Was he right? Having read his Philosophical Drama, I am of opinion that he was wrong. It exhibits literary faculty of a high order, and it is deficient in none of those penetrating qualities of intelligence which serve to render the imagination at once free and efficient when engaged in dramatic work. We do not say that it reaches the heaven of invention; and, indeed, its author was inspired by no such soaring ambition. He writes in prose, and prose which, though always classical and often eloquent, never seeks to pass the boundary between prose and poetry invariably respected by the judicious. But he had saturated himself with the atmosphere of the time in which the action of his drama is laid; and he had represented to himself in clear and well-defined outlines the character of his central figure. To do all this is surely to write a work of no little difficulty with no little success.
Shortly after quitting Nantes by the post-road that conducts to Poitiers, the traveller passes, before reaching Clisson, a village consisting of one long street, which, if he thinks it worth while to inquire, he will be told is called Le Pallet. No one, however, will concern himself to add that behind the unpretending but venerable church which stands on a slight elevation to the left, above the last cottages in the place, are to be seen some all but submerged walls, and here and there the choked vestiges of an ancient moat. These are all that remain of the castle of Le Pallet, which was levelled with the ground more than four centuries and a half ago, in the course of the wars that succeeded the attack directed by Marguerite de Clisson against John V., Duke of Brittany. Hard by is an insignificant stream, known as the Sanguèze, and which evidently owes its name, like the Italian Sanguinetto that flows into the Lake of Thrasymene, to the blood of battle that is recorded to have once dyed its waters.
In 1079, the Castle of Le Pallet stood intact on its little eminence; and in that year, though on what day of the calendar cannot be said, the famous dialectician, Pierre Abélard, was born within its walls. His father, its lord, was called Bérenger; his mother’s name was Lucie. This much may be asserted, with every probability that it is true; but these bare facts are about all that tradition has preserved, or literary industry unearthed. Bérenger, though inured, like everyone in his position in those warlike times, to the exercise of arms, manifested a predilection for letters rarely encountered in his class, and is said to have intentionally inspired his sons with a love for philosophical studies, not easily reconciled with the performance of knightly duties. There were, at least, three other sons of the marriage, Raoul, Porcaire, and Dagobert, and a daughter, Dényse; and if we may trust the testimony of the first of the Letters which compose the famous correspondence of Eloisa and Abelard, into all Bérenger’s sons alike was inculcated the notion that distinction in knowledge is a worthier object of ambition than the trophies of war. Pierre manifested a much readier disposition than his brothers to accept the paternal estimate of the relative value of courage and culture; and though he was the eldest-born, he waived his rights of inheritance in order more freely to pursue the path indicated by his parent. The story is a strange, not to say an incredible one, for times when the sword was the only true badge of honor; and we are driven to conclude either that Abelard sought to remove from himself the stigma which he would have incurred by such a choice, had he not surrounded it with the halo of filial duty, or that his biographers were determined that dramatic completeness should attend his character from the very outset of his career. His own words are that he deliberately abandoned the court of Mars in order to shelter himself in the lap of Minerva. Probably the only conclusion that can safely be drawn from all the statements respecting his selection is, that he developed at an early age extraordinary talents for the acquisition of learning and the conduct of philosophical discussion, and that he was freely permitted to indulge his bent by parents who had no interest in thwarting him.
It was impossible, however, that he should cultivate his passion for letters and philosophy within the boundaries of Brittany, then, as now, perhaps the least instructed portion of what was not yet territorially known as France. He travelled from place to place in search of persons who taught dialectics, and even thus early he prided himself upon imitating the ancient philosophers to the extent of being a peripatician or vagrant. Among his preceptors at this period, the name of one only is known to us; nor is it possible to say where it was that Abelard reaped the benefit of his teaching. Jean Roscelin, Canon of Compiègne, was already under ecclesiastical ban for his uncompromising Nominalism, when Abelard entered upon his teens, and for a time at least had to take refuge in England. Some have contended that Abelard must have passed a portion of his youth upon our shores; but the supposition is as utterly without proof as the assertion of Otho of Frisingen that Roscelin was Abelard’s first instructor in philosophy. It is more probable that the young catechumen encountered the ostracised teacher in some of those more hidden and remote conferences of learning, to which the hostility of his ecclesiastical superiors had compelled him to limit his philosophical energy.
But what was that which Abelard wished to learn and that Roscelin, or any teacher, or, as we should say, Professor of the period, had to communicate? And how was the knowledge, which some sought to impart and many to acquire, conserved? Universities had not yet been called into being; and no great centres of recognized learning drew to themselves the youth or crystallized the opinions of an entire nation. In their stead, and operating as yet as sole substitute, were Episcopal Schools, under the immediate protection and supervision of the Archbishop or Bishop of the diocese; and it depended almost as much on the ambition of a Prelate as upon the importance of his See, whether his School acquired a wide renown, or remained the obscure head-quarters of local instruction. Deriving his faculties from the Bishop, there presided over each Episcopal School a clerical lecturer, or “scholastic”; and all those who attended his classes, or course, were termed his scholars. The success of his teaching and the number of his followers necessarily shed lustre on his episcopal superior and upon the province in which the latter resided; and the emulation which burned among the more intelligent and aspiring members of the Episcopate, in their endeavors to secure for their respective schools Masters of erudition and eloquence, was almost an exact anticipation of the spirit of honorable rivalry that subsists among the Governing Bodies of modern German Universities. Those who favor the doctrine that there is nothing new under the sun, will perhaps be disposed to look backward rather than forward for a parallel to the influence of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. Hippias, Prodikos, Gorgias, and other less famous men, whose names have been preserved to us by Plato, passed from city to city in ancient Greece, teaching and disputing. Some, we are told, amassed considerable fortunes; while one and all gathered about them the restless brains of their generation, who carried through the land the fame of their doctrines and the brilliance of their rhetoric.
De Rémusat’s drama opens in the cloister of Nôtre-Dame, where a number of scholars are assembled to hear a lecture by Guillaume de Champeaux. The master has not yet arrived; and the first scene is passed in what the undergraduates of the nineteenth century call chaff. Finally, the great lecturer makes his appearance; the scholars crowd around him, and he proceeds to expound his thesis of the reality of Universals, or the substantiality of abstract ideas. In a word, he is the champion of Realism as opposed to Nominalism, and maintains, for example, that Man exists as really and essentially as any individual man, and that Humanity is not a mere name or intellectual abstraction, but just as much an entity as a building composed of so many stones. At the end of his discourse he says, “Are you all satisfied, or is anyone present harassed by doubt? If so, let him speak, and I will answer him.”
Abelard rises. He is unknown equally to master and to scholars, but he soon enchains attention by the vigor of his dialectic. He involves the lecturer in a series of contradictions, and ends by establishing his proposition that Universals are neither realities, nor mere names, but Conceptions, and by winning over the whole class to his views. In vain Guillaume de Champeaux pronounces the word heresy, and points out that Abelard bases his theories on the dangerous foundation of human reason. The remainder of the First Act, which is entitled “La Philosophie,” is devoted to depicting the supremacy gradually obtained by the brilliant young Breton over the students of Nôtre-Dame, until, Guillaume de Champeaux finally abandoned by his scholars, Abelard can exclaim, “Maintenant l’Ecole de Paris, c’est moi!”
The Second Act, the scene of which is laid at Laon a year later, is headed “La Théologie”; and in it Abelard acquires over Anselme of Laon, in theological controversy, a victory analogous to that he had previously won over Guillaume de Champeaux in the realm of metaphysics. The audience is the same, for the students of Nôtre-Dame have followed Abelard to Laon; and the same is the weapon with which his triumph is achieved. “When theology,” he exclaims in the course of a warm disputation with Anselme, “is not seconded by dialectic, vainly does it knock at the door of the spirit; it is reason that holds the key, and opens to the truth.” Anselme replies with anathemas. Then Abelard bursts out:—
“You hear him. My friends, he is old and feeble. Be good to him, but lead him away. His advanced age unfits him for these wrestlings with science. Take him into the air. Alas! Saint Matthew was right when he said you may not put new wine into old bottles.”
His words are received with acclamation; and the overthrow of Anselme de Laon, in spite of his friendship with Saint Bernard, is as complete as the dethronement of Guillaume de Champeaux. In an incredibly short space of time, Abelard has seen the fulfilment of his most ambitious dreams, and he finds himself surrounded by a band of scholars who regard him as the oracle of his age. Yet in the midst of these astounding triumphs, he experiences “a mixture of impatience and weakness, of ardor and weariness,” and thus soliloquizes:—