Pedro Abelardo
Peter Abelardo, in French Pierre Abélard (Le Pallet, 1079 –Chalon-sur-Saône, April 21, 1142), was a philosopher, theologian, French poet and monk.
In the philosophical controversy, characteristic of the Middle Ages, about the nature of universals, he supported the ideas of conceptualism. At the same time, he polemicized against scholastic natural realism. In his book Sic et non he argued that religious faith should be limited to "rational principles". Some of his theological statements were condemned as heretical by the authorities of the Catholic Church.
He is recognized by modern critics as one of the great geniuses in the history of logic, which he used through the genres and techniques of dialectical diatribe and a deep syllogistic mastery. Abelardo is also remembered, centuries later, in full Romanticism, for the love affair he had with Eloísa. At the same time the author of numerous poems, he dedicated a large part of his life to teaching and debate.
It seems that Abelardo, known in the Middle Ages as Golia ('demonic'), was particularly proud of this nickname, signing some of his letters with it. It was also known as Peripateticus Palatinus due to the influence of Aristotle and Boethius on it.
Life
A large part of his life is known thanks to his autobiography, History of my calamities, a consolatory writing as if he were writing it to an unfortunate friend. Although in it a victimizing vision is given by its author, it helps us to get an idea of the interesting and controversial life of this peculiar genius.
First studies and beginning of teaching
He was born in the fortified town of Le Pallet (Brittany, near Nantes) in 1079. His father Berenger was a wealthy man and gave him a careful education. Abelardo was passionate about studying from his early years; he gave up his military career and studied logic and dialectics. Imbued with a combative spirit, he dedicated himself to traveling through various provinces to dialectically dispute with those who practiced this art. Although he is not mentioned in the Historia Calamitatum , he studied Arts in Loches (south of Tours) between the years 1095 and 1097, with Roscelinus, considered the father of nominalism. Although he accused him of being a tritheist, this had a marked influence on him in his youth.
At the age of twenty Abelardo moved to Paris, whose episcopal school was, at that time, the most famous and the most popular; the chief or head of it was the archdeacon William of Champeaux. Having Guillermo as a teacher, he studied in Paris primarily rhetoric, grammar and dialectic, the disciplines of the trivium preparatory to the formation of the time during the years 1098 and 1100; later he studied arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, which made up the quadrivium of more advanced studies in the year 1108, also with William, with which he obtained the title of Master of Arts.
Around 1112 he began teaching in Melun, Corbeil, and later on the hill of Sainte-Geneviève, near Paris, the city where William taught and where he would found the school in the hermitage of Saint Victor. Abelardo got Guillermo's students to leave him for him by publicly ridiculing him for his naive realism. While Guillermo de Champeaux abandoned teaching to take refuge in Saint Victor, between 1112 and 1113 Abelardo moved to Laon, a city located northeast of Paris. As he did with William, he ridiculed and rebutted his theology professor, Anselm of Laon, earning him enmity. As in the previous case in his autobiography, he would blame his problems on envy and jealousy.
In 1114 he returned to Paris and succeeded in the Notre-Dame cathedral school as a lay teacher, but his adversaries took advantage of his relationship with Heloise to throw him out. His school was so famous that, according to Guizot, a pope (Celestine II), nineteen cardinals, more than fifty French, English, and German bishops and archbishops, and a much larger number of controversialists, including Arnaldo, were educated in it. from Brescia.
Relationship with Eloísa
In addition to teaching, Abelardo dedicated himself to music, composing songs in Romance and simple language that extraordinarily soothed the ladies and greatly entertained the students.
In 1115 he met Heloise, niece of Fulbert, canon of the Paris Cathedral, who entrusted him with her education. Eloísa and Abelardo became lovers keeping their relationship a secret, until in 1119 Eloísa had a son, who would be called Astrolabe.
Abelardo kidnapped Eloísa and took her to her sister's house in Le Pallet. Abelardo insisted on marrying Eloísa, who was opposed because he considered that a man of science could not dedicate himself to a family, and finally the wedding was celebrated in secret. However, Fulberto spread the news and Abelardo sent Eloísa to the Argenteuil monastery. Fulberto then managed to bribe a servant to enter Abelardo's room with some servants and they castrated him. The servant and one of the attackers were arrested and punished with the same mutilation and blindness, while Canon Fulbert was banished from Paris and his property was confiscated. Abelard, for his part, hid humiliated as a monk in Saint-Denis, and arranged for Heloise to become a nun in Argenteuil.
Return to teaching and Council of Soissons
In the year 1120, already recovered from the trauma, he went to Provins where he returned to teaching, managing to gather numerous disciples. There he starred in the polemic with Roscelino, embodied in the De unitate et trinitate divina .
Between 1121 and 1122 his work and his person were questioned as a result of denunciations made by Alberico and Lotulfo, students of the now deceased Guillermo and Anselmo de Laon, for which he was invited to give explanations before the Council of Soissons. When Abelardo arrived, he understood that they had set a trap for him and that his enemies had already convinced the people and the judges that he was a heretic. When he appeared before the judges he was not allowed to speak and without the possibility of defending himself he had to listen to his verdict, he was forced to personally burn his work and had to accept the prohibition to teach.
After a short stay in the monastery of Saint-Médard, in 1123 he returned to Saint-Denis, where he was initially warmly received. But he soon made enemies again by denying the apostolic origin of Dionysus the Areopagite, arguing that according to the texts, during the time the abbey was founded, Dionysus could not be in that place. Thus, he provoked a new scandal and was forced to retire in solitude near Nogent-sur-Seine, in Troyes, where he founded the school of the Paraclete.
The Paraclete
During the period between the years 1123-1125 and despite the accusations, his fame allowed him to gather a large number of disciples. He provoked new controversies, especially with Saint Norbert, founder in 1120 of the order of regular canons, with the order of the Premonstratensians and with Bernardo de Claraval, abbot of Clairvaux, close to the school of the Paraclete. Bernardo, who had founded the monastery of Clairvaux a few years before, was extremely rigorous and severe and led a current of strong criticism of the Hellenic and Arabic influence on Christian theology. His vehement criticism of Abelard's methodology and teachings made him justifiably fear a new accusation of heresy.
In the year 1128 he passed through the monastery of Saint-Gildas de Rhuys (Morbihan) and was named abbot by the monks; despite which he would leave in his autobiography an unfavorable portrait of them. A year later he managed to establish a monastery in the Paraclete and the transfer of Eloísa as abbess.
In 1132 he abandoned Saint-Gildas. During this time he must have produced his autobiography, Historia calamitatum . According to John of Salisbury (1110-1180), his disciple in Sainte-Geneviève, between the years approximately 1136 and 1139, Abelard was once again involved in polemics, this time with the sect of the cornificians, and He was already considered the greatest logic teacher of his time. During this time he began writing his Ethics ( Scito te ipsum ), a work that he will leave unfinished.
New accusations: Council of Sens
In 1139, the Cistercian Guillermo de Saint Thierry (1085-1148) gathered nineteen of Abelardo's supposedly heretical propositions and Bernardo de Claraval sent them to Rome with an accusatory treaty for his condemnation, visiting Abelardo afterwards to get him to retract.
Abelard requested a public discussion in a synod, but in 1140 the synod of Sens demanded that Abelard recant without further discussion. Abelardo decided to appeal to Pope Innocent II and in 1141 he went to Rome, but on the way he heard that the pope had signed Sens's proposal and that he was condemned as a heretic to perpetual silence as a teacher. During that year he wrote an Apology or Confessions of faith, a kind of retraction, he elaborated the Dialogue between a philosopher, a Jew and a Christian (unfinished) and finished the latest version of the Sic et non. He was transferred to the Cluny monastery, although shortly after he would move again for health reasons to a monastery linked to that of Cluny, that of Saint-Marcel.
On April 21, 1142, at the age of sixty-three, he died in retirement in the monastery of Saint-Marcel, in Chalon-sur-Saône. His body was taken to the Paraclete and Eloísa, who died twenty-two years later, was buried next to him. Since 1817 the two bodies rest together in the same tomb in the Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise.
Contributions
With Pedro Abelardo the high point was reached in the critique of realism that Roscelino de Compiegne had begun. With nominalism, both Abelardo and his followers made a major change, stating that there are no universal realities, but only singular things. Universals are mere names or concepts elaborated by the understanding. What matters is the individual, his conscience and his responsibility.
His method is both cause and consequence of his epistemology. Conceptualism, influenced by Roscelino's nominalism, supposes a frontal criticism of the naive realism of the Augustinian-Neoplatonic vision. Abelardo considers language as an interdependent world of the subject and external reality, something completely original for his time, it is a small linguistic twist within his time. Faced with the problem of universals, the prevailing realism, whether naive or critical, considered that universals exist as entities, while for nominalism they only exist in the mind. For Abelardo, universals are logical-linguistic categories that relate the mental world to the physical one.
His contribution to ethics is also highly original, as he faces an unprecedented task. With his peculiar book, Abelardo intended, on the one hand, to put an end to the prescriptive moralism of penitential morality, and on the other, to overcome Augustinian pessimism. True to his method, he starts from an analysis of concepts such as sin or virtue to thus redefine ethics. It is undoubtedly a work that breaks with the Christian tradition, which did nothing more than collect and repeat texts. The eight sentences condemned in Sens at the request of Bernardo de Claraval were completely out of context.
With Abelardo's nominalism, moral behavior is encrypted in the conscience of each individual, the foundation of morality being the personal and free consent of the individual in their actions.
Work
Apart from the peculiar Historia de mis calamidades, Abelardo's production covers the fields of logic and theory of knowledge, theology, ethics and apologetics.
- Logical
- Comments to the Logical vetus Aristotelian, Porfirio and Boecio.
- His Dialectic (1141) is a complete treaty of composite logic for the children of his brother Dagoberto (the introduction has been lost). In it reproduces almost literally what Boecio wrote in De consolatione Philosophiae:Homo est rationale animal atque mortale as well as the etymological explanation of man according to Boecio ("Homo" ab "humo" nominatus est). This underlines the belonging of man to the world.
- Theology
- De unitate et trinitate divina or Theologia summi boni. Written between 1119 and 1120, it was his first theological treatise that emerged from the classes he taught in San Denis. It applies philosophical reasoning to the statements of faith in an attempt to make them more intelligible. He was a doomed oblation in Soissons (1121).
- Theologia christiana. Introductio ad theologiam, a “summa”, only the first third and some sentences that were condemned in Sens (1141). In this writing it highlights the identity of philosophy with the intelligibility of natural law, in terms of the essence and object of philosophary
- Sic et non, contradictory texts on one hundred and fifty-eight issues: These are arguments about claims and denials of the same thing, a dialectical method, anticipation of the quaestio scholastic.
- Ethics and apologetics
- Scito te ipsum (Ethica). It is dedicated to highlighting the nature of sin that differentiates from evil will. Various sentences were sentenced in Sens (1141).
- Dialogue between a philosopher, a Christian and a Jew. In him he affirms that ethics is the first of all moral disciplines and arts because it leads man to the attainment of the supreme good.
The following works have been translated into Spanish:
- Know yourself, or Ethics, preliminary study, translation and notes by Pedro Santidrián, Classic Collection of Thought 77, ed. Tecnos (1991), Madrid; reprint in Col. Great Works of Thought 40, ed. Altaya (1994), Madrid.
- EthicsCol. Library of Philosophical Initiation 116, preliminary study, translation and notes by Angel Cappelletti, ed. Aguilar (1971), Buenos Aires.
- Letters from Abelardo and Eloísa – History Calamitatum, preliminary study, translation and notes by Pedro Santidrián and Manuela Astruga, ed. Olañeta, Palma de Mallorca (1982); more affordable in Bolsillo Book, Editorial Alliance (1983).
- Letters from Abelardo and Eloísa, preliminary study, translation and notes by Natalia Jakubecki and Marcela Borelli, ed. The damn part (2013), Buenos Aires.
- Dialogue between a philosopher, a Jew and a Christian, Yalde, Zaragoza (1988); there is a bilingual edition (Latin/Spanish), annotated and translated by Silvia Magnavacca, in ed. Losada, Library of Works 30 (2003).
Work as a musician
Abelardo was also an important composer and poet. He composed love songs for Heloísa, which have not survived. Later he composed approximately one hundred hymns for the Monastery of Argenteuil, the place where Heloise had retired. Likewise, he composed six very original Biblical plancti (laments) that influenced the later birth of the lay, a type of song that flourished in northern Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries.
Modern Goliardy
The term Goliardía is due to the nickname of Pedro Golía Abelardo. This term was adopted by Bolognese university students at the end of the XIX century, when the movement promoted by Giosuè Carducci was founded, then professor at the local Faculty of Letters, who attended student demonstrations in Germany similar to what would later become the modus operandi of the goliards.