Falk’s Reviews > Abelard: A Medieval Life > Status Update

“Belief in inevitable progress caused the most optimistic scholars of Abelard’s generation to coin a new word to describe themselves: they were ‘modern’, the far seeing men of ‘now’ (modo); they were ‘today’s men’ (hodierni), by contrast with the ‘ancient’ philosophers and Old Testament prophets. Abelard has an imaginary pagan philosopher demand of the Jews and Christians why there has not been the same progress in religious belief that has taken place in everything else, ‘ where human understanding increases with the passing of the ages and the succession of time’ [Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian]. The modernizing scientists of the twelfth century has as confident (and as naive) a belief in the inevitability of progress as their conterparts in the twentieth century.” (p. 33)

“A century and more after Abelard, the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas displays the same otimism and the same method [as Abelard’s Sic et Non]. Any question, even on the profoundest points of theology is answered in a page or two. The difference between Sic et Non and Summa Theologiae is that Aquinas actually answeres the questions posed ... whereas Abelard left it to future research and his ‘tender readers’. The scholastic method allowed its practitioners to save the appearances of the authorities, while putting forward original solutions of their own whenever the sources required further explication, which was extremely often. Abelard’s Theologia, for example, cites numerous ancient authors, both classical and Biblical, and yet its arguments were so novel that they were stigmatized by William of St. Thierry and St. Bernard as dangerously heretical.” (p. 34)