Peter Abelard

Peter Abelard was a French philosopher, logician and theologian of the twelfth century, the most celebrated teacher in the schools of Paris in his day. He brought a sharp, questioning use of logic to theology, took a new position in the long debate over universals, and argued that the moral worth of an act lies in the intention behind it. His love affair with his student Héloïse, and the letters they later exchanged, made him one of the best-known figures of the Middle Ages.

Abelard was born around 1079 at Le Pallet, a village in Brittany near Nantes, into a family of minor nobility. As the eldest son he was expected to become a knight, but he gave up his inheritance to study, and his writings show a good knowledge of Latin authors such as Cicero, Ovid and Seneca. He travelled to learn from the leading masters of logic, among them Roscelin of Compiègne and, in Paris, William of Champeaux.

Ambitious and combative, he soon set up his own schools at Melun and Corbeil, in rivalry with William, before ill health sent him back to Brittany for some years. Returning to Paris, he challenged William in public over the problem of universals and, by his own account, forced his old teacher to change his position. Around 1113 he turned to theology under Anselm of Laon (not to be confused with Anselm of Canterbury), whose traditional teaching he found thin, and he was soon lecturing on scripture himself. By the mid-1110s he was teaching at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and drawing students from across Europe.

In Paris Abelard became tutor to Héloïse, the young niece of Fulbert, a canon of Notre-Dame, who was already famous for her learning. They became lovers; she became pregnant and gave birth in Brittany to a son, whom they named Astrolabe. Abelard agreed to a secret marriage, which Héloïse herself opposed, but Fulbert, believing Abelard meant to abandon her, sent men who attacked and castrated him at night, around 1117–1118.

Abelard then became a monk at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, and Héloïse, at his wish, took the veil at Argenteuil. Years later, after he wrote an autobiographical letter, the Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), the two began a famous correspondence. Her letters, frank about her continuing love and her doubts about religious life, are among the most remarkable writings by a medieval woman. Their authenticity was once questioned, but most scholars now accept them.

Abelard's habit of applying logic to the doctrine of the Trinity made enemies. In 1121 a church council at Soissons condemned his treatise on the subject and made him burn it with his own hand. He withdrew to a remote spot near Nogent-sur-Seine, where students gathered around him and built an oratory he named the Paraclete. Around 1126 he became abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, where the unruly monks, he wrote, tried to kill him; he later gave the Paraclete to Héloïse and her nuns, and she became its abbess.

By the mid-1130s he was teaching again in Paris, on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève. His theology now drew the attention of Bernard of Clairvaux, the most powerful churchman in France, who distrusted his whole approach to faith. Abelard sought a public debate at Sens, but Bernard arranged instead for the assembled bishops to examine his writings; the council condemned a list of propositions drawn from them. Sources disagree on whether it met in 1140 or 1141. Abelard set out to appeal to the pope in Rome, but Pope Innocent II upheld the verdict and ordered him to silence. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, took him in, reconciled him with Bernard and obtained the lifting of the sentence. Abelard died at the priory of Saint-Marcel near Chalon-sur-Saône on 21 April 1142. He was buried at the Paraclete, and his remains, with those of Héloïse, now lie in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Abelard was above all a logician, working from the "old logic" that the early Middle Ages had inherited from Aristotle through the Roman philosopher Boethius. His main logical works are the Logica "ingredientibus", a commentary on those texts, and the Dialectica, an independent treatise. He made original contributions to the theory of propositions and of logical consequence.

His best-known position concerns universals: general terms such as "human" or "animal". Realists like William of Champeaux held that such terms name real things shared by many individuals. Abelard argued that this made no sense, since one real thing cannot be wholly present in many separate individuals at once. Only individual things exist. A universal is a word whose meaning applies to many things because those things resemble one another in some respect, not because they share a common thing. This view, often called conceptualism or a form of nominalism, anticipated the more thoroughgoing nominalism of William of Ockham two centuries later.

In Sic et Non (Yes and No), Abelard collected passages from the Bible and the Church Fathers that seemed to contradict one another on more than 150 questions, without resolving them. His preface explained how such conflicts might be settled: by checking the text, the context and the meaning of words. The method of setting authorities against each other and reasoning to a conclusion became central to the scholastic teaching of the universities and to Medieval Christian Philosophy in general.

His Ethics, also called Scito te ipsum (Know Yourself), argued that sin lies not in an action itself, nor in desire, but in consent to what one knows to be wrong. Two people may do the same deed, one guiltily and one innocently; God judges the intention. This focus on the inner state of the agent was new and controversial. He also wrote a Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian, poems and hymns, and a rule for the nuns of the Paraclete.

Abelard's students included future bishops, cardinals and popes, and writers such as John of Salisbury. The condemnations meant that later medieval authors seldom cited him by name, yet his methods shaped the theology of Peter Lombard, whose textbook was used for centuries, and the question-and-answer form later perfected by Thomas Aquinas. His insistence that doubt leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth, made him a hero to later admirers of free thought, while the story of Abelard and Héloïse has been retold by poets, novelists and painters ever since.