CHAPTER XV
THE INFLUENCE OF ABÉLARD
If the inquirer into the influence of the famous dialectician could content himself with merely turning from the study of Abélard’s opinions to the towering structure of modern Catholic theology, he would be tempted to exclaim, in the words of a familiar epitaph, ‘Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice.’ Abélard’s most characteristic principles are now amongst the accepted foundations of dogmatic theology; most, or, at all events, a large number, of the conclusions that brought such wrath about him in the twelfth century are now calmly taught in the schools of Rome and Louvain and Freiburg. Bernardism has been almost banished from the courts of the temple. The modern theologian could not face the modern world with the thoughts of the saint whose bones are treasured in a thousand jewelled reliquaries; he must speak the thoughts of the heretic, who lies by the side of his beloved, amidst the soldiers and statesmen, the actresses and courtesans, of Paris. The great political organisation that once found it expedient to patronise Bernardism has now taken the spirit of Abélard into the very heart of its official teaching.
There are few in England who will read such an assertion without a feeling of perplexity, if not incredulity. Far and wide over the realm of theology has the spirit of Abélard breathed; and ever-widening spheres of Evangelicalism, Deism, Pantheism, and Agnosticism mark its growth. But it is understood that Rome has resisted the spirit of rationalism, and to-day, as ever, bids human reason bow in submission before the veiled mysteries of ‘the deposit of revelation.’
Yet the assertion involves no strain or ingenuity of interpretation of Catholic theology. The notion that Rome rebukes the imperious claims of reason is one of a number of strangely-enduring fallacies concerning that Church. The truth of our thesis can be swiftly and clearly established. The one essential source of the antagonism of St. Bernard and Abélard was the question of the relations of faith and reason. ‘Faith precedes intellect,’ said the Cistercian; ‘Reason precedes faith,’ said the Benedictine. All other quarrels were secondary and were cognate to their profound and irreconcilable opposition on this point. M. Guizot adds a second fundamental opposition on the ethical side. This, however, was certainly of a secondary importance. Few historians hesitate to regard the famous struggle as being in the main a dispute over the rights and duties of reason.
Turn then from the pontificate of Innocent II. to that of Pius IX. and of Leo XIII. Towards the close of the last century, Huet, Bishop of Avranches, began to meet rationalistic attacks with a belittlement of human reason. The idea found favour with a class of apologists. De Bonald, Bonetty, Bautain, and others in France, and the Louvain theologians in Belgium, came entirely to repudiate the interference of reason with regard to higher truths, saying that their acceptance was solely a matter of faith and tradition. Well, the Church of Rome (to which all belonged) descended upon the new sect with a remarkable severity. Phrases that were purely Bernardist in form and substance were rigorously condemned. The French ‘Traditionalists’ were forced to subscribe to (amongst others) the following significant proposition: ‘The use of reason precedes faith, and leads up to it, with the aid of revelation and grace.’ It was the principle which Abélard’s whole life was spent in vindicating. The Louvain men wriggled for many months under the heel of Rome. They were not suffered to rest until they had cast away the last diluted element of their theory.
The episode offers a very striking exhibition of the entire change of front of Rome with regard to ‘the rights of reason.’ There are many other official utterances in the same sense. An important provincial council, held at Cologne in 1860, and fully authorised, discussed the question at length. ‘We have no faith,’ it enacted, ‘until we have seen with our reason that God is worthy of credence and that He has spoken to us’; and again, ‘The firmness of faith ... requires that he who believes must have a preliminary rational certitude of the existence of God and the fact of a revelation having come from Him, and he must have no prudent doubt on the matter.’ In the Encyclical of 1846 even Pius IX. insisted on the same principle: ‘Human reason, to avoid the danger of deception and error, must diligently search out the fact of a divine revelation, and must attain a certainty that the message comes from God, so that, as the Apostle most wisely ordains, it may offer Him a “reasonable service.”’ The Vatican Council of 1870 was equally explicit. The modern Catholic theologian, in his treatise on faith, invariably defines it as an intellectual act, an acceptance of truths after a satisfactory rational inquiry into the authority that urges them. It is official Catholic teaching that faith is impossible without a previous rational certitude. Moreover, the theologian admits that every part and particle of the dogmatic system must meet the criticism of reason. In the positive sense it is indispensable that reason prove the existence of God, the authority of God, and the divinity of the Scriptures. In the negative sense, no single dogma must contain an assertion which is clearly opposed to a proved fact or to a clear pronouncement of human reason or the human conscience. These are not the speculations of advanced theologians, but the current teaching in the Roman schools and manuals[38] of dogmatic theology.
Thus has history vindicated the heretic. The multiplication of churches has made the Bernardist notion of faith wholly untenable and unserviceable to Rome. Reason precedes faith; reason must lead men to faith, and make faith acceptable to men. That is the gospel that now falls on the dead ear of the great master.
And when we pass from this fundamental principle or attitude to a consideration of special points of dogma we again meet with many a triumph. We have already seen how Abélard’s ‘novelties’ may be traced to a twofold criticism—ethical and intellectual—of the form in which Christian dogmas were accepted in his day. Without explicitly formulating it, Abélard proceeded on the principle which is now complacently laid down by the Catholic theologian, and was accepted by the Christian world at large a century or half a century ago: the principle that what is offered to us as revealed truth must be tested by the declarations of the mind and of the conscience. The intellectual criticism led him to alter the terms of the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and others; the ethical criticism led him to modify the current theories of original sin, the atonement, penance, and so forth.