Abélard now formed a resolution which has given rise to much speculation. Instead of stepping at once into the chair of the cloistral school, which he admits was offered to him, he goes off to some distance from Paris for the purpose of studying theology. It is the general opinion of students of his life that his main object in doing so was to make more secure his progress towards the higher ecclesiastical dignities. That he had such ambition, and was not content with the mere chair and chancellorship of the cloistral school, is quite clear. In his clouded and embittered age he is said, on the high authority of Peter of Cluny, to have discovered even that final virtue of humility. There are those who prefer him in the days of his frank, buoyant pride and ambition. If he had been otherwise in the days of the integrity of his nature, he would have been an intolerable prig. He was the ablest thinker and speaker in France. He was observant enough to perceive it, and so little artificial as to acknowledge it, and act in accordance. Yet there was probably more than the counsel of ambition in his resolution. From the episode of Goswin’s visit to St. Genevieve it is clear that whispers of faith, theology, and heresy were already breaking upon the freedom of his dialectical speculations. He must have recalled the fate of Scotus Erigena, of Bérenger, of Roscelin, and other philosophic thinkers. Philosophic thought was subtly linked with ecclesiastical dogma. He who contemplated a life of speculation and teaching could not afford to be ignorant of the ecclesiastical claims on and limitations of his sphere. Such thoughts can scarcely have been unknown to him during the preceding year or two, and it seems just and reasonable to trace the issue of them in his resolution. He himself merely says: ‘I returned chiefly for the purpose of studying divinity.’ Hausrath quotes a passage from his Introductio ad theologiam with the intention of making Abélard ascribe his resolution to the suggestion of his admirers. On careful examination the passage seems to refer to his purpose of writing on theology, not to his initial purpose of studying it.
Abélard would naturally look about for the first theological teacher in France. There were, in point of fact, few theological chairs at that time, but there was at least one French theologian who had a high reputation throughout Christendom. Pupil of St. Anselm of Canterbury at Bec, canon and dean of the town where he taught, Anselm of Laon counted so many brilliant scholars amongst his followers that he has been entitled the ‘doctor of doctors.’ William of Champeaux, William of Canterbury, and a large number of distinguished masters, sat at his feet. His scholia to the Vulgate were in use in the schools for centuries. He and his brother Raoul had made Laon a most important focus of theological activity for more countries than France. England was well represented there. John of Salisbury frequently has occasion to illustrate the fame and magnitude of the cathedral school.
Anselm had been teaching for forty years when Abélard, aetat. thirty-four, appeared amidst the crowd of his hearers. We can well conceive the fluttering of wings that must have occurred, but Laon was not Paris, and Anselm was not the man to enter upon an argumentative conflict with the shrewd-tongued adventurer. Two incidents of contemporary life at Laon, in which Anselm figured, will be the best means of illustrating the character of the theologian. Abbot Guibertus, of that period, has left us a delightful work ‘De vita sua,’ from which we learn much about Laon and Anselm. The treasure of the cathedral was entrusted, it seems, to seven guardians—four clerics and three laymen. One of these guardians, a Canon Anselm, was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He purloined a good deal of the treasure; and when the goldsmith, his accomplice, was detected, and turned king’s evidence, Anselm denied the story, challenged the goldsmith to the usual duel, and won.[12] The canon was encouraged, and shortly set up as an expert burglar. One dark, stormy night he went with his ‘ladders and machines’ to a tower in which much treasure was kept, and ‘cracked’ it. There was dreadful ado in the city next day; most horrible of all, the burglar had stolen a golden dove which contained some of the hair and some of the milk of the Virgin Mary. In the uncertainty the sapient Master Anselm (no relation, apparently, of Canon Anselm Beessus, the burglar and cathedral treasurer) was invited to speak. His advice largely reveals the man. Those were the days, it must be remembered, when the defects of the detective service were compensated by a willingness and activity of the higher powers which are denied to this sceptical age. When their slender police resources were exhausted, the accused was handed over to a priest, to be prepared, by prayer and a sober diet of bread, herbs, salt, and water, for the public ordeal. On the fourth day priests and people repaired to the church, and when the mass was over, and the vested priests had prostrated themselves in the sanctuary, the accused purged himself of the charge or proved his guilt by carrying or walking on a nine foot bar of heated iron, plunging his arms ‘for an ell and a half’ into boiling water, or being bodily immersed in a huge tank, cold, and carefully blessed and consecrated.
These are familiar facts. The difficulty at Laon was that there was no accused to operate on. The Solomon Laudunensis was therefore called into judgment, and his proposal certainly smacks of the thoroughness of the systematic theologian. A baby was to be taken from each parish of the town, and tried by the ordeal of immersion. When the guilty parish had been thus discovered, each family in it was to purge itself by sending an infant representative to the tank. When the guilt had been thus fastened on a certain house, all its inmates were to be put to the ordeal.[13]
We see Anselm in a very different light in an incident that occurred a year or two before Abélard’s arrival. Through the influence of the King of England and the perennial power of gold a wholly unworthy bishop had been thrust upon the people of Laon. Illiterate, worldly, and much addicted to military society, he was extremely distasteful to Anselm and the theologians. The crisis came when the English king, Henry I., tried to levy a tax on the people of Laon. The bishop supported his patron; Anselm and others sternly opposed the tax in the name of the people. Feeling ran so high that the bishop was at length brutally murdered by some of the townsfolk, and the cathedral was burned to the ground. Anselm immediately, and almost alone, went forth to denounce the frenzied mob, and had the unfortunate prelate—left for the dogs to devour before his house—quietly buried.
Such was the man whom Abélard chose as his next, and last, ‘teacher.’ In the circumstances revealed in the above anecdotes it would have been decidedly dangerous to attack Anselm in the manner that had succeeded so well at Notre Dame. There is, however, no just reason for thinking that Abélard had formed an intention of that kind. No doubt, it is impossible to conceive Abélard in the attitude of one who seriously expected instruction from a master. Yet it would be unjust to assume that he approached the class-room of the venerable, authoritative theologian in the same spirit in which he had approached William of Champeaux’s lectures on rhetoric. We do not find it recorded that he made any attempt to assail directly the high position of the old man. It was sufficient for the purpose we may ascribe to him that he should be able to state in later years that he had frequented the lectures of Anselm of Laon.
With whatever frame of mind the critic came to Laon, he was not long in discovering the defects of Anselm’s teaching. Anselm had one gift, a good memory, and its fruit, patristic erudition. The fame that was borne over seas and mountains was founded mainly on the marvellous wealth of patristic opinion which he applied to every text of Scripture. There was no individuality, no life, in his work. To Abélard the mnemonic feat was a mechanical matter; and indeed, he probably cared little at that time how St. Ambrose or St. Cyril may have interpreted this or that text. Little as he would be disposed to trust the fame of masters after his experience, he tells us that he was disappointed. He found the ‘fig-tree to be without fruit,’ fair and promising as it had seemed. The lamp, that was said to illumine theological Christendom, ‘merely filled the house with smoke, not light.’ He found, in the words of his favourite Lucan,
‘magni nominis umbra,
Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro’:
and he determined ‘not to remain in this idleness under its shade very long.’ With his usual heedlessness he frankly expressed his estimate of the master to his fellow pupils.