Peter Abelard
Sep. 13th, 2007 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryChristian fundamentalists were already refuted before the movement came into existence by Peter Abelard—but I would think Jimmy Swagert had never heard of Abelard, not Pat Robertson read him.
In Sic et Non (Yes and No) he assembled a list of theological questions—e.g. should priests be celibate (not surprising in his case!)—and a catalog of relevant Biblical and patristic texts on each, some of which seemed to clearly give the answer yes, other just clearly the answer no. He did not try to reach a conclusion on any individual issue—that was not the point—but in the introduction gave the ground for doing so. Each text must be analyzed: How is language being used in each quotation? What is the context? Is the author speaking in his own voice, or is he perhaps stating a position he refutes in the next sentence? And so on. The literal meaning of the texts not only fails to resolve the issue, but in a corpus that is held to be infallible, yet is filled with irreconcilable contradictions, there isn’t any literal meaning that can be known, only the meaning that can be produced by analysis.
But, to be fair, in the Theologia Christiana he attacks those who espouse dialectic over and against revelation just as strenuously, with arguments that can be applied to modern science. His opponents there think that everything can be explained by human reason, that we ought to accept only what can be demonstrated by reason and reject appeals to authority except insofar as the authority’s position can be validated through reason. He insists that reason is limited and so complete knowledge must depend on revelation, yet concedes that only authorities who agree with reason as far as reason goes can be trusted when they move beyond it. Actually this last point is where he hangs himself. The context of scripture is so much better understood than in the thirteenth century that he would today be betraying his own principles to follow it against science. Our ability to gather evidence, if not our reasoning power per se, has also been expanded far beyond any limits he could have imagined.
In Sic et Non (Yes and No) he assembled a list of theological questions—e.g. should priests be celibate (not surprising in his case!)—and a catalog of relevant Biblical and patristic texts on each, some of which seemed to clearly give the answer yes, other just clearly the answer no. He did not try to reach a conclusion on any individual issue—that was not the point—but in the introduction gave the ground for doing so. Each text must be analyzed: How is language being used in each quotation? What is the context? Is the author speaking in his own voice, or is he perhaps stating a position he refutes in the next sentence? And so on. The literal meaning of the texts not only fails to resolve the issue, but in a corpus that is held to be infallible, yet is filled with irreconcilable contradictions, there isn’t any literal meaning that can be known, only the meaning that can be produced by analysis.
But, to be fair, in the Theologia Christiana he attacks those who espouse dialectic over and against revelation just as strenuously, with arguments that can be applied to modern science. His opponents there think that everything can be explained by human reason, that we ought to accept only what can be demonstrated by reason and reject appeals to authority except insofar as the authority’s position can be validated through reason. He insists that reason is limited and so complete knowledge must depend on revelation, yet concedes that only authorities who agree with reason as far as reason goes can be trusted when they move beyond it. Actually this last point is where he hangs himself. The context of scripture is so much better understood than in the thirteenth century that he would today be betraying his own principles to follow it against science. Our ability to gather evidence, if not our reasoning power per se, has also been expanded far beyond any limits he could have imagined.
