had already begun to teach for himself, remains uncertain.
His wanderings finally brought him to Paris, still under
the age of twenty. There, in the great cathedral school of
Notre-Dame, he sat for a while under the teaching of William
of Champeaux, the disciple of St Anselm and most advanced of
Realists, but, presently stepping forward, he overcame the
master in discussion, and thus began a long duel that issued
in the downfall of the philosophic theory of Realism, till
then dominant in the early Middle Age. First, in the teeth
of opposition from the metropolitan teacher, while yet only
twenty-two, he proceeded to set up a school of hs own at
Melun, whence, for more direct competition, he removed to
Corbeil, nearer Paris. The success of his teaching was
signal, though for a time he had to quit the field, the
strain proving too great for his physical strength. On his
return, after 1108, he found William lecturing no longer at
Notre-Dame, but in a monastic retreat outside the city, and
there battle was again joined between them. Forcing upon
the Realist a material change of doctrine, he was once more
victorious, and thenceforth he stood supreme. His discomfited
rival still had power to keep him from lecturing in Paris, hut
soon failed in this last effort also. From Melun, where he
had resumed teaching, Abelard passed to the capital, and set
up his school on the heights of St Genevieve, looking over
Notre-Dame. From his success in dialectic, he next turned to
theology and attended the lectures of Anselm at Laon. His triumph
over the theologian was complete; the pupil was able to give
lectures, without previous training or special study, which
were acknowledged superior to those of the master. Abelard
was now at the height of hs fame. He stepped into the chair at
Notre-Dame, being also nominated canon, about the year 1115.
Few teachers ever held such sway as Abelard now did for a
time. Distinguished in figure and manners, he was seen
surrounded by crowds--it is said thousands of students,
drawn from all countries by the fame of hs teaching, in which
acuteness of thought was relieved by simplicity and grace of
exposition. Enriched by the offerings of his pupils, and
feasted with universal admiration, he came, as he says,
to think himself the only philosopher standing in the
world. But a change in his fortunes was at hand. In his
devotion to science, he had hitherto lived a very regular
life, varied only by the excitement of conflict: now, at
the height of his fame, other passions began to stir within
him. There lived at that time, within the precincts of
Notre-Dame, under the care of her uncle, the canon Fulbert, a
young girl named Heloise, of noble extraction, and born about
1101. Fair, but still more remarkable for her knowledge,
which extended beyond Latin, it is said, to Greek and Hebrew,
she awoke a feeling of love in the breast of Abelard; and
with intent to win her, he sought and gained a footing in
Fulbert's house as a regular inmate. Becoming also tutor to
the maiden, he used the unlimited power which he thus obtained
over her for the purpose of seduction, though not without
cherishing a real affection which she returned in unparalleled
devotion. Their relation interfering with his public work, and
being, moreover, ostentatiously sung by himself, soon became
known to all the world except the too-confiding Fulbert; and,
when at last it could not escape even his vision, they were
separated only to meet in secret. Thereupon Heloise found
herself pregnant, and was carried off by her lover to Brittany,
where she gave birth to a son. To appease her furious uncle,
Abelard now proposed a marriage, under the condition that it
should be kept secret, in order not to mar his prospects of
advancement in the church; but of marriage, whether public
or secret, Heloise would hear nothing. She appealed to him
not to sacrifice for her the independence of his life, nor
did she finally yield to the arrangement without the darkest
forebodings, only too soon to be reallzed. The secret of
the marriage was not kept by Fulbert; and when Heloise, true
to her singular purpose, boldly denied it, life was made so
unsupportable to her that she sought refuge in the convent of
Argenteuil. Immediately Fulbert, believing that her husband,
who aided in the flight, designed to be rid of her, coinceived
a dire revenge. He and some others broke into Abelard's
chamber by night, and perpetrated on him the most brutal
mutilation. Thus cast down from his pinnacle of greatness
into an abyss of shame and misery, there was left to the
brilliant master only the life of a monk. The priesthood
and ecclesiastical office were canonically closed to him.
Heloise, not yet twenty, consummated her work of self-sacrifice
at the call of his jealous love, and took the veil.
It was in the abbey of St Denis that Abelard, now aged
forty, sought to bury himself with his woes out of sight.
Finding, however, in the cloister neither calm nor solitude,
and having gradually turned again to study, he yielded after
a year to urgent entreaties from without and within, and
went forth to reopen his school at the priory of Maisonceile
(1120). His lectures, now framed in a devotional spirit, were
heard again by crowds of students, and all his old influence
seemed to have returned; but old enmities were revived
also, against which he was no longer able as before to make
head. No sooner had he put in writing his theological
lectures (apparently the Introductio and Theolo giam
that has come down to us), than his adversaries fell foul of
his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma.
Charging him with the heresy of Sabellius in a provincial
synod held at Soissons in 1121, they procured by irregular
practices a condemnation of his teaching, whereby he was made
to throw his book into the flames and then was shut up in
the convent of St Medard at Soissons. After the other, it
was the bitterest possible experience that could befall him,
nor, in the state of mental desolation into which it plunged
him, could he find any comfort from being soon again set free.
The life in his own monastery proved no more congenial than
formerly. For this Abelard himself was partly responsible.
He took a sort of malicious pleasure in irritating the monks.
Quasijocando, 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, Abelard wrote a letter to the abbot Adam in
which he preferred to the authority of Bede that of Eusebius'
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 beeit bishop of Corinth. Life in the
monastery was intolerable for such a troublesome spirit, and
Abelard, who had once attempted to escape the persecution
he had called forth by flight to a monastery at Provins,
was finally allowed to withdraw. In a desert place near
Nogent-sur-Seine, he built himself a cabin of stubble and
reeds, and turned hermit. But there fortune came back to him
with a new surprise. His retreat becoming 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 they built for him by the name of the Paraclete.
Upon the return of new dangers, or at least of fears, Abelard
left the Paraclete to make trial of another refuge, accepting
an invitation to preside over the abbey of St Gildas-de-Rhuys,
on the far-off shore of Lower Brittany. It proved a wretched
exchange. The region was inhospitable, the domain a prey to
lawless exaction, the house itself savage and disorderly.
Yet for nearly ten years he continued to struggle with fate
before he fled from his charge, yielding in the end only under
peru of violent death. The misery of those years was not,
however, unrelieved; for he had been able, on the breaking
up of Heloise'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
Heloise had lived amid universal esteem for her knowledge and
character, uttering no word under the doom that had fallen upon
her youth; hut now, at last, the occasion came for expressing
all the pent-up emotions of her soul. Living on for some time
apart (we do not know exactly where), after his flight from St
Gildas, Abelard wrote, among other things, his famous Historia
Calamitatum, and thus moved her to peu 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, Abelard commended to
her. He not long after was seen once more upon the field
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 space: no new triumph, but a last great
trial, awaited him in the few years to come of his chequered
life. As far back as the Paraclete days, he had counted
as chief among his foes Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom was
incarnated the principle of fervent and unhesitating faith,
from which rational inquiry like his was sheer revolt, and
now this uncompromising spirit was moving, at the instance of
others, to crush the growing evil in the person of the boldest
offender. After preliminary negotiations, in which Bernard
was roused by Abelard's steadfastness to put forth all his
strength, a council met at Sens (1141), before which Abelard,
formally arraigned upon a number of heretical charges, was
prepared to plead his cause. When, however, Bernard, not without
foregone terror in the prospect of meeting the redoubtable
dialectician, had opened the case, suddenlly Abelard appealed to
Rome. The stroke availed him nothing; for 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
thither to urge his plea in person, Abelard had broken down
at the abbey of Cluny, and there, an utterly fallen man, with
spirit of the humblest, and only not bereft of his intellectual
force, he lingered but a few months before the approach of
death. Removed by friendly hands, for the relief of his
sufferings, to the priory of St Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saone,
he died on the 21st of April 1142. First buried at St Marcel,
his remains soon after were carried off in secrecy to the
Paraclete, and given over to the loving care of Heloise, who
in time came herself to rest beside them (1164). The bones
of the pair were shifted more than once afterwards, but they
were marvellously preserved even through the vicissitudes
of the French Revolution, and now they lie united in the
well-known tomb in the cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise at Paris.
Great as was the influence exerted by Abelard on the minds of
his contemporaries and the course of medieval thought, he has
been little known in modern times but for his connexion with
Heloise. Indeed, it was not till the 19th century, when Cousin
in 1836 issued the collection entitled Ouvrages inedits
