ABELARD, PETER (1079-1142), scholastic philosopher, was born in Pallet (Palais), not far from Nantes, in 1079. He was the eldest son of a noble Breton house. He studied first under Roscelin, the extreme nominalist, and then went to the cathedral school of Notre Dame, whose master was William of Champeaux, the disciple of St. Anselm, and most advanced of realists. After a short time 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 ages.
When William procured his expulsion from Paris, he set up a school of his own at Melun, whence he removed to Corbeil, nearer Paris, finally becoming master of the school of St. Genevieve. 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 more popular than those of the master. Abelard was now at the height of his fame. In '115 he was made canon and master of Notre Dame, whither the fame of his learning and his personal charm drew students from all countries. (Fulk of Deuil, Ep. ad Abaelardum.) Few teachers ever held such sway as Abelard now did for a time ; but a change in his fortunes was at hand. He fell in love with the beautiful and learned Heloise, niece of Canon Fulbert, and seduced her. After the birth of their son, they were secretly married, though Heloise appealed to Abelard not to sacrifice his independence and chances of advancement. When the marriage became known, Heloise returned to the convent of Argenteuil. Fulbert, believing that Abelard planned to be rid of her, took a barbarous revenge, breaking into his chamber by night and per petrating upon him the most brutal mutilation. Abelard, in de spair, became a monk at St. Denys and Heloise took the veil.
After a year Abelard opened a school of theology at the priory of Maisoncelle (II20). His lectures were heard again by crowds of students, and all his old influence seemed to have returned ; but old enmities were revived also. 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 a condemnation of his teaching, made him burn his book, and shut him up in the convent of St. Medard at Soissons. When he returned to St. Denys, another dis pute arose. He cited Bede to prove that Dionysius the Areopagite had been bishop of Corinth, and not, as the monks held, bishop of Athens. When this historical heresy led to the inevitable persecu tion, Abelard withdrew to a desert place near Nogent-sur-Seine and turned hermit. His retreat becoming known, students flocked to him from Paris, and in gratitude for the consolation they brought him, 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 accepted an invitation to preside over the abbey of St. Gildas de Rhuys, in Lower Brittany. The abbey was poor, disorderly and depraved ; yet for nearly ten years he endured it, and it was only under peril of violent death that he fled from his charge. Mean while 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. After his flight from St. Gildas, he wrote, among other things, his famous Historia Calamitatum, and thus moved Heloise to pen her three Letters, which have kept their place among the great love letters of the world. In 1136 he was lecturing on Mount St. Genevieve (when he was heard by John of Salisbury), but it was only for a brief space. As far back as the Paraclete days he had been the opponent of Bernard of Clairvaux, who upheld the principle of fervent and unhesitating faith, from which rational inquiry like his was sheer revolt, and Abelard now came into conflict with this uncompromising spirit. In 1141 a council met at Sens, before which Abelard, formally arraigned upon a number of heretical charges, was prepared to plead his cause; but when Bernard had opened the case, suddenly 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 till a second condemnation was procured at Rome in the following year. Meanwhile, on his way thither to urge his plea in person, Abelardllad broken down at the abbey of Cluny, and there, an utterly fallen man, only not bereft of his intellectual force, he lingered but a few months. Removed for the relief of his sufferings to the priory of St. Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saone, he died April 21, 1142. HeloIse died in and the two now lie in the well-known tomb in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise in Paris.
Great as was the influence exerted by Abelard on the minds of his contemporaries and the course of mediaeval thought, he has been little known in modern times but for his relations with Heloise. Indeed, it was not till 1836, when Cousin issued the collection entitled Ouvrages inedits d'Abelard, that his philo sophical performance could be judged at first hand; of his strictly philosophical works only one, the ethical treatise Scito to ipsum, having been published earlier (1721). Cousin's collection, besides giving extracts from the theological work Sic et Non (an assem blage 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 I3oethius, and a fragment, De Gen eribus et Speciebus, which, with the psychological treatise De Intellectibus (published apart by Cousin in Fragmens Pitilosopliiques, vol. ii.) is now considered upon internal evidence not to be by Abelard himself. A genuine work, the Glossulae super Porphyrium, from which Charles de Remusat, in his classical monograph Abelard (1845), has given extracts, remains in manu script.
The general importance of Abelard lies in his having fixed more decisively than anyone before him the scholastic manner of philosophizing, with its object of giving a formally rational ex pression 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 ap proval from the heads of the church. Through him was prepared 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 con ceptualism and his attitude to the question of universals, see SCHOLASTICISM.
Outside of his dialectic, it was in ethics that Abelard 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 hardly ventured to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the ethical inquiries of Aristotle became known to them.