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.
[14] The Count of Anjou had just invented them to hide the
enormity of his bunions. Flattering courtiers found them
excellent. The English king’s jester had exaggerated the
turned-up points, and the nobles were driving the practice to
death, as is the aristocratic wont.
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.’
[15] The condition of monasteries will be found treated more
fully on p. 125; that of nunneries on p. 209.
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.