John Slotemaker: Peter Lombard's Inheritance: The Use of Augustine's De Trinitate in select Fourteenth-Century Commentaries on the Sentences

Augustine of Hippo had a profound influence on the development of medieval Christian thought. While medieval masters had access to some of Augustine's corpus, much of their knowledge of his theology was disseminated through florilegia collections and other resources/textbooks. The present paper argues that Peter Lombard' Sentences had a significant influence on how Augustine' trinitarian theology was received in the fourteenth century. Towards that end, the paper examines all citations of Augustine in the trinitarian theology (i.e., Sentences commentaries) of Walter Chatton (†1343), Adam Wodeham (†1358), Gregory of Rimini (†1358), and Peter of Ailly (†1420), systematically examining which citations from Augustine derive from the Lombard's Sentences and which resulted (most likely) from a re-examination of Augustine’s De Trinitate in the fourteenth century. By focusing thematically on various aspects of trinitarian theology, the paper determines how Peter Lombard shaped the reception of Augustine in select fourteenth-century authors (further, the paper notes the topics of fourteenth-century trinitarian theology that seemed to instigate a re-examination of Augustine by late-medieval theologians). The paper concludes by arguing that as the textbook of medieval theology, the Sentences profoundly shaped which aspects of Augustine's trinitarian theology were normative for late-medieval theologians.