Peter Abelard kept out-arguing his teachers, and it kept costing him
A knight's son who swapped the sword for logic, Peter Abelard beat his Paris masters in debate, drew crowds wherever he taught, and was forced to burn his own theology book. His love for his student Héloïse ended his career, yet their letters and his memoir of calamities still read like modern autobiography.
Abelard was born around 1079 at Le Pallet, about 16 kilometres east of Nantes, eldest son of a minor Breton noble named Berenger. Encouraged to study the liberal arts, he excelled at dialectic and gave up a military future. He wandered France debating, studied with the nominalist Roscellinus, and around 1100 reached Paris, where he began calling himself Abelard.
At the Notre-Dame cathedral school he studied under William of Champeaux, a champion of realism about universals, the question of whether general terms like species name real things. Abelard, by his own account, soon defeated his master in argument; William found him arrogant. Abelard opened rival schools at Melun and Corbeil, broke down from the strain, recovered in Brittany, and returned to challenge William again. Moving into theology, he sat through Anselm of Laon's lectures unimpressed, started teaching Ezekiel himself, was banned, and around 1115 became master at Notre-Dame.
After his affair with Héloïse he became a monk at Saint-Denis, but trouble followed. In 1121 a synod at Soissons condemned his rational treatment of the Trinity, through irregular procedure, and made him burn the book. He irritated his fellow monks by citing Bede to question their founder's identity, left, and built a reed hut near Nogent-sur-Seine; students camped around him, and the site became the Oratory of the Paraclete. Later he was abbot of a lawless Breton monastery, and when Héloïse's nuns were expelled from Argenteuil in 1129 he gave the Paraclete to her new community, with a rule and hymns he composed.
His Sic et Non set contradictory church authorities side by side, and his Ethics made the intention behind an act central to moral judgement. He developed the idea of limbo and a moral influence theory of the atonement stressing Christ's love. Admirers call him the Descartes of the twelfth century. He died on 21 April 1142.
Source: Peter Abelard
