Peter Abelard

Peter Abelard was born in Brittany around 1079. Before he founded his own school in 1102 he attended lectures with Roscelin and William of Champeaux. After an illness we find him in Paris (c. 1108). Abelard appears to have had a propensity for antagonizing some of his teachers (such as William of Champeaux on the issue of universals, and Anselm of Laon, the most famous Biblical exegete of his time). The bright and flamboyant Abelard attracted many students, often to the chagrin of other Masters (if Abelard’s own account is to be believed). In 1115 or 1116 he began an affair with a young and attractive student, Heloise, the niece of his host Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame in Paris. Abelard later recalled: “with our lessons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love . . . with our books open before us, more words of love than of our reading passed between us, and more kissing than teaching.” Heloise fell pregnant, but was reluctant to marry Abelard lest it would hinder his scholarly career, and when the marriage took place it was conducted in secrecy. Heloise joined a monastery without taking the veil, and Fulbert, presumably assuming that Abelard had abnegated his promise to marry Heloise, sent a band of men to inflict the ultimate humiliation on Abelard’s manhood. As he later recalled it: “they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.” Abelard then joined the Abbey of St. Denis and from one of their houses he continued teaching, not just on logic and dialectic, as he had done before, but also on theology. His major work of this period is the Theologia Summi Boni which, unfortunately, landed Abelard in more troubled waters. The work was condemned at the Synod of Soissons in 1121, and Abelard was forced to burn his own work. In 1122 (after difficulties with his fellow-monks at St. Denis) he founded his own oratory. If Abelard had hoped to live as a hermit the great number of students that flocked to him made this impossible. Abelard stayed at this hermitage (dedicated to the Paraclete or the Comforter) for about five years. Here he rewrote and expanded his previous work on theology, now called Theologia Christiana.