Pedro Abelardo

Abelard, Peter (1079–1142)

Among the many scholars who promoted the revival of learning in western Europe in the early twelfth century, Abelard stands out as a consummate logician, a formidable polemicist and a champion of the value of ancient pagan wisdom for Christian thought. Although he worked within the Aristotelian tradition, his logic deviates significantly from that of Aristotle, particularly in its emphasis on propositions and what propositions say. According to Abelard, the subject matter of logic, including universals such as genera and species, consists of linguistic expressions, not of the things these expressions talk about. However, the objective grounds for logical relationships lie in what these expressions signify, even though they cannot be said to signify any things. Abelard is, then, one of a number of medieval thinkers, often referred to in later times as ‘nominalists’, who argued against turning logic and semantics into some sort of science of the ‘real’, a kind of metaphysics. It was Abelard’s view that logic was, along with grammar and rhetoric, one of the sciences of language.

In ethics, Abelard defended a view in which moral merit and moral sin depend entirely on whether one’s intentions express respect for the good or contempt for it, and not at all on one’s desires, whether the deed is actually carried out, or even whether the deed is in fact something that ought or ought not be done.

Abelard did not believe that the doctrines of Christian faith could be proved by logically compelling arguments, but rational argumentation, he thought, could be used both to refute attacks on Christian doctrine and to provide arguments that would appeal to those who were attracted to high moral ideals. With arguments of this latter sort, he defended the rationalist positions that nothing occurs without a reason and that God cannot do anything other than what he does do.

1 Life

In comparison with most other medieval thinkers we know a great deal about Abelard’s career, since he left an autobiographical essay entitled Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), which in effect recounts his life up to about 1132. He was born to a noble and very religious family in Le Pallet, near Nantes in Brittany, in 1079. Roscelin of Compiègne was one of his earliest teachers, and later in Paris he studied under William of Champeaux. In these years Abelard’s main interest was logic, or dialectic as it was then called, which also included metaphysical issues such as the status of universals as well as psychological topics such as the role of images in thought. It was over the subject of universals that Abelard came into acrimonious conflict with William of Champeaux, and eventually he left Paris to set up his own schools nearby, first in Corbeil and later in Melun.

Having achieved a reputation as a subtle logician, Abelard moved on to study theology with Anselm of Laon, but here again he fell into competition with his teacher and even lured away some of his students. The stay at Laon was short, and by 1114 Abelard was back teaching logic in Paris. However, theology was to move more and more to the centre of his interests as his career progressed.

It was at this juncture that Abelard’s famous romance with Heloise began. Heloise was only 17 but was well educated, thanks to the devotion of her guardian and uncle, Fulbert. It was by securing from Fulbert the job of teaching her that Abelard was able to pursue his amorous ends. Abelard confesses that during the height of their passion he was more given to writing love poems than studying logic. Heloise became pregnant, and Abelard took her away to his home in Brittany without Fulbert’s permission. There she gave birth to their only child, Astrolabe. In order to reconcile himself to Fulbert, Abelard married Heloise and brought her back to Paris where she again lived with her uncle. The marriage was to have been kept secret in order not to endanger Abelard’s career as a cleric, but Fulbert broadcast the news, with the result that Abelard had Heloise removed to a convent. Fulbert was so enraged by this that he hired thugs who attacked Abelard and castrated him. Subsequently, Heloise remained a nun for the rest of her life and became herself well known in this vocation. Abelard resumed his scholarly career after first entering the abbey of St Denis.

The next period of Abelard’s life was intensely productive. His most important logical works, as well as the first version of his Theologia (Theology), were probably produced while he was at St Denis. Some of his enemies, well placed in the church hierarchy, found in the Theologia what they took to be errors, and at a church council summoned in April 1121 in Soissons, Abelard’s work was condemned (this condemnation was later revoked). However, Abelard thrived on controversy, and from 1122 to 1127 he continued his teaching and work at a retreat in the country near Quincy. His reputation became even greater, and students from all over Europe flocked to his lectures on both logic and theology.

In 1127 Abelard accepted an appointment as the abbot of a monastery in Brittany known for its moral laxity. By this time he had become a strong proponent of church reform, especially in moral matters. His efforts to establish discipline at the monastery only angered the monks there, to the point where they tried several times to murder him. Eventually Abelard was relieved of these duties, and returned to Paris to teach at the school on Mont Ste-Geneviève.

Following the council at Soissons Abelard had revised his Theologia several times, but his doctrine of the Trinity as well as his view of sin again angered the church hierarchy, including the now very powerful Bernard of Clairvaux. In June of 1140, a council of bishops at Sens condemned several of his positions. Abelard’s appeal to the pope was countered by Bernard, but eventually a reconciliation was arranged. Abelard died at Cluny on 21 April 1142.

Although in his own day Abelard was famous and influential, his impact on later generations was less than might have been expected. Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which became the standard theological textbook in the thirteenth century, owed much to Abelard’s Sic et Non (Yes and No), and strong realism about universals was never an option after Abelard’s attack; but many of Abelard’s logical innovations were forgotten once the corpus of Aristotle’s logic became available in the West. Abelard was hardly ever referred to after 1200, and a fellow nominalist like William of Ockham, writing around 1317, seems totally unaware of his work.

2 Works

In order to understand and assess Abelard as a philosopher, it is important to consider not only his works on logic but also his writings on theology. At risk of considerable over-simplification, his works may be divided into those composed before his stay in the community near Quincy (1122–7) and those written during and after that stay. As C.J. Mews (1985) has pointed out, this break seems to correspond with certain revisions Abelard made in both his logical and theological teachings.

In the earlier group lie his two great logical works, Dialectica and the Logica ingredientibus (Logic for Beginners). The latter is really four works, consisting of glosses on four earlier and important logical works, Porphyry’s Isagōgē, Aristotle’s Categories, Aristotle’s Peri hermenias or De Interpretatione, and on Boethius’ De differentiis topicis (see Aristotle; Boethius, A.M.S.; Porphyry). These were interpretative commentaries on what was later called the ‘old logic’. The Dialectica is an independent treatise roughly covering the same topics treated in the old logic, but without direct commentary. In theology, Abelard produced in the period before Quincy the version of his Theologia known as the Theologia ‘summi boni’ (Theology of the Highest Good) and the collection of conflicting passages from scriptures and earlier church fathers and doctors known as the Sic et Non.

After he moved to Quincy, Abelard’s Theologia went through several revisions, resulting in a long work divided into five books now referred to as the Theologia Christiana (Christian Theology). A final reworking of his theological ideas in shorter form is found in the Theologia Scolarium (Theology for Students). Also in the area of theology from the later period is his Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum (Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian) and his Ethica or Scito te ipsum (Ethics, or Know Thyself). Abelard’s work in logic seems to have diminished in the post-Quincy period, but he did compose a new and important gloss on Porphyry’s Isagōgē called the Glossule super Porphyrium or Logica ‘nostrorum petitioni sociorum’ (Logic in Response to the Request of Our Comrades), probably while at Quincy. Because of this diminishing interest, Abelard never made much use of the ‘new logic’, that of Aristotle’s Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations, which became available in western Europe in the 1130s (see Translators).

3 Pagan wisdom and Christian faith

Abelard was, at least in his later life, a devout Christian committed to the moral reform of the church and the defence of traditional orthodox Christian beliefs. However, he was also well read in the literature of pagan Greece and Rome, and was convinced that among the works of the philosophers of the ancient world could be found useful models of moral life and more precise understandings of dogmas such as the Trinity than were to be found even in the Old Testament. His Theologia evidences an overriding concern to defend the use of pagan learning in explicating and defending the Christian faith, while at the same time refuting ‘pseudo-philosophers’ who in his own day were creating difficulties for belief by misusing that most important legacy of the ancients, logic.

Abelard found that the ancient philosophers, although they had lived before the time of Christ, had already taught some of the most important doctrines of the Christian religion, namely the immortality of the soul, the existence of a creator, the supreme importance of living virtuously, the likelihood of retribution in the next life for sins in this one and even, in Plato’s case, the doctrine of the Trinity (see Plato; Trinity). It was not Abelard’s view that the ancient sages came to these insights simply by the use of reason and other natural cognitive faculties; rather, he held that God had given them a certain revelation as a reward for their exemplary lives.

4 Logic

Abelard’s actual knowledge of ancient philosophy outside of ethics was very limited and was often reliant on the fragmentary accounts of it given by early Christian thinkers such as Augustine. In the field of logic he at least had translations of a few primary sources, such as Aristotle’s Categories and Peri hermenias and Porphyry’s Isagōgē. Also in his possession were the commentaries of Boethius on these sources, as well as a few of Boethius’ own treatises. The rest of Aristotle’s logical works became available only late in Abelard’s life, after his own interest in logic had waned. In this legacy Abelard’s genius discovered many difficulties and omissions, and his reflection on these led him to develop a quite original logical theory, even though he always presented it as an extension and modification of the traditional Aristotelian framework.

Perhaps the most un-Aristotelian feature of Abelard’s logical theory is the central role he gives to sentences and what sentences say, rather than to terms. Any sentence, even a question or an imperative, says or proposes something called a dictum, although only assertions commit the speaker to the truth of what is said. These dicta are the primary subjects of truth and falsity, with assertions being true or false only insofar as their dicta are. Abelard recognizes that the genuine contradictory of an affirmative sentence is one in which the negation operates on the whole dictum of the latter, not just on the predicate. His elaborate theory of conditionals rests on the view that a conditional is true only when the truth of the antecedent’s dictum requires the truth of the consequent’s dictum. We have here the makings of a genuinely ‘propositional’ logic akin to that developed in ancient times by the Stoics, that is, a logic in which the basic logical relationships of entailment, opposition and so on are seen as holding between propositions (see Stoicism).

Abelard’s appreciation of the saying-function of sentences leads him to a very original analysis of what is involved in verbs, and in the verb ‘to be’ used as a copula. The tendency of Aristotelian logic is to view simple categorical sentences as having three parts: two noun phrases linked by some form of the copula. Thus ‘Socrates is a human’ has as its parts the noun phrases ‘Socrates’ and ‘a human’, plus the copula ‘is’. Abelard, on the other hand, sees such sentences as falling into two parts, a subject noun phrase and a predicate verb phrase. The peculiar function of the verb is thus to provide the saying-force, without which the string of words would be at best a list rather than an assertion. The copula really has no signification on its own, but merely acts to transform a noun phrase into a verb.

Nouns, he thinks, turn out to be implicit verbs, as can be inferred from their covert importation of tense. In ‘Some man is a philosopher’ ‘man’ extends over only presently existing men, so that the whole sentence really means ‘Something which is now a man is a philosopher’, where the verb implicit in the subject is made explicit. Although nouns often have ‘appellation’ – for example, in many contexts they are taken as applying to or naming certain individual things – these things are nevertheless not what the noun signifies. Signification has both a psychological and more properly a semantic aspect. The former will be discussed later, but as for the latter, Abelard refers to status or ‘natures’ as what is signified by both verbs and nouns. These are apparently referred to by verbal nominalizations such as ‘being a man’ or ‘walking’. Perhaps the best way to view a status is as that which, in a dictum, corresponds to the predicate of the corresponding sentence, for Abelard talks in much the same way about status as he does about dicta. Thus a status or nature associated with a predicate is what might be said of some thing by using that predicate in a sentence in which the subject noun named that thing.

Status and dicta turn out to be important both for Abelard’s analysis of modal propositions and for his treatment of conditionals. A modal proposition, such as ‘It is possible for this man, who is sitting, to be standing’, turns out to have a false sense in which the whole dictum of the sentence ‘This man, who is standing, is sitting’ is the apparent subject of the modality, and another true sense in which what is being asserted is both that standing is compatible with the status of being a man and that the man in question is in fact sitting. Conditional propositions are necessarily true only if the dictum of the antecedent explicitly or implicitly contains the dictum of the consequent. Necessarily true conditionals such as, ‘If there is a rose, there is a flower’, the truth of which depends simply on the logical relationship between the natures of being a rose and being a flower, are sometimes called ‘laws of nature’ by Abelard and are fundamental for science (see Language, medieval theories of; Natural philosophy, medieval §§8–9).

5 Ontology

Although Abelard never had a kind word for his old teacher Roscelin and the two quarrelled bitterly over matters of theology, it is clear that the student in large measure took over his master’s view that logic is about vocally produced sounds qua signifiers, not about the things those sounds may be used to refer to. Such a view sharply separates logic from sciences such as physics, which talk directly about things without regard to any use of them as signifiers. Instead, physics treats logic as a tool which can be of help in any inquiry that employs language. Abelard conducted a vigorous attack on ‘realist’ views of logic, such as that held by William of Champeaux. This dispute focused on ‘universals’, for example, items such as genera and species (that is, the items which Aristotle claimed were each predicated of many subjects by true affirmations), since these were crucial to Aristotelian logic and science. As viewed in Abelard’s day, the issue was whether universals were things existing independently of language (realism) or whether they were only the words that referred to things (nominalism). Abelard came down clearly on the latter side (see Nominalism; Realism and anti-realism; Universals).

William’s version of the realist position treated genera and species as something like materials common to many things. The different things they are common to are differentiated by opposed forms which also exist in these materials. Abelard argued that the end result of this view is that one and the same individual thing may have opposed characteristics at the same time. Abelard’s own positive view shifted somewhat from that of his Logica ingredientibus, where it is simply the vocally produced physical sound (the vox) which is a universal, and that of the Logica ‘nostrorum petitioni sociorum’, where it is words (sermones) that are universals and different words might share the same physical sound. However, the basic idea remains: universality results from some thing being used as a sign of many.

Where Abelard’s view differs radically from that of his teacher Roscelin is in the role of the status. Abelard claims that the status ‘being a human’ is the reason why the term ‘human’ applies to the many things to which it does apply; but, he says enigmatically, this is ‘no thing’. Nevertheless it is that which verbs, and nouns, signify. Do they signify, then, without signifying anything? In the Logica ‘nostrorum petitioni sociorum’, Abelard explains that through the idea associated with a universal word there does not have to be some particular thing that one thinks of when one uses the word. For example, in just the way that there does not have to be some thing that I want when I want a hood – in other words, I can want a hood without there being any particular thing that I want – similarly I can think of something through the idea associated with ‘human’ even though there is no particular thing (or human) that I think of.

Dicta, too, turn out not to be things. Abelard thinks it would make the necessity of any conditional proposition incomprehensible if we thought of the dicta of the antecedent and consequent as things. Nevertheless, his whole semantic theory is deeply dependent on talk about both status and dicta. Even in his theory of the Trinity, without status he has no grounds on which to defend the objective differentiation of the three divine persons. Apparently Abelard thought it was possible to evade the embarrassing ontological consequences of a ‘realist’ approach to logic while retaining all the advantages of an approach which bases logic in objective facts, for, as discussed below, he eschews the idea of founding logic on relations between mental entities such as ideas or concepts. Perhaps the chief conundrum for interpreters of Abelard is how this is supposed to be possible.

Abelard also introduces here the concept of ‘impersonal’ propositions wherever there is a statement of grammatical subject-predicate form but the subject is the nominalization of a verb phrase or a sentence (see above). Since neither verb phrases nor sentences name anything, Abelard thinks it is a mistake to take their nominalizations as nonetheless naming something. It is not just that ‘being a human’ fails to name a thing; it doesn’t name at all. Nouns like status and dictum, since their use is based in their being predicated of items like being a human and Socrates’ being a human, likewise do not really name at all. Is this tantamount on Abelard’s part to saying that the language in which we talk about the foundations of logic necessarily escapes the scope of the very logic about which it is designed to talk? A full study of the implications of Abelard’s logic has yet to be written.

Another area of ontology in which Abelard was very inventive concerns the doctrine of sameness and distinctions. While defending the doctrine of the Trinity, Abelard was led to develop the idea that items might be the same ‘essentially’ even though some predicates true of one are not true of the other, because the items are distinct ‘in property’. An example is the way that a wax statue is the same ‘essentially’ as the wax that composes it; but the statue is not the matter for the statue, even though the wax is. This same idea lies behind the distinction of words from the physical sounds in which they are realized. The word is the same ‘essentially’ as the sound, but nevertheless two words might be the same as one vocal sound and yet not the same as each other.

6 Psychology of signification

Although logic is about words that are realized in sound, Abelard acknowledges that those sounds constitute words and thus have properties significant for the logician only because they express ideas in the mind of the speaker. His views on the mental side of signification are fairly elaborate and reflect his careful reading of Aristotle’s Peri hermenias.

The fundamental notion here is that of an ‘idea’ (intellectus), which is a genuine mental thing, an act or a disposition toward a mental act. The idea is not the content of such an act, but rather the idea itself always has some content. Only beings with reason can have ideas and thus ideas must be distinguished from both sensings and imaginings. Abelard locates this distinction in the way an idea isolates some property for attention, while sensings and imaginings grasp something without separating out some single property or complex of properties of that thing from its other properties. In other words, any idea reflects a certain abstractive thought process. What is isolated and thought of through the idea is some dictum or status: in other words, what is signified by the word or words which express the idea in question.

Abelard often talks of linguistic expressions as signifying the ideas they express, but he makes it clear that this sense of ‘signification’ is not one which permits inferring that language necessarily talks about ideas. He is very insistent that we must avoid a semantic theory which would have all language ultimately be about something in the mind. This applies also to the images which the mind creates in order to give itself something to focus on when it thinks. Abelard does not think that these images are mental things in the way ideas are; indeed, they are not ‘things’ at all. My image of a four-sided tower is not a four-sided thing which exists, either in my mind or in external reality. Such images cannot be equated with what words signify, since, Abelard claims, we can use exactly the same image when we use words with different meanings. The ‘attention’ of the mind allows us to focus on one property at one time and another at another time, in both cases using the very same image. The image is not the content of the idea that uses it.

The contents of ideas, then, are the status or dicta which are the ‘things’ (as opposed to the ideas) which words signify. Since, as noted above, status and dicta are not themselves things, Abelard’s position here teeters on the brink of self-contradiction. However, he argues vigorously that we need not always find some thing for our terms to signify. When I am thinking of a man, I need not be thinking of any particular man. In the sentence ‘A man is in the house’ ‘a man’ does not signify any particular man, not even the one which happens to be in the house, if such a person exists. Abelard is keenly aware that noun phrases in certain contexts are used ‘non appellatively’, in other words in such a way that one cannot point to any particular thing and say that it is the referent of the phrase. His observation here clearly dovetails with the view mentioned in §5, that an idea can be of something even though there is no particular thing it is of, and is thus part of Abelard’s perhaps dubious way of avoiding the apparent ontological implications of his semantics.

7 Ethics

Abelard’s positions on ethical questions were heavily influenced on the one hand by what he knew of Stoic ethics, and on the other hand by the Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments in the next life for righteousness or sinfulness in this one. Stoic ethical doctrines were accessible to Abelard through the writings of Cicero and Seneca, as well as through the detailed accounts of Stoic ethics in the writings of Augustine and other church fathers. His views largely amount to an attempt to take the Stoic doctrine of moral virtue and vice and make it the basis of how God judges souls to be meritorious (deserving of eternal blessedness) or guilty (deserving of damnation). In the course of this effort, however, a number of important notions are drastically redefined.

Whereas in the Stoic view virtues and vices were settled practices of deliberately choosing good and bad courses of action, for Abelard they are inclinations which manifest themselves prior to choice and over which we have little control. In his view, a tendency to get angry too easily is a vice, but having that vice does not of itself make one sinful and deserving of punishment. It is deciding to yield to that tendency that is sinful. In Abelard’s view, then, there is no logical inconsistency in supposing that a person has many vices but is in fact a very righteous person deserving of God’s rewards. In fact, Abelard says, having vices to fight against is required in order to attain the highest merit. The person who has nothing but virtues easily does the right thing and thus merits reward less.

Neither does Abelard think that sin or righteousness lies merely in willing something. Here his view changed somewhat over time, but in his Ethica, probably a late work, he adopts a conception of a will which equates it with a desire, not with any deliberate decision to undertake some course of action nor with a mere faculty for such decisions. On this point Abelard was clearly not in accord with earlier writers such as Augustine and Anselm. Given such a definition of will, Abelard has no trouble showing that a person can have a will to do something they should not and yet not sin, and also sin while not having any will for doing something they should not. The first case is illustrated by a man who lusts after a married woman but restrains himself and never adopts the intention to seduce her. The second is exemplified by a servant who kills his master in self-defence; he never willed the death of his master but rather only desired his own life, a perfectly legitimate will. And yet (on Abelard’s very rigorous moral standard) he sinned in not allowing himself to be killed rather than engage in a killing.

Once the firm intention to do wrong is formed, however, the guilt exists, and it is not increased by the actual performance of the deed. Thus Christ can rightly condemn men for having committed adultery in their hearts even if they have not actually seduced a woman. Sin, in Abelard’s view, lies entirely in the consent to do what one knows one should not, or to omit doing what one knows one should. (The men Christ condemned, Abelard believes, had consented to such a seduction; they had not merely lusted after the woman.) This alone makes one guilty and deserving of retribution from God. That sinners must know they are wrong is important for Abelard. One of the theses which the bishops at the council of Sens objected to was Abelard’s claim that, because they thought they were doing what they were supposed to do, the men who crucified Christ were not guilty. The consent or intention to do something may be objectively bad – what one consents to may in fact be something one ought not consent to – and yet, because of the ignorance of the person who consents, no guilt be incurred. The consent is sinful when and only when it amounts to contempt for what is good and right, which Abelard often equates with contempt for God. Likewise, a consent is meritorious only when it shows respect and love for what is good, in other words, for God (see Sin).

Although sin is the only thing that makes one deserving of punishment, both divine and human punishment can in certain circumstances be justifiably visited on those who do not deserve it. Abelard describes a case where a woman, who was only trying to keep her baby warm, accidentally smothered it to death. The judge, he says, is justified in punishing her in order to set an example that will remind others to be more careful. Human justice, he claims, is legitimately more concerned with outward deeds than with inner intentions, since it is the former, not the latter, that directly affect the peace and welfare of the community. Similarly, Abelard allows the doctrine that, for obscure reasons of his own, God is justified in condemning to eternal death some unbaptized infants who have never sinned.

8 Theodicy

Abelard argues for God’s existence as follows. We recognize that we ourselves are not made by ourselves but by something else; however, we as rational beings are certainly superior to the world of non-rational things. This would not be so if that world were something that caused itself, because anything which relies only on itself for its subsistence is superior to anything that relies on something other than itself. Hence that world is brought into existence by something else, a maker or ruler, and this we call God (see God, arguments for the existence of).

Abelard recognizes that logically this argument is less than completely compelling, but he thinks that in this area we should accept those arguments which make an appeal to our better sentiments. His attitude here reveals how far Abelard was from developing theology as a branch of rational philosophy or metaphysics in the way that would be attempted later, in the thirteenth century (see Aquinas, T.).

One conclusion that Abelard reached on the basis of such arguments was that everything that is or occurs has a reason for being or occurring. To allow otherwise would be to claim that there are some things that God either makes occur or allows to occur, without having a full reason for why these rather than other things should occur. This Abelard thinks would detract from the divine goodness. On this basis, Abelard draws the conclusion that God could not do or omit anything other than what he at some time does do or omit. He will not allow that God might be faced with several alternatives which are equally best, so that there could be no reason for him to choose one rather than the other. And, of course, God cannot choose an alternative to which there is a better alternative. From God’s point of view, then, all that he does or omits he must do or omit (see Omnipotence). This view too was among those condemned at Sens, and Abelard admitted that few agreed with him on this subject. Although he cleverly used his theory of modalities to argue otherwise, the position seems clearly headed toward fatalism of the Stoic variety. That Abelard proposed such a view at all shows to what extent he was attracted by the extreme rationalism represented in ancient Stoicism.