Peter Abélard

by Joseph McCabe

By the terms of Suger’s decision Abélard could neither lodge with secular friends nor enter any cell, priory, or abbey. Probably this coercion into leading an eremitical life was unnecessary. The experience of the last three years had made a hermitage of his heart; nothing would be more welcome to him than this quiet valley. It was a spot he had noticed in earlier years. In his ancient chronicle Robert of Auxerre says that Abélard had lived there before; Mr. Poole thinks it was to the same part of Champagne that he resorted on the three occasions of his going to the province of Count Theobald. That would at least have to be understood in a very loose sense. On the two former occasions he had found a home prepared, a cell and a priory, respectively; he had now to build a hut with his own hands. It was a deserted spot he had chosen, he tells us; and Heloise adds, in one of her letters, that before Abélard’s coming it had been the haunt of robbers and the home of foxes and wild boars, like the neighbouring forest of Fontainebleau.

Abélard must have seen this quiet side-valley in passing along the Seine on the road to Paris. It was some twelve miles from Troyes, where he had a number of friends; and when he expressed a desire to retire to it with his companion, they obtained for him the gift of the meadow through which the Arduzon ran. Bishop Hatton gave them permission to build an oratory, and they put together a kind of mud hut—‘in honour of the Blessed Trinity’! Here the heavy heart began once more to dream of peace. Men had tortured him with a caricature of the divine justice when his aim and purpose had been of the purest. He had left their ignorant meddlesomeness and their ugly passions far away beyond the forests. Alone with God and with nature in her fairest mood, he seemed to have escaped securely from an age that could not, or would not, understand his high ideal.

So for some time no sound was heard in the valley but the song of the birds and the grave talk of the two hermits and the frequent chant in the frail temple of the Trinity. But Abélard’s evil genius was never far from him; it almost seems as if it only retired just frequently enough and long enough to let his heart regain its full power of suffering. The unpractical scholar had overlooked a material point, the question of sustenance. Beech-nuts and beech-leaves and roots and the water of the river become monotonous. Abélard began to cast about for some source of revenue. ‘To dig I was not able, to beg I was ashamed,’ he says, in the familiar words. There was only one thing he could do—teach.

Probably he began by giving quiet lessons to the sons of his neighbours. He had only to let his intention be known in Troyes, and he would have as many pupils as he desired. But he soon found that, as was inevitable, he had released a torrent. The words in which he describes this third confluence of his streams of ‘barbarians’ do not give us the impression that he struggled against his fate. With all his genius he remained a Breton—short of memory and light of heart. The gladdening climate of mid-France and the brightness and beauty of the valley of the Seine quickened his old hopes and powers. The word ran through the kingdoms of Gaul, and across the sea and over the southern hills, that Abélard was lecturing once more. And many hundreds, probably thousands, of youths gathered their scant treasures, and turned their faces towards the distant solitude of Nogent-sur-Seine.

Then was witnessed a scene that is quite unique in the annals of education. Many centuries before, the deserts of Egypt had seen a vast crowd of men pour out from the cities, and rush eagerly into their thankless solitude. That was under the fresh-born influence of a new religious story, the only force thought competent to inspire so great an abdication. The twelfth century saw another great stream of men pouring eagerly into a solitude where there was no luxury but the rude beauty of nature. Week by week the paths that led into the valley by the Arduzon discharged their hundreds of pilgrims. The rough justice of nature offered no advantage to wealth. Rich and poor, noble and peasant, young and old, they raised their mud-cabins or their moss-covered earth-works, each with his own hand. Hundreds of these rude dwellings dotted the meadow and sheltered in the wood. A bundle of straw was the only bed to be found in them. Their tables were primitive mounds of fresh turf; the only food a kind of coarse peasant-bread, with roots and herbs and a draught of sweet water from the river. The meats and wines and pretty maids and soft beds of the cities were left far away over the hills. For the great magician had extended his wand once more, and the fascination of his lectures was as irresistible as ever.

They had built a new oratory, in wood and stone, for the loved master; and each morning, as the full blaze of the sun fell upon the strangely scarred face of the valley, they arose from the hay and straw, splashed or dipped in the running river, and trooped to the spot where Abélard fished for their souls with the charming bait of his philosophy. Then when the master tired of reading Scripture, and of his pathetic task of finding analogies of the infinite in the finite, they relaxed to such games and merriment as youth never leaves behind.

Discipline, however, was strict. There is a song, composed at the time by one of the pupils, which affords an instructive glimpse of the life of the strange colony. Some one seems to have informed Abélard of a group of students who were addicted to the familiar vice. He at once banished them from the colony, threatening to abandon the lectures unless they retired to Quincey. The poet of the group was an English youth, named Hilary, who had come to France a little before. Amongst his Versus et ludi, edited by Champollion, we find his poetic complaint of the falseness of the charge and the cruelty of their expulsion. It is a simple, vigorous, rhymed verse in Latin, with a French refrain. It is obviously intended to be sung in chorus, and it thus indirectly illustrates one of the probable recreations of the youths who were thus thrown upon their own resources. Many another of Hilary’s rough songs must have rung through the valley at nightfall. Perhaps Abélard recovered his old gift, and contributed to the harmless gaiety of the colony. Seared and scarred as he was, there was nothing sombre or sour about his piety, save in the moments of actual persecution. With all his keen and living faith and his sense of remorse, he remains a Breton, a child of the sun-light, sensitive to the gladdening force of the world. Not until his last year did he accept the ascetic view of pleasures which were non-ethical. Watchful over the faith and morals of the colony, he would make no effort to moderate the loud song with which they responded to the warm breath of nature.

The happiness of his little world surged in the heart of the master for a time, but nature gave him a capacity for, and a taste of, manifold happiness, only that he might suffer the more. ‘I had one enemy—echo,’ he says in his autobiography. He was soon made uneasily conscious that the echo of his teaching and the echo of the glad life of the colony had reached Clairvaux.

The first definite complaint that reached his ears referred to the dedication of his oratory. Though formally dedicated to the Trinity, it was especially devoted to the Holy Spirit, in the character of Paraclete (Comforter); indeed both it and the later nunnery were known familiarly as ‘the Paraclete.’ Some captious critics had, it appears, raised a question whether it was lawful to dedicate a chapel to one isolated member of the Trinity. The question was absurd, for the Church frequently offers worship to the Holy Spirit, without mentioning the Father and the Son. The cautious Abélard, however, defends his dedication at great length. A second attack was made under the pretext of questioning the propriety of an image of the Trinity which was found in the oratory. Some sculptor in the colony had endeavoured to give an ingenious representation of the Trinity in stone. He had carved three equal figures from one block of stone, and had cut on them inscriptions appropriate to each Person of the Trinity.[20] Such devices were common in the Church, common in all Trinitarian religions, in fact. But Abélard was credited with intentions and interpretations in everything he did. Neither of these incidents proved serious, however. It was not until Abélard heard that Alberic and Lotulphe were inciting ‘the new apostles’ to assail him that he became seriously alarmed. The new apostles were Bernard of Clairvaux and Norbert of Prémontré.

Not many leagues from the merry valley on the Arduzon was another vale that had been peopled by men from the cities. It was a dark, depressing valley, into which the sun rarely struggled. The Valley of Wormwood men called it, for it was in the heart of a wild, sombre, chilly forest. The men who buried themselves in it were fugitives, not merely from the hot breath of the cities and the ugly deeds of their fellows, but even from the gentler inspiration of nature, even from its purest thrills. They had had a vision of a golden city, and believed it was to be entered by the path of self-torture. The narrow windows of their monastery let in but little of the scanty light of the valley. With coarse bread and herbs, and a few hours’ sleep on boxes of dried leaves, they made a grudging concession to the law of living. But a joke was a sacrilege in the Valley of Wormwood, and a song a piece of supreme folly. The only sound that told the ravens and the owls of the presence of man was the weird, minor chant for hours together, that did not even seem to break the silence of the sombre spot. By day, the white-robed, solemn shades went about their work in silence. The Great Father had made the pilgrimage to heaven so arduous a task that they dare not talk by the wayside.