to Paris in 1113, and acquired extraordinary popularity as a teacher. It was at this time that he
became the lover of Héloà ̄se, niece of Canon Fulbert. The canon had him castrated, and he
and Héloà ̄se had to retire from the world, he into a monastery at St. Denis, she into a nunnery
at Argenteuil. Their famous correspondence is said, by a learned German named Schmeidler, to
have been entirely composed by Abélard as a literary fiction. I am not competent to judge as to
the correctness of this theory, but nothing in Abélard's character makes it impossible. He was
always vain, disputatious, and contemptuous; after his misfortune he was also angry and
humiliated. Héloà ̄se's letters are much more devoted than his, and one can imagine him
composing them as a balm to his wounded pride.
Even in his retirement, he still had great success as a teacher; the young liked his cleverness, his
dialectical skill, and his irreverence towards their other teachers. Older men felt the correlative
dislike of him, and in 1121 he was condemned at Soissons for an unorthodox book on the Trinity.
Having made due submission, he became abbot of Saint Gildas in Brittany, where he found the
monks savage boors. After four miserable years in this exile, he returned to comparative
civilization. His further history is obscure, except that he continued to teach with great success,
according to the testimony of John of Salisbury. In 1141, at the instance of Saint Bernard, he was
again condemned, this time at Sens. He retired to Cluny, and died the next year.
Abélard's most famous book, composed in 1121-22, is Sic et Non, "Yes and No." Here he gives
dialectical arguments for and against a great variety of theses, often without attempting to arrive at
a conclusion; clearly he likes the disputation itself, and considers it useful as sharpening the wits.
The book had a considerable effect in waking people from their dogmatic slumbers. Abélard's
view, that (apart from Scripture) dialectic is the sole road to truth, while no empiricist can accept
it, had, at the time, a valuable effect as a solvent of prejudices and an encouragement to the
fearless use of the intellect. Nothing outside the Scriptures, he said, is infallible; even Apostles
and Fathers may err.
His valuation of logic was, from a modern point of view, excessive. He considered it pre-
eminently the Christian science, and made play with its derivation from "Logos." "In the
beginning was the Logos,"