Peter Abelard: Not actually a radical?

You know the classic debate between Anselm and Abelard, which has become a proxy fight between conservatives and liberals? I don’t think said debate ever actually took place. That is to say, Abelard didn’t disagree with Anselm’s position, which quickly became something like theological “common sense,” in any real way. The locus classicus for the “moral influence” theory of the atonement, i.e., the passage from the Romans commentary translated in the Classics of Christian Literature volume A Scholastic Miscellaney, asks some tough questions of both the patristic and the Anselmic view of atonement — and indeed I think those questions are really interesting in their own terms — but Abelard winds up embracing essentially everything he questions, even though he’s not able to come up with a satisfying answer. (There’s even a place where he affirms that Christ frees us from the lordship of the devil!) The “moral influence” theory itself, which is really kind of a misleading name, seems to be kind of a supplement to help us understand God’s motivations in a way that goes beyond the rather cold and claustrophobic scheme Anselm sets up. Yet he really does wind up affirming everything elsewhere — the debt thing, the satisfaction offered by Christ, etc. And in fact, you kind of need that scheme to be in the background to make sense of why Christ’s death is supposed to be an illustration of love — after all, no one would think that a loved one just arbitrarily submitting to death would be the most loving possible thing to do; there would have to be a pretty compelling reason.

A similar pattern can be found in his long digression on original sin, after his commentary on the “first Adam/second Adam” scheme. Given his ethics, there is no possible way original sin can make sense for Abelard — particularly the damnation of infants. He asks some really challenging questions that seem really interesting to me in terms of showing his presuppositions, but then he winds up saying, “Oh well, God knows best! Who are we to judge?” Due to the tendency to read him as a proto-Enlightenment thinker, one is tempted to claim that this is kind of a backhanded sarcastic thing, but no: I’m pretty sure he actually does want to be in total conformity to what he takes to be orthodox, but is just being honest about where he can’t make it work in his own mind.

(Of course, the odds of one of the commenters here having read the entire Romans commentary, which as far as I can tell is not available in any modern language, are pretty slim — in fact, I’m only about two-thirds of the way through currently. I do seem to have gotten through the stuff most relevant to my project, but the only way to know for sure is to read the rest, sadly.)