Peter Abélard

by Joseph McCabe

To this abbey of St. Genevieve, then, the militant master led his followers, and he began at once to withdraw the students from Notre Dame, as he candidly tells us. If Bishop Galo and his chapter found their cloistral school deserted, they might be induced to consider Abélard’s gifts and influence. So the war went on merrily between the two camps. The masters fulminated against each other; the students ran from school to school, and argued it out on the bridge and in the taverns, and brought questions to their logical conclusion in the Pré-aux-clercs.[9] There was certainly, as we saw previously, ample room for litigation in the problems of mediæval dialectics. John of Salisbury studied dialectics under Abélard at St. Genevieve (though not in the abbey) at a later date, and he tells us that when he returned to Paris twelve years afterwards he found his dialectical friends just where he had left them. ‘They had not added the smallest proposition,’ he says contemptuously. Little John preferred ‘philology,’ as they called classical studies in his day.

We get a curious insight into the school-life of the period in the Life of Saint Goswin. Goswin of Douai—whom we shall meet again once or twice—was studying in the school of Master Joscelin the Red, down the hill. He was a youthful saint of the regulation pattern: had borne the aureole from his cradle. About this time he is described as brimming over with precocious zeal for righteousness, and astounded at the impunity with which Abélard poured out his novelties. Why did not some one silence ‘this dog who barked at the truth’? Already, the authors of the saint’s life—two monks of the twelfth century—say, ‘Abélard’s hand was against every man, and every man’s hand against him,’ yet no one seemed inclined ‘to thrash him with the stick of truth.’ The young saint could not understand it. He went to Master Joscelin at length, and declared that he was going to do the work of the Lord himself. Joscelin is reported to have endeavoured to dissuade him with a feeling description of Abélard’s rhetorical power; we do not know, however, that Joscelin was void of all sense of humour. In any case the saintly youngster of ‘modest stature’ with the ‘blue-grey eyes and light air’ had a good measure of courage. It will be interesting, perhaps, to read the issue in the serio-comic language of the times.

‘With a few companions he ascended the hill of St. Genevieve, prepared, like David, to wage single conflict with the Goliath who sat there thundering forth strange novelties of opinion to his followers and ridiculing the sound doctrine of the wise.

‘When he arrived at the battlefield—that is, when he entered the school—he found the master giving his lecture and instilling his novelties into his hearers. But as soon as he began to speak, the master cast an angry look at him; knowing himself to be a warrior from his youth, and noticing that the scholar was beginning to feel nervous, he despised him in his heart. The youth was, indeed, fair and handsome of appearance, but slender of body and short of stature. And when the proud one was urged to reply, he said: “Hold thy peace, and disturb not the course of my lecture.”’

The story runs, however, that Abélard’s students represented to him that the youth was of greater importance than he seemed to be, and persuaded him to take up the glove. ‘Very well,’ said Abélard, and it is not improbable, ‘let him say what he has to say.’ It was, of course, unfortunate for Goliath, as the young champion of orthodoxy, aided by the Holy Spirit, completely crushed him in the midst of his own pupils.

‘The strong man thus bound by him who had entered his house, the victor, who had secured the Protean-changing monster with the unfailing cord of truth, descended the hill. When they had come to the spot where their companions awaited them in the distant schools [i.e. when they had got to a safe distance from Abélard’s pupils], they burst forth in pæans of joy and triumph: humbled was the tower of pride, downcast was the wall of contumacy, fallen was he that had scoffed at Israel, broken was the anvil of the smiter,’ etc. etc.

The course of events does not seem to have been much influenced by this breaking of the ‘anvil.’ Joscelin was soon compelled to seek fresh pastures; he also found ultimate consolation in a bishopric, and a share in the condemnation of Abélard. The commentator of Priscian must then have received the full force of Abélard’s keen dialectical skill and mordant satire. His students began to fall away to the rival camp in large numbers. William was informed in his distant solitude, and he returned (‘impudenter,’ says Abélard) in haste to St. Victor’s. He opened his old school in the priory, and for a time Paris rang more loudly than ever with the dialectical battle. But William’s intervention proved fatal to his cause. The substitute had kept a handful of students about him, Abélard says, but even they disappeared when William returned. The poor Priscianist could think of nothing better than to develop ‘a call to the monastic life,’ and he obeyed it with admirable alacrity. However, just as Abélard was about to enter on the last stage of the conflict, he was recalled to Pallet by his mother.

The eleventh century had witnessed a strong revival of the monastic spirit. When men came at length to feel the breath of an ideal in their souls, the sight of the fearful disorder of the age stimulated them to the sternest sacrifices. They believed that he who said, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,’ was God, that he meant what he said, and that he spoke the message to all the ages. So there uprose a number of fervent preachers, whose voices thrilled with a strange passion, and they burned the Christ-message into the souls of men and women. In Brittany and Normandy Robert of Arbrissel and two or three others had been at work years before St. Bernard began his apostolate. They had broken up thousands of homes—usually those which were helping most to sweeten the life of the world—and sent husband and wife to spend their days apart in monasteries and nunneries. The modern world speaks of the harshness of it; in their thoughts it was only a salutary separation for a time, making wholly certain their speedy reunion in a not too ethereal heaven. In the great abbey of Fontevraud, founded by Robert of Arbrissel in the year 1100, there were nearly four thousand nuns, a large proportion of whom were married women. Even in their own day the monastic orators were strongly opposed on account of their appalling dissolution of domestic ties. Roscelin attacked Robert of Arbrissel very warmly on the ground that he received wives into his monasteries against the will of their husbands, and in defiance of the command of the Bishop of Angers to release them: he boldly repeats the charge in a letter to the Bishop of Paris in 1121. Not only sober thinkers and honest husbands would resent the zeal of the Apostle of Brittany; the courtly, and the ecclesiastical and monastic, gallants of the time would be equally angry with him. We have another curious objection in some of the writers of the period. Answering the question why men were called to the monastic life so many centuries before women, they crudely affirm that the greater frailty of the women had made them less competent to meet the moral dangers of the cenobitic life. Thus from one cause or other a number of calumnies, still found in the chronicles, were in circulation about Robert of Arbrissel.[10] It would be interesting to know what half-truths there were at the root of these charges; there may have been such, in those days, quite consistently with perfect religious sincerity. In the martyrologies of some of the monastic orders, there are women mentioned with high praise who disguised themselves as men, and lived for years in monasteries. It is noteworthy that mediæval folk worked none of those miracles at the tomb of Robert of Arbrissel that they wrought at the tombs of St. Bernard and St. Norbert. He is not a canonised saint.

However, in spite of both responsible and irresponsible opposition, Robert of Arbrissel, Vitalis the Norman, and other nervous orators, had caused an extensive movement from the hearth to the cloister throughout Brittany and Normandy, such as St. Bernard inaugurated in France later on. Home after home—château or chaumière—was left to the children, and they who had sworn companionship in life and death cheerfully parted in the pathetic trust of a reunion. Abélard’s father was touched by the sacred fire, and entered a monastery. His wife had to follow his example. Whatever truth there was in the words of Roscelin, the Church certainly commanded that the arrangement should be mutual, unless the lady were of an age or a piety beyond suspicion, as St. Francis puts it in his ‘Rule.’ Lucia had agreed to take the veil after her husband’s departure. This was the news that withheld the hand of ‘the smiter’ on the point of dealing a decisive blow, and he hastened down to Brittany to bid farewell to his ‘most dear mother.’ Not only in this expression, but in the fact of his making the journey at all in the circumstances, we have evidence of a profound affection. Since he had long ago abdicated his rights of primogeniture, there cannot have been an element of business in the visit to Pallet.

He was not long absent from Paris. The news reached him in Brittany that the prior had at length discovered a dignified retreat from the field. Soon after Abélard’s departure the bishopric of Châlons-sur-Marne became vacant, and William was nominated for the see. He bade a fond farewell to Paris and to dialectics. From that date his ability was devoted to the safe extravagances of mystic theology, under the safe tutorship of St. Bernard.[11] He had left his pupil Gilduin to replace him at St. Victor, and the school quickly assumed a purely theological character; but the luckless chair of Notre Dame he entrusted to the care of Providence.