Vacarius

VACARIUS. - Glossator of Roman-Justinian law, styled as magister Vacarius, b. in Lombardy ca. 1115-20, d. in England after 1198.

He studied the new legal science at Bologna under the disciples of Irnerius (v.). Ca. 1145 he settled in England at the invitation of the household of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, to which he belonged as an ordained clericus. He was the first to introduce into the island the teaching of Roman jurisprudence; after the death (1154) of King Stephen, who had forbidden it, he held a chair especially at Oxford, to which he has linked his fame. After the death of Theobald (1161), he passed into the service of the archiepiscopal Curia of York under Roger, whom he helped to clear of the accusation of complicity in the murder of St. Thomas Becket, and under Geoffrey Plantagenet. In 1198 Innocent III entrusted to him the preaching, in the province of York, of the Crusade for the Holy Land.

He wrote a scholastic compendium of the Justinian Code and Digest, with coordinating and explanatory glosses, in the first years of his teaching, ca. 1149, which was enriched with personal notes or notes taken from his oral teaching: it was commonly called Liber pauperum, because it was easy to acquire for those students, called for that reason pauperistae, who had no means of procuring the more costly complete legislative texts.

In the Summa de matrimonio, composed ca. 1156, he treated as a civilian the question of the essence of the marriage contract, discussed between the canonists of Bologna and the theologians of Paris, completing the Parisian sentence of consensus, by identifying the perfecting element of the marriage transaction in the traditio or mutua susceptio. He shows himself, moreover, opposed to the conciliatory tendency in fashion among the decretists. In the De assumpto homine (manuscript of the University of Cambridge), and in other opuscules not traced, he defends the reality of the nature of Jesus Christ and the unity of the person. A field of broader discussion he had in the Liber contra multiplices et varios errores (before 1177) in which he confutes the errors of his former fellow student U. Speroni (v.) who had become a heresiarch, developing many and important theological themes. In conformity with his juridical spirit, V. proceeds in the defense of traditional doctrine with precision of concepts and rigor of argumentation, alternating scriptural auctoritates and rationes, with frequent recourse to notions and exemplifications of Roman law.

Ilarino da Milano