- Length
- 720 pagesBoyer and McKeon, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition, Chicago, 1976-77 - Latin only
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
Sic et Non
A collection of contradictions with no answers, which invented the method that European philosophy then used for three hundred years. Abelard's point was not that the authorities are wrong but that a reader who has noticed them disagreeing has been given something to do.
- Date
- c. 1120
- Author
- Peter Abelard
- Region
- Paris and the Paraclete
- Language
- Latin
- 1976 Latin, Boyer and McKeon The critical edition; no complete English version exists Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Opens — Starts a line of argument nothing before it was answering
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Absorbed — Its argument became assumption and stopped being cited
The method it demonstrates became the standard form of every scholastic work for the next three centuries, so completely that the book itself stopped being needed.
What the book says
A book that consists almost entirely of other people's words arranged to disagree. Abelard poses about a hundred and fifty-eight theological questions - whether faith should be supported by reason, whether God can do everything, whether sin is ever pleasing to God, whether it is permitted to lie - and under each he sets the authorities who say yes against the authorities who say no. Augustine against Augustine, Jerome against Ambrose, scripture against scripture. He supplies no resolutions. What he does supply is a prologue, and it is the whole point of the exercise: a set of rules for what to do when the fathers appear to contradict each other. Check whether the text is genuine or has been misattributed. Check whether the passage has been corrupted in copying. Check whether the author later retracted it. Ask whether the same word is being used in two senses, whether one statement is a general rule and the other a particular case, whether one is a concession and the other a command. Only if all of that fails should the reader weigh the authorities against each other. The prologue closes by saying that doubt leads to enquiry and enquiry to truth.
What it argues
That contradiction between authorities is a starting point rather than a scandal, and that resolving it is a skill with rules. The prologue's procedure - test authenticity, test transmission, test whether the author changed his mind, distinguish senses, distinguish general from particular - is a working method of textual criticism assembled two centuries before anyone called it that, and it treats the authoritative text as something that must be interrogated before it can be obeyed. The body of the book is the demonstration: a hundred and fifty-eight cases where the interrogation is plainly necessary, laid out so that the reader cannot avoid doing it.
How it argues
By arrangement alone. Abelard writes almost nothing in his own voice after the prologue; the argument is made by juxtaposition, and the reader who wants a resolution has to produce it. This is a teaching device and it is also a philosophical claim - that authority does not settle questions by itself, since authorities disagree, and that reason is therefore required not as a rival to tradition but as the only way of using it. He is careful never to say that a father is wrong, which is what kept the book out of trouble.
The moment
Paris in the first decades of the twelfth century, with the cathedral schools filling with students and Abelard the most famous and most disliked teacher in Europe. His autobiography describes a career of humiliating his own masters, the affair with Heloise and its violent end, and two condemnations - at Soissons in 1121, where he was made to burn a book of his own with his own hands, and at Sens in 1140, secured by Bernard of Clairvaux. Sic et Non belongs to the period between. It was never itself condemned, and it is the book most likely to have alarmed the people who condemned the others.
How it travelled
By being absorbed. Within a generation Peter Lombard's Sentences had taken the method and supplied the missing half - the same collection of conflicting authorities, now with resolutions - and the Sentences became the textbook every theology student in Europe had to lecture on for the next four hundred years. The scholastic question form that follows, with objections stated, a contrary authority given, a determination and then replies to each objection, is Abelard's procedure formalised. Aquinas's Summa is built entirely of it. The book that started it was printed only in 1836.
The strongest objection
That the method is corrosive whatever Abelard intended, and his contemporaries were not being foolish to think so. A procedure that requires every authoritative text to be checked for authenticity, corruption and retraction before it can be applied has made the reader's judgement the final court, and the deference is formal at that point. Abelard's answer - that he never says any father is wrong, only that they cannot all be read the same way - is technically correct and does not meet the objection. Bernard of Clairvaux's charge was not that Abelard had reached heretical conclusions but that he had made everything a matter for argument, and on that he was right.
Why read it
The prologue, which is short and is one of the founding documents of critical reading in Europe. The body is a reference work of contradictions in Latin with no translation, and nobody outside the field needs it. Read the prologue next to Abelard's autobiography, which is short, extraordinary and in print everywhere.
- First printed
- 1836
- First in English
- 0
- Digitised
- Partial
The number of questions differs between manuscripts as Abelard added to it. There is still no complete English translation; the prologue has been translated many times, the body almost never.
The prologue is available in several English versions, some of them out of copyright. The full text exists in English only in fragments.
Where it stands
Absorbed, and in a strong sense: the method outlived the book so completely that most people who have used its descendant have never heard of it. It is read now by medievalists and by historians of textual criticism, who recognise the prologue as an early statement of principles the discipline arrived at independently much later.
On quoting this book
The Latin is public domain, but the book consists of quotations from other authors and there is no complete English version to quote from. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Which state of the text is definitive is unresolved, since Abelard kept adding questions. Whether the book is a teaching exercise, a genuine attempt at reconciliation, or a demonstration that reconciliation cannot always be had is argued, and the absence of resolutions supports all three readings. And how far the prologue's rules are original to Abelard rather than assembled from canon-law practice already in use is a real question in current scholarship.