biography
pronunciation:
[abelah(r)d]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1079–1142)
|
| biography:
| Theologian, born near Nantes, W France. He studied under Roscellinus and Guillaume de Champeaux (c.1070–1171). As lecturer in the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris, he became tutor to Héloïse, the 17-year-old niece of the canon Fulbert. They fell passionately in love, but when their affair was discovered, they fled to Brittany, where Héloïse gave birth to a son. After returning to Paris, they were secretly married. Héloïse's relatives took their revenge on Abelard by castrating him. He fled in shame to the abbey of St Denis to become a monk, and Héloïse took the veil at Argenteuil as a nun. In 1121, a synod at Soissons condemned his Nominalistic doctrines on the Trinity as heretical, and Abelard took to a hermit's hut at Nogent-sur-Seine, where his pupils helped him build a monastic school he named the Paraclete. In 1125 he was elected abbot of St Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, and the Paraclete was given to Héloïse and a sisterhood. In his final years he was again accused of numerous heresies and he retired to the monastery of Cluny. After his death, he was buried in the Paraclete at Héloïse's request, and when she died in 1164 she was laid in the same tomb. In 1817 they were buried in one sepulchre at Père Lachaise. |
|
|
