Susan Cahill

“Paris should be both walkable and walked, if the limitless variety, the unexpectedness, the provincialism, the rusticity, the touching eccentricity are to be appreciated.”

In 1115 Canon Fulbert, a cathedral staffer, gave some rent-free rooms to teacher/theologian Peter Abelard in exchange for his services as a tutor to the canon’s intellectually precocious niece, Héloise. She read French, Latin, and Greek; she wanted to learn Hebrew; she was interested in Abelard’s unorthodox philosophical project: to use dialectics to understand the ambiguities and contradictions of religious faith. Orthodox scholars refused the very notion of ambiguity and contradiction. Absolutism—religious, moral, political—defined the very ground of being.

His students adored him, his shocking humanism and open-mindedness freed them to think outside the prescribed boxes. Abelard, for instance, was the defender of sexual pleasure, rejecting the bachelor theologians’ dogma that marital intercourse is always sinful. Saint Augustine had preached that pleasure itself is a sin; Pope Gregory the Great echoed him: “There can be no sexual pleasure without sin.”