Abstract

The twelfth century was not unlike the twentieth in its bold application of mere dialectic to the problems of ethics and religious faith, while it was handicapped by the absence of a steadying metaphysic and a developed psychology. Its brashly free debate of theological idea and moral standard was ahead both of its technical apparatus and of its time, although it did prepare the way for the academic maturity of the thirteenth century. Abelard, its enfant terrible, embodied a double drama, of the heart as well as of the head, in his stirring life which tends to evoke in modern crusading freethinkers a web of romantic fiction. The legend of free-thought and free-love asserting its independence against tyrannous Church authority is refuted by Abelard’s own Historia Calamitatum Mearum, in which he analyses with mediaeval unsqueamishness his own aggressive pride and lust. In that semi-cultured age his aggressive perfectionism in both intellectual and religious life made enemies of colleagues and teachers, while he personally enjoyed for long the broad tolerance of authority and the enthusiasm of flocks of disciples. The final, harsh prosecution of his bold theology by St. Bernard exemplifies, not only a clash of personalities but of attitudes to truth, especially to the sacred truth of the Christian faith which had recently raised Europe from barbarism. Bernard had a real apprehension of its absolute value which he was loath to confide to the problematic limits of notional analysis; Abelard wanted to exercise his dialectic upon it at any cost—which was paid when Héloise used his own simpliste morality of intention as a tragic argumentum ad hominem against their need of marriage. Both attitudes, the merely real and the simply notional, might be pushed to extremes and it required a mature metaphysic to properly balance them. It is not surprising that Newman, who was suspicious of the hard-headed, clear but shallow logicians who would sacrifice the end of reasoning to the mere process in the real problems of ethics and religion, should pass a similarly harsh verdict upon Abelard without doing full justice to his historic personality.