9 - Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
Summary
Peter Abelard's contributions to ethics are concentrated in two works, his Ethics (or Scito te Ipsum) and his Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian (or Collationes). There are ethical insights to be found scattered elsewhere in his works, but for the sustained presentation of an ethical theory, one can only turn to these two works. The Dialogue is actually two dialogues, one between a philosopher and a Jew, the other between the philosopher and a Christian, debating the relative merits of pagan philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. The Ethics concentrates on the development of a distinctively Christian ethical theory. It was to have consisted of two books.
The unfinished second book of the Ethics begins with a description of what Abelard takes himself to have accomplished in the first book, namely, the provision of an understanding of what sins are, how they are rectified, and how they differ from vices (Sc. 128.1–4; Spade 1995, 226). The second book was supposed to have taken up the topic of what it is to do good, or, as he prefers to put it in his more careful moments, what it is to do well (Coll. 163.3229–3230; Spade 1995, 404). The text was abandoned after one page. The Ethics, then, consists of a rather elaborate and zestful account of wrongdoing along with the merest of gestures towards an account of right-doing. It is as if Dante had neglected to write Paradiso after finishing Inferno. But as the newspapers attest daily, accounts of wrongdoing fascinate us more than accounts of right-doing: how many more people have read Inferno than Paradiso?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Abelard , pp. 279 - 304Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
- 4
- Cited by