Books in Brief

The Story of My Misfortunes, by Peter Abélard (Free Press, $3.50). For his own twelfth-century contemporaries, Peter Abélard was a master of dialectic, a brilliant teacher, and an agile questioner of matters spiritual, who placed his emphasis upon the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit in each soul. Upon his students he had some of the same heady effect as, say, the books of Simone Weil have today; and before he died, he had been condemned for heresy. Such a temperament, of course, always has a profoundly intractable element, and Peter’s Historia Calamitatum reveals him as more proud than self-reckoning. He accuses others of envy, calumny, persecution, but regards his own pride with equanimity, so that his best pages are those which have to do with Héloïse. The chapter (VII) which analyzes her motives for opposing their marriage (on the ground that Peter was already a dedicated man whom a wife could only impair) makes one of the most noble images in human annals. Beside it, Peter’s own spectacle seems slight and temporal.

R. phelps

Featured Tags

The Story of My Misfortunes, by Peter Abélard (Free Press, $3.50). For his own twelfth-century contemporaries, Peter Abélard was a master of dialectic, a brilliant teacher, and an agile questioner of matters spiritual, who placed his emphasis upon the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit in each soul. Upon his students he had some of the same heady effect as, say, the books of Simone Weil have today; and before he died, he had been condemned for heresy. Such a temperament, of course, always has a profoundly intractable element, and Peter’s Historia Calamitatum reveals him as more proud than self-reckoning. He accuses others of envy, calumny, persecution, but regards his own pride with equanimity, so that his best pages are those which have to do with Héloïse. The chapter (VII) which analyzes her motives for opposing their marriage (on the ground that Peter was already a dedicated man whom a wife could only impair) makes one of the most noble images in human annals. Beside it, Peter’s own spectacle seems slight and temporal.

R. phelps