The writing and correspondence of Hastings Rashdall: 1915 to 1924	HastingsRashdall.org.uk
"The Atonement" - a paper read to the Origen Society at Oxford, March 1917.
In the Ripon Hall Archive [Box 107] at the Bodleian Library there is the original ms of this lecture which HR gave to the Origen Society in March 1917. In the section on Abelard, the passage quoted below, “Abelard, on the other hand. . .  . . . I cannot do better than quote to you Abelard’s words:” was apparently originally deleted, and replaced by the second extract below, whereas when published the first introduction was used and the second one deleted:
Abelard, on the other hand, provided the medieval world with a theory to which no objection can be taken on moral grounds. It is the view of Christ's death which can really claim the largest consensus not only of Fathers but of Christians from the earliest days to the latest – the view which simply treats the death of Christ as a peculiarly characteristic and conspicuous exhibition of that self-sacrificing love which was the inspiring motive of all Christ's work for man and which makes it the great revelation of God, moving the world to answering love and gratitude. I cannot do better than quote two you Abelard's words:  “I think that the purpose and cause of the Incarnation was that He might illuminate the world by His wisdom and excite it to the love of Himself.”
Download the whole lecture as published, in pdf format Back to the writing and correspondence of Rashdall, 1915 - 1924	Very different as very much simpler is the teaching which the far bolder and greater, if less saintly, thinker, Abelard, substitutes for the ransom theory. Abelard was specially interested in the theoretical study of Morality: his “Scito te ipsum” represents a really original treatise on moral philosophy, written before the recovery of the Aristotelian writings made originality in Ethics almost impossible to the medieval mind. His study of Morality, combined with the task of commenting upon the Epistle to the Romans, forced upon him the problem of the Atonement and its justice. In Abelard, not only the ransom theory but any kind of substitutionary or expiatory Atonement is explicitly denied. We get rid altogether of the notion of a mysterious guilt which by an abstract necessity of things, required to be dissolved by death or suffering, no matter whose, and of all pseudo-Platonic hypostacizing of the universal “humanity”. The efficacy of Christ’s death is now quite definitely and explicitly explained by its subjective influence upon the mind of the sinner. The voluntary death of the innocent Son of God on man’s behalf moves the sinner to gratitude and answering love - and so consciousness of sin, repentance, amendment. His position is succinctly expressed in one of the propositions condemned by the Council of Sens in 1141 and by Pope Innocent II. After stating with remorseless clearness the objections to the common ideas upon the subject, he proceeds, “I think that the purpose and cause of the Incarnation. . . . (The above text can be seen to be identical to that of the section on Abelard in the Bamptons! We cannot know which text was actually read to the Origen Society.)