Gratian

Gratian, founder of the science of canon law. Born, according to tradition, in central Italy, he became a Camaldolese monk and taught at the Monastery of SS Felix and Nabor at Bologna. His Decretum, or Concordance of Discordant Canons (about 1140), recognized almost immediately as the best collection of law compiled up to that time, includes material from the apocryphal Canons of the Apostles up through those enacted by Pope Innocent II (pope 1130-1143) and the Second Lateran Council (1139). It contains almost 4,000 texts, which in the Friedberg standard edition (1879) occupy 1,424 columns. Although it never received formal Church approval, the Decretum was used in ecclesiastical courts and as a textbook in law schools. It formed the first book of the Corpus Iuris Canonici, the basic law of the Roman Catholic Church until 1917. More than a mere compilation, it represents the author's attempt to harmonize conflicting canons by interspersing his own commentaries.