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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.
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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. As a boy, he learned quickly, and,
choosing an academic life instead of the military career usual
for one of his birth, acquired the art of dialectic (a branch of
philosophy) which at that time consisted chiefly of the logic of
Aristotle transmitted through Latin channels and which was the
great subject of liberal study in the Episcopal schools. The
nominalist Roscellinus, the famous canon of Compiegne, claims to
have been his teacher; but whether this was in early youth, when
he wandered from school to school for instruction and exercise,
or some years later, after he had already begun to teach,
remains uncertain.
Rise to fame
Abélard's travels finally brought him to Paris while still in
his teens. There, in the great cathedral school of Notre-Dame de
Paris[1], he was taught for a while by William of Champeaux, the
disciple of Anselm of Laon (not to be confused with Saint
Anselm) and most advanced of Realists. 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.
On his return, after 1108, he found William lecturing in a
monastic retreat outside the city, and there they once again
became rivals. Abélard was once more victorious, and now stood
supreme. William was only temporarily able to prevent him from
lecturing in Paris. 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.
From his success in dialectic, he next turned to theology and
attended the lectures of Anselm at Laon. His triumph was
complete; the pupil was able to give lectures, without previous
training or special study, which were acknowledged superior to
those of the master. Abélard was now at the height of his fame.
He stepped into the chair at Notre-Dame, being also nominated
canon, about the year 1115.
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. Enriched by the offerings
of his pupils, and entertained with universal admiration, he
came, as he says, to think himself the only undefeated
philosopher in the world. But a change in his fortunes was at
hand. In his devotion to science, he had always lived a very
regular life, enlivened only by philosophical debate: now, at
the height of his fame, he encountered romance.
↑
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. Construction on the current Notre-Dame
de Paris would not be begun until 1163.
His love, Héloïse
Living within the precincts of Notre-Dame, under the care of her
uncle, the canon Fulbert, was a girl named Héloïse, born about
1101. She is said to have been beautiful, but still more
remarkable for her knowledge, which extended beyond Latin, it is
said, to Greek and Hebrew. Abélard fell in love with her; and he
sought and gained a place in Fulbert's house. Becoming tutor to
the girl, he used his power for the purpose of seduction, and
she returned his devotion. Their relations interfered with his
public work, and were not kept a secret by Abélard himself. Soon
everyone knew except the trusting Fulbert. Once her uncle found
out, the lovers were separated, only to meet in secret. 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; but Héloïse
opposed the idea. She appealed to him not to sacrifice for her
the independence of his life, but reluctantly gave in to
pressure. The secret of the marriage was not kept by Fulbert;
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. Immediately Fulbert, believing that her
husband, who had helped her run away, wanted to be rid of her,
plotted revenge. He and some others broke into Abélard's chamber
by night, and castrated him. The priesthood and ecclesiastical
office were, thereby, canonically closed to 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.
Finding no respite in the cloister, and having gradually turned
again to study, he gave in to urgent entreaties, and reopened
his school at the priory of Maisonceile (1120). His lectures,
now framed in a devotional spirit, were once again heard by
crowds of students, and all his old influence seemed to have
returned; but he still had many enemies, against whom he could
make less vigorous opposition. No sooner had he published his
theological lectures (apparently the Introductio ad Theologiam)
than his adversaries picked up on his rationalistic
interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma. Charging him with the
heresy of Sabellius in a provincial synod held at Soissons in
1121, they obtained through irregular procedures an official
condemnation of his teaching, and he was made to burn his book
before being shut up in the convent of St. Medard at Soissons.
It was the bitterest possible experience that could befall him.
The life in his own monastery proved no more congenial than
formerly. For this Abélard himself was partly responsible. He
took a sort of malicious pleasure in irritating the monks. As if
for the sake of a joke, 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, 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. In a desert place near Nogent-sur-Seine, he built himself
a cabin of stubble and reeds, and turned hermit. When his
retreat became 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 of the Paraclete.
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 region was inhospitable, the domain a prey to
outlaws, the house itself savage and disorderly. Yet for nearly
ten years he continued to struggle with fate before he left. 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.
He soon returned to the site 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 time: a last great trial
awaited him. 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. 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 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. Removed by
friends, for the relief of his sufferings, to the priory of St.
Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saone, he died. 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 (1164). The bones of the
pair were moved more than once afterwards, but they were
preserved even through the vicissitudes of the French
Revolution, and now are presumed to lie in the well-known tomb
in the cemetery of Père Lachaise in eastern Paris, though there
seems to be some dissent as to their actual resting place.
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. According to Père-Lachaise, the remains of both lovers
were translated from the Oratory in the early 1800's and
reburied in the famous crypt on their grounds. 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. It was not till
the 19th century, when Cousin in 1836 issued the collection
entitled Ouvrages inedits d'Abélard, 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 ("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. A genuine work, the Glossulae super
Porphyrium, from which Charles de Rémusat, in his classical
monograph Abélard (1845), has given extracts, was published in
1930.
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. 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 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.
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 Abélard 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
Abélard'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. 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. See also the valuable analysis by Nitsch in
the article Abalard. There is a comprehensive bibliography in U.
Chevalier, Repertoire des sources hist. du moyen age, s.
"Abailard."
The
four following volumes offer a much more up to date approach of
Abélard.
Michael T. Clanchy Abelard: A Medieval Life, Blackwell Pub.,
1997 ISBN 0631205020
John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard.
Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelth-Century France, St. Martin
Press, 1999 (paperback, Palgrave, 2001).
Constant J. Mews, Abelard and Heloise, Oxford University Press
(Great Medieval Thinkers), 2005.
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.
The
Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated by Betty Radice,
1972, ISBN 0140442979. A more modern translation of Historia
Calamitatum.
"Time Jesum Non Riventum", translated by Betty Radice, c. 1970,
this is the superbly accurate transcript of Abelard's document,
the one that saw him condemned in 1140 at the Council of Sens
for heresy.
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! / The world forgetting, by
the world forgot. /
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray'r accepted
and each wish resign'd. [1]
In
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's film Being John Malkovich
(1999), John Cusack's character performs a puppet show of
Abélard and Héloïse.
Howard Brenton's play In Extremis: The Story Of Abelard And
Heloise will be premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2006. [2]
The
Abelard Centre for Education, a Toronto-based Private School, is
named after Peter Abélard.
References
Historia CalamitatumThis edition is a sort of autobiography of
Author Peter Abelard
1
"Eloisa to Abelard". Retrieved 6 April 2006
2
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre 2006Retrieved 6 April 2006
Pierre Abélard from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Pierre (Peter) Abelard of Le Pallet, introduction Short
biography of Pierre (Peter) Abélard, with summary of heresies
used to accuse and try him at Sens in 1140; links to
explanations; relevant bibliography; from abelard.org
Enrico Garzilli wrote a musical play called "Rage of the Heart"
(http://rageoftheheart.com/index.php) witch is about
Abelard and his love for Héloïse.
****
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