Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/26

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holy Roman church. He was certainly chancellor in 1145 and 1146 (Jaffé, Reg. Pont. Rom. 1851, pp. 609, 616). On the accession to the papacy of St. Bernard's friend and pupil, Eugenius III, in 1145, St. Bernard wrote (Ep. 362) to Pullen warmly commending the new pontiff to him, and inviting him to become Eugenius's ‘consoler and counsellor.’ In an extract, printed by Migne, from a work of St. Bernard's biographer, William, abbot of St. Theodoric at Reims, against the ‘De relationibus Divinis’ of Gilbert de la Poirée (which does not appear in the printed works of the abbot), Robertus Pullen, ‘chancellor of the apostolic see,’ is appealed to, with Anselm of Laon, Hugh of S. Victor, and others, against Gilbert's doctrine, which makes the persons of the Trinity into ‘proprietates,’ and in favour of the view that ‘whatever is in God’ is God.

The praise bestowed on Pullen by Bernard and by Bernard's biographer, the abbot of St. Theodoric, clearly indicates the position of Pullen as an upholder of the orthodox conservative cause against the Abelardian influence. But the influence of Pullen's ‘Sententiarum Theologicarum Libri VIII,’ in which he embodied his views, was soon supplanted by the treatise of Peter the Lombard, ‘the Master of the Sentences,’ who was a pupil of Abelard. Peter's book, representing Abelard's full-blown scholastic method, and (with some modification) Abelard's doctrine of the Trinity, gradually triumphed, over its opponents. Another cause of the superior popularity of the Lombard is said to be the fact that he suggests more questions, and decides them less peremptorily, than his predecessor; hence his book lent itself better to the purposes of a text-book for lecturers and a basis for endless disputation.

Some writers make Pullen die in 1147, and, as he does not appear as chancellor of Rome after 1146, this date is probably not far wrong. His ‘Sententiarum Theologicarum libri VIII’ was published by the Benedictine Hugh Mathoud at Paris in 1655, and is reprinted by Migne in ‘Patrologiæ Cursus, series Latina.’ Pits (De Angliæ Scriptoribus, 1619, p. 211) ascribes to him the following works: ‘In Apocalypsim S. Johannis;’ ‘Super aliquot Psalmos;’ ‘De Contemptu Mundi;’ ‘Super Doctorum dictis;’ ‘Prælectiones;’ ‘Sermones.’ Of the last work a manuscript is preserved in the Lambeth Library (No. 458). The sermons, which breathe a very ascetic spirit, were evidently delivered to scholars.

Pullen is undoubtedly a different person from the Robert who became archbishop of Rouen in 1208. It is also impossible to identify him with a Robert who, according to Ciaconius, was made a cardinal by Innocent II in 1130, and was afterwards chancellor of the holy Roman church. Cardinals were at that time usually resident at Rome, and it is scarcely possible that Cardinal Robert should, as Pullen did, have taught at Oxford and Paris after 1130, the year of his elevation to the cardinalate.

[The passage from William, abbot of Theodoric and St. Bernard's biographer, coupled with the statement of the Oseney chronicler and of John of Salisbury (Met. i. 5), sufficiently establishes the identity of the eminent theologian with the archdeacon of Rochester, St. Bernard's correspondent, and of the archdeacon with the Roman chancellor, a point about which Bishop Stubbs (Lectures on Med. and Mod. Hist. p. 133) has raised some ingenious doubts. The fullest abstract of Pullen's Sentences is given in Ceillier's Hist. Gén. des Auteurs Sacrés et Ecclés. xiv. 391–9. There are also notices in Brucker's Hist. Crit. Phil. (1766–7), iii. 767; Dupin's Hist. des Controverses Ecclés. 1696, pp. 719–23; Oudin, De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, 1722, ii. 1118–21; Cave, De Scriptoribus Eccles. (1745), iii. 223; Tanner's Bibliotheca Brit.-Hib. 1788; Fabricius's Bibl. Med. Ævi, 1858, iii. 406. The rhetorical and no doubt apocryphal details of Pullen's life and work at Oxford, which some of the writers mentioned in the article reproduce, seem to have come from Boston of Bury.]

H. R.-l.

PULLEN, PULLEIN, or PULLEYNE, SAMUEL (1598–1667), archbishop of Tuam, son of William Pullein, rector of Ripley, Yorkshire, was born there in 1598. He commenced M.A. at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1623, and in 1624 was appointed the first master, under the second endowment, of the Leeds grammar school, and lecturer in the parish church. In both offices he was succeeded in 1630 by his brother Joshua Pullen (d. 1657), father of Tobias Pullen [q. v.] Joshua continued master until 1651.

Samuel accompanied the Marquis (afterwards James, first duke) of Ormonde to Ireland as private chaplain in 1632. He was installed a prebendary of the diocese of Ossory on 5 June 1634, appointed rector of Knockgraffon, Tipperary, and chancellor of Cashel in 1636. On 14 Nov. 1638 he was created dean of Clonfert in Galway. On the outbreak of the catholic rebellion in October 1641, Pullen, who was then living in Cashel, Tipperary, was plundered of all his goods, to the value of four or five thousand pounds, and, with his wife and children, only escaped murder by the protection of a jesuit father named James Saul, who sheltered him for three months. On his escape to England, Pullen became chaplain to Aubrey de Vere, twentieth earl of Oxford. Invited by the Countess of Oxford to hear a sermon of a popular puritan preacher, an alleged shoemaker, Pullen recog-