He soon found the weak points in William’s armour, and proceeded to attack him with the uncalculating passion of youth. It was not long before the friendly master was converted into a bitter, life-long enemy; and that, he wearily writes, ‘was the beginning of my calamities.’ Possibly: but it is not unlikely that he had had a similar experience at Locmenach. However that may be, it was a fatal victory. Ten years afterwards we find William in closest intimacy and daily intercourse with Bernard of Clairvaux.
Most of the scholars at Notre Dame were incensed at the success of Abélard. In those earlier days the gathering was predominantly clerical; the more so, on account of William’s championship of orthodoxy. But as the controversy proceeded, and rumour bore its echo to the distant schools, the number and the diversity of the scholars increased. Many of the youths took the side of the handsome, brilliant young noble, and encouraged him to resist. He decided to open a school.
There was little organisation in the schools at that period—the university not taking shape until fully sixty years afterwards (Compayré)—and Abélard would hardly need a ‘license’ for the purpose, outside the immediate precincts of the cloister. But William was angry and powerful. It were more discreet, at least, not to create a direct and flagrant opposition to him. The little group of scholars moved to Melun, and raised a chair for their new master in that royal town. It was thirty miles away, down the valley of the Seine; but a thirty mile walk was a trifle in the days when railways were unknown, and William soon noticed a leakage in his class. Moreover, Melun was an important town, the king spending several months there every year. William made strenuous efforts to have the new academy suppressed, but he seems to have quarrelled with some of the courtiers, and these took up the cause of the new master of noble rank.
When Abélard saw the powerlessness of the chancellor of Notre Dame, he decided to come a little nearer. There was another fortified and royal town, Corbeil by name, about half-way to Paris, and thither he transferred his chair and his followers. The move was made, he tells us, for the convenience of his students. His reputation was already higher than William’s, and the duel of the masters had led to a noisy conflict between their respective followers. Corbeil being a comfortable day’s walk from Paris, there was a constant stream of rival pupils flowing between the two. In the schools and the taverns, on the roads and the bridges, nothing was heard but the increasing jargon of the junior realists and conceptualists. Besides the great problem, dialectics had countless lesser ones that would furnish argumentative material for an eternity. ‘Whether the pig that is being driven to market is held by the man or the rope’; ‘whether a shield that is white on one side and black on the other may be called either black or white,’ and problems of that kind, are not to be compared in point of depth and fecundity with such mere matters of fact as the origin of species. But the long and severe strain had gravely impaired Abélard’s health; he was compelled to close his school, and return to Brittany. William was not the only one who rejoiced. The Church was beginning to view with some alarm the spread of the new doctrine and the new spirit. Cynical rivals were complaining that ‘the magician’ had brought ‘a plague of frogs’ on the land.
Abélard tells us that he remained ‘for several years almost cut off from France.’ Rémusat thinks it was probably during this period that he studied under Roscelin, but there is now little room for doubt that his intercourse with the famous nominalist falls in the earlier years. Much more probable is it that we should assign his relations to Tirric of Chartres to the later date. The substance of the anecdote that was found on the margin of the Ratisbon manuscript seems to accord admirably with Abélard’s circumstances in the period we have now reached. The question, however, will interest few, beyond the narrow circle of historical specialists. He himself is silent about the few years of rest in the Breton castle, merely stating that he returned to Paris when he had recovered his health. We have to remember that the autobiography he has left us was entitled by him the ‘Story of my Calamities.’ It is not the full presentment of the swiftly moving drama of the life of Abélard. He speaks of joy only when it is the prelude to sorrow, or when some faint spark of the old ardour leaps into life once more.
When Abélard at length returned to the arena, he found a significant change. William had deserted the cloistral school. In a solitary spot down the river, beyond the foot of the eastern slope of St. Genevieve, was a small priory that had belonged to the monks of St. Victor of Marseilles. Thither, says Franklin, William had retired ‘to hide his despair and the shame of his defeat.’ The controversy had by no means been decided against him yet. Indeed, William’s biographers loyally contend that he was sincerely touched by the religious spirit of the age, and adopted the monastic life from the purest of motives. Abélard, on the other hand, declares that the inspiration came from a hope of exchanging the chair of Notre Dame for that of an episcopal see. Abélard is scarcely an ideal witness, though the passage was written nearly thirty years afterwards, yet his interpretation is probably correct; at least, if we take it as a partial explanation. William was shrewd enough to see that his supremacy in the scholastic world was doomed, and that the best alternative was a bishopric. He was still young (about thirty-eight, apparently) and ambitious; in his character of archdeacon, he was already only one step removed from the episcopate; and he had influence and qualifications above the average. It is scarcely correct to say, as Gervaise does, that at that time ‘the monastery was the recognised path to the episcopacy,’ on account of the wide degradation of the secular clergy. Their degradation was assuredly deep and widespread, but so were simony and electoral corruption. We generally find, in the old chronicles, one or other of the deceased bishop’s archdeacons ascending the vacant throne. However, William of Champeaux was a religious man; for the pious the surest path to the episcopate passed through the monastery.
Whatever be the correct analysis of the motive—and it was probably a complex feeling, including all the impulses suggested, which William himself scarcely cared to examine too narrowly—the fact is that in the year 1108 he donned the black cassock of the canon regular, and settled with a few companions in the priory of St. Victor. The life of the canons regular was a compromise between that of the sterner monks and the unascetic life of the secular canons and secular clergy. They followed, on the whole, the well-known rule of St. Augustine. They arose at midnight to chant their matins, but, unlike the Cistercians, they returned to bed as soon as the ‘office’ was over. They ate meat three times a week, and were not restricted in the taking of fish and eggs. They had linen underclothing, and much friendly intercourse with each other, and they were less rigidly separated from the world. Altogether, not too rough a path to higher dignities—or to heaven—and (a not unimportant point) one that did not lead far from Paris.
Such was the foundation of one of the most famous schools of mystic theology. The abbey that William instituted, before he was removed to the coveted dignity in 1113, has attained an immortality in the world of thought through such inmates as Richard and Hugh of St. Victor.
Abélard’s first impulse on hearing the news was to repair at once to the cloistral school. He found the chair occupied. William had not, in fact, resigned his title of scholastic, and he had placed a substitute in the chair. It was a poor ruse, for there was now no master in Christendom who could long endure the swift, keen shafts of the ambitious Breton. Abélard would quickly make the chair of Notre Dame uncomfortable for the most pachydermatous substitute; and he seems to have commenced the edifying task at once, when he heard that the unfortunate William had set up a chair of rhetoric at St. Victor. Like a hawk, Master Peter descended on the ill-fated canon. The Bishop of Mans had, it appears, stimulated William into a renewal of activity, and he had chosen that apparently safe section of the trivium, the art of rhetoric.
With what must have been a mock humility, Abélard went down the river each day with the crowd of monks and clerks to receive instruction in rhetoric from the new Prior of St. Victor’s. Deutsch remarks, with Teutonic gravity, that we do not read of a reconciliation between the two. Nor do we find that Abélard had been ‘converted’ to the spirit of Robert of Arbrissel or Bernard of Clairvaux during his retirement at Pallet. Abélard, now nearly thirty years of age, could have taught William the art of rhetoric with more profit than he himself was likely to derive from William’s prælectiones. His obvious aim was to break William’s connection with Paris and with Notre Dame. The high and gentle spirit of these latter days, that studies the feelings of an antagonist, and casts aside an ambition that would lead over the fallen fame of a fellow-man, did not commend itself to the mediæval mind.