But charity and justice had no part in that pitiful conventicle. Archbishop and legate thought it politic to follow the ruling of Alberic to the end, and the parchment was handed to Abélard. And priest and prelate, monk and abbot, shamelessly stood around, whilst the greatest genius of the age, devoted to religion in every gift of his soul, as each one knew, faltered out the familiar symbol. ‘Good Jesus, where wert thou?’ Abélard asks, long years afterwards. There are many who ask it to-day.
So ended the holy Council of Soissons, Provincial Synod of the arch-diocese of Rheims, held under the ægis of a papal legate, in the year of grace 1121. Its acta are not found in Richard, or Labbé, or Hefele: they ‘have not been preserved.’ There is an earlier ecclesiastical council that earned the title of the latrocinium (‘rogues’ council’), and we must not plagiarise. Ingenious and audacious as the apologetic historian is, he has not attempted to defend the Council of Soissons. But his condemnation of it is mildness itself compared with his condemnation of Abélard.
For a crowning humiliation Abélard was consigned by the council to a large monastery near Soissons, which served as jail or penitentiary for that ecclesiastical province. The abbot of this monastery, Geoffrey of the Stag’s-neck, had assisted at the council, and Dom Gervaise would have it that he had secured Abélard for his own purposes. He thinks the abbot was looking to the great legal advantage, in the frequent event of a lawsuit, of having such an orator as Abélard in his monastery. It is a possibility, like many other details in Gervaise’s Life of Abélard. In forbidding his return either to Maisoncelle or to St. Denis, and definitely consigning him to the abbey of St. Médard, the council was once more treating him as a legally convicted heretic. As far as it was concerned, it was filling the chalice of the poor monk’s bitterness. It is a mere accident that Geoffrey was a man of some culture, and was so far influenced by the hideous spectacle he had witnessed as to receive Brother Peter with sympathy and some honour.
CHAPTER VIII
CLOUD UPON CLOUD
The abbey of St. Médard, to which Abélard accompanied his friendly jailer, was a very large monastery on the right bank of the Aisne, just outside Soissons. At that time it had a community of about four hundred monks. It derived a considerable revenue from its two hundred and twenty farms, yet it bore so high a repute for regular discipline that it had become a general ‘reformatory school’ for the district. ‘To it were sent the ignorant to be instructed, the depraved to be corrected, the obstinate to be tamed,’ says a work of the time; though it is not clear how Herr Hausrath infers from this that the abbey also served the purpose of monastic asylum. For this character of penitentiary the place was chosen for the confinement of Abélard. Thither he retired to meditate on the joy and the wisdom of ‘conversion.’ ‘God! How furiously did I accuse Thee!’ he says of those days. The earlier wound had been preceded, he admits, by his sin; this far deeper and more painful wound had been brought upon him by his ‘love of our faith.’
Whether Abbot Geoffrey thought Abélard an acquisition or no, there was one man in authority at St. Médard who rejoiced with a holy joy at his advent. This was no other than Abélard’s earlier acquaintance, St. Goswin. The zealous student had become a monastic reformer, and had recently been appointed Prior[18] of St. Médard. In the recently reformed abbey, with a daily arrival of ‘obstinate monks to be trained,’ and a convenient and well-appointed ascetical armoury or whipping-room, the young saint was in a congenial element. Great was his interest when ‘Pope Innocent,’[19] as his biographers say, ‘sent Abélard to be confined in the abbey, and, like an untamed rhinoceros, to be caught in the bonds of discipline.’ Abélard was not long in the abbey before the tamer approached this special task that Providence had set him. We can imagine Abélard’s feelings when the obtuse monk took him aside, and exhorted him ‘not to think it a misfortune or an injury that he had been sent there; he was not so much confined in a prison, as protected from the storms of the world.’ He had only to live piously, and set a good example, and all would be well. Abélard was in no mood to see the humour of the situation. He peevishly retorted that ‘there were a good many who talked about piety and did not know what piety was.’ Then the prior, say his biographers, saw that it was not a case for leniency, but for drastic measures. ‘Quite true,’ he replied, ‘there are many who talk about piety, and do not know what it is. But if we find you saying or doing anything that is not pious, we shall show you that we know how to treat its contrary, at all events.’ The saint prevailed once more—in the biography: ‘the rhinoceros was cowed, and became very quiet, more patient under discipline, more fearful of the lash, and of a saner and less raving mind.’
Fortunately, the boorish saint had a cultured abbot, one at least who did not hold genius to be a diabolical gift, and whose judgment of character was not wholly vitiated by the crude mystic and monastic ideal of the good people of the period. The abbot seems to have saved Abélard from the zeal of the prior, and possibly he found companionable souls amongst the four hundred monks of the great abbey, some of whom were nobles by birth. We know, at all events, that in the later period he looked back on the few months spent at St. Médard with a kindly feeling.
His imprisonment did not last long. When the proceedings of the council were made known throughout the kingdom, there was a strong outburst of indignation. It must not be supposed that the Council of Soissons illustrates or embodies the spirit of the period or the spirit of the Church; this feature we shall more nearly find in the Council of Sens, in 1141. The conventicle had, in truth, revealed some of the evils of the time: the danger of the Church’s excessively political attitude and administration, the brutality of the spirit it engendered with regard to heresy, the fatal predominance of dogma over ethic. But, in the main, the conventicle exhibits the hideous triumph of a few perverse individuals, who availed themselves of all that was crude and ill-advised in the machinery of the Church. When, therefore, such men as Tirric, and Geoffrey of Chartres, and Geoffrey of the Stag’s-neck, spread their story abroad, there were few who did not sympathise with Abélard. The persecutors soon found it necessary to defend themselves; there was a chaos of mutual incriminations. Even Alberic and Lotulphe tried to cast the blame on others. The legate found it expedient to attribute the whole proceeding openly to ‘French malice.’ He had been ‘compelled for a time to humour their spleen,’ as Abélard puts it, but he presently revoked the order of confinement in St. Médard, and gave Abélard permission to return to St. Denis.