His student days ended abruptly in Paris, where he had enrolled himself as the pupil of a distinguished philosopher, Guillaume de Champeaux; but one day Abelard engaged in a disputation with his master.  His wonderful combination of eloquence, logic, and originality utterly routed Champeaux, who was thus humiliated in the presence of his disciples.  He was the first of many enemies that Abelard was destined to make in his long and stormy career.  From that moment the young Breton himself set up as a teacher of philosophy, and the brilliancy of his discourses soon drew to him throngs of students from all over Europe.

Before proceeding with the story of Abelard it is well to reconstruct, however slightly, a picture of the times in which he lived.  It was an age when Western Europe was but partly civilized.  Pedantry and learning of the most minute sort existed side by side with the most violent excesses of medieval barbarism.  The Church had undertaken the gigantic task of subduing and enlightening the semi-pagan peoples of France and Germany and England.

When we look back at that period some will unjustly censure Rome for not controlling more completely the savagery of the medievals.  More fairly should we wonder at the great measure of success which had already been achieved.  The leaven of a true Christianity was working in the half-pagan populations.  It had not yet completely reached the nobles and the knights, or even all the ecclesiastics who served it and who were consecrated to its mission.  Thus, amid a sort of political chaos were seen the glaring evils of feudalism.  Kings and princes and their followers lived the lives of swine.  Private blood-feuds were regarded lightly.  There was as yet no single central power.  Every man carried his life in his hand, trusting to sword and dagger for protection.

The cities were still mere hamlets clustered around great castles or fortified cathedrals.  In Paris itself the network of dark lanes, ill lighted and unguarded, was the scene of midnight murder and assassination.  In the winter-time wolves infested the town by night.  Men-at-arms, with torches and spears, often had to march out from their barracks to assail the snarling, yelping packs of savage animals that hunger drove from the surrounding forests.

Paris of the twelfth century was typical of France itself, which was harried by human wolves intent on rapine and wanton plunder.  There were great schools of theology, but the students who attended them fought and slashed one another.  If a man’s life was threatened he must protect it by his own strength or by gathering about him a band of friends.  No one was safe.  No one was tolerant.  Very few were free from the grosser vices.  Even in some of the religious houses the brothers would meet at night for unseemly revels, splashing the stone floors with wine and shrieking in a delirium of drunkenness.  The rules of the Church enjoined temperance, continence, and celibacy; but the decrees of Leo IX. and Nicholas II. and Alexander II. and Gregory were only partially observed.