many of the
foremost figures in the intellectual and clerical life of the early
twelfth century it has been possible to check his own account of
his career with considerable accuracy. The story told in the
"Historia Calamitatum" covers the events of his life from boyhood
to about 1132 or 1133,--in other words, up to approximately his
fifty-third or fifty-fourth year. That the account he gives of
himself is substantially correct cannot be doubted; making all due
allowance for the violence of his feelings, which certainly led him
to colour many incidents in a manner unfavourable to his enemies,
the main facts tally closely with all the external evidence now
available.

A very brief summary of the events of the final years of his life
will serve to round out the story. The "Historia Calamitatum" was
written while Abelard was still abbot of the monastery of St.
Gildas, in Brittany. The terrors of his existence there are fully
dwelt on in his autobiographical letter, and finally, in 1134 or
1135, he fled, living for a short time in retirement. In 1136,
however, we find him once more lecturing, and apparently with much
of his former success, on Mont Ste. Genevieve. His old enemies were
still on his trail, and most of all Bernard of Clairvaux, to whose
fiery adherence to the faith Abelard's rationalism seemed a sheer
desecration. The unceasing activities of Bernard and others finally
brought Abelard before an ecclesiastical council at Sens in 1140,
where he was formally arraigned on charges of heresy. Had Abelard's
courage held good, he might have won his case, for Bernard was
frankly terrified at the prospect of meeting so formidable a
dialectitian, but Abelard, broken in spirit by the prolonged
persecution from which he had suffered, contented himself with
appealing to the Pope. The indefatigable Bernard at once proceeded
to secure a condemnation of Abelard from Rome, whither the accused
man set out to plead his case. On the way, however, he collapsed,
both physically and in spirit, and remained for a few months at the
abbey of Cluny, whence his friends removed him, a dying man, to the
priory of St. Marcel, near Chalons-sur-Saone. Here he died on April
21, 1142.

A discussion of Abelard's position among the scholastic
philosophers would necessarily go far beyond the proper limits of a
mere historical note. He stands out less commandingly as a
constructive philosopher than as a master of dialectics. He was, as
even his