4 - Fame without conscience

Summary

Fame and conscience are the categories, borrowed from St Augustine and employed by others, in which Abelard considers the most traumatic of his adversities in the HC. In 1121 he was condemned – wrongly, as he saw it – by a council at Soissons. That event and its aftermath represent a turning-point in the narrative of his life. Previously measured by the standards of fame, Abelard's experiences in and after 1121 then begin to be analysed in terms of conscience. That distinction, fundamental to the HC, is made by an author who, as he portrays himself in youth, had strutted and struggled on the public stage almost as if there were no private one. Not until he began to exercise the cognitive capacities of his emotions in the sequel to Soissons was Abelard capable of making the choices needed to redefine his responsibility to himself and to others. The moral maturity evinced at the end of the HC is far removed from the ethical adolescence described at its beginning.

Abelard's development is traced in an autobiographical work which is the natural and necessary complement to his Scito te ipsum. Self-Knowledge and conscience had been linked by ancient philosophers, and the link is maintained by this philosophical author in what is far more than a history of his calamities. That is why the traditional title, which rests on the fragile authority of a scribal rubric, is inadequate and misleading.