Rainer Michael Ilgner (1944-2013) died before completing plans to publish an English edition of Scito Te Ipsum that incorporated materials first published in German in his critical edition for Brepols’s Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (2001) and also from the translation and study he made ten years later as Scito Te Ipsum, Petri Abaelardi Opera Theologica IV for Brepols’s series, Fontes Christiani (2011). His widow, Hildegard Keith Ilgner, contacted Brepols with the idea of seeing her husband’s work finished. Professor Thomas O’Loughlin, editor of Brepols Library of Christian Sources, then secured the help of Dr. Declan Lawell, a classicist at The Blue Coat School in Liverpool who “checked and revised the whole edition” giving “[e]special attention to the English translation,” so that Dr. Ilgner’s work on Abelard could “deservedly reach a wider readership” (Preface, n.p.). To the credit of all involved is this handsome, polished, and well edited volume. Its contents have been arranged in the following manner:
I. Preface
II. Introduction, pages 9-104
1. A momentous letter
2. The Title Scito te ipsum
3. Ethica nostra
4. Time of composing
5. Announcement of the Ethica
6. Relations to other works of Abelard
7. Other sources and reference texts
8. The structure of the work and the question of its completeness
9. Basic Concepts
10. Scito te ipsum and the Synod of Sens
11. Manuscripts and Editions
III. Outline of Scito te ipsum, pages 105-6IV. Text and Translation [ specifically Book I and two paragraphs of the unfinished Book II], pages 108-259
V. Bibliography, pages 261-99
VI. Index, pages 301-9
Prior to Ilgner’s work, editions of Scito Te Ipsum, also known by its generic title, Ethica, had been published by Bernard Pez in 1721 in Augsburg, by Victor Cousin in 1849 in Paris and by David Luscombe in 1971 in Oxford. Iligner discusses the five extant manuscripts. Three, including the oldest which is from the twelfth century, A, Codex Latinus Monacensis 14160, as well as B, Codex Latinus Monacensis 28363 and E, Codex Latinus Monacensis 18597 are held in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. C, MS 296, is owned by Balliol College, Oxford and D, MS Lat. 76, is in Mainz’s Stadtbibliothek. [1] So thorough was the effect of Pope Innocent II’s order in 1141 to burn Abelard’s books that “[n]one of the manuscripts known today is in a French library” (102). Iligner traces the title from the ancient Greek maxim, γνῶθι σεαυτόν, through classical Latin, nosce te, to the medieval period. The imperative in Latin of the fourth conjugation verb, scio, scire, scivi, scitum in its singular future active form (singular: scito, plural: scitote) has the force of a commandment, i.e., a mandate for future action that you will do something, and is in itself interesting. While the future imperative of many verbs is frequently found in Classical Latin (especially in Plautus and Terence), the present imperative of scio, (singular: sci, plural: scite), although rare, also occurs as seen in this line from Ovid’sMetamorphoses, 15.43 “mandere vos vestros scite.” [2] The title itself stirred up controversy. Medieval theologians traced the idea of self-examination back to Origen’s commentary on the Song of Songs, 1.8 thus proving “the priority of the Bible over Greek wisdom because Solomon, the author of the Song of Songs, lived long before the seven wise men” of ancient Greece (12). For those reasons it had become a spiritual motto in Christian theology (11-12). According to Ilgner, men like William of St. Thierry thought that “borrowing spiritual words for a theological work” was “an abuse” (12-13). “There was apparently not one person who could or was ready to cope with” these words from Abelard (9).
Ilgner tells us that the treatise was “a late work, perhaps the last that Abelard wrote” (19) and by using evidence from a letter written by William of St. Thierry concludes that it was published “at the beginning of 1140” (20). The treatise is an examination based on many colorful examples of wrong-doing to differentiatevice from sin. To Abelard, sin was “contempt of God” [contemptus dei] and “every act of sin” was “determined by the triad of suggestio--delectatio--consensio [seduction, desire and consent] (60, 62, 63, 66). Paramount to all was intentio, intention.
Had this been the only treatise of Abelard’s to have come down to us one would been hard pressed to discern in it the spiritual and physical tribulations (including castration) suffered by this “Socrates of Gaul,” this “luckless Breton philosopher,” living in “the gloom of the century of iron” to use words from Abelard’s biographer Joseph McCabe. [3] Nor is it easy to find any obvious thoughts about his famous/infamous romance with Heloise. But other texts such as Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum and his correspondence with Heloise show us why this man’s tumultuous life brought him both praise and blame. Mark Twain in his Innocents Abroad (1869) described a visit made to the graves of Peter and Heloise in Paris and denounced Abelard as “a dastardly seducer.” Decades later however Thomas Hardy saw beauty in the immortal quality of their romance, and in his 1928 poem, “The Clasped Skeletons,” likened the bones of a couple found in an ancient British barrow grave to those of other lovers such as Paris and Helen and David and Bathsheba saying: “Ages before Monk Abelard/ Gained tender Heloise’s ear/ And loved and lay with her till scarred/ Had you lain loving here.” Scholars such as Elizabeth Zimmerman have pointed to Heloise’s contribution to Abelard’s ideas about intention in regard to sinful actions. And so Scito Te Ipsum should perhaps be read with that in mind. Would that we had Heloise’s own, Scito Te Ipsam, to match Abelard’s. If these questions interest you, you should take time to read this book.
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Notes:
1. For more see Julia Burrow, Charles Burnett, David Luscombe, “A Checklist of the Manuscripts Containing the Writings of Peter Abelard and Heloise and Other Works Closely Associated with His School, Revue d’Histoire des Textes (1986): 183-302 and in particular page 247 with its entry #285 onScito Te Ipsum. See also D. E. Luscombe, “Towards a New Edition of Peter Abelard’s Ethics or Scito Te Ipsum: An Introduction to the Manuscripts,” Vivarium 3 (1965): 115-27.
2. See Peter Barrios-Lech, “The Imperative in -to in Plautus and Terence,” Classical Quarterly 20 (October, 2017): 485-506.
3. See Joseph McCabe, Peter Abélard (London, Duckworth, 1901): 2, 11, 74, and 102.
4. See Elizabeth Zimmerman, “‘It is Not the Deed but the Intention of the Doer’: The Ethic of Intention and Consent in the First Two Letters of Heloise,” Forum for Modern Language Studies (July, 2006): 249-67.