Pierre
Abelard (1079-1142) was a truly brilliant man, but a very unpleasant one at
that, always looking for trouble and always finding it. The story of how he
seduced the niece of the canon of Notre Dame, refusing to marry her openly, as
this would have killed his promising ecclesiastical career, and how the good
canon hired a bunch of thugs to have him castrated for such treachery, is far better known than the highly
credible opinion that the ensuing romantic correspondence between the seduced
girl, now a nun, Heloise, and her terminally disabled lover, must all have been
Abelard’s own rather pathetic fake, in which Heloise herself had no part.
His
is a genuinely tragic story, but one cannot help seeing that most of that
tragedy was of his own doing, as he seemed to be an expert at making enemies
and a total failure at friendships, even though at the height of his fame he
was unquestionably the most popular man in France, and even in disgrace, living
like a hermit in a wilderness, students and curious tourists flocked to his
abode in swarms, so that even by the end of his life his popularity had never
quite subsided. For the record, three future Popes and several heads of state
found themselves among his appreciative students, which is in itself
astonishing, considering the scandalous way of life he was known to have led.
He
was accused of being a dangerous heretic in all his philosophical and
theological views, even forced, as a penance, to burn his own manuscripts, but
the irony of it was that it was not the content of his doctrines, but his
offensive attitude and pugnacious style, which caused him all his problems. And,
quite contrary to his style, the substance of his original writings was
sometimes so highly esteemed that it would become the Church’s doctrinal
position, like it happened to his doctrine of the Limbo, which effectively amended
the repugnantly unpalatable Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of the
unbaptized babies. In Abelard’s view there was a place in hell called Limbus Infantium, where such unfortunate
babies would not suffer for the sin of the adults, except for being removed
from the joy of dwelling in the presence of their Creator and God. This novel
doctrine subsequently received the approval of Pope Innocent III, and, later
still, St. Thomas Aquinas ipse enthusiastically developed Abelard’s original idea
further, by distinguishing between two kinds of eternal joy: natural,
experienced by unbaptized babies and righteous pagans, and supernatural,
which the unbaptized babies and righteous adults who knew not Christ through no
fault of theirs, were, alas, not privy to.
With
regard to other aspects of Abelard’s philosophy, they were also stunningly ripe
for being accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. Christian scholasticism was
just about to blossom under Aristotle’s almighty philosophical aegis, but,
ironically, the Western world had almost no knowledge of him at the time (it
would be arriving soon enough, but not yet, in Abelard’s time). But the
lingering problem of the Platonic universals, and its sister problem of
reconciling Christian faith with reason were intensely discussed, in fact, they
would appear to have become an obsession of the Church at the expense of
practically everything else. And thus in the absence of Aristotle’s upcoming
reassurance, Christian thinkers were desperately trying to solve it all by
themselves. Abelard seems to have been the most imaginative and successful
among them… in this respect.
In
its bare essence, Abelard promotes the view that universals are mainly words,
and that universality is not an ontological feature of the world, but a
semantic feature of linguistics. This makes him, in philosophical jargon, not a
realist, but a nominalist. Things that resemble each other, he
says, do not turn “resemblance” into a thing, but such resemblances do give
rise to abstract universals. But, on the other hand, he is far from rejecting realism
wholesale. Platonic ideas are not fiction, but they indeed exist in God’s
mind, as patterns for His creation. In other words, they are real, being
God’s original concepts.
Should
the reader have noticed a significant similarity here with Avicenna’s views on
the same subject, this does not mean that either of the two borrowed anything
from the other. Avicenna is known to have been all too familiar with
Aristotle’s works, and was undoubtedly under their influence, writing on this
subject. The fact that Abelard’s view is so close to his and Aristotle’s
indicates how ready medieval thought was at that time to embrace Aristotle as
the guiding philosophical light of Christian Scholasticism, and how evocative
Abelard’s genius was of the Geist of the time in Its monumental
journey through the dialectics of history.
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