On Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux
Thursday, May 7, 2020
8:00PM ET
Registration required
Join us at 8:00PM ET (7:00PM CT) on Thursday, May 7th as we cosponsor, together with the Lumen Christi Institute, a webinar on Zoom with Willemien Otten. Dr. Otten will speak on “On Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux” as a part of the spring webinar series Reason and Wisdom in Medieval Christian Thought. The Saint Benedict Institute is a cosponsor of this event.
This event is free and open to the public, but online registration is required. For more information and to register for this webinar, click here.
Peter Abelard (d. 1142) and Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) were contemporaries who both emerged from the new twelfth-century schools. But their dispositions, personalities, and eventual conflict have come to represent a conflict between the rising scholastic and the traditional monastic cultures of learning. Professor Willemien Otten will introduce these iconic twelfth-century personalities, the direction of their work, and the theological controversy that put them on opposing sides.
Willemien Otten is Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity; also in the College; Associate Faculty in the Department of History, Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. She holds an M.A. and PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Otten studies the history of Christianity and Christian thought with a focus on the Western medieval and the early Christian intellectual tradition, including the continuity of Platonic themes. She is coeditor of Eriugena and Creation (2014), On Religion and Memory (2013), and the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (430–2000) (2013). Her most recent project is entitled “Natura Educans: The Psychology of Pantheism from Eriugena to Emerson.”