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.
[4] This and other details I gather from fragments of the minor
poets of the time.
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.
[5] The Notre Dame of to-day, like the earlier Louvre, dates from
the end of the twelfth century.
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.
[6] Lest there be a suspicion of caricature, or of ignorance
(though I too have sat in the chair of scholastic philosophy, and
held grave discourse on _genera_ and _species_), let me remind
the reader of the theological import which was read into the
problem.
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.
[7] The reader would probably not be grateful for a long
explanation of the meaning of the change. It amounted to a
considerable approach of William’s position towards that of
Abélard.
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]
[8] To transfer a chair was frequently a physical operation in
those days. There is, in one of the old records, a story of
a dissatisfied master and his pupils removing their chair to
another town, higher up the river. They were not welcome, it
seems, and their chair was pitched into the river to find its way
home.
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.