This is followed shortly by a number of hymns and sermons. Heloise had asked him to write some hymns for liturgical use, so as to avoid a wearisome repetition and to dispense with some inappropriate ones. He sent ninety-three, but they are of little literary and poetic value. The source of his old-time poetic faculty is dried up. A sequence for the Feast of the Annunciation, which is attributed to him, won praise from, of all people, Luther. But the number of hymns and songs ‘attributed’ to Abélard is large. The sermons, of which thirty-four are to be found in the collection of his works, are not distinguished in their order. The abbot was not an eloquent preacher. But they are carefully written, erudite compositions, which were delivered at St. Gildas, or the Paraclete, or by special invitation. Some of them have much intrinsic interest or value—those on Susannah and John the Baptist, for instance, in connection with monastic affairs, and that on St. Peter in connection with his rigid loyalty to Rome.

A more interesting appendix to the correspondence is found in the forty-two ‘Problems of Heloise,’ with the replies of Abélard. Under the pretext of following out his direction, but probably with a greater anxiety to prolong the intercourse, Heloise sent to him a list of difficulties she had encountered in reading Scripture. The daughters of Charlemagne had responded to Alcuin’s exhortations with a similar list. The little treatise is not unworthy of analysis from the historico-theological point of view, but such a task cannot be undertaken here. The problems are, on the whole, those which have presented themselves to every thoughtful man and woman who has approached the Bible with the strictly orthodox view; the answers are, generally speaking, the theological artifices which served that purpose down to the middle of the wayward nineteenth century.

With this mild outbreak of rationalism Heloise passes out of the pages of history, save for a brief reintroduction in Abélard’s closing year. The interest and the force of her personality have been undoubtedly exaggerated by some of the chief biographers of Abélard, but she was assuredly an able, remarkable, and singularly graceful and interesting woman. Cousin once suddenly asked in the middle of a discourse: ‘Who is the woman whose love it would have been sweetest to have shared?’ Many names were suggested, though there must have been a strong anticipation that he would name Mme. de Longueville, for he laboured at that very time under his posthumous infatuation for the sister of Condé. But he answered, Heloise, ‘that noble creature who loved like a St. Theresa, wrote sometimes like Seneca, and who must have been irresistibly charming, since she charmed St. Bernard himself.’ It was a fine phrase to deliver impromptu, but an uncritical estimate. It is a characteristic paradox to say that she loved like a St. Theresa, and an exaggeration to say that she ever wrote like Seneca. As to her charming St. Bernard—the ‘pseudo-apostle,’ as she ungraciously calls him,—they who read the one brief letter he wrote her will have a new idea of a charmed man. Yet with her remarkable ability, her forceful and exalted character in the most devitalising circumstances, and her self-realisation, she would probably have written her name in the annals of France without the assistance of Abélard. It must be remembered that she had a very singular reputation, for her age, before she met Abélard. She might have been a St. Theresa to Peter of Cluny, or, as is more probable, a Montmorency in the political chronicle of France.

CHAPTER XII

A RETURN TO THE ARENA

The literary and personal activity described in the preceding chapter, together with the elaboration of a new ‘theology,’ of which we shall read presently, brings the story of Abélard’s life down to 1135 or 1136. His movements during the three or four years after his flight from St. Gildas are very obscure. St. Bernard seems to speak of his presence in Paris at one time, though the passages can, and perhaps should, be explained away. Heloise speaks of his visits to the Paraclete. On the whole he probably remained in Brittany, at Nantes or Pallet, and devoted his time to literary work. But in 1136 we find him in Paris once more. Whether the monks succeeded in making Brittany too insecure for him, or the count failed to guarantee his income, or a natural disgust with the situation and longing for the intellectual arena impelled him to return, we cannot say. It is only known that in 1136 he was once more quickening the scholastic life of Europe from the familiar slope of St. Genevieve.

So swift and eventful has been the career of the great teacher that one realises with difficulty that he is now almost an old man, a man in his fifty-seventh or fifty-eighth year. It is twenty years since the grim termination of his early Parisian activity, and a new generation fills the schools. The ideas with which he first startled and conquered the intellectual world have been made familiar. The vigour, the freshness, the charming pertinacity of youth have departed. Yet there is no master in Christendom, young or old, that can restrain the flood of ‘barbarians’ when ‘Li mestre’ reappears at Paris. John of Salisbury was amongst the crowd. It is from his Metalogicus that we first learn of Abélard’s return to the arena, and the renewal of his old triumph. St. Bernard fully confirms the story, after his fashion. Indeed, in one sense Abélard’s triumph was greater than ever, for he gathered a notable group of followers about him on St. Genevieve. There was Arnold of Brescia, the scourge of the Italian clergy, the ‘gad-fly’ of the hierarchy. There was Gilbert de la Porée, a dreaded dialectician and rationalistic theologian. There was Hyacinth, the young deacon and noble from Rome, afterwards a power in the sacred college. There was Bérenger, the caustic critic, who gave Bernard many an unpleasant quarter of an hour. There were future bishops and theologians in remarkable numbers.

However, we have no information of a definite character until five years afterwards. In fact John of Salisbury complicates the situation by stating that Abélard withdrew shortly after 1136. Deutsch thinks that Abélard left Paris for a few years; Hausrath, on the contrary, conjectures that he merely changed the locality of his school. John of Salisbury would, in that case, have followed his lectures in the cloistral school in 1136, and would have remained faithful to the abbey, following Abélard’s successor, a Master Alberic, when Abélard was, for some unknown reason, constrained to move his chair to the chapel of St. Hilary, also on the slope of St. Genevieve. According to the Historia Pontificalis it was at St. Hilary that Bernard visited him in 1141. It is an ingenious way of keeping Abélard in Paris during the five years, as most historians would prefer to do. Its weak point is the supposition that John of Salisbury would continue to attend at the abbey of St. Genevieve with Abélard teaching a few yards away.

The difficulty may be gladly left to the chronologist. The first great fact in Abélard’s career after his return to Paris is that St. Bernard begins to take an active interest in his teaching in the spring of 1141. Ten short weeks afterwards the prestige of the great teacher was shattered beyond recall, and he set out upon his pathetic journey to the tomb. It was a tense, a titanic struggle, on the side of Bernard.