Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours by John Marenbon (review)

Three books concerning Abelard have lately come to my hands. The volume presently under review, Babette Hellemans’s (edited) Rethinking Abelard: A Collection of Critical Essays (Brill, 2014), and Juanita Ruys’s The Repentant Abelard: Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s ‘Carmen ad Astralabium’ and ‘Planctus’ (Palgrave, 2014). Surprisingly, John Marenbon’s book impressed me least of these three volumes. While Marenbon claims to have written his book ‘so as to be comprehensible to readers who are approaching him [Abelard] for the first time’ (p. 3), only first-time readers with very good Latin and considerable research skills would find it easily accessible. Abelard’s works are not by any means all translated into English: of the thirty-four entries concerning his works in the present volume, only thirteen are in full or partial English translation, and these are usually very difficult to find. Surprisingly, the list does not include the two very revealing (and vastly more fascinating than the dry material Marenbon deals with) original works by Abelard that Ruys has brought into public ken with excellent translations, introductions, and annotations: the Carmen to Abelard’s (and Heloise’s) son, and the lovely planctus in which Abelard casts his ‘repentance’ in regard to the same Heloise. While not all were available in translation when Marenbon wrote his book, they should at least have been listed among Abelard’s works. It is worth noting that David Luscombe, in his ‘review’ article ‘Peter Abelard: Some Recent Interpretations’ (Journal of Religious History, 7.1 (1972), pp. 69–75), starts with the planctus and provides overall a much shorter and more enticing introduction to the study of Abelard than the book under review here does.

Abelard in Four Dimensions has really been written for keen Abelard specialists. There is a reasonable life of Abelard presented in Chapter 1, but Marenbon goes far too deeply into obscurities regarding the dating of Abelard’s works and his personal disbelief in the break-through offered brilliantly in Constant Mews’s The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) is perplexing.

The only Abelardian argument to receive any detailed treatment by Marenbon is termed ‘NAG’ and represents the view that ‘God can do no other than he does’. This is a view few moderns would be interested in (and even contemporaries were sceptical). By p. 87, we have been taken through Abelard’s argument here and the views of his opponents. Marenbon does so very competently indeed, but I am afraid that I find this territory uninteresting and out of touch with today’s problems; I doubt it would tempt any person contemplating further work on Abelard to proceed.

Marenbon’s ‘four dimensions’ seem to me to be somewhat platitudinous and they do not really succeed in taking the reader very far into the problem of dealing with past philosophers. Having offered a few such generalities, Marenbon chooses to look carefully at the relationship between Anselm and Abelard. Why pick Anselm, who, Marenbon claims, had not much influence on Abelard? Why not choose a larger figure in Abelard’s development, such as, say, William of Champeaux, or even Roscelin? This chapter takes us up to Leibnitz, but only a specialist will likely be able to engage with Marenbon’s speculations here, and Leibnitz seems to have got some of Abelard wrong, anyway (p. 144).

Marenbon then takes us into a learned discussion of modern writers on Abelard, who are all part of ‘the re-discovery of Abelard as a philosopher that has taken place over the last forty years’ (p. 146). This takes us to p. 199, after which Marenbon’s Conclusion makes claims for originality and scholarly improvements in Abelardian research, which I leave to the reader to assess and judge.

While this book has been written with...