Peter Abelard Pictures

PETER ABELARD

        Abelard was born into the lesser nobility around 1079 in Le Pallet, a small town in Brittany near Nantes. He received early training in letters, and took to his students with enthusiasm.

During the first year of the twelfth century, Abelard felt confident enough to set himself up as a lecturer, first at Melun and then at Corbeil, competing mainly with Willam of Champeaux(Paris) for students and reputation. The strain prove too much-Abelard’s health failed, and he returned to Brittany for several years.

Upon returning Paris, Abelard became scholar-in-residence at Norte Dame, a position he held until his romantic entanglement with Heloise led to his castration, at which point he entered the Benedictine monastery of Saint Denis and Heloise entered the convent of Argenteuil. After his recovery, Abelard resumed teaching at a nearby priority, primarily on theology and in particular on the trinity.

It was not to be. Abelard says that poverty forced him to resume teaching. He and the students who flocked to him in droves constructed an oratory named the paraclete, where he continued to write, teach, and research. This idyll came to an end around 1126, when Abelard accepted an invitation to become abbot of the monastery of Saint Gildas de Rhuys in Brittany; shortly afterwards he handed over paraclte to Heloise and the other nuns, whose convent had been expropriated. Abelard found the monks of Saint GIldas difficult and obstructive even dangerous and he claims that there were several attemps on his life while in residence. During this period he wrote HISTORIA CALAMITATUM and corresponded with Heloise.

By the mid-1130s Abelard was given permission to return to Paris and to teach in the schools on the Mont Ste.-Genevieve. It was during this time that his theological treatises were brought to the attention of Bernard of Clairevaux, who objected to some Abelard’s conclusions as well as to his approach to matters of faith. After some inconclusive attempts to resolve their differences, Abelard asked the archbishop of Sens to arrange a public dispute between himself and Bernard on 3 June 1140, to settle their disagreements. Bernard initially refused the invitation on the grounds that one should not debate matters of faith, but then accepted it and, unknown to Abelard, arranged to convene another commissions of enquiry to review Abelard’s works on suspicion of heresy. When Abelard discovered that there was no debate but instead a kangaroo court, he refused to take part, announcing his intention to appeal to the pope directly. He walked out of the proceeding and the began travelling to Rome. The council condemned nineteen proposition it claimed to find in his works adjourned. Bernard launched a successful campaign petitioning the papal Court of Soissons reached Abelard while he was at Cluny; Abelard was ordered to silence. By all accounts Abelard complied immediately, even meeting peacefully with Bernard in reconciliation. Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, wrote the Pope about the matters, and the Pope lifted Abelard’s sentence. Abelard remained under the protection of Peter the Venerable first at Cluny, the at St. Michael, as his health gradually deteriorated. Abelard died on 21 April 1142. His body was interred at the Paraclete, and today is in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Abelard students were active as Kings, philosophers, poets, politicians, theologians, and monks; they include three Popes and several heads of state. Explicit references to Abelard’s thinking in the later Middle Ages are few, likely because of the cloud cast by the verdict of the council of Soissons, but it is clear that he had a seminal influence on twelfth-century philosophy and perhaps on later fourteenth-century speculation as well.