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anchor.
PETER ABÉLARD
All rights reserved
Copyrighted in America
PETER ABÉLARD
by
JOSEPH McCABE
Author of
‘Twelve Years in a Monastery,’ etc.
[Illustration]
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
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE QUEST OF MINERVA 1
II. A BRILLIANT VICTORY 18
III. PROGRESS OF THE ACADEMIC WAR 41
IV. THE IDOL OF PARIS 64
V. DEAD SEA FRUIT 96
VI. THE MONK OF ST. DENIS 124
VII. THE TRIAL OF A HERETIC 146
VIII. CLOUD UPON CLOUD 163
IX. BACK TO CHAMPAGNE 181
X. THE TRIALS OF AN ABBOT 202
XI. THE LETTERS OF ABÉLARD AND HELOISE 224
XII. A RETURN TO THE ARENA 253
XIII. THE FINAL BLOW 281
XIV. CONSUMMATUM EST 309
XV. THE INFLUENCE OF ABÉLARD 329
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.
[1] I am thinking, of course, of the thousands of simple folk who
rushed blindfold into the fatal procession towards Jerusalem,
setting their children on their rude carts, and asking naïvely,
at each tower that came in sight in their own France, if that was
the Holy City: those whose bones marked the path to Palestine for
later Crusaders. As to the professional warriors, there is surely
more humour than aught else in the picture of the King of France
and his like setting forth to ‘do penance’ for their vice and
violence by a few months of adventure, carnage, and pillage.
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.
[2] Locmenach = _locus monachorum_, ‘the place of the monks.’ The
older name was Moriacum. It is now called Locminé, and lies a few
miles to the east of Vannes.
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]
[3] The name occurs in a dozen different forms in the ancient
records. I adopt the form which is generally used by modern
French writers. D’Argentré and other historians of Brittany say
that it was not unknown about Nantes in those days. We must
remember that it was the period when nicknames, trade-names,
etc., were passing into surnames. Another pun on the name, which
greatly tickled the mediæval imagination, was ‘Aboilar,’ supposed
to convey the idea that he was a dog who barks at heaven (_aboie
le ciel_). It was perpetrated by Hugo Metellus, a rival master.
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.