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.
[9] Until a comparatively recent date ‘aller sur le Pré’ meant,
in the language of the Latin Quarter, to settle an affair of
honour.
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.
[10] As a mere illustration of the times—no one would think
of taking it seriously—we may quote the passage referring to
him in Dubois’s _Historia Ecclesiæ Parisiensis_ (also found
in Lobineau). A monk and bishop, Gaufridus Vindoniencensis,
writes to remonstrate with Robert for ‘inventing a new kind of
martyrdom’ ... ‘inter feminas et cum ipsis noctu frequenter
cubare. Hinc tibi videris, ut asseris, Domini Salvatoris digne
bajulare crucem, cum extinguere conaris male accensum carnis
ardorem.’ Later he complains of Robert’s partiality, treating
some nuns with unusual sweetness and others with excessive
acrimony; and amongst the punishments inflicted on the latter he
mentions the penance of ‘stripping.’
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.
[11] It will interest many, however, to learn (from the pages
of Du Boulai’s _Historia Universitatis Parisiensis_) that he is
charged by the querulous Gaufridus Vindoniencensis with teaching
that only the gravest sins were matter for obligatory confession.
These particularly grave transgressions are heresy, schism,
paganism, and Judaism—all non-ethical matters!
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.
[12] When Anselm’s guilt was ultimately proved, people were
somewhat troubled as to the ill-success of their Providential
detective service, until they heard that the goldsmith, in
accusing the canon, had broken faith with him.
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]
[13] Luckily the citizen-parents were wiser than their Solomon
for once. They proposed that the process should commence with
the seven treasurers. In spite of preliminary experiments in
private the canon was convicted. But the reader must go to the
pious Geoffroy’s narrative (_Migne_, vol. 156, col. 1011) to
read how the burglar was tortured, how he obtained release for a
time by trickery, and how, being unable to sleep at night for a
miraculous dove, he finally confessed and restored.
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.’