Abelard’s work in ethics is influenced both by Stoic ethics and Christian theology.
Its most characteristic doctrine is the primacy of consent (or intention) over action. An emphasis on the believer’s interior life, and the importance of the very quality of thoughts themselves underlying actions, is typical of the tradition of Patristic ethics. Abelard carries this emphasis to its logical conclusion by claiming that the sin of a sinful consent is not added to by the character of the ensuing act (or diminished if by chance there is no ensuing act). The act itself is sinful only in the derivative sense that it arises from a sinful consent. How then do we tell whether a consent is sinful? Not only do ensuing acts not tell us, but preceding vices or desires do not tell us either, since one may consent in a meritorious way in spite of the prompting of one’s vices or desires.
Abelard has seemed to some commentators to be left with no objective reference point for determining sinful consents. But in fact he does address this concern: a consent is sinful when it constitutes an attitude of contempt (contemptus) for God. It does so when it is formed explicitly in violation of one of God’s laws. To consent in this way, of course, one must actually know what God’s laws are in the first place, and this requirement might seem to sit uncomfortably with the fact that those in pagan cultures are in no position to be apprised of Christian revelation. But Abelard has a broad conception of God’s law. It includes the superseded Old Law of the Old Testament, and the incumbent New Law of the New Testament, but it also includes many self-evident precepts of natural law, such as the edicts against murder, mendacity, adultery, and so on. These precepts are available as items of Old Law or New Law, but they are also available independently of the content of Christian revelation. Pagan thinkers clearly had cognitive access to precepts like these, as attested in their writings. But indeed, it does not require special intellectual gifts to achieve this access. The general run of adults, so long as they are sound of mind, achieve it by virtue of having conscience (conscientia). This capacity is what permits widely shared insight into self-evident truths - especially, but not exclusively, into the self-evident truths of natural law. Humans in general have this insight, so their consents in violation of natural law are genuinely instances of contempt for God. That is why those consents are sins. Those humans who have benefited from revelation and have access to what Abelard calls ‘‘positive law’’ - formerly the Old Law, now the New Law - have all the more capacity to identify consents which instance such contempt.
The capstone of Abelard’s ethical system is his notion of charity (caritas). This receives a fairly specified definition: love of God for his own sake or of one’s neighbors for the sake of God. When present as a settled disposition of the soul it constitutes a virtue. Indeed, it is the central virtue. If sin is contempt for God then habitually referencing actions to one’s love for God will be a barrier to sin. Abelard comments approvingly on past approaches to virtue theory which simplify the field first by identifying
Cardinal virtues and then by founding these on the one virtue of justice; he proceeds similarly, except that he places charity - a theological virtue, not a pagan one - in this central role. It is the chief means of meritorious consents, but more importantly it is the chief end of human striving, the highest good for human beings. The reward of heaven is the protracted exercise of this love in the form of a beatific vision. It might seem intuitive to distinguish meritorious consents from the heavenly reward to which they lead, but on Abelard’s view the consents and reward both reduce to the same thing: the love of God (just as sinful consents and hell both reduce to the same thing: the hatred of God). Heaven is not, properly speaking, even a reward, he maintains. It is an extension of the inner life of charity that leads to it.
See also: > Bernard of Clairvaux > Boethius > Categories
> Divine Power > Heloise > Logic > Modal Theories and Modal Logic > Natural Law > Parts and Wholes
> Roscelin of Compiegne > Schools in the Twelfth Century > Time > Universals > Virtue and Vice
> William of Champeaux
World History
