CHAPTER VII
THE TRIAL OF A HERETIC
The swiftly multiplying charges seem to have impaired Abélard’s health. He became much more sensitive to the accusation of heresy than the mere injustice of it can explain. We have an evidence of his morbid state at this period in a letter he wrote to the Bishop of Paris. The letter must not be regarded as a normal indication of the writer’s character, but, like the letter of Canon Roscelin which it elicited, it is not a little instructive about the age in which the writers lived. There are hypercritical writers who question the correctness of attributing these letters to Abélard and Roscelin, but the details they contain refer so clearly to the two masters that any doubt about their origin is, as Deutsch says, ‘frivolous and of no account’; he adds that we should be only too glad, for the sake of the writers, if there were some firm ground for contesting their genuineness.
A pupil of Abélard’s, coming down from Paris, brought him word that Roscelin had lodged an accusation of heresy against him with the bishop. As a monk of St. Denis, Abélard still belonged to Bishop Girbert’s jurisdiction. Roscelin had himself been condemned for heresy on the Trinity at Soissons in 1092, but his was an accommodating rationalism; he was now an important member of the chapter of St. Martin at Tours. Report stated that he had discovered heresy in Abélard’s new work, and was awaiting the return of Girbert to Paris in order to submit it to him. Abélard immediately grasped the pen, and forwarded to Girbert a letter which is a sad exhibition of ‘nerves.’ ‘I have heard,’ he says, after an ornate salutation of the bishop and his clergy, ‘that that ever inflated and long-standing enemy of the Catholic faith, whose manner of life and teaching are notorious, and whose detestable heresy was proved by the fathers of the Council of Soissons, and punished with exile, has vomited forth many calumnies and threats against me, on account of the work I have written, which was chiefly directed against his heresy.’ And so the violent and exaggerated account of Roscelin’s misdeeds continues. The practical point of the epistle is that Abélard requests the bishop to appoint a place and time for him to meet Roscelin face to face and defend his work. The whole letter is marred by nervous passion of the most pitiful kind. It terminates with a ridiculous, but characteristic, dialectical thrust at the nominalist: ‘in that passage of Scripture where the Lord is said to have eaten a bit of broiled fish, he [Roscelin] is compelled to say that Christ ate, not a part of the reality, but a part of the term “broiled fish.”’
Roscelin replied directly to Abélard, besides writing to Girbert. The letter is no less characteristic of the time, though probably an equally unsafe indication of the character of the writer. ‘If,’ it begins, in the gentle manner of the time, ‘you had tasted a little of that sweetness of the Christian religion which you profess by your habit, you would not, unmindful of your order and your profession, and forgetful of the countless benefits you received from my teaching from your childhood to youth, have so far indulged in words of malice against me as to disturb the brethren’s peace with the sword of the tongue, and to contemn our Saviour’s most salutary and easy commands.’ He accepts, with an equally edifying humility, Abélard’s fierce denunciation: ‘I see myself in your words as in a mirror. Yet God is powerful to raise up out of the very stones,’ etc. But he cannot long sustain the unnatural tone, and he suddenly collapses into depths of mediæval Latin, which for filth and indecency rival the lowest productions of Billingsgate. The venerable canon returns again and again, in the course of his long letter, to Abélard’s mutilation, and with the art of a Terence or a Plautus. As to the proposed debate, he is only too eager for it. If Abélard attempts to shirk it at the last moment, he ‘will follow him all over the world.’ He finally dies away in an outburst of childish rage which beats Abélard’s peroration. He will not continue any longer because it occurs to him that Abélard is, by the strictest force of logic, a nonentity. He is not a monk, for he is giving lessons; he is not a cleric, for he has parted with the soutane; he is not a layman, for he has the tonsure; he is not even the Peter he signs himself, for Peter is a masculine name.
These were the two ablest thinkers of Christendom at the time. Fortunately for both, the battle royal of the dialecticians did not take place. Possibly Roscelin had not lodged the rumoured complaint at all. In any case Girbert was spared a painful and pitiful scene.
A short time afterwards, however, Alberic and Lotulphe found an excellent opportunity to take action. Some time in the year 1121 a papal legate, Conon, Bishop of Praeneste, came to Rheims. Conon had been travelling in France for some years as papal legate, and since it was the policy of Rome to conciliate France, in view of the hostility of Germany, the legate had a general mission to make himself as useful and obliging as possible. Archbishop Ralph, for his part, would find it a convenient means of gratifying his teachers, without incurring much personal responsibility. The outcome of their conferences was, therefore, that Abélard received from the legate a polite invitation to appear at a provincial synod, or council, which was to be held at Soissons, and to bring with him his ‘celebrated work on the Trinity.’ The simple monk was delighted at the apparent opportunity of vindicating his orthodoxy. It was his first trial for heresy.
When the time drew near for what Abélard afterwards called ‘their conventicle,’ he set out for Soissons with a small band of friends, who were to witness the chastisement of Alberic and Lotulphe. But those astute masters had not so naïve a view of the function of a council. Like St. Bernard, with whom, indeed, they were already in correspondence, they relied largely on that art of ecclesiastical diplomacy which is the only visible embodiment of the Church’s supernatural power. Moreover, they had the curious ecclesiastical habit of deciding that an end—in this case, the condemnation of Abélard—was desirable, and then piously disregarding the moral quality of the means necessary to attain it. How far the two masters had arranged all the conditions of the council we cannot say, but these certainly favoured their plans.
Soissons, to begin with, was excellently suited for the holding of a council which was to condemn, rather than investigate. Its inhabitants would remember the sentence passed on Roscelin for a like offence. In fact Longueval says, in his Histoire de l’Église Gallicane, that the people of Soissons were religious fanatics as a body, and had of their own impulse burned, or ‘lynched,’ a man who was suspected of Manichæism, only a few years previously. Alberic and Lotulphe had taken care to revive this pious instinct, by spreading amongst the people the information that ‘the foreign monk,’ ‘the eunuch of St. Denis,’ who was coming to the town to be tried, had openly taught the error of tri-theism. The consequence was that when the Benedictine monk appeared in the streets with his few admirers, he had a narrow escape of being stoned to death by the excited citizens. It was a rude shock to his dream of a great dialectical triumph.