Why Abelard?

Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1142) was a Breton who began a brilliant academic career as a philosopher and thus discovered rationalism as his first epistemological love. He established a reputation in the cathedral school of Paris as a first-rate thinker and an energetic, dynamic teacher who challenged his students to think and not merely copy. They traveled to Paris in droves to learn from this controversial, entertaining, and attractive scholar. Yet theology was the queen of the sciences in the twelfth century and offered answers beyond those available to the philosophers. So Abelard chose to become a student again, albeit only for a short time, for he tired of the authoritarian pedagogy employed by the theologians. Abelard’s most controversial work, Sic et Non, was a backhanded slap at the scholastic practice of quoting authorities in order to answer questions. He simply posed questions and cited authorities rendering incompatible answers, without attempting synthesis or reconciliation. Yet Abelard was not an Enlightenment rationalist; he did not seek to replace revelation with reason. Rather he, like Aquinas, sought to use reason to make sense of what was revealed.

Abelard was also an emotive or romantic learner and expressed this aspect of his personality by composing bawdy ditties and love songs that his students sang in the streets of Paris. His intuition was most obvious in the relational connections he made with his students, with whom he lived and for whom they had profound admiration. Yet he lacked an experiential knowledge of truth until he was caught up in one of the most notorious sexual scandals of the medieval era. He took on the task of educating a bright teenage girl named Heloise and, despite the difference in their ages (perhaps 18-20 years), they quickly established an intimate relationship. In doing so, he violated both his moral code (to resist sexual temptation), which he had acquired through revelation, and his philosophical code (to remain unentangled), which he had chosen through a rational process.

The affair was discovered and Canon Fulbert, Heloise’s uncle and guardian, had Abelard brutally castrated out of anger for his betrayal and deception. Heloise entered a convent where, despite rising to the position of abbess, she pined for Abelard the rest of her days. She wrote him ardent letters expressing her discontent with the lot dealt to them by God. Abelard likewise entered a monastery but, unlike Heloise, there he found contentment and a greater measure of truth than he had previously known. The dramatic experience of pleasure, joy, pain, grief, and loss had revealed to him aspects of God’s character, particularly aspects of God’s justice, that Abelard had been unable or unwilling to discover through other means. Despite his brilliance, or perhaps because of it, Abelard had never truly known God until experience and reflection taught him what was true.

He begged Heloise to see this as well, to understand that what had happened to them was, ultimately, an act of God’s mercy for it released them from their slavery to temporal passions and permitted them to live lives that had greater meaning. Abelard himself continued to teach within the confines of the monastery. His reputation grew again and soon the young men of western Europe were once again flocking to Abelard to gain knowledge. They wanted to meet and study under the great man who had mastered philosophy and theology but found truth in a humiliating, painful slice of a knife. And now he had something more to teach them. Abelard remained controversial until the end, for his encounter with a fuller truth had energized the activist within. He actively sought new and creative ways to understand God, despite the reproaches of those who clung to revelation as the sole appropriate means of knowing such truth.

One does not need a public scandal and humiliation, nor bodily suffering and reproach to follow the model of Abelard. One lesson for the Christian scholar of today is to remain forever discontented with the limits of truth and to seek all avenues by which those limits may be overcome. Abelard, in the end, utilized multiple epistemologies in his pursuit of truth. A second aspect Abelard models is the passion to guide others through (or, in his case, around) the process by which he himself was transformed. Abelard’s concern for the soul of Heloise and the souls of his students was magnified after his tragedy for he understood the value of what he had learned. He desired that others would come to the same point but without the same grief in arriving there. A third lesson that Abelard teaches the modern Christian scholar is the aim of one’s pursuit is Christ Himself. When Abelard came to know Christ, he also came to know himself and, not incidentally, he came to know better the hearts and minds of those around him.