PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH Abelard supported Heloăse out of his tutorial earnings and the pair renewed their relationship by means of edifying correspondence One of Abelard’s longest letters, written some years later, is called History of my Calamities It is the main source of our knowledge of his life up to this point, and is the liveliest piece of autobiography between Augustine’s Confessions and the diary of Samuel Pepys While at St Denis, Abelard continued to teach, and began to write theological treatises The Wrst one, Theology of the Highest Good, addressed the problem that set Anselm and Roscelin at odds: the nature of the distinction between the three divine persons in the Trinity, and the relationship in the Godhead between the triad ‘power, wisdom, goodness’ and the triad ‘Father, Son, and Spirit’ Like Roscelin, Abelard got into trouble with the Church; his work was condemned as unsound by a synod at Soissons in 1121 He had to burn the treatise with his own hand and he was brieXy imprisoned in a correctional monastery On his return to St Denis, Abelard was soon in trouble again for denying that the abbey’s patron had ever been bishop of Athens He was forced to leave, and set up a country school in an oratory that he built in Champagne and dedicated to the Paraclete (the Holy Spirit) From 1125 to 1132 or thereabouts he was abbot of St Gildas, a corrupt and boisterous abbey in Brittany, where his attempts at reform were met with threats of murder Heloăse meanwhile had become prioress of Argenteuil When she and her nuns were made homeless in 1129, Abelard installed them in the Paraclete oratory Some time early in the 1130s Abelard returned to Paris, teaching again on the Mont Ste Genevie`ve He spent most of the rest of his working life there, lecturing on logic and theology and writing copiously He wrote a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, and an ethical treatise with the Socratic title Know Thyself He continued to assemble a collection of authoritative texts on important theological topics, grouping them in contradictory pairs under the title Sic et Non (‘Yes and No’) He developed the ideas of his Theology of the Supreme Good in several succeeding versions, of which the deWnitive one was The Theology of the Scholars, which was Wnished in the mid1130s This book brought him into conXict with St Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and second founder of the Cistercian order, later to be the preacher of the Second Crusade Bernard took out of the book (sometimes fairly, some45