Justified True Belief

(●) The logician who taught the West to put its hardest questions in writing, and who was punished for it twice. + If you have ever watched a good lawyer lay out the case for one side, then the case for the other, then say which way the evidence falls, you have watched a habit of mind that a Breton schoolmaster helped to make normal. State the question. Set out the strongest authorities against your answer. Set out the strongest for it. Then decide, and say why. Within two generations of Abelard’s death that shape had become the shape of the theology textbook, and it is still the skeleton of every article in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae a hundred years later. The reason he matters to a Christian who wants to give reasons for what he believes is plain enough. Abelard is the man who insisted, against real and powerful opposition, that a believer may reason about his faith at all. Truth cannot contradict truth, he argued, so no article of faith is damaged by being examined, and the art of argument is not the enemy of the church but part of its equipment. He is also the cautionary case that goes with the encouragement, and the two have to be carried together. The same confidence, running without a brake, produced ways of speaking about the Trinity that two councils condemned, and an account of the cross that his greatest opponent thought had emptied it out. One fact about him is worth holding on to throughout. He wrote his own life. The Historia Calamitatum, the Story of My Misfortunes, is a long letter of consolation sent to a friend in trouble, and it is one of the very few sustained autobiographies the Latin West produced in the seven hundred years after Augustine’s Confessions. A monk of the previous generation, Guibert of Nogent, had written one about fifteen years earlier, and that is the kind of company it keeps: a handful of books across seven centuries. What is remarkable is that Abelard’s is not flattering. His vanity, his seduction of the student entrusted to him, the maiming that ended it, the book he was made to burn: he set them all down himself. Almost everything hard that can be said about Abelard, Abelard said first.

(●) 1079 AD: Born the eldest son of a Breton knight, he handed his inheritance to his brothers and left to argue for a living. + He was born at Le Pallet, a small town on the road into lesser Brittany, about eight miles east of Nantes by his own reckoning. His father Berengar was a knight who had picked up some learning before he took up arms, and who liked it well enough to see that each of his sons was taught letters before he was taught weapons. The eldest son got a double share of the attention, and it took. An eldest son in that world inherited land, arms and a name. Abelard gave all three away. Writing about it thirty years later he chose two Roman gods to say what he had done: "gladly leaving to my brothers the pomp of glory in arms, the right of heritage and all the honours that should have been mine as the eldest born, I fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might win learning in the bosom of Minerva." Mars is the god of war, Minerva the goddess of wisdom. He had walked out of one household into the other. What he went off to study was dialectic, the art of reasoned argument, which is what the Middle Ages called logic: how to pin down what a word means, how to tell a good inference from one that merely sounds good, how to corner a man who is wrong. In his day the whole subject was taught from a short shelf of books, and short is the word. There was Porphyry’s introduction to Aristotle, Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, and the commentaries of Boethius, and a student could carry the lot of it under one arm. Abelard kept the soldier’s vocabulary for it all his life. He had exchanged his weapons, he says, and preferred to the prizes of war "the battle of minds in disputation." So he wandered from school to school looking for a fight, which is the ordinary way a young logician made his name and the only way he made enemies fast enough to matter. A tradition going back to his own later letters puts him for a time under Roscelin of Compiègne, a teacher whose views on universal words had already got him into trouble with a council.

(●) c. 1100 AD: He came to Paris, argued his own master out of his doctrine, and opened a rival school down the road. + Paris was where dialectic was most alive, and the man at the centre of it was William of Champeaux, who taught at the cathedral school of Notre Dame. Abelard arrived as a student, was liked, and then began to refute him in public. He was barely into his twenties, and by his own cheerful account the youngest man in the school and the one who had been at his books the shortest time, which the senior students found insufferable. The quarrel was over universals, the question of what a general word like "man" actually picks out, and Abelard’s answer to it outlived everything else he did (T1). What matters at this point in his life is simply that he won. "In the course of our many arguments on various matters," he writes, "I compelled him by most potent reasoning first to alter his former opinion on the subject of the universals, and finally to abandon it altogether." William’s lectures never recovered their authority, and the students drained away. So Abelard set up on his own, first at the royal castle of Melun and then at Corbeil, close enough to Paris to keep the fights coming. And then his body gave out. He had been driving himself at a pace nobody could hold, teaching and disputing and studying at once, and he fell seriously ill and had to go home to Brittany for some years, cut off from France entirely. When he came back he added theology to logic. That meant going to Laon to sit under Anselm of Laon, the most respected teacher of sacred doctrine in the kingdom, and it meant sitting in the lectures long enough to decide that the great man was hollow. Abelard’s verdict on him is one of the cruellest sentences in medieval literature: "When he kindled a fire, he filled his house with smoke and illumined it not at all. He was a tree which seemed noble to those who gazed upon its leaves from afar, but to those who came nearer and examined it more closely was revealed its barrenness." He did not keep the opinion to himself, and he was told, as anyone saying such a thing would be, that he could hardly do better himself. He took the dare. He offered to lecture on the prophet Ezekiel, one of the more forbidding books in the Bible, and to do it without preparation. The room filled. He finished the lectures in Paris, and by about 1115 he held the chair at Notre Dame that had once been William’s.

(●) c. 1115 AD: At the height of his fame he took a canon’s brilliant niece as his private pupil, and ruined them both. + Heloise lived in the cathedral close with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame. A canon was one of the clergy on a cathedral’s permanent staff, with a house inside its precinct and an income from its lands, and Fulbert had spent a good deal of that income on his niece’s education. He was proud of the result, and he had reason to be. She was already known across the kingdom for her learning, which in a young woman of that century was rare enough to make her famous. Abelard was in his late thirties and the most celebrated teacher in Europe. He is brutally clear about what he did and why. He picked her out deliberately, talked his way into lodgings in Fulbert’s house on the excuse that running his own household was distracting him from study, and let the old man beg him to tutor her at any hour and to discipline her if she was idle. "I should not have been more smitten with wonder," he writes, "if he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of a ravenous wolf." Under the pretext of study they spent their hours in love, and his lecturing went slack: he had become, he says, "nothing more than a reciter of my former discoveries," and the songs he was writing were love songs, sung all over Paris. Then Fulbert found out, and Heloise was pregnant. Abelard took her to his sister in Brittany, where their son was born, and the two of them gave the boy the name of an astronomical instrument, Astralabe, which is the sort of thing that couple would do. Abelard then offered marriage, on one condition: that it stay secret, so as not to wreck his standing in the church. Heloise argued fiercely against the whole idea. A philosopher, she told him, had no business with a cradle in the study, and for herself she would rather be called his mistress than his wife. They married anyway, quietly. When Fulbert began to spread the news, Abelard hid her in the convent at Argenteuil where she had been schooled, and her uncle read that as an attempt to be rid of her. Around 1117 his kinsmen bribed a servant, came into Abelard’s room at night, and, in his own flat words, "they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow." The whole city was at his door in the morning. What he could not bear was not the pain but the shame, and he is honest about the motive that took him into religion: "it was the overwhelming sense of my disgrace rather than any ardour for conversion to the religious life that drove me to seek the seclusion of the monastic cloister." He entered the abbey of Saint-Denis. At his bidding, and before him, Heloise took the veil at Argenteuil. To take the veil is to become a nun, and the vow is for life; she made it because he asked her to, and she went to the altar weeping the words of a Roman widow out of Lucan. Nobody knows how young she was. Her birth year is disputed, and the estimates run from the early 1090s to about 1100.

(●) 1121 AD: A council at Soissons made him throw his own book on the Trinity into the fire with his own hand. + He went back to teaching almost at once, and his students asked him for something their other masters would not give. They wanted reasons. It was no use, they said, quoting words at them that neither the speaker nor the hearer could understand; a man cannot believe what he has not first grasped in some fashion, and it is ridiculous to preach to others what neither you nor they can get hold of. So Abelard wrote the Theologia "Summi Boni", an attempt to say how a Christian may speak about the Trinity at all, using the words power, wisdom and goodness for the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Two of Anselm of Laon’s former pupils, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf of Lombardy, took the book to a papal legate. A legate was the pope’s personal representative in a country, carrying the pope’s own authority with him, and one thing he could do with it was summon a council. This one met at Soissons in 1121, and it did not go well for anyone’s dignity. "Straightway upon my summons I went to the council," Abelard writes, "and there, without further examination or debate, did they compel me with my own hand to cast that memorable book of mine into the flames." Then one of his accusers muttered that the book had said the Father alone was omnipotent, which astonished the legate; he replied that he could not believe a child would blunder so badly. When Abelard rose to state his faith in his own words, he was not allowed to. He was told to recite the Athanasian Creed instead, the long set statement of the Trinity that boys in a cathedral school learned by heart, and a copy was put in front of him in case he did not know it. He read it through his tears, and was handed over to the abbot of Saint-Médard as though he were a convicted criminal. He was released within weeks, and the harshness of the sentence turned opinion against the men who had asked for it. But something in him had been broken open, and he saw a pattern in his own life that he could not unsee. He had lost, he writes, the two things he had gloried in, and he had lost them in the order of his two sins: for his sensuality, the means of it; for his pride, "the very book in which I most gloried." Paul’s line about knowledge had become his own: this knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1).

(●) c. 1122 AD: He fled into a marsh near Troyes, named his shelter the Comforter, and the students followed him into it. + Saint-Denis was not a refuge for long, and the thing that drove him out of it was a footnote. Reading the English monk Bede, Abelard came on the statement that Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian converted by Paul in Acts 17, had been bishop of Corinth and not of Athens. That cut the ground from under the abbey’s proudest claim, which was that its own Saint Denis and this Dionysius were the same man, and with it from under the relics that drew the pilgrims and the pilgrims’ money. He said so out loud. The monks did not want their walls undermined by a fact, and he had to run for it. What he found was empty ground by the river Ardusson, in the diocese of Troyes, and there he built himself an oratory, which is simply a small building meant for prayer, out of reeds and thatch. The students came anyway. They left towns and castles for a marsh, put up huts, slept on straw and rushes, ate herbs and coarse bread off piles of turf, and by his account "seemed hermits rather than scholars." They rebuilt the oratory in stone and wood as their numbers grew. He renamed it. The building had been dedicated to the Trinity; he called it the Paraclete, which is the Greek word John’s Gospel uses for the Holy Spirit and which means the one called alongside to help, the Comforter. Jesus promises the disciples "another Helper, to be with you forever" (John 14:16), and Abelard chose the name, he says, "mindful of how I had come there a fugitive and in despair, and had breathed into my soul something of the miracle of divine consolation." Some churchmen were scandalized that a church should be named for the Spirit alone, and he had to argue that whole point out too. Around 1127 an escape offered itself and he took it. The abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, on the Breton coast, elected him abbot, and going there was the worst decision of his life. The house was violent and half-lawless, the monks resented every reform he attempted, and he says plainly that they tried to kill him, once by putting poison in the chalice at the altar. He stayed, on and off, for years, which tells you what the alternatives looked like.

(●) 1129 AD: He gave the Paraclete to Heloise, and the letters that made them famous began. + In 1129 Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, pressing an old claim to the property, had the nuns turned out of Argenteuil. Heloise was their prioress, the second in command of the house, and now she and her sisters were homeless with nothing but what they could carry. Abelard had a church standing empty in a marsh. He gave it to them, and Pope Innocent II confirmed the gift in 1131. Heloise became the abbess, the head of the community, and she turned out to be very good at it indeed. The Paraclete grew, acquired daughter houses, and outlasted them both by six centuries. Around 1132, from Brittany, Abelard wrote the Historia Calamitatum as a letter to a friend whose troubles he meant to put in perspective. A copy reached Heloise. Her reply is one of the most direct letters that survives from the whole Middle Ages, and she is not consoled: he has written a long account of his sufferings to a stranger, she says, and sent nothing to her; she took the veil at his word and not at God’s; she is called chaste and knows what she still wants. She signs herself his in a way that no rule of religion covers. He answered her grief with theology, which is not remotely what she had asked for. After two exchanges she made a decision that shaped the rest of both their lives: she would stop writing about the past. Instead she set him to work. She wanted a rule for a community of women, since the Rule of Saint Benedict, the sixth-century code that laid down how monks were to eat, sleep, work and pray, had been written for men and fitted the nuns badly. She wanted a history of women in the religious life. And she wanted answers to forty-two hard questions on Scripture that she and the sisters had collected between them. He did all of it, and then he kept going. He sent them over a hundred hymns for their hours and their seasons, six laments in the voices of biblical figures, and thirty-four sermons. It is the most productive stretch of his life, and it exists because she asked for it.

(●) c. 1140 AD: Bernard of Clairvaux had him condemned at Sens before he could speak, and Cluny took him in to die absolved in 1142. + By the mid 1130s Abelard was back on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, lecturing to crowds again. The young John of Salisbury, later one of the finest minds in England, heard him there in 1136 and never forgot it. Then William of Saint-Thierry read the latest version of the Theologia and was appalled. William was a Cistercian, one of the new reforming monks who had walked away from wealthy abbeys for bare churches and hard manual work, and he was a man of real holiness and no humour whatever. He drew up a list of the errors he believed he had found and sent it to Bernard of Clairvaux, the most powerful churchman in Europe and a man who trusted prayer a great deal further than he trusted a syllogism. Abelard thought he could win in the open, and he asked the archbishop of Sens for a public hearing. What he got was an ambush. By the account of Berengar of Poitiers, one of his own pupils, Bernard spent the evening before the hearing working on the assembled bishops one by one, so that when the session opened there was nothing left to debate. The propositions, meaning the short list of statements pulled out of his books and set down for judgment, were simply read aloud. Abelard saw what was happening, refused to answer, appealed to Rome and walked out. The council condemned the propositions all the same, and within weeks Innocent II confirmed the sentence and ordered him silenced. The year is traditionally given as 1140, but a strong case has been made for 1141, and reference works still print both. He set out for Rome to make his appeal, and got as far as Cluny. There the abbot, Peter the Venerable, took him in, wrote to the pope on his behalf, and got the sentence of excommunication lifted, which mattered because excommunication shut a man out of the sacraments and so out of the ordinary life of the church. He also brought Abelard and Bernard face to face and made peace between them. Then he did the kindest thing anyone had done for Abelard in his whole life: he let him stay. When his health failed, Peter moved him to the quiet priory of Saint-Marcel on the Saône, and there, on 21 April 1142, at about sixty-three, he died. Peter the Venerable sent the body to Heloise, and with it two things she had asked for: a sealed absolution she could hang on his tomb, and a letter about his last years. The letter reads like a rebuke to everyone who had hunted him. He had never seen his equal, Peter wrote, in humility of dress and manner. Forced into a first place among the brethren, he appeared in his clothing as the last of all. He was constantly at his books, always praying, reading, writing or dictating, and at the end he made his confession of the catholic faith and then of his sins, and commended his soul to his Redeemer. Heloise governed the Paraclete for another twenty years and was buried beside him. As for the tomb that visitors are shown at Père Lachaise in Paris, it is a nineteenth-century monument, and whether the bones inside it are theirs has never been settled.

What He Taught

(T1) General words like "man" name no thing standing behind the men. + A shepherd counts a hundred sheep. He can point at each one. Can he point at sheep? The word plainly means something, since "all sheep are grazing animals" is true and "all sheep are made of tin" is false, so the word is doing real work. But there is nothing in the field to put your hand on except individual sheep. That is the problem of universals: working out what a general word picks out. It reached the twelfth century as a question Porphyry had raised and then declined to answer, handed down in Boethius’ Latin, and by Abelard’s day it had hardened into two camps. On one side were the realists, William of Champeaux among them, who said that the universal is a real thing: one and the same nature, wholly present in every single man, so that Socrates and Plato differ only in their accidents. An accident, in this vocabulary, is a feature a thing can pick up or lose while still being what it is, like a man’s height or his snub nose or the fact that he is sitting down. On that view Socrates and Plato are the very same humanity wearing different hats. Abelard pressed the cost of it hard. If the identical thing is wholly in Socrates at Athens and wholly in Plato at Rome, then one thing is in two places at once. Worse, since Socrates is rational and some animals are not, the one shared nature would have to be rational and irrational at the same time. William modified his view, and then he dropped it. On the other side stood the nominalists, who said the universal is only a name, and Roscelin at his most extreme was said to hold that it is nothing but a puff of air, a noise. That has its own cost, and the cost is steep. If "man" is just a noise, then "man is mortal" tells you nothing whatever about any man. Abelard’s way between the two is careful, and it has worn well. What is universal, he said, is not a thing at all but a word considered as sayable of many, a sermo, which means not the bare sound coming out of the mouth but the word with its meaning attached to it. And what makes one word fit a thousand men is not some single item they all have inside them. It is that they agree in being a man. Go back to the shepherd. His hundred sheep agree in being sheep, and that agreement is perfectly real, but it is not a hundred-and-first sheep hiding in the flock; it is a way the hundred are. The mind, meeting many men, forms out of them a blurred common picture that fits each one and none of them exactly, and the word carries that. So a general word can say something true about the world without there being a floating Man somewhere for it to point at. None of this is idle school exercise, and it is worth seeing why. A theologian has to say that Father, Son and Spirit are one God without turning the divine nature into a fourth thing standing alongside the three. He has to say that the Son took our nature without making that nature an object the Son picked up somewhere. Get the general words wrong and the sentences of the creed start to say things nobody means. Every later Western discussion of what our words for God can and cannot do runs on rails Abelard helped to lay.

(Q) "I compelled him by most potent reasoning first to alter his former opinion on the subject of the universals, and finally to abandon it altogether." + Source: Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, chapter II (Henry Adams Bellows translation, 1922). He is remembering, some thirty years later, the debates with William of Champeaux that made his name and his enemies. In the same chapter he grants how hard the question is: the problem of universals is "ever the most vexed one among logicians," and even Porphyry, introducing Aristotle, "dared not attempt a final pronouncement thereon" (T1).

(T2) Truth is never opposed to truth, so no article of faith is damaged by being examined. + A builder who suspects a beam is rotten does not protect the house by refusing to test it. He protects the house by testing it, and if the beam holds, the test has cost him nothing but an afternoon. Abelard had to make that argument because his critics were saying the opposite. A Christian, they told him, has no business writing about the art of argument at all: the subject does not belong to the faith, and its methods eat away at faith from underneath. His reply is one of the clearest statements of the case for Christian reasoning written before Aquinas, and it comes in three moves. If dialectic really destroys faith, he says, then it is not knowledge in the first place, because knowledge is the grasp of what is actually so, and two truths cannot stand against each other the way one lie can contradict another. Next, all knowledge comes from God, and all of it is good, even the knowledge of evil, since a man who is going to avoid a thing has to know first what the thing is. And last, of all the arts, the one whose entire business is sorting the true from the false is the very last one the church should be afraid of, because without it the church cannot answer a clever heretic. There is a correction to be made here, and Abelard’s life makes it for him. His rule is sound: truth does not contradict truth, and an examined doctrine is not a weakened one. His estimate of how far reason had actually got was another matter, and Bernard’s charge against him was precisely that he handled the deep things of God as though they were puzzles that yield to a sharp mind, making them "clear and easy to every one." Paul’s own measure sits between the two: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Look hard, and know that you are looking at a reflection.

(Q) "Truth is not opposed to truth. For not as falsehood may be opposed to falsity, or evil to evil, can the true be opposed to the true, or the good to the good; but rather all good things are in accord." + Source: Abelard on the study of dialectic, from the logical works edited by Victor Cousin (Ouvrages inédits d’Abélard, pp. 434 to 435), in the translation of Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (1911). He is answering the accusation that a Christian may not write about logic. The same passage ends by turning the charge inside out: dialectic "as leader in all knowledge it holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy. The same also is shown to be needful to the Catholic Faith, which cannot without its aid resist the sophistries of schismatics" (T2). A sophistry is a bad argument dressed to look like a good one, and a schismatic in his vocabulary is anyone who has broken away from the church’s teaching. His point is that you cannot take apart a bad argument without knowing how arguments are put together.

(T3) Doubt is not the enemy of belief; it is where inquiry starts. + Two people watched the same accident and give you two different accounts of it. You do not conclude that nothing happened. You start asking questions: where was each of them standing, what could each of them see, is one of them repeating what a third person said. That is what Abelard did to the church fathers, the great Christian teachers of the first centuries whose authority nobody in his world questioned. His Sic et Non, which means Yes and No, sets out one hundred and fifty-eight theological questions, and under each one he lines up the fathers who answer yes and the fathers who answer no, quoting them at length and in their own words. And then he stops. He supplies no resolution at all. The prologue is where he explains why the contradictions are there and how a reader ought to work at them. A manuscript may have been miscopied. A translator may have slipped. A father may be reporting somebody else’s opinion rather than stating his own, or speaking to one particular case rather than laying down a general rule, or he may have taken the view back later, the way Augustine went through his own books near the end of his life and corrected them in the Retractations. Then Abelard draws a line that matters more than anything else in the book. Canonical Scripture, meaning the books the church received as the word of God, is not in this category at all. If a passage of Scripture seems false, he says, the fault is never the author’s: either the copy is bad, or the translator erred, or you have not understood it. The later fathers, whose books fill libraries, may be weighed, and where they seem to depart from the truth they may be disagreed with. It is only fair to say what is wrong with the book as well. Abelard sharpened some of his headings further than the passages underneath them will bear, and by refusing to resolve anything he left the impression that the fathers were simply at war with one another. Contemporaries who loved those fathers found the whole performance shocking, and the book itself never came into common use. What conquered the schools was the same method with the answers put back in.

(Q) "For the first key to wisdom is called interrogation, diligent and unceasing.... By doubting we are led to inquiry; and from inquiry we perceive the truth." + Source: Abelard, Sic et Non, Prologue, in the translation of Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (1911). The closing lines of the prologue, explaining the point of collecting the fathers’ disagreements: the apparent clash is meant to send a young reader to search out the truth of the matter and to make him sharper for the search (T3).

(T4) Sin is not in the deed; it is in the consent of the mind to what it knows is wrong. + Two men hang a condemned criminal. One is the sheriff, doing what the law requires and wishing it were not necessary. The other volunteered because the criminal is an old enemy and he has waited years for this. The rope is the same, the neck is the same, the corpse is the same. Nobody thinks the two men have done the same thing. Abelard built a whole moral treatise out of that observation and called it Scito te ipsum, Know Yourself. His name for the thing that makes the difference between the sheriff and the enemy is consent, by which he means the moment when the will stops merely looking at a temptation and says yes to it. Before that moment there is desire, which he thinks is not yet sin but only the raw material of it. After that moment there is the deed, which he thinks adds nothing to the guilt already incurred. Sin, on his account, is contempt of God, and contempt is exactly what consenting to what you know he forbids amounts to. Follow that out and you get two hard results. A man who fully intends a murder and is stopped only by a locked door is already a murderer before God. And a man who kills in genuine ignorance, believing he is doing right, has not sinned in the way the word usually means. There is a great deal of the Gospel in this, and it is why the emphasis survived him. Jesus locates adultery in the look, before the act: "everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:28), and the defilement comes out of the heart, not into it (Matthew 15:19). Abelard is doing what the Sermon on the Mount does, refusing to let a clean record stand in for a clean heart. Where he was pushed back, and rightly, is on how much weight the principle can carry all by itself. He pressed it far enough to say that those who crucified Christ in ignorance did not sin in crucifying him, and that desire itself is never sinful, only the yes that follows it. Scripture is not that tidy. For one thing, the law appoints a sacrifice for the man who sins unintentionally (Leviticus 4:2). That sacrifice is there to make atonement, which means to cover a wrong before God and set the relationship right, and there would be nothing to cover if the unintended deed were not a real sin. For another, when Peter stands in the temple and tells the crowd that they and their rulers had acted in ignorance (Acts 3:17), he does not go on to tell them that they are therefore innocent. He tells them to repent, so that their sins may be blotted out (Acts 3:19). And wanting is not left outside the law either, since the one commandment Paul says taught him what sin is forbids a wanting rather than a deed: you shall not covet (Romans 7:7). His accusers at Sens listed both points against him. On the substance, if not on the fairness of the process, Christians have generally done what those texts suggest: kept his emphasis on the heart, and declined the exclusions he built on top of it.

(Q) "Penitence is truly fruitful when grief and contrition proceed from love of God, regarded as benignant, rather than from fear of penalties. Sin cannot endure with this groaning and contrition of heart: for sin is contempt of God, or consent to evil, and the love of God in inspiring our groaning, suffers no ill." + Source: Abelard, Scito te ipsum (the Ethics), chapter 19 (Migne, Patrologia Latina 178, column 664), in the translation of Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (1911). The definition of sin as consent arrives here inside a discussion of repentance, which is where Abelard always wanted it: not as a rule for assigning blame but as a description of what has to change in a person (T4). Note what he thinks makes sorrow real. Not the fear of what is coming, but love for the God who is kind.

(T5) The cross redeems by kindling love, and the love it kindles is our freedom. + Think of someone pulled out of a wrecked car by a stranger who went back into it and did not come out. Nobody has to tell that person to be grateful. The rest of their life is different, and it is different from the inside. Abelard was arguing against an account of the cross that had been common for centuries, the ransom theory. On that account humanity had fallen under the devil’s lawful ownership, and Christ’s death was the price paid to buy us back from him. Abelard denied the first half outright, and his reason is hard to answer: a kidnapper acquires no rights over the child he has taken. The devil is a jailer, not an owner, and you do not owe a jailer anything. Then he turned on the alternative that was being offered him, and asked the question that made his enemies furious. If God required the blood of an innocent man before he could forgive anybody, how is the murder of his own Son a smaller crime than eating a piece of forbidden fruit, and how on earth are we made just by committing it? How cruel and wicked it seems, he says, that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent as the price of anything. His own answer is that the redemption is love. God’s Son took our nature, taught us by word and by example all the way to death, and by doing so bound us to himself; the love that this kindles in us is what frees us, so that we do everything out of love for him rather than fear of him. Scripture gives him a great deal to work with. "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8), and "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). What the church would not follow him in was the little word "only." The same letter to the Romans that says God shows his love also says that God put Christ forward "as a propitiation by his blood" (Romans 3:25). A propitiation is a sacrifice that turns aside anger and puts an offender back in the right with the one he has wronged, and it is a Godward word: it describes something done in front of God, not something felt in us. The prophet is talking about the same direction when he says the servant was "pierced for our transgressions" (Isaiah 53:5), and so is Peter when he says "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24). Bernard put the objection in one line that has never been improved on: did Christ then teach righteousness and not bestow it, show charity and not pour it in, and so go home to heaven? The trouble with love as the whole story is that it saws off the branch it sits on. If the cross changes us and does nothing at all about our guilt, then the very thing it is supposed to move us with is not actually there to be moved by.

(Q) "Our redemption, therefore, is that supreme love of Christ shown to us by His passion, which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but acquires for us the true liberty of the sons of God, so that we fulfil all things not so much from fear as from love of Him who exhibited so great favour towards us." + Source: Abelard, Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Opera, ed. Cousin, ii. 207), in the translation of Hastings Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919). Abelard is explaining why a Christian after the passion is more righteous than a believer before it: a kindness actually received moves the heart further than one merely hoped for. He finishes the sentence with the Lord’s own words, that no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends (T5).

(Q) "I would not rank as a philosopher if it implied any error in faith; I would not be an Aristotle if it kept me away from Christ. For no other name is given to me under heaven in which I may find salvation." + Source: Abelard, Confession of Faith to Heloise, in the translation of Joseph McCabe, Peter Abélard (1901). Written from Cluny after the condemnation at Sens, and addressed to "my sister Heloise, once dear to me in the world, and now most dear in Christ." He begins by naming what has happened to him: logic has brought the enmity of men upon him, and there are those who praise his cleverness and deny him the purity of Christian faith. Then, in the one sentence that answers both charges at once, he sets his own order straight, and he ends by telling her what to hold about him: that he has grounded his conscience on the rock on which Christ built his church. It is the last thing he is known to have written to her.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His method became the shape of every book the Middle Ages wrote its theology in. + The Sic et Non itself was too raw to be used, but the thing it demonstrated could not be un-demonstrated. You can take a doctrine, put it as a question, gather the authorities on both sides of it, and get to work. Within about fifteen years of Abelard’s death, Peter Lombard, who had come to Paris while Abelard was still lecturing there, finished the Four Books of Sentences, which did exactly that and then answered each question instead of leaving it open. It became the set text of every theology faculty in Europe for the next four hundred years, so that every major theologian from Bonaventure to Luther began his career by lecturing on it. Think of what that means for a student: for four centuries, learning theology meant learning to argue both sides of a question first. The lawyers did the same. At Bologna, Gratian arranged the law of the church on the same principle, in a book whose actual title is the Concordance of Discordant Canons. The finished form of the method is the article of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, a century later: the question stated, the objections set out at their strongest, a contrary authority, the answer, then a reply to each objection in turn. That is Abelard’s Sic et Non with the resolutions restored. The institutional result was just as large. The masters and students who gathered around him on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève were part of what became the University of Paris. John of Salisbury, who sat in his lectures in 1136 and went on to be bishop of Chartres, called him simply the Peripatetic of Le Pallet, the walking philosopher. And one of his old pupils, Guido di Castello, was elected pope as Celestine II in 1143, the year after his teacher died at Cluny with the sentence against him lifted.

(†) His reading of the cross was taken up before he was cold, and Christians have been sorting it out ever since. + Peter Lombard, whose book became the classroom of Europe, wrote Abelard’s central sentence into it almost word for word: so great a pledge of love having been given us, we are moved and kindled to love God who did such great things for us, and by this we are justified. What the schools would not do was let it stand alone. Lombard himself kept the older language of sacrifice and deliverance beside it, and the generation that followed held the love of the cross and the sacrifice of the cross together. Bonaventure and Aquinas both treat the demonstration of love as one of several things Christ’s passion accomplishes rather than the whole of it. It helps to set him beside Anselm of Canterbury, who had died when Abelard was thirty, and whose Cur Deus Homo asked what the cross does before God. Abelard fixed the other half of the question: what the cross does inside us. Between the two of them they set the terms of every later discussion of the atonement, and the terms have not really changed since. When nineteenth and twentieth century theologians revived Abelard’s half under the name of the moral influence theory, which is the view that the cross saves precisely by the effect the sight of it has on the human heart, they were pressing a case he had genuinely made. The sharpest statement of it came in Hastings Rashdall’s Bampton Lectures of 1915, an endowed series of theological lectures given at Oxford. But they pressed it further than Abelard had, into a flat denial that the cross does anything Godward at all. The answer most of Christendom has given, then and now, is that the two halves are not rivals in the first place: the demonstration of love moves us because the sacrifice behind it is real.

(†) Bernard beat him at Sens, and then the church quietly kept most of what he had built. + Bernard of Clairvaux was not a small-minded opponent, and his charge was serious. In the treatise he sent to Pope Innocent II against Abelard’s errors, he wrote that Abelard "lays bare to himself the deep things of God, he makes them clear and easy to every one," until the mystery hidden from the ages is something any passer-by can walk into. Behind the sarcasm is a real conviction: that some things are known by being loved and obeyed before they are known by being analysed, and that a man who can explain everything has probably stopped listening. The judgment went against Abelard, and yet the church never treated him the way it had treated Arius, whose name became a byword and whose books were destroyed. Abelard’s books went on being copied and mined for material. His pupils filled the schools. Two of the finest historians of the next generation, Otto of Freising and John of Salisbury, wrote of him with respect, and Otto thought Bernard’s zeal had left him too ready to believe a charge. Even admirers of Bernard in later ages have found the Council of Sens hard to defend as a piece of procedure. The last word from the twelfth century is not the sentence at Sens. It is a letter. Peter the Venerable, who had sheltered him, wrote to Heloise about the man he had lived alongside to the end: a true servant of Christ and a philosopher, humble in dress and manner beyond anyone he had ever known, always at prayer or at his books, who died having confessed the catholic faith and then his sins. And he ends by telling the abbess what he believes about her husband and about the resurrection: "him in thy stead, or as another thee, the Lord holds in His bosom; and at the day of His coming, His grace will restore him to thee."

(†) He used a pupil who had been entrusted to him, and he left the sacrifice out of the cross. + Two things stand against him, and it is worth noticing where the evidence for both of them comes from. Neither one is a hostile summary written by an enemy. Both are in his own handwriting. - The seduction. This is not a rumour that grew in the telling. It is his account of himself. He moved into Fulbert’s house intending to seduce the girl he had been engaged to teach, he used her uncle’s trust and his own reputation for chastity as cover, and he records that there were blows, given to avert suspicion. He names his own condition at the time and offers no excuse for it: he was "utterly absorbed in pride and sensuality." To his credit, he married her, he provided for her house for the rest of his life, and he called the sin a sin. But when she wrote to him out of real grief, what she got back was instruction. A reader who admires the mind should keep hold of the picture of the pupil who was handed to that mind to be taught. - The cross with the sacrifice taken out. His emphasis is true, and the church has kept it. His exclusion is not, and Bernard’s question is exactly the right one to put to it: did Christ teach righteousness and not bestow it, show charity and not pour it in? Scripture will not let the cross be only a demonstration. "Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins" (Hebrews 9:22), and the sinner is "justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:24). A gift has to come from somewhere before it can be given. There is a third thing here that is easy to overstate and should not be dropped either. His language about the Trinity was condemned twice, and although both proceedings were rushed and partly political, the worry underneath them was fair. Naming the three Persons power, wisdom and goodness invites a reader to hear three attributes of one God where the creeds confess three who. Christians across the traditions have taken his confidence in reason and quietly left that formulation behind. Abelard himself, at the end of his life, wrote the sentence that puts the order right: he would not be an Aristotle if it kept him away from Christ.