Week four of PHIL2400 saw us study the letters of Abelard and Helouise (although I think that Abelard would have prefered the title to have placed Helouise's name first) to shed some light upon the ethics of intention.  I didn't enjoy this material at all.  Perhaps if it was a course in literature or even Christian Metaphysics I would have found it more engaging, but as a reflection upon the ethics of intention specifically relating to the Passions, I found it lacking.

I'm sure that you could find these letters online if you so desired, although there are a fair few of them.  We focused on letter's one through four.  I don't want to bore you with all of my oppositional ramblings but I will draw attention to a couple of points that I've mentioned in the margins.  The first point, from letter one, I'll come back to as there was considerable disagreement in the tutorial regarding its meaning.  I don't like to disagree with my T.A.s that often but I just wasn't swayed by his position on this point.  More of that to come though.

Primarily I found these letters reinforced some general Christian (if I may say so, being so broad) metaphysical concepts such as the power of prayer on God's obligation to reciprocate upon prayer.  Further, and something that I assumed the Gender Students would have mentioned, is that the letters also reinforce the subordinate status of women in Christian society with quotes such as 'a capable woman is her husband's crown' and 'a good wife makes a happy husband'.  Although the same letter does say that a woman's faith canlead her husband to salvation with the following claim: 'the unbelieving husband now belongs to God through his wife'.

Secondly, there is a major section of the second letter, Abelard's first reply to Helouise, that presents a rather good case against racism within Christianity.  Abelard uses all sorts of language to argue that the soul is important and not the body in discrimination, he says:

The Etheopian woman is black in the outer part of her flesh and as regards exterior appearance looks less lovely than other women; yet she is not unlike them within, but in several respects she is whiter and lovelier...

The following quote I thought was quite good in this regard too:

He [God] changes her colour, that is, he makes her different from other women who thirst for earthly things and seek worldly glory, so that she may truly become through her humility a lily of the valey, and not a lily of the heights like those foolish virgins who pride themselves on purity of the flesh or an outward show of self denial, and then whither in the fire of temptation.

Not really getting into much that can be called ethics yet, I know, but as I mentioned above I found more in this reading that was applicable elsewhere than to a course on Ethics and the Passions.  The last quote above does have ethical import, but I feel it's not very profound.  It is quite a common position to hold, and was certainly not an original position of Abelard's, to claim that humility is a virtue and that outward presentations of virtue are not what's important in ethical theory.  But this does seem to have some import relating to the ethics of intention, this week's subject.  The foolish virgins have a bad intention, they are intending to mislead people, perhaps their congregation, into thinking that they are virtuous, however, their real intention is is to be found in their fire of temptation.  I'll come back to the first point I alluded to above, the one that I disagreed with my T.A. upon as this, hopefully, will shed some more light upon the ethics of intention to be found in these letters.

This is basically two sentences as follows and is from the first letter from Helouise to Abelard:

Wholly guilty though I am, I am also, as you know, wholly innocent.  It is not the deed but the intention of the doer that makes the crime, and justice should weigh not on what was done but the spirit in which it was done

A little cryptic, I know.  Now my T.A.s position was that Helouise was claiming that she is not responsible for a negative occurance that happened to Abelard, namely his castration, as she didn't intend for it to occur.  I find this reading a little far fetched as Helouise was not implicated at all in this act anyway.  She didn't organise the castrators to come, she didn't perform the castration, so how could she be implicated anyway?  She was not the doer nor was she the person with the intention. 

On my reading of the above passage I felt that there was a distinction between the terms intention and spirit.  I also feel that this is not relating to a specific incident (it doesn't refer to a specific incident explicitly in the text) but to a general ethic of intention.  My reading is that Helouise is saying that even if one intends to perform a bad act, when justice is handed down the spirit in which that act was committed is what's important.  What defines an act as bad, nawadays, is generally socially constructed ideas.  To be safe I'll call the Bible a set of rules from God so what was considered bad to Helouise was rules of the Bible and the Church.  If we apply my reading to the relationship between Abelard and Helouise then I thni the import becomes apparent.

Abelard and Helouise were having pre-marital sex, undoubtedly a negative act in their time, and both of them intended to have this relationship.  Their subsequent marriage plays no role in analysing this act as in an ethic of intention each individual intention needs to be analysed indiependantly.  Helouise is therefore saying, if applied to this case, that even though she intended to commit a negative act, possibly a sin, the spirit in which it was done was positive, founded in love, so Abelard and herself should not be judged harshly.

Maybe my reading is a bit far fetched but I do feel it has more relevance to a study of the ethics of intention.

Next week is mid-semester break and then on to Descartes.....really looking forward to that one.