Max was excited. The book had come in the mail. He had been wishing to read it for years. Peter Lombard, The Sentences Book 3: On the Incarnation of the Word. He was surprised at how long it had taken for the text to be translated into English. Wasn’t The Sentences one of the most important and influential textbooks in history? Theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas or Bl. Duns Scotus had to read it and comment upon it to earn their academic credentials. Max wanted to know why scholars had not thought The Sentences was worth a translation in its own right. Were they trying to hide something? Or was the sentiment that many had, that The Sentences was a dull, unoriginal work, a valid excuse?
Max quickly read through the introduction, finding that Giulio Silano, the translator, had given some praise to the book in his hand. “The third book of the Sentences, for a variety of reasons (at some of which Dante hints in the dedication), has been the most congenial in which to become immersed, and so it is perhaps the hardest to let go.”[1] Christology was Max’s favorite theological topic; if the translator found this book to be the best of the four volumes of The Sentences, he knew he was in for something special.
Obviously, the book had to be understood within its context. Before it had been written, Peter Abelard had pointed out how theological authorities often contradicted each other, leaving a theologian perplexed as they pursued truth. Peter Lombard took upon himself Abelard’s project, but went a step further: he wanted to show that these contradictions need not leave us confused, but could lead us into a greater understanding of the truth, once we understand the meaning behind what the authorities said. Lombard knew that authorities would not be correct on every occasion, but, when it came to significant theological matters, he expected competent authorities to agree with one another. And Lombard went on to show how such agreement could be found, making a giant leap in the discipline of hermeneutics.
The first chapter asked the question as to why the Son became man, while the Father and the Spirit did not. In the midst of Lombard’s text, Max was drawn to the text which said, “This wisdom is the woman of the Gospel who lights the lamp and finds the tenth coin which had been lost, namely, the Wisdom of the Father, which lit the lamp of human weakness with the light of its divinity and restored man, who was lost, marked with the name and image of the king.”[2]
Max picked up a pencil and, despite his desire to keep his books pure, underlined the passage he just read, and wrote next to it, “Sophiology?” Max was interested in the history of Sophiology and wondered about its forms throughout history. It was a hotly debated subject, one which had many of its critics claim Sophiologists were heretics. Max, himself favoring the Sophiologists, felt that most of the criticisms aimed at Sophiologists were based upon misunderstanding. Ancient Gnosticism had, to some degree, hurt the field of research. But in Russia Sophiology was able to find a home, and Sophiologists like Bulgakov were some of the most profound theologians Max had encountered. He believed that there were many orthodox precedents to modern Sophiology in history. Anytime he read a text which even had possible Sophiological hints, he took note. Certainly most of them were not Sophiological in the proper sense, but many of them did hint at, or complement, thoughts which Sophiologists discussed amongst themselves. Max had got most of his own notes from mystical authors like Jacob Böhme, Meister Eckhart and St Maximus the Confessor (his patron saint), but he always got a profound sense of pleasure when one of the schoolmen, like St Thomas Aquinas, could be shown to be Sophiological. Finding a text like this in Lombard just made Max want to read more. As Bulgakov had shown, Christology was very Sophiological, so Max hoped he would find more incidents of Sophiology within The Sentences.
As he was reading Lombard, Max was unaware of the danger he, and the world, was in. It was the middle of winter, so one would not have expected a mosquito to have been in his home. But it was there, flying around. A mutant mosquito. It was born with enhanced genes, allowing it to thrive in winter. It had followed Max in to his home after he had picked up his mail from the mailbox. It was trying to get at him, trying to feed off him, but Max kept moving. Once it was inside the home, it found itself in a new, perplexing environment, and it flew around, looking for Max. But, unknown even to the mosquito (what do they know, really?), it carried within it a new, deadlier form of the West Nile Virus. The genes of the mosquito interfered with the virus, making it develop into a strain which, if it got into a human, would infect the host with a deadly plague that no scientist could figure out and cure. It would be a deadly virus which would quickly spread and kill most of the people in the world within a couple years. The world was at a point of crisis, but no one knew.
Max continued to read from his book; but he knew he going to have to put it down. It was getting late in the morning and he would have to start cooking lunch. He decided that he would stop when he finished the chapter he was reading. It was a classical topic which he had heard debated before: whether or not one could say Christ grew in wisdom and grace, and if so, how. The debate centered upon Luke 2:52, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.” Modern theologians took Luke’s text literally, believing it necessary for Christ to truly grow in knowledge if he is to be fully man On the other hand, classical authorities read the text differently: if Jesus is the Son of God made flesh, if Jesus is wisdom incarnate, how can he be said to grow in wisdom: saying Wisdom grew in wisdom just doesn’t make sense. And yet that is what Luke is apparently saying. The answer of Lombard was the classical answer: Jesus only appeared to grow in wisdom, so that an onlooker would look at him and think he was a gifted, but normal, human. “But it can certainly be taken in this sense: that Christ may be said to have made progress in the sight of men and in what he revealed of his own senses. And so the human sense made progress in him according to what he revealed and in the opinion of other men. In the same way, he is also said not to have known his father and mother in his infancy because he acted and bore himself as if he were lacking in this knowledge.”[3] It was one of the ways theologians allowed a docetical approach to Christ stand; they wanted to preserve the fact that Christ had to be wisdom incarnate.
When Max was moving to put the book down, the mosquito was starting to close in on him. It sensed his warmth. It sensed his blood. It was hungry and it needed to feed. But Max saw it. He used the book in his hand and swatted at it. The mosquito evaded him, but moved in closer. He swatted again. The mosquito just got closer. It landed on his left arm. One last time, he took the book, and hit it upon his arm.
“Got you,” Max said, wiping the mosquito off his book, unaware of the catastrophe he had just avoided.
He finally put the book down on the table.
“Now then, what should I have for lunch?”
[1] Peter Lombard, The Senteces Book 3: On the Incarnation of the Word. Trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: PIMS, 2008), xl.
[2] Ibid., 4.
[3] Ibid., 53 -54.
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