Abelard condemned at Soissons

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Peter Abelard, the sharpest philosophical mind of his generation, was made to throw his own treatise on the Trinity into a fire at the Council of Soissons. The humiliation would be repeated when Bernard of Clairvaux hunted him down again two decades later at Sens. The condemnation drove Abelard into temporary exile but did nothing to diminish his celebrity; students followed him wherever he went, drawn by a brilliance his enemies could not silence.