Peter Lombard on God’s Knowledge and Its Capacities: Sententiae, Book I, Distinctions 38-39

Abstract

s literary and intellectual legacy has been studied rather diligently since the appearance of Marcia Colish's magisterial two-volume monograph and Philipp Rosemann's more accessive, yet equally rigorous studies [Colish 1994;Rosemann 2004;. As a complement to the flow of new publications in the wake of the global "Lombard research" 1 and as a continuation of my earlier research [Tkachenko 2017] I would like to pay some attention to the Master of the Sentences' theology. In particular, further studies in his theology proper are needed: a more detailed exposition of the distinctions 38 and 39 would be of some avail for the purpose of clarification of the Lombard's doctrine of God's knowledge and its relation to the human free will.As I have shown elsewhere [Tkachenko 2017: 27-28, passim] Lombard tends to see God's (fore)knowledge as either his pure awareness of everything knowable or the awareness and actual willing of some future events. At the same time, he denies that the divine knowledge per se causes anything: neither God's knowledge causes these events to happen, nor are the actually happening events causes for God knowing them. God's knowledge can be said to cause a thing to happen in a narrow sense only, when it is complemented by his voluntary action. God's knowledge, in general, is not causative, but God's knowledge of the good is causative, because he simultaneously knows and wills what is good. Hence, Lombard's is the traditional compatibilist view of God's foreknowledge and voluntary activity on the one side and the contingency of the created order and the rational creatures' free will on the other side. But the details of this conception are yet to be revealed. The distinctions 38 (its last part) and 39 of the Book of Sentences (Libri quattuor sententiarum) or simply the Sentences might shed some light upon the issue and, thus, what follows will be an attempt at clarification of Peter Lombard's position. 2