In the meantime the day which the Archbishop of Sens had appointed was rapidly approaching. It was the Octave of, or eighth day after, Pentecost. On the Sunday after Whitsunday, now dedicated to the Trinity, there was to be a brilliant religious function in the cathedral at Sens. It was customary to expose the relics to veneration on that day, and as Sens, the metropolitan church of Paris[29] and other important towns, had a very valuable collection of relics, the ceremony attracted a notable gathering of lords, spiritual and temporal. Louis VII. was to be there, with the usual escort of French nobles: the curiously compounded monarch had a profound veneration for relics, and something like a passion for the ceremonies that accompanied their translation, veneration, and so forth. All the suffragans of the archbishop would be present, with a number of other bishops, and abbots, clerics, and masters innumerable. Quite apart from the duel between the greatest thinker and the greatest orator in Europe, there would be a very important and weighty gathering at the cathedral on that day. Abélard willingly assented. Bernard is fond of repeating in his later letters that Abélard set to work ‘to summon his friends and followers from all parts.’ We shall see that the only noteworthy supporters of Abélard at Sens were pupils or masters from Paris, which lay at a convenient distance. Bernard was shortly to lose his serenity in a sea of rhetoric.
There is a minor quarrel as to whether Bernard reversed his decision, and intimated his acceptance to the archbishop before the day arrived. Father Hefele thinks he did so. It is, however, clear that, in his letter to the pope afterwards, Bernard wishes to convey the impression that he held out until the last moment, and only yielded to the entreaties of his friends in actually presenting himself.
We shall refer to this letter to Pope Innocent shortly, but it is worth while to notice now the edifying picture he draws of his own preparation in contrast with that of ‘the dragon.’ Abélard is represented as feverishly whipping up his supporters, whilst Bernard refuses to hear of such an encounter, not only on account of Abélard’s world-famed skill in debate, but also because he thinks it improper to discuss sacred things in this fashion. But friends represent that the Church will suffer, and the enemies of Christ triumph. Wearily and ‘without preparation’—trusting wholly in the divine promise of inspiration—he presents himself on the appointed day before ‘Goliath.’
In point of historical fact there is no reason for thinking that Abélard made any effort to gather supporters. The few we read of accompanied him from Paris. He had scarcely a single friend in the ranks of his ‘judges.’ On the other hand we do know that Bernard himself sent out a strong and imperious ‘whip’ to his episcopal supporters. There is a brief letter, contained in the Migne collection, which was despatched to all the French bishops on whom Bernard could rely for sympathy and support. They have heard, he says, of his summons to appear at Sens on the Octave of Pentecost. ‘If the cause were a personal one,’ he goes on, ‘the child of your holiness could perhaps not undeservedly look to your support [patrocinium]. But it is your cause, and more than yours; and so I admonish you the more confidently and entreat you the more earnestly to prove yourselves friends in this necessity—friends, I should say, not of me, but of Christ.’ And he goes on to prejudge the case in the mind of the official judges with his rhetorical denunciation of Abélard’s heresies. ‘Be not surprised,’ he concludes, ‘that I summon you so suddenly and with so brief a notice; this is another ruse of our cunning adversary, so that he might meet us unprepared and unarmed.’
The consequence of the sending of this whip will be apparent when we come to examine the composition of the gathering at Sens. It marks the beginning of a period of most remarkable intrigue. The idyllic picture of the poor abbot making his way at the last moment to the assembly with a sublime trust in Providence and the righteousness of his cause must be regarded again at the close of the next chapter.
Whether Bernard formally accepted the summons or not, therefore, authentic information was conveyed to both sides that the debate would take place. It will be readily imagined how profoundly stirred the kingdom of France would be over such an expectation. The bare qualities of the antagonists put the discussion leagues above any remembered or contemporary event in the scholastic world; the object of the debate—the validity of the new thought that was rapidly infecting the schools—was a matter of most material concern. Deutsch has a theory of the conflict which seems to be only notable as an illustration of the profundity of the Teutonic mind. He opines there may have been a political struggle underlying the academic demonstration. Louis was just beginning his struggle with Rome over the vexed question of investitures, and it is conceivable that the Abélardists leaned to the side of the king, in opposition to Bernard and the ‘ultramontanes.’ It is conceivable, but not at all probable. Abélard’s sermon on St. Peter indicates a really ultramontane sentiment; moreover, he has ever kept aloof from the political side of life. His follower, Arnold of Brescia, would be likely enough to fall in with any such regal design. Arnold was a young Luther, of premature birth. Born in Italy at the beginning of the twelfth century, he had travelled to France, and studied under Abélard, at an early age. He returned to Italy, and assumed the monastic habit. An enthusiastic idealist and a man of proportionate energy and audacity, he soon entered upon a fiery crusade against the sins of the monks, the clergy, and the hierarchy. He was driven from Italy in 1139, then from Switzerland, and he had just taken refuge in Paris when Bernard started his campaign. Since one of his most prominent theories was that the higher clergy should be stripped of all temporal privileges and possessions, his place is easily determined on the question of investitures. However, it is most unlikely that he should have dragged Abélard into these semi-political and dangerous questions. And although Bernard most sedulously urges the association of the hated Arnold with Abélard in his letters to Rome, he never mentions a suspicion of such a coalition as Deutsch suggests; nor, in fine, does the conduct of the secular arm give the least countenance to the theory.
The conflict was inevitable, without the concurrence of any political intrigue. Abélard and Bernard were the natural representatives of schools which could no longer lie down in peace in the fold of the Church. Abélard foresaw disaster to the Church in the coming age of restless inquiry unless its truths could be formulated in his intellectual manner. Bernard was honestly convinced that Abélard was ‘preparing the way for Anti-Christ.’ And it followed as a further consequence that Bernard should wish to avoid the discussion to which Abélard looked for salvation from the menace of the mystical school.
It will appear presently that Bernard was less concerned with the details of Abélard’s teaching than with his spirit. He, however, dwells on them for controversial purposes, and they are certainly full of interest for the modern mind. The point will be more fully developed in a supplementary chapter. For the moment a brief glance at them will be instructive enough. They differ a little in Bernard’s letter from the list given by William of St. Thierry, but one cannot even glance at them without noticing how remarkably this thinker of the twelfth century anticipated the judgment of the nineteenth century. His theses, like the theses of the advanced theology of these latter days, indicate two tendencies—an intellectual tendency to the more rational presentment of dogma, and an ethical tendency to the greater moralisation of ancient dogma.
We have already seen a good illustration of this anticipation of modern tendencies in Abélard’s treatment of the traditional doctrines of heaven and hell respectively, and we shall see more later on. Of the fourteen specific points (thirteen in William’s letter) contained in the present indictment, we may pass over most of those which refer to the Trinity as without interest. Abélard’s phrases were new, but he cordially rejected the Arianism, Nestorianism, and so forth, with which Bernard insisted on crediting him. In the ninth proposition, that the species of bread and wine remain in the air after transubstantiation, and that adventurous mice only eat the species, not the Body of Christ, Abélard enunciated an opinion which has been widely adopted by modern Catholic theologians. In his second proposition, that the Holy Ghost was the Platonic anima mundi, Abélard was merely trying to save Plato from the damnation of the Bernardists.
On the ethical side, Abélard’s theses (in their context in his works) are truly remarkable. Thus the third, ‘That God can only do those things which He actually does, and in the way and at the time that He does them,’ and the seventh, ‘That God is not bound to prevent evil,’ are obviously indications of an ethical attempt to save the sanctity of the Infinite in view of the triumph of evil. ‘That Christ did not become Man for the purpose of saving us from the yoke of the devil’ is an early formulation of the familiar modern conception of the Incarnation. ‘That God does not do more for the elect, before they accept his grace, than for the damned,’ and ‘That we have shared the punishment but not the guilt of Adam,’ are further clear anticipations of the refined theology of modern times. ‘No man can sin before he exists,’ said Abélard, to Bernard’s mighty indignation. ‘That God alone remits sin’ is heretical to the modern Catholic, but the dogma was not completely born until the following century;[30] ‘that evil thoughts, and even pleasure, are not of themselves sinful, but only the consent given to them,’ and ‘that the Jews who crucified Christ in ignorance did not sin, that acts which are done in ignorance cannot be sinful,’ express the universal opinion of even modern Catholic theologians, in the sense in which Abélard held them.