Theologian, born near Nantes, W France. He studied under Roscellinus and Guillaume de Champeaux (c.10701171). As lecturer in the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris, he became tutor to Héloïse, the 17-year-old niece of the canon Fulbert. They fell passionately in love, but when their affair was discovered, they fled to Brittany, where Héloïse gave birth to a son. After returning to Paris, they were secretly married. Héloïse's relatives took their revenge on Abelard by castrating him. He fled in shame to the abbey of St Denis to become a monk, and Héloïse took the veil at Argenteuil as a nun. In 1121, a synod at Soissons condemned his Nominalistic doctrines on the Trinity as heretical, and Abelard took to a hermit's hut at Nogent-sur-Seine, where his pupils helped him build a monastic school he named the Paraclete. In 1125 he was elected abbot of St Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, and the Paraclete was given to Héloïse and a sisterhood. In his final years he was again accused of numerous heresies and he retired to the monastery of Cluny. After his death, he was buried in the Paraclete at Héloïse's request, and when she died in 1164 she was laid in the same tomb. In 1817 they were buried in one sepulchre at Père Lachaise.
Pierre Abélard (in English, Peter Abelard) or Abailard (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a French scholastic philosopher and logician. The story of his affair with his student, Héloïse, has become legendary.
Life
Youth
He was born in the little village of Pallet, about 10 miles east of Nantes, in Brittany, the eldest son of a noble Breton family. The name Abaelardus (also written Abailardus, Abaielardus, and in many other ways) is said to be a corruption of Habélardus, substituted by Abélard himself for a nickname ('Bajolardus') given him when a student.
Rise to fame
Abélard's travels finally brought him to Paris while still in his teens. He was soon able to defeat the master in argument, resulting in a long duel that ended in the downfall of the philosophic theory of Realism, till then dominant in the early Middle Ages (to be replaced by Abélard's Conceptualism, or by Nominalism, the principal rival of Realism prior to Abélard). First, against opposition from the metropolitan teacher, while yet only twenty-two, Abélard set up a school of his own at Melun, then, for more direct competition, he moved to Corbeil, nearer Paris.
The success of his teaching was notable, though for a time he had to give it up, the strain proving too great for his constitution. Abélard was once more victorious, and now stood supreme. From Melun, where he had resumed teaching, Abélard went on to the capital, and set up his school on the heights of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, overlooking Notre-Dame. Abélard was now at the height of his fame.
Distinguished in figure and manners, Abélard was seen surrounded by crowds - it is said thousands of students - drawn from all countries by the fame of his teaching. Though it was located on the same spot in the Île de la Cité, the cathedral of Abélard's time was not the same as the cathedral we see today.
His love, Héloïse
Living within the precincts of Notre-Dame, under the care of her uncle, the canon Fulbert, was a girl named Héloïse (1100-1163). Abélard fell in love with her; Their relations interfered with his public work, and were not kept a secret by Abélard himself. Héloïse became pregnant, and was carried off by Abélard to Brittany, where she gave birth to a son called Astrolabe. To appease her furious uncle, Abélard proposed a secret marriage, in order not to mar his prospects of advancement in the church; and when Héloïse boldly denied it, life was made so difficult for her that she sought refuge in the convent of Argenteuil at Abélard's bidding. He and some others broke into Abélard's chamber by night, and castrated him. Héloïse, not yet twenty, consummated her work of self-sacrifice at Abélard's jealous bidding that she never again share romantic love with a man, and became a nun. According to Australian historian Constant Mews, a set of 113 anonymous love letters found in a fifteenth Century manuscript represent the correspondence exchanged by Héloïse and Abélard during the earlier phase of their affair.
Later life
It was in the abbey of Saint-Denis that Abélard, now aged forty, sought to bury himself as a monk with his woes out of sight. For this Abélard himself was partly responsible. When this historical heresy led to the inevitable persecution, Abélard wrote a letter to the Abbot Adam in which he preferred to the authority of Bede that of Eusebius of Caesarea's 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 been bishop of Corinth. Life in the monastery was intolerable for Abélard, and he was finally allowed to leave.
Abélard, fearing new persecution, left the Oratory to find another refuge, accepting an invitation to preside over the abbey of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, on the far-off shore of Lower Brittany. The misery of those years was lightened because he had been able, on the breaking up of Héloïse'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 Héloïse had lived respectably. Living on for some time apart (we do not know exactly where), after his flight from the Abbey of St Gildas, Abélard wrote, among other things, his famous Historia Calamitatum, and thus moved her to write 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, Abélard commended to her. As far back as the Paraclete days, his chief enemy had been Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom was incarnated the principle of fervent and unhesitating faith, from which rational inquiry like Abélard's was sheer revolt, and now the uncompromising Bernard was moving to crush the growing evil in the person of the boldest offender. After preliminary negotiations, in which Bernard was roused by Abélard's steadfastness to put forth all his strength, a council met at Sens (1141), before which Abélard, formally arraigned upon a number of heretical charges, was prepared to plead his cause. When, however, Bernard had opened the case, suddenly Abélard appealed to Rome. Meanwhile, on his way there to urge his plea in person, Abélard collapsed at the abbey of Cluny, and there he lingered only a few months before the approach of death. First buried at St. Marcel, his remains were soon carried off secretly to the Paraclete, and given over to the loving care of Héloïse, who in time came herself to rest beside them (1163).
The Oratory of the Paraclete claims he and Héloïse are buried on their site and that what exists in Père-Lachaise is merely a monument. There are still others who believe that while Abélard is buried in the tomb at Père-Lachaise, Heloïse's remains are elsewhere.
Reception
Abélard was an enormous influence on his contemporaries and the course of medieval thought, but he has been known in modern times mainly for his connection with Héloïse. Cousin's collection, besides giving extracts from the theological work Sic et Non ("Yes and No") (an assemblage of opposite opinions on doctrinal points, culled from the Fathers as a basis for discussion, the main interest in which lies in the fact that there is no attempt to reconcile the different opinions), includes the Dialectica, commentaries on logical works of Aristotle, Porphyry and Boethius, and a fragment, De Generibus et Speciebus. The last-named work, and also the psychological treatise De Intellectibus, published apart by Cousin (in Fragmens Philosophiques, vol. ii.), are now considered upon internal evidence not to be by Abélard himself, but only to have sprung out of his school.
Philosophical work
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The general importance of Abélard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with its object of giving a formally rational expression to the received ecclesiastical doctrine. 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 all 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. Outside of his dialectic, it was in ethics that Abélard showed greatest activity of philosophical thought; 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
Wikisource has original text related to this article: Pierre Abélard Wikisource has an original article from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica about: Abelard, PeterAbélard's own works remain the best sources for his life, especially his Historia Calamitatum, an autobiography, and the correspondence with Héloïse. The literature on Abélard is extensive, but consists principally of monographs on different aspects of his philosophy.
The four following volumes offer a much more up to date approach of Abélard.
Music
Today Abélard is known largely as a philosopher who had a tragic love affair with Héloïse. However, Abélard was also long known as an important poet and composer. Abélard composed some celebrated love songs, that are now lost, for Héloïse.
Abélard later wrote the words and melodies for over a hundred hymns for the religious community that Héloïse joined. Melodies that have survived have been praised as "flexible, expressive melodies (that) show an elegance and technical adroitness that are very similar to the qualities that have been long admired in Abélard's poetry." (Micheal Oliver, reviewing a CD of Abélard's music in Gramophone, 1995)
Abélard also left six biblical planctus (laments) which were very original and influenced the subsequent development of the lai, a song form that flourished in northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries .
Written works
The Glosses of Peter Abailard on Porphyry (Petri Abaelardi Glossae in Porphyrium) Sic et Non Dialectica, before 1125 Introductio ad Theologiam, 1136-1140 Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian, 1136-1139 Abelard's Ethics (Scito Teipsum, seu Ethica), before 1140 The Story of My Misfortunes (Historia Calamitatum), translated by Henry Adams Bellows, 1922, from Internet Medieval Sourcebook.Cultural references
References in culture to the story of AbÉlard and Héloïse continue to accrete.
Alexander Pope's poem "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717) is written as though from Héloïse in her convent:How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
In Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's film Being John Malkovich (1999), John Cusack's character performs a puppet show of Abélard and Héloïse. The Abelard Centre for Education, a Toronto-based Private School, is named after Peter Abélard. In Cole Porter's "Jubilee", the intro to the song "Just One Of Those Things" includes a reference to Abélard and Héloïse. In scene five of James Goldman's The Lion in Winter, Eleanor of Aquitaine reminisces about watching Abélard and Héloïse in the palace garden as a young girl.
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