Peter Abelard and the Metaphysics of Essential Predication

On several critical occasions in his philosophical and theological musings,¹ we find Abelard having recourse to what is at heart the same philosophical simile—in one instance drawing comparison to a stone statue, in another to a bronze statue, in a third to a wax image. The common point of comparison is obvious; each of these examples gives us a case where some physical material (the stone, the bronze, the wax) has come to receive some manner of shape (the shape of the statue or image). The doctrine illustrated by these means is not, as might be supposed, a conventional Aristotelian form/matter metaphysics (which would receive its fullest airing in the Middle Ages only decades after Abelard’s death, with the translation of the relevant Aristotelian texts²). What is illustrated is in fact a string of doctrines, dispersed over the fields of metaphysics, theology and ethics; these may be itemized thus:

1. i. A vox is the pure, physical sound out of which a word is made; a sermo is that vox taken as invested with meaning (i.e., taken as a meaningful sound). The vox and sermo are in some sense the same thing and in some sense not, just as a statue and the stone of which it is carved.³

2. ii. The Persons of the Trinity are likewise in some sense the same thing and in some sense not, just as the wax image and the wax of which it is formed.⁴

3. iii. A punishment can be considered a good punishment or a bad punishment. But a good punishment can still be a bad thing, just as a bronze statue can be a perishable statue (in that it will sooner or later meet its destruction) but nonetheless an imperishable thing (in that it is identical with the bronze it is made of, the bronze being itself imperishable).⁵

(i) is a key doctrine in Abelard’s famous attack on realist theories of universals; (ii) is likewise a vital part of his presentation of Trinitarian doctrine (which itself is the subject of most of his theological writing); and (iii) is intimately connected with his account of good and evil. The passages which employ these statuary examples (as I shall call them) are thus of undeniable importance for Abelard’s larger theoretical designs, and this importance suggests that we may do well to take a special methodological interest in the examples themselves.⁶

1

I begin with a distinction seemingly removed from this topic, but in fact, as shall emerge, at the very center of it: between predication in essence (hereafter “essential predication”) and predication in adjacence (“adjacent predication”). This distinction attaches a meaning to “essence” rather removed from its usual, Aristotelian sense; for the twelfth century and earlier, particularly among logicians and grammarians, “essentia” is often employed in a sense very like that of “res” to mean, simply, “thing.”⁷ The notion of essential predication is founded on this usage. To read a sentence as involving an essential predication is simply to impute to the predicate the role of being the name of some thing. In this way the predicate is construed as behaving semantically the same way the subject does; the subject and predicate alike denote something, and if what the predicate denotes is identical with what the subject denotes then the sentence is true.⁸ So, if “Socrates is white” is taken in this way, “white” figures in the interpretation as the name of some white thing or other, and is held to denote this thing, just as “Socrates” is held to denote Socrates; the sentence is then held to assert the identity of these denoted things, as if it ran “Socrates is identical with some thing that is white.”

To read a sentence as an adjacent predication, by contrast, is to read the predicate as corresponding to some adjacent (i.e., inhering) form,⁹ so that the sentence is true when that inhering form actually does inhere in the thing denoted by the subject. So, if “Socrates is white” is taken in this way, “Socrates” still...