The topic of this brief communication, Theology and Law in Fishacre’s Sentence Commentary, emerges, as one might expect, from the decade- long project of producing a critical edition of the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences by the Dominican theologian, Richard Fishacre. Preparing this edition has been a delightful and often-surprising exercise, and it is one of the surprises that concerns us here. Put in the form of a question, it is this: Why does a Dominican theologian, teaching in the theology faculty of the University of Oxford during the 1240’s, devote so much of his exposition of Book Four, on the Sacraments, to a detailed consideration of the Church’s canon law and to the teachings of the jurists?'

The edition of Fishacre’s commentary provides two kinds of clues to the question. The first is what Fishacre says, explicitly, and the second is what he does—the ways in which he utilizes canon law and the teachings of the canonists in his commentary. We will examine each type of evidence in turn.

Fishacre, like most medieval teachers, took a great deal of care in writing his inaugural lecture for each term of study in the schools, and these lectures now form the prologues to his commentaries on each of the four books of Sentences. What is striking, at least to this reader, is not what Fishacre says about the relation of Law and Theology, but rather what he does not say. Nowhere in the Prologue to Book Four does he prepare us for the abundant recourse he is about to make to the teachings of the canonists.

Philosophers regularly debate with their predecessors, historians of philosophy are often astonished at the results, yet the two seldom exchange notes. The Bounds of Sense, published in 1966 by Peter Strawson, is one of the best books by one of the finest Oxford philosophers of our day: an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the author allows in the second sentence of the preface that, ‘as any Kantian scholar who may read it will quickly detect, it is by no means a work of historical-philosophical scholarship’. In the other philosophical tradition, Martin Heidegger brought out a study of Kant in 1929 which immediately sold out: in his preface to the second edition (1950), he allowed that the ‘violence’ of his interpretation, deplored by Kantian scholars, could indeed be substantiated from the text, but fended off the criticism by claiming that ‘historical-philosophical research is always justified when it makes this objection against attempts that want to bring about a thoughtful conversation between thinkers’. He goes on: ‘In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own task, a thoughtful dialogue stands under different laws’. In short, students of the history of philosophy have a job to do; but they have no part in the conversation in which philosophical thought takes place. Heidegger, and even Strawson, clearly regard the work of historians of philosophy as less than vital for the advance of philosophy.

University students of philosophy, in whichever tradition, learn within their first few weeks to rehearse the objections to Cartesianism; it is not an objection that, historically, Descartes may never have been a Cartesian.