The great University of Paris was already famous in the twelfth century. Professors, most of them ecclesiastics, lectured on all the foolish subtilties of the learning of the day to crowds of students collected from every quarter of Europe. At the monastic school of Notre Dame the most distinguished lecturer on dialectic,--meaning philosophy and logic as applied to philosophy,--at the close of the eleventh century, was Guillaume de Champeaux. The method of instruction was, necessarily, almost entirely oral, for books were worth almost their weight in coin. It was the custom for the professor to encourage discussions with the students and to overwhelm them with the weight of his wisdom and the acuteness of his reasoning. In this fashion Guillaume had long triumphed, and had, we may fancy, acquired no little of that dogmatic habit of mind which is fostered by unchallenged teaching. About the year 1100 his ascendency was seriously threatened by a young Breton, scarcely yet a man, who had come to his school as a student and had had the temerity to overcome him in argument. This was Pierre Abélard, soon famous as a logician, philosopher, and theologian, now remembered chiefly because of his connection with the fair and noble Héloïse. Abélard was born at Pallet, or Palais, not far from Nantes. He was the eldest son of a family of some distinction, and his father, Bérenger, was determined to give his son an education in keeping with his own knightly rank. Bérenger himself was better educated than most of the gentlemen of his class, and there seems to have been a decided leaning to devoutness in the family, since both Bérenger and his wife, Lucie, took monastic vows later in life. At any rate, Pierre, after a taste of learning, determined to devote himself entirely to the pursuit of knowledge. Let us see how he tells this part of his own story. "The progress that I made in learning attached me to its pursuit with an ever increasing ardor, and such was the charm that it exercised over my mind that, renouncing the glory of arms, my own heritage, my own privileges as eldest son, I abandoned forever the camp of Mars to take refuge in the bosom of Minerva. Preferring the art of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, I exchanged the arms of war for those of logic, and sacrificed trophies of the battlefield for the joys of contest in argument. I took to travelling from province to province, going wherever I heard that the study of this art received special honor, and always engaging in argument, like a veritable emulator of the Peripatetics."
In this way, Abélard, still under twenty, came to the school of Guillaume de Champeaux. Received at first with honor, as an intelligent pupil, Abélard remained some time, perhaps two years. But his restless, inquisitive, and, above all, rational mind could not accept calmly what seemed to it untrue. Abélard, a mere boy, dared to dispute with his master, Guillaume, and, what is far worse, to get the better of arguments on Guillaume's own peculiar subject. The school was divided into two parties. Guillaume, being the more influential, prevented his pupil from establishing himself as a lecturer in Paris, and Abélard removed to Melun, at that time a royal residence and a city of some importance. Here he opened a school of his own, which prospered so greatly, in spite of the jealousy of Guillaume and the older teachers, that he removed to Corbeil, near Paris, and was soon recognized as more than the equal of his old instructor. But his health broke down under the strain; he retired to rest and recuperate in his native land, and remained there several years. Returning about 1108, he again met Guillaume in argument, in the convent of Saint-Victor, outside Paris, and again vanquished him, this time so completely that Guillaume gave up his chair in Paris. His jealousy, however, still kept Abélard from establishing himself in the great city. The young philosopher opened his school on Mont Sainte-Geneviève, a hill just outside the walls of the Paris of that day, where he taught with brilliant success, till summoned to Brittany by his mother Lucie, then about to take the veil. On his return from this trip he determined to study theology. The venerable Anselm of Laon was the most distinguished teacher of theology, and to him Abélard went. Here is part of his comment on Anselm, which will help us to understand something of the writer's character.
"He enjoyed marvellous facility of speech, but his thought was without value, even without good sense. The fire that he kindled filled his house with smoke, but did not illuminate it. He was a tree dense with foliage and beautiful from afar, but found fruitless when examined more closely. I had come to him to gather fruit; I found in him the fig tree cursed by the Lord, or the old oak to which Lucan compares Pompey: But the shadow of a great name, the lofty oak in the midst of the fruitful field." With such an opinion of his preceptor, it is not surprising that Abélard grew impatient and talked imprudently. The immediate result was that the young scholar proved, to his own satisfaction and apparently to that of his hearers, that he could lecture on theology, as Anselm understood theology, by the aid of ordinary intelligence alone. The ultimate result was that he made an enemy of Anselm. He returned to Paris--about 1115--in triumph, was given the chair formerly held by Guillaume de Champeaux, and became a canon of the cathedral of Notre Dame.
During the three or four years that followed this signal triumph over his old master, Abélard enjoyed a popularity and a reputation for learning almost without parallel. He was of handsome presence, polished and winning in manners, accomplished even in the little arts and graces of the society of the period. All this would account for his personal popularity; but his was really a brilliant mind, fascinatingly if dangerously logical, and straightforward in dealing with vexed questions of philosophy and theology. And with all his learning he knew how to meet the difficulties of ordinary minds, to present his arguments in a style not only simple but lucid and entertaining. He brought to his work a precious quality--enthusiasm. From all parts of Europe students flocked to him, by hundreds, by thousands; and with the offerings they brought he was rich. Then it was that pride prepared his ruin. "Believing myself henceforth the only living philosopher, fancying that I had no more opposition to encounter or accusation to fear, I commenced to give rein to my passions, I who had always lived in the greatest continence. The more I advanced in the paths of philosophy and theology, the further I was getting, by my impure life, from philosophers and saints." How much of this confession is real humility, and how much mere pretence, exaggeration, and vain rhetoric, we cannot say. It is an unfortunate fact that what is recognized as the language of religion is so highly colored, so tropical, so manifestly not to be taken in its absolute and literal sense, that one cannot estimate a character by autobiographic testimony of this sort. What Rousseau meant when he confessed that he "gave rein to his passions" we know full well, for he tells us. What, or rather how much, Abélard means we cannot tell, since his language is evidently in large part figurative. We do not think, however, that he was ever really a libertine.
In his own account of his love story Abélard says that he was attracted by the beauty, the youth, and the mental attainments of Héloïse, the niece of Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame, who had loved her tenderly and had educated her with unusual care. Smitten more by the physical than by the mental graces of the girl, then about eighteen, Abélard sought a pretext to ingratiate himself with Fulbert, and to enter his house as a lodger. The opportunity of having his beloved niece instructed by a person of such distinction was more than Fulbert could let pass. In the intimate relations of teacher and pupil Abélard also found his opportunity; and the two were soon plainly lovers in the eyes of all the world save Fulbert, who refused to believe in the treachery of his friend and the shame of his niece. Abélard, who was in his thirty-ninth year, loved with all the ardor of youth; he wrote passionate love songs, which were long popular but have been lost; he neglected his work, and devoted his time to Héloïse instead of to his lectures on theology. At last even Fulbert could no longer refuse to believe. The lovers were separated, but continued to meet in secret. Not long after the first discovery of their relations by her uncle, Héloïse found herself about to become a mother. Abélard stole her away one night, while Fulbert was absent, and fled with her to Brittany, where she remained with his sister until after the birth of her son, whom she named Astrolabe.
To appease Fulbert, who was thirsting for revenge but dared not pursue the pair into Brittany, the stronghold of Abélard's family, Abélard proposed to marry Héloïse, provided the union be kept secret, so as not to jeopardize his interests or prospects in the Church. Héloïse, devoted body and soul to Abélard, would not hear of a marriage which might ruin his career, and was with difficulty brought to consent even to a secret union. Fulbert, seeing no other means of redress, accepted Abélard's proposition, and gave his word to keep the marriage a secret. Héloïse and Abélard secretly came back to Paris and were wedded a few days later, the ceremony being performed at dawn, in the presence of Fulbert and a few of his friends.
But the temporary disappearance from Paris of so noteworthy a person as Abélard could not be concealed. The whole town had known of his passion for Héloïse, and the gossips now guessed, no doubt, why he had disappeared, and why Héloïse also had gone. We do not need to be told that the surmises made, all so dishonorable to his niece, must have been galling in the extreme to Fulbert. He could not endure the shame of his niece, and tried to quell the scandal by letting the news of the marriage leak out. Abélard says that Fulbert told it himself, in violation of his oath of secrecy--for which we can hardly blame him as much as Abélard does. The devoted Héloïse, to protect Abélard, flatly denied the marriage; not all Fulbert's entreaties and threats could move her to admit that she was anything but Abélard's mistress. Beside himself with anger and shame, Fulbert grew so violent that Héloïse fled to a nunnery at Argenteuil, near Paris, Abélard aiding her in her flight. At Argenteuil Abélard had her dressed in the monastic habit, though she did not take the vows.
We must admit that there were some grounds for supposing, as Fulbert and his family believed, that Abélard meant to rid himself of his wife by having her shut up in the convent: and they had experienced enough of her self-sacrificing firmness to know that she would offer no resistance to Abélard's wishes, if such were his wishes. Determined at least to punish him, they bribed one of his servants, broke into his house at night, and inflicted upon him the most severe and brutal mutilation. If Héloïse was forced to be a nun, Abélard should be fit for nothing but a monk.
The perpetrators of this Draconian vengeance fled. Paris was all agog with the shame of the brilliant philosopher. There were partisans in plenty on his side, and Abélard takes pleasure in telling us that two of the perpetrators of the crime, including his servant, were captured, blinded, and mutilated as he had been. The justice of the Middle Ages never erred on the side of mercy. Abélard fell into the most abject despair, but still we see in him the same dominant regard to his career in the world. When his friends came about him, particularly the clerks, with their lamentations and their manifestations of compassion, he says: "I suffered more from their compassion than from the pain of my wound; I felt my shame more than my actual mutilation." He felt not only the shame, but the ruin of all his ambitions. "In this state of hopelessness and of utter confusion it was, I admit, rather a feeling of shame than predilection for the vocation that impelled me towards the shades of a cloister." Ever ready to obey his wishes, Héloïse took the veil in the convent of Argenteuil at the same time that Abélard entered the abbey of Saint-Denis. Héloïse was not yet twenty; did her youthful heart, full of love of life, yearn for the cramped life of the nunnery? We shall later see what she herself says upon this score; for the present suffice it to note that even Abélard pauses in the account of his woes to praise her complete abnegation of self, and to tell us that she went to the altar where the irrevocable vows were to be taken, repeating in the midst of her sobs the lament of Cornelia: "O my husband, greatest of men! worthy of a bride far better than I! Had Fate such power over a head so illustrious? Wretch that I am, why did I wed thee only to bring woe upon thee? Be thou now avenged in the sacrifice I so willingly make for thee!" --(Lucan, Pharsalia, VIII., 1. 94.) The convent was to her a punishment; but as she goes to it she does not think of her punishment, but only of his.
Let us leave Héloïse for the present and pursue the story of Abélard. His troubles were just beginning; henceforth almost everything seemed to go wrong with him. Scarcely recovered from his injuries, he was besought by his former pupils to resume his lectures, while the monks of Saint-Denis, thinking to gain credit through their illustrious recruit, also urged him to teach again. These same monks Abélard had found far from congenial. They were covetous, narrow-minded, and outrageously licentious. He was, therefore, the more willing to undertake his old work, and opened a modest school at the little village of Maisoncelle, in Brie, where the monks of Saint-Denis had a priory. Here, once more, crowds came to hear him, and he felt so encouraged that he ventured to put in book form some of his theological and philosophical opinions, at the instance and for the use of his students. Neither misfortune nor the wish of Job that his adversary had written a book had taught him caution; in his book, probably the Introductio ad Theologiam that has come down to us, he ventured to discuss even the most obscure and jealously guarded mysteries of the faith, and to discuss them with the same lucidity, directness, and acuteness of reason that had made him famous as a lecturer. He was, indeed, in the habit of acting upon one of the phrases which one may cull from his writings as characteristic of the man's mental attitude: "Understand, that you may believe." Abélard found, like hundreds of others who have proceeded in this way, that his reason could not account, to its own satisfaction, for all the things called of faith. He was constantly allowing himself to be led on in discussion until he found himself confronted with a dilemma: either to follow logic still further and end in infidelity, or to silence, as best he could, the voice of reason by an appeal to authority and to faith. On the present occasion it was an utterance on the dogma of the Trinity that his enemies seized upon. The leaders of the persecution were two former classmates, who now intrigued against him. Without examining him, without giving him a chance to discuss, justify, or explain his doctrine, a council, assembled at Soissons in 1121, condemned his book, not so much for what it taught, as because the author had presumed to teach theology without definite authority from the Church. Summoned before the council--the decision had been reached and the trial conducted without his presence--Abélard was forced to throw his book into the flames. As a confession of faith he was made to recite the Athanasian creed, and, to humiliate him still further, they brought him the text, as if he could not recite from memory that which was known by every child. The man's overwrought nature gave way under this last exhibition of petty malice. He tells us: "I read (the creed) as well as I could for sobs and tears." He was then delivered to the abbot of Saint-Médard to be confined to the monastery for an indefinite period.