Abstract

Peter Abelard is perhaps best known for having taken the role of master in the schools to celebrity status. Yet, dramatically public as his life was, the analyses he develops in his commentary on the letter to the Romans (c. 1134) and in the Ethica (c. 1138) of moral action, sacramental efficacy, even the atonement, center on interior subjectivity. The rightness of an act is determined in the first instance by the agent’s intention, and ultimately by God’s. The sacraments, such as baptism and penance, represent what God is accomplishing through his relation to the recipient, independently of the actions themselves or the work of the priest. Further, just as sin involves a turning away from God, so our redemption consists in the love aroused in us by the sacrifice of his Son. All of this displays Abelard’s capacity for analytic nuance; but it foreshadows, too, the shift that will divide Christian theology in the sixteenth century