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[ 90 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
innocent. It is not the deed but the intention of the doer which makes the crime, and
justice should weigh not what was done, but the spirit in which it was done.
12
Subsequently, Abelard would draw on such thoughts, as well as on the Gospels and
Augustine, to craft a subjective approach to ethics.
In his
Ethics, or Know Thyself
(c. 1135), Abelard claimed that sin, which is
contempt of God, does not consist in unwholesome desires, say, for forbidden
pleasures, but in the intentions and consents that may grow out of such desires.
Once intended, the act itself is morally irrelevant. Virtue, on the other hand,
consists not in behavior but in living in love with God, while vice consists in liv-
ing outside of love with God. Personal conscience is binding even when it is
mistaken. Abelard even went so far as to argue that
those who killed Jesus were
not sinning since they thought they were doing the right thing. He thereby hor-
rified many of his contemporaries.
As also in the cases of Otloh and Guibert, Abelard and Heloise’s approach
strikingly illustrates a new movement in understanding and assessing conduct
away from the consideration of external behavior and toward that of inner moti-
vation. One telling symptom of this newfound fascination with exploring the
inner space of human subjectivity was the advent, between 1000 and 1200, of pri-
vate confession as part of the church’s normal discipline. Christians were encour-
aged to identify themselves not just with their public deeds but, as we saw also in
the case of Heloise, with their private intentions, desires, fantasies, and dreams.
And since what one
really
desires might well be hidden from one’s own view, they
were encouraged to ferret out their true motivations. For instance, an early con-
fessional manual enjoins Christians to examine “all your thoughts, every word
you speak, and all your actions,” including “your dreams, to know if, once awak-
ened, you did not give them your consent,” being careful not to “think that in so
sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant.”
13
This newfound fascination with human subjectivity also showed up in other
literature of the twelfth century. Crétien de Troyes, whose Arthurian legends
were written between 1165 and 1190, went to great lengths to describe not only
external actions but also individual points of view. In his stories, individuals are
portrayed as having conflicting inner subjective perspectives on the same events,
partly due to their different beliefs and previous experiences but also to such
things as their differing visual perspectives. In general, he showed greater inter-
est than had others before him in the diversity of peoples’ minds. He also stressed
the tension between the ideals of his heroes and societal norms.
14
Prior to his
work, narratives that told of different people, even of people in conflict with one
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