At five or six o’clock each morning the great cathedral bell would ring out the summons to work. From the neighbouring houses of the canons, from the cottages of the townsfolk, from the taverns, and hospices, and boarding-houses, the stream of the industrious would pour into the enclosure beside the cathedral. The master’s beadle, who levied a precarious tax on the mob, would strew the floor of the lecture-hall with hay or straw, according to the season, bring the Master’s text-book, with the notes of the lecture between lines or on the margin, to the solitary desk, and then retire to secure silence in the adjoining street. Sitting on their haunches in the hay, the right knee raised to serve as a desk for the waxed tablets, the scholars would take notes during the long hours of lecture (about six or seven), then hurry home—if they were industrious—to commit them to parchment while the light lasted.
The lectures over, the stream would flow back over the Little Bridge, filling the taverns and hospices, and pouring out over the great playing meadow, that stretched from the island to the present Champ de Mars. All the games of Europe were exhibited on that international playground: running, jumping, wrestling, hurling, fishing and swimming in the Seine, tossing and thumping the inflated ball—a game on which some minor poet of the day has left us an enthusiastic lyric—and especially the great game of war, in its earlier and less civilised form. The nations were not yet systematically grouped, and long and frequent were the dangerous conflicts. The undergraduate mind, though degrees had not yet been invented, had drawn up an estimate, pithy, pointed, and not flattering, of each nationality. The English were, it is sad to find, ‘cowardly and drunken,’—to the ‘Anglophobes’; the French were ‘proud and effeminate’; the Normans ‘charlatans and boasters,’ the Burgundians ‘brutal and stupid’; the Bretons ‘fickle and extravagant’; the Flemings ‘blood-thirsty, thievish, and incendiary’; the Germans ‘choleric, gluttonous, and dirty’; the Lombards ‘covetous, malicious, and no fighters’; the Romans ‘seditious, violent, and slanderous.’ Once those war-cries were raised, peaceable folk hied them to their homes and hovels, and the governor summoned his guards and archers.
The centre of this huge and novel concourse was the master of the cathedral school. After long years of conventual life Heloise draws a remarkable picture of the attitude of Paris towards its idol. Women ran to their doors and windows to gaze at him, as he passed from his house on St. Genevieve to the school. ‘Who was there that did not hasten to observe when you went abroad, and did not follow you with strained neck and staring eyes as you passed along? What wife, what virgin, did not burn? What queen or noble dame did not envy my fortune?’ And we shall presently read of a wonderful outburst of grief when the news of the outrage done to Abélard flies through the city. ‘No man was ever more loved—and more hated,’ says the sober Hausrath.
It is not difficult to understand the charm of Abélard’s teaching. Three qualities are assigned to it by the writers of the period, some of whom studied at his feet: clearness, richness in imagery, and lightness of touch are said to have been the chief characteristics of his teaching. Clearness is, indeed, a quality of his written works, though they do not, naturally, convey an impression of his oral power. His splendid gifts and versatility, supported by a rich voice, a charming personality, a ready and sympathetic use of human literature, and a freedom from excessive piety, gave him an immeasurable advantage over all the teachers of the day. Beside most of them, he was as a butterfly to an elephant. A most industrious study of the few works of Aristotle and of the Roman classics that were available, a retentive memory, an ease in manipulating his knowledge, a clear, penetrating mind, with a corresponding clearness of expression, a ready and productive fancy, a great knowledge of men, a warmer interest in things human than in things divine, a laughing contempt for authority, a handsome presence, and a musical delivery—these were his gifts. His only defects were defects of character, and the circumstances of his life had not yet revealed them even to himself.
Even the monkish writers of the Life of St. Goswin, whose attitude towards his person is clear, grant him ‘a sublime eloquence.’ The epitaphs that men raised over him, the judgments of episcopal Otto von Freising and John of Salisbury, the diplomatic letter of Prior Fulques, the references of all the chroniclers of the time, I refrain from quoting. We learn his power best from his open enemies. ‘Wizard,’ ‘rhinoceros,’ ‘smiter,’ ‘friend of the devil,’ ‘giant,’ ‘Titan,’ ‘Prometheus,’ and ‘Proteus,’ are a few of their compliments to his ability: the mellifluous St. Bernard alone would provide a rich vocabulary of flattering encomiums of that character: ‘Goliath,’ ‘Herod,’ ‘Leviathan,’ ‘bee,’ ‘serpent,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘hydra,’ ‘Absalom,’ are some of his epithets. When, later, we find St. Bernard, the first orator and firmest power in France, shrink nervously from an oral encounter with him, and resort to measures which would be branded as dishonourable in any other man, we shall more faithfully conceive the charm of Abélard’s person and the fascination of his lectures.
Yet no careful student of his genius will accept the mediæval estimate which made him the ‘Socrates of Gaul,’ the peer of Plato and of Aristotle. He had wonderful penetration and a rare felicity of oral expression, but he was far removed from the altitude of Socrates and Plato and the breadth of Aristotle. He had no ‘system’ of thought, philosophical or theological; and into the physical and social world he never entered. His ideas—and some of them were leagues beyond his intellectual surroundings—came to him piecemeal. Yet we shall see that in some of those which were most abhorrent to Bernard—who was the Church for the time being—he did but anticipate the judgment of mature humanity on certain ethical and intellectual features of traditional lore. The thesis cannot be satisfactorily established until a later stage.
When we proceed to examine the erudition which gave occasion to the epitaph, ‘to him alone was made clear all that is knowable,’ we must bear in mind the limitations of his world. When Aristotle lent his mind to the construction of a world system, he had the speculations of two centuries of Greek thinkers before him; when Thomas of Aquin began to write, he had read the thoughts of three generations of schoolmen after Abélard, and all the Arabic translations and incorporations of Greek thought. At the beginning of the twelfth century there was little to read beside the fathers. If we take ‘all that was knowable’ in this concrete and relative sense, the high-sounding epitaph is not far above the truth.
His Latin is much better than that of the great majority of his contemporaries. Judged by a perfect classical standard it is defective; it admits some of the erroneous forms that are characteristic of the age. But it is not without elegance, and it excels in clearness and elasticity. It could not well be otherwise, seeing his wide and familiar acquaintance with Latin literature. He frequently quotes Lucan, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Cicero; students of his writings usually add an acquaintance with Juvenal, Persius, Statius, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Quintilian, and Priscian. It was a frequent charge in the mouths of his enemies that he quoted the lewdest books of Ovid in the course of his interpretation of Scripture. The constant glance aside at the literature of human passion and the happy flash of wit were not small elements in his success. Those who came to him from other schools had heard little but the wearisome iteration of Boetius, Cassiodorus, and Martianus Capella. They found the new atmosphere refreshing and stimulating.
His command of Greek and Hebrew is a subject of endless dispute. His pupil Heloise certainly had a knowledge of the two tongues, as we shall see presently. She must have received her instruction from Abélard. But it is clear that Abélard likes to approach a controversy which turns on the interpretation of the original text of Scripture through a third person, such as St. Jerome. He rarely approaches even the easy Greek text of the New Testament directly, and he has no immediate acquaintance with any Greek author. Aristotle he has read in the Latin translation of Boetius, through whose mediation he has also read Porphyry’s Isagoge. He was certainly familiar with the De Interpretatione and the Categories; Cousin grants him also an acquaintance with the Prior Analytics; and Brucker and others would add the Sophistici Elenchi and the Topics. The physical and metaphysical works of Aristotle were proscribed at Paris long after the Jewish and Arabian translations had found a way into other schools of France. The golden thoughts of Plato came to him through the writings of the fathers; though there is said to have been a translation of the Timæus in France early in the twelfth century.
His knowledge of Hebrew must have been equally, or even more, elementary. Only once does he clearly approach the Hebrew text without patristic guidance; it is when, in answering one (the thirty-sixth) of the famous ‘Problems of Heloise,’ he adduces the authority of ‘a certain Hebrew,’ whom he ‘heard discussing the point.’ In this we have a clear clue to the source of his Hebrew. The Jews were very numerous in Paris in the twelfth century. When Innocent the Second visited Paris in 1131, the Jews met him at St. Denis, and offered him a valuable roll of the law. By the time of Philippe Auguste they are said to have owned two-thirds of the city: perceiving which, Philippe recollected, or was reminded, that they were the murderers of Christ, and so he banished them and retained their goods. Abélard indicates that they took part in the intellectual life of Paris in his day; in Spain they were distinguished in every branch of higher thought; and thus the opportunity of learning Hebrew lay close at hand. One does not see why Rémusat and others should deny him any acquaintance with it. His knowledge, however, must have been elementary. He does not make an impressive, though a novel, use of it in deriving the name of Heloise (Helwide, or Helwise, or Louise) from Elohim, which he does, years afterwards, in the sober solitude of his abbey and the coldness of his mutilation.