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Updated: September 3, 2025
Among his pupils he numbered Gerson, who was also Chancellor of the University of Paris, another highly zealous and energetic reformer, a more avowed enemy of scholasticism and mysticism, of exaggerated austerity and astrology, eminently modern in the best sense of the word, whose political and religious enemies are his title of respect.
Not seduced by quite such a brilliant genius as Erasmus possessed into literary digressions, he had from the beginning fixed his attention on theology. He knew Plato and Plotinus, though not in Greek, was very well read in the older Fathers and also respectably acquainted with scholasticism, not to mention his knowledge of mathematics, law, history and the English poets.
In philosophy, properly speaking, he denounced what was hollow and empty in scholasticism, detesting that preference should be given to "the straw of words rather than to the grain of fact," and proclaiming that reasoning "is good to conclude but not to establish."
The reasons were partly political, probably, but these themselves were grounded in the new philosophical, anti-religious attitude. Of course, this affected the churches. There was a reaction from Protestant scholasticism within them which, later on, culminated in Unitarianism, Universalism and Arminianism.
What a comment on the very philosophy which Abélard himself taught! What better description of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages! But original and brilliant as was the genius of Abélard, he no more could have anticipated the new method which Bacon taught than could Thomas Aquinas.
His severe satire upon scholasticism and its professors roused the anger of those whom with scathing words he castigated.
Even at the present day the Oriental is swathed in mediaevalism. A journalist, for instance, however European his mode of life, will write leaders supported by arguments drawn from tradition and will reason after the manner of the old scholasticism. But a change may well take place. Islam may gradually acquire the spirit as well as the form of modern Europe.
Sharp and sudden was the transition from rabbinic scholasticism and soporific hasidic mysticism to this new world of ideas, flooded with the light of science, to these new revelations announcing the glad tidings of the freedom of thought, of the demolition of all traditional fetters, of the annihilation of all religious and national barriers, of the brotherhood of all mankind.
In verbose monologues, he combats the superstitions and fanaticism of the orthodox. This Jewish Tartufe is very different in his complexity from the character created by Moliere. Zibeon is a wonderworking Rabbi, a subtle sophist, a crafty dialectician. The waves of the Talmud, the casuistry of more than a millennium of scholasticism, have left their traces in his mind and personality.
"We see a Christ stripped of Jewish legend, and Greek speculation, and medieval scholasticism; moving simply and divinely among the ways of His Jewish world, a man among men.
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