Peter Abelard and the Natural Law, Introduction

HAVING REVIEWED ST. ANSELM OF LAON AND THE SCHOOL OF LAON and their contribution to the natural law, it would seem reasonable to look at Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and his contributions to the natural law. The natural law was a central feature of Peter Abelard's project to give due emphasis to reason at a time when perhaps reason was not getting its fair share, and so the alliance between faith and reason was being strained. "The idea of law, especially natural law, was central to this project" of Peter Abelard in trying to "give a rationally coherent, ethically centered explanation of the main elements of Christian belief." Marenbon (2007), 271. To begin with, Abelard was convinced that Christian belief was reasonable (which is not, of itself a controversial position), and thus had been anticipated by the best of pagan philosophical reasoning. As part of this vision, Abelard included the practical reason, and thus moral reasoning. Abelard "needed natural law to give a foundation to his ethical theory, which, without it, would have collapsed into unsustainable subjectivism." Marenbon (2007), 271. The controversial aspects raised by Abelard's teaching and innovations were largely the result of improper emphasis and balance on his part, an endemic imprudence and brashness, an injudicious use of language, and his remarkable talent, vastly surpassing his unquestionable intellectual talents, of arousing controversy and attracting enemies.

Bas-Relief of Abelard

Born in the hamlet of Pallet in Brittany, Peter (or Pierre) Abelard was the son of Berengar, the village lord, and his wife, Lucia. You would not have known it from the quiet in the village, but the world was engulfed in the so-called "problem of the universals," and there was an acrimonious debate among the scholars, as the Realist school was on the descendant, and the Nominalist school was on the ascendant. Both of Abelard's parents were of apparently pious disposition, as, after their children reached adulthood, they entered the religious life.

In any event, Peter was the eldest of the children. Groomed for a military career so as to follow in his father's office, he opted instead to devote himself to learning, and had a remarkable aptitude for it, equaled only by his ability to land himself in controversy. Exposed early to the teachings of the monk Roscelin "the Nominalist," the first of that time, Otto of Freisingen states in his chronicles, to institute the "sentiam vocum," primus nostris temporibus sentiam vocum instituit. Mon. Germ. Histor., Script. XX, 376. (The sententiam vocum was one of the anti-Realist's solutions to the problem of the universals, and the precise relationship between genera and species that was bandied about during this debate. What were genera? What were species? Were they a thing (res), or where they mere intellectual constructs, "voices" (voces), as it were? Did only individual humans have real existence, and "humanity" not? Was "humanity" a res, a real thing (hence "Realism") or merely a vox flatus, merely a concept or name (nomen) (hence "Nominalism")? Whether Roscelin was the progenitor of the sententiam vocum or not, it is indisputable that he was a budding anti-Realist, though certainly he did not advance der reine Nominalismus Occams, the pure nominalism, that William of Occam (ca. 1288-ca. 1348) was to advance. But this is not the time or place to discuss Roscelin.) The "problem of universals" aside for the time being, Roscelin headed a school at Locmenach, near Vannes. After spending some time there, Abelard left to study at the Cathedral School in Paris to study dialectic under the Realist William of Champeaux (ca. 1070-1121), the erstwhile pupil of St. Anselm of Laon, the inspiration for the School of St. Victor, and the future bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne. (In marked contrast to Roscelin, William of Champeux was an Über-Realist and anti-Nominalist. In the matter of universals, Abelard was to adopt a mean position between Roscelin and William of Champeaux, but whether that teaching could be characterized as a moderate Realism or a moderate Nominalism is hard to tell.) For a time, Abelard tried to found a rival school, at Paris, then at Melun and later at Corbeil, but he eventually returned to Paris to study rhetoric under William of Champeaux. For a period of time he went to Laon to study Scriptural studies or exegesis under St. Anselm of Laon; however, he soon found himself embroiled in controversy, and was forced to leave the School of Laon. Eventually, after William of Champeaux retired to the monastery of St. Victor for a time, Abelard managed to get a position at the Cathedral School in Paris, where he was nominated canon, and taught both dialectic and rhetoric for a decade between 1108 and 1118, a time, he admits in his Historia Calamitatum, was filled with vanity and pride, not unmixed with imprudence and mortal sin.

Bas-Relief of Héloïse

It was here where he met, and fell in love, and had an improper and highly irregular dalliance with the bright, young Héloïse, niece of canon Fulbert, whom he was supposed to tutor, but instead seduced and impregnated with a child, his son, who would eventually be born and given the name Astrolabius (meaning "Astrolabe," a scientific instrument for measuring the position of stars), a name perhaps rivaled only by Frank Zappa naming his daughter Moon Unit. They were secretly married, but that did not stop canon Fulbert from exercising self-help to stop the relationship. He had Abelard forcibly castrated, and with that operation Abelard became an unwilling eunuch for the kingdom of Heaven. Both the scandal and the mutilation caused by the castration effectively ended Abelard's career at the Cathedral School in Paris. Héloïse retired to Argenteuil where she donned the nun's habit.

No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole;
Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!
Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me,
Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.

(Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard").

Detail of Abelard and Héloïse by Vignaud

Abelard found refuge in the Abbey of St. Denis, where he took the Benedictine habit, a habit which did not fit him well. He soon found himself at odds with the monks there and was relegated to a priory or cella, a sort of branch of the monastery. He soon shortly found himself embroiled again in controversy, this time because of his quarrels with followers of the School of Laon, who accused him of unorthodox, Sabellian opinions regarding the Trinity. He was summoned to appear before a council at Soissons which was presided over by Kuno, Bishop of Praneste, who acted also as papal legate. Although he was not condemned by the Council, he was ordered to recite the Athanasian Creed, and to burn his book on the Trinity. As a result of the activities of his Abbot, Adam, he was also sentenced to imprisonment in the Abbey of St. Médard. He fled to Troyes where he founded an oratory, named after the Paraclete. After Abbot Adam's death, his successor, Suger, absolved Abelard from his predecessor's censure, and Abelard resumed the life of a Benedictine monk. In 1125, he was elected Abbot of the Abbey of St. Gildas de Rhuys on the coast of Brittany. Héloïse took over the Oratory of the Paraclete at Troyes and became Abbess of that institution. Communication between Abelard and Héloïse continued throughout their life, and that infelicitous love affair, as well as Abelard's struggles against authority, has made Abelard the darling of all Romantics and Rebels, from the medieval Roman of the Rose authored by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun to the Romantic-styled paintings of Abelard and Héloïse by the Frenchman Jean Vignaud (1775-1826) and the Englishman Edmund Blair Leighton (1853-1922). It is telling that the remains of Abelard and Héloïse escaped the cultural iconoclasm of the French Revolution. In fact, they seemed to have been honored by the spirit of the Jacobin in that in 1817, these citizens of the ancien régime were given a place of honor at the cemetery of Père Lachaise in Paris.

They were effectively revered as romantic saints, mythologized as forerunners of modernity, at odds with the ecclesiastical and monastic structures of their day. They became celebrated more for rejecting the traditions of the past than for any particular intellectual achievement.

Constant J. Mews, Abelard and Heloise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4.

Abelard and His Student Héloïse by Edmund Blair Leighton

Abelard's tenure as Abbot of St. Gildas was not particularly felicitous. Faced with recalcitrant monks, who viewed him as overly strict, he found himself constantly battling their efforts to be rid of him. Ultimately, around 1136 he returned to Paris where he resumed his career as a teacher, and where he taught, among many others, John of Salisbury.

A Decidedly Byronic Abelard
(Whether before or after castration is difficult to tell)

Once again, Abelard's teachings on the Trinity were called into question. This time, however, his adversary was the redoubtable and influential St. Bernard. Ultimately, the dispute resulted in a council at Sens in 1141, which condemned a number of propositions that were contained in his writings. Abelard appealed to Rome. The sentence of the council of Sens was confirmed by Innocent II. However, here the Venerable Peter of Cluny stepped in (beati pacifici!), and, as a result of his efforts, obtained a mitigation of the sentence against Abelard, reconciled Abelard and St. Bernard, and offered Abelard respite at Cluny. Eventually, Abelard became a member of that monastic community, and taught at that monastery's school. He died in 1142 at Chalôn-sur-Saône, and was buried at the oratory he founded in Troyes. We may perhaps hope that in his death he finally found the peace he mentioned in his hymn O quanta qualia sunt illa Sabbata:

That heavenly city is truly Jerusalem,
Whose peace is forever, whose pleasure's supreme,
Where desire never goes beyond its object
And reward is not despised as short of its goal.

Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
Cuius pax iugis est, sum iucunditas
Ubi no praevenit rem desiderium
Nec desiderio minus est praemium.

(English translation from James J. Wilhelm, ed., Lyrics of the Middle Ages (1990))

Abelard's opera may be divided into philosophical works and theological works. His philosophical works include the Dialectica, a treatise on logic, the Scito Teipsum or Ethica, a treatise on moral philosophy, and glosses on Porphyry, Boëtius, and the Categories of Aristotle. His theological works include the famous Sic et Non (Yes and No), the condemned Tractatus de Unitate et Trinitate Divina (Treatise on the Divine Unity and Trinity), an updated and enlarged version of that same treatise under the title Theologia Christiana, the Dialogus inter Philosophum, Judaeum, et Christianum, the famous Sententia Petri Abaelardi (Sentences of Peter Abelard) also known as the Epitomi Theologiae Christianae. There are a scattering of exegetical works, hymns, and sequences also attributed to Abelard. In addition, Abelard wrote an autobiographical work entitled Historia calamitarum (History of my Misfortunes), and is famous for his correspondence to Héloïse.

Abelard and Héloïse from a Manuscript of the Roman de la Rose

Ironically, in the area of the natural law, Abelard predicated his thinking on the ideas of the School of Laon, which he otherwise excoriated. Specifically, he adopted its view, which was consistent with received teaching from the Church Fathers, that the old law, the vetus lex, and the new law, lex nova, were distinct. The Bible presented the situation of Abel (as well as others) that lived virtuous lives before the law of Moses, indeed, before Abraham was given the rite of circumcision. How was this to be explained other than by a better understanding of law? The notion of the natural law seemed the ideal vehicle for understanding how this could be. The ultimate justification was found in St. Paul's invocation of this "law of the heart" in Romans 2:14-15. Thus, the natural law was the sort of constant in all law, including both the Mosaic law and the law of the Gospel, and accordingly also governed the Patriarchs who came before the revelation of the old law to Moses at Mount Horeb. "Abelard adopted his basic structure of thinking about law from the School of Laon." Marenbon (2007), 272. However, given the Laudinensian scholars' emphasis on the Scriptures, they did not focus on the pagan evidences of the natural law. "The writers of the School of Laon had not been at all concerned with Greek antiquity in their discussion of natural law." Marenbon (2007), 272. That is, the Laudiensian school did not analyze the natural law from the vantage point of reason. Though he was criticized for it by his contemporaries, Abelard departed from the theologians of the School of Laon by emphasizing the philosophical overlap between the Scriptural notion of the natural law and the philosophical notions. The Abelardian emphasis allowed the natural law to be viewed as something suprahistorical, in that, wrested from the scriptural history, "natural law [was] no longer restricted to a particular chronological period," nor, for that matter, to a particular people. Marenbon (2007), 272. This shift in emphasis by Abelard resulted in a greater appreciation for the natural law in guiding all men and all cultures in all history. In the next series of blog entries, we shall review some of the more important Abelardian works that discuss his concept of the natural law. We will first look at his Collationes (Comparisons or Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian), a work celebrated for the clear distinction between natural law and positive law, perhaps the first, most clear distinction of the kind in legal thought. Following that, we will look at his Scito Teipsum (Know Yourself), a work sometimes entitled Ethica (Ethics). Abelard's moral teachings, which influence his view of law, are significant for their emphasis on intention of the actor in analyzing the morality of acts, or at least the actor's culpability. We shall also review Abelard's unusual take on the Golden Rule in reviewing his Problemata Heloissae, as well as his Commentary on Romans. In discussing all these matters, we will rely very heavily on the excellent guidance of John Marenbon, whose many works on Peter Abelard are superlative.

St. Anselm of Laon: Glossing the Natural Law

HOWBEIT THAT AFTER ADAM'S FALL there were men that were considered virtuous and pleasing to God before the advent of the Mosaic law? How is it that those who flourished between Adam's fall and the revelation of Mosaic law, for example Abel, suffering as they were from original sin, can be said to have lived virtuous or morally good lives, lives consonant with the will of God? Could these men, without either the Law or Faith in Christ, be saved? This was one of the several questions that preoccupied the Dean and Chancellor of the Cathedral at Laon, St. Anselm of Laon [Anselmus Laudinensis], who flourished in the early 12th century. We do not know the date of his birth, but we know that he died in 1117. His brother, Ralph, also an exegete and theologian, took over headship of the School of Laon for at least another decade.

St. Anselm of Laon was the headmaster of the famous school of theology and Scriptural exegesis, the Cathedral School of Laon, a school which Crowe states "dominated the theology of the early twelfth century," one that was "particularly preoccupied with the natural law." Crowe, 80. Modernly, the School of Laon is hardly known. So perhaps R. W. Southern's comments are true with both respect to Laon and to St. Anselm and the School of Laon: "Laon was a city with a great past, an uncertain present, and an insignificant future." R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), II, 29.

St. Anselm's chief work is his Glossa interlinearis or Glossa interlineans, a commentary on the entire Vulgate; how much of it is actually his and not also his schools' work is hard to evince, though scholars have tried. The Glossa interlinearis was regarded as one of the two chief exegetical works of the medieval church, its only competitor being the Glossa ordinaria of Walafrid of Strabo. These two glosses on the words of the Latin Vulgate were celebrated in their day. Their names come from the fact that by the 12th century, Bibles were published with one gloss on the text (attributed to St. Anselm) interlineated above the words of the Biblical text which it explained, while the other (Strabo's, the older and more "ordinary") was marginalized beside the Biblical text it sought to elaborate. Thus we find published Bibles with the titles as follows: Biblia latina una cum glossa ordinaria Walafridi Strabonis et interlineari Anselmi Laudunensis, "Latin Bible With the Ordinary Gloss of Walafridi of Strabo and the Interlineated of Anselm of Laon." Eventually, the practice was extended to add the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra and the Additiones of Paulus Burgensis at the foot of the published Scriptures. Essentially, these bibles were "study" bibles avant la lettre.

The Rebdorf Psalter: Book of Psalms with Gloss by Anselm of Laon

From the Schøyen Collection

In his Encyclical on Biblical Studies, Pope Leo XIII mentioned both St. Anselm of Laon and Walafrid of Strabo in discussing the state of Biblical studies from the time of the Church Fathers up until the time of the Scholastic theologians:

From this period down to the eleventh century, although Biblical studies did not flourish with the same vigor and the same fruitfulness as before, yet they did flourish, and principally by the instrumentality of the clergy. It was their care and solicitude that selected the best and most useful things that the ancients had left, arranged them in order, and published them with additions of their own - as did S. Isidore of Seville, Venerable Bede, and Alcuin, among the most prominent; it was they who illustrated the sacred pages with "glosses" or short commentaries, as we see in Walafrid Strabo and St. Anselm of Laon.

Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus, No. 7. It is likely that the Glossa interlinearis is not entirely the product of St. Anselm himself, but an amalgamation containing some of his work and the work of others synthesized by his Cathedral School.

St. Anselm's opinions (known as sententiae) during his morning lectures, and re-discussed during the evening sessions or collatio or declatio, were recorded by his students or perhaps by amanuenses, and these were later gathered together in florilegium collections, often with little systematicization. Sabø, at 248; Southern, 36 ff., 45. Like the Glossa interlinearis, in such florilegium collections it is often difficult to discern which sententiae are St. Anselm's, and which are wrongly attributed to him.

Systematic Sentences attributed to St. Anselm of Laon

Not much is known about St. Anselm of Laon. And there is a split in camps as to how he ought to be considered. On the one hand, Gilbert, Abbot of Novigento, in his preface of his Bartholomew, bishop of Laon, characterizes St. Anselm of Laon as one of the two clear lights of his age among all the stars, the sun of the age, as compared to the other, lesser light on the left, being his brother, Ralph, also a biblical scholar and theologian. The Church, it may be noted, has canonized St. Anselm of Laon as a Saint, who is thus raised to her altars. In Book III of that life, Gilbert characterizes St. Anselm is the man of all France, whose liberal disciplinary and tranquil moral teachings enlightened the entire Latin-speaking world. On the other hand, poor St. Anselm is stained by the acerbic pen of the master wit and enfant terrible, Peter Abelard. In his Historia Calamitatum, Peter Abelard describes St. Anselm thus:

And so I enrolled under this old man [senem] whose great name rested on long practice rather than on ability or learning. If one doubt about some point consulted him, he left him in grater doubt. He was a wonder in the minds of his listeners, but a nobody in the estimate of his questioners. He had a remarkable command of language, but it was despicable with respect to meaning and devoid of sense [sed sensum contemptibilem et ratione vacuum]. While he kindled a fire, he filled his room with smoke but did not light it up. His tree appeared heavy with foliage to those viewing it from afar, but to those who came near and looked closely, it was found fruitless. And so when I went to this tree to gather fruit therefrom, I found that it was the fig tree which Our Lord cursed, or like the old oak to which Lucan likened Pompey saying:

"There he stood, the mere shadow
Of a great name, like an oak
Towering in a fruitful field."

Realizing this, I did not delay long in the idleness of his shadow. I went to his lectures more and more irregularly, and for this the distinguished among his students were offended with me as despising a man of such renown. . . . [T]hat old man arrogantly forbade me to continue in the place where he was teaching the work of interpretation which I had entered upon . . . .

J. T. Muckle, The Story of Abelard's Adversities (translation of Historia calamitatum) (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieaval Studies, 1964), 21-22, 24.

Abelard and his Student Heloise Surprised
by Master Fulbert by Jean Vignaud

Without doubt, Abelard's writing was tendentious. In assessing Peter Abelard's vituperation, and the objectiveness of its critique of St. Anselm, one may recall that the insufferable Abelard was thrown out of the Cathedral School of Laon by no one less than St. Anselm. In defense of St. Anselm, we do not have his side of the story. And Abelard, like Rousseau many years after him, seemed to have suffered from narcissistic, unstable, impatient, almost misanthropic personality, and was burdened with a history of considerable moral failures though unquestionably gifted with a brilliant mind. Modern scholars seem to weigh in with Abelard, but this is probably largely a matter also of tendentiousness.

Were St. Anselm and his followers the most significant impetus in the revival of theology experience in the twelfth century, the inventors of the influential systematic collection of sentences, and the progenitors of the scholastic method and miracle? Or were they rather as Peter Abelard saw them, "essentially reactionary, concerned with the reiteration, and not with the critical analysis, of biblical and patristic authority." Marcia L. Colish, Studies in Scholasticism (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 7. Or were they, as Professor Colish suggests, something in between? Perhaps more soberly, the School of Laon was "far from stagnant, if far from systematic or architectonic in its view of theology." Colish, 11. In any event, it is true that the thought process and methodology of St. Anselm of Laon and his school, though they may have contributed to the rise of the Scholastic method, were "largely non-philosophical, biblical, and patristic" in outlook. Colish, 9-10.

Vulgate with Glosses

St. Anselm of Laon insisted on reconciling both biblical and patristic authority, so that the Church Fathers could be understood by means of the Scriptures, and the Scriptures by means of the Church Fathers. For all that, he does not disdain his contemporaries, the moderni magistri, and so, in his analyses, we see him reference St. Ivo of Chartres, William of Champeaux, and even his brother Ralph. Magnæ Sabø, ed., Hebrew Bible Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), I/2, 248. , at 248-49. In their effort to incorporate the notion of natural law into their system of Scriptural interpretation, St. Anselm of Laon and his school developed a "characteristically theological" concept of the natural law, Crowe, 80, one that found its roots in Scripture and tradition, and not reason. The natural law, however, though revealed as existing in Scripture remained a rule of reason. Crowe's synopsis is as follows:

The natural law, the law of behaviour for humanity, is anterior to the Mosaic law (which became necessary precisely because men had neglected the law of their nature); it is the fruit of the ratio naturalis which can know God and discern the basic maxims, such as the prohibition of homicide and, in a general formula, the Golden Rule of not doing to others what you would not have done to yourself.

Crowe, 80. In our next blog entry, we shall look at the allegorical interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew in the Ennarationes in Evangelium Matthaei (162 PL 1227-1500). Though Migne assigns its authorship to St. Anselm of Laon, most scholars believe such attribution incorrect. We will also look at the Systematic Sentences of St. Anselm of Laon, though St. Anselm's authorship of these again has been questioned. Whether written by St. Anselm or not, these two texts will at least impart the flavor of the form that the School of Laon's teaching on the natural law had at the cusp of the transformation of Europe's staid, monastic and unitinerant past, where the Benedictine ruled. In St. Anselm of Laon and the School of Laon we are at the threshold of Europe's intellectual future: the universities, where scholasticism and the itinerant orders, in particular the Dominicans and Franciscans, flourished. It was as if the Western mind, disciplined by the rule of the monastery and the safety of its cloisters and fellow monks, was about to be let out freely to walk about the land with his Scriptures and his Glossa in hand, encountering in a great adventure, in the rough and tumble of academic disputation, the pagan Aristotle, the Jew Maimonedes, and the Muslim Ibn Sina. Eventually, the intellectual turmoil caused by the joinder of these various streams would be channelled and synthesized by the intellectual giant St. Thomas Aquinas. This would include the doctrine of the natural law. But we are still a long ways away from that.