BACK TO CHAMPAGNE
The scene of the next act in Abélard’s dramatic career is a bright,
restful valley in the heart of Champagne. It is the summer of 1122,
and the limpid Arduzon rolls through enchantingly in its course
towards the Seine. In the meadow beside it are two huts and a small
oratory, rudely fashioned from the branches of trees and reeds from
the river, and daubed over with mud. No other sign of human presence
can be seen. Abélard and one companion are the only human beings to
be found for miles. And even all thought of the cities of men and the
sordid passions they shelter is arrested by the great forests of oak
and beech which hem in the narrow horizon and guard the restfulness
of the valley.
By the terms of Suger’s decision Abélard could neither lodge with
secular friends nor enter any cell, priory, or abbey. Probably this
coercion into leading an eremitical life was unnecessary. The
experience of the last three years had made a hermitage of his heart;
nothing would be more welcome to him than this quiet valley. It was a
spot he had noticed in earlier years. In his ancient chronicle Robert
of Auxerre says that Abélard had lived there before; Mr. Poole thinks
it was to the same part of Champagne that he resorted on the three
occasions of his going to the province of Count Theobald. That would
at least have to be understood in a very loose sense. On the two
former occasions he had found a home prepared, a cell and a priory,
respectively; he had now to build a hut with his own hands. It was a
deserted spot he had chosen, he tells us; and Heloise adds, in one of
her letters, that before Abélard’s coming it had been the haunt of
robbers and the home of foxes and wild boars, like the neighbouring
forest of Fontainebleau.
Abélard must have seen this quiet side-valley in passing along the
Seine on the road to Paris. It was some twelve miles from Troyes,
where he had a number of friends; and when he expressed a desire to
retire to it with his companion, they obtained for him the gift of
the meadow through which the Arduzon ran. Bishop Hatton gave them
permission to build an oratory, and they put together a kind of mud
hut—‘in honour of the Blessed Trinity’! Here the heavy heart began
once more to dream of peace. Men had tortured him with a caricature
of the divine justice when his aim and purpose had been of the
purest. He had left their ignorant meddlesomeness and their ugly
passions far away beyond the forests. Alone with God and with nature
in her fairest mood, he seemed to have escaped securely from an age
that could not, or would not, understand his high ideal.
So for some time no sound was heard in the valley but the song of the
birds and the grave talk of the two hermits and the frequent chant in
the frail temple of the Trinity. But Abélard’s evil genius was never
far from him; it almost seems as if it only retired just frequently
enough and long enough to let his heart regain its full power of
suffering. The unpractical scholar had overlooked a material point,
the question of sustenance. Beech-nuts and beech-leaves and roots and
the water of the river become monotonous. Abélard began to cast about
for some source of revenue. ‘To dig I was not able, to beg I was
ashamed,’ he says, in the familiar words. There was only one thing he
could do—teach.
Probably he began by giving quiet lessons to the sons of his
neighbours. He had only to let his intention be known in Troyes, and
he would have as many pupils as he desired. But he soon found that,
as was inevitable, he had released a torrent. The words in which he
describes this third confluence of his streams of ‘barbarians’ do
not give us the impression that he struggled against his fate. With
all his genius he remained a Breton—short of memory and light of
heart. The gladdening climate of mid-France and the brightness and
beauty of the valley of the Seine quickened his old hopes and powers.
The word ran through the kingdoms of Gaul, and across the sea and
over the southern hills, that Abélard was lecturing once more. And
many hundreds, probably thousands, of youths gathered their scant
treasures, and turned their faces towards the distant solitude of
Nogent-sur-Seine.
Then was witnessed a scene that is quite unique in the annals of
education. Many centuries before, the deserts of Egypt had seen a
vast crowd of men pour out from the cities, and rush eagerly into
their thankless solitude. That was under the fresh-born influence of
a new religious story, the only force thought competent to inspire
so great an abdication. The twelfth century saw another great stream
of men pouring eagerly into a solitude where there was no luxury but
the rude beauty of nature. Week by week the paths that led into the
valley by the Arduzon discharged their hundreds of pilgrims. The
rough justice of nature offered no advantage to wealth. Rich and
poor, noble and peasant, young and old, they raised their mud-cabins
or their moss-covered earth-works, each with his own hand. Hundreds
of these rude dwellings dotted the meadow and sheltered in the wood.
A bundle of straw was the only bed to be found in them. Their tables
were primitive mounds of fresh turf; the only food a kind of coarse
peasant-bread, with roots and herbs and a draught of sweet water from
the river. The meats and wines and pretty maids and soft beds of the
cities were left far away over the hills. For the great magician had
extended his wand once more, and the fascination of his lectures was
as irresistible as ever.
They had built a new oratory, in wood and stone, for the loved
master; and each morning, as the full blaze of the sun fell upon the
strangely scarred face of the valley, they arose from the hay and
straw, splashed or dipped in the running river, and trooped to the
spot where Abélard fished for their souls with the charming bait of
his philosophy. Then when the master tired of reading Scripture,
and of his pathetic task of finding analogies of the infinite in
the finite, they relaxed to such games and merriment as youth never
leaves behind.
Discipline, however, was strict. There is a song, composed at the
time by one of the pupils, which affords an instructive glimpse of
the life of the strange colony. Some one seems to have informed
Abélard of a group of students who were addicted to the familiar
vice. He at once banished them from the colony, threatening to
abandon the lectures unless they retired to Quincey. The poet of the
group was an English youth, named Hilary, who had come to France a
little before. Amongst his _Versus et ludi_, edited by Champollion,
we find his poetic complaint of the falseness of the charge and
the cruelty of their expulsion. It is a simple, vigorous, rhymed
verse in Latin, with a French refrain. It is obviously intended to
be sung in chorus, and it thus indirectly illustrates one of the
probable recreations of the youths who were thus thrown upon their
own resources. Many another of Hilary’s rough songs must have rung
through the valley at nightfall. Perhaps Abélard recovered his old
gift, and contributed to the harmless gaiety of the colony. Seared
and scarred as he was, there was nothing sombre or sour about his
piety, save in the moments of actual persecution. With all his keen
and living faith and his sense of remorse, he remains a Breton, a
child of the sun-light, sensitive to the gladdening force of the
world. Not until his last year did he accept the ascetic view of
pleasures which were non-ethical. Watchful over the faith and morals
of the colony, he would make no effort to moderate the loud song with
which they responded to the warm breath of nature.
The happiness of his little world surged in the heart of the master
for a time, but nature gave him a capacity for, and a taste of,
manifold happiness, only that he might suffer the more. ‘I had one
enemy—echo,’ he says in his autobiography. He was soon made uneasily
conscious that the echo of his teaching and the echo of the glad life
of the colony had reached Clairvaux.
The first definite complaint that reached his ears referred to the
dedication of his oratory. Though formally dedicated to the Trinity,
it was especially devoted to the Holy Spirit, in the character of
Paraclete (Comforter); indeed both it and the later nunnery were
known familiarly as ‘the Paraclete.’ Some captious critics had, it
appears, raised a question whether it was lawful to dedicate a chapel
to one isolated member of the Trinity. The question was absurd, for
the Church frequently offers worship to the Holy Spirit, without
mentioning the Father and the Son. The cautious Abélard, however,
defends his dedication at great length. A second attack was made
under the pretext of questioning the propriety of an image of the
Trinity which was found in the oratory. Some sculptor in the colony
had endeavoured to give an ingenious representation of the Trinity
in stone. He had carved three equal figures from one block of stone,
and had cut on them inscriptions appropriate to each Person of the
Trinity.[20] Such devices were common in the Church, common in
all Trinitarian religions, in fact. But Abélard was credited with
intentions and interpretations in everything he did. Neither of
these incidents proved serious, however. It was not until Abélard
heard that Alberic and Lotulphe were inciting ‘the new apostles’ to
assail him that he became seriously alarmed. The new apostles were
Bernard of Clairvaux and Norbert of Prémontré.
[20] The statue was preserved in a neighbouring church until the
eighteenth century. It was destroyed at the Revolution.
Not many leagues from the merry valley on the Arduzon was another
vale that had been peopled by men from the cities. It was a dark,
depressing valley, into which the sun rarely struggled. The Valley of
Wormwood men called it, for it was in the heart of a wild, sombre,
chilly forest. The men who buried themselves in it were fugitives,
not merely from the hot breath of the cities and the ugly deeds of
their fellows, but even from the gentler inspiration of nature, even
from its purest thrills. They had had a vision of a golden city, and
believed it was to be entered by the path of self-torture. The narrow
windows of their monastery let in but little of the scanty light of
the valley. With coarse bread and herbs, and a few hours’ sleep on
boxes of dried leaves, they made a grudging concession to the law of
living. But a joke was a sacrilege in the Valley of Wormwood, and a
song a piece of supreme folly. The only sound that told the ravens
and the owls of the presence of man was the weird, minor chant for
hours together, that did not even seem to break the silence of the
sombre spot. By day, the white-robed, solemn shades went about their
work in silence. The Great Father had made the pilgrimage to heaven
so arduous a task that they dare not talk by the wayside.
Foremost among them was a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant little
man. The face was white and worn with suffering, the form enfeebled
with disease and exacting nervous exaltation; but there was a light
of supreme strength and of joy in the penetrating eyes. He was a man
who saw the golden city with so near, so living a vision, that he was
wholly impatient of the trivial pleasures of earth: a man formed in
the mould of world-conquerors and world-politicians, in whose mind
accident had substituted a supernatural for a natural ideal: a man of
such intensity and absorption of thought that he was almost incapable
of admitting a doubt as to the correctness of his own judgment and
purpose and the folly of all that was opposed to it: a man in whom
an altruistic ethic might transform, or disguise, but could never
suppress, the demand of the entire nature for self-assertion. This
was Bernard of Clairvaux, who had founded the monastery in the
deepest poverty ten years before. He was soon to be the most powerful
man in Christendom. And he held that, if the instinct of reasoning
and the impulse of love did indeed come from God and not from the
devil, they were of those whimsical gifts, such as the deity of the
Middle Ages often gave, which were given with a trust they would be
rejected.
The other new apostle was St. Norbert, the founder of the
Premonstratensian canons. He had fruitlessly endeavoured to reform
the existing order of canons, and had then withdrawn to form a kind
of monastery of canons at Prémontré, not far from Laon, where he
occasionally visited Anselm. His disciples entered zealously into
the task of policeing the country. No disorder in faith or morals
escaped their notice; and although Norbert was far behind Bernard
in political ability, the man who incurred his pious wrath was in
an unenviable position. He had influence with the prelates of the
Church, on account of his reforms and the sanctity of his life; he
had a profound influence over the common people, not only through
his stirring sermons, but also through the miracles he wrought.
Abélard frequently bases his rationalistic work on the fact, which
he always assumes to be uncontroverted, that the age of miracles
is over. Norbert, on the contrary, let it be distinctly understood
that he was a thaumaturgus of large practice. Abélard ridiculed his
pretensions, and the stories told of him. Even in his later sermons
we find him scornfully ‘exposing’ the miracles of Norbert and his
companions. They used to slip medicaments unobserved into the food of
the sick, he says, and accept the glory of the miracle if the fever
was cured. They even attempted to raise the dead to life; and when
the corpse retained its hideous rigidity after they had lain long
hours in prayer in the sanctuary, they would turn round on the simple
folk in the church and upbraid them for the littleness of their
faith. This poor trickery was the chief source of the power of the
Premonstratensian canons over the people. Abélard could not repose
and ridicule it with impunity.
These were the new apostles—‘pseudo-apostles’ Heloise calls them—whom
Alberic and Lotulphe now incited to take up the task which they
themselves dared pursue no longer. And so, says Abélard, ‘they heaped
shameless calumnies on me at every opportunity, and for some time
brought much discredit upon me in the eyes of certain ecclesiastical
as well as secular dignitaries.’ We shall find that, when Abélard
stands before the ecclesiastical tribunal a second time, many of
his earlier friends have deserted him, and have fallen under the
wide-reaching influence of St. Bernard.
But it is strenuously denied by prejudiced admirers of St. Bernard
that he had anything to do with Abélard at this period. Father
Hefele, for instance, thinks that Abélard is guilty of some
chronological confusion in the passage quoted above; looking back on
the events of his life, he has unconsciously transferred the later
activity of Bernard to the earlier date, not clearly separating it
in time from the work of Alberic and Norbert. Unfortunately, the
‘Story of my Calamities’ was written _before_ Bernard commenced his
open campaign against Abélard. We shall see later that this is beyond
dispute. There is, then, no question of confusion.
Mr. Cotter Morison says it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that
Bernard showed any active hostility to Abélard at that time, and he
thinks the charge springs merely from an over-excited imagination.
Mr. Morison is scarcely happier here than in his earlier passage.
It must be understood that this reluctance to admit the correctness
of Abélard’s complaint is inspired by a passage in one of Bernard’s
letters. In writing to William of St. Thierry (ep. cccxxvii. in
_Migne_), fifteen years afterwards, he excuses his inaction with
regard to Abélard (whose heresies William has put before him) on the
ground that he ‘was ignorant of most, indeed nearly all, of these
things.’ This is interpreted to mean that he knew little or nothing
about Abélard until 1141, and the Abélardists generally give a more
or less polite intimation that it is—what Mr. Poole explicitly calls
another statement of Bernard’s—a lie. Cotter Morison, however,
interprets ‘these things’ to mean ‘the special details of Abélard’s
heresy,’ and it is therefore the more strange that he should join
the Bernardists in straining the historical evidence. Yet he is
probably nearer to the truth than the others in his interpretation of
Bernard’s words. Even modern writers are too apt at times to follow
the practice of the Church, in judging a statement or an action, and
put it into one or other of their rigid objective categories. In
such cases as this we need a very careful psychological analysis,
and are prone to be misled by the Church’s objective moral boxes
or classifications. Most probably Bernard wrote in that convenient
vagueness of mind which sometimes helps even a saint out of a
difficulty, especially where the honour of the Church is involved,
and which is accompanied by just a suspicion of ethical discomfort.
In reality, we may, with all sobriety, reverse Mr. Morison’s
statement, and say it is ‘not far short of impossible’ that Bernard
was ignorant of, or indifferent to, Abélard’s activity at that time.
Ten years previously, when Bernard led his little band of white-robed
monks to their wretched barn in the Vale of Bitterness, he went to
Châlons to be consecrated by William of Champeaux. William conceived
a very strong affection for the young abbot, and he shortly after
nursed him through a long and severe illness. So great was their
intimacy and so frequent their intercourse that people said Châlons
and Clairvaux had changed places. This began only twelve months
after William had been driven from Paris, in intense anger, by the
heretical upstart, Peter Abélard. Again, Alberic was another of
Bernard’s intimate friends. A year or two before Abélard founded
the Paraclete—that is to say, about the time of the Council of
Soissons—we find Bernard ‘imploring’ (so even Duchesne puts it)
the Pope to appoint Alberic to the vacant see of Châlons after the
death of William. He failed to obtain it, but afterwards secured for
him the archbishopric of Bourges. Anselm of Laon was also a friend
of Bernard’s. Moreover, Clairvaux was only about forty miles from
Troyes, where Abélard’s latest feat was the supreme topic.
It is thus quite impossible for any but a prejudiced apologist to
question Bernard’s interest in the life of the Paraclete and its
founder. Even were he not the heresy-hunter and universal reformer
that he notoriously was, we should be compelled to think that he
had heard all the worst charges against Abélard over and over
again before 1124. To conceive Bernard as entombed in his abbey,
indifferent to everything in this world except the grave, is the
reverse of the truth. Bernard had a very profound belief in what
some theologians call ‘the law of secondary causes’—God does not
do directly what he may accomplish by means of human instruments.
Prayer was necessary; but so were vigilance, diplomacy, much running
to and fro, and a vast correspondence. He watched the Church of God
with the fiery zeal of a St. Paul. He knew everything and everybody:
smote archbishops and kings as freely as his own monks: hunted down
every heretic that appeared in France in his day: played even a large
part in the politics of Rome. And we are to suppose that such a man
was ignorant of the presence of the gay, rationalistic colony a few
leagues away from his abbey, and of the unique character and profound
importance to the Church of that vast concourse of youths; or that
he refrained from examining the teaching of this man who had an
unprecedented influence over the youth of France, or from using the
fulness of his power against him when he found that his teaching was
the reverse of all he held sacred and salutary.
We may take Abélard’s statement literally. Bernard and Norbert were
doing the work of his rivals, and were doing it effectively. They
who had supported him at Soissons or afterwards were being poisoned
against him. Count Theobald and Geoffrey of Chartres are probably
two whom he had in mind. He feels that the net is being drawn close
about him through the calumnies of these ubiquitous monks and canons.
The peace of the valley is broken; he becomes morbidly sensitive
and timorous. Whenever he hears that some synod or conventicle has
been summoned he trembles with anxiety and expectation of another
Soissons. The awful torture of that hour before the council comes
back to him, and mingles with the thought of the power of his new
enemies. He must fly from France.
Away to the south, over the Pyrenees, was a land where the poor monk
would have found peace, justice, and honour. Spain was just then
affording ‘glory to God in heaven, and peace to men of good-will on
earth’: it had been snatched from the dominion of Christianity for a
century or two. So tolerant and beneficent was the reign of the Moors
that even the Jews, crushed, as they were, by seven centuries of
persecution, developed their finest powers under it. They were found
in the front rank of every art and science; in every field where, not
cunning and astuteness, but talent of the highest order and industry,
were needed to command success. The Moors had happily degenerated
from the fierce proselytism of their religious prophet—whilst the
Christians had proportionately enlarged on that of theirs—and their
human character was asserting the high natural ideal which it always
does when it breaks away from the confining bonds of a narrow dogma.
It was towards this land that Abélard turned his thoughts. It seemed
useless for him to exchange one Christian land for another. A few
years before, a small group of French monks had created a centre of
education in a humble barn on the banks of the Cam; but was England
more tolerant than France? He remembered Roscelin’s experience. There
were famous schools in Italy; but some of his most brilliant pupils
at the Paraclete, such as Arnold of Brescia, had little good to say
of Italy. The evil lay in Christianity itself—in that intolerance
which its high claim naturally engendered.
One does not like to accept too easily this romantic proposal to find
refuge under the protection of the crescent, yet Abélard’s words
compel us to do so. ‘God knows,’ he says, ‘that at times I fell
into so deep a despair that I proposed to go forth from Christendom
and betake me to the heathens ... to live a Christian life amid the
enemies of Christ.’ Possibly he would have done so, if he had had a
better knowledge of Spain at that time. The Arabs of Spain were no
enemies of Christ. Only a most perverse idea of their state could
make an able thinker and teacher thus regard a life amongst them as
a matter of ultimate and desperate resort. Had they but conquered
Europe, materially or morally, half the problems that still harass
it—or ought to do—would have been solved long ago. It is pathetic
to find Abélard speculating whether the hatred of the Christians
for him will not make his path easier to the favour of the Arabs,
by producing in them an impression that he had been unfaithful
to Christian dogma. The caliphs could keep a watchful eye on the
thoughts of professed Mohammedan philosophers, but they cared little
about the theories of others. Abélard, with his pronounced tendency
to concentrate on natural-religious and ethical truths, would have
found an honoured place in Spain; and he would quickly have buried
his dogmas there.
Abélard was spared the trial of so desperate and dreadful a
secession. Far away on the coast of Brittany an abbot died in 1125,
and Abélard’s evil genius put it into the hearts of the monks to
offer the vacant dignity to the famous teacher. They sent some of
their number to see him at the Paraclete. It seemed a providential
outlet from his intolerable position. There were abbeys and abbeys,
it was true, but his Breton optimism and trust in fate closed that
avenue of speculation. Conon, Duke of Brittany, had agreed to his
installation. Suger made no opposition; he probably saw the net that
was being drawn about him in France. Abélard turned sadly away from
the vale of the Paraclete and the devoted colony, and faced the mists
of the west and of the future. ‘I came not to bring peace into the
world but the sword.’