I have now to set out with care the story of that immortal love. But nine readers out of ten are minded to pass judgment on the acts and lives of those we recall from the dead. My function is to reconstruct the story as faithfully as the recorded facts allow. Yet I would make one more digression before doing so.
What standard of conduct shall be used in judging Abélard? There are a thousand moral codes—that of the Hindu and that of the Christian, that of the twelfth century and that of the twentieth. In the twelfth century even the St. Bernards thought it just that a man who could not see the truth of the Church’s claims should be burned alive, and his soul tortured for all eternity; that a Being was just and adorable who tortured a twelfth century babe for Adam’s sin; that twelfth century Jews might be robbed because their remote ancestors had put Christ to death; that the sanctity of justice demanded, literally, an eye for an eye; and so forth. One may, of course, choose whatever standard of conduct one likes to measure Abélard’s, or anybody else’s, actions: Cardinal Newman, and such writers, have a fancy for judging him by the perfected code of the nineteenth. We cannot quarrel with them; though it is well to point out that they are not measuring Abélard’s subjective guilt, nor portraying his character, in so doing. And if any do elect to judge Abélard by the moral code of the twelfth century, it must be noted that this varied much, even on the point of sexual morality. St. Bernard and his like saw an inherent moral evil in sexual union; they thought the sanctity of the priestly character was incompatible with it, and that virginity was, in itself, and by the mere abstinence from sexual commerce, something holier than marriage. Apart from this, no doubt—if it can be set apart in the question—good men were agreed. But, as will appear presently, there were large bodies of men, even clerks, who not only differed from them in practice, but also in their deliberate moral judgment. We must approach closer still. When we have to determine an individual conception of the law, for the purpose of measuring real and personal guilt, we must have a regard to the surrounding influences, the current thoughts and prevailing habits, which may have impaired or obscured the feeling of its validity in any respect. It is well, then, first to glance at the morals of the time when one feels eager to measure Abélard’s guilt.
It was a period when the dark triumph of what is called materialism, or animalism, was as yet relieved only by a sporadic gleam of idealism. There was purity in places, but over the broad face of the land passion knew little law. If the unlettered Greek had immoral gods to encourage him, the mediæval had immoral pastors. The Church was just endeavouring to enforce its unfortunate law of celibacy on them. With a stroke of the pen it had converted thousands of honest wives into concubines. The result was utter and sad demoralisation. In thus converting the moral into the deeply immoral, the Church could appeal to no element in the consciences of its servants; nor even to its basic Scriptures. Writers of the time use hyperbolic language in speaking of the prevalent vice, and the facts given in the chronicles, and embodied in the modern collections of ancient documents, fully sustain it. Speaking of the close of the eleventh century, Dubois, in his Historia Ecclesiæ Parisiensis, says: ‘The condition of the Church [in general] at that time was unhappy and wretched ... nearly all the clergy were infected with the vice of simony ... lust and shameful pleasure were openly rampant.’ It is true that he excepts his ‘Church of Paris,’ but his own facts show that it is only a piece of foolish loyalty. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, who studied at Paris towards the close of the century (it must have been worse in Abélard’s time), gives a clearly overdrawn, yet instructive, picture of its life in his Historia Occidentalis. ‘The clergy,’ he says, probably meaning the scholars in general, of whom the majority were clerics, ‘saw no sin in simple fornication. Common harlots were to be seen dragging off clerics as they passed along to their brothels. If they refused to go, opprobrious names were called after them. School and brothel were under the same roof—the school above, the brothel below.... And the more freely they spent their money in vice, the more were they commended, and regarded by almost everybody as fine, liberal fellows.’ The vice that has ever haunted educational centres and institutes was flagrant and general. It is a fact that the authorities had at length to prohibit the canons to lodge students in their houses on the island. In the country and in the other towns the same conditions were found. In Father Denifle’s Chartularium there is a document (No. V.) which throws a curious light on the habits of the clergy. A priest of Rheims was dancing in a tavern one Sunday, when some of the scholars laughed at him. He pursued them to their school, took the place by storm, half-murdered, and then (presumably recalling his sacerdotal character) excommunicated them. At another time, Cardinal Jacques tells us, the lady of a certain manor warned the priest of the village to dismiss his concubine. He refused; whereupon the noble dame had the woman brought to her, and ordained her ‘priestess,’ turning her out before the admiring villagers with a gaudy crown. Another poor priest told his bishop, with many tears, that, if it were a question of choosing between his church and his concubine, he should have to abandon the church; the story runs that, finding his income gone, the lady also departed. There is an equally dark lament in Ordericus Vitalis, the Norman, who lived in Abélard’s day. The letters and sermons of Abélard—Abélard the monk, of St. Bernard, and of so many others, confirm the darkest features of the picture. Only a few years previously the king had lived with the wife of one of his nobles, in defiance of them all; and when a council, composed of one hundred and twenty prelates, including two cardinals and a number of bishops, met at Poitiers to censure him, the Duke of Aquitaine broke in with his soldiers, and scattered them with the flat of his sword. Indeed, an ancient writer, Hugo Flaviniacensis, declares there was a feeling that Pope Paschal did not, for financial reasons, approve the censure passed by his legates.
Considering the enormous prevalence of simony, one could hardly expect to find the Church in a better condition. The writers of the time make it clear that there was an appalling traffic in bishoprics, abbeys, prebends, and all kinds of ecclesiastical goods and dignities. We have already seen one tragic illustration of the evil, and we shall meet many more. A few years previously the king had nominated one of his favourites, Étienne de Garlande, for the vacant bishopric of Beauvais; and this youth, ‘of no letters and of unchaste life,’ at once took even major orders, and talked of going to Rome ‘to buy the curia.’ But, as with regard to the previous point, it is useless to give instances. Corruption was very prevalent; and one cannot wonder at it in view of the reputation which the papacy itself had, in spite of its occasional quashing of a corrupt election. This point will be treated more fully in the sixth chapter.
The question of the deep and widespread corruption of the regular clergy must also be deferred. In his fourth letter to Heloise, Abélard complains that ‘almost all the monasteries of our day’ are corrupt; Jacques de Vitry affirms that no nunneries, save those of the Cistercians, were fit abodes for an honest woman in his day.[15] It is not a little instructive to find Abbot Abélard, in his latest and most ascetic period, telling his son (a monk), in the course of a number of admirable moral maxims, that: ‘A humble harlot is better than she who is chaste and proud,’ and that ‘Far worse is the shrewd-tongued woman than a harlot.’
Finally, mention must be made of the extreme violence of the age. Several illustrations have been given in the course of the narrative, and it will bring many more before the reader. They were still the days of the lex talionis, the judicial duel, the ordeal, and the truce of God. Murder was common in town and country. We have seen the brutal murder of the Bishop of Laon in 1112; we find the Bishop of Paris threatened by the relatives of his archdeacon, and the Prior of St. Victor’s murdered by them, in 1133. But the story will contain violence enough. As for ‘the undisciplined student-hordes of the Middle Ages,’ see the appalling picture of their life in Rashdall’s Universities of Europe. Our period is pre-university—and worse: with the founding of the university came some degree of control. Yet even then the documentary evidence discloses a fearful condition of violence and lawlessness. In the year 1197 we find the Bishop of Paris abolishing the ‘Feast of Fools.’ On January 1st (and also on the feast of St. Stephen), it seems, a carnival was held, during which the masquers had free run of the cathedral and the churches, making them echo with ribald songs, and profaning them with bloodshed and all kinds of excess. In 1218, says Crevier, we find the ecclesiastical judges of Paris complaining that the students break into the houses of the citizens, and carry off their womenfolk. In 1200 we find a pitched battle between the students of Paris and the governor and his guards, in which several are killed; and the king condemns the unfortunate governor to be tried by ordeal; to be hanged forthwith if it proves his guilt, and to be imprisoned for life (in case Providence has made a mistake) if it absolves him. After another of these battles, when the governor has hanged several students, the king forces him and his council to go in their shirts to the scaffold and kiss the bodies. In another case, in 1228, the king sides with the governor, and the masters close the university in disgust until the students are avenged.
But of story-telling there would be no end. And, indeed, there is the danger of giving a false impression of scantiness of evidence when one follows up a large assertion with a few incidents. It is, however, clear from the quoted words of accredited historians, and will be made clearer in the progress of the narrative, that simony, unchastity, violence, cruelty, and usury were real and broad features of the age of Abélard. The reader will not forget them, when he is seeking to enter into the conscience of the famous master.
CHAPTER V
DEAD SEA FRUIT