The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

But, as generally happens, a sand-bag substitute was put in the bishop’s place; and Abelard came back to open a school on Mt. St. Genevieve and to bombard this professor. The battle was short and decisive, for the next we learn of this nameless champion of a defeated cause, he is absolutely enrolled as a humble follower of the great logician. This is but a fair sample of the general success which attended the new ideas. Everywhere they gained currency, attracting inquiry, arousing envy, awaking ecclesiastical suspicion, and inflaming the hatred of his defeated opponents.

About this time of inception and premonition, say 1113, Abelard undertook to examine the instruction given by William’s teacher, Anselm of Laon, who there vegetated as dean of the cathedral church. We must not confuse his name with that of the great Archbishop of Canterbury, whose method and science have outlasted the most of his contemporaries, and whom Neander styles “the Augustine of the twelfth century.” Had he been the teacher and Abelard the pupil, history might have made a different record. A profounder and a more reverent line of thought might have affected the acute and daring mind of the rising dialectician. And, above every other consideration, the new philosophy might have contained those elements of religion whose absence neutralized for centuries that wholesome independence which held mere dogmatism cheap as compared to the sacred light of truth. It would, indeed, have been well if such an Anselm had been at Laon, but the dean was a weak and futile person. And so it was inevitable that Abelard should again be in trouble and almost in disgrace, but even in his pathetic Historia Calamitatum the pupil did not forget to satirize his master. “He was that sort of a man,” he says, “that if any went to him being uncertain he returned more uncertain still.... When he lit a fire he filled his house with smoke, but he did not brighten it with light.” He adds, sarcastically, that Anselm’s philosophy always suggested to his mind the story of the fig-tree that our Lord cursed because it bore plenty of leaves and no fruit.

Abelard himself, however, was a genuine educator, and many bishops and other ecclesiastics, with nineteen cardinals and two popes, came from the ranks of his pupils. He loved liberty, although he loved it to that extent to which his own will—and no other authority, human or divine—restricted it. In this he differed from Anselm of Canterbury, who loved liberty, not according to license but according to law. Mere freedom to inquire, to complain, or to theorize, does not invariably carry with it profitable results. And Abelard—whose very freedom was in itself a noble revelation to the shackled intellects of his age—committed the grave error of supposing that the sweep of a free hand would certainly give lines of beauty and forms of grace. Something deeper than the mere distaste of false opinions is needful for this. Art, meditation, truth—all must lie beneath the O of Giotto or the masterly strokes of Apelles. And our rhetorician would have done well to have confined himself to the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. When he undertook theology he first quarrelled with Anselm of Laon, and next he encountered all Christendom and Bernard of Clairvaux. His was the fatal blunder of every “free inquirer” who forgets reverence, and who, in his pride of intellect, may likely fall as the angels fell. Surely no Lucifer ever plunged more swiftly down from heaven’s battlements than did poor Peter Abelard from the dizzy height of his sudden success.

This is no place to criticise his “system,” if system it can be properly called. The Sic et Non—“Yes and No”—his most famous work, is really a mere challenge. He quotes the Bible against the Fathers and the Fathers against the Bible, touching on deep tideways and bogs and quicksands which he never attempts to ford, fathom, or bridge. The Arians, Sabellians, Nestorians and Pelagians are resuscitated in these pages. He flings their doubts before us like a gauntlet cast into the arena of debate. One may choose which side he will take. Such a man, arising in the nineteenth century and claiming sympathy with Christianity, would be by some suspected as a secret enemy and his vanity would loosen his armor for the entrance of many a venomed shaft. His genuine ardor would be misunderstood and his opinions would be heavily attacked before they could deploy at their full strength. If this be true to-day how infinitely more true must it have been of an age narrower, more illiterate, and with an arm which wielded not in vain the sword of excision against heretics!

This, then, was the man who in the prime of manhood and at the topmost peak of prosperity found himself with money in his pocket, in Paris, and his own master. He had not yet said of the dogmas of Mother Church as Luther said of Tetzel, “By God’s help I will go down and beat a hole in your drum.” Hitherto he had safely kept to Aristotle—at once the blessing and the bane of Middle-Age reasoners—and he had the vainglorious sense that five thousand students hung breathless on his words. He considered himself upon the firmest footing that one could desire, and behold, he fell!

The “damned spot” of Abelard’s character is that which, after all, has insured his fame. And, since it is indispensable, a few sentences must exhibit it in its repulsive ugliness. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we do not need the help of any other biographer than his own bitter soul. His Historia Calamitatum is the sufficient history. In this he tells us that his life had been previously irreproachable and of the strictest moral correctness. Now, however, he began to “let himself go”—how far, or how fast, it is of no use for us to investigate. But Fulbert, the Canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, had a perfect Hypatia for a niece, and to this lady Abelard’s gaze was turned.

She was eighteen, and there was an irresistible charm about her, as of some fragrant white lily. She was a woman fit to lend grace and beauty to prosaic surroundings. And Abelard has the unspeakable audacity to declare that he, a man of thirty-eight, deliberately selected this pure and perfect flower and meant to take it for himself. Not to marry; for the truth demands that we should perceive his own thorough appreciation of the fact that marriage would sink him out of the ranks of scholars into those of tradesmen and would be the death-blow to his ambition. Not to marry; for it was a bad age, and sin sometimes clothed itself in the cowl of the monk and the robe of the prelate, and such a sin was better forgiven than such a blunder. Let all contemporaneous history bear witness! For every account of the lives of Heloise and Abelard reveals the impossibility of passing these unpleasant facts without notice or comment. On this pivot turns the golden world of that deathless love.

So the avaricious Fulbert took Abelard to dwell in his own house, and gave his niece’s education entirely into his care, and, as her teacher himself expresses it, delivered her “like a lamb to a hungry wolf.”

Heloise was probably the better educated of the two. She was the child of unknown parents. Bayle asserts that she was the daughter of a priest, and his facilities and laboriousness respecting such abstruse particulars no one will question. The authority from which he is possibly quoting, says that this priest was John “Somebody” (nescio cujus) and a canon of the same cathedral with Fulbert at Paris. Doubtless the trace of her ancestry is utterly lost to us beyond these meagre items. Even Fulbert’s alleged relationship has been questioned. But the scholarship of Heloise speaks for itself in a terse, sparkling Latin style, which is as pleasant beside Abelard’s lumbering sentences as a bright mountain brook beside a turbid and turbulent stream. Count de Bussy-Rabutin—no mean critic—has put on record that he never read more elegant Latin. She also understood Greek and Hebrew, with neither of which, strange to say, was Abelard acquainted. And at first blush it would seem that the teacher should have been the pupil.

Absolute justice requires that the ugly and disgraceful slurs in the Historia Calamitatum, and even in the correspondence, should not be overlooked. Here is what will serve for a fair example. He says of her, Quae cum per faciem non esset infima, per abundantiam litterarum erat suprema—while she was not exactly the worst-looking of them, she was the best educated; and therefore he selected her! The spretae injuria formae never went further than this. But this is by no means the solitary instance of that low snarl in which the currish nature of the Breton rustic now and then indulged.