Philosophers and other Kinds of Human Beings according to Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury

Peter Abelard’s and John of Salibsury’s comparisons of the philosophical life with the life of other classes of human beings has something in common with the writings of the thirteenth-century Parisian master of arts, Boethius of Dacia. In fact, expressed in Aristotelian terminology, we find in Boethius’s most famous work, De summo bono, the following theses, so similar to those of Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury which we describe in this article: living a life without philosophy goes against human nature, and is rather like living the life of an animal; the intellect is that which is divine in human beings; human happiness and the highest good attainable in our earthly life is the knowledge and contemplation of the universe and its cause; philosophy, virtue and happiness are interconnected such that true happiness can only be reached through the practice of virtue, which can only be reached, in turn, through the practice of philosophy; the speculative life is superior to the active, and yet an active life which seeks philosophy and virtue is, even if the lowest, still a degree of the highest good and highest happiness in this life. As a result, it seems that very similar considerations concerning the different possible ways of living, and particularly the two different philosophical ways to live, appear in both Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury as Christian and, to a certain extent, even as monastic adaptations of Platonic, Neoplatonist and Stoic topoi; whereas, in the writings of the thirteenth-century, Parisian art masters they appear as a consequence of reading and commenting upon Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. One could ask whether Abelard’s and John’s attitude concerning ethical and meta-philosophical problems played a role in promoting the assimilation of Aristotelian philosophy. In fact, the difference between Abelard’s and John’s intellectual world and that of the thirteenth-century arts masters is so wide that the following words are probably correct: their attitude “prefigured rather than influenced the development of thirteenth-century scholasticism.” (Ch. Burnett)