³1username³2BryceHarrington³2name³2text_default³2version³21³2ts³2980844916³2ip³264.81.18.202³2data³2newauthor³31³3minor³30³3text³3ABELARD, PETER (1079-1142), scholastic philosopher, was born 
at Pallet (Palais), not far from Nantes, in 1079.  He was the 
eldest son of a noble Breton house.  The name Abaelardus 
(also written Abailardus, Abaielardus, and in many other 
ways) is said to be a corruption of Habelardus, substituted 
by himself for a nickname Bajolardus given to him when a 
student.  As a boy, he showed an extraordinary quickness of 
apprehension, and, choosing a learned life instead of the 
knightly career natural to a youth of his birth, early became 
an adept in the art of dialectic, under which name philosophy, 
meaning at that time chiefly the logic of Aristotle transmitted 
through Latin channels, was the great subject of liberal 
study in the episcopal schools.  Roscellinus, the famous 
canon of Compiegne, is mentioned by himself as his teacher; 
but whether he heard this champion of extreme Nominalism in 
early youth, when he wandered about from school to school 
for instruction and exercise, or some years later, after he 
had already begun to teach for himself, remains uncertain.  
His wanderings finally brought him to Paris, still under 
the age of twenty.  There, in the great cathedral school of 
Notre-Dame, he sat for a while under the teaching of William 
of Champeaux, the disciple of St Anselm and most advanced of 
Realists, but, presently stepping forward, he overcame the 
master in discussion, and thus began a long duel that issued 
in the downfall of the philosophic theory of Realism, till 
then dominant in the early Middle Age. First, in the teeth 
of opposition from the metropolitan teacher, while yet only 
twenty-two, he proceeded to set up a school of hs own at 
Melun, whence, for more direct competition, he removed to 
Corbeil, nearer Paris.  The success of his teaching was 
signal, though for a time he had to quit the field, the 
strain proving too great for his physical strength.  On his 
return, after 1108, he found William lecturing no longer at 
Notre-Dame, but in a monastic retreat outside the city, and 
there battle was again joined between them.  Forcing upon 
the Realist a material change of doctrine, he was once more 
victorious, and thenceforth he stood supreme.  His discomfited 
rival still had power to keep him from lecturing in Paris, hut 
soon failed in this last effort also.  From Melun, where he 
had resumed teaching, Abelard passed to the capital, and set 
up his school on the heights of St Genevieve, looking over 
Notre-Dame.  From his success in dialectic, he next turned to 
theology and attended the lectures of Anselm at Laon.  His triumph 
over the theologian was complete; the pupil was able to give 
lectures, without previous training or special study, which 
were acknowledged superior to those of the master.  Abelard 
was now at the height of hs fame.  He stepped into the chair at 
Notre-Dame, being also nominated canon, about the year 1115. 

Few teachers ever held such sway as Abelard now did for a 
time.  Distinguished in figure and manners, he was seen 
surrounded by crowds--it is said thousands of students, 
drawn from all countries by the fame of hs teaching, in which 
acuteness of thought was relieved by simplicity and grace of 
exposition.  Enriched by the offerings of his pupils, and 
feasted with universal admiration, he came, as he says, 
to think himself the only philosopher standing in the 
world.  But a change in his fortunes was at hand.  In his 
devotion to science, he had hitherto lived a very regular 
life, varied only by the excitement of conflict: now, at 
the height of his fame, other passions began to stir within 
him.  There lived at that time, within the precincts of 
Notre-Dame, under the care of her uncle, the canon Fulbert, a 
young girl named Heloise, of noble extraction, and born about 
1101.  Fair, but still more remarkable for her knowledge, 
which extended beyond Latin, it is said, to Greek and Hebrew, 
she awoke a feeling of love in the breast of Abelard; and 
with intent to win her, he sought and gained a footing in 
Fulbert's house as a regular inmate.  Becoming also tutor to 
the maiden, he used the unlimited power which he thus obtained 
over her for the purpose of seduction, though not without 
cherishing a real affection which she returned in unparalleled 
devotion.  Their relation interfering with his public work, and 
being, moreover, ostentatiously sung by himself, soon became 
known to all the world except the too-confiding Fulbert; and, 
when at last it could not escape even his vision, they were 
separated only to meet in secret.  Thereupon Heloise found 
herself pregnant, and was carried off by her lover to Brittany, 
where she gave birth to a son.  To appease her furious uncle, 
Abelard now proposed a marriage, under the condition that it 
should be kept secret, in order not to mar his prospects of 
advancement in the church; but of marriage, whether public 
or secret, Heloise would hear nothing.  She appealed to him 
not to sacrifice for her the independence of his life, nor 
did she finally yield to the arrangement without the darkest 
forebodings, only too soon to be reallzed.  The secret of 
the marriage was not kept by Fulbert; and when Heloise, true 
to her singular purpose, boldly denied it, life was made so 
unsupportable to her that she sought refuge in the convent of 
Argenteuil.  Immediately Fulbert, believing that her husband, 
who aided in the flight, designed to be rid of her, coinceived 
a dire revenge.  He and some others broke into Abelard's 
chamber by night, and perpetrated on him the most brutal 
mutilation.  Thus cast down from his pinnacle of greatness 
into an abyss of shame and misery, there was left to the 
brilliant master only the life of a monk.  The priesthood 
and ecclesiastical office were canonically closed to him.  
Heloise, not yet twenty, consummated her work of self-sacrifice 
at the call of his jealous love, and took the veil. 

It was in the abbey of St Denis that Abelard, now aged 
forty, sought to bury himself with his woes out of sight.  
Finding, however, in the cloister neither calm nor solitude, 
and having gradually turned again to study, he yielded after 
a year to urgent entreaties from without and within, and 
went forth to reopen his school at the priory of Maisonceile 
(1120).  His lectures, now framed in a devotional spirit, were 
heard again by crowds of students, and all his old influence 
seemed to have returned; but old enmities were revived 
also, against which he was no longer able as before to make 
head.  No sooner had he put in writing his theological 
lectures (apparently the Introductio and Theolo giam 
that has come down to us), than his adversaries fell foul of 
his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma.  
Charging him with the heresy of Sabellius in a provincial 
synod held at Soissons in 1121, they procured by irregular 
practices a condemnation of his teaching, whereby he was made 
to throw his book into the flames and then was shut up in 
the convent of St Medard at Soissons.  After the other, it 
was the bitterest possible experience that could befall him, 
nor, in the state of mental desolation into which it plunged 
him, could he find any comfort from being soon again set free.  
The life in his own monastery proved no more congenial than 
formerly.  For this Abelard himself was partly responsible.  
He took a sort of malicious pleasure in irritating the monks. 
Quasijocando, he cited Bede to prove that Dionysius the 
Areopagite had been bishop of Corinth, while they relied upon 
the statement of the abbot Hilduin that he had been bishop of 
Athens.  When this historical heresy led to the inevitable 
persecution, Abelard wrote a letter to the abbot Adam in 
which he preferred to the authority of Bede that of Eusebius' 
Historia Ecelesiastica and St Jerome, according to whom 
Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, was distinct from Dionysius 
the Areopagite, bishop of Athens and founder of the abbey, 
though, in deference to Bede, he suggested that the Areopagite 
might also have beeit bishop of Corinth.  Life in the 
monastery was intolerable for such a troublesome spirit, and 
Abelard, who had once attempted to escape the persecution 
he had called forth by flight to a monastery at Provins, 
was finally allowed to withdraw.  In a desert place near 
Nogent-sur-Seine, he built himself a cabin of stubble and 
reeds, and turned hermit.  But there fortune came back to him 
with a new surprise.  His retreat becoming known, students 
flocked from Paris, and covered the wilderness around him 
with their tents and huts.  When he began to teach again he 
found consolation, and in gratitude he consecrated the new 
oratory they built for him by the name of the Paraclete. 

Upon the return of new dangers, or at least of fears, Abelard 
left the Paraclete to make trial of another refuge, accepting 
an invitation to preside over the abbey of St Gildas-de-Rhuys, 
on the far-off shore of Lower Brittany.  It proved a wretched 
exchange.  The region was inhospitable, the domain a prey to 
lawless exaction, the house itself savage and disorderly.  
Yet for nearly ten years he continued to struggle with fate 
before he fled from his charge, yielding in the end only under 
peru of violent death.  The misery of those years was not, 
however, unrelieved; for he had been able, on the breaking 
up of Heloise's convent at Argenteuil, to establish her as 
head of a new religious house at the deserted Paraclete, and 
in the capacity of spiritual director he often was called to 
revisit the spot thus made doubly dear to him.  All this time 
Heloise had lived amid universal esteem for her knowledge and 
character, uttering no word under the doom that had fallen upon 
her youth; hut now, at last, the occasion came for expressing 
all the pent-up emotions of her soul.  Living on for some time 
apart (we do not know exactly where), after his flight from St 
Gildas, Abelard wrote, among other things, his famous Historia 
Calamitatum, and thus moved her to peu her first Letter, 
which remains an unsurpassed utterance of human passion and 
womanly devotion; the first being followed by the two other 
Letters, in which she finally accepted the part of resignation 
which, now as a brother to a sister, Abelard commended to 
her.  He not long after was seen once more upon the field 
of his early triumphs lecturing on Mount St Genevieve in 
1136 (when he was heard by John of Salisbury), but it was 
only for a brief space: no new triumph, but a last great 
trial, awaited him in the few years to come of his chequered 
life.  As far back as the Paraclete days, he had counted 
as chief among his foes Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom was 
incarnated the principle of fervent and unhesitating faith, 
from which rational inquiry like his was sheer revolt, and 
now this uncompromising spirit was moving, at the instance of 
others, to crush the growing evil in the person of the boldest 
offender.  After preliminary negotiations, in which Bernard 
was roused by Abelard's steadfastness to put forth all his 
strength, a council met at Sens (1141), before which Abelard, 
formally arraigned upon a number of heretical charges, was 
prepared to plead his cause.  When, however, Bernard, not without 
foregone terror in the prospect of meeting the redoubtable 
dialectician, had opened the case, suddenlly Abelard appealed to 
Rome.  The stroke availed him nothing; for Bernard, who had 
power, notwithstanding, to get a condemnation passed at the 
council, did not rest a moment till a second condemnation was 
procured at Rome in the following year.  Meanwhile, on his way 
thither to urge his plea in person, Abelard had broken down 
at the abbey of Cluny, and there, an utterly fallen man, with 
spirit of the humblest, and only not bereft of his intellectual 
force, he lingered but a few months before the approach of 
death.  Removed by friendly hands, for the relief of his 
sufferings, to the priory of St Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saone, 
he died on the 21st of April 1142.  First buried at St Marcel, 
his remains soon after were carried off in secrecy to the 
Paraclete, and given over to the loving care of Heloise, who 
in time came herself to rest beside them (1164).  The bones 
of the pair were shifted more than once afterwards, but they 
were marvellously preserved even through the vicissitudes 
of the French Revolution, and now they lie united in the 
well-known tomb in the cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise at Paris. 

Great as was the influence exerted by Abelard on the minds of 
his contemporaries and the course of medieval thought, he has 
been little known in modern times but for his connexion with 
Heloise.  Indeed, it was not till the 19th century, when Cousin 
in 1836 issued the collection entitled Ouvrages inedits 
d'Abelard, that his philosophical performance could be judged 
at first hand; of his strictly philosophical works only one, 
the ethical treatise Scito te ipsum, having been published 
earlier, namely, in 1721.  Cousin's collection, besides giving 
extracts from the theological work Sic et Non (an assemblage 
of opposite opinions on doctrinal points, culled from the 
Fathers as a basis for discussion, the main interest in which 
lles in the fact that there is no attempt to reconcile the 
different opinions), includes the Dialectica, commentaries 
on logical works of Aristotle, Porphyry and Boothius, and a 
fragment, De Generibus et Speciebus.  The last-named 
work, and also the psychological treatise De Inteilectibus, 
published apart by Cousin (in Fragmens Philosophiques, 
vol. ii.), are now considered upon internal evidence not to 
be hy Abelard himself, but only to have sprung out of his 
school.  A genuine work, the Glossulae super Porphyrium, 
from which Charles de Remusat, in his classical monograph 
Abelard (1845), has given extracts, remains in manuscript. 

The general importance of Abelard lles in his having fixed 
more decisively than any one before him the scholastic manner 
of philosophizing, with its object of giving a formally 
rational expression to the received ecclesiastical doctrine 
. However his own particular interpretations may have been 
condemned, they were conceived in essentially the same spirit 
as the general scheme of thought afterwards elaborated in 
the 13th century with approval from the heads of the church.  
Through him was prepared in the Middle Age the ascendancy 
of the philosophical authority of Aristotle, which became 
firmly established in the half-century after his death, when 
first the completed Organon, and gradually ail the other 
works of the Greek thinker, came to be known in the schools: 
before his time it was rather upon the authority of Plato 
that the prevailing Realism sought to lean.  As regards his 
so-called Conceptualism and his attitude to the question of 
Universals, see SCHOLASTICISM.  Outside of his dialectic, 
it was in ethics that Abelard showed greatest activity of 
philosophical thought; laying very particular stress upon 
the subjective intention as determining, if not the moral 
character, at least the moral value, of human action.  His 
thought in this direction, wherein he anticipated something 
of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his 
scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of 
morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of 
conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the 
great ethical inquiries of AAstotle became fully known to them. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY --Abelard's own works remain the best sources 
for his life, especially his Historia Culamitatum, an 
autobiography, and the correspondence with Heloise.  The 
literature on Abelard is extensive, but consists principally 
of monographs on different aspects of his philosophy.  
Charles de Remusat's Abelard (2 vols., 1845) remains an 
authority; it must be distinguished from his drama Abelard 
(1877), which is an attempt to give a picture of medieval 
life.  McCabe's life of Abelard is written closely from 
the sources. eee also the valuable analysis by Nitsch 
in the article ``Abalard'' There is a comprehensive 
bibliograohy in U. Chevalier, Repertoire des sources 
hist. du moyen age, s. ``Abailard.'' (G. C. R.; J. T. S.*) 


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Source:  An unnamed encyclopedia from a project that puts out-of-copyright texts into the public domain.  This is from a *very* old source, and reflects the thinking of the turn of the last century.  -- BryceHarrington

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