Reading Saving Paradise: Abelard

Abelard

Nearly all church leaders supported the Crusades, but the dissenters’ arguments  reveal what was at stake in 11th and 12th century debates about war, ethics, and the will of God.    

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was one of the dissenters – and one of the most original theologians of the 12th century.  Abelard’s thinking challenged the scripture-based, traditional theologies of his day.  He was a leader in the scholastic movement, a new system of education outside of monasteries and castles.  Abelard was also a critic of Anselm’s atonement theology, and he dismantled its logical underpinnings:

How cruel and perverse it seems that God should require the blood of the innocent as the price of anything,, or that it should in any way please Him that an innocent person should be slain – still less that God should hold the death of His Son in such acceptance that by it He should be reconciled with the whole world. 

For Abelard, Jesus’ atoning death did not restore God’s perfection; rather, it revealed God’s already complete and perfect love.  Anselm’s atonement theory had argued that human sin angers God – which lessens God’s perfection – and therefore God demands payment for sin.  Abelard saw that Anselm’s atonement theory depended on the idea that God lacks something; but Abelard believed that God lacks nothing because his perfection is eternal.  God's perfect love does not need humans to be punished. 

Then why did Jesus die?

Anselm had argued that Jesus’ death paid the price God demanded; but Abelard argued that his death created a deeper love for God than would have been possible without it. 

Abelard believed that the human heart needed to be moved from fear to love, and this was what Jesus’ death made possible – conversion, a change of heart.   When they saw Christ’s suffering on the cross, people could feel overwhelming compassion for Christ. Turning away from self-love, they could now love so unselfishly that they could suffer unto death.  

What is real repentance?

Like earlier theologians, Abelard saw Christ as the victim of human sin.  But where others had demanded repentance by terrorizing sinners with fears of hell’s torments, Abelard said that fears of punishment or hopes for reward indicated self-interest, not pure and selfless love.  For Abelard, real repentance was selfless, brokenhearted love. 

Abelard also rejected the traditional idea of original sin, arguing that human beings could not be blamed for something inherent in their nature. Sin could not be inherited; it was created by human choices.    

Unlike many of his peers, Abelard avoided characterizing groups of people as inherently sinful and condemned.  His recognition of the plight of the Jews shows his emphasis on compassion for victims.  He thought Jews and pagans were saved partly through their moral behavior; their intent was not evil, so they were not culpable.  (This novel description of sin was one reason he was charged with heresy.)  

Can Christians ever use power to stop evil?

 

Seeing Jesus’ suffering led Abelard to a moral call to recognize injustice.  His theology set the stage for what would become liberal theology’s basis for ethical action: compassionate pity for those who suffer, mixed with a deep sense of guilty responsibility, and an aversion to explicit uses of power. 

But because he focused so sharply on selfless love, Abelard implied that no use of power could ever be loving.  By making love an inner feeling and intention, Abelard offered no ethical way to use power to stop harm. 

Abelard and community

Abelard’s focus on individual choice and intention led him to argue that people only needed a personal and internal relationship with Christ; relationships with others had nothing more to offer.  For Abelard, communities were no longer essential to the process of transforming the sinner or healing the victim.  He argued that God absolved individuals who had a change of heart; the church confirmed absolution outwardly, but it had already occurred inwardly through the Spirit.

Abelard’s interpretation of Jesus’ atoning death could be used to romanticize suffering and death.  And though Abelard knew that human beings could be inconstant, he still built his ethics of love on the individual, subjective, self-conscious self.  He called Christians to sacrifice themselves in love, so they were totally giving up themselves to the other.  Hence his system of ethics and love oscillates between intense subjective introspection and self-denial and oblivion.

Abelard, a man of strong feelings, inspired intense feelings in others.  He was a famous teacher when he first met Heloise, one of his most brilliant students.  When the scandal of his relationship with Heloise threatened his career, he turned to a monastic vocation to restore his reputation.  But he was a failure at community life; his morally strict administrative style made him unpopular with his own monks, and even prompted them to poison him. 

Because of the controversies surrounding him, many of Abelard’s works were lost to history.  The brilliant teacher and theologian eventually became famous not for his theology but for his love affair with Heloise.