The Philosophy of Peter Abelard by John Marenbon (review)

642 BOOK REVIEWS progressing from his written words to an infinitely expressive Word which God alone can compose. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. PETER]. CASARELLA The Philosophy ofPeter Abelard. By JOHN MARENBON. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 373. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-55397-0. The life and work of Peter Abelard have been variously interpreted by scholars of various ages. His contemporaries viewed and valued him primarily as a logician, and David Luscombe's magisterial work, The School of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), reviews the evidence of Abelard's fame and influence as a teacher. Not long after Abelard's death, however, his philosophical (and, to a lesser extent, his theological) works fell into disuse, and his reputation was shaped, or perhaps deformed, by the reading and rereading of Bernard of Clairvaux's attacks. Renaissance and later humanists, particularly Fran\;ois d'Amboise and Andre Duchesne, the editors of the 1616 editio princeps of Abelard's works, opened his work to a wider public (despite those works being on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum). By the nineteenth century, Abelard had gained the reputation of an innovator, confident in the power of reason (and especially of his own), a tragic though "daring young man" who "brought religion back to philosophy, morality and humanity" in the words of Michelet's Histoire de France (1833). In all periods since the philosopher's death, however, the main entrance to study of Abelard has been through his correspondence. His correspondence with Heloise began to circulate in the thirteenth century, and was translated into French by the author of the famous Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun. From Petrarch to the present day, Abelard is most often first encountered as a controversialist and a lover: a reputation which has won him not a little sympathy, but which has evoked but limited interest in his philosophical works. The twentieth century has seen a return to an evaluation of Abelard as a philosopher and a logician: this has, in part, been the result of new editions of Abelard's logical works, beginning with Bernhard Geyer's 1933 edition of Abelard's commentaries on Porphyry and Aristotle, and continuing through the production in the 1950s of editions of almost all of Abelard's other logical works. BOOK REVIEWS 643 One of the most recent assessments of Abelard's philosophy comes from John Marenbon, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a prolific writer on medieval philosophy. His present discussion ofAbelard is divided into three parts, two of which conclude with an excursus. The first part discusses Abelard's life and works, and considers the problems of chronology and canon; the excursus concluding this part deals at length and with a good deal of completeness with the question of the authenticity of Abelard's correspondence with Heloise. Marenbon reviews in turn each claim that the letters are forgeries, as well as arguments that the whole correspondence was produced by Abelard as sole author (the thesis of Chrysogonus Waddell, which Marenbon regards as "implausible"). Of more importance, however, is Marenbon's plea for the letters to be read, not in isolation or abstraction, but within the context of their times and of Abelard's (and Heloise's) own thought. The second part analyzes Abelard's ontology, epistemology, and semantics, showing how he tried to reconstruct the ideas he found in Aristotle, Porphyry, and Boethius to fit his presumption that there is nothing which is not a particular. Abelard's nominalism is fairly and fully presented, and Marenbon introduces each chapter with a clear survey of the passages in the classical authors on which Abelard is commenting. Noticeably absent from this section, however, is any reference to the writings ofAbelard's more recent predecessors or contemporaries. His conflicts with his teachers, particularly his rivalry with William of Champeaux and his abuse of Roscelin of Compiegne, are mentioned in passing in the biographical section of this book, but the economy of the presentation of Abelard's logical writings in this section forces us to see these other masters through Abelard's eyes. The presentation also skips directly from Aristotle, Porphyry, and Boethius to Abelard...