings
alongside the study of theological topics and themes as they were gathered
together in ordered collections of sententiae evidence for and opinions
about debatable issues. Starting with haphazardly reported gatherings of very
short sententiae which seem to have been used in classroom teaching in the
cathedral school at Laon by its master Anselm, sentences reached their apo-
gee in the Four Books of Sentences of Peter Lombard, master of the cathedral
school at Notre Dame.3 By the early thirteenth century, when Lombards
Sentences became the standard textbook for theology students, who could not
graduate without having made their own commentary on the work, Peters
topics and questions, and the authoritative material he drew upon to consider
them, had set an inescapable pattern for high-level teaching and research.4
This is not to say that the exposition of individual biblical books was forgot-
ten, although as a genre which can be rambling and difficult to follow it
has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship. Taken together, how-
ever, classroom commentary on both Bible and Sentences laid the founda-
tions for the summa, a new type of treatise where explanation proceeded by
question and answer, and which aimed at a comprehensive summation of
its thematically-arranged subject. A summa was to be the last word on any

3 Peter Lombard, Sentences, ed. Brady. Lombards collection became the standard of its type,
but there were a number of others; see for example Cdric Giraud, Per verba magistri:
Anselme de Laon et son cole au XIIe sicle (Turnhout, 2010) and Peter of Poitiers, Sententiae,
ed. Moore and Dulong.
4 See note 2, above.
Conformity And Diversity 179

particular topic, and it can claim to be the characteristic genre of the

thirteenth-century schools.5
As their name suggests, summae were often large volumes, and it is an attri-
bute of theology in this period that its books become longer and longer. Given
that the basics of Christian belief had been set out in the credal statements of
the Church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, we might wonder what
more there was to say. What we see is not a change in fundamental doctrine,
but a widening of discussion to include much more of the detailed context of
everyday life, alongside a greater interest in the psychology of the individual
and his motivations for good and evil. Precisely because the Articles of Faith
gave outer (unchanging) limits to the discussion of doctrine, the consideration
of what might be contained within those boundaries could continue to expand,
especially within the professional confines of university scholarship. In the
religious sphere, this expansion went in two directions: the Church was dis-
posed to enlarge its orbit of influence, with greater involvement in more areas
of life; and the laity wanted to know more about the beliefs and practice of
their faith. The Articles of Faith remained the same, but their penetration had
to go wider and deeper if the Church was to retain and develop its position in
the world. Interpretation allowed biblical answers to questions about new or
more regularly encountered aspects of life; issues of motivation or intention
became a matter for interrogation. Individual, private confession allowed
required regular access to every conscience.
Were Churchmen forced into areas of thought they did not want to enter?
They were split. The renaissance had wrought changes to higher education made
possible by greater resources of disposable time and income. In biblical studies
and theology, one consequence was the move we have already noted, to teaching
outside monasteries in cathedral schools. With a wider variety of students
possessing a wider variety of motives for wanting to learn, teaching methods,
too, had to change. Instead of slow, sequential, ruminative reading, classroom
instruction had to be sharper, more focussed, more attuned to question and
answer. Students had to be able to expound particular interpretations, but also
to explain why others were less acceptable. The conversational atmosphere of
the classroom took over from the considered reverence of the monastic chapter
or cell. Just as all artists are more interested in the process of making art than in
its subject, so the sacrality of the subject matter, some observers believed, had
been forgotten by those in the new secular settings, in favour of arguments about

5 New types of material and differences in genre are evident in the varieties of form and layout
that manuscripts of these materials were given: see L. Smith, Masters of the Sacred Page.
Manuscripts of Theology in the Latin West to 1274, The Medieval Book 2 (Notre Dame, IN, 2001).
180 Chapter 7

the scope and meaning of biblical theology. It was acceptable to argue over prob-
lems in logic, but not over the Body of Christ. For those still in the cloister, it
seemed as if things had changed for the worse. The Benedictine Rupert of Deutz
did not like what he had heard (second-hand) of the teachings of Anselm of
Laon, and in 1117 travelled there to tell him so only to be frustrated by Anselm
dying as Rupert arrived.6 Alexander, prior of the community at Canons Ashby,
complained to the monk Letardus that, when he was a student (in the late
twelfth century):

there were scarcely any masters to be found whose aim was not ambi-
tious, whose teaching was not mercenary and whose tongue was not
venal.7

And most famously of all, Bernard of Clairvaux claimed:

Catholic faith, the childbearing of the Virgin, the sacrament of the Altar,
the incomprehensible mystery of the Holy Trinity are being discussed in
the streets and the market places8

not, for Bernard, a matter of rejoicing, but a sign that, with their appearance
in the classroom, the holy mysteries had been reduced to the level of the triv-
ium. It did not matter that the substance of the faith was unaltered; at issue
was the idea that questions of belief could be elucidated (or even rightly dis-
cussed) using these methods.
If the fundamentals did not change, what exactly was the work in the
twelfth- and thirteenth-century classrooms meant to achieve? What we see in
our case study of the commandments is typical. We can start with the fact
that there is a regular consideration of the commandments, as a theological
subject, rather than simply as part of a biblical commentary on Exodus or

6 J.H. Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (London, 1983), p. 191: Rupert had issued a written challenge
to Anselm (Rupert of Deutz, De voluntate Dei, O magistri temporibus nostris inclyti,
Wilhelme Cathalaunensis [William of Champeaux] pontifex et Anselme Laudunensis luci-
fer: PL 170: 437). Anselm seems to have been largely unmoved; he composed a brief reply,
describing the fuss as a petty quarrel over words, in the fashion of young boys: Lottin,
Psychologie et Morale, vol. 5, pp. 175177.
7 Quoted in R.W. Hunt, English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century, in Essays in Medieval
History, ed. R.W. Southern (London, 1968), pp. 106128, at p. 106.
8 Bernard of Clairvaux, Letter 332, to Cardinal Guido, in S. Bernardi opera, vol. 8: Epistolae, ed.
J. Leclercq and H. Rochais (Rome, 1977), p. 271: quoted in C.J. Mews, Orality, Literacy and
Authority in the Twelfth-Century Schools, Exemplaria 2 (1990), 475500, at p. 484.
Conformity And Diversity 181

Deuteronomy. This was not least due to the increase in classroom discussion.
The wider production and use of sententiae meant the establishment of a
repeatable framework of deliberation for a greater number of individual topics
and groups of topics, of which the commandments were one. With the success
of the Paris theology schools and their consolidation into the university, we
can see a dilation in the amount and size of written material on any given mat-
ter. The method of dealing with each of the questions is almost guaranteed to
increase the amount said. When Peter Lombards Sentences collection became
a theology faculty textbook in the 1220s, it gained quasi-authoritative status.
Each of Peters questions had to be debated, and could be added to, but not
diminished; and so, as commentators explored more and more aspects of each
subject, their commentaries expanded. Biblical examples (with the Gospels
and New Testament more valued than the Old Testament) should always be
the first evidence adduced, followed by opinions from the Church Fathers an
amorphous group which included the Latin Fathers Augustine, Jerome,
Ambrose and Gregory the Great, Greeks such as Origen and John Chrysostom,
and selected later writers up to Bede. They might be quoted from their original
writings, or via various later commentary-compilations, especially Rabanus
Maurus and the Glossa ordinaria. A very few modern interpreters Anselm
and Lanfranc of Bec, Hugh of St Victor, Bernard of Clairvaux were valued
highly enough to be used and referenced by name; any other modern scholarly
opinion was generally cited anonymously. Some ancient pagan thinkers
Plato, Seneca and Ovid, for example could also be mined for examples,
though without authority. Aristotle was a special case. His rules for logical pro-
cedure were well-known to all educated men from Boethius translations of
his works for the arts curriculum. By the end of the twelfth century, transla-
tions of some of his metaphysical works were in circulation, setting chal-
lenges for a Christian world view which his reputation as an authority in the
liberal arts constrained theologians to address. Arguments were organised for
and against a proposition, and the skill of the theologian was to judge their
relative merit. Logic and force of argument alone were not the deciding fac-
tors, if Church tradition or ecclesiastical discipline were involved, such as in
the questions of whether women could be priests or whether priests could
marry.9 In the most developed form of the scholastic method, each argument
on the losing side had to be answered or explained individually, so as to
neutralise its force.
Why was this additive style valued? It appealed to a twelfth- and thirteenth-
century aspiration to comprehensiveness. We can see this reflected in the

9 For example, see Bonaventure, Glossa, bk IV, dist. 25, art. 2, qq. 1, 3.
182 Chapter 7

compendia which mark much of the scholarly production of the twelfth cen-
tury, works such as the Glossa ordinaria, Gratians Decretum and of course, the
Sentences.10 It was carried on in a series of major projects by or linked to the
Dominican Order, such as Hugh of St Chers Postilla in totam bibliam, which
updated the Glossa; in the works of biblical reference concordances and cor-
rectoria associated with Hugh and the Dominicans in Paris; or in Vincent of
Beauvais encyclopaedic triad, the Speculum naturale, doctrinale, and histori-
ale.11 The various summae of the thirteenth century represent the apogee of
this mental disposition which thought of all knowledge as awaiting rediscov-
ery, having already been given by God.
Thus the second reason why the accretion of arguments was thought so use-
ful was that it helped scholars lay out what was currently known, so as to make
clear what still needed attention. For modern astronomers studying space,
knowing more only makes it clear how much more there is to know: the uni-
verse expands to make more space, not to fill what is already there. So it was
with theology: new areas of interest themselves gave rise to further questions,
all requiring new banks of sources and examples. For although the Bible was
the primary means of revelation, it was not easy to interpret. Putting aside sec-
tions where the text seemed to have become corrupted by repeated copying
(which by the thirteenth century were well known to need urgent attention),
there were more ordinary difficulties which arose from passages which were
mutually contradictory, which seemed at odds with orthodox belief about God,
which portrayed biblical heroes and heroines acting in ways that scripture else-
where prohibited, or which were simply too much bound up in the context of
ancient Israel to be clear to modern readers. Exposition of the Decalogue and
the rest of the Torah precepts can illustrate all these differences: how could one
reconcile the commandment against giving false testimony with Jesus counsel,

10 Gratian, Decretum (Concordantia discordantium canonum) in Ae. Friedberg, ed., Corpus

iuris canonici, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1879).
11 For Hugh see R.H. and M.A. Rouse, The Verbal Concordance to the Scripture, Archivum
Fratrum Praedicatorum, 44 (1974), 530; eidem, The Book Trade at the University of Paris,
ca. 1250ca. 1350, in La Production du livre universitaire au moyen ge. Exemplar et pecia,
ed. L.-J. Bataillon, B.G. Guyot, and R.H. Rouse (Paris, 1988), pp. 41114; eidem, Authentic
Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN, 1991); Gilbert
Dahan, La critique textuelle dans les correctoires de la Bible du XIIIe sicle, in Langages
et philosophie: Hommage Jean Jolivet, ed. A. de Libera, et al. (Paris, 1997), pp. 365392;
and M.M. Mulchahey, First the Bow is Bent in Study. Dominican Education before 1350
(Toronto, 1998). There is no modern edition of Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum maius, but
a number of incunable editions exist, and a facsimile edition of the 1674 Douai edition:
Vincentius Bellovacensis Speculum Quadruplex sive Speculum Maius, 4 vols (Graz, 1964).
Conformity And Diversity 183

Do not swear at all? How could the ever-loving God of the New Testament be
reconciled with the jealous God of Exodus 20, wreaking revenge not only on
the sinner, but on the fourth generation of his descendants? How could the
Decalogue order no killing, while David, an archetypal hero in the exegesis of
both Old and New Testaments, sent Uriah to die in the front line of battle, so
that he could cover his adultery with Uriahs wife, Bathsheba? And what on
earth could be intended by many of the 603 precepts which ordered such min-
ute care with food, or animal sacrifices, or any number of detailed practices that
were not only not observed by Christians, but not even understood? Far from
going away, these were questions that, like the persistent survival of the Jews,
still needed to be explained. And, with the extension of preaching and teaching
for the laity after Lateran IV, thirteenth-century masters, especially mendicants,
needed to be able to provide answers to these tricky problems which would in
some way be comprehensible and acceptable to a non-clerical world.
One further concept important in validating a working method that involved
an inclusive piling-up of arguments was the notion of hidden or multiple
meanings. It was the heresy of gnosticism to claim that religion required a spe-
cial knowledge (= gnosis) only available to a few initiates. Christianity, on the
contrary, declared that understanding and faith were available to all, if they
wanted to believe. Nevertheless, the complexity of Christian doctrine appeared
at times to walk a fine line between both positions: the outward meaning of a
scriptural text or event was not its real meaning or perhaps not its only real
meaning; this was only to be found by considering the words according to a
spiritual interpretation. Theologians contrasted the outer and inner meanings
as the gold treasure contained in a silver box. Was the spiritual meaning inten-
tionally hidden by the literal sense, or protected by it, or simply in addition to
what was in plain sight? Why, indeed, would God go to such lengths to make it
difficult to comprehend what he intended to say? What was the best way to
discover the truth?
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, biblical commentators read
Scripture according to its literal sense and two or three spiritual senses of
meaning. The literal (or historical) sense could include much more than the
obvious what happened meaning of the words; if the author intended the
text to have a double meaning, for instance, this could all be part of the literal.
Scholars such as Hugh of St Victor and Peter the Chanter stressed the impor-
tance of understanding the literal meaning before attempting any others:
without this literal foundation no building can remain standing.12 In this they

12 Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, bk 6, c. 2; Peter the Chanter, Verbum abbreviatum, PL 205:

25A-B (and see the discussion in Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, vol. 1, pp. 90116,
184 Chapter 7

were making a deliberate move away from the Christian tradition that we can
find in Origen, for example, or the Glossa ordinaria, which turns quickly to the
spiritual meaning, with little attention to the literal. Hugh and Peter did not
intend to ignore the spiritual senses, but they did want to achieve a less one-
sided approach. Whereas a monastic audience could cope with indeed, revel
in an interpretative world where nothing was what it seemed according to
the letter, Hugh and Peter were both working with lay audiences in their field
of vision. Though neither was directly teaching lay people, Hugh, as an
Augustinian canon, was part of an Order involved in pastoral care, and Peters
Notre Dame school was renowned for dealing with issues that arose in every-
day life. For the Bible to be credible for ordinary people, its interpretation had
to begin, at least, by taking seriously the letter of the text.
Hugh and Peter worked with two spiritual senses, but in the common
thirteenth-century theory there were three: the allegorical or mystical, which
used the text to show readers what they should believe; the moral or typologi-
cal, which showed them how they should act; and the anagogical, which
allowed a glimpse of the world to come. Not all Scripture could be read through
all four senses. Peters Distinctiones Abel gives an alphabetical list of biblical
words, each interpreted according to various of the senses (with biblical exam-
ples), but the use of the spiritual senses was never mechanical, never simply a
matter of a formulaic substitution of one meaning for another.13 Indeed, the
deployment of spiritual senses can be a continual surprise. Some passages had
a tradition of being read a particular way, some are making a polemical or
topical point; it is not always clear why one strategy was preferred to others,
beyond the need to be edifying, in precisely the sense of Hugh and Peters
image of building (aedificare) the house of faith. Nevertheless, the malleability
of this way of reading texts, parodied by Alan of Lille as giving Scripture a wax
nose which could be manipulated in the skilled hands of an interpreter, was
one way in which new ideas could be introduced into exegesis.
If we step back and consider these working methods as a whole, it is clear
how they could indeed, were designed to build conformity into a tradi-
tional line of understanding. You began with what was already there, and
although it was possible to move on to new questions and areas of interest, this
had to be done in addition to, not instead of, the existing scheme of things.

and n. 22 for further references); and see also Peter Comestor, prologue to Historia scho-
lastica, PL 198: 10531054.
13 Peter the Chanter, Distinctiones Abel, ed. J.-B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense, vol. 3 (Paris,
1855), pp. 1308; and Analecta sacra spicilegio solesmensi, ed. J.-B. Pitra, vol. 2 (Rome, 1884),
pp. 3154.
Conformity And Diversity 185

Reason or experience alone were not enough to settle a question; this required
consolidation from authoritative sources. The list of such sources was con-
strained by the test of time, and although it was possible slowly to add new
authorities, they could never obtain the stature of the old. All orthodox think-
ing about religion naturally demands such a cautious approach; and in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find it alloyed to emergent educational
institutions, in the cathedral schools and the nascent university at Paris, which
were feeling their way towards a systematic form of training for young theolo-
gians. Students had to show they knew and could manipulate the conventions
of academic writing; judged competent to teach, they took their turn instilling
the same practices in their own students. It is not surprising, then, that even to
those familiar with medieval academic theology, the overwhelming impres-
sion given by the material the scholastic method produced is of similarity and
conformity. So many identical or similar questions, addressed via the same sets
of biblical examples and patristic authorities, and coming to virtually identical
conclusions. Where there are differences and disagreements, they are not sig-
nalled by fanfares or pointing fingers; the masters expect an audience knowl-
edgeable enough to know where the divergences lie. Moreover, since novelty
was treated with caution, when it does appear it is often as part of an expan-
sion or detailing of what was already common, rather than as an overturning
of an existing analysis or approach. The type of questions asked, the register or
tone of the solutions offered, and the level of detail required in an answer are
always a function of the genre in which they are situated and the audience they
were to serve.

The Individual Voice

Yet in spite of the tramlines their working methods and context imposed upon
them, medieval theologians at least, the best of them do not all sound the
same. Their particular interests, approach, and tone of voice are evident to the
attentive reader. They could move beyond the flattening effects of medieval
theological method and speak with an individual voice. Even within the close
confines of Sentences commentaries there are differences. Alexander of Hales
is credited with using Peter Lombard rather than the Bible as the basis for his
theology course, and giving it the status of textbook in the university, so it is
not surprising that he follows the organisation and emphases of the Sentences
closely. Nevertheless, Alexander employs more sources and a wider variety,
including what seems to be the first use of Maimonides (in Latin translation)
by a Christian theologian. The ratio of his own writing to cited sources is much
186 Chapter 7

greater in Alexander than in the Lombard: he shows how the Sentences could
be usefully expanded to form a course of teaching. The reportatio form in
which the commentary survives makes it difficult to judge Alexander as a styl-
ist, since the apparent bluntness of his writing may well be down to his auxil-
iary notetakers, but we can see both from the citation of Maimonides and the
way Alexander deals with biblical examples that he is concerned to address the
literal meaning of the Bible before moving on to other interpretations and is
not afraid to disagree with his sources, even with Augustine, on occasion.
In contrast, even in a compulsory exercise like a Sentences commentary,
Bonaventure is a lucid and attractive Latinist, whose work has a recognisable
elegance and measured clarity. He is careful about structure, and is particularly
fond of breaking down arguments into groups of three, often giving three pos-
sible interpretations of a question, the last of which is always his own preferred
view. A favourite strategy is his appeal to synecdoche a figure of speech where
the part stands for the whole, or vice versa which allows him to take any
single commandment as a starting point to open up much broader issues. This
was not an uncommon strategy, but Bonaventure is explicit in noting that he is
using this rhetorical device to advance his argument: he wants his method to
be clear. Similarly, he makes sure to explain any differences between his patris-
tic sources, finding ways to eliminate dissonance by placing their opinions in
context. Bonaventure is less concerned with rehearsing the conventional bibli-
cal examples than most of our authors, nor is he particularly engaged by points
of principle, electing instead to stress what his readers should do to keep the
commandments. He always seems to be aware of his audience all young male
clerics so that, for instance, in discussing oaths he asks a series of questions
on whether married men can enter a religious community, because that vow is
a much greater good than the vow of matrimony, and the grace of the Holy
Spirit can turn the lukewarm and negligent brother into one eager for perfec-
tion.14 In fact, his approach is notably pastoral, with a shrewd comprehension
of human nature and its capacities. Rather than lay down strict rules which
could never be lived up to, he builds in leniency from the beginning, so that
everything is within human capacity and there is no excuse for being discour-
aged by their difficulty or impossibility.
All these characteristics are concentrated in his Collationes on the Decalogue,
and we also see the additional use of anecdote and supposedly contemporary
examples illustrating his skill as a preacher and teacher. He produces several
long stories which read the precepts in spiritual ways. One is the story of a
famous Paris master who supposedly did not recognise his old mother when

14 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 39, art. 3, qu. 3.

Conformity And Diversity 187

she dressed in fine clothes, only to embrace her when she returned in her usual
simple apparel. Another is a laugh-out-loud tale of a son who dishonours his
father, and who dies when a toad plants itself immovably across his face.15 Or
there is the learned man who tries to become wealthy by making a pact with
the devil, only to be deceived by appearances.16 Closer to home, he tells that as
a student he heard that Aristotle taught that the world was eternal not created,
and he admits he was disturbed by the possibility and the force of the argu-
ments in favour. The experience left him believing that the idolatry forbidden
by the first commandment also prohibited all erroneous investigations of
unholy and superstitious things.17 Inquiring into things for the sake of it, out-
side of the Church, did no good, and was likely to produce positive harm.
Bonaventure is a shrewd psychologist, aware of alternative enticements in the
world. For him, curiosity is dangerous, in the main for the misunderstandings
it can lead to; some investigations, then, should simply be forbidden.18
For all his pastoral sympathy, Bonaventure on the commandments is notice-
ably anti-Jewish. No Christian interpreter could discuss the Decalogue without
at least a passing reference to the Jews of the Old Covenant; but on the whole
they seem interested to examine Gods motives rather than to show aggression
towards his chosen people, and comments are generally confined to explaining
that God viewed the Israelites as children and gave the law in a form that chil-
dren could understood. But Bonaventure seems to go out of his way to make
disparaging remarks about Jewish habits and beliefs. The Old Law worked
through fear, because the Jews were stiff-necked and prone to evil.19 More
than once he notes Jews criticising Christians for not keeping the precepts
properly. He says that the commandment to honour parents was particularly
necessary for Jews because they are likely to neglect their parents; or, in consid-
ering oath-taking, he warns against a Jewish fondness for swearing oaths on
idols.20 None of his claims seems to have any basis in fact, by which I mean that
they cannot be interpreted as a misunderstanding (wilful or unintentional) of

15 Bonaventure, Collationes, Coll. 5, nos 201.

16 Ibid., Coll. 2, no. 23.
17 Ibid., Coll. 2, no. 28: prohibentur omnes profanae et superstitiosae adinventiones
errorum.
18 Ibid.
19 Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 40, art. 1, qu. 1: sic, quia in tempore Legis veteris erant
homines durae cervicis et ad malum proni, Dominus proposuit comminationes et taxavit
etiam graves poenas, ut per hoc incuteret eis timorem, per quem a malo revocarentur et
ad bonum stimularentur.
20 E.g., Bonaventure, Glossa, bk III, d. 37, dub. 4: quia Iudaei maxime proni erant ad idola-
triam et avaritiam, quae est quaedam idololatria.
188 Chapter 7

Jewish practice. They seem, rather, to be simple calumny sitting oddly along-
side the lyrical mysticism of some of his other work. Does this attitude grow
from his Franciscan vocation to preach, using Jews as the sort of example that
should be avoided, or is he more distinctively anti-Jewish? It is true that Jews
are not the only group to be mentioned: he makes a point of noting the beliefs
of heretics and saracens on several occasions, in contrast to the sympathy he
shows to fellow Christians. Perhaps, just as he admits that he was enticed by
Aristotle as a student, he is aware of the appeal of unorthodox theology and the
enticement of the exotic, and he responds with a firm denunciation.
Reading Bonaventure, it is easy to see why he was so famous. In comparison,
John of La Rochelle is a neglected figure, now as in his own day overshadowed
by his contemporary, Alexander of Hales, with whose work his own is often
conflated. But in his treatment of the Decalogue at least, this evaluation must
be overturned. Johns especial interest is in law and legal theory, and so the
commandments are a perfect canvas for his talents. His approach to the mate-
rial is visionary. He goes back to basics, founding all law on the debt Creation
owes to its Creator. From there, he sets the precepts in their place in the wider
law, considers the ceremonial and judicial commands in detail, and of all our
commentators is most the concerned to draw out their scope, to give compre-
hensive coverage to the topics they address. He draws on legal as well as theo-
logical sources. His method is to divide and sub-divide his material, but he
does so with subtlety and care, thinking about people and their actions and
motives; the divisions never seem to be for their own sake but because they
take us to a new area of discussion, often with an interesting twist. For instance,
on the first commandment, dealing with worship, a commonly-raised question
asked whether it was right to venerate a bad priest. John deals with the issue,
but also asks whether a bad priest should be venerated more than a good
man a much more difficult matter of comparative judgement.21 His answer
depends on the existence of inside-outside meanings. A priest has an invisible
indelible character imposed at ordination, and this interior good always com-
mands veneration; but his visible, exterior character is obviously a different
matter, and in this guise he should garner no respect although how in prac-
tice this distinction could be made clear is left undetermined.
Again, on theft, John sets out the essential types of stealing, listing three
general and four special sorts. But his point is not to make lists, but to explain
how they come about. The three general sorts of stealing (theft, rapine and
usury) correspond to its three fundamental elements: the simple taking of
property; taking property without the owners knowledge; and taking property

21 John of La Rochelle, Tractatus de Legibus, on 1st cdt, no. 302.

Conformity And Diversity 189

against the owners will. Theft encompasses all three elements, rapine two, and
usury only one. The four special sorts of stealing (furtum interpretative) are
sacrilege (stealing sacred things), embezzlement (theft from the public good),
rustling cattle, and kidnap (stealing people). Three plus four makes seven types
in all, which proves that he has covered the whole field.22 John prefers the lan-
guage of crime (crimen) to sin (peccatum), in part because this allows him to
thinks in terms of the obligation individuals owe to their neighbour, and
because he likes to set his material in a legal context.
Indeed, it is hard to read John and not think that he had had legal training
before becoming a Franciscan. And yet the tone of his Tractatus de Legibus is
not of someone concerned solely with rules, but of a man with realistic expec-
tations of his fellow human beings, familiar with the accommodations needed
to make rules work in the everyday world. He is exceptional in his interest in
mitigating circumstances. Discussing lying, he starts by following Augustines
dictum that lying is always sinful but as it proceeds, his treatment gains in
subtlety. He uses a lawyers phrasing to explain that the prohibition in this com-
mandment has force semper et ad semper, that is, it is unfailingly wrong to tell
a lie; but the positive affirmation of truth-telling that the interpreters find in
the precept applies only semper, pro tempore et causa, by which he means
that the need to tell the truth varies, depending on circumstances.23 It is not so
much the conclusions he reaches that are unusual (none of his overarching
theological positions is unorthodox), but the way he works round to them and
his straightforward manner of exposition set him apart. However, John does
discuss issues that others do not, and he comes across as a rather lenient spirit
who understands the temptations of ordinary life, for instance in his tolerance
of concubinage. That he also understands lifes vicissitudes is clear from his
concern for the welfare of the poor, which surfaces in his opinions on theft in
necessity, on nepotism, and on clergy and secular leaders who take goods and
money beyond their legitimate needs; it is seen as well in his condemnations
of usury and simony carried over from the innovative interpretations of
William of Auxerre. He is not interested in defending the structures of Church
or society except insofar as they protect the weak and procure justice for all.
Two contrasting examples of individuality can be seen in Robert Grosseteste
and Simon of Hinton. As far as we can tell, both were educated in their native
England rather than in Paris. Both worked in Oxford, teaching mendicant stu-
dents, although whereas Simon was a Dominican himself, Robert remained a
secular cleric. Simon was made provincial prior of the Oxford Dominicans but

22 Ibid., no. 373.

23 Ibid., no. 388.
190 Chapter 7

Grosseteste rose even higher, becoming bishop of Lincoln, at that time the big-
gest diocese in the country. Robert did not start out as a theologian, and schol-
ars debate how and where he acquired his theological knowledge; he is not a
systematic theological thinker and it is difficult to see his writing as conform-
ing to a type. His ten commandments treatise is unlike any discussion by his
Parisian contemporaries. Its overall structure and emphases do not fit into any
recognisable pattern. It is clear from some of his biblical examples that
Grosseteste knows where at least some of the cruces of Decalogue argument
lie, but he does not see himself as bound by the Bible, and anyone with a
decent biblical knowledge could have come up with a similar list of problem-
atic scriptural texts. His commandments treatise gives the impression that
Robert simply sat down to write what he thought was interesting and impor-
tant, setting aside (if he ever knew it) what the tradition of precepts scholar-
ship might teach. Roberts writing style is also idiosyncratic, lacking the clarity
or systematic technique of the Parisians. He is personal (I speaks to You in
his writing), prone to digression, and he uses examples not found elsewhere,
with a striking if sometimes baffling turn of phrase. But unlike Bonaventure,
whose command of elegant Latin enhances his arguments, Robert seems often
to be struggling against his convoluted written style. He is an observer of his
fellow human beings and a sympathiser with their frailties, seeming to avoid
references to sin as a theoretical concept, and writing instead about its practi-
cal instantiation in malice and hatred, for example, or its likely link with
drunkenness.24 Nevertheless, Grosseteste comes across as severe, with tough
punishments that speak of simple right and wrong, as opposed to the mitiga-
tion to be found in John of La Rochelle. He takes thought for the sinned against,
however, as well as the sinning, and restitution is part of his vocabulary of pen-
alty. In fact the overall tone of the treatise is an odd mixture of sympathy and
rigidity: on the one hand, he appears to be a compassionate observer of human
life, whilst simultaneously demanding standards which seem divorced from
everyday reality and possibility.
Robert seems to avoid the discussion of biblical examples for their own
sake, or as part of a tradition, especially where they seem hard to reconcile
with daily life. Instead his focus seems to be on the family, as the crucible for
refining religious education and observance, and the place where most people
are best able to practise the Gospel commandment to love. He is descriptive
rather than argumentative, and here again he discards or does not know
the developing scholarly conventions for discussing the Decalogue: for
instance, he ignores all questions of numbering or division, but concentrates

24 Grosseteste, De Decem mandatis. De quinto mandato; De sexto mandato, for examples.

Conformity And Diversity 191

instead on subjects likely to matter to the uneducated listener, such as defini-

tions of superstition or servile work. This concentration on the domestic links
him to Simon of Hinton, who also seems to focus particularly on issues his
audience were likely to encounter, both as students and in their preaching
vocation. Simons discussion of the first commandment contains a long digres-
sion against the commonplace perils of superstition and astrology which uses
Augustine and Isidore to prove that the stars are inanimate and can have no
effect on human life. Grosseteste, too, condemns superstition, though not at
such length. It seems unlikely that Oxford was so much more superstitious a
place than Paris, and more that both masters were speaking to students whose
working lives would be spent among ordinary people, who might be likely to
be attracted to such beliefs. Certainly, Simon more than once remarks on his
fondness for images and statues in churches because of their instructional
value, especially for the less learned.
The particular Oxford context seems to come most to the fore, however, in
Simons warnings against mixing with Jews: the Dominican brothers lived in
the area of the city which also housed the Jewry, which in Oxford was an estab-
lished and learned community. Simon makes several contemptuous remarks
about the Jews as uncultured (rudes), and prone to idolatry, luxury and avarice.
Sometimes he issues direct prohibitions (not eating with Jews, going to their
services or consulting their doctors); but he also addresses questions which
may have been indirectly raised by the Jewish presence, such as asking why the
Christian God is worshipped in the east a reference, it would appear, to the
orientation of churches as opposed to synagogues which were built to face
Jerusalem. It is clear that Simon recognises the attraction of the exotic and
educated Jewish society for his student charges, who could explain their inter-
est as a desire to learn more about the Old Testament. He does his best to make
the Jews seem unpleasant, and failing that, he simply issues orders against
fraternising with the enemy.
One of Simons other idiosyncracies is his fondness for using examples con-
cerning princes, knights, magnates, and other dignitaries from the secular
world. Perhaps these, too, are the result of personal experience, or the sort of
context he expects his students to be working within; or it may just be that he
thinks these are the kind of examples that lay people like hearing about. He
talks about oaths that magnates and secular people make a habit of swearing,
for instance; he uses the relation between lord and subject an analogy for God
and man; he talks about knights (milites) and princes. Like Grossesteste, Simon
uses the first person singular I ask, I prefer, I concede and this adds to
the feeling of immediacy in his work, even though (again like Grosseteste) its
force is blunted by his wandering style and sometimes convoluted expressions.
192 Chapter 7

Unlike Grosseteste, his questions and answers are both rather standard, even if
the path he takes to them is not straightforward. Reading both scholars, how-
ever, it is not surprising that neither was promoted from their English cul-de-
sac to teach with the intellectuals in Paris.
We can make one final contrast in individuality by comparing the Exodus
commentary of the Dominican Hugh of St Cher with that of the Franciscan
Nicholas of Lyra. Like John of La Rochelle, Hugh may have had legal training
before becoming a theologian and his style is notable for its organisation and
clarity. His Postilla on Exodus attempts to be a comprehensive new biblical
commentary a phrase-by-phrase compendium of interpretation intended as
a fundamental updating of the Glossa ordinaria, expressly designed for his
book-poor Dominican brothers. On any given lemma, Hugh quotes or para-
phrases the most important patristic commentators and adds the views of
influential modern writers, such as Hugh of St. Victor, Stephen Langton,
William of Auxerre, and Bernard of Clairvaux. He is excellent at explaining
context, stating the issues, and showing what possible solutions have already
been advanced. And his work is not bland: certainly he collates, but within the
commentary he asks miniature scholastic questions which summon argu-
ments for and against, weigh up the evidence, and decide. Hugh produced his
Postilla as a contemporary Bible commentary for his fledgling Order, and his
intellectual gifts allowed him to produce work that was comprehensive, but
also ordered and lucid a surprisingly rare combination.
Nicholas of Lyras biblical Postilla was a monument to scholarship after
Hughs model. Commentary can become the most conformist of theological
genres, but Nicholas exhibits immense individuality because of the sources he
employs and his concern for the literal meaning of the biblical text. Nicholas
begins his commentary on each chapter of Scripture by laying out its
structure dividing the text into sections and noting their key concepts. He
then proceeds to expound what was for him the primary meaning of the text
the sense that the author intended to convey and that subsequent history had
revealed, all of which could count as literal. Although well schooled in the tra-
dition of Christian commentary, his preference was to return to Hebrew inter-
pretation, as mediated by his favourite source, the Jewish scholar Rashi. In the
Prologue to his commentary on the whole Bible, Nicholas states that he will
cite Rashi because he is better (rationabilius) at interpreting the literal sense
than any Christian interpreter.25 Although his text is peppered with affirmative
remarks about Rashis readings (e.g., Rabbi Solomon says, and it seems better

25 Nicholas uses the less pejorative Hebrews (Hebraei) to denote Jewish scholars and
scholarship, rather than Jews (Iudaei).
Conformity And Diversity 193

here), Nicholas remains a Christian theologian of unimpeachable ortho-

doxy. He used Jewish material for detail, but his overall understanding of
Scripture retained the staunch pugnacity of a mendicant preacher.
Nicholas was in love with the detail of the text, not least because, if the text
could be shown to be correct in its details, then the overall message of the
Christian messiah must also be true. He was not afraid to note points of dif-
ference between Rashi and his Christian sources. For instance, he is aware (fol-
lowing Rashi) that the Jews often interpreted the commandments more
narrowly than Christian commentators, dealing with the wider questions
included by Christians under the other 603 precepts. Jews considered that the
commandment against adultery, for example, applied only to men committing
adultery against their wives not because they thought that wifely infidelity
was not important, but because it was covered elsewhere in the Law. It is a
hallmark of Nicholas exegesis that he does not feel the need to give only a
single interpretation of a text, or to judge between possible exegeses. What is
important for him is that credible interpretations do exist, and he is content to
leave readers to work out their preferences for themselves or to accept them
all. In the commandment against having other gods, for instance, Nicholas
notes in succession Rashis reporting of the Hebrew interpretation, followed by
the divergent opinions of our doctors: some say that the commandment for-
bids the worship of images of fictitious things, whereas others teach that it
includes all idolatry, even when no image is involved at all. Nicholas does not
need to come to a conclusion; rather, what is notable is the intensity with
which he grapples with the biblical text and its possible interpretations, and
his willingness within the broad limits of Christian orthodoxy to leave the
reader to decide for himself the specifics of meaning.

Diversity of Genre

These examples of the persistence of an individual scholarly voice come from

biblical Sentences commentaries, Tractatus, collationes and summae. Because
its place had been confirmed at the centre of Christian belief, the Decalogue
could appear in a particularly wide variety of theological genres, from the most
formal academic contexts to short mnemonic verses. In the wake of the early-
thirteenth-century ecclesiastical reforms represented by the canons of the
Fourth Lateran Council, knowledge of the commandments was accepted as
essential for all believers, along with the Articles of Faith expressed in the Creed
and the Pater Noster. The need to teach the precepts to the laity saw the
Decalogue move out of the classroom to live in new or renewed types of writing,
194 Chapter 7

such as catechisms and confessors manuals which, if not aimed directly at the
lay audience, were intended for those whose business was preaching and pasto-
ral care. Looking at examples of some of these extra-academic materials will
allow us to see how indeed, if the high-level work of our commentators
found its way to ordinary believers.
The minimal importance of the commandments can be sensed by its place
in Peter Rigas popular late-twelfth-century verse paraphrase of the Bible,
Aurora.26 The Giving of the Law takes up twenty-five lines of the section on
Exodus, but most of these are dedicated to an exciting description of the scene
on Sinai, with fire, thunder and noise. Only four lines deal with the command-
ments per se:

Scorn other gods, flee from perjury, keep the sabbath;

honour your father, love your mother;
do not be a killer, an adulterer, a thief, an unjust witness,
take care not to make your neighbours couch or belongings your own.

[Sperne deos, fugito periuria, sabbata serva;

Sit tibi patris honor, sit tibi matris amor;
Non sis occisor, mechus, fur, testis iniquus,
Vicinique thorum resque caveto suas.]27

Not the most memorable or accurate rendering. Moreover, these four lines
are followed by six which praise our law of the Gospels over this lex antiqua,
which smokes where the new law shines (sed fumat prima, secunda nitet). For
Peter Riga, the commandments are self-evident, and more than that, subservi-
ent to the New Law.
By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, an Anglo-Norman writer
was recommending the commandments as a structure to meditate on, prior to
making your confession.28 The anonymous author begins by reminding
readers (hearers?) of the seven deadly sins or criminal vices. These can, it is
implied, be eradicated by search[ing] ones conscience according to the Ten
Commandments of the Law that God gave to Moses.29 The precepts themselves

26 Aurora Petri Rigae Biblia Versificata. A Verse Commentary on the Bible, ed. P.E. Beichner, 2
vols (Notre Dame, 1965).
27 Ibid., Exodus, lines 377380.
28 The Commandments, chapter 13 in Cher Alme: texts of Anglo-Norman piety, ed. Tony
Hunt, trans. Jane Bliss, intro. Henrietta Leyser (Tempe, AZ, 2010).
29 Ibid., p. 325.
Conformity And Diversity 195

are quoted in a sort of shortened paraphrase of the biblical text: The First
Commandment is this: Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him alone
shalt thou serve, or Keep the sabbath, for example. The exposition, which is
entirely orthodox, has a vigorous but somewhat scattergun approach, focussing
the reader, who is addressed as Christian, on actively keeping the precepts
rather than on simple avoidance: have you worshipped God with pilgrimages or
many penances? have you carried out the promises of your baptism, rejecting
the Devil and his works? The commentary gets longer as the commandments
progress. The ban on lechery covers both fornication and adultery, and unnat-
ural lechery mentions sex with animals or between two men. Most of the dis-
cussion of this commandment is directed at men, in fact (consider whether a
woman has sinned through your aid or counsel, or whether you have kissed [or
more] any woman you should not have), but a final line adds, let the woman
examine her own situation, whether she has done these things. Many of the
definitions are very wide, and they paint a vivid picture of everyday life. Here is
the seventh commandment in full:

You shall not commit theft. Here, consider whether you have taken any-
thing wrongly, by usury, by seizure, by theft, by finding and keeping, by
false tallies, by fraud; and this in various manners, the way merchants sin
when they sell things and hide what is bad about them and tell of the
good where there is none. They swear and lie and sell too dear to give
credit; they weigh and measure falsely. Also, consider whether you have
set fire to wheat or vines, or torn up and cut gardens. Or whether you have
been a false judge, false witness, false arbiter, or false assessor. Or if you
have accused anybody or given counsel by which harm came to them. Or
whether you have allowed anybody to be wrongly condemned, whom
you could have freed; whether you have received anything from a Jew, a
thief, a robber, a usurer, or from one who practises simony; whether you
have found or taken anything you havent given back; whether you have
held back their pay from servants for you ought to keep none of those
things. Also, consider whether you have received anything from any per-
son who ought not to have property, such as married women who ought
to have nothing except what is in common with their husbands, or men
of religion. If you have received any such thing you ought to give it back.
If you have won anything in battle, providing the battle was for the right
on your side, you may keep what you have won with leave from the com-
mander of the army, as long as you havent taken it from poor people or
religious, for then you must give it back. Consider whether you have
gained anything from false accounting; or, if you have received anything
196 Chapter 7

for commiting lechery, you must return it not to the woman, but by giv-
ing it to the poor.

This is not so very far from John of La Rochelle (and was written around the
same time), although it lacks his careful argument and justification, and his
concern for the limits of each precept. Sometimes, the coverage becomes so
broad as to be difficult to take seriously:

consider whether you have neglected to receive the Body of Our Lord
when you ought to have done, because you didnt want to relinquish your
sins; and whether you have received it unworthily or without devotion
whether you have had evil suspicion of anybody, or have done anything
to cause anybody to be suspicious of youwhether you have been too
talkativeat meals

is all included in the commandment against false witness. There is nothing

here that anyone could disagree with, but it seems open to the charge of being
too broad a brush quite to convince as practical advice. Coveting your neigh-
bours goods includes covetousness, which is too great a love of gain, avarice,
too great a love of keeping things, and ambition, too great a love of mastery.
Coveting his wife encompasses the warnings against sorcery and superstition
that usually come much earlier, but here are included in ways you might try to
attract women. Our academic commentators might not approve of the ragbag
organisation, but they would certainly agree with the evil ladder by which one
goes down into hell: whose first rung is desire, the second consent, the third
deed, the fourth habit, and the fifth despair.
The earliest example of this type of confessors manual is reckoned to be
that by Thomas of Chobham, an Englishman trained in Paris, who used his
education to pursue an ecclesiastical career in London and Salisbury. His pop-
ular Summa confessorum was in circulation by 1216, and though it shows no
evidence of knowing the Lateran IV decrees, its practical approach responds to
many of the same underlying impulses.30 Thomas divides the work into seven
parts: the nature of penance; types of penance; sin; the seven sacraments; the
priesthood; priestly behaviour in the confessional; and finally, specific pen-
ances for particular sins, ranging from everyday acts of lying to what to do if a
mouse eats the eucharistic bread.

30 Thomae de Chobham Summa confessorum, ed. F. Broomfield (Louvain and Paris, 1968).
The Summa is extant in more than 100 manuscripts and two early printings (Cologne,
1485, and Paderborn, 1486).
Conformity And Diversity 197

Thomas considers the commandments under the third section, on sin,

where he considers vices and the virtues which oppose and remedy them.31
Along with the vices and virtues of the commandments, he discusses the ten
plagues of Egypt a link which, as we saw in chapter 2, goes back to Augustine.
His analysis of the precepts in this section has little to say about individual
commandments, and is more reminiscent of a university commentary than
anything we might have expected from a confessors handbook. For example,
he links the first three precepts with the persons of the Trinity, discusses the
difference between similitudes and likenesses when considering the meaning
of images, and gives broad definitions of the commandments about your
neighbour. His treatment here falls somewhere between the schoolroom and
the confessional. Luckily, this is not the only place in the Summa we can look
for the issues contained within each of the commandments. In his fourth and
seventh sections (on the sacraments and on specific sins, respectively),
Chobham gives a detailed treatment of matrimony (encompassing questions
of adultery and fornication, for example), the sin of luxuria (again including
adultery), homicide, superstition (which theologians generally discussed
under the first commandment), theft (and its companions, rapine, sacrilege,
usury, simony, and restitution), lying, oath-taking, perjury, and vows. In fact, it
might be said that the very structure of Chobhams text is aimed to be a com-
prehensive exposition of the second-tablet commandments.32
The precept against killing is a good example of his two approaches.
For the academic commentators, killing is, as we have seen, one of the least
important of the commandments. Broadly, they note that killing means
homicide, not judicial killing, that it includes suicide but excludes the killing
of animals, and that circumstances are to be taken into account when judging
whether or not the precept has been broken. Chobhams treatment of killing
within his Decalogue questions is amongst the shortest. He notes that the will
to kill as well as the act is forbidden, citing 1 John 3: 15: whoever hates his
brother commits homicide. But fortunately for us, this section is far from
being his main discussion of killing. Thomas returns to the subject under
his treatment of the broader topic of anger (ira), since anger provides the

31 Chobham, Summa confessorum, Articulus Tertius. Que sint illa et quot sint peccata pro
quibus iniungenda est penitentia. Distinctio prima. De criminalibus peccatibus. De
Decalogo is qu. VIIIa; Quod virtutes precipiuntur in decalogo, vitia prohibentur, qu.
VIIIIa; De decem plagis Egypti et de decalogo, qu. Xa.
32 Ibid.: matrimony (art. 4, dist. 2, qu. VIIa; art. 7, dist. 2, qu. XIIIIa); luxuria (art. 7, dist. 2);
homicide, art. 7, dist. 4, qu. VIa, VIIa, VIIIa; superstition (art. 7, dist. 5); theft (art. 7, dist. 6,
qu. IIaXIIa); lying, etc. (art. 7, dist. 1112).
198 Chapter 7

motivation to kill.33 Here, Thomas raises thirty-six separate issues about kill-
ing, dealt with under four headings, including not only lawful killing, but
meritorious homicide, which covers war, judicial killing, defence of others,
and the killing of heretics and Jews. If, for example, it is possible for a popu-
lace, without schism or sedition, to distance themselves from a prince who is
promoting an unjust war, then their bishops should encourage them to do
so.34 What if you kill by accident or without meaning to? Thomas gives a nice
example of cutting down a tree in order to build a house, only to have the tree
fall on someone and kill them. Can you nevertheless be ordained or promoted
in holy orders?35 Unlike the commentaries on the commandments, the
Summa concerns itself with the question of penalties, which gives us some
idea of how the sinfulness of each act was judged, relative to the others.
Parricides, for instance, must pray for mercy for a year outside a church, fol-
lowed by another year of penance inside, after which, to avoid despair, they
should be re-admitted to communion, as long as they seem repentant. But
they must abstain from meat every day for the rest of their lives, and from
wine, mead (medone), and sweet beer (as opposed to the small beer that
would have been the ubiquitous drink) for three days of every week. They
cannot take up arms, except against pagans, and must go everywhere on foot,
not by vehicle. But their bishop has discretion in increasing or decreasing all
of these provisions.36
The intended audience of the anonymous treatise on confession appears to
be lay, whereas Chobham is writing for clergy with a pastoral mission. We can
see the same difference in material connected with preaching. A.G. Little
edited a Liber exemplorum, dated 127079, which comprises prepared ingredi-
ents for sermons, like the filling in a sandwich.37 It was produced by a
Warwickshire friar, trained in Paris and living in Ireland. Perhaps surprisingly,
the Libers examples touch on only three of the commandments, working on
the sabbath or holy days, theft, and honouring parents. The friars stock is
almost all drawn from sources which are a long way from our classrooms the
Gemma ecclesiasticus of Gerald of Wales, William Peraldus bestselling Summa

33 Ibid., art. 7, dist. 4: De ira, qqu. VIa, VIIa, VIIIa, VIIIIa.

34 Ibid., art. 7, dist. 4, qu. VIa, c. 9.
35 Ibid., art. 7, dist. 4, qu. VIIIa: De casuali homicidio. Guilt in the matter of the deadly tree
depends on whether you were careful to warn bystanders, diligently, shouting in a loud
voice, about what was going to happen. If, after that, they were foolish enough not to get
out of the way, you are in the clear (c. 1).
36 Ibid., art. 7, dist. 4, qu. VIIIIa, c. 3.
37 A.G. Little, Liber exemplorum ad usum praedicantium (Aberdeen, 1908).
Conformity And Diversity 199

de viciis, a saints life and a sermon by the Archbishop of Armagh. Only the
references to Augustines City of God and Gregory the Greats Dialogues would
have any traction in the schools, but both are such common texts that they
have probably been used via the excerpts in a florilegium of patristic writing.
His taste is for the graphic (Queen Eleanors uncle who dares to hunt on Good
Friday loses an eye when his horse darts into a forest chasing a wild beast) and
the sentimental (the old father whose son throws him out of the house in win-
ter has to appeal to his grandson for help).38
We can judge some actual sermons in a collection of the later fourteenth
and early fifteenth centuries from the English Midlands, compiled at Oxford.39
Only four out of the fifty-one edited sermons are specifically on the Decalogue,
although others do contain some scattered material. The precepts are described
as healing medicine for the soul.40 Everyone should know the matter of the
commandments, which is necessary for all rational creatures.41 Once again,
keeping the precepts is interpreted as a positive doing of good rather than
merely the avoiding of evil, and the interpretation can be spiritual as much as
literal: for example, spiritual killing includes backbiting or envy; spiritual lech-
ery is when your soul, Gods spouse, sins with the devil in hell; what is bodily
lechery you know well enough too well, Id say by experience.42 In the
main, the sermons rehearse a rather dull exposition of the commandments,
forbidding swearing oaths (which does more harm to Christ than the Jews
did), having other gods, in the form of your wife, child, gold and silver or even
cattle, and sinning on Sunday: theres more sin done on Sunday than at any
other time, including boasting, gluttony and evil plays.43 Perhaps the most
interesting denunciation is of old men, who, far from being the parents (literal
or spiritual) that children should honour, are nowadaysfull of vices, and so
they be but children. They seem to have forgotten, the preacher notes, that
Abraham was called father because of his holy manner of life, not for his age
alone.44

38 Ibid., nos 138 (from Gerald of Wales) and 143 (from William Peraldus).
39 W.O. Ross, Middle English Sermons edited from British Museum MS Royal 18 B. xxiii, Early
English Text Society 209 (London, 1940). The sermons specifically on the Decalogue are
nos 1821. These sermons were preached in Advent, but most of the sermons on the com-
mandments in J.-B. Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters fr
der Zeit von 11501350, 11 vols (Mnster, 19691990) come from the 3rd Sunday in Lent.
40 Ibid., no. 1.
41 Ibid., nos 3, 5.
42 Ibid., no. 5.
43 Ibid., nos 18, 20.
44 Ibid., no. 20.
200 Chapter 7

The commandments may have been more vividly conveyed to those lucky
enough to see them among a cycle of plays. Once again, this is English material,
and somewhat difficult to date. The play texts are mid-fifteenth or sixteenth
century, but it is likely that they were written down somewhat later than they
were first performed.45 The precepts can appear in two contexts where there
is a Moses (or Prophets) play, and when there is a scene of Christ Among the
Doctors, where the text that the child Jesus is teaching in the Temple is the
Decalogue.46 Despite their function as teaching tools, the plays allow them-
selves quite a lot of dramatic freedom. The Decalogue as it appears in Moses
plays is generally significantly different from the versions given by Christ and
the Doctors. In the Doctors plays, the first commandment is regularly replaced
by the Gospel precept to love God:

I read this is the first biddinge,

and is the most in Moyses lawe:
to love our God above all thinge
with all our might and all our lowe.47

Or, as here in the Coventry play, the first two commandments are replaced by
loving God and neighbour:

First honor God aboue all thyng

With all thy hartt and all thy wyll,
And asse thy-self love thy neybur
And in noo wyse to do hym yll.48

45 See the discussion of dating in the introductions to the four play texts we shall consider:
The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS, 2 vols (London,
New York, Toronto, 1974); Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Hardin Craig, EETS, 2nd
edn (London, 1957); The N-Town Play. Cotton Vespasian D. 8, ed. Stephen Spector, EETS, 2
vols (New York, Toronto, 1991); The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley,
EETS, 2 vols (Oxford, 1994); and similarly in the REED volumes dedicated to them: Chester,
ed. Lawrence M. Clopper (Manchester, 1979); Coventry, ed. R.W. Ingram (Manchester,
1981).
46 A.C. Cawley, Middle English Metrical Versions of the Decalogue with Reference to the
English Corpus Christi Cycles, Leeds Studies in English 8 (1975), 129145.
47 The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. Lumiansky and Mills, play 11: The Purification; Christ and the
Doctors, pp. 214215.
48 Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, ed. Craig: The Pageant of the Weavers, p. 63. See also The
Towneley Plays, ed. Stevens and Cawley, p. 213.
Conformity And Diversity 201

This insertion of the Gospel commands to love necessarily involves reorganisa-

tion elsewhere: the ninth precept now forbids swearing oaths (following on
from the eighth which forbids bearing or counselling of false witness) and the
tenth precept now covers only coveting your neighbours goods. The plays
intention is to show that the Law of Moses has been replaced by the Law of the
Gospel, with none of the subtlety our schoolmen might have preferred. In the
Moses plays, even though the first two commandments are correctly said to be
having no other (or false) gods, and not swearing or taking Gods name in vain,
they are not always given in the right order; and the prohibition of adultery is
regularly replaced by one of simple fornication.49
From the Chester, Coventry and Towneley examples we might think that
our academic discussions have had little or no effect on the commandments in
their most memorable form; but this is to reckon without the N-Town cycle and
its long exposition of the precepts in its Moses play.50 Here, our commentators
would be proud. The editor suggests that the plays author was influenced by
Peter Comestors Historia scholastica, but details suggest an even better knowl-
edge of academic debate. The exposition begins with the commandments and
their division on the two stone tablets:

The preceptys at taught xal be

Be wretyn in ese tabyls tweyn
In e fyrst ben wretyn thre
That towch to God, is is sertyn.
In e secund tabyl be wretyn ful pleyn
e oer vij, at towch mankende.51

Taking Gods name is vain is explained as swearing oaths; and although oaths
are allowed (the text is clearly aware of the Gospel prohibition), you must
always beware of them becoming a habit:

But swere not oftyn, by rede of me.

For yf u vse oftyntyme to swere,
It may gendyr custom in the.
Beware of custom, for he wyl dere.52

49 See, for instance, Towneleys Moses play (no. 7: The Play of the Prophets) or Chester, play 5:
Moses and the Law.
50 The N-Town Play, ed. Spector, play 6: Moses.
51 Ibid., p. 60.
52 Ibid., p. 62.
202 Chapter 7

Throughout the play, small touches remind us of the classroom: poor men
often keep the sabbath better than rich men because they have no money for
rich clothes or to indulge their gluttony; your father and mother are both
bodyli and gostly; killing also covers wurd and wyll, for wykkyd worde
werkyht oftyntume grett ill. Having expounded the last two precepts on covet-
ousness, the playwright adds:

The vijth comaundement of lechory

Doth exclude e synfull dede.
But theys tweyn last most streytly
Both ded and thought ei do forbede.
In wyll nere thought no lechery e lede:
i thought and wyll u must refreyn
All i desire, as I e rede;
In clennes of lyff iself restreyn.53

This is hardly Augustines subtle distinction between act and intention, but to
find it here at all is something of a surprise. Even more of a surprise is the
N-Town Doctors play, which ignores the commandments altogether and has
Christ expound the Pater Noster.54 It is tempting to think that, whereas the
other cycles wish to emphasise the New Law at the expense of the Old, the
N-Town plays portray a more academically accurate picture of its importance
and meaning.
Our final comparison of texts is between a catechism designed for lay read-
ers and a set of instructions for priests catechising their parishioners. John
Mirks Festial is a fifteenth-century English versified version of William of
Pagulas famous early-fourteenth-century priests manual, the Oculus sacerdo-
tis.55 Mirk was a regular canon at Lilleshall in Shropshire, and his was the best
known manual of instruction of the period. As well as the commandments,
Mirk covers the teaching of the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the seven sacra-
ments. The text is made up of jaunty rhyming couplets, written as questions a

53 Ibid., p. 65.
54 Ibid., play 21: Christ and the Doctors, pp. 197207.
55 G. Kristensson, John Mirks Instructions for Parish Priests, edited from MS Cotton Claudius
A. II and six other Manuscripts with introduction, notes and glossary (Lund, 1974); the
Decalogue is lines 853972 in the Cotton MS text and 849972 in the Royal MS text. For
the Oculus sacerdotis, see L.E. Boyle, A Study of the Works attributed to William of Pagula:
with special reference to the Oculus sacerdotis and Summa summarum, unpubl. DPhil.
thesis, 2 vols (University of Oxford, 1956).
Conformity And Diversity 203

priest should ask a parishioner. Although each commandment is dealt with in

about a dozen lines of text, the length of treatment is not entirely even: the
sabbath precept is more than twice as long as the average, and the precept
against false witness only half the average length. The interpretation aims to
include deeds, words and thoughts for every commandment, with both spiri-
tual and literal exegesis, and its basic message is do as you would be done by.
The focus is relentlessly on the everyday, giving what must have been common
examples:

Hast ou be wonet to swere als [accustomed]

By goddes bones or herte, fals,
What by hys woundes, nayles or tre,
Whenne ou mytes haue lete be?56

The text on the sabbath commandment asks not just whether you have stopped
work, but whether you have spent the day well, not just wasting your time at
the pub, singing and aimlessly roaming around. It is important to go to church
and hear mass because:

For, a-pon e werkeday,

Men be so bysy in vche way,
That for here ocupacyone,
ey leue myche of here deuocyone;57

Work-life balance was an issue even in the fifteenth century, it would seem.
Mirk finds an everyday path through the unlikely precept against killing by giv-
ing it a spiritual interpretation. He does not fail to ask whether you have killed
anyone, or aided someone who has, but he moves quickly to asking whether
you have any mon woundet in debate, Or had to hym any dedly hate?, or set
him a bad example.58 You can also kill by the things you do not do, such as not
sharing your food with a hungry man. His point is that even for the command-
ments that seem furthest from your own experience, there is an interpretation
that applies to everyone.
Mirks manual has enough detail to show his clerical readers what he has in
mind, but in the main it allows a lot of room for their own interpretation and
fleshing out of the precepts. But Dederich of Mnsters late-fifteenth-century

56 Kristensson, John Mirk, ll. 669672 (Cotton MS).

57 Ibid., ll. 893896 (Cotton MS).
58 Ibid., ll. 921922, 925926 (Cotton MS).
204 Chapter 7

catechism for the laity, A Fruitful Mirror, takes the opposite line.59 Like Mirk,
Dederich began his religious career as a regular canon, but he later became a
Franciscan; his important work was the earliest printed German catechism
and was very widely read. The catechism is extraordinarily detailed, almost to
the point of being overwrought. But although the minutiae are fascinating to
the modern reader, such an approach seems almost too comprehensive to be
convincing for readers at the time, as we noted with the anonymous Anglo-
Norman manual, earlier. However, since the work was remarkably widely dis-
tributed, this must not have been the contemporary view. There can be no
doubt that Dederich knew his audience and had observed human life. When
keeping the sabbath, he says, do not try to get around it by working late the
night before and starting up again at the end of the holy day. Causing someone
to drink himself to death is forbidden, as is remaining silent when you see that
someone is worried meaning, it would seem, that they might do themselves
harm. Adultery is committed by those who perform wrong acts at unaccept-
able times and in unacceptable ways, so that ugly, misshapen, leprous children
or other physical diseases result. Covetousness includes those who lead any-
one to unchastity by kisses, looks, talking, indecent touching, messages, love
letters, deceit, promises, indecent words, flattery, superfluous ornaments,
superfluous means of enhancing beauty, meals, matchmaking, dancing,
jumping, wicked gestures, showing of body parts, sorcery, reading impure
books, or other means too unseemly to write or speak aloud. As well as gossip,
false witness includes making hypocritical confessions, or revealing someone
elses confession, minimizing someone elses virtues, bragging about doing
something bad, and keeping a poor man involved in a business negotiation
until he cannot pay the costs. He reserves his greatest denigration, in words
which reach a different level of disapproval from his other writing, for homo-
sexual acts and masturbation. Because of these actions the world is plagued
with fire, with flood, with death, with scarcity, with loss of goods on water and
on land, and with countless additional plagues that torment the world and that
we see before our eyes daily. These examples give some idea of Dederichs
relentless lists, comprehensive descriptions, and the almost obsessive inten-
sity of his writing. For all his inclusivity, Dederichs general message is that you
must support the status quo: the spiritual and secular powers are ordained by
God and must be obeyed; it is wrong to consider breaking the law; indeed, any
sort of stepping out of line is absolutely forbidden. It is up to the individual to

59 Br Dederich von Mnster of the Observant Order [Dietrich Kolde]. A Fruitful Mirror or
Small Handbook for Christians, transl. R.B. Dewell in Three Reformation Catechisms:
Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran, ed. D. Janz (New York, 1982).
Conformity And Diversity 205

care for his own soul: he who does not attempt to get impure thoughts out of
his heart is guilty of concupiscence. Where John Mirk seems prepared to give
parish priests leeway to interpret for themselves, Dederich considers it his duty
to cover every possibility for his lay readers.
We know that theologians were aware of the importance of the context of
their pronouncements. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the Liber
exemplorum discussed above is its friar-authors awareness of audience, and of
the need to tailor your words to your listeners. Try not to give offence, and
avoid contemporary political arguments, he counsels.60 If you are speaking to
lay people, do not use coarse language and make sure you tone down stories of
poor clerical or monastic morals; and take care not to give them ideas: avoid
condemning sins (such as incest) that they probably will not have thought of
committing, unless they hear about them in your sermons!61 Masters in the
schools had similar rules amongst themselves. They could speculate in an oral
presentation, for instance, in a way that they would not commit to writing: we
accept certain things in a lecture that we would not accept when writing it
down.62 Someone who had heard Peter Lombard teaching in person writes in
the margin of a manuscript of his Sentences that what he said in discussion (in
discutione) of a particular point was not quite the same as what was in his writ-
ten text (in scribendo).63 Responding in a register appropriate to a particular
genre of discourse was well understood. Innocent III wrote to Peter, archbishop
of Compostela:

We answer these points in the manner of a scholar. But if we should have

to answer them in the manner of the papacy, we should indeed answer
more simply and more cautiously.64

60 Little, Liber exemplorum, no. 104.

61 Ibid., nos 165, 197, and cf. nos 99, 206; pp. xii-xiv.
62 quaedam concedimus in legendo, que non concedimus in disserendo: A. Landgraf,
Schwankungen in der Lehre des Petrus Lombardus, Scholastik 31 (1956), pp. 533544, at
p. 534, quoting Troyes, MAT, MS lat. 964, fol. 113v, from the school of Odo of Ourscamp.
63 Nichil tamen est quod Magister in discutione peccata dismissa redire et eis tantam
penam quantum prius deberi plane asserebat, licet hic in scribendo nulli parti se dicat
preiudicare. This is a note on Sentences, bk IV, d. 22, c. 1, from Bamberg, Staatsbib., MS Pat.
128, fol. 17va, quoted in I.C. Brady, Peter Manducator and the Oral Teachings of Peter
Lombard, Antonianum 41 (1966), pp. 454490, at p. 479.
64 Haec ergo tibi scholastico more respondemus. Sed si oporteat nos more apostolico
respondere, simplicius quidem sed cautius respondemus: PL 216: 1178B, quoted in
Y.Congar, Bref histoire des formes du magistre et de ses relations avec les docteurs,
Revue des sciences philosophiques et thologiques 60 (1976), 99112, at p. 103.
206 Chapter 7

The classroom and the curia were not the same thing. The advantage of oral
teaching over writing was that it allowed a freedom to speculate and advance
new opinions that published texts did not.
Stephen Langton was aware that his words might come back to haunt him.
On more than one occasion he says that he dare not commit myself to taking
a particular position, or admits that he cannot solve a problem.65 He is alert to
what an audience might make of what is said. Discussing prayer, for instance,
Langton argues that prayers for particular individuals are also useful for every-
one else, just as a lamp or candle is as useful to those who did not have it made
as for those who did; but he adds that this opinion should not be preached to
the laity.66 Hugh of St Cher denounces those preachers who, looking around
their congregation and noting no obvious Latinate listeners, nevertheless con-
tinue in that language in order to impress; and he equally derides members of
the congregation who can only speak French but go to Latin sermons in order
to seem clever.67

***

A wide variety of types of theological material were produced in the thir-

teenth century, some of which, if not new, were revived for new purposes. The
Decalogue was part of very many of them, because of its place as Scripture, its
coherence as a code of law, and its use as a catechetical and confessional text.
We are not used to thinking that the medieval response to biblical material
might vary, depending on the genre in which it is situated; but a commentary
on Exodus from the schools deals with the precepts very differently from
John of La Rochelles Tractatus de Legibus or Thomas of Chobhams Summa
confessorum. In the world of the confessor, dealing more immediately with
lay believers and the practicalities of their lives, the same material can be
dealt with at once more strictly and more leniently than in a classroom dis-
cussion: more strictly, in that the questions are laid out in more detail, with
comprehensive coverage of quotidian problems; more leniently, in that the
blanket bans of the academy are nuanced to fit pastoral necessity. These are
authors responding not just to students and theories, but to the everyday
imperatives of the parish. They know that what is suitable in one situation
will not work in the other. But rather than force new developments into old

65 F.M. Powicke, Stephen Langton (Oxford, 1928), pp. 16, 71.

66 Powicke, Stephen Langton, p. 73, quoting Langtons Quaestiones, from Cambridge, StJohns
College, MS 57, fol. 264r.
67 Hugh of St Cher, Postilla on Ps 18 (19): 13.
Conformity And Diversity 207

forms, commentators and theologians invent new genres, giving themselves

the freedom to produce new forms of interpretation, and allowing themselves
to respond to a changingworld with changing theology, whilst maintaining
the continuity of basic doctrine.
Scholars of medieval theological material often ignore the nature of the
types of works which are their subject. Instead, it seems to be taken for granted
that theological conclusions are broadly stable, and that the proferred answers
to any particular question will be the same, wherever or however they are pre-
sented. The medieval Church regarded its teachings as timeless and true; and
because most of those who have studied it were also Christian believers, there
has been an inclination amongst post-medieval scholars to treat theological
material in the same way. Theological content has tended to be treated as a
branch of philosophy ahistorical and largely without need of context, its sys-
tems self-contained. According to this reading, the arguments of theologians,
like those of philosophers, can be put side-by-side, whatever era or circum-
stances gave them birth; and twentieth-century accounts of medieval theology
told the story in terms of solutions to problems, with little account of working
processes or expected audiences. One common tendency was and is to present
the work of medieval scholars only in relation to those of Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas was made a Doctor of the Church in the sixteenth century, and his
theological opinions were established as a measure against which others could
be judged. But in his own day Thomas ideas were not treated with anything
like the same reverence, and this is one of the reasons I have avoided using
Thomas here, and have given space to scholars who, though less well-known
now, were nonetheless highly regarded in the Middle Ages. They set out the
working practices that Thomas and others would follow; their expositions
formed the backbone of later interpretation.
We do not take the same attitude towards other sorts of religious material
and evidence. Saints lives, for instance, may be formally similar to one another,
and yet are recognised as arising out of particular historical conditions and
contemporary needs: what is wanted in a saint varies with time and place. The
job of the historian is to uncover the circumstances and reasoning that make
the document what it is and why it is, when it is. But it is the claim of system-
atic theology that it represents a system of concepts (in this case, beliefs or
articles of faith) which exist outside of temporal change: as signs of God, they
are, like him, eternal and timeless. Even here, however, there has to be room
for movement, whether because of the human inability to understand the
divine revelation fully, or because God has planned to reveal himself differ-
ently over time, depending on the varying human capacity to comprehend
what it sees. For medieval Christians, who viewed their faith as a continuation
208 Chapter 7

and fulfilment of the religion disclosed to Abraham and the Jews, the changes
resultant on progressive revelation had to be recognised as profound the dif-
ference between a Messiah already come and one still awaited. Other points of
changing belief encompassed such basic questions as the meaning of the
Eucharist and the place of an ordained ministry in the body of the Church.
Each shift on questions such as these, as well as myriad smaller points, has
entailed changes in theological argument and conclusions. Thus, although the
Church has always wished to make its teachings seem changeless, this has
never really been the case; theological truth may change slowly, but change it
does.
One way of considering such change is by paying attention to genre in theo-
logical material, in the same way that it is accepted as part of literary scholar-
ship. Just as literary scholars are clear that they are dealing with poetry or
prose, legend or romance, and recognise their individual characteristics and
ground rules, so must students of theology do the same. In particular, ques-
tions of audience and reception are crucial in literature: who could or would
read a text, and why, is as basic in literary studies as asking who wrote it and
why. The comparative study of theological genre is an area that has received
little attention, but is ripe for further investigation. At base, not all documents
which deal with theological questions are the same; the solution to a doctri-
nal question may differ, depending on whether it comes from a sermon or from
a summa. The early-twelfth-century schools, like that of Anselm at Laon,
simultaneously produced both biblical commentary and collections of theo-
logical sententiae. This dual pattern continued throughout the history of the
schools, with Peter Lombards Sentences sitting alongside his commentaries on
the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles, which were amongst the most celebrated
exegesis of the period. In the fifty years after Lombards death, sentences mate-
rial was transformed into sets of questions and theological summae, but study
of the Bible per se did not go away. Peter the Chanter produced both a Summa
de sacramentis and biblical commentary; his slightly earlier contemporary,
Peter Comestor, was the author of a Bible-study classic, the Historia scholas-
tica, which stood alongside the Sentences and the Glossa ordinaria. In the thir-
teenth century, summae such as William of Auxerres Summa aurea or Thomas
of Chobhams pastoral Summa confessorum, were companions to Hugh of
St Chers complete biblical commentary, the Postillae. Each of these had its
place within the various genres of theology, aimed at different audiences and
different purposes.
But we also need to remember the influence of individuality. In the period
up to the 1230s the developing state of the curriculum was such that commen-
tators could adapt existing types of material to suit differing needs. With small
Conformity And Diversity 209

numbers of teachers and students, individual masters could create their own
niche. The inventive variety of the materials they developed is first and fore-
most a reflection of the particular interests of their authors. Martin Grabmann
dubbed Peter the Chanter and his circle of contemporaries at Paris the
biblical-moral school, after Peters penchant for discussion of individual
cases more than general principles, and the epithet has been regularly repeated
as a defining characteristic; but reversing the catchphrase, the suggestion that
other theologians were neither biblical nor moral illustrates the false dichot-
omy the nickname creates.68 Powicke is surely right to note:

It is easy, indeed, to exaggerate in the search for tendencies They are

the artificial creation of modern scholarsand I cannot but feel that
Dr.Grabmann, in his interesting and learned work, has conveyed a mis-
leading impression of conscious divergencies which were not apparent
to the eminent teachers of Langtons time. In the eyes of their pupils the
personal foibles, the temperament, the measure of their sympathy, or
their powers of exposition were doubtless the traits which distinguised
one master from another. Some would be more systematic than others,
but they all lectured and disputed on the same things. There was one
fashion common to all.69

Stephen Langton, Powickes subject, was a case in point. Influenced by the

Victorine scholars in his biblical commentary, by Peter the Chanter when he
dealt with difficult moral issues, and by Peter Lombard when addressing mat-
ters of speculative theology, Langton was nonetheless his own man. As Powicke
judges, men like Langton used the Lombard, just as they used St. Augustine
and St. Ambrose; they did not adopt him.70 Stephen produced massive bibli-
cal commentaries, was a noted preacher (he was nicknamed Stephen with the
tongue of thunder), produced a series of questions on problems in theology
and morals, and spent two tempestuous decades as a cardinal and archbishop.
There is little to be gained from trying to pigeonhole him as a member of this
or that scholarly faction. In the century between Peter Lombard and John of La
Rochelle, the schools were still too fluid, too exciting for there to be only one
type of scholar, producing one type of work. The syllabus had yet to ossify and
the boundary between the schools and the wider world was still porous;

68 Martin Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastichen Methode, 2 vols (Freiburg im Breisgau,
1909), vol. 2, p. 467.
69 Powicke, Stephen Langton, p. 55.
70 Ibid., p. 54.
210 Chapter 7

aclever man who could innovate or consolidate could make his reputation in
his own way.
Stability was a hallmark of the universal Church; it had to reflect the unchang-
ing nature of God and the all-encompassing message and application of the
Gospel. There could be nothing new under the sun. In the commandments, we
have seen this reflected in the idea of the moral law always applicable and
never wrong to follow. The reason the precepts of the Decalogue persisted after
the coming of Christ was because they were judged to be the moralia among the
613 mitzvuot. The ceremonial and judicial laws could be neglected, but the
moral laws remained. But could they stay the same, when the world in which
they were to be interpreted was changing? It was the keystone of the medieval
Church that, since its doctrines came from God, they were always and every-
where the same. This was a good thing in itself, illustrating the essential truth
and reliability of faith; Christian teachings were absolute, not relative to cir-
cumstances, and believers could know where they stood. Nevertheless, some
accommodation to the medieval world could not be avoided. To begin with,
faced with situations not envisaged in the original context, all biblical scholars
are forced to interpret their text to make sense in their own circumstances. The
very act of exegesis is an admission of flexibility; the need for textual interpreta-
tion is in itself a chink in the armour of fundamentalism. The biblical commen-
tators in this book all found themselves having to read the Bible in the light of
the world around them. For Augustine whose writings none of our later schol-
ars could ignore that Roman world was in transition. Similarly, the influential
scholars of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century schools worked in the midst of
a renewal of religious life which opened the closed world of monastic study to
the marketplace of ideas.
Some of this wider discussion was engendered by the increased interest of
lay believers in their religion, and their own part in it. Throughout the twelfth
century, the old acceptance that individual lay Christians could largely leave
spiritual professionals to pray on their behalf increasingly gave way to a desire
for a more active involvement in their own spirituality and salvation. The
Church felt itself challenged by less orthodox sects and teachings which
encouraged lay even female participation and leadership. Building on the
eleventh-century Gregorian reform, it responded in a number of ways: by
defining right belief more strictly, it was made clear who was inside and who
outside the establishment; by accepting new forms of religious life (as long as
they were obedient), it found a place for some kinds of spiritual expression
that, in outward appearance, sailed close to the heretical winds; and it
responded to lay requests for more teaching and involvement in Church life.
The canons and spirit of the Fourth Lateran Council, called by Pope Innocent
Conformity And Diversity 211

III in 1215, were both acknowledgement of and reply to the currents of change
in the Church. One of the aims of the Council was to provide for the education
of both clergy and (indirectly) the laity.71 The new mendicant Orders formed a
symbiotic relationship with Innocent, because the mendicants provided the
personnel for his Lateran IV reforms; and there was symbiosis, too, in the rela-
tionship between the Paris schools and the Lateran Council. Without the need
for a more educated clergy and the encouragement of the mendicants, the
proto-university at Paris might not have thrived as it did; and without the
financial underpinning the mendicants (ironically) provided, the theology fac-
ulty might not have attracted enough students to survive, since in 1219 the uni-
versity had been forbidden by Honorius III from teaching the money-spinning
subject of civil law.72 For the mendicants who increasingly made up the body
of teachers and students at Paris, the schools were a preparation for work out-
side academia; and in response to this, the sorts of material that scholars
produced broadened and diverged from the traditional mode of biblical com-
mentary. The commandments make their way into the parish church and onto
the pageant wagon, but for the most part it seems as though the careful discus-
sions of our commentators have little influence on their presentation in these
very different genres.

71 For the text (Latin and English) of the Lateran IV decrees see N.P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of
the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London and Washington, 1990), I.227-71.
72 For Honorius prohibition see H. Denifle and E. Chatelain, Chartularium Universitatis
Parisiensis, 4 vols (Paris, 18891897), vol. I, no. 32. For the mendicants in the Schools see
Smalley, The Study of the Bible; M.M. Mulchahey, The Dominican Studium System and
the Universities of Europe in the Thirteenth Century, in Manuels, Programmes de Cours
et Techniques dEnseignement dans les Universits Mdivales, ed. J. Hamesse (Louvain-la-
Neuve, 1994), 277324; and eadem, First the Bow is Bent in Study; Bert Roest, A History
of Franciscan Education (c. 12101517) (Leiden and Boston, 2000).
Last Words

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but
under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from
the past.
karl marx. 18th Brumaire

If there was a group of people for whom Marxs dictum was not true, we might
think it was the men who created the culture and writings of the twelfth- and
thirteenth-century schools. They took the study of their religion out of the
hands of monks and created institutions, materials and curricula to suit their
own purposes. As interest in spiritual life expanded throughout the laity, they
wrote to address circumstances and questions which covered minute details of
everyday life. They insisted that people be judged not only by their actions but
even by their intentions and motives: to act was one thing; to act only from
love, and not anger or fear or envy, was quite another. It is not surprising, then,
that the biblical Decalogue was the subject of these scholars interest. What
better to study than a text which described relations between a people and
their God, and relations between the people themselves? Here was a chance to
make their history to use the Bible to prescribe the world as they thought it
should be; and for those prescriptions to make their way to the ordinary believ-
ers, through students whose vocation took them out of the schools and into
the pulpit. The classroom could be transmitted via the pulpit to the world.
It has been argued that the spirit of reform given shape in the canons of the
Third and Fourth Lateran Councils was nourished in the schools. Popes and
bishops employed graduates or had been educated at the schools themselves.
The implication is that academic biblical theology argued for a more Gospel-
centred, morally pure, reform-minded Church, and that the reasoning of the
academics won out over the corruption of an old guard of bureaucrats. This is
not quite the story that the exegesis of the commandments tells. This is not to
say that occasional, single points made by the commentators are not reform-
minded, but it is not the overall picture. The most evident general observation
we can make about Decalogue commentary is its dependence on exegetical
tradition. Of course, any religion reliant on a foundational set of writings will
always be looking to those texts (and to a collection of authoritative interpreta-
tions of them) for guidance. The schools used just such a method, employing
biblical and patristic texts to set out how the Christian life should be lived.
But the idea that this was a closed textual community, subject to no worldly

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014|doi 10.1163/9789004274884_010

Last Words 213

influences, seems to me to be far from the truth. In fact, rather than the exege-
sis of the commandments influencing the secular world, there appears to be
much more influence of the world on the commentary.
Let us take the question of killing. The commandment is unequivocal: you
shall not kill. Moreover, it is reinforced by the Sermon on the Mount: there, not
only killing but the desire to kill is forbidden. Unlike some situations where the
Old and New Testaments appear to be discordant, here the teachings affirm
and strengthen one another. Nor is the wording ambiguous: the text is not con-
fined to murder; it refers simply to killing. The commentators are aware of both
these points. They quote the New Testament alongside the old; they ask which
terms are used and in acknowledgement that killing (occidere) is specified,
they consider the question of killing plants and animals, and of killing yourself
(se occidere). In the light of the Gospel counsel to turn the other cheek, Simon
of Hinton even asks whether the only viable option for Christians is not to
remove themselves from all situations in which force might have to be used.
Given the lack of ambiguity in the two biblical texts, the answer should be
obvious: killing of any sort is wrong. But of course, that is not what the com-
mentaries say. Suicide is forbidden, but killing after due legal process (even of
an innocent man) is allowed, and even welcomed, as is killing in wartime and
for self-defence. The only caveat is that the act must be carried out in the spirit
of justice, and not of vengeance or hatred. Killing is even allowed indirectly, as
when the victors in a just war may remove the goods of the vanquished (as long
as they are not fellow-Christians or Jews), leaving them nothing to live on.
This kind of wartime looting might be thought to break the commandment
against stealing which, like killing, the Decalogue bans in unequivocal terms.
But it is not forbidden by the commentators; indeed, they consider the taking
of someone elses property in these circumstances of the just war as not steal-
ing at all, in the same way that it is not stealing to take food or goods from
someone else if you are desperate and without other means of support. Further,
when faced with stealing in the form of usury, which was condemned by the
Bible and despised in Christian tradition, the scholars are ambiguous. Usury
is forbidden by the law of God; but in practical terms, so long as the rate of
interest is kept within reasonable bounds, charging for lending money is
acceptable.
One of the reasons why lending at interest was problematic was that those
who borrowed in this way had to swear an oath to the lender that they would
return the money, plus interest, at an agreed time. Swearing unnecessary oaths
was forbidden in the commandments and positively condemned in the
Sermon on the Mount. Thus, among its other faults, such as charging for time,
encouraging idolatry (of money), reducing borrowers to penury, and allowing
214 last words

Jews to acquire Christian property, usury involved taking the Lords name in
vain. With such a catalogue of disapproval, we might think that the commen-
tators would ban usury in all cases, and it is clear from some of their discus-
sions that they would like to be able to do this; but they are aware that to do so
would undermine much of the system of business and commerce. The circum-
stances of daily living force them into an exegesis that the Bible does not sup-
port. The same was true of swearing oaths in the law courts and for other
transactions a problem that went back as far as the Gospels, and which had
constrained even Augustine to allow oath-taking on limited occasions. Far
from the classroom influencing the world, I judge that the opposite is much
more likely to be true. The schools might effect small changes within the broad
principles of interpretation, but the bigger picture was set by long tradition,
which was in turn responsive to the practicalities of worldly living. The Church
could not stray too far from the needs of secular convenience and still expect
to be listened to.
What we have not seen in the interpretation of the commandments is any
sort of call for radical societal change. Believers who interpreted the Bible in
this way were not likely to be teaching masters in the schools; more probably
they would be among those branded heretical. All the scholars we have heard
from held some sort of position in the Church or in their religious Order
beyond that of teacher, and none would have been trusted with these duties if
they had been in the least suspect. There are doubtless commentaries on the
commandments from outside the mainstream which read them in unortho-
dox, and perhaps more exciting, ways, but I have made a point of choosing the
ordinary because it is more often neglected than the unusual, and the picture
it presents is more genuinely the common medieval experience. Where these
commentators do call for change, however, is at the level of the individual.
Instead of dealing with society as a whole, they address every single person, to
set out the standards expected by God. In this the commentators are following
the example of the Decalogue itself, which speaks to the (Hebrew and Latin)
reader in the singular you. The commentators make it clear that the com-
mandments are meant to apply to everyone: men and women, freeman and
slave, Gentile and Jew. By virtue of their creation by God, every person has a
responsibility to worship their creator, and to recognise in their fellow human
beings the image and likeness of God, treating them as they would treat them-
selves. The exegesis of the commandments is directed at individual rather than
communal change or at most, communal change brought about by individu-
als doing their duty. This is true whatever the rank and situation of the person
involved. The starving man may take enough food to keep him alive, but no-
one can steal on behalf of anyone else; the overlord can levy taxation on his
Last Words 215

subjects, but only as much as will supply the moderate needs of his household;
it is the duty of everyone who can to give alms: the commentators envision a
web of duties and responsibilities, but it is individuals who are linked, not
groups or structures and no-one is exempt.
The commandments belonged to the Jews. Their adoption by Christians was
a matter for ridicule by Jews, who accused Christians of picking and choosing
between the laws as it suited them; and the commandments were a matter for
debate among Christian sects, not all of whom thought the Old Testament or
the Law had force in the New Covenant. How much of this background is evi-
dent in the commentary tradition; were these deliberately polemical texts? At
first sight, we might think the answer is yes, since it was common to explain
differences between the Law and the Gospels by describing the Jews as chil-
dren, whose meagre understanding could comprehend only the former, with
its less rigorous demands. Some commentators, notably Bonaventure, were apt
to include disparaging remarks about the suitability of the avaricious Jews to
being usurers, or their propensity for swearing oaths. I do not mean to dimin-
ish the existence of such comments if I also say that they are few and far
between. The characterisation of the Jews as children is taken over from Jerome
as an explanation of the purpose of Jesus extra precepts in the Sermon on the
Mount. It was a traditional way to resolve the issue of the sufficiency of the
Law. The sole commentator who appears to address relations with the Jews
from personal experience, Simon of Hinton in Oxford, seems to do so because
he recognises their attraction to his students, rather than out of any particular
hatred. He does not seem intolerant or vengeful; rather, he seems concerned to
stop his younger brethren from doing anything stupid. John of La Rochelle
joins Christians and Jews together as those who must be allowed enough to live
on by a conquering army. Nicholas of Lyra, in the next century, is an out-and-
out admirer of Jewish learning. In fact, the most notable anti-Jewish position
in all the works we have discussed is that of the mystery plays of Christ among
the Doctors: the child Jesus outflanks the learned Jews, the commandments
are re-written to include the two Gospel precepts to love, and Moses Law is
dismissed as inferior to Christs.
The situation with heresy is slightly different. Bonaventure mentions hereti-
cal groups by name (Arians, Manichees, Sabellians, etc.), but it is not clear how
far these are heretics he knows himself or whether he draws their incorrect
beliefs from the writings of the Fathers. Some exegesis of the commandments
does seem to be intended to counter heretical positions, such as not acknowl-
edging the authority of the Old Testament, banning the killing of animals, or
refusing to separate the person of the priest from his sacramental function; but
there is a surprising vagueness about these references. Sects are generally
216 last words

referred to simply as heretici, and none is closely described. It seems, in fact,

as though the commentators either do not know, or intentionally avoid
explaining, exactly what each heretical group believes, causing us to wonder
how common they were. Rather, it is clear from the commentaries that, even
for those religious such as Dominicans, whose vocation is generally said to
include the conversion of heretics, their principal intention was to teach the
orthodox faith, rather than argue against those who propounded error. Even
among mendicants, most of their time was spent teaching those who knew
little, rather than those who knew wrong.
At the beginning of the twelfth century, the commandments were the
preserve of monks who meditated on the book of Exodus. By the end of the
century, they were debated in the secular cathedral schools, which discussed
the place of the Law, the balance of action and intention, and focussed their
exposition on the commandment against false witness. In the next century, the
commandments became a pillar of catechesis, a means of teaching the laity
about their faith, and a checklist to ingrain the habits of private confession;
and they continued to be discussed in biblical commentary and theological
summae, in the academic setting of the schools. This history is one of massive
expansion the explosion of theological thinking over the course of a century.
In this, it is a microcosm of the renaissance in thought that accompanied the
bubbling life of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe. Too often this intel-
lectual energy is today characterised as an institution of stultifying conformity.
In this earlier period at least, this was far from the truth, and the relatively
neglected scholars of these pages have shown, I hope, the depths of interest
and individuality that the medieval schools could nurture.
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General Index
613 laws2, 25, 27, 3240, 67, 183, 193, 210
Abraham19, 23, 24, 25, 38, 41, 42, 43, 57,
127, 154, 199, 208
Absalom92
Adorno Church, Bruges54
Adultery1, 45, 50, 6364, 70, 104, 112116,
117, 121122, 126, 135140, 147, 148, 150152,
183, 193, 195, 197, 201, 204
Alan of Lille49, 52, 184
Alcuin59
Alexander of Ashby180
Alexander of Hales10, 11, 24, 26, 27, 28,
33, 34, 46, 47, 6770, 100, 128n, 130, 135, 166,
171, 185186, 188
Alexander Stavensby5n
Ambrose12, 24, 133, 142, 162, 181, 209
Anger46, 6364, 68, 90, 128, 130, 133,
197, 212
Anglo-Norman Anonymous194
Anselm of Bec20, 181
Anselm of Laon7, 14, 41, 71, 178, 180, 208
Aquinas, Thomas6, 38, 207
Arius/Arians76, 89, 96, 215
Aristotle8, 38, 46, 72, 89, 181, 187, 188
Articles of Faith6, 103, 179, 193, 207
Astrology5557, 88, 191
Astronomy52, 55, 88
Augustine3, 4, 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20n, 21,
26, 27, 2831, 32, 34n, 36, 43, 4647, 48, 50,
51, 52, 53, 55n, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 76,
77, 82, 83n, 84, 88, 89n, 90, 96, 98, 102, 103,
112, 113, 114, 119120, 121, 126, 127128, 136,
137, 138, 139, 140, 141n, 143, 146152, 155,
156161, 163, 165, 166169, 172173, 181, 186,
189, 191, 197, 199, 202, 209, 210, 214
Avarice46, 6364, 142, 146, 149152,
191, 196,
Avicenna9
Baldwin, John W.1, 4n, 8n, 114n,
143n, 145n, 177n, 183n
Baptism26n, 40, 43, 58, 149, 195,
Bathsheba127, 183
Bede7, 12, 181
Bernard of Chartres12, 60n
Bernard of Clairvaux104n, 181, 192
Bigamy115, 136
Blasphemy97
Boethius5152, 181
Bonaventure10, 11, 2728, 39, 43, 7273,
76, 81, 82, 83, 85n, 8889, 9394n, 9798,
99, 100102, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117118n,
123, 128, 133, 134n, 138, 144, 146, 148149,
150n, 153, 157n, 159, 161, 162, 163168,
171172, 181n, 186, 187, 188, 215
Browne, Sir Thomas52
Caerimonialia (ceremonial law)3435,
37, 68, 99100, 153, 188, 210
Capital punishment123
Cassuto, Umberto1n, 14n, 66n
Cathars86, 116, 137
Cattle rustling189
Chartres cathedral60
Chastity (corporeal/spiritual)39, 42,
90, 115n, 138, 157, 204
Chester Play200n, 201
Christ Among the Doctors (play)200, 215
Chrysostom, John95, 165, 181
Circumcision24, 26n, 4043, 58, 100
Commandments
Division ofsee Division
Numberingsee Numbering
Concupiscence/covetousness31, 4041,
46, 58, 64, 66, 6870, 113, 126127, 139140,
146153, 196, 201, 202, 204
Coventry Play200, 201
Creed56, 12, 72, 193, 202
Crusade/crusader14, 130, 142, 170
Curtius, E. R.5253n
Damascus, John of85n
David (King David)49, 60, 92, 127,
164, 183
Deadly Sins6n, 46, 6364, 103, 194
Dederich of Mnster (Dietrich Kolde/
Coelde)12, 119, 203205
Division of commandments on stone
tablets3, 6573
General Index 229

Donatists89 Honorius III211

Drunkenness103, 190 Hugh of St Cher10, 88, 96, 103,
Dualist/dualism26, 83, 116, 137 122, 150152, 182, 192, 206, 208,
Dulia8485 Hugh of St Victor7, 2324, 26n, 3334,
68, 70, 96, 133, 140, 153, 157n, 158, 160,
Elijah69 170171, 181, 183184, 192,
Esau56, 154, 173 Hyperdulia8485

False gods87, 96, 139, 167, 201 Ibn Ezra, Abraham5354n

False testimony/false witness13, 46,
6364, 69, 9495, 107, 125, 131, ch. 6, 182,
195196, 201, 203, 204, 216
Father and Mother, honouring4445, 63,
64, 67, 69, 71, 101, 107112, 117119, 122123,
125, 187, 194, 198, 199
Fornication112115, 121, 136138, 140,
195, 197, 201
Gematria53
Geoffrey of Auxerre59
Gerald of Wales198199n
Gilbert of Auxerre (the Universal)7
Glossa ordinaria (Gloss)4, 5n, 7, 11, 30,
35, 43n, 67n, 70, 78, 79, 83, 84, 92, 94n,
96n, 106, 108, 116, 117, 118n, 126n, 133, 137,
139, 167n, 178, 181, 182, 184, 192, 208,
Goethe, J. W.175
Golden Calf2n, 80, 81, 105,
Golden Rule22
Good Samaritan107, 120
Gossip204
Grabmann, Martin209
Gratian142n, 143, 154, 164, 165n,
167n, 182
Gregory the Great7, 12, 19, 56, 164, 165n,
181, 199
Gregory IX9, 118n
Hammurabic Code14
Heresy26
Heretics/heresy3, 6, 26, 29, 31, 62,
80, 83, 86, 89, 91, 96, 98, 110, 116, 119,
130, 136, 137, 143, 165, 188, 198, 210, 214,
215, 216
Hesychius6768
Hittite covenants14
Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem54
Homicide127135, 168, 197198,
Homosexuality115, 138, 195, 204
Idolatry37, 38, 39, 4243, 7989, 90, 93,
96, 105, 117, 122, 135, 139, 145, 166, 187, 191,
193, 213
Idololatria89n, 139, 187n
Images2, 55, 62, 77, 8183, 85n, 86, 88,
191, 193, 197
Incest115, 136, 138, 205
Infidels3, 87, 117, 130, 143, 167
Innocent III4n, 5, 169, 205, 210211
Isaac25, 127, 154
Isidore of Seville7, 12, 22, 48, 49n, 51, 54,
58, 88, 94, 96, 191
Iudicialia (judicial law)2, 3435, 37,
4445, 68, 112, 127, 128, 131, 141, 188,
197198, 210
Ivo of Chartres104n
Jacob15, 25, 56, 154, 173
Jephthah170
Jerome7, 12, 13, 21, 55, 83, 92, 113n, 129,
143, 163, 166, 171, 181, 215
Jew/Jews2, 3, 6, 15, 19, 21, 26, 2940, 55,
67, 81, 8688, 99100, 101102, 106, 108, 115,
118, 126, 127, 133, 135, 137, 140141, 143, 149,
152, 153, 166, 176, 183, 187188, 191, 192n, 193,
198, 199, 208, 213, 215
Jewish oath165n
John of La Rochelle9, 10, 11, 18, 1922,
23, 25, 27, 38, 71, 8486, 9697, 101102n,
103, 110, 114116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
123, 129, 130, 131133, 136, 137, 138, 142,
143145, 148n, 155, 157, 160, 168, 170, 171,
188, 192, 196, 206, 215
John Mirk12, 203205
John Pecham5n, 6n
John Wyclifsee Wyclif
Josephus65, 66n
Joshua155
Justification4044
Just war118, 198, 213
230 General Index

Kidnap141, 189 N-Town Plays200n202

Killing14, 23, 46, 6364, 69, 121, 122, 126,
127135, 144, 150151, 152, 160, 183, 197198,
203, 213
Killing Animals116, 213, 215
Killing Letter2831
Killing Plants116, 213
Lanfranc of Bec181
Lateran Council, 4th (1215)4, 5,
8, 9, 14, 112, 114, 150, 183, 193, 196,
210211, 212
Latria8385
Liber exemplorum198, 205
Libri Carolini81n
Likeness/similitude27, 34n, 77, 8182,
85, 123, 197, 214
Lust/lechery (luxuria)46, 64, 80, 125,
140, 150, 195197, 199, 202
Lying119120, ch. 6, 189, 196197
Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben
Maimon)9, 26, 27n, 33, 36, 38, 44, 67,
112n, 185186
Manicheans26, 53n, 98, 165, 215
Manuscripts
Bamberg, Staatsbib., Pat. 128205n
Durham, Cathedral Library, A.I.79n
Cambridge, Peterhouse 1129n
Cambridge, St Johns College, 57206n
London, British Library, Royal 9
E. XIV11n, 56n
Oxford, Trinity College 659n
Troyes, mgt (formerly Bibl. mun.),
lat. 964205n
Marriage22, 57, 113115, 119, 136140,
186, 197n
Marx, Karl212
Masturbation115n, 138, 204
Midwives, Hebrew155
Mitzvah/mitzuotsee 613 laws
Moralia (moral law)2, 27, 34, 35, 37, 45,
47, 68, 99, 100, 113, 115, 118, 128, 129, 136, 137,
144, 153, 157, 210
Moses2, 14, 19, 21, 24, 2526, 31, 33n, 40,
41, 46, 65, 69, 70, 81, 9697, 101, 127, 194,
200202, 215,
Murder49, 125, 127, 129, 134, 137, 147,
152, 213
Mystery plays200203
Nepotism115, 145, 189
Nicholas of Cusa54
Nicholas of Lyra12, 80, 90, 91n, 92, 101,
102, 104, 105, 108, 112, 116, 127, 132, 135n, 137,
141, 148, 149, 152, 154, 192=193, 215
Numbering commandments3n,
3233, 6569
Oaths68, 9498, 106, 143n, 154, 155, 156,
162169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 186, 187, 191, 197,
199, 201, 213, 214, 215
Obligation22, 24, 27, 39, 6970, 84,
85, 105, 118, 120, 123, 138, 154, 155157,
168, 170, 171, 176, 189
Odo of Morimond59
Origen7, 29, 35, 6667, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84,
9093, 147, 148n, 181, 184
Other gods3n, 56, 62, 64, 66, 68, 77,
7981, 88, 90, 105, 117, 139, 193, 194, 199,
Otto IV169
Our Father/ Pater Noster56, 54, 193, 202
Ovid181
Oxford, Council of (1222)5n, 9
Parents, honouringsee Father
and Mother
Pater Nostersee Our Father
Paul, apostle21, 2830, 31, 41, 69, 79,
82, 126, 138
Pelagians89
Perjury154, 156, 167, 170172, 194, 197
Peter the Chanter1n, 8, 9, 62, 114, 145, 162,
170, 183184n, 208209
Peter Comestor8, 66n, 82, 8384n, 90,
92n, 95, 108, 114, 159160n, 184n, 201, 208
Peter of Compostela205
Peter Damian138
Peter Lombard45n, 7, 8, 9, 10, 23n, 30,
34n, 43, 46n, 62, 67, 70, 71, 8283, 94, 95, 111,
125, 126, 134, 143, 145, 152, 159n, 166, 167, 171,
178, 181, 185186, 205, 208, 209
Peter of Poitiers8, 123n, 129, 130, 133,
134n, 139, 141, 149, 152, 153, 159, 166, 178n
Peter Riga194
Philip the Chancellor10
Philo Judaeus53, 58n, 59n, 6566n, 67,
108109, 111
Plagues of Egypt46, 60, 6165, 68, 74,
75, 197
General Index
Plato121, 169, 181
Powicke, F. M.1, 5n, 9n, 11n, 56n, 177n,
206n, 209
Punishment2, 16, 28, 32, 37, 40, 4446,
86, 9193, 105, 119, 122, 138, 160161, 162, 169,
172, 190
Pythagoras53
Rabanus Maurus7, 52n, 58, 61, 85, 181
Rahab155
Ralph of Flaix35
Ralph of Laon7
Rapine/robbery116, 140, 142, 145,
188189, 197
Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac)12, 80,
111, 112, 127, 141, 192193
Raymond of Peafort11, 56, 163n
Razias121n, 131
Rebecca154
Remedy for sin (commandments as)46,
6264, 75, 105, 139, 197
Restitution33, 45, 141, 190, 197
Reward23, 37, 45, 122123n, 149
Robberysee Rapine
Robert Grosseteste5n, 10, 45, 46n, 50,
76, 7980, 88, 103n, 107, 109, 110, 113114n,
116n, 121, 132, 133, 134n, 135n, 139, 141142,
151, 172, 173, 189192
Roman law143
Rupert of Deutz180
Sabbath2, 13, 34, 58, 62, 64, 68, 69, 76,
87, 98106, 109,116, 126, 194195, 198, 202,
203, 204
Sabellians89, 215
Samson121, 131
Saracens3, 38, 87, 89, 130, 188,
Seneca45, 181
Sermon on the Mount2, 13, 27, 39, 122,
125, 126, 134, 153, 163, 169, 213, 215
Seven deadly sins6n, 46, 6364, 103, 194
Similitude/likenesssee Likeness
Simon of Hinton11, 56, 70n, 8688,
95,99100, 116, 122, 128, 134, 136137,
140141n, 142, 146, 155, 163n, 165, 166n, 167,
168, 169, 189, 191, 213, 215
231
Simony145, 189, 195, 197
Sin against nature115, 138
Smalley, Beryl1, 4n, 10n, 11n, 26, 35n, 37n,
39n, 49n, 50n, 56n, 177n, 211n
Spies (book of Joshua)155
Stealing (see Theft)
Stephen Langton1, 5n, 89n, 6162, 64,
69, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 103, 133134n, 139n,
148, 158, 192, 206, 209
Suicide120121, 131, 137, 197, 213
Sunday35, 99, 103, 104, 106, 199
Superstition38, 5557, 58, 80n, 8889,
172, 187, 191, 196, 197
Swearing (see Oaths)
Synecdoche101, 131, 137, 186
Ten Words1, 65
Tetragrammaton81
Theft45, 46, 63, 64, 6970, 115, 116,
118, 119, 122, 126, 135, 136n, 137, 140146,
147, 150152, 188189, 195, 197, 198,
213, 214
Thomas of Chobham8, 910n, 55, 56,
122n123, 151, 196198, 206, 208
Towneley Plays200n, 201
Usury9, 141, 143144, 188189, 195, 197,
213214
Vegetarianism116
Vincent of Beauvais182
Virginity/ deflowering virgins
(stuprum)57, 138
Walter of St Victor131n
William of Auvergne9, 10n, 26n, 27, 35n,
36, 37, 39, 4143, 44,49, 50n
William of Auxerre9, 10, 11, 22,
23, 31, 34n, 36, 3941, 46, 51, 61, 6364,
84, 123, 127128, 130, 144, 145, 155,
158159n, 162, 163, 165n, 169, 170171n,
189, 192, 208
William de Montibus5n, 10n, 54
William of Pagula202
William Peraldus198, 199n
Wyclif, John46n, 110, 117n
Index of References to Scripture
(excepting the Decalogue)

Genesis Song of Songs

149n 1: 397
22: 16164 Ecclesiasticus
253656 3: 21545
27154 Isaiah
Exodus 6118
1: 1521155 Ezekiel
71260 5: 2550
21: 1544 18: 292
21: 1744 18: 1991
22: 1813, 127 Matthew
32332n 5 (see Sermon the Mount)
34: 14261n 5: 172, 27, 126
Leviticus 5: 33163, 169
19: 3111 5: 3413, 95, 98
19: 1866 5: 39122n, 128
20: 944 10: 3050
Deuteronomy 11: 3039
4: 131n 19: 161727
6: 566 Mark
10: 41n 2: 272, 13, 104,
Joshua 12: 3066n
2155 Luke
Judges 10: 2737107
11: 3040170 Lk 2766n
1 Samuel John
25: 22164 13: 3413
Proverbs Acts
13: 24110 8: 1821145
Psalms Romans
5: 7162 1: 9164
18: 255 8: 2094
19: 910118 10118
42: 1149 12: 21134
58: 11118 Corinthians
84: 1118 1 Cor. 8: 482
109 (110): 4164 1 Cor. 8: 5679
119 [118]: 333516 1 Cor. 10: 22165
Wisdom 2 Cor. 1: 23164
1: 11162 2 Cor. 3: 628, 126
11: 2150
Index Of References To Scripture (excepting The Decalogue) 233

Galatians James
5: 342 2: 1027
Philippians 5: 12164
1: 8164 John
3: 181980 1 John 3: 15134, 197