The Project Gutenberg eBook, Peter Abélard, by Joseph McCabe

[Transcriber's note]

[Table of Contents]

[Index]

PETER ABÉLARD

All rights reserved

Copyrighted in America

PETER ABÉLARD

BY

JOSEPH M^cCABE

AUTHOR OF

‘TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY,’ ETC.

LONDON
DUCKWORTH and CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, W.C.
1901

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty

PREFACE

The author does not think it necessary to offer any apology for having written a life of Abélard. The intense dramatic interest of his life is known from a number of brief notices and sketches, but English readers have no complete presentation of the facts of that remarkable career in our own tongue. The History of Abailard of Mr. Berington, dating from the eighteenth century, is no longer adequate or useful. Many French and German scholars have rewritten Abélard’s life in the light of recent knowledge and feeling, but, beyond the short sketches to be found in Compayré, Poole, Rashdall, Cotter Morison, and others, no English writer of the nineteenth century has given us a complete study of this unique and much misunderstood personality. Perhaps one who has also had a monastic, scholastic, and ecclesiastical experience may approach the task with a certain confidence.

In the matter of positive information the last century has added little directly to the story of Abélard’s life. Indirectly, however, modern research has necessarily helped to complete the picture; and modern feeling, modern humanism, reinterprets much of the story.

Since the work is intended for a circle of readers who cannot be assumed to have a previous acquaintance with the authorities who are cited here and there, it is necessary to indicate their several positions in advance. The chief sources of the story are the letters of Abélard and Heloise. The first letter of the series, entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities,’ is an autobiographical sketch, covering the first fifty years of Abélard’s life. To these must be added the letters of St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux: of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny: of Jean Roscelin, canon of Compiègne, Abélard’s early teacher: and of Fulques of Deuil, a contemporary monk. A number of Latin works written shortly after Abélard’s death complete, or complicate, the narrative. The principal of these are: the Vita Beati Bernardi, written by his monk-secretary: the Vita Beati Goswini, by two monks of the period: the De gestis Frederici I. of a Cistercian bishop, Otto of Freising: the Metalogicus and the Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury: and the Vita Ludovici Grossi and De rebus a se gestis of Suger, abbot of St. Denis, and first royal councillor. Many of the chronicles of the twelfth century also contain brief references.

Chief amongst the later French historians is Du Boulai with his Historia Universitatis Parisiensis—‘the most stupid man who ever wrote a valuable book,’ says Mr. R. L. Poole. Amongst other French chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may mention: De Launoy (De scholis celebrioribus), Dubois (Historia Ecclesiæ Parisiensis), Lobineau (Histoire de Bretagne), Félibien (Histoire de l’abbaye de Saint Denys and Histoire de la ville de Paris), Longueval (Histoire de l’Église Gallicane), Tarbé (Recherches historiques sur la ville de Sens), and, of course, the Histoire littéraire de la France, Gallia Christiana, and ecclesiastical historians generally.

A large number of ‘lives’ of Abélard have been founded on these documents. In French we have La vie de P. Abélard of Gervaise, a monkish admirer of the eighteenth century, far from ascetic in temper, but much addicted to imaginative description: the historical essay of Mme. and M. Guizot, prefixed to M. Oddoul’s translation of the letters of Abélard and Heloise: the Abélard of M. Rémusat, pronounced by Ste. Beuve himself to be ‘un chef d’œuvre’: and the Lettres Complètes of M. Gréard, with a helpful introduction. In German Reuter chiefly discusses Abélard as a thinker in his Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung: Deutsch is mainly preoccupied with his theology in his Peter Abälard, but gives an exhaustive study of the last years of his life in Abälards Verurtheilung zu Sens: Neander discusses him in his Heilige Bernhard: and Hausrath offers the most complete and authoritative study of his career and character in his recent Peter Abälard. In English we have, as I said, the eighteenth-century work of Berington, a small fantastic American version (quite valueless), and the more or less lengthy studies of Abélard found in Rashdall’s fine Universities of Europe, Cotter Morison’s Life and Times of St. Bernard (scarcely a judicious sketch), Compayré’s Abélard and the Universities (in which the biography is rather condensed), Roger Vaughan’s Life of St. Thomas of Aquin, and Mr. R. L. Poole’s Illustrations of the History of Mediæval Thought (from whom we may regret we have not received a complete study of Abélard).

January 31, 1901.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE QUEST OF MINERVA

Peter Abélard was born towards the close of the eleventh century. No other personality that we may choose to study leads to so clear and true an insight into those strange days as does that of the luckless Breton philosopher. It was the time of transition from the darkest hour of mediæval Europe to a period of both moral and intellectual brilliance. The gloom of the ‘century of iron’ still lay on the land, but it was already touched with the faint, spreading dawn of a new idealism. There is, amongst historians, a speculation to the effect that the year 1000 of the Christian era marked a real and very definite stage in the history of thought. Usually we do violence to events by our chronological demarcations; but it is said that Christendom confidently expected the threatened rolling-up of the heavens and the earth to take place in the year 1000. Slowly, very slowly, the sun crept over the dial of the heavens before the eyes of idle men. But no Christ rode on the clouds, and no Anti-Christ came into the cities. And the heaviness was lifted from the breasts of men, and the blood danced merrily in their veins once more. They began again ‘to feel the joy of existence,’ as an old writer has it, and to build up their towers afresh in the sun-light.

It was a strangely chequered period, this that changed the darkness of the tenth into the comparative radiance of the thirteenth century. All life was overcast by densest ignorance and grossest lust and fiercest violence, the scarcely altered features of the ‘converted’ northern barbarians; yet the light of an ideal was breaking through, in the pure atmosphere of reformed monasteries, in the lives of saintly prelates and women refined beyond their age, and in the intellectual gospel of a small band of thinkers and teachers. Amid the general degradation of the Church and the cloister strong souls had arisen, ardent with a contagious fire of purity. High-minded prelates had somehow attained power, in spite of the net of simony and corruption. The sons of St. Benedict, rising and falling too often with the common tide, had, nevertheless, guarded some treasures of the earlier wisdom, and shared them lovingly at their gates with the wandering scholar. Thousands there were who could close heart and home at the fiery word of a preacher, and go to starve their souls in the living tomb of a monastery. Thousands could cast down their spades and their wine-cups, and rush to meet death in the trail of a frenzied hermit.[1] They were the days of the travail of the spirit; and they rise before us in arresting vision when we look into the life of Peter Abélard.

That life begins some day in the last decade of the eleventh century, when the young Breton, then in his fifteenth or sixteenth year, went out from his father’s castle into the bright world on the quest of Minerva. Of his earlier years we know nothing. Later fancy has brooded over them to some purpose, it is true, if there are any whom such things interest. The usual unusual events were observed before and after his birth, and the immortal swarm of bees that has come down the ages, kissing the infant lips of poets and philosophers, did not fail to appear at Pallet. In point of sober fact, we rely almost exclusively on Abélard’s autobiography for the details of his earlier career, and he tells us nothing of his childhood, and not much of his youth. It matters little. The life of a soul begins when it looks beyond the thoughts of parents and teachers—if it ever do—out into the defiant world, and frames a view and a purpose.

The home from which Abélard issued, somewhere about the year 1095, was an ancient castle at Pallet, in Brittany, about eleven miles to the south-east of Nantes. At the end of the village, which was threaded on the high road from Nantes to Poitiers, a steep eminence dominated the narrow flood of the Sanguèze. The castle was built on this: overlooking the village more, as it chanced, in a spirit of friendly care than of haughty menace. The spot is still visited by many a pilgrim—not with a priestly benediction; but the castle is now the mere relic of a ruin. In the most penetrating movements of his prophetic genius, Abélard never foresaw the revolt of the serfs, or indeed any economic development. In this one respect he failed to detect and outstrip what little advance was made in his day. His father’s castle has disappeared with the age it belonged to, and the sons of his vassals now lay the bones of their dead to rest on his desolated hearth.

Bérenger, the father, was a noble of a rare type. He had fortunately received a little culture before setting out in the service of Hoel IV., Duke of Brittany and Count of Nantes, and he in turn communicated his taste and his knowledge to his children. From the fact, too, that he and his wife Lucia adopted the monastic life a few years after Abélard’s departure, we may gather that they were also above the moral level of their class. It is not idle to note that Abélard’s mind encountered no evil or irreligious influences when it first opened. All the circumstances that are known to us suggest a gentle, uplifting, and reverential education. He was the eldest of the sons of Bérenger; and, partly, no doubt, because greater care had been taken with his education, partly in the necessary consciousness of mental power, he early determined to leave home, and wander over the land in search of learning. His words give one the impression that he shouldered a wallet, and sallied forth alone, after the adventurous fashion of the day. However that may be, he says that he resolved to leave the chances of the favour of Mars to his brothers, and set out to woo the gentler Minerva. Abandoning the rights of primogeniture and the possible grace of kings, he passed away from the great castle, and turned eagerly in the direction of the nearest school.

It was not uncommon in those ‘Dark Ages’ for a young noble to resign the comfort of the château and the glamour of a courtly life in this way. The scholastic fever, which was soon to inflame the youth of the whole of Europe, had already set in. You could not travel far over the rough roads of France without meeting some foot-sore scholar, making for the nearest large monastery or episcopal town. Before many years, it is true, there was a change, as the keen-eyed Jew watched the progress of the fever. There arose an elaborate system of conveyance from town to town, an organisation of messengers to run between the château and the school, a smiling group of banks and bankers. But in the earlier days, and, to some extent, even later, the scholar wandered afoot through the long provinces of France. Here and there a noble or a wealthy merchant would fly past in his silks and furs, with a body-guard of a dozen stout fellows; or a poor clerk would jog along on his ass, looking anxiously towards each wood or rock that bordered the road ahead. Robbers, frequently in the service of the lord of the land, infested every province. It was safest to don the coarse frieze tunic of the pilgrim, without pockets, sling your little wax tablets and style at your girdle, strap a wallet of bread and herbs and salt on your back, and laugh at the nervous folk who peeped out from their coaches over a hedge of pikes and daggers. Few monasteries refused a meal or a rough bed to the wandering scholar. Rarely was any fee exacted for the lesson given. For the rest, none were too proud to earn a few sous by sweeping, or drawing water, or amusing with a tune on the reed-flute: or to wear the cast-off tunics of their masters.

It is fitting that we should first find little Pierre—Master Roscelin recalls him in later years as ‘the smallest of my pupils’—under the care of a rationalist scholar. Love was the first rock on which the fair promise of his early manhood was shattered, but throughout the long, sternly religious years that followed, it was his restless application of reason to the veiled dogmas of faith that brought endless cruelty and humiliation upon him. Now, Jean Roscelin, canon of Compiègne, was the rationalist of his day. As Abélard was fated to do, he had attempted to unveil the super-sacred doctrine of the Trinity; not in the spirit of irreverent conceit, with which people credited both him and Abélard, but for the help of those who were afflicted with a keen intellect and an honest heart. For this he had been banished from England in 1093, and from the kingdom of France, and had settled in one or other of the Gaulish provinces.

Mme. Guizot, in her very careful study of Abélard, sees no evidence for the statement that he studied under Roscelin, but the fact is now beyond dispute. Otto von Freising, a contemporary historian, says that he ‘had Roscelin for his first master’; Aventinus and others also speak of Roscelin as an early teacher of his. Roscelin himself, in a letter which it seems ‘frivolous,’ as Deutsch says, to hesitate to accept, claims that Abélard sat at his feet—it was the literal practice in those days—‘from boyhood to youth.’ Abélard, on the other hand, writes that he attended Roscelin’s lectures ‘for a short time’; but this correspondence took place at a moment when the one would be greatly disposed to exaggerate and the other to attenuate. An anonymous anecdote, which we shall examine presently, pretends that he found Roscelin unsatisfactory, but ‘controlled his feeling so far as to remain under Roscelin for a year.’ It is clear enough that he spent a few of his earlier years on the hay-strewn floor of Master Roscelin’s lecture-hall.

There is some uncertainty as to the locality, but a sufficient indication to impart an interest to the question. Roscelin says it was at the ‘Locensis ecclesia.’ This is easily understood if we interpret it to mean the monastery of Locmenach[2] in Brittany. The monks of St. Gildas, on the coast of Brittany, a wild band whose closer acquaintance we shall make later on, had established a branch monastery at Locmenach. As will appear in due time, they would be likely to have small scruple about increasing its revenue by erecting a chair for one of the most famous dialecticians in Christendom, in spite of his condemnation for heresy at London and Soissons. We have no special information about the manner of school-life at Locmenach, save that we know the monks of St. Gildas to have been the living antithesis to the good monks of Bec; but it is interesting to find Abélard studying dialectics under a famous rationalist, and in a monastery that was subject to the Abbey of St. Gildas of Rhuys. The dark pages of his later history will give point to the dual circumstance.

There is one other, and less reliable, account of Abélard in his school-days. In an anecdote which is found in one or two older writers, and on the margin of an old Abélard manuscript, it is stated that he studied mathematics under a certain Master Tirricus. The anecdote is generally rejected as valueless, on the ground that it contains clear trace of the work of a ‘constructive imagination’; but Mr. Poole points out that ‘there is no reason to doubt’ the authenticity of the substance of the narrative, and it seems to me that the fictional element may be reduced to a very slender quantity. The story runs that Tirric, or Theodoric, one day found Abélard shedding tears of fruitless perspiration over mathematical problems. He had already, it is said, mastered the higher branches of knowledge, and was even teaching, but had omitted mathematics, and was endeavouring to remedy the omission by taking private lessons from Tirric. Noting his effort, the master is represented to say: ‘What more can the sated dog do than lick the bacon?’ ‘To lick the bacon’ is, in the crude Latinity of the age, bajare lardum, and the story pretends the phrase afforded a nickname for Pierre (Bajolard or Baiolard), and was eventually rounded into Abélard or Abailard. The construction is so crude, and the probability that Abélard is a surname needing no legendary interpretation is so high, that the whole anecdote is often contemptuously rejected. It is surely much more reasonable to read the phrase as a pun on Abélard’s name, which some later writer, to whom the name was unfamiliar, has taken in a constructive sense.[3]

There are several good reasons for retaining the historical framework of the anecdote. It is a fact that Abélard never mastered mathematics; chancing to mention arithmetic in one of his works, he says, ‘Of that art I confess myself wholly ignorant.’ It was unfortunate for mathematics. Most probably the puerility of that liberal art, in its early mediæval form, repelled him. In the next place, there was a distinguished master living in France of the name of Tirric, or Theodoric, who is said to have had a leaning to mathematics. He taught in the episcopal school at Chartres, long famous for the lectures of his brother Bernard. Finally, a Master Tirric (presumably the same) turns up at Abélard’s trial in 1121, and boldly and caustically scourges papal legate and bishops alike. However, if we attribute so much authority to the story, it clearly refers to a later date. The picture of Abélard, already a teacher, sated with knowledge, coming ‘in private’ to repair an omission in the course of his studies, must be relegated to one of the intervals in his teaching at Paris, not, as Mr. Poole thinks, to the period between leaving Roscelin and arriving at Paris.

Abélard himself merely says that he ‘went wherever dialectics flourished.’ For five or six years he wandered from school to school, drawn onward continually by the fame of schools and of masters. Schools were plentiful, and the age was already rich in great teachers. Charlemagne had inaugurated the scholastic age two hundred years before with the founding of the Palace School, and had directed that every monastery and every episcopal town should give instruction. With periods of languor the Benedictines had sustained the scholastic tradition through the soulless age that followed, and the second half of the eleventh century saw a brisk development. There was the great abbey of Bec, in Normandy, where St. Anselm still detained crowds of pupils after the departure of Lanfranc. But at Bec the students were not part of a ‘great undisciplined horde,’ as Rashdall calls the students of the early Middle Ages. With its careful regulations, its bare-back castigations, its expurgated classics, and its ever watchful monks, it contrived at once to cultivate the mind (in moderation) and to guard the sanctity of faith and morals. Cluny, in the south, had a similar school at its gates, and the same control of the scholars it lodged and fed. St. Denis, near Paris, had another famous Benedictine school. The forty monasteries that William of Dijon had recently reformed had opened free schools for the wandering pupils, and even fed the poorer youths.

Then there were men of European fame teaching in the cathedral cloisters of the larger towns. At Chartres, good Bishop Ivo—the only lawyer who ever lived and died in the odour of sanctity—had spent much energy in the improvement of his school. Little John, or John of Salisbury, has left us a proud record of its life at a slightly later date, when Tirric and his brother Bernard presided over it. At Tournai, Master Eudes of Orleans, the peripatetic of the time, walked the cloisters all day with his questioning scholars, and gathered them before the cathedral door of an evening to explain the profound mysteries of the solid spheres that whirled overhead, and of the tiny, immortal fires that were set in them. Other famous episcopal schools were those of Tours, Rheims, Angers, and Laon. But every bishop had his master or masters for the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics (the trivium), and in the larger towns were ‘lectors’ of the other four liberal arts (the quadrivium), music, geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. Theology was taught under the watchful eye of the bishop and his chapter, and in time chairs of Hebrew, and, with the progress of the Saracenic invasion of the intellectual world, even of Arabic, were founded. At the abbey of St. Denis, monk Baldwin, sometime physician to the King of England, taught and practised the art of healing. At Chartres, also, medicine was taught somewhat later; and there are stories of teachers of law. And beside all these, there were the private masters, ‘coaches,’ etc., who opened schools wherever any number of scholars forgathered.

Thus the historical imagination can readily picture all that is contained in the brief phrase with which Abélard dismisses the five or six years of his studies. ‘There was no regular curriculum in those days,’ Mr. Rashdall says, in his study of the ‘Universities of Europe’; but the seven liberal arts were taught, and were gradually arranging themselves in a series under the pressure of circumstances. Music Abélard certainly studied; before many years his songs were sung through the length and breadth of France. None of his contemporaries made a more eager and profitable study of what was called grammar—that is, not merely an exercise in the rules of Donatus and Priscian, but a close acquaintance with the great Latin poets and historians. Rhetoric and dialectics he revelled in—‘I went wherever dialectics flourished.’ To so good purpose did he advance in this work of loosening the tongue and sharpening the wit, that throughout his life the proudest orators and thinkers of Christendom shrank in dismay from the thought of a verbal encounter with him. ‘I am a child beside him,’ pleaded Bernard of Clairvaux, at a time when France, and even Rome, trembled at the sound of his own voice. But we must defer for a few pages the consideration of mediæval dialectics.

‘Illi soli patuit quicquid scibile erat,’

said an ancient epitaph; and, though the historian handles epigrams with discretion, it must be admitted that Abélard surpassed his contemporaries, not only in ability and in utterance, but also in erudition. There is the one exception of mathematics, but it seems probable that he despised what passed under that name in the twelfth century. ‘Mathematics,’ he says somewhere, in a sarcastic parenthesis, ‘the exercise of which is nefarious.’ But in the thrust and parry of dialectics he found a keen delight; and so he wandered from place to place, edging his logical weapons on fellow-pupils and provincial masters, until one day, about the opening year of the twelfth century, he directed his steps towards far-famed Paris—beautiful, naughty, brilliant, seductive Paris, even in those distant days.

But the Paris of the first decade of the twelfth century was wholly different, not only from the Paris of to-day, but even from the Paris of Victor Hugo’s famous picture.

CHAPTER II

A BRILLIANT VICTORY

If you desire to see the Paris of those early days, imagine yourself beside the spot where the modern Pantheon stands. It is the summit of what Paris called ‘the hill’ for many a century—the hill of St. Genevieve. Save for the large monastery of secular canons beside you, the abbey of St. Genevieve, there is yet little sign of the flood of grimy masonry that will creep up slowly from the river valley, as the ages advance, and foul the sweet country for miles beyond. Paris lies down in the valley below, a toy city. The larger island in the Seine bears almost the whole weight of the capital of France. It has, it is true, eaten a little way into the northern bank of the river, to which it is joined by the Great Bridge. That is the Lombard Quarter, and Lutetian commerce is increasing rapidly. Numbers of curious ships sail up the broad, silver bosom of the Seine, and make for the port of St. Landry. The commercial quarter is already spreading in the direction of Montmartre, with the public butchery and bakery at its outskirt; but it is a mere fringe. The broad valleys and the gentle hills that are one day to support Paris are now clothed with vineyards and orchards and cornfields, and crowned with groves of olive[4] and oak. On the nearer side, too, the city has already overflowed the narrow limits of the island. There are houses on the fine stone bridge, the Little Bridge, and there is a pretty confusion of houses, chapels, schools, and taverns gradually stealing up the slope of St. Genevieve. But, here also, most of the hill is covered with gardens and vineyards, from which a chapel or a relic of old Roman Lutetia peeps out here and there—the ruins of the famous old thermæ lie half-way down the hill below us—; and along the valley of the

‘... florentibus ripis amnis’

(to quote a poet of the time), to east and west, are broad lakes of fresh green colour, broken only in their sweet monotony by an occasional island of masonry, an abbey with a cluster of cottages about it.

It is down straight below us, on the long, narrow island, that we see the heart of France, the centre of its political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical life. A broad, unpaved road, running from Great Bridge to Little Bridge, cuts it into two. Church occupies most of the eastern half, State most of the western; their grateful subjects pack themselves as comfortably as they can in the narrow fringe that is left between the royal and ecclesiastical domains and the bed of the river. Each generation in turn has wondered why it was so scourged by ‘the burning fire’ (the plague), and resolved to be more generous to the Church. From the summit of St. Genevieve we see the front of the huge, grey, Roman cathedral, that goes back to the days of Childebert, and the residences of its prelates and canons bordering the cloister. Over against it, to the west, is the spacious royal garden, which is graciously thrown open to the people two or three times a week, with the palace of King Philip at the extremity of the island. That is Paris in the year of grace 1100; and all outside those narrow limits is a very dream of undulating scenery, with the vesture of the vine, the fir, the cypress, the oak, the olive, and the fig; and the colour of the rose, the almond, the lily, and the violet; and the broad, sweet Seine meandering through it; and the purest air that mortal could desire.

To our young philosopher Paris probably presented itself first in the character of ‘the city of philosophers.’ Each of the great abbeys had its school. That of the abbey of St. Genevieve will soon be familiar to us. The abbey of St. Germain of Auxerre, to the north, and the abbey of St. Germain of the Meadow, to the west, had schools at their gates for all comers. St. Martin in the Fields had its school, and the little priory of St. Victor, to the east, was soon to have one of the most famous of all schools of theology. The royal abbey of St. Denis, a few miles away, had a school in which Prince Louis was then being trained, together with the illustrious Abbot Suger. A number of private schools were scattered about the foot of St. Genevieve. The Jews had a school, and—mark the liberality of the time—there was, or had been until a very few years before, a school for women; it was conducted by the wife and daughters of famous Master Manegold, of Alsace, women who were well versed in Scripture, and ‘most distinguished in philosophy,’ says Muratori.

But Abélard went straight to the centre of Paris, to the cloistral enclosure under the shadow of old Notre Dame,[5] where was the first episcopal school in the kingdom, and one of the first masters in Christendom. William of Champeaux was a comparatively young master, who had forced his way into high places by sheer ability. He was held to be the first dialectician in France, and ‘almost the first royal councillor.’ In the great philosophic controversy of the period he was the leader of the orthodox school. The Bishop of Paris had brought him to the island-city, and vested him with the dignity of archdeacon of the cathedral and scholasticus (chancellor or rector) and master of the episcopal school. So high was the repute of his ability and his doctrine that, so Fleury says, he was called ‘the pillar of doctors.’ From an obscure local centre of instruction he had lifted the Parisian school into a commanding position, and had attracted scholars from many lands. And he was then in the prime of life. Within a few months Abélard made his authority totter, and set his reputation on the wane. In six or seven years he drove him, in shame and humiliation, from his chair, after a contest that filled Christendom with its echoes.

Let us repeat that William of Champeaux was then in the prime of life, or only ten years older than Abélard. There are those who talk of the ‘venerable teacher’ and the audacious, irreverent stripling. This picture of the conflict is historically ridiculous. Rousselot and Michaud, two of the most careful students of Champeaux’s life, give the date of his birth as 1068 and 1070, respectively. He had fought his way with early success into the first chair in Christendom; he cannot have been much older than Abélard when he secured it. Abélard had an immeasurably greater ability; he was frankly conscious of the fact; and he seems promptly to have formed the perfectly legitimate design of ousting William—whose philosophy certainly seemed absurd to him—and mounting the great chair of Notre Dame.

Such a thought would naturally take shape during the course of the following twelve months. The only indication that Abélard gives us is to the effect that William was well disposed towards him at first, though there is no foundation in recorded fact for the assertion that William invited the youth to his house, but they were gradually involved in a warm dialectical encounter. Abélard was not only a handsome and talented youth (which facts he candidly tells us himself), but he was a practised dialectician. The lectures of those untiring days lasted for hours, and might be interrupted at any moment by a question from a scholar. Moreover, William was principally occupied with dialectics, and it would be quite impossible—if it were desired—to instruct youths in the art of disputing, without letting them exercise their powers on the hosts of problems which served the purpose of illustration. Hence the young Breton must have quickly brought his keen rapier into play. The consciousness of power and the adolescent vanity of exhibiting it, both generously developed in Abélard, would prepare the way for ambition. Question and answer soon led on to a personal contest.

But there was a stronger source of provocation, and here it will be necessary to cast a hurried glance at the great controversy of the hour. Cousin has said that the scholastic philosophy was born of a phrase that Boetius translated out of Porphyry. It is a good epigram; but it has the disadvantage of most epigrams—it is false. The controversy about genera and species is by no means of vital importance to the scholastic philosophy, as Abélard himself has said. However, there is much truth in the assertion that this celebrated controversy, as a specific question, may be traced entirely to Porphyry.

Boetius was the chief author read in the early mediæval schools. Amongst other works they had his Latin translation of Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle, and in one corner of this volume some roving scholastic had been arrested by the allusion to the old Greek controversy about genera and species. To put it shortly: we have mental pictures of individual men, and we have also the idea of man in general, an idea which may be applied to each and all of the individual men we know. The grave problem that agitated the centuries was, whether not only the individual human beings who live and move about us, but also this ‘general man’ or species, had an existence outside the mind. The modern photographer has succeeded in taking composite photographs. A number of human likenesses are super-imposed on the same plate, so that at length individual features are blended, and there emerges only the vague portrait of ‘a man.’ The question that vexed the mediæval soul was, whether this human type, as distinct from the individual mortals we see in the flesh, had a real existence.

In whatever terms the problem be stated, it is sure to appear almost childish to the non-philosophical reader; as, indeed, it appeared to certain scholars even of that time. John of Salisbury, with his British common sense and impatience of dialectical subtlety, petulantly spoke of it as ‘the ancient question, in the solution of which the world has grown grey, and more time has been consumed than the Cæsars gave to the conquest and dominion of the globe, more money wasted than Crœsus counted in all his wealth.’ But listen to another Briton, and one with the fulness of modern life outspread before him. Archbishop Roger Vaughan, defending the attitude of the enthusiasts in his Thomas of Aquin, says: ‘Kill ideas, blast theories, explode the archetypes of things, and the age of brute force is not far distant.’ And Rousselot declares, in his Philosophie du Moyen Age, that the problem of universals is ‘the most exalted and the most difficult question in the whole of philosophy.’ Poor philosophy! will be the average layman’s comment. However, though neither ancient Greeks nor mediæval formalists were guilty of the confusion of ideas and ideals which Dom Vaughan betrays, the schoolmen had contrived to connect the question in a curious fashion with the mystery of the Trinity.

When, therefore, Jean Roscelin began to probe the question with his dialectical weapons, the ears of the orthodox were opened wide. The only position which was thought compatible with the faith was realism—the notion that the species or the genus was a reality, distinct from the individuals that belonged to it, and outside the mind that conceived it. By and by it was whispered in the schools, and wandering scholars bore the rumour to distant monasteries and bishoprics, that Roscelin denied the real existence of these universals. Indeed, in his scorn of the orthodox position, he contemptuously declared them to be ‘mere words’; neither in the world of reality, nor in the mind itself, was there anything corresponding to them; they were nothing but an artifice of human speech. Europe was ablaze at once. St. Anselm assailed the heretic from the theological side; William of Champeaux stoutly led the opposition, and the defence of realism, from the side of philosophy. Such was the question of the hour, such the condition of the world of thought, when Pierre Abélard reached the cloistral school at Paris.

If you stated the problem clearly to a hundred men and women who were unacquainted with philosophic speculations, ninety-nine of them would probably answer that these universals were neither mere words nor external realities, but general or generalised ideas—composite photographs, to use the interesting comparison of Mr. Galton, in the camera of the mind. That was the profound discovery with which Abélard shattered the authority of his master, revolutionised the thought of his age, and sent his fame to the ends of the earth. He had introduced a new instrument into the dialectical world, common sense, like the little girl in the fairy tale, who was brought to see the prince in his imaginary clothes.[6] This, at least, Abélard achieved, and it was a brilliant triumph for the unknown youth: he swept for ever out of the world of thought, in spite of almost all the scholars of Christendom, that way of thinking and of speaking which is known as realism. I am familiar with the opinion of scholastic thinkers in this question, from the thirteenth century to the present day. It differs verbally, but not substantially, from the conceptualism of Abélard. The stripling of twenty or twenty-one had enunciated the opinion which the world of thought was to adopt.

We still have some of the arguments with which Abélard assailed his chief—but enough of philosophy, let us proceed with the story. Once more the swift and animated years are condensed into a brief phrase by the gloomy autobiographist; though there is a momentary flash of the old spirit when he says of the earlier stage that he ‘seemed at times to have the victory in the dispute,’ and when he describes the final issue in the words of Ovid,

‘... non sum superatus ab illo.’

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.

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.

To this abbey of St. Genevieve, then, the militant master led his followers, and he began at once to withdraw the students from Notre Dame, as he candidly tells us. If Bishop Galo and his chapter found their cloistral school deserted, they might be induced to consider Abélard’s gifts and influence. So the war went on merrily between the two camps. The masters fulminated against each other; the students ran from school to school, and argued it out on the bridge and in the taverns, and brought questions to their logical conclusion in the Pré-aux-clercs.[9] There was certainly, as we saw previously, ample room for litigation in the problems of mediæval dialectics. John of Salisbury studied dialectics under Abélard at St. Genevieve (though not in the abbey) at a later date, and he tells us that when he returned to Paris twelve years afterwards he found his dialectical friends just where he had left them. ‘They had not added the smallest proposition,’ he says contemptuously. Little John preferred ‘philology,’ as they called classical studies in his day.

We get a curious insight into the school-life of the period in the Life of Saint Goswin. Goswin of Douai—whom we shall meet again once or twice—was studying in the school of Master Joscelin the Red, down the hill. He was a youthful saint of the regulation pattern: had borne the aureole from his cradle. About this time he is described as brimming over with precocious zeal for righteousness, and astounded at the impunity with which Abélard poured out his novelties. Why did not some one silence ‘this dog who barked at the truth’? Already, the authors of the saint’s life—two monks of the twelfth century—say, ‘Abélard’s hand was against every man, and every man’s hand against him,’ yet no one seemed inclined ‘to thrash him with the stick of truth.’ The young saint could not understand it. He went to Master Joscelin at length, and declared that he was going to do the work of the Lord himself. Joscelin is reported to have endeavoured to dissuade him with a feeling description of Abélard’s rhetorical power; we do not know, however, that Joscelin was void of all sense of humour. In any case the saintly youngster of ‘modest stature’ with the ‘blue-grey eyes and light air’ had a good measure of courage. It will be interesting, perhaps, to read the issue in the serio-comic language of the times.

‘With a few companions he ascended the hill of St. Genevieve, prepared, like David, to wage single conflict with the Goliath who sat there thundering forth strange novelties of opinion to his followers and ridiculing the sound doctrine of the wise.

‘When he arrived at the battlefield—that is, when he entered the school—he found the master giving his lecture and instilling his novelties into his hearers. But as soon as he began to speak, the master cast an angry look at him; knowing himself to be a warrior from his youth, and noticing that the scholar was beginning to feel nervous, he despised him in his heart. The youth was, indeed, fair and handsome of appearance, but slender of body and short of stature. And when the proud one was urged to reply, he said: “Hold thy peace, and disturb not the course of my lecture.”’

The story runs, however, that Abélard’s students represented to him that the youth was of greater importance than he seemed to be, and persuaded him to take up the glove. ‘Very well,’ said Abélard, and it is not improbable, ‘let him say what he has to say.’ It was, of course, unfortunate for Goliath, as the young champion of orthodoxy, aided by the Holy Spirit, completely crushed him in the midst of his own pupils.

‘The strong man thus bound by him who had entered his house, the victor, who had secured the Protean-changing monster with the unfailing cord of truth, descended the hill. When they had come to the spot where their companions awaited them in the distant schools [i.e. when they had got to a safe distance from Abélard’s pupils], they burst forth in pæans of joy and triumph: humbled was the tower of pride, downcast was the wall of contumacy, fallen was he that had scoffed at Israel, broken was the anvil of the smiter,’ etc. etc.

The course of events does not seem to have been much influenced by this breaking of the ‘anvil.’ Joscelin was soon compelled to seek fresh pastures; he also found ultimate consolation in a bishopric, and a share in the condemnation of Abélard. The commentator of Priscian must then have received the full force of Abélard’s keen dialectical skill and mordant satire. His students began to fall away to the rival camp in large numbers. William was informed in his distant solitude, and he returned (‘impudenter,’ says Abélard) in haste to St. Victor’s. He opened his old school in the priory, and for a time Paris rang more loudly than ever with the dialectical battle. But William’s intervention proved fatal to his cause. The substitute had kept a handful of students about him, Abélard says, but even they disappeared when William returned. The poor Priscianist could think of nothing better than to develop ‘a call to the monastic life,’ and he obeyed it with admirable alacrity. However, just as Abélard was about to enter on the last stage of the conflict, he was recalled to Pallet by his mother.

The eleventh century had witnessed a strong revival of the monastic spirit. When men came at length to feel the breath of an ideal in their souls, the sight of the fearful disorder of the age stimulated them to the sternest sacrifices. They believed that he who said, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,’ was God, that he meant what he said, and that he spoke the message to all the ages. So there uprose a number of fervent preachers, whose voices thrilled with a strange passion, and they burned the Christ-message into the souls of men and women. In Brittany and Normandy Robert of Arbrissel and two or three others had been at work years before St. Bernard began his apostolate. They had broken up thousands of homes—usually those which were helping most to sweeten the life of the world—and sent husband and wife to spend their days apart in monasteries and nunneries. The modern world speaks of the harshness of it; in their thoughts it was only a salutary separation for a time, making wholly certain their speedy reunion in a not too ethereal heaven. In the great abbey of Fontevraud, founded by Robert of Arbrissel in the year 1100, there were nearly four thousand nuns, a large proportion of whom were married women. Even in their own day the monastic orators were strongly opposed on account of their appalling dissolution of domestic ties. Roscelin attacked Robert of Arbrissel very warmly on the ground that he received wives into his monasteries against the will of their husbands, and in defiance of the command of the Bishop of Angers to release them: he boldly repeats the charge in a letter to the Bishop of Paris in 1121. Not only sober thinkers and honest husbands would resent the zeal of the Apostle of Brittany; the courtly, and the ecclesiastical and monastic, gallants of the time would be equally angry with him. We have another curious objection in some of the writers of the period. Answering the question why men were called to the monastic life so many centuries before women, they crudely affirm that the greater frailty of the women had made them less competent to meet the moral dangers of the cenobitic life. Thus from one cause or other a number of calumnies, still found in the chronicles, were in circulation about Robert of Arbrissel.[10] It would be interesting to know what half-truths there were at the root of these charges; there may have been such, in those days, quite consistently with perfect religious sincerity. In the martyrologies of some of the monastic orders, there are women mentioned with high praise who disguised themselves as men, and lived for years in monasteries. It is noteworthy that mediæval folk worked none of those miracles at the tomb of Robert of Arbrissel that they wrought at the tombs of St. Bernard and St. Norbert. He is not a canonised saint.

However, in spite of both responsible and irresponsible opposition, Robert of Arbrissel, Vitalis the Norman, and other nervous orators, had caused an extensive movement from the hearth to the cloister throughout Brittany and Normandy, such as St. Bernard inaugurated in France later on. Home after home—château or chaumière—was left to the children, and they who had sworn companionship in life and death cheerfully parted in the pathetic trust of a reunion. Abélard’s father was touched by the sacred fire, and entered a monastery. His wife had to follow his example. Whatever truth there was in the words of Roscelin, the Church certainly commanded that the arrangement should be mutual, unless the lady were of an age or a piety beyond suspicion, as St. Francis puts it in his ‘Rule.’ Lucia had agreed to take the veil after her husband’s departure. This was the news that withheld the hand of ‘the smiter’ on the point of dealing a decisive blow, and he hastened down to Brittany to bid farewell to his ‘most dear mother.’ Not only in this expression, but in the fact of his making the journey at all in the circumstances, we have evidence of a profound affection. Since he had long ago abdicated his rights of primogeniture, there cannot have been an element of business in the visit to Pallet.

He was not long absent from Paris. The news reached him in Brittany that the prior had at length discovered a dignified retreat from the field. Soon after Abélard’s departure the bishopric of Châlons-sur-Marne became vacant, and William was nominated for the see. He bade a fond farewell to Paris and to dialectics. From that date his ability was devoted to the safe extravagances of mystic theology, under the safe tutorship of St. Bernard.[11] He had left his pupil Gilduin to replace him at St. Victor, and the school quickly assumed a purely theological character; but the luckless chair of Notre Dame he entrusted to the care of Providence.

Abélard now formed a resolution which has given rise to much speculation. Instead of stepping at once into the chair of the cloistral school, which he admits was offered to him, he goes off to some distance from Paris for the purpose of studying theology. It is the general opinion of students of his life that his main object in doing so was to make more secure his progress towards the higher ecclesiastical dignities. That he had such ambition, and was not content with the mere chair and chancellorship of the cloistral school, is quite clear. In his clouded and embittered age he is said, on the high authority of Peter of Cluny, to have discovered even that final virtue of humility. There are those who prefer him in the days of his frank, buoyant pride and ambition. If he had been otherwise in the days of the integrity of his nature, he would have been an intolerable prig. He was the ablest thinker and speaker in France. He was observant enough to perceive it, and so little artificial as to acknowledge it, and act in accordance. Yet there was probably more than the counsel of ambition in his resolution. From the episode of Goswin’s visit to St. Genevieve it is clear that whispers of faith, theology, and heresy were already breaking upon the freedom of his dialectical speculations. He must have recalled the fate of Scotus Erigena, of Bérenger, of Roscelin, and other philosophic thinkers. Philosophic thought was subtly linked with ecclesiastical dogma. He who contemplated a life of speculation and teaching could not afford to be ignorant of the ecclesiastical claims on and limitations of his sphere. Such thoughts can scarcely have been unknown to him during the preceding year or two, and it seems just and reasonable to trace the issue of them in his resolution. He himself merely says: ‘I returned chiefly for the purpose of studying divinity.’ Hausrath quotes a passage from his Introductio ad theologiam with the intention of making Abélard ascribe his resolution to the suggestion of his admirers. On careful examination the passage seems to refer to his purpose of writing on theology, not to his initial purpose of studying it.

Abélard would naturally look about for the first theological teacher in France. There were, in point of fact, few theological chairs at that time, but there was at least one French theologian who had a high reputation throughout Christendom. Pupil of St. Anselm of Canterbury at Bec, canon and dean of the town where he taught, Anselm of Laon counted so many brilliant scholars amongst his followers that he has been entitled the ‘doctor of doctors.’ William of Champeaux, William of Canterbury, and a large number of distinguished masters, sat at his feet. His scholia to the Vulgate were in use in the schools for centuries. He and his brother Raoul had made Laon a most important focus of theological activity for more countries than France. England was well represented there. John of Salisbury frequently has occasion to illustrate the fame and magnitude of the cathedral school.

Anselm had been teaching for forty years when Abélard, aetat. thirty-four, appeared amidst the crowd of his hearers. We can well conceive the fluttering of wings that must have occurred, but Laon was not Paris, and Anselm was not the man to enter upon an argumentative conflict with the shrewd-tongued adventurer. Two incidents of contemporary life at Laon, in which Anselm figured, will be the best means of illustrating the character of the theologian. Abbot Guibertus, of that period, has left us a delightful work ‘De vita sua,’ from which we learn much about Laon and Anselm. The treasure of the cathedral was entrusted, it seems, to seven guardians—four clerics and three laymen. One of these guardians, a Canon Anselm, was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He purloined a good deal of the treasure; and when the goldsmith, his accomplice, was detected, and turned king’s evidence, Anselm denied the story, challenged the goldsmith to the usual duel, and won.[12] The canon was encouraged, and shortly set up as an expert burglar. One dark, stormy night he went with his ‘ladders and machines’ to a tower in which much treasure was kept, and ‘cracked’ it. There was dreadful ado in the city next day; most horrible of all, the burglar had stolen a golden dove which contained some of the hair and some of the milk of the Virgin Mary. In the uncertainty the sapient Master Anselm (no relation, apparently, of Canon Anselm Beessus, the burglar and cathedral treasurer) was invited to speak. His advice largely reveals the man. Those were the days, it must be remembered, when the defects of the detective service were compensated by a willingness and activity of the higher powers which are denied to this sceptical age. When their slender police resources were exhausted, the accused was handed over to a priest, to be prepared, by prayer and a sober diet of bread, herbs, salt, and water, for the public ordeal. On the fourth day priests and people repaired to the church, and when the mass was over, and the vested priests had prostrated themselves in the sanctuary, the accused purged himself of the charge or proved his guilt by carrying or walking on a nine foot bar of heated iron, plunging his arms ‘for an ell and a half’ into boiling water, or being bodily immersed in a huge tank, cold, and carefully blessed and consecrated.

These are familiar facts. The difficulty at Laon was that there was no accused to operate on. The Solomon Laudunensis was therefore called into judgment, and his proposal certainly smacks of the thoroughness of the systematic theologian. A baby was to be taken from each parish of the town, and tried by the ordeal of immersion. When the guilty parish had been thus discovered, each family in it was to purge itself by sending an infant representative to the tank. When the guilt had been thus fastened on a certain house, all its inmates were to be put to the ordeal.[13]

We see Anselm in a very different light in an incident that occurred a year or two before Abélard’s arrival. Through the influence of the King of England and the perennial power of gold a wholly unworthy bishop had been thrust upon the people of Laon. Illiterate, worldly, and much addicted to military society, he was extremely distasteful to Anselm and the theologians. The crisis came when the English king, Henry I., tried to levy a tax on the people of Laon. The bishop supported his patron; Anselm and others sternly opposed the tax in the name of the people. Feeling ran so high that the bishop was at length brutally murdered by some of the townsfolk, and the cathedral was burned to the ground. Anselm immediately, and almost alone, went forth to denounce the frenzied mob, and had the unfortunate prelate—left for the dogs to devour before his house—quietly buried.

Such was the man whom Abélard chose as his next, and last, ‘teacher.’ In the circumstances revealed in the above anecdotes it would have been decidedly dangerous to attack Anselm in the manner that had succeeded so well at Notre Dame. There is, however, no just reason for thinking that Abélard had formed an intention of that kind. No doubt, it is impossible to conceive Abélard in the attitude of one who seriously expected instruction from a master. Yet it would be unjust to assume that he approached the class-room of the venerable, authoritative theologian in the same spirit in which he had approached William of Champeaux’s lectures on rhetoric. We do not find it recorded that he made any attempt to assail directly the high position of the old man. It was sufficient for the purpose we may ascribe to him that he should be able to state in later years that he had frequented the lectures of Anselm of Laon.

With whatever frame of mind the critic came to Laon, he was not long in discovering the defects of Anselm’s teaching. Anselm had one gift, a good memory, and its fruit, patristic erudition. The fame that was borne over seas and mountains was founded mainly on the marvellous wealth of patristic opinion which he applied to every text of Scripture. There was no individuality, no life, in his work. To Abélard the mnemonic feat was a mechanical matter; and indeed, he probably cared little at that time how St. Ambrose or St. Cyril may have interpreted this or that text. Little as he would be disposed to trust the fame of masters after his experience, he tells us that he was disappointed. He found the ‘fig-tree to be without fruit,’ fair and promising as it had seemed. The lamp, that was said to illumine theological Christendom, ‘merely filled the house with smoke, not light.’ He found, in the words of his favourite Lucan,

‘magni nominis umbra,

Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro’:

and he determined ‘not to remain in this idleness under its shade very long.’ With his usual heedlessness he frankly expressed his estimate of the master to his fellow pupils.

One day when they were joking together at the end of the lecture, and the students were twitting him with his neglect of the class, he quietly dropped a bomb to the effect that he thought masters of theology were superfluous. With the text and the ordinary glosses any man of fair intelligence could study theology for himself. He was contemptuously invited to give a practical illustration of his theory. Abélard took the sneer seriously, and promised to lecture on any book of Scripture they cared to choose. Continuing the joke, they chose the curious piece of Oriental work that has the title of Ezechiel. Once more Abélard took them seriously, asked for the text and gloss, and invited them to attend his first lecture, on the most abstruse of the prophets, on the following day. Most of them persisted in treating the matter as a joke, but a few appeared at the appointed spot (in Anselm’s own territory) on the following day. They listened in deep surprise to a profound lecture on the prophet from the new and self-consecrated ‘theologus.’ The next day there was a larger audience; the lecture was equally astonishing. In fine, Abélard was soon in full sail as a theological lector of the first rank, and a leakage was noticed in Anselm’s lecture hall.

Abélard’s theological success at Laon was brief, if brilliant. Two of the leading scholars, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulphe of Novare, urged Anselm to suppress the new movement at once. Seven years later we shall meet Alberic and Lotulphe playing an important part in the tragedy of Abélard’s life; later still Alberic is found in intimacy with St. Bernard. The episode of Laon must not be forgotten. Probably Anselm needed little urging, with the fate of William of Champeaux fresh in his ears. At all events he gave willing audience to the suggestion that a young master, without due theological training, might at any moment bring the disgrace of heresy on the famous school. He ‘had the impudence to suppress me,’ Abélard has the impudence to say. The students are said to have been much angered by Anselm’s interference, but there was no St. Genevieve at Laon—happily, perhaps,—and Abélard presently departed for Paris, leaving the field to the inglorious ‘Pompey the Great.’

CHAPTER IV

THE IDOL OF PARIS

A new age began for Paris and for learning, when Peter Abélard accepted the chair of the episcopal school. It would be a difficult task to measure the influence he had in hastening the foundation of the university—as difficult as to estimate the enduring effect of his teaching on Catholic theology. There were other streams flowing into the life of the period, and they would have expanded and deepened it, independently of the activity of the one brilliant teacher. The work of a group of less gifted, though highly gifted, teachers had started a current of mental life which would have continued and broadened without the aid of Abélard. Life was entering upon a swifter course in all its reaches. Moreover, the slender rill of Greek thought, which formed the inspiration of the eleventh century, was beginning to increase. Through Alexandria, through Arabia, through Spain, the broad stream of the wisdom of the Greeks had been slowly travelling with the centuries. In the twelfth century it was crossing the Pyrenees, and stealing into the jealous schools of Europe. The homeless Jew was bringing the strong, swift, noble spirit of the ‘infidel Moor’ into a hideous world, that was blind with self-complacency. The higher works of Aristotle (the early Middle Ages had only his logic), the words of Plato, and so many others, were drifting into France. Christian scholars were even beginning to think of going to see with their own eyes this boasted civilisation of the infidel.

Yet it is clear that Abélard stands for a mighty force in the story of development. At the end of the eleventh century Paris was an island; at the end of the twelfth century it was a city of two hundred thousand souls, walled, paved, with several fine buildings and a fair organisation. At the end of the eleventh century the schools of Paris, scattered here and there, counted a few hundred pupils, chiefly French; at the end of the twelfth century the University of Paris must have numbered not far short of ten thousand scholars. Let us see how much of this was effected by Abélard.

The pupil who had left Paris when both William and Abélard disappeared in 1113 would find a marvellous change on returning to it about 1116 or 1117. He would find the lecture hall and the cloister and the quadrangle, under the shadow of the great cathedral, filled with as motley a crowd of youths and men as any scene in France could show. Little groups of French and Norman and Breton nobles chattered together in their bright silks and fur-tipped mantles, and with slender swords dangling from embroidered belts; ‘shaven in front like thieves, and growing luxuriant, curly tresses at the back like harlots,’ growls Jacques de Vitry, who saw them, vying with each other in the length and crookedness of their turned-up shoes.[14] Anglo-Saxons looked on, in long fur-lined cloaks, tight breeches, and leathern hose swathed with bands of many coloured cloth. Stern-faced northerners, Poles, and Germans, in fur caps and coloured girdles and clumsy shoes, or with feet roughly tied up in the bark of trees, waited impatiently for the announcement of ‘Li Mestre.’ Pale-faced southerners had braved the Alps and the Pyrenees under the fascination of ‘the wizard.’ Shaven and sandalled monks, black-habited clerics, black canons, secular and regular, black in face too, some of them, heresy-hunters from the neighbouring abbey of St. Victor, mingled with the crowd of young and old, grave and gay, beggars and nobles, sleek citizens and bronzed peasants.

Crevier and other writers say that Abélard had attracted five thousand students to Paris. Sceptics smile, and talk of Chinese genealogies. Mr. Rashdall, however, has made a careful study of the point, and he concludes that there were certainly five thousand, and possibly seven thousand, students at Paris in the early scholastic age, before the multiplication of important centres. He points out that the fabulous figures which are sometimes given—Wycliffe says that at one time there were sixty thousand students at Oxford, Juvenal de Ursinis gives twenty thousand at Paris in the fifteenth century, Italian historians speak of fifteen thousand at Bologna—always refer to a date beyond the writer’s experience, and frequently betray a touch of the laudator temporis acti. It is, at all events, safe to affirm that Abélard’s students were counted by thousands, if they had not ‘come to surpass the number of the laity’ [ordinary citizens], as an old writer declares. Philippe Auguste had to direct a huge expansion of the city before the close of the century. There is nothing in the commercial or political development of Paris to explain the magnitude of this expansion. It was a consequence of a vast influx of students from all quarters of the globe, and the fame of Master Abélard had determined the course of the stream.

One condition reacted on another. A notable gathering of students attracted Jews and merchants in greater numbers. They, in turn, created innumerable ‘wants’ amongst the ‘undisciplined horde.’ The luxuries and entertainments of youth began to multiply. The schools of Paris began to look fair in the eyes of a second world—a world of youths and men who had not felt disposed to walk hundreds of miles and endure a rude life out of academic affection. The ‘dancers of Orleans,’ the ‘tennis-players of Poitiers,’ the ‘lovers of Turin,’ came to fraternise with the ‘dirty fellows of Paris.’ Over mountains and over seas the mingled reputation of the city and the school was carried, and a remarkable stream set in from Germany, Switzerland, Italy (even from proud Rome), Spain, and England; even ‘distant Brittany sent you its animals to be instructed,’ wrote Prior Fulques to Abélard (a Breton) a year or two afterwards.

At five or six o’clock each morning the great cathedral bell would ring out the summons to work. From the neighbouring houses of the canons, from the cottages of the townsfolk, from the taverns, and hospices, and boarding-houses, the stream of the industrious would pour into the enclosure beside the cathedral. The master’s beadle, who levied a precarious tax on the mob, would strew the floor of the lecture-hall with hay or straw, according to the season, bring the Master’s text-book, with the notes of the lecture between lines or on the margin, to the solitary desk, and then retire to secure silence in the adjoining street. Sitting on their haunches in the hay, the right knee raised to serve as a desk for the waxed tablets, the scholars would take notes during the long hours of lecture (about six or seven), then hurry home—if they were industrious—to commit them to parchment while the light lasted.

The lectures over, the stream would flow back over the Little Bridge, filling the taverns and hospices, and pouring out over the great playing meadow, that stretched from the island to the present Champ de Mars. All the games of Europe were exhibited on that international playground: running, jumping, wrestling, hurling, fishing and swimming in the Seine, tossing and thumping the inflated ball—a game on which some minor poet of the day has left us an enthusiastic lyric—and especially the great game of war, in its earlier and less civilised form. The nations were not yet systematically grouped, and long and frequent were the dangerous conflicts. The undergraduate mind, though degrees had not yet been invented, had drawn up an estimate, pithy, pointed, and not flattering, of each nationality. The English were, it is sad to find, ‘cowardly and drunken,’—to the ‘Anglophobes’; the French were ‘proud and effeminate’; the Normans ‘charlatans and boasters,’ the Burgundians ‘brutal and stupid’; the Bretons ‘fickle and extravagant’; the Flemings ‘blood-thirsty, thievish, and incendiary’; the Germans ‘choleric, gluttonous, and dirty’; the Lombards ‘covetous, malicious, and no fighters’; the Romans ‘seditious, violent, and slanderous.’ Once those war-cries were raised, peaceable folk hied them to their homes and hovels, and the governor summoned his guards and archers.

The centre of this huge and novel concourse was the master of the cathedral school. After long years of conventual life Heloise draws a remarkable picture of the attitude of Paris towards its idol. Women ran to their doors and windows to gaze at him, as he passed from his house on St. Genevieve to the school. ‘Who was there that did not hasten to observe when you went abroad, and did not follow you with strained neck and staring eyes as you passed along? What wife, what virgin, did not burn? What queen or noble dame did not envy my fortune?’ And we shall presently read of a wonderful outburst of grief when the news of the outrage done to Abélard flies through the city. ‘No man was ever more loved—and more hated,’ says the sober Hausrath.

It is not difficult to understand the charm of Abélard’s teaching. Three qualities are assigned to it by the writers of the period, some of whom studied at his feet: clearness, richness in imagery, and lightness of touch are said to have been the chief characteristics of his teaching. Clearness is, indeed, a quality of his written works, though they do not, naturally, convey an impression of his oral power. His splendid gifts and versatility, supported by a rich voice, a charming personality, a ready and sympathetic use of human literature, and a freedom from excessive piety, gave him an immeasurable advantage over all the teachers of the day. Beside most of them, he was as a butterfly to an elephant. A most industrious study of the few works of Aristotle and of the Roman classics that were available, a retentive memory, an ease in manipulating his knowledge, a clear, penetrating mind, with a corresponding clearness of expression, a ready and productive fancy, a great knowledge of men, a warmer interest in things human than in things divine, a laughing contempt for authority, a handsome presence, and a musical delivery—these were his gifts. His only defects were defects of character, and the circumstances of his life had not yet revealed them even to himself.

Even the monkish writers of the Life of St. Goswin, whose attitude towards his person is clear, grant him ‘a sublime eloquence.’ The epitaphs that men raised over him, the judgments of episcopal Otto von Freising and John of Salisbury, the diplomatic letter of Prior Fulques, the references of all the chroniclers of the time, I refrain from quoting. We learn his power best from his open enemies. ‘Wizard,’ ‘rhinoceros,’ ‘smiter,’ ‘friend of the devil,’ ‘giant,’ ‘Titan,’ ‘Prometheus,’ and ‘Proteus,’ are a few of their compliments to his ability: the mellifluous St. Bernard alone would provide a rich vocabulary of flattering encomiums of that character: ‘Goliath,’ ‘Herod,’ ‘Leviathan,’ ‘bee,’ ‘serpent,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘hydra,’ ‘Absalom,’ are some of his epithets. When, later, we find St. Bernard, the first orator and firmest power in France, shrink nervously from an oral encounter with him, and resort to measures which would be branded as dishonourable in any other man, we shall more faithfully conceive the charm of Abélard’s person and the fascination of his lectures.

Yet no careful student of his genius will accept the mediæval estimate which made him the ‘Socrates of Gaul,’ the peer of Plato and of Aristotle. He had wonderful penetration and a rare felicity of oral expression, but he was far removed from the altitude of Socrates and Plato and the breadth of Aristotle. He had no ‘system’ of thought, philosophical or theological; and into the physical and social world he never entered. His ideas—and some of them were leagues beyond his intellectual surroundings—came to him piecemeal. Yet we shall see that in some of those which were most abhorrent to Bernard—who was the Church for the time being—he did but anticipate the judgment of mature humanity on certain ethical and intellectual features of traditional lore. The thesis cannot be satisfactorily established until a later stage.

When we proceed to examine the erudition which gave occasion to the epitaph, ‘to him alone was made clear all that is knowable,’ we must bear in mind the limitations of his world. When Aristotle lent his mind to the construction of a world system, he had the speculations of two centuries of Greek thinkers before him; when Thomas of Aquin began to write, he had read the thoughts of three generations of schoolmen after Abélard, and all the Arabic translations and incorporations of Greek thought. At the beginning of the twelfth century there was little to read beside the fathers. If we take ‘all that was knowable’ in this concrete and relative sense, the high-sounding epitaph is not far above the truth.

His Latin is much better than that of the great majority of his contemporaries. Judged by a perfect classical standard it is defective; it admits some of the erroneous forms that are characteristic of the age. But it is not without elegance, and it excels in clearness and elasticity. It could not well be otherwise, seeing his wide and familiar acquaintance with Latin literature. He frequently quotes Lucan, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Cicero; students of his writings usually add an acquaintance with Juvenal, Persius, Statius, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Quintilian, and Priscian. It was a frequent charge in the mouths of his enemies that he quoted the lewdest books of Ovid in the course of his interpretation of Scripture. The constant glance aside at the literature of human passion and the happy flash of wit were not small elements in his success. Those who came to him from other schools had heard little but the wearisome iteration of Boetius, Cassiodorus, and Martianus Capella. They found the new atmosphere refreshing and stimulating.

His command of Greek and Hebrew is a subject of endless dispute. His pupil Heloise certainly had a knowledge of the two tongues, as we shall see presently. She must have received her instruction from Abélard. But it is clear that Abélard likes to approach a controversy which turns on the interpretation of the original text of Scripture through a third person, such as St. Jerome. He rarely approaches even the easy Greek text of the New Testament directly, and he has no immediate acquaintance with any Greek author. Aristotle he has read in the Latin translation of Boetius, through whose mediation he has also read Porphyry’s Isagoge. He was certainly familiar with the De Interpretatione and the Categories; Cousin grants him also an acquaintance with the Prior Analytics; and Brucker and others would add the Sophistici Elenchi and the Topics. The physical and metaphysical works of Aristotle were proscribed at Paris long after the Jewish and Arabian translations had found a way into other schools of France. The golden thoughts of Plato came to him through the writings of the fathers; though there is said to have been a translation of the Timæus in France early in the twelfth century.

His knowledge of Hebrew must have been equally, or even more, elementary. Only once does he clearly approach the Hebrew text without patristic guidance; it is when, in answering one (the thirty-sixth) of the famous ‘Problems of Heloise,’ he adduces the authority of ‘a certain Hebrew,’ whom he ‘heard discussing the point.’ In this we have a clear clue to the source of his Hebrew. The Jews were very numerous in Paris in the twelfth century. When Innocent the Second visited Paris in 1131, the Jews met him at St. Denis, and offered him a valuable roll of the law. By the time of Philippe Auguste they are said to have owned two-thirds of the city: perceiving which, Philippe recollected, or was reminded, that they were the murderers of Christ, and so he banished them and retained their goods. Abélard indicates that they took part in the intellectual life of Paris in his day; in Spain they were distinguished in every branch of higher thought; and thus the opportunity of learning Hebrew lay close at hand. One does not see why Rémusat and others should deny him any acquaintance with it. His knowledge, however, must have been elementary. He does not make an impressive, though a novel, use of it in deriving the name of Heloise (Helwide, or Helwise, or Louise) from Elohim, which he does, years afterwards, in the sober solitude of his abbey and the coldness of his mutilation.

Add an extensive acquaintance with Scripture and the fathers, and the inventory is complete. Not difficult to be erudite in those days, most people will reflect. Well, a phonogram may be erudite. The gifts of Abélard were of a higher order than industry and memory, though he possessed both. He takes his place in history, apart from the ever-interesting drama and the deep pathos of his life, in virtue of two distinctions. They are, firstly, an extraordinary ability in imparting such knowledge as the poverty of the age afforded—the facts of his career reveal it; and secondly, a mind of such marvellous penetration that it conceived great truths which it has taken humanity seven or eight centuries to see—this will appear as we proceed. It was the former of these gifts that made him, in literal truth, the centre of learned and learning Christendom, the idol of several thousand eager scholars. Nor, finally, were these thousands the ‘horde of barbarians’ that jealous Master Roscelin called them. It has been estimated that a pope, nineteen cardinals, and more than fifty bishops and archbishops, were at one time among his pupils.

We are now at, or near, the year 1118. In the thirty-ninth year of his age, the twenty-third year of his scholastic activity, Abélard has reached the highest academic position in Christendom. He who loved so well, and so naturally, to be admired, found himself the centre of a life that had not been seen since Greek sages poured out wisdom in the painted colonnade, and the marble baths, and the shady groves of Athens. His self-esteem was flattered; his love of rule and of eminence was gratified. Poor as many of his pupils were, their number brought him great wealth. His refinement had ample means of solacing its desires. The petty vexations of the struggle were nobly compensated. Before him lay a world of fairest promise into which he, seemingly, had but to enter. Then there arose one of the forces that shattered his life, beginning its embodiment in an idyll, ending quickly in a lurid tragedy. It is the most difficult stage in the story of Abélard. I approach it only in the spirit of the artist, purposing neither to excuse nor to accuse, but only to trace, if I may, the development of a soul.

Abélard’s life had until now been purely spiritual, almost wholly intellectual. His defects were spiritual—conceit and ambition; if, as men assure us, it is a defect to recognise that you have a supra-normal talent, and to strive for the pre-eminence it entitles you to. The idealist spirit in which he had turned away from the comfort and quiet of the château had remained thus far the one fire that consumed his energy. In the pretty theory of Plato, his highest soul had silenced the lower, and reduced the lowest to the barest requisite play of vegetative life. There are men who go through life thus. The scientist would crudely—it is the fashion to say ‘crudely’—explain that the supra-normal activity of the upper part of the nervous system made the action of the lower part infra-normal; but let us keep on the spiritual plane. There are men whose soul is so absorbed in study or in contemplation that love never reaches their consciousness; or if it does, its appeal is faint, and quickly rejected. The condition of such a life, highly prized as it is by many, is constant intellectual strain.

Abélard had now arrived at a point when the mental strain began instinctively to relax. Wealth would inevitably bring more sensuous pleasure into his life. He was not one of the ‘purely intellectual’; he had a warm imagination and artistic power. No immediate purpose called for mental concentration. Sensuous enjoyment crept over the area of his conscious life. During a large proportion of his time, too, he was following with sympathy the quickening life of the passionate creations of Ovid and Vergil and Lucan. The inner judge, the sterner I, is indisposed to analyse, unless education, or faith, or circumstance, has laid a duty of severer watchfulness upon it. Blending with other and not alarming sensuous feelings, veiling itself, and gently, subtly passing its sweet fire into the veins, the coming of love is unperceived until it is already strong to exert a numbing influence on the mind. Abélard awoke one day to a consciousness that a large part of the new sweetness that pervaded his life was due to the birth of a new power in his soul—a power as elusive to recognition as it is imperious in its demands. Then is the trial of the soul.

Before quoting Abélard’s confession, with respect to this transformation of his character, it is necessary, out of justice to him, to anticipate a little, in indicating the circumstances of the making of the confession. The long letter which Abélard entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities’ was written twelve or thirteen years after these events. By that time he had not only endured a succession of cruel persecutions, but his outlook on life and on self had been entirely changed. Not only had the memory of the events faded somewhat, but he had become colour-blind in an important sense. A frightful mutilation had distorted his physical and psychic nature. Partly from this cause, and partly under the stress of other circumstances, he had become a Puritan of the Puritans, an ascetical hermit. As is the wont of such, he manifests a tendency to exaggerate the shadows cast by actions of his which he can no longer understand; for nature has withdrawn her inspiration. On the point we are considering he does not evince the smallest desire of concealment or palliation, but rather the reverse. And, finally, the letter, though written ostensibly for the solace of a friend in distress, was clearly written for circulation, and for the conciliation of the gentler of the Puritans, who knew his life well.

After speaking of the wealth and fame he had attained, he says: ‘But since prosperity ever puffs up the fool, and worldly ease dissolves the vigour of the mind, and quickly enervates it by carnal allurements; now that I thought myself to be the only philosopher in the world, and feared no further menace to my position, whereas I had hitherto lived most continently, I began to loose the rein to passion. And the further I had advanced in philosophy and in reading Holy Writ, so much the wider did I depart from philosophers and divines by the uncleanness of my life. It is well known to thee that philosophers and divines have ever been distinguished for this virtue of continence. But, whilst I was thus wholly taken up with pride and lust, the grace of God brought me a remedy, unwilling as I was, for both maladies; for lust first, and then for pride. For lust, by depriving me of its instrument; for pride—the pride which was chiefly born of my knowledge of letters, according to the word of the Apostle, ‘knowledge puffeth up’—by humbling me in the burning of the book by which I set such store. And now I would have thee learn the truth of both these stories, from the events themselves rather than from rumour, in the order in which they befell. Since then I had ever abhorred the uncleanness of harlots, and I had been withheld from the company and intercourse of noble dames by the exactions of study, nor had I more than a slight acquaintance with other women, evil fortune, smiling on me, found an easier way to cast me down from the summit of my prosperity; proud, as I was, and unmindful of divine favour, the goodness of God humbled me, and won me to itself.’ And the penitent passes on immediately to give the story of his relation to Heloise.

It is quite clear that all the vehement language with which he scourges himself before humanity refers exclusively to his liaison with Heloise. Searching about, as he does, for charges to heap upon his dead self, he yet denies that he had intercourse with women of any description before he knew the one woman whom he loved sincerely throughout life. In a later letter to Heloise, not intended to circulate abroad, he repeats the statement; recalling their embraces, he says they were the more treasured ‘since we had never known the like (ista gaudia) before.’ Moreover, he says a little later in the ‘Story’ that up to the time of his liaison with Heloise he had a ‘repute for chastity’ in the city; the events we have to follow prove this to have been the case. Finally, let us carefully remember that there would be no advantage in concealing any earlier disorder, and that there is clear indication, even in the short passage I have quoted, of a disposition rather to magnify faults than to attenuate.

I labour the point, because a writer who has introduced Abélard to many of the present generation, and for whom and whose thoughts I have otherwise a high regard, has somehow been led to lay here a very damning indictment of Abélard. Mr. Cotter Morison was a follower of the religion that worships the departed great, and should have a special care to set in light the character of those whom the Church has bruised in life, and slandered after death, under a false view of the interest of humanity. Yet, in his Life of St. Bernard, he has grossly added to the charge against Abélard, with the slenderest of historical bases. It were almost an injustice to Kingsley to say that Cotter Morison’s Abélard recalls the great novelist’s pitiful Hypatia. The Positivist writer thus interprets this stage in Abélard’s career. After saying that his passion broke out like a volcano, and that he felt ‘a fierce, fiery thirst for pleasure, sensual and animal,’ he goes on in this remarkable strain: ‘He drank deeply, wildly. He then grew fastidious and particular. He required some delicacy of romance, some flavour of emotion, to remove the crudity of his lust. He seduced Heloise.’

Was ever a graver perversion in the historical construction of character by an impartial writer? Stranger still, Mr. Cotter Morison has already warned his readers that the ‘Story of my Calamities’ must be shorn of some penitential exaggeration, if we are to give it historical credence. But Mr. Morison has witnesses. Prior Fulques, in a letter to Abélard, reminded him that he squandered a fortune on harlots. The assertion of this monk of Deuil, based, professedly, on the reports of Abélard’s bitter enemies, the monks of St. Denis, and made in a letter which is wholly politic, is held by Mr. Morison to ‘more than counterbalance’ the solemn public affirmation of a morbidly humble, self-accusing penitent. And this, after warning us not to take Abélard’s self-accusation too literally! I shall examine this letter of Prior Fulques’ more closely later. Not only does the letter itself belong to, but the charge refers to, a later period, and will be weighed then. There is nothing at this stage to oppose to the quiet and indirect claim of Abélard, allowed by the action of Fulbert, that his character was unsullied up to the date of his liaison with Heloise.

Let us return to the accredited historical facts. Somewhere about the year 1118 Abélard first felt the claims of love. He was wealthy and prosperous, and living in comparative luxury. He had those gifts of imagination which usually reveal an ardent temperament. Whether it was Heloise who unwittingly kindled the preparing passion, or whether Abélard yielded first to a vague, imperious craving, and sought one whom he might love, we do not know. But we have his trustworthy declaration that he detested the rampant harlotry, and knew no woman until he felt the sweet caress of Heloise.

I have now to set out with care the story of that immortal love. But nine readers out of ten are minded to pass judgment on the acts and lives of those we recall from the dead. My function is to reconstruct the story as faithfully as the recorded facts allow. Yet I would make one more digression before doing so.

What standard of conduct shall be used in judging Abélard? There are a thousand moral codes—that of the Hindu and that of the Christian, that of the twelfth century and that of the twentieth. In the twelfth century even the St. Bernards thought it just that a man who could not see the truth of the Church’s claims should be burned alive, and his soul tortured for all eternity; that a Being was just and adorable who tortured a twelfth century babe for Adam’s sin; that twelfth century Jews might be robbed because their remote ancestors had put Christ to death; that the sanctity of justice demanded, literally, an eye for an eye; and so forth. One may, of course, choose whatever standard of conduct one likes to measure Abélard’s, or anybody else’s, actions: Cardinal Newman, and such writers, have a fancy for judging him by the perfected code of the nineteenth. We cannot quarrel with them; though it is well to point out that they are not measuring Abélard’s subjective guilt, nor portraying his character, in so doing. And if any do elect to judge Abélard by the moral code of the twelfth century, it must be noted that this varied much, even on the point of sexual morality. St. Bernard and his like saw an inherent moral evil in sexual union; they thought the sanctity of the priestly character was incompatible with it, and that virginity was, in itself, and by the mere abstinence from sexual commerce, something holier than marriage. Apart from this, no doubt—if it can be set apart in the question—good men were agreed. But, as will appear presently, there were large bodies of men, even clerks, who not only differed from them in practice, but also in their deliberate moral judgment. We must approach closer still. When we have to determine an individual conception of the law, for the purpose of measuring real and personal guilt, we must have a regard to the surrounding influences, the current thoughts and prevailing habits, which may have impaired or obscured the feeling of its validity in any respect. It is well, then, first to glance at the morals of the time when one feels eager to measure Abélard’s guilt.

It was a period when the dark triumph of what is called materialism, or animalism, was as yet relieved only by a sporadic gleam of idealism. There was purity in places, but over the broad face of the land passion knew little law. If the unlettered Greek had immoral gods to encourage him, the mediæval had immoral pastors. The Church was just endeavouring to enforce its unfortunate law of celibacy on them. With a stroke of the pen it had converted thousands of honest wives into concubines. The result was utter and sad demoralisation. In thus converting the moral into the deeply immoral, the Church could appeal to no element in the consciences of its servants; nor even to its basic Scriptures. Writers of the time use hyperbolic language in speaking of the prevalent vice, and the facts given in the chronicles, and embodied in the modern collections of ancient documents, fully sustain it. Speaking of the close of the eleventh century, Dubois, in his Historia Ecclesiæ Parisiensis, says: ‘The condition of the Church [in general] at that time was unhappy and wretched ... nearly all the clergy were infected with the vice of simony ... lust and shameful pleasure were openly rampant.’ It is true that he excepts his ‘Church of Paris,’ but his own facts show that it is only a piece of foolish loyalty. Cardinal Jacques de Vitry, who studied at Paris towards the close of the century (it must have been worse in Abélard’s time), gives a clearly overdrawn, yet instructive, picture of its life in his Historia Occidentalis. ‘The clergy,’ he says, probably meaning the scholars in general, of whom the majority were clerics, ‘saw no sin in simple fornication. Common harlots were to be seen dragging off clerics as they passed along to their brothels. If they refused to go, opprobrious names were called after them. School and brothel were under the same roof—the school above, the brothel below.... And the more freely they spent their money in vice, the more were they commended, and regarded by almost everybody as fine, liberal fellows.’ The vice that has ever haunted educational centres and institutes was flagrant and general. It is a fact that the authorities had at length to prohibit the canons to lodge students in their houses on the island. In the country and in the other towns the same conditions were found. In Father Denifle’s Chartularium there is a document (No. V.) which throws a curious light on the habits of the clergy. A priest of Rheims was dancing in a tavern one Sunday, when some of the scholars laughed at him. He pursued them to their school, took the place by storm, half-murdered, and then (presumably recalling his sacerdotal character) excommunicated them. At another time, Cardinal Jacques tells us, the lady of a certain manor warned the priest of the village to dismiss his concubine. He refused; whereupon the noble dame had the woman brought to her, and ordained her ‘priestess,’ turning her out before the admiring villagers with a gaudy crown. Another poor priest told his bishop, with many tears, that, if it were a question of choosing between his church and his concubine, he should have to abandon the church; the story runs that, finding his income gone, the lady also departed. There is an equally dark lament in Ordericus Vitalis, the Norman, who lived in Abélard’s day. The letters and sermons of Abélard—Abélard the monk, of St. Bernard, and of so many others, confirm the darkest features of the picture. Only a few years previously the king had lived with the wife of one of his nobles, in defiance of them all; and when a council, composed of one hundred and twenty prelates, including two cardinals and a number of bishops, met at Poitiers to censure him, the Duke of Aquitaine broke in with his soldiers, and scattered them with the flat of his sword. Indeed, an ancient writer, Hugo Flaviniacensis, declares there was a feeling that Pope Paschal did not, for financial reasons, approve the censure passed by his legates.

Considering the enormous prevalence of simony, one could hardly expect to find the Church in a better condition. The writers of the time make it clear that there was an appalling traffic in bishoprics, abbeys, prebends, and all kinds of ecclesiastical goods and dignities. We have already seen one tragic illustration of the evil, and we shall meet many more. A few years previously the king had nominated one of his favourites, Étienne de Garlande, for the vacant bishopric of Beauvais; and this youth, ‘of no letters and of unchaste life,’ at once took even major orders, and talked of going to Rome ‘to buy the curia.’ But, as with regard to the previous point, it is useless to give instances. Corruption was very prevalent; and one cannot wonder at it in view of the reputation which the papacy itself had, in spite of its occasional quashing of a corrupt election. This point will be treated more fully in the sixth chapter.

The question of the deep and widespread corruption of the regular clergy must also be deferred. In his fourth letter to Heloise, Abélard complains that ‘almost all the monasteries of our day’ are corrupt; Jacques de Vitry affirms that no nunneries, save those of the Cistercians, were fit abodes for an honest woman in his day.[15] It is not a little instructive to find Abbot Abélard, in his latest and most ascetic period, telling his son (a monk), in the course of a number of admirable moral maxims, that: ‘A humble harlot is better than she who is chaste and proud,’ and that ‘Far worse is the shrewd-tongued woman than a harlot.’

Finally, mention must be made of the extreme violence of the age. Several illustrations have been given in the course of the narrative, and it will bring many more before the reader. They were still the days of the lex talionis, the judicial duel, the ordeal, and the truce of God. Murder was common in town and country. We have seen the brutal murder of the Bishop of Laon in 1112; we find the Bishop of Paris threatened by the relatives of his archdeacon, and the Prior of St. Victor’s murdered by them, in 1133. But the story will contain violence enough. As for ‘the undisciplined student-hordes of the Middle Ages,’ see the appalling picture of their life in Rashdall’s Universities of Europe. Our period is pre-university—and worse: with the founding of the university came some degree of control. Yet even then the documentary evidence discloses a fearful condition of violence and lawlessness. In the year 1197 we find the Bishop of Paris abolishing the ‘Feast of Fools.’ On January 1st (and also on the feast of St. Stephen), it seems, a carnival was held, during which the masquers had free run of the cathedral and the churches, making them echo with ribald songs, and profaning them with bloodshed and all kinds of excess. In 1218, says Crevier, we find the ecclesiastical judges of Paris complaining that the students break into the houses of the citizens, and carry off their womenfolk. In 1200 we find a pitched battle between the students of Paris and the governor and his guards, in which several are killed; and the king condemns the unfortunate governor to be tried by ordeal; to be hanged forthwith if it proves his guilt, and to be imprisoned for life (in case Providence has made a mistake) if it absolves him. After another of these battles, when the governor has hanged several students, the king forces him and his council to go in their shirts to the scaffold and kiss the bodies. In another case, in 1228, the king sides with the governor, and the masters close the university in disgust until the students are avenged.

But of story-telling there would be no end. And, indeed, there is the danger of giving a false impression of scantiness of evidence when one follows up a large assertion with a few incidents. It is, however, clear from the quoted words of accredited historians, and will be made clearer in the progress of the narrative, that simony, unchastity, violence, cruelty, and usury were real and broad features of the age of Abélard. The reader will not forget them, when he is seeking to enter into the conscience of the famous master.

CHAPTER V

DEAD SEA FRUIT

The great cemetery of Père Lachaise at Paris is a city of historic tombs. Names of world-fame look down on you from the marble dwellings of the dead, as you pass along its alleys and broad avenues. Paris loves to wander there on Sundays; to scatter floral symbols of a living memory on the youngest graves, and to hang wreaths of unfading honour over the ashes of those who have fought for it and served it. The memory of the dead soon fades, they say, yet you will see men and women of Paris, on many a summer’s day, take flowers and wreaths in solemn pity to lay on the tomb of a woman who was dust seven hundred years ago. It is the grave of Heloise, and of her lover, Abélard.

It is scarcely necessary to say that in a serious endeavour to depict the historical Heloise much myth and legend must be soberly declined. Even historians have been seduced from their high duty in writing her praise: witness the fond exaggeration of M. de Rémusat, which would make her ‘the first of women.’ Yet it must be admitted that impartial study brings us face to face with a very remarkable personality. This will be easily accepted in the sequel, when we have followed the course of her life to some extent—when, for instance, we see the affection and the extraordinary respect with which she inspires the famous abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable. It is more difficult to recall her at the period of her fateful meeting with Abélard. We have, however, the sober assurance of Peter the Venerable that, even at this early date, she was ‘of great repute throughout the entire kingdom’; and there is no reason whatever to resent Abélard’s assertion that she was already distinguished for her knowledge.

The mythic additions to the portraiture of Heloise refer almost exclusively to her parentage and her beauty. Abélard introduces her to us as the niece of a canon of the cathedral chapter, named Fulbert. It is quite clear that Abélard considered her such throughout life, and that it was the belief of Heloise herself; but of her parentage neither of them speaks. In strict justice, the only inference we may draw from this is that she lost her parents at an early age. We should never have known the parentage of Abélard but for his own autobiography. However, the tradition that has charged itself with the romance of Abélard’s life found in this silence a convenient pretext for weaving further romantic elements into the story. There is a pretty collection of myths about Heloise’s birth, most of them, of course, making her illegitimate. The issue of lawful wedlock is ever too prosaic and ordinary for the romantic faculty—in spite of facts. The favourite theory is that Heloise was the daughter of Canon Fulbert; even Hausrath thinks Fulbert’s conduct points to this relationship. Two other canons of Paris are severally awarded the honour by various writers. On the other hand, it was inevitable that she should be given a tinge of ‘noble’ blood, and this is traced on the maternal side. Turlot makes the best effort—from the romantic point of view—in describing her as the daughter of an abbess, who was the mistress of a Montmorency, but who gave an air of respectability to her family matters by passing for the mistress of Fulbert. From the less interesting point of view of history, we can only say that she lived with her uncle, Canon Fulbert, and we must admit that we do not know whether she was illegitimate or an orphan. But the former category was very much the larger one, even in those violent days.

It was also natural that tradition should endow her with a singular beauty: an endowment which sober history is unable to confirm. She must, it is true, have had a singular grace and charm of person. It is impossible to think that her mental gifts alone attracted Abélard. Moreover, in the course of the story, we shall meet several instances of the exercise of such personal power. But we cannot claim for her more than a moderate degree of beauty. ‘Not the least in beauty of countenance,’ says Abélard, ‘she was supreme in her knowledge of letters.’ The antithesis does not seem to be interpreted aright by those writers who think it denies her any beauty. ‘Not the least’ is a figure of rhetoric, well known to Abélard, which must by no means be taken with Teutonic literalness.

But that ‘repute throughout the kingdom,’ which Peter the Venerable grants her, was based on her precocious knowledge. It is generally estimated that she was in her seventeenth or eighteenth year when Abélard fell in love with her. She had spent her early years at the Benedictine nunnery at Argenteuil, a few miles beyond St. Denis. Her education was then continued by her uncle. Canon Fulbert has no reputation for learning in the chronicles of the time; in fact, the only information we have of him, from other sources than the story of Abélard, is that he was the happy possessor of ‘a whole bone’ out of the spine of St. Ebrulfus. However, it is indisputable that Heloise had a reputation for letters even at that time. Both Abélard and Peter of Cluny are explicit on the point; the latter says to her, in one of his admiring letters, ‘in study you not only outstripped all women, but there were few men whom you did not surpass.’ From this it is clear that the learning of Heloise was not distinguished only when compared with the general condition of the feminine mind. In fact, although Abbot Peter speaks slightingly of womanly education in general, this was a relatively bright period. We have already seen the wife and daughters of Manegold teaching philosophy at Paris with much distinction at the close of the eleventh century, and one cannot go far in the chronicles of the time without meeting many instances of a learned correspondence in Latin between prelates and women.

Nevertheless, the learning of Heloise cannot have been considerable, absolutely speaking. Her opportunities were even more limited than the erudition of her time. That she knew Hebrew is explicitly stated by Abélard and Peter of Cluny, and also by Robert of Auxerre; but she probably learned it (with Greek) from Abélard, and knew no more than he. Her Latin is good; but it is impossible to discuss here her famous Letters, which give us our sole direct insight into her personality. Learned, critical, penetrative, she certainly was, but Rémusat’s estimate is entirely inadmissible. Beside Aspasia or Hypatia she would ‘pale her ineffectual fire.’

It is not difficult to understand how the two were brought together. Both of high repute ‘in the whole kingdom,’ or, at all events, in Paris, they could not long remain strangers. Abélard was soon ‘wholly afire with love of the maid,’ he tells us, and sought an opportunity of closer intercourse with her. Though Cotter Morison’s theory of the sated sensualist looking round for a dainty morsel is utterly at variance with Abélard’s narrative—the only account of these events that we have—it is, nevertheless, clear that Abélard sought the intimacy of Heloise for the purpose of gaining her love. He says so repeatedly; and, though we have at times to moderate the stress of his words, we cannot refuse to accept their substance. Mr. Poole considers the idea of a deliberate seduction on the part of Abélard ‘incredible.’ It is strange that one who is so familiar with the times should think this. ‘I thought it would be well to contract a union of love with the maid,’ Abélard says. From the circumstance that he had to approach Fulbert (who was, however, only too willing) through the mediation of friends, it does not seem rash to infer that he had had no personal intercourse with the canon and his niece. It was through her fame and, perhaps, an occasional passing glance that he had come to love her. He had, however, little diffidence about the issue. Though between thirty-five and forty years of age, he looked ‘young and handsome,’ he tells us; and we learn further from Heloise that he had gifts ‘of writing poetry and of singing’ which no female heart could resist. The ‘Socrates of Gaul’ set out on a love-adventure.

And one fine day the little world of Paris was smirking and chattering over the startling news that Master Peter had gone to live with Heloise and her uncle. The simple canon had been delighted at the proposal to receive Abélard. Alleging the expense of maintaining a separate house and the greater convenience of Fulbert’s house for attending the school, Abélard had asked his hospitality in consideration of a certain payment and the instruction of Heloise in leisure hours. It may or may not be true that Fulbert was avaricious, as Abélard affirms, but the honour of lodging the first master in Christendom and the valuable advantage to his niece are quite adequate to explain Fulbert’s eager acceptance. ‘Affection for his niece and the repute of my chastity,’ says Abélard, blinded the canon to the obvious danger, if not the explicit intention. The master was at once established in the canon’s house. One reads with pity how the uncle, blind, as only an erudite priest can be, to the rounded form and quickened pulse, child-like, gave Abélard even power to beat his niece, if she neglected her task.

A tradition, which seems to have but a precarious claim to credence, points out the spot where the idyll of that love was lived. In the earlier part of the present century there was a house at the corner of the Rue des Chantres (on the island, facing the Hotel de Ville), which bore an inscription claiming that ‘Heloise and Abélard, the model of faithful spouses, dwelt in this house.’ If we accept the vague legend, we can easily restore in imagination the little cottage of Fulbert. It lay a few yards from the water’s edge, and one could look out from its narrow windows over the gently sloping garden of the bank and the fresh, sweet bosom of the river; the quays were beyond—where the Hotel de Ville now stands—and further still outspread the lovely panorama that encircled Paris.

In a very short time master and pupil were lovers. He did assuredly fulfil his promise of teaching her. Most probably it was from him that she learned what Greek and Hebrew she knew; for Abélard, in later years, not only reminds her nuns that they ‘have a mother who is conversant with these tongues,’ but adds also that ‘she alone has attained this knowledge,’ amongst the women of her time. It is also clear that he taught her dialectics, theology, and ethics. But it was not long, he confesses, before there were ‘more kisses than theses,’ and ‘love was the inspirer of his tongue.’ He does not hesitate to speak of having ‘corrupted’ or seduced her, but it is only prejudice or ignorance that can accept this in the full severity and gravity of the modern term. Heloise had been educated in a nunnery; but before many years we find these nuns of Argenteuil turned on the street for ‘the enormity of their lives.’ The charge must not be taken too literally just yet, but it should make us hesitate to credit Heloise with a rigorous moral education. She lived, too, in a world where, as we saw, such liaisons were not considered sinful. It is far from likely that she would oppose any scruple to Abélard’s desire. Indeed, from the study of her references to their love, in the letters she wrote long years afterwards—wrote as an abbess of high repute—one feels disposed to think that Abélard would have had extreme difficulty in pointing out to her the sinfulness of such a love. It is with an effort, even after twenty years of chaste, conventual life, that she accepts the ecclesiastical view of their conduct. Abélard sinned; but let us, in justice, limit his sin at least to its due objective proportion; its subjective magnitude I shall not venture to examine.

In a few months the famed philosopher appeared in a new character, as ‘the first of the troubadours,’ to use the words of Ampère. ‘À mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit les passions sont plus grandes,’ said Pascal. Of all false epigrams that is surely the falsest, but it would be easily inspired by the transformation of Pierre Abélard. The sober-living man of forty, whom all had thought either never to have known or long since to have passed the fever of youth, was mastered by a deep, tyrannical passion. The problems of dialectics were forgotten, the alluring difficulties of Ezechiel unheeded. Day after day the murmuring throng was dismissed untaught from the cloistral school; whilst passers-by heard songs that were ardent with deep love from the windows of the canon’s house. All Paris, even all France, caught the echo, says Heloise, and ‘every street, every house, resounded with my name.’ The strange ‘Story of love and learning,’ as an old ballad expressed it, was borne through the kingdom in Abélard’s own impassioned words.[16]

Months ran on, and the purblind priest remained wholly unconscious of what all Paris sang nightly in its taverns. At length the truth was forced upon his mind, and he at once interrupted the love-story. He drove Abélard from the house, and raised the usual futile barriers to the torrent of passion. Whether the canon was really more earnest than the majority of his order, and therefore sincerely shocked at the thought of the liaison, or whether it had disturbed some other project he had formed, it is impossible to say. Heloise herself, in her sober maturity, affirms that any woman in France would have thought her position more honourable than any marriage. However that may be, Fulbert angrily forbade a continuance of the relation. Once more Abélard must have felt the true alternative that honour placed before him: either to crush his passion and return to the school, or to marry Heloise and sacrifice the desire of further advancement in ecclesiastical dignity.

Abélard was not a priest at that time. He was probably a canon of Notre Dame, but there are very satisfactory reasons for holding that he did not receive the priesthood until a much later date. In the ‘Story’ he makes Heloise address him, about this time, as ‘a cleric and canon,’ but he is nowhere spoken of as a priest. Had he been a priest, the circumstance would have afforded Heloise one of the most powerful objections to a marriage; in the curious and lengthy catalogue of such objections which we shall find her raising presently she does not mention the priesthood. But even if he were a priest, it is not at all clear that he would have considered this in itself an impediment to marriage. From the acts of the Council of London (1102), the Council of Troyes (1107), the Council of Rheims (1119), and others, we find that the decree of the Church against the marriage of priests, and even bishops, was far from being universally accepted. Indeed, we have specific reason for thinking that Abélard did not recognise an impediment of that character. In a work which bears the title Sententiae Abaelardi, we find the thesis, more or less clearly stated, that the priest may marry. The work is certainly not Abélard’s own composition, but the experts regard it as a careful summary of his views by some master of the period.

Apart from the laxer view of love-relation which Abélard probably shared, we can only find firm ground to interpret his reluctance to marry in the fear of injuring his further ambition. Marriage was fast becoming a fatal obstacle to advancement in the ecclesiastical world; a lover—with wealth—was not a serious difficulty. Even this point, however, cannot be pressed; it looks as though his ambition had become as limp and powerless as all other feelings in the new tyranny of love. Historians have been so eager to quarrel with the man that they have, perhaps, not paid a just regard to the fact that Heloise herself was violently opposed to marriage, and conscientiously thought their earlier union more honourable. This will appear presently.

Whatever struggle may have distracted Abélard after their separation, he was soon forced to take practical measures. Heloise found means to inform him—not with the conventional tears, but, he says, ‘with the keenest joy’—that she was about to become a mother. Fate had cut the ethical knot. He at once removed her from Fulbert’s house during the night, and had her conveyed, in the disguise of a nun,[17] to his home at Pallet. It is not clearly stated that Abélard accompanied her, but, beside the intrinsic probability, there is a local tradition that Abélard and Heloise spent many happy months together at Pallet, and there is a phrase in the ‘Story’ which seems to confirm it. However that may be, we find him in Paris again, after a time, seeking a reconciliation with Fulbert.

Fulbert was by no means the quiet, passive recluse that one would imagine from his earlier action, or inaction. The discovery of Abélard’s treachery and the removal of his niece had enkindled thoughts of wild and dark revenge. He feared, however, to attack Abélard whilst Heloise remained at Pallet; it is a fearful commentary on the times that Abélard should coolly remark that a retaliation on the part of his own relatives was apprehended. Revenge was considered a legitimate daughter of justice in those days. A compromise was at length imagined by Abélard. He proposed to marry Heloise, if Fulbert and his friends would agree to keep the marriage secret. In this we have a still clearer revelation of the one serious flaw in Abélard’s character—weakness. No doubt, if we had had an autobiography from an unmaimed Abélard—an Abélard who identified himself with, and endeavoured proudly to excuse, the lover of Heloise—we should be reminded of many extenuating elements; the repugnance of Heloise, the stupid anti-matrimonialism of the hierarchy, the current estimate of an unconsecrated liaison, and so forth. Even as it is, Abélard perceives no selfishness, no want of resolution, in his action. ‘Out of compassion for his great anxiety,’ he says, he approached Fulbert on the question of a private marriage. The canon consented, though secretly retaining his intention of taking a bloody revenge, Abélard thinks; and the master hastened once more to Brittany for his bride.

Abélard probably flattered himself that he had found an admirable outlet from his narrow circumstances. Fulbert’s conscience would be salved by the Church’s blessing on their love; the hierarchy would have no matrimonial impediment to oppose to his advancement; Paris would give an indulgent eye to what it would regard as an amiable frailty, if not a grace of character. Unfortunately for his peace, Heloise energetically repulsed the idea of marriage. The long passage in which Abélard gives us her objections is not the least interesting in the ‘Story.’

‘She asked,’ he writes, ‘what glory she would win from me, when she had rendered me inglorious, and had humbled both me and her. How great a punishment the world would inflict on her if she deprived it of so resplendent a light: what curses, what loss to the Church, what philosophic tears, would follow such a marriage. How outrageous, how pitiful it was, that he whom nature had created for the common blessing should be devoted to one woman, and plunged in so deep a disgrace. Profoundly did she hate the thought of a marriage which would prove so humiliating and so burdensome to me in every respect.’

Then follows an elaborate, rhetorical discourse on the disadvantages of matrimony, with careful division and subdivision, arguments from reason, from experience, from authority, and all the artifices of rhetoric and dialectics. That the learned Heloise did urge many of its curious points will scarcely be doubted, but as a careful and ordered piece of pleading against matrimony it has an obvious ulterior purpose. St. Paul is the first authority quoted; then follow St. Jerome, Theophrastus, and Cicero. She (or he) then draws an animated picture of the domestic felicity of a philosopher, reminding him of servants and cradles, infant music and the chatter of nurses, the pressing throng of the family and the helplessness of the little ones. The example of monks, of Nazarites, and of philosophers is impressively urged; and if he will not hesitate, as ‘a cleric and a canon,’ to commit himself ‘irrevocably to domestic joy,’ at least let him remember his dignity as a philosopher. The sad fate of the married Socrates is adduced, together with the thunder and rain incident. Finally, she is represented as saying that it is ‘sweeter to her and more honourable to him that she should be his mistress rather than his wife,’ and that she prefers to be united to him ‘by love alone, not by the compulsion of the marriage vow.’

When the letter containing this curious passage reached Heloise, nearly twenty years after the event, she, an abbess of high repute for holiness, admitted its correctness, with the exception that ‘a few arguments had been omitted in which she set love before matrimony and freedom before compulsion.’ Holy abbess writing to holy abbot, she calls God to witness that ‘if the name of wife is holier, the name of friend, or, if he likes, mistress or concubine, is sweeter,’ and that she ‘would rather be his mistress than the queen of a Cæsar.’ They who disregard these things in sitting in judgment on that famous liaison are foredoomed to error.

But Abélard prevailed. ‘Weeping and sobbing vehemently,’ he says, ‘she brought her discourse to an end with these words: “One thing alone remains for us now, we must exhibit in our common ruin a grief as strong as the love that has gone before.”’ It is an artistic termination to Abélard’s discourse, at all events.

Back to Paris once more, therefore, the two proceeded. Heloise had a strong foreboding of evil to come from the side of Fulbert; she did not trust his profession of conciliation. However, she left her boy, whom, with a curious affectation, they had called Astrolabe (the name of an astronomic apparatus), in the charge of Abélard’s sister Denyse. They were married a few days after their arrival at Paris. The vigil was spent, according to custom, in one of the churches: they remained all night in prayer, and the ceremony took place after an early Mass in the morning. Their arrival in Paris had been kept secret, and only Fulbert and a few friends of both parties were present at the marriage. Then they parted at the altar: the man weakly proceeding to follow his poor ambition in the school, the noble young wife making herself a sad sacrifice to his selfishness and irresolution.

During the next few dreary months they saw each other rarely and in secret. Abélard was a man of the type that waits for the compulsion of events in a serious conflict of desires, or of desire and duty. He could not lay aside his day-dream that somehow and some day the fates would smooth out a path along which he could carry both his whole ambition and his love. Events did decide for him once more. Fulbert, it seems, broke his faith with Abélard and divulged the marriage. But when people came to Heloise for confirmation, she did more than ‘lie with the sweetness of a Madonna,’ in Charles Reade’s approving phrase; she denied on oath that she was the wife of Abélard. Fulbert then began to ill-treat her (the circumstance may be commended to the notice of those historians who think he had acted from pure affection), and Abélard removed her secretly from her uncle’s house.

It was to the convent at Argenteuil that Abélard conveyed his wife this time. One passes almost the very spot in entering modern Paris by the western line, but the village lay at a much greater distance from the ancient island-city, a few miles beyond St. Denis, going down the river. It was a convent of Benedictine nuns, very familiar to Heloise, who had received her early education there. In order to conceal Heloise more effectually, he bade her put on the habit of the nuns, with the exception of the veil, which was the distinguishing mark of the professed religious. Here she remained for some months; Abélard waiting upon events, as usual, and occasionally making a secret visit to Argenteuil. According to Turlot, the abbess of Argenteuil was the mother of Heloise. We know, at least, that the nunnery was in a very lax condition, and that, beyond her unconquerable presentiment of evil, Heloise would suffer little restraint. Indeed, Abélard reminds her later, in his second letter to her, that their conjugal relations continued whilst she was in the nunnery.

How long this wretched situation continued it is impossible to determine. It cannot have been many months, at the most, before Fulbert discovered what had happened; it was probably a matter of weeks. Yet this is the only period in which it is possible to entertain the theory of Abélard’s licentiousness. We have already seen that Cotter Morison’s notion of a licentious period before the liaison with Heloise is quite indefensible. The tragic event which we have presently to relate puts the latest term to the possibility of such licence. Now, there are two documents on which Abélard’s critics rely: a letter to him from Fulques, prior in the monastery of Deuil near Paris, and a letter from his former teacher, Master Roscelin. Prior Fulques, however, merely says he ‘has heard’ that Abélard was reduced to poverty through ‘the greed and avarice of harlots’; and Roscelin explicitly states that he heard his story from the monks of St. Denis. Indeed, we may at once exclude Roscelin’s letter; not merely because it was written in a most furious outburst of temper, when a man would grasp any rumour, but also on the ground that his story is absurd and impossible. He represents Abélard, when a monk at St. Denis, later, returning to his monastery with the money earned by his teaching, and marching off with it to pay a former mistress. We shall see, in a later chapter, that Abélard did not begin to teach until he had left St. Denis.

If, however, Roscelin’s story is too absurd to entertain in itself, it is useful in casting some light on Fulques’s letter. Fulques was writing to Abélard on behalf of the monks of St. Denis. He would be well acquainted with their gossip, and would, therefore, probably be referring to the story which Roscelin shows to be impossible in giving it more fully. It is not unlikely that the story was really a perverse account of Abélard’s visits to Heloise at Argenteuil. In any case we are reduced to the gossip of a band of monks of notorious character (teste St. Bernard), of indirect and uncertain information, and of bitter hostility to Abélard.

And this is all the evidence which can be found in support of the calumny. On the strength of this monkish gossip we are asked to believe that Abélard grossly deceived his young wife, and made an attempt, as ridiculous (if the rumour contained truth) as it was hypocritical, to deceive the readers of his heart-naked confession. We are to suppose that ‘the abhorrence of harlots,’ of which he spoke earlier, entirely disappeared when he found himself united by the sacred bonds of both religion and love to a noble and devoted wife. We are to suppose that his apparent detestation and condemnation of his past conduct was a mere rhetorical artifice to conceal the foulest and most extraordinary episode in his career from the people amongst whom he had lived—an artifice, moreover, which would be utterly inconsistent with his life and character at the time he wrote the ‘Story.’ It is almost impossible to take such a notion seriously.

Once more, then, we are in a period of waiting for the direction of events. It came this time in tragic accents that for ever cured the unfortunate Breton of his listless trust in fate.

Fulbert learned at length that Heloise had been sent to Argenteuil, and had taken the habit. The canon at once inferred that this was a preliminary step to a dissolution of the marriage. He would be unaware that it had been consummated, and would suppose that Abélard intended to apply to Rome for a dispensation to relieve him of an apparent embarrassment. He decided on a fearful revenge, which should at least prevent Abélard from marrying another.

And one early morning, a little later, Paris was in a frenzy of excitement. Canons, students, and citizens, thronged the streets, and pressed towards Abélard’s house on St. Genevieve. ‘Almost the entire city,’ says Fulques, went clamouring towards his house: ‘women wept as though each one had lost her husband.’ Abélard had been brutally mutilated during the night. Hirelings of Canon Fulbert had corrupted his valet, and entered his room whilst he slept. They had perpetrated an indescribable outrage, such as was not infrequently inflicted in the quarrels of the Patareni and the Nicolaitæ. In that dark night the sunshine disappeared for ever from the life of Pierre Abélard. Henceforth we have to deal with a new man.

It is a pious theory of the autobiographist himself that this mutilation led indirectly to his ‘conversion.’ There is undoubtedly much truth in this notion of an indirect occasioning of better thoughts and of an indirect influence being cast on his mind for life. Yet we of the later date, holding a truer view of the unity of human nature, and of the place that sex-influence occupies in its life, can see that the ‘conversion’ was largely a direct, physical process. We have, in a very literal sense, another man to deal with henceforward.

As Abélard lay on the bed of sickness, the conversion gradually worked onwards towards a critical decision. It is not clear that the mutilation would prove of itself an impediment to scholastic honour or ecclesiastical office, but the old life could not be faced again by one with so little strength and so keen a sensibility. ‘I pondered on the glory I had won and on the swift chance blow that had obscured it, nay, wholly extinguished it: on the just judgment of God by which I had been punished in the member that had sinned: on the justice of treachery coming from him whom I had myself betrayed: on the joy of my rivals at such a humiliation: on the endless sorrow this wound would inflict on my family and my friends: on the speed with which this deep disgrace would travel through the world. What path was open to me now? How could I ever walk abroad again, to be pointed at by every finger, ridiculed by every tongue, a monstrous spectacle to all?... In such sorry plight as I was, the confusion of shame rather than a devout conversion impelled me to seek refuge in the monastery.’

To this natural ‘confusion of shame’ we must look for an explanation of, not merely the folly, but the cruelty and selfishness, of Abélard’s proposal. It involved the burial of Heloise in a nunnery. No one could shrink more feelingly from the unnatural shade of the cloister than did Heloise, as Abélard must have known, but in his pain and despair he forgot the elementary dictates of love or of honour. In any other circumstances the act would be deemed brutal. Indeed, he wantonly increased the suffering of his young wife by ordering her to take the vows first. Twenty years afterwards she plaintively tells him the sorrow he gave her by such a command. ‘God knows,’ she says, ‘I should not have hesitated, at your command, to precede or to follow you to hell itself.’ She was ‘profoundly grieved and ashamed’ at the distrust which seemed to be implied in his direction. But hers was the love that ‘is stronger than death,’ and she complied without a murmur, making of her sunny nature one more victim on the altar of masculine selfishness.

Abélard has left us a dramatic picture of her taking the vows. It shows clearly that the love which impelled her to such a sacrifice was not the blind, child-like affection that is wholly merged in the stronger loved one, but the deep, true love that sees the full extent of the sacrifice demanded, and accepts it with wide-opened eyes. At the last moment a little group of friends surrounded her in the convent-chapel. The veil, blessed by the bishop, lay on the altar before them, and they were endeavouring to dissuade her from going forward to take it. She waved them aside—waved aside for the last time the thought of her child and the vision of a sun-lit earth—and took the fateful step towards the altar. Then, standing on the spot where the young nun generally knelt for the final thanksgiving to God, she recited with the tense fervour of a human prayer the words of Cornelia in Lucan:

‘O spouse most great,

O thou whose bed my merit could not share!

How hath an evil fortune worked this wrong

On thy dear head? Why hapless did I wed,

If this the fruit that my affection bore?

Behold the penalty I now embrace

For thy sweet sake!’

And, weeping and sobbing, she walked quickly up the steps of the altar, and covered herself with the veil of the religious profession.

CHAPTER VI

THE MONK OF ST. DENIS

Abélard had now entered upon the series of blunders which were to make his life a succession of catastrophes. A stronger man would have retired to Pallet, and remained there until the discussion of his outrage had abated somewhat; then boldly, and, most probably, with complete success, have confronted the scholastic world once more, with his wife for fitting companion, like Manegold of Alsace. In his distraction and abnormal sense of humiliation, Abélard grasped the plausible promise of the monastic life. In the second place, he, with a peculiar blindness, chose the abbey of St. Denis for his home.

The abbey of St. Denis was not only one of the most famous monasteries in Europe, but also a semi-religious, semi-secular monarchical institution. It was the last monastery in the world to provide that quiet seclusion which Abélard sought. It lay about six miles from Paris, near one of the many bends of the Seine on its journey to the sea. Dagobert was its royal founder; its church was built over the alleged bones of the alleged St. Denis the Areopagite, the patron of France; it was the burial-place of the royal house. Over its altar hung the oriflamme of St. Denis, the palladium of the country, which the king came to seek, with solemn rite and procession, whenever the cry of ‘St. Denis for France’ rang through the kingdom. Amongst its several hundred monks were the physicians and the tutors of kings—Prince Louis of France was even then studying in its school.

Rangeard, in his history of Brittany, says, that at the beginning of the twelfth century there were more irregular than regular abbeys in France. Abélard himself writes that ‘nearly all the monasteries’ of his time were worldly. The truth is that few monasteries, beside those which had been very recently reformed, led a very edifying life. Hence it is not surprising, when one regards the secular associations of the place, to find that the Benedictine abbey of St. Denis was in a very lax condition. Abélard soon discovered that, as he says, it was an abbey ‘of very worldly and most disgraceful life.’ The great rhetorician has a weakness for the use of superlatives, but other witnesses are available. St. Bernard wrote of it, in his famed, mellifluous manner, that it was certain the monks gave to Cæsar the things that were Cæsar’s, but doubtful if they gave to God the things that were God’s. A chronicler of the following century, Guillaume de Nangis, writes that ‘the monks scarcely exhibited even the appearance of religion.’

The abbey had not been reformed since 994, so that human nature had had a considerable period in which to assert itself. The preceding abbot, Ives I., was accused at Rome of having bought his dignity in a flagrant manner. The actual abbot, Adam, is said by Abélard to have been ‘as much worse in manner of life and more notorious than the rest as he preceded them in dignity.’ It is certainly significant that the Benedictine historian of the abbey, Dom Félibien, can find nothing to put to the credit of Adam, in face of Abélard’s charge, except a certain generosity to the poor. Nor have later apologists for the angels, de Nangis, Duchesne, etc., been more successful. Ecclesiastical history only finds consolation in the fact that Adam’s successor was converted by Bernard in 1127, and at once set about the reform of the abbey.

When Abélard donned the black tunic of the Benedictine monk in it, probably in 1119, the royal abbey was at the height of its gay career. St. Bernard himself gives a bright picture of its life in one of his letters. He speaks of the soldiers who thronged its cloisters, the jests and songs that echoed from its vaulted roofs, the women who contributed to its gaiety occasionally. From frequent passages in Abélard we learn that the monks often held high festival. It may be noted that monastic authorities nearly always give occasion to these festivities, for, even in the severest rules, one always finds an egg, or some other unwonted luxury, admitted on ‘feast-days.’ It is the consecration of a principle that no body of men and women on earth can apply and appreciate better than monks and nuns. The feasts of St. Denis rivalled those of any château in gay France. The monks were skilful at mixing wine—it is a well-preserved monastic tradition—their farmer-vassals supplied food of the best in abundance, and they hired plenty of conjurors, singers, dancers, jesters, etc., to aid the task of digestion.

Nor was the daily life too dull and burdensome. Royal councils were frequently held at the abbey, and one does not need much acquaintance with monastic life to appreciate that circumstance. Then there was the school of the abbey, with its kingly and noble pupils—and corresponding visitors: there was the continual stream of interesting guests to this wealthiest and most famous of all abbeys: there was the town of St. Denis, which was so intimately dependent on the abbey. Above all, there were the country-houses, of which the abbey had a large number, and from which it obtained a good deal of its income. Some dying sinner would endeavour to corrupt the Supreme Judge by handing over a farm or a château, with its cattle, and men and women, and other commodities of value, to the monks of the great abbey. These would be turned into snug little ‘cells’ or ‘priories,‘ and important sources of revenue. Sometimes, too, they had to be fought for in the courts, if not by force of arms. Abélard complains that ‘we [monks] compel our servants to fight duels for us’: he has already complained of the frequent presentation to monasteries of both man and maid servants. In 1111 we find some of the monks of St. Denis, at the head of a small army, besieging the château of Puiset, capturing its lieutenant, and casting him into a monastic prison. At Toury Abbot Adam had his important dependence armed as a fortress, and made a financial speculation in the opening of a public market. Rangeard tells us, in addition, that many of the monks were expert in canon law, and they travelled a good deal, journeying frequently to Rome in connection with matrimonial and other suits.

But before Abélard turned his attention to the condition of the abbey, he was long preoccupied with the thought of revenge. Revenge was a branch virtue of justice in those days, and Abélard duly demanded the punishment of talio. The valet, who had betrayed him, and one of the mutilators, had been captured, and had lost their eyes, in addition to suffering the same mutilation as they had inflicted. But Abélard seems to have been painfully insistent on the punishment of Fulbert. The matter belonged to the spiritual court, since Abélard was a cleric, and Bishop Girbert does not seem to have moved quickly enough for the new monk. Fulbert escaped from Paris, and all his goods were confiscated, but this did not meet Abélard’s (and the current) idea of justice. He began to talk of an appeal to Rome.

In these circumstances was written the famous letter of Prior Fulques, to which we have referred more than once. It is a characteristic piece of mediæval diplomacy. Fulques was the prior of Deuil, in the valley of Montmorency, a dependency of the abbey of St. Florent de Saumur. He was apparently requested by the abbot of St. Denis to persuade Abélard to let the matter rest. At all events, he begins his letter with a rhetorical description of Abélard’s success as a teacher, depicting Britons and Italians and Spaniards braving the terrors of the sea, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, under the fascination of Abélard’s repute. Then, with a view to dissuading him from the threatened appeal to Rome, he reminds him of his destitution and of the notorious avarice of Rome. There is no reason why we should hesitate to accept Fulques’s assertion that Abélard had no wealth to offer the abbey when he entered it. If, as seems to be the more correct proceeding, we follow the opinion that he spent the interval between the first withdrawal of Heloise and the marriage with her at Pallet, he cannot have earned much during the preceding two or three years. He was hardly likely to be a provident and economical person. Most of whatever money he earned, after he first began to serve up stale dishes to his students in the absorption of his passion, would probably pass into the coffers of Fulbert or, later, of the nunnery at Argenteuil. There is no need whatever to entertain theories of licentiousness from that ground. We have, moreover, already sufficiently discussed that portion of Fulques’s letter.

But the second part of the prior’s argument, the avarice of Rome, requires a word of comment. It is characteristic of the ecclesiastical historian that in Migne’s version of Fulques’s letter the indictment of Abélard is given without comment, and the indictment of Rome is unblushingly omitted. It might be retorted that such historians as Deutsch and Hausrath insert the indictment against Rome, and make a thousand apologies for inserting the charge against Abélard. The retort would be entirely without sting, since a mass of independent evidence sustains the one charge, whilst the other is at variance with evidence. The passage omitted in Migne, which refers to Abélard’s proposal to appeal to Rome, runs as follows. ‘O pitiful and wholly useless proposal! Hast thou never heard of the avarice and the impurity of Rome? Who is wealthy enough to satisfy that devouring whirlpool of harlotry? Who would ever be able to fill their avaricious purses? Thy resources are entirely insufficient for a visit to the Roman Pontiff.... For all those who have approached that see in our time without a weight of gold have lost their cause, and have returned in confusion and disgrace.’

Let us, in justice, make some allowance for the exigency of diplomacy and the purposes of rhetoric; the substance of the charge is abundantly supported by other passages in Migne’s own columns. For instance, Abbot Suger, in his Vita Ludovici Grossi, says of his departure from Rome after a certain mission, ‘evading the avarice of the Romans we took our leave.’ The same abbot speaks of their astonishment at St. Denis when Paschal II. visited the abbey in 1106: ‘contrary to the custom of the Romans, he not only expressed no affection for the gold, silver, and precious pearls of the monastery (about which much fear had been entertained),’ but did not even look at them. It may be noted, without prejudice, that Paschal was seeking the sympathy and aid of France in his quarrel with Germany. In the apology of Berengarius, which is also found in Migne, there is mention of ‘a Roman who had learned to love gold, rather than God, in the Roman curia.’ Bernard of Cluny, a more respectable witness, tersely informs us that ‘Rome gives to every one who gives Rome all he has.’ Matthew of Paris is equally uncomplimentary. We have spoken already of the licentious young Étienne de Garlande and his proposal of going to Rome to buy the curia’s consent to his installation in a bishopric; also of the rumour that Pope Paschal disapproved, out of avarice, the censure passed on the adulterous king. Duboulai, after giving Fulques’s letter, is content to say that the pope feared too great an interference with the officials of the curia on account of the papal schism.

Whether the letter of the monastic diplomatist had any weight with Abélard or no, it seems that he did desist from his plan, and laid aside all thought of Fulbert. But the unfortunate monk soon discovered the disastrous error he had made in seeking peace at the abbey of St. Denis. There had, in fact, been a serious mistake on both sides. The monks welcomed one whom they only knew as a lively, witty, interesting associate, a master of renown, a poet and musician of merit. A new attraction would accrue to their abbey, a new distraction to their own life, by the admission of Abélard. The diversion of the stream of scholars from Paris to St. Denis would bring increased colour, animation, and wealth. The erudite troubadour and brilliant scholar would be an excellent companion in the refectory, when the silent meal was over, and the wine invited conversation.

They were rudely awakened to their error when Abélard began to lash them with mordant irony for their ‘intolerable uncleanness.’ They found that the love-inspired songster was dead. They had introduced a kind of Bernard of Clairvaux, a man of wormwood valleys, into their happy abbey: a morose, ascetic, sternly consistent monk, who poured bitter scorn on the strong wines and pretty maids, the high festivals and pleasant excursions, with which the brothers smoothed the rough path to Paradise. And when the gay Latin Quarter transferred itself to St. Denis, and clamoured for the brilliant master, Abélard utterly refused to teach. Abbot Adam gently remonstrated with his ‘subject,’ pointing out that he ought now to do more willingly for the honour of God and the sake of his brothers in religion what he had formerly done out of worldly and selfish interest. Whereupon Abbot Adam was urgently reminded of a few truths, nearly concerning himself and ‘the brothers,’ which, if not new to his conscience, were at least novel to his ears.

So things dragged on for a while, but Adam was forced at length to rid the monastery of the troublesome monk. Finding a pretext in the importunity of the students, he sent Abélard down the country to erect his chair in one of the dependencies of the abbey. These country-houses have already been mentioned. Large estates were left to the abbey in various parts of the country. Monks had to be sent to these occasionally, to collect the revenue from the farmers and millers, and, partly for their own convenience, partly so that they might return something in spiritual service to the district, they built ‘cells’ or ‘oratories’ on the estates. Frequently the cell became a priory; not infrequently it rebelled against the mother-house; nearly always, as is the experience of the monastic orders at the present day, it was a source of relaxation and decay.

The precise locality of the ‘cell’ which was entrusted to Brother Peter is matter of dispute, and the question need not delay us. It was somewhere on the estates of Count Theobald of Champagne, and therefore not very far from Paris. Here Abélard consented to resume his public lectures, and ‘gathered his horde of barbarians about him’ once more, in the jealous phrase of Canon Roscelin.

Otto von Freising relates that Abélard had now become ‘more subtle and more learned than ever.’ There is no reason to doubt that he continued to advance in purely intellectual power, but it seems inevitable that he must have lost much of the brightness and charm of his earlier manner. Yet his power and his fascination were as great as ever. Maisoncelle, or whatever village it was, was soon transformed into the intellectual centre of France. It is said by some historians that three thousand students descended upon the village, like a bewildering swarm of locusts. Abélard says the concourse was so great that ‘the district could find neither hospitality nor food’ for the students. One need not evolve from that an army of several thousand admirers, but it seems clear that there was a second remarkable gathering of students from all parts of Christendom. There was no teacher of ability to succeed him at Paris; he was still the most eminent master in Europe. Even if he had lost a little of the sparkle of his sunny years, no other master had ever possessed it. Indeed, it is not audacious to think that the renewal of his early success and the sweetness of life in lovely Champagne may have in time quickened again such forces and graces of his character as had not been physically eradicated. He began to see a fresh potentiality of joy in life.

Unfortunately for Abélard, his perverse destiny had sent him down to the neighbourhood of Rheims. It will be remembered that Anselm of Laon was urged to suppress Abélard’s early theological efforts by two of his fellow-pupils, Alberic of Rheims and Lotulphe of Novare. Alberic appears to have been a man of ability, and he had been made archdeacon of the cathedral, and head of the episcopal school, at Rheims. He had associated Lotulphe with himself in the direction of the schools, and they were teaching with great success when Abélard appeared on the near horizon. Anselm of Laon and William of Champeaux had gone, and the two friends were eager to earn the title of their successors. The apparent extinction of Master Abélard had largely increased their prestige, and had filled the school of Rheims. Indeed, we gather from the details of a ‘town and gown’ fight which occurred at Rheims about this time that the students had almost come to outnumber the citizens.

Hence it is not surprising that Abélard’s newfound peace was soon disturbed by rumours of the lodging of complaints against him in high quarters. The Archbishop of Rheims, Ralph the Green, began to be assailed with charges. In the first place, he was reminded, it was uncanonical for a monk to give lectures, and take up a permanent residence, outside his monastery; moreover, the said monk was most unmonastically engaged in reading Aristotle, with a flavour of Vergil, Ovid, and Lucan. Raoul le Vert probably knew enough about St. Denis not to attempt to force Abélard to return to it. Then the grumblers—‘chiefly those two early intriguers,’ says the victim—urged that Abélard was teaching without a ‘respondent’; but the archbishop still found the pretext inadequate. Then, at length, came the second great cloud, the accusation of heresy.

The convert had now made theology his chief object of study. The students who gathered about him in his village priory loudly demanded a resumption of the lectures on dialectics and rhetoric, but Abélard had really passed to a new and wholly religious outlook. He complied with the request, only with a secret intention that, as he states in the ‘Story,’ philosophy should be used as a bait in the interest of divinity. The religious welfare of his followers now seriously concerned him. It will be seen presently that he exercised a strict control over their morals, and it was from the purest of motives that he endeavoured, by a pious diplomacy, to direct their thoughts to the study of Holy Writ. His rivals and enemies have attempted to censure him for this casting of pearls before swine. Certainly there were dangers accompanying the practice, but these were not confined to Abélard’s school. We can easily conceive the disadvantage of discussing the question, for instance, utrum Maria senserit dolorem vel delectationem in Christo concipiendo? before a crowd of twelfth century students. However, Abélard’s attitude was wholly reverent, and his intention as pure as that of St. Anselm.

The one characteristic feature of Abélard’s theological work—the feature which was constantly seized by his enemies, and which invests him with so great an interest for the modern student—was his concern to conciliate human reason. His predecessors had complacently affirmed that reason had no title to respect in matters of faith. They insulted it with such pious absurdities as ‘I believe in order that I may understand’ and ‘Faith goeth before understanding.’ Abélard remained until his last hour constitutionally incapable of adopting that attitude. He frequently attributes his obvious concern to meet the questioning of reason to the desire of helping his followers. This is partly a faithful interpretation of their thoughts—for which, however, he himself was chiefly responsible—and partly a subtle projection of his own frame of mind into his hearers. The development of the reasoning faculty which was involved in so keen a study of dialectics was bound to find expression in rationalism.

Abélard seems already to have written two works of a very remarkable character for his age. One of these is entitled A Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian. It may have been founded on the Octavius of Minucius Felix; on the other hand it may be classed with Lessing’s Nathan. It has been called ‘the most radical expression of his rationalism,’ and it would certainly seem to embody his attitude during the period of his highest prosperity. The ultimate victory lies with the Christian, so far as the work goes (it is unfinished), but incidentally it shows more than one bold departure from traditional formulæ. Abélard’s reluctance to consign all the heathen philosophers to Tartarus would be highly suspect to his pious contemporaries. It is a matter of faith in the Roman Catholic Church to-day that no man shall enter heaven who has not a belief in a personal God, at least; many theologians add the narrower qualification of a literal acceptance of the Trinity. But Abélard tempered his audacity by proving that his favourite heathens had this qualification of a knowledge of the Trinity, probably under the inspiration of St Augustine.

The Dialogue was not much assailed by his rivals; probably it was not widely circulated. It is, however, an important monument of Abélard’s genius. It anticipated not merely the rationalistic attitude of modern theology, but also quite a number of the modifications of traditional belief which modern rational and ethical criticism has imposed. Abélard regards the ethical content of Christianity, and finds that it is only the elaboration or the reformation of the natural law, the true essence of religion. God has given this essential gift in every conscience and in every religion; there are no outcasts from the plan of salvation; the higher excellence of the Christian religion lies in its clearer formulation of the law of life. The popular notions of heaven and hell and deity are travesties of true Christian teaching. God, as a purely spiritual being, is the supreme good, and heaven is an approach to Him by obedience; hell, isolation from Him. When we remember that Abélard had before him only the works of the fathers and such recent speculations as those of Anselm, we shall surely recognise the action of a mind of the highest order in these debates.

The second work was not less remarkable. It was a collection of sentences from the fathers on points of dogma. So far the compilation would be an admirable one, but apart from the growing accusation that Abélard was wanting in reverence for the authority of the fathers, there was the suspicious circumstance that he had grouped these eighteen hundred texts in contradictory columns. Thus one hundred and fifty-eight questions are put by the compiler, relating to God, the Trinity, the Redemption, the Sacraments, and so forth. The quotations from the fathers are then arranged in two parallel columns, one half giving an affirmative, and the rest a negative, answer to the question. Such a work would be perfectly intelligible if it came from the pen of a modern freethinker. Abélard’s Sic et Non (Yes and No), as the work came to be called, has borne many interpretations. Such careful and impartial students of Abélard’s work as Deutsch pronounce the critical element in it to be ‘constructive, not sceptical.’ Most probably it was the intention of the compiler to shatter the excessive regard of his contemporaries for the words of the fathers, and thus to open the way for independent speculation on the deposit of revelation (to which he thought he had as much right as Jerome or Augustine), by making a striking exhibition of their fallibility.

Neither of these works seems to have fallen into the hands of Alberic. Twenty years afterwards we find a theologian complaining of the difficulty of obtaining some of Abélard’s works, which had been kept secret. He probably refers to one or both of these works. However that may be, Abélard wrote a third book during his stay at Maisoncelle, and on this the charge of heresy was fixed.

Wiser than the Church of those days, and anticipating the wisdom of the modern Church of Rome, Abélard saw the great danger to the faith itself of the Anselmian maxim, Fides praecedit intellectum. He argued that, as the world had somehow outlived the age of miracles, God must have intended rational evidence to take its place. In any case, there was an increasingly large class of youths and men who clamoured for ‘human and philosophic grounds,’ as he puts it, who would lie to their consciences if they submitted to the current pietism. Abélard believed he would render valuable service to the Church if he could devise rational proofs, or at least analogies, of its dogmas. It was in this frame of mind, not in a spirit of destructive scepticism, that he raised the standard of rationalism. He at once applied his force to the most preterrational of dogmas, and wrote his famous Treatise on the Unity and Trinity of God.

A manuscript of the treatise was discovered by Stölzle a few years ago. It is unnecessary to inflict on the reader an analysis of the work. It is perfectly sincere and religious in intention, but, like every book that has ever been penned on the subject of the Trinity, it contains illustrations which can be proved to be heretical. We may discuss the point further apropos of the Council of Soissons.

CHAPTER VII

THE TRIAL OF A HERETIC

The swiftly multiplying charges seem to have impaired Abélard’s health. He became much more sensitive to the accusation of heresy than the mere injustice of it can explain. We have an evidence of his morbid state at this period in a letter he wrote to the Bishop of Paris. The letter must not be regarded as a normal indication of the writer’s character, but, like the letter of Canon Roscelin which it elicited, it is not a little instructive about the age in which the writers lived. There are hypercritical writers who question the correctness of attributing these letters to Abélard and Roscelin, but the details they contain refer so clearly to the two masters that any doubt about their origin is, as Deutsch says, ‘frivolous and of no account’; he adds that we should be only too glad, for the sake of the writers, if there were some firm ground for contesting their genuineness.

A pupil of Abélard’s, coming down from Paris, brought him word that Roscelin had lodged an accusation of heresy against him with the bishop. As a monk of St. Denis, Abélard still belonged to Bishop Girbert’s jurisdiction. Roscelin had himself been condemned for heresy on the Trinity at Soissons in 1092, but his was an accommodating rationalism; he was now an important member of the chapter of St. Martin at Tours. Report stated that he had discovered heresy in Abélard’s new work, and was awaiting the return of Girbert to Paris in order to submit it to him. Abélard immediately grasped the pen, and forwarded to Girbert a letter which is a sad exhibition of ‘nerves.’ ‘I have heard,’ he says, after an ornate salutation of the bishop and his clergy, ‘that that ever inflated and long-standing enemy of the Catholic faith, whose manner of life and teaching are notorious, and whose detestable heresy was proved by the fathers of the Council of Soissons, and punished with exile, has vomited forth many calumnies and threats against me, on account of the work I have written, which was chiefly directed against his heresy.’ And so the violent and exaggerated account of Roscelin’s misdeeds continues. The practical point of the epistle is that Abélard requests the bishop to appoint a place and time for him to meet Roscelin face to face and defend his work. The whole letter is marred by nervous passion of the most pitiful kind. It terminates with a ridiculous, but characteristic, dialectical thrust at the nominalist: ‘in that passage of Scripture where the Lord is said to have eaten a bit of broiled fish, he [Roscelin] is compelled to say that Christ ate, not a part of the reality, but a part of the term “broiled fish.”’

Roscelin replied directly to Abélard, besides writing to Girbert. The letter is no less characteristic of the time, though probably an equally unsafe indication of the character of the writer. ‘If,’ it begins, in the gentle manner of the time, ‘you had tasted a little of that sweetness of the Christian religion which you profess by your habit, you would not, unmindful of your order and your profession, and forgetful of the countless benefits you received from my teaching from your childhood to youth, have so far indulged in words of malice against me as to disturb the brethren’s peace with the sword of the tongue, and to contemn our Saviour’s most salutary and easy commands.’ He accepts, with an equally edifying humility, Abélard’s fierce denunciation: ‘I see myself in your words as in a mirror. Yet God is powerful to raise up out of the very stones,’ etc. But he cannot long sustain the unnatural tone, and he suddenly collapses into depths of mediæval Latin, which for filth and indecency rival the lowest productions of Billingsgate. The venerable canon returns again and again, in the course of his long letter, to Abélard’s mutilation, and with the art of a Terence or a Plautus. As to the proposed debate, he is only too eager for it. If Abélard attempts to shirk it at the last moment, he ‘will follow him all over the world.’ He finally dies away in an outburst of childish rage which beats Abélard’s peroration. He will not continue any longer because it occurs to him that Abélard is, by the strictest force of logic, a nonentity. He is not a monk, for he is giving lessons; he is not a cleric, for he has parted with the soutane; he is not a layman, for he has the tonsure; he is not even the Peter he signs himself, for Peter is a masculine name.

These were the two ablest thinkers of Christendom at the time. Fortunately for both, the battle royal of the dialecticians did not take place. Possibly Roscelin had not lodged the rumoured complaint at all. In any case Girbert was spared a painful and pitiful scene.

A short time afterwards, however, Alberic and Lotulphe found an excellent opportunity to take action. Some time in the year 1121 a papal legate, Conon, Bishop of Praeneste, came to Rheims. Conon had been travelling in France for some years as papal legate, and since it was the policy of Rome to conciliate France, in view of the hostility of Germany, the legate had a general mission to make himself as useful and obliging as possible. Archbishop Ralph, for his part, would find it a convenient means of gratifying his teachers, without incurring much personal responsibility. The outcome of their conferences was, therefore, that Abélard received from the legate a polite invitation to appear at a provincial synod, or council, which was to be held at Soissons, and to bring with him his ‘celebrated work on the Trinity.’ The simple monk was delighted at the apparent opportunity of vindicating his orthodoxy. It was his first trial for heresy.

When the time drew near for what Abélard afterwards called ‘their conventicle,’ he set out for Soissons with a small band of friends, who were to witness the chastisement of Alberic and Lotulphe. But those astute masters had not so naïve a view of the function of a council. Like St. Bernard, with whom, indeed, they were already in correspondence, they relied largely on that art of ecclesiastical diplomacy which is the only visible embodiment of the Church’s supernatural power. Moreover, they had the curious ecclesiastical habit of deciding that an end—in this case, the condemnation of Abélard—was desirable, and then piously disregarding the moral quality of the means necessary to attain it. How far the two masters had arranged all the conditions of the council we cannot say, but these certainly favoured their plans.

Soissons, to begin with, was excellently suited for the holding of a council which was to condemn, rather than investigate. Its inhabitants would remember the sentence passed on Roscelin for a like offence. In fact Longueval says, in his Histoire de l’Église Gallicane, that the people of Soissons were religious fanatics as a body, and had of their own impulse burned, or ‘lynched,’ a man who was suspected of Manichæism, only a few years previously. Alberic and Lotulphe had taken care to revive this pious instinct, by spreading amongst the people the information that ‘the foreign monk,’ ‘the eunuch of St. Denis,’ who was coming to the town to be tried, had openly taught the error of tri-theism. The consequence was that when the Benedictine monk appeared in the streets with his few admirers, he had a narrow escape of being stoned to death by the excited citizens. It was a rude shock to his dream of a great dialectical triumph.

On one point, however, Abélard’s simple honesty hit upon a correct measure. He went straight to Bishop Conon with his work, and submitted it for the legate’s perusal and personal judgment. The politician was embarrassed. He knew nothing whatever about theology, and would lose his way immediately in Abélard’s subtle analogies. However, he bade Abélard take the book to the archbishop and the two masters. They in turn fumbled it in silence, Abélard says, and at length told him that judgment would be passed on it at the end of the council.

Meantime Abélard had succeeded in correcting, to some extent, the inspired prejudice of the townsfolk. Every day he spoke and disputed in the streets and churches, before the council sat, and he tells us that he seemed to make an impression on his hearers. Alberic, in fact, came one day with a number of his pupils for the purpose of modifying his rival’s success; though he hurriedly retreated when it was shown that his specially prepared difficulty had no force. Premising ‘a few polite phrases,’ he pointed out that Abélard had denied that God generated himself in the Trinity; for this statement, he carefully explained, he did not ask reasons, but an authority. Abélard promptly turned over the page, and pointed to a quotation from St. Augustine. It was a swift and complete victory. But Abélard must needs improve on it by accusing his accuser of heresy, and Alberic departed ‘like one demented with rage.’ Priests and people were now openly asking whether the council had discovered the error to lie with itself rather than with Abélard. They came to the last day of the council.

Before the formal opening of the last session, the legate invited the chief actors in the comedy (except Abélard) to a private discussion of the situation. Conon’s position and attitude were purely political. He cared little about their dialectical subtleties; was, in fact, quite incompetent to decide questions of personality, modality, and all the rest. Still it was mainly a minor political situation he had to deal with, and he shows an eagerness to get through it with as little moral damage as possible. Ralph the Green, president of the council, knew no more than Conon about theology; he also regarded it as a political dilemma, and the prestige of his school would gain by the extinction of Abélard. Ralph had nine suffragan bishops, but only one of these is proved to have taken part in the ‘conventicle.’ It was Lisiard de Crespy, Bishop of Soissons, who would support his metropolitan. Joscelin, an earlier rival of Abélard, was teaching in Soissons at that time, and would most probably accompany his bishop. Abbot Adam of St. Denis was present; so were Alberic and Lotulphe. One man of a more worthy type sat with them, an awkward and embarrassing spokesman of truth and justice, Geoffroi, Bishop of Chartres, one of the most influential and most honourable members of the French episcopacy.

Conon at once shrewdly introduced the formal question, what heresy had been discovered in Abélard’s book? After his ill-success in the street-discussion, Alberic seems to have hesitated to quote any definite passage in the work. Indeed, we not only have two contradictory charges given, but the texts which seem to have been used in this council to prove the charge of tri-theism were quoted by the Council of Sens in 1141 in proof of an accusation of Sabellianism. Otto von Freising says that Abélard held the three divine persons to be modifications of one essence (the Anselmists claiming that the three were realities); Abélard himself says he was accused of tri-theism. Every ‘analogy’ that has been found in the natural world for the dogma of the Trinity, from the shamrock of St. Patrick to the triangle of Père Lacordaire, exposes its discoverer to one or other of those charges—for an obvious reason. After the death of Dr. Dale I remember seeing a passage quoted by one of his panegyrists in illustration of his singularly sound and clear presentation of dogma: it was much more Sabellian than anything Abélard ever wrote.

However, the explicit demand of the legate for a specimen of Abélard’s heresy was embarrassing. Nothing could be discovered in the book to which Abélard could not have assigned a parallel in the fathers. And when Alberic began to extort heresy by ingenious interpretation Geoffroi de Lèves reminded them of the elementary rules of justice. In the formal proceedings of a trial for heresy no one was condemned unheard. If they were to anticipate the trial by an informal decision, the requirement of justice was equally urgent. They must give the accused an opportunity of defending himself. That was the one course which Alberic dreaded most of all, and he so well urged the magical power of Abélard’s tongue that the bishop’s proposal was rejected. Geoffroi then complained of the smallness of the council, and the injustice of leaving so grave and delicate a decision to a few prelates. Let Abélard be given into the care of his abbot, who should take him back to St. Denis and have him judged by an assembly of expert theologians. The legate liked the idea. The Rheims people regarded it, for the moment, as an effective removal of Abélard from their neighbourhood. The proposal was agreed to, and the legate then proceeded to say the Mass of the Holy Ghost.

Meantime Archbishop Ralph informed Abélard of the decision. Unsatisfactory as the delay was, he must have been grateful for an escape from the power of Rheims. He turned indifferently from the further session of the council. Unfortunately another conference was even then taking place between Alberic, Ralph, and Conon; and Abélard was presently summoned to bring his book before the council.

Alberic and Lotulphe were, on reflection, dissatisfied with the result. Their influence would have no weight in a trial at Paris, and their ambition required the sacrifice of the famous master. They therefore went to the archbishop with a complaint that people would take it to be a confession of incompetency if he allowed the case to go before another court. The three approached the legate again, and now reminded him that Abélard’s work was published without episcopal permission, and could justly be condemned on that ground. As ignorant of canon law as he was of theology, and seeing the apparent friendlessness of Abélard, and therefore the security of a condemnation, Conon agreed to their proposal.

Abélard had long looked forward to the hour of his appearance before the Council. It was to be an hour of supreme triumph. The papal legate and the archbishop in their resplendent robes in the sanctuary; the circle of bishops and abbots and canons; the crowd of priests, theologians, masters, and clerics; the solemn pulpit of the cathedral church, from which he should make his highest effort of dialectics and oratory; the scattered rivals, and the triumphant return to his pupils. He had rehearsed it daily for a month or more. But the sad, heart-rending reality of his appearance! He was brought in, condemned. He stood in the midst of the thronged cathedral, with the brand of heresy on his brow, he, the intellectual and moral master of them all. A fire was kindled there before the Council. There was no need for Geoffrey of Chartres to come, the tears coursing down his cheeks, to tell him his book was judged and condemned. Quietly, but with a fierce accusation of God Himself in his broken heart, as he afterwards said, he cast his treasured work in the flames.

Even in that awful moment the spirit of comedy must needs assert its mocking presence; or is it only part of the tragedy? Whilst the yellow parchment crackled in the flames, some one who stood by the legate muttered that one passage in it said that God the Father alone was omnipotent. Soulless politician as he was, the ignorant legate fastened on the charge as a confirmation of the justice of his sentence. ‘I could scarcely believe that even a child would fall into such an error,’ said the brute, with an affectation of academic dignity. ‘And yet,’ a sarcastic voice fell on his ear, quoting the Athanasian Creed, ‘and yet there are not Three omnipotent, but One.’ The bold speaker was Tirric, the Breton scholastic, who, as we have seen, probably instructed Abélard in mathematics. His bishop immediately began to censure him for his neat exhibition of the legate’s ignorance, but the teacher was determined to express his disgust at the proceedings. ‘You have condemned a child of Israel,’ he cried, lashing the ‘conventicle’ with the scornful words of Daniel, ‘without inquiry or certainty. Return ye to the judgment seat, and judge the judges.’

The archbishop then stepped forward to put an end to the confusion. ‘It is well,’ he said, making a tardy concession to conscience, ‘that the brother have an opportunity of defending his faith before us all.’ Abélard gladly prepared to do so, but Alberic and Lotulphe once more opposed the idea. No further discussion was needed, they urged. The council had finished its work; Abélard’s errors had been detected and corrected. If it were advisable to have a profession of faith from Brother Peter, let him recite the Athanasian Creed. And lest Abélard should object that he did not know the Creed by heart, they produced a copy of it. The politic prelates were easily induced to take their view. In point of fact the archbishop’s proposal was a bare compliance with the canons. Abélard’s book had been condemned on the ground that it had been issued without authorisation; nothing had been determined as to the legitimacy of its contents. The canons still demanded that he should be heard before he was sent out into the world with an insidious stigma of heresy.

But charity and justice had no part in that pitiful conventicle. Archbishop and legate thought it politic to follow the ruling of Alberic to the end, and the parchment was handed to Abélard. And priest and prelate, monk and abbot, shamelessly stood around, whilst the greatest genius of the age, devoted to religion in every gift of his soul, as each one knew, faltered out the familiar symbol. ‘Good Jesus, where wert thou?’ Abélard asks, long years afterwards. There are many who ask it to-day.

So ended the holy Council of Soissons, Provincial Synod of the arch-diocese of Rheims, held under the ægis of a papal legate, in the year of grace 1121. Its acta are not found in Richard, or Labbé, or Hefele: they ‘have not been preserved.’ There is an earlier ecclesiastical council that earned the title of the latrocinium (‘rogues’ council’), and we must not plagiarise. Ingenious and audacious as the apologetic historian is, he has not attempted to defend the Council of Soissons. But his condemnation of it is mildness itself compared with his condemnation of Abélard.

For a crowning humiliation Abélard was consigned by the council to a large monastery near Soissons, which served as jail or penitentiary for that ecclesiastical province. The abbot of this monastery, Geoffrey of the Stag’s-neck, had assisted at the council, and Dom Gervaise would have it that he had secured Abélard for his own purposes. He thinks the abbot was looking to the great legal advantage, in the frequent event of a lawsuit, of having such an orator as Abélard in his monastery. It is a possibility, like many other details in Gervaise’s Life of Abélard. In forbidding his return either to Maisoncelle or to St. Denis, and definitely consigning him to the abbey of St. Médard, the council was once more treating him as a legally convicted heretic. As far as it was concerned, it was filling the chalice of the poor monk’s bitterness. It is a mere accident that Geoffrey was a man of some culture, and was so far influenced by the hideous spectacle he had witnessed as to receive Brother Peter with sympathy and some honour.

CHAPTER VIII

CLOUD UPON CLOUD

The abbey of St. Médard, to which Abélard accompanied his friendly jailer, was a very large monastery on the right bank of the Aisne, just outside Soissons. At that time it had a community of about four hundred monks. It derived a considerable revenue from its two hundred and twenty farms, yet it bore so high a repute for regular discipline that it had become a general ‘reformatory school’ for the district. ‘To it were sent the ignorant to be instructed, the depraved to be corrected, the obstinate to be tamed,’ says a work of the time; though it is not clear how Herr Hausrath infers from this that the abbey also served the purpose of monastic asylum. For this character of penitentiary the place was chosen for the confinement of Abélard. Thither he retired to meditate on the joy and the wisdom of ‘conversion.’ ‘God! How furiously did I accuse Thee!’ he says of those days. The earlier wound had been preceded, he admits, by his sin; this far deeper and more painful wound had been brought upon him by his ‘love of our faith.’

Whether Abbot Geoffrey thought Abélard an acquisition or no, there was one man in authority at St. Médard who rejoiced with a holy joy at his advent. This was no other than Abélard’s earlier acquaintance, St. Goswin. The zealous student had become a monastic reformer, and had recently been appointed Prior[18] of St. Médard. In the recently reformed abbey, with a daily arrival of ‘obstinate monks to be trained,’ and a convenient and well-appointed ascetical armoury or whipping-room, the young saint was in a congenial element. Great was his interest when ‘Pope Innocent,’[19] as his biographers say, ‘sent Abélard to be confined in the abbey, and, like an untamed rhinoceros, to be caught in the bonds of discipline.’ Abélard was not long in the abbey before the tamer approached this special task that Providence had set him. We can imagine Abélard’s feelings when the obtuse monk took him aside, and exhorted him ‘not to think it a misfortune or an injury that he had been sent there; he was not so much confined in a prison, as protected from the storms of the world.’ He had only to live piously, and set a good example, and all would be well. Abélard was in no mood to see the humour of the situation. He peevishly retorted that ‘there were a good many who talked about piety and did not know what piety was.’ Then the prior, say his biographers, saw that it was not a case for leniency, but for drastic measures. ‘Quite true,’ he replied, ‘there are many who talk about piety, and do not know what it is. But if we find you saying or doing anything that is not pious, we shall show you that we know how to treat its contrary, at all events.’ The saint prevailed once more—in the biography: ‘the rhinoceros was cowed, and became very quiet, more patient under discipline, more fearful of the lash, and of a saner and less raving mind.’

Fortunately, the boorish saint had a cultured abbot, one at least who did not hold genius to be a diabolical gift, and whose judgment of character was not wholly vitiated by the crude mystic and monastic ideal of the good people of the period. The abbot seems to have saved Abélard from the zeal of the prior, and possibly he found companionable souls amongst the four hundred monks of the great abbey, some of whom were nobles by birth. We know, at all events, that in the later period he looked back on the few months spent at St. Médard with a kindly feeling.

His imprisonment did not last long. When the proceedings of the council were made known throughout the kingdom, there was a strong outburst of indignation. It must not be supposed that the Council of Soissons illustrates or embodies the spirit of the period or the spirit of the Church; this feature we shall more nearly find in the Council of Sens, in 1141. The conventicle had, in truth, revealed some of the evils of the time: the danger of the Church’s excessively political attitude and administration, the brutality of the spirit it engendered with regard to heresy, the fatal predominance of dogma over ethic. But, in the main, the conventicle exhibits the hideous triumph of a few perverse individuals, who availed themselves of all that was crude and ill-advised in the machinery of the Church. When, therefore, such men as Tirric, and Geoffrey of Chartres, and Geoffrey of the Stag’s-neck, spread their story abroad, there were few who did not sympathise with Abélard. The persecutors soon found it necessary to defend themselves; there was a chaos of mutual incriminations. Even Alberic and Lotulphe tried to cast the blame on others. The legate found it expedient to attribute the whole proceeding openly to ‘French malice.’ He had been ‘compelled for a time to humour their spleen,’ as Abélard puts it, but he presently revoked the order of confinement in St. Médard, and gave Abélard permission to return to St. Denis.

It was a question of Scylla or Charybdis, of Prior Goswin or Abbot Adam. The legate seems to have acted in good faith in granting the permission—perhaps we should say in good policy, for he again acted out of discreet regard for circumstances; but when we find Abélard availing himself of what was no more than a permission to return to St. Denis we have a sufficient indication of the quality of his experience at St. Médard. He does indeed remark that the monks of the reformed abbey had been friendly towards him, though this is inspired by an obvious comparison with his later experience at St. Denis. But St. Médard was a prison; that sufficed to turn the scale. A removal from the penitentiary would be equivalent, in the eyes of France, to a revocation of the censure passed on him. So with a heart that was hopelessly drear, not knowing whether to smile or weep, he went back, poor sport of the gods as he was, to the royal abbey.

For a few months Brother Peter struggled bravely with the hard task the fates had set him. He was probably wise enough to refrain from inveighing, in season and out of season, against the ‘intolerable uncleanness’ of Adam and his monks. Possibly he nursed a hope—or was nursed by a hope—of having another ‘cell’ entrusted to his charge. In spite of the irregularity of the abbey, formal religious exercises were extensively practised. All day and night the chant of the breviary was heard in the monastic chapel. There was also a large and busy scriptorium; the archivium of the ancient abbey was a treasury of interesting old documents; and there was a relatively good library. It was in the latter that Brother Peter found his next adventure, and one that threatened to be the most serious of all.

Seeing the present futility of his theological plans, he had turned to the study of history. There was a copy of Bede’s History of the Apostles in the library, and he says that he one day, ‘by chance,’ came upon the passage in which Bede deals with St. Denis. The Anglo-Saxon historian would not admit the French tradition about St. Denis. He granted the existence of a St. Denis, but said that he had been Bishop of Corinth, not of Athens. The legend about the martyrdom of Denis the Areopagite, with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius, at Paris in the first century, is now almost universally rejected by Roman Catholic historians, not to mention others. It is, however, still enshrined with honour in that interesting compendium of myths of the Christian era, the Roman breviary, and is read with religious solemnity by every priest and every monastic choir in the Catholic world on the annual festival.

However, the abbey of St. Denis, the monastery that owed all its wealth and repute to its possession of the bones of ‘the Areopagite,’ was the last place in the world in which to commence a rationalistic attack on the legend. With his usual want of tact and foresight Brother Peter showed the passage in Bede to some of his fellow-monks, ‘in joke,’ he says; he might as well have cut the abbot’s throat, or destroyed the wine-cellar ‘in joke.’ There was a violent commotion. Heresy about the Trinity was bad, but heresy about the idol of the royal abbey was more touching. It is not quite clear that Abélard came to the opinion of modern religious historians, that the St. Denis of Paris was a much later personage than the Areopagite of the Acts of the Apostles, but he seems to hold that opinion. In any case, the monks felt that to be the substance of his discovery, and held it to be an attack on the glory of the abbey. Venerable Bede was, they bluntly replied, a liar. One of their former abbots, Hilduin, had made a journey to Greece for the special purpose of verifying the story.

When the monks flew to Abbot Adam with the story of Brother Peter’s latest outbreak, Adam saw in it an opportunity of terrifying the rebel into submission, if not of effectually silencing him. He called a chapter of the brethren. One’s pen almost tires of describing the cruel scenes to which those harsh days lent themselves. The vindictive abbot perched on his high chair, prior and elder brethren sitting beside him; the hundreds of black-robed, shaven monks lining the room; on his knees in the centre the pale, nervous figure of the Socrates of Gaul. With a mock solemnity, Abbot Adam delivers himself of the sentence. Brother Peter has crowned his misdeeds, in his pride of mind, with an attack, not merely on the abbey that sheltered him, but on the honour and the safety of France. The matter is too serious to be punished by even the most severe methods at the command of the abbey. Brother Peter is to be handed over to the king, as a traitor to the honour of the country. The poor monk, now thoroughly alarmed, abjectly implores the abbot to deal with him in the usual way. Let him be scourged—anything to escape the uncertain temper of King Louis. No, the abbey must be rid of him. He is taken away into confinement, with an injunction that he be carefully watched until it is convenient to send him to Paris.

There were, however, some of the monks who were disgusted at the savage proceeding. A few days afterwards he was assisted to escape from the monastic dungeon during the night, and, ‘in utter despair,’ he fled from the abbey, with a few of his former pupils. It was, in truth, a desperate move. As a deserter from the abbey, the canons required that two stalwart brothers should be sent in pursuit of him, and that he be reimprisoned. As a fugitive from the king’s justice, to which he had been publicly destined, he was exposed to even harsher treatment. However, he made his way into Champagne once more, and threw himself on the mercy of his friends.

One of the friends whom he had attached to himself during his stay at Maisoncelle was prior of St. Ayoul, near the gates of Provins. It was a priory belonging to the monks of Troyes, and both Hatton, Bishop of Troyes, and Theobald, Count of Champagne, were in sympathy with the fugitive. The prior, therefore, received Abélard into his convent, to afford at least time for reflection. His condition, however, was wholly uncanonical, and the prior, as well as the abbot of St. Peter of Troyes, urged him to secure some regularity for his absence from St. Denis, so that they might lawfully shelter him at St. Ayoul. Abélard summoned what diplomatic faculty he had, and wrote to St. Denis.

‘Peter, monk by profession and sinner by his deeds, to his dearly beloved father, Adam, and to his most dear brethren and fellow-monks,’ was the inscription of the epistle. Brother Peter, it must be remembered, was fighting almost for life; and he was not of the heroic stuff of his friend and pupil, Arnold of Brescia. There are critics who think he descended lower than this concession to might, that he deliberately denied his conviction for the purpose of conciliating Adam. Others, such as Poole, Deutsch, and Hausrath, think the letter does not support so grave a censure. The point of the letter is certainly to convey the impression that Bede had erred, and that Abélard had no wish to urge his authority against the belief of the monks. In point of fact, Bede is at variance with Eusebius and Jerome, and it is not impossible that Abélard came sincerely to modify the first impression he had received from Bede’s words; in the circumstances, and in the then state of the question, this would not be unreasonable. At the same time a careful perusal of the letter gives one the impression that it is artistic and diplomatic; that Abélard has learned tact, rather than unlearned history. It reads like an effort to say something conciliatory about St. Denis, without doing serious violence to the writer’s conscience. Perhaps the abbot of St. Peter’s could have thrown some light on its composition.

Shortly afterwards Abbot Adam came to visit Count Theobald, and Abélard’s friends made a direct effort to conciliate him. The prior of St. Ayoul and Abélard hurried to the count’s castle, and begged him to prevail upon his guest to release Abélard from his obedience. The count tried to persuade Adam to do so, but without success. Adam seemed determined, not so much to rid his happy convent of a malcontent, as to crush Abélard. He found plenty of pious garbs to cover his vindictiveness with. At first he deprecated the idea that it was a matter for his personal decision. Then, after a consultation with the monks who accompanied him, he gravely declared that it was inconsistent with the honour of the abbey to release Abélard; ‘the brethren had said that, whereas Abélard’s choice of their abbey had greatly redounded to its glory, his flight from it had covered them with shame.’ He threatened both Abélard and the prior of St. Ayoul with the usual canonical penalties, unless the deserter returned forthwith to obedience.

Adam’s departure, after this fulmination, left Abélard and his friends sadly perplexed. The abbot had the full force of canon law on his side, and he was evidently determined to exact his pound of flesh. However, whilst they were busy framing desperate resolves, they received information of the sudden death of Abbot Adam. He died a few days after leaving Champagne, on the 19th of February 1122. The event brought relief from the immediate pressure. Some time would elapse before it would be necessary to resume the matter with Adam’s successor, and there was room for hope that the new abbot would not feel the same personal vindictiveness.

The monk who was chosen by the Benedictines of St. Denis to succeed Adam was one of the most remarkable characters of that curious age. Scholar, soldier, and politician, he had an enormous influence on the life of France during the early decades of the twelfth century. Nature intended him for a minister and a great soldier: chance made him a monk; worldly brothers made him an abbot, and St. Bernard completed the anomaly by ‘converting’ him in 1127. At the time we are speaking of he was the more active and prominent of two men whom Bernard called ‘the two calamities of the Church of France.’ He was born of poor parents, near one of the priories or dependencies of St. Denis. His talent was noticed by the monks, and his ‘vocation’ followed as a matter of course. He was studying in the monastic school when King Philip brought his son Louis to St. Denis, and the abbot sent for him, and made him companion to the royal pupil. He thus obtained a strong influence over the less gifted prince, and when Louis came to the throne in 1108, Suger became the first royal councillor. Being only a deacon in orders, there was nothing to prevent him heading the troops, directing a campaign, or giving his whole time to the affairs of the kingdom. He had proved so useful a minister that, when some of the monks of St. Denis came in great trepidation to tell the king they had chosen him for abbot, they were angrily thrust into prison. Suger himself was in Rome at the time, discharging a mission from the king, and he tells us, in his autobiography, of the perplexity the dilemma caused him. However, before he reached France, the king had concluded that an abbot could be as useful as a prior in an accommodating age. In the sequel, St. Denis became more royal, and less abbatial than ever—until 1127. St. Bernard complained that it seemed to have become the ‘war office’ and the ‘ministry of justice’ of the kingdom.

Abélard now seems to have been taken in hand by a more astute admirer, Burchard, Bishop of Meaux. They went to Paris together, and apparently did a little successful diplomacy before the arrival and consecration of Suger. The newly created abbot (he had been ordained priest the day before his consecration) refused to undo the sentence of his predecessor. He was bound by the decision of the abbey, he said; in other words, there was still a strong vindictive feeling against Abélard in the abbey, which it was not politic to ignore. It is quite impossible that Suger himself took the matter seriously.

But before Suger’s arrival Abélard and his companions had made friends at court. Whether through his pupils, many of whom were nobles, or through his family, is unknown, but Abélard for the second time found influence at court when ecclesiastical favour was denied. One of the leading councillors was Étienne de Garlande, the royal seneschal, and means were found to interest him in the case of the unfortunate monk. We have already seen that Stephen had ecclesiastical ambition in his earlier years, and had become a deacon and a canon of Étampes. But when his patron, King Philip, submitted to the Church and to a better ideal of life, Stephen concluded that the path to ecclesiastical dignities would be less smooth and easy for the ‘illiterate and unchaste,’ and he turned to secular ambition. At the time of the events we are reviewing he and Suger were the virtual rulers of France; from the ecclesiastical point of view he was the man whom St. Bernard associated with Suger as ‘a calamity of the Church.’

‘Through the mediation of certain friends’ Abélard had enlisted the interest of this powerful personage, and the court was soon known to favour his suit. There are many speculations as to the motive of the king and his councillors in intervening in the monastic quarrel. Recent German historians see in the incident an illustration of a profound policy on the part of the royal council. They think the king was then endeavouring to strengthen his authority by patronising the common people in opposition to the tyrannical and troublesome nobility. Following out a parallel policy with regard to the Church, whose nobles were equally tyrannical and troublesome, Stephen and Suger would naturally befriend the lower clergy in opposition to the prelates. Hence the royal intervention on behalf of the monk of St. Denis is associated with the intervention on the side of the peasantry a few years before.

The theory is ingenious, but hardly necessary. Abélard says that the court interfered because it did not desire any change in the free life of the royal abbey, and consequently preferred to keep him out of it. That is also ingenious, and complimentary to Abélard. But it is not a little doubtful whether anybody credited him with the smallest influence at St. Denis. We shall probably not be far from the truth if we suppose a court intrigue on the monk’s behalf which his friends did not think it necessary to communicate fully to him. Geoffrey of Chartres and other friends of his were French nobles. Many of his pupils had that golden key which would at any time give access to Étienne de Garlande.

In any case Stephen and Suger had a private discussion of the matter, and the two politicians soon found a way out of the difficulty. Abélard received an order to appear before the king and his council. The comedy—though it was no comedy for Abélard—probably took place at St. Denis. Louis the Fat presided, in robes of solemn purple, with ermine border. Étienne de Garlande and the other councillors glittered at his side. Abbot Suger and his council were there to defend the ‘honour’ of the abbey; and Brother Peter, worn with anxiety and suffering, came to make a plea for liberty. Louis bids the abbot declare what solution of the difficulty his chapter has discovered. Suger gravely explains that the honour of their abbey does not permit them to allow the fugitive monk to join any other monastery. So much to save the face of the abbey. Yet there is a middle course possible, the abbot graciously continues: Brother Peter may be permitted to live a regular life in the character of a hermit. Brother Peter expresses his satisfaction at the decision—it was precisely the arrangement he desired—and departs from the abbey with his friends, a free man once more, never again, he thinks, to fall into the power of monk or prelate.

CHAPTER IX

BACK TO CHAMPAGNE

The scene of the next act in Abélard’s dramatic career is a bright, restful valley in the heart of Champagne. It is the summer of 1122, and the limpid Arduzon rolls through enchantingly in its course towards the Seine. In the meadow beside it are two huts and a small oratory, rudely fashioned from the branches of trees and reeds from the river, and daubed over with mud. No other sign of human presence can be seen. Abélard and one companion are the only human beings to be found for miles. And even all thought of the cities of men and the sordid passions they shelter is arrested by the great forests of oak and beech which hem in the narrow horizon and guard the restfulness of the valley.

By the terms of Suger’s decision Abélard could neither lodge with secular friends nor enter any cell, priory, or abbey. Probably this coercion into leading an eremitical life was unnecessary. The experience of the last three years had made a hermitage of his heart; nothing would be more welcome to him than this quiet valley. It was a spot he had noticed in earlier years. In his ancient chronicle Robert of Auxerre says that Abélard had lived there before; Mr. Poole thinks it was to the same part of Champagne that he resorted on the three occasions of his going to the province of Count Theobald. That would at least have to be understood in a very loose sense. On the two former occasions he had found a home prepared, a cell and a priory, respectively; he had now to build a hut with his own hands. It was a deserted spot he had chosen, he tells us; and Heloise adds, in one of her letters, that before Abélard’s coming it had been the haunt of robbers and the home of foxes and wild boars, like the neighbouring forest of Fontainebleau.

Abélard must have seen this quiet side-valley in passing along the Seine on the road to Paris. It was some twelve miles from Troyes, where he had a number of friends; and when he expressed a desire to retire to it with his companion, they obtained for him the gift of the meadow through which the Arduzon ran. Bishop Hatton gave them permission to build an oratory, and they put together a kind of mud hut—‘in honour of the Blessed Trinity’! Here the heavy heart began once more to dream of peace. Men had tortured him with a caricature of the divine justice when his aim and purpose had been of the purest. He had left their ignorant meddlesomeness and their ugly passions far away beyond the forests. Alone with God and with nature in her fairest mood, he seemed to have escaped securely from an age that could not, or would not, understand his high ideal.

So for some time no sound was heard in the valley but the song of the birds and the grave talk of the two hermits and the frequent chant in the frail temple of the Trinity. But Abélard’s evil genius was never far from him; it almost seems as if it only retired just frequently enough and long enough to let his heart regain its full power of suffering. The unpractical scholar had overlooked a material point, the question of sustenance. Beech-nuts and beech-leaves and roots and the water of the river become monotonous. Abélard began to cast about for some source of revenue. ‘To dig I was not able, to beg I was ashamed,’ he says, in the familiar words. There was only one thing he could do—teach.

Probably he began by giving quiet lessons to the sons of his neighbours. He had only to let his intention be known in Troyes, and he would have as many pupils as he desired. But he soon found that, as was inevitable, he had released a torrent. The words in which he describes this third confluence of his streams of ‘barbarians’ do not give us the impression that he struggled against his fate. With all his genius he remained a Breton—short of memory and light of heart. The gladdening climate of mid-France and the brightness and beauty of the valley of the Seine quickened his old hopes and powers. The word ran through the kingdoms of Gaul, and across the sea and over the southern hills, that Abélard was lecturing once more. And many hundreds, probably thousands, of youths gathered their scant treasures, and turned their faces towards the distant solitude of Nogent-sur-Seine.

Then was witnessed a scene that is quite unique in the annals of education. Many centuries before, the deserts of Egypt had seen a vast crowd of men pour out from the cities, and rush eagerly into their thankless solitude. That was under the fresh-born influence of a new religious story, the only force thought competent to inspire so great an abdication. The twelfth century saw another great stream of men pouring eagerly into a solitude where there was no luxury but the rude beauty of nature. Week by week the paths that led into the valley by the Arduzon discharged their hundreds of pilgrims. The rough justice of nature offered no advantage to wealth. Rich and poor, noble and peasant, young and old, they raised their mud-cabins or their moss-covered earth-works, each with his own hand. Hundreds of these rude dwellings dotted the meadow and sheltered in the wood. A bundle of straw was the only bed to be found in them. Their tables were primitive mounds of fresh turf; the only food a kind of coarse peasant-bread, with roots and herbs and a draught of sweet water from the river. The meats and wines and pretty maids and soft beds of the cities were left far away over the hills. For the great magician had extended his wand once more, and the fascination of his lectures was as irresistible as ever.

They had built a new oratory, in wood and stone, for the loved master; and each morning, as the full blaze of the sun fell upon the strangely scarred face of the valley, they arose from the hay and straw, splashed or dipped in the running river, and trooped to the spot where Abélard fished for their souls with the charming bait of his philosophy. Then when the master tired of reading Scripture, and of his pathetic task of finding analogies of the infinite in the finite, they relaxed to such games and merriment as youth never leaves behind.

Discipline, however, was strict. There is a song, composed at the time by one of the pupils, which affords an instructive glimpse of the life of the strange colony. Some one seems to have informed Abélard of a group of students who were addicted to the familiar vice. He at once banished them from the colony, threatening to abandon the lectures unless they retired to Quincey. The poet of the group was an English youth, named Hilary, who had come to France a little before. Amongst his Versus et ludi, edited by Champollion, we find his poetic complaint of the falseness of the charge and the cruelty of their expulsion. It is a simple, vigorous, rhymed verse in Latin, with a French refrain. It is obviously intended to be sung in chorus, and it thus indirectly illustrates one of the probable recreations of the youths who were thus thrown upon their own resources. Many another of Hilary’s rough songs must have rung through the valley at nightfall. Perhaps Abélard recovered his old gift, and contributed to the harmless gaiety of the colony. Seared and scarred as he was, there was nothing sombre or sour about his piety, save in the moments of actual persecution. With all his keen and living faith and his sense of remorse, he remains a Breton, a child of the sun-light, sensitive to the gladdening force of the world. Not until his last year did he accept the ascetic view of pleasures which were non-ethical. Watchful over the faith and morals of the colony, he would make no effort to moderate the loud song with which they responded to the warm breath of nature.

The happiness of his little world surged in the heart of the master for a time, but nature gave him a capacity for, and a taste of, manifold happiness, only that he might suffer the more. ‘I had one enemy—echo,’ he says in his autobiography. He was soon made uneasily conscious that the echo of his teaching and the echo of the glad life of the colony had reached Clairvaux.

The first definite complaint that reached his ears referred to the dedication of his oratory. Though formally dedicated to the Trinity, it was especially devoted to the Holy Spirit, in the character of Paraclete (Comforter); indeed both it and the later nunnery were known familiarly as ‘the Paraclete.’ Some captious critics had, it appears, raised a question whether it was lawful to dedicate a chapel to one isolated member of the Trinity. The question was absurd, for the Church frequently offers worship to the Holy Spirit, without mentioning the Father and the Son. The cautious Abélard, however, defends his dedication at great length. A second attack was made under the pretext of questioning the propriety of an image of the Trinity which was found in the oratory. Some sculptor in the colony had endeavoured to give an ingenious representation of the Trinity in stone. He had carved three equal figures from one block of stone, and had cut on them inscriptions appropriate to each Person of the Trinity.[20] Such devices were common in the Church, common in all Trinitarian religions, in fact. But Abélard was credited with intentions and interpretations in everything he did. Neither of these incidents proved serious, however. It was not until Abélard heard that Alberic and Lotulphe were inciting ‘the new apostles’ to assail him that he became seriously alarmed. The new apostles were Bernard of Clairvaux and Norbert of Prémontré.

Not many leagues from the merry valley on the Arduzon was another vale that had been peopled by men from the cities. It was a dark, depressing valley, into which the sun rarely struggled. The Valley of Wormwood men called it, for it was in the heart of a wild, sombre, chilly forest. The men who buried themselves in it were fugitives, not merely from the hot breath of the cities and the ugly deeds of their fellows, but even from the gentler inspiration of nature, even from its purest thrills. They had had a vision of a golden city, and believed it was to be entered by the path of self-torture. The narrow windows of their monastery let in but little of the scanty light of the valley. With coarse bread and herbs, and a few hours’ sleep on boxes of dried leaves, they made a grudging concession to the law of living. But a joke was a sacrilege in the Valley of Wormwood, and a song a piece of supreme folly. The only sound that told the ravens and the owls of the presence of man was the weird, minor chant for hours together, that did not even seem to break the silence of the sombre spot. By day, the white-robed, solemn shades went about their work in silence. The Great Father had made the pilgrimage to heaven so arduous a task that they dare not talk by the wayside.

Foremost among them was a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant little man. The face was white and worn with suffering, the form enfeebled with disease and exacting nervous exaltation; but there was a light of supreme strength and of joy in the penetrating eyes. He was a man who saw the golden city with so near, so living a vision, that he was wholly impatient of the trivial pleasures of earth: a man formed in the mould of world-conquerors and world-politicians, in whose mind accident had substituted a supernatural for a natural ideal: a man of such intensity and absorption of thought that he was almost incapable of admitting a doubt as to the correctness of his own judgment and purpose and the folly of all that was opposed to it: a man in whom an altruistic ethic might transform, or disguise, but could never suppress, the demand of the entire nature for self-assertion. This was Bernard of Clairvaux, who had founded the monastery in the deepest poverty ten years before. He was soon to be the most powerful man in Christendom. And he held that, if the instinct of reasoning and the impulse of love did indeed come from God and not from the devil, they were of those whimsical gifts, such as the deity of the Middle Ages often gave, which were given with a trust they would be rejected.

The other new apostle was St. Norbert, the founder of the Premonstratensian canons. He had fruitlessly endeavoured to reform the existing order of canons, and had then withdrawn to form a kind of monastery of canons at Prémontré, not far from Laon, where he occasionally visited Anselm. His disciples entered zealously into the task of policeing the country. No disorder in faith or morals escaped their notice; and although Norbert was far behind Bernard in political ability, the man who incurred his pious wrath was in an unenviable position. He had influence with the prelates of the Church, on account of his reforms and the sanctity of his life; he had a profound influence over the common people, not only through his stirring sermons, but also through the miracles he wrought. Abélard frequently bases his rationalistic work on the fact, which he always assumes to be uncontroverted, that the age of miracles is over. Norbert, on the contrary, let it be distinctly understood that he was a thaumaturgus of large practice. Abélard ridiculed his pretensions, and the stories told of him. Even in his later sermons we find him scornfully ‘exposing’ the miracles of Norbert and his companions. They used to slip medicaments unobserved into the food of the sick, he says, and accept the glory of the miracle if the fever was cured. They even attempted to raise the dead to life; and when the corpse retained its hideous rigidity after they had lain long hours in prayer in the sanctuary, they would turn round on the simple folk in the church and upbraid them for the littleness of their faith. This poor trickery was the chief source of the power of the Premonstratensian canons over the people. Abélard could not repose and ridicule it with impunity.

These were the new apostles—‘pseudo-apostles’ Heloise calls them—whom Alberic and Lotulphe now incited to take up the task which they themselves dared pursue no longer. And so, says Abélard, ‘they heaped shameless calumnies on me at every opportunity, and for some time brought much discredit upon me in the eyes of certain ecclesiastical as well as secular dignitaries.’ We shall find that, when Abélard stands before the ecclesiastical tribunal a second time, many of his earlier friends have deserted him, and have fallen under the wide-reaching influence of St. Bernard.

But it is strenuously denied by prejudiced admirers of St. Bernard that he had anything to do with Abélard at this period. Father Hefele, for instance, thinks that Abélard is guilty of some chronological confusion in the passage quoted above; looking back on the events of his life, he has unconsciously transferred the later activity of Bernard to the earlier date, not clearly separating it in time from the work of Alberic and Norbert. Unfortunately, the ‘Story of my Calamities’ was written before Bernard commenced his open campaign against Abélard. We shall see later that this is beyond dispute. There is, then, no question of confusion.

Mr. Cotter Morison says it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard showed any active hostility to Abélard at that time, and he thinks the charge springs merely from an over-excited imagination. Mr. Morison is scarcely happier here than in his earlier passage. It must be understood that this reluctance to admit the correctness of Abélard’s complaint is inspired by a passage in one of Bernard’s letters. In writing to William of St. Thierry (ep. cccxxvii. in Migne), fifteen years afterwards, he excuses his inaction with regard to Abélard (whose heresies William has put before him) on the ground that he ‘was ignorant of most, indeed nearly all, of these things.’ This is interpreted to mean that he knew little or nothing about Abélard until 1141, and the Abélardists generally give a more or less polite intimation that it is—what Mr. Poole explicitly calls another statement of Bernard’s—a lie. Cotter Morison, however, interprets ‘these things’ to mean ‘the special details of Abélard’s heresy,’ and it is therefore the more strange that he should join the Bernardists in straining the historical evidence. Yet he is probably nearer to the truth than the others in his interpretation of Bernard’s words. Even modern writers are too apt at times to follow the practice of the Church, in judging a statement or an action, and put it into one or other of their rigid objective categories. In such cases as this we need a very careful psychological analysis, and are prone to be misled by the Church’s objective moral boxes or classifications. Most probably Bernard wrote in that convenient vagueness of mind which sometimes helps even a saint out of a difficulty, especially where the honour of the Church is involved, and which is accompanied by just a suspicion of ethical discomfort.

In reality, we may, with all sobriety, reverse Mr. Morison’s statement, and say it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard was ignorant of, or indifferent to, Abélard’s activity at that time. Ten years previously, when Bernard led his little band of white-robed monks to their wretched barn in the Vale of Bitterness, he went to Châlons to be consecrated by William of Champeaux. William conceived a very strong affection for the young abbot, and he shortly after nursed him through a long and severe illness. So great was their intimacy and so frequent their intercourse that people said Châlons and Clairvaux had changed places. This began only twelve months after William had been driven from Paris, in intense anger, by the heretical upstart, Peter Abélard. Again, Alberic was another of Bernard’s intimate friends. A year or two before Abélard founded the Paraclete—that is to say, about the time of the Council of Soissons—we find Bernard ‘imploring’ (so even Duchesne puts it) the Pope to appoint Alberic to the vacant see of Châlons after the death of William. He failed to obtain it, but afterwards secured for him the archbishopric of Bourges. Anselm of Laon was also a friend of Bernard’s. Moreover, Clairvaux was only about forty miles from Troyes, where Abélard’s latest feat was the supreme topic.

It is thus quite impossible for any but a prejudiced apologist to question Bernard’s interest in the life of the Paraclete and its founder. Even were he not the heresy-hunter and universal reformer that he notoriously was, we should be compelled to think that he had heard all the worst charges against Abélard over and over again before 1124. To conceive Bernard as entombed in his abbey, indifferent to everything in this world except the grave, is the reverse of the truth. Bernard had a very profound belief in what some theologians call ‘the law of secondary causes’—God does not do directly what he may accomplish by means of human instruments. Prayer was necessary; but so were vigilance, diplomacy, much running to and fro, and a vast correspondence. He watched the Church of God with the fiery zeal of a St. Paul. He knew everything and everybody: smote archbishops and kings as freely as his own monks: hunted down every heretic that appeared in France in his day: played even a large part in the politics of Rome. And we are to suppose that such a man was ignorant of the presence of the gay, rationalistic colony a few leagues away from his abbey, and of the unique character and profound importance to the Church of that vast concourse of youths; or that he refrained from examining the teaching of this man who had an unprecedented influence over the youth of France, or from using the fulness of his power against him when he found that his teaching was the reverse of all he held sacred and salutary.

We may take Abélard’s statement literally. Bernard and Norbert were doing the work of his rivals, and were doing it effectively. They who had supported him at Soissons or afterwards were being poisoned against him. Count Theobald and Geoffrey of Chartres are probably two whom he had in mind. He feels that the net is being drawn close about him through the calumnies of these ubiquitous monks and canons. The peace of the valley is broken; he becomes morbidly sensitive and timorous. Whenever he hears that some synod or conventicle has been summoned he trembles with anxiety and expectation of another Soissons. The awful torture of that hour before the council comes back to him, and mingles with the thought of the power of his new enemies. He must fly from France.

Away to the south, over the Pyrenees, was a land where the poor monk would have found peace, justice, and honour. Spain was just then affording ‘glory to God in heaven, and peace to men of good-will on earth’: it had been snatched from the dominion of Christianity for a century or two. So tolerant and beneficent was the reign of the Moors that even the Jews, crushed, as they were, by seven centuries of persecution, developed their finest powers under it. They were found in the front rank of every art and science; in every field where, not cunning and astuteness, but talent of the highest order and industry, were needed to command success. The Moors had happily degenerated from the fierce proselytism of their religious prophet—whilst the Christians had proportionately enlarged on that of theirs—and their human character was asserting the high natural ideal which it always does when it breaks away from the confining bonds of a narrow dogma.

It was towards this land that Abélard turned his thoughts. It seemed useless for him to exchange one Christian land for another. A few years before, a small group of French monks had created a centre of education in a humble barn on the banks of the Cam; but was England more tolerant than France? He remembered Roscelin’s experience. There were famous schools in Italy; but some of his most brilliant pupils at the Paraclete, such as Arnold of Brescia, had little good to say of Italy. The evil lay in Christianity itself—in that intolerance which its high claim naturally engendered.

One does not like to accept too easily this romantic proposal to find refuge under the protection of the crescent, yet Abélard’s words compel us to do so. ‘God knows,’ he says, ‘that at times I fell into so deep a despair that I proposed to go forth from Christendom and betake me to the heathens ... to live a Christian life amid the enemies of Christ.’ Possibly he would have done so, if he had had a better knowledge of Spain at that time. The Arabs of Spain were no enemies of Christ. Only a most perverse idea of their state could make an able thinker and teacher thus regard a life amongst them as a matter of ultimate and desperate resort. Had they but conquered Europe, materially or morally, half the problems that still harass it—or ought to do—would have been solved long ago. It is pathetic to find Abélard speculating whether the hatred of the Christians for him will not make his path easier to the favour of the Arabs, by producing in them an impression that he had been unfaithful to Christian dogma. The caliphs could keep a watchful eye on the thoughts of professed Mohammedan philosophers, but they cared little about the theories of others. Abélard, with his pronounced tendency to concentrate on natural-religious and ethical truths, would have found an honoured place in Spain; and he would quickly have buried his dogmas there.

Abélard was spared the trial of so desperate and dreadful a secession. Far away on the coast of Brittany an abbot died in 1125, and Abélard’s evil genius put it into the hearts of the monks to offer the vacant dignity to the famous teacher. They sent some of their number to see him at the Paraclete. It seemed a providential outlet from his intolerable position. There were abbeys and abbeys, it was true, but his Breton optimism and trust in fate closed that avenue of speculation. Conon, Duke of Brittany, had agreed to his installation. Suger made no opposition; he probably saw the net that was being drawn about him in France. Abélard turned sadly away from the vale of the Paraclete and the devoted colony, and faced the mists of the west and of the future. ‘I came not to bring peace into the world but the sword.’

CHAPTER X

THE TRIALS OF AN ABBOT

Abélard had, of course, committed another serious blunder in accepting the proffered ‘dignity.’ There was an error on both sides, as there had been in his first fatal assumption of the cowl; though on this occasion the pressure behind him was greater, the alternative less clear, and the prospect at least uncertain. It will be remembered that Abélard probably studied at Locmenach in his early years. This was a branch monastery of the ancient abbey of St. Gildas at Rhuys, on the coast; and it is not impossible that some recollection of the monks of Locmenach entered into his decision to become abbot of St. Gildas. There were probably few abbeys in France at the time which were sufficiently moral and earnest in their life to offer a congenial home to this man who is held up to the blushes of the ages as a sinner, and of whom the Church only speaks in the low and solemn tone that befits a great scandal. If Abélard’s first and chief misfortune is that he was a Christian, his second is that he was a monk.

The abbey of St. Gildas had reached the last stage of monastic decay. The monks did not accept presents of pretty maid-servants, nor receive fine lady visitors in their abbey, like the monks of St. Denis; nor were they eager to have a nunnery of sisters in religion close at hand, like the cloistered canons. Theirs was not a case for the application of the words of Erasmus: ‘Vocantur “patres”—et saepe sunt.’ Each monk had a respectable wife and family on the monastic estate. The outlying farms and cottages were colonised with the women and the little monklings; there was no cemetery of infant bones at or near St. Gildas. Their monasticism consisted in the discharge of their formal religious exercises in church and choir—the chant of the Mass and of the breviary. And when the monk had done his day’s work of seven or eight hours’ chanting, he would retire, like every other Christian, to the bosom of his family. The half-civilised Celtic population of the district were quite content with this version of their duty, and did not refuse them the customary sustenance.

Abélard’s horror on discovering this state of things was equalled by the surprise of the monks when they discovered his Quixotic ideas of monastic life. They only knew Abélard as the amorous troubadour, the teacher who attracted crowds of gay and wealthy scholars wherever he went, the object of the bitter hostility of the monastic reformers whom they detested. It was the Bernardist or Norbertian Abélard whom they had chosen for their abbot. Surprise quickly turned to disgust when the new abbot lectured them in chapter—as a sexless ascetic could so well do—on the beauty of continence and the Rule of St. Benedict. They were rough, ignorant, violent men, and they soon made it clear that reform was hopelessly out of the question.

The very locality proved an affliction. He had exchanged the gentle beauty and the mild climate of the valley of the Seine for a wild, bleak, storm-swept sea-shore. The abbey was built on a small promontory that ran out into the Bay of Biscay, a few leagues to the south of Vannes. It was perched on the edge of the steep granite cliffs, and Abélard’s very pen seems to shudder as he writes of the constant roar of the waves at the foot of the rocks and the sweep of the ocean winds. Behind them stretched a long series of sand-hills. They occupied a scarcely gracious interval between desolation and desolation. For Abélard was not of the temperament to appreciate the grandeur of an ever-restless ocean or to assimilate the strength that is borne on its winds. He was sadly troubled. Here he had fled, he says, to the very end of the earth, the storm-tossed ocean barring his further retreat, yet he finds the world no less repulsive and cruel.

In the character of abbot, Abélard was at liberty to seek what consolation he could outside his abbey. He soon found that there was none to be had in the vicinity of Rhuys. ‘The whole barbarous population of the land was similarly lawless and undisciplined,’ he says; that seems to include such other monks and priests as the locality contained. Even their language was unintelligible to him, he complains; for, although he was a Breton, his ear would only be accustomed to Latin and to Romance French, which would differ considerably from the Celtic Bas-Breton. Whether the lord of the district was equally wild—as seems most probable—or no, the way to his château was barred by another difficulty. He was considered the bitter enemy of the abbey, for he had ‘annexed’ the lands that belonged by right to the monks. Moreover he exacted a heavy tribute from them. They were frequently without food, and wandered about stealing all they could lay their hands on for the support of their wives and families. They violently urged Abélard to fight for their rights and find food for them, instead of giving them his ethereal discourses. And the abbot succeeded just far enough to embitter the usurper against him, without obtaining much for his lawless monks. He found himself in a new dilemma. If he remained in the abbey he was assailed all day by the hungry clamour and the brutal violence of his ‘subjects’; if he went abroad the tyrannical lord threatened to have him done to death by his armed retainers.