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Updated: May 14, 2025
So sweet did I find the pleasures of our loving days that I cannot bring myself to reject them or to banish them from my memory. Wheresoever I go, they thrust themselves upon my vision, and rekindle the old desire. But Abelard knew only too well that not in this life could there be anything save spiritual love between himself and Heloise.
Abelard had, almost at the same time with Anselm, interpreted the death of Christ in far different fashion. It was a revelation of the love of God which wins men to love in turn. This notion of Abelard was far too subtle. The crass objective dogma of Anselm prevailed. The death of Christ was a sacrifice. The purpose was the propitiation of an angry God.
Although much brilliance was shed over the reign of Louis the Sixth by the learning of Abelard and the professors who followed him, yet soon after the barbarous custom was introduced of trial by combat; the idea might probably have been suggested by Louis having challenged Henry the First of England to decide their differences in a single encounter.
Be that as it may, its authentic history had been extensive before Abélard assumed the direction of its affairs. His gruesome picture of the conditions which prevailed there cannot, of course, be accepted as wholly accurate, but even allowing for gross exaggeration, the life of the monks must have been quite sufficiently scandalous.
It has a certain interest to the historian of education, however, as an illustration of the way in which a method struck out by a single original thinker may influence the work of scholars and universities for generations. The method of scholastic theology is mainly due to Abelard.
Couldst thou behold those brilliant eyes without recalling the tender glances which have been so fatal to thee? Couldst thou see that majestic air of Abelard without being jealous of everyone who beholds so attractive a man? That mouth cannot be looked upon without desire; in short, no woman can view the person of Abelard without danger.
His letters always began, "Dearest Héloïse," or "Mélisande," or "Baucis," or "Isolde"; and, rather than acknowledge her ignorance of these classic allusions, she looked them up and sent her answers to "Dear Abélard," or "Pelléas," or "Philemon," or "Tristan," as the case demanded.
But that man never could come within the influence of a subject in the least pathetic without overflowing his banks. He ought to be dammed or leveed, I should more properly say. Such is the history not as it is usually told, but as it is when stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that would enshrine for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre Abelard.
In this "Story of My Misfortunes" Abélard gives his own account of the triumphant manner in which he confounded his master, William, but as Henry Adams says, "We should be more credulous than twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abélard's word in 1135, that in 1110 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished dialectician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other dialectician was ever silenced by it whatever may have been the case with theologians-and so obvious that it could not have troubled a scholar of fifteen.
And the discussions raised at the meetings corresponded with the persons attending them; there was the disputation of the schools; there was no founding of sects; the lessons of Abelard and the questions he handled were scientifico-religious; it was to expound and propagate what they regarded as the philosophy of Christianity, that masters and pupils made bold use of the freedom of thought; they made but slight war upon the existing practical abuses of the church; they differed from her in the interpretation and comments contained in some of her dogmas; and they considered themselves in a position to explain and confirm faith by reason.
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