Medieval Philosophy: Abelard’s Sic et Non

Medieval Philosophy: Abelard’s Sic et Non

Should you have antiquarian interests, you may at some future date want to read Peter Abelard’s famous treatise Sic et Non (1120) for a no-nonsense guide to critical thinking during the early Middle Ages. Merely reading its 158 theological questions would have been an education in itself for 12th-century university students. Within just a few minutes they would have discovered the kinds of questions that were routinely studied during that time.

If they had been fortunate enough to own a copy of this book before the age of printing that was to dawn three centuries later, they could have chosen any question that interested them about Christian and found both pro and con arguments by authorities that would at first glance have proved equally convincing to them.

What they wouldn’t have found, however, was a resolution of those questions, for that after all was the point of this groundbreaking, epoch-making, astonishing book. Students had to work their way through both sets of persuasive arguments to determine for themselves which arguments made the stronger case.

It was this personal challenge to each student that caused such a sensation in the medieval university world, which had always appealed to recognized authorities and their proof texts to answer such questions. But here students were confronted with two sets of authorities that contradicted one another; hence the title, Yes and No.

So why didn’t Abelard provide an answer key, but purposely left these questions unanswered? For two reasons: (1) to dramatize the inadequacy of appealing to authority as a reliable means of answering such questions. By juxtaposing two contradictory sets of arguments, students realized at once that appealing to authorities would have gotten them nowhere for one set contradicted the other. In this sense, Sic et Non was a very iconoclastic modern book that shattered centuries of precedent.

(2) It was human reason alone that could settle these questions by subjecting these pro and con arguments to critical analysis to discover which side of the question offered the more convincing case.

Students had now to decide for themselves not which authorities were right, but rather which authorities offered the stronger arguments. It was a tectonic shift in attitude that no longer had anything to do with prestige of an authority, but everything to do with the quality of evidence and argumentation. Welcome to the Modern World!

For the first time in their lives, students were invited to leave intellectual childhood where they had always been spoon-fed the “answers” to become mature adults by choosing for themselves which arguments and authorities were the more convincing.

This was a revolution in medieval thinking, and once word began to spread about what Abelard was doing, students came flocking to Paris from all over Europe to study with this exciting new master of dialectical thinking.

This newfound reliance on reason instead of authority brushed aside eleven centuries of conditioning on the primacy of authority over reason in searching for truth, which received its classic expression by Tertullian in the early third century: Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? Quid academiae et ecclesiae? What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? The Academy with the Church? (Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics, 7. 9).

Tertullian was rejecting the relevance of Greek philosophy to Christianity which had its beginning in Jerusalem. Divine Revelation rather than human reason as symbolized by Plato’s Academy in Athens was the only reliable way to truth.

And now, one millennium later, this point of view was being challenged by the use of reason not to deny Revelation, but to determine what Revelation had actually said, or, as Abelard himself wrote in his Prologue to Sic et Non: Dubitando quippe ad inquisitionem uenimus; inquirendo ueritatem percipimus (By doubting we come to questioning and through questions we perceive the truth).

In this sense, Sic et Non was not an iconoclastic book at all, but quite traditional in nature because it wasn’t denying Divine Revelation, which it accepted on faith, but what Revelation had actually said or meant as interpreted by various authorities, mainly the early Church Fathers, who attempted to explain it.

In his 6,400-word Prologue to Sic et Non, Abelard goes to great lengths in offering examples to suggest how critical intelligence could, in fact, reconcile some of these so-called “contradictory arguments.” His was a very subtle and sophisticated mind that wanted to engage the tradition in much more nuanced ways than had ever been done before.

One comes away from reading this Prologue realizing that Abelard was no destroyer of traditional authority at all but, on the contrary, its staunch defender in a way that his critics might not perhaps have had the wit to understand.

In fact, he comes across as the Church Fathers’ defense attorney, giving all sorts of possible reasons why they might not have been correctly understood, as well as providing extenuating circumstances that would mitigate their natural human errors.

The initial opposition to Abelard on the part of the older generation of churchmen gradually subsided over the coming decades as these critics gradually died off and replaced by the next generation, many of whom had once been Abelard’s students.

His dialectical way of thinking became a permanent feature of later Scholasticism, especially in the work of Thomas Aquinas, as well as in later philosophy up to our times.

But, alas, nothing is permanent in this world, and Abelard’s Sic et Non nevertheless was later considered so dangerous by Church authorities that it was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Even in ecclesiastical circles, job security, alas, always prevails.

It must be said in closing that Abelard’s effect on his times bore a remarkable resemblance to that skeptical Greek philosopher, Carneades, when he visited Rome and proceeded to argue both sides of a question. You may recall that the Romans were always intrigued by the Greeks even before the philosopher Carneades made this legendary visit to Rome in 155 BCE and created a sensation with his back-to-back two-day lecture course.

The first day he made a dazzling case for the noble cause of political justice, unleashing a barrage of irrefutable philosophical arguments why justice should be universally practiced by every tribe and nation, a performance that brought the audience of young Roman aristocrats to their feet in paroxysms of admiration and wonder.

The very next day he returned to demolish those seemingly irrefutable arguments, which at the same time implicitly justified all the actual Roman conquests and wanton depredations to the great embarrassment of Cato the Censor and the other City Fathers also present at this event that proved the danger of unfettered intellect to practical politics.

So dazzled by this second display of philosophical wizardry and oratorical skill that this audience of young Romans were beside themselves yet again, and the news of what had just occurred spread like wildfire through the city so that these young men were eager to learn this skill themselves.

Cato immediately drew two contradictory lessons from Carneades’ devastating performance: Should Rome want to demonstrate to all the world that it was indeed a just republic, it could return all the provinces it had unjustly conquered and annexed. This, to be sure, would never occur.

Should it choose not to do this, however, it would reveal to the audience — and to all of Rome — what a moral hypocrite it was in playing the role of a just republic that preached to other nations why they should at all times behave justly.

Both of these lessons made it clear that Carneades’ public ambush tore the mask of respectability from Rome’s public face to reveal it as just another predatory nation while preaching to the world the Gospel of political justice. It was this that alerted Cato to the terror of Greek learning!

If these young wealthy Romans could be instructed in this new revolutionary Greek logic it could topple the Roman republic itself by making plain the moral duplicity of what Rome had been doing for over a century and would continue doing for centuries more. This unraveling of Rome’s visionary plans for the future could never be allowed to happen, and so Carneades was banished from Rome the very next day.

Today, if you read widely in any field, you discover that there are authorities on every side of every question, so that one simply chooses which authorities are the most persuasive, which was simply what Abelard had taught. This approach strikes the modern mind as commonsensical, , but in the twelfth century it was heresy.

Another good critical read is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), which deals with the pro and con arguments about censorship and freedom of thought throughout history. Its eloquence and argumentative power have made it a masterpiece, which is now taught in every college and university in America, with the possible exception of Governor DeSantis’ Florida.

However, you should not believe one word of this marvelous book or the attempts to refute it, but keep an open mind and decide for yourself.

Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.