Yes and No

Among the special treats on this year’s reading list is a book I had looked forward to for decades: Peter Abelard’s Yes and No. Most people who read Abelard want to read his correspondence with Heloise. I was much more interested in the work that laid the foundation for the University of Paris. Abelard taught his lessons in odd corners of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and scores of students came and – bless them! – voluntarily paid Abelard for his services. And from these meetings arose the concept of Education in France.

What I thought I understood about the book was this: That Abelard wished to explore certain questions of Christian doctrine in search of authoritative answers. That he had compiled great numbers of quotations from the Bible as well as from Fathers and Doctors of the Church that purported to answers these questions. (Or rather that he had challenged his students to find all these passages.) That the authorities cited routinely differed in their answers, so that each question could, with support, be answered both “yes” and “no.” And that Abelard got in trouble for leaving his students in a muddle about essential tenets of the Christian faith and for never saying, “But of course the real answer to question X is this.” Now having read the book, I have to say my preconceptions were slightly wrong.

First of all, the only thing Abelard actually wrote in the volume is an introduction in which he provides several reasons for seemingly contradictory language in the Church's authoritative writings: ambiguity of words, false writings with a saint's name attached, corruption in text, statements later retracted by the writer, misunderstanding on the part of later readers of when an authority is quoting or speaking in the voice of a heretic, taking opinion for fact, and everyday use of speech that departs from literal truth (e.g., “this cup is empty”). We should not accuse the saints of lying, he says, but only Scripture can be said not to depart from truth. Even the saints themselves (especially Augustine) tell readers not to follow the statements they make in which they have erred. So Abelard prefaces the long litanies of conflicting quotations with a statement that none of the problems the reader is about to face mean that the Christian faith is a sham or that the Bible is not true or that the saints all just made things up.

Secondly, the core doctrines of the Christian faith are never questioned. None of the 158 questions touch, for instance, anything in the Nicene Creed. Abelard never sows doubt about the existence of God, his role as Creator, his existence in three persons, the divinity of Christ or of the Holy Spirit, the virgin birth, the actual death and resurrection of the Lord, or the efficacy of that death and resurrection toward salvation. Many of the early questions have to do with understanding the Trinity and the inadequacy of language to describe the Three-in-One. Is God triple, he asks? Well, as the title says, yes and no. Other early questions regard God’s foreknowledge, exactly how Christ took on humanity, etc. Starting somewhere around 40% of the way in, the questions begin to concern such questions as when the angels were created, whether Mary doubted Gabriel, the order of post-Resurrection appearances, which apostles had wives, which evangelist corresponds with which animal face on the cherubim, whether one baptismal immersion is enough, if James the Just was the son of Joseph, whether intinction is a suitable form for receiving communion, when and if one can remarry, whether Cain is damned, which sin is the second most serious, etc. I must admit that he does address whether baptism is necessary for salvation, whether infants have sin, whether works justify, the true presence of Christ on the altar, and whether grace comes before our good will or not, but I think most Christian students will have to admit that the answer to each of these questions is complex and cannot be summed up in a single word: yes or no.

Now I’m not a twelfth-century Parisian, so I don’t know how it came across at the time, and I wasn’t in Notre Dame to hear Abelard’s oral presentation of his lessons, so I don’t know what subtle nuances of meaning he may have supplied. But reading through Yes and No, I didn't get the impression that Abelard was thumbing his nose at doctrine or denying the truth of Christianity. However, the overall effect of the relentless verbal tennis does make it seem as if he thought the Church placed too much stock in authority, especially in proof texts taken out of context. Question: Did (and does) the Church depend too much on proof texts taken out of context? The answer is not “yes and no.”