Theologia Summi boni

The reader cannot fail to notice the erudition displayed by Abelard, encompassing almost entirely the knowledge available to the learned man of his age. Nor can the specificity of the text that most attracted the ire of those sitting in Soissons go unnoticed: not so much the substantive theses as the novel method. For Abelard, theological truth is neither "objectively" available, nor given only in personal mystical experience, but is attainable as the goal of a skillful dialectical process based on a hermeneutic of theological propositions inherent in the higher levels of natural human rationality. His argument is directed not so much to profiled theologians but to the widest possible range of literate, intellectually schooled readers. This is precisely what has led authoritative twentieth-century thinkers to identify him as the first great intellectual figure of modernity. 

Georgi Kapriev