Abelard worked against an institutional and intellectual background that was complex and various not just because of his period – before the rise of the universities regularized the structure of academic teaching and learning – but also as a result of his own character and fortune. The aim of this chapter is to examine how Abelard fitted into these contexts and, in particular, to look at how his philosophical ideas relate to those of the thinkers who immediately preceded him. It aims also to show that Abelard was a changing, developing thinker.
In the first section, “Life and works,” I give a very brief sketch of Abelard’s life, and then of his works, and try to show the main direction of his intellectual interests in a career which, as I shall argue, falls into two distinct halves. In Section II, I add a little detail to this bare account, by considering (in very roughly chronological order) the various cultural settings in which Abelard worked. Three of them are particular milieus to which he belonged: the logical schools at the beginning of the twelfth century, the world of twelfth-century monastic thinking and reform, and the Paris schools, logical and theological, of the 1130s. One is a cultural setting in rather a different sense: Abelard’s reading. In Section III, I have chosen two topics through which to examine more precisely, and very selectively, aspects of Abelard’s relation to earlier and contemporary medieval philosophers: Abelard’s nominalism, and his treatment of Plato’s idea of a World Soul. The discussions in Section II are general and aim to introduce readers both to important aspects of Abelard’s intellectual life and, more widely, to the culture and education of the twelfth century. Those in Section III are more detailed. They aim to put forward some new suggestions, and to give an idea of the sort of evidence the historian must sift and interpret in order to understand how Abelard’s thought developed within its intellectual context.
Peter Abelard was born c. 1079, the eldest son in a family of the lower gentry, at Le Pallet, near Nantes in Brittany.1 He quickly showed ability and enthusiasm for intellectual life, and especially for logic. Giving up his inheritance, he first studied in the Loire area, under (perhaps among others) Roscelin, a well-known logician who had been accused of heresy by Anselm, and then in Paris, where he arrived c. 1100, under William of Champeaux, canon and Archdeacon of Notre Dame and master of the school there. Retrospectively, Abelard portrays William as having quickly turned from approval to hostility when Abelard proved himself his superior in argument, but Abelard was certainly closer, and more indebted to William than this account would suggest. Abelard quickly set up as a schoolmaster himself, first at Melun, a favored royal residence, and then nearer Paris at Corbeil (c. 1102–1104). He became ill and had to leave Paris for his native Brittany, returning to Paris only c. 1108. By this time, William of Champeaux had moved with a few followers to the hermitage of St. Victor near Paris. He still taught publicly, and Abelard attended his lectures on rhetoric, where he successfully challenged him over his theory of universals. The fame he won from this victory almost led to his holding the position of master at Notre Dame. But William’s machinations forced him to set up his school first at Melun again, then c. 1110–1112, on the Mont Ste. Geneviève (regarded as separate from the city in the early twelfth century, although only half an hour’s walk from Notre Dame). In 1113, Abelard decided that he should go to Laon to study biblical exegesis and Christian doctrine with Anselm of Laon, their most famous living exponent. Unimpressed by Anselm’s teaching, Abelard began to offer his own lessons on the (notoriously difficult) book of Ezechiel. Anselm forbade him to continue this teaching, and Abelard returned to Paris where, at last, he was able to become master at Notre Dame.
In 1115 or 1116, Abelard began an affair with Heloise, the talented and well-read niece of Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame (Abelard himself was a canon of Sens, the cathedral of the archdiocese to which Paris belonged). Eventually, Fulbert discovered the liaison, and Heloise, who had become pregnant, was sent to be looked after by Abelard’s family in Brittany. To make his peace with Fulbert, Abelard agreed to marry Heloise, although he stipulated that the marriage should be secret. Heloise argued against the marriage, and when Fulbert began telling people about the marriage, Heloise denied it had taken place. To protect her from her uncle, Abelard sent Heloise to the nunnery of Argenteuil, where she had been brought up; she dressed as a nun and shared the nuns’ life, although she was not veiled. Most probably imagining that Abelard wished to force Heloise to become a nun and so be rid of her, Fulbert arranged (1117) for a band of men to break into Abelard’s room at night and castrate him. In reaction, Abelard decided to become a monk at the monastery of St. Denis, near Paris, and insisted that Heloise become a nun at Argenteuil.
Abelard soon moved from the Abbey of St. Denis itself to a house owned by the monastery, where he continued to teach as he had done before, but adding lectures on theology to his courses on logic. (Abelard had continued the lectures on Ezechiel cut short at Laon when he returned to Paris, but there is no evidence that his teaching on Christian doctrine went beyond these.) The first product of his new interest in sacred doctrine, the Theologia “summi boni,” was the object of proceedings for heresy, instigated by two pupils of Anselm of Laon, which led to Abelard’s being summoned, in March 1121, to the council held at Soissons before the papal legate. The council was, apparently, not convinced that there was anything heretical in the book, but Abelard’s accusers managed in part to win over the legate. The Theologia was condemned and Abelard himself was forced to throw it into the flames. He was sentenced to perpetual confinement in a monastery other than his own, but it had apparently been agreed in advance that the sentence of imprisonment would be revoked almost immediately, and after a few days at St. Medard (a sort of monastic house of correction), he was returned to St. Denis.
Soon afterwards, Abelard angered his fellow monks and his abbot, Adam, by questioning whether their founder, St. Denis, had been bishop of Athens or – as Bede held – of Corinth. Adam accused him of insulting both the monastery and the Kingdom of France (which had Denis as its patron saint). Abelard decided to flee the monastery, and he lodged at St. Ayoul of Provins, where the prior was a friend. Abbot Adam would not let Abelard regularize his position by allowing him to live as a monk wherever he wished, but when Adam died in March 1122 and was succeeded by Suger, Abelard managed, with the help of a powerful supporter (Stephen de Garlande, the King’s chancellor), to gain permission to live “in whatever solitary place he wished,” so long as he did not place himself under the obedience of any other abbot. Abelard was given a little land in Champagne, near Nogent-sur-Seine, and he built a simple oratory there, dedicated to the Trinity. He did not long remain in isolation. Pupils flocked to be taught by him in the wilderness, and the oratory, rebuilt in wood and stone and re-dedicated to the Paraclete (the Holy Spirit or Comforter), became the center of a sort of eremetical university. Abelard remained at the Paraclete for about five years, but he once again felt that he was the object of persecution, this time by two “new apostles” – probably Bernard of Clairvaux and Norbert of Xanten.
Some time between 1126 and 1128, Abelard accepted his election as Abbot of St. Gildas, in the remote Rhuys peninsula of his native Brittany. St. Gildas turned out to be a very corrupt monastery, where the monks lived with concubines and their children. Abelard, who had by now become a fervent though unconventional advocate of monastic reform, tried to make the monks live according to their Rule, and he was helped by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. But the monks tried to murder him, he claims, and he was forced to live outside the monastery. During Abelard’s period at St. Gildas, a series of events took place which put him once again in intellectual contact with his wife, Heloise. In April 1129, Suger succeeded in his plans to have the nuns, including Heloise, expelled from Argenteuil and to take over the property for St. Denis. Abelard gave the Paraclete to Heloise and the nuns who came with her, and the gift was eventually confirmed by the Pope. Heloise became abbess of what grew into a flourishing community of nuns, and Abelard helped the foundation intellectually and practically.
Lack of success at controlling the monks of St. Gildas made Abelard decide to take up public teaching again (although he would remain, officially, Abbot of St. Gildas). In 1132 or thereabouts he returned, therefore, to Paris, which by now had become the greatest intellectual center of Northern Europe. His lectures, on the Mont Ste. Geneviève, included logic, at least until 1136, but were mainly concerned with the Bible, Christian doctrine, and ethics. Some historians believe that he stopped teaching after 1136. But it seems more probable that he continued with all except his lectures on logic until perhaps as late as 1141.
The moves that put an end to Abelard’s teaching career were instigated by William of St. Thierry, a Cistercian monk and a notable (and philosophically sophisticated) theologian in his own right. He discovered what he considered to be heresies in some of Abelard’s teachings, and in spring 1140 he wrote to the Bishop of Chartres and to Bernard of Clairvaux denouncing them. Another, less distinguished theologian, Thomas of Morigny, also produced at much the same time a list of Abelard’s supposed heresies, perhaps at Bernard’s instigation. According to his hagiographer, William of Auxerre, Bernard proceeded cautiously and according to canonical procedure, admonishing Abelard in private and persuading him to correct anything heretical in his works; only when Abelard reneged on his agreement to make the corrections, he says, did Bernard bring his accusations into the open. But there are indications that Bernard’s conduct was less temperate. Abelard was faced with a campaign by Bernard and his followers to make his supposed heresies known and to have them condemned by the Pope. An important Church council at Sens was planned for 2 June 1141.2 Abelard challenged Bernard either to withdraw his accusations or to make them publicly at the council. By this move, Abelard put himself into the position of the wronged party and forced Bernard to defend himself from the accusation of slander. On the eve of the council, however, Bernard called a private meeting of the assembled bishops and persuaded them to condemn, one by one, each of the heretical propositions he attributed to Abelard. When Abelard appeared at the council the next day, he was presented with a list of condemned propositions imputed to him. In order to avoid the trap Bernard had set, Abelard left the assembly, appealed to the Pope, and set off for Rome.
Although Abelard had well-placed friends in the papal entourage, his hopes that the Pope would take a different view of his case than the Council of Sens were unfounded. On 16 July, Pope Innocent II issued a bull excommunicating Abelard and his followers and imposing perpetual silence on him, and in a second document he ordered Abelard to be confined in a monastery and his books to be burned. But Abelard was saved from the severity of this sentence by Peter the Venerable, abbot of the great monastery of Cluny. Abelard had stopped there, on his way to Rome, before the papal condemnation had reached France. Peter persuaded Abelard, who was already old by the standards of the time, and may have been suffering from cancer, to give up his journey and stay at the monastery. He managed to arrange a reconciliation with Bernard, to have the sentence of excommunication lifted, and to persuade Innocent that it was enough if Abelard, who had now given up the schools for good, remained at Cluny or under its aegis. Abelard was treated, not at all as a condemned heretic, but as a revered and wise scholar and, in his final months, spent at the Cluniac priory near Chalon-sur-Saône, as an example of a devout Christian, humbly preparing himself for death. He died on 21 April 1142.
Abelard’s writings divide into two main groups: those on logic, and those concerned with Christian doctrine (in the widest sense).3 This division corresponds quite closely to a chronological one. The logical works were written between c. 1102 and c. 1126, the doctrinal works between c. 1120 and Abelard’s death in 1142. Even the overlap is less than it may seem, because during the period from 1120 to 1126 the logical works Abelard wrote were quite short, compared both to the extensive logical texts he produced in the five or so years before 1120, and the long doctrinal works he wrote between 1120 and c. 1126.
The earliest works of Abelard (probably c. 1102–c. 1104) are almost certainly his shorter commentaries on logical texts by Porphyry, Aristotle, and Boethius.4 The only other work very probably from the early period is the Dialectica, an exposition of the whole logical syllabus in the form of a textbook, not a commentary, but based on the lectures Abelard gave on the texts of the logical syllabus. The Dialectica used to be thought of as a late work, or at least to have been revised by Abelard late in his life. But now most scholars agree that it was written before about 1120, and there are strong arguments to support a dating to c. 1116 (or even perhaps a little earlier).5 Shortly after his castration, and before 1120, Abelard wrote up his long commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, and Boethius’s On Topical Differentiae – a series of works sometimes known, from its opening, as the Logica “ingredientibus.” The development of Abelard’s thinking about the Isagoge over the next few years is shown by his Glosulae super Porphyrium (often called the Logica “nostrorum petitioni sociorum”), a short but discursive commentary on Porphyry’s text written c. 1123–c. 1126.6 A short treatise, De intellectibus, dates from roughly the same time as the Glosulae:7 it is based on the same or similar lectures on the Isagoge, but also contains some material close to Abelard’s 1118–1119 commentary on On Interpretation, but showing some development in Abelard’s thinking here too.
Abelard’s first doctrinal work was the Theologia “summi boni,” a treatise on the Trinity, written c. 1120 and promptly condemned at the Council of Soissons. Shortly after this council, Abelard compiled the first version of Sic et non, his collection of (mainly) patristic excerpts which give apparently opposite answers to important questions of Christian doctrine. By the time he left the Paraclete (c. 1126), Abelard had also produced the second version of the Theologia, the Theologia Christiana, a treatise about twice the length of the version condemned at Soissons, in which he elaborated and improved his arguments, but in no way withdrew them, and added many new features, including a lengthy paean of the ancient philosophers of Greece, their virtues and their wisdom. It was probably at St. Gildas (c. 1127–1131) that Abelard wrote his Collationes (often called Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian), which explores the relation between natural law and the laws of the Old and New Testaments, and the nature of the Highest Good. Abelard’s other experiment with dialogue form (perhaps from a little earlier) is a brief dialogue (= Soliloquium) between PA (Petrus Abaelardus) and AP (Abaelardus Petrus) on love of wisdom as love of Christ.
Abelard’s second period in Paris, from c. 1132 until perhaps 1140 or 1141, was the most productive period of his life. He had prepared his re-entry to the schools with the Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Disasters), an autobiography which provoked a reply from Heloise and so led to the famous exchange of letters between husband and wife, now monk and nun.8 Abelard’s lectures on the Bible in Paris are represented by a commentary on Romans, probably written soon after his return (c. 1133–1134).9 He also set about revising his Theologia into its final form, the Theologia “scholarium” (ready c. 1135), conciser than the Theologia Christiana, but extending in its final, unfinished book to give a fuller discussion of divine omnipotence and prescience. Abelard’s lectures on Christian doctrine covered a wider range of subjects, though, than even this version of the Theologia. After considering God and his attributes, they went on to discuss the incarnation and Christ’s work, virtue, vice, sin, merit, and the sacraments. These lectures are known through three sets of lecture notes, one of them probably revised and corrected by Abelard himself.10 Abelard also prepared (c. 1138–1139), but left incomplete, a monograph on ethics, sometimes called just the Ethica, but entitled by Abelard Scito te ipsum (Know Thyself). At the same time as he was composing works related to his teaching in Paris, Abelard was engaged in an ambitious program of writing for Heloise and the nuns of the Paraclete. The exchange of letters with Heloise was completed by the provision of a Rule for her nuns.11 Abelard answered a series of doctrinal queries put to him by Heloise (= Problemata), sent her a collection of sermons, many written specially for the Paraclete (= Sermones), and he also composed for her and her community a commentary on the Hexaemeron (= Expositio in Hexameron),12 a hymn book (= Hymnarius Paraclitensis) and a set of poetic lamentations on biblical themes (= Planctus).13
The Council of Sens and the events surrounding it put a stop to most of Abelard’s activity as a writer. He composed a long Apologia, defending himself against Bernard (only the beginning of it survives), and two short confessions of faith, one public (= Confessio fidei “Universis”) and one addressed to Heloise (= Confessio fidei ad Heloisam). At Cluny and its dependency, Abelard seems only to have written his Carmen ad Astralabium, a moralizing poem addressed to his son which, despite the constraints of the form, summarizes much of Abelard’s distinctive ethical thinking, especially in regard to practical morality.
As the chronology of his teaching and writings suggests, Abelard’s career splits into two halves: an earlier period (up to c. 1117), when his interests were almost entirely in logic, and a later period when his main interest came increasingly to lie in questions connected with Christian doctrine. This split is sharper and more important than might be thought. Abelard has often been regarded – both by modern scholars and by contemporary antagonists – as a logician who applied the tools of logic to Christian doctrine. On this view, Abelard can be seen as spending the second half of his career using the techniques he had developed in its first half. But, arguably, such a view fails to appreciate Abelard as a constructive thinker.14 In his logical writings, Abelard did not just make some remarkable contributions to logic and semantics. He also developed a metaphysics, based on the central notion that every thing is a particular. In his doctrinal writings, he set about an ambitious project of reformulating Christian doctrine in a rationally coherent way. The project had two main strands. One consisted in showing how doctrines such as that of the Trinity are, though to an extent only, penetrable by reason, and had indeed been penetrated by the philosophers of pre-Christian times. I give an example of this thinking below (§III.2), when I discuss the treatment by Abelard and his contemporaries of Plato’s World Soul. The other strand – unfortunately not treated in this chapter – consisted in the development of a wide-ranging philosophical ethics.15 It is remarkable how few direct links exist between the metaphysics of Abelard’s earlier career, and his thinking about Christian doctrine and ethics in the years that followed. The later doctrinal and ethical teachings do not go against his earlier metaphysics, but they do not grow out of them or even require them.
For the first long period of his career, from when he left home to study in the 1090s until 1117, Abelard was fully engaged by a very particular area of intellectual activity, of which he quickly became an outstanding exponent. Abelard gave up his inheritance to pursue, not the life of learning in general, but a career as a logician. He sought out the best teachers – Roscelin of Compiègne and William of Champeaux – before setting up as a logic master himself.
In the twelfth century, logic (dialectica as it was usually called) was studied on the basis of just a handful of textbooks, most of which had already been available to medieval scholars for two or three centuries: the two Aristotelian works then known – the Categories and On Interpretation – and Porphyry’s Isagoge (Introduction), along with Boethius’s On Division and his textbooks on categorical syllogisms, hypothetical syllogisms, and topical reasoning (with, as aids for study, Boethius’s commentaries – two each on the Isagoge and On Interpretation, one on the Categories).16 Despite the narrowness of this textual basis, a far wider range of topics was discussed than would now be included in logic. The Categories (and so the Isagoge, an introduction to the categories), raised a whole variety of metaphysical questions, while On Interpretation stimulated discussion about epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language.
Logic formed part of what was, in theory at least, a wider school curriculum, based on the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Although Abelard studied rhetoric (HC 65; Radice 1974, 60), the only art of importance to him besides logic was grammar. Grammar remained a subject for students after they had mastered the Latin language. In part, it was devoted to further study of the subtleties of Latin, on the basis of Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae, which also touch on many areas of semantics. Already in the eleventh century, the Institutiones were the object of a lengthy and philosophically important gloss (known as the Glosulae) which was then revised in the twelfth.17 The Glosulae and associated grammatical texts, as much as any logical work, provide the background for some central areas of discussion in Abelard’s Dialectica and his long commentary on On Interpretation, such as the semantics of verbs, the nature of predication, and the meaning of the verb “to be.”18
At the turn of the twelfth century, schools were attached to cathedrals, where one of the canons would be the schoolmaster. Roscelin, for instance, taught Abelard at Loches (and perhaps Tours), where he was a canon; William of Champeaux was a canon of Notre Dame. The reputation of a school depended on that of its master. Abelard was drawn to Paris, not by the standing of the town – which did not yet have the political and cultural importance it gained in the following decades – but by William’s fame as a logician. Many of Abelard’s struggles and conflicts in the first fifteen years of his career were the result of his wish, eventually successful, to take over as the master at Notre Dame. As his establishment of schools at Melun, Corbeil, and on the Mont Ste. Geneviève shows, it would not have been possible for him, at that period, simply to set up another school in Paris.
How, exactly, did teaching take place in the logical schools? There are two sorts of evidence: accounts (such as that in Abelard’s autobiographical Historia calamitatum), and the texts themselves which the schools produced. Although all teaching was centered round the exposition of the ancient textbooks, it also involved disputation. Disputations, it seems, might take place between a master and a pupil and the master might – as happened to William of Champeaux, when Abelard disputed with him – find himself forced into self-contradiction when he tried to uphold one of his positions in the face of the pupil’s objections (HC 65; Radice 1974, 60). Even strangers could interrupt a lecture and draw the master into disputation, as a hagiographer claims that Goswin, when still a student, did to Abelard, a young but very popular teacher.19 Such logical contests were acrimonious affairs, in which the challenger sought to humiliate an established figure. Abelard’s successful attack cost William much of his reputation in the subject (or so Abelard maintained: HC 66; Radice 1974, 60). Abelard’s logical contest with William may also have had links with the struggles for power at court and between leading ecclesiastics; William was an influential member of the group of people who saw themselves as reformers, and Abelard became the protégé of his greatest political enemy, Stephen de Garlande.20
The teaching of the early twelfth-century logical schools is also witnessed by a number of commentaries on the logical textbooks that have survived in manuscript (and, in a few cases, have been published),21 and by other works, such as Abelard’s Dialectica which, although in the form of a treatise, is clearly derived from Abelard’s teaching.22 Although the commentaries usually show signs of having been revised and polished from the original lectures, there is often evidence in them of a give-and-take in discussion, more constructive and less acrimonious than the disputations between Abelard and William or Goswin. A fascinating insight into early twelfth-century teaching methods is given by a commentary on On Interpretation which, although anonymous, can be clearly identified as recording lectures by Abelard from the early 1100s.23 This text seems, far more than most, to record verbatim what happened at the lectures: not only comments and jokes in the vernacular, but lengthy argumentative exchanges. Logical battling with students seems to be not just an exercise for learners, but a way of thinking for the master.
Until his mid-thirties, Abelard’s literary culture was remarkably narrow. No doubt he had studied some literary texts and the Vulgate Bible when learning Latin, but his serious reading seems not to have stretched beyond the logical texts and Priscian. It was perhaps due to Heloise that Abelard first began to read widely outside logic.24 Certainly, she was well known for her knowledge of books (HC 71; Radice 1974, 66: habundantia litterarum, litteratoria scientia) – as a woman, she would have been excluded from the mainly oral culture of the logical schools. She and Abelard clearly shared a passion for the Roman poet, Lucan, whose Pharsalia provide points of reference in his later exchanges with Heloise.25
It was, however, the violent ending of his marriage with Heloise which, in its repercussions, did most to change Abelard into a widely read, learned writer. When he became a monk at St. Denis, for the first time Abelard had access to an extensive library. The Theologia “summi boni” illustrates Abelard’s new range of interests and reading. In Books II and III, a conceptual analysis of Trinitarian relations, Abelard uses his old logical skills, but also shows his understanding of Boethius’s Opuscula sacra. In Book I, Abelard demonstrates his new learning, by assembling testimony to the Trinity, from the Bible and also, more extensively, from ancient Greek and Roman authors. From this time onwards, Abelard’s thinking and writing reflected his engagement with a whole variety of ancient and patristic authors, as evidenced especially by his Sic et non, which he used as a scholar nowadays might use a card index, to provide learned material for his writings on theology.
In some cases, though, Abelard’s interest in a patristic work was not confined to a few isolated quotations, neatly classified in Sic et non. Boethius, as already mentioned, was important to Abelard for his theological works as well as his logical commentaries and translations, perhaps because Boethius, more than any other late ancient writer, uses the techniques of Aristotelian logic to try to understand the Trinity. Abelard also knew Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy well. He had a particular fondness for Jerome: he sometimes presented himself as his successor in desert monasticism (see below §II.3). By about 1130 he had, with the help of his commentaries, acquired a surprising grasp of the Old Testament.26 Augustine was important to Abelard not, primarily, as a source of metaphysical ideas (as he had been to Anselm of Canterbury), but for his ethical views and analyses, his discussions about the use of reasoning, and his presentation of ancient pagan philosophy. Abelard sometimes followed closely, sometimes reacted rather violently against Augustine’s moral thinking. In his efforts to justify his use of logic in theology, Abelard found that works such as Augustine’s On Order and On Christian Doctrine were very useful for selective quotation (see e.g., Coll. 76, 96). The City of God, more than any other text, opened to Abelard the world of Greek and Roman civilization and, especially, ancient philosophy. Abelard generally ignored the fact that Augustine was writing to expose the failings of the ancient world, and the insufficiency of pagan philosophy, despite its grasp of some central truths about God. Rather, he used the City of God to provide information for the eulogy of the ancient world which he added to the Theologia Christiana; and in his Collationes it serves, among other things, as a sourcebook of ancient ethical doctrines.27
There was only a very limited range of ancient philosophical texts (other than logical ones) which Abelard, or indeed any of his contemporaries, knew: Cicero’s De inventione which, on account of a final section on the virtues, he thought of as a treatise on ethics; late in his career Cicero’s On Friendship;28 and some Seneca. Two Platonic texts were especially important to him: Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, and Plato’s own Timaeus translated into Latin, and commented on, by Calcidius, the only text of Plato’s read widely in the medieval West. I shall return to these two works below (§III.2).
Abelard did not become a monk for spiritual reasons, but – as he says (HC 80–81; Radice 1974, 76) – through shame and confusion after his castration. And his own life as a monk was, to say the least, unsettled. Yet not long after he became a monk, Abelard became a fervent exponent of monastic reform – that is to say, of returning monastic life to the severity enjoined by St. Benedict and the other monastic fathers. He was soon rebuking his confreres for their depravities; his own school-monastery, the Paraclete, aspired to Jerome’s austere ideals (his pupils there “seemed to be more like hermits than scholars”); and his troubles as Abbot of St. Gildas came about because of his attempts to reform the monastery.29 Although, politically, Abelard was targeted as an enemy by the reform party, to which William of Champeaux and St. Bernard belonged, he shared many of its ideals.30
Abelard gave intellectual expression to his enthusiasm for monastic reform in two ways. The first lay in his contributions to the monastic life of Heloise, especially the Rule he provided for her. The Rule is a remarkable and impracticable document (the nuns actually followed a different, more standard rule), and it may owe a good deal to Heloise’s own suggestions. The ideal it sets is one of moderation, and its underlying principle is that the details of monastic life need to be varied depending on those who are following it: St. Benedict’s prescriptions, designed for men, need to be altered in order to make a rule that is suitable for women.
Before his dealings with Heloise and her nuns, Abelard had already formulated a rather different, more extreme, and more surprising approach to monasticism, which he had in mind when he ran the Paraclete. He talks about it in Book II of the Theologia Christiana (and also in his Sermon 33). As explained above, Theologia Christiana includes a long section praising the virtues of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Abelard picks out, especially, the ascetic virtues of the ancient philosophers: their abstinence in diet, their sexual continence, and their contempt for material possessions. From the opening of the Timaeus, which refers back to the Republic, Abelard gained the notion that the ancient philosophers really did rule over states of the sort described by Plato, where possessions were in common and all was arranged for the common good. To him, these philosophers’ cities seemed not merely to anticipate monasteries, but to establish an ideal of monastic life. The Christian monks of his day, he believed, failed shamefully to measure up to it (TC 2.150:630–636).
When Abelard returned to Paris c. 1132, he found a city that had changed enormously in the fifteen years since he had left it. No longer was it like cathedral schools elsewhere, with one schoolmaster. Masters were now allowed to teach on payment of a fee to the cathedral authorities, and so there was a proliferation of schools, both of logic and theology.31 Among the teachers of logic in Paris in the 1130s were Adam of Balsham, author of an innovative logical treatise, the Ars disserendi,32 and Alberic, who was one of Abelard’s fiercest opponents.33 The theologians included Walter of Mortagne – like Abelard, also an important logician34 – and nearby, at the hermitage founded by William of Champeaux, Hugh of St. Victor.
Abelard certainly gave lectures on logic, but no logical writings of his from the period survive; perhaps mere mischance, but the references to “Master Peter” by other logicians of the time suggests that he added little new thinking to his earlier courses.35 Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations became popular among Paris logicians from the 1130s onwards; Abelard had seen the work, but was not much interested by it.
Rather, Abelard dedicated himself to providing a systematic, comprehensive, and rational understanding of Christian doctrine. Abelard was not alone in his efforts to be systematic and comprehensive, although he certainly may have been a pioneer. At much the same time, Hugh of St. Victor was working on his comprehensive textbook, De sacramentis, and other systematic treatises, such as the Sententie Anselmi and the Sententie divine pagine, although probably slightly later than Abelard’s, reflect the type of thinking going on in the Paris schools to which he had returned.
In the logical teaching and writing to which he devoted the first half of his career (c. 1100–1120), Abelard also developed a metaphysics. Its central thesis, which required him to adapt much that he learned from Aristotle and Porphyry, is
(T1) Every thing is particular.
In his chapter, Peter King provides a striking and coherent interpretation, from a modern philosopher’s point of view, of the metaphysical theory Abelard developed around this thesis.36 Here I wish, rather, to look at the context of discussion in which Abelard arrived at (T1): late eleventh- and early twelfth-century debate over the status of universals. This debate was closely linked to the reading of Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge – especially the passage in Porphyry’s work where he asks, but does not answer, whether genera and species exist or are merely concepts; whether, if they exist, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and, if incorporeal, whether they are separated from bodies or not.37 In line with these questions, the debate was especially concerned with universal substances (e.g., Animal, Man), although sometimes universal properties or accidents (e.g., Beauty, Whiteness) were also considered.
(T1) represents a position in the debate about universals: the view that universals are not things. In his Logica “ingredientibus,” Abelard combines the negative thesis of (T1) with the positive thesis that
(T2) Universals are voces.
A vox is a word or utterance. Abelard means by (T2) that there are no universal things signified by universal words: if we look for universals, all we can find are the words which are predicated at once of many things (such as “man” in “Socrates is a man,” “Plato is a man”). And universal words are, insofar as they are considered as things, particular things, and so (T2) is consistent with (T1).
Abelard and others who held the view about universals represented by (T1) and (T2) were called vocalists (vocales or upholders of the sententia vocum).38 How, and when, did Abelard become a vocalist? His first teacher of logic was Roscelin, who was criticized by Anselm of Canterbury for holding that a universal is merely a flatus vocis (the breath of air produced when a person utters something). Traditionally, Abelard’s approach to universals has been seen as an inheritance from Roscelin. But the story is not so straightforward.39
First, it is important to distinguish two approaches adopted in the period that result in sentences and passages that might seem like the work of vocalists, whereas in fact the exponents of these approaches do not accept both (T1) and (T2); indeed, they are not even trying to put forward any metaphysical position at all. First, there is the linguistic approach to logic, according to which logic was devised in order to discern truth from falsehood, which can be done only through words (voces). Textbooks that followed this approach would skip the material of the Categories and Isagoge, and begin by considering the basic elements of a statement (propositio). The fact that a textbook of this sort was written by none other than William of Champeaux, the arch-defender of realism (see below), emphasizes the distance between this approach and vocalism.40
The second approach is a new departure, although it probably derived from the first. Recent scholars have not distinguished it from vocalism.41 This approach tries to follow through the idea of logic as a verbal discipline by reading the Isagoge and the Categories (and, to an extent, De divisione) as being about words, not things. Following the terminology of the time, I shall speak of the logicians who follow this second approach to logic as adopting the “in voce approach.” It is witnessed by some anonymous Isagoge commentaries from the late eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century,42 by the Dialectica of Garlandus of Besançon (c. 1100) – a textbook aiming to cover the whole of logic,43 and (from roughly the same time) by Abelard’s earliest Isagoge (IP Isag.), On Division, and (fragmentary) Categories commentaries. If, as seems very likely, this was the approach to logic by Rainbert of Lille and reported in a twelfth-century chronicle, then it goes back at least to c. 1088–1092.44
The immediate signs of the in voce approach are that Porphyry’s five predicables (genus, species, differentia, proprium, and accident) and Aristotle’s ten categories are described as words,45 and the subject of the Isagoge is said be to be “five words” (by which the commentators do not mean that Porphyry is concerned just with the five particular words for the predicables, but with genus-words – such as “animal,” species-words – such as “man,” and so on). As one of the commentators puts it, just so that there can be no doubt: “Porphyry’s intention is to treat five words, not the things signified by the words.”46 In his Dialectica – the most thoroughgoing example of the in voce approach – Garlandus revealingly entitles the section dealing with the subject-matter of the Isagoge and the Categories “On non-complex words.” Although it is hard even for him not to slip into ways of writing that seem to suggest that he is really talking about things, these chapters are full of reminders that his subject-matter consists of voces: for instance, “an accident is that which is present and goes away, that is, that word is called ‘accident’ which comes to a substance, that is a substantive word . . .”; “. . . no substance, that is no substantial word”; “‘Quality’ is a word according to which we are said to be how we are.”47
Although the in voce approach treats genera and species, as discussed in the Isagoge as words, it would be wrong to see it as vocalist in the sense defined at the beginning of the section. There is no reason to believe its exponents accepted (T1) and they may not even have accepted (T2). Their position concerned exegetical method: how were the statements made by Porphyry about his five predicables and by Aristotle about the Ten Categories to be understood – as statements about words or about the things signified by the words? Their decision to read them as about words does not mean that they believed that there were not, in fact, things signified by the words. If it did, they would have had to have held that there is nothing in the world but words – an absurd position, pace some of our own contemporaries. Two illustrations make this point clearer.
The commentary in P4a contains a whole set of arguments for understanding the Isagoge as being about words.48 They are all based on the fact that Porphyry describes a genus as being “that which is predicated of many things”: this description fits words, not things, because things are not predicated. Contrast this approach with that of a genuine vocalist, the Abelard of the Logica, writing fifteen to twenty years later: he does indeed begin by briefly considering (LI Isag. 9:18–10:7; Spade 1994, 16–21) various authoritative statements which suggest that genera and species are things, or are words, but – because his concerns are not merely exegetical – he then turns to completely different, metaphysical arguments about what sort of things, if any, universals might be.
Abelard’s own in voce commentary on the Categories provides the second illustration. Aristotle says (4a–b) that one of the distinguishing characteristics of primary substances (e.g., Socrates, this stone) is that they can receive contrary attributes. Although Aristotle’s comment is obviously about things, Abelard insists on taking it as being about a word. Yet he has no hesitation in referring to the things signified by the word in giving his explanation (capitals indicate Aristotle’s words that are being quoted):
IT IS ABLE TO TAKE ON CONTRARIES – this is when some word takes on at different times two changeable contraries with regard to that word, in such a way that those contraries have causes which are different from the thing signified by the word which takes on those contraries – as “man” takes on “white” and “black” at different times, the causes of which, that is whiteness, blackness, are different from the thing signified by this word “man”.
(IP Cat. 58:10–16)
Roscelin, too, seems to have practised in voce exegesis. A contemporary epigram suggests so vividly: “Aristotle weeps . . . over the things which have been taken away from him and labelled as words; Porphyry groans, because his reader has robbed him of things. O Roscelin! Boethius hates whoever gnaws away things!”49 And in a set of notes on the Isagoge (P9), it is recorded that “Master Roscelin” interpreted Porphyry’s remark that “accidents can be more or less” in an unmistakably in voce fashion: “accidental words are constructed with ‘more’ and ‘less’, that is, they enter into comparisons.”50
But Roscelin seems to have done more than merely interpret in voce. There are clear indications that he adopted a definite metaphysical position, which included (T2). Was he not therefore a vocalist?
The most famous piece of evidence about Roscelin’s views is Anselm’s attack on him, in De incarnatione Verbi where, as well as being accused of regarding universals as flatus vocis, he is said not “to understand color as something other than a body” nor “a man’s wisdom as something other than his soul.”51 Anselm might merely be drawing unintended metaphysical consequences from Roscelin’s practice of in voce exegesis, but it seems unlikely. In any case, there is some even more revealing testimony. In his Dialectica (v.1, 554:37–555:9), Abelard recalls that there was “an insane view” held by his “master, Roscelin.” On this view, not only species, but also parts are (merely) words, and a house, for instance, is not made up of parts. Clearly this view is not merely exegetical (as is Abelard’s in his early commentary on On Division, where he too sometimes takes parts to be verbal: see, e.g., IP De div. 169:22–32), and indeed Roscelin had, according to Abelard, a series of arguments purporting to show that any assertion ascribing parts to something leads to self-contradiction. And in a fragment known as the Sententia Magistri Petri, Abelard attacks a view of parts and wholes which seems to be the same as that attributed to Roscelin in the Dialectica.52
This evidence suggests two possible interpretations. One is that Roscelin held a definite metaphysical theory and, as a result, adopted an in voce approach to commenting on Aristotle and Porphyry. The other is that Roscelin began as an in voce exegete, and at some stage well before Abelard wrote his Dialectica, he moved from merely following an exegetical method into propounding a definite metaphysical theory. The second alternative is the more probable, because the metaphysical position he adopted, extreme though it was, would not have supported the in voce strategy of taking even Porphyry’s discussion of accidents as merely about words. Roscelin, then, seems to have converted the exegetical principle of taking the predicables, categories and wholes and parts, as words into a metaphysics which regards most of them really as just words. Most, not all: he has to preserve primary substances and wholes, but these are the only items in his sparse ontology. It would, then, be misleading to describe Roscelin simply as a vocalist, since his position was so much stronger. He appears to have held, in addition to (T1) and (T2), that
(T3) Every particular is either a particular substance or a particular whole.
(T3) greatly strengthens (T1). (T1) allows there to be particular differentiae (for instance, the particular rationality by which I am rational), particular propria (the particular ability-to-laugh by which I am able to laugh), and particular accidents (the particular greyness, by which my eyes are grey). (T3) rules out the existence of all these things. (T3) also rules out parts (for example, the walls or roof of a house) from being said to exist. All that exists, given (T1) and (T3), are particular members of natural kinds (Socrates, Fido, that rose) and particular artificially made wholes (that house, this piano). Given that he held (T3) as well as (T1), Roscelin seems to have extended (T2) to
(T2*) Universals, parts, differentiae, propria, and accidents are voces.53
Abelard’s vocalism may have been influenced by Roscelin’s extreme view, but it owed as much to the thought of the realists (those who rejected (T1) and held that some things are not particulars but universals).
The realism which had been developed by the late eleventh century derived from a certain reading of Boethius’s discussion in his second commentary on the Isagoge; modern writers usually call it material essence realism (MER). Anselm of Canterbury formulated a loose version of MER (by the time of the Monologion: 1076).54 But, in the developed form which writers such as Abelard would attack, MER is first found in a commentary on the Isagoge (P3 – sometimes called “Pseudo-Hrabanus”) that there is very good reason to attribute to William of Champeaux. Exponents of MER are realists because they hold that all members of a species or genus have some real essence in common, by which they are (for instance) a man or an animal. The special feature of MER is an attempt to explain Boethius’s idea in his second commentary on the Isagoge that the same things are particulars and universals. A genus is said to be like matter and a specific differentia like form, so that a species is a “formed genus,” and similarly a species is like matter from which the individual is made by adding accidental features. There can, therefore, be a process of stripping away, which leads from the individual to the genus. Mentally, though not in reality, the various features which distinguish Socrates from other men can be stripped away, so that just the species, man, remains, and the process can be continued, stripping away the specific differentiae, until the genus, animal, is left.55 The earliest version of P3 has both of these related ideas. “A species,” says William, “is nothing other than a formed genus, and an individual nothing other than a formed species.”56 He also performs the stripping-away thought-experiment:
in actuality genera and species have their being in individual things (habent esse indiuiduata). I can, however, consider by reason the same thing which is individuated with its accidents removed from its make-up, and consider the pure, simple thing – and the thing considered in this way is the same as that which is in that individual. And so I understand it as a universal. For it does not go against nature for it to be a pure thing if it were to happen that all its accidents could be removed. But because it will never happen in actuality that any thing exists without accidents, so neither in actuality will that pure universal thing be found.57
This version of P3 almost certainly pre-dates William’s encountering in voce exegesis, and therefore Abelard’s arrival in Paris in 1100: the later revision of P3 discusses in voce exegesis explicitly and raises objections to it, whereas there is no mention of it here.58
In the Historia calamitatum (65:80–89), Abelard tells of how (c. 1108), when attending his lectures on rhetoric, he attacked William’s view that “essentially the same whole thing is at the same time within its single individuals, which have no diversity in essence but are various only because of the multiplicity of their accidents” – a clear summary of MER. Abelard does not say what were his destructive arguments: probably they resembled those he gives against this theory in the Logica “ingredientibus” (LI Isag. 10:17–13:17; Spade 1994, 23–40). He was so successful that William had to abandon this theory and adopt another type of realism, based on the idea of non-difference.59 No doubt Abelard’s own practice of in voce exegesis spurred him to attack William’s position (and perhaps he was influenced, too, by Roscelin’s extreme position, although there is no evidence that he ever adopted it himself). But, with his attack, Abelard moved from exegesis to metaphysics: he argued, so it would seem from his Logica, that no thing could be universal in the way William claimed. In one sense, then, vocalism proper was born when Abelard challenged and defeated William on universals. For his position to be sustainable, though, Abelard needed to add to his negative metaphysical claim (T1), a positive account of what does exist, and to devise a semantics to explain how sentences about universals link with reality. In order to arrive at the metaphysics that can be seen in the Dialectica and, slightly more developed, in the Logica, Abelard needed to give up the in voce method to reading the ancient texts and adopt a flexible method nearer to that of William of Champeaux, in which some passages are taken as about words, some as about things.60 William, therefore, played a double role in the origins of vocalism: as the upholder of a view by rejecting which vocalism defined itself, and as the thinker who provided some of the basic methodological tools, without which vocalism could never have become established.
Abelard has become known, not as a vocalist, but as a nominalist. Behind this difference in label lies a change in Abelard’s own position. In his Glosulae (LNPS), written five or so years after the Logica, Abelard explicitly rejects (T2) – the view that universals are voces (without mentioning that he himself had been its best known advocate!). Rather, he says that
(T4) Universals are sermones.
The change is less sharp than it may seem. Abelard, it seems, worried that (T2) might be taken, over-literally, to mean that physical utterances were themselves somehow universal. The term “sermo” lessens the risk of such misinterpretation, because it refers to words as bearers of meaning; the word “nomen” has a similar semantic force, and Abelard uses this, more common word interchangeably with “sermo” in the Glosulae (LNPS).61 It is most probably from this usage that Abelard’s followers came to be called the Nominales, and that the word “nominalist” entered the philosophical vocabulary.62
Whereas Abelard’s nominalism will strike modern readers as a serious philosophical theme, his thoughts about the World Soul, as discussed by Plato, Macrobius, and Boethius, may seem to be of merely antiquarian interest. Yet, in fact, this topic is hardly less central to Abelard’s overall philosophical and theological project in the years 1120 to 1140, than nominalism was to his logical and metaphysical project of the years 1100 to 1120. But it requires a greater leap of historical imagination to see what was at stake.
Plato’s Timaeus recounts, in semi-mythical terms, the making of the universe. The universe is portrayed as a living thing (30b–d), which therefore has a soul, the World Soul. The World Soul of the Timaeus was one of the sources to which Neoplatonists looked when they identified three “hypostases” – three levels of intelligible reality: the One, Intellect (nous), and Soul. The three Neoplatonic hypostases are ordered hierarchically – Intellect emanates from the One, and Soul from Intellect – and so seem not to correspond to the co-equal persons of the Christian Trinity. But it was commonplace among the Church Fathers to identify Intellect with the Son of God (his Wisdom or logos), and Augustine (City of God x, 23) even suggests that, while Plotinus subordinated Soul to the One and the Intellect, Porphyry did not and that he spoke, though in a free way, about the Trinity.
For twelfth-century thinkers, who made no distinction between Plato’s doctrines and those of the Neoplatonists, the issue of whether ancient pagans knew of the Trinity crystallized around the interpretation of the World Soul. Abelard’s views have two distinct phases. In the Dialectica (c. 1115–1116) he briefly describes Plato’s teaching about a World Soul in hostile terms: he dismisses both the idea of the World Soul itself and those who, “relying too much on allegory” hold that, when he wrote of the Good, Nous (Intellect), and the World Soul, Plato was talking about the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By contrast, in the Theologia “summi boni” (1121; TSB 1.36–59; 98:348–108:633) and the two later versions of the Theologia, Abelard argues at length that Plato and his followers were indeed referring to the Holy Spirit, by means of what he calls involucra or integumenta (literally “coverings”), when they talked of the World Soul, and to the Trinity when they talked of the Good, Intellect, and Soul. Misled by a dating of the Dialectica to the end of Abelard’s life, historians used to represent the passage there as a recantation of the position held in the Theologia. But, given the strong evidence for dating the Dialectica to c. 1116 (and certainly to before 1120, and so before the earliest version of the Theologia), Abelard seems rather to have begun by rejecting Plato’s teaching and then, when he had studied it more carefully, enthusiastically accepted it and its Christian interpretation.63
Abelard’s developing view of Plato was related to the thinking of predecessors and contemporaries. In the early twelfth century, the topic was particularly important for those masters who, against the fashion of the day, kept up the grammarians’ tradition of expounding the ancient classics. In his Metalogicon, John of Salisbury singles out two teachers who carried on this tradition; Bernard, master at Chartres at the turn of the century, and William of Conches (roughly a contemporary of Abelard, though longer living). Both of these masters made a speciality of commenting on ancient philosophical texts. Bernard wrote the earliest surviving medieval commentary on Plato’s Timaeus.64 William commented on the three main Platonist texts available: Macrobius’s Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (a work written by a Christian, but moving in the world of ancient Platonism), and the Timaeus itself.
Abelard very probably knew Bernard’s commentary on the Timaeus.65 But Bernard does not mention the identification of the World Soul with the Holy Spirit. William does. Moreover, William went further in expounding Platonic texts in a way which, despite the fact that their authors were pagans, made them carry, beneath a veil of fiction, truths acceptable to Christians.66 He usually describes the passages which he believed needed such non-literal interpretation as integumenta or involucra, a usage he may have inherited from Bernard of Chartres.67 It is very tempting, therefore, to think that there must have been direct influence, one way or the other, between Abelard’s and William’s thinking on this area.68 Investigation into the direction and chronology of the influence uncovers a more complex and, ultimately, very revealing story.
In his earliest commentary on Boethius’s Consolation (probably c. 1120), William of Conches identifies the World Soul and the Holy Spirit, and in three subsequent works – the Commentary on Macrobius, the Commentary on the Timaeus, and the Philosophia mundi, written in this order over the next few years – he mentions the identification, though without endorsing it personally.69 William’s earliest discussion, then, dates from the same time as Abelard first developed his second, favourable view of the World Soul, in the Theologia “summi boni,” or perhaps a little earlier or later. Abelard’s earlier hostility in the Dialectica very probably dates from well before William started writing. Yet the closest parallel with William is not provided by a text from the Theologia, but by Abelard’s early, hostile discussion of the World Soul in the Dialectica. Abelard here clearly bases his account of the World Soul not on a direct reading of Plato but on Macrobius (I.14.6) and, in rejecting the interpretation of those Christians who “rely too much on allegory,” he seems to have had a discussion like that in William’s commentary on Macrobius in mind. The point made by William that the World Soul/Holy Spirit has different effects on different people, giving more of its gifts to some than to others, is one of the main ideas taken up by Abelard in his brief discussion.70 Unless the accepted datings of the Dialectica and William’s earliest writings are wrong, this parallel suggests that by c. 1115 there was a tradition, probably attached to the reading of Macrobius, according to which the World Soul was identified as the Holy Spirit. Abelard violently rejected this interpretation, whereas William at first accepted it, and then gradually distanced himself from it and finally abandoned it.
There does not seem, either, to have been a direct influence of William on Abelard’s later, sympathetic discussion of the World Soul, or of that discussion on William. In the Theologia Christiana (IV, 140–144; 336:2218–337:2287) and the Theologia “scholarium” (the identical passage: II, 169–173; 490:2457–492:2519), Abelard returns to the very passage in Macrobius that had been behind his comments on the World Soul in the Dialectica and glosses it carefully. Although he and William think that Macrobius is talking about the Trinity, the lack of common ground between these remarks and William’s commentary is striking. Even the point about the diversity of gifts of the Holy Spirit is changed and subsumed into a wider, more complex reading.71
By examining more carefully the contrast between the two writers, however, one area of influence does emerge. Although one of William’s main methods of interpretation was the uncovering of integumenta or involucra and, in his commentary on the Timaeus, he would explain the discussion of the World Soul as a series of integumenta, nowhere does he treat the identification of the World Soul and the Holy Spirit as an integumentum or involucrum. From William’s point of view, it is merely a side issue. Uncovering Plato’s integumentum is, for William, a matter of finding a scientific account of the making of the world, acceptable to Christians, not of finding Christian doctrine itself hidden in it. By contrast, Abelard talks of an integumentum or involucrum almost only when he is explaining the true meaning of Plato and his followers’ remarks on the World Soul as being to do with the Holy Spirit and the Trinity.72 It seems, then, that Abelard discovered the notion of integumenta/involucra – very possibly through the work of Bernard of Chartres or even William himself – but adapted it and used it for a purpose different from William’s.
Abelard and William both wished, in some sense, to rationalize Christian belief. But their projects were different. William’s lifelong project was to give an account of the creation, nature, and man in terms of natural science, a task to which the doctrine of the Trinity was extremely peripheral. Arguably, he used the idea of integumentum/involucrum to further his scientific aims, suggesting that in some cases the belief taught literally to the ordinary faithful was a mere covering, and the true Christian doctrine, hidden except to the learned, fitted a more scientific account of nature.73 William deeply admired Plato. Yet it was not part of his project – nor had it been part of Bernard of Chartres’s – to establish that Plato had shared Christian beliefs. Rather, he wanted to show that Plato was a valuable scientific thinker, whose ideas did not contradict Christian teaching.
By contrast, Abelard was uninterested in natural science. His project of reformulating Christian doctrine in a rationally coherent way extended to almost every area, but the teaching on the Trinity was at its center. Seeing the Trinity as a doctrine propounded by the great philosophers of antiquity was an important part of Abelard’s attempt to show that it was fully coherent with a rational understanding of what God must be. For this task, the idea of integumentum/involucrum was an essential instrument. It is tempting to think that he borrowed this method from William, or at least owed it to the tradition in which William worked.
1. Two short but detailed accounts of Abelard’s life are Mews 1995, 9–20 and Marenbon 1997a, 7–35. Both contain full references to primary sources and to modern scholarship. Clanchy 1997 provides a vivid, imaginative, and persuasive account of Abelard’s life and background. HC is the main source for Abelard’s life up to c. 1132, but it must be used with caution: see Marenbon 1997a, 73–74 and chapter 2 below.
2. There has been much debate over whether the Council of Sens took place in June 1141 or June 1140. I am now inclined to follow Mews’s arguments for 1141: see Mews 1999, n. 23, 303–304.
3. The fundamental modern work on the chronology and canon of Abelard’s works has been done by Constant Mews, especially in the articles reprinted in Mews 2001; cf. also Mews 1995, 20–41. An account of Abelard’s writings, making extensive use of Mews’s work, is given in Marenbon 1997a, 36–93.
4. IP Isag., IP De in., and IP De div. IP Cat. is probably from a little later (c. 1108). Clanchy 1997, 103–104, suggests that these all may be works from the 1130s. He does not take into account that IP Isag. and IP Div. are striking examples of one approach to exegesis popular at the turn of the twelfth century, but not afterwards (see below, §III.1); IP Cat. is very clearly an earlier approach to some of the material which is put forward in the Dialectica and LI Cat. (I do not myself think that these commentaries should, as the abbreviation used in this volume might suggest, be identified with the Introductiones parvulorum mentioned by Abelard.)
6. Two texts witness stages of development of Abelard’s thought on this area between the commentary of c. 1118–1119 and the LNPS: they are the Positio vocum sententiae (ed. in Iwakuma 1992b, 66–73), probably reworked by someone other than Abelard; and the Glossae super Porphyrium secundum vocales (edited, atrociously, in Ottaviano 1933, 107–207), probably based directly on Abelard’s lectures – cf. Mews 1984.
7. Morin 1994.
8. There has been a long dispute over the authenticity of these “personal” letters, but the weight of evidence favors it: see Marenbon 1997a, 82–93; cf. also chapter 2 below. Abelard also wrote a number of letters that are not part of the collection. They are edited by Smits 1983.
9. A disciple of Abelard’s preserved a good deal of Abelard’s teaching from a later set of lectures (c. 1136–1138) on Romans and the other Pauline epistles: Comm. cant.
10. The version probably corrected by Abelard used to be known as the Sententie Hermanni. They have been ed. in Buzzetti 1983; a new and better edition by David Luscombe for Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis, is in press. The other lecture notes are Sent. Flor. and Sent. Par. On Abelard’s authorship of the Sententie, see Mews 1986.
12. The only published edition remains, so far, that in Patrologia latina 178 (the final sections, missing for the Patrologia edition, are printed in Buytaert 1968). There is an unpublished critical edition in Romig 1981.
13. It is very probable, though not certain, that these laments were sent to Heloise.
16. On the twelfth-century logical curriculum, see Marenbon 2000, 78–79.
17. The Glosulae are printed in some of the early printed editions of Priscian: see Rosier-Catach 1993 for the edition of an important section, and Gibson 1979.
18. Irène Rosier-Catach’s continuing project of work is illuminating this side of Abelard’s writing: see Rosier-Catach 1999; Rosier-Catach forthcoming-b.
19. See vita prima in Gibbon 1620, 14–17. There is an excellent discussion of this episode in Clanchy 1997, 91–92.
20. See Bautier 1981, 58–67.
21. A “working catalogue” of the commentaries on the Isagoge, Categories, and On Interpretation is given in Marenbon 2000, 98–122, 130–138.
23. The commentary (H5) is in Munich, clm 14779, ff. 44r–66r. Although anonymous, its attribution to Abelard is made certain by internal evidence: see the discussion, with quotations, in Iwakuma 1999, 97–98.
24. Cf. Clanchy 1997, 169.
25. The references to the Pharsalia in Abelard’s and Heloise’s work have been sensitively discussed by P. Von Moos: see especially Von Moos 1975 and Von Moos 1976. A different impression of Abelard’s range of reading c. 1115, shortly after he met Heloise, emerges if Constant Mews’s attribution to him (in Mews 1999) and Heloise of a large collection of love letters copied in a late medieval manuscript is accepted. Powerful arguments against accepting this attribution are put in a review (forthcoming in Journal of the Classical Tradition) by Peter Dronke of Wheeler 2000, and I shall give my own reasons for rejecting Mews’s arguments in a review of Mews 1999 in the same journal.
26. See Mews 1988.
29. See HC 81:654–660; 92:1038–94:1093 (with extensive quotations from Jerome); and 99:1259–1262.
30. For a general discussion, see Miethke 1973 and Luscombe 1975.
31. See Southern 1995, 198–233.
32. Ed. in Minio-Paluello 1956.
33. For commentaries by, or influenced by, Alberic, see Marenbon 1992.
34. Walter seems to have been the advocate of an extreme view about the need for selflessness that influenced Abelard (see Wielockx 1982 and 1988). He is also thought to have been the author of a logical treatise, Quoniam de generali (ed. in Hauréau 1892, 298–320).
37. The Isagoge is best studied in de Libera and Segons 1998 (with Greek text and Boethius’s translation, as used in the Middle Ages): see 1 (§2).
39. The fundamental research in this area has been carried out over the last decade or so by Yukio Iwakuma (who has kindly read and commented on the following section) and Constant Mews. See especially Iwakuma 1992b, 1996, 1999; Mews 1992, 1997, and 1998. It was Iwakuma who introduced the word “vocalist” into the modern scholarly discussion, although he prefers to use the word less precisely than I define it. My reconstruction of the pre-history of Abelard’s nominalism is rather different from that made by him or by Mews.
41. Iwakuma 1992b uses “vocalist” to describe in voce exegetes as well as those with views like, or derived from Abelard’s. Not only does this use mask an important distinction, it also does not reflect accurately the contemporary terminology: none of the explicit uses of the terms vocales or sententia vocum listed by Iwakuma is linked to in voce exegesis: they are all linked to vocalists, in my preferred, narrower sense of the term.
42. P4a and 4b, P7, and P30 (ed. in Iwakuma 1992b, 103–111, 74–100, 100–102). The figures (P4a, P30, C5, etc.) here and in the following paragraphs refer to the commentaries catalogued in Marenbon 2000.
43. For the identification of the author and the dating, see Iwakuma 1992b, 47–54. The text is edited in de Rijk 1959.
44. In Herimann, 275: 13–18, a passage referring to the years 1088 to 1092 describes Rainbert as teaching logic in voce – a method he describes as a novelty and contrasts with that of Odo of Tournai, who taught it in re “in the manner of Boethius and the learned men of antiquity.” The chronicle was written in 1142 or later (cf. p. 267). The passage has been much discussed by modern scholars: see e.g., Iwakuma 1992b, 41; and Mews 1998, 53–54.
45. Porphyry’s five predicables are, with regard to language, five different sorts of predicate: genus (“Man is an animal”), species (“Socrates is a man”), differentia – the word for the essential characteristic by which members of one species differ from members of another species of the same genus (“Man is rational”), proprium – strictly, the word for an accidental characteristic that is possessed by all and only the members of one species (“Man is able to laugh”), and accident – the word for any other non-essential property or relation of something (“Socrates is white”). On some interpretations, the predicables are also the things designated by these words.
47. Ed. in de Rijk 1959, 10:25–27, 19:9, 33:8.
49. Jaffé 1869, 187, §98 (“Ad Ruzelinum de vocibus”), ll. 5–8; Iwakuma 1992b, 41; Mews 1998, 52. These scholars also cite a passage from the Historia francica (in Bouquet 1781, vol. XII, 36C) where Roscelin is said to have been a follower, along with Robert of Paris and Arnulf of Laon, of a certain John, who is said to have held that dialectic is “vocal.” John need not, however, on this account be considered an in voce exegete, let alone a vocalist: he might merely have followed the type of verbal approach exemplified in William of Champeaux’s Introductiones.
51. Schmitt 1946, vol. I, 285.
52. See Jolivet 1992, 116–118. Here Jolivet develops an interesting account of Roscelin’s views, emphasizing his semantics.
53. Yukio Iwakuma has recently brought to light a Categories commentary (C27) which is described in its title as being by Master “Ros” – the abbreviation used by, for instance, Abelard, for Roscelin. He has very kindly supplied me with the transcription of about half of the text that he has so far made. The commentary does not, I believe, support the positions which the other evidence suggests were characteristic of Roscelin c. 1100. On universals, its position is that genera and species are sermones – that is to say (T4), Abelard’s position from the 1120s onwards, although sermo is a term used frequently by Boethius himself in his Categories commentary. The methodology of exegesis, too, is like the mature Abelard’s, as is its author’s tendency to bring theological questions into the discussion. If C27 is really by Roscelin, then my very tentative view is that it dates from c. 1120 and belongs to the world of discussion of Abelard’s Logica and LNPS.
54. Yukio Iwakuma has established this point (in Iwakuma 1996), although I do not interpret his findings in the same way as he does.
55. Cf. Abelard’s description of material essence realism in the LI Isag. 10:17–25. I am grateful to Christopher Martin for helping me to understand MER in this way.
56. Oxford Laud. lat. 67, f. 10ra, quoted in Iwakuma 1996, 121.
57. Oxford Laud. lat. 67, f. 10ra. I am very grateful to Professor Iwakuma for sending me his complete, unpublished edition of this commentary.
58. Iwakuma prints the relevant passage from the later version in Iwakuma 1992b, 44. Iwakuma used to date this version of P3 to 1060–1070, but now he believes it was written just before 1100. Iwakuma does not consider that the material essence theory is proposed in this commentary, but was devised by William in haste, on the basis of Anselm’s theology, only once Abelard had challenged him: see Iwakuma 1999, 118–119.
59. Iwakuma has shown how this theory is adopted in P14, also probably by William: see Iwakuma 1999, 119.
61. See Marenbon 1992, 53.
62. Whether the Nominales were so called because they considered universals to be nomina, and whether they were the followers of Abelard, has been disputed – but the most probable answer is “Yes”: see the papers from a conference on twelfth-century nominalism arranged by William Courtenay printed in Vivarium 30 (1992), especially those by Normore (1992), Iwakuma (1992a), and myself (1992).
64. The text is published, and its attribution to Bernard supported with powerful arguments, in Dutton 1991.
66. See especially Jeauneau 1973, 127–192; and Dronke 1974, 13–55.
67. Bernard uses the terms quite frequently in his Commentary on the Timaeus (cf. Dutton 1991, index verborum). The terms begin to have a metaphorical use in classical Latin, and Augustine’s use of them is close to that found in the twelfth century: see Dronke 1974, 56, n. 2 for a detailed discussion.
68. Various scholars have wished to make a connection: see Jeauneau 1973, 290; Mews 1985, 100–102; and Dronke 1974, 57–60.
69. Nauta 1999, 169:525–170:531; see the references given by Jeauneau in the place cited in the next note for references to the other works.
70. Compare Dial. 558.30–35: “Qui quidem Spiritus, cum totus ubique diffusus omnia contineat, quorumdam tamen fidelium cordibus per inhabitantem gratiam sua largitur charismata, quae vivificare dicitur suscitando in eas virtutes; in quibusdam vero dona ipsius vacare videntur, quae sua digna habitatione non invenit, cum tamen et [in] ipsis praesentia eius non desit, sed virtutum exercitium” and William of Conches, Commentary on Macrobius I.14.6 (Vatican Urbin. lat. 1140, f.80v): “Non enim omnibus idem confert. Septem (MS viii) enim confert haec dona: alii aliud, uni plus, alii minus.” (Jeauneau prints this passage in his edition of William’s Glosae super Platonem [Jeauneau 1965, 145, n. (c)].) I am grateful to Edouard Jeauneau for lending me his photographs of the whole manuscript.
71. The relevant part of William’s commentary is on ff. 79v–80v of Vatican Urbin. lat. 1140. In TC and TSch, one of Abelard’s main points is that Macrobius is talking about the Holy Spirit only in its function as a soul. It is in this sense that it “degenerates,” because it has its effects in time, not eternity. Abelard then brings in the multiplicity of the Holy Spirit’s gifts as a comparison: Macrobius refers to the Holy Spirit in a temporal way, although it is eternal, just as people refer to the Spirit as sevenfold although it is entirely simple. Jeauneau also draws a parallel between Abelard’s and William’s attempts to explain away Macrobius’s employment of the word “create” in connection with Nous (the Son) and the Soul (the Holy Spirit). But Abelard’s explanation – that by “is created” Macrobius meant simply “comes from something else” – is not found in William.
72. Abelard does not use either of the words “integumentum” or “involucrum” outside the Theologia. The only instance where one of them is used except in discussing the World Soul and the Holy Spirit/Trinity is at TC 2.126; 191:1922 (referring to the mystica involucra in the Bible).
73. See Dronke 1974, 50–53.