Moral Themes in the Works of Peter Abelard

Abstract

The article intends to focus on one of the main authors of medieval philosophy, Peter Abelard, and re-propose the importance of moral themes in his work, that involve not only aspects of anthropology, but also of ontology which have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In the light of this revaluation and re-proposal of Abelard’s work, the study intends to take as its formal object an ethic of relationship based on two measures: one objective (God and his will), and one subjective (man and his conscience). Studies of Abelard’s moral thought have often insisted on only one of these two measures conceiving so his reflection as “suspended” between two poles, which are contradictory if taken separately: the pole of a subjectivist morality, and the pole of a totally religious morality. Only the category of relation, conceived in the light of Trinitarian revelation – which unceasingly exercises Abelard’s thought – can avoid this risk and open to a hermeneutic that is, at the same time, faithful to the text and attentive to the deeper concerns of Abelard’s thought.