Peter Abelard

Abelard was the eldest son of a Breton knight who gave up his inheritance to pursue dialectic. In Paris he studied under the realist William of Champeaux, soon reduced his master to silence in debate, and set up his own school, to which students flocked. He called himself the only philosopher never defeated, and his arrogance made enemies everywhere.

Around 1115 he became master at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and tutor to Héloïse, niece of the canon Fulbert. They fell in love; she became pregnant; they married in secret; Fulbert had him castrated by night. He entered the abbey of Saint-Denis and she a convent, and their later letters are the most moving documents of the Middle Ages. His theology was condemned and burned at Soissons in 1121 and condemned again at Sens in 1140 at the instance of Bernard of Clairvaux; he died at Cluny on his way to appeal to Rome.

On universals he opposed both realism and crude nominalism: a universal is not a thing and not a mere sound but a meaningful word pointing to a 'status' that particulars share. Sic et Non set one hundred and fifty-eight contradictory statements of the Church Fathers side by side and asked the reader to judge by reason, a method that became the standard form of scholasticism. His ethics held that sin lies not in the deed but in the intention, a revolutionary claim in its day.