Peter Abelard's “Medeival Ethics“

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In Peter Abilard's "Ethical Writings", he entertains the idea that the soul may be injured. He believes the only way to injure the soul is to offend god. He calls this sin.

There are different ways of sinning, among them ways where the act isn’t then considered sin at all. The two things that compose a sin are the will, and consent. When they agree, in most cases, a sin is born. For example, if a person thinks about having sex with someone else’s spouse, even if they don’t actually do it, they have committed a sin. Respectively, if that same person has sex with someone else’s spouse mistaking them for their own, there is no sin.

The will must be present first in order for anything to occur. The will is the impetus for the idea (sin). Without the will (which acts on the rational part of the soul and dominates the conscious mind), there can be no consent. The non-rational part of the soul which dominates the subconscious mind then considers the idea. The subconscious either accepts or rejects what the outcome of the idea is. If the outcome is accepted, this is what we call consent. If it is rejected, there can be no sin committed because the outcome is not accepted and thus it is no longer a willful process.

When this outcome is consented to, this means that a sin has been committed. To explain by using the examples above; in the first example, the will has presented the idea of having sex with another person’s spouse. The subconscious looks at the result of the action, and obviously is not opposed, so consent is granted to think about the act. In the other example, when this happens the will has not presented the idea of a sin, because the conscious mind believes this other person is someone else. The subconscious does not object to the outcome because of the false will, so consent is granted for the act, but it is not a sin because the consent was not given for the act.

Through these exampl...