Intellectual life

Peter Abelard was born at Le Pallet, near Nantes, the eldest son of a minor Breton noble, in about 1079. According to his own witness he was provided with a good education by a father who, although a soldier, had a passion for learning, ‘until I was so carried away by my love of learning that I renounced the glory of a soldier’s life … and withdrew from the court of Mars in order to kneel at the feet of Minerva’. His parallel of the lives of the soldier and the scholar is a just one, for he goes on to describe his choice in martial language. ‘I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war’. Again, just like the noble ‘youth’ who set out in search of adventure and material gain or, even more, on crusade, he left home accoutred for intellectual battle ( Duby 1977 :176–7). ‘I began to travel about in several provinces disputing, like a true peripatetic philosopher, wherever I had heard there was a keen interest in the art of dialectic’ ( Radice 1974 :58). By the age of sixteen he had already begun these travels, having made his way to Loches where he studied under the nominalist philosopher, John Roscelin.