ABSTRACT
In 1971, Professor Engels drew up an agenda for research. But in 1972 California came to Cluny: the late John Benton, then Professor in the California Institute of Technology, argued, during another important colloquium devoted to Peter Abelard and held in Cluny, that the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise was a forgery dating from the second half of the thirteenth century. Dialectic is then the means of telling the difference between truth and fa hood. In matters of Christian belief dialectic is subordinate to the revela of God. Both dialectical theologians and their antagonists recognized that God transcends the rules of Aristotelian logic. Language changes and loses its original meaning when people speak about God. The more one reflects on Professor Engels’ illustration of the distinction in Abelard’s writing between a plain style and rhetorical decoration, the mor its importance appears to grow.
