One day when they were joking together at the end of the lecture, and the students were twitting him with his neglect of the class, he quietly dropped a bomb to the effect that he thought masters of theology were superfluous. With the text and the ordinary glosses any man of fair intelligence could study theology for himself. He was contemptuously invited to give a practical illustration of his theory. Abélard took the sneer seriously, and promised to lecture on any book of Scripture they cared to choose. Continuing the joke, they chose the curious piece of Oriental work that has the title of Ezechiel. Once more Abélard took them seriously, asked for the text and gloss, and invited them to attend his first lecture, on the most abstruse of the prophets, on the following day. Most of them persisted in treating the matter as a joke, but a few appeared at the appointed spot (in Anselm’s own territory) on the following day. They listened in deep surprise to a profound lecture on the prophet from the new and self-consecrated ‘theologus.’ The next day there was a larger audience; the lecture was equally astonishing. In fine, Abélard was soon in full sail as a theological lector of the first rank, and a leakage was noticed in Anselm’s lecture hall.
Abélard’s theological success at Laon was brief, if brilliant. Two of the leading scholars, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulphe of Novare, urged Anselm to suppress the new movement at once. Seven years later we shall meet Alberic and Lotulphe playing an important part in the tragedy of Abélard’s life; later still Alberic is found in intimacy with St. Bernard. The episode of Laon must not be forgotten. Probably Anselm needed little urging, with the fate of William of Champeaux fresh in his ears. At all events he gave willing audience to the suggestion that a young master, without due theological training, might at any moment bring the disgrace of heresy on the famous school. He ‘had the impudence to suppress me,’ Abélard has the impudence to say. The students are said to have been much angered by Anselm’s interference, but there was no St. Genevieve at Laon—happily, perhaps,—and Abélard presently departed for Paris, leaving the field to the inglorious ‘Pompey the Great.’
CHAPTER IV
THE IDOL OF PARIS
A new age began for Paris and for learning, when Peter Abélard accepted the chair of the episcopal school. It would be a difficult task to measure the influence he had in hastening the foundation of the university—as difficult as to estimate the enduring effect of his teaching on Catholic theology. There were other streams flowing into the life of the period, and they would have expanded and deepened it, independently of the activity of the one brilliant teacher. The work of a group of less gifted, though highly gifted, teachers had started a current of mental life which would have continued and broadened without the aid of Abélard. Life was entering upon a swifter course in all its reaches. Moreover, the slender rill of Greek thought, which formed the inspiration of the eleventh century, was beginning to increase. Through Alexandria, through Arabia, through Spain, the broad stream of the wisdom of the Greeks had been slowly travelling with the centuries. In the twelfth century it was crossing the Pyrenees, and stealing into the jealous schools of Europe. The homeless Jew was bringing the strong, swift, noble spirit of the ‘infidel Moor’ into a hideous world, that was blind with self-complacency. The higher works of Aristotle (the early Middle Ages had only his logic), the words of Plato, and so many others, were drifting into France. Christian scholars were even beginning to think of going to see with their own eyes this boasted civilisation of the infidel.
Yet it is clear that Abélard stands for a mighty force in the story of development. At the end of the eleventh century Paris was an island; at the end of the twelfth century it was a city of two hundred thousand souls, walled, paved, with several fine buildings and a fair organisation. At the end of the eleventh century the schools of Paris, scattered here and there, counted a few hundred pupils, chiefly French; at the end of the twelfth century the University of Paris must have numbered not far short of ten thousand scholars. Let us see how much of this was effected by Abélard.
The pupil who had left Paris when both William and Abélard disappeared in 1113 would find a marvellous change on returning to it about 1116 or 1117. He would find the lecture hall and the cloister and the quadrangle, under the shadow of the great cathedral, filled with as motley a crowd of youths and men as any scene in France could show. Little groups of French and Norman and Breton nobles chattered together in their bright silks and fur-tipped mantles, and with slender swords dangling from embroidered belts; ‘shaven in front like thieves, and growing luxuriant, curly tresses at the back like harlots,’ growls Jacques de Vitry, who saw them, vying with each other in the length and crookedness of their turned-up shoes.[14] Anglo-Saxons looked on, in long fur-lined cloaks, tight breeches, and leathern hose swathed with bands of many coloured cloth. Stern-faced northerners, Poles, and Germans, in fur caps and coloured girdles and clumsy shoes, or with feet roughly tied up in the bark of trees, waited impatiently for the announcement of ‘Li Mestre.’ Pale-faced southerners had braved the Alps and the Pyrenees under the fascination of ‘the wizard.’ Shaven and sandalled monks, black-habited clerics, black canons, secular and regular, black in face too, some of them, heresy-hunters from the neighbouring abbey of St. Victor, mingled with the crowd of young and old, grave and gay, beggars and nobles, sleek citizens and bronzed peasants.
Crevier and other writers say that Abélard had attracted five thousand students to Paris. Sceptics smile, and talk of Chinese genealogies. Mr. Rashdall, however, has made a careful study of the point, and he concludes that there were certainly five thousand, and possibly seven thousand, students at Paris in the early scholastic age, before the multiplication of important centres. He points out that the fabulous figures which are sometimes given—Wycliffe says that at one time there were sixty thousand students at Oxford, Juvenal de Ursinis gives twenty thousand at Paris in the fifteenth century, Italian historians speak of fifteen thousand at Bologna—always refer to a date beyond the writer’s experience, and frequently betray a touch of the laudator temporis acti. It is, at all events, safe to affirm that Abélard’s students were counted by thousands, if they had not ‘come to surpass the number of the laity’ [ordinary citizens], as an old writer declares. Philippe Auguste had to direct a huge expansion of the city before the close of the century. There is nothing in the commercial or political development of Paris to explain the magnitude of this expansion. It was a consequence of a vast influx of students from all quarters of the globe, and the fame of Master Abélard had determined the course of the stream.
One condition reacted on another. A notable gathering of students attracted Jews and merchants in greater numbers. They, in turn, created innumerable ‘wants’ amongst the ‘undisciplined horde.’ The luxuries and entertainments of youth began to multiply. The schools of Paris began to look fair in the eyes of a second world—a world of youths and men who had not felt disposed to walk hundreds of miles and endure a rude life out of academic affection. The ‘dancers of Orleans,’ the ‘tennis-players of Poitiers,’ the ‘lovers of Turin,’ came to fraternise with the ‘dirty fellows of Paris.’ Over mountains and over seas the mingled reputation of the city and the school was carried, and a remarkable stream set in from Germany, Switzerland, Italy (even from proud Rome), Spain, and England; even ‘distant Brittany sent you its animals to be instructed,’ wrote Prior Fulques to Abélard (a Breton) a year or two afterwards.