Don't Be Temerarious: The Fathers Rarely Erred, and Never Lied

Abelard's intro to his Sic et non prologue

In this fifth post, we turn to the issue of temerity (often translated colloquially as rashness) against the fathers.

When reading the fathers, one will find many cases of apparent contradiction. One’s intellectual posture must not become temerarious, roughly, hasten on to accusastions of them erring or (ever) of them lying. Rather, one must work through a rather long intellectual “checklist” before concluding, all other resources exhausted, that the father erred.

Abelard gives you that intellectual checklist throughout his prologue; but at the beginning, he commands the posture of non-temerity or (roughly) reverent humility before the fathers—something which is certainly needed in today’s day and age, and which is requisite for anyone wanting to engage in retrieval.

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Introduction to Abelard’s Prologue

We advance now to introduce Abelard’s prologue particularly–also with an eye to confronting the charges of immorality which are often leveled against Abelard, and first of all that of temerity in exposing the nakedness of Noah rather than covering it.

Scholarly approaches to the prologue today usually understand it as outlining Abelard’s program: it is a summary of his principles for solving the conflicting authorities given throughout Sic et non. Many scholastics preferred to give guidance for this in situ: e.g., Lombard in his Sententiae will cite a conflicting authority, but then immediately explain how to interpret it. Abelard, by contrast, abstracts all his concrete helps from the individual conflicts and issues them at the beginning as universal principles–then giving the conflicting authorities throughout Sic et non without further comment.

Scholars have thus attempted to identify Abelard’s various principles, or more reductively his solutions. Crocco for example flags five solutions found in the prologue: (1) identify different senses of words; (2) check for authenticity; (3) track development of the author; (4) distinguish between an author’s personal position versus his mere citation; and (5) classify varying degrees of authority. De Ghellinck, for his part, offers six: determine (1) unusual or strange senses of words; (2) inauthentic works; (3) retractions and differences between personal positions versus citations; (4) differences between an absolute law versus e.g. mere council; (5) equivocal senses (polysemy); and (6) degrees of authority. Bady himself identifies six reasons for merely diverse, but not adverse loutions, thus solving contradictions. They are:

1. “Linguistic and rhetorical reasons”: various improper locutions and equivocal senses.

2. “A psychological and theological reason”: “none but God can judge the exact intention of an author, nor explain the divine mysteries.”

3. “Textual reasons”: false attributions, corruptions, etc.

4. “Literary reasons”: retractions or mere citations of someone else’s position.

5. “A linguistic reason”: use of common language, rather than speaking according to truth.

6. “A moral and historical reason”: differences of circumstances, causes, etc.

Bady continues and identifies a possible seventh solution, viz., grading authorities; if it is at all a solution, he claims, it is only a subsidiary one, for it does not (as do the others) “defend the fathers through an explanation [la raison] (nulla possit absolui ratione…).”

From our perspective, all these attempts to identify Abelard’s principles are variously correct in part (e.g., they all flag Abelard’s first solution, involving equivocation); but none of them identifies all Abelard’s solutions or understands/explains exactly what each is, much less how they all coordinate together. Doing this will be our task in a later post.

There is a deeper problem, however; namely that the above attempts insufficiently apprehend Abelard’s actual intention in his prologue. Certainly, he gives principles for handling conflicting authorities, both those in his Sic et non and then throughout patristic writings more generally. However, merely doing this is not his exact intention–something clear, initially, from the fact that Abelard’s “program” in his prologue is not entirely applicable to his Sic et non text. The text includes, e.g., no “false attributions” of titles (as Abelard clarifies at the end of his prologue)--although his program explains how to handle these.

Abelard’s actual intention, we submit, is giving the intellectual grounds for avoiding temerity when approaching conflicting authorities, particularly temerity which would accuse the fathers of (1) errors or (2) lying. Abelard’s various principles/solutions thus supply or just are these intellectual grounds, and so are outlined accordingly. (Indeed, we will see later that [1] not accusing the fathers of erring and [2] not accusing the of lying are Abelard’s primary textual divisions of his prologue.)

Don’t Be Temerarious!

In order to see and understand this, let us consider Abelard’s opening and introductory paragraph, where he identifies this as the intention of his prologue:

“Although in such a multitude of words not a few sayings even of the saints seem not only diverse among themselves, but even adverse against each other, nevertheless we must not temerariously judge about those [saints] through whom the world itself is to be judged–as it is written: ‘The saints will judge the nations’; and again, ‘You also will sit and judge.’ We must not denounce them as liars or even despise them as erroneous–those of whom the Lord said, ‘Whoever hears you, hears me; and who rejects you, rejects me.’”

Unsurprisingly, given the sheer abundance of patristic writings, we also find many sayings “even of the holy” fathers which are not just diverse (e.g., that God is wise and good), but even adverse or opposed (e.g., that he is and is not wise; that he is merciful and just). What is more, we even find cases when two fathers are proposing directly opposed to each other in an argument: although Abelard does not flag this here, it is no accident that Augustine and Jerome (and Origen) loom large in his prologue, given their famous conflict. That conflicting authorities are found is manifest to anyone who reads the fathers; and we should remind that it is not temerarious to merely note this, especially when one immediately continues (as Abelard does) and explains how to handle it.

Nonetheless, despite these many adverse sayings, “we must not temerariously judge” about the holy fathers, Abelard immediately proclaims–either despising them quickly as erroneous or (and at the least) denouncing them ever as liars.

The issue for Abelard is not whether the fathers ever erred; Abelard holds that they sometimes did (unlike Christ and his apostles), and explains later how this is to be handled. The issue rather is the posture of temerity, which must be avoided. Abelard immediately gives us authorities to support this–by contrast to his pattern throughout Sic et non, his pattern throughout the whole prologue is straightforward authorities supporting his propositions. The saints will judge, not be judged; they will sit and judge, not rise and hear their charges; whoever hears the, hears Christ, but who rejects them, rejects him. Just as we do not have a posture of temerity toward Christ, just so we must not have such toward the holy fathers.