Annotatio LXII

”But Adam knew his wife, and she bore Cain.” — Genesis 4:1

The testimony of Ambrose from the work On Cain and Abel — published for the exposition of the present passage — the Master of the Sentences [Peter Lombard] brings forward, in the fourth book, distinction 39, where, being about to demonstrate that priests neither bind nor loose sinners,¹ but only show and pronounce [them] bound or loosed by God alone, he cites, for the confirmation of this error of his,² the authority of Ambrose from chapter 4 of the second book of the said work, running thus: “The Word of God remits sins; the priest is a judge: the priest indeed exhibits his office, but exercises the rights of no power.” Gratian, in the first distinction On Penance, alleges the same passage in plainly the same words. It is probable that either the one [drew] from the other, or both, from some other Rhapsode [compiler] — as is the custom of the Sentence-writers — excerpted this passage without the Ambrosian codex having been inspected: in which these words are read in a sense wholly diverse, nay even contrary, in this manner:³ “Sins are remitted through the Word of God, of which the Levite is the interpreter and, as it were, the executor; they are remitted also through the office of the Priest and the sacred ministry.” Which words Ambrose brought forth for this very purpose: to show that not only God, but priests also, remit sins.⁴ Just as he explained the same thing yet more openly in the first book On Penance, chapter 2, saying: “He who receives the Holy Spirit receives also the power of loosing sin, and of binding; for thus it is written: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit; whose sins you shall remit, they are remitted to them; and whose you shall retain, they shall be retained.’ Therefore he who cannot loose sin does not have the Holy Spirit. The office of the priest is the gift of the Holy Spirit; and the right of the Holy Spirit [is exercised] in the loosing and binding of sins.” These things I judged must be noted, that I might vindicate Ambrose from this suspicion, and at the same time admonish those who delight overmuch in Rhapsodists, Compendiums, and Summists — lest they be loath sometimes to return from the streams to the fountains, and to seek out the very sentences of the Fathers in their own authors, and to weigh them diligently. For it usually happens that abbreviators and collectors — whether from carelessness, or from forgetfulness, or from too great a zeal for brevity — gather the sentences of others either mutilated or interrupted, often with the words transposed, often even so far altered that from them a new and plainly different sense arises. But these things have been said, not that I should condemn the labors of these [men], which I have so often commended in the preceding books, but that I may render studious readers much more diligent and skillful. See what pertains to this argument below, in Annotation 71, and in Annotation 202 of the sixth book.