[11] Peter Lombard was born in Lumellogno[12] (then a rural commune, now a quartiere of Novara, Piedmont), in northwestern Italy, to a poor family.

[8] The patronage of Odo, bishop of Lucca, who recommended him to Bernard of Clairvaux, allowed him to leave Italy and further his studies at Reims and Paris.

Lombard studied first in the cathedral school at Reims, where Magister Alberich and Lutolph of Novara were teaching, and arrived in Paris about 1134,[14] where Bernard recommended him[15] to the canons of the church of St. Victor.

[17] The more usual story is that Philip, younger brother of Louis VII and archdeacon of Notre-Dame, was elected by the canons but declined in favor of Peter Lombard, his teacher.

Peter Lombard wrote commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline epistles; however, his most famous work by far was Libri Quatuor Sententiarum, or the Four Books of Sentences, which became the standard textbook of theology at the medieval universities.

All the major medieval thinkers in western Europe, from Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel, were influenced by it.

Peter Lombard's magnum opus stands squarely within the pre-scholastic exegesis of biblical passages, in the tradition of Anselm of Laon who taught through quotations from authorities.

[22] It stands out as the first major effort to bring together commentaries on the full range of theological issues, arrange the material in a systematic order, and attempt to reconcile them where they appeared to defend different viewpoints.

By this important decision the Council excluded the error of Butzer and some Catholic theologians (Gropper, Seripando, and Albert Pighius) who maintained that an additional "external favour of God" (favor Dei externus) belonged to the essence of justification.

Since justification consists in an interior sanctity and renovation of spirit, its formal cause evidently must be a created grace (gratia creata), a permanent quality, a supernatural modification or accident (accidens) of the soul.