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

“What was Abelard’s religion? There is no simple answer to this question If there was one, Abelard’s prosecutors or his defenders at his trials for heresy would have found it.” (p. 215)

“‘Very often’, he had pointed out in his prologue to Sic et Non, ‘the same words have different meanings, when one and the same word has been used to express now one meaning, now another. For, each one of us abounds in his own words, just as he does in his own sense of them.’ Each individual is locked into his own vocabulary and his own sense of himself. Abelard had probably first reached this existensialist conclusion through his study of logic, which made him see how fluid language is.
When he turned to religious thought, Abelard applied the same rules to it as the language of logic. Each individual must begin by ‘knowing himself’ – Scito te ipsum – as the title of his book of Ethics announced. And he began with the controversial words: ‘We call morals vice and virtues of the mind.’...” (p. 216)

“If Abelard survived into the the pontificate of Celestine II, who was consecrated on 26 September 1143, Peter the Venerable may have had little difficulty getting favourable letters, as in his previous persona as Cardinal Guy of Castello the new pope had great affection for Abelard, according to St Bernard at least. On his death in 1144 Celestine II left his copies of Theologia and Sic et Non to his church of Città di Castello. This is remarkable, as Innocent II had ordered Abelard’s ‘erroneous books’ burned wherever they were found. Theologia and Sic et Non were Abelard’s biggest books and they would have been difficult to conceal. Guy of Castello presumably did not think them to be erroneous.” (p. 218)

“In his account of his struggle with William of Champeaux thirty years earlier, Abelard has cited the Homeric hero ,Ajax, to demonstrate that ‘I was not vanquished’. As Ajax had killed himself with his own sword, the reader is left wondering what message Abelard wished to convey. Was annihilation in ‘non-defeat’ the best he could report, once he stopped boasting and faced realities? Was his career in ‘religion’ as disastrous a ‘non-defeat’ as his career in the schools? Single-handed, he had taken on the greatest powers in Western Christendom (not to mention the allegedly homicidal monks of St Gildas): Cardinal Cono of Praeneste and his prosecutors at Soissons in 1121; Abbot Suger of St Denis and the French monarchy in 1122; and finally St Bernard and all the forces of the Papacy in the 1130s. Each time Abelard had had to retreat and yet he could say with justice: ‘I was not vanquished.’” (p. 219)