Sic et Non
Yes and No — 158 questions on which the Church Fathers disagree
Tradition: Latin scholastic theology
By doubting we come to inquiry, by inquiry to truth — the dialectical engine of the scholastic revolution
Sic et Non is the most influential methodological text of the twelfth-century renaissance. Abelard compiles 158 theological questions — on the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, ethics, and Scripture — and for each question sets out apparently contradictory passages from the Church Fathers (Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory, and others) without resolving them. The resolution is left to the reader, guided by the hermeneutical rules Abelard sets out in the Prologue: consider the context, check for textual corruption, distinguish between precept and counsel, attend to changes of opinion over an author's lifetime. This method — juxtaposing contradictory authorities and resolving them through dialectical analysis — became the structural template for Gratian's Concordance of Discordant Canons (c. 1140), Peter Lombard's Sentences (c. 1150), and ultimately the scholastic quaestio disputata that would define university theology for the next four centuries.
Author
Editions cited
- Sic et Non: A Critical Edition, ed. Blanche Boyer & Richard McKeon (Chicago, 1976–77)
- Peter Abelard, Sic et Non, in Migne, PL 178
- Excerpts tr. in Fairweather, A Scholastic Miscellany (Westminster, 1956)
School Embodiments
The Sic et Non method is the direct ancestor of the scholastic quaestio. Its Prologue provides the hermeneutical rules that every later scholastic would use to reconcile apparently contradictory authorities.
"By doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth." (Sic et Non, Prologue)
The work insists that dialectical reason must be applied to sacred texts and patristic authorities — no authority is above critical examination.
"The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning. … For by doubting we come to investigate." (Sic et Non, Prologue)
The Prologue's rules for resolving textual contradictions — attending to context, authorial intention, historical circumstances, and textual transmission — constitute an early and sophisticated hermeneutical method.
"We must consider whether the passage has been corrupted by copyists, or whether the author later retracted the opinion, or whether it was stated as a concession rather than a definitive judgement." (Sic et Non, Prologue)
By showing that even the Fathers disagree, the Sic et Non implicitly undermines the authority of tradition as a monolithic source, pushing toward the critical independence that would later characterise nominalist theology.
"The same words are used in different senses by different writers." (Sic et Non, Prologue, paraphrase)
Internal Tensions
The Sic et Non's great provocation is that it displays contradictions without resolving them. Abelard's defenders saw this as pedagogical; his critics saw it as subversive — an implicit argument that the Fathers were unreliable. The work raises but does not answer the question of what happens when dialectical resolution fails: is there a residual authority of tradition that trumps reason, or does reason always have the last word? Later scholasticism would answer differently at different moments.
I. Time
The work operates within the standard medieval Christian temporal framework: created time, linear history, eschatological horizon. The ontology of time is not a topic of the Sic et Non, but the method presupposes that the Fathers wrote in specific historical contexts — an implicitly historicist awareness.
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II. Space
Not addressed directly. The inherited Ptolemaic-Aristotelian finite cosmos is the background assumption. Abelard's interests in this work are purely theological and methodological.
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III. Matter
Not a central topic. The background metaphysics is the standard medieval hylomorphic framework: matter is created, real, and ordered by divine wisdom.
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IV. Observer
The implied observer is the rational theologian who applies dialectical method to authoritative texts. Active, critical, embodied. The emphasis on inquiry and doubt makes the observer the arbiter of textual meaning — a proto-modern stance. Plural observers under a personal God.
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V. Energy
Not addressed. The standard medieval framework applies: finite, conserved, irreversible.
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VI. Information
The Sic et Non is centrally concerned with the transmission, corruption, and recovery of information in authoritative texts. Information is conserved in principle but subject to loss and distortion in practice — hence the need for critical method. Personal conservation follows from the Christian doctrine of the soul's immortality.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Sic et Non resolves each dilemma
48 resolved positions across 4 dimensions · 9 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.