PeterAbelard

ABELARD, PETER (1079-1142), ScholasticPhilosopher, 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 ParisFrance, still under

the age of twenty. There, in the great cathedral school of

Notre-Dame, he sat for a while under the teaching of WilliamofChampeaux, 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 ParisFrance. 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 HistoriaCalamitatum, 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 lies 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 MiddleAge 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 AristotlE became fully known to them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY --Abelard's own works remain the best sources

for his life, especially his HistoriaCulamitatum, 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