And so the contest ran on, until at length a new rumour was borne over the roads and into the schools of Europe. The ‘pillar of doctors’ was broken—had fallen beyond restoration. Guillaume de Champeaux had changed his doctrine on the question of universals. Swiftly the story ran over hill and dale—they were days when the words of masters outstripped the deeds of kings and the fall of dynasties: the champion of realism had so far yielded to Abélard’s pressure as to modify his thesis materially. For long years he had held that the universal was essentially one and the same in all its individuals; now he admitted that it was only indifferently, or individually, identical.[7] The death of King Philip was a matter of minor interest to a world that brooded night and day over the question of genera and species.
Abélard felt that he need strive no longer in the hall of the poor canon regular, and he turned his attention to the actual occupant of the chair of Notre Dame. We need not delay in determining the name of the luckless master, whether it was Robert of Melun, as some think, or Adam of the Little Bridge, or Peter the Eater—poor man! a sad name to come down the ages with; it was merely an allusion to his voracious reading. He had the saving grace of common-sense, whatever other gifts he was burdened with. As soon as he saw the collapse of William’s authority and the dispersal of his pupils, he resolved to decline a contest with the irresistible Breton. He voluntarily yielded the chair to Abélard, and took his place on the hay-strewn floor amongst the new worshippers. Such a consummation, however, was not to the taste of the angered scholastic. A substitute had, it seems, the power to subdelegate his license, so that the installation of Abélard in the cathedral school was correct and canonical. But William was still scholastic of the place, and he had an obvious remedy. Robert, or Peter, or whoever it may have been, depended on him, and he at once set to work to recall the delegation. Abélard says that he trumped up a false and most obnoxious charge against the intermediary. He did, at all events, succeed in changing the appointment, and thus rendering Abélard’s subdelegated license null. The new-comer was a man of different temper, so that Abélard only occupied the great chair ‘for a few days.’ He could not teach in or about the episcopal school without a ‘respondent,’ and he therefore once more transferred his chair to Melun.[8]
The Prior of St. Victor’s had won a pyrrhic victory. Whether or no Abélard had learned a lesson from him, and began in his turn to practise the subtle art of diplomacy, we cannot say, but Paris was soon too warm for the prior. The lawless students respected his authority no longer, and clamoured for Abélard. The king was dead: long live the king! They discovered that William’s conversion was peculiarly incomplete. For a man who had felt an inner call to leave the world, he still evinced a fairly keen interest in its concerns. William found their ‘ceaseless raillery’ intolerable. He fled, says Archbishop Roger Vaughan, ‘to hide his shame in a distant monastery.’ Abélard merely records that ‘he transferred his community to a certain town at some distance from the city.’ The path to Paris lay open once more.
CHAPTER III
PROGRESS OF THE ACADEMIC WAR
When Abélard and his admirers returned from Melun to Paris, they found William’s new successor sitting resolutely in the chair of Notre Dame. From some manuscripts of the ‘Story of my Calamities’ it appears that he had won repute by his lectures on Priscian, the Latin grammarian. He had thus been able to augment the little band who remained faithful to William and to orthodoxy with a certain number of personal admirers. Clearly, the episcopal school must be taken by storm. And so, says Abélard, his pen leaping forward more quickly at the recollection, twenty years afterwards, ‘we pitched our camp on the hill of St. Genevieve.’
During the century that preceded the coalescence of the schools into a university, St. Genevieve was the natural home of rebellion. Roscelin had taught there. Joscelin the Red, another famous nominalist, was teaching there. The ‘feminists’ had raised their tabernacle there; the Jews their synagogue. From its physical advantages the hill naturally presented itself to the mind of every master who had designs on the episcopal school or the episcopal philosophy. Its gentle, sunny flanks offered ideal situations for schools, and the students were breaking away more and more from the vicinity of the cloister and the subordination it expressed. A new town was rapidly forming at its foot, by the river, and on the northern slope; a picturesque confusion of schools, chapels, brothels, taverns, and hospices. It was the cradle of the famed Latin Quarter—very Latin in those days, when the taverns swung out their Latin signs, ‘taverna de grangia,’ ‘ad turbotum,’ ‘apud duos cygnos,’ and so forth, and the songs that came from the latticed, vine-clothed arbours were half French, half Celtic-Latin.
Abélard did not open a private school on ‘the hill.’ He delivered his assault on ‘the island’ from the abbey of St. Genevieve at the summit, the site now occupied by the Pantheon. There is nothing in the least remarkable in the abbey opening its gates to one who was obviously bent on assailing the great ecclesiastical school, and who was already regarded as the parent of a new and freer generation of students. The secular canons had little deference for authority and little love of asceticism at that period. St. Norbert had fruitlessly tried to reform them, and had been forced to embody his ideal in a new order. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, the classical censor of the twelfth century, makes bitter comment on their hawks and horses, their jesters and singing-girls, and their warmer than spiritual affection for their sisters in religion, the ‘canonesses.’ It was natural enough that an abbey of secular canons should welcome the witty and brilliant young noble—and the wealth that accompanied him.
We have little information about the abbey at that precise date, but history has much to say of its affairs some thirty or forty years afterwards, and thus affords a retrospective light. In the year 1146 Innocent the Second paid a visit to Paris. The relics of St. Genevieve were one of the treasures of the city, and thither his holiness went with his retinue, and King Louis and his followers. In the crush that was caused in the abbey church, the servants of the canons quarrelled with those of the court, and one of them was unlucky enough to bring his staff down with some force on the royal pate. That was a death-blow to the gay life of the abbey. Paris, through the abbot of St. Denis, who was also the first royal councillor, quickly obtained royal and papal assent to the eviction of the canons, and they were soon summarily turned out on the high road. They did not yield without a struggle, it is true. Many a night afterwards, when the canons regular who replaced them were in the midst of their solemn midnight chant, the evicted broke in the doors of the church, and made such turmoil inside, that the chanters could not hear each other across the choir. And when they did eventually depart for less rigorous surroundings, they thoughtfully took with them a good deal of the gold from Genevieve’s tomb and other ecclesiastical treasures, which were not reclaimed until after many adventures.