Foremost among them was a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant little man. The face was white and worn with suffering, the form enfeebled with disease and exacting nervous exaltation; but there was a light of supreme strength and of joy in the penetrating eyes. He was a man who saw the golden city with so near, so living a vision, that he was wholly impatient of the trivial pleasures of earth: a man formed in the mould of world-conquerors and world-politicians, in whose mind accident had substituted a supernatural for a natural ideal: a man of such intensity and absorption of thought that he was almost incapable of admitting a doubt as to the correctness of his own judgment and purpose and the folly of all that was opposed to it: a man in whom an altruistic ethic might transform, or disguise, but could never suppress, the demand of the entire nature for self-assertion. This was Bernard of Clairvaux, who had founded the monastery in the deepest poverty ten years before. He was soon to be the most powerful man in Christendom. And he held that, if the instinct of reasoning and the impulse of love did indeed come from God and not from the devil, they were of those whimsical gifts, such as the deity of the Middle Ages often gave, which were given with a trust they would be rejected.
The other new apostle was St. Norbert, the founder of the Premonstratensian canons. He had fruitlessly endeavoured to reform the existing order of canons, and had then withdrawn to form a kind of monastery of canons at Prémontré, not far from Laon, where he occasionally visited Anselm. His disciples entered zealously into the task of policeing the country. No disorder in faith or morals escaped their notice; and although Norbert was far behind Bernard in political ability, the man who incurred his pious wrath was in an unenviable position. He had influence with the prelates of the Church, on account of his reforms and the sanctity of his life; he had a profound influence over the common people, not only through his stirring sermons, but also through the miracles he wrought. Abélard frequently bases his rationalistic work on the fact, which he always assumes to be uncontroverted, that the age of miracles is over. Norbert, on the contrary, let it be distinctly understood that he was a thaumaturgus of large practice. Abélard ridiculed his pretensions, and the stories told of him. Even in his later sermons we find him scornfully ‘exposing’ the miracles of Norbert and his companions. They used to slip medicaments unobserved into the food of the sick, he says, and accept the glory of the miracle if the fever was cured. They even attempted to raise the dead to life; and when the corpse retained its hideous rigidity after they had lain long hours in prayer in the sanctuary, they would turn round on the simple folk in the church and upbraid them for the littleness of their faith. This poor trickery was the chief source of the power of the Premonstratensian canons over the people. Abélard could not repose and ridicule it with impunity.
These were the new apostles—‘pseudo-apostles’ Heloise calls them—whom Alberic and Lotulphe now incited to take up the task which they themselves dared pursue no longer. And so, says Abélard, ‘they heaped shameless calumnies on me at every opportunity, and for some time brought much discredit upon me in the eyes of certain ecclesiastical as well as secular dignitaries.’ We shall find that, when Abélard stands before the ecclesiastical tribunal a second time, many of his earlier friends have deserted him, and have fallen under the wide-reaching influence of St. Bernard.
But it is strenuously denied by prejudiced admirers of St. Bernard that he had anything to do with Abélard at this period. Father Hefele, for instance, thinks that Abélard is guilty of some chronological confusion in the passage quoted above; looking back on the events of his life, he has unconsciously transferred the later activity of Bernard to the earlier date, not clearly separating it in time from the work of Alberic and Norbert. Unfortunately, the ‘Story of my Calamities’ was written before Bernard commenced his open campaign against Abélard. We shall see later that this is beyond dispute. There is, then, no question of confusion.
Mr. Cotter Morison says it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard showed any active hostility to Abélard at that time, and he thinks the charge springs merely from an over-excited imagination. Mr. Morison is scarcely happier here than in his earlier passage. It must be understood that this reluctance to admit the correctness of Abélard’s complaint is inspired by a passage in one of Bernard’s letters. In writing to William of St. Thierry (ep. cccxxvii. in Migne), fifteen years afterwards, he excuses his inaction with regard to Abélard (whose heresies William has put before him) on the ground that he ‘was ignorant of most, indeed nearly all, of these things.’ This is interpreted to mean that he knew little or nothing about Abélard until 1141, and the Abélardists generally give a more or less polite intimation that it is—what Mr. Poole explicitly calls another statement of Bernard’s—a lie. Cotter Morison, however, interprets ‘these things’ to mean ‘the special details of Abélard’s heresy,’ and it is therefore the more strange that he should join the Bernardists in straining the historical evidence. Yet he is probably nearer to the truth than the others in his interpretation of Bernard’s words. Even modern writers are too apt at times to follow the practice of the Church, in judging a statement or an action, and put it into one or other of their rigid objective categories. In such cases as this we need a very careful psychological analysis, and are prone to be misled by the Church’s objective moral boxes or classifications. Most probably Bernard wrote in that convenient vagueness of mind which sometimes helps even a saint out of a difficulty, especially where the honour of the Church is involved, and which is accompanied by just a suspicion of ethical discomfort.
In reality, we may, with all sobriety, reverse Mr. Morison’s statement, and say it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard was ignorant of, or indifferent to, Abélard’s activity at that time. Ten years previously, when Bernard led his little band of white-robed monks to their wretched barn in the Vale of Bitterness, he went to Châlons to be consecrated by William of Champeaux. William conceived a very strong affection for the young abbot, and he shortly after nursed him through a long and severe illness. So great was their intimacy and so frequent their intercourse that people said Châlons and Clairvaux had changed places. This began only twelve months after William had been driven from Paris, in intense anger, by the heretical upstart, Peter Abélard. Again, Alberic was another of Bernard’s intimate friends. A year or two before Abélard founded the Paraclete—that is to say, about the time of the Council of Soissons—we find Bernard ‘imploring’ (so even Duchesne puts it) the Pope to appoint Alberic to the vacant see of Châlons after the death of William. He failed to obtain it, but afterwards secured for him the archbishopric of Bourges. Anselm of Laon was also a friend of Bernard’s. Moreover, Clairvaux was only about forty miles from Troyes, where Abélard’s latest feat was the supreme topic.
It is thus quite impossible for any but a prejudiced apologist to question Bernard’s interest in the life of the Paraclete and its founder. Even were he not the heresy-hunter and universal reformer that he notoriously was, we should be compelled to think that he had heard all the worst charges against Abélard over and over again before 1124. To conceive Bernard as entombed in his abbey, indifferent to everything in this world except the grave, is the reverse of the truth. Bernard had a very profound belief in what some theologians call ‘the law of secondary causes’—God does not do directly what he may accomplish by means of human instruments. Prayer was necessary; but so were vigilance, diplomacy, much running to and fro, and a vast correspondence. He watched the Church of God with the fiery zeal of a St. Paul. He knew everything and everybody: smote archbishops and kings as freely as his own monks: hunted down every heretic that appeared in France in his day: played even a large part in the politics of Rome. And we are to suppose that such a man was ignorant of the presence of the gay, rationalistic colony a few leagues away from his abbey, and of the unique character and profound importance to the Church of that vast concourse of youths; or that he refrained from examining the teaching of this man who had an unprecedented influence over the youth of France, or from using the fulness of his power against him when he found that his teaching was the reverse of all he held sacred and salutary.
We may take Abélard’s statement literally. Bernard and Norbert were doing the work of his rivals, and were doing it effectively. They who had supported him at Soissons or afterwards were being poisoned against him. Count Theobald and Geoffrey of Chartres are probably two whom he had in mind. He feels that the net is being drawn close about him through the calumnies of these ubiquitous monks and canons. The peace of the valley is broken; he becomes morbidly sensitive and timorous. Whenever he hears that some synod or conventicle has been summoned he trembles with anxiety and expectation of another Soissons. The awful torture of that hour before the council comes back to him, and mingles with the thought of the power of his new enemies. He must fly from France.
Away to the south, over the Pyrenees, was a land where the poor monk would have found peace, justice, and honour. Spain was just then affording ‘glory to God in heaven, and peace to men of good-will on earth’: it had been snatched from the dominion of Christianity for a century or two. So tolerant and beneficent was the reign of the Moors that even the Jews, crushed, as they were, by seven centuries of persecution, developed their finest powers under it. They were found in the front rank of every art and science; in every field where, not cunning and astuteness, but talent of the highest order and industry, were needed to command success. The Moors had happily degenerated from the fierce proselytism of their religious prophet—whilst the Christians had proportionately enlarged on that of theirs—and their human character was asserting the high natural ideal which it always does when it breaks away from the confining bonds of a narrow dogma.
It was towards this land that Abélard turned his thoughts. It seemed useless for him to exchange one Christian land for another. A few years before, a small group of French monks had created a centre of education in a humble barn on the banks of the Cam; but was England more tolerant than France? He remembered Roscelin’s experience. There were famous schools in Italy; but some of his most brilliant pupils at the Paraclete, such as Arnold of Brescia, had little good to say of Italy. The evil lay in Christianity itself—in that intolerance which its high claim naturally engendered.